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Title: The life of Voltaire
Author: Tallentyre, S. G.
Language: English
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_By S. G. Tallentyre_
The Life of Voltaire
The Life of Mirabeau
Matthew Hargraves
THE LIFE
OF
VOLTAIRE
[Illustration: _Voltaire from the statue by Houdon at the Comédie
Française._]
THE LIFE
OF
VOLTAIRE
BY
S. G. TALLENTYRE
AUTHOR OF “THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS,” ETC.
“_Je n’ai point de sceptre, mais j’ai une plume._”--VOLTAIRE
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
THIRD EDITION
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE BOYHOOD 1
II. EPIGRAMS AND THE BASTILLE 16
III. “ŒDIPE,” AND THE JOURNEY TO HOLLAND 25
IV. THE “HENRIADE,” AND A VISIT TO COURT 37
V. ENGLAND, AND THE “ENGLISH LETTERS” 48
VI. PLAYS, A BURLESQUE, AND THE APPEARANCE OF THE “LETTERS” 60
VII. MADAME DU CHÂTELET 74
VIII. A YEAR OF STORMS 86
IX. WORK AT CIREY 96
X. PLEASURE AT CIREY 106
XI. THE AFFAIR DESFONTAINES 117
XII. FLYING VISITS TO FREDERICK 127
XIII. TWO PLAYS AND A FAILURE 137
XIV. VOLTAIRE AS DIPLOMATIST AND COURTIER 149
XV. THE POPE, THE POMPADOUR, AND “THE TEMPLE OF GLORY” 159
XVI. THE ACADEMY, AND A VISIT 167
XVII. COURT DISFAVOUR, AND HIDING AT SCEAUX 175
XVIII. THE MARQUIS DE SAINT-LAMBERT 183
XIX. THE DEATH OF MADAME DU CHÂTELET 194
XX. PARIS, “ORESTE” AND “ROME SAUVÉE” 206
XXI. GLAMOUR 221
XXII. THE RIFT WITHIN THE LUTE 233
XXIII. THE QUARREL WITH MAUPERTUIS 249
XXIV. THE FLIGHT FROM PRUSSIA 265
XXV. THE COMEDY OF FRANKFORT 274
XXVI. THE “ESSAY ON THE MANNERS AND MIND OF NATIONS” 286
XXVII. THE ARRIVAL IN SWITZERLAND 296
XXVIII. THE DÉLICES, AND THE “POEM ON THE DISASTER OF LISBON” 307
XXIX. “NATURAL LAW,” THE VISIT OF D’ALEMBERT, AND THE AFFAIR OF BYNG 318
XXX. THE INTERFERENCE IN THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR, THE
“GENEVA” ARTICLE, AND LIFE AT DÉLICES 329
XXXI. “THE LITERARY WAR,” AND THE PURCHASE OF FERNEY AND TOURNEY 344
XXXII. FERNEY 356
XXXIII. “CANDIDE,” AND “ÉCRASEZ L’INFÂME” 369
XXXIV. THE BATTLE OF PARTICLES, AND THE BATTLE OF COMEDIES 384
XXXV. BUILDING A CHURCH, AND ENDOWING A DAUGHTER 401
XXXVI. THE AFFAIR OF CALAS 413
XXXVII. THE “TREATISE ON TOLERANCE” 429
XXXVIII. THE SIRVENS AND LA BARRE 446
XXXIX. VOLTAIRE AND GENEVA: VOLTAIRE AND LA HARPE 463
XL. THE COLONY OF WATCHMAKERS AND WEAVERS 481
XLI. THE PIGALLE STATUE, AND THE VINDICATION OF LALLY 497
XLII. LATTER DAYS 514
XLIII. THE LAST VISIT 530
XLIV. THE END 553
INDEX 573
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
VOLTAIRE _Frontispiece_
_From the Statue by Houdon at the Comédie Française._
NINON DE L’ENCLOS 6
_From an original Picture given by herself to the Countess of Sandwich._
J. B. ROUSSEAU 32
_From an Engraving after a Picture by J. Aved._
LOUIS XV. 40
_From the Picture by Carle Van Loo in the Museum at Versailles._
MADAME DU CHÂTELET 70
