The accounts of the dying of Voltaire would fill a volume. Round this great deathbed were gathered persons who each had a different end to serve by differently describing it.

Villette wanted to prove himself the wise and unselfish friend; and Madame Denis must appear the tenderly devoted niece.

The AbbÉ Depery published an awful description of these last moments, which he declares he heard from Belle-et-Bonne. She was dead when he made the statement; and “it is easy to make the dead speak.” But if that fearful story had been true, this girl, who passionately loved her more than father and dedicated the remainder of her days to his memory, would hardly have repeated it. Lady Morgan, who saw her in Paris forty years later, declared that she spoke of the dying man’s peace, tranquillity, and resignation.

D’Alembert, Grimm, and Condorcet naturally wished to see a death, firm, consistent, and philosophic: and they saw it.

Dr. Tronchin, the sincere Christian, would fain have beheld a repentant sinner. Failing that, what could he see but the “frightful torment” of the wicked to whom Death is the King of Terrors, “the furies of Orestes,” the sÆva indignatio of Swift?

Gaultier naturally did not wish to own that he had missed so illustrious a conversion. He did not own it: he said the convert’s mind was wandering.

But, after all, it matters not how one dies, but how one has lived. Death-bed utterances, even if truly reported, are to be attributed less to the illumined soul than to the diseased body. If at last the horrors of the Great Change and the awful prospect of the unknown Eternity overwhelmed this unbeliever, as at such an hour they have overwhelmed many sincere Christians, that fact is no confession that Voltaire gave the lie to the convictions of his life.

For more than sixty years they had been those not of a man in the careless vigour of health, or of a thoughtless profligate, or of an indifferent, but of one who had always known his tenure of life to be frail; who had realised the consolations of the religion he could not believe, and yearned for that faith he could never have.

If, at the last, his priestly counsellors did succeed in terrifying the old dying mind, enfeebled by the dying body, by their threats of Judgment and Eternity, what use to his soul, or the cause of their Christianity?

It is the eighty-four years of vigorous life and passionate utterance that count before God and man, and not the dying minutes.

Out of lies innumerable, then—some witnesses took their testimony of the death-bed of Voltaire from the cook of the HÔtel Villette—the following account has been sifted.

On some day, which was either May 12th or shortly after it, the old man met Madame Denis and Madame Saint-Julien when he was out walking.

He said he was ill and going to bed. Two hours later his good Butterfly came to see him. She found him very feverish, and begged that Tronchin might be sent for.

Madame Denis, remembering the Doctor’s counsels, declined to summon him.

The patient grew worse. Villette sent for a local apothecary, who came with medicine which the sick man was at first too wise to take. But he was ill and old, and Madame Denis was naggingly persistent. He took, not enough said Madame Denis; too much said Madame Saint-Julien, who tasted it. Anyhow, he grew worse. That evening old Richelieu came to see him and recommended a remedy—laudanum—which he had himself been in the habit of taking for the gout.

With the night the patient’s sufferings increased. He sent for the laudanum.

Madame Saint-Julien and a relative (most likely d’Hornoy), who were there when it came, implored caution. The audacious ignorance of Madame Denis had no fears.

WagniÈre, who of course was not present, declares that his master characteristically seized the remedy and took too much, too often. D’Alembert—the notoriously truthful—says that he never took any: the bottle was broken. However that may be, he grew alarmingly worse.

At last Dr. Tronchin was called. But the patient was already past human aid. Suffering agonies from his internal disease, a fearful and most exhausting nausea, all the torments of ruined nerves and exhausted brain and unable to eat or sleep, the old man could still turn to the good physician and apologise to him for the liberty he had taken with his dying body. Tronchin had been right! He should have gone back to Ferney.

Often and often he called for WagniÈre. By his side, always one may hope, was the good and gentle woman he had married to Villette. Constantly in and out of the sick room were a motley crowd—Madame Denis, AbbÉ Mignot, d’Hornoy, Lorry, Villette himself, besides Tronchin and a servant, Morand.

