THE COLONY OF WATCHMAKERS AND WEAVERS
“What harm can a book do that costs a hundred crowns?” Voltaire had
written to Damilaville on April 5, 1765. “Twenty volumes folio will
never make a revolution; it is the little pocket pamphlets of thirty
sous that are to be feared.”
He had acted on that principle all his life. But he had never acted upon
it so much as in his hand-to-hand battle with _l’infâme_. He never acted
upon it so often as in his eighteen months’ solitude at Ferney in
1768-69.
For many years, from that “manufactory” of his, as Grimm called it, he
poured forth a ceaseless stream of dialogues, epistles, discourses,
reflections, novelettes, commentaries, burlesques, reviews. Hardly any
of them were more than a few pages in length. But each dealt with some
subject near to his wide heart; cried aloud for some reform which had
not been made, and must be made; pointed out with mocking finger some
scandal in Church or State; satirised with killing irony some gross
abuse of power; turned on some miscarriage of civil justice the
searchlight of truth; laughed lightly, in dialogue, at the education of
women by nuns in convents to fit them to be wives and mothers in the
world; drew up damning statistics of the 9,468,800 victims “hanged,
drowned, broken on the wheel, or burnt, for the love of God” and their
religion from the time of Constantine to Louis XIV.; pleaded vivaciously
against the eighty-two annual holidays set apart by the Church on which
it was criminal to work but not to be drunken and mischievous;
enumerated the “Horrible Dangers of Reading,” of knowing, of thinking;
and lashed with the prettiest of stinging little whips a corrupt
ministry, a wicked priesthood, and _l’infâme, l’infâme_.
“_Il fait le tout en badinant._” Serious? Why, no. “Our French people
want to learn without studying”; and they shall. Instruct! Instruct! but
as one instructs a child with a lesson in the form of a story, or the
simplest little sermon with a sugar-plum of a joke at the end. This was
such a laughing philosopher that many persons have doubted if he really
could have been a philosopher at all. He turned so many somersaults, as
friend Frederick put it plaintively. But the somersaults gained him an
audience, and once gained he knew very well how to keep and teach it. It
was one of his own sayings that ridicule does for everything and is the
strongest of arms. He proved the truth of that assertion himself--in the
pamphlets by which he held the attention and commanded the intellect of
the eighteenth century.
Read them now--they are the must amusing reading in the world--and
beneath the sparkling mockery, see the burning meaning.
They are, considered as works of art alone, much more than brilliant
burlesques. Each of them is endowed with Voltaire’s “unquenchable life,”
and “stamped with the express image” of his whole personality. Gay,
crisp, and clear, expressing his ideas in the fewest and easiest words
and in the most vivacious and graceful of all literary styles, they
conveyed to his generation “the consciousness at once of the power and
the rights of the human intelligence.”
Through these pamphlets “the revolution works in all minds. Light comes
by a thousand holes it is impossible to stop up.” “Reason penetrates
into the merchants’ shops as into the nobles’ palaces.”
What better proof could Voltaire himself have wanted of the growth of
that liberty and tolerance which he loved, and strove to make all men
love and have, than the fact that the government, autocratic and
all-powerful as it was, could not prevent those pamphlets selling and
working in their midst?
“Opinion rules the world,” said Voltaire himself. At last he had made
his opinion, Public Opinion. “From 1762 to the end of Voltaire’s life it
was on the side of the philosophers.”
True, the authorities still burnt his works. In 1768 he had written
“The Man with Forty Crowns,” a burlesque story “on the financial chaos
which fifteen years later brought France to bankruptcy.” That must be
burnt of course. France hated unfavourable prophecies. It _was_ burnt.
But by now Voltaire’s pamphlets were like Shadrach, Meshach, and
Abednego. Flames could not hurt them. And when they came out of the
fiery furnace it was only with an added lustre and glory.
