humility, could ever make in any degree comprehensible. In the second, be it remembered what face Christianity, so called, had presented on the continent through many centuries, and still presented in Voltaire’s time. Where vice the most atrocious, tyranny, indolence, avarice, and the constant effort to keep men’s minds down to a level of brutish ignorance and stagnant demoralisation were the common characteristics of the ministers of what Voltaire and nearly all France with him, were accustomed to regard as the Christian religion.
“L’homme propose et Dieu dispose.” After many years’ sojourn at Ferney, where, doubtless, some of Voltaire’s happiest years were spent, and where he meant to lay his bones, it pleased his niece, Madame Denis, an elderly dame, yet withal sharing the sublime Emilie’s much-to-be-admired love of pleasure, and some of her thirst for conquest, to decide that he should bend his steps once more towards Paris; and in such glowing colours did she represent to him what his reception there would be, so ceaselessly did she dwell on the subject; in short, “she so teased him, and she so pleased him” in the matter, that on the 5th of February, 1778, Voltaire, at the age of eighty-four, took his departure from Ferney, accompanied by Madame Denis and his goddaughter, “Belle-et-bonne,” the Marquise de Villette, and turned his steps towards Paris.
Voltaire at Breakfast at Ferney.
“Le bruit seul de son départ,” writes the panegyrist before alluded to, “souleva dans tout Paris une acclamation universelle. La ville entière se prépara à recevoir son héros, et de la Rue Saint Denis aux plus nobles maisons des grands faubourgs se faisaient sentir les avant-coureurs d’un triomphe éclatant.”
At four o’clock in the afternoon Voltaire arrived at the house of the Marquis de Villette, in the Rue de Beaune. He was wrapped up in a vast pelisse; on his head was a large woollen wig, surmounted by a grey squirrel cap, beneath which could be seen little but his eyes, “vifs et brillants comme deux escarboucles.”
Crowds arrived to visit him, and grands seigneurs, court beauties, friends, strangers, bourgeois, litterateurs, actors and actresses, celebrities and nobodies, elbowed each other in the desire to see and to hear the illustrious hero, who had for each a smile, a compliment, “une parole aimable, un doux regard.” Hardly was he recovered from the fatigues of his journey, and from the somewhat oppressive homage of his admirers, when, always with an eye to business, he set about preparing for the stage his “Irène,” which he wished to see brought out at the Théâtre Français.
