Chapter XXX

THE INTERFERENCE IN THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR, THE “GENEVA” ARTICLE, AND LIFE AT DÉLICES

On January 5, 1757, Damiens, an unfortunate lunatic, made a very feeble attempt upon the life of Louis XV. As is usual in such cases, the King was accredited with infinite calm and courage, though his heroism had consisted entirely in being the unwilling victim of a very small wound from a very small penknife. However, he took the penknife to be the chosen instrument of the wrath of heaven; went to bed; sent a contrite message to the Queen; and for ten days declined to have any dealings with the lively Pompadour.

On January 6th, d’Argenson wrote Voltaire a very courtier-like account of the affair. To say that when Voltaire heard that a New Testament had been found in the poor lunatic’s pocket he was delighted, is to express his sentiments feebly. A Testament! I told you so! All assassins have “a Bible with their daggers.” But have you ever heard of one who had a Cicero, a Plato, or a Virgil?

He turned, twisted, and tossed the subject with all that gibing buffoonery which was his _forte_ and other men’s fear. Damiens died under tortures which were a disgrace to civilisation. D’Argenson, Secretary of State, and Machault, Keeper of the Seals, who had been bold and foolish enough to suppose that the King would be able to kill time without his Pompadour, united, in her brief disgrace, to crush her. With her return to power, she crushed them. On February 1st they were both exiled. A few days earlier, the other brother d’Argenson (the better friend of the two to Voltaire) had died. Voltaire might well say that his own fate was more worth having than that of a Secretary of State who was banished; and that he would rather scold his gardeners than pay court to kings. In February he received a very flattering invitation from Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, to go to Petersburg to write “The History of Peter the Great,” her father. He undertook to write the history. But he declined the invitation. Frederick, too, was trying coquetries on him--such a tender letter, for instance, from Dresden on January 19th! But here again he was firm: “I want neither king nor autocracy. I have tasted them ... that is enough.”

The early months of the year 1757 were passing, indeed, not a little pleasantly at Monrion.

The society of Lausanne, living up to its character of being more liberal than that of Geneva, was only too delighted to welcome such an amusing person as Voltaire in its midst. Many Lausannois were French--all French in their social charms and their language--and only Swiss in their sincerity and simplicity. Voltaire said that, as an audience, there were a couple of hundred of them who were worth the whole _parterre_ of Paris, and who would have hissed Crébillon’s “Catilina” off the stage. What higher praise could he have given to anybody? Lausanne, indeed, would not have been Swiss if there had not been a certain section of its society who held themselves aloof from this volatile Deist and his more volatile entertainments. Nor would it have been a country town if there had not been in it some touchy and discontented persons who were offended with M. de Voltaire because he had not asked them often enough or had asked someone else too often. Voltaire gaily divided the society into two parts: first, the Olympe, which included both the strait-laced and the offended; and, second, the Sensible People. That classification spoke for itself. He was not a little amused one day when, hearing that an Olympe lady had had a parody of “Zaire” acted at her house, he said to a young girl of the same name, “Ah! Mademoiselle, it is you who have been laughing at me!” and the naïve girl replied, “Oh no, Monsieur, it was my aunt!”

But, Olympes notwithstanding, Lausanne as a whole was only too delighted to come to M. de Voltaire’s theatricals, and the excellent suppers prepared by his first-rate cook. It did not expect him to pay visits, which he hated. So he and Madame Denis spent all their leisure hours learning parts and coaching their company. Madame Denis lived in a whirl of “tailors, hairdressers, and actors,” and being well amused was entirely amiable.

The plays acted were “Zaire,” “Alzire,” and the “Enfant Prodigue,” and a new play of Voltaire’s which he now called “Fanine,” and which was afterwards called “Zulime.”

Voltaire persistently declared that Madame Denis acted “Zaire” infinitely better than Gaussin, “though she has not such fine eyes”; which was a very delicate way of describing her squint.

