THE LAST VISIT
Morley speaks of Voltaire’s last visit as “one of the historic events of
the century,” “the last great commotion in Paris under the old
_régime_.” “A ghost, a prophet, an apostle,” says Grimm, “could not have
excited a more fervent interest.”
The Salons worshipped the man who for sixty years had been the first wit
of the wittiest age in history--the author of that dear, daring, ribald,
wicked “Pucelle.”
The Philosophers kissed the hem of the garment of the author of “The
Philosophical Dictionary.”
The Academy fell at the feet of him who had attempted every kind of
literature and failed in none.
The Drama welcomed not only the most famous playwright since Corneille
and Racine, but the man who for sixty years had not ceased to try to
improve the civil status of actors.
The thrifty _bourgeois_ left their shops and stood in crowds outside the
Hôtel Villette, waiting to see him who was himself of their order and
had fought for its rights and rent earth and heaven with cries against
its wrongs.
The Protestant came to worship him who had preached Tolerance, defended
the Calas, and flung all the weight of his scorn and passion against a
law which proclaimed the heretic’s wife his mistress, and their children
bastards.
The submerged, the _canaille_, fierce and hungry-eyed, were among the
street crowds to see him who had pleaded against a criminal code which
punished petty theft, blasphemy, and desertion in time of peace, by
death; meted to the hapless imbeciles, called sorcerers, the vengeance
of superstition and
[Illustration: “TRIOMPHE DE VOLTAIRE”
_From a Contemporary Print_]
fear; and robbed the children of the condemned by confiscating their
goods to the King.
Court and Church paid him the higher compliment of fearing him.
The preachers denounced the apostate from their pulpits. Here is he who
has not only, having examined the evidences of Christianity, boldly
declared that he finds them absurd and inadequate, but has also dared to
attack the evil lives of the believers, tyranny, oppression,
persecution, calling them the inevitable consequence of the Faith, and
so the most powerful of all arguments against it.
Anti-Christ! Anti-Christ!
King and ministers turned and looked at each other in consternation.
Surely there was somewhere an edict of banishment against this person?
But where? If it had been found, no one would have dared to put it into
execution.
The Paris which had once imprisoned him for teaching it how to become
free, and persecuted him for opposing persecution, was at last the Paris
of Voltaire, and not the antechamber of the Kings of France.
On the day after his arrival, Wednesday, February 11, 1778, he received
three hundred visitors. In an outer room were Madame Denis and Villette.
And within, his crown an old nightcap and his royal robes an ancient
bedgown, sat the King of intellectual France. The courtier bred in
Courts knew well how to play his Majesty. Easy and gracious in manner,
no visitor went away without a _mot_, an anecdote, a happy quotation he
could repeat to his friends--“I heard it from the great Voltaire.” One
of the guests was the perfidious La Harpe, who had not seen his old
friend since they parted in anger at Ferney ten years ago, and who
found, he said, the wit undimmed, the memory unimpaired.
In intervals between the departure of one guest and the admission of the
next--if there could have been any such intervals--the old playwright
dictated a new line or a correction for “Irène” to Wagnière, and then
went on receiving half Paris. “All Parnassus was there, from the mire to
the summit,” said Madame du Deffand. In that crowded day, her old
friend found time to write her a little note and tell her how he had
arrived, dead, but was risen again to throw himself at the feet of his
Marquise.
Thursday, February 12th, brought a congratulatory deputation from the
Academy, which was represented by three personal friends of
Voltaire--Saint-Lambert, Marmontel, and the Prince de Beauvau. His
Majesty received them with “a lively recognition,” and sent a cheerful
message to the Academy that he hoped to visit it in person.
Gluck, the great musician, and Piccini the lesser, came to do homage,
one after the other, on February 13th. “Ah! that’s as it should be!”
says old Voltaire. “Piccini comes after Gluck.”
The Comédie Française sent a congratulatory deputation on Saturday, the
14th, and much laboured flattery in an address delivered by Bellecour
and Madame Vestris. Voltaire responded in the same manner--exaggerated.
“We all played comedy beautifully!” he said, with a twinkle, afterwards.
For the rest of that day his talk to his guests was graver than usual.
He discussed politics with them--and the French politics of 1778 were
enough to sober Folly itself. A weak King, a ruined Treasury, a corrupt
Church--and, as Voltaire himself wrote to Florian a week or two later,
in the social state “a revolting luxury and a fearful misery.”
He showed his guests a letter he had just received from another King who
was neither fool nor feeble, and who ruled a kingdom which beside
starving France was Utopia, El Dorado, Paradise.
By Sunday, February 15th, Voltaire was ill. But then Tronchin was in
Paris! Voltaire had not written to that old friend for a matter of ten
years--except “a _billet-doux_ on arriving” in the capital. But though
Tronchin disapproved of almost everything Voltaire did and thought, the
good Doctor loved the man as a woman loves an engaging and ill-trained
child.
He forgave the ten years’ silence and the Châtelaine theatre, even old
Voltaire’s truculent unbelief--came to him, looked at him with those
serene, wise eyes, forbade all going out, and commanded absolute rest.
