But it was not Paris alone which did homage to this greatness. If ever man had been a citizen of the world, Voltaire had been.
On November 26, 1778, Frederick the Great, now President of his own Academy, read to it Voltaire’s Eulogium. It is a most generous testimony to the character of that brilliant, irritable, and delightful child of genius whom the great King had so hotly loved and loathed. As an appreciation of his works, it is worthless. Frederick the Great was no literary critic. But it poured burning contempt on the “imbecile priests” of Paris who had refused such a man the last offices of the dead, and not all the authorities in the world could keep it out of their capital.
In the May of the following year, to shame those “imbecile priests” the deeper, although he had, as he put it, no idea of the immortality of the soul himself, Frederick had a mass for Voltaire’s said in the Roman church at Berlin. A little later the faithful and persevering d’Alembert proposed that that King should erect a statue to his friend in that same church. Frederick did not see his way to this. He had in his own possession a finer monument to Voltaire’s greatness—a part of that correspondence which is one of Arouet’s “surest titles to immortality” and contains at once “the history of Voltaire intime and of the eighteenth century.”
No one had mourned Voltaire more passionately than the other great sovereign, Catherine. “Since he is dead, wit has lost its honour; he was the divinity of gaiety.” To her, he had been much more than that. He had “formed her mind and her head.”
He had left his library, except its English books, with his other effects, to Madame Denis. In the December of 1778, Catherine completed the purchase of those 6,210 volumes with their copious marginal notes, with manuscripts, original letters, and papers concerning the trials in which Voltaire had been engaged. Some months later she sent for Wagnière to arrange them. When he had finished his work, she came to look at it. Bowing before Voltaire’s statue she said, “There is the man to whom I owe all I know and all I am.” Hearing that Wagnière was poorly provided for, she magnificently gave him a pension for life. He visited Frederick, and returned to live and die at Ferney. One of Voltaire’s editors, passing through that village in 1825, found the secretary’s son still living there—a Justice of the Peace.
To get rid of her uncle’s library was for Madame Denis but to free herself of one useless encumbrance. There was another. What was the use of Ferney to such a woman? Ice and snow, weavers and watchmakers, country, retirement, solitude—she hated them all. Her uncle’s poor people had never been anything to her—except when they fêted and made much of her on a birthday. Return to them? Never. She sold Ferney to Villette. To the indignation of her relations and of the whole Academy—particularly d’Alembert, who was as jealous for dead Voltaire’s honour as a mother for her daughter’s good name—she insisted on marrying her Duvivier. It is a little satisfactory to learn that that dull person (in society he was popularly known as the Extinguisher) avenged Voltaire by bullying the woman who had bullied him.
Madame Denis never had any interest but as the niece of her uncle. With his death she fades into the commonplace obscurity for which she was made.
The Villettes retired to Ferney. In her old home, when her husband had once more forgotten the fatal attractions of the capital, he and Belle-et-Bonne lived not unhappily. But the weaving and watchmaking industry declined. The pilot was no longer at the helm. The strong hand and all-directing brain which had turned starving idleness to affluent industry, and established trade on a sound business basis, were no longer there to hold and supervise. Ferney fell back into the nothingness from which a master-mind had drawn it.
Presently Villette became heavily inculpated in the famous Guéménée bankruptcy for thirty-three millions. He sold Ferney, where he had retained Voltaire’s rooms as they had been at the time of his death, and where, a cherished possession, he had kept the dead man’s heart enclosed in a silver vase. Husband and wife came up to Paris and lived in the Hôtel Villette, where Belle-et-Bonne continued the tender charities which were the solace of her life, and surrounded herself with relics and mementoes of her dead Voltaire.
In March, 1779, M. Ducis was installed in Voltaire’s vacant chair in the French Academy. According to custom, he read the Eulogy of his predecessor. The time for official prohibitions was past. No government had been able to prevent the Hermit of Ferney being known to the whole world as “the great Voltaire” for many years before his death. He was the great Voltaire still. Grimm declares that no meeting of the Academy ever attracted such crowds. When some clerical member dared to suggest that all expressions contrary to religion and morals should be erased by some friendly hand from Voltaire’s works, he was hissed and groaned into silence.