The carriage dropped me off at the end of an avenue of linden trees, and the coachman pointed with his whip toward the house, as if a king were to be visited there. In a way, that was indeed the case. Ferney lies an hour outside the gates of Geneva, across the French border, in a valley bathed that afternoon in a light that only late August can produce: a yellowish, already slightly weary light that steeped the vineyards above Lake Geneva in a kind of bronze stillness.
The château—if one chooses to call it that—was smaller than I had imagined. A white, clearly articulated structure with green shutters; in front lay a courtyard with rosebeds, and behind it, a park that sloped gently down toward the lake. A maid in a starched apron opened the door and said only: "The master awaits you in the garden."
I followed her through a cool hallway that smelled of floor wax and of the apples resting in a bowl upon a console table. Engravings hung on the walls—a few portraits, a small map of Geneva. Then came a glass door, a few steps, and I stood in the garden.
He sat beneath a plane tree in a wicker armchair, a plaid blanket draped across his knees, even though it was still warm. He wore a dressing gown of violet velvet—slightly faded—and a wig that sat not quite straight. On a small table beside him lay an open book, an inkwell, and a stack of handwritten sheets, weighted down by a stone.
"Come closer," he called out, without rising. "I no longer rise for just anyone who comes from Paris. But for you, I shall make a partial exception—I shall sit up straight."
And indeed, he adjusted his posture in the armchair, sitting up straighter with that impish precision I recognized from engravings. His face was narrow, almost bony; his eyes, however, were bright and quick, as if they were the only organ the years had left untouched.
“Sit down. Theodora is bringing tea. Or would you prefer wine? In Ferney, we drink both—sometimes simultaneously. It depends on whether one wishes to speak *of* reason, or *against* it.”
I said that the tea would suffice. He nodded with satisfaction, as if I had passed a test.
On Literature
“So, you write as well,” he began, without having asked me. “One can tell just by looking at you. You have that look—the look of people who are constantly formulating something in their minds while going about their day, something they haven’t yet committed to paper. A somewhat absent look. I have it, too; I’ve had it my whole life.”
I laughed and admitted that I was indeed working on something. He waved a dismissive hand.
“Write briefly. That is the first rule. The world has too many thick books. People mistake them for being profound simply because they are heavy. In truth, they are merely heavy. — Write clearly. That is the second rule. If you write a sentence that you yourself have to read twice, the reader has already cursed it three times over. — And thirdly,” he raised his index finger, “be entertaining. Truth is a bitter medicine. If you coat it in honey, the reader will swallow it down without even realizing that he is becoming wiser in the process.”
I asked him which of his own works was dearest to him.
He fell silent for a moment, gazing out into the garden, where a gardener was tapping at an apple tree with a long stick. Then, in a voice softer than before, he spoke:
“Candide. Not because it is my *best* work—I have written tragedies that I labored over for years, yet which hardly anyone performs today—a fact that both annoys and amuses me. No, *Candide* is dear to me because I wrote it in three days, in a fit of anger and mirth combined. It is a clenched fist encased in a kid-leather glove. It strikes far more effectively than one might imagine.”
I remarked that I had read it in my youth and that it had left me feeling both deeply joyful and deeply sorrowful—all at the same time.
“Then you read it exactly as it was meant to be read. Anyone who merely laughs has missed the point entirely. And anyone who merely weeps has missed it just as well. The world is both. One must view it with both eyes—the weeping eye and the laughing one—otherwise, one sees only half the truth.”
On Philosophy
He took a sip of the tea the maid had brought in the meantime. His hand trembled slightly, yet he did not let it disturb him.
“Philosophy,” he said, “has become a fad these days. In Paris, ladies sit in their salons and have Diderot explain to them how the universe works—between two sorbets. It is delightful, and it is ridiculous; and since I am one of them myself, my complaints are only half-hearted.”
He set down his cup. “But in all seriousness: I believe in reason, yet I do not believe that it is everything. In my youth, I imagined one could tackle superstition with clear arguments just as one might tackle weeds with a scythe. Today I know: The weeds will grow as long as human beings remain human beings. One must wield the scythe nonetheless. But one must not delude oneself into thinking the field will ever be left bare.”
