THE PIGALLE STATUE, AND THE VINDICATION OF LALLY
One spring evening of the year 1770 the idea was suggested, at the table
of the Neckers in Paris, of erecting a statue to the great Voltaire.
Necker was a prosperous banker, and, to be, Comptroller-General.
Madame, his wife, once the beloved of Gibbon, was the daughter of a
Swiss minister and one of the first _salonières_ in the capital.
The plan was immediately approved and acted upon by her seventeen
guests. They formed themselves into a committee to receive
subscriptions, and decided that the work should be entrusted to the
famous Pigalle, who was to fix his own price, which he did very
modestly.
Madame Necker herself communicated the plan to Voltaire.
He was boyishly delighted at the compliment. He answered gaily that he
was seventy-six and had just had a long illness which had treated both
his mind and body very badly, and that if Pigalle was to come and model
his face he must first have a face to model. “You would hardly guess
where it ought to be. My eyes have sunk three inches; my cheeks are like
old parchment; ... the few teeth I had are gone.... This is not
coquetry, it is truth.”
It was. Dr. Burney, who visited Ferney in this year, spoke of his host
as a living skeleton--“mere skin and bone”--but he spoke, too, like
everybody else, of the gleaming eyes full of living fire; and d’Alembert
wrote to the model himself: “Genius ... has always a countenance which
genius, its brother, will easily find.”
Subscriptions had flowed in from the first with unprecedented
generosity. The magnificent Richelieu contributed magnificently.
Frederick, one of the first to wish to give, wrote to ask d’Alembert of
what amount his gift should be.
“An écu, Sire, and your name,” says d’Alembert. But Frederick gave more
than money. In noble words and a most generous eulogy, he blotted out
Frankfort and the past for ever. “The finest monument to Voltaire is the
one he has erected himself. His work will endure when the Basilisk of
St. Peter, the Louvre, and all the buildings which human vanity supposes
eternal, have perished.”
Voltaire was delighted at Frederick’s subscription (which of course was
not limited to words), not only because that great name would look
nobly, but for a more characteristic reason. “It would save money to too
generous literary men, who have none.”
Among the “too generous literary men” were four old enemies--Rousseau,
Fréron, Palissot, and La Beaumelle. Their money was returned--except
that of Rousseau. And peace-making d’Alembert had very hard work to get
_vif_ Voltaire to accept Jean Jacques’s gift as a “reparation.”
Another foe more unforgiving--or more honest--declined to give at all.
“I will not give a sou to the _sub_scription,” says Piron, “but I will
undertake the _in_scription.”
About June 16th, Pigalle, sculptor to the King and Chancellor of the
Academy of Painting, arrived at Ferney, on work intent. But the model
was so agreeable a host! True, in spite of the parties and distractions,
he gave the sculptor a sitting every day. But as he never kept still a
moment and was dictating letters, with much vivid French gesticulation,
to Wagnière the whole time, it was not wonderful that on the seventh day
of a visit which was to last eight, M. Pigalle discovered that he had
done nothing at all. Fortunately, on that seventh day--June 23,
1770--the conversation turned upon the Golden Calf of the Children of
Israel. Voltaire was so childishly delighted when Pigalle declared that
such a thing would take at least six months to make--as disproving the
Mosaic testimony that it was made in twenty-four hours--that during the
rest of the sitting the model was as quiet and obedient as possible.
The results were so satisfactory that Pigalle resolved not to attempt
another interview, and the next morning left Ferney quietly and without
seeing anyone.
The Golden Calf incident so pleased Voltaire that he at once wrote it
down and dated it. He repeated it, with much chuckling, to all his
correspondents; wrote an article on Casting for his dear “Philosophical
Dictionary,” where he introduced it again, most amusingly; and in 1776
wrote a pamphlet--“A Christian against Six Jews”--in which he put
Pigalle’s professional testimony in opposition to that of the sacred
writers.