In March they “preached the ‘Enfant Prodigue,’ with an opera-bouffe (‘Serva Padrona’) for dessert.” Also in March, they played “Zulime” “better than it will be played in Paris,” said its author. He proudly numbered among the audience on its first night twelve Calvinist ministers and their young students, studying for the Church. Here was liberal-mindedness indeed! Besides acting plays, there was the house to improve or to alter. Its master was surrounded with workmen. He had also a parrot and a squirrel. He had turned to play-acting, he said, because though “tranquillity is a beautiful thing--ennui is of its acquaintance and family.” But he knew too well, by that old courtly experience, that the worst of all boredoms is perpetual amusement. He was happy at Monrion because there, as everywhere, he knew how to work as well as to play. In articles for the “Encyclopædia,” rewriting “Zulime,” and beginning “The History of Peter the Great,” he justified his existence. He had much to do, so he enjoyed his theatricals and the lovely country in which he found himself, as only the busy can enjoy anything “From my bed I can see the lake, the Rhone, and another river. Have you a better view? Have you tulips in March?... My vines, my orchard, and myself owe no man anything....”

Was it glamour again? If it was, it was a better glamour than had made him dream Prussia heaven, and Frederick the Great a faithful friend.

On June 3th, he went back to Délices for the summer. Madame Denis was still in high good-humour--furnishing the house, entertaining, acting. Voltaire said she was “a niece who made the happiness of his life.” Everything was _couleur de rose_. Switzerland had proved a successful venture indeed. By August the man who now signed himself the Swiss Voltaire had acquired yet another house in Lausanne--Chêne, in the Rue de Lausanne, which was the last street in the town on the Geneva side, and from where he had exquisite views of the lake. He rented it for nine years. Quite near it was a house called Mon Repos, which belonged to two of Voltaire’s amateur dramatic company, the Marquis and Marquise de Genlis. Very soon these two enthusiasts made, in a barn adjoining their house, a theatre which practically belonged to Voltaire, and where in future nearly all his theatricals were held. His first letter from Chêne is dated August 29, 1757. Here he soon received with great gravity the Lord Bailiffs of Berne: good, sober, pompous people, with a very amusing idea of their own importance, and a strictly limited sense of humour. “What the deuce, M. de Voltaire,” said one of them one day, “are you always writing verses for? What is the good of it, I ask you? It leads to nothing. Now _I_, you see, am a Bailiff.” And another day, a second observed solemnly, “They say you have written against God. That is bad, but I hope He will pardon you; and against religion, which is worse; and against our Lord, which is worse still: but He will forgive you in His mercy. Only take care, M. de Voltaire, you do not write against their Excellencies the High Bailiffs, for _they_ will never pardon you!” It is not difficult to imagine the zest and delight with which Voltaire repeated these stories.

These good Swiss had not only charming scenery, cultivated society, and some kind of freedom, but they were also, without intending it, positively amusing! It would have been well for Voltaire’s peace of mind if he could have engrossed himself entirely in their small world, and forgotten wholly that vaster, louder one, which stretched wide beyond Délices, Monrion, and Chêne. But he had ever itching fingers for a fight.

In the August of 1756 had begun the third, longest, and greatest struggle for Silesia, the Seven Years’ War. Voltaire did not choose to remember that, though he had tried diplomacy before, he had never tried it successfully. He flung himself, head foremost in every sense, into the contest. He began in the spring of 1757 by inventing a war machine: “an engine of massacre upon the plan of the Assyrian war chariots of old.” Certainly, he was a peace advocate. But if men must destroy each other, let them do so by the best and quickest of possible means. He had had, too, a dozen careers already without adding to them that of a scientific inventor. It is marvellous, but true, that this “paper smudger’s” idea--the appellation was his own--was really very excellent. The machine was also intended to carry ammunition and forage. The Minister of War thought well of it. The inventor recommended it highly to Richelieu. The Assyrian chariots were not tried until they were used for carrying grape-shot, but they were not the less an uncommonly bright, ingenious, and Voltairian invention.

The inventor relinquished the idea of their immediate use rather sadly. But the war, considered apart from war chariots, was becoming of personal moment to him.

In the spring of 1757, the Petticoats, which were the damnation of France, swept her into it.

In his old Paris days, Voltaire had known, and scornfully liked, a certain rosy-cheeked _bon conteur_ of an abbé, called Bernis. Verse-maker and _bon-vivant_--not yet developed into the shrewder and wiser personage his “Memoirs and Letters” reveal him--Voltaire had named the abbé the flower-girl of Parnassus, or Babet, after a famous pretty flower-seller of the day; and loved to tease him on those rosy cheeks and that cheerful air. Babet, who was nothing if not audacious, had asked Boyer (the âne of Mirepoix, who had died in 1755) for a post: and when Boyer told him that as long as he was in power a Babet had nothing to hope for, replied, “Sir, I shall wait.” The answer ran through Paris. It was the beginning of success. Madame de Pompadour turned the smile on this round-faced wit; pensioned him; installed him in the Tuileries; and made him ambassador to Vienna, and Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Frederick, who had received the mistress’s kind regards, sent through Voltaire, with that curt “I do not know her,” had also laughed at Bernis-Babet in the fatal “Œuvre de Poëshie du Roi Mon Maître.”

