She selected as mediator her new envoy at Geneva, M. Hennin, who arrived on December 16, 1765, whose mediation did not prosper at all, but who was, and remained, much Voltaire’s friend.
By this time the Bourgeoisie had become not a little aggressive and dictatorial, and the long mediatory dinner-parties had begun to bore Voltaire.
After all, the most oppressed class were the Natives. Two of them called at Ferney, and presently brought its lord a written statement of their grievances against the Bourgeoisie, which were not few or slight. He promised help, entered into the smallest details, and dismissed them with memorable words: “You are the largest part of a free and industrious people, and you are in slavery.... If you are forced to leave a country which your labours make prosperous, I shall still be able to help and protect you.”
He wrote a little introductory letter to that statement which the Natives purposed to present to M. de Beauteville, the new mediator sent by France, to succeed, if that might be, where Hennin had failed.
“What is the Third Estate?” said the Abbé Sieyès. “Nothing.” “What ought it to be? Everything.”
In 1766 it was nothing. In the eye of the law, said de Beauteville, it positively did not exist.
He dismissed the petition with contumacy, and sent the Natives to the Councils, who received them in the same way.
Then M. de Voltaire himself wrote a petition for them; but before they sent it to the mediators (three had now been appointed, one by France, one by Berne, one by Geneva), he warned them of their probable failure, in a prophecy which Geneva long remembered. “You are like little flying-fish. Out of the water, you are eaten by birds of prey; in it, by larger fish. You are between two equally powerful parties: you will fall victims to the interests of one or the other, or perhaps of both together.”
When the petition was presented on April 28, 1766, the unlucky Natives were threatened with imprisonment if they did not reveal its authorship. They did. Notwithstanding, a few days later, Auzière, their leader, was thrown into prison, a result Voltaire had long foreseen. Here the affair ended, for a time at least. Voltaire summed up his own position, with his usual neatness, in writing to d’Argental on May 6th. “The Natives say that I take the part of the Bourgeois, and the Bourgeois that I take the part of the Natives. The Natives and Bourgeois both pretend I pay too much deference to the Councils, and the Councils say I am too friendly to both the Bourgeois and Natives.”
The Councils, in point of fact, were exceedingly angry with Voltaire, to whom happened precisely what happens to the foolish person who separates fighting dogs. The dogs growl at him and begin fighting again, and their master considers his interference uncommonly impertinent.