“You have given me back my life.”
Voltaire was so much moved that the serene Tronchin, nay, the very cook who happened to be in the room at the same moment, was moved too.
Tronchin wrote off immediately to Ferney for Voltaire’s coachman and carriage. Madame Denis’s vociferous indignation was wasted on him. Little Madame Suard, the sprightly visitor of Ferney, must have been as delighted as all others who put Voltaire’s life above their own pleasure. She came to see her old host. “We shall kill him,” she said, “if he stays here.”
But Madame Denis was not going back to the dismal solitude and the ice and snow of Ferney without a fight. Is it the Villette house you do not like? She hurried out, and nearly took one in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, with a beautiful garden where Uncle Voltaire could fancy himself in the country. The negotiations for it fell through. But there is what might be made a very fine house in the Rue Richelieu, and which has the enormous advantage of being quite close to the home of your butterfly philosopher, Madame Saint-Julien! Voltaire at eighty-four, and with, as he pointed out to his every correspondent, at least two mortal complaints, actually consented to buy this unfinished house. He would live there eight months of the year, and the other four at Ferney. Still, those other four were to be taken at once. He would go now—soon! If he could go, that is. But had he not just been elected to three months’ Presidency of the Academy? His vacillations were the despair of Tronchin—ay, and the despair of himself. He longed to go, but he could not go. Madame Denis, with the most limitless capacity for nagging ever vouchsafed to mortal woman, volubly assured him that influential friends had told her that if he did go, he would never be allowed to return.
True, on April 2d “Irène” had been performed at Court. That did not look like a new edict of banishment. But then the author had not been asked to see his play. Perhaps that did? Then it was said the Queen herself had had an idea of slipping into the theatre on that great 30th of March to see the crowning of the people’s King—only—only—the other King had peremptorily forbidden her. A dog Voltaire had been fond of at Ferney came to Paris with one of the Ferney servants and bounded in to lick his master’s hand with the touching, dumb joy of animal affection. “You see I am still beloved at Ferney,” says the old man. Villette and Madame Denis took very good care that that dog should never enter the house again. They tried to get rid of Wagnière—his influence was so bad and so powerful. They failed in this. But, after all, they succeeded in their main object.
When a man’s foes are those of his own household, resistance is peculiarly difficult.
“I have seen a great many fools,” Tronchin wrote on April 6th, “but never such an old fool as he is.”
The exhaustion consequent on his crowning had passed away. With it passed away, too, the idea of an immediate return to Ferney.
By that day, April 6th, the “old fool” was well enough to go on foot, in spite of adoring crowds, to the Academy.
A seller of books on the way naïvely begged him “to write me some and my fortune will be made.” “You have made so many other people rich! Write me some books. I am a poor woman.” Among the people he heard himself often called by that name which was a sweeter flattery to his soul than all odes and plaudits—“the man of Calas.”