Late in life, Voltaire adopted Reine Philiberte de Vericourt, a young girl of noble but poor family, whom he had rescued from a convent life, installed in his own house, and married to the Marquis de Villette. Her pet name was _Belle et Bonne_, and no one had more to do with the happiness of the last years of Voltaire than she. She watched by the dying Voltaire’s bedside, and Lady Morgan thus records her report: “To his last moment everything he said and did breathed the benevolence and goodness of his character. All announced in him tranquility, peace, resignation; except a little moment of ill-humor which he showed to the _cure_ of St. Sulpice when he begged him to withdraw, and said, ’Let me die in peace.’” Voltaire himself wrote to Mme. du Deffand: “They say sometimes of a man, ’He died like a dog’; but, truly, a dog is very happy to die without all the ceremony with which they persecute the last moments of our lives. If they had a little charity for us, they would let us die without saying anything about it. The worst is that we are then surrounded by hypocrites, who worry us to make us think as they do not in the least think; or else by imbeciles, who desire us to be as stupid as they are. All this is very disgusting. The only pleasure of life at Geneva is that people can die there as they like; many worthy persons summon no priest at all. People kill themselves if they please, without any one objecting; or they await the last moment, and no one troubles them about it.” Under suffering, age, and impending death, Voltaire’s bearing, as Carlyle acknowledges, “one must say is rather beautiful.” Voltaire had all his life “enjoyed” bad health. He had always a feeble constitution, and was a confirmed invalid for the greater part of his life, suffering from bladder disorder, and a variety of other diseases that would have soon finished an ordinary man. We may say he was sustained by his work, which was ever gay, even when most pessimistic. “My eyes are as red as a drunkard’s,” he writes, “and I have not the honor to be one.” His wit lasted in old age. A visitor to Ferney, hearing him praise Haller enthusiastically, told him that Haller did not do him equal justice. “Ah,” said Voltaire, lightly, “perhaps we are both mistaken.” To Bailly, the astronomer, he wrote, at the age of eighty-one: “A hundred thanks for the book of medicine which you sent me, together with your own [_History of Ancient Astronomy_], when I was very unwell. I have not opened the first. The second I have read and feel much better.” He kept himself at work with coffee. His interest was ever in his work. At the very last, the new dictionary he had proposed to the Academy was on his mind; it was not proceeding as rapidly as his indefatigable spirit desired. “J’ai fait un pen de bien; c’est mon meilleur ouvrage”—“I have done a little good; that is my best work,” was one of his latest utterances.