Chapter XXXI: “the Literary War,” and the Purchase of Ferney and Tourney

On June 21, 1758, Voltaire was writing delightedly to his Angel to tell him that through the offices of the pink-cheeked Bernis, Louis XV. had been good enough to give a formal permit for the greatest Frenchman of the age to retain his title of Gentleman-in-Ordinary.

Frederick said, obviously enough, “_That_ will not be the patent that will immortalise you.” But the Gentleman himself was quite naïvely delighted. He had always been miserable at Court and in Paris, but he so much wished to feel he could go back there, if he liked! He seems to have regarded this formal permission to keep his title as the thin end of the wedge. But it was not.

“Let him stay where he is,” was the Bien-Aimé’s sole comment on Voltaire’s exile. Marmontel suggested to Madame de Pompadour that it was for _her_ to recall him; but Madame could only reply, perhaps not untruthfully, “Ah, no! it does not rest with me.”

In July, Voltaire visited another Court, which had never looked askance at him. He spent a fortnight with his old friend the Elector Palatine, at Schwetzingen. The Elector had arranged some money matters for Voltaire greatly to his advantage, so the visit was one of gratitude. It has no importance, except that the story runs that here the guest was so engrossed by a mysterious Something he was writing that he shut himself up in his room for three days, only opening his door to have food and coffee passed in. On the fourth day Madame Denis forced an entry. Voltaire threw a manuscript at her, saying, “There, curious, that is for you.” It was the manuscript of “Candide.”

The only drawback to the little anecdote is that Madame Denis was not at Schwetzingen at all--having been left behind at home with her sister, learning parts. “Candide” may have been written at the Elector’s; but the time for its appearance was not yet ripe.

The summer of 1758 passed without much incident at Délices. Elsewhere, there was only too much. The Seven Years’ War--“the most hellish war that ever was fought,” said Voltaire--raged with unabated fury. Frederick had recovered Silesia by a great victory at Leuthen on December 5, 1757, when he beat an army of Austrians three times as large as his own. On August 25th of this 1758 he beat the Russians at Zorndorf. And then his evil star rose again. On October 14th, he was taken by surprise and defeated with great loss at Hochkirch. But he suffered a still greater loss that day in the death of Wilhelmina, Margravine of Bayreuth. Worthy in courage to be the sister of Frederick, and in intelligence to be the friend of Voltaire, both men mourned her as she deserved to be mourned. Frederick wrote that there are some troubles against which all stoicism and all the reasonings of the philosophers are alike useless. He was face to face with such a trouble now. Voltaire, at the King’s request, wrote to her memory an ode beginning, “Dear and illustrious shade, soul brave and pure.” But it is not always when the writer is himself most moved that his writings are most moving. There are some griefs which paralyse the brain and make every utterance cold. Voltaire was no more satisfied with his poem than was Frederick. He wrote another, which gave the unhappy brother the first moment of comfort he had had, he said, for five months. For a time their mutual loss and grief drew the two friends together as of yore. They put away their grievances. The “old need of communication, of finding each other again, at least in thought,” was powerfully present. Over Wilhelmina’s grave they forgot for a while Maupertuis and Akakia, Freytag and Frankfort.

Voltaire would have known himself forgotten and obscure if he had ever lived six consecutive months in his life without being plunged in some or other kind of quarrel. That “Geneva” article was still a tree of discord bearing fruit. It will not be forgotten that to oblige the most hospitable host in the world, d’Alembert had introduced into it a few remarks on the beneficial effects of play-acting in general, and the peculiar benefits which would accrue from it to Geneva in particular.

In the October of 1758, from the depths of his forest of Montmorency, Jean Jacques Rousseau--intense, morbid, bitter, with so much amiss in himself that he supposed all other men to be unreasonable and out of gear--wrote to d’Alembert his famous “Letter on Plays.”

He had “tried his wings” against d’Alembert’s friend, in his reply to the “Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon,” and Voltaire had laughed at him gaily and civilly enough. If Jean Jacques’s impetuosity had ever waited for reason, there would have seemed none now why he should not enter the lists again, and tilt once more with this active, mocking, sprightly little opponent, whom everybody knew to have inspired d’Alembert’s sentiments.

