# Voltaire/Chapter 26

CHAPTER XXVI.
HIS LAST YEARS.
As years went on and found him still by the Lake, he became known as "the Patriarch of Ferney;" and as he kept himself incessantly before the public by his writings, and with constantly increasing fame, the tide of visitors continued to augment in numbers and importance. It became necessary for people with intellectual pretensions to make at least one pilgrimage to the modern Mecca, where they might have the advantage of hearing the prophet explain his own doctrines; and the learned and the great, men of all professions and beliefs, literary ladies and fashionable ladies, came to render their incessant homage, or to gratify their ardent curiosity. It must have been in the year 1764, or 1765, that he received a very remarkable visitor indeed; no less a person than Boswell, who had then undergone the anguish of separation from his revered friend, whom he had left "rolling his majestick frame in his usual manner" on the pier at Harwich, in order to make a tour on the Continent. He quite appreciated Voltaire's celebrity, if not his genius, and referred afterwards, in his conversations with Johnson, to "when I was at Ferney;" where ​it appears that the patriarch, affecting, says Boswell, the English style of expression, characterised the illustrious sage of Fleet Street as "a superstitious dog," but, after hearing a disparaging remark of Johnson's about Frederick the Great, he exclaimed, "An honest fellow!" This, with a remark about Pope and Dryden, is all the record that the prince of recorders brought away from Ferney. Had there been room in his very exclusive Pantheon for more than one deity, we might have learned much about Voltaire which now will never be known, but which the irrepressible interest of Boswell would easily have extracted,—as thus: "Finding my illustrious host in a specially communicative humour, I ventured to say, 'The world, sir, would be very glad to know why you call yourself Voltaire,'"—or, "Talking, at dinner, of his confinement in the Bastille, I expressed my wonder that notwithstanding the injuries he had received from the Government he had never attacked it, but only the priesthood; to which he replied,"—what can now only be matter of speculation.
It was several years after this that Doctor Burney, father of the once famous authoress of 'Evelina,' paid a diffident visit to Ferney, having no introduction. After describing the scenery, the church, the theatre, the buildings, and the chateau itself, into which he was allowed to penetrate, "a very neat and elegant house, not large nor affectedly decorated," he had sight of the great man:—
"He was going to his workmen. My heart leaped at the sight of so extraordinary a man. He had just then quitted his garden, and was crossing the court before his house. Seeing my chaise, and me on the point of mounting it, he made ​a sign to his servant, who had been my cicerone, to go to him; in order, I suppose, to inquire who I was. After they had exchanged a few words together he approached the place where I was standing motionless, in order to contemplate his person as much as I could while his eyes were turned from me; but on seeing him move towards me, I found myself drawn by some irresistible power towards him; and without knowing what I did, I insensibly met him half-way. It is not easy to conceive it possible for life to subsist in a form so nearly composed of mere skin and bone as that of M. de Voltaire. He complained of decrepitude (he was then 76) and said, He supposed I was anxious to form an idea of the figure of one walking after death. However, his eyes and whole countenance are still full of fire; and though so emaciated, a more lively expression cannot be imagined."
He then inquired after English news, and talked of our poets of the day.
"During this conversation, we approached the buildings that he was constructing near the road to his chateau. 'These,' said he, pointing to them, 'are the most innocent, and perhaps the most useful, of all my works.' I observed that he had other works, which were of far more extensive use, and would be much more durable, than those. He was so obliging as to show me several farm-houses that he had built, and the plans of others; after which I took my leave."
After a lapse of several more years we have another glimpse of him at the age of eighty-two. A clergyman named Sherlock, provided with an introduction, paid him a long morning visit, and dined with him next day. The patriarch's dress is thus described:—
"On the two days I saw him, he wore white cloth shoes, white woollen stockings, red breeches, with a nightgown and waistcoat of blue linen, flowered, and lined with yellow. He had on a grizzled wig with three ties, and over it a silk nightcap, embroidered with gold and silver."
​ As we learn from other authority that he was in the habit of driving out in a carriage adorned with gold stars on a blue ground, and with carved and gilded mountings, few philosophers, in any age, when taking the air, could have presented a more splendid appearance. But to return to Mr Sherlock:—
"He met me in the hall; his nephew, M. d'Hornoi, Counsellor in the Parliament of Paris, held him by the arm. He said to me, with a very weak voice, 'You see a very old man, who makes a great effort to have the honour of seeing you. Will you take a walk in my garden? It will please you, for it is in the English taste; it was I who introduced that taste into France, and it has become universal. But the French parody your gardens—they put your thirty acres into three.'
