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Voltaire’s Last Visit To Paris
by
“Il faut s’embrasser, a la Francoise” [“You must embrace, in French fashion”], they cried.
John Adams, who witnessed the spectacle, thus describes what followed: “The two aged actors upon this great theatre of philosophy and frivolity, embraced each other by hugging one another in their arms, and kissing each other’s cheeks, and then the tumult subsided. And the cry immediately spread through the whole kingdom, and, I suppose over all Europe, ‘How charming it was to see Solon and Sophocles embrace.'”
A month later Voltaire lay dead, his brilliant eyes closed, his active brain at rest. The excitement of his visit to Paris and the constant ovation which he had received had been too much for the old man. He had died in the midst of his triumph, vanished from the stage of life just when his genius had compelled the highest display of appreciation which it was possible for his countrymen to give. As for the church, which his keen pen had dealt with as severely as with the temporal powers, it could not well forget his incessant and bitter attacks. That he might obtain Christian burial, he confessed and received absolution from the Abbe Gaultier; but, with his views, this was simply a sacrifice to the proprieties; he remained a heathen poet to the end, a born satirist and scoffer at all tradition and all conventionality.
Voltaire was deistic in belief, in no sense atheistic. Among his latest words were, “I die worshipping God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, but detesting superstition.” Despite the admiration of the people, the powers of the state could not forget that the man so enthusiastically received was the great apostle of mockery and irreverence. The government gave its last kick to the dead lion by ordering the papers not to comment on his death. The church laid an interdict on his burial in consecrated ground,–an hour or two too late, as it proved. His body, minus the heart, was transferred in 1791 to the Pantheon, and when, in 1864, the sarcophagus was opened with the purpose of restoring the heart to the other remains, it was found to be empty. In the stirring days of France the body had by some one, in some way, been removed.