VOLTAIRE.—AN ACCOUNT OF THE DEATH OF THE FRENCH INFIDEL.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 379, 23 July 1880, Page 19

VOLTAIRE.— AN ACCOUNT OF THE DEATH OF THE FRENCH INFIDEL.

A MEDICAL gentleman of great talent published a short time ago a treatise on the great differences which characterised the last moments of Catholics and Protestants generally. Whilst, he observed, Catholics were calm and patient and resigned and hopeful in d^atb.. the professors of other religions were uneasy and querulous, to live, and more desirous to secure medical than spiritual assistance. The article awakened considerable attention. By some it was looked upon as an attack upon Protestantism, though written by a professed Protestant, whilst others endeavoured to show that no conclusion, favourable or unfavourable, to any form of religion could be fairly drawn from the quiet or disquiet, mental contentment or mental unrest of the dying, since even men like Voltaire have been known to die without the smallest fear or alarm and even with a smile and a joke upon their lips. I have no desire to enter on the theory of sensations and feelings in man's last moments : it is a subject fraught with difficulties ; but for the sake of historical truth I could wish to state what were the real circumstances accompanyijg the death of the God-denying man, Voltaire. It can be easily shown that the death of Voltaire was terrible in the extreme, and that the Galilean as clearly conquered him, to use the words of another enemy of Christianity, as he had previously overthrown the infamous Julian, surnamed the apostate. I will appeal only to authentic evidence ; not to the statements of infidels who one after the other endeavoured to hide the weakness, as they called it, of their Coryphaeus, but to the evidence of men who had no ends to subserve, whilst either affirming or denying certain facts connected with the last hours of the notorious philosophe. On the 25th of February, then, 1758, Voltaire penned the following blasphemy : •' Twenty years more and God will be in a pretty plight." Let us see what was taking place precisely at the time indicated. On the 25th of February, 1778, Voltaire was lying, as was thought, on his bed of death. Backed and tortured by remorse for past misdeeds, he was most anxious to propitiate the God whom he had insulted and the Church which he and his had sworn to destroy ; and hence he resolved on addressing himself to a minister of religion in order to receive the sacrament of reconciliation. On the 26th, then, he wrote the following letter to the Abbe Gualtier : " You promised me, Sir, to come and hear me, I entreat you to take tbe trouble to call as soon as possible." The Abbe went at once. A few days after, in the presence of the same M. Gaultier, the Abbe Mignon, and the Marquis de Villevielle, the dying man made the following declaration : "I, the undersigned, declare that for these four days past, having been afflicted with a vomiting of blood, at the age of eighty- four, and not having been able to drag myself to Church, the Reverend the Rector of St. Sulpice having been pleased to add to his good works that of sending to me the Abbe Gualtier, a priest, I confessed to him, and if it pleases God to dispose of me, I die in the Catholic Church, in which I was born, hoping that the Divine mercy will deign to pardon all my faults. If ever I have scandalised the Church, I ask pardon of God and of the Church.— 2nd March, 1778. — Voltaire." Tbis document was deposited with Mons. Momet, notary at Paris. It was also, with the permission of Voltaire, carried to the Rector of St. Sulpice and to the Archbishop of Paris, in order that they might say whether or not the declaration was sufficiently explicit and satisfactoiy. Twice before, when dangerously ill, this wretched man had made abject retractations ; but then he had not only retracted when restored to health, but passing from bad to worse, he poured out fuller vials of wrath against God and Christianity. It was then of necessity to receive the most solemn and full abjuration of former infidelities. When M. Gaultier returned with the Archiepiscopal answer, he was refused admission to tbe dying man. The arch-conspirators, troubled at the apostasy of their hero, and dreading the ridicule which would fall upon themselves, determined not to allow any minister of religion thenceforth to visit him. Finding himself thus cut off from the consolations of religion, Voltaire became infuriated ; no reproach, no curse, was deemed bad enough for the D'Alemberts and Diderots who guarded him ; " Begone," he said, "it was you who brought me to my present state. Begone, I could have done without you ; but you could not have existed without me— and what a wretched glory have you procured me 1" And then praying and next blaspheming ; now saying : " O Christ I" and next, "I am abandoned by God and man," he wasted away his life, ceasing to curse and blaspheme and live on the 30th of May, 1778. These facts were made public by Mons. Tronchin, a Protestant physician from Geneva, who attended him almost to the last. Horrified at what he had witnessed, he declared that "to see all the furies of Orestes, one had only to be present at the death of Voltaire "—pour voir toutcs les furies d' Or este, il ny avalt qua sc troucer alamortde Voltaire." " Such a spectacle," he adds, " would benefit the young who are in danger of losing the precious helps of religion." The Marechal de Richelieu, too, was so terrified at what he saw, that he left the bedside of Voltaire, declaring that " the sight was too awful for k mdurance." w Vilette, the friend of Voltaire, and of course his copier, Monke, denied these statements, but the great philosopher, Mons. de Luc, confirmed what had been stated about the terrors of death which had haunted Voltaire. I will transcribe i portion of his letter dated Windsor, October 23, 1797 : " Being at I'aris in 1781," — De Luc was then in his fifty-first year — " I was often in company with Mons. Tronchin. He was an old acquaintance of Voltaire's at Geneva, whence he came to Paiis in quality of first physician to the father of the late Duke of Orleans. He was called in during Voltaire's last illness, and I have heard him repeat all those circumstances about which Paiis and the whole world were at that time speaking ; about the horrid state of this impious man's soul at the approach of death. Mons. Tronchin did everything in his power to calm him, for the agitation he was in was so violent that no remedies could take effect.

But he could not succeed ; and unable to endure the horror he felt at the peculiar nature of his frantic rage, he abandoned him. Mons. Tronchin immediately published in all companies the real facts. This he did to furnish an awful lesson to those who calculate on being able on the bed of death to investigate the most fitting dispositions in which to appear before the judgment-seat of God. At that moment, not only the state of the body, but the condition of the soul, may frustrate their hopes of making so awful an investigation, for justice and sanctity, as well as goodness, are attributes of God, and He sometimes, as a wholesome admonition to mankind, permits the punishments denounced against the impious man to begin even in this life, with the tortures of remorse." Such are the facts evinced by Tronchin and Richelieu, and believed in throughout the world, relative to tbe death of the infidel Voltaire. — W. W. in Catholic Progress.