D’Alembert left. It was his last visit to Ferney.
On December 24, 1770, the powerful Choiseul was disgraced and exiled by the far more powerful Dubarry. “The coachman of Europe,” as Frederick called him, had been infinitely clever and infinitely unlucky. If he had made the army and remade the fleet, expelled the Jesuits, and promoted trade, art, and literature, he had involved his country in wars, for which she had wept tears of blood. He fell: and great was the fall of him.
The tidings were received at Ferney with the utmost consternation. For Voltaire personally Choiseul had done much. He had helped in the affairs of Calas and of Chaumont, in that of the Corneille Commentary, and of the blockade of Ferney. And, more than all, he had protected, with the absolutely necessary protection none but a powerful minister could afford, the colony of watchmakers and weavers.
His disgrace ruined Versoix: and Ferney rocked on her foundations.
The steady resolution, and perhaps the fighting renown, of her old master tided his children over the crisis. But there was famine as well as disturbance abroad in the land, and for a while things looked black indeed.
On January 23d of the new year 1771, Louis XV., d’Aiguillon, the successor of Choiseul, and Maupeou, the Chancellor, suppressed the Parliament of Paris, to the general disgust. Voltaire did not share it. That Parliament, if it had been forced at last to reinstate the Calas, had condemned La Barre, d’Étallonde, and General Lally: it “was defiled with the blood of the weak and the innocent”; had burnt the works of the Encyclopædists; and been so fiercely Jansenist that wise men regretted the Jesuits it had ruined. In its place were to be established six Superior Councils or Local Parliaments, which were to give justice gratuitously and to be the final courts of appeal, thereby saving the nation the enormous expense of conveying accused persons to the capital. To be sure, the jury system as practised in ideal England was better still. But in an imperfect world one must be satisfied with imperfect progress.
Voltaire believed the six sovereign Councils to be “the salvation of France”—“one of the best ideas since the foundation of monarchy.” As far back as 1769 he had attacked the old Parliament, under a very transparent anonymity, in his “History of the Parliament of Paris.”
All things considered, there was no wonder that a shrewd Maupeou, knowing how bitterly public opinion was against him, should call to his aid the man “who had led it and fashioned it to his taste.” Voltaire put himself at the disposition of Maupeou, and for many a month deafened the enemy with blast upon blast from his famous old trumpet.
If he was quite disinterested—and he was—in working under Maupeou for what he felt convinced was “the liberty, salvation, and well-being of whole populations,” it was not at all unnatural that Choiseul should find it hard to forgive this active devotion to the policy of his supplanters.
The Duchess, with whom Voltaire had coquetted so charmingly over that pair of silk stockings, was as much offended as her husband. Madame du Deffand, her dearest friend, was offended too. And Voltaire spared himself neither pains nor time to restore confidence, to assure the dear exiles of Chanteloup in immense letters of his sincere and unaltering devotion to them: of his gratitude for the powerful protection of the one, and the gracious kindness of the other. Of course such letters had no effect. The haughty little Duchess begged that the correspondence might end. And the most obstinate of men went on writing to her exactly the same.