On May 16th the poor old man revived a little. To this day belong the last verses of the easiest and most limpid verse-writer of all time. They were written in reply to some lines of the AbbÉ Attaignant, and appeared in the “Journal de Paris.” To them the dying writer added a few piteous words in prose. “I can do no more, Monsieur.... The mind is too much affected by the torments of the body.”

On May 25th, d’Hornoy wrote to WagniÈre urging his instant return. The patient was kept alive only by spoonfuls of jelly; and his exhaustion and feebleness were terrible.

By the next day the watchers had abandoned all hope. He revived, indeed, to hear the news of the vindication of Lally. That would have roused him from the dead. He dictated his last letter. For the moment, joy made mind triumph over matter, as it had done with this man all his life long. But his doctors could not be deceived. He was dying.

One of them was watching anxiously now for the signs of that repentance he longed for. “Religious toleration, the most difficult conquest to wring from the prejudices and passions of men,” Voltaire had not been able to wring from one of the best friends he ever had. Tronchin wrote bitterly of this death-bed. In his zeal for some proof, some confession of the fallacy of that stern creed of negation, since called Voltairism, the great Doctor almost forgot his compassion and his friendship.

D’Alembert records that on May 28th Mignot went to fetch de Tersac.

De Tersac replied to the effect that it was no use visiting a man whose reason was already dimmed, but that unless he made a far fuller and more orthodox profession of faith than he had yet made, he would not accord him Christian burial.

Mignot, himself a personage, a member of the Grand Council and the head of an abbey, threatened to apply to the Parliament for justice. De Tersac replied that he could do as he pleased.

For two days more, Voltaire lingered—sometimes quite unconscious, but sometimes wholly sensible. On the morning of Saturday, May 30th, Gaultier again wrote to him offering his services.

At six o’clock in the evening of that day, Mignot fetched Gaultier and de Tersac.

D’Alembert told Frederick the Great that de Tersac approached Voltaire, saying loudly, “Jesus Christ!” and that Voltaire, rousing a little from his stupor, made a motion with his hand—“Let me die in peace.”

Grimm and La Harpe tell the same story with unimportant variations. It may be true. “Spare me three things,” said Madame du Deffand on her death-bed—perhaps remembering Voltaire’s—“Let me have no question, no arguments, and no sermons.”

Saint-Sulpice thought, or said that he thought, Voltaire too ill to make a confession. The persons about the bed took no pains to contradict him.

At nine o’clock in the evening the priests left. For three hours Voltaire was dying—calmly and peacefully, say some; in “all the terrors of the damned,” say others. But the truth, none knows.

Ten minutes before he died he took Morand’s hand. “Farewell, my dear Morand. I am dying.” He never spoke again.

At a quarter-past eleven on the evening of Saturday, May 30, 1778, in the eighty-fourth year of his age, died FranÇois Marie Arouet de Voltaire.

His relatives had concealed the dangerous nature of his illness from the world. Madame Denis had written, even to WagniÈre, and as late as May 26th, a letter of pretended hopefulness. King, priests, and prejudice were strong. Mignot and d’Hornoy knew well that it would be necessary to act cautiously, and to act at once. They had been professionally advised not to contest at law the question of burial.

From de Tersac they obtained a formal consent in writing that the body of Voltaire might be removed without ceremony. “I relinquish to that end all parochial rights.”

Gaultier declared, also in writing, that he had been to Voltaire at his request, and found him “not in a state to be heard in confession.”

On the night of May 30th the body was embalmed. The heart was taken out and given by Madame Denis to Villette.

Early in the morning of Sunday, May 31st, Mignot, taking with him the two priests’ declarations and Voltaire’s confession of faith made a few weeks before, left Paris in a post-chaise for his Abbey of ScelliÈres, at Romilly-on-Seine, in Champagne, one hundred and ten miles from Paris.