Well for Voltaire if those pamphlets could have engrossed all his
solitude. In Beuchot’s edition of his writings they fill ten large
volumes. Here surely was occupation enough for a lifetime! But Voltaire
had time for everything, and was for ever the spoilt boy who loved his
own way.
The Easter of 1769 reminded him of last Easter and the fact that the
Bishop of Annecy had forbidden his priesthood to allow him to confess or
communicate. Very well then! I will do both.
His feeble body had been ill and ailing for a year--a condition of
things which is apt to make the mind unreasonable. There was a recent
case of a man called Boindin, who, dying unfortified by the Sacraments,
had been refused Christian burial. There was always the case of Adrienne
Lecouvreur--“thrown into the kennel like a dead dog.”
Voltaire declared, to persons whom he could have no object in deceiving,
that he had lately had “twelve accesses of fever.” He was seventy-five
years old. And death always was and had been a far more present reality
to him than to most people.
These things taken together form, not at all a valid excuse, but some
sort of honest excuse for an act that needs a great deal of excusing.
Voltaire was in bed one day in the March of 1769, dictating to Wagnière,
when he saw from his window Gros, the Ferney curé, and a Capuchin monk
who had come to help him with the Easter confessions, walking in the
garden. Voltaire sent for the Capuchin and told him that he was too ill
to leave his bed, but as a Frenchman, an official of the King, and
seigneur of the parish, he wished there and then to make his confession.
And he put the usual fee of six francs into the Capuchin’s hand. The
poor man, with the fear of his Bishop before his eyes, nervously
temporised, said he was very busy and would return in a few days.
“Trust me to get even with him!” cries the patient when M. le Capuchin
had retired. Burgos, “a kind of surgeon,” is sent for, and having felt
the invalid’s pulse, is fool enough to say that it is excellent.
“What, you ignorant fellow! Excellent?” roars the sick man.
Burgos feels it again. It is a very different pulse this time, and M. de
Voltaire is in a high fever.
“Then go and tell the priest.”
Six days elapsed and no priest appeared. So the very active-minded
invalid caused the whole household to be roused in a body in the middle
of the night, and to hurry off to the curé saying their master was dying
and presenting a certificate signed by himself, Wagnière, Bigex, and
Burgos, which declared the invalid’s pious desire to die fortified with
the Sacraments and in the bosom of the faith in which he was born and
had lived.
Neither curé nor Capuchin appeared.
Then Voltaire sent a lawyer to the curé, saying that if he did not come,
the Lord of Ferney would denounce him to the Parliament as having
refused the Sacraments to a dying man.
The poor curé was in such a fright that he was attacked on the spot,
says Wagnière, by the colic.
On March 31st, Voltaire drew up before a notary a statement in legal
form declaring himself, in spite of calumnies, to be a sincere Catholic.
Among others the complaisant Father Adam witnessed this statement.
The next day, April 1st, the Capuchin appeared at Ferney. The Bishop of
Annecy had been consulted, and now sent by the Capuchin a profession of
faith for Voltaire to sign.
The invalid, who had already recited a hurried jumble of the Pater, the
Credo, and the Confiteor, replied that the Creed was supposed to contain
the whole faith; and though the unhappy Capuchin went on presenting to
him at intervals the Bishop’s paper to sign, he would do nothing but
repeat his statement about the Creed. After having delivered to the
Capuchin a long homily on morality and tolerance (which Wagnière found
“very touching and pathetic”) the sick man suddenly called out loudly,
“Give me absolution at once,” which the terrified confessor, who had
entirely lost his head, did. Then Voltaire sent for the curé, who
administered the Sacrament.
The notary was also present. “At the very instant the priest gave the
wafer to M. de Voltaire” he declared aloud that he sincerely pardoned
those who had calumniated him to the King “and who have not succeeded in
their base design, and I demand a record of my declaration from the
notary.” He recorded it. No sooner was Voltaire left to himself than
this amazing invalid jumped out of bed and went for a walk in the
garden.
