It is more pleasing to contemplate the good deeds of this versatile and extraordinary man, whose activity astonished his contemporaries[7], and, considering his infirmities and age, seem almost superhuman. The civil troubles of Geneva caused a number of exiles. The fugitives, destitute and suffering, were received at Ferney, and treated with hospitality and generosity. Voltaire's first idea was to found the little town of Versoi, on the banks of the lake of Geneva. He applied to the duke de Choiseul for protection and funds. These were at first granted; but the disgrace of the minister ruined the infant town, and its founder was obliged to restrict his exertions to his own colony at Ferney. He caused commodious houses to be built, and the place, which was before a miserable hamlet, inhabited by peasants in the last degree of penury, became a pleasant village, filled by industrious artisans, who carried on a considerable trade in watchmaking. It is to this village that Voltaire led madame du Genlis, and the sight of it filled her with respect for his enlarged views and benevolent heart. Nor was this the only place that owed the blessings of prosperity to him. By most persevering and courageous representations he induced the chancellor Maupeou to enfranchise the peasants of a territory among the mountains of Jura, who were serfs to the monastery of St. Claude, and suffered the most unendurable grievances from the feudal laws still in force. Afterwards, when Louis XVI. came to the throne, he asked for various exemptions from taxes from the minister Turgot for the town of Gex, which flourished in consequence, till Turgot was exiled, his ordinances cancelled, and the town was ruined. His colony fell under the same ban, and he shared the general loss. He was grieved, but not disheartened. "It is true," he wrote to his valued and steady friend the comte d'Argental, "that I have had the folly, in my eighty-third year, to commence an undertaking above my strength. I must abandon it, and wait till I grow younger. My strange fate, which led me from Paris to the frontiers of Switzerland, and forced me to change a filthy hamlet into a pretty town, a quarter of a league long, follows me; she does not restore my youth, but crushes me with the stones of the houses I have built. A change of ministry in France has deprived my colony of all the advantages I had obtained; and the good I have done my new country has turned to mischief. I put the last drop of my blood into this useful establishment, without any view except that of doing good--my blood is lost, and all I have to do is to die of a consumption." He wrote to another friend: "Ferney, which you saw a wretched village, has become a pretty town. I scarcely know how this has been brought about; but I know that it has ruined me. It was ridiculous in so insignificant a man as me to build a town."