LATTER DAYS
Voltaire’s old age was naturally something less eventful than the
“crowded hour” of his youth and manhood. But if ever his private life
afforded him a chance of quiet, public events always stepped in to
disturb it.
On May 10, 1774, Louis XV. died of the smallpox, to the good and
blessing of the world. His old courtier at Ferney no sooner heard the
news than he put pen to paper and wrote his Majesty’s _Éloge_, “to be
pronounced before an Academy on May 25th.”
Of course a eulogy had to be eulogistic. The old hand had not lost its
cunning. To flatter the dear departed, to speak of him as a good father,
a good husband and master, and “as much a friend as a king can be”; to
offer for his little failings that courtly excuse, “One cannot be always
a king: one would be too much to be pitied,” and to imply that the man
was a fool so that the insult sounded like a compliment, why, Voltaire
was the one writer in the world who could do it. And he did it.
He turned the occasion to practical use, by preaching against the
neglect of inoculation; and then looked to the future.
What wonder that, for the moment, even this prophet should forget to
prophesy Revolution; should think that he saw already the beginning of
the Golden Age--Millennium--all things made new?
To be sure, he told the government plainly that there were still
Frenchmen who were “in the same legal condition as the beasts of that
land they watered with their tears.” And the young King answered by
repealing the Tax of the Joyful Accession; by disgracing Terrai, for
whom old Ferney was keeping his last tooth; by appointing first as
Minister of Finance, then as Comptroller-General, and then as Secretary
of State, the great reforming Turgot, one of the most enlightened men in
France and already the personal friend of Voltaire. “If any man can
re-establish the finances,” wrote Ferney on September 7th, “he is the
man.” And a few days later, when Turgot obtained free trade in grain,
the enthusiastic old invalid thanked Nature for having made him live
long enough to see that day. Free trade in grain had a very personal
application to this master of a town, this founder of a colony. He had
d’Étallonde staying with him now; and next to his arduous and passionate
work for the restitution of that young officer’s civil rights (“he is
calm about his fate, and I--I die of it”), his four hundred children had
the largest share of his mind. That they returned his affection and
repaid him as they could, was proved when, on Madame Denis’s recovery
from a dangerous chest complaint in the spring of 1775, they fêted that
“niece of her uncle” “with companies of infantry and cavalry, cockades
and kettledrums”--all the mummery and millinery which they loved, and
their master had loved all his life.
Madame Denis was, it must be remembered, already the legal owner of
Ferney. She was to be its practical owner. And it was her old uncle’s
too sanguine hope that she would maintain the manufactory after him. She
was certainly pleased at the colonists’ rejoicings, and the colonists
were pleased themselves, and Voltaire was highly delighted; and a quite
cool observer, Hennin, the Resident, noted that it was a grand thing to
see a cavalcade of nearly a hundred men, mounted and in uniform, from a
village where, twelve years before, there were twenty families of
wretched peasants.
So that, although the year 1775, which was to usher into Ferney such a
succession of visitors as might make the most sociable heart quail,
began with sickness, it began with rejoicing too.
D’Étallonde was still staying there. Nephew d’Hornoy was helping
Voltaire to work his case. The Marquis and Marquise de Luchet came to
join the party in the spring, and were here two months--the Marquis, who
was to be one of Voltaire’s biographers, always engaged in mad schemes
for making money out of gold mines; and the Marquise turning her
good-natured and laughter-loving self into a hospital nurse and nursing
the Ferney invalids unremittingly.
Then came the Florians; and the Marquis’s third wife brought with her
another lively visitor, her young sister, whom Voltaire called “Quinze
Ans,” “who laughed at everything and laughed always.”
They were followed by ecstatic little Madame Suard, who worshipped
Voltaire with the tiresome adoration of a schoolgirl; kissed his hands
and clasped her own; flattered, adored, and coquetted with him; and went
so far as to declare in the long and rapturous accounts she wrote of
him, that his every wrinkle was a charm.
With her came her brother, Panckoucke, who wanted to edit Voltaire’s
works, but did not yet obtain that favour. She also found with Voltaire,
Audibert, that merchant of Marseilles, the earliest friend of the Calas;
and Poissonnier, Catherine the Great’s doctor.
