You would not be solitary there; you would have companions and disciples; you might establish a chair there, the chair of truth.

Your library might go by water, and there would not be four leagues' journey by land.

In fine, you would leave slavery for freedom." All these inducements having failed of effect, Voltaire gave up the foundation of a colony at Cleves, to devote all his energy to that at Ferney.

There he exercised signorial rights with an active and restless guardianship which left him no illusions and but little sympathy in respect of that people whose sacred rights he had so often proclaimed.
"The people will always be sottish and barbarous," he wrote to M.Bordes; "they are oxen needing a yoke, a goad, and a bit of hay." That was the sum and substance of what he thought; he was a stern judge of the French character, the genuine and deep-lying resources of which he sounded imperfectly, but the infinite varieties of which he recognized.

"I always find it difficult to conceive," he wrote to M.de Constant, "how so agreeable a nation can at the same time be so ferocious, how it can so easily pass from the opera to the St.Bartholomew, be at one time made up of dancing apes and at another of howling bears, be so ingenious and so idiotic both together, at one time so brave and at another so dastardly." Voltaire fancied himself at a comedy still; the hour of tragedy was at hand.