On the same evening, when the capital was dark and the streets deserted, two other carriages left the HÔtel Villette. In one was the body of the dead man, dressed, and lying on the seat like a sleeping traveller. A servant was also in the carriage. In the next came d’Hornoy and two distant cousins of Voltaire, who, after Mignot, were his nearest male relatives. This dreadful cortÈge “stopped at no inn, alighted at no post-house.”

At midday on June 1st it reached ScelliÈres. The AbbÉ Mignot had obtained, on the strength of the clerical certificates and Voltaire’s written profession of faith, the consent of his prior that the great man should be buried there.

At three o’clock in the afternoon the body was laid in the choir, and vespers for the dead were sung over it. It remained there all night, surrounded by torches.

Early the next morning, June 2d, before many of the assembled clergy of the district whom the prior had summoned, Voltaire was buried with full rites and the honourable and decent burial he had desired.

Only a small stone marked his resting-place, with the bald inscription “Here lies Voltaire.”

After all, he needed no epitaphs. He had avenged the oppressed and enlightened the ignorant.

On June 3d, the bishop of the diocese sent a mandate forbidding the burial. It was too late. On that day Mignot and the other relatives returned to Paris.

The city had heard of Voltaire’s death by now: the devout with exultation, the philosophers with profound grief. The authorities had, indeed, forbidden the newspapers to publish any obituary notice of Voltaire or even to mention his decease. At the theatre no piece written by him was to be played for twenty-one days. The Academy was forbidden to hold the service at the Cordeliers customary on the death of a member.

But these restrictions of a petty tyranny had the effect of all such restrictions—the exact opposite to what was intended.

The heart of Paris would have throbbed the quicker for a Voltaire’s death in any case. But for those prohibitions it throbbed with indignation too.

“You are right, Saint-Sulpice,” said one of many bitter epigrams the occasion produced. “Why bury him?... Refuse a tomb, but not an altar.”

In this June following his death, his will, made at Ferney in September, 1776, was proved. Terse, lucid, and able, it is characteristic of the man who wrote it. Voltaire appointed Madame Denis his residuary legatee. To Mignot and d’Hornoy he left one hundred thousand francs each; to WagniÈre, eight thousand livres; to Madame WagniÈre and Bonne-Baba, his clothes, and to Bonne-Baba eight hundred livres as well. Each servant was to have a year’s wages. To Rieu, that ex-American officer, were left such English books from the library as he might choose: to the poor of the parish of Ferney—“if there are any poor”—three hundred livres; and to the curÉ a diamond, five hundred livres in value. Voltaire also appointed fifteen hundred francs to be given to the lawyer who was to help Madame Denis in the execution of his will.

It will be observed that the legacies to the servants, and particularly to faithful WagniÈre, were very small. Hoping against the knowledge he had of her character, Voltaire had supposed that Madame Denis would continue his generosity towards them. WagniÈre, true to his master’s person and honour in life, was true to his memory after death. He uttered not a word of complaint.

In the August of 1778, d’Alembert chose Voltaire as the subject for the prize poem of the Academy; and until his own death, five years later, never ceased to work for the posthumous glory of the man he had loved.

The once false La Harpe also eulogised Voltaire, and wrote a play in his honour; and the scholarly Condorcet wrote his Life.

But it was not Paris alone which did homage to this greatness. If ever man had been a citizen of the world, Voltaire had been.

On November 26, 1778, Frederick the Great, now President of his own Academy, read to it Voltaire’s Eulogium. It is a most generous testimony to the character of that brilliant, irritable, and delightful child of genius whom the great King had so hotly loved and loathed. As an appreciation of his works, it is worthless. Frederick the Great was no literary critic. But it poured burning contempt on the “imbecile priests” of Paris who had refused such a man the last offices of the dead, and not all the authorities in the world could keep it out of their capital.