In July, Chabanon, and Abbé Morellet were both staying at Ferney. Also
in July, an audacious and wholly unsnubbable person called Denon had
forced his way there too; asked for his host’s bust; was refused; and
revenged himself by sending the poor old Patriarch a most hideous sketch
of his lean features which he, Denon, had made himself. It was very far
from being the only offensive likeness of the great man. Still extant is
a caricature called “Déjeuner at Ferney,” which Voltaire used to think
was by Huber, and which contains grotesque portraits of Voltaire and
Father Adam, and represents poor Madame Denis, who _was_ inclined to
_embonpoint_, enormously fat. But, after all, it was in the January of
this 1775 that Frederick had sent Voltaire, Voltaire’s bust in porcelain
with _Immortali_ written beneath it. Here was compensation for many
caricatures.
Little Madame Saint-Julien, who had made Ferney lace the mode, and was a
fashionable philanthropist when philanthropy was not the fashion, paid
another long visit to Ferney in the autumn, and went back to Paris to
intercede with her influential relatives for Voltaire’s children. She
and their father were so successful that the day soon came when, “in
spite of the obstinate resistance of the farmers-general,” they obtained
for the colonists that “moderate and fixed tariff which freed the
country from the despotism of a pitiless tax,” extorting from the
poverty-stricken province of Gex alone the exorbitant sum of not less
than forty thousand livres annually.
The grateful colonists had fireworks and illuminations on that good
Butterfly’s birthday; and in December they fêted old Voltaire himself,
filled his carriage with flowers, and decorated the horses with laurels.
The visitors did not cease with the new year 1776. Nay, one came who
came to stay. Mademoiselle Reine-Philiberte de Varicourt was the niece
of those six poor gentlemen whose estates Voltaire had reclaimed in 1761
from the Jesuits of Ornex. Bright, honest, and good, well deserving that
charming name of Belle-et-Bonne with which old Voltaire immediately
christened her, the unfortunate girl had no _dot_ and was destined to a
convent.
But Madame Denis took one of her good-natured likings to her. She was
girlishly kind to old Voltaire, while he on his part soon worshipped her
pretty face, virgin heart, and bright intelligence. No “narrowing
nunnery walls” for her! Marie Dupuits had husband and child to think of
now, and Marie had never had Reine-Philiberte’s dignified good sense.
Belle-et-Bonne fell into place at once. She became a regular, and not
the least delightful, member of the heterogeneous Ferney household.
Another Englishman, Martin Sherlock, visited it in April, 1776, and
wrote his experiences, in his “Letters of an English Traveller,” in
French, which has been retranslated into his native tongue.
Voltaire, who was accompanied by d’Hornoy, met his guest in the hall,
showed him his gardens, spoke a few words to him in English, told an
anecdote of Swift, talked of Pope, of Chesterfield, of Hervey, and with
his old passionate admiration of Newton. Stopping before his bust, he
exclaimed, “This is the greatest genius that ever existed!” There was
no dimming of the old mind, no lack-lustre, no weariness. The England he
had not seen for nearly fifty years was still a vivid and a present
reality.
On one of his visits--Sherlock paid two--Voltaire showed his guest his
shelves filled with English books--Robertson, “who is your Livy”; Hume,
“who wrote history to be applauded”; Bolingbroke, “many leaves and
little fruit”; Milton, Congreve, Rochester.
He criticised the English language--“energetic, precise, and barbarous.”
He explained to Madame Denis the scene in Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” where
the King makes love to Katharine in bad French. He spoke “with the
warmth of a man of thirty.”
Quaintly dressed in white shoes and stockings, red breeches, embroidered
waistcoat and bedgown, and a gold and silver nightcap over his grey
peruke, old Voltaire apologised for this singular appearance to his
guest by saying in English that at Ferney they were for Liberty and
Property. “So that I wear my nightcap and Father Adam his hat.” Later,
he added gravely, “You are happy, you can do anything.... We cannot even
die as we will.”
During the conversation he had uttered what his visitor called “horrors”
about Moses and Shakespeare.
