The next day he was made a Freemason, and in the evening went to see the unacknowledged actress-wife of the Duke of Orleans.
On April 11th he returned Madame du Deffand’s visit. She forgave him for not coming before; but the Convent of St. Joseph, in which she lived, found it hard to forgive him for coming at all and profaning their holy place with his presence. He paid other visits. One old friend, the Comtesse de Ségur, was dying when he saw her. For a little, the charm of his reminiscences brought back to her their youth. When he visited her again, remembering only that he, like herself, stood on the brink of eternity, she passionately conjured him to cease his “war against religion.” He turned upon her fiercely, forgetting her womanhood and her dying. That stern, terse creed he had hammered and forged for himself was as dear to him as was to her the fuller faith she had accepted without trouble or thought. The room was full of people. The guests paused to listen. Voltaire remembered himself: offered sympathy, suggested remedies, and left, greatly moved.
Another visit was yet more pathetic. He went to see Egérie de Livri, once the vivacious poor companion of the Duchesse de Sully and would-be actress, and now the Marquise de Gouvernet. In this withered old woman of eighty-three what traces were there of the brilliant girl to whom a Voltaire of five-and-twenty had taught declamation and love, who had gaily forgotten him for de Génonville, and graciously remembered him when he had immortalised her in “Les Vous et Les Tu”? Above him, on the wall, smiled the picture he had given her—his dead self, by Largillière. A ghost! A ghost! He left her, profoundly saddened. She sent the portrait to him at the Hôtel Villette, and he gave it to Belle-et-Bonne.
Another friend came to see him one morning—Longchamp—from whom he had parted eight-and-twenty years ago, and with whom were connected many memories, of the Court and of Paris, of Cirey and Madame du Châtelet.
If the man had cheated his master, he had loved him too. The things are not incompatible.
These meetings made the old heart yearn again for quiet and Ferney. But there was still so much to do!
Besides his plays to be corrected and personally supervised in rehearsal, a new grand scheme had been filling his mind, quickening his last energies, bringing back the resolute passion of his youth.
On April 27th, he attended a séance at the Academy. Abbé Délille read a translation of Pope’s “Epistle to Arbuthnot.” Well, one Academician had known the thing in the original and the author in the flesh. He sat and listened attentively. Then he got up. An admirable translation, gentlemen. But our language is, after all, poor—poorer than it need be in poetic expression. Why, for instance, should we not call an actor who plays tragedy, a tragedian? And why—why should this Academy not undertake the reconstruction of the French Dictionary? The one we have is unworthy of us—dull, inadequate, impossible. The Academy is called the lawgiver of language to the people of France. Let it worthily prove itself so! The work shall not only be useful, but patriotic. Each member shall take a letter. As for me, gentlemen, I am willing to consecrate to such a task the brief remainder of my days. The old man spoke with the fire and the vigour of youth. Some of his auditors were incompetent for the task he proposed to them; many were lazy and apathetic.
But the octogenarian who had suggested it went home with his soul on fire, drew paper and pen towards him, and began, through domestic disturbance and the ceaseless round of visits, to elaborate his scheme.
Two days later he received an ovation from the Academy of Sciences. D’Alembert read a Eulogy, written by Condorcet, of Trudain, Councillor of State, who had helped Voltaire with his colony at Ferney. To eulogise Voltaire himself followed in natural sequence. Franklin was there too. Old Voltaire spoke to him. “Embrace in the French fashion!” cried a voice: and they did.