Meanwhile, curé and Capuchin laid their terrified heads together and
bethought themselves of some means to avoid the consequences of having
absolved and given the mass to the scoffer without his having signed the
declaration drawn up by the Bishop.
On April 15th, they summoned seven witnesses whom they had persuaded to
declare on oath that they had heard M. de Voltaire pronounce a complete
and satisfactory confession of faith, which confession they invented and
sent to the Bishop.
The hocus-pocus was on both sides, it will be seen. But Voltaire was
responsible for it all. Paris--even Paris--received the news of his
“unpardonable buffoonery” “pretty badly.” The d’Argentals entirely
disapproved of it, and Dr. Tronchin condemned it with severity.
“Useless _méchancétés_ are very foolish,” Voltaire had said. He regarded
this one as indispensable. When he wrote to his Angels excusing himself,
he declared that he had need of a buckler to withstand the mortal blows
of sacerdotal calumny, and that such a duty, neglected, might at his
death have had very unpleasant consequences for his family. These were
not sufficient reasons for his act. But they at least free him from “the
reproach of erecting hypocrisy into a deliberate doctrine.” As Condorcet
says, “such deceptions did not deceive, while they did protect.”
“Disagreeable as these temporisings are to us,” they damn deeper the
time which made them a pressing expedient, than the time-server.
As the Bishop of Annecy had accused Voltaire of holding impious
conversations at his dinner-table, he now took advantage of Madame
Denis’s absence to have pious works read aloud to him at that meal. When
a President of the Parliament of Dijon was dining with him, Massillon,
of whom Voltaire was a warm admirer, was the author chosen. “What style!
What harmony! What eloquence!” cries the Patriarch of Ferney as he
listens to those magnificent periods, to the denunciations like a god’s.
The reader continued for three or four pages.
“Off with Massillon!” cries Voltaire, and “he gave himself up to all the
folly and _verve_ of his imagination.” Irreverence? Malicious mockery?
It has been generally thought so. May it not rather have been that both
sentiments were perfectly genuine? that in one there expressed itself
the passionate admiration and in the other the irresponsible liveliness,
of which this extraordinary character was equally capable?
Though he had nearly harried the life out of one poor Capuchin of Gex,
though he had wantonly insulted the faith of all the Capuchins, almost
his next act was to obtain for them, through Choiseul, an annuity of six
hundred francs for the Gex monastery, in return for which benefit the
Brothers gave him the title of Temporal Father of the Capuchins of Gex.
He derived a monkeyish delight from it; used to sign his letters with a
cross, “✟, Brother Voltaire unworthy Capuchin”; but then he also derived
an honest delight from the good he had been able to do the monastery.
Who can explain him?
Presently he was writing to Cardinal Bernis to obtain the Pope’s
permission for Father Adam to wear a wig on his bald head during mass.
The climate was cold, the poor Father rheumatic, and his Holiness had
been obliged to forbid wigs to the priesthood as they had so often been
used as a disguise for unworthy purposes.
All through religious controversies and irreligious acts, Voltaire was
engaged in a long, constant and very flattering
[Illustration: VOLTAIRE
_From the Etching by Denon_]
correspondence with Catherine the Great. Even Frederick, in the
beguiling days before the Prussian visits, had not so gratified
Voltaire’s self-love. Voltaire was the teacher, and Catherine, the
greatest of queens and the cleverest of women, his humble pupil. In 1768
she had taken his advice--there is no subtler form of flattery--upon
inoculation, and herself submitted to the operation. And in this 1769
she sent him the loveliest pelisse of Russian sable, a snuff box she had
turned with her own royal hands, her portrait set in diamonds, and an
epitome of the laws with which she governed her great empire. Here
surely was balm for solitude, calumny, sickness, old age, every mortal
misfortune! Voltaire warmed body and soul through the snowy Swiss spring
in that gorgeous pelisse. In March, he had another present, which
delighted his queer old heart hardly less. Saint-Lambert--Saint-Lambert,
who had robbed him of his mistress and wounded him with a wound which
another man could never have forgiven or forgotten--sent him his poem,
“The Seasons.” And the poet Voltaire writes to his brother of the lyre
the most charming compliments and congratulations.
