During this August, Voltaire, rather proud of the transaction, “borrowed Lekain,” who was acting at Court, from Marie Antoinette. The Hermit of Ferney was too toothless to act himself, but his earliest passion was also his latest. There was the most charming little theatre in the village of Ferney now. Lekain acted in that and at Châtelaine. The young Queen’s graciousness in lending her player made artful old Voltaire long to have “Olympie” acted before her; to have her for his protectress; to see with his own eyes “her whose least charm,” as he said, “was loveliness.”
Picture the delight of the whilom author of “The Princess of Navarre” when he was commissioned to write a divertissement for her benefit. He wrote, or rather reproduced a sketch of a fête given at Vienna by the Austrian Court sixty years before, and called it “The Host and Hostess.” The thing was meritless, but not objectless, though it failed in its object—the rapprochement of Ferney and Versailles.
Then M. de Voltaire must needs write an allegory, “Sésostris,” to flatter the beaux yeux of the Queen, and to show what a King might do for the good of his people.
To the year 1776, besides the Battle of Shakespeare, belong two more fights—the last of Voltaire’s life. Beauregard, Rohan, Jore—how far they were away! But the spirit of their old antagonist had not waxed faint.
The first fight was only a skirmish, it is true. Father Adam had been spoilt, of course. From being an inoffensive, lazy person—“the only idler in a houseful of busy people”—he had become assertive, worrying, and quarrelsome. He had fallen out with Bigex, the copyist, in 1769; and as a result Bigex had had to leave. And now the Father must go himself. It was characteristic of the man who had allowed Jore a pension for life, that he should send after this ungrateful priest who owed him thirteen years’ hospitality, presents of money.
In the second fight, the very last of his life, occurring in the December of 1776, Voltaire matched steel with a worthier foe. It was in answer to an attack made upon him by an Abbé Guénée that he wrote the bold and brilliant, if neither deep nor sound, “Christian against Six Jews,” which advanced Pigalle’s evidence on the subject of the Golden Calf, and might have better confuted Guénée if that reasoner had not been on his own ground and most cool and subtle in argument.
But if his foes did not spare this old Voltaire, neither did his friends. In the early days of 1777 Moultou introduced at Ferney a wearisome playwright called Berthe, who would persist in reading aloud his tedious play to their host. “Here the Chevalier laughs,” read Berthe, as a stage direction. “Happy man!” murmured Voltaire. When the listener could bear it no longer, he feigned the most violent colic that ever man had suffered. The next day Berthe came again, and so did the colic. “If God had not come to my aid,” said Voltaire to Grimm, “I should have been lost.”
It was in 1777 that Voltaire amused himself by competing under a pseudonym, for a prize offered by the French Academy for the best translation of the sixth book of the “Iliad.” It did not gain a prize. It was not even good. But that such a man at such an age should have been “sleeplessly active” enough to enter into such a competition, makes the thing worth recording.
But worse than unsuccessful translations and dull plays, worse than being beaten in a verbal quibble with a priest, was a mortification this vain old heart received in the June of 1777.
Joseph II., the young Emperor of Austria, brother of Marie Antoinette, and himself something of a philosopher, had been the lion of the spring in Paris. It was confidently expected by d’Alembert, Frederick the Great—everyone, including Voltaire himself—that on his return home the celebrity would do what all celebrities did—visit the King of their kind at Ferney.