Voltaire was not the person to starve in silence. The soldiers were spoiling the trees in his park; poor d’Aumard could not get his plasters; Adam was very ill and could have neither doctor nor medicine (“so he is sure to recover”); and the household generally lacked everything except snow, “and we have enough of that to stock Europe.” Choiseul must be written to! Voltaire wrote to him and pointed out that it was not the Genevans France was punishing, but Ferney; and on January 30th Choiseul sent an order exempting Ferney from the general rule and giving Voltaire an unlimited passport for himself and his household.
It was a very large one by now. Durey de Morsan, an amiable elderly ne’er-do-weel, had joined it, and lived there on Voltaire’s charity, sometimes doing a little copying in return for his board and lodging.
There was also a protégé of Richelieu’s, called Gallien, who repaid Voltaire’s hospitality with the basest ingratitude; and an ex-Capuchin monk, known to Ferney as Richard, who, when he had been generously entertained for two years, decamped with money, manuscripts, and jewels belonging to his host.
And then, besides its regular inmates, there poured through the house a continual stream of visitors. In 1766 there had stayed there Madame Saint-Julien, a gay, good-natured, and highly connected little lady, whom Voltaire called his “butterfly philosopher”; and La Borde, playwright for himself, and first valet de chambre for the King.
Here, too, also in 1766, had come James Boswell, Esquire, of Auchinleck, for whose benefit M. de Voltaire is pleased to assume the manner and style of Mr. Boswell’s great patron, and to speak of that patron as “a superstitious dog.”
Voltaire would hardly have been his vain old French self if he had not modified his opinion of the great Doctor when Boswell told him that Johnson had said that Frederick the Great wrote as Voltaire’s footboy, who had acted as his amanuensis, might do.
To be sure, when Boswell got home and asked the Doctor if he thought Rousseau as bad a man as Voltaire, that staunch old bigot had replied, “Why, Sir, it is difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them.”
But Voltaire did not know of that answer.
Also in 1766, Grétry the musician, then only five-and-twenty, had often come over from Geneva, where he was staying, to visit Voltaire. Madame Cramer had first introduced him. The conversation often turned on comic opera, which Voltaire had once hated, but which, as expounded by Grétry, he was soon to love and at seventy-four to write gaily himself.
When Grétry spoke of his host’s prodigious reputation, he records that Voltaire characteristically replied that he would give a hundred years of immortality for a good digestion.