Before this, he was writing the kindest letters to La Harpe again. When
Madame Denis, in the latter half of this October, 1769, and after an
absence of a little less than eighteen months, burst into Ferney, her
uncle seems to have folded her in his arms, received her with as much
delight as if she had always been trustworthy, practical, sensible, and
considerate, and to have let bygones be bygones as only he knew how.
The Dupuits were already home again; and Voltaire was busy with a new
business which had been in his mind since he first came to Ferney, and
in practical existence at least since 1767.
From the moment he had bought his estates he had felt the full weight of
his responsibilities as a landowner, and realised as keenly as Arthur
Young, the philosophic farmer who rode through France prophesying her
downfall, that agriculture is the true wealth of a nation.
“The best thing we have to do on earth is to cultivate it.”
At more than threescore years and ten, this old son of the pavement had
set himself to learn, and did learn, the whole _technique_ of
agriculture. Directly he bought Ferney he began putting the barren land
round it under cultivation, and so occupied all persons on his estates
who were out of work. When he was seventy-eight he was still hard at
work with his own hands on that field which had been called Voltaire’s
Field, because he cultivated it entirely himself.
It has been seen how he planted avenues of trees. Four times over he
lined his drive with chestnut and walnut trees, and four times they
nearly all died, or were wantonly destroyed by the peasants. “However, I
am not daunted. The others laugh at me. Neither my old age nor my
complaints nor the severity of the climate discourage me. To have
cultivated a field and made twenty trees grow is a good which will never
be lost.”
He entered into a long correspondence with Moreau--that rare being, a
practical Political Economist. He delighted in Galiani’s famous
“Dialogues on Corn”--never was man in the right so wittily before--and
in this very 1769 he was thanking Abbé Mords-les-Morellet for his
“Dictionary of Commerce.”
For, after all, the Land meant the People; and commerce there must be,
if the work of the People on the Land were to be remunerative.
Many terrible accounts have been given of the condition of the French
poor before the Revolution. But theirs was a misery which no passion and
eloquence can overstate.
Forbidden at certain seasons to guard their wretched pieces of land by
fences lest they should interfere with my lord’s hunt, or to manure
their miserable crops lest they should spoil the flavour of my lord’s
game; forbidden, at hatching seasons, to weed those crops lest they
should disturb the partridges; and forbidden, without special
permission, to build a shed in which to store their grain--the fruit of
their lands and their labour, if there was any such fruit, was always
lost to them.
Taxes alone deprived them of three quarters of what they earned. On one
side was the _corvée_, or the right of the lord to his peasants’ labour
without paying for it; and the _taille_, or the tax on property, which
exacted a certain sum from each village: so that if the rich would not
pay, the poor _must_.
Add to this the toll-gates, so numerous that fish brought from Harfleur
to Paris paid eleven times its value _en route_; the fines exacted when
land was bought or sold; above all, the enormous tax upon salt, which
soon was as the match to fire the gunpowder of the Revolution; the
tithes exacted by the Church: the fees for masses for the dead, for
burying, christening, and marrying, coupled with the bitter injustice
that the clergy of that Church were themselves exempt from all taxation.
Add to these regular taxes the irregular ones.
On the accession of Louis XV. one was levied, called the Tax of the
Joyful Accession. Joyful! The people who paid it lived in a windowless,
one-room hut of peat or clay; clothed in the filthiest rags; ignorant,
bestial, degraded; creatures who never knew youth or hope: who died in
unrecorded thousands, of pestilence and famine; or lived, to their own
cruel misery, a few dark years “on a little black bread, and not enough
of that.”
Such were the fifty poor of Ferney as Voltaire found them, but not the
twelve hundred he left.