Therefore, on May 1, 1757, “the first minister of the state,” Pompadour, made her willing tool, Bernis, sign an offensive and defensive treaty with the ambassador of Austria against Frederick the Great, and plunged France into the blood of the Seven Years’ War.

Voltaire’s interest in it was varied and conflicting. He was the friend of Richelieu, of Bernis, and the Pompadour: and he was a Frenchman. He had strong sympathy with brave Maria Theresa and with Austria--the allies of his country. Her great enemy, Frederick, was both his friend and his foe: still loved, still admired, and still unforgiven. All through these seven years one sees that fatal affair of Frankfort rankling in Voltaire’s heart; struggling with his admiration for Frederick as a king and a soldier: with his pity for him when beaten, with his pride in him when victorious. All through the war Frederick wrote him prose and verse; the deepest sorrows of his soul, reproaches, confidences, yearnings. And Voltaire answered half bitterly and half tenderly, with angry allusions to the past, and brave words to comfort the King’s sore heart for the future: never consistent, not seldom spiteful, and yet touched, affectionate, and sympathetic.

Explain the attitude who can.

In July, 1757, Voltaire wrote to Richelieu begging him, if he passed by Frankfort, to send the four ears of those two _coquins_, Freytag and Schmidt.

In August he was busy trying to bring about peace, through the medium of the Margravine of Bayreuth and Richelieu, between Freytag’s master and France. This first diplomatic interference of Voltaire’s in the war was not badly planned. In his own words, he “wanted Richelieu to add the quality of arbitrator to that of general.” The scheme was so far a success

_From an Engraving_]

that, on August 19th, Wilhelmina replied that her brother was as grateful for such a proposal as herself. The moment for it was opportune. Frederick was still bruised and broken by the crushing defeat he had suffered at Kolin on June 18th. He wrote direct to Richelieu on September 6th, asking him to act as an arbitrator; and Richelieu replied that he was very willing. Did the hermit of Délices rub his lean hands and congratulate himself on a good piece of work? Perhaps he knew the temper of an offended woman and a piqued Bernis too well. The blood of her children was as water to these rulers of France. The Court declined arbitration.

The unhappy Margravine wrote to Voltaire on September 12th that Frederick was reduced to frightful extremities. She might well so write. In October Voltaire sent to the King one of the wisest and kindliest letters which he ever penned. He dissuaded Frederick from a contemplation of suicide. He stimulated him by admiration. He deterred him by insisting that such an act would not only sadden his friends, but please his foes. When, in this same month, Voltaire read some dismal verses Frederick had written to d’Argens on the same unhappy topic, he wrote a second letter to the King, diplomatically lauding the verses to the skies, and again passionately dissuading such a poet, and such a man, from the disgrace of suicide.

In those fatal “Memoirs” (meant to be secret) he was now writing at Délices, Voltaire, indeed, avenged himself for Freytag and Frankfort by declaring that much of that Epistle to d’Argens was stolen from Chaulieu and from himself; while that love of justice which was always getting the better of his malice, in spite of himself, made him add that, under the circumstances, it was wonderful for a king to have written two hundred verses at all.

On October 8th, dismal Luc confided to Wilhelmina that he had “laughed” at the exhortations of Patriarch Voltaire; and the very next day wrote to the Patriarch a letter owning that those admonitions had had effect, and ending:

Though the storm beats high
I must fight, not fly,
And a King live and die.

