“Off with Massillon!” cries Voltaire, and “he gave himself up to all the folly and verve of his imagination.” Irreverence? Malicious mockery? It has been generally thought so. May it not rather have been that both sentiments were perfectly genuine? that in one there expressed itself the passionate admiration and in the other the irresponsible liveliness, of which this extraordinary character was equally capable?
Though he had nearly harried the life out of one poor Capuchin of Gex, though he had wantonly insulted the faith of all the Capuchins, almost his next act was to obtain for them, through Choiseul, an annuity of six hundred francs for the Gex monastery, in return for which benefit the Brothers gave him the title of Temporal Father of the Capuchins of Gex. He derived a monkeyish delight from it; used to sign his letters with a cross, “✟, Brother Voltaire unworthy Capuchin”; but then he also derived an honest delight from the good he had been able to do the monastery.
Who can explain him?
Presently he was writing to Cardinal Bernis to obtain the Pope’s permission for Father Adam to wear a wig on his bald head during mass. The climate was cold, the poor Father rheumatic, and his Holiness had been obliged to forbid wigs to the priesthood as they had so often been used as a disguise for unworthy purposes.
All through religious controversies and irreligious acts, Voltaire was engaged in a long, constant and very flattering
VOLTAIRE
From the Etching by Denon
correspondence with Catherine the Great. Even Frederick, in the beguiling days before the Prussian visits, had not so gratified Voltaire’s self-love. Voltaire was the teacher, and Catherine, the greatest of queens and the cleverest of women, his humble pupil. In 1768 she had taken his advice—there is no subtler form of flattery—upon inoculation, and herself submitted to the operation. And in this 1769 she sent him the loveliest pelisse of Russian sable, a snuff box she had turned with her own royal hands, her portrait set in diamonds, and an epitome of the laws with which she governed her great empire. Here surely was balm for solitude, calumny, sickness, old age, every mortal misfortune! Voltaire warmed body and soul through the snowy Swiss spring in that gorgeous pelisse. In March, he had another present, which delighted his queer old heart hardly less. Saint-Lambert—Saint-Lambert, who had robbed him of his mistress and wounded him with a wound which another man could never have forgiven or forgotten—sent him his poem, “The Seasons.” And the poet Voltaire writes to his brother of the lyre the most charming compliments and congratulations.