In the May of the following year, to shame those “imbecile priests” the deeper, although he had, as he put it, no idea of the immortality of the soul himself, Frederick had a mass for Voltaire’s said in the Roman church at Berlin. A little later the faithful and persevering d’Alembert proposed that that King should erect a statue to his friend in that same church. Frederick did not see his way to this. He had in his own possession a finer monument to Voltaire’s greatness—a part of that correspondence which is one of Arouet’s “surest titles to immortality” and contains at once “the history of Voltaire intime and of the eighteenth century.”

No one had mourned Voltaire more passionately than the other great sovereign, Catherine. “Since he is dead, wit has lost its honour; he was the divinity of gaiety.” To her, he had been much more than that. He had “formed her mind and her head.”

He had left his library, except its English books, with his other effects, to Madame Denis. In the December of 1778, Catherine completed the purchase of those 6,210 volumes with their copious marginal notes, with manuscripts, original letters, and papers concerning the trials in which Voltaire had been engaged. Some months later she sent for WagniÈre to arrange them. When he had finished his work, she came to look at it. Bowing before Voltaire’s statue she said, “There is the man to whom I owe all I know and all I am.” Hearing that WagniÈre was poorly provided for, she magnificently gave him a pension for life. He visited Frederick, and returned to live and die at Ferney. One of Voltaire’s editors, passing through that village in 1825, found the secretary’s son still living there—a Justice of the Peace.

To get rid of her uncle’s library was for Madame Denis but to free herself of one useless encumbrance. There was another. What was the use of Ferney to such a woman? Ice and snow, weavers and watchmakers, country, retirement, solitude—she hated them all. Her uncle’s poor people had never been anything to her—except when they fÊted and made much of her on a birthday. Return to them? Never. She sold Ferney to Villette. To the indignation of her relations and of the whole Academy—particularly d’Alembert, who was as jealous for dead Voltaire’s honour as a mother for her daughter’s good name—she insisted on marrying her Duvivier. It is a little satisfactory to learn that that dull person (in society he was popularly known as the Extinguisher) avenged Voltaire by bullying the woman who had bullied him.

Madame Denis never had any interest but as the niece of her uncle. With his death she fades into the commonplace obscurity for which she was made.

The Villettes retired to Ferney. In her old home, when her husband had once more forgotten the fatal attractions of the capital, he and Belle-et-Bonne lived not unhappily. But the weaving and watchmaking industry declined. The pilot was no longer at the helm. The strong hand and all-directing brain which had turned starving idleness to affluent industry, and established trade on a sound business basis, were no longer there to hold and supervise. Ferney fell back into the nothingness from which a master-mind had drawn it.

Presently Villette became heavily inculpated in the famous GuÉmÉnÉe bankruptcy for thirty-three millions. He sold Ferney, where he had retained Voltaire’s rooms as they had been at the time of his death, and where, a cherished possession, he had kept the dead man’s heart enclosed in a silver vase. Husband and wife came up to Paris and lived in the HÔtel Villette, where Belle-et-Bonne continued the tender charities which were the solace of her life, and surrounded herself with relics and mementoes of her dead Voltaire.

In March, 1779, M. Ducis was installed in Voltaire’s vacant chair in the French Academy. According to custom, he read the Eulogy of his predecessor. The time for official prohibitions was past. No government had been able to prevent the Hermit of Ferney being known to the whole world as “the great Voltaire” for many years before his death. He was the great Voltaire still. Grimm declares that no meeting of the Academy ever attracted such crowds. When some clerical member dared to suggest that all expressions contrary to religion and morals should be erased by some friendly hand from Voltaire’s works, he was hissed and groaned into silence.

On the first anniversary of his death, “Agathocle,” his last tragedy, still incomplete, was performed in Paris, with a prologue by d’Alembert.

A complete edition of Voltaire’s works appeared in 1780.

