But if he wanted a reward for all his trouble, he had it. The miserable hamlet had become a thriving village and the desert place blossomed like a rose. The master’s corn fed his people and his bad wine (“which is not harmful”) gave them drink. His bees produced excellent honey and wax, and his hemp and flax, linen.
Here dwelt together, as one family, Catholics and Huguenots. “Is not this better than St. Bartholomew?” “When a Catholic is sick, Protestants go and take care of him”; and vice versa. The good Protestant women prepared with their own hands the little portable altars for the Procession of the Holy Sacrament, and the curé thanked them publicly in a sermon. Gros had died—of drink, said Voltaire—and his place had been taken by Hugenot, an excellent priest, generous and liberal-minded, the friend of all his people whatever their faith, and of M. de Voltaire, who was supposed to have none at all.
Here surely was the tree of Tolerance he had planted, bearing beautiful fruit. It might well warm his old heart to see his little colony firm on “those two pivots of the wealth of a state, be it little or great, freedom of trade and freedom of conscience.”
The man who worked the case of Calas for three years, the case of Sirven for seven, and the cases of Lally and d’Étallonde for twelve, was not likely to grow tired of the little colony always beneath his eyes. Nor was he unmindful of the claims not only Ferney, but all Gex, had upon his bounty. When it was devastated by famine in 1771 he had corn sent him from Sicily, and sold it much under cost price to his starving children and the poor people of the province. Their sufferings and sorrows were his own. He pleaded passionately for those who were, and had been for generations, miserable with the hopeless misery that is dumb; but who, before many years were past, were to cry aloud their wrongs with a great and terrible voice which would reach to the ends of the earth.
All Voltaire’s letters in his later years are full of his watchmakers and weavers, their prosperity or their poverty, what he had done for them or what he would do. Did his own glorification play no part in his schemes? It doubtless played some. But the fact that he may have been vain does not alter the fact that he set an example which Christians have nobly followed, but which, in his day at least, they certainly did not set him.
Voltaire, sceptic and scoffer, too often of evil life and unclean lips, was not only the High Priest of Tolerance, but the first great practical philanthropist of his century.
LOUIS XVI.
From the Portrait by Callet in the Petit Trianon