Another account of the episode declares that Pigalle kept his sitter
quiet by talking of his dear “Pucelle.”
There seems no reason why both stories should not be true.
Pigalle’s statue disappointed his own generation, and is only a
curiosity to ours.
The best statue of Voltaire is usually considered to be the one by
Houdon, of a very old, sitting, draped figure, with a face far from
unamiable or unkindly, excessively able and shrewd, with the most
steady, penetrating old eyes, and mocking lips closed over the toothless
mouth.
Pigalle represented his subject entirely unclad--for the best of all
reasons, said Grimm, he could not do drapery. Good Madame Necker,
mindful of her Calvinistic education, objected to the nakedness. But not
old Voltaire. “It is all one to me,” he said airily; and added sensibly,
“M. Pigalle must be left absolute master of his statue.... It is a crime
... to put fetters on genius.”
The want of clothing, however, gave rise to many doubtful jokes in
eighteenth-century Paris, and his enemies made very spiteful epigrams on
the meagreness of the figure. “Posterity will not want to count M. de
Voltaire’s ribs,” says Fréron sarcastically. And though Voltaire
pretended to laugh at such gibes--and laughed himself at all his bodily
defects--he was still morally thin-skinned. “A statue is no
consolation,” he wrote dismally to d’Argental, “when so many enemies
conspire to cover it with mud.”
But there were more friends to cover it with adulation. In 1772,
Mademoiselle Clairon surprised the _habitués_ of her rooms one evening
by drawing back a curtain and showing them the bust of Voltaire on an
altar. She put a laurel crown on the head, and in her “noble and
beautiful voice” recited an ode of Marmontel’s which, particularly in
its Apostrophe to Envy, produced a great effect.
When Voltaire heard of the incident, he got out his old lyre and thanked
Mademoiselle in verse of extraordinary freshness--“very pretty for a
young man of only seventy-nine,” says Grimm.
While his statue was the topic of Paris, the original was entertaining
at least three celebrated visitors at Ferney: Dr. Burney, d’Alembert,
and Condorcet.
Dr. Burney, the father of Johnson’s dear _protégée_, Fanny, came to
Geneva in the course of his Musical Tour through France and Italy.
Hearing that Voltaire relentlessly snubbed the curious idle who only
came “to look at the wild beast,” the good pompous Doctor was a little
nervous of the reception he might meet. But all went well.
A servant, presumably Wagnière, introduced Burney to his master’s
sanctum, and to the library, where Burney saw a portrait of young
Dupuits, whom he supposed to be Voltaire’s brother, though Wagnière told
him Voltaire was seventy-eight (he was really seventy-six), and the
difference in age between the “brothers” must have been forty years at
the least.
Then Dr. Burney was introduced to the great man himself, who still
worked, said Wagnière, ten hours a day and wrote constantly without
spectacles. The conversation turned on English literature, and Voltaire
observed how England had now no one “who lords it over the rest like
Dryden, Pope, and Swift”; and remarked, when critics are silent it
proves not so much that the age is correct, as that it is dull. Burney
was shown the model village--“the most innocent and the most useful of
all my works”--and tactfully departed before he should have taken more
than his share of the great man’s time.
D’Alembert arrived at Ferney in the September of 1770. He was supposed
to be _en route_ to see Rome and die. Frederick the Great had sent him
six thousand francs for the tour. But either, as d’Alembert told the
King, the prospect of the fatigue and the bad inns daunted him, or, as
Duvernet says, Voltaire’s society was too seductive. D’Alembert returned
the King half of his money, and in two months was back in Paris.
The Marquis de Condorcet, who then was celebrated as a philosophic and
freethinking noble who had wholly broken with the religion and the
traditions of his caste, and now is celebrated as the philosopher and
_littérateur_ who wrote a brief and scholarly Life of Voltaire and who
poisoned himself to escape the guillotine, was a fellow-guest with
d’Alembert.