In 1784 there were secretly circulating in Paris the “Memoirs for the Life of Voltaire,” written by himself in 1759 and revenging himself on Frederick for Freytag and Frankfort with the most cool and deadly spite. The man who wrote them, in that perfectly easy and limpid French of which he was always master even when he was by no means master of himself, had never intended them to be published. He burnt the original manuscript; but he had two copies made. It will not be forgotten that La Harpe and Madame Denis were dismissed from Ferney for having stolen one of them. One became the property of Catherine the Great. The other, Madame Denis, remembering that “wearisome niece” and the “Golden Lion,” sent in 1783 to Beaumarchais, then editing Voltaire’s works. He did not dare to include the “Memoirs” therein, in Frederick’s lifetime. But they were passed from hand to hand in Paris, and it was doubtless well for Voltaire’s fame that Frederick had already eulogised him and said masses for the peace of his soul. The “Memoirs” are now always included in Voltaire’s works. It is not, all things considered, wholly his fault that many people, ignorant of the circumstances under which it was drawn, have assumed the malicious caricature of Frederick therein contained to be a faithful portrait.

For thirteen years the body of him “who against monks had never rested, among monks rested peacefully” enough. The Revolution he foresaw had come, though not as he had foreseen it.

His ideal of government had been a purified and constitutional monarchy, but always a monarchy. “My muscles are not very flexible: I do not mind making one bow, but a hundred on end would fatigue me.” By 1790 Louis XVI. was a king only in name. In that year the Abbey of ScelliÈres, with all other religious houses, became the property of the nation. Villette had not merely fallen in with the views of the Revolution. They had been his when such convictions were dangerous and awkward, and he never forgot that Prophet of Revolution, Voltaire. It was through Villette that the Quai de ThÉatins, on which the HÔtel Villette stood, was renamed the Quai Voltaire.

In November, 1790, after a performance of “Brutus,” Charles Villette, ex-Marquis, harangued the audience and passionately pleaded, “in the name of the country,” that the remains of Voltaire might be brought to Paris and honourably buried. “This translation will be the dying sigh of fanaticism.” The idea pleased a people agog for excitement and drunk with the first deep draughts of a liberty which for centuries they had not been allowed even to taste.

On June 1, 1791, the National Assembly made Louis XVI. sign the decree which ordained that the ashes of his great enemy should be transferred from the church of Romilly to that of Sainte-GeneviÈve in Paris—Sainte-GeneviÈve, which was henceforth to be called the Pantheon of France.

On July 6th, a funeral car, decked with laurels and oak leaves, drawn by four horses and escorted by a detachment of the National Guard, left Romilly-on-Seine and began its solemn triumphal progress to Paris. On the front of the car was written, “To the memory of Voltaire.” On one side, “If man is born free, he ought to govern himself”; on the other, “If man has tyrants, he ought to dethrone them.”

As it passed through the villages, the villagers came out to greet it with wreaths of flowers and laurels in their hands. Mothers held up their babies that they too might say that they had seen this great day; old men pressed forward to touch and be healed. At night the villages through which the procession passed were illuminated; by day could be seen triumphal arches, girls dressed in white, and garlands of flowers. Out of their ignorance and wretchedness, this canaille recognised him who had wept and clamoured for the rights of all men and made freedom a possibility even for them.

At nightfall on July 10th, the cortÈge reached Paris. The sarcophagus was placed on an altar on the ruins of that tower of the Bastille in which Voltaire had been twice a prisoner.

On the altar was the inscription, “On this spot, where despotism chained thee, receive the homage of a free people.”

All Sunday night the sarcophagus remained there. At three o’clock on the sunny afternoon of Monday, July 11th, it was placed on a car designed by David, and drawn through Paris, escorted by an enormous company, organised, orderly, and representing every rank and condition. Here were the men who had demolished the Bastille, carrying its flag, and in their midst that terrible virago who had led them in the fray. Here were citizens with pikes, Swiss, Jacobins, actors, and bodies of soldiers. Some carried banners with devices from the dead man’s writings. Some, dressed in Greek costume, carried a gilt model of the famous statue by Houdon. Among the self-constituted guard were many who, not a month before, had brought back that other King to his capital—from Varennes—with howls, insults, and imprecations.

