Voltaire’s old age was naturally something less eventful than the “crowded hour” of his youth and manhood. But if ever his private life afforded him a chance of quiet, public events always stepped in to disturb it.

On May 10, 1774, Louis XV. died of the smallpox, to the good and blessing of the world. His old courtier at Ferney no sooner heard the news than he put pen to paper and wrote his Majesty’s Éloge, “to be pronounced before an Academy on May 25th.”

Of course a eulogy had to be eulogistic. The old hand had not lost its cunning. To flatter the dear departed, to speak of him as a good father, a good husband and master, and “as much a friend as a king can be”; to offer for his little failings that courtly excuse, “One cannot be always a king: one would be too much to be pitied,” and to imply that the man was a fool so that the insult sounded like a compliment, why, Voltaire was the one writer in the world who could do it. And he did it.

He turned the occasion to practical use, by preaching against the neglect of inoculation; and then looked to the future.

What wonder that, for the moment, even this prophet should forget to prophesy Revolution; should think that he saw already the beginning of the Golden Age—Millennium—all things made new?

To be sure, he told the government plainly that there were still Frenchmen who were “in the same legal condition as the beasts of that land they watered with their tears.” And the young King answered by repealing the Tax of the Joyful Accession; by disgracing Terrai, for whom old Ferney was keeping his last tooth; by appointing first as Minister of Finance, then as Comptroller-General, and then as Secretary of State, the great reforming Turgot, one of the most enlightened men in France and already the personal friend of Voltaire. “If any man can re-establish the finances,” wrote Ferney on September 7th, “he is the man.” And a few days later, when Turgot obtained free trade in grain, the enthusiastic old invalid thanked Nature for having made him live long enough to see that day. Free trade in grain had a very personal application to this master of a town, this founder of a colony. He had d’Étallonde staying with him now; and next to his arduous and passionate work for the restitution of that young officer’s civil rights (“he is calm about his fate, and I—I die of it”), his four hundred children had the largest share of his mind. That they returned his affection and repaid him as they could, was proved when, on Madame Denis’s recovery from a dangerous chest complaint in the spring of 1775, they fÊted that “niece of her uncle” “with companies of infantry and cavalry, cockades and kettledrums”—all the mummery and millinery which they loved, and their master had loved all his life.

Madame Denis was, it must be remembered, already the legal owner of Ferney. She was to be its practical owner. And it was her old uncle’s too sanguine hope that she would maintain the manufactory after him. She was certainly pleased at the colonists’ rejoicings, and the colonists were pleased themselves, and Voltaire was highly delighted; and a quite cool observer, Hennin, the Resident, noted that it was a grand thing to see a cavalcade of nearly a hundred men, mounted and in uniform, from a village where, twelve years before, there were twenty families of wretched peasants.

So that, although the year 1775, which was to usher into Ferney such a succession of visitors as might make the most sociable heart quail, began with sickness, it began with rejoicing too.

D’Étallonde was still staying there. Nephew d’Hornoy was helping Voltaire to work his case. The Marquis and Marquise de Luchet came to join the party in the spring, and were here two months—the Marquis, who was to be one of Voltaire’s biographers, always engaged in mad schemes for making money out of gold mines; and the Marquise turning her good-natured and laughter-loving self into a hospital nurse and nursing the Ferney invalids unremittingly.

Then came the Florians; and the Marquis’s third wife brought with her another lively visitor, her young sister, whom Voltaire called “Quinze Ans,” “who laughed at everything and laughed always.”

They were followed by ecstatic little Madame Suard, who worshipped Voltaire with the tiresome adoration of a schoolgirl; kissed his hands and clasped her own; flattered, adored, and coquetted with him; and went so far as to declare in the long and rapturous accounts she wrote of him, that his every wrinkle was a charm.

With her came her brother, Panckoucke, who wanted to edit Voltaire’s works, but did not yet obtain that favour. She also found with Voltaire, Audibert, that merchant of Marseilles, the earliest friend of the Calas; and Poissonnier, Catherine the Great’s doctor.