Is it difficult to fancy the conversation between these three men over
the Ferney supper-table at the magic hour when Voltaire was always at
his best, “at once light and learned,” brilliant and subtle? The
tranquil cheerfulness of that true philosopher, d’Alembert--“his just
mind and inexhaustible imagination”--soothed the vexations with which he
found his irritable host overwhelmed.
Condorcet, whom Voltaire spoke of as having “the same hatred of
oppression and fanaticism, and the same zeal for humanity” as he had
himself, was as exempt from what it was then modish to call
“prejudices,” as the gentle d’Alembert.
Of that brilliant little party there was but one man who still clung to
some tenets of the old faith; and that man was Voltaire. Du Pan records
how he heard him give an “energetic lesson” at his supper-table to his
two guests, by sending all the servants out of the room in the middle of
their conversation. “Now, gentlemen, continue your attack on God. But as
I do not want to be strangled or robbed to-night by my servants they had
better not hear you.”
“_Si Dieu n’existait pas il faudrait l’inventer_,” Voltaire had said in
one of the most famous lines in the world.
Baron Gleichen, who was at Délices in 1757, records how a young author
sought to recommend himself to the great man’s favour by saying “I am an
atheist apprentice at your service.” “But I,” replied Voltaire, “am a
master Deist.”
But the pupils he had taught had gone far beyond his teaching. Diderot
spoke of him as “_cagot_”; and the story runs that some fine lady of
Paris dismissed him scornfully in the words, “He is a Deist, he is a
bigot.”
He had no further bigotries, it is certain. A thousand stories are told
to illustrate his indignation against what he took to be a debasing
fanaticism.
A Genevan lady brought to see him her little girl, who was as
intelligent as she was pretty and could learn everything but her
Catechism, and that she could not understand. “Ah!” says Voltaire. “How
reasonable! A child always speaks the truth. You do not understand your
Catechism? Do you see these fine peaches? Eat as many as you like.”
It is recorded, too, that Voltaire had always a special grudge against
Habakkuk: and when someone showed him that he had misrepresented facts
in that prophet’s history, “It is no matter,” he replied; “Habakkuk was
capable of anything.”
There are many other such stories told of him. All profane jests are
fathered on Voltaire. Some of them have lost their point with the
circumstances and surroundings among which they were uttered. Some grow
clumsy in translation. Some are without authenticity. That a searching
wit like Voltaire, quite unhampered by reverence, must have found
abundant subject for witticism in the degraded state of the established
religion of his country in his time, is palpable enough.
D’Alembert left. It was his last visit to Ferney.
On December 24, 1770, the powerful Choiseul was disgraced and exiled by
the far more powerful Dubarry. “The coachman of Europe,” as Frederick
called him, had been infinitely clever and infinitely unlucky. If he had
made the army and remade the fleet, expelled the Jesuits, and promoted
trade, art, and literature, he had involved his country in wars, for
which she had wept tears of blood. He fell: and great was the fall of
him.
The tidings were received at Ferney with the utmost consternation. For
Voltaire personally Choiseul had done much. He had helped in the affairs
of Calas and of Chaumont, in that of the Corneille Commentary, and of
the blockade of Ferney. And, more than all, he had protected, with the
absolutely necessary protection none but a powerful minister could
afford, the colony of watchmakers and weavers.
His disgrace ruined Versoix: and Ferney rocked on her foundations.
The steady resolution, and perhaps the fighting renown, of her old
master tided his children over the crisis. But there was famine as well
as disturbance abroad in the land, and for a while things looked black
indeed.
On January 23d of the new year 1771, Louis XV., d’Aiguillon, the
successor of Choiseul, and Maupeou, the Chancellor, suppressed the
Parliament of Paris, to the general disgust. Voltaire did not share it.
