In this spring of 1772, Voltaire was occupied in building a pretty little house in the neighbourhood for the Florian husband and wife. The poor bride was not destined to enjoy it long. She died two years later of a disease which was called by many extraordinary names and received the most extraordinary treatment, but which appears to have been consumption. The Marquis immediately fell violently in love with someone else.
The only significance of his third Marquise lies in the fact that she was the bearer of a conciliatory letter and a copy of his “Natural History” from the famous Buffon to Voltaire—the two having previously been on bad terms.
More visitors flocked to Ferney in the autumn of 1772. Lekain paid a third visit, and, the Genevan theatre having been burnt, “bewitched Geneva” at Châtelaine instead.
Châtelaine was a playhouse which Voltaire had built on French soil, but only a few yards from the territory of the republic, to the great umbrage of “Tronchins and syndics.”
They did not hate it less in this September, when Lekain’s seductive genius drew their young people within its walls by half-past eleven A.M. for a performance which was to take place at four, and the women wept and fainted at his pathos. Old Voltaire had a box reserved for him, cried like a schoolgirl at one moment, and the next applauded as if he were possessed, by thumping his stick violently on the floor and crying aloud, “It’s splendid! It couldn’t be better!”
A cool-headed English visitor, Dr. John Moore, who was here during one of Lekain’s visits, described the performances as only “moderately good.”
Traveller, physician, and writer, the author of a popular novel, “Zeluco,” and the father of the hero of Coruña, Moore had frequent opportunities of conversing with the famous old skeleton who had so “much more spirit and vivacity than is generally produced by flesh and blood.” He understood Voltaire far better than most of the English visitors. To be sure, he could not forgive him his adverse criticisms on Shakespeare—the king who can do no wrong. But Dr. Moore, himself a sincere Christian, was one of the very few who admitted that Voltaire was as sincere an unbeliever; that his Deism was not an offensive affectation to shock the devout, but a
VOLTAIRE’S DECLARATION OF FAITH
From the Original in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris