Voltaire Dying | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 17, 1872

Voltaire Dying.

On the 25th of February, 1758, Voltaire penned the following blasphemy: “Twenty years more, and God will be in a pretty plight.” Let us see what was taking place precisely at the time indicated. On the 25th of February, 1778, Voltaire was lying, as was thought, on his bed of death. Racked and tortured by remorse for past misdeeds, he was most anxious to propitiate the God whom he had insulted, and the church which he and his band had sworn to destroy; and hence he resolved on addressing a minister of religion, in order to receive the sacrament of reconciliation. On the 26th, then, he wrote the following letter to the Abbe Gaultier: “You promised me, sir, to come and hear me. I entreat you to take the trouble to call as soon as possible.” The Abbe went at once. A few days later, in the presence of the same Abbe Gaultier, the Abbe Mignot, and the Marquis de Villeveille, the dying man made the following declaration: “I, the undersigned, declare, that, for these four days past, having been afflicted with a vomiting of blood, at the age of eighty-four, and not being able to drag myself to church, the Rev., Rector of St. Sulpice, having been pleased to add in his other good works, that of sending to me the Abbe Gaultier, a priest, I confessed to him, and if it pleased God to dispose of me, I die in the holy Catholic church, in which I was born, hoping that the divine mercy will pardon all my faults. If ever I have scandalized the church, I ask pardon of God and the church. March 2, 1778. Voltaire.”

This document was deposited with Mons. Momet, Notary at Paris. It was also, with permission of Voltaire, carried to the Rector of St. Sulpice, and to the Archbishop of Paris, in order that they might say whether or not the declaration was sufficiently explicit and satisfactory.

Twice before, when dangerously ill, the wretched man had made abject retractions. But these he not only rejected when restored to health, but, passing from bad to worse, he poured out fuller vials of his wrath against God and Christianity. It was then of necessity to receive the most solemn and full abjuration of past infidelities.

When Gaultier returned with the archiepiscopal answer, he was refused admission to the dying man. The arch-conspirators trembled at the apostasy of their hero; and dreading the ridicule which would fall upon themselves, it was determined not to allow any minister of religion thenceforth to visit him. Finding himself thus cut off from the consolations of religion, Voltaire became infuriated, no reproach, no curse being deemed bad enough for the D’Alemberts and Diderot, who guarded him. “Begone! I could have done without you all; but you could not have existed without me—and what wretched glory have you procured me!” And then praying, and next blaspheming, now saying, “O Christ,” and next, “I am abandoned by God and man,” he wasted away his life, ceasing to curse, and blaspheme, and live, on the 30th of May, 1778. These facts were made public by Mons. Tronchin, a Protestant physician from Geneva, who attended him almost to the last. Horrified at what he had witnessed, he declared that to see all the furies of Orestes, one only had to be present at the death of Voltaire—(“Pour voir toutes les furies d’Orestes, il n’y avait qu’à se trouver à la mort de Voltaire.”) “Such a spectacle,” he adds, “would benefit the young, who are in danger of losing the precious helps of religion.” The Marechal de Richelieu, too, was so terrified at what he saw, that he left the bedside of Voltaire, declaring that, “the sight was too horrible for endurance.”

Vilette, the friend of Voltaire, and of course, his copier Monke denied these statements, just as the friends of Cæsar denied the resurrection of our divine Lord; but the great philosopher, Mons. de Luc, whose learning, integrity, and position, were of the highest, honestly repeated and confirmed what had been publicly and truthfully stated about the terrors of death that had haunted Voltaire. I will transcribe a portion of his letter. De Luc was then in his fifty-first year. This letter is dated Windsor, Oct. 23, 1785: “Being at Paris in 1781, I was often in company with Mons. Tronchin. He was an old acquaintance of Voltaire’s at Geneva, whence he came to Paris, in quality of first physician to the father of the late Duke of Orleans. He was called in during Voltaire’s last illness, and I have heard him repeat all these circumstances about which Paris and the whole world were at that time speaking, respecting the horrid state of the impious man’s soul, at the approach of death. Mons. Tronchin did everything in his power to calm him (for the agitation he was in was so violent that no remedies could take effect) but could not succeed; and unable to endure the horror which he felt at the peculiar nature of his frantic rage, he abandoned him. Mons. Tronchin immediately published in all companies the real facts. This he did to furnish a dreadful lesson to those who calculate on being able when on their death-bed to investigate the dispositions most proper to appear in before the Judgment-seat of God. At that period, not only the state of the body, but also the condition of the soul may frustrate their hopes of making so awful an investigation; for justice and sanctity, as well as goodness, are attributes of God; and he sometimes, as a wholesome admonition to mankind, permits the punishments denounced against the impious man to begin even in this life, with the tortures of remorse.”

Such are the facts relative to the wretched end of Voltaire—facts evidenced by Tronchin and Richelieu, and believed in, as De Luc assures us, by the whole of Paris, and spoken of throughout the entire world.—London Popular Journal.