_From an Engraving after Marianne Loir._
MADAME DE POMPADOUR 152
_From the Painting by François Boucher in the possession, and by kind
permission, of Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild._
MARIA LECZINSKA 172
_From the Picture by Carle Van Loo in the Louvre._
FREDERICK THE GREAT 210
_From an Engraving by Cunejo, after the Painting by Cunningham._
MOREAU DE MAUPERTUIS 238
_From an Engraving after a Painting by Tourmere._
LEKAIN 292
_From an Engraving after a Painting by S. B. Le Noir._
THE CHÂTEAU OF FERNEY 334
_From an Engraving._
VOLTAIRE 370
_From the Bust by Houdon._
MADEMOISELLE CLAIRON 426
_From an Engraving after a Picture by Carle Van Loo._
VOLTAIRE 486
_From the Etching by Denon._
LOUIS XVI. 496
_From the Portrait by Callet in the Petit Trianon._
VOLTAIRE’S DECLARATION OF FAITH 506
_From the Original in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris._
“TRIOMPHE DE VOLTAIRE” 530
_From a Contemporary Print._
SOME SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Œuvres Complètes de Voltaire. _Beuchot._
La Jeunesse de Voltaire. _Gustave Desnoiresterres._
Voltaire au Château de Cirey. _Gustave Desnoiresterres._
Voltaire à la Cour. _Gustave Desnoiresterres._
Voltaire et Frédéric. _Gustave Desnoiresterres._
Voltaire aux Délices. _Gustave Desnoiresterres._
Voltaire et J. J. Rousseau. _Gustave Desnoiresterres._
Voltaire et Genève. _Gustave Desnoiresterres._
Voltaire. Son Retour et sa Mort. _Gustave Desnoiresterres._
Voltaire. _Morley._
Vie de Voltaire. _Condorcet._
Mon Séjour auprès de Voltaire. _Collini._
Mémoires sur Voltaire. _Longchamp et Wagnière._
Critical Essays. _Carlyle._
Vie de Voltaire. _Abbé Duvernet._
Le Roi Voltaire. _A. Houssaye._
Voltaire et son Temps. _F. Bungener._
Voltaire à Ferney. _M. Bavoux._
The Life of Voltaire. _James Parton._
Voltaire et le Président de Brosses. _Foisset._
Les Ennemis de Voltaire. _Charles Nisard._
Ménage et Finances de Voltaire. _Nicolardot._
Voltaire et le Voltairisme. _Nourrisson._
Voltaire au Collège. _Henri Beaune._
Voltaire et les Génevois. _Gabarel._
Vie Privée de Voltaire et de Madame du Châtelet. _Madame de Graffigny._
Voltaire’s Visit to England. _Archibald Ballantyne._
Voltaire, sa Vie et ses Œuvres. _Eugène Noel._
Voltaire et Rousseau. _Maugras._
Voltaire avant et pendant la Guerre de Sept Ans. _Duc de Broglie._
Bolingbroke and Voltaire in England. _Churton Collins._
Voltaire for English Readers. _Colonel Hamley._
Voltaire et Madame du Châtelet. _Havard._
Centenaire de Voltaire. _Victor Hugo._
Vie Intime de Voltaire aux Délices et Ferney. _Perry et Maugras._
La Physique de Voltaire. _E. Saigey._
Histoire Littéraire de Voltaire. _Marquis de Luchet._
Mémoires de Marmontel.
Mémoires, ou Essai sur la Musique. _Grétry._
Mémoires. _Madame de Genlis._
Mémoires sur la Vie de Ninon de l’Enclos.
Mémoires. _Président Hénault._
Mémoires. _Saint-Simon._
Mémoires. _Marquis d’Argenson._
Journal et Mémoires. _Marais._
