He had designed his own tomb jutting out from the wall of the church. “The wicked will say that I am neither inside nor out.”
In March a public event distracted his thoughts for a moment from “Eloïsa,” Ancian, and the church building. The Dauphin’s eldest son died; and Pompignan, as Historiographer of France, lifted his diminished head from Montauban and from those “mountains of ridicule” which covered him, and wrote a eulogium of the little boy, which alas! for foolish Pompignan, was also another attack on the philosophers. Voltaire waited a little. Then he wrote two pieces of “murderous brevity”—the “Ah! Ahs!” and the “Fors.”
Down went the head of Pompignan again. If it even peeped up for a moment, which it still did now and then, Ferney shot an arrow at it from the richest quiver and with the deadliest aim in the world.
But he had better things to do now than hitting an enemy who was down.
That dear spoilt daughter of the house, who might interrupt even the chess or the verse reading of vif Papa Voltaire with impunity—who was pretty and naïve enough to do anything in the world she liked with him—still had no dot.
On April 10, 1761, Voltaire wrote to Duclos, secretary of the Academy, and proposed that he (Voltaire) should edit and annotate Corneille’s works, in an edition of the classics then appearing under the patronage of the Academy, for the benefit of the great Peter’s great-niece.
To say that Voltaire put his whole heart, soul, and body into the thing and worked at it like a galley slave, and worked till he made all Europe work too, is no exaggeration. He began by getting up a subscription, which remains one of the best managed, if not the best managed, and certainly the most successful thing of its kind ever undertaken. He advanced all money for preliminary expenses himself. The King of France, the Empress of Russia, the Emperor and Empress of Austria, Choiseul, and Madame de Pompadour figured imposingly and attractively on his list. The nobles and notables of France, courtiers, farmers-general, and literary men quickly followed suit. In England the givers included good Queen Charlotte, Lords Chesterfield, Lyttelton, Palmer, Spencer, and the great Mr. Pitt. To Pitt, Voltaire wrote, in the English he was always clever enough to remember, when expedient; and Pitt replied favourably.
By May, only a month after the subscription was started, and before a single copy of the work was ready, enough money had come in to afford Marie Corneille a yearly income of fifteen hundred francs.
Voltaire was far from finding the labour congenial. To the vigour of his creative genius work that was so largely mechanical soon became irritating and tiresome. Still, it consoled him, as he said, for those public disasters in the Seven Years’ War which were fast making France the fable of the nations and the laughing stock of Europe; and presently for that crushing defeat of the French by Frederick the Great at Villinghausen on July 15th.
That he was an excellent commentator is proved by the fact that his Commentary remains unrivalled, and is still the text-book on Corneille. With an ear as exquisitely delicate for a harmony as a discord, with that single-minded love of good literature which equally prevented him being flatterer or caviller, Voltaire was the critic who, like the poet, is born, not made. He admired warmly; but he blamed candidly. “It is true that Corneille is a sacred authority; but I am like Father Simon, who, when the Archbishop of Paris asked him what he was doing to prepare himself for the priesthood, replied, ‘Monseigneur, I am criticising the Bible.’”