It might have been added that when an interesting stranger who carried no introduction was passing through the town, Voltaire sometimes sent for him; but this experiment was not always a success, and failed most ludicrously in the case of Claude Gay, the Philadelphian Quaker, author of some theological works now forgotten, but then of note.  The meeting was only arranged with difficulty on the philosopher’s undertaking to put a bridle on his tongue, and say nothing flippant about holy things.  He tried to keep his promise, but the temptation was too strong for him.  After a while he entangled his guest in a controversy concerning the proceedings of the patriarchs and the evidences of Christianity, and lost his temper on finding that his sarcasms failed to make their usual impression.  The member of the Society of Friends, however, was not disconcerted.  He rose from his place at the dinner-table, and replied:  “Friend Voltaire! perhaps thou mayst come to understand these matters rightly; in the meantime, finding I can do thee no good, I leave thee, and so fare thee well.”

And so saying, he walked out and walked back to Geneva, while Voltaire retired in dudgeon to his room, and the company sat expecting something terrible to happen.

A word, in conclusion, about Coppet!

Necker[63] bought the property from his old banking partner, Thelusson, for 500,000 livres in French money, and retired to live there when the French Revolution drove him out of politics.  His daughter, Madame de Stael, inherited it from him, and made it famous.

Not that she loved Switzerland; it would be more true to say that she detested Switzerland.  Swiss scenery meant nothing to her.  When she was taken for an excursion to the glaciers, she asked what the crime was that she had to expiate by such a punishment; and she could look out on the blue waters of Lake Leman, and sigh for “the gutter of the Rue du Bac.”  Even to this day, the Swiss have hardly forgiven her for that, or for speaking of the Canton of Vaud as the country in which she had been “so intensely bored for such a number of years.”

What she wanted was to live in Paris, to be a leader—­or, rather, to be “the” leader—­of Parisian society, to sit in a salon, the admired of all admirers, and to pull the wires of politics to the advantage of her friends.  For a while she succeeded in doing this.  It was she who persuaded Barras to give Talleyrand his political start in life.  But whereas Barras was willing to act on her advice, Napoleon was by no means equally amenable to her influence.  Almost from the first he regarded her as a mischief-maker; and when a spy brought him an intercepted letter in which Madame de Stael exprest her hope that none of the old aristocracy of France would condescend to accept appointments in the household of “the bourgeois of Corsica,” he became her personal enemy, and, refusing her permission to live either in the capital or near it, practically compelled her to take refuge in her country seat.  Her pleasance in that way became her gilded cage.