Gaultier naturally did not wish to own that he had missed so illustrious a conversion. He did not own it: he said the convert’s mind was wandering.
But, after all, it matters not how one dies, but how one has lived. Death-bed utterances, even if truly reported, are to be attributed less to the illumined soul than to the diseased body. If at last the horrors of the Great Change and the awful prospect of the unknown Eternity overwhelmed this unbeliever, as at such an hour they have overwhelmed many sincere Christians, that fact is no confession that Voltaire gave the lie to the convictions of his life.
For more than sixty years they had been those not of a man in the careless vigour of health, or of a thoughtless profligate, or of an indifferent, but of one who had always known his tenure of life to be frail; who had realised the consolations of the religion he could not believe, and yearned for that faith he could never have.
If, at the last, his priestly counsellors did succeed in terrifying the old dying mind, enfeebled by the dying body, by their threats of Judgment and Eternity, what use to his soul, or the cause of their Christianity?
It is the eighty-four years of vigorous life and passionate utterance that count before God and man, and not the dying minutes.
Out of lies innumerable, then—some witnesses took their testimony of the death-bed of Voltaire from the cook of the Hôtel Villette—the following account has been sifted.
On some day, which was either May 12th or shortly after it, the old man met Madame Denis and Madame Saint-Julien when he was out walking.
He said he was ill and going to bed. Two hours later his good Butterfly came to see him. She found him very feverish, and begged that Tronchin might be sent for.
Madame Denis, remembering the Doctor’s counsels, declined to summon him.
The patient grew worse. Villette sent for a local apothecary, who came with medicine which the sick man was at first too wise to take. But he was ill and old, and Madame Denis was naggingly persistent. He took, not enough said Madame Denis; too much said Madame Saint-Julien, who tasted it. Anyhow, he grew worse. That evening old Richelieu came to see him and recommended a remedy—laudanum—which he had himself been in the habit of taking for the gout.