A College of Physicians could not have kept Voltaire, when he began to recover a little, from doing as he liked. He was soon sitting up in bed, working on “Irène” and dictating to Wagnière as usual. Visitors thrust themselves in again. Poets came to read their complimentary odes. One writer announced to Voltaire in a most wearisome prepared speech, that to-day he had come to visit Homer, to-morrow he would visit Euripides, the next Sophocles, the next Tacitus, the next ——“Sir, I am very old,” says the voice from the bed; “if you could pay all these calls in one——”
Another flatterer said that, having surpassed his brethren in everything Voltaire would surpass Fontenelle himself in length of days.
“Ah! no, Sir. Fontenelle was a Norman: he cheated even Nature.”
By March 10th the invalid was not unnaturally worse again, and Tronchin kept him in bed, although, or perhaps because, there was a rehearsal of “Irène” actually going on in the house at the moment.
The next day, Madame Vestris, who was to play in “Irène,” was allowed to see him about her part. The maddening placidity with which she delivered lines intended to be passionately pathetic did not help to soothe the invalid’s irritable and nervous condition. He told her how fifty years ago he had seen Mademoiselle Duclos reduce the whole house to tears by a single line; and talking to Mademoiselle Clairon afterwards, he hit the imperturbable Vestris hard in a mot well understood by all Paris.
He had himself recited with extraordinary feeling a few lines out of his last play. “Ah!” said Clairon, “where will you find an actress to render them like that? Such an effort might kill her.”
“So much the better,” answers the poor old playwright viciously. “I should be only too glad to render the public such a service.”
The mediocrity of the other actors also grievously afflicted the overwrought mind and body of the sick man. There came, indeed, times when he sank into a sort of stupor: when nothing seemed to matter; when he was indifferent or unconscious that Madame Denis was conducting rehearsals and giving away the first-night tickets on her own responsibility, and that d’Argental and La Harpe were making such alterations in “Irène” as they deemed fit. He must have been really ill. In four days, it is said, he had aged four years. The trumpet blasts of adulation in prose or verse, always appearing in the newspapers, had no power to rouse him; and as for the abuse—“I received such abominations every week at Ferney,” he said, “and had to pay the postage; here I get them every day, but they cost me nothing—so I am the gainer.”
On March 14th, Madame Denis presided over the last rehearsal of “Irène,” and on March 16th was the first performance.
The playwright, who had written and rewritten it, laboured at it, as he said himself, as if he had been twenty, was in bed in the Hôtel Villette, not too ill to be interested in its success, but past any great anxiety concerning it.