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In 1775, Bailly sent the first volume of his history to Voltaire. In thanking him for his present, the illustrious old man addressed to the author one of those letters that he alone could write, in which flattering and enlivening sentences were combined without effort with high reasoning powers.
By some ecclesiastical quarrel, Voltaire had been provoked to withdraw himself from Lausanne, and retire to his castle at Ferney, where I again visited the poet and the actor, without seeking his more intimate acquaintance, to which I might now have pleaded a better title.
John, as Monsieur Voltaire called him was his dearest friend; and as for Sir Isaac Newton, one would have thought that he and Voltaire had exchanged nightcaps often. The valor of the English nation Monsieur Voltaire could not extol enough.
The famous Speranski relates that in the seminary of St. Petersburg one of his professors, when not in a state of intoxication, was in the habit of preaching the doctrines of Voltaire and Diderot! The rise of the sentimental school in Western Europe produced an important change in Russian literature, by undermining the inordinate admiration for the French pseudo-classical school.
For him at any rate life was then warm and the day bright and the earth very fair, and he lauded his gods accordingly. It was his very sensuousness, as we are so often saying, that made him religious. The optimism which Voltaire wished to destroy was to him a sovereign element of comfort.
We know that Voltaire did not take reproach with serenity, and he behaved with bitter violence towards Rousseau in circumstances when silence would have been both more magnanimous and more humane. Rousseau occasionally, though not very often, retaliated in the same vein. On the whole his judgment of Voltaire, when calmly given, was not meant to be unkind.
"As to Friedrich himself, who of course says nothing of the ANTI-MACHIAVEL in public, he privately, to Voltaire, disowns all these editions; and intends to give a new one of his own, which shall be the right article; but never did it, having far other work cut out for him in the months that came. But how zealous the worlds humor was in that matter, no modern reader can conceive to himself.
She will erect a monument to him in her charming jardin Anglois. This will occupy her, and then "Time, the comforter" Inimitable Voltaire! Our dear Brillante has just had a superb hommage from her lover the commissary a necklace and bracelets of the finest; pearls: but she cannot wear them yet: her brother having died last week, she is in deep mourning.
He confesses that, "Among the English, French irreligious philosophy had been preached, even before the greater part of the French philosophers were born. It was Bolingbroke who set up Voltaire. Throughout the eighteenth century infidelity had celebrated champions in England. Able writers and profound thinkers espoused that cause, but they were never able to render it triumphant as in France."
I have no doubt it was accidentally broken by one of those little rogues of pages of honor, who was afraid to acknowledge his fault; but Monsieur Voltaire chose to put it on the ladies in general and on Francezka in particular, and there was great sport and much wit over the matter.
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