Voltaire had been going to the theatre to-morrow. Well, he could give
that up. But rest? Madame Necker called to see him this very
day--Sunday. And how, pray, could he decline to receive the wife of her
husband, the woman who had done so much for him in the matter of the
Pigalle statue, and who, distantly related to Belle-et-Bonne, had
sternly disapproved of her innocence being used to reform a wickedness
like Villette’s and had only brought herself with difficulty to enter
that scoundrel’s house? Voltaire received her with the most delightful
_empressement_.
And then, waiting to see him was the “wise and illustrious” Franklin,
philosopher and politician, who until Voltaire’s arrival had himself
been the lion of Paris. How to refuse _him_? He came into the presence
chamber, bringing with him his grandson. Voltaire spoke in English until
Madame Denis told him that Franklin perfectly understood French. There
were twenty persons or so in the room. The two great men talked of the
government and constitution of the United States. “If I were forty,”
says Voltaire, “I should go and settle in your happy country.”
Then Dr. Franklin presented his grandson, a lad about seventeen.
Voltaire raised his hands above the boy’s head and blessed him,
“uttering only these words,” and in English--“God and Liberty.”
He told the story himself to several of his correspondents. It moved his
old heart. And the persons who saw the scene--to be sure, they were
French and ready to be affected at anything--shed tears.
The Franklins had not been gone an hour before Voltaire was receiving
Lord Stormont, the English ambassador, and Belbâtre, a famous performer
on the harpsichord. Rest? Dr. Tronchin already knew the temper and
disposition of his invalid, and something, though not yet all, of the
selfish and pleasure-loving character of his Denis and his Villette.
Voltaire was sent to bed. And prudent Tronchin inserted a notice in the
“Journal de Paris” stating that M. de Voltaire had lived since he came
to Paris on the capital of his strength instead of only on the income,
as all his friends must wish; that that capital would very soon be
exhausted, “and we shall be the witnesses, if we are not the
accomplices, of his death.”
The notice did not appear until February 20th, and by the 19th this
marvellous old man was at least well enough to be assigning the parts in
“Irène.” Richelieu, himself eighty-two, came to help him in this
delicate task. The magnificent marshal, in spite of the care and
splendour of his dress, did not look nearly so young and vigorous as the
attenuated figure in bedgown and nightcap, with his sunken eyes afire
and all his old keenness and spirit. Besides settling parts, he was now
rewriting the play itself so enthusiastically, that wretched Wagnière
did not even have time to dress himself.
The next day, February 20th, that poor, shameful, tawdry favourite,
Madame Dubarry, came out of her social banishment to see this new king,
Arouet. Le Brun, poet, and once benefactor of Marie Corneille, who had
written an inflammatory ode in praise of the monarch and wanted to see
if it had been appreciated, closely followed the Dubarry. He tells how
Voltaire contrasted the fresh, fair innocence of Belle-et-Bonne with the
stale and painted charms of the last avowed mistress of a King of
France.
Le Brun himself was characteristically received with “You see, Sir, a
poor old man of eighty-four, who has committed eighty-four follies.” The
story runs that Voltaire had said the same to Sophie Arnould, and that
that sprightly person had replied, “Why, that’s nothing! I am only forty
and I have committed a thousand.”
It was on this same day, February 20th, that Voltaire received a letter
from Abbé Gaultier, who had been a Jesuit for seventeen years and a curé
for twenty, and now had a post at the Hospital of the Incurables.
Gaultier was anxious for the salvation of Voltaire’s soul, and that he
should have the saving of it. Voltaire responded favourably; and the
next day, the 21st, received the priest. Gaultier and Wagnière both give
accounts of the interview. Both may have lied. One must have. The truth
seems to be that Gaultier was ushered into a salon full of people, whom
Voltaire soon dismissed. He took the priest into his private room,
where--to make a long matter short--Gaultier offered himself as
Voltaire’s confessor. The Patriarch asked if anyone had suggested to him
to make that offer--the Archbishop of Paris, for instance, or the Curé
of Saint-Sulpice, in whose parish Villette’s house was situated.
Gaultier replied, No; and Voltaire said he was glad of the assurance. A
long conversation ensued. Voltaire declared that he loved God; and
Gaultier answered that he must give proofs of it. They were three times
interrupted--by the Marquis de Villevieille, nephew Mignot, and
Wagnière. Madame Denis came in to beg that her uncle might not be tired
and worried. When Gaultier was dismissed, it was with the promise that
he should be received again.
When Wagnière asked Voltaire what he thought of Gaultier, Voltaire
replied that he was “a good fool.” He appears to have thought that he
would be more easily satisfied than shrewder men, and that if it came to
the dreadful necessity of a confession as an insurance of decent and
honourable burial, Gaultier would be the best confessor.
A few days later a certain Abbé Martin thrust himself in and
imperatively insisted that the sceptic should make confession then and
there to him. “I have come for that. I shall not move an inch.”
“From whom do you come, M. l’Abbé?”
“From God Himself.”
“Well, well, Sir--your credentials?”
The Abbé was dumb. The inconsistent old Patriarch, feeling that he had
been severe, went out of his way to be more than usually kind and
agreeable during the rest of the visit.
