At the Théâtre Français, become the Theatre of the Nation, were garlands and music and the inscription, “He wrote ‘Irène’ at eighty-four.” And once more a chorus sang the spirited song out of “Samson.”
At last, at ten o’clock at night and in a drizzling rain, the Pantheon was reached.
The sarcophagus was lifted into the place designed for it—near the tombs of Descartes and Mirabeau.
The history of Voltaire after death could be elaborated into a volume. But, after all, it throws no light on his life and character, only on those of the friends who loved him, the enemies who hated him, and the mob who went mad over him.
When it is considered that to the excesses of that mob he would have been passionately opposed, and that the only Revolution he desired was gradual, temperate, and unbloody, it may well be doubted if, had he lived till 1791, his last journey would not have been, like that of many other patriots, to a very different accompaniment and a very different destination.
For a while he was allowed to rest in that quiet and honoured grave.
But 1814 saw the restoration of those Bourbons whose hatred for him was hereditary.
With the connivance of the ministry, the tombs of both Voltaire and Rousseau were violated, their bones removed in a sack at night to a waste place outside the city, and emptied into a pit filled with quicklime. That long-dreaded fate—“thrown into the gutter like poor Lecouvreur”—was Voltaire’s after all.
But those dishonoured ashes and that unhallowed burial keep his memory more vividly alive than the marble tomb of a Pantheon.
The violation was discovered in 1864, when, the Villette family becoming extinct, Voltaire’s heart became the property of the nation.