Old Voltaire was good-natured enough to criticise the young man’s plays for him, and La Harpe received the criticisms with the sulkiness of offended dignity. Voltaire was not patient by nature, heaven knows. But he kept his coolness and his temper with this irritating young man to a degree quite extraordinary. It was always “the little La Harpe,” or “my dear child,” or “Ah! the little one is angry!” with a good-natured laugh.
When one day the conceited visitor went so far as to rewrite some verses in his part in Voltaire’s “Adélaïde”—“which seemed to me feeble”—“Let us hear them, my son,” says Voltaire. And when he had heard them, as improved by La Harpe—
“Good,” he said. “Yes, that is better. Go on making such changes. I shall only gain by them.”
On another occasion, La Harpe, at a dinner-party of twenty persons, recited an ode by one old foe of Voltaire’s, Pompignan, on the death of another, J. B. Rousseau, without stating the name of the author.
“Very good,” says Voltaire. “Who wrote it?”
The audacious La Harpe makes him guess. And at last tells him.
“Pompignan.”
That name, as La Harpe himself said, was a coup de théâtre indeed. There was a silence. “Repeat the lines again,” says Voltaire. As La Harpe repeats them, the Patriarch listens with fixed attention. “There is no more to be said. It is a beautiful stanza.”
Was this the same man whom the mere suggestion that d’Arnaud’s sun was rising and his setting, had spurred to the folly of the Prussian visit? Was this the man so thin-skinned that every gnat-bite of a criticism made him raw and mad? The truth seems to be that Voltaire had a very weak spot in his heart for La Harpe, and loved him better than his own glory.
Not many years ago, in a grocer’s shop in Paris, was discovered an autograph letter of Voltaire’s in which he begged the Controller-General for a pension for his protégé.