But such incidents made one ponder. To avoid the sickness which would
make confession a necessity was the obvious thing to do. But to keep
well meant to rest. And every hour that struck, every turn of the wheel,
brought fresh excitements, fresh work, fresh visitors.
On the very day of Gaultier’s visit, February 21st, came Madame du
Deffand, whose long friendship and “herculean weakness” had enabled her
to brave the crowds that surrounded Voltaire, and visit him first about
a week earlier, on February 14th. Her account of that occasion has been
lost. But the most ennuied and world-weary worldling of any time
confessed that it had been delightful.
On this February 21st the event had lost the one great antidote to
boredom--novelty. Denis was “_gaupe_,” and Villette “_a plat_ person of
comedy,” and Belle-et-Bonne damned with faint praise as “said to be
amiable.”
But in the presence of Voltaire, her correspondent since her youth, her
warmest sympathiser when blindness fell upon her, even Madame du Deffand
forgot again for a while what a bitter and empty world that is where
Pleasure is the only god and amusement the be-all and end-all of
existence. Old Voltaire entertained her with a lively account of
Gaultier’s visit.
But, all the same, he had not forgotten that that incident had a very
serious side.
Four days later, on February 25th, about midday, he was dictating in
bed, when suddenly, in a violent fit of coughing, he broke a
blood-vessel. Wagnière, terrified, rang the bell loudly. Madame Denis
ran into the room, and Tronchin was summoned immediately. It had been so
easy to laugh at Gaultier with a blind old _mondaine_ when one felt
lively and well! But now--call him at once! Turning to the persons in
his room, the old man bade them all remember that he had fulfilled “what
they call here one’s duties.” Tronchin came, bled the patient, and, what
was likely to be far more useful, sent him a very excellent and
strong-minded young nurse who was to refuse admission to all visitors,
and a surgeon who was to stay in the house all night.
Meanwhile, Protestant Wagnière, who regarded his master’s dealings with
the priests as disgraceful to his honour in this world and very unlikely
to save his soul for the next, had not summoned Gaultier.
The next day, February 26th, Voltaire wrote the priest a little note:
“You promised, Sir, to come and hear me. Come as soon as you can.”
Madame Denis added her entreaties in a postscript. But, it being nine
o’clock at night when Gaultier received the letter, he did not come to
the Hôtel Villette till the next day, when his penitent could not, or
would not, see him.
By Sunday, March 1st, he was well enough to listen to La Harpe reading a
canto of “La Pharsale”--so loudly that he could be heard in the street.
On the Monday morning d’Alembert came to see the sick man. Voltaire told
him that he had “taken the leap,” and sent for Gaultier. There had been
other priests, said d’Alembert, writing to Frederick the Great, who had
thrust themselves into his room, preaching at him like fanatics, “whom
the old Patriarch, from goodness of heart, had not ordered to be thrown
out of the window.” Gaultier was more moderate and reasonable than his
brethren; and, thinks d’Alembert, if Voltaire has the natural weakness
to feel that it is of consequence what becomes of the remains of poor
humanity after death, he is right to do as he proposes to do--as all the
world does, the good Protestant as well as the godless pagan. This is
d’Alembert’s attitude toward the matter throughout.
Later on that same day, Gaultier reappeared. He was ushered into the
sick room. Voltaire sent the servants out of it. Wagnière listened at
the door, which was luckily only a sort of paper screen. He was very
much agitated by those fears for his master’s honour. When Voltaire
called him and bade him bring writing materials, the servant was too
moved to answer the question as to what ailed him. Voltaire took the
pen, wrote his statement or profession of faith, which declared that he
had confessed to Gaultier, that he died in the Catholic religion in
which he was born, and that if he had scandalised the Church he asked
pardon of God and of it. D’Alembert--the truthful d’Alembert--says that
Voltaire told him he added the last phrase at the request of the priest
“and to have peace.”
But to that “zeal in concessions,” which had always made him as
vigorously thorough in his lies as he was thorough in his good deeds,
the addenda may in part be attributed.
The Marquis de Villevieille and Abbé Mignot readily signed what Gaultier
lightly called “a little declaration which does not signify much.”
Wagnière hotly declined.
Before leaving, Gaultier proposed to give the sick man the Communion.
Voltaire excused himself. He coughed too much, he said. He gave
Gaultier, according to the custom, twenty-five louis for the poor of the
parish, and the priest left.
There was one man about Voltaire, but only one, who wished him to
declare, not what it was expedient to think, but what he really thought:
what were the convictions of his soul, and the creed of his heart.
A few days earlier, on February 28th, at the earnest request of Wagnière
and at a moment when he solemnly believed that his last hour had come,
Voltaire had written down, clearly and firmly, his real faith:
“I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and
detesting superstition. February 28, 1778. Voltaire.”
So far as a few weak words can express any man’s attitude towards the
Supreme Being and his own fellow-sinners, this confession expresses
Voltaire’s.
It is still preserved in the National Library at Paris.
On the Tuesday, March 3d, Gaultier returned. He wanted, or rather his
superiors, the Archbishop of Paris and de Tersac, the Curé of
Saint-Sulpice, to whom he had showed the confession, said that _they_
wanted, one more detailed and less equivocal. The truth was
Saint-Sulpice would have liked the credit of such a conversion himself.