Jean Jacques, it is true, was a strange person to write against plays. He had written them himself. He had a genuine admiration for M. de Voltaire’s. If all plays were but like his! But, then, they are not. So he brought to bear against them all the magic and the fervour of his style, and flung on to four hundred pages of paper his astonishing views not only on play-acting, but on women, on love, and on literature.

No one reads “La Lettre sur les Spectacles” now. But everybody read it then, and though the stricter of the educated Calvinists only coldly acknowledged Rousseau as an ally, the common people heard him gladly. The aristocracy of Geneva had enjoyed Voltaire’s theatrical evenings too much to bring themselves to disapprove of them.

From Paris the little frail d’Alembert “deigned to overwhelm that fool Jean Jacques with reasons,” in a letter full of grave and stately irony. As for Voltaire, he waited, as he could afford to wait. He had taught some at least of the Genevans to be as “mad for theatres” as he was himself; and--he had “Candide” up his sleeve.

Running parallel with that controversy on theatres was another. Of course Voltaire was in it--and the soul of it. That goes without saying. He had been but a short time settled in Lausanne, when one Saurin, a poet-neighbour of his there, begged him to contradict a certain history of Joseph Saurin, his father, as given by Voltaire in a Catalogue of French Writers, added to his “Century of Louis XIV.” In that catalogue Voltaire had written of Joseph what not only he, but all the world, believed to be true. Joseph had been a pastor who, hating the life of Switzerland, had allowed himself to be very easily brought back by the preaching of Bossuet to Roman Catholicism and to France. But in France he was poor, and he hated poverty. Presently came rumours of robbery--of robbery he had committed in church. In a letter to a Lausanne pastor, Gonon, Saurin practically confessed to these robberies. This letter was published in the “Swiss Mercury” of April, 1736, and Saurin did not attempt to refute it. He had since died; and now, at his son’s suggestion, this energetic Voltaire must needs unearth the whole story, and with a very rash good-nature, set to work to prove that that letter to Gonon was nothing but a forgery after all. He obtained a certificate from three of the Lausanne ministers who had been principally concerned in the affair, declaring that they had never seen the original. This certificate Voltaire put into the second edition of his “Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations.”

But in this October of 1758, some impertinent anonymous person reproduces the whole letter from Saurin to Gonon in another Swiss newspaper, and positively dares to doubt the authenticity of Voltaire’s certificate from the three pastors.

On November 15th, M. de Voltaire sits down and writes “A Refutation of an Anonymous Article,” wherein he dwells on the useless danger and cruelty to an innocent family of attempting to convict their dead father of heinous crime.

The impertinent unknown (who turns out to be a pastor, Lervèche, who had long objected to Voltaire’s theatricals at Mon Repos) writes a “Reply” to the refutation.

Then who should appear on the scene but Grasset, the publisher, and Voltaire’s enemy in the latest “Pucelle” fracas. Grasset reprints the whole correspondence, and adds thereto Voltaire’s “Defence of Lord Bolingbroke,” and other little _brochures_ from his pen most likely to give offence. The whole he calls “The Literary War or Selected Pieces of M. de V----.”

Literary War indeed! says M. de V----; a literary libel! And do you know who this Grasset is? A scoundrel, a cheat, a common criminal! M. de V----, in short, not only loses his temper, but seems for the moment to lose sight of the Saurin cause, and to devote all his energies to getting Grasset punished. He appeals to all the local authorities. He “knocks at every door,” and continues to knock till all are opened. He is once more his own angry, spry, busy little fighting self. Peaceful landowner and householder--all that is forgotten. Behold again the restless and terrible little enemy who fought Desfontaines.

Most people listened to him--and sympathised, if not for his rage with Grasset, at least for his zeal for the Saurins. There was but one man who threw on his enthusiasm the cold water of irony: and that was Haller, the great Swiss genius, _savant_, philosopher, linguist, botanist, poet, philologist. Until Voltaire settled at Délices, Haller had been _the_ lion of the neighbourhood. Now he was only _a_ lion. The situation hardly needs further explanation. Suffice it to say that Haller was as firm a Christian as Voltaire was a Deist: and that Haller had been a rather sarcastic spectator of M. de Voltaire’s theatricals. All generous admiration was on the side of Voltaire, who always had plenty to spare for real talent such as Haller’s.

