Tolerance! Tolerance! Between writing it, living it, dreaming it, the thing might have become a monomania, a possession. Only its great apostle was also a Frenchman—the most versatile son of the most versatile people on earth.
At the end of 1763 he had been privately circulating in Paris a gay novelette in verse called “Gertrude, or the Education of a Daughter”; and a little later he was reviewing English books for a Parisian literary paper.
Then, too, in the autumn of 1763 the young Prince de Ligne—eighteen years old, bright, shallow, amusing, “courtier of all Courts, favourite of all kings, friend of all philosophers”—had been staying at Ferney. It is said that before his arrival Voltaire, dreadfully fearing he should be bored, took some strong medicine, so that he could say (truthfully this time) he was too ill to appear. The very self-pleased and much-admired young Prince is now chiefly known to the world by the account he has given of Voltaire intime.
He writes vividly both of his host’s greatness and littleness; tells how he loved the English, bad puns, and his best clothes; how his torrents of visitors wearied him, and what artful designs he invented to get rid of them; how good he was to the poor; how “he made all who were capable of it think and speak”; was charmed to find a musical talent in his shoemaker—“Mon Dieu! Sir, I put you at my feet—I ought to beat yours”—how he thought no one too obscure and insignificant to cheer with the liveliest wit and the most amazing vivacity ever possessed by a man of sixty-nine.
Ligne says he was quite delighted with the “sublime reply” of a regimental officer to the question “What is your religion?”
“My parents brought me up in the Roman faith.” “Splendid answer!” chuckles Voltaire. “He does not say what he is!”
Early in 1764, young Boufflers, the son of that Madame de Boufflers who was the mistress of King Stanislas, and perhaps Madame du Châtelet’s predecessor in the heart of Saint-Lambert, also came to Ferney. Boufflers was travelling incognito as a young French artist. He did not forget to write and tell his mother of his warm reception by her old acquaintance. Voltaire, with that rare adaptability of his, easily accommodated himself to his guest’s youth and treated him en camarade; while Boufflers, on his part, drew with his artist’s pencil a clever rough sketch of his host when he was losing at chess with Father Adam.
A further distraction from “Tolerance” and the Calas came in the shape of the first public performance of “Olympie” in Paris, on March 17, 1764. It had already been named by the public “O l’impie!”—a title the author was by no means going to apply to himself; while as for it applying to the piece—“Nothing is more pious. I am only afraid that it will not be good for anything but to be played in a convent of nuns on the abbess’s birthday.”
“Olympie” was well received. But it was feeble, in spite of those many alterations of which the indefatigable author vigorously said “You must correct if you are eighty. I cannot bear old men who say ‘I have taken my bent.’ Well, then, you old fools, take another!”
He also said that he had written it chiefly to put in notes at the end on suicide, the duties of priests, and other subjects in which he was interested; so it was not wonderful that even his friends had to own it a failure.