With the night the patient’s sufferings increased. He sent for the laudanum.
Madame Saint-Julien and a relative (most likely d’Hornoy), who were there when it came, implored caution. The audacious ignorance of Madame Denis had no fears.
Wagnière, who of course was not present, declares that his master characteristically seized the remedy and took too much, too often. D’Alembert—the notoriously truthful—says that he never took any: the bottle was broken. However that may be, he grew alarmingly worse.
At last Dr. Tronchin was called. But the patient was already past human aid. Suffering agonies from his internal disease, a fearful and most exhausting nausea, all the torments of ruined nerves and exhausted brain and unable to eat or sleep, the old man could still turn to the good physician and apologise to him for the liberty he had taken with his dying body. Tronchin had been right! He should have gone back to Ferney.
Often and often he called for Wagnière. By his side, always one may hope, was the good and gentle woman he had married to Villette. Constantly in and out of the sick room were a motley crowd—Madame Denis, Abbé Mignot, d’Hornoy, Lorry, Villette himself, besides Tronchin and a servant, Morand.
On May 16th the poor old man revived a little. To this day belong the last verses of the easiest and most limpid verse-writer of all time. They were written in reply to some lines of the Abbé Attaignant, and appeared in the “Journal de Paris.” To them the dying writer added a few piteous words in prose. “I can do no more, Monsieur.... The mind is too much affected by the torments of the body.”
On May 25th, d’Hornoy wrote to Wagnière urging his instant return. The patient was kept alive only by spoonfuls of jelly; and his exhaustion and feebleness were terrible.
By the next day the watchers had abandoned all hope. He revived, indeed, to hear the news of the vindication of Lally. That would have roused him from the dead. He dictated his last letter. For the moment, joy made mind triumph over matter, as it had done with this man all his life long. But his doctors could not be deceived. He was dying.
One of them was watching anxiously now for the signs of that repentance he longed for. “Religious toleration, the most difficult conquest to wring from the prejudices and passions of men,” Voltaire had not been able to wring from one of the best friends he ever had. Tronchin wrote bitterly of this death-bed. In his zeal for some proof, some confession of the fallacy of that stern creed of negation, since called Voltairism, the great Doctor almost forgot his compassion and his friendship.
D’Alembert records that on May 28th Mignot went to fetch de Tersac.