Whatever his sins were--and they were many--he had one of the noblest
and most difficult of virtues--a far higher conception of his duty to
others than the men of his time. It was fashionable to talk philanthropy
in the eighteenth century, but dangerous, as well as unmodish, to
practise it.
“True philosophy ...” wrote the great Doer in the midst of the Dreamers,
“makes the earth fertile and the people happier. The true philosopher
cultivates the land, increases the number of the ploughs, and so of the
inhabitants; occupies the poor man, and thus enriches him; encourages
marriages, cares for the orphan; does not grumble at necessary taxes,
and puts the labourer in a condition to pay them promptly.”
He had begun by getting back for the Ferney poor that tithe of which
Ancian had deprived them, and by making the peasants mend and make
roads--at fair wages. Later, he petitioned the King for “some
privileges for my children”; and Gex was at last declared free from all
the taxes of the farmers-general, and salt, which used to be ten sous
the pound, came down to four.
His building operations at both the church and château gave occupation
to many masons. Then the masons must have decent dwellings in which to
live themselves; and here was more work.
In 1767, he could write that he had formed a colony at Ferney; that he
had established there three merchants, artists, and a doctor, and was
building houses for them. By 1769 he recorded with an honest pride that
he had quadrupled the number of the parishioners, and that there was not
a poor man among them; that he had under his immediate supervision two
hundred workers, and was the means of life to everyone round him.
Nor did he forget to provide them with pleasure as well as with work.
Every Sunday the young people of the colony used to come up to the
château to dance. Their host provided them with refreshments, and was
the happiest spectator of their happiness.
Then he started a school, and himself paid the schoolmaster. There had
been a time when he had thought that “it is not the labourer one must
teach, it is the _bon bourgeois_, the inhabitant of towns: that
enterprise is grand and great enough,” which, for his day, it certainly
was. It was a hundred years in advance of his time. Even that drastic
reformer, Frederick the Great, had announced superbly, “The vulgar do
not deserve enlightenment.” So what wonder that in 1763 even a
clear-sighted Voltaire prayed for “ignorant brothers to follow my
plough?”
The wonder rather is that by 1767 his views had so enormously progressed
that when Linguet, the barrister, wrote to him that in his opinion all
was lost if the _canaille_ were shown that they too could reason, he
emphatically answered, instancing the intelligent Genevans who read as a
relaxation from manual labour--“No, Sir; all is not lost when the people
are put into a condition to see that they too have a mind. On the
contrary, all is lost when they are treated like a herd of bulls, for
sooner or later they will gore you with their horns.”
Prophetic--but if many heard that voice crying in the wilderness, none
acted on his words, save himself.
But in prospering Ferney there was room not only for a school and a
doctor, masons and labourers, but for special industries. From the
first, Voltaire had cultivated silkworms. He was never the man for an
idle hobby. Why should no use be made of the silk? Before 1769, the
Ferney theatre, which Madame Denis had lately used as a laundry, was
turned into a silkworm nursery. From busy Geneva came stocking weavers,
only too glad to colonise in a place where the lord, and master lent
them money “on very easy terms,” built decent dwellings for them, and
gave them the full benefit of his knowledge of affairs.
By September 4, 1769, Voltaire, always alive to the advantages of a good
advertisement, sent to the Duchesse de Choiseul the first pair of silk
stockings ever made on his looms. If she would but wear them they _must_
be the mode! What stocking would not look beautiful on a foot so
charming? Voltaire found time to engage his Duchess to wear them, in a
gay, coquettish, and essentially French correspondence. Madame had made
a mistake, it appears, and sent him, as a pattern, a shoe much too large
for her. Neither his thousand schemes and labours nor his seventy-five
years had spoiled his talent for flattering badinage. His Duchess
accepted his stockings and his compliments, showed both to her friends,
and thus put some fifty to a hundred people, including young Calas who
was helping his benefactor, out of the way of want.
