Evelyn Beatrice Hall

“What harm can a book do that costs a hundred crowns?” Voltaire had written to Damilaville on April 5, 1765. “Twenty volumes folio will never make a revolution; it is the little pocket pamphlets of thirty sous that are to be feared.”

He had acted on that principle all his life. But he had never acted upon it so much as in his hand-to-hand battle with l’infÂme. He never acted upon it so often as in his eighteen months’ solitude at Ferney in 1768-69.

For many years, from that “manufactory” of his, as Grimm called it, he poured forth a ceaseless stream of dialogues, epistles, discourses, reflections, novelettes, commentaries, burlesques, reviews. Hardly any of them were more than a few pages in length. But each dealt with some subject near to his wide heart; cried aloud for some reform which had not been made, and must be made; pointed out with mocking finger some scandal in Church or State; satirised with killing irony some gross abuse of power; turned on some miscarriage of civil justice the searchlight of truth; laughed lightly, in dialogue, at the education of women by nuns in convents to fit them to be wives and mothers in the world; drew up damning statistics of the 9,468,800 victims “hanged, drowned, broken on the wheel, or burnt, for the love of God” and their religion from the time of Constantine to Louis XIV.; pleaded vivaciously against the eighty-two annual holidays set apart by the Church on which it was criminal to work but not to be drunken and mischievous; enumerated the “Horrible Dangers of Reading,” of knowing, of thinking; and lashed with the prettiest of stinging little whips a corrupt ministry, a wicked priesthood, and l’infÂme, l’infÂme.

“Il fait le tout en badinant.” Serious? Why, no. “Our French people want to learn without studying”; and they shall. Instruct! Instruct! but as one instructs a child with a lesson in the form of a story, or the simplest little sermon with a sugar-plum of a joke at the end. This was such a laughing philosopher that many persons have doubted if he really could have been a philosopher at all. He turned so many somersaults, as friend Frederick put it plaintively. But the somersaults gained him an audience, and once gained he knew very well how to keep and teach it. It was one of his own sayings that ridicule does for everything and is the strongest of arms. He proved the truth of that assertion himself—in the pamphlets by which he held the attention and commanded the intellect of the eighteenth century.

Read them now—they are the must amusing reading in the world—and beneath the sparkling mockery, see the burning meaning.

They are, considered as works of art alone, much more than brilliant burlesques. Each of them is endowed with Voltaire’s “unquenchable life,” and “stamped with the express image” of his whole personality. Gay, crisp, and clear, expressing his ideas in the fewest and easiest words and in the most vivacious and graceful of all literary styles, they conveyed to his generation “the consciousness at once of the power and the rights of the human intelligence.”

Through these pamphlets “the revolution works in all minds. Light comes by a thousand holes it is impossible to stop up.” “Reason penetrates into the merchants’ shops as into the nobles’ palaces.”

What better proof could Voltaire himself have wanted of the growth of that liberty and tolerance which he loved, and strove to make all men love and have, than the fact that the government, autocratic and all-powerful as it was, could not prevent those pamphlets selling and working in their midst?

“Opinion rules the world,” said Voltaire himself. At last he had made his opinion, Public Opinion. “From 1762 to the end of Voltaire’s life it was on the side of the philosophers.”

True, the authorities still burnt his works. In 1768 he had written “The Man with Forty Crowns,” a burlesque story “on the financial chaos which fifteen years later brought France to bankruptcy.” That must be burnt of course. France hated unfavourable prophecies. It was burnt. But by now Voltaire’s pamphlets were like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Flames could not hurt them. And when they came out of the fiery furnace it was only with an added lustre and glory.

Well for Voltaire if those pamphlets could have engrossed all his solitude. In Beuchot’s edition of his writings they fill ten large volumes. Here surely was occupation enough for a lifetime! But Voltaire had time for everything, and was for ever the spoilt boy who loved his own way.

The Easter of 1769 reminded him of last Easter and the fact that the Bishop of Annecy had forbidden his priesthood to allow him to confess or communicate. Very well then! I will do both.

His feeble body had been ill and ailing for a year—a condition of things which is apt to make the mind unreasonable. There was a recent case of a man called Boindin, who, dying unfortified by the Sacraments, had been refused Christian burial. There was always the case of Adrienne Lecouvreur—“thrown into the kennel like a dead dog.”

