There was division in his own house on the subject of the Parliament too. His nephew, Mignot, that short-sighted, good-natured, roundabout abbé, the son of Catherine, and the brother of Mesdames Denis and Florian, was, like his uncle, on the side of the reforms, and on May 20, 1771, was made senior clerk of the new Parliament.
D’Hornoy, on the other hand, Voltaire’s great-nephew, had been a councillor of the old Parliament and was exiled with it.
However, politics apart, Voltaire liked both nephews, thought them honest souls, and made them, as has been noted, handsome allowances.
Brochures against the old Parliament and for the new occupied the Hermit of Ferney very actively during the whole of the year 1771, but they did not prevent him carrying on a correspondence with four sovereigns—Catherine, Frederick, Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski, and Gustavus III. of Sweden.
On December 18th he began a new tragedy, “The Laws of Minos.” It was that dismal thing, a play with a purpose—“to make superstition execrable, and prove that when a law is unequal there is nothing for it but to abolish it.” It was written in honour of Maupeou. The Chancellor’s enemies did Voltaire a good turn by preventing it from being played.
Death was busy just now among both friends and foes of Voltaire. He was fast reaching the age when he was naturally the last leaf on the tree. In the December of 1771 died Helvétius, philosopher and farmer-general; in the spring of 1772, Duclos, who had replaced Voltaire as Historiographer of France, and preceded d’Alembert as Secretary to the Academy. Then fell a leaf from the Arouet branch itself. Madame de Florian, always delicate, went the way of all flesh; and by February 1, 1772, her widowed husband had arrived at Ferney in that loud desolation which is the herald of speedy consolation.
He met at Ferney a very pretty, vivacious little Protestant who had been divorced from her first husband for incompatibility of temper. The pair were gaily married before April 1, 1772—to the disgust of Madame Denis, who rightly thought her sister was forgotten too soon, but to the delight of that old matchmaker, Voltaire.
Besides the bride and bridegroom, there was also at hospitable Ferney, Florian’s nephew, whom Voltaire called Florianet, an observant youth who lived to write “The Youth of Florian, or Memoirs of a Young Spaniard,” and who had stayed here before when he was a boy of ten or eleven. He had acted then as a sort of page to Voltaire, and Father Adam had furthered his education by setting him Latin exercises. Voltaire used to help the child out of those intricacies concerning Hostages and the Gate of a City, play games with him, and try to wake in him liveliness and wit. “Seem witty, and the wit will come” was the advice of the wittiest man of his century.
Florianet was seventeen now, and amused himself, during a visit of two months, with balls, hunting, a quarrel with his new aunt, and games with Marie Dupuits’s little girl. She was eight years old and very intelligent, and Voltaire was fond of her with that fondness for all young creatures which is surely an amiable trait in a busy man.
He was hardly less fond of Wagnière’s children (the Genevan boy was a married man by this time, rearing a family at Ferney), who used to play about the room while the Patriarch dictated to their father.