Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/315

Rh VOLTAIRE 291 the president De Brosses ; and lie engaged in a long and tedious return match with the republic of Geneva, in which the scoring was alternate and rather bewildering, Geneva playing at one time an insult to Voltaire s friend and patron Catherine of Russia, and Voltaire replying at another by setting up a rival colony of watchmakers at Ferney. The match went on the whole in favour of Voltaire, for during its course a theatre was authorized in the city, and he himself, a kind of exile from it, was applied to to mediate between different classes of the community. But the general events of this Ferney life are somewhat of that happy kind which are no events the distractions and employments of a man who has nothing serious to occupy himself about. In this way things went on for many years, and Voltaire, who had been an old man when he established himself at Ferney, became a very old one almost without noticing it. The death of Louis XV. and the accession of Louis XVI. excited even in his aged breast the hope of re- entering Paris, but he did not at once receive any en couragement, despite the reforming ministry of Turgot. A much more solid gain to his happiness was the adop tion, or practical adoption, in 177G of Heine Philiberte de Varicourt, a young girl of noble but poor family, whom Voltaire rescued from the convent, installed in his house as an adopted daughter, and married to the Marquis de Villette. Her pet name was &quot; Belle et Bonne,&quot; and nobody had more to do with the happiness of the last years of the &quot; patriarch &quot; than she had. It is doubtful whether his last and fatal visit to Paris was due to his own wish or to the instigation of his niece, Madame Denis ; but it is fair to say that this lady a woman of disagreeable temper, especially to her inferiors appears to have been rather hardly treated by Voltaire s earlier, and sometimes by his later, biographers. The suggestion which has been made that the success of Beaumarchais piqued him has nothing impossible in it. At any rate he had, at the end of 1777 and the beginning of 1778, been carefully finishing a new tragedy Irene for production in the capital ; he started on the 5th of February, and five days later arrived at the city which he had not seen for eight and twenty years. Abundant as is the information respecting the whole, or almost the whole, of his life, it is nowhere more abundant than in respect to these last months. He was received with immense rejoicings, not indeed directly by the court, but by the Academy, by society, and by all the more im portant foreign visitors. About a fortnight after his arrival age and fatigue made him seriously ill, and a con fessor was sent for. But he recovered, scoffed at himself as usual, and prepared more eagerly than ever for the first performance of Irene, on March 16. At the end of the month he was able to go out and attend a performance of it, which has often been described, and was a kind of apotheosis. He was crowned with laurel in his box, amid the plaudits of the audience, and did not for the moment seem to be the worse for it, enjoying several other triumphs, during one of which he had, in full Academic seance, to embrace Franklin after the French manner. He even began or proceeded with another tragedy, Ayathocle, and attended several Academic meetings. But such pro ceedings in the case of a man of eighty-four were impossible. To keep himself up he exceeded even his usual excess in coffee, and about the middle of May he became very ill. For about a fortnight he was alternately better and worse ; but on May 30 the priests were once more sent for, to wit, his nephew the Abbe Mignot, the Abbe Gaultier, who had officiated on the former occasion, and the parish priest, the cure of St Sulpice. He was, however, in a state of half insensibility, and petulantly motioned them away. The legends set afloat about his dying in a state of terror and despair are certainly false ; but it must be regarded as singular and unfortunate that he who had more than once gone out of his way to conform ostentatiously and with his tongue in his cheek should have neglected or missed this last opportunity. The result was a difficulty as to burial which was compromised by hurried interment at the abbey of Scellieres in Champagne, anticipating the inter dict of the bishop of the diocese by an hour or two. On July 10, 1791, the body was transferred to the Pantheon, but it was not to rest there, and during the Hundred Days it was once more, it is said, disentombed, and stowed away in a piece of waste ground. His heart, taken from the body when it was embalmed, and given to Madame Denis and by her to Madame de Villette, was preserved in a silver case, and when it was proposed (in 1864) to restore it to the other remains the sarcophagus at Sainte Genevieve (the Pantheon) was opened and found to be empty. In person Voltaire was not engaging, even as a young man. His extraordinary thinness is commemorated, among other things, by the very poor but well-known epigram at tributed to Young, and identifying him at once with &quot; Satan, Death, and Sin.&quot; In old age he was a mere skeleton, with a long nose and eyes of preternatural brilliancy peering out of his wig. He never seems to have been addicted to any manly sport, and took little exercise. He was sober enough (for his day and society) in eating and drinking generally ; but drank coffee, as his contem porary, counterpart, and enemy, Johnson, drank tea, in a hardened and inveterate manner. It may be presumed with some certainty that his attentions to women were for the most part platonic ; indeed, both on the good and the bad side of him, he was all brain. He appears to have had no great sense of natural beaut} 7, in which point he resembled his generation (though one remarkable story is told of his being deeply affected by Alpine scenery) ; and, except in his passion for the stage, he does not seem to have cared much for any of the arts. Conversation and literature were, again as in Johnson s case, the sole gods of his idolatry. As for his moral character, the wholly intellectual cast of mind just referred to makes it difficult to judge that. His beliefs or absence of beliefs emanci pated him from conventional scruples ; and it must be ad mitted that he is not a good subject for those who main tain that a nice morality may exist independently of religion. He was good-natured when not crossed, generous to dependants who made themselves useful to him, and indefatigable in defending the cause of those who were oppressed by the systems with which he was at war. But he was inordinately vain, and totally unscrupulous in gaining money, in attacking an enemy, or in protecting himself when he was threatened with danger. In these three cases he stuck at no lie, found no weapons too foul to use, and regarded no gain as too dirty to pouch. His peculiar fashion of attacking the popular beliefs of his time has also failed to secure the approval of some who have very little sympathy with those beliefs, of not a few even who go so far as to approve of ridicule and indeed of mere ribaldry being used to wean those who hold things sacred from their belief in them. The only excuse made for the alternate cringing and insult, the alternate abuse and lying, which marked his course in this matter, has been the very weak plea that a man cannot fight with a system, a plea which is sufficiently answered by the retort that a great many men have so fought and have won. But this comes so closely to the discussion of Voltaire s works and intellectual character that it may be dismissed for the present with only one more remark, by no means new, but it would seem constantly requiring repetition. Voltaire s works, and especially his private letters, constantly contain