In July, Chabanon, and AbbÉ Morellet were both staying at Ferney. Also in July, an audacious and wholly unsnubbable person called Denon had forced his way there too; asked for his host’s bust; was refused; and revenged himself by sending the poor old Patriarch a most hideous sketch of his lean features which he, Denon, had made himself. It was very far from being the only offensive likeness of the great man. Still extant is a caricature called “DÉjeuner at Ferney,” which Voltaire used to think was by Huber, and which contains grotesque portraits of Voltaire and Father Adam, and represents poor Madame Denis, who was inclined to embonpoint, enormously fat. But, after all, it was in the January of this 1775 that Frederick had sent Voltaire, Voltaire’s bust in porcelain with Immortali written beneath it. Here was compensation for many caricatures.

Little Madame Saint-Julien, who had made Ferney lace the mode, and was a fashionable philanthropist when philanthropy was not the fashion, paid another long visit to Ferney in the autumn, and went back to Paris to intercede with her influential relatives for Voltaire’s children. She and their father were so successful that the day soon came when, “in spite of the obstinate resistance of the farmers-general,” they obtained for the colonists that “moderate and fixed tariff which freed the country from the despotism of a pitiless tax,” extorting from the poverty-stricken province of Gex alone the exorbitant sum of not less than forty thousand livres annually.

The grateful colonists had fireworks and illuminations on that good Butterfly’s birthday; and in December they fÊted old Voltaire himself, filled his carriage with flowers, and decorated the horses with laurels.

The visitors did not cease with the new year 1776. Nay, one came who came to stay. Mademoiselle Reine-Philiberte de Varicourt was the niece of those six poor gentlemen whose estates Voltaire had reclaimed in 1761 from the Jesuits of Ornex. Bright, honest, and good, well deserving that charming name of Belle-et-Bonne with which old Voltaire immediately christened her, the unfortunate girl had no dot and was destined to a convent.

But Madame Denis took one of her good-natured likings to her. She was girlishly kind to old Voltaire, while he on his part soon worshipped her pretty face, virgin heart, and bright intelligence. No “narrowing nunnery walls” for her! Marie Dupuits had husband and child to think of now, and Marie had never had Reine-Philiberte’s dignified good sense.

Belle-et-Bonne fell into place at once. She became a regular, and not the least delightful, member of the heterogeneous Ferney household.

Another Englishman, Martin Sherlock, visited it in April, 1776, and wrote his experiences, in his “Letters of an English Traveller,” in French, which has been retranslated into his native tongue.

Voltaire, who was accompanied by d’Hornoy, met his guest in the hall, showed him his gardens, spoke a few words to him in English, told an anecdote of Swift, talked of Pope, of Chesterfield, of Hervey, and with his old passionate admiration of Newton. Stopping before his bust, he exclaimed, “This is the greatest genius that ever existed!” There was no dimming of the old mind, no lack-lustre, no weariness. The England he had not seen for nearly fifty years was still a vivid and a present reality.

On one of his visits—Sherlock paid two—Voltaire showed his guest his shelves filled with English books—Robertson, “who is your Livy”; Hume, “who wrote history to be applauded”; Bolingbroke, “many leaves and little fruit”; Milton, Congreve, Rochester.

He criticised the English language—“energetic, precise, and barbarous.” He explained to Madame Denis the scene in Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” where the King makes love to Katharine in bad French. He spoke “with the warmth of a man of thirty.”

Quaintly dressed in white shoes and stockings, red breeches, embroidered waistcoat and bedgown, and a gold and silver nightcap over his grey peruke, old Voltaire apologised for this singular appearance to his guest by saying in English that at Ferney they were for Liberty and Property. “So that I wear my nightcap and Father Adam his hat.” Later, he added gravely, “You are happy, you can do anything.... We cannot even die as we will.”

During the conversation he had uttered what his visitor called “horrors” about Moses and Shakespeare.

