Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 May 1879 — Voltaire’s Remains. [ARTICLE]

Voltaire’s Remains.

Mr. Stewart’s remains can hardly have a more checkered career than those of a very different celebrity Voltaire. When he died at Paris in May, 1778, the church there refused sepulture to its arch-enemy, and his body was interred in Champagne. During the revolution the National Assembly decreed that Voltaire’s remains should be brought to Paris, and they were accordingly deposited in the Pantheon with great pomp, in 1791. Thither, too, presently came the body of Rousseau. One dark night in May, 1814, when the Bourbons were enjoying their own again, some of the faithful, indignant that the bones of such enemies to religion should rest in consecrated ground, threw them pell mell into a sack, and carried them to a point in the suburbs near Bercy, where there was a large vacant lot belonging to the city. Here a hole had been already dug, and the contents of the sack were shaken into it and covered with quick-lime. The hole was then filled in, and the conspirators trampled down the earth. Voltaire’s heart had been saved by a friend, in whose family it remained until 1864. On its then being offered to the Government, Napoleon 111. decided that it should be placed with the body. On consulting the Archbishop of Paris, that functionary suggested the expediency of verifying the actual presence of Voltaire’s remains. An investigation followed, and tLe truth came out. The heart was then placed in the National Library, and a portion of the brain appropriated by the surgeons at the autopsy was publicly sold. Its present whereabouts is unknown.