That Parliament, if it had been forced at last to reinstate the Calas,
had condemned La Barre, d’Étallonde, and General Lally: it “was defiled
with the blood of the weak and the innocent”; had burnt the works of the
Encyclopædists; and been so fiercely Jansenist that wise men regretted
the Jesuits it had ruined. In its place were to be established six
Superior Councils or Local Parliaments, which were to give justice
gratuitously and to be the final courts of appeal, thereby saving the
nation the enormous expense of conveying accused persons to the capital.
To be sure, the jury system as practised in ideal England was better
still. But in an imperfect world one must be satisfied with imperfect
progress.
Voltaire believed the six sovereign Councils to be “the salvation of
France”--“one of the best ideas since the foundation of monarchy.” As
far back as 1769 he had attacked the old Parliament, under a very
transparent anonymity, in his “History of the Parliament of Paris.”
All things considered, there was no wonder that a shrewd Maupeou,
knowing how bitterly public opinion was against him, should call to his
aid the man “who had led it and fashioned it to his taste.” Voltaire put
himself at the disposition of Maupeou, and for many a month deafened the
enemy with blast upon blast from his famous old trumpet.
If he was quite disinterested--and he was--in working under Maupeou for
what he felt convinced was “the liberty, salvation, and well-being of
whole populations,” it was not at all unnatural that Choiseul should
find it hard to forgive this active devotion to the policy of his
supplanters.
The Duchess, with whom Voltaire had coquetted so charmingly over that
pair of silk stockings, was as much offended as her husband. Madame du
Deffand, her dearest friend, was offended too. And Voltaire spared
himself neither pains nor time to restore confidence, to assure the dear
exiles of Chanteloup in immense letters of his sincere and unaltering
devotion to them: of his gratitude for the powerful protection of the
one, and the gracious kindness of the other. Of course such letters had
no effect. The haughty little Duchess begged that the correspondence
might end. And the most obstinate of men went on writing to her exactly
the same.
There was division in his own house on the subject of the Parliament
too. His nephew, Mignot, that short-sighted, good-natured, roundabout
abbé, the son of Catherine, and the brother of Mesdames Denis and
Florian, was, like his uncle, on the side of the reforms, and on May 20,
1771, was made senior clerk of the new Parliament.
D’Hornoy, on the other hand, Voltaire’s great-nephew, had been a
councillor of the old Parliament and was exiled with it.
However, politics apart, Voltaire liked both nephews, thought them
honest souls, and made them, as has been noted, handsome allowances.
Brochures against the old Parliament and for the new occupied the Hermit
of Ferney very actively during the whole of the year 1771, but
they did not prevent him carrying on a correspondence with four
sovereigns--Catherine, Frederick, Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski, and
Gustavus III. of Sweden.
On December 18th he began a new tragedy, “The Laws of Minos.” It was
that dismal thing, a play with a purpose--“to make superstition
execrable, and prove that when a law is unequal there is nothing for it
but to abolish it.” It was written in honour of Maupeou. The
Chancellor’s enemies did Voltaire a good turn by preventing it from
being played.
Death was busy just now among both friends and foes of Voltaire. He was
fast reaching the age when he was naturally the last leaf on the tree.
In the December of 1771 died Helvétius, philosopher and farmer-general;
in the spring of 1772, Duclos, who had replaced Voltaire as
Historiographer of France, and preceded d’Alembert as Secretary to the
Academy. Then fell a leaf from the Arouet branch itself. Madame de
Florian, always delicate, went the way of all flesh; and by February 1,
1772, her widowed husband had arrived at Ferney in that loud desolation
which is the herald of speedy consolation.
He met at Ferney a very pretty, vivacious little Protestant who had been
divorced from her first husband for incompatibility of temper. The pair
were gaily married before April 1, 1772--to the disgust of Madame Denis,
who rightly thought her sister was forgotten too soon, but to the
delight of that old matchmaker, Voltaire.
