But Madame Denis took one of her good-natured likings to her. She was girlishly kind to old Voltaire, while he on his part soon worshipped her pretty face, virgin heart, and bright intelligence. No “narrowing nunnery walls” for her! Marie Dupuits had husband and child to think of now, and Marie had never had Reine-Philiberte’s dignified good sense.
Belle-et-Bonne fell into place at once. She became a regular, and not the least delightful, member of the heterogeneous Ferney household.
Another Englishman, Martin Sherlock, visited it in April, 1776, and wrote his experiences, in his “Letters of an English Traveller,” in French, which has been retranslated into his native tongue.
Voltaire, who was accompanied by d’Hornoy, met his guest in the hall, showed him his gardens, spoke a few words to him in English, told an anecdote of Swift, talked of Pope, of Chesterfield, of Hervey, and with his old passionate admiration of Newton. Stopping before his bust, he exclaimed, “This is the greatest genius that ever existed!” There was no dimming of the old mind, no lack-lustre, no weariness. The England he had not seen for nearly fifty years was still a vivid and a present reality.
On one of his visits—Sherlock paid two—Voltaire showed his guest his shelves filled with English books—Robertson, “who is your Livy”; Hume, “who wrote history to be applauded”; Bolingbroke, “many leaves and little fruit”; Milton, Congreve, Rochester.
He criticised the English language—“energetic, precise, and barbarous.” He explained to Madame Denis the scene in Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” where the King makes love to Katharine in bad French. He spoke “with the warmth of a man of thirty.”
Quaintly dressed in white shoes and stockings, red breeches, embroidered waistcoat and bedgown, and a gold and silver nightcap over his grey peruke, old Voltaire apologised for this singular appearance to his guest by saying in English that at Ferney they were for Liberty and Property. “So that I wear my nightcap and Father Adam his hat.” Later, he added gravely, “You are happy, you can do anything.... We cannot even die as we will.”
During the conversation he had uttered what his visitor called “horrors” about Moses and Shakespeare.
Nothing proves better the young vigour of this marvellous old mind than the strength of its animosities. The “let-it-alone” spirit of old age was never this man’s while there was breath left in his body. At the end of 1773 he had attacked another literary foe—an ungrateful protégé, “the inclement Clement”—in the “Cabals,” a satire in which ring out clearly the notes a younger hand had struck in “Akakia” or in “Vanity.”
Then on March 10, 1776, Fréron died of mortification at the suppression of his “Literary Year,” and up gets Voltaire and says he has received an anonymous letter asking him, if you please, to endow Frélon-Fréron’s daughter! This is too much. Voltaire suggests that Madame Fréron wrote that letter. And the Frélons say Voltaire invented it himself. And Voltaire is as spry and alert and angry as when he first hated Fréron, thirty years ago.