Voltaire declared, to persons whom he could have no object in deceiving, that he had lately had “twelve accesses of fever.” He was seventy-five years old. And death always was and had been a far more present reality to him than to most people.

These things taken together form, not at all a valid excuse, but some sort of honest excuse for an act that needs a great deal of excusing.

Voltaire was in bed one day in the March of 1769, dictating to WagniÈre, when he saw from his window Gros, the Ferney curÉ, and a Capuchin monk who had come to help him with the Easter confessions, walking in the garden. Voltaire sent for the Capuchin and told him that he was too ill to leave his bed, but as a Frenchman, an official of the King, and seigneur of the parish, he wished there and then to make his confession. And he put the usual fee of six francs into the Capuchin’s hand. The poor man, with the fear of his Bishop before his eyes, nervously temporised, said he was very busy and would return in a few days.

“Trust me to get even with him!” cries the patient when M. le Capuchin had retired. Burgos, “a kind of surgeon,” is sent for, and having felt the invalid’s pulse, is fool enough to say that it is excellent.

“What, you ignorant fellow! Excellent?” roars the sick man.

Burgos feels it again. It is a very different pulse this time, and M. de Voltaire is in a high fever.

“Then go and tell the priest.”

Six days elapsed and no priest appeared. So the very active-minded invalid caused the whole household to be roused in a body in the middle of the night, and to hurry off to the curÉ saying their master was dying and presenting a certificate signed by himself, WagniÈre, Bigex, and Burgos, which declared the invalid’s pious desire to die fortified with the Sacraments and in the bosom of the faith in which he was born and had lived.

Neither curÉ nor Capuchin appeared.

Then Voltaire sent a lawyer to the curÉ, saying that if he did not come, the Lord of Ferney would denounce him to the Parliament as having refused the Sacraments to a dying man.

The poor curÉ was in such a fright that he was attacked on the spot, says WagniÈre, by the colic.

On March 31st, Voltaire drew up before a notary a statement in legal form declaring himself, in spite of calumnies, to be a sincere Catholic. Among others the complaisant Father Adam witnessed this statement.

The next day, April 1st, the Capuchin appeared at Ferney. The Bishop of Annecy had been consulted, and now sent by the Capuchin a profession of faith for Voltaire to sign.

The invalid, who had already recited a hurried jumble of the Pater, the Credo, and the Confiteor, replied that the Creed was supposed to contain the whole faith; and though the unhappy Capuchin went on presenting to him at intervals the Bishop’s paper to sign, he would do nothing but repeat his statement about the Creed. After having delivered to the Capuchin a long homily on morality and tolerance (which WagniÈre found “very touching and pathetic”) the sick man suddenly called out loudly, “Give me absolution at once,” which the terrified confessor, who had entirely lost his head, did. Then Voltaire sent for the curÉ, who administered the Sacrament.

The notary was also present. “At the very instant the priest gave the wafer to M. de Voltaire” he declared aloud that he sincerely pardoned those who had calumniated him to the King “and who have not succeeded in their base design, and I demand a record of my declaration from the notary.” He recorded it. No sooner was Voltaire left to himself than this amazing invalid jumped out of bed and went for a walk in the garden.

Meanwhile, curÉ and Capuchin laid their terrified heads together and bethought themselves of some means to avoid the consequences of having absolved and given the mass to the scoffer without his having signed the declaration drawn up by the Bishop.

On April 15th, they summoned seven witnesses whom they had persuaded to declare on oath that they had heard M. de Voltaire pronounce a complete and satisfactory confession of faith, which confession they invented and sent to the Bishop.

The hocus-pocus was on both sides, it will be seen. But Voltaire was responsible for it all. Paris—even Paris—received the news of his “unpardonable buffoonery” “pretty badly.” The d’Argentals entirely disapproved of it, and Dr. Tronchin condemned it with severity.

“Useless mÉchancÉtÉs are very foolish,” Voltaire had said. He regarded this one as indispensable. When he wrote to his Angels excusing himself, he declared that he had need of a buckler to withstand the mortal blows of sacerdotal calumny, and that such a duty, neglected, might at his death have had very unpleasant consequences for his family. These were not sufficient reasons for his act. But they at least free him from “the reproach of erecting hypocrisy into a deliberate doctrine.” As Condorcet says, “such deceptions did not deceive, while they did protect.” “Disagreeable as these temporisings are to us,” they damn deeper the time which made them a pressing expedient, than the time-server.