"From his gardens you see the Alps, the Lake, the city of Geneva and its environs, which are very pleasant. He said, 'It is a beautiful prospect.' He pronounced these words tolerably well. Sherlock—'How long is it since you were in England?' Voltaire—'Fifty years, at least.' We then talked of literature; and from that moment he forgot his age and infirmities, and spoke with the warmth of a man of thirty. He said some shocking things against Moses and against Shakespeare.
"D' Hornoi—'There, Monsieur is a village which M. de Voltaire has built.' Voltaire—'Yes, we have our freedom here. Cut off a little corner and we are out of France. I asked some privileges for my children here, and the king' (or rather Voltaire's friend, Turgot, then finance minister) 'has granted me all that I asked, and has declared the Pays de Gex exempt from all taxes of the Farmer-General; so that salt, which formerly sold for ten sous a pound, now sells for four. I have nothing more to ask, except to live.'
"The next day as we sat down to dinner, he said in English, tolerably pronounced, 'We are here for liberty and property! ​This gentleman, whom let me present to Monsieur Sherlock, is a Jesuit—he wears his hat; I am a poor invalid—I wear my nightcap.'
In the course of dinner, Mr Sherlock asked how he had found la chère Anglaise?—which may be translated either "the English fare," or "the dear Englishwoman." The reverend gentleman's question of course related to the diet; but the gay Voltaire, taking it mischievously in the other sense, replied, "I found her very fresh and white."
"Many subjects were talked of pleasantly, English and French; and Voltaire remarked, 'When I see an Englishman subtle and fond of lawsuits, I say, "There is a Norman, who came in with William the Conqueror;" when I see a man good-natured and polite, "That is one who came with the Plantagenets;" a brutal character, "That is a Dane:" for your nation, Monsieur, as well as your language, is a medley of many others.'
"After dinner, passing through a little parlour, he took me by the arm and stopped me. 'Do you know this bust?' (of Sir Isaac Newton.) 'It is the greatest genius that ever existed. If all the geniuses of the universe were assembled, he should lead the band.'
"It was of Newton, and of his own works, that M. de Voltaire always spoke with the greatest warmth."
Not only did work of a cast suited to the gravity of age continue to occupy the last years of his long life, but those lighter pieces, products of the exuberant fertility and impulsive fancy which are the attributes of youth, were as numerous as ever. Only they took a deeper tone, and one always deepening as he consciously drew nearer and nearer to that close which for him, steadfastly gazing on it, was wrapt in impenetrable ​darkness. In the end of 1773 he wrote the following stanzas, erroneously headed in his works as "to Madame du Deffant;" they were indeed sent to her for perusal, but were addressed to some lady still possessed of so much youth and beauty as to render the case of the Delia of the poem applicable to herself:—
It seems likely that the extraordinary old man might have continued for some years to enjoy his work and his comforts at Ferney, but for an unlucky visit to Paris in 1778. His niece, Madame Denis, had lived with him ever since he had been in the neighbourhood of Geneva; a short, fat woman, vulgar, unfeeling, extravagant, and very fond of gaiety. Notwithstanding that she had never been handsome, and was far from young, she spent so much time at her toilette that Voltaire seldom saw her till dinner; she was very grasping and exacting, very anxious that nobody should obtain any influence over him, and quarrelled with all his secretaries; in fact, seems to have devoted herself generally to promote his unhappiness. Voltaire, who, though in some respects irritable, was in many ways exceptionally indulgent, humoured her, even praised and flattered her, indemnifying himself occasionally with a little ridicule. It occurred to this lady, then about sixty-six, that her residence at Ferney was rather dull, and that Parisian life was much better suited to her style and temperament. ​Full of this idea she began to manœuvre for its realisation. Voltaire had a new tragedy about to appear; she tried to persuade him that it never would receive justice unless he should superintend its production on the stage: other arguments were used and persisted in, until the poor old man was brought reluctantly to consent. Immediately on entering Paris he received a shock in the news that his friend Le Kain, the actor, had been buried the day before. As soon as his arrival was known, vast numbers of visitors poured in to pay their respects to him; all Paris was delighted except the Court and the clergy—and the expected displeasure of these, of which signs appeared, caused him much anxiety. In the midst of all this excitement he was engaged in completing still another new tragedy ("Agathocle"), and also his part of a French dictionary which he had planned, and of which he had taken the letter A for his share. Benjamin Franklin came to see him, bringing his grandson, whom he desired to kneel for the patriarch's blessing. Pronouncing in English the words, "God, liberty, tolerance," "this," said Voltaire, "is the most suitable benediction for the grandson of Franklin." A still more notable interview was that with the Marquise de Gouvernet, the Suzanne de Livry of yore, now a widow. Again he appeared at the doors of that hotel, his repulse from which had produced, as rejoinder, the poem, "Les Vous et les Tu." It was like the meeting of two ghosts in another world when the aged pair, both past eighty-four, tottered towards each other, trying in vain to reconcile what they beheld with what they remembered; while from the wall, Voltaire's portrait, preserved by the Marquise for sixty years, looked down with that mocking smile ​which was not an irrelevant commentary. He came home greatly agitated from this interview. "I am returning," he said, "from one bank of the Styx to the other." The next day the Marquise sent back his portrait; and the day after his death she, too, descended to the grave.
