“It seems to me that, M. de la Harpe having no pension, mine (from the King) is too large by half, and that it should be divided between us.”
If this could be arranged—“La Harpe, and everyone else, can easily be made to think that this pension is a just recompense for the services he has rendered to literature.”
The request was not granted. La Harpe never even knew that it had been made. But its singular generosity and delicacy are not altered by those facts. Well might Voltaire’s bitterest enemy, Jean Jacques Rousseau, write of him: “I know no man on earth whose impulses have been more beautiful.”
But his treatment of La Harpe was something better even than a noble impulse.
In the beginning of 1768, after the young couple had been guests in his house for more than a year, and after one of them at least had received full measure, pressed down and running over, of help, forbearance, and kindness, Voltaire discovered that valuable manuscripts had been stolen from him. Among others were those secret Memoirs written in 1759, which expressed the feelings of an angry, younger Voltaire, but not of a wiser and older one. To Paris had been sent not only copies of “The Civil War of Geneva,” but anecdotes for his Histories which Voltaire was keeping until the death of the persons concerned left him at liberty to publish them.
There was a loud domestic explosion at Ferney. The strongest and gravest suspicion fell upon La Harpe. He vehemently denied everything, and accused a certain Antoine, a sculptor, of the crime. Antoine simply said La Harpe was a liar.
Madame Denis, who herself was suspected of a foolish elderly tendresse for La Harpe and of complicity in the affair with him, took his side, with, one may safely assume, a torrent of eloquence. But eloquence, not proof, was all either she or La Harpe had to offer. From his room La Harpe, “putting arrogance in the place of repentance,” wrote his generous old host many impertinent little notes. He might have spared him.
Voltaire had often had manuscripts stolen from him before, and always alas! by his own familiar friends whom he trusted. But this time he felt the treachery with peculiar bitterness. He was not passionate and furious as he generally was. His attitude was that of knowing La Harpe to be guilty and longing to find him innocent. He made as little of it as he could. “This little roguery of La Harpe’s is not serious,” he wrote. “But it is certain and proven.” In the November of 1767 La Harpe had been in Paris for a time, when “he gave the third canto of ‘The Civil War of Geneva’ to three persons of my acquaintance.”
“I did not reproach him,” Voltaire wrote sadly to Hennin, “but his own conscience did. He never alluded to the affair and looked me straight in the face, or spoke of it without turning pale with a pallor not that of innocence.” Still, if I can help him in the future as I have done in the past, I shall do so; “only, if Madame Denis brings him back to Ferney I must lock up my papers.” “His imprudence has had very disagreeable consequences for me, but I pardon him with all my heart; he has not sinned from malice.”
Only to his intimate friends did he admit La Harpe had sinned at all. The sinner was dear to him. He must lie, if need be, to prove his innocence to the world.