The want of clothing, however, gave rise to many doubtful jokes in eighteenth-century Paris, and his enemies made very spiteful epigrams on the meagreness of the figure. “Posterity will not want to count M. de Voltaire’s ribs,” says Fréron sarcastically. And though Voltaire pretended to laugh at such gibes—and laughed himself at all his bodily defects—he was still morally thin-skinned. “A statue is no consolation,” he wrote dismally to d’Argental, “when so many enemies conspire to cover it with mud.”
But there were more friends to cover it with adulation. In 1772, Mademoiselle Clairon surprised the habitués of her rooms one evening by drawing back a curtain and showing them the bust of Voltaire on an altar. She put a laurel crown on the head, and in her “noble and beautiful voice” recited an ode of Marmontel’s which, particularly in its Apostrophe to Envy, produced a great effect.
When Voltaire heard of the incident, he got out his old lyre and thanked Mademoiselle in verse of extraordinary freshness—“very pretty for a young man of only seventy-nine,” says Grimm.
While his statue was the topic of Paris, the original was entertaining at least three celebrated visitors at Ferney: Dr. Burney, d’Alembert, and Condorcet.
Dr. Burney, the father of Johnson’s dear protégée, Fanny, came to Geneva in the course of his Musical Tour through France and Italy.
Hearing that Voltaire relentlessly snubbed the curious idle who only came “to look at the wild beast,” the good pompous Doctor was a little nervous of the reception he might meet. But all went well.
A servant, presumably Wagnière, introduced Burney to his master’s sanctum, and to the library, where Burney saw a portrait of young Dupuits, whom he supposed to be Voltaire’s brother, though Wagnière told him Voltaire was seventy-eight (he was really seventy-six), and the difference in age between the “brothers” must have been forty years at the least.
Then Dr. Burney was introduced to the great man himself, who still worked, said Wagnière, ten hours a day and wrote constantly without spectacles. The conversation turned on English literature, and Voltaire observed how England had now no one “who lords it over the rest like Dryden, Pope, and Swift”; and remarked, when critics are silent it proves not so much that the age is correct, as that it is dull. Burney was shown the model village—“the most innocent and the most useful of all my works”—and tactfully departed before he should have taken more than his share of the great man’s time.
D’Alembert arrived at Ferney in the September of 1770. He was supposed to be en route to see Rome and die. Frederick the Great had sent him six thousand francs for the tour. But either, as d’Alembert told the King, the prospect of the fatigue and the bad inns daunted him, or, as Duvernet says, Voltaire’s society was too seductive. D’Alembert returned the King half of his money, and in two months was back in Paris.
The Marquis de Condorcet, who then was celebrated as a philosophic and freethinking noble who had wholly broken with the religion and the traditions of his caste, and now is celebrated as the philosopher and littérateur who wrote a brief and scholarly Life of Voltaire and who poisoned himself to escape the guillotine, was a fellow-guest with d’Alembert.