When Haller returned a very cool answer to Voltaire’s warm pleadings for the Saurins and suggested that to concern himself in so small a matter was beneath a great man’s greatness, Voltaire waited a judicious ten days, and returned a mild and pleading answer.

To be beneath one’s greatness to put wrong, right, and to clear a dead man’s honour! Haller could have known the Voltaire who was to avenge Calas, very little. The correspondence continued. Haller was not a little stiff-necked and difficult: and Voltaire at once persistent and impulsive. Then Haller published the letters--in which he fancied he himself played a _beau rôle_--and made an enemy, though a very generous enemy, of Voltaire, for ever.

Grimm records how Voltaire one day asked an English visitor at Ferney, from whence he had come.

“From Mr. Haller’s.”

“He is a great man,” cried Voltaire, “a great poet, a great naturalist, a great philosopher--almost a universal genius in fact.”

“What you say, Sir, is the more admirable,” replied the Englishman, “because Mr. Haller does not do you the same justice.”

“Ah!” said Voltaire, “perhaps we are both mistaken.”

A like interview is also described as taking place between Voltaire and Casanova in 1760. Casanova stayed with Haller before he went to visit Voltaire; and on leaving his first host observed how much he was looking forward to becoming acquainted with his second.

“Ah!” replied Haller, “many persons, contrary to physical laws, have found M. de Voltaire greater when seen at a distance.”

Voltaire had presently the satisfaction of hearing that the sale of “The Literary War” was prohibited, and of seeing Grasset severely censured; though he would have liked better to see him banished.

The Saurin-Grasset-Haller affair had one important influence upon Voltaire. It disgusted him with Lausanne.

In this autumn of 1758 Voltaire wrote to a very old friend, King Stanislas, saying that he had fifty thousand francs which he should like to invest in an estate in Lorraine--that he might not die on the borders of Lake Leman. Cautious Stanislas consulted the French Government. Would this meet its views? Choiseul, representing it, as Bernis’s successor, replied, “You know Voltaire well enough to decide for yourself.”

So on some date, not before November 20, 1758, Bettinelli--Italian, Jesuit, poet, and literary man--arrived at Délices as the envoy of Stanislas, sent to accept the proposed investment and tell Voltaire how delighted Stanislas would be to have him as a neighbour.

Voltaire was in the garden, gardening, when Bettinelli came, and presented an extraordinary appearance in a long pelisse, a black velvet cap, and a peruke which covered almost all his face except the nose and chin, which by now nearly met. He had a stick in his hand which had a weeding fork at one end and a pruning hook at the other; and observed, when he saw Bettinelli, that his crop from his garden was much more abundant “than from that I sow in my books for the good of mankind.”

The pair talked on all kinds of subjects. Bettinelli, who was not a little afraid of Voltaire’s cynic wit, nervously remarked the brilliant flash of the eyes and the sarcastic, mobile lips. He thought his host spoke slowly because he was preparing something caustic to say next; but the truth was the host had already lost most of his teeth and spoke slowly in order to be understood. The pair discussed all kinds of subjects--Italy, the Inquisition, slavery, Tasso, Ariosto, Tronchin, Bettinelli’s poetry, and the famous book “On the Mind,” which Voltaire sharply criticised; and whose author, Helvétius, he summed up “as a fool who wanted to be a philosopher with courtiers and a courtier with philosophers.”

They spoke of Madame du Châtelet. In Voltaire’s rooms were several pictures of the dead woman. “Here is my immortal Émilie,” he said. Bettinelli records that she was the only person of whom he heard Voltaire speak with an unchanging admiration and enthusiasm. Before Bettinelli left he had a little interview with Dr. Tronchin, who congratulated him on having found Voltaire in a mood unusually serene and equable. In fact, the visit had been wholly a success--but for one thing. When Bettinelli handed Voltaire Stanislas’s acceptance of his proposal to live in Lorraine, Voltaire took it, saying that he had just bought a little estate near Délices, where he intended to live out the rest of his life. On November 18th, Voltaire had dated his first letter from Ferney. Bettinelli was too late.

Since the middle of this September, 1758, Voltaire had been busy negotiating with a M. de Boisy for the purchase of Ferney--formerly spelt Fernex--and with a Président de Brosses for the life lease of Tourney or Tournay.

