On November 5th, he was arranging details for her journey and her education with Le Brun.
He wrote to her direct to assure her she should have every facility for the practice of her religion, for reading, and for music; that Madame Denis would supply her with a wardrobe; that she should have masters for accomplishment; and learn to act so that in six months she would be playing Chimène.
In the second week in December Mademoiselle arrived. Quiet, gentle, and good, as naïvely ignorant as she was ingenuously ready to learn, tenderly and faithfully attached to the father she had left as she was to grow girlishly fond of the father she had found, Marie Corneille comes like a fresh and virgin air across the tainted and heated atmosphere of that eighteenth century, like some human angel to the Voltaire who hardly ever, perhaps never before, had intimately known a good woman.
He began at once to give her lessons in reading and writing, and in grammar. Mademoiselle had not much aptitude for that “sublime science,” or for any science. She had come out of her convent as widely and profoundly ignorant as even those good nuns could leave a girl. And the cleverest man of his age taught her to write, and made her send him little notes, which he returned to her with her very doubtful orthography corrected; made history as amusing as a novel, and all the teaching go gaily “without the least appearance of a lesson.” She was to have a tutor presently, when one good enough could be found. Meanwhile Voltaire taught her by word of mouth, while she looked up into his lean face with her clear candid eyes, and he looked back and delighted in her round girlish prettiness—“a plump face like a puppy’s”—and her adorable naïveté. Madame Denis forgot her comforts and her flirtations to nurse her when she was “a little ill,” and to teach her needlework when she was well. All the servants adored her, and vied with each other to serve her. Presently she had her own femme de chambre. Every Sunday Voltaire and his niece took her to mass. Voltaire did not only preach tolerance. He did more even than leave her, when she prayed, “her early Heaven, her happy views.” He made every careful provision, as he had said he would, for her to follow the faith of her fathers. The sneer on his lips and the scorn in his soul died as he looked at Marie Corneille. Trust, simplicity, innocence, appealed not in vain to Voltaire, as they have appealed not in vain to far worse men. There is a noble touch in that confession of his that, though he loved her well enough to set a very high value on her love for him, he liked nothing more in her than her unforgetting attachment to her father. To that father (who was, it may be added, a very cavilling and trying person) he wrote himself, thanking him with the finest tact and delicacy for a loan so delightful, and repeatedly congratulating himself on being the host of so charming a visitor. Voltaire certainly knew how to confer a favour.
It was not unnatural that, when the news of this adoption reached them, the devout should call out loudly at a lamb being entrusted to such a wolf. But it is noticeable that none of the devout offered to support the lamb in their own sheepfold. They only demanded a lettre de cachet to get her away from Voltaire.
There was another trouble too. Fréron, though he had helped her himself, was bitterly angry and jealous at Voltaire’s adoption. In his “Literary Year” he inserted, with a very venomous pen, calumnies on her father, and on the mode of education Voltaire was providing for her. Without the smallest ground for such a charge he declared that her tutor was to be Lécluse, the dentist and amateur actor, whom Fréron represented as a kind of disreputable mountebank.
Voltaire instantly rose to the provocation. He always rose. But when its subject was an innocent girl, he may be forgiven that he was more furious than wise. He demanded justice from the minister Malesherbes, and a formal apology from Fréron: and failed to get either. So there appeared first a cutting epigram, and then an exceedingly scurrilous publication called “Anecdotes of Fréron,” which Voltaire vehemently denied, but which that very best and most trustworthy of all possible editors, Beuchot, has included, not the less, in his Works.
Fréron’s calumnies were not without effect. They lost Marie Corneille a husband: who must have been well lost, since the sting of a wasp frightened him away.
Meanwhile the life at Ferney and Délices went a busy and tranquil way; and Papa Voltaire began to cast about in his mind the means for providing a dot for his daughter.