Ferney, as has been said, stood on the north shore of Lake Leman, in the district of Gex, three and a half miles from Geneva and almost joining DÉlices. The village to which it belonged, also called Ferney, was really nothing but a mean hamlet with forty or fifty miserable inhabitants, “devoured by poverty, scurvy, and tax-gatherers.” A very ugly little church stood much too near the house.

That house, when Voltaire bought it, was very old, tumbledown, and totally inadequate to his requirements. The entrance was through two towers connected by a drawbridge. If it was picturesque, it was certainly not comfortable. When Voltaire had rebuilt it, it was certainly comfortable, and decidedly unpicturesque.

He had begun that rebuilding three months before the deed of purchase was signed. By December 6, 1758, he had twenty masons at work. By the 24th, what he might well have cynically called his optimism led him to think it “a pretty house enough.” By June, 1759, it was “a charming chÂteau in the Italian style.”

By July it was “of the Doric order. It will last a thousand years.”

By November it was “a piece of architecture which would have admirers even in Italy.” While by the March of 1761 it had grown—at any rate in its master’s fancy—into “a superb chÂteau.”

There have not been wanting to Voltaire enemies to argue persistently and vociferously that Ferney was not at all what he represented it; and that all his geese were swans. They were. Ferney at its best and completest was never anything but a plain, sensible, commodious country house. It had neither wings nor decoration; not any architectural merit, except that its ugliness was simple and not elaborate. Voltaire was his own architect; and owned quite frankly that he knew nothing at all about architecture. The man who had travelled through Holland, Belgium, and Prussia without once stepping out of his post-chaise to look at a famous picture, or an immortal sculpture, or the “frozen music” of a grand cathedral, had as little feeling for art as for Nature.

He thought Ferney a superb chÂteau because it was his chÂteau. Just as he was devoted to flowers and gardens, when they were his flowers and his gardens.

It is certainly not the best way of loving art or Nature, but it is the only way of many persons besides Voltaire. And, after all, that comfortable feeling of landed proprietorship, that honest pride in his cows and his sheep, his bees and his silkworms, sits pleasantly enough on this withered cynic of sixty-five; and makes him at once more human, more sympathetic—the same flesh and blood as the simple and ordinary.

He had, as he said, plenty of wood and stone for his building operations on the premises—“oak enough to be useful to our navy, if we had one”; and stone, which the architect thought very good, and which turned out to be very bad. He said gaily that when the house was finished he should write on the wall “Voltaire fecit”; and that posterity would take him for a famous architect. As for that marble of which he had talked largely as being brought up by the lake, the man who declared that he preferred a good English book to a hundred thousand pillars of it, did not trouble to obtain much or to make an elaborate use of what he did obtain. He wanted the house “agreeable and useful,” and he had it. There was a fine view from it; though not so fine as it might have been, for it faced the high road. Still, as its happy master said, it was situated in the most smiling country in Europe; at its feet the lake gleamed and sparkled; and beyond the warm and gorgeous luxuriance of its perfect gardens could be seen, in dazzling contrast, the eternal snows of Mont Blanc.

When the rebuilding was finished the house was, looked at without prejudice, the well-appointed home of a well-to-do bourgeois gentilhomme—with an unusual love for literature. There was an ordinary hall with a stone staircase on the left which led up to the fourteen guest-rooms, all comfortably furnished, said one of those guests, who was an Englishman and had been used to solid English comfort at home. Here and there were some good pictures—or copies of good pictures—copies, most likely, since Voltaire, hardly knowing the difference, would be apt to reflect that a copy would do as well as an original, and be much cheaper. A Venus after Paul Veronese and a Flora after Guido Reni, some of the visitors declared genuine; and some as hotly pronounced spurious. WagniÈre, that Genevan boy who lived to write memoirs like the other secretaries, stated that his master had about twenty valuable pictures in all; and some good busts. There were various family portraits about the house: one of Madame Denis; one of Voltaire’s young mother; and, soon, a likeness of Madame de Pompadour painted by herself, and by herself given to Voltaire. In Madame Denis’s room presently there was a portrait of Catherine, Empress of Russia, embroidered in silk; and a marble statue of Voltaire. There was a copy of this statue, or his bust in plaster, in almost every room in the house.

