The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Madame Denis was, it must be remembered, already the legal owner of Ferney. She was to be its practical owner. And it was her old uncle’s too sanguine hope that she would maintain the manufactory after him. She was certainly pleased at the colonists’ rejoicings, and the colonists were pleased themselves, and Voltaire was highly delighted; and a quite cool observer, Hennin, the Resident, noted that it was a grand thing to see a cavalcade of nearly a hundred men, mounted and in uniform, from a village where, twelve years before, there were twenty families of wretched peasants.

So that, although the year 1775, which was to usher into Ferney such a succession of visitors as might make the most sociable heart quail, began with sickness, it began with rejoicing too.

D’Étallonde was still staying there. Nephew d’Hornoy was helping Voltaire to work his case. The Marquis and Marquise de Luchet came to join the party in the spring, and were here two months—the Marquis, who was to be one of Voltaire’s biographers, always engaged in mad schemes for making money out of gold mines; and the Marquise turning her good-natured and laughter-loving self into a hospital nurse and nursing the Ferney invalids unremittingly.

Then came the Florians; and the Marquis’s third wife brought with her another lively visitor, her young sister, whom Voltaire called “Quinze Ans,” “who laughed at everything and laughed always.”

They were followed by ecstatic little Madame Suard, who worshipped Voltaire with the tiresome adoration of a schoolgirl; kissed his hands and clasped her own; flattered, adored, and coquetted with him; and went so far as to declare in the long and rapturous accounts she wrote of him, that his every wrinkle was a charm.

With her came her brother, Panckoucke, who wanted to edit Voltaire’s works, but did not yet obtain that favour. She also found with Voltaire, Audibert, that merchant of Marseilles, the earliest friend of the Calas; and Poissonnier, Catherine the Great’s doctor.

In July, Chabanon, and Abbé Morellet were both staying at Ferney. Also in July, an audacious and wholly unsnubbable person called Denon had forced his way there too; asked for his host’s bust; was refused; and revenged himself by sending the poor old Patriarch a most hideous sketch of his lean features which he, Denon, had made himself. It was very far from being the only offensive likeness of the great man. Still extant is a caricature called “Déjeuner at Ferney,” which Voltaire used to think was by Huber, and which contains grotesque portraits of Voltaire and Father Adam, and represents poor Madame Denis, who was inclined to embonpoint, enormously fat. But, after all, it was in the January of this 1775 that Frederick had sent Voltaire, Voltaire’s bust in porcelain with Immortali written beneath it. Here was compensation for many caricatures.

Little Madame Saint-Julien, who had made Ferney lace the mode, and was a fashionable philanthropist when philanthropy was not the fashion, paid another long visit to Ferney in the autumn, and went back to Paris to intercede with her influential relatives for Voltaire’s children. She and their father were so successful that the day soon came when, “in spite of the obstinate resistance of the farmers-general,” they obtained for the colonists that “moderate and fixed tariff which freed the country from the despotism of a pitiless tax,” extorting from the poverty-stricken province of Gex alone the exorbitant sum of not less than forty thousand livres annually.

The grateful colonists had fireworks and illuminations on that good Butterfly’s birthday; and in December they fêted old Voltaire himself, filled his carriage with flowers, and decorated the horses with laurels.

The visitors did not cease with the new year 1776. Nay, one came who came to stay. Mademoiselle Reine-Philiberte de Varicourt was the niece of those six poor gentlemen whose estates Voltaire had reclaimed in 1761 from the Jesuits of Ornex. Bright, honest, and good, well deserving that charming name of Belle-et-Bonne with which old Voltaire immediately christened her, the unfortunate girl had no dot and was destined to a convent.