Nor did he forget to provide them with pleasure as well as with work. Every Sunday the young people of the colony used to come up to the château to dance. Their host provided them with refreshments, and was the happiest spectator of their happiness.
Then he started a school, and himself paid the schoolmaster. There had been a time when he had thought that “it is not the labourer one must teach, it is the bon bourgeois, the inhabitant of towns: that enterprise is grand and great enough,” which, for his day, it certainly was. It was a hundred years in advance of his time. Even that drastic reformer, Frederick the Great, had announced superbly, “The vulgar do not deserve enlightenment.” So what wonder that in 1763 even a clear-sighted Voltaire prayed for “ignorant brothers to follow my plough?”
The wonder rather is that by 1767 his views had so enormously progressed that when Linguet, the barrister, wrote to him that in his opinion all was lost if the canaille were shown that they too could reason, he emphatically answered, instancing the intelligent Genevans who read as a relaxation from manual labour—“No, Sir; all is not lost when the people are put into a condition to see that they too have a mind. On the contrary, all is lost when they are treated like a herd of bulls, for sooner or later they will gore you with their horns.”
Prophetic—but if many heard that voice crying in the wilderness, none acted on his words, save himself.
But in prospering Ferney there was room not only for a school and a doctor, masons and labourers, but for special industries. From the first, Voltaire had cultivated silkworms. He was never the man for an idle hobby. Why should no use be made of the silk? Before 1769, the Ferney theatre, which Madame Denis had lately used as a laundry, was turned into a silkworm nursery. From busy Geneva came stocking weavers, only too glad to colonise in a place where the lord, and master lent them money “on very easy terms,” built decent dwellings for them, and gave them the full benefit of his knowledge of affairs.
By September 4, 1769, Voltaire, always alive to the advantages of a good advertisement, sent to the Duchesse de Choiseul the first pair of silk stockings ever made on his looms. If she would but wear them they must be the mode! What stocking would not look beautiful on a foot so charming? Voltaire found time to engage his Duchess to wear them, in a gay, coquettish, and essentially French correspondence. Madame had made a mistake, it appears, and sent him, as a pattern, a shoe much too large for her. Neither his thousand schemes and labours nor his seventy-five years had spoiled his talent for flattering badinage. His Duchess accepted his stockings and his compliments, showed both to her friends, and thus put some fifty to a hundred people, including young Calas who was helping his benefactor, out of the way of want.
On February 15, 1770, the party quarrels in Geneva came to a climax—and bloodshed.
The Natives had not forgotten the promise made to them four years earlier. “If you are forced to leave your country ... I shall still be able to help and protect you.”
Neither had Voltaire.
On February 10, 1767, in writing to de Beauteville, the French mediator, he had suggested the scheme of a working colony—the nucleus of the idea of some enterprising person enticing the great watchmaking industry of quarrelsome Geneva to form a settlement, which should be managed by its founder and should bear his name. The scheme had appealed to Choiseul. In 1768, with Voltaire’s co-operation and approval, that minister founded the colony of Versoix—or Versoy, as Voltaire spells it—which was designed to be what Ferney actually became.