theatre, as a parrot learns.[270] She wrote a comedy; but the players, out of respect for Voltaire, declined to act in it. She wrote a tragedy; but the one favour, which the repeated entreaties of years could never wring from Voltaire, was that he would read it. She had histrionic as well as dramatic ambition, and here worked a miracle, for her representation of Mérope once drew floods of tears from some English ladies.[271] Her affectation of intellect had not cooled the reality of simple sensation, and if she loved art, she was said not to despise gallantry. At any rate, though she was only sixteen years younger than her uncle,[272] she needed continual festivities and crowds of guests. Ferney was rather a difficult spot for a woman with a passion for the hum of cities. For five months in the year, says Voltaire, my deserts are, on the admission of Russians, worse than Siberia itself; we see thirty leagues of mountain, snow, and precipices: it is Naples in summer, Lapland in winter.[273] One year he marks with word of bitterness snow falling thick in the middle of May. Four feet of snow in the courtyard constituted a normal winter state. He commemorates with enthusiasm how one day, through these four feet of snow, he saw porters bringing him a hamper of Champagne from a friend; for the more generous sort of Burgundy with which he ordinarily recruited himself had fallen short, and he had been reduced to the humble vintage of Beaujolais. Yet in the midst of a thousand discomforts and hardships we never hear him wishing to be back in Paris. It remained to him the accursed city, as it had been before his journey to England. He always thought with horror of its cabal, intrigue, frivolity, and sovereign indifference to the ruin of the kingdom and the shedding of innocent blood. There can be no doubt that this wise exile prolonged his days. He was constantly complaining of illness, and he passed months at a time in bed, which may in truth have been the best possible preservative of life for one of his temperament. Yet in spite of this avoidance of society, this passion for his study, the man of ordinary capacity, with no more than an ordinary working day, may marvel how amid so many distractions the master of the house contrived to write so many scores of pieces, large and small, and so many hundreds of letters, grave and gay. Of these letters nearly seven thousand are already in print, and M. Beuchot, most carefully informed of all Voltaire’s editors, thinks there are likely to be quite as many more still in undiscovered existence. Ferney was the centre of the most universal and varied correspondence that any one man has ever carried on. Frederick the Great was not the only crowned head with whom Voltaire interchanged royal communication. Catherine II. of Russia, of Anhalt-Zerbst by birth, was the helpful patroness of Diderot and D’Alembert, and was always eager to hear some word from the