Meanwhile, at Délices, busy Voltaire was trying his hand a second time at peace negotiations. This time his medium was de Tencin--that crafty and haughty Cardinal, who, three years before, at Lyons, had found it impolitic to invite Voltaire to dinner. But the Cardinal loved intrigue, and hated Austria and the Austrian alliance with France, from his soul. When, on November 5, 1757, Frederick beat French and Austrians at Rossbach with “the most unheard-of and the most complete defeat in history” (the vigorous words are Voltaire’s), all angry France shared the Cardinal’s hatred of the rosy-cheeked Bernis’s treaty with the Court of Vienna. De Tencin allied himself with the man he had despised--Voltaire--“to engage the Margravine to confide to him the interests of her brother the King,” and so to procure peace between France and Prussia. Prussia was willing enough. Voltaire was the intermediary through whom all the letters passed. He said malignly that he enjoyed the post because he foresaw the disappointment the Cardinal was preparing for himself. In reality, he was something less Machiavellian, and really thought the peace he hoped for might be brought about. De Tencin communicated directly with Louis XV.; and sent him a letter of the Margravine, written to be so sent. But Maria Theresa had bowed her pride to flatter Madame de Pompadour; while Frederick had said “I do not know her.” The Pompadour’s kingly slave answered de Tencin icily that the Secretary for Foreign Affairs would instruct his Eminence of the royal intentions. So Babet, the “flower-girl,” the verse-maker, the _bon-vivant_, dictated to the astute Cardinal the unfavourable reply he was to make to the Margravine. De Tencin had to sign it. He died only a fortnight later--of mortification, said Voltaire.

Thus ended Voltaire’s second interference in the Seven Years’ War. Both were useless. His interest in the affair was very far from being ended, or even weakened. But in the meantime there were disturbances nearer home.

It was sixteen months since d’Alembert had stayed at Délices, and been charmed by the liberal-mindedness of Calvinism. The result of that visit was, as has been noted, the famous article entitled “Geneva” in the storm-breeding “Encyclopædia.” In this December of 1757 the pious pastors of that town heard that they were therein complimented as no longer believing in the divinity of Christ or in hell; as having in many cases no other religion than “a perfect Socinianism,” rejecting all mystery; as, among the learned at least, having a faith which had reduced itself to believe in one God, and which was alone distinguished from pure Deism by a cold respect for the Scriptures and for Christ.

It is not difficult to fancy what an effect such statements, uttered by a d’Alembert, and in what was then the most famous book in the world, would have on that strict, simple, pure-living sect. Was it true? Could any of it be true? The dreadful fear that it might be--that that stern, narrow creed, with its brief assertions and its wide negations, might lead, or tend, unknown to its followers, to something very like a barren Deism--appears to have taken possession of their souls.

On December 12th, Voltaire, who had been waiting sixteen months for this _dénouement_, began to enjoy himself. “These droll people,” he wrote to d’Alembert “actually dare to complain of the praise you have given them--to believe in a God and to have more reason than faith. Some of them accuse me of having a profane alliance with you. They say they will protest against your article. Let them, and laugh at them.”

On December 23d, at a meeting of Calvinistic pastors, they made, with deep heart-searchings, a formal inquiry to assure themselves that none of them had given ground for d’Alembert’s--compliments. They then drew up a commission, which appointed Dr. Tronchin, not less a sincere Christian than he was a sincere friend of the Deist Voltaire, to reply to the article in the “Encyclopædia” and “to wipe away the stain” that d’Alembert had affixed to their character. It was Tronchin’s charm as a writer that he touched the heart as well as appealed to the head. He refuted the imputations of d’Alembert in terms not a little touching. From Paris, on January 6, 1758, d’Alembert replied, as he could but reply, that he was convinced of the truth of his words: and what he had written, he had written. When Geneva further asked him to name the pastors who had given rise to such opinions, he very honourably declined. On February 8th, the commission produced its Confession of Faith. As it did not insist on the doctrine of Everlasting Punishment, or declare that Christ was equal to His Father, or lay stress on the worship of Him, Voltaire said with some truth, when he wrote to d’Alembert, that they had declared themselves Christian Deists after all, and justified the article in the “Encyclopædia.”

“Geneva,” in fact, brought home to the thoughtful Calvinist the logical outcome of his religion. The shock was great. To stand face to face with the ultimate consequences of their belief would indeed startle the votaries of many other creeds besides Calvinism.

Their difference on the most vital of all subjects did not affect the friendship of the great Voltaire and the great Tronchin.

During this winter of 1757-58, the Doctor was, for the time being, almost the greater man of the two. He had just returned from Paris, where he had prescribed for all its rank, wit, and fashion; and where he and his inoculation had become a _furore_ and the mode. In Geneva he now started a cure, to which flocked all the _mondaines_ of Paris to learn the rudiments of hygiene, of temperance, and of common-sense; to be taught for the first time in their lives the value of simple living; and to undergo inoculation.

