“Ferney is free, now that France is a Republic. You vote, and so govern yourselves.”
My friend was out of soundings. “Plaît-il?” staring imbecilely. Then, pulling his thoughts together—“Madame is right. France is a great country. She demands many soldiers. Conscripts are taken every year from Ferney. It maybe I shall go, one day. Unless I can lose these two front teeth, or, by accident, cut off this finger.”
He had his inquiry when the sketch was done.
“The pictures one sees on the walls in Geneva—beasts and people—red and blue and many colors—that are to play in the spectacles—are they made like that?”
I laughed—“They are printed,”—then, as the difficulty of enlightening him on the subject of lithography struck me, I added—“Somebody makes the drawing first.”
He shook his head compassionately. “I never knew how much of work they were! Ah! I shall always think of it when I see them. And of the poor people who draw them!”
“Les Délices”—Voltaire’s home in Geneva prior to his purchase of Ferney, is now a girls’ boarding-school. We had friends there, and were, through the kindness of the Principal, allowed free access to the grounds and such apartments as retained traces of Voltaire’s residence. The house is large and rambling, and Voltaire’s dressing- and bed-rooms are, as at Ferney, upon the ground-floor. The frescoes are fairly distinct, as yet, and the carved mantels unaltered. One long wing is unused and closed. This was the private theatre that shattered, at last, and forever, the brittle friendship between Voltaire and Rousseau.
“You have basely corrupted my Republic!” was the angry protest of the author of “La Nouvelle Héloïse.”
Voltaire retorted by satire, caustic and pointed;—some say, with the famous sarcasm upon the Canton of Geneva, which is but fifteen miles square:—