VOLTAIRE

 

During his visit to Russia Voltaire had

a revelation that made him an even more

inveterate atheist. In a snug after the dinner

the empress Catherine II was making improper

jokes about having unprecedented sex with

the horses Voltaire was watching her with

a furtive, delicate smile as if ashamed.

Catherine took him by the hand and pulled

him along. “Stay here and let’s talk I’ll leave  

the door ajar.” She entered the imperial lavatory,

Catherine raised her skirts she had nothing on

underneath and she sat on the gilded throne

of Poland hollowed and adapted for shitting.

Voltaire was bent double with muffled laughter.

“This throne of the stinking Poles has been

conceived for this purpose as it seems. Come in

and see it.” She called him straining herself.

“Do you like it? I finish and you certainly

sit on it.” To turn her away from the ridiculous

scene the Orthodox guard stopped him with

a verse from the Psalm 18, “and with the crooked

thou dost show thyself perverse.” Voltaire went

out of the cabin of lavatory and looked down.

In Paris he changed the mistresses like old clothes

and he hated Shakespeare, he wrote agonizing

that he was a brute. At the age of 83 the illness

dug its teeth into him, he wrote to his doctor,

“The patient from the street Beaune begs

forgiveness for giving you so much trouble

with his corpse...” Suffering from a bladder

infection and from urinary retention he was

in a pitiable state.  His niece, Mrs. Denis, because

of the will – the joker should not withdraw it –

kept him isolated in a house at the bottom

of the garden of the palace of Mr De Villette

who had lodged him. Voltaire was dying

in a dark hut under the surveillance of two

hags who chattered away, giggled, and drank

and caroused near him, and they didn’t even

care about giving him the potions or changing

the bedclothes. The priest from Saint-Supplice,

the abbot Gotier, came to see his parishioner

and tried to make him retract his convictions

so as to confess him. But when he invoked

Jesus Voltaire stopped him, “For God’s sake,

don’t talk to me about that man! You’d better

explain the Psalm 18 line by line to me...” Soon

he fell prey to the dementia, to the despair and

to the fear. The agony was horrible. The husband

of the niece said, “He bit his fingers and sticking

his hands into the chamber pot he took what was

there and ate it all...” On May 30, at 10 o’clock

in the evening, the patient almost had no pulse,

they rubbed his temples. Voltaire opened his

eyes so as to say, “Let me die in my perversion.”

After he let out a long, ferocious, terrifying holler

that no longer came to an end something

unbelievable he breathed his last, weakened.

In order for him not to get to the common grave

his nephew the abbot Mignot decided to take  

his corpse on the sly to the abbey Sellières.

Voltaire, dead as he was, got on the carriage

where he was strapped into the seat. A valet

who was about to die for fear of infestation

accompanied him. At the gates of Paris they

passed the barrier without any prohibition

and the employees greeted the traveller.

He was buried even in the church near

the pew and he remained there until 1791

when the revolutionary Danton decided

the transfer of his human remains to Pantheon

where they arrived carried on a catafalque

of porphyry, but without a foot and a few

teeth spirited away by his more fanatical

admirers, genuine revolutionaries.