Nothing proves better the young vigour of this marvellous old mind than the strength of its animosities. The “let-it-alone” spirit of old age was never this man’s while there was breath left in his body. At the end of 1773 he had attacked another literary foe—an ungrateful protÉgÉ, “the inclement Clement”—in the “Cabals,” a satire in which ring out clearly the notes a younger hand had struck in “Akakia” or in “Vanity.”

Then on March 10, 1776, FrÉron died of mortification at the suppression of his “Literary Year,” and up gets Voltaire and says he has received an anonymous letter asking him, if you please, to endow FrÉlon-FrÉron’s daughter! This is too much. Voltaire suggests that Madame FrÉron wrote that letter. And the FrÉlons say Voltaire invented it himself. And Voltaire is as spry and alert and angry as when he first hated FrÉron, thirty years ago.

But these enemies he knew, or had known, in the flesh.

To admire or to despise Shakespeare was but a literary question. Old Eighty-two in this July of 1776 took it as a burning personal one. He had not precisely adored Shakespeare in the “English Letters.” A barbarian, a monster—but of very great genius. For the sake of that genius he had permitted the polished French people to condone that “heavy grossness” and the shocking lack of taste; and in his famous criticism on “Hamlet,” written in 1748, though he had called its author “a drunken savage,” he had found in the play, not the less, “sublime touches worthy of the loftiest genius.” To Sherlock, but three months ago, though he had uttered “horrors” in his criticism, he had admitted that “amazing genius” again.

And now one Letourneur publishes a new translation of the great William, and takes upon himself to call him the “god of the theatre,” the only model for true tragedy; and ignores Corneille and Racine (to say nothing of the author of “Zaire”) in toto.

Then Voltaire beat his breast and tore his hair to think that it was I—I—who showed to the French the pearls in this English dunghill; that I suffered persecution for telling them that though the god had feet of clay, the head and heart were gold.

So in a rage M. de Voltaire sat down and wrote a letter to the Academy—“his factotum against Shakespeare”; gave himself the lie; literally translated many passages, knowing, as he had said himself, that in a translation the letter killeth and the spirit giveth life; presented, as he meant to do, a gross and coarse Shakespeare, an indecent buffoon who had “ruined the taste of England for two hundred years.” Various persons rushed into the fray on either side.

On August 25th, Voltaire’s letter was read at a public meeting at the Academy, and a good-natured Marquis de Villevieille galloped off post-haste to Ferney to tell of its success. But there had been dissentient voices. Anglomania was already a power in the land. The young Queen had her Crawfords and Dillons, her English garden, her English jockeys, her English billiards. D’Alembert was too cool, too cool! The untrammelled nature of the great Diderot was formed to appreciate the broad and daring genius of the great Englishman. And Madame Necker, with the sure instincts of a clever woman, criticised Voltaire’s letter in a letter to Garrick. Voltaire had but shown Shakespeare’s dead body—“But I—I have seen the soul animating it, and know it is something more even than a majestic ghost which Garrick, the enchanter, summons from the grave.”

The letter to the Academy was the last utterance on the great Englishman of the man who—whether he hotly regretted it, as he did now and in the famous Preface to “Semiramis,” or was, or said he was, proud of it, as when he wrote to Walpole—first revealed Shakespeare to the people of France.

August saw the arrival of a visitor who was hereafter herself to be a celebrity, Madame de Genlis. Now only thirty years old, she was not yet famous for her literary works or that grave and religious turn of mind which did not prevent her occupying the very equivocal position of gouvernante to the children of the Duke of Orleans. As Madame Suard came to Ferney prepared to go into raptures, so Madame Genlis came prepared to disapprove.

The serious lady carried out her intention as thoroughly as the frivolous one. Her account of her visit contains much more about herself than about Voltaire, but states, no doubt very truly, that the impiety of his conversation was shocking, and, certainly untruly, that his manners lacked tact and urbanity. For this too particular lady the very trees in the Ferney garden grew too low and upset her temper and her hair; while the wild enthusiasm for their host of her companion, a painter, M. Ott, quite distressed a person who had so firmly resolved not to make a fool of herself in that direction.

