Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/314

Rh 290 VOLTAIRE required some more external pressure to induce him to take this apparently obvious step. He had been, in the first blush of his Frankfort disaster, refused, or at least not granted, permission even to enter France proper, a rebuff probably due in about equal parts to a wish not to displease or disoblige Frederick, and a wish to punish Voltaire himself for selecting Prussia as a home. At Colmar he was not safe, especially when in January 1754 a pirated edition of the Essai sur les Mceurs, written long before, appeared. Permission to establish himself in France was now absolutely refused ; and even Madame de Pompadour was powerless, if indeed she cared greatly to exert her power. Nor did an extremely offensive per formance of Voltaire s the solemn partaking of the eucharist at Colmar after due confession at all mollify his enemies. His exclusion from France, however, was chiefly metaphorical, and really meant exclusion from Paris and its neighbourhood. In the summer he went to Plombieres, and after returning to Colmar for some time journeyed in the beginning of winter to Lyons, and after a month there went, as it may almost be said, &quot; home &quot; to a home which he had never yet visited, but which was, with slight changes of actual domicile, but with no change of neighbourhood, to shelter him for the rest of his life. His first resting-place, Geneva, was reached in the middle of December ; but Voltaire had no purpose of re maining in the city, and almost immediately bought a country house just outside the gates, to which he gave the name of Les Delices. This, the first house of his own which he can be said to have possessed, is still standing, though now absorbed in the suburbs. It was pretty, with fine views ; but it had advantages of a non-a?sthetic kind for its owner, of which he made no secret. He was here practically at the meeting-point of four distinct jurisdic tions Geneva, the canton Vaud, Sardinia, and France, while other cantons were within easy reach. Before finally settling in Ferney he bought other houses dotted about these territories, so as never to be without a refuge close at hand in case of sudden storms. At Les Delices he set up a considerable establishment, which his great wealth (obtained chiefly by speculation in the manner already more than once hinted at) made him able easily to afford. He kept open house for visitors ; he had printers close at hand in Geneva ; he fitted up a private theatre in which he could enjoy what was perhaps the greatest pleasure of his whole life acting in a play of his own, stage-managed by himself. His residence at Geneva brought him into correspondence (at first quite amicable) with the most famous of her citizens, J. J. Rousseau. His Orphelin de la Chine, performed at Paris in 1755, was very well received; and the earthquake at Lisbon, which appalled other people, gave Voltaire an excellent opportunity for ridiculing the beliefs of the orthodox, first in verse (1756) and later in the (from a literary point of view) unsurpassable tale of Candide (1759). All was, however, not yet quite smooth with him. Geneva had a law expressly forbidding theatrical performances in any circumstances whatever. Voltaire, as has been said, had infringed this law already as far as private performances went, and he had thought of building a regular theatre, not indeed at Geneva but at Lausanne. In July 1755 a very polite and, as far as Voltaire was concerned, indirect resolution of the consistory declared that in consequence of these proceedings of the Sieur de Voltaire the pastors should notify their flocks to abstain, and that the chief syndic should be informed of the con sistory s perfect confidence that the edicts would be carried out. Voltaire obeyed this hint as far as Les Delices was concerned, and consoled himself by having the performances in his Lausanne house. But he never was the man to take opposition to his wishes either quietly or without retalia tion. He undoubtedly instigated D Alembert to include a censure of the prohibition in his Encyclopedic article on &quot; Geneva,&quot; a proceeding which provoked Rousseau s celebrated Lettre a D Alembert sur les Spectacles. As for himself, even still restless, he looked about for a place where he could combine the social liberty of France with the political liberty of Geneva, and he found one. At the end of 1758 he bought the considerable property of Ferney, on the shore of the lake, about four miles from Geneva, and on French soil. At Les Delices (which he sold in 1765) he had become a householder on no small scale ; at Ferney (which he increased by other purchases and leases) he became a complete country gentleman. He set about establishing himself handsomely in his new abode, and though he. did not absolutely abandon his other houses he was henceforward known to all Europe as squire of Ferney, hardly less than as author of the Henriade and the Pucelle, of Charles XII. and ATcdkia,. From this time forward many of the most celebrated men of Europe visited him there, and large parts of his usual biographies are composed of extracts from their accounts of Ferney. His new occupations by no means quenched his literary activity, but on the contrary stimu lated it. He did not make himself a slave to his visitors, but appeared only occasionally and reserved much time for work and for his immense correspondence, which had for a long time once more included Frederick, the two getting on very well when they were not in contact. Above all, he now, being comparatively secure in position, engaged much more strongly in public controversies, and, without wholly abandoning, resorted less to, his old labyrinthine tricks of disavowal, garbled publication, and private libel. The suppression of the Encyclopedic, to which he had been a considerable contributor, and whose conductors were his intimate friends, drew from him a shower of lampoons directed now at &quot;1 infame&quot; (see infra) generally, now at literary victims, such as Le Franc de Ponipignan (who had written one piece of verse so much better than anything serious of Voltaire s that he could not be forgiven), or Palissot (who had boldly gibbeted most of the philosophes in his play of that name, but had not included Voltaire), now at Freron, an excellent critic and a dangerous writer, who had attacked Voltaire from the conservative side, and at whom the patriarch of Ferney, as he now began to be called, levelled in return the very inferior farce-lampoon of UEcossaise, of the first night of which Freron himself did an admirably humorous criticism. How he built a church and got into trouble in so doing at Ferney, how he put &quot; Deo erexit Voltaire&quot; on it (1760- 61) and obtained a relic from the pope for his new build ing, how he entertained a grand-niece of Corneille, and for her benefit wrote his well-known &quot;commentary&quot; on that poet, are matters of interest, but to be passed over briefly. Here, too, he began that series of interferences on behalf of the oppressed and the ill-treated which, whatever mixture of motives may have prompted it, is certainly an honour to his memory. Volumes and almost libraries have been written on the Calas affair, and it is impossible here to give any account of it or of the only less famous cases of Sirven (very similar to that of Calas, though no life was actually lost), Espinasse (who had been sentenced to the galleys for harbouring a Protestant minister), Lally (the son of the unjustly treated but not blameless Irish-French commander in India), D Etalonde (the companion of La Barre), Montbailli, and others. In 1768 he entered, it would seem out of pure wanton ness, into an indecent controversy with the bishop of the diocese (who, like an honest man, was not particularly well satisfied with his occasional conformity) ; he had differences with the superior landlord of part of his estate,