I asked if he believed in God. It was a clumsy question—I realized it the very moment I voiced it. Yet he took it seriously.
“In the God of the priests? Not for a single breath. In a watchmaker who once set this peculiar world in motion and now simply lets it run its course? Perhaps. Let me tell you what I object to regarding religions: not their God. Rather, it is what people make of Him the moment they build a church around Him and begin to hand out the keys. Tyranny in a cassock is more detestable to me than any other form of tyranny, for it claims to descend from Heaven.”
He looked at me, suddenly wide awake. “But never mistake this for contempt for the faith of the common people. When an old woman in the mountains recites the Lord’s Prayer in the evening—because there is no one else left to listen to her—that is closer to my heart than all the chatter of the doctors of the Sorbonne. — Let people believe. But let them think, too. Both at once. That is the true art.”
What Matters to Him
I asked him what was most important to him in life—if, at seventy-six years of age, he had to sum it up in a single sentence today.
He laughed—a dry, quiet laugh.
“In a single sentence? You are worse than a confessor! — Very well: that there be less cruelty in the world when I leave it than there was when I arrived. If I can say that of myself, then my life was not wasted.”
He gestured out toward the park. “Do you see this garden? Twelve years ago, there was no garden here—only a dilapidated village. The people here lived in fear: of the priest, of the bailiff, of the winter, and of themselves. I had houses built; I established a watchmaking workshop and a small church—one which, I maintain, I built *for* God and *against* the clerics. Today, twelve hundred people live here, where previously only fifty eked out a meager existence. — That matters more to me than half of my books. Writing is words. Building is stones. The two belong together.”
He added, in a softer voice: “And the Calas case. If, after my death, I am granted credit for only this one thing—that I fought for an innocent man who was broken on the wheel, fighting against the justice system of his own city, and that, in the end, his name was cleared—then I shall be content. Write that down. Not for my sake. For Calas’s sake.”
On Childhood and Origins
A cloud drifted across the sun, and for a moment, the garden lost its color. Voltaire pulled the blanket up a little higher.
“You want to know the details. Very well. I was born in November 1694 in Paris—on the Rue de Beaune, or somewhere nearby. My father was a notary, a diligent, middle-class man who sought reason within the pages of his legal files—and, more often than not, found it there. My mother died when I was seven. One does not remember such things in coherent sentences. One remembers a scent, a dress, a voice that is suddenly no longer there.”
He gazed into his cup for a moment. “I was a frail child—half-dead at birth, the midwife claimed. Perhaps it is true; perhaps it is merely a family legend. In any case, they later sent me to the Jesuits, to the Collège Louis-le-Grand. They drilled Latin into me and taught me the intricacies of meter so thoroughly that, to this day, I could scan an Alexandrine in my sleep. I owe them a great deal—even though I have written much against them in the years since. Both are true. One may be grateful to one’s teachers while simultaneously disagreeing with them. Indeed, that is the finest form of gratitude.”
He smiled. “My father wanted to make a lawyer out of me. I wanted to become a poet. We argued about it for a long time. He lost. He didn’t realize it, but he had lost from the very start.”
On Friends Among Writers
I asked him about his colleagues—whether he kept in touch, whether there were any friendships that sustained him.
He made a gesture, half amused, half dismissive.
“Writers. My dear friend, writers are the vainest breed under God’s sun—and I do not exempt myself. We embrace one another in letters and sink our teeth into one another in prefaces. It is a peculiar climate.”
He counted them off on his fingers. “There was Frederick—the King of Prussia. You know the story. He summoned me to Potsdam; I spent three years at his court; we adored one another, and in the end, we fell out hopelessly. He is a brilliant mind and an even more brilliant sovereign—and the two together do not sit well with the vanity of a poet like me. We write to one another again now—politely, sometimes even warmly—from a great distance. Up close, we would tear each other to shreds once more. That is simply how it is.”