Besides the bride and bridegroom, there was also at hospitable Ferney,
Florian’s nephew, whom Voltaire called Florianet, an observant youth who
lived to write “The Youth of Florian, or Memoirs of a Young Spaniard,”
and who had stayed here before when he was a boy of ten or eleven. He
had acted then as a sort of page to Voltaire, and Father Adam had
furthered his education by setting him Latin exercises. Voltaire used to
help the child out of those intricacies concerning Hostages and the Gate
of a City, play games with him, and try to wake in him liveliness and
wit. “Seem witty, and the wit will come” was the advice of the wittiest
man of his century.
Florianet was seventeen now, and amused himself, during a visit of two
months, with balls, hunting, a quarrel with his new aunt, and games with
Marie Dupuits’s little girl. She was eight years old and very
intelligent, and Voltaire was fond of her with that fondness for all
young creatures which is surely an amiable trait in a busy man.
He was hardly less fond of Wagnière’s children (the Genevan boy was a
married man by this time, rearing a family at Ferney), who used to play
about the room while the Patriarch dictated to their father.
In this spring of 1772, Voltaire was occupied in building a pretty
little house in the neighbourhood for the Florian husband and wife. The
poor bride was not destined to enjoy it long. She died two years later
of a disease which was called by many extraordinary names and received
the most extraordinary treatment, but which appears to have been
consumption. The Marquis immediately fell violently in love with someone
else.
The only significance of his third Marquise lies in the fact that she
was the bearer of a conciliatory letter and a copy of his “Natural
History” from the famous Buffon to Voltaire--the two having previously
been on bad terms.
More visitors flocked to Ferney in the autumn of 1772. Lekain paid a
third visit, and, the Genevan theatre having been burnt, “bewitched
Geneva” at Châtelaine instead.
Châtelaine was a playhouse which Voltaire had built on French soil, but
only a few yards from the territory of the republic, to the great
umbrage of “Tronchins and syndics.”
They did not hate it less in this September, when Lekain’s seductive
genius drew their young people within its walls by half-past eleven A.M.
for a performance which was to take place at four, and the women wept
and fainted at his pathos. Old Voltaire had a box reserved for him,
cried like a schoolgirl at one moment, and the next applauded as if he
were possessed, by thumping his stick violently on the floor and crying
aloud, “It’s splendid! It couldn’t be better!”
A cool-headed English visitor, Dr. John Moore, who was here during one
of Lekain’s visits, described the performances as only “moderately
good.”
Traveller, physician, and writer, the author of a popular novel,
“Zeluco,” and the father of the hero of Coruña, Moore had frequent
opportunities of conversing with the famous old skeleton who had so
“much more spirit and vivacity than is generally produced by flesh and
blood.” He understood Voltaire far better than most of the English
visitors. To be sure, he could not forgive him his adverse criticisms on
Shakespeare--the king who can do no wrong. But Dr. Moore, himself a
sincere Christian, was one of the very few who admitted that Voltaire
was as sincere an unbeliever; that his Deism was not an offensive
affectation to shock the devout, but a
[Illustration: VOLTAIRE’S DECLARATION OF FAITH
_From the Original in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris_]
profound conviction; and that “as soon as he is convinced of the truths
of Christianity he will openly avow his opinion, in health as in
sickness, uniformly to his last moment.”
Dr. Moore also perceived that here was the man who was not afraid of
dying--only of dying before he had said all he had to say. He records
Voltaire’s famous comparison of the British nation to a hogshead of its
own beer--“the top of which is froth, the bottom dregs, the middle
excellent.” Moore’s “Society and Manners in France” contains one of the
best, if not the best, accounts of Voltaire written from personal
observation by an Englishman.
In the midst of theatrical gaieties news reached Voltaire of the death
of Theriot, on November 23, 1772. Old age, that merciful narcotic,
helped to deaden the blow for Theriot’s old friend. Also, Theriot had
long been proven worthless, and he had a great many of Voltaire’s
letters in his possession, which roused Voltaire from grief to anxiety
lest they should appear incontinently in print.
