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. Many of the most celebrated men of Europe visited him there. In spite of these interruptions he wrote much and conducted an 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 Encyclopedie, to which he had been a considerable contributor, and whose conductors were his inti mate friends, drew from him a shower of lampoons directed now at "l'infame" (see infra) generally, now at literary victims, such as Le Franc de Pompignan, or Palissot or at Freron, 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 the farce-lampoon of L'Ecossaise.
Here, too, he began that series of interferences on behalf of the oppressed and the ill-treated which 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'Etalonde (the companion of La Barre), Montbailli and others.
In this way Voltaire, who had been an old man when he estab lished 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. At the end of 1777 and the beginning of 1778, he had been carefully finishing a new tragedy—Irene—for pro duction in the capital. He started on Feb. 5, and five days later arrived at the city which he had not seen for 28 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 Irene, on March 16. 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 May 3o, the priests were once more sent for—to wit, his nephew, the abbe Mignot, the abbe Gaultier, who had officiated on the former occasion, and the parish priest, the cure of St. Sulpice. In a state of half-insensi bility he petulantly motioned them away, dying in the course of the night. The result was a difficulty as to burial, which was compromised by hurried interment at the abbey of Scellieres in Champagne, anticipating the interdict of the bishop of the diocese by an hour or two. On July io, 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 the other remains, the sarcophagus at Sainte Genevieve (the Pantheon) was opened and found to be empty. In person Voltaire was not engaging, even as a young man. His extraordinary thinness is commemorated, among other things, by the very poor but well-known epigram attributed to Young, and identifying him at once with "Satan, Death and Sin." In old age he was a mere skeleton, with a long nose and eyes of preternatural brilliancy peering out of his wig. He never seems to have been addicted to any manly sport, and took little exercise. He was sober enough (for his day and society) in eating and drinking generally ; but drank coffee, as his contemporary, counter part and enemy, Johnson, drank tea, in a hardened and inveterate manner. It may be presumed with some certainty that his atten tions to women were for the most part platonic; indeed, both on the good and the bad side of him, he was all brain. Conversation and literature were, again as in Johnson's case, gods of his idolatry. He was good-natured when not crossed, generous to dependents who made themselves useful to him, and inde fatigable in defending the cause of those who were oppressed by the systems with which he was at war. But he was inordinately vain, and totally unscrupulous in gaining money, in attacking an enemy, or in protecting himself when he was threatened with danger. Voltaire's works, and especially his private letters, con stantly contain the word "l'infame" and the expression (in full or abbreviated) "ecrasez l'infame." This has been misunder stood in many ways—the mistake going so far as in some cases to suppose that Voltaire meant Christ by this opprobrious ex pression. No careful and competent student of his works has ever failed to correct this gross misapprehension. "L'infame" is not God ; it is not Christ ; it is not Christianity; it is not even Catholicism. Its briefest equivalent may be given as "persecuting and privileged orthodoxy" in general, and, more particularly, it is the particular system which Voltaire saw around him, of which he had felt the effects in his own exiles and the confiscations of his books, and of which he saw the still worse effects in the hideous sufferings of Calas and La Barre.