When there was a supper and a dance after theatricals he himself appeared for a moment only, and then retired to his room, which adjoined that where, not the guests, but the servants were dancing, and where he tranquilly worked or slept to the sound of the music. Sometimes he did not even appear to do the honours of the house at all; and declared of himself that he would have been dead in four days if he had not well known how to live quietly in the midst of uproar, and alone in a mob.
He had the usual quarrel on hand to keep him busy. That conceited La Beaumelle, who had been a thorn in his flesh in Prussia, assailed him in the summer of 1767 with no fewer than ninety-four abusive anonymous letters. Voltaire put the matter into the hands of the police. But in 1770 La Beaumelle, who had further complicated the situation by marrying the sister of young Lavaysse, the Calas’ unfortunate friend, began an objectionable commentary on Voltaire’s works, and would have finished it but that he (La Beaumelle) died in 1773.
That Voltaire spent energy and time in trying to inspire, and that he knew no greater delight than when he did inspire, his visitors with his own passion for hard work in place of idle pleasure, is on the testimony of Chabanon and of a fellow-visitor of Chabanon’s, the famous La Harpe.
La Harpe from the first came to Ferney to be a brilliant pupil to this great past master of so many arts; to learn from the author of “Zaire” and of “Alzire,” of “Mahomet” and of “Mérope,” of “The Princess of Navarre,” “The Prodigal Son,” “Brutus,” and “The Scotch Girl,” how to write every kind of play that ever playwright has written. It has been mentioned that La Harpe had been at Ferney in 1765—part of the time with that noblest exponent of the drama, Clairon. He was here also in 1766 with Chabanon. And now, in the beginning of 1767, he came once again—this time with his young wife, and for a visit which lasted more than a year.
La Harpe was a clever, arrogant, and very self-satisfied young man of about eight-and-twenty. His tragedy, “Warwick,” produced in 1763, made him famous in his own age. In this, he is only celebrated as the first writer in France who “made criticism eloquent.” He had led a disreputable youth, and had just married his landlady’s daughter as a reparation for wrong done to her. But in that age almost everybody was disreputable; and if virtue had been a sine qua non in society, there would have been no society at all.
Voltaire took this promising youth to his warm and sanguine old heart at once. He was poor! He was clever! He could act! What more did one want? With Voltaire’s help he had gained a prize at the Academy. And with further help he should do greater things than that. Nothing is pleasanter in Voltaire’s character as an old man than the enthusiastic interest and delight he took in his young literary protégés. He worked with them, corrected them, praised them, went into raptures over their talents to his friends, financed them, fathered them, housed them, and in the desire for their fame quite forgot his own.
The memorable La Harpe visit of 1767 opened under the rosiest aspects. The little bride had the youth in which Voltaire delighted, and she turned out to be “a comedian without knowing it.” If “The Scythians” had been hissed in Paris, Madame de la Harpe reciting Act II. made Ferney sob. La Harpe, too, “declaimed verses as well as he wrote them,” and was “the best actor in France.”
So there were theatricals galore.
If thorns pricked on the rose stems and there were clouds in the bluest of skies, it was not Voltaire who spoke of them.
It is Chabanon, the fellow-guest, who sketches La Harpe as overbearing, impatient of correction, uncommonly quarrelsome, and quite forgetful of the fact that his host’s position and seniority of nearly fifty years demanded some sort of respect.