Before this, he was writing the kindest letters to La Harpe again. When Madame Denis, in the latter half of this October, 1769, and after an absence of a little less than eighteen months, burst into Ferney, her uncle seems to have folded her in his arms, received her with as much delight as if she had always been trustworthy, practical, sensible, and considerate, and to have let bygones be bygones as only he knew how.
The Dupuits were already home again; and Voltaire was busy with a new business which had been in his mind since he first came to Ferney, and in practical existence at least since 1767.
From the moment he had bought his estates he had felt the full weight of his responsibilities as a landowner, and realised as keenly as Arthur Young, the philosophic farmer who rode through France prophesying her downfall, that agriculture is the true wealth of a nation.
“The best thing we have to do on earth is to cultivate it.”
At more than threescore years and ten, this old son of the pavement had set himself to learn, and did learn, the whole technique of agriculture. Directly he bought Ferney he began putting the barren land round it under cultivation, and so occupied all persons on his estates who were out of work. When he was seventy-eight he was still hard at work with his own hands on that field which had been called Voltaire’s Field, because he cultivated it entirely himself.
It has been seen how he planted avenues of trees. Four times over he lined his drive with chestnut and walnut trees, and four times they nearly all died, or were wantonly destroyed by the peasants. “However, I am not daunted. The others laugh at me. Neither my old age nor my complaints nor the severity of the climate discourage me. To have cultivated a field and made twenty trees grow is a good which will never be lost.”
He entered into a long correspondence with Moreau—that rare being, a practical Political Economist. He delighted in Galiani’s famous “Dialogues on Corn”—never was man in the right so wittily before—and in this very 1769 he was thanking Abbé Mords-les-Morellet for his “Dictionary of Commerce.”
For, after all, the Land meant the People; and commerce there must be, if the work of the People on the Land were to be remunerative.
Many terrible accounts have been given of the condition of the French poor before the Revolution. But theirs was a misery which no passion and eloquence can overstate.
Forbidden at certain seasons to guard their wretched pieces of land by fences lest they should interfere with my lord’s hunt, or to manure their miserable crops lest they should spoil the flavour of my lord’s game; forbidden, at hatching seasons, to weed those crops lest they should disturb the partridges; and forbidden, without special permission, to build a shed in which to store their grain—the fruit of their lands and their labour, if there was any such fruit, was always lost to them.