Singers and music preceded the car itself. Supported on four great wheels of bronze, it looked like a magnificent altar. On the summit was the sarcophagus, and on that a full-length figure of Voltaire reclining in an attitude of sleep and with a winged Immortality placing a crown of stars on his head. On the sarcophagus was written, in words of noble simplicity, “He avenged Calas, La Barre, Sirven, and Montbailli. Poet, philosopher, historian, he gave a great impetus to the human mind: he prepared us to become free.” The whole structure, forty feet high, was drawn by twelve white horses, two of which, it is said, had been furnished by Marie Antoinette. On the car were such inscriptions as—“He defended Calas.” “He inspired toleration.” “He claimed the rights of men.”

Behind it walked Belle-et-Bonne and her husband, with their little girl in her nurse’s arms. Then came deputations from the National Assembly and the Courts of Justice, and then another detachment of military.

The procession itself consisted of a hundred thousand persons. Six hundred thousand more witnessed it.

It first stopped at the Opera House. The operatic company came forward and sang that song in Voltaire’s “Samson” which became, with the “Marseillaise,” the song of the Revolution—

After the Opera House, the Tuileries was passed. Every window was filled with spectators, save one. Behind that, closed and barred, sat the most unhappy of monarchs, Louis and Marie Antoinette, awaiting doom.

The next stop was in front of the HÔtel Villette. Upon a platform outside it were fifty young girls dressed in white, and before them the two daughters of Calas in deep mourning. They kissed the sarcophagus of “the man of Calas”; and Belle-et-Bonne lifted up her child as if “to consecrate her to reason, to philosophy, and to liberty.”

The next stop was at the old ComÉdie FranÇaise—the scene of Voltaire’s earliest dramatic triumphs, and where now was his bust with the inscription, “He wrote ‘Œdipe’ at seventeen.”

At the ThÉÂtre FranÇais, become the Theatre of the Nation, were garlands and music and the inscription, “He wrote ‘IrÈne’ at eighty-four.” And once more a chorus sang the spirited song out of “Samson.”

At last, at ten o’clock at night and in a drizzling rain, the Pantheon was reached.

The sarcophagus was lifted into the place designed for it—near the tombs of Descartes and Mirabeau.

The history of Voltaire after death could be elaborated into a volume. But, after all, it throws no light on his life and character, only on those of the friends who loved him, the enemies who hated him, and the mob who went mad over him.

When it is considered that to the excesses of that mob he would have been passionately opposed, and that the only Revolution he desired was gradual, temperate, and unbloody, it may well be doubted if, had he lived till 1791, his last journey would not have been, like that of many other patriots, to a very different accompaniment and a very different destination.

For a while he was allowed to rest in that quiet and honoured grave.

But 1814 saw the restoration of those Bourbons whose hatred for him was hereditary.

With the connivance of the ministry, the tombs of both Voltaire and Rousseau were violated, their bones removed in a sack at night to a waste place outside the city, and emptied into a pit filled with quicklime. That long-dreaded fate—“thrown into the gutter like poor Lecouvreur”—was Voltaire’s after all.

But those dishonoured ashes and that unhallowed burial keep his memory more vividly alive than the marble tomb of a Pantheon.

The violation was discovered in 1864, when, the Villette family becoming extinct, Voltaire’s heart became the property of the nation.

It was decided to place it with his ashes in the Pantheon. But the tomb was empty.

The Marquis de Villette died in 1793, thereby escaping the guillotine, to which he had been condemned for refusing to vote for the death of the King. Belle-et-Bonne, a widow at thirty-six, consecrated her life to Voltaire’s memory.

In 1878, his centenary was celebrated with the warmest enthusiasm by the most fickle capital in the world.

Victor Hugo eulogised Voltaire with much emotion and applause, and fervent words which mean nothing in particular. But the fact that the Fighter had been dead a century did not prevent him from being still a cause of strife. Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, hotly attacked the infidel and demanded an injunction against a new edition of his works, which was refused.