On February 15, 1770, the party quarrels in Geneva came to a climax--and
bloodshed.
The Natives had not forgotten the promise made to them four years
earlier. “If you are forced to leave your country ... I shall still be
able to help and protect you.”
Neither had Voltaire.
On February 10, 1767, in writing to de Beauteville, the French mediator,
he had suggested the scheme of a working colony--the nucleus of the idea
of some enterprising person enticing the great watchmaking industry of
quarrelsome Geneva to form a settlement, which should be managed by its
founder and should bear his name. The scheme had appealed to Choiseul.
In 1768, with Voltaire’s co-operation and approval, that minister
founded the colony of Versoix--or Versoy, as Voltaire spells it--which
was designed to be what Ferney actually became.
The crisis of February 15, 1770, caused great numbers of the Native
watchmakers of Geneva to flee from the city and take refuge at Versoix
and at Ferney. Versoix was unequal to the emergency. There were no
houses for the workers. But Ferney rose to the occasion. That was always
part of its old master’s genius.
Only a few months after the Natives had first consulted him, this
far-seeing person had begun to build workmen’s dwellings in his village.
The overflow from those “pretty houses of freestone,” he now took into
the château itself. So far, so good.
The next thing to do was to obtain the permission for his settlement
from the authorities. The authorities were personified by M. de
Choiseul. Voltaire had helped him with his Versoix. So Choiseul could
not, and did not, refuse to help Voltaire with Ferney.
To start the watchmakers in their new home at their old trade, Voltaire
advanced sixty thousand livres. He at once found occupation for fifty
Genevan workmen, not counting the inhabitants of Gex. He himself bought
gold, silver, and jewels for the work, a better bargain than the
work-people could do for themselves.
In six weeks he had watches ready for sale--of exquisite workmanship,
artistic design, and to be sold at least one third cheaper than they
could be in Geneva. The Duke of Choiseul bought the first six watches
ever made by Voltaire’s manufactory.
By April 9th the old courtier was promising the Duchess that she should
soon have one worthy to wear even at _her_ waist.
Then he began his system of personal advertisement. The handsomest
commission in the world on every watch he sold could not have made the
neediest agent work harder or more cunningly than did this Voltaire, who
received at first no commission, never could expect a large one, and had
need of neither large nor small.
On June 5, 1770, he sent round a circular to all the foreign
ambassadors--“diplomacy _en masse_”--a most beautiful circular from “The
Royal Manufactory of Ferney” (in capital letters), and recommending
watches--“plain silver,” from three louis, to repeaters at forty-two.
That flaming document is still preserved.
The advertiser wrote a letter with it. “I never write for the sake of
writing,” he said; “but when I have a subject I do not spare my pen, old
and dying as I am.”
Catherine the Great was appealed to; and in answer to her “vaguely
magnificent order for watches” to “the value of some thousands of
roubles,” Voltaire had to apologise for his workmen having taken
advantage of her goodness, and sent her watches to the value of eight
thousand!
The Empress replied imperially--as she was obliged to do--that such an
expense would not ruin her. And in his next letter her artful old friend
warmly recommended his pendulum clocks--“which we are now making”--and
asked her to assist him in promoting a watch trade between Ferney and
China. She did.
Ferney was soon sending watches not only to China, but to Spain, Italy,
Russia, Holland, America, Turkey, Portugal, and North Africa, besides
carrying on an enormous trade with Paris.
“Give me a chance and I am the man to build a city,” said Voltaire to
Richelieu. With a chance he could have done anything. Kings and
commoners, cardinals, great ladies--he appealed to them all. Is not
rosy-faced Bernis at Rome? Well, why should not he promote the sale of
watches for me in the Imperial City?
Bernis totally ignored the commission. He was almost the only person to
whom Voltaire applied who behaved so badly. And Ferney wrote him such a
stinging reproach for his neglect that poor Bernis must have regretted
he had not been more obliging.