The library was simple, and, for Voltaire, small. Dr. Burney, the father of Fanny, who saw it in 1770, describes it as “not very large but well filled,” and says it contained “a whole-length figure in marble” of its master “recumbent, in one of the windows.” At Voltaire’s death it contained only 6,210 volumes. But almost every one had on its margin copious notes in that fine, neat little handwriting. Six thousand volumes annotated by a Voltaire! His sarcasm should have made the dullest ones amusing; and his relentless logic the obscurest ones clear. There were a great many volumes of history and theology; dictionaries in every language; all the Italian poets; and all the English philosophers. The Comte de Maistre, who saw this library after Voltaire’s death when it had been bought by Catherine the Great, wondered at the “extreme mediocrity” of the books. By this he explained himself to mean that there were no rare old editions and no sumptuous bindings, which the Count took as a sign that Voltaire was “a stranger to all profound literature.” It was a sign that Voltaire read to act; that books were his tools, not his ornaments; that he loved literature, not as a sensuous delight, but as the lever that was to turn the world. “A few books, very much marked.” That library was infinitely characteristic of the man who was doer, not dreamer; of the mind to which every poet, every philosopher, every scientist acted as a spur to new practical effort; of the man who was to go down the ages not as playwright, or verse-maker, but as he who “conquered the intellect of France, for the Revolution.”

The salle À manger was distinguished only by a most extraordinary and very bad allegorical picture, called “The Temple of Memory,” in which a Glory, with her hair dressed much À la mode, was presenting Voltaire (who was surrounded with a halo like a saint) to the God of Poetry who was getting out of his chariot with a crown in his hand. On one side of the picture appeared busts of Euripides, Sophocles, Racine, Corneille, and other great men; on the opposite side were caricatures of FrÉron and Desfontaines, who were being most satisfactorily kicked by Furies. Voltaire laughed at, and enjoyed immensely, this part of the picture while he was at meals. The artist was Alix, a native of Ferney, and soon an habituÉ at the chÂteau. It was fortunate for him that Voltaire was so much better a friend than he was a judge of art.

His bedroom and salon were both small rooms. The salon, entered by folding doors, contained the master’s bust above the stove, six or seven pictures, “more or less good,” a portrait of Madame du ChÂtelet, and casts of Newton and Locke. One of the pictures, after Boucher, represented a hunting scene. There were ten tapestry armchairs, and a table of very common varnished marble. French windows and a glass door led into the garden.

Voltaire’s bedroom was principally distinguished by a neatness, cleanness, and simplicity natural to him, but very unusual in his day. The roughly carved deal bedstead one visitor regretfully regarded as “almost mean.” It was the fashion then to spend the night in what looked like a large heavily curtained coffin. Voltaire—to the melancholy vexation of the fashionable—seems to have dispensed with most of the curtains, but could not escape a huge baldachino over his head. Inside it, hung a very bad pastel portrait of Lekain; and a candelabra containing three wax candles, so that he could see to read. On either side of the bed hung portraits of Frederick the Great, of Voltaire himself, and of Madame du ChÂtelet. Placed between the door and the only window were five or six other engraved portraits, all in very simple black frames. The bed hangings and the four armchairs were upholstered alike in pale blue damask.

The room contained five desks. On each were notes for the various subjects on which the author was working: this desk had notes for a play; this, for a treatise on philosophy; a third for a brochure on science; and so on. All were exquisitely neat and orderly; every paper in its right place. The writing chair was of cane, with a cover on it to match the bed curtains. Later on, Voltaire had a second writing-chair made, which he used much in the last few years of his life: one of its arms formed a desk, and the other a little table with drawers; and both were revolving.

Just below the master’s bedroom was WagniÈre’s, so that if Voltaire knocked on the floor during the night the servant could hear him. That he did so knock, pretty often, rests on the rueful testimony of WagniÈre himself.

Quite close to the house stood a little marble bathroom with hot and cold water laid on. It was a very unusual luxury in those times, and considered a highly unnecessary one. It is pleasant to a century much more particular in such matters than the eighteenth to reflect that Voltaire was always personally cleanly and tidy to an extent which his contemporaries considered ridiculous. That fine and dirty age could hardly forgive his insisting on his ancient perukes and queer old gardening clothes being kept as trim and well brushed as if they were new and grand. His passion for soap and water was one of the complaints his enemies in Prussia had brought against him. WagniÈre records that his master was “scrupulously clean” and also his love of washing his eyes in pure cold water. Doubtless the habit preserved them, in spite of the inordinate amount of work they had to do. To the day of his death they never needed spectacles.