A fortnight after he came to Paris the unwonted excitement he had undergone brought on a dangerous attack of hæmorrhage from the lungs. Mindful of the fate of his friend Adrienne le Couvreur, he expressed piteously his wish that his body should not be cast into the highway; and, in the hope of averting that doom, confessed to a priest, and signed a paper asking pardon if he had offended the Church. A day or two afterwards his secretary, being alone with him, begged him to state exactly what his views still continued to be at a time when he believed himself dying; and received this written declaration: "I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.—Voltaire."
From this attack, however, he so far recovered that, a month later, he was present at the representation of his new tragedy "Irène," when his costume was well calculated to do honour to that or any other occasion, rivalling in splendour that which he wore at Ferney:—
"He had made a grand toilet; he wore a red velvet coat trimmed with ermine, a large perruque of the time of Louis XIV., black and unpowdered, and in which his meagre face was so buried that only his eyes could be seen, which seemed ​to emit sparks. His head was surmounted with a square, red cap, in form of a crown. He had in his hand a little cane, with a top like a crow's beak."
It was a moment of extraordinary triumph for the returned exile. The whole theatre rose to receive him amidst long-continued applause; between the pieces his bust was crowned with laurel on the stage by the entire company; verses were recited in his honour; he was carried to his coach on the shoulders of his admirers, and attended to his hotel by an immense concourse. Turning on the steps, he said, "You wish, then, to stifle me with roses!"—and entered the house, which he did not quit again. He bore his last grievous illness with fortitude, and, on the 30th May 1778, met death with equanimity. But he was not held to have duly made the amende honorable to the Church, and the clergy of Paris denied him sepulture. His body, embalmed, was taken by his nephew, the Abbé Mignot, to the Abbey of Scellières in Champagne, and there interred with the rites of the Church. Next day a mandate arrived from the bishop of the diocese to forbid the burial, but the prohibition was then ineffectual.
Thirteen years afterwards the Revolutionists, claiming in him a champion of their cause, took up his body and transported it to the Pantheon, to lie among those whom they judged worthy of honour. But his companions there were men whose doctrines and practice would, in life, have revolted him. Beside him was laid the wretch Marat, whom he would have loathed and denounced. The violent overturning of the old monarchy, the proscriptions, the massacres, the guillotine—these would have received no countenance from him, ​and found no warrant in his writings, which had always inculcated those principles of toleration and justice that were no more respected by the Revolutionary Government than by the despotism which it destroyed.
In spite of this—in spite, too, of the fact that he had never been an assailant of the system of the monarchy—writers have gone on, down to this time, repeating, some in praise, some in blame, that he was a chief author of the Revolution. It is a matter impossible either of proof or of disproof; it must rest rather on opinion than evidence. What is more apparent is, that when a people have been so long and grievously misgoverned and oppressed, and find their relations with the Government so changed as they were when Louis XVI. and the people's representatives assumed towards each other such novel attitudes, the impending convulsion is not so much to be ascribed to the influence of this or that man, as to the constant accumulation of destructive force on the one side, and the constant diminution of repressive power on the other.
However this may be, it is chiefly as a literary phenomenon that Voltaire is now interesting to us. In that light it appears to the present writer that no inconsiderable part of his extraordinary fame was owing to the circumstances of the period, and the conditions in which he wrote, and has reasonably vanished with the lapse of time. That he still retains so eminent a position in France is due, in great measure, to those gifts of expression which do not much aid in extending a writer's reputation beyond his own country. But, after the winnowings of generations, a wide and deep repute still remains to him; nor will any diminution which it ​may have suffered be without compensation, for, with the fading of old prejudices, and with better knowledge, his name will be regarded with increased liking and respect. Yet it must not be supposed that he is here held up as a pattern man. He was, indeed, an infinitely better one than the religious bigots of the time. He believed, with far better effect on his practice than they could boast, in a Supreme Ruler. He was the untiring and eloquent advocate, at the bar of the Universe, of the rights of humanity. He recognised and lamented all the evils permitted by Providence. But he forgot, except sometimes in theory, to return thanks for the blessings which are showered along with those evils on the earth, and thus the great intellect and the high purpose are left without the crowning grace of reverence.
END OF VOLTAIRE.
* ↑ Delia was the name of Tibullus's mistress.
* ↑ It came, with Ferney, into the possession of the Marquis de Villette; and at the death of the last possessor of that title was sold, some years ago, for about £250.