On July 30th had arrived there “the sublime Clairon.” She had been the first actress of her day when Voltaire had known her in Paris. Now she was the finest tragic actress of the eighteenth century, and in the rich maturity of her two-and-forty years a most clever and cultivated woman. She had helped Voltaire’s plays enormously; some she had made for him. He said so, at least. Further, she was one of the philosophers. In 1761 she had protested against the excommunication of actors as a class; and Voltaire, remembering Adrienne Lecouvreur, had seconded her with all the force and irony of his style.
When she reached Ferney her host was so ill that she had to declaim her rôle in his “Orphan of China,” which cured him on the spot. Part of her visit he hobbled about on crutches, crippled by an attack of sciatica and half blind from an affection of the eyes, but as mentally lively and alert as if he had had both of those requisites for happiness, “the body of an athlete and the soul of a sage.”
Mademoiselle was not well herself, and under Tronchin. But she went on acting against the express orders of that good physician. It was in her blood, as it was in Voltaire’s. He had entirely rebuilt his theatre for her. He went quite mad over her superb talent; and declared that for the first time in his life he had seen perfection in any kind. Blind though his avuncular affection might be, when he beheld Clairon in the flesh he did not suggest that Madame Denis (who, with her sister, was acting too) could in any way be her rival.
Clairon was still at Ferney in August. Soon after she left, that faithful Damilaville paid a visit there; and during the summer had come, under the chaperonage of Lord Abingdon, the famous John Wilkes. “Voltaire is obliging to me beyond all description” was Wilkes’s record of his reception; while Voltaire, on his part, bore enthusiastic testimony to the great demagogue’s inexhaustible life and wit.
On the 8th or 9th of that August, when Voltaire was acting or telling stories, nimbly gesticulating with those crutches, events of sinister importance to him, and of importance to all men who hated l’infâme, were taking place in Abbeville.
On one of those days, two large crucifixes in the town, one on a bridge, the other in a cemetery, were shamefully and blasphemously mutilated. The town was naturally very angry. It set itself busily to work to find the culprits. A few days later three suspected persons, all boys under one-and-twenty, were brought up before the authorities and questioned.
While their examination was proceeding, the Bishop of the diocese organised a solemn procession through the streets to the places where the sacrilege had been committed, and, kneeling there, invoked pardon for the blasphemers in ominous words, as “men who, though not beyond the reach of God’s mercy, had rendered themselves worthy of the severest penalty of this world’s law.”
The mutilated crucifixes were placed in a church, to which the people flocked in crowds, and in a temper of mind very different from that of Him who hung there in effigy and in the supreme agony had prayed for His murderers.
On September 26th, a formal decree of arrest was issued against the three young men, d’Étallonde de Morival, Moisnel, and the Chevalier de la Barre.
D’Étallonde had already fled to Prussia; partly, no doubt, because his conscience was ill at ease, but partly, too, because he, or his friends, knew the times and the people. In Prussia he was afterwards made, through Voltaire’s influence, an officer in Frederick’s army.