Nothing proves better the young vigour of this marvellous old mind than
the strength of its animosities. The “let-it-alone” spirit of old age
was never this man’s while there was breath left in his body. At the end
of 1773 he had attacked another literary foe--an ungrateful _protégé_,
“the inclement Clement”--in the “Cabals,” a satire in which ring out
clearly the notes a younger hand had struck in “Akakia” or in “Vanity.”
Then on March 10, 1776, Fréron died of mortification at the suppression
of his “Literary Year,” and up gets Voltaire and says he has received an
anonymous letter asking him, if you please, to endow Frélon-Fréron’s
daughter! This is too much. Voltaire suggests that Madame Fréron wrote
that letter. And the Frélons say Voltaire invented it himself. And
Voltaire is as spry and alert and angry as when he first hated Fréron,
thirty years ago.
But these enemies he knew, or had known, in the flesh.
To admire or to despise Shakespeare was but a literary question. Old
Eighty-two in this July of 1776 took it as a burning personal one. He
had not precisely adored Shakespeare in the “English Letters.” A
barbarian, a monster--but of very great genius. For the sake of that
genius he had permitted the polished French people to condone that
“heavy grossness” and the shocking lack of taste; and in his famous
criticism on “Hamlet,” written in 1748, though he _had_ called its
author “a drunken savage,” he had found in the play, not the less,
“sublime touches worthy of the loftiest genius.” To Sherlock, but three
months ago, though he had uttered “horrors” in his criticism, he had
admitted that “amazing genius” again.
And now one Letourneur publishes a new translation of the great William,
and takes upon himself to call him the “god of the theatre,” the only
model for true tragedy; and ignores Corneille and Racine (to say nothing
of the author of “Zaire”) _in toto_.
Then Voltaire beat his breast and tore his hair to think that it was
I--I--who showed to the French the pearls in this English dunghill; that
I suffered persecution for telling them that though the god had feet of
clay, the head and heart were gold.
So in a rage M. de Voltaire sat down and wrote a letter to the
Academy--“his factotum against Shakespeare”; gave himself the lie;
literally translated many passages, knowing, as he had said himself,
that in a translation the letter killeth and the spirit giveth life;
presented, as he meant to do, a gross and coarse Shakespeare, an
indecent buffoon who had “ruined the taste of England for two hundred
years.” Various persons rushed into the fray on either side.
On August 25th, Voltaire’s letter was read at a public meeting at the
Academy, and a good-natured Marquis de Villevieille galloped off
post-haste to Ferney to tell of its success. But there had been
dissentient voices. Anglomania was already a power in the land. The
young Queen had her Crawfords and Dillons, her English garden, her
English jockeys, her English billiards. D’Alembert was too cool, too
cool! The untrammelled nature of the great Diderot was formed to
appreciate the broad and daring genius of the great Englishman. And
Madame Necker, with the sure instincts of a clever woman, criticised
Voltaire’s letter in a letter to Garrick. Voltaire had but shown
Shakespeare’s dead body--“But I--I have seen the soul animating it, and
know it is something more even than a majestic ghost which Garrick, the
enchanter, summons from the grave.”
The letter to the Academy was the last utterance on the great Englishman
of the man who--whether he hotly regretted it, as he did now and in the
famous Preface to “Semiramis,” or was, or said he was, proud of it, as
when he wrote to Walpole--first revealed Shakespeare to the people of
France.
August saw the arrival of a visitor who was hereafter herself to be a
celebrity, Madame de Genlis. Now only thirty years old, she was not yet
famous for her literary works or that grave and religious turn of mind
which did not prevent her occupying the very equivocal position of
_gouvernante_ to the children of the Duke of Orleans. As Madame Suard
came to Ferney prepared to go into raptures, so Madame Genlis came
prepared to disapprove.
The serious lady carried out her intention as thoroughly as the
frivolous one. Her account of her visit contains much more about herself
than about Voltaire, but states, no doubt very truly, that the impiety
of his conversation was shocking, and, certainly untruly, that his
manners lacked tact and urbanity. For this too particular lady the very
trees in the Ferney garden grew too low and upset her temper and her
hair; while the wild enthusiasm for their host of her companion, a
painter, M. Ott, quite distressed a person who had so firmly resolved
not to make a fool of herself in that direction.