As for Frederick the Great, he did better even than buy watches by the
cartload like the other great potentate, Catherine.
He gave for twelve years free lodging in Berlin, with exemption from all
taxation, to eighteen families of refugee Genevan watchmakers. This
started the watchmaking industry in his capital.
To Madame Dubarry, who had succeeded to the honours and dishonour of the
Pompadour, the Gentleman-in-Ordinary-to-the-King sent presently the
loveliest little watch set in diamonds.
He left no stone unturned. He supervised every detail. In 1773, Ferney
sold “four thousand watches worth half a million of francs.” All losses
Voltaire bore himself. Capable and alert as he was, they were sometimes
heavy.
He had had a royal order, for instance, on the occasion of the marriage
of the Dauphin with Marie Antoinette, which was encouraging but
expensive. He was never paid.
Nothing daunted him however. By the June of 1770 he had begun building
those much-needed houses in the rival, or rather the sister, colony of
Versoix. And then, as if he found weaving and watchmaking insufficient
for his energy, by 1772 he had started a lacemaking industry. That
butterfly Madame Saint-Julien must make this airiest of gossamer
fabrics--“the beautiful blonde lace which was made in our village”--the
fashion. “The woman who made it can make more very reasonably. She can
add a dozen workers to the staff, and we shall owe to you a new
manufactory.” The vigorous boy who wrote the words, originated the
scheme, and carried it to successful issue, was only seventy-eight. He
personally negotiated with the shop which was to buy and sell his new
wares when made. Cannot one see him haggling and bargaining and enjoying
himself, with a twinkle in his bright old eyes and a very humorous
shrewdness in the curves of his thin lips?
But if he wanted a reward for all his trouble, he had it. The miserable
hamlet had become a thriving village and the desert place blossomed like
a rose. The master’s corn fed his people and his bad wine (“which is
not harmful”) gave them drink. His bees produced excellent honey and
wax, and his hemp and flax, linen.
Here dwelt together, as one family, Catholics and Huguenots. “Is not
this better than St. Bartholomew?” “When a Catholic is sick, Protestants
go and take care of him”; and _vice versa_. The good Protestant women
prepared with their own hands the little portable altars for the
Procession of the Holy Sacrament, and the curé thanked them publicly in
a sermon. Gros had died--of drink, said Voltaire--and his place had been
taken by Hugenot, an excellent priest, generous and liberal-minded, the
friend of all his people whatever their faith, and of M. de Voltaire,
who was supposed to have none at all.
Here surely was the tree of Tolerance he had planted, bearing beautiful
fruit. It might well warm his old heart to see his little colony firm on
“those two pivots of the wealth of a state, be it little or great,
freedom of trade and freedom of conscience.”
The man who worked the case of Calas for three years, the case of Sirven
for seven, and the cases of Lally and d’Étallonde for twelve, was not
likely to grow tired of the little colony always beneath his eyes. Nor
was he unmindful of the claims not only Ferney, but all Gex, had upon
his bounty. When it was devastated by famine in 1771 he had corn sent
him from Sicily, and sold it much under cost price to his starving
children and the poor people of the province. Their sufferings and
sorrows were his own. He pleaded passionately for those who were, and
had been for generations, miserable with the hopeless misery that is
dumb; but who, before many years were past, were to cry aloud their
wrongs with a great and terrible voice which would reach to the ends of
the earth.
All Voltaire’s letters in his later years are full of his watchmakers
and weavers, their prosperity or their poverty, what he had done for
them or what he would do. Did his own glorification play no part in his
schemes? It doubtless played some. But the fact that he may have been
vain does not alter the fact that he set an example which Christians
have nobly followed, but which, in his day at least, they certainly did
not set _him_.
Voltaire, sceptic and scoffer, too often of evil life and unclean lips,
was not only the High Priest of Tolerance, but the first great practical
philanthropist of his century.
[Illustration: LOUIS XVI.
_From the Portrait by Callet in the Petit Trianon_]