This was the last famous assault on the Great Assaulter. France, perhaps even Catholic France, recognises in some sort the debt she owes to Voltaire. Is not the enemy who shows a nation her weak points, forces her to look to her ships and her armaments, to remedy abuses in her organisation, and feebleness, viciousness, and incompetency in her servants, something very like a friend in disguise?

It may be truly said that Voltaire did good to Roman Catholicism by attacking much that degraded it; by hooting out of it the superstition and tyranny which have made some of the noblest souls on earth decline it; and by forcing its children to give a reason for the faith that was in them.

Then, too, if the Church of Rome could withstand that deadly, breathless, and brilliant onslaught called Voltairism, she may well point triumphantly to the fulfilment of that ancient prophecy and consolation, “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

To the Church in France it may be acknowledged that Voltaire was not wholly an evil, while to her country he was a great glory.

In England there is still against him a prejudice, which, said Buckle, nothing but ignorance can excuse. To the ordinary Briton Voltaire is only a very profane scoffer who made some rather amusing and very doubtful jokes.

Yet this was he who, as Frederick the Great said, was extraordinary in everything. Here was the man who was poet, playwright, novelist, letter-writer, historian, critic, philosopher, theologian, socialist, philanthropist, agriculturist, humorist, reformer, wit, and man of the world.

England has no counterpart for him. But then neither has France, nor any other country. Think of the great names of earthly fame. Of which can it be said—with even approximate truth—“Here is another Voltaire?”

As a poet, he was the king of those society verses which he modestly said himself “are good for nothing but society and only for the moment for which they are written.”

But such as they are—madrigal, epigram, epitaph, the gracefullest flattery in four lines, and the daintiest malice in a couplet—if Voltaire had written nothing else, his supremacy in these alone would have given him a perpetual place in the literature of his country.

His longer and graver poems are immortal for what he said, not for how he said it.

As a playwright, his tragedies were the most famous of his age. Ours applies to them those fatal adjectives—fluent, elegant, correct. Without any of the indomitable life and swing which characterise almost all his other works, they were perfectly suited to that exceedingly bad public taste which preferred smoothness before vigour, and a careful consideration of the unities to the genius of a Shakespeare.

Voltaire’s comedies are only sprightly and fluent.

As a historian, whether in prose or verse, he is celebrated for his broad and comprehensive views, his enormous general knowledge (for his time), “the vehemence and sincerity of his abhorrence of the military spirit,” his savage hatred of the religious culte, and his inimitably interesting and vivacious style. Until his day the learned rarely had wit and the witty rarely had learning. Voltaire set an example which has been singularly little followed: he made facts more amusing than fiction.

His fiction indeed is, with the multitude, one of his chief titles to fame. But all his fiction, rhyming or prose, was to teach fact; though his heart was so perfect that the facts never spoilt the fancy. He was the pioneer in France of the short story, the conte. There may be traced, in a slight degree, the influence of Swift. But Voltaire’s satire is gayer, brighter, and cleaner than the great Dean’s.

Voltaire is the first letter-writer in the world. He was himself interested in everything, and so interesting to everybody.

His letters contain not only his own best biography, and not only the literary history of the eighteenth century. They touch on all contemporary history—social, religious, scientific, political. They are at once the wittiest and the most natural extant. He wrote with that liquid ease with which a bird shakes out his song. His French is at one and the same time the most perfect French for the Frenchman and the stylist, and the simplest for the foreigner to understand.

Besides his letters, with their easy grace and wealth of world-wide knowledge, Horace Walpole’s are but the gossip of a clique; Madame de SÉvignÉ’s the chit-chat of a boudoir; Lady Wortley Montagu’s coarse and clumsy; and Pope’s stilted and artificial. They are also comparatively free from the indecency which mars many other of Voltaire’s writings and almost all the correspondence of his age. His letters remain (as early as 1872 there were seven thousand of them in print, and Beuchot thought at least as many more undiscovered) an almost inexhaustible gold mine of literary delight, and a most liberal education.