As her point of view was unfavourable, her testimony as to her host’s
“ingenuous goodness” to his colonists, to the perfect modesty and
simplicity with which he regarded his great work for them, is the more
valuable. She confirmed the opinion of many others as to the piercing
brilliancy of the old eyes--“which have in them an inexpressible
sweetness.” Madame Saint-Julien was there at the same time--little and
gay and kind--and presently Marie Dupuits’s little girl ran into the
room and put her arms round Grandpapa Voltaire’s neck.
During this August, Voltaire, rather proud of the transaction, “borrowed
Lekain,” who was acting at Court, from Marie Antoinette. The Hermit of
Ferney was too toothless to act himself, but his earliest passion was
also his latest. There was the most charming little theatre in the
village of Ferney now. Lekain acted in that and at Châtelaine. The young
Queen’s graciousness in lending her player made artful old Voltaire long
to have “Olympie” acted before her; to have her for his protectress; to
see with his own eyes “her whose least charm,” as he said, “was
loveliness.”
Picture the delight of the whilom author of “The Princess of Navarre”
when he was commissioned to write a _divertissement_ for her benefit. He
wrote, or rather reproduced a sketch of a _fête_ given at Vienna by the
Austrian Court sixty years before, and called it “The Host and Hostess.”
The thing was meritless, but not objectless, though it failed in its
object--the _rapprochement_ of Ferney and Versailles.
Then M. de Voltaire must needs write an allegory, “Sésostris,” to
flatter the _beaux yeux_ of the Queen, and to show what a King might do
for the good of his people.
To the year 1776, besides the Battle of Shakespeare, belong two more
fights--the last of Voltaire’s life. Beauregard, Rohan, Jore--how far
they were away! But the spirit of their old antagonist had not waxed
faint.
The first fight was only a skirmish, it is true. Father Adam had been
spoilt, of course. From being an inoffensive, lazy person--“the only
idler in a houseful of busy people”--he had become assertive, worrying,
and quarrelsome. He had fallen out with Bigex, the copyist, in 1769; and
as a result Bigex had had to leave. And now the Father must go himself.
It was characteristic of the man who had allowed Jore a pension for
life, that he should send after this ungrateful priest who owed him
thirteen years’ hospitality, presents of money.
In the second fight, the very last of his life, occurring in the
December of 1776, Voltaire matched steel with a worthier foe. It was in
answer to an attack made upon him by an Abbé Guénée that he wrote the
bold and brilliant, if neither deep nor sound, “Christian against Six
Jews,” which advanced Pigalle’s evidence on the subject of the Golden
Calf, and might have better confuted Guénée if that reasoner had not
been on his own ground and most cool and subtle in argument.
But if his foes did not spare this old Voltaire, neither did his
friends. In the early days of 1777 Moultou introduced at Ferney a
wearisome playwright called Berthe, who would persist in reading aloud
his tedious play to their host. “Here the Chevalier laughs,” read
Berthe, as a stage direction. “Happy man!” murmured Voltaire. When the
listener could bear it no longer, he feigned the most violent colic that
ever man had suffered. The next day Berthe came again, and so did the
colic. “If God had not come to my aid,” said Voltaire to Grimm, “I
should have been lost.”
It was in 1777 that Voltaire amused himself by competing under a
pseudonym, for a prize offered by the French Academy for the best
translation of the sixth book of the “Iliad.” It did not gain a prize.
It was not even good. But that such a man at such an age should have
been “sleeplessly active” enough to enter into such a competition, makes
the thing worth recording.
But worse than unsuccessful translations and dull plays, worse than
being beaten in a verbal quibble with a priest, was a mortification this
vain old heart received in the June of 1777.
Joseph II., the young Emperor of Austria, brother of Marie Antoinette,
and himself something of a philosopher, had been the lion of the spring
in Paris. It was confidently expected by d’Alembert, Frederick the
Great--everyone, including Voltaire himself--that on his return home the
celebrity would do what all celebrities did--visit the King of their
kind at Ferney.
On June 27th, Voltaire wrote airily to say that he did not expect his
Majesty. What in the world was there for him to see in this manufactory
of watches and verses? But all the same, when the day came, Ferney rose
up very early in the morning and from eight o’clock was ready in its
best clothes, with its master in his great peruke, waiting. A splendid
dinner had been prepared. The condition of the road from Ferney to
Versoix had been improved by its owner. All was in readiness.
