But if there had been need for patience in the first affair, there was a hundred times greater need in the second.
The Parliament of Toulouse declined to give up its papers, as it had declined before. And then that flight—“the reason of their condemnation is in their flight. They are judged by contumacy.”
In June, too, the death of Madame Sirven—“of her sorrows”—removed a most important and most valuable witness for the defence. Then the Sirvens had no money. Voltaire had to supply all—brains, wealth, influence, labour, literary talent. For seven years he worked the case with an energy that never tired, an enthusiasm that never cooled. When it had been going on for four years, he wrote that it “agitated all his soul.” “This ardour, this fever, this perpetual exaltation”—what worker, however hot and persevering he fancy himself, is not ashamed by it, and astounded?
Voltaire wrote Memoirs for the Sirvens. He won over the disapproving d’Argentals to be as “obstinate” about it (the phrase is his own) as he was himself. He got up a subscription to which the great Frederick and the great Catherine of Russia gave generously; and Madame Geoffrin made her protégé, Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski—now King of Poland—contribute too.
Finally, Voltaire succeeded in persuading Sirven to return to Mazamet, where the case was re-tried; and on December 25, 1771, when Voltaire was seventy-seven years old, the Parliament of Toulouse met and completely exculpated the accused. As Voltaire said, it had taken them two hours to condemn innocence, and nine years to give it justice. Still, the thing was done.
In 1772, the Sirvens came to Ferney to thank their benefactor, and afforded him one of the highest of human pleasures: “the sight of a happiness which was his own work.”
The year 1765, in which Voltaire showed so much public spirit, was not privately uneventful. In it he gave up Délices, which he had bought in 1755, and whose place Ferney had altogether usurped in his heart. In 1829, Délices was still in possession of the Tronchin family, from whom Voltaire had rented it. In 1881, it was a girls’ school.
In 1766, he also gave up the lease of Chêne, his house in Lausanne.
In the January of 1765, Voltaire and Frederick the Great were again reconciled after a quarrel and a break in their correspondence which had lasted four years. Frederick, forsooth, had chosen to take as a personal insult the fact that Voltaire should waste his talents writing that stupid history about “the wolves and bears of Siberia”! And why in the world should he want to dedicate his “Tancred” to that old enemy of the Prussian monarch’s, Madame de Pompadour? Voltaire, on his side, was minded to write any history he chose, and dedicate his plays to anybody he liked, and would thank Frederick not to interfere.
Then, at the end of 1764 he hears that Frederick is ill—and to the wind with both his heat and his coldness at once.