With a last flash of his old spirit, he made someone write in a large hand, on a sheet of paper which he had pinned to the bed hangings where everyone could see it, the following words:
“On May 26th the judicial murder committed by Pasquier (Councillor to the Parliament) upon the person of Lally was avenged by the Council of the King.”
If ever man carried into the other life the hatred of that oppression and injustice which have made the wretchedness of this to more than half the human race, surely that man was Voltaire.
CHAPTER XLII
LATTER DAYS
Voltaire’s old age was naturally something less eventful than the “crowded hour” of his youth and manhood. But if ever his private life afforded him a chance of quiet, public events always stepped in to disturb it.
On May 10, 1774, Louis XV. died of the smallpox, to the good and blessing of the world. His old courtier at Ferney no sooner heard the news than he put pen to paper and wrote his Majesty’s Éloge, “to be pronounced before an Academy on May 25th.”
Of course a eulogy had to be eulogistic. The old hand had not lost its cunning. To flatter the dear departed, to speak of him as a good father, a good husband and master, and “as much a friend as a king can be”; to offer for his little failings that courtly excuse, “One cannot be always a king: one would be too much to be pitied,” and to imply that the man was a fool so that the insult sounded like a compliment, why, Voltaire was the one writer in the world who could do it. And he did it.
He turned the occasion to practical use, by preaching against the neglect of inoculation; and then looked to the future.
What wonder that, for the moment, even this prophet should forget to prophesy Revolution; should think that he saw already the beginning of the Golden Age—Millennium—all things made new?
To be sure, he told the government plainly that there were still Frenchmen who were “in the same legal condition as the beasts of that land they watered with their tears.” And the young King answered by repealing the Tax of the Joyful Accession; by disgracing Terrai, for whom old Ferney was keeping his last tooth; by appointing first as Minister of Finance, then as Comptroller-General, and then as Secretary of State, the great reforming Turgot, one of the most enlightened men in France and already the personal friend of Voltaire. “If any man can re-establish the finances,” wrote Ferney on September 7th, “he is the man.” And a few days later, when Turgot obtained free trade in grain, the enthusiastic old invalid thanked Nature for having made him live long enough to see that day. Free trade in grain had a very personal application to this master of a town, this founder of a colony. He had d’Étallonde staying with him now; and next to his arduous and passionate work for the restitution of that young officer’s civil rights (“he is calm about his fate, and I—I die of it”), his four hundred children had the largest share of his mind. That they returned his affection and repaid him as they could, was proved when, on Madame Denis’s recovery from a dangerous chest complaint in the spring of 1775, they fêted that “niece of her uncle” “with companies of infantry and cavalry, cockades and kettledrums”—all the mummery and millinery which they loved, and their master had loved all his life.