Presently the sound of the rumbling of the travelling carriage is heard
in the distance. If his Majesty had not meant to call at the château,
why choose this route? There were others. “This is Ferney!” says the
coachman. “Whip up the horses!” cries the Emperor. And the imperial
_cortège_ dashes through Ferney, and past the windows of the expectant
château itself, at a gallop. When it is added that his Majesty alighted
at Versoix and examined that infant colony, and that when he reached
Berne he paid a special visit to Voltaire’s great rival, Haller, it will
be seen that he meant to offend.
It is to the credit of a plucky old heart that Voltaire quite refused to
acknowledge himself snubbed, pointed out that he had always said his
Majesty would not come, and that “my age and maladies prevented me from
finding myself on his route.” But if he swallowed it with a smile, the
pill was a bitter one not the less. “This disgrace” the poor old man
called it, writing in confidence to his Angel. But the “disgrace,” if
any, was not Voltaire’s, but the man’s who, privately confessing himself
a philosopher, was afraid to visit Voltaire lest he should be openly
accounted one, and offend an austere mother.
The Emperor’s neglected visit was the last mortification of the man who
had had many, and had felt all with an extraordinary sensitiveness.
But, after all, “the end of all ambition is to be happy at home,” and
Voltaire had many consolations.
The good, fat, Swiss servant, Barbara, was one. Voltaire was at last
learning a little how to grow old, and now went to bed at ten and slept
till five, when Baba would bring him his coffee. One day he took it into
his head to mix some rose-water with it, as an experiment. The result
was an acute indigestion. He rang the bell violently. Enter Baba. “I am
in the agonies of death. I put some rose-water in my coffee and am dying
of it.” “Sir,” says the indignant Baba, “with all your cleverness you
are sillier than your own turkeys.”
But nearer and dearer than a Baba could be was Belle-et-Bonne. By this
time she had become like the old man’s daughter. With rare tact she had
succeeded in endearing herself to him without offending Madame Denis.
She would arrange his papers for him, and keep the desk which hung over
his bed, and “which he could lower or raise at pleasure,” in that order
and neatness his soul loved.
“Good morning, _belle nature_,” he would say when she greeted him in the
morning; and when she kissed his old parchment face would declare it was
Life kissing Death. It was Belle-et-Bonne who could soothe his
irritability or impatience--“You put me on good terms with life.”
And it was Voltaire of eighty-three who taught Mademoiselle
Reine-Philiberte de Varicourt how to dance.
In the summer of this 1777 there arrived unexpectedly one day at Ferney
a worn-out _roué_ of a Marquis de Villette, who had passed two or three
months here in 1765, and with whom Voltaire had since corresponded.
Rich, gallant, well born, a society versemaker, this “ne’er-do-weel of
good company” was the sort of person who sounds attractive on paper, and
in real life is wholly objectionable. Voltaire--Voltaire!--had tendered
him moral advice and urged him to reform. He had known the young man’s
mother--herself a woman of irregular morals--and from these two facts
arose an entirely unfounded scandal, that Voltaire was Villette’s
father.
He was soon to be a sort of father-in-law. Villette, now some forty
years old, and having run away from an intrigue and a duel in Paris, met
Belle-et-Bonne at Ferney; saw her walking in the procession of the
_fête_ of St. Francis (always kept enthusiastically by the colony of
François Marie Arouet), with flowers at her breast, a basket with doves
in it in her hand, and her face bright, beautiful, and blushing.
What was there to do but to fall in love with her? Wagnière, who hated
Villette, said that he played fast and loose with Mademoiselle for three
months. However that may have been, Voltaire approved of his suit. To be
sure, Belle-et-Bonne was too good for him. But she had no _dot_--if a
pretty face, an innocent heart, youth, dignity, and intelligence count
for nothing--so she would have no choice. And any husband is better than
none--when none means a convent. _Enfin_, where to find a French marquis
of stainless reputation in the eighteenth century? It was said that
Voltaire _had_ offered Villette a _dot_ with his wife, and the
disinterested Villette had refused it. And if that is not a sign of
reformation--what is?