Voltaire always loved the bold and sensible regimen of this good physician. Like the women, he was also not a little influenced by the great Doctor’s charming manner, handsome face, and splendid six feet of height. Then, too, supposing ennui _should_ be “of the acquaintance and family” of retirement, this “cure” brought half the wit of the capital to the very doors of the Hermit of Délices. The year 1757 was not over, and their acquaintance was of the briefest, when Voltaire, with his usual impulsiveness, was already in the midst of a delightful intimacy with one of the cleverest and most sympathetic of the Tronchin patients, Madame d’Épinay. Bright, black-eyed, about two-and-thirty years old, the ill-treated wife of a Farmer-General, the head of a salon, and the coquettish friend of Rousseau, Madame d’Épinay reflected in her sparkling little French mind the cleverness of a clever age, and, without ever saying or doing anything which gave substantial evidence of a superior intelligence, had a great deal of that vague quality which is now called culture. Voltaire delighted in her; played with her; laughed with her; talked with her; called her his Beautiful Philosopher; wrote her innumerable little notes about innumerable little nothings; welcomed her constantly at Délices; and in January, 1758, had her to stay there for two or three days with her doctor. Madame’s complaint was of the nerves, and the very best cure for that kind of disease is to be amused, as everybody knows. So she was delighted to come to Délices, where Madame Denis was “entirely comic,” and “fit to make you die of laughing”; short, fat, ugly; quite good-natured; a liar, simply from habit; clever enough to seem so without being so; always gesticulating, talking, and arguing, especially when that “Geneva” article--just now very much on the _tapis_--was mentioned, when she threw her arms and hands about, abused republics and their laws with a fine generality, and was entirely absurd.

The little, shrewd, shallow visitor was not quite so sure about the great Voltaire. He might have been fifteen, he was so gay, lively, and inconsequent! But then he had a number of quite childish prejudices; and an air of laughing at everybody, even himself. Madame d’Épinay was not at all certain she liked _that_. In Paris she had been taken gravely as a clever woman. The owl of Délices, looking at her through those little, cynic, half-shut and all-seeing eyes of his, regarded her as an ingenious little mechanical toy, whom it amused him to set in motion. That he was very gallant with her was true enough. But gallantry is hardly a compliment to a woman who wants to be looked upon as _savante_.

Madame d’Épinay was not the only one of Tronchin’s patients who visited Voltaire. Almost all of them came to peep at him. Here was the Marquise de Muy--“a very little soul in a very little body much debilitated by remedies,” said Tronchin--but the _chère amie_ of Choiseul the minister, and so to be cultivated by a far-seeing Voltaire.

Here, too, came the nephew and niece of de Tencin, the Montferrats--whom Voltaire received very kindly though he liked neither them nor their uncle.

Among neighbours who were not of Tronchin’s “cure,” Huber, celebrated as a painter and wit, had been one of the most constant visitors at Délices from the first, and was fast dropping into the position he never afterwards relinquished, of _ami de la maison_. Madam Tronchin--as plain and disagreeable as her husband was handsome and charming--was a guest too. “Et que fait Madame Tronchin?” said someone one day to the sprightly Madame Cramer, herself a visitor. “Elle fait peur,” was the answer. Madame Cramer, as the wife of Gabriel Cramer, one of Voltaire’s publishers, and as, in her own person, gay, naïve, and witty, was always a _persona grata_ at Délices. Her husband and brother-in-law were as successful socially as in their business; acted in their client’s theatricals, and were delightfully good-looking and pleasant.

Voltaire’s nearest neighbours at Délices, a Professor Pictet and his wife and daughter, were constantly of his parties. The daughter Charlotte was a gay and pretty little person, who had aroused the jealousy of Madame Denis by embroidering Voltaire a cap to wear on the top of the great peruke he always affected. Voltaire repaid the present by trying to find Mademoiselle what he always considered the _summum bonum_, a husband; and Madame Denis was not precisely pleased when Charlotte married a handsome major of eight-and-twenty, for whom the foolish niece herself had had a _tendresse_. In 1757, a Baron Gleichen, who wrote Souvenirs, also visited Délices.

It is no contradiction to say of Voltaire that he was all through his life both the most unsociable and the most sociable of men.

