De Tersac replied to the effect that it was no use visiting a man whose reason was already dimmed, but that unless he made a far fuller and more orthodox profession of faith than he had yet made, he would not accord him Christian burial.
Mignot, himself a personage, a member of the Grand Council and the head of an abbey, threatened to apply to the Parliament for justice. De Tersac replied that he could do as he pleased.
For two days more, Voltaire lingered—sometimes quite unconscious, but sometimes wholly sensible. On the morning of Saturday, May 30th, Gaultier again wrote to him offering his services.
At six o’clock in the evening of that day, Mignot fetched Gaultier and de Tersac.
D’Alembert told Frederick the Great that de Tersac approached Voltaire, saying loudly, “Jesus Christ!” and that Voltaire, rousing a little from his stupor, made a motion with his hand—“Let me die in peace.”
Grimm and La Harpe tell the same story with unimportant variations. It may be true. “Spare me three things,” said Madame du Deffand on her death-bed—perhaps remembering Voltaire’s—“Let me have no question, no arguments, and no sermons.”
Saint-Sulpice thought, or said that he thought, Voltaire too ill to make a confession. The persons about the bed took no pains to contradict him.
At nine o’clock in the evening the priests left. For three hours Voltaire was dying—calmly and peacefully, say some; in “all the terrors of the damned,” say others. But the truth, none knows.
Ten minutes before he died he took Morand’s hand. “Farewell, my dear Morand. I am dying.” He never spoke again.
At a quarter-past eleven on the evening of Saturday, May 30, 1778, in the eighty-fourth year of his age, died François Marie Arouet de Voltaire.