As a blasphemous mocker at some of the most sacred convictions of their souls, Voltaire has been naturally, when he touches on religion, anathema not only to Roman Catholics, but to all Christians. The liberal-minded will be ready to own that to attack a system he not only believed to be false but actively harmful, was well within his rights. It is his method which inspires just indignation. A profoundly serious subject has a right to profoundly serious treatment. But, after all, Voltaire’s gibes and laugh turn against himself. Who believes a scoffer? If he had not jeered at the creed of Christendom, he would have made more converts to the creed of Voltaire.

What was his creed? It had only one article. “I believe in God.” In that belief “one finds difficulties; in the belief that there is no God, absurdities.” “The wise man attributes to God no human affections. He recognises a power necessary, eternal, which animates all Nature; and is resigned.”

As for the immortality of the soul, it seems, contrary to the opinion of many of his biographers, that Voltaire rather longed to believe in it, than that he did so. “But your soul, Sir—your soul? What idea have you of it? From whence does it come? Where is it? What is it? What does it do? How does it act? Where does it go? I know nothing about it and I have never seen it.” “For sixty years I have tried to discover what the soul is, and I still know nothing.”

His practical scheme of religion he expressed himself. “To worship God; to leave each man the liberty to serve Him in his own fashion; to love one’s neighbours; enlighten them if one can, pity them when they are in error; to attach no importance to trivial questions which would never have given trouble if no seriousness had been imputed to them. That is my religion, which is worth all your systems and all your symbols.”

The stumbling-blocks he found in the road to Christianity—that is to Roman Catholicism, the only form of Christianity to which he addressed himself—were twofold. The mental stumbling-block was miracle; and the moral, the lives of the believers. He considered the second to be the natural fruit of the first: that the Christian belief must be destroyed to destroy the wickedness, darkness, cruelty, and tyranny he found in Christian lives; that men “will not cease to be persecutors till they have ceased to be absurd.”

It should be remembered—it is not often remembered—that, in the words of Morley, “there is no case of Voltaire mocking at any set of men who lived good lives,” and that “the Christianity he assailed was not that of the Sermon on the Mount.”

Regarding the problems of the future life, of future awards, punishments, and compensations, and the manifold mysteries of this world, he was, broadly speaking, an Agnostic.

“Behold, I know not anything.”

But Voltaire’s real claim to eternal remembrance is far less how he thought or what he wrote, than what his writings did.

Some of them are obsolete to-day because they so perfectly accomplished their aim. Who wants to read now passionate arguments against torture, and scathing satires on a jurisdiction which openly accepted hearsay as evidence?

In his own day those writings produced many practical reforms, and paved the way to many more. Through them, he was himself enabled to be a philanthropist in an age when the prosperous elder brothers of the world looked up to God from stricken Abel with that scornful question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Through them, he saved innocent lives and restored stolen honour.

But his Ferney, his Lally, Calas, Sirven, La Barre, were only types of his work for all the race.

He found the earth overspread with hideous under-growths of oppression and privilege, intolerance and cruelty; and he destroyed them.

He found the good land covered with abuses in Church and State and every social order; abuses political, personal; of the rights of the living, and the decent respect owed to the dead—and he uprooted them. With a laugh and blasphemy on his lips, but with eyes and soul afire and the nervous tireless hands trembling with eagerness, the most dauntless, passionate, dogged little worker in all human history hewed and hacked at the monstrous tyrannies of centuries, and flung them, dead, from the fair and beautiful soil they had usurped.

At last, after sixty years of superhuman effort, he had cleared the place and made it ready for the planting of the Tree of Liberty.

Whoso sits under that tree to-day in any country, free to worship his God as he will, to think, to learn, and to do all that does not intrench on the freedom of his fellow-men—free to progress to heights of light and knowledge as yet unseen and undreamt—should in gratitude remember Voltaire.