Pictures hung around the room; one remarkable etching of “Voltaire and his friends;” old engravings and some paintings of little value. The furniture, of the stiffest order of the antique, was covered with faded embroidery.
“The work of Madame du Chatelet, the niece of Voltaire,” continued the footman, demurely.
The next room was his bed-chamber. A narrow bed, head and foot-board covered with damask to match the arras; more embroidered chairs from the niece’s hand, and, just opposite the door, a portrait of Voltaire, painted at the age of twenty-five. A dapper, curled, and be-frilled dandy of the era that produced Chateauneuf, Ninon de l’Enclos and Chaulieu. The visage is already disfigured by the smirk of self-satisfaction he intended should be cynical, which gives to the bust in the outer apartment, and to sketched and engraved likenesses, taken in mature manhood and old age, the look of a sneering monkey. Close to the young Voltaire hung the portrait of Madame du Chatelet.
“The niece of Voltaire!” reiterated the serving-man, pointedly.
There could then be no impropriety in our prolonged survey of the beautiful face. She was the mistress of a fine fortune and château at Cirey, when Voltaire sought a retreat in the neighborhood from governmental wrath, excited by his eulogistic “Lettres sur les Anglais.” She was the ablest mathematician of her time, revelling in the abstruse metaphysics and political economics which were Voltaire’s delight, and so thorough a Latinist that she read the “Principia” in Latin from choice. Her husband was much older than herself, an officer in the French army, and thus furnished with an excuse for absenteeism from the society of a woman too much his superior mentally to be an agreeable help-meet. The Platonic attachment between the accomplished châtelaine and the poet-satirist lasted nineteen years. He was thirty-six when it began. Her death broke what little heart he had. There is a story that he sent his confidential valet into the room where her corpse lay, the night after her demise, to take from her hand a ring he had given her, long ago, containing his miniature. When it was brought to him, he kissed it passionately, and, before fitting it upon his own finger, touched the spring of the seal concealing the picture. It was not his, but the handsomer face of a younger man, that met his eyes, one who had bowed, she would have had Voltaire believe, hopelessly, at her feet. The duped lover bore the dead woman no malice for her perfidy, if the contents of the Ferney apartments be admitted as evidence. On the mantel in the bedroom is a glass case, covering the model designed by him for her sarcophagus. The flat door of the tomb is cleft in twain by the rising figure of the woman, holding in her arms the babe that cost her life and was buried with her.
The Philosopher’s Walk, Voltaire’s favorite promenade, is nearly a hundred yards in length, and completely embowered by pollarded limes, the lateral branches meeting and interlacing over the broad alley. From the parapet of the adjoining terrace can be had, on clear days, a magnificent view, comprehending the Bernese Alps, the Juras, the Aiguilles and their crowned Monarch—Mont Blanc—by day, a silver dome,—at the rising and going down of the sun, a burning altar of morning and evening sacrifice.
“In sight of this, the Man of Ferney could say—‘There is no God!’” interjected an indignant voice, while we hung, entranced, over the wall.
“The ‘Coryphæus of Deism’ never said it!” answered Caput. “His last words,—after he had, to secure for his meagre body the rites of Mother Church, signed a confession of faith in her tenets—were,—‘I die, worshiping God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, but detesting superstition.’”
The philosopher had, presently, another and more enthusiastic defender. I had tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain a photograph of the little church outside the gate of the château. Albeit no artist, except for my own convenience and amusement, I resolved to have something that should look like the interesting relic. While my companions strayed down the pleached walk into the woods, I returned to the entrance, sat down upon the grassy bank opposite the church-front and began to sketch. There was no one in sight when I selected my position, but, pretty soon, a party of three—two ladies and a gentleman—emerged from the gate and stopped within earshot for a parting look at the lowly sanctuary, now a granary.
The Traveling American dashes at dead languages as valiantly as at living.