If some new friends came into Voltaire’s life in this solitary 1768, more old ones went out of it.
On June 24th of this year died Marie Leczinska. Friend? Well, once. There was that pension sur sa cassette, and “my poor Voltaire.”
In the autumn died Olivet—a friend indeed—the best of Latinists, the kindly schoolmaster at Louis-le-Grand.
In December, that silent staunch laborious worker for the philosophic faith, Damilaville, met death with the resolute courage with which he had faced life, and left the world poorer for one of those rare people who say nothing and do much.
Voltaire mourned him as a public as well as a personal loss. He mourned him characteristically—that such a man should die while Fréron waxed fat! But since they did, the less time to sit idle and weeping.
Up then, and at them with those little deadly arrows of which the Voltairian quiver was always full—the arrows called Pamphlets.
CHAPTER XL
THE COLONY OF WATCHMAKERS AND WEAVERS
“What harm can a book do that costs a hundred crowns?” Voltaire had written to Damilaville on April 5, 1765. “Twenty volumes folio will never make a revolution; it is the little pocket pamphlets of thirty sous that are to be feared.”
He had acted on that principle all his life. But he had never acted upon it so much as in his hand-to-hand battle with l’infâme. He never acted upon it so often as in his eighteen months’ solitude at Ferney in 1768-69.
For many years, from that “manufactory” of his, as Grimm called it, he poured forth a ceaseless stream of dialogues, epistles, discourses, reflections, novelettes, commentaries, burlesques, reviews. Hardly any of them were more than a few pages in length. But each dealt with some subject near to his wide heart; cried aloud for some reform which had not been made, and must be made; pointed out with mocking finger some scandal in Church or State; satirised with killing irony some gross abuse of power; turned on some miscarriage of civil justice the searchlight of truth; laughed lightly, in dialogue, at the education of women by nuns in convents to fit them to be wives and mothers in the world; drew up damning statistics of the 9,468,800 victims “hanged, drowned, broken on the wheel, or burnt, for the love of God” and their religion from the time of Constantine to Louis XIV.; pleaded vivaciously against the eighty-two annual holidays set apart by the Church on which it was criminal to work but not to be drunken and mischievous; enumerated the “Horrible Dangers of Reading,” of knowing, of thinking; and lashed with the prettiest of stinging little whips a corrupt ministry, a wicked priesthood, and l’infâme, l’infâme.