The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Here is a pretty state of things! says Voltaire. A priest who is not only thief but murderer as well! He set to work at once. He moved heaven, earth, and the authorities to get M. Ancian “employment in the galleys.” He found out Decroze’s father and sister. He tried to rouse the father’s timidity and apathy to action. The sister told him, on her oath, that her confessor had refused her absolution if she did not force that father to renounce his son’s cause.

By January 3, 1761, Voltaire was passionately complaining that a “feeble procedure” against the criminal had hardly been begun. The province was divided on the subject. All Voltaire’s letters of the time are full of it. But Ancian was protected by his order. It was thought, as it has been often thought before and since, that the scandal of punishing the crime would be greater than the scandal of leaving it unpunished.

Ancian had to pay Decroze a sum down; but he kept his living, and nursed his revenge.

When he saw M. de Voltaire pulling down the churchyard wall and removing the cross, he knew that the time had come. He assured his brother curé of Ferney and the simple people of the place that this atheist of a Voltaire had profaned their church; that he had not only moved the cross without first fulfilling the usual formalities, but had cried out, “Take away that gibbet!” Ancian, therefore, on the biblical principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, denounced Voltaire to the ecclesiastical judge of Gex as guilty of sacrilege and impiety, and involved him in a “criminal suit of a most violent character.”

But Ancian did not know, though he ought to have known, the sort of man with whom he had to deal. Voltaire’s blood was up. A criminal lawsuit, forsooth, for “a foot and a half of churchyard and two mutton cutlets which had been mistaken for disinterred bones”! There was an angry note in that laugh which meant fight. Further, his enemies were saying publicly that they hoped to see him burned, or at least hanged, for the glory of God and the edification of the faithful; and meanwhile his church-building operations were stopped.

It was an old principle of his always to turn their own weapons against his foes. He had not forgotten it. He put himself into correspondence with an able ecclesiastical lawyer of Lyons. He read up ecclesiastical histories, and ancient volumes of Church law; and then suddenly flung at the head of the enemy such a mass of rules and precedents, of dreary old parallel cases of mouldering decrees which councils had forgotten to revoke, of long-winded formulas and by-laws whose existence and orthodoxy were as indisputable as they had been unheeded, and of authorities who were infinitely sound, obscure, and confusing—that the priestly party put its hands to its ears, cried “Peccavi!” and confessed itself beaten on its own ground.

In the meanwhile its surprising little foe, who “passionately loved to be master,” had rased the whole church at Ferney to the ground, “in reply to the complaints of having taken down half of it,” had removed the altars, the confessional boxes, and the fonts, and sent his parishioners to attend mass elsewhere.

To crown all, and to leave nothing undone that could be done, by June 21st he had forwarded the plan of his church to the Pope and applied to his Holiness for a bull granting him absolute power over his churchyard, permission for his labourers to work on fête days, instead “of getting drunk in honour of the Saints” according to custom, and for sacred relics to place in the church.

The letters to Rome are, very unfortunately, lost. But, through Choiseul, they reached there; and the requests were granted in part. On October 26, 1761, the Holy Father sent a piece of the hair shirt of St. Francis of Assisi—the patron saint of François Marie Arouet. On the same day, in tardy recognition for the dedication of “Tancred,” came a present of the portrait of Madame de Pompadour. “So you see,” wrote Voltaire, “I am all right both for this world and the next.”

When his church was finished he inscribed on it Deo Solo (sic), which by September 14, 1761, he had altered to Deo erexit Voltaire. He was fond of saying that it was the only church in the universe which was dedicated to God alone, and not to a saint. “For my part I had rather build for the Master than for the servants.”