So in November, 1777, Mademoiselle de Varicourt was married in the
Ferney chapel at midnight, with her six uncles preceding her up the
aisle, and Papa Voltaire, in Catherine’s sable pelisse, to give her
away.
The young couple spent the honeymoon at Ferney, and through it Voltaire
was working at his last two plays, “Irène” and “Agathocle.”
It is marvellous, not so much that a man of eighty-three should write
bad plays, as that he should write any.
No wonder that the new tragedy, “Irène,” went ill at first. And not so
very wonderful that the old playwright should follow his immemorial
habit and rewrite till it satisfied him. He lost three months over it.
And, as he remarked most truly, “Time is precious at my age.”
So when “Irène” was impossible he turned to “Agathocle.”
Madame Denis’s easy tears and laughter over the two pieces were no sound
criticism. Villette and Villevieille, then staying at Ferney, admired
politely as visitors. The playwright, whose vanity has been excellently
defined as “a gay and eager asking of assurance from others that his
work gave them pleasure,” was delighted with the compliments. But he
accepted correction in that spirit which showed that his vanity “never
stood in the way of self-knowledge.”
“If I had committed a fault at a hundred,” he said, “I should want to
correct it at a hundred-and-one.” So when Condorcet, more honest than
the visitors, paid him the finer compliment of assuring him that such
work as he had produced in “Irène” was not worthy of his genius, he took
that assurance in excellent part; and though by January 2, 1778, “Irène”
had been read and welcomed by the Comédie Française, he went on
correcting and altering it to the end of the month.
He was spurred to do his best by the fact that Lekain declined to play
the _rôle_ written for him. No letters could have been kinder, wiser, or
more conciliatory than those his old host and friend wrote to the great
player.
The part should be rewritten for him!
He was also spurred to do his best by the fact that “Irène” was to be
the means, the excuse, the reason to take him to Paris.
Paris! The idea had been simmering long. Paris! It was twenty-eight
years since he had left it, for a few months at the most. To be sure, he
had been far happier at Ferney than in the riot and fever of that
over-rated capital. In answer to those who talked about the stagnation
of the country, and talked of it as if it were some narcotic trance
which numbed brain and use, Voltaire could point to the best work of his
life. Near him, bound to his heart by many cords, was the smiling cosmos
of the industrial Ferney which he had drawn from the chaos of a barren
and starving province. Here were his gardens and farms; the house he had
built, and loved as one can only love the work of one’s own brain; the
books and pictures he had collected; the thousand household gods from
which the young part easily, but which the old regard with a personal
affection.
Then, Ferney was safe. And in Paris--“Do you not know there are forty
thousand fanatics who would bring forty thousand fagots to burn me? That
would be my bed of honour.” If Louis XV. was dead, so was a friendly
Pompadour. Choiseul and Madame Dubarry were banished.
Good Louis XVI. hated this infidel of a Voltaire, and was just shrewd
enough in his dulness to fear him. It was Louis, still a king, who,
asked what play should be performed at the theatre, replied, “Anything,
so long as it is not Voltaire.” It was Louis Capet in the Temple who is
reported to have said, pointing to the works of Rousseau and Voltaire in
the library of the tower, “Those two men have lost France.”
The brilliant Queen, who had permitted M. de Voltaire to write her a
_divertissement_ and to steal Lekain, was something more favourable. But
the Queen--extravagant and childless--was the most unpopular woman in
France. In 1776, she had compassed the fall of Turgot, Voltaire’s
friend, the hope of his country. In Paris, now, there was but one
minister who was even tepidly favourable to the great recluse of Ferney,
and that was Maurepas.
Altogether, the time seemed hardly ripe. But “if I want to commit a
folly,” Voltaire had written to Chabanon in 1775, “nothing will prevent
me.”
If a king had once been too strong for Voltaire, he may well have known
now that he was stronger than any king. Besides, he had never been
formally banished. “I do not wish Voltaire to return to France”
was not an edict after all. Had he ever forgotten he was still
Gentleman-in-Ordinary? And as for the danger to his person--seriously,
what could be done to an old man of nearly eighty-four. Then, too, he
needed a change. His health, though he was fond of repeating that he had
as many mortal diseases as he had years, was quite good enough to permit
him to take one.