As the Bishop of Annecy had accused Voltaire of holding impious conversations at his dinner-table, he now took advantage of Madame Denis’s absence to have pious works read aloud to him at that meal. When a President of the Parliament of Dijon was dining with him, Massillon, of whom Voltaire was a warm admirer, was the author chosen. “What style! What harmony! What eloquence!” cries the Patriarch of Ferney as he listens to those magnificent periods, to the denunciations like a god’s. The reader continued for three or four pages.

“Off with Massillon!” cries Voltaire, and “he gave himself up to all the folly and verve of his imagination.” Irreverence? Malicious mockery? It has been generally thought so. May it not rather have been that both sentiments were perfectly genuine? that in one there expressed itself the passionate admiration and in the other the irresponsible liveliness, of which this extraordinary character was equally capable?

Though he had nearly harried the life out of one poor Capuchin of Gex, though he had wantonly insulted the faith of all the Capuchins, almost his next act was to obtain for them, through Choiseul, an annuity of six hundred francs for the Gex monastery, in return for which benefit the Brothers gave him the title of Temporal Father of the Capuchins of Gex. He derived a monkeyish delight from it; used to sign his letters with a cross, “?, Brother Voltaire unworthy Capuchin”; but then he also derived an honest delight from the good he had been able to do the monastery.

Who can explain him?

Presently he was writing to Cardinal Bernis to obtain the Pope’s permission for Father Adam to wear a wig on his bald head during mass. The climate was cold, the poor Father rheumatic, and his Holiness had been obliged to forbid wigs to the priesthood as they had so often been used as a disguise for unworthy purposes.

All through religious controversies and irreligious acts, Voltaire was engaged in a long, constant and very flattering

VOLTAIRE

From the Etching by Denon

correspondence with Catherine the Great. Even Frederick, in the beguiling days before the Prussian visits, had not so gratified Voltaire’s self-love. Voltaire was the teacher, and Catherine, the greatest of queens and the cleverest of women, his humble pupil. In 1768 she had taken his advice—there is no subtler form of flattery—upon inoculation, and herself submitted to the operation. And in this 1769 she sent him the loveliest pelisse of Russian sable, a snuff box she had turned with her own royal hands, her portrait set in diamonds, and an epitome of the laws with which she governed her great empire. Here surely was balm for solitude, calumny, sickness, old age, every mortal misfortune! Voltaire warmed body and soul through the snowy Swiss spring in that gorgeous pelisse. In March, he had another present, which delighted his queer old heart hardly less. Saint-Lambert—Saint-Lambert, who had robbed him of his mistress and wounded him with a wound which another man could never have forgiven or forgotten—sent him his poem, “The Seasons.” And the poet Voltaire writes to his brother of the lyre the most charming compliments and congratulations.

Before this, he was writing the kindest letters to La Harpe again. When Madame Denis, in the latter half of this October, 1769, and after an absence of a little less than eighteen months, burst into Ferney, her uncle seems to have folded her in his arms, received her with as much delight as if she had always been trustworthy, practical, sensible, and considerate, and to have let bygones be bygones as only he knew how.

The Dupuits were already home again; and Voltaire was busy with a new business which had been in his mind since he first came to Ferney, and in practical existence at least since 1767.

From the moment he had bought his estates he had felt the full weight of his responsibilities as a landowner, and realised as keenly as Arthur Young, the philosophic farmer who rode through France prophesying her downfall, that agriculture is the true wealth of a nation.

“The best thing we have to do on earth is to cultivate it.”

At more than threescore years and ten, this old son of the pavement had set himself to learn, and did learn, the whole technique of agriculture. Directly he bought Ferney he began putting the barren land round it under cultivation, and so occupied all persons on his estates who were out of work. When he was seventy-eight he was still hard at work with his own hands on that field which had been called Voltaire’s Field, because he cultivated it entirely himself.

It has been seen how he planted avenues of trees. Four times over he lined his drive with chestnut and walnut trees, and four times they nearly all died, or were wantonly destroyed by the peasants. “However, I am not daunted. The others laugh at me. Neither my old age nor my complaints nor the severity of the climate discourage me. To have cultivated a field and made twenty trees grow is a good which will never be lost.”

He entered into a long correspondence with Moreau—that rare being, a practical Political Economist. He delighted in Galiani’s famous “Dialogues on Corn”—never was man in the right so wittily before—and in this very 1769 he was thanking AbbÉ Mords-les-Morellet for his “Dictionary of Commerce.”

