n not claim a great share in a citizen who ran away from the
town of his boyhood to avoid being thrashed for stealing apples. It
was, indeed, at Geneva that Jean Jacques received from his aunt the
disciplinary chastisement of which he gives such an exciting account in
his "Confessions"; and he once returned to the city and received the
Holy Communion there in later life. But that is all. Jean Jacques was
not educated at Geneva, but in Savoy--at Annecy, at Turin, and at
Chambery; his books were not printed at Geneva, tho' one of them was
publicly burned there, but in Paris and Amsterdam; it is not to Genevan
but to French literature that he belongs.

We must visit Voltaire at Ferney, and Madame de Stael at Coppet. Let the
patriarch come first. Voltaire was sixty years of age when he settled
on the shores of the lake, where he was to remain for another
four-and-twenty years; and he did not go there for his pleasure. He
would have preferred to live in Paris, but was afraid of being locked
up in the Bastille. As the great majority of the men of letters of
the reign of Louis XV. were, at one time or another, locked up in the
Bastille, his fears were probably well founded.

Moreover, notes of warning had reached his ears. "I dare not ask you to
dine," a relative said to him, "because you are in bad odor at Court."
So he betook himself to Geneva, as so many Frenchmen, illustrious
and otherwise, had done before, and acquired various properties--at
Prangins, at Lausanne, at Saint-Jean (near Geneva), at Ferney, at
Tournay, and elsewhere.

He was welcomed cordially. Dr. Tronchin, the eminent physician,
cooperated in the legal fictions necessary to enable him to become a
landowner in the republic. Cramer, the publisher, made a proposal for
the issue of a complete and authorized edition of his works. All the
best people called. "It is very pleasant," he was able to write, "to
live in a country where rulers borrow your carriage to come to dinner
with you."

Voltaire corresponded regularly with at least four reigning sovereigns,
to say nothing of men of letters, Cardinals, and Marshals of France;
and he kept open house for travelers of mark from every country in the
world. Those of the travelers who wrote books never failed to devote a
chapter to an account of a visit to Ferney; and from the mass of such
descriptions we may select for quotation that written, in the stately
style of the period, by Dr. John Moore, author of "Zeluco,