Voltaire, as we have seen, took possession of Ferney in 1758, and he lived here almost without a break for something like twenty years. His estate was a feudal seigniory in the district of Gex, on the very frontier of Switzerland, but in France, though enjoying immunity from French taxation. He built a new manor-house, and in his capacity of lord of the manor replaced the dilapidated little church of the estate by a new one, very small, very plain, and about which, notwithstanding its famous inscription of which he so often boasted,—_Deo erexit Voltaire_,—much more noise has been made, than so simple and natural a proceeding at all calls for.[266] Madame Denis kept house for him, and according to the Paris gossips of the time, on an extravagant scale, which often produced ruptures between the two. Guests were incessant and the hospitality ungrudging.[267] He complained during the Seven Years’ War of the embarrassment of being a Frenchman, when he had to entertain daily at dinner Russians, English, and Germans.[268] He protests that he is weary of being hotel-keeper in general for all Europe, and so weary was he at one time of this noisy and costly post, that the establishment was partially suspended for upwards of a year. One of the most generous of Voltaire’s many generous acts was his reception into his house of a child who had no other claim on him than that of being the great-grand-daughter of the uncle of Corneille. A soldier ought to succour the niece of his general, he said. He took the liveliest interest in the little maid’s education, though she appears to have been a sulky pupil, and eventually he married her with due dower to one Dupuits. The bustle and expense of his establishment became greater than ever, and in the spring of 1768 Paris was as much electrified by news of a revolution at Ferney, as she has been since by some revolutions in her own streets. Madame Denis and the two Dupuits had suddenly made their way to Paris, and for a year and a half Voltaire was left in peace, part of which he employed sensibly in having his house cleaned from cellar to garret,—a bit of news which is handed down to our times, since, according to Grimm, the domestic arrangements of the manor-house at Ferney interested at that moment more or less every court in Europe.[269] In the autumn of 1769 Madame Denis returned, and with her the old stir and extravagance were resumed, for Voltaire was one of the best-humoured of men to his family and friends, and could deny his niece nothing. We have more than one description of this too immortal niece. They are all equally unflattering. Her homeliness of appearance amounted to the ugliness that is bitter. She was destitute of wit, and had a vulgar soul. Born to be the insipid gossip of a bourgeois circle, says one charitable writer, but having by chance the first man in the nation for an uncle, she learnt to chatter about literature and the