Then, too, there were farms which Voltaire managed himself, and so made lucrative. He was pleased to say, with a twinkle in his eye, that he also did everything in the garden—the gardener was “si bête.” That he had a field which was always called Voltaire’s field, because he cultivated it entirely with his own hands, is certainly true. Before long he had four or five hundred beehives; turkeys and silkworms; and a breeding stable for horses, transferred from the Délices. He was not a little delighted when, in this May of 1759, the Marquis de Voyer, steward of King Louis’s stables, made him a present of a fine stallion. As if he had not hobbies enough, he soon became an enthusiastic tree-planter—begging all his friends to follow his example—and sending waggons all the way to Lyons for loads of young trees for his park.
After a while that park stretched in three miles of circuit round the house, and included a splendid avenue of oaks, lindens, and poplars. In the garden were sunny walls for peaches; vines, lawns, and flowers. It was laid out with a charming imprévu and irregularity, most unfashionable in that formal day. Voltaire had always a “tender recollection of the banks of the Thames,” and made his garden as English as he could. It is indeed melancholy to note that artificial water and prim terraces were soon introduced to spoil—though their master thought they improved—its luxuriant irregularity; and that objects like lightning conductors, and fountains presided over by plaster nymphs, were not considered the least out of keeping with Nature by their lord and master. Near his silkworm house a thick linden-tree with overhanging branches formed what was called Voltaire’s study, and there he wrote verses “for recreation.” Nature certainly never inspired any of them. Now and again there came, it is true, even to this most typical son of the most artificial of all centuries, as he cultivated his field, or pruned and weeded in his garden, such reflections as might have fallen from the lips of his great opposite, Rousseau: “I have only done one sensible thing in my life—to cultivate the ground. He who clears a field renders a better service to humankind than all the scribblers in Europe.”
“You have done a great work for posterity” a friend said to him one day.
“Yes, Madame. I have planted four thousand feet of trees in my park.”
No more incongruous picture could be painted than that of this “withering cynic,” this world-famous hewer, hacker, and uprooter in his old grey shoes and stockings, a long vest to his knees, little black velvet cap and great drooping peruke, tranquilly directing, cultivating, sowing, “planting walnut and chestnut trees upon which I shall never see walnuts or chestnuts,” consoling himself for the toads in his garden by the reflection that “they do not prevent the nightingales from singing”: and prophesying that his destiny would be “to end between a seedlip, cows, and Genevans.”
For the time this country life was his element not the less. He wrote that it was, to Madame du Deffand, a dozen times. True, he had taken to it late. But perhaps always, deep down in him, undeveloped, stifled by Paris and by the burning needs of humanity, had been the peaceful primæval tastes. Cirey had roused them. Délices had nourished them: and Ferney and Tourney confirmed them.
Tourney had given its master a title, but at first it gave him nothing else. It was a county pour rire, “the land in a bad state,” “a garden where there was nothing but snails and moles, vines without grapes, fields without corn, and sheds without cows,” and “a house in ruins.” Still, the land could be made fertile; and the house, if it was in ruins, boasted an admirable view, and was but “a quarter of a league” from Geneva.
By February, 1759, fifty workmen were putting it to rights; and by November the Count of Tourney could say that he had planted hundreds of trees in the garden, and used more powder (in rock-blasting) than at the siege of a town. Everything needed repairing, he added—fields, roads granaries, wine-presses—and everything was being repaired.
As at Ferney and Délices, the master personally supervised every detail; and so made his farms, his nurseries, his bees, his silkworms, all pay.
In the house at Tourney he quickly made a theatre-room. If some of the guests were disposed to laugh at a stage which held nine persons in a semicircle with difficulty, and to think the green and gold decorations tawdry, Voltaire adored that “theatre of Punchinello” as a child adores a new toy. “A little green and gold theatre,” “the prettiest and smallest possible”—he alludes to it in his letters a hundred times. From the September of 1760 he was anxious to transfer it to Ferney. But meanwhile he loved it where and as it was. Tourney also was useful to provide accommodation for the servants of the innumerable guests who came to stay at Ferney.