“Diderot—a brilliant mind, forging his *Encyclopédie* volume by volume, in defiance of censorship and narrow-mindedness. I admire him; I assist him wherever I can. We rarely visit one another. Letters suffice. Sometimes, in fact, letters are the very best part of a friendship—for on paper, one is more dispassionate than one is across a table.”
“D’Alembert—refined, cautious, astute. A man with whom one can converse for hours on a single concept without ever growing bored.”
His face darkened slightly. “And Rousseau. Ah, Rousseau. We read one another; we wrote to one another; we fell out—worse than I have ever fallen out with anyone else. He considers me a cold cynic; I consider him a gifted hypocrite who curses civilization while simultaneously lodging in Parisian salons. We are both unjust toward one another. And perhaps—this I admit only to you—we became so embittered precisely because we resemble each other more than we would like. Two vanities in a century too narrow for them.”
He sighed, almost a little theatrically. “True friends, you know, are not the famous ones. They are the ones who write to you at night when you are ill, and who send a letter with no intention of having it published. I have a few of those. A man needs nothing more.”
On Family
I asked him about his family. It was a question—I did not know how he would receive it.
He paused briefly. Then, in an unusually sober tone, he said:
“I never started a family of my own. No wife, no children. That was not a decision—it was simply the way life led me, such that that particular door never opened very wide. Madame du Châtelet—she was my friend, my collaborator, my lover, my truest reader, for fifteen years at Cirey. A woman of such intellect that I could learn alongside her without feeling my pride wounded. She died in 1749. In childbirth. I have never quite stopped missing her.”
He gazed out into the garden for a while.
“Here at Ferney lives my niece, Madame Denis. She manages my household; she argues with me; she defends me against the world—and, occasionally, against myself. She is my family—in the sense in which one understands ‘family’ when one does not interpret the word too narrowly.”
He raised his hand. “Family is not merely a matter of blood. Family is what remains when you fall ill. Who brings you your soup? Who writes your letters for you? Who keeps the petitioners at bay when you no longer have the strength? *That* is family. In my case, it is Madame Denis, my secretary, the gardener—who has known me for twenty years—and the maid, who knows without being asked whenever I am feeling cold. That is no small thing. In fact, it is a great deal.”
How He Sees the World
By now, the sun had moved on, and the shadow of the plane tree lay diagonally across us. I ventured my next question: how he viewed the world—now, from Ferney, at the close of a long century.
He leaned back. His face grew more serious.
“Worse than I would have wished it to be. Better than I feared it would be forty years ago. — As a young man, I believed that Reason would march like a Roman legion. That it would strike down all superstition, raze all tyrannies to the ground. That, within two generations, we would be living in a world where no one was tortured for their beliefs anymore, and where peasants no longer had to die at the whim of a master.”
He made a weary gesture. “It did not come to pass. Reason does not march. It trickles. It seeps away. It reappears where one least expects it, and vanishes from the very place where one thought it had taken hold. — Nevertheless: the world has grown brighter; that much I grant you. Today, one can write things for which, fifty years ago, one would have been hanged. Not everywhere, mind you. But in some places. That is a start.”
He looked me directly in the eye. “Do you know what troubles me most? Not stupidity. That will always be with us. But rather the inertia of the intelligent. The people who see that something is wrong, yet take refuge behind the excuse that ‘it has always been this way, and always will be.’ That is the true malady. The malice of the wicked is nothing without the complacency of the good. — Write that down, if you wish to take something away from this afternoon. It is not my own—or rather, it *is* my own, yet it belongs to many others as well. Truths belong to no one.”
Where He Loves to Live
I asked him if he missed Paris. If he didn’t wish to return to the city that had shaped him.
He laughed aloud—and it was the most cheerful laugh of the entire afternoon.
“Paris! My dear fellow, Paris is a mistress who has abandoned you—one you have no desire to run into again on the street. I love her; I owe her everything; yet, at the same time, I curse her. She threw me into the Bastille; she expelled me; she banned my plays and burned my books. I shall not be seeing her again anytime soon. —Perhaps someday. Perhaps at the very end. An old man still retains the right to return to his city just once before he takes his final leave.”
