own, stage-managed by himself. His residence at Geneva brought him into correspondence (at first quite amicable) with the most famous of her citizens, J. J. Rousseau. His Orphelin de la Chine, performed at Paris in 1755, was very well received; the notorious La Pucelle appeared in the same year. The earthquake at Lisbon, which appalled other people, gave Voltaire an excellent opportunity for ridiculing the beliefs of the orthodox, first in verse (1756) and later in the (from a literary point of view) unsurpassable tale of Candide (1759). All was, however, not yet quite smooth with him. Geneva had a law expressly forbidding theatrical performances in any circumstances whatever. Voltaire had infringed this law already as far as private performances went, and he had thought of building a regular theatre, not indeed at Geneva but at Lausanne. In July 1755 a very polite and, as far as Voltaire was concerned, indirect resolution of the Consistory declared that in consequence of these proceedings of the Sieur de Voltaire the pastors should notify their flocks to abstain, and that the chief syndic should be informed of the Consistory's perfect confidence that the edicts would be carried out. Voltaire obeyed this hint as far as Les Délices was concerned, and consoled himself by having the performances in his Lausanne house. But he never was the man to take opposition to his wishes either quietly or without retaliation. He undoubtedly instigated D'Alembert to include a censure of the prohibition in his Encyclopédie article on “Geneva,” a proceeding which provoked Rousseau's celebrated Lettre à D'Alembert sur les spectacles. As for himself, he looked about for a place where he could combine the social liberty of France with the political liberty of Geneva, and he found one.
At the end of 1758 he bought the considerable property of Ferney, on the shore of the lake, about four miles from Geneva, and on French soil. At Les Délices (which he sold in 1765) he had become a householder on no small scale; at Ferney (which he increased by other purchases and leases) he became a complete country gentleman, and was henceforward known to all Europe as squire of Ferney. Many of the most celebrated men of Europe visited him there, and large parts of his usual biographies are composed of extracts from their accounts of Ferney. His new occupations by no means quenched his literary activity. He did not make himself a slave to his visitors, but reserved much time for work and for his immense correspondence, which had for a long time once more included Frederick, the two getting on very well when they were not in contact. Above all, he now, being comparatively secure in position, engaged much more strongly in public controversies, and resorted less to his old labyrinthine tricks of disavowal, garbled publication and private libel. The suppression of the Encyclopédie, to which he had been a considerable contributor, and whose conductors were his intimate friends, drew from him a shower of lampoons directed now at “l'infâme” (see infra) generally, now at literary victims, such as Le Franc de Pompignan (who had written one piece of verse so much better than anything serious of Voltaire's that he could not be forgiven), or Palissot (who in his play Les Philosophes had boldly gibbeted most of the persons so termed, but had not included Voltaire), now at Fréron, an excellent critic and a dangerous writer, who had attacked Voltaire from the conservative side, and at whom the patriarch of Ferney, as he now began to be called, levelled in return the very inferior farce-lampoon of L'Écossaise, of the first night of which Fréron himself did an admirably humorous criticism.
How he built a church and got into trouble in so doing at Ferney, how he put “Deo erexit Voltaire” on it (1760-61) and obtained a relic from the pope for his new building, how he entertained a grand-niece of Corneille, and for her benefit wrote his well-known “commentary” on that poet, are matters of interest, but to be passed over briefly. Here, too, he began that series of interferences on behalf of the oppressed and the ill-treated which, whatever mixture of motives may have prompted it, is an honour to his memory. Volumes and almost libraries have been written on the Calas affair, and we can but refer here to the only less famous cases of Sirven (very similar to that of Calas, though no judicial murder was actually committed), Espinasse (who had been sentenced to the galleys for harbouring a Protestant minister), Lally (the son of the unjustly treated but not blameless Irish-French commander in India), D'Étalonde (the companion of La Barre), Montbailli and others. In 1768 he entered into controversy with the bishop of the diocese; he had differences with the superior landlord of part of his estate, the president De Brasses; and he engaged in a long and tedious return match with the republic of Geneva. But the general events of this Ferney life are somewhat of that happy kind which are no events.
In this way Voltaire, who had been an old man when he established himself at Ferney, became a very old one almost without noticing it. The death of Louis XV. and the accession of Louis XVI. excited even in his aged breast the hope of re-entering Paris, but he did not at once receive any encouragement, despite the reforming ministry of Turgot. A much more solid gain to his happiness was the adoption, or practical adoption, in 1776 of Reine Philiberte de Varicourt, a young girl of noble but poor family, whom Voltaire rescued from the convent, installed in his house as an adopted daughter, and married to the marquis de Villette. Her pet name was “Belle et Bonne,” and nobody had more to do with the happiness of the last years of the “patriarch” than she had. It is doubtful whether his last and fatal visit to Paris was due to his own wish or to the instigation of his niece, Madame Denis; but this lady—a woman of disagreeable temper, especially to her inferiors—appears to have been rather hardly treated by Voltaire's earlier, and sometimes by his later, biographers. The suggestion which has been made that the success of Beaumarchais piqued him has nothing impossible in it. At any rate he had, at the end of 1777 and the beginning of 1778, been carefully finishing a new tragedy—Irène—for production in the capital. He started on the 5th of February, and five days later arrived at the city which he had not seen for eight-and-twenty years.
He was received with immense rejoicings, not indeed directly by the court, but by the Academy, by society and by all the more important foreign visitors. About a fortnight after his arrival, age and fatigue made him seriously ill, and a confessor was sent for. But he recovered, scoffed at himself as usual, and prepared more eagerly than ever for the first performance of Irène, on the 16th of March. At the end of the month he was able to attend a performance of it, which was a kind of apotheosis. He was crowned with laurel in his box, amid the plaudits of the audience, and did not seem to be the worse for it. He even began or proceeded with another tragedy—Agathocle—and attended several Academic meetings. But such proceedings in the case of a man of eighty-four were impossible. To keep himself up, he exceeded even his usual excess in coffee, and about the middle of May he became very ill. On the 30th of May the priests were once more sent for—to wit, his nephew, the abbé Mignot, the abbé Gaultier, who had officiated on the former occasion, and the parish priest, the cure of St Sulpice. He was, however, in a state of half-insensibility, and petulantly motioned them away, dying in the course of the night. The legends about his death in a state of terror and despair are certainly false; but it must be regarded as singular and unfortunate that he, who had more than once gone out of his way to conform ostentatiously and with his tongue in his cheek, should have neglected or missed this last opportunity. The result was a difficulty as to burial, which was compromised by hurried interment at the abbey of Scellières in Champagne, anticipating the interdict of the bishop of the diocese by an hour or two. On the 10th of July 1791 the body was transferred to the Pantheon, but during the Hundred Days it was once more, it is said, disentombed, and stowed away in a piece of waste ground. His heart, taken from the body when it was embalmed, and given to Madame Denis and by her to Madame de Villette, was preserved in a silver case, and when it was proposed (in 1864) to restore it to