For, after all, the Land meant the People; and commerce there must be, if the work of the People on the Land were to be remunerative.

Many terrible accounts have been given of the condition of the French poor before the Revolution. But theirs was a misery which no passion and eloquence can overstate.

Forbidden at certain seasons to guard their wretched pieces of land by fences lest they should interfere with my lord’s hunt, or to manure their miserable crops lest they should spoil the flavour of my lord’s game; forbidden, at hatching seasons, to weed those crops lest they should disturb the partridges; and forbidden, without special permission, to build a shed in which to store their grain—the fruit of their lands and their labour, if there was any such fruit, was always lost to them.

Taxes alone deprived them of three quarters of what they earned. On one side was the corvÉe, or the right of the lord to his peasants’ labour without paying for it; and the taille, or the tax on property, which exacted a certain sum from each village: so that if the rich would not pay, the poor must.

Add to this the toll-gates, so numerous that fish brought from Harfleur to Paris paid eleven times its value en route; the fines exacted when land was bought or sold; above all, the enormous tax upon salt, which soon was as the match to fire the gunpowder of the Revolution; the tithes exacted by the Church: the fees for masses for the dead, for burying, christening, and marrying, coupled with the bitter injustice that the clergy of that Church were themselves exempt from all taxation.

Add to these regular taxes the irregular ones.

On the accession of Louis XV. one was levied, called the Tax of the Joyful Accession. Joyful! The people who paid it lived in a windowless, one-room hut of peat or clay; clothed in the filthiest rags; ignorant, bestial, degraded; creatures who never knew youth or hope: who died in unrecorded thousands, of pestilence and famine; or lived, to their own cruel misery, a few dark years “on a little black bread, and not enough of that.”

Such were the fifty poor of Ferney as Voltaire found them, but not the twelve hundred he left.

Whatever his sins were—and they were many—he had one of the noblest and most difficult of virtues—a far higher conception of his duty to others than the men of his time. It was fashionable to talk philanthropy in the eighteenth century, but dangerous, as well as unmodish, to practise it.

“True philosophy ...” wrote the great Doer in the midst of the Dreamers, “makes the earth fertile and the people happier. The true philosopher cultivates the land, increases the number of the ploughs, and so of the inhabitants; occupies the poor man, and thus enriches him; encourages marriages, cares for the orphan; does not grumble at necessary taxes, and puts the labourer in a condition to pay them promptly.”

He had begun by getting back for the Ferney poor that tithe of which Ancian had deprived them, and by making the peasants mend and make roads—at fair wages. Later, he petitioned the King for “some privileges for my children”; and Gex was at last declared free from all the taxes of the farmers-general, and salt, which used to be ten sous the pound, came down to four.

His building operations at both the church and chÂteau gave occupation to many masons. Then the masons must have decent dwellings in which to live themselves; and here was more work.

In 1767, he could write that he had formed a colony at Ferney; that he had established there three merchants, artists, and a doctor, and was building houses for them. By 1769 he recorded with an honest pride that he had quadrupled the number of the parishioners, and that there was not a poor man among them; that he had under his immediate supervision two hundred workers, and was the means of life to everyone round him.

Nor did he forget to provide them with pleasure as well as with work. Every Sunday the young people of the colony used to come up to the chÂteau to dance. Their host provided them with refreshments, and was the happiest spectator of their happiness.

Then he started a school, and himself paid the schoolmaster. There had been a time when he had thought that “it is not the labourer one must teach, it is the bon bourgeois, the inhabitant of towns: that enterprise is grand and great enough,” which, for his day, it certainly was. It was a hundred years in advance of his time. Even that drastic reformer, Frederick the Great, had announced superbly, “The vulgar do not deserve enlightenment.” So what wonder that in 1763 even a clear-sighted Voltaire prayed for “ignorant brothers to follow my plough?”

The wonder rather is that by 1767 his views had so enormously progressed that when Linguet, the barrister, wrote to him that in his opinion all was lost if the canaille were shown that they too could reason, he emphatically answered, instancing the intelligent Genevans who read as a relaxation from manual labour—“No, Sir; all is not lost when the people are put into a condition to see that they too have a mind. On the contrary, all is lost when they are treated like a herd of bulls, for sooner or later they will gore you with their horns.”

