eager vanity of the dramatist whom Geneva now had for so close a
neighbour, and who had just set her the example by setting up a theatre
of his own; and partly, also, because it gave the writer an opportunity
of denouncing the intolerant rigour with which the church nearer home
treated the stage and all who appeared on it. Geneva was to set an
example that could not be resisted, and France would no longer see
actors on the one hand pensioned by the government, and on the other an
object of anathema, excommunicated by priests and regarded with contempt
by citizens.[345]

The inveterate hostility of the church to the theatre was manifested by
the French ecclesiastics in the full eighteenth century as bitterly as
ever. The circumstance that Voltaire was the great play-writer of the
time would not tend to soften their traditional prejudice, and the
persecution of players by priests was in some sense an episode of the
war between the priest and the philosophers. The latter took up the
cause of the stage partly because they hoped to make the drama an
effective rival to the teaching of pulpit and confessional, partly from
their natural sympathy with an elevated form of intellectual
manifestation, and partly from their abhorrence of the practical
inhumanity with which the officers of the church treated stage
performers. While people of quality eagerly sought the society of those
who furnished them as much diversion in private as in public, the church
refused to all players the marriage blessing; when an actor or actress
wished to marry, they were obliged to renounce the stage, and the
Archbishop of Paris diligently resisted evasion or subterfuge.[346] The
atrocities connected with the refusal of burial, as well in the case of
players as of philosophers, are known to all readers in a dozen
illustrious instances, from Molière and Adrienne Lecouvreur downwards.