On December 8th he was writing to d’Alembert to recommend “brother La
Harpe” (who had so grievously failed him) for the post, left vacant by
Theriot’s death, of Parisian correspondent to Frederick the Great.
At the end of 1772, the jealousy of foolish Denis made another little
_fracas_ at Ferney. A girl of seventeen, Mademoiselle de Saussure, the
daughter of a famous doctor, and “a very wide-awake little person,” said
Grimm, had the good fortune to amuse, and often visit, a Voltaire of
seventy-eight. Madame Denis, who disliked Mademoiselle, not only for
herself, but as being a relative of her sister’s supplanter, the second
Madame Florian, made a scandal of the affair.
If ever that homely proverb, “Give a dog a bad name and hang him,” was
true of anybody, it was certainly true of Voltaire.
It was wonderful that that sensitive niece did not find a cause of
jealousy when, in the June of 1773, an old friend, La Borde, came back
to Ferney, bearing with him as a present for Voltaire the portrait of
Madame Dubarry, on which that charming and disreputable lady had
imprinted two kisses. Her favour was worth having. Only twenty-seven
years old, and but recently picked up from the gutter, she was the real
ruler of France. She had dismissed Choiseul; she had made Terrai, that
dissolute Comptroller-General of Finances, whose “edicts fell in
showers”; and she used the public treasury as if it were her private
purse.
Voltaire knew King and Court too well to neglect such a power. Somehow,
in Geneva the winters had been getting longer and more snowy than ever;
and always, in his mind, was that old, old idea of seeing Paris once
again before he died. And there was no chance of a return if the
Omnipotent Woman was unfavourable.
So Voltaire replied with that happy mixture of grace and effrontery for
which his youth had been so famous, and in September, 1773, as has been
noted, he sent Madame the sweetest little watch set in diamonds.
She repaid him for his compliments--on the spot. She helped him to
vindicate General Lally.
It must not be thought that statues and visitors, old age in the
present, and death in a near future, made Voltaire forget to fight
_l’infâme_, or the iniquitous legal system which was often _l’infâme’s_
strongest support. He never forgot anything; and his mind had room for a
thousand interests that never jostled or hurt each other.
In 1772, it had been greatly occupied by the case of the Bombelles.
Madame de Bombelles, a Protestant, had the misfortune to be the wife of
a French officer who grew tired of her, and in order that he might marry
someone else, discarded his wife on the excuse that they had been
married by Protestant rites. The unhappy woman pleaded her case at law.
It was decided against her; her marriage declared null and void;
ordained that she should pay the costs of the suit; that her child
should be educated as a Catholic, at its father’s expense. Voltaire
pleaded long and loud against a decision so shameful, and pleaded, as
usual, as if the interest in hand were the only one he had in the world.
But though _l’infâme_ was responsible for much, the cruelly unjust
justice of the day had upon its guilty soul crimes with which _l’infâme_
had nothing to do.
There had been the case of Martin--condemned to the wheel “on an
equivocal meaning.” The wretched man, arraigned on a wholly unfounded
suspicion of murder, when one of the witnesses said that he did not
recognise him as the person he had seen escaping from the scene of
action, cried out, “Thank God! There is one who has not recognised me!”
Which the judge took to mean, “Thank God! I committed the murder but
have not been recognised by the witness.”
The real murderer confessed before long, but not before Martin had been
tortured and broken on the wheel, his little fortune confiscated, and
his innocent family dispersed abroad, so that they never even knew
perhaps that their father was proved innocent--too late.
Voltaire wrote an account of the case to d’Alembert. “Fine phrases! Fine
phrases!” he said once to an admirer complimenting him on his style. “I
never made one in my life!” He never did. He wrote to make men act, as
he had always written; and the substance of his tale was ever so great
and so moving that the simpler the form of it, the more effective.