As her point of view was unfavourable, her testimony as to her host’s “ingenuous goodness” to his colonists, to the perfect modesty and simplicity with which he regarded his great work for them, is the more valuable. She confirmed the opinion of many others as to the piercing brilliancy of the old eyes—“which have in them an inexpressible sweetness.” Madame Saint-Julien was there at the same time—little and gay and kind—and presently Marie Dupuits’s little girl ran into the room and put her arms round Grandpapa Voltaire’s neck.

During this August, Voltaire, rather proud of the transaction, “borrowed Lekain,” who was acting at Court, from Marie Antoinette. The Hermit of Ferney was too toothless to act himself, but his earliest passion was also his latest. There was the most charming little theatre in the village of Ferney now. Lekain acted in that and at ChÂtelaine. The young Queen’s graciousness in lending her player made artful old Voltaire long to have “Olympie” acted before her; to have her for his protectress; to see with his own eyes “her whose least charm,” as he said, “was loveliness.”

Picture the delight of the whilom author of “The Princess of Navarre” when he was commissioned to write a divertissement for her benefit. He wrote, or rather reproduced a sketch of a fÊte given at Vienna by the Austrian Court sixty years before, and called it “The Host and Hostess.” The thing was meritless, but not objectless, though it failed in its object—the rapprochement of Ferney and Versailles.

Then M. de Voltaire must needs write an allegory, “SÉsostris,” to flatter the beaux yeux of the Queen, and to show what a King might do for the good of his people.

To the year 1776, besides the Battle of Shakespeare, belong two more fights—the last of Voltaire’s life. Beauregard, Rohan, Jore—how far they were away! But the spirit of their old antagonist had not waxed faint.

The first fight was only a skirmish, it is true. Father Adam had been spoilt, of course. From being an inoffensive, lazy person—“the only idler in a houseful of busy people”—he had become assertive, worrying, and quarrelsome. He had fallen out with Bigex, the copyist, in 1769; and as a result Bigex had had to leave. And now the Father must go himself. It was characteristic of the man who had allowed Jore a pension for life, that he should send after this ungrateful priest who owed him thirteen years’ hospitality, presents of money.

In the second fight, the very last of his life, occurring in the December of 1776, Voltaire matched steel with a worthier foe. It was in answer to an attack made upon him by an AbbÉ GuÉnÉe that he wrote the bold and brilliant, if neither deep nor sound, “Christian against Six Jews,” which advanced Pigalle’s evidence on the subject of the Golden Calf, and might have better confuted GuÉnÉe if that reasoner had not been on his own ground and most cool and subtle in argument.

But if his foes did not spare this old Voltaire, neither did his friends. In the early days of 1777 Moultou introduced at Ferney a wearisome playwright called Berthe, who would persist in reading aloud his tedious play to their host. “Here the Chevalier laughs,” read Berthe, as a stage direction. “Happy man!” murmured Voltaire. When the listener could bear it no longer, he feigned the most violent colic that ever man had suffered. The next day Berthe came again, and so did the colic. “If God had not come to my aid,” said Voltaire to Grimm, “I should have been lost.”

It was in 1777 that Voltaire amused himself by competing under a pseudonym, for a prize offered by the French Academy for the best translation of the sixth book of the “Iliad.” It did not gain a prize. It was not even good. But that such a man at such an age should have been “sleeplessly active” enough to enter into such a competition, makes the thing worth recording.

But worse than unsuccessful translations and dull plays, worse than being beaten in a verbal quibble with a priest, was a mortification this vain old heart received in the June of 1777.

Joseph II., the young Emperor of Austria, brother of Marie Antoinette, and himself something of a philosopher, had been the lion of the spring in Paris. It was confidently expected by d’Alembert, Frederick the Great—everyone, including Voltaire himself—that on his return home the celebrity would do what all celebrities did—visit the King of their kind at Ferney.

On June 27th, Voltaire wrote airily to say that he did not expect his Majesty. What in the world was there for him to see in this manufactory of watches and verses? But all the same, when the day came, Ferney rose up very early in the morning and from eight o’clock was ready in its best clothes, with its master in his great peruke, waiting. A splendid dinner had been prepared. The condition of the road from Ferney to Versoix had been improved by its owner. All was in readiness.

