VOLTAIRE. Ill 



the society of his friends and the amusements of the 

 stage, a small theatre being formed in the chateau, 

 and his niece, and occasionally himself, acting in the 

 different pieces represented. Madame Denis had some 

 talents for the stage, but he greatly exaggerated her 

 merit, and even amused Marmontel, who relates the 

 anecdote in his ' Memoirs,' with telling him on one oc- 

 casion how much she had excelled Clairon. " J'avoue," 

 says he, " j'ai trouve cela un pen fort." Voltaire him- 

 self had very humble pretensions as an actor, and 

 laughs at himself, with much good humour, in his 

 letters for these exhibitions. The Genevese purists 

 were scandalised at the near neighbourhood of private 

 theatricals, but they occasionally formed part of the 

 audience in spite of Rousseau's exhortations against 

 the stage. They also visited Voltaire without scruple 

 at Ferney. He kept a hospitable house, befitting his 

 affluent circumstances and generous disposition ; he 

 received strangers who were properly introduced, and 

 it may well be imagined that the inexhaustible resources 

 of his learning and his wit, as varied as it was original, 

 gave extraordinary delight to his guests. He was fond 

 of assisting persons in distress, but chiefly young persons 

 of ability struggling with difficult circumstances: thus 

 the niece of Corneille, left in a destitute condition, was 

 invited, about the year 1760, to Ferney, where she 



Galas and Debarre ; nearly the whole of the three volumes of 

 ' Commentaries on Dramatic Works.' Beside these volumes there 

 are eight or more thick volumes of his Correspondence; and beside 

 finishing and correcting some of his other historical works, he wrote 

 the ' Peter the Great' and the ' Age of Louis XV.' during the 

 same last twenty years of his life ; so that he wrote forty volumes 

 during that period of his old age. 