In 1773, he wrote the “Fragment on the Criminal Lawsuit of the
Montbaillis.”
It is only four pages long. It tells, in language to be understood by
any child, the story of a husband and wife, snuff-makers of St. Omer,
who in July, 1770, had been accused of murdering their drunken old
mother.
The inventive French temperament concluded that they _must_ have
murdered her, because a drunken mother is a trial, and her loss would be
a gain. A quarrel they had had with her on the last evening of her life
(the reconciliation which followed was conveniently forgotten) lent
colour to the theory.
The positive facts that the doctor, who was at once called, attributed
the old woman’s death to apoplexy; that she not only left no money
behind her, but that with her death expired the licence to make snuff,
which was her son’s only means of livelihood; that the accused were
known to have been patient and affectionate in their filial
relationship; were themselves of quiet and gentle character; and that
there was not a single witness to the crime for which they were
arraigned--had no weight with either the populace or the magistrates.
On November 19, 1771, Montbailli was tortured and broken on the wheel;
and his wife, aged only twenty-four, was left in prison in irons,
awaiting the birth of her child, and then death by the hand of the
executioner.
But that dreadful reprieve gave her relatives time to appeal to the only
man in France who could save her.
Voltaire laid the matter before the Chancellor Maupeou. The case was
re-tried. Both the Montbaillis were declared innocent. And that fickle
and dangerous people who had compassed the death of her husband, and
who, but for Voltaire, would have compassed her own, received back the
wife with tears of joy.
Voltaire had not spared himself. If he wrote briefly, he wrote often.
That style, so simple to read, was not nearly so simple to write. Before
things are made clear to the reader they have to be still clearer to the
writer, who must know at least twice as much as he tells. Then, too,
every fresh case brought Voltaire others. While he was writing pamphlets
for the Montbaillis, he was also writing pamphlets on the case of a
certain Comte de Morangiés; he was working hard for young d’Étallonde;
he was appealing for his own poor people of Ferney and Gex; and he was
in the midst of the suit for the vindication of Lally.
General Lally was a hot-headed Irish Jacobite, who had plotted in France
for the restoration of the Stuarts, and who, when he was sent to India
in the service of France, had declared his policy to be “No more English
in India.”
A clerk called Clive frustrated that little plan. Among a shipload of
French prisoners sent to England was General Lally. England released him
on parole. He returned to France--a country never noted for her
tenderness to the unsuccessful. Besides popular indignation, he had to
face that of the disappointed shareholders in the East India Company,
and the ill-will of a government that supposed the best way to appease
England would be to maltreat Lally.
He “was accused of all crimes” of which a man could be capable. He
demanded an investigation. “I bring here my head and my innocence,” he
wrote to Choiseul, “and await your orders.”
He awaited them for fifteen months in the Bastille--untried.
Then a special court was formed of fifteen members of the dying and
rotten Parliament of Paris; and this man, who had “spent his last rupee
in the public service,” was accused of having sold Pondichery to his
bitterest foes, the English, and upon no fewer than one hundred and
fifty-nine other counts.
In the teeth of all testimony the unanimous voice of those fifteen
judges condemned him to be beheaded. Surly, churlish, and embittered,
imprudent speech was proven against him. But no worse offence. “He is
the only man who has had his head cut off for being ungracious.” That
coward, the King, shut himself up in Choisy, so that no petition for
mercy might reach him.
On May 6, 1766, Lally, General, sixty-four years old, and six times
wounded in the service of his adopted country, was taken, gagged and
handcuffed, to the Place de Grève and there beheaded. The gag was
removed at the foot of the scaffold. But he was wise enough to
disappoint the mob, and died without a word.
“It is expedient that one man should die for the people.” That spirit is
not extinct in France yet.
But if Lally’s innocent blood cried in vain from the ground to King,
magistracy, and mob, it reached old ears that to their last hour would
never be deaf to the tale of wrong.