Presently the sound of the rumbling of the travelling carriage is heard in the distance. If his Majesty had not meant to call at the chÂteau, why choose this route? There were others. “This is Ferney!” says the coachman. “Whip up the horses!” cries the Emperor. And the imperial cortÈge dashes through Ferney, and past the windows of the expectant chÂteau itself, at a gallop. When it is added that his Majesty alighted at Versoix and examined that infant colony, and that when he reached Berne he paid a special visit to Voltaire’s great rival, Haller, it will be seen that he meant to offend.

It is to the credit of a plucky old heart that Voltaire quite refused to acknowledge himself snubbed, pointed out that he had always said his Majesty would not come, and that “my age and maladies prevented me from finding myself on his route.” But if he swallowed it with a smile, the pill was a bitter one not the less. “This disgrace” the poor old man called it, writing in confidence to his Angel. But the “disgrace,” if any, was not Voltaire’s, but the man’s who, privately confessing himself a philosopher, was afraid to visit Voltaire lest he should be openly accounted one, and offend an austere mother.

The Emperor’s neglected visit was the last mortification of the man who had had many, and had felt all with an extraordinary sensitiveness.

But, after all, “the end of all ambition is to be happy at home,” and Voltaire had many consolations.

The good, fat, Swiss servant, Barbara, was one. Voltaire was at last learning a little how to grow old, and now went to bed at ten and slept till five, when Baba would bring him his coffee. One day he took it into his head to mix some rose-water with it, as an experiment. The result was an acute indigestion. He rang the bell violently. Enter Baba. “I am in the agonies of death. I put some rose-water in my coffee and am dying of it.” “Sir,” says the indignant Baba, “with all your cleverness you are sillier than your own turkeys.”

But nearer and dearer than a Baba could be was Belle-et-Bonne. By this time she had become like the old man’s daughter. With rare tact she had succeeded in endearing herself to him without offending Madame Denis. She would arrange his papers for him, and keep the desk which hung over his bed, and “which he could lower or raise at pleasure,” in that order and neatness his soul loved.

“Good morning, belle nature,” he would say when she greeted him in the morning; and when she kissed his old parchment face would declare it was Life kissing Death. It was Belle-et-Bonne who could soothe his irritability or impatience—“You put me on good terms with life.”

And it was Voltaire of eighty-three who taught Mademoiselle Reine-Philiberte de Varicourt how to dance.

In the summer of this 1777 there arrived unexpectedly one day at Ferney a worn-out rouÉ of a Marquis de Villette, who had passed two or three months here in 1765, and with whom Voltaire had since corresponded. Rich, gallant, well born, a society versemaker, this “ne’er-do-weel of good company” was the sort of person who sounds attractive on paper, and in real life is wholly objectionable. Voltaire—Voltaire!—had tendered him moral advice and urged him to reform. He had known the young man’s mother—herself a woman of irregular morals—and from these two facts arose an entirely unfounded scandal, that Voltaire was Villette’s father.

He was soon to be a sort of father-in-law. Villette, now some forty years old, and having run away from an intrigue and a duel in Paris, met Belle-et-Bonne at Ferney; saw her walking in the procession of the fÊte of St. Francis (always kept enthusiastically by the colony of FranÇois Marie Arouet), with flowers at her breast, a basket with doves in it in her hand, and her face bright, beautiful, and blushing.

What was there to do but to fall in love with her? WagniÈre, who hated Villette, said that he played fast and loose with Mademoiselle for three months. However that may have been, Voltaire approved of his suit. To be sure, Belle-et-Bonne was too good for him. But she had no dot—if a pretty face, an innocent heart, youth, dignity, and intelligence count for nothing—so she would have no choice. And any husband is better than none—when none means a convent. Enfin, where to find a French marquis of stainless reputation in the eighteenth century? It was said that Voltaire had offered Villette a dot with his wife, and the disinterested Villette had refused it. And if that is not a sign of reformation—what is?

