On June 27th, Voltaire wrote airily to say that he did not expect his Majesty. What in the world was there for him to see in this manufactory of watches and verses? But all the same, when the day came, Ferney rose up very early in the morning and from eight o’clock was ready in its best clothes, with its master in his great peruke, waiting. A splendid dinner had been prepared. The condition of the road from Ferney to Versoix had been improved by its owner. All was in readiness.
Presently the sound of the rumbling of the travelling carriage is heard in the distance. If his Majesty had not meant to call at the château, why choose this route? There were others. “This is Ferney!” says the coachman. “Whip up the horses!” cries the Emperor. And the imperial cortège dashes through Ferney, and past the windows of the expectant château itself, at a gallop. When it is added that his Majesty alighted at Versoix and examined that infant colony, and that when he reached Berne he paid a special visit to Voltaire’s great rival, Haller, it will be seen that he meant to offend.
It is to the credit of a plucky old heart that Voltaire quite refused to acknowledge himself snubbed, pointed out that he had always said his Majesty would not come, and that “my age and maladies prevented me from finding myself on his route.” But if he swallowed it with a smile, the pill was a bitter one not the less. “This disgrace” the poor old man called it, writing in confidence to his Angel. But the “disgrace,” if any, was not Voltaire’s, but the man’s who, privately confessing himself a philosopher, was afraid to visit Voltaire lest he should be openly accounted one, and offend an austere mother.
The Emperor’s neglected visit was the last mortification of the man who had had many, and had felt all with an extraordinary sensitiveness.
But, after all, “the end of all ambition is to be happy at home,” and Voltaire had many consolations.
The good, fat, Swiss servant, Barbara, was one. Voltaire was at last learning a little how to grow old, and now went to bed at ten and slept till five, when Baba would bring him his coffee. One day he took it into his head to mix some rose-water with it, as an experiment. The result was an acute indigestion. He rang the bell violently. Enter Baba. “I am in the agonies of death. I put some rose-water in my coffee and am dying of it.” “Sir,” says the indignant Baba, “with all your cleverness you are sillier than your own turkeys.”
But nearer and dearer than a Baba could be was Belle-et-Bonne. By this time she had become like the old man’s daughter. With rare tact she had succeeded in endearing herself to him without offending Madame Denis. She would arrange his papers for him, and keep the desk which hung over his bed, and “which he could lower or raise at pleasure,” in that order and neatness his soul loved.
“Good morning, belle nature,” he would say when she greeted him in the morning; and when she kissed his old parchment face would declare it was Life kissing Death. It was Belle-et-Bonne who could soothe his irritability or impatience—“You put me on good terms with life.”
And it was Voltaire of eighty-three who taught Mademoiselle Reine-Philiberte de Varicourt how to dance.
In the summer of this 1777 there arrived unexpectedly one day at Ferney a worn-out roué of a Marquis de Villette, who had passed two or three months here in 1765, and with whom Voltaire had since corresponded. Rich, gallant, well born, a society versemaker, this “ne’er-do-weel of good company” was the sort of person who sounds attractive on paper, and in real life is wholly objectionable. Voltaire—Voltaire!—had tendered him moral advice and urged him to reform. He had known the young man’s mother—herself a woman of irregular morals—and from these two facts arose an entirely unfounded scandal, that Voltaire was Villette’s father.