CHAPTER XLI
THE PIGALLE STATUE, AND THE VINDICATION OF LALLY
One spring evening of the year 1770 the idea was suggested, at the table of the Neckers in Paris, of erecting a statue to the great Voltaire.
Necker was a prosperous banker, and, to be, Comptroller-General.
Madame, his wife, once the beloved of Gibbon, was the daughter of a Swiss minister and one of the first salonières in the capital.
The plan was immediately approved and acted upon by her seventeen guests. They formed themselves into a committee to receive subscriptions, and decided that the work should be entrusted to the famous Pigalle, who was to fix his own price, which he did very modestly.
Madame Necker herself communicated the plan to Voltaire.
He was boyishly delighted at the compliment. He answered gaily that he was seventy-six and had just had a long illness which had treated both his mind and body very badly, and that if Pigalle was to come and model his face he must first have a face to model. “You would hardly guess where it ought to be. My eyes have sunk three inches; my cheeks are like old parchment; ... the few teeth I had are gone.... This is not coquetry, it is truth.”
It was. Dr. Burney, who visited Ferney in this year, spoke of his host as a living skeleton—“mere skin and bone”—but he spoke, too, like everybody else, of the gleaming eyes full of living fire; and d’Alembert wrote to the model himself: “Genius ... has always a countenance which genius, its brother, will easily find.”
Subscriptions had flowed in from the first with unprecedented generosity. The magnificent Richelieu contributed magnificently. Frederick, one of the first to wish to give, wrote to ask d’Alembert of what amount his gift should be.
“An écu, Sire, and your name,” says d’Alembert. But Frederick gave more than money. In noble words and a most generous eulogy, he blotted out Frankfort and the past for ever. “The finest monument to Voltaire is the one he has erected himself. His work will endure when the Basilisk of St. Peter, the Louvre, and all the buildings which human vanity supposes eternal, have perished.”