Like the Abbé de l'Épée, and for as many years—almost thirty of his half-voluntary, half-enforced exile—Voltaire had devoted himself in his own way to the bettering of humanity, crippled mentally and spiritually. He had given vision to the blind, hearing to the deaf, voice to the speechless. He took in the outcast, and cherished the orphan. With his inherent pity for the oppressed, and his deep-rooted indignation with all cruelty, he had made himself the advocate of the unjustly condemned; and none among his brilliant pages will live longer than his impassioned pleadings for the rehabilitation of the illegally executed Jean Calas. And now he comes back from Ferney, through all the length of France, in a triumphal progress without parallel, welcomed everywhere by exultant worshippers. At four in the afternoon of February 10, 1778, his coach appears just where his statue now stands at the end of Quai Malaquais, then Quai des Théatins. He wears a large, loose cloak of crimson velvet, edged with a small gold cord, and a cap of sable and velvet, and he is "smothered in roses." His driver makes his way slowly along the quay, through the acclaiming crowd, to the home of "la Bonne et Belle," the girl he had rescued from a convent and adopted, now the happy wife of the Marquis de Villette. Their eighteenth-century mansion stands on the corner of Rue de Beaune and present Quai Voltaire, unaltered in its simple stateliness. Here Voltaire is visited by all Paris that was allowed to get to him. Mlle. Clairon is one of the first, on her knees at the bedside of her old friend, exhausted by his triumph. She is no longer young, and shows that she owns to fifty-five years, by her retired life at the present numbers 34 and 36 Rue du Bac. There she has her books and her sewing and her spendthrift Comte Valbelle d'Oraison, who lives on her.
The Seventeenth-century Buildings on Quai Malaquais, with the Institute and the Statue of Voltaire.
D'Alembert and Benjamin Franklin are among his visitors, and the dethroned Du Barry, and thirty chefs, each set on the appointment of cook for the master. He goes to the Academy, then installed in the Louvre, and to the Comédie Française, temporarily housed in the Tuileries, the Odéon not being ready. There his "Irène," finished just before leaving Switzerland, is produced, and at the performance on the evening of March 30th he is crowned in his box, his bust is crowned on the beflowered stage, and the palms and laurels and plaudits leave him breath only to murmur: "My friends, do you really want to kill me with joy?" That was the last seen of him by the public. He had come to Paris, he said, "to drink Seine water"; and either that beverage poisoned him, or the cup of flattery he emptied so often. One month after that supreme night, on May 30, 1778, at a little after eleven at night, he died in that corner apartment on the first floor. For thirty years after it was unoccupied and its windows were kept closed.
Almost his last words, as he remembered what the Church had meant to him, and what it might mean for him, were: "I don't want to be thrown into the roadway like that poor Lecouvreur." That fate was spared his wasted frame by the quickness of his nephew, the Abbé Mignot. Here, at the entrance-gate in Rue de Beaune, this honest man placed his uncle's body, hardly cold, in his travelling carriage, and with it drove hastily, and with no needless stops, to Scellières in Champagne. There he gave out the laudable lie of a death on the journey, and procured immediate interment in the nave of his church, under all due rites. The grave was hardly covered before orders from the Bishop of Troyes arrived, forbidding the burial. The trick would have tickled the adroit old man. His body was allowed to rest for thirteen years, and then it was brought back in honor to Paris. A great concourse had assembled, only two weeks earlier, at the place where the Bastille had been, hoping to hoot at the royal family haled back from Varennes. Now, on July 11, 1791, a greater concourse was stationed here, to look with silent reverence on this cortége, headed by Beaumarchais, all the famous men of France carrying the pall or joining in the procession. They entered by the Vincennes road, passed along the boulevards, crossed Pont Royal to stop before this mansion, and went thence to the Panthéon. There his remains lay once more in peace, until the Bourbons "de-Panthéonized" both Voltaire and Rousseau.
Benjamin Franklin had come to visit Voltaire here on the quay, by way of the Seine from Passy, in which retired suburb he was then living. The traces he has left in the capital are to be found in two inscriptions and a tradition. We know that he had rooms, during a part of the year 1776, in Rue de Penthièvre, and his name, carved in the pediment of the stately façade of the house numbered 26 in that street, is a record of his residence in it or on its site. There is another claimant to his tenancy for a portion of this same year. The American who happens to go to or through Passy, on a Fourth of July, will have opportune greeting from the Stars and Stripes, draped over the doorway of the old-fashioned building, more a cottage than a mansion, now numbered 21 Rue Franklin. Its owners do this each year, they tell you, in honor of the great American who occupied the cottage in 1776. Their claim is the more credible, inasmuch as the street has been given his name since his day there, when it was Rue Basse. In the following year he went farther afield, and for nine years he remained in a villa in the large garden, now covered by the ugly École des Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne, at the corner of Rues Raynouard and Singer. The Historical Society of Passy and Auteuil has placed a tablet in this corner wall, recording Franklin's residence at this spot from 1777 to 1785. His friend, M. Ray de Chaumont, occupied only a portion of his Hôtel de Valentinois, and gave up the remaining portion to Franklin for his residence and his office, eager to show his sympathy for the colonies and his fondness for their envoy. Only John Adams, when he came, was shocked in all his scrupulosity to find an American agent living rent-free! In this garden he put up the first lightning-conductor in France, and in this house he negotiated the treaty that gave the crown's aid to the colonies and made possible their independence. To this spot came the crowd to catch a glimpse of the homely-clad figure, and men of science and letters to learn from him, and ladies from the court to caress him. And it may have been here that he made answer to the enamoured marquise, in words that have never been topped for the ready wit of a gallant old gentleman.