There were reasons which made both estates peculiarly suitable to a Voltaire. Ferney was in France, in Burgundy, in the district of Gex; but it was also on the frontier of Switzerland, only three and a half miles from Geneva. Here one could laugh at those strait-laced Genevans as freely as if the three miles were three hundred; and if one offended France, which was only a question of time, what more simple than to drive into Geneva? Then, too, Ferney, lying on the north shore of Lake Leman, almost joined the Délices. Voltaire at first thought it would be a sort of supplement to his first Swiss home. But, as all the world knows, Ferney soon supplanted Délices in its master’s affections, and became the literary capital of Europe.

There were equally strong reasons for buying Tourney. It was in France, in Burgundy, as Ferney was; and it was under the direction of a foreign prelate, the Bishop of Annecy. It was on the very frontier of the Swiss canton of Berne; and at the very gates of that rich, powerful, intellectual Geneva, and yet entirely independent of its prim Calvinistic laws. From Tourney one could thus “tease Geneva and caress Paris; brave orders and _lettres de cachet_; have one’s works printed without the King’s permission, and get away in the twinkling of an eye from all prosecutions.” Admirable for a Voltaire, this. Then, too, if Ferney was a supplement to Délices--Tourney was a prolongation of Ferney. Add to this, with the life lease of Tourney went the title of Lord and Count of Tourney. Was not this something to the man who clung so tightly to the empty honour of Gentleman-in-Ordinary? It was very much. Voltaire took an enormous pleasure in calling the attention of his correspondents to his new designation; and presently signed himself, with a solemn pride and joy, “Gentleman-in-Ordinary to the King of France and Count of Tourney.” If Tourney was nothing in the world but a tumbledown old country house with a ruined farm attached to it--what difference did that make? What was a Gentleman-in-Ordinary? An exile from France the French King would have none of. The same sort of pleasure which he received from fine clothes was conveyed to Voltaire by fine titles. The characteristic is not a grand or ennobling one; but it is delightfully human.

By September, then, he had these two estates in view--“Tourney for the title, and Ferney for the land: Ferney for a perpetuity, and Tourney only for life.” There was not much trouble with M. de Boisy over Ferney. It was bought for 24,000 écus in the name of Madame Denis, who was to inherit it after her uncle’s death. The contract for the purchase was not actually signed until February 9, 1759; but in the middle of September, 1758, Voltaire had made a kind of state entrance into the parish, accompanied by Madame Denis. Madame Denis was in her very best clothes, with all the diamonds the _ménage_ Voltaire could produce. As for Uncle Voltaire himself, he, in spite of the fact that the weather was still very warm, enjoyed himself vastly in crimson velvet trimmed with ermine. The pair drove in the smartest carriage, and attended High Mass--“droned out--false”--at the parish church, during which the enthusiastic future tenants of the proprietor of Ferney thumped on tin boxes to represent a welcome of cannon! That little, lively, black-eyed French-woman, Madame d’Épinay, has left a vivacious record of the day. If she saw it as comic, Voltaire did not. Once more he justified Tronchin’s appellation for him, “an old baby,” and enjoyed himself like a schoolboy.

But if the Ferney negotiations had been simple, not so the Tourney.

Président de Brosses and Voltaire were soon engaged in a vast correspondence. A whole book has been written on their relations with each other. There is no doubt that over Tourney Voltaire showed a great deal of that spirit which people call business capacity in themselves and meanness in others.

On September 9th, he made an offer to de Brosses for the life lease of the little estate. De Brosses said the offer was insufficient. After a good deal of trouble and haggling over small items on both sides, Voltaire finally bought the life lease of Tourney (with all seigneurial rights and that delightful title included) for 35,600 livres. He undertook to make certain alterations and repairs. A herd of cattle was included in his purchase. Although he was not to enter into his life tenancy until February 22, 1759, the agreement is dated December 11, 1758; and on December 24th he made his state entrance into Tourney, as three months before he had into Ferney.