So in November, 1777, Mademoiselle de Varicourt was married in the Ferney chapel at midnight, with her six uncles preceding her up the aisle, and Papa Voltaire, in Catherine’s sable pelisse, to give her away.

The young couple spent the honeymoon at Ferney, and through it Voltaire was working at his last two plays, “IrÈne” and “Agathocle.”

It is marvellous, not so much that a man of eighty-three should write bad plays, as that he should write any.

No wonder that the new tragedy, “IrÈne,” went ill at first. And not so very wonderful that the old playwright should follow his immemorial habit and rewrite till it satisfied him. He lost three months over it. And, as he remarked most truly, “Time is precious at my age.”

So when “IrÈne” was impossible he turned to “Agathocle.”

Madame Denis’s easy tears and laughter over the two pieces were no sound criticism. Villette and Villevieille, then staying at Ferney, admired politely as visitors. The playwright, whose vanity has been excellently defined as “a gay and eager asking of assurance from others that his work gave them pleasure,” was delighted with the compliments. But he accepted correction in that spirit which showed that his vanity “never stood in the way of self-knowledge.”

“If I had committed a fault at a hundred,” he said, “I should want to correct it at a hundred-and-one.” So when Condorcet, more honest than the visitors, paid him the finer compliment of assuring him that such work as he had produced in “IrÈne” was not worthy of his genius, he took that assurance in excellent part; and though by January 2, 1778, “IrÈne” had been read and welcomed by the ComÉdie FranÇaise, he went on correcting and altering it to the end of the month.

He was spurred to do his best by the fact that Lekain declined to play the rÔle written for him. No letters could have been kinder, wiser, or more conciliatory than those his old host and friend wrote to the great player.

The part should be rewritten for him!

He was also spurred to do his best by the fact that “IrÈne” was to be the means, the excuse, the reason to take him to Paris.

Paris! The idea had been simmering long. Paris! It was twenty-eight years since he had left it, for a few months at the most. To be sure, he had been far happier at Ferney than in the riot and fever of that over-rated capital. In answer to those who talked about the stagnation of the country, and talked of it as if it were some narcotic trance which numbed brain and use, Voltaire could point to the best work of his life. Near him, bound to his heart by many cords, was the smiling cosmos of the industrial Ferney which he had drawn from the chaos of a barren and starving province. Here were his gardens and farms; the house he had built, and loved as one can only love the work of one’s own brain; the books and pictures he had collected; the thousand household gods from which the young part easily, but which the old regard with a personal affection.

Then, Ferney was safe. And in Paris—“Do you not know there are forty thousand fanatics who would bring forty thousand fagots to burn me? That would be my bed of honour.” If Louis XV. was dead, so was a friendly Pompadour. Choiseul and Madame Dubarry were banished.

Good Louis XVI. hated this infidel of a Voltaire, and was just shrewd enough in his dulness to fear him. It was Louis, still a king, who, asked what play should be performed at the theatre, replied, “Anything, so long as it is not Voltaire.” It was Louis Capet in the Temple who is reported to have said, pointing to the works of Rousseau and Voltaire in the library of the tower, “Those two men have lost France.”

The brilliant Queen, who had permitted M. de Voltaire to write her a divertissement and to steal Lekain, was something more favourable. But the Queen—extravagant and childless—was the most unpopular woman in France. In 1776, she had compassed the fall of Turgot, Voltaire’s friend, the hope of his country. In Paris, now, there was but one minister who was even tepidly favourable to the great recluse of Ferney, and that was Maurepas.

Altogether, the time seemed hardly ripe. But “if I want to commit a folly,” Voltaire had written to Chabanon in 1775, “nothing will prevent me.”

If a king had once been too strong for Voltaire, he may well have known now that he was stronger than any king. Besides, he had never been formally banished. “I do not wish Voltaire to return to France” was not an edict after all. Had he ever forgotten he was still Gentleman-in-Ordinary? And as for the danger to his person—seriously, what could be done to an old man of nearly eighty-four. Then, too, he needed a change. His health, though he was fond of repeating that he had as many mortal diseases as he had years, was quite good enough to permit him to take one.