This “man of little understanding and a bigoted fanatic,” as d’Alembert
called him, was not a person to be offended. He had, as parish priest,
the disposal of the bodies of those who died in his parish.
Voltaire would not see Gaultier. But from that stormy sick bed, on March
4th, he wrote the most graceful of conciliatory letters to offended de
Tersac; and laconically announced to poor Gaultier, in a note, that
Villette had given orders that until M. de Voltaire was better, no
priest, except the Curé of Saint-Sulpice, should be admitted to the
house.
Persistent Gaultier returned in a week and was again refused admission.
Death-bed conversions were his speciality, and he was not going to be
cheated of this one without a struggle. Meanwhile Voltaire upset all
his plans by recovering rapidly. Paris, who had heard much more than the
truth concerning this illness and confession, avenged herself for her
anxiety by epigrams. It was right that the Curé of the Incurables should
attempt such a conversion! The patient himself (whose every utterance
was reported) declared that if he had lived on the banks of the Ganges
he would have died with a cow’s tail in his mouth. To die with a lie in
it did not shock Paris in the least.
To find excuses for Voltaire’s act, it is as necessary, as it is now
impossible, to realise fully the conditions of life and death under a
government which permitted no liberty of conscience, and in which men
were either orthodox or anathema.
There were other troubles besides religious ones to harry this old
patient of eighty-four out of a sick bed to the grave before his time.
Tronchin wanted Voltaire’s real good, and Voltaire’s real good meant
Ferney and repose; while Villette was all for himself, pleasure, and
Paris. One day the doctor turned the Marquis by force out of the
sick-room. Villette called in a rival practitioner, Lorry--famous and
freethinking--and no doubt was disappointed when Tronchin worked
amicably side by side with his _confrère_.
A College of Physicians could not have kept Voltaire, when he began to
recover a little, from doing as he liked. He was soon sitting up in bed,
working on “Irène” and dictating to Wagnière as usual. Visitors thrust
themselves in again. Poets came to read their complimentary odes. One
writer announced to Voltaire in a most wearisome prepared speech, that
to-day he had come to visit Homer, to-morrow he would visit Euripides,
the next Sophocles, the next Tacitus, the next ----“Sir, I am very old,”
says the voice from the bed; “if you _could_ pay all these calls in
one----”
Another flatterer said that, having surpassed his brethren in everything
Voltaire would surpass Fontenelle himself in length of days.
“Ah! no, Sir. Fontenelle was a Norman: he cheated even Nature.”
By March 10th the invalid was not unnaturally worse again, and Tronchin
kept him in bed, although, or perhaps because, there was a rehearsal of
“Irène” actually going on in the house at the moment.
The next day, Madame Vestris, who was to play in “Irène,” was allowed to
see him about her part. The maddening placidity with which she delivered
lines intended to be passionately pathetic did not help to soothe the
invalid’s irritable and nervous condition. He told her how fifty years
ago he had seen Mademoiselle Duclos reduce the whole house to tears by a
single line; and talking to Mademoiselle Clairon afterwards, he hit the
imperturbable Vestris hard in a mot well understood by all Paris.
He had himself recited with extraordinary feeling a few lines out of his
last play. “Ah!” said Clairon, “where will you find an actress to render
them like that? Such an effort might kill her.”
“So much the better,” answers the poor old playwright viciously. “I
should be only too glad to render the public such a service.”
The mediocrity of the other actors also grievously afflicted the
overwrought mind and body of the sick man. There came, indeed, times
when he sank into a sort of stupor: when nothing seemed to matter; when
he was indifferent or unconscious that Madame Denis was conducting
rehearsals and giving away the first-night tickets on her own
responsibility, and that d’Argental and La Harpe were making such
alterations in “Irène” as they deemed fit. He must have been really ill.
In four days, it is said, he had aged four years. The trumpet blasts of
adulation in prose or verse, always appearing in the newspapers, had no
power to rouse him; and as for the abuse--“I received such abominations
every week at Ferney,” he said, “and had to pay the postage; here I get
them every day, but they cost me nothing--so I am the gainer.”
On March 14th, Madame Denis presided over the last rehearsal of “Irène,”
and on March 16th was the first performance.
The playwright, who had written and rewritten it, laboured at it, as he
said himself, as if he had been twenty, was in bed in the Hôtel
Villette, not too ill to be interested in its success, but past any
great anxiety concerning it.
The house was crowded. Marie Antoinette was there--Marie Antoinette, who
had been brilliantly imprudent enough to inquire why if Madame Geoffrin,
“the nurse of the philosophers,” had been received at Court, Voltaire
should not be? She had a notebook in her hand, and put down therein all
the pious and edifying passages to prove to her absent lord that M. de
Voltaire’s conversion was real! Her brother-in-law, d’Artois, was there;
the Duke and Duchess of Bourbon: all Versailles, but the King.