Prophetic—but if many heard that voice crying in the wilderness, none acted on his words, save himself.

But in prospering Ferney there was room not only for a school and a doctor, masons and labourers, but for special industries. From the first, Voltaire had cultivated silkworms. He was never the man for an idle hobby. Why should no use be made of the silk? Before 1769, the Ferney theatre, which Madame Denis had lately used as a laundry, was turned into a silkworm nursery. From busy Geneva came stocking weavers, only too glad to colonise in a place where the lord, and master lent them money “on very easy terms,” built decent dwellings for them, and gave them the full benefit of his knowledge of affairs.

By September 4, 1769, Voltaire, always alive to the advantages of a good advertisement, sent to the Duchesse de Choiseul the first pair of silk stockings ever made on his looms. If she would but wear them they must be the mode! What stocking would not look beautiful on a foot so charming? Voltaire found time to engage his Duchess to wear them, in a gay, coquettish, and essentially French correspondence. Madame had made a mistake, it appears, and sent him, as a pattern, a shoe much too large for her. Neither his thousand schemes and labours nor his seventy-five years had spoiled his talent for flattering badinage. His Duchess accepted his stockings and his compliments, showed both to her friends, and thus put some fifty to a hundred people, including young Calas who was helping his benefactor, out of the way of want.

On February 15, 1770, the party quarrels in Geneva came to a climax—and bloodshed.

The Natives had not forgotten the promise made to them four years earlier. “If you are forced to leave your country ... I shall still be able to help and protect you.”

Neither had Voltaire.

On February 10, 1767, in writing to de Beauteville, the French mediator, he had suggested the scheme of a working colony—the nucleus of the idea of some enterprising person enticing the great watchmaking industry of quarrelsome Geneva to form a settlement, which should be managed by its founder and should bear his name. The scheme had appealed to Choiseul. In 1768, with Voltaire’s co-operation and approval, that minister founded the colony of Versoix—or Versoy, as Voltaire spells it—which was designed to be what Ferney actually became.

The crisis of February 15, 1770, caused great numbers of the Native watchmakers of Geneva to flee from the city and take refuge at Versoix and at Ferney. Versoix was unequal to the emergency. There were no houses for the workers. But Ferney rose to the occasion. That was always part of its old master’s genius.

Only a few months after the Natives had first consulted him, this far-seeing person had begun to build workmen’s dwellings in his village. The overflow from those “pretty houses of freestone,” he now took into the chÂteau itself. So far, so good.

The next thing to do was to obtain the permission for his settlement from the authorities. The authorities were personified by M. de Choiseul. Voltaire had helped him with his Versoix. So Choiseul could not, and did not, refuse to help Voltaire with Ferney.

To start the watchmakers in their new home at their old trade, Voltaire advanced sixty thousand livres. He at once found occupation for fifty Genevan workmen, not counting the inhabitants of Gex. He himself bought gold, silver, and jewels for the work, a better bargain than the work-people could do for themselves.

In six weeks he had watches ready for sale—of exquisite workmanship, artistic design, and to be sold at least one third cheaper than they could be in Geneva. The Duke of Choiseul bought the first six watches ever made by Voltaire’s manufactory.

By April 9th the old courtier was promising the Duchess that she should soon have one worthy to wear even at her waist.

Then he began his system of personal advertisement. The handsomest commission in the world on every watch he sold could not have made the neediest agent work harder or more cunningly than did this Voltaire, who received at first no commission, never could expect a large one, and had need of neither large nor small.

On June 5, 1770, he sent round a circular to all the foreign ambassadors—“diplomacy en masse”—a most beautiful circular from “The Royal Manufactory of Ferney” (in capital letters), and recommending watches—“plain silver,” from three louis, to repeaters at forty-two. That flaming document is still preserved.

The advertiser wrote a letter with it. “I never write for the sake of writing,” he said; “but when I have a subject I do not spare my pen, old and dying as I am.”

Catherine the Great was appealed to; and in answer to her “vaguely magnificent order for watches” to “the value of some thousands of roubles,” Voltaire had to apologise for his workmen having taken advantage of her goodness, and sent her watches to the value of eight thousand!

The Empress replied imperially—as she was obliged to do—that such an expense would not ruin her. And in his next letter her artful old friend warmly recommended his pendulum clocks—“which we are now making”—and asked her to assist him in promoting a watch trade between Ferney and China. She did.

