theatre and Lekain drew together in Ferney the nineteen cantons. In this year he adopted into his family a lovely girl of eighteen whom he called Belle-et-Bonne.
1777—In this year he was still, at the age of eighty-three, an active, vigilant, and successful man of business, with ships on the Indian seas, with aristocratic debtors paying him interest, with the industrial "City of Ferney" earning immense revenues, with famous flocks, birds, bees, and silkworms, all receiving his daily attention. His yearly income at this time was more than 200,000 francs, and with nearly as much purchasing power then as the same number of dollars has with us to-day. In this year his pet, the sweet Belle-et-Bonne, was wooed and won by a gay marquis from Paris. Voltaire, though a bachelor, was fond of match-making, and was pleased in telling of the twenty-two marriages that had taken place on his estate of Ferney. The newly married pair remained in the château and they and Madame Denis conspired to induce him to go to Paris. They adduced a hundred reasons why he should go and these he as cleverly parried; but at length they prevailed and he consented to go for six weeks only.
1778—On the 3d of February they started. The colonists and he were weeping. At the stopping-places on the way, in order to get away from the crowd of admirers that would press on him, he found it necessary to lock himself in his room. He made the 300 miles by February 10th, and put up at the hotel of Madame de Villette, after an exile of twenty-eight years! The city was electrified by the news and a tide of visitors set in, and crowds waited outside the hotel for a chance glimpse of the great man. He held a continuous reception and, amidst the tumult of homage, his gayety, tact, and humor never flagged. Among the first to do homage to Voltaire was Dr. Benjamin Franklin, with whom he conversed in English. With the American ambassador was his grandson, a youth of seventeen, upon whom Franklin asked the venerable philosopher's benediction. Lifting his hands, Voltaire solemnly replied: "My child, God and Liberty, remember those two words." He said to Franklin that he so admired the Constitution