The second occasion was much the more magnificent of the two. Madame de Fontaine was with him this time, as well as Madame Denis. Both were in diamonds. Here, too, was their brother Mignot, the abbé; also _tout paré_. The village girls handed the ladies baskets of flowers and oranges. The artillery had come from Geneva, so there was no need to thump upon tin boxes. There were drums, fifes, cannon: all the music of flattery. The spectators were not only peasants, as they had been at Ferney, but all the polite persons of the neighbourhood. There was a splendid banquet, given by the outgoing tenant of Tourney, and served by the innkeeper of a neighbouring village. The curé made M. de Voltaire a beautiful address. M. de Voltaire was wholly delighted--“very gay and content.” He answered quite _en grand seigneur_, and as was expected of him, “Ask anything you like for the good of your parish and I will give it you.” Lord and Count of Tourney! This most impressionable of men lived up to the part immediately. He wrote an enthusiastic account of the proceedings to de Brosses on the very same day, when he was back again at Délices. “I made my entrance like Sancho Panza into his island. Only his paunch was wanting to me.” “My subjects frightened my horses with musketry and torpedoes.” The banquet (served by the native innkeeper) “was a magnificent repast in the style of those of Horace and Boileau.” In short, the Lord of Tourney saw his new estates all _couleur de rose_, or almost all. It is infinitely characteristic that in this very letter he went on to plead for the restitution of certain tithes to the poor of Ferney, which they had enjoyed for a century, and of which Ancian, the curé of the neighbouring parish of Moens, “the most abominable pettifogger in the district,” had deprived them, further “putting them to fifteen hundred francs of law expenses before they knew it.” Voltaire had also appealed passionately to the Bishop of Annecy; and did at last obtain his suit, but only after he had paid a very large sum out of his own pocket.

He wrote also to Theriot that evening--tired, no doubt, but too charmed to remember it. “You are mistaken, my old friend; I have four paws instead of two. One paw in Lausanne, in a very pretty house for the winter; one paw at Délices, near Geneva, where good company comes to see me--those are the front paws. The back are at Ferney, and in the county”--a county, if you please, and not merely an estate--“of Tourney.”

He went on to point out the advantages of Ferney--how there was plenty of land and wood for the rebuilding operations he already had in hand; how he could get marble by the lake; how the extensive estates would really not be so costly after all. For himself, he would like to live on them quite simply. But my niece, you know--that victim of Frankfort--_she_ merits luxury and indulgences. He had already set the peasants to work to mend the neglected roads about Ferney; so that in a month or two he was able to say truthfully that they had earned more in that time than formerly they had been able to do in a year. He had already chartered more than a hundred workmen, that his rebuilding and gardening operations might be put in hand at once.

The year closed full of the happiest expectations. Despite gala entrances to new estates, Madame Denis, indeed, complained that the winter of 1758-59 was dull. It was all spent at Délices: as being more out of the way of the troubling of Grassets and Hallers, than Monrion. True, plenty of visitors came from Lausanne; but there were not many who came to sleep and stay. True, too, the Délices troupe had privately acted (“the only pleasure I have in this country,” Madame Denis wrote dismally) “Aménaïde,” which was to have its name changed to “Tancred” later; and as “Tancred” become immortal. But Madame Denis apparently was suffering from an indigestion which Tronchin could not cure, for she spoke slightingly of that good physician, and discontentedly of life in general. Uncle Voltaire was so absurdly busy! Trying to do a hundred things at once, and invincibly obstinate. “It is the only sign of old age he has.” “If I were not so sensitive I should be very happy.” When a lady complains she is sensitive, she always means that she is cross and offended. Uncle Voltaire had shown his invincible obstinacy by persisting in going on with that Saurin controversy when his niece thought he had very much better leave it alone.

Then, too, he was getting more and more engrossed every day with pulling down and putting up, with barns, farms, oxen, sheep, horses; and “adored the country even in winter,” while Louise, as he said himself, was “very difficult to reduce to the _rôle_ of Ceres, of Pomona, and of Flora, and would much rather have been Thalia in Paris.” But when her uncle found Tourney and Ferney, he found a better life than he had ever known; and the dearest and crossest of nieces would not make him relinquish it. The year 1759 was still new-born when he was writing, not once but many times, that he was wonderfully well and happy, stronger and better than he had ever been; that he had only really lived since the day he chose his retreat; that he was so infinitely content “that if I dare I should think myself wise.”

“Such is my life, Madame, tranquil and occupied, full and philosophic.” “I love to plant, I love to build, and so satisfy the only tastes which gratify old age.”

“This kind of life makes one want to live.” “Property in paper depends upon fortune; property in land depends only upon God.”

“To have found the secret of being independent in France is more than to have written the ‘Henriade.’”