The part should be rewritten for him!
He was also spurred to do his best by the fact that “Irène” was to be the means, the excuse, the reason to take him to Paris.
Paris! The idea had been simmering long. Paris! It was twenty-eight years since he had left it, for a few months at the most. To be sure, he had been far happier at Ferney than in the riot and fever of that over-rated capital. In answer to those who talked about the stagnation of the country, and talked of it as if it were some narcotic trance which numbed brain and use, Voltaire could point to the best work of his life. Near him, bound to his heart by many cords, was the smiling cosmos of the industrial Ferney which he had drawn from the chaos of a barren and starving province. Here were his gardens and farms; the house he had built, and loved as one can only love the work of one’s own brain; the books and pictures he had collected; the thousand household gods from which the young part easily, but which the old regard with a personal affection.
Then, Ferney was safe. And in Paris—“Do you not know there are forty thousand fanatics who would bring forty thousand fagots to burn me? That would be my bed of honour.” If Louis XV. was dead, so was a friendly Pompadour. Choiseul and Madame Dubarry were banished.
Good Louis XVI. hated this infidel of a Voltaire, and was just shrewd enough in his dulness to fear him. It was Louis, still a king, who, asked what play should be performed at the theatre, replied, “Anything, so long as it is not Voltaire.” It was Louis Capet in the Temple who is reported to have said, pointing to the works of Rousseau and Voltaire in the library of the tower, “Those two men have lost France.”
The brilliant Queen, who had permitted M. de Voltaire to write her a divertissement and to steal Lekain, was something more favourable. But the Queen—extravagant and childless—was the most unpopular woman in France. In 1776, she had compassed the fall of Turgot, Voltaire’s friend, the hope of his country. In Paris, now, there was but one minister who was even tepidly favourable to the great recluse of Ferney, and that was Maurepas.
Altogether, the time seemed hardly ripe. But “if I want to commit a folly,” Voltaire had written to Chabanon in 1775, “nothing will prevent me.”
If a king had once been too strong for Voltaire, he may well have known now that he was stronger than any king. Besides, he had never been formally banished. “I do not wish Voltaire to return to France” was not an edict after all. Had he ever forgotten he was still Gentleman-in-Ordinary? And as for the danger to his person—seriously, what could be done to an old man of nearly eighty-four. Then, too, he needed a change. His health, though he was fond of repeating that he had as many mortal diseases as he had years, was quite good enough to permit him to take one.
Then there was “Irène,” which he could see put into rehearsal himself: and then—then—then—there was the domestic influence of all Ferney urging him to take the step, to make up his mind, to go back to glory, to honour, to life.
Madame Denis, of course, longed for Paris. Her sixty-eight years and a chest complaint had not cooled her zest for pleasure and admirers. And if you do not go, Uncle Voltaire, whether you are banished or no, three parts of Europe will think you are! She had long ago inspired Marie Dupuits with her own love of amusement. The Marquis de Villette was constitutionally even less able to endure the country than Mama Denis. He had the finest house in the capital, which had once been the Bernières’ house, where Voltaire had stayed as a young man, which stood at the corner of the Rue de Beaune on what is now the Quai Voltaire, opposite the Tuileries, and which is entirely at Papa Voltaire’s service! Put all these persuadings and persuaders together before a man already more than half inclined to go, and the result is easily foreseen.