The cortége that accompanied Voltaire's remains to the Panthéon was headed, it has been said, by Beaumarchais; fittingly so, for Beaumarchais was then heir-presumptive to the dramatic crown, and his "Figaro" had already begun to laugh the nobility from out of France. Louis XVI. saw clearly, for once, when he said: "If I consent to the production of the 'Marriage of Figaro,' the Bastille will go." He did consent, and it was played to an immense house on April 27, 1784, in the Comédie Française, now the Odéon. That night the old order had its last laugh, and it rang strangely and sadly. Yet in this comedy, that killed by ridicule—the most potent weapon in France—once played a queen that was, and once a queen that was to be. On August 19, 1785, on the stage of the Little Trianon at Versailles, the Comte d'Artois—brother to Louis XIV., later to be Charles X.—appeared as the Barber, to the Rosina of Marie Antoinette. And, in the summer of 1803, during the Consulate, when Malmaison was the scene of gayeties, a theatre was constructed in the garden, and on its boards, Hortense (soon after Queen of Holland) made a success as Rosina.
Playwriting was merely a digression in the diversified career of this man of various aptitudes, whose ups and downs we have no excuse for dwelling on, as we trace him through Paris streets. There is no tablet to mark his birth, on January 24, 1732, in the house of his father, Caron, the watchmaker of Rue Saint-Denis, opposite the old Cemetery of the Innocents, nearly at Rue de la Ferronerie. Pierre-Augustin Caron he was christened, and it was in his soaring years that he added "de Beaumarchais." This quarter is notable in that it was the scene of the birth and boyhood of four famous dramatists—of Molière, as we have seen, and of Regnard, as we shall see; of Beaumarchais and of Eugène Scribe. To record this latest birth, on December 24, 1791, a tablet is set in the wall of No. 32 Rue Saint-Denis, at the corner of Rue de la Reynie, only a few steps south of the Caron house. It is a plain, old-style house of four stories and a garret, and has become a shop for chocolates and sweets. It has on its sign, "Au Chat Noir"; black cats are carved wherever they will cling on its front and side, and a huge, wooden, black cat rides on the cart that carries the chocolate.
Beaumarchais had a residence at No. 6 Rue de Condé in 1773, and at the Hôtel de Hollande, Rue Vielle-du-Temple 47, in 1776. We shall go there later. On the wall of the house, No. 2 Boulevard Beaumarchais, a tablet marks the site of his great mansion and its spacious gardens. These covered the entire triangle enclosed by Rues Amelot, Daval, and Roquette. He had found the money for this colossal outlay, not in his plays, but in all sorts of mercantile transactions, some of them seemingly shabby. It is claimed that he lost large sums in supplying, as the unavowed agent of the crown, war equipment to the struggling American colonies. His palace went up in sight of the Bastille, then going down. The Parisians came in crowds to see his grounds, with their grottoes, statues, and lake; and he entertained all the swelldom of France. There, one day in 1792, the mob from the too-near Faubourg Saint-Antoine came uninvited, and raided house and grounds for hidden arms and ammunition, not to be found. The owner went to the Abbaye prison and thence into exile and poverty. Returning in 1796, he spent his last years in a hopeless attempt to gather up remnants of his broken fortunes, a big remnant being the debt neglected and rejected by the American Congress. The romance of this "Lost Million" cannot be told here. Beaumarchais died in this house in 1799, and was buried in the garden. When the ground was taken for the Saint-Martin Canal in 1818, his remains were removed to Père-Lachaise. The grave is as near that of Scribe as were their birthplaces. His name was given to the old Boulevard Saint-Antoine in 1831, and in 1897 his statue was placed in that wide space in Rue Saint-Antoine that faces Rue des Tournelles. The pedestal is good, and worthy of a more convincing statue of this man of strong character and of contrasting qualities. And at the Washington Head-quarters at Newburgh-on-Hudson, and at the various collections of Revolutionary relics in the United States, you will find cannon that came from French arsenals, and that, it was hinted, left commissions in the hands of Caron de Beaumarchais.