Then there was “Irène,” which he could see put into rehearsal himself:
and then--then--then--there was the domestic influence of all Ferney
urging him to take the step, to make up his mind, to go back to glory,
to honour, to life.
Madame Denis, of course, longed for Paris. Her sixty-eight years and a
chest complaint had not cooled her zest for pleasure and admirers. And
if you do not go, Uncle Voltaire, whether you are banished or no, three
parts of Europe will think you are! She had long ago inspired Marie
Dupuits with her own love of amusement. The Marquis de Villette was
constitutionally even less able to endure the country than Mama Denis.
He had the finest house in the capital, which had once been the
Bernières’ house, where Voltaire had stayed as a young man, which stood
at the corner of the Rue de Beaune on what is now the Quai Voltaire,
opposite the Tuileries, and which is entirely at Papa Voltaire’s
service! Put all these persuadings and persuaders together before a man
already more than half inclined to go, and the result is easily
foreseen.
On the evening of February 3, 1778, Madame Denis and the _ménage_
Villette left Ferney to prepare the Hôtel Villette in Paris against the
arrival of M. de Voltaire.
On February 5th, Voltaire himself, accompanied only by Wagnière and a
cook, set out in their travelling carriage. There was a painful farewell
from the colonists. The poor people felt that their protector was
leaving them for ever. It was in vain he promised them that he would be
back in six weeks at the latest. That he really intended thus to return
is partially proved by the fact that he did not even arrange his
manuscripts and papers before leaving.
The first night was spent at Nantua.
At Bourg, where the horses were changed, Voltaire was recognised and had
to escape from the crowd who surrounded him by locking himself up in a
room in the post-house. Of course the innkeeper produced his best
horses, and called out in his enthusiasm, “Drive fast! Kill the
horses--I don’t care about them! You are carrying M. de Voltaire!”
The _incognito_ Voltaire had resolved to maintain was already a thing of
the past. He had begun to taste what are called the delights or the
drawbacks of fame, according to the temperament of the speaker.
The second night was passed at Sanecey. On the third, at Dijon some of
his adorers insisted on dressing up as waiters and waiting upon him at
supper in order to get a good view of him. Others serenaded the poor man
outside his bedroom window. In Dijon he made an appointment with a
lawyer, and transacted some business.
The next stop was at Joigny. A spring of the carriage broke when they
were near Moret, but Villette arrived to rescue them from that very
common dilemma, and met them with _his_ carriage, in which they pursued
the journey.
The nearer they approached to the capital, the higher rose Voltaire’s
spirits. He told stories with inimitable gaiety. “He seemed twenty.”
At half-past three on the afternoon of February 10th they reached Paris.
When the custom-house officer inquired if they had anything against
regulations, Voltaire replied that there was nothing contraband except
himself. He grew more and more lively every moment. They had no sooner
arrived at the Hôtel Villette than this gay young traveller must step
round to the Quai d’Orsay to see the Comte d’Argental. Friends for sixty
years, their friendship had been strong enough to bridge a gulf of
separation which had lasted more than half their long lives. Madame
d’Argental had died in the December of 1774. There was but one Angel
now. He had taken wing too, for the moment, Voltaire found when he
reached the house. But the old man was no sooner back in the Hôtel
Villette than d’Argental arrived, and the two fell on each other’s
necks. “I have left off dying to come and see you,” says Voltaire. But
there was a shadow on their happiness. D’Argental brought bad news. Two
days earlier, on February 8th, Lekain, whose first part had been Titus
in Voltaire’s “Brutus,” played his last part in “Adélaïde du Guesclin.”
He died, in spite of all the skill of Tronchin. Voltaire “uttered a
great cry.” Lekain had been his friend. Lekain was to have played in
“Irène.”
Belle-et-Bonne tells how the two old men sat up late into the night
discussing the additions Voltaire had made in that play.
But for it, but for the thousand distractions of this new world, the
loud acclamations, the surging stream of visitors the moment brought,
Voltaire might have mourned Lekain longer.
But he was back in Paris. When he left it, he was a power, a danger, a
fear. He had returned to it a king, and awaited his crowning.