It might have been added that when an interesting
stranger who carried no introduction was passing through
the town, Voltaire sometimes sent for him; but this
experiment was not always a success, and failed most
ludicrously in the case of Claude Gay, the Philadelphian
Quaker, author of some theological works now forgotten,
but then of note. The meeting was only arranged
with difficulty on the philosopher’s undertaking
to put a bridle on his tongue, and say nothing flippant
about holy things. He tried to keep his promise,
but the temptation was too strong for him. After
a while he entangled his guest in a controversy concerning
the proceedings of the patriarchs and the evidences
of Christianity, and lost his temper on finding that
his sarcasms failed to make their usual impression.
The member of the Society of Friends, however, was
not disconcerted. He rose from his place at the
dinner-table, and replied: “Friend Voltaire!
perhaps thou mayst come to understand these matters
rightly; in the meantime, finding I can do thee no
good, I leave thee, and so fare thee well.”
And so saying, he walked out and walked back to Geneva,
while Voltaire retired in dudgeon to his room, and
the company sat expecting something terrible to happen.
A word, in conclusion, about Coppet!
Necker[63] bought the property from his old banking
partner, Thelusson, for 500,000 livres in French money,
and retired to live there when the French Revolution
drove him out of politics. His daughter, Madame
de Stael, inherited it from him, and made it famous.
Not that she loved Switzerland; it would be more true
to say that she detested Switzerland. Swiss scenery
meant nothing to her. When she was taken for
an excursion to the glaciers, she asked what the crime
was that she had to expiate by such a punishment;
and she could look out on the blue waters of Lake
Leman, and sigh for “the gutter of the Rue du
Bac.” Even to this day, the Swiss have hardly
forgiven her for that, or for speaking of the Canton
of Vaud as the country in which she had been “so
intensely bored for such a number of years.”
What she wanted was to live in Paris, to be a leader—or,
rather, to be “the” leader—of
Parisian society, to sit in a salon, the admired of
all admirers, and to pull the wires of politics to
the advantage of her friends. For a while she
succeeded in doing this. It was she who persuaded
Barras to give Talleyrand his political start in life.
But whereas Barras was willing to act on her advice,
Napoleon was by no means equally amenable to her influence.
Almost from the first he regarded her as a mischief-maker;
and when a spy brought him an intercepted letter in
which Madame de Stael exprest her hope that none of
the old aristocracy of France would condescend to accept
appointments in the household of “the bourgeois
of Corsica,” he became her personal enemy, and,
refusing her permission to live either in the capital
or near it, practically compelled her to take refuge
in her country seat. Her pleasance in that way
became her gilded cage.