Then there was “IrÈne,” which he could see put into rehearsal himself: and then—then—then—there was the domestic influence of all Ferney urging him to take the step, to make up his mind, to go back to glory, to honour, to life.

Madame Denis, of course, longed for Paris. Her sixty-eight years and a chest complaint had not cooled her zest for pleasure and admirers. And if you do not go, Uncle Voltaire, whether you are banished or no, three parts of Europe will think you are! She had long ago inspired Marie Dupuits with her own love of amusement. The Marquis de Villette was constitutionally even less able to endure the country than Mama Denis. He had the finest house in the capital, which had once been the BerniÈres’ house, where Voltaire had stayed as a young man, which stood at the corner of the Rue de Beaune on what is now the Quai Voltaire, opposite the Tuileries, and which is entirely at Papa Voltaire’s service! Put all these persuadings and persuaders together before a man already more than half inclined to go, and the result is easily foreseen.

On the evening of February 3, 1778, Madame Denis and the mÉnage Villette left Ferney to prepare the HÔtel Villette in Paris against the arrival of M. de Voltaire.

On February 5th, Voltaire himself, accompanied only by WagniÈre and a cook, set out in their travelling carriage. There was a painful farewell from the colonists. The poor people felt that their protector was leaving them for ever. It was in vain he promised them that he would be back in six weeks at the latest. That he really intended thus to return is partially proved by the fact that he did not even arrange his manuscripts and papers before leaving.

The first night was spent at Nantua.

At Bourg, where the horses were changed, Voltaire was recognised and had to escape from the crowd who surrounded him by locking himself up in a room in the post-house. Of course the innkeeper produced his best horses, and called out in his enthusiasm, “Drive fast! Kill the horses—I don’t care about them! You are carrying M. de Voltaire!”

The incognito Voltaire had resolved to maintain was already a thing of the past. He had begun to taste what are called the delights or the drawbacks of fame, according to the temperament of the speaker.

The second night was passed at Sanecey. On the third, at Dijon some of his adorers insisted on dressing up as waiters and waiting upon him at supper in order to get a good view of him. Others serenaded the poor man outside his bedroom window. In Dijon he made an appointment with a lawyer, and transacted some business.

The next stop was at Joigny. A spring of the carriage broke when they were near Moret, but Villette arrived to rescue them from that very common dilemma, and met them with his carriage, in which they pursued the journey.

The nearer they approached to the capital, the higher rose Voltaire’s spirits. He told stories with inimitable gaiety. “He seemed twenty.”

At half-past three on the afternoon of February 10th they reached Paris. When the custom-house officer inquired if they had anything against regulations, Voltaire replied that there was nothing contraband except himself. He grew more and more lively every moment. They had no sooner arrived at the HÔtel Villette than this gay young traveller must step round to the Quai d’Orsay to see the Comte d’Argental. Friends for sixty years, their friendship had been strong enough to bridge a gulf of separation which had lasted more than half their long lives. Madame d’Argental had died in the December of 1774. There was but one Angel now. He had taken wing too, for the moment, Voltaire found when he reached the house. But the old man was no sooner back in the HÔtel Villette than d’Argental arrived, and the two fell on each other’s necks. “I have left off dying to come and see you,” says Voltaire. But there was a shadow on their happiness. D’Argental brought bad news. Two days earlier, on February 8th, Lekain, whose first part had been Titus in Voltaire’s “Brutus,” played his last part in “AdÉlaÏde du Guesclin.” He died, in spite of all the skill of Tronchin. Voltaire “uttered a great cry.” Lekain had been his friend. Lekain was to have played in “IrÈne.”

Belle-et-Bonne tells how the two old men sat up late into the night discussing the additions Voltaire had made in that play.

But for it, but for the thousand distractions of this new world, the loud acclamations, the surging stream of visitors the moment brought, Voltaire might have mourned Lekain longer.

But he was back in Paris. When he left it, he was a power, a danger, a fear. He had returned to it a king, and awaited his crowning.