“I have the vanity to think that God has made me for an _avocat_,” said
Voltaire.
He had closely followed the General’s trial. His prosecutor was
Pasquier, who had received a royal pension for condemning poor mad
Damiens to horrible tortures--Pasquier, “with the snout of an ox and the
heart of a tiger,” and Voltaire’s especial detestation.
It may have been that hatred which first made him examine the documents
concerning this trial. Also, he had met Lally at Richelieu’s, and worked
with him at d’Argenson’s.
On June 16, 1766, he wrote to d’Alembert, “I will stake my neck on it he
was not a traitor”; and a few days later, to d’Argental, “It is my fate
to be dissatisfied with the sentences of the Parliament. I dare to be so
with that which has condemned Lally.”
Dissatisfied with wrong? There have been thousands of men good enough
for that, who have lived and died dissatisfied with it, without lifting
a finger to put right in its place.
Months passed, and years. Voltaire inserted in his “History of Louis
XV.” an able exculpation of Lally. It was something. But it was not
enough.
In 1769, he wrote that Lally and his gag, Sirven, Calas, Martin, the
Chevalier de la Barre, came before him sometimes in dreams. “People
think our century only ridiculous, but it is horrible.” In 1773, he
wrote that he still had on his heart the blood of Lally and the
Chevalier de la Barre.
Still? For ever till they were avenged. He had read English books on
Lally’s case. The English had had no reason to love Lally, but they
regarded his sentence as a barbarous injustice.
And then, early in this year 1773, Lally’s young son, whom the father
had charged to avenge his memory, sent his first Memoir on the case to
Voltaire and asked his assistance.
Voltaire had been very ill--really ill, not fancifully so--with the
gout, and he was in his eightieth year. But this “_avocat_ of lost
causes” had his old burning zeal.
He first began by telling the young Chevalier de Lally-Tollendal, out of
his abundant experience, and in a letter dated April 28, 1773, what to
do and what not to do. “As for me, I will be your secretary.”
Lally-Tollendal, then two-and-twenty years old, had at fifteen written a
Latin poem on Jean Calas. He thus already knew his Voltaire. The King
had paid for his education--a confession of, or an _amende_ for, the
injustice which had killed his father. He was to be one of the
aristocratic democrats of the French Revolution, a refugee in England,
and, in 1815, peer of France. But now he was nothing and nobody, and
alone could never have fulfilled his father’s trust.
For many weeks the labour of “The Historical Fragments of the History
of India and of General Lally” occupied Voltaire “day and night.” It
cost him, he told Madame du Deffand, more than any other work of his
life. It had to be amusing in the history because the monkeys, who
formed one half of the nation, would not read history unless it was
amusing; and pathetic enough, as touching General Lally, to melt the
hearts of the tigers who formed the other half.
Then there were pamphlets to be written, and Madame Dubarry to be won
over. Through her, Lally-Tollendal got his commission in the army.
Through Voltaire, on May 26, 1778, Louis XVI. in council publicly
vindicated General Lally.
In a room in the Hôtel Villette, at the corner of the Rue de Beaune in
Paris, a dying old Voltaire received that news. The splendid intellect
which had served him for more than eighty years, as never mind served
man before, was waning too. But for a moment its strength came back. To
Lally-Tollendal Voltaire dictated his last letter.
“The dead returns to life on learning this great news; he tenderly
embraces M. Lally; he sees that the King is the Defender of Justice; and
will die, content.”
With a last flash of his old spirit, he made someone write in a large
hand, on a sheet of paper which he had pinned to the bed hangings where
everyone could see it, the following words:
“On May 26th the judicial murder committed by Pasquier (Councillor to
the Parliament) upon the person of Lally was avenged by the Council of
the King.”
If ever man carried into the other life the hatred of that oppression
and injustice which have made the wretchedness of this to more than half
the human race, surely that man was Voltaire.