The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Voltaire declared, to persons whom he could have no object in deceiving, that he had lately had “twelve accesses of fever.” He was seventy-five years old. And death always was and had been a far more present reality to him than to most people.

These things taken together form, not at all a valid excuse, but some sort of honest excuse for an act that needs a great deal of excusing.

Voltaire was in bed one day in the March of 1769, dictating to Wagnière, when he saw from his window Gros, the Ferney curé, and a Capuchin monk who had come to help him with the Easter confessions, walking in the garden. Voltaire sent for the Capuchin and told him that he was too ill to leave his bed, but as a Frenchman, an official of the King, and seigneur of the parish, he wished there and then to make his confession. And he put the usual fee of six francs into the Capuchin’s hand. The poor man, with the fear of his Bishop before his eyes, nervously temporised, said he was very busy and would return in a few days.

“Trust me to get even with him!” cries the patient when M. le Capuchin had retired. Burgos, “a kind of surgeon,” is sent for, and having felt the invalid’s pulse, is fool enough to say that it is excellent.

“What, you ignorant fellow! Excellent?” roars the sick man.

Burgos feels it again. It is a very different pulse this time, and M. de Voltaire is in a high fever.

“Then go and tell the priest.”

Six days elapsed and no priest appeared. So the very active-minded invalid caused the whole household to be roused in a body in the middle of the night, and to hurry off to the curé saying their master was dying and presenting a certificate signed by himself, Wagnière, Bigex, and Burgos, which declared the invalid’s pious desire to die fortified with the Sacraments and in the bosom of the faith in which he was born and had lived.

Neither curé nor Capuchin appeared.

Then Voltaire sent a lawyer to the curé, saying that if he did not come, the Lord of Ferney would denounce him to the Parliament as having refused the Sacraments to a dying man.