Most of the visitors comment on the well-kept appearance of the house; though one, Lady Craven, Margravine of Anspach, said the salle À manger was generally dirty and the servants’ liveries soiled. It was at Ferney as it had been at Cirey. The master was particular, but the mistress was not. If Madame du ChÂtelet had been engrossed with science, Madame Denis was engrossed with amusement. Her extravagance and bad household management in that respect were often the cause of disagreements between her uncle and herself. And, that “fat pig, who says it is too hot to write a letter,” as Voltaire once described his niece to Madame d’Épinay, was the sort of person who thought no trouble too great for pleasure, but any trouble too great for duty.

It is significant that when she went to Paris in 1768 her uncle seized the opportunity of having Ferney thoroughly cleaned from top to bottom.

It is said that when he caught sight of cobwebs by the pillars and porticoes of the house, which the servants had neglected to remove, he used to vigorously flick a whip, crying out, “À la chasse! À la chasse!” and the whole household, including the guests, had to join in the spider hunt.

He had in his daily employ sixty or seventy persons, and sometimes more. Five servants usually waited at table, of whom three were in livery. Martin Sherlock, the Englishman, says that the dinner consisted of two courses and was eaten off silver plates with the host’s coat of arms on them; while at the dessert the spoons, forks, and blades of the knives were of silver-gilt; and adds that no strange servant was ever allowed to officiate at meals. WagniÈre records how two of the household having robbed their master, the police got wind of the matter; and Voltaire bade him go and warn the delinquents to fly immediately, “for if they are arrested I shall not be able to save them from hanging.” He also sent them some money for the journey. It is pleasant to learn that the hearts of the culprits were touched by this generous kindness, and that, having escaped, they lived honest lives.

It was a rule at Ferney that all peasants who came to the house should have a good dinner and twenty-four sous given them before they pursued their way.

“Good to all about him,” was the Prince de Ligne’s description of Voltaire. It was not an extravagant one.

If the house at Ferney was simple and comfortable rather than magnificent, the grounds were on a far more elaborate scale. There was enough land to grow wheat, hay, and straw. There were poultry yards and sheepfolds; an orchard watered by a stream; meadows, storehouses, and an immense barn which stabled fifty cows with their calves and served as a granary, and of which its master was intensely proud.

Then, too, there were farms which Voltaire managed himself, and so made lucrative. He was pleased to say, with a twinkle in his eye, that he also did everything in the garden—the gardener was “si bÊte.” That he had a field which was always called Voltaire’s field, because he cultivated it entirely with his own hands, is certainly true. Before long he had four or five hundred beehives; turkeys and silkworms; and a breeding stable for horses, transferred from the DÉlices. He was not a little delighted when, in this May of 1759, the Marquis de Voyer, steward of King Louis’s stables, made him a present of a fine stallion. As if he had not hobbies enough, he soon became an enthusiastic tree-planter—begging all his friends to follow his example—and sending waggons all the way to Lyons for loads of young trees for his park.

After a while that park stretched in three miles of circuit round the house, and included a splendid avenue of oaks, lindens, and poplars. In the garden were sunny walls for peaches; vines, lawns, and flowers. It was laid out with a charming imprÉvu and irregularity, most unfashionable in that formal day. Voltaire had always a “tender recollection of the banks of the Thames,” and made his garden as English as he could. It is indeed melancholy to note that artificial water and prim terraces were soon introduced to spoil—though their master thought they improved—its luxuriant irregularity; and that objects like lightning conductors, and fountains presided over by plaster nymphs, were not considered the least out of keeping with Nature by their lord and master. Near his silkworm house a thick linden-tree with overhanging branches formed what was called Voltaire’s study, and there he wrote verses “for recreation.” Nature certainly never inspired any of them. Now and again there came, it is true, even to this most typical son of the most artificial of all centuries, as he cultivated his field, or pruned and weeded in his garden, such reflections as might have fallen from the lips of his great opposite, Rousseau: “I have only done one sensible thing in my life—to cultivate the ground. He who clears a field renders a better service to humankind than all the scribblers in Europe.”

“You have done a great work for posterity” a friend said to him one day.

“Yes, Madame. I have planted four thousand feet of trees in my park.”