Ferney was soon sending watches not only to China, but to Spain, Italy, Russia, Holland, America, Turkey, Portugal, and North Africa, besides carrying on an enormous trade with Paris.

“Give me a chance and I am the man to build a city,” said Voltaire to Richelieu. With a chance he could have done anything. Kings and commoners, cardinals, great ladies—he appealed to them all. Is not rosy-faced Bernis at Rome? Well, why should not he promote the sale of watches for me in the Imperial City?

Bernis totally ignored the commission. He was almost the only person to whom Voltaire applied who behaved so badly. And Ferney wrote him such a stinging reproach for his neglect that poor Bernis must have regretted he had not been more obliging.

As for Frederick the Great, he did better even than buy watches by the cartload like the other great potentate, Catherine.

He gave for twelve years free lodging in Berlin, with exemption from all taxation, to eighteen families of refugee Genevan watchmakers. This started the watchmaking industry in his capital.

To Madame Dubarry, who had succeeded to the honours and dishonour of the Pompadour, the Gentleman-in-Ordinary-to-the-King sent presently the loveliest little watch set in diamonds.

He left no stone unturned. He supervised every detail. In 1773, Ferney sold “four thousand watches worth half a million of francs.” All losses Voltaire bore himself. Capable and alert as he was, they were sometimes heavy.

He had had a royal order, for instance, on the occasion of the marriage of the Dauphin with Marie Antoinette, which was encouraging but expensive. He was never paid.

Nothing daunted him however. By the June of 1770 he had begun building those much-needed houses in the rival, or rather the sister, colony of Versoix. And then, as if he found weaving and watchmaking insufficient for his energy, by 1772 he had started a lacemaking industry. That butterfly Madame Saint-Julien must make this airiest of gossamer fabrics—“the beautiful blonde lace which was made in our village”—the fashion. “The woman who made it can make more very reasonably. She can add a dozen workers to the staff, and we shall owe to you a new manufactory.” The vigorous boy who wrote the words, originated the scheme, and carried it to successful issue, was only seventy-eight. He personally negotiated with the shop which was to buy and sell his new wares when made. Cannot one see him haggling and bargaining and enjoying himself, with a twinkle in his bright old eyes and a very humorous shrewdness in the curves of his thin lips?

But if he wanted a reward for all his trouble, he had it. The miserable hamlet had become a thriving village and the desert place blossomed like a rose. The master’s corn fed his people and his bad wine (“which is not harmful”) gave them drink. His bees produced excellent honey and wax, and his hemp and flax, linen.

Here dwelt together, as one family, Catholics and Huguenots. “Is not this better than St. Bartholomew?” “When a Catholic is sick, Protestants go and take care of him”; and vice versa. The good Protestant women prepared with their own hands the little portable altars for the Procession of the Holy Sacrament, and the curÉ thanked them publicly in a sermon. Gros had died—of drink, said Voltaire—and his place had been taken by Hugenot, an excellent priest, generous and liberal-minded, the friend of all his people whatever their faith, and of M. de Voltaire, who was supposed to have none at all.

Here surely was the tree of Tolerance he had planted, bearing beautiful fruit. It might well warm his old heart to see his little colony firm on “those two pivots of the wealth of a state, be it little or great, freedom of trade and freedom of conscience.”

The man who worked the case of Calas for three years, the case of Sirven for seven, and the cases of Lally and d’Étallonde for twelve, was not likely to grow tired of the little colony always beneath his eyes. Nor was he unmindful of the claims not only Ferney, but all Gex, had upon his bounty. When it was devastated by famine in 1771 he had corn sent him from Sicily, and sold it much under cost price to his starving children and the poor people of the province. Their sufferings and sorrows were his own. He pleaded passionately for those who were, and had been for generations, miserable with the hopeless misery that is dumb; but who, before many years were past, were to cry aloud their wrongs with a great and terrible voice which would reach to the ends of the earth.

All Voltaire’s letters in his later years are full of his watchmakers and weavers, their prosperity or their poverty, what he had done for them or what he would do. Did his own glorification play no part in his schemes? It doubtless played some. But the fact that he may have been vain does not alter the fact that he set an example which Christians have nobly followed, but which, in his day at least, they certainly did not set him.

Voltaire, sceptic and scoffer, too often of evil life and unclean lips, was not only the High Priest of Tolerance, but the first great practical philanthropist of his century.