The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

By November it was “a piece of architecture which would have admirers even in Italy.” While by the March of 1761 it had grown—at any rate in its master’s fancy—into “a superb château.”

There have not been wanting to Voltaire enemies to argue persistently and vociferously that Ferney was not at all what he represented it; and that all his geese were swans. They were. Ferney at its best and completest was never anything but a plain, sensible, commodious country house. It had neither wings nor decoration; not any architectural merit, except that its ugliness was simple and not elaborate. Voltaire was his own architect; and owned quite frankly that he knew nothing at all about architecture. The man who had travelled through Holland, Belgium, and Prussia without once stepping out of his post-chaise to look at a famous picture, or an immortal sculpture, or the “frozen music” of a grand cathedral, had as little feeling for art as for Nature.

He thought Ferney a superb château because it was his château. Just as he was devoted to flowers and gardens, when they were his flowers and his gardens.

It is certainly not the best way of loving art or Nature, but it is the only way of many persons besides Voltaire. And, after all, that comfortable feeling of landed proprietorship, that honest pride in his cows and his sheep, his bees and his silkworms, sits pleasantly enough on this withered cynic of sixty-five; and makes him at once more human, more sympathetic—the same flesh and blood as the simple and ordinary.

He had, as he said, plenty of wood and stone for his building operations on the premises—“oak enough to be useful to our navy, if we had one”; and stone, which the architect thought very good, and which turned out to be very bad. He said gaily that when the house was finished he should write on the wall “Voltaire fecit”; and that posterity would take him for a famous architect. As for that marble of which he had talked largely as being brought up by the lake, the man who declared that he preferred a good English book to a hundred thousand pillars of it, did not trouble to obtain much or to make an elaborate use of what he did obtain. He wanted the house “agreeable and useful,” and he had it. There was a fine view from it; though not so fine as it might have been, for it faced the high road. Still, as its happy master said, it was situated in the most smiling country in Europe; at its feet the lake gleamed and sparkled; and beyond the warm and gorgeous luxuriance of its perfect gardens could be seen, in dazzling contrast, the eternal snows of Mont Blanc.

When the rebuilding was finished the house was, looked at without prejudice, the well-appointed home of a well-to-do bourgeois gentilhomme—with an unusual love for literature. There was an ordinary hall with a stone staircase on the left which led up to the fourteen guest-rooms, all comfortably furnished, said one of those guests, who was an Englishman and had been used to solid English comfort at home. Here and there were some good pictures—or copies of good pictures—copies, most likely, since Voltaire, hardly knowing the difference, would be apt to reflect that a copy would do as well as an original, and be much cheaper. A Venus after Paul Veronese and a Flora after Guido Reni, some of the visitors declared genuine; and some as hotly pronounced spurious. Wagnière, that Genevan boy who lived to write memoirs like the other secretaries, stated that his master had about twenty valuable pictures in all; and some good busts. There were various family portraits about the house: one of Madame Denis; one of Voltaire’s young mother; and, soon, a likeness of Madame de Pompadour painted by herself, and by herself given to Voltaire. In Madame Denis’s room presently there was a portrait of Catherine, Empress of Russia, embroidered in silk; and a marble statue of Voltaire. There was a copy of this statue, or his bust in plaster, in almost every room in the house.

The library was simple, and, for Voltaire, small. Dr. Burney, the father of Fanny, who saw it in 1770, describes it as “not very large but well filled,” and says it contained “a whole-length figure in marble” of its master “recumbent, in one of the windows.” At Voltaire’s death it contained only 6,210 volumes. But almost every one had on its margin copious notes in that fine, neat little handwriting. Six thousand volumes annotated by a Voltaire! His sarcasm should have made the dullest ones amusing; and his relentless logic the obscurest ones clear. There were a great many volumes of history and theology; dictionaries in every language; all the Italian poets; and all the English philosophers. The Comte de Maistre, who saw this library after Voltaire’s death when it had been bought by Catherine the Great, wondered at the “extreme mediocrity” of the books. By this he explained himself to mean that there were no rare old editions and no sumptuous bindings, which the Count took as a sign that Voltaire was “a stranger to all profound literature.” It was a sign that Voltaire read to act; that books were his tools, not his ornaments; that he loved literature, not as a sensuous delight, but as the lever that was to turn the world. “A few books, very much marked.” That library was infinitely characteristic of the man who was doer, not dreamer; of the mind to which every poet, every philosopher, every scientist acted as a spur to new practical effort; of the man who was to go down the ages not as playwright, or verse-maker, but as he who “conquered the intellect of France, for the Revolution.”

The salle à manger was distinguished only by a most extraordinary and very bad allegorical picture, called “The Temple of Memory,” in which a Glory, with her hair dressed much à la mode, was presenting Voltaire (who was surrounded with a halo like a saint) to the God of Poetry who was getting out of his chariot with a crown in his hand. On one side of the picture appeared busts of Euripides, Sophocles, Racine, Corneille, and other great men; on the opposite side were caricatures of Fréron and Desfontaines, who were being most satisfactorily kicked by Furies. Voltaire laughed at, and enjoyed immensely, this part of the picture while he was at meals. The artist was Alix, a native of Ferney, and soon an habitué at the château. It was fortunate for him that Voltaire was so much better a friend than he was a judge of art.

His bedroom and salon were both small rooms. The salon, entered by folding doors, contained the master’s bust above the stove, six or seven pictures, “more or less good,” a portrait of Madame du Châtelet, and casts of Newton and Locke. One of the pictures, after Boucher, represented a hunting scene. There were ten tapestry armchairs, and a table of very common varnished marble. French windows and a glass door led into the garden.

Voltaire’s bedroom was principally distinguished by a neatness, cleanness, and simplicity natural to him, but very unusual in his day. The roughly carved deal bedstead one visitor regretfully regarded as “almost mean.” It was the fashion then to spend the night in what looked like a large heavily curtained coffin. Voltaire—to the melancholy vexation of the fashionable—seems to have dispensed with most of the curtains, but could not escape a huge baldachino over his head. Inside it, hung a very bad pastel portrait of Lekain; and a candelabra containing three wax candles, so that he could see to read. On either side of the bed hung portraits of Frederick the Great, of Voltaire himself, and of Madame du Châtelet. Placed between the door and the only window were five or six other engraved portraits, all in very simple black frames. The bed hangings and the four armchairs were upholstered alike in pale blue damask.