After all, he needed no epitaphs. He had avenged the oppressed and enlightened the ignorant.
On June 3d, the bishop of the diocese sent a mandate forbidding the burial. It was too late. On that day Mignot and the other relatives returned to Paris.
The city had heard of Voltaire’s death by now: the devout with exultation, the philosophers with profound grief. The authorities had, indeed, forbidden the newspapers to publish any obituary notice of Voltaire or even to mention his decease. At the theatre no piece written by him was to be played for twenty-one days. The Academy was forbidden to hold the service at the Cordeliers customary on the death of a member.
But these restrictions of a petty tyranny had the effect of all such restrictions—the exact opposite to what was intended.
The heart of Paris would have throbbed the quicker for a Voltaire’s death in any case. But for those prohibitions it throbbed with indignation too.
“You are right, Saint-Sulpice,” said one of many bitter epigrams the occasion produced. “Why bury him?... Refuse a tomb, but not an altar.”
In this June following his death, his will, made at Ferney in September, 1776, was proved. Terse, lucid, and able, it is characteristic of the man who wrote it. Voltaire appointed Madame Denis his residuary legatee. To Mignot and d’Hornoy he left one hundred thousand francs each; to Wagnière, eight thousand livres; to Madame Wagnière and Bonne-Baba, his clothes, and to Bonne-Baba eight hundred livres as well. Each servant was to have a year’s wages. To Rieu, that ex-American officer, were left such English books from the library as he might choose: to the poor of the parish of Ferney—“if there are any poor”—three hundred livres; and to the curé a diamond, five hundred livres in value. Voltaire also appointed fifteen hundred francs to be given to the lawyer who was to help Madame Denis in the execution of his will.
It will be observed that the legacies to the servants, and particularly to faithful Wagnière, were very small. Hoping against the knowledge he had of her character, Voltaire had supposed that Madame Denis would continue his generosity towards them. Wagnière, true to his master’s person and honour in life, was true to his memory after death. He uttered not a word of complaint.
In the August of 1778, d’Alembert chose Voltaire as the subject for the prize poem of the Academy; and until his own death, five years later, never ceased to work for the posthumous glory of the man he had loved.
The once false La Harpe also eulogised Voltaire, and wrote a play in his honour; and the scholarly Condorcet wrote his Life.