No more incongruous picture could be painted than that of this “withering cynic,” this world-famous hewer, hacker, and uprooter in his old grey shoes and stockings, a long vest to his knees, little black velvet cap and great drooping peruke, tranquilly directing, cultivating, sowing, “planting walnut and chestnut trees upon which I shall never see walnuts or chestnuts,” consoling himself for the toads in his garden by the reflection that “they do not prevent the nightingales from singing”: and prophesying that his destiny would be “to end between a seedlip, cows, and Genevans.”

For the time this country life was his element not the less. He wrote that it was, to Madame du Deffand, a dozen times. True, he had taken to it late. But perhaps always, deep down in him, undeveloped, stifled by Paris and by the burning needs of humanity, had been the peaceful primÆval tastes. Cirey had roused them. DÉlices had nourished them: and Ferney and Tourney confirmed them.

Tourney had given its master a title, but at first it gave him nothing else. It was a county pour rire, “the land in a bad state,” “a garden where there was nothing but snails and moles, vines without grapes, fields without corn, and sheds without cows,” and “a house in ruins.” Still, the land could be made fertile; and the house, if it was in ruins, boasted an admirable view, and was but “a quarter of a league” from Geneva.

By February, 1759, fifty workmen were putting it to rights; and by November the Count of Tourney could say that he had planted hundreds of trees in the garden, and used more powder (in rock-blasting) than at the siege of a town. Everything needed repairing, he added—fields, roads granaries, wine-presses—and everything was being repaired.

As at Ferney and DÉlices, the master personally supervised every detail; and so made his farms, his nurseries, his bees, his silkworms, all pay.

In the house at Tourney he quickly made a theatre-room. If some of the guests were disposed to laugh at a stage which held nine persons in a semicircle with difficulty, and to think the green and gold decorations tawdry, Voltaire adored that “theatre of Punchinello” as a child adores a new toy. “A little green and gold theatre,” “the prettiest and smallest possible”—he alludes to it in his letters a hundred times. From the September of 1760 he was anxious to transfer it to Ferney. But meanwhile he loved it where and as it was. Tourney also was useful to provide accommodation for the servants of the innumerable guests who came to stay at Ferney.

No idea of Voltaire’s life there could be given without mention of that incessant stream of visitors of all nations and languages which flowed through it, almost without pause for twenty years. Half the genius—and but too many of the fools—of Europe came to worship at the shrine of the prophet of this literary Mecca.

As prim Geneva shut its gates at nightfall, every one who came to sup with M. de Voltaire had to stay all night in his house. Ferney had no inn. After fourteen years of his life there, Voltaire might well say that he had been the hotel-keeper of Europe. He told Madame du Deffand, as early as 1763, that he had entertained four hundred English people, of whom not one ever after gave him a thought.

Too many of his guests, indeed, were not merely self-invited: but remained at Ferney with such persistency that their unhappy host would sometimes retire to bed and say he was dying, to get rid of them. One caller, who had received a message to this effect, returned the next day. “Tell him I am dying again. And if he comes any more, say I am dead and buried.”

Another visitor, when told Voltaire was ill, shrewdly replied that he was a doctor and should like to feel his pulse. When Voltaire sent down a message to say he was dead, the visitor replied, “Then I will bury him. In my profession I am used to burying people.” His humour appealed to Voltaire’s. He was admitted. “You seem to take me for some curious animal,” said Voltaire.

“Yes, Monsieur, for the Phoenix.”

“Very well: the charge to see me is twelve sous.”

“Here are twenty-four,” said the visitor. “I will come again to-morrow.”

He did, and on many to-morrows: and was received as a friend.

But all the importunate were not so clever, and their fulsome flattery was odious to the man who loved it daintily dressed.

“Sir, when I see you, I see the great candle that lights the world.”

“Quick, Madame Denis,” cried Voltaire. “A pair of snuffers!”

One persistent woman tried to effect an entry by saying that she was the niece of Terrai, the last, and not the least corrupt, of Louis XV.’s finance ministers.

Voltaire sent out a message. “Tell her I have only one tooth left, and I am keeping that for her uncle.”

The AbbÉ Coyer, on his arrival, calmly announced that he was going to stay six weeks.

“In what respect, my dear AbbÉ, are you unlike ‘Don Quixote’? He took the inns for chÂteaux, and you take the chÂteaux for inns.”

Coyer left early the next day.

Still, in spite of such rebuffs, the visitors were incessant.

One said that he could not recollect there being more than sixty to eighty people at supper after theatricals. Voltaire himself said there were constantly fifty to a hundred.

Many visitors stayed for weeks; many for months; some for years.