The play, or more correctly the playwright, was received with tumultuous
applause. “Irène” was feeble and tired, like the old hand that had
written it. But here and there, where the bright flame of a dying genius
flickered up for a moment, the house applauded madly, and to parts
wholly meritless listened in respectful silence. After each act,
messengers were despatched to tell Voltaire all was well. At the end of
the last, Dupuits rushed to announce a general success, and the
sick-room quickly filled with congratulating friends. “What you say
consoles but does not cure me,” said the poor old invalid. But he roused
himself enough to inquire which verses were the most applauded, and to
chuckle joyfully when he heard of the delighted reception of those which
smote the clergy hip and thigh.
On March 19th, the “Journal de Paris” published a very sanguine account
of Voltaire’s health. “His recent indisposition has left no
after-effects.” It was certainly true that he was better again. He
received a deputation from the Academy congratulating him on “Irène,”
and by March 21st was well enough to go out in a carriage. He was
recognised and surrounded by the people in the streets, and when he
regained the Hôtel Villette there was a deputation of Freemasons waiting
to see him. There was no peace for him, in fact, at home or abroad. His
whole visit to Paris was like the progress of a popular sovereign who
has no officials to ensure his comfort and privacy.
Being better, the most natural thing to do was to go over “Irène.” He
sent for an acting copy. Directly he saw how it had been tampered with,
he fell into the greatest rage in which Wagnière, after twenty-four
years’ service and a much richer experience of his master’s _vifness_
than Collini, had ever seen him. He forced Madame Denis to confess. He
pushed her away so that she fell into an armchair, or rather, says
Wagnière spitefully, into the arms of Duvivier, that dull young man she
afterwards married. Then the indignant uncle sent the niece out (it was
raining too) to d’Argental’s house to fetch the manuscripts and plays
with which he had intrusted that old friend. His rage lasted for twelve
hours. He roundly abused both d’Argental and La Harpe. And then, for he
was the same Voltaire, he apologised to both with a most generous
humility.
On March 28th, he went to see Turgot--“Sully-Turgot”--the man who had
“saved the century from decadence,” and whose disgrace in 1776 Voltaire
had felt as a keen personal grief and an irreparable public disaster.
The meeting was very French and effusive. But it was not, for that,
insincere. “Let me kiss the hands of him,” cries old Voltaire, “who has
signed the salvation of the people.”
The day of this King’s coronation had been fixed for March 30th. The
nominal King sat aloof and sulky at Versailles. But what did that
matter? The Queen, keener-eyed, saw in Voltaire a rival force not to be
disregarded. And when d’Artois heard of Voltaire’s death--“There has
died a great rogue and a great man,” said he. From a d’Artois it was no
bad testimony.
At four o’clock in the afternoon of this March 30th a gorgeous blue,
star-spangled coach waited at the door of the Hôtel Villette.
And presently there gets into it, amid the shouts and acclamations of
his subjects, a very, very lean old figure, in that grey peruke whose
fashion he had not altered for forty years, a square cap on the top of
it, a red coat lined with ermine, Ferney white silk stockings on the
shrunken legs, large silver buckles on the shoes, a little cane in the
hand with a crow’s beak for a head, and over all this extraordinary
fancy dress (it was only rather less remarkable in Paris in 1778 than it
would be in Paris to-day) Catherine’s sable pelisse.
Thus dressed, he was driven through tumultuous crowds to the Louvre,
where two thousand persons received him with shouts of “Long live
Voltaire!”
The Academy met him in their outer hall--an honour never accorded to
anyone, even to princes. Twenty Academicians were present. The absentees
were all churchmen. The King was conducted to the Presidential Chamber,
and there unanimously elected to the next three months’ Presidency. Then
the Perpetual Secretary, friend d’Alembert, rose and read a so-called
Eulogy of Boileau, which was really a Eulogy of Voltaire. The serene
dignity of the Secretary contrasted not a little with old Voltaire’s
painful efforts after self-command. It was twenty-eight years since he
had been among them. It was thirty-five since, as a body, they had
refused him admission. And now----!
He paid a brief visit to d’Alembert’s office, and then got into his
carriage again. The crowds had increased. All sorts and conditions of
men were here to welcome him who had pointed the way to freedom--who,
unlike all other kings, was of the people, and so, for them. Frenzied,
as in another frenzy they had hooted the Calas to judgment through the
streets of Toulouse, and as but a very few years later they might have
hooted Voltaire himself to the Place de la Guillotine, they applauded
and worshipped him now. The Villettes and Madame Denis met him at the
Comédie Française. Their protection was necessary. The people clambered
on the carriage itself to see him, to touch him. One man seized
Belle-et-Bonne’s little hand instead of the Patriarch’s. “Ma foi!” he
said. “This is a plump hand for eighty-four!”
She and Madame Denis preceded him to the box set aside for the
Gentlemen-in-Ordinary. Then, with the women pressing on him and plucking
the fur from his pelisse to keep as souvenirs, Voltaire made his way
through the house to the passionate acclamations of the crowded
audience. He would fain have concealed himself behind Belle-et-Bonne and
his portly niece. “To the front!” cried the gods. And to the front he
came. Opposite him was the royal box, in which was d’Artois who had been
with the Queen at the opera, but had slipped away to do homage to a
greater royalty.
Then another cry shook the house. “The crown!”