At Délices there were nearly always seven or eight persons to supper. On one occasion at least, the house was so full of guests for theatricals, that Madame Denis, having no bed, sat up all through the night playing cards. When he met his guests no host could have been more agreeable than Voltaire. He had a hundred stories to tell. He made so many _mots_ that half the _mots_ of the eighteenth century have been fathered upon him by posterity. Sometimes he read aloud, or quoted from memory. He was inimitably gay, good-natured, and courteous. One woman (who did not love him) said that he alone of his age knew how to speak to women as women like to be spoken to. That old quality which had made him revere the intellect of Madame du Châtelet made him respect now whatever was respectable in the intellect of his female companions. That surest sign of inferiority--to be afraid of mental superiority in the weaker sex--was certainly never to be found in Voltaire. If he toyed with a d’Épinay, it was because she was but a toy after all. He searched so diligently for cleverness in his nieces that he actually thought he had found it. Some of the best and most careful letters he ever wrote are those to Madame du Deffand--who was old, poor, blind--but splendidly intelligent.

He certainly took very good care during this social winter of 1757-58--as in all other social winters and summers--not to see too much of his guests, male or female. He worked twelve or fifteen hours a day; and generally kept his secretary writing part of the night as well. He never suffered himself to be interrupted in the mornings; and was fond of saying that he believed less in optimism at that time than at any other.

As in the old days at Cirey, he was often too busy to join his friends at dinner, and ate “no matter what, no matter when,” instead.

In January, 1758, he migrated to Chêne, his newly acquired house in Lausanne; and, in the formal phrase of one of his guests there, by “his wit and his philosophy, his table and his theatre, refined in a visible degree the manners” of that town. That guest was an English youth called Gibbon, who, having been led into Roman Catholicism at college, had been sent to a minister at Lausanne to be led out of it again--by Calvinism. In the intervals of falling in love with the _beaux yeux_ of Mademoiselle Curchod (afterwards Madame Necker), the self-satisfied young gentleman found time during two winters to pompously approve of M. de Voltaire in various _rôles_--in “Zaire,” “Alzire,” “Fanine,” and the “Enfant Prodigue,” played in that theatre in the granary of Mon Repos. Gibbon wrote hereafter, in that solemn, polished, rewritten, immortal Autobiography, that M. de Voltaire’s “declamation was fashioned to the pomp and cadence of the old stage, and he expressed the enthusiasm of poetry rather than the feelings of Nature”; while Voltaire, in the gay impromptu of _his_ style, declared of himself he was “the best old fool in any troupe. I had rage and tears--attitudes and a cap.” He added that Madame Denis was splendid in the _rôle_ of mothers; and a little later quite seriously announced that though she had not _all_ the talents of Mademoiselle Clairon (!) she was much more pathetic and human! The observing English youth in the audience considered, on the contrary, that the “fat and ugly niece” quite ruined the parts of “the young and fair,” and was not nearly clever enough to make the spectators forget the defects of her age and person. When she was playing the heroine in “Zaire” she did herself say, hoping for a compliment, “To take such a part one ought to be young and beautiful!” and a well-meaning _gauche_ person replied “Ah! Madame, you are a living proof to the contrary!” Uncle Voltaire would have been very _vif_, no doubt, if he had known of Gibbon’s unflattering criticism on his niece. As it was, he was not too pleased on his own account when this heavy young genius must needs, after having heard them only twice, remember and repeat certain lines which Voltaire had written in the first enthusiasm of settling at Délices, and which (of course) contained an allusion which would offend somebody. M. de Voltaire may be forgiven if he wished this blundering Mr. Gibbon and his prodigious memory--in England.

In May, after the _ménage_ Voltaire had moved back to Délices, another visitor came to it. She was Madame du Boccage, famous for her learning, as modest as she was accomplished, and a woman quite after her host’s heart. He put off a visit to the Elector Palatine to receive her. He gave up his bed to her as being the most comfortable in the house; and got up plays for her benefit. As for Madame, she found him everything that was kind and agreeable, surrounded by the best company--that is, the intellectually best company--and always singing the praises of his rural life. In fact, the only thing she had to complain of was that he was so very hospitable that, like the nieces, she was always having indigestion. She left after a visit of five days, and long corresponded with her host.

Between work and play, the Délices, Monrion, and Chêne, Voltaire had spent more than three years in Switzerland. That they had been happy enough to have made him altogether forget that a Paris, a Louis, and a Pompadour existed--and neglected him--is true enough. But he never forgot. If on one side of his character he was splendidly a philosopher, on the other he was always an “old baby” crying for the moon.