“I come from Geneva,” answered the Jesuit with an evil smile.
“I saw the executioner burn Rousseau’s _Emile_.”
“They may do that, as far as I am concerned, and throw the fool himself into the fire.”
“Yes: one cannot tolerate lunatics: there are limits!”
“Yes, and saw them burn the new edition of Monsieur Voltaire’s _Candide_.”
“For shame! But it is merely a mob in Geneva.”
“A Protestant mob, with your permission.”
“Don’t trouble yourself; I hate Protestants equally with Catholics! This terrible Calvin burnt his friend Servetus in Geneva, because he did not believe in the Trinity. And had Jean Calas in Toulouse been a Catholic, and his son a Protestant, I would still have attacked the judges, although I am nothing. I am nothing; only, what I write is something.”
“Then some day we will raise a monument to Monsieur Voltaire’s writings--not to Voltaire.”
“You have no need; I have already raised my monument myself in the hundred volumes of my collected works. The world has nothing to do with how the old ass looked; there is nothing to see in that. We know my weaknesses; I have lied, I have stolen, I have been ungrateful; something of a scoundrel, something of a brute! That is the dirty part of me, and I bequeath it to Jesuits, pettifoggers, hair-splitters and collectors of anecdotes;--but my spirit to God who gave it, and to men an honest purpose to understand their Monsieur Voltaire.”
“Good-night, Mont Blanc; you have a white head like myself, and stand with your feet in cold water, as I do! Now I go and lie down! Tomorrow I travel to Paris, where I will die.”
In the northern tower of the Church of Notre Dame de Paris was the tower-watchman’s chamber. But it had been arranged like a bookbinder’s workshop, for the watchman’s day-duty was not particularly heavy, and the hours of the night passed with sleep or without sleep, no one troubling themselves to oversee this now superfluous church servant.
Nobody entered the church, which had been damaged in various ways, and no one ascended the northern tower, for the bells hung in the southern one. There the watchman’s duty was regarded more seriously, for on all extraordinary occasions the alarm-bell had to sound.
The watchman kept up a sort of telegraphic communication with the bellringer in the southern tower. In calm weather they could chat with each other, but when it was windy, they had to use speaking trumpets.