Brizard, the actor, came forward and put a laurel crown on the old
poet’s head. “Ah, God! You will kill me with glory!” he said. He took it
off and put it on Belle-et-Bonne’s. And the house bade her give it back
to him. He resisted. And then Prince de Beauvau came forward and crowned
him again. By this time the whole auditorium was on its feet. The
passages were full to suffocation. The actors, dressed for their parts,
came before the curtain to join in the enthusiasm. The delirium lasted
for twenty minutes. The air of the theatre was black with the dust
caused by the movement of so great a multitude, struggling to see.
At last the play began. It was “Irène,” of course--“Irène,” now at its
sixth representation.
The audience had read their own meaning into its lines. They applauded
wildly throughout. At the end the curtain was raised again. On the stage
was a pedestal, and on the pedestal the bust of Voltaire which had been
brought from the hall of the Comédie where it had recently been placed.
Actors and actresses were grouped round it, holding garlands of flowers.
Some of the audience, despite the new regulations, had crowded on to the
stage for a better view.
Then Brizard, dressed for his part of monk in “Irène,” placed his laurel
garland on the head, and the whole company followed his example. From
the house burst a roar which sounded as if it was from one throat as it
was from one heart. For the first time in France, said Grimm, there was
no dissentient voice. “Envy and hatred, fanaticism and intolerance,
dared not murmur.” Perhaps even at that delirious moment the old
Patriarch recognised the triumph, not as his, but as philosophy’s: and
rejoiced the more. “It is then true, Sire,” he wrote on April 1st, in
his last letter to Frederick the Great, “that in the end men _will_ be
enlightened, and those who believe that it pays to blind them will not
always be victorious.”
March 30, 1778, is a great day in the history of France as celebrating,
not the honour of Voltaire, but of that “happy revolution he had
effected in the mind and the conduct of his century.”
Villette drew him forward to the front of the box, and while he stood
there for a moment the applause redoubled.
Then Madame Vestris, who had played “Irène,” came forward and recited an
ode by the Marquis de Saint-Marc. Voltaire, writing to Saint-Marc the
next day, thanked him for having made him immortal in the prettiest
verses in the world. The ode was not bad; but if it had been it would
have been applauded and encored just the same. Copies were circulated
through the house.
On the stage one woman came forward and impulsively kissed the bust, and
other enthusiasts followed her example.
A stranger, entering at the moment, supposed himself to be in a
madhouse.
The curtain fell again; and again rose, this time on “Nanine.” Once
more, it was not the play that counted, but the playwright. When the
curtain fell for the last time, he made his royal way to his carriage
between lines of women sobbing with emotion. Some persons seized his
hands and kissed them with tears. Others fell upon the horses to stop
them and cried for torches. Thus lighting him, crowds accompanied his
carriage home, shouting, dancing, and weeping. When at last he reached
the Hôtel Villette, worn out with the glory and the high-pitched
emotions of the day, the poor old Patriarch himself wept like a child.
“If I had known the people would commit such follies I would never have
gone to the Comédie.”
But it was the next morning which, like all next mornings, was the real
time for reflection. Here was the man who, more than any other Frenchman
who ever lived, understood the national temperament. “Capable of all
excesses,” “the Parisians pass their time in hissing and clapping--in
putting up statues and pulling them down again.” “You do not know the
French,” he said to Genevan Wagnière; “they would have done as much for
Jean Jacques.” “They want to stifle me under roses.”
The reflections showed a just judgment. But, coming at such a time, they
showed, too, a man old, tired, and at the end of his tether. Tronchin
had long said that to survive such a life as he had been living the last
few weeks, his body must be made of steel.
Long and bitterly discussed, but this “next morning” become a pressing
and imminent question, was the return to Ferney. To go--or to stay? On
the one side were Villette and Madame Denis. They were not the rose, but
it was delightful to live near the rose. The one, despite the good and
pretty wife, had already been drawn back again into the vile
dissipations of the capital. The other was not only out at
entertainments all day, but at sixty-eight was coyly coquetting with her
Duvivier.
In the second camp was Wagnière, who besides having left home, wife, and
children at Ferney, was sincerely devoted to his master’s real good; the
judicious, clear-seeing d’Alembert, young Dupuits, and above all, Dr.
Tronchin. Fearless and upright, the great doctor made one last
passionate appeal to his patient to go while there was time. “I would
give a hundred louis to see you back at Ferney. Go in a week.”
“Am I fit to travel?” says the poor old Patriarch.
“I will stake my head on it,” says Tronchin.
The thin trembling hand grasped the strong one.
“You have given me back my life.”
Voltaire was so much moved that the serene Tronchin, nay, the very cook
who happened to be in the room at the same moment, was moved too.
Tronchin wrote off immediately to Ferney for Voltaire’s coachman and
carriage. Madame Denis’s vociferous indignation was wasted on him.
Little Madame Suard, the sprightly visitor of Ferney, must have been as
delighted as all others who put Voltaire’s life above their own
pleasure. She came to see her old host. “We shall kill him,” she said,
“if he stays here.”