He gestured around him. “But here, in Ferney, I live well. The border is close by—fifteen minutes on horseback, and I am in Switzerland. If the wrong letter arrives from Versailles, I can be sitting in Geneva by that very evening. That is not fear; that is experience. A writer needs two things: a desk and an open door. I have both of them here.”
He gazed out into the garden. “Moreover, I have this park. I had the trees planted myself. I know each and every one of them. That is a kind of love one cannot find in Paris. —‘He who has a garden and books wants for nothing,’ a Roman once said. I would add: and a few correspondents. Then life is complete.”
What He Still Plans to Do
It was nearly evening. The gardener had disappeared; the shadows had grown long. I asked him my final question: what he still intended to do. What he still wished to accomplish—now, in the years that remained to him.
He remained silent for a long time. It was a different kind of silence than before—a contemplative, almost gentle one.
“Write. What else? I have a few polemics in mind that I still need to finish—arguments against things that vex me. There is a farmer near Abbeville—a young man named La Barre—whom they executed four years ago over a trifle. His case gives me no peace. As long as I have ink, I will fight to ensure that such verdicts are handed down no more. One human being at a time. That is all one can do.”
He looked at me. “Besides, I want to go to Paris once more. Yes. I just talked myself out of it, but that wasn’t entirely true. I do want to go back. Not for long. Just to see if the city is still the city it used to be. Perhaps the Théâtre-Français is still staging one of my plays. Perhaps there is a free table at the Café Procope. An old man needs nothing more than that.”
He paused briefly, then added—almost mischievously:
“And I want to continue tending the garden. Trees are the only pupils who never talk back to you. They do exactly as they are told—at whatever pace pleases them. That is a lesson I learned only late in life. Some things simply take time, and it is not my place to rush them. I plant. Others harvest. That is the proper order of things.”
He rose slowly, steadying himself against the back of his armchair. I saw how frail he was—how fragile beneath his violet dressing gown—and yet, at the very same time, how resilient.
“You may go now,” he said. “It is growing cool, and I become ill-tempered when I am cold. Write down what seems important to you, and forget the rest. That is the secret of all memory: that one forgets the right things.”
He held out his hand to me. It was slender and surprisingly warm.
“And write briefly,” he added, with that final, faint smile. “I have told you this before. But when it comes to important matters, one is allowed to repeat oneself.”
I walked down the avenue, back toward the car. Behind me lay the white house, the garden, the plane tree. When I turned around once, I saw him still standing there, clad in his violet velvet, and waving. A small, slender hand in a vast, slowly darkening garden.
S.
Postscript
Voltaire—born François-Marie Arouet on November 21, 1694, in Paris—died there on May 30, 1778. The encounter depicted here is a work of literary fiction; it is set in the summer of 1770 at his country estate, Ferney, located on the Franco-Genevan border, where he had resided since 1759. Historically documented facts include his background as the son of a Parisian notary, the early death of his mother, his schooling at the Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand, and his difficult relationship with his father.
Equally well-attested are his long-standing relationship with Émilie du Châtelet—who died in 1749—Voltaire’s time at the court of Frederick II in Potsdam and his subsequent rift with the King, his falling-out with Rousseau, and his collaboration with Diderot and d’Alembert in connection with the *Encyclopédie*.
Under Voltaire’s stewardship, Ferney indeed evolved into a place of significance: a destitute village was transformed into a flourishing manufacturing community with a population exceeding twelve hundred. Also historically substantiated is his advocacy on behalf of Jean Calas and the Chevalier de La Barre—legal cases that became emblematic of his lifelong struggle against religious fanaticism.
After a long absence, Voltaire returned to Paris once more in 1778, where he passed away just a few weeks later. The thoughts attributed to him in this story—his defense of tolerance, his skepticism toward dogma, his insistence on the separation of faith and ecclesiastical power, and his love for clarity and concision—are entirely consistent with his body of work and his extensive correspondence. The dialogues themselves, however, are literary inventions rather than historical quotations.
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