Madame de Fontaine, with her lover en train, could come when she chose—and she often chose. Mignot came when he liked. Great-nephew d’Hornoy was a constant visitor.

At different times there were two adopted daughters and two Jesuit priests living in the house. One relative, as will be seen, was at Ferney for a decade—completely paralysed. And hanging about the house were generally a trio or a quartette of gentlemen ne’er-do-weels, who sometimes copied their host’s manuscripts, and sometimes stole them.

In the midst of such a household Voltaire pursued his way and his life’s work, wonderfully methodically and equably. It was his custom to stay in bed till eleven o’clock, or later. There he read or wrote; or dictated to his secretaries with a distressing rapidity. Sometimes he was reading to himself at the same time. About eleven, a few of his guests would come up and pay him a brief visit.

The rest of the morning he spent in the gardens and farms, superintending and giving orders. In earlier years, he dined with his house party—in an undress, for which he always apologised and which he never changed. Later on, he always dined alone. After dinner he would go into the salon and talk for a little with his guests. The whole of the rest of the afternoon and evening until supper-time he spent in study: in which he never allowed himself to be interrupted. One at least of his guests complained that his only fault was to be “fort renfermÉ.”

At supper he appeared in as lively spirits as a schoolboy set free from school. It was the time for recreation: and a well earned recreation too. He led his guests to talk on such subjects as pleased them. When a discussion grew serious, he would listen without saying a word, with his head bent forward. Then, when his friends had adduced their arguments, he advanced his own, in perfect order and clearness, and yet with an extraordinary force and vehemence. He was seldom his best before a large company, especially of the kind that had come, as he said, “to see the rhinoceros.” But with a few kindred spirits he was as brilliant as he had been twenty years before over the supper-table at Cirey. At Ferney he must have missed indeed that woman who, having flung off her mantle of science and erudition, became socially what socially all women should be—an inspirer, a sympathiser, a magnet to draw out men’s wit—a sorceress who talked so well that she made her companions feel not how clever she was, but how clever they were.

Niece Denis was certainly the most good-natured of hostesses—if she was gaupe, as Madame du Deffand said—and was grateful to her uncle’s guests for mitigating the ennui of a country life. She was useful too. When Voltaire was tired or bored, he could retire directly after supper to that invariable refuge, bed; and leave his niece to act with his visitors. When he was not bored and there were no theatricals, he sometimes read aloud a canto of the “Pucelle” as in old times; or quoted poetry—any but his own—which he never could recollect; or talked theatres or played chess. It was the only game in which he indulged, and he was a little ashamed of it. Games are so idle!

When he went to bed he started work afresh. It was his only intemperance. If he kept an abundant table for his guests he was still infinitely frugal himself. His dÉjeuner consisted only of coffee, with cream; his supper, of eggs, although there was always a chicken ready for him in case he fancied it. He drank a little burgundy, and owned to a weakness for lentils. Of coffee, in which he had indulged freely in youth, he now took only a few cups a day. He had a habit of ignoring meals altogether when he was busy—a little idiosyncrasy somewhat trying to his secretaries. WagniÈre also complained that his master was too sparing in sleep; and called him up from that room below, several times in the night, to assist him in his literary work. When he had a play on hand he was “in a fever.”

Many of the visitors who stayed at Ferney have left an account of their life there. Though the accounts always graphically portray the character of the writers, they sketch much less vividly the portrait of Voltaire. But from such accounts—all taken together, and corrected by each other from Voltaire’s own descriptions, from WagniÈre’s and from Madame Denis’s—Ferney, and the life there, were as nearly as possible what has been depicted. Changes in habits are inevitable in twenty years. Differing accounts may all be true—at different times. Feverishly busy for Voltaire, idle and sociable for Madame Denis; she carried along by that unceasing stream of guests, and he watching it, half amused and half bored, from his own firm mooring of a great life’s work—that was Ferney for its master and mistress from 1758 until 1778. They did not regularly take up their abode there until 1760. They did not give up DÉlices altogether until 1765. But from the autumn of 1758 Ferney was their real home, the home of Voltaire’s heart; inextricably associated with him by his friends and his enemies; the subject of a thousand scandals, and of most beautiful imaginative descriptions. Nearly all great men have had one place dedicated to them—Florence to Dante; Corsica to Napoleon; Stratford to Shakespeare; Weimar to Goethe; and Ferney to Voltaire.