But Madame Denis was not going back to the dismal solitude and the ice
and snow of Ferney without a fight. Is it the Villette house you do not
like? She hurried out, and nearly took one in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré,
with a beautiful garden where Uncle Voltaire could fancy himself in the
country. The negotiations for it fell through. But there is what might
be made a very fine house in the Rue Richelieu, and which has the
enormous advantage of being quite close to the home of your butterfly
philosopher, Madame Saint-Julien! Voltaire at eighty-four, and with, as
he pointed out to his every correspondent, at least two mortal
complaints, actually consented to buy this unfinished house. He would
live there eight months of the year, and the other four at Ferney.
Still, those other four were to be taken at once. He would go now--soon!
If he _could_ go, that is. But had he not just been elected to three
months’ Presidency of the Academy? His vacillations were the despair of
Tronchin--ay, and the despair of himself. He longed to go, but he could
not go. Madame Denis, with the most limitless capacity for nagging ever
vouchsafed to mortal woman, volubly assured him that influential friends
had told her that if he did go, he would never be allowed to return.
True, on April 2d “Irène” had been performed at Court. That did not look
like a new edict of banishment. But then the author had not been asked
to see his play. Perhaps that _did_? Then it was said the Queen herself
had had an idea of slipping into the theatre on that great 30th of March
to see the crowning of the people’s King--only--only--the other King had
peremptorily forbidden her. A dog Voltaire had been fond of at Ferney
came to Paris with one of the Ferney servants and bounded in to lick his
master’s hand with the touching, dumb joy of animal affection. “You see
I am still beloved at Ferney,” says the old man. Villette and Madame
Denis took very good care that that dog should never enter the house
again. They tried to get rid of Wagnière--his influence was so bad and
so powerful. They failed in this. But, after all, they succeeded in
their main object.
When a man’s foes are those of his own household, resistance is
peculiarly difficult.
“I have seen a great many fools,” Tronchin wrote on April 6th, “but
never such an old fool as he is.”
The exhaustion consequent on his crowning had passed away. With it
passed away, too, the idea of an immediate return to Ferney.
By that day, April 6th, the “old fool” was well enough to go on foot, in
spite of adoring crowds, to the Academy.
A seller of books on the way naïvely begged him “to write me some and my
fortune will be made.” “You have made so many other people rich! Write
me some books. I am a poor woman.” Among the people he heard himself
often called by that name which was a sweeter flattery to his soul than
all odes and plaudits--“the man of Calas.”
The next day he was made a Freemason, and in the evening went to see the
unacknowledged actress-wife of the Duke of Orleans.
On April 11th he returned Madame du Deffand’s visit. She forgave him for
not coming before; but the Convent of St. Joseph, in which she lived,
found it hard to forgive him for coming at all and profaning their holy
place with his presence. He paid other visits. One old friend, the
Comtesse de Ségur, was dying when he saw her. For a little, the charm of
his reminiscences brought back to her their youth. When he visited her
again, remembering only that he, like herself, stood on the brink of
eternity, she passionately conjured him to cease his “war against
religion.” He turned upon her fiercely, forgetting her womanhood and her
dying. That stern, terse creed he had hammered and forged for himself
was as dear to him as was to her the fuller faith she had accepted
without trouble or thought. The room was full of people. The guests
paused to listen. Voltaire remembered himself: offered sympathy,
suggested remedies, and left, greatly moved.
Another visit was yet more pathetic. He went to see Egérie de Livri,
once the vivacious poor companion of the Duchesse de Sully and would-be
actress, and now the Marquise de Gouvernet. In this withered old woman
of eighty-three what traces were there of the brilliant girl to whom a
Voltaire of five-and-twenty had taught declamation and love, who had
gaily forgotten him for de Génonville, and graciously remembered him
when he had immortalised her in “Les Vous et Les Tu”? Above him, on the
wall, smiled the picture he had given her--his dead self, by
Largillière. A ghost! A ghost! He left her, profoundly saddened. She
sent the portrait to him at the Hôtel Villette, and he gave it to
Belle-et-Bonne.
Another friend came to see him one morning--Longchamp--from whom he had
parted eight-and-twenty years ago, and with whom were connected many
memories, of the Court and of Paris, of Cirey and Madame du Châtelet.
If the man had cheated his master, he had loved him too. The things are
not incompatible.
These meetings made the old heart yearn again for quiet and Ferney. But
there was still so much to do!
Besides his plays to be corrected and personally supervised in
rehearsal, a new grand scheme had been filling his mind, quickening his
last energies, bringing back the resolute passion of his youth.
On April 27th, he attended a _séance_ at the Academy. Abbé Délille read
a translation of Pope’s “Epistle to Arbuthnot.” Well, one Academician
had known the thing in the original and the author in the flesh. He sat
and listened attentively. Then he got up. An admirable translation,
gentlemen. But our language is, after all, poor--poorer than it need be
in poetic expression. Why, for instance, should we not call an actor who
plays tragedy, a tragedian? And why--why should this Academy not
undertake the reconstruction of the French Dictionary? The one we have
is unworthy of us--dull, inadequate, impossible. The Academy is called
the lawgiver of language to the people of France. Let it worthily prove
itself so! The work shall not only be useful, but patriotic. Each member
shall take a letter. As for me, gentlemen, I am willing to consecrate to
such a task the brief remainder of my days. The old man spoke with the
fire and the vigour of youth. Some of his auditors were incompetent for
the task he proposed to them; many were lazy and apathetic.
But the octogenarian who had suggested it went home with his soul on
fire, drew paper and pen towards him, and began, through domestic
disturbance and the ceaseless round of visits, to elaborate his scheme.
Two days later he received an ovation from the Academy of Sciences.
D’Alembert read a Eulogy, written by Condorcet, of Trudain, Councillor
of State, who had helped Voltaire with his colony at Ferney. To eulogise
Voltaire himself followed in natural sequence. Franklin was there too.
Old Voltaire spoke to him. “Embrace in the French fashion!” cried a
voice: and they did.
At the end of April it was decided that Wagnière should leave for
Ferney, to get there papers and books of which Voltaire had need. It was
a bitter parting. The servant had done his best to make his master go
with him. But Tronchin was not always at his side, and Denis and
Villette were. Then there were his plays still needing correction. And
now that Dictionary scheme, so hotly resolved upon--how to abandon
_that_? Then, too, the Abbé Beauregard had preached in glowing
vituperation at Versailles against all the philosophers, and one
philosopher in particular. The kingly party, as well as the
ecclesiastical, was mad to hound this Voltaire out of Paris.
There had been many times in his life when he had perforce to turn his
back on the enemy and fly. But those had gone by for ever.
On April 27th, he signed the contract of purchase for the new house in
the Rue Richelieu.
On the 29th, Wagnière left. Both knew the parting was their last. But
neither could face the fact.
Life went on with a madder rush when the secretary had gone. Visits
succeeded to visits. One ovation brought another. All the _mots_ the
Patriarch uttered (and numbers he did not) were recorded in the
newspapers. His every action was noted--his very motives guessed.
Through all he was working feverishly--without the invaluable help of
Wagnière and with his strength kept up by drugs--on that scheme for the
Dictionary.
It was ready by May 7th. He went to the Academy. Upon some of the
brethren at least--they were almost all young enough to be his
grandsons--had fallen that fatal mental inertia, that deadly sleep
which paralysed the brains of half aristocratic France just before the
Revolution. Nothing matters! Nothing is worth while! With eyes and heart
aglow, this old Voltaire read aloud his brief and masterly plan. It
remains that upon which all great dictionaries in Europe and America
have been modelled to this day.
He recommended it with a zeal of which he alone was capable. Tronchin
speaks of it as his “last dominant idea, his last passion.” If he had
been a boy of twenty, with name and fortune to make by this Dictionary
alone, he could not have been more eager. In the end he obtained a
unanimous consent to his scheme. But it was cool--cool! He insisted on
the immediate division of the letters among the members. He himself took
A. It meant the most work. That he also wrote a part of T is certain.
One old member reminded him of his age, and he turned upon him in reply
with “something more than vivacity.” The _séance_ ended.
“Gentlemen,” says old Voltaire, “I thank you in the name of the
alphabet.”
“And we,” replied Chastellux, “thank you in the name of letters.”
That evening Voltaire was present _incognito_ at the performance of
“Alzire.” Of course he was recognised. For three quarters of an hour the
howls of applause never ceased. Then he himself begged silence from the
house. As he left it, the people, pressing on him, thrust odes of
inflammatory flattery into his hand. This mob was enthusiastic enough.
But those Academicians, his brothers, with all the world to
conquer--their apathy lay heavily on his soul. If death came to him, the
only young man of them all, would they go on with his scheme? He doubted
them. “They are sluggards,” he said passionately to Tronchin, “who
wallow in idleness; but I will make them march.” He must write them a
Discourse to sting them and shame them. No man in the world had so much
and so ably used the fine, pliant, delicate machinery of the French
language, as he had. In the most perfect French in the world he had
alike coquetted with women in drawing-rooms and spoken his great
message to the race. He loved the tool with which he had carved immortal
work. The day was not long enough to say what he had to say upon the
language he had adorned. Far on into the night--brain and nerve
stimulated by strong coffee--he wrote on the subject that possessed his
soul. The sleep he had banished deserted him now when he called it. He
wrote on. There was so little time! There was so much to do! Not afraid
of death, but of dying before he had finished his work--that description
was true to the finest shade of meaning. The coffee aggravated the
internal disease from which he suffered. But he wrote on. On May 11th he
could not go to a meeting of the Academy. But he could still write. The
strong sun of that long life was fast sinking below the horizon, and the
night coming when no man can work. The old brain nerved itself to one
last effort. The old hand wrote on:
“Whoso fears God, fears to sit at ease.”
Doubtful in morals, and a most trenchant unbeliever, the scoffer
Voltaire yet sets a splendid example to all inert Christians who,
comfortably cultivating the selfish virtues, care nothing for the race
and recognise no mission but to save their own miserable souls.
Who has done more good for the world--the stainless anchorite, be his
cloister a religious one or his own easy home; or this sinner, of whom
it was said at his death, with literal truth, that the history of what
had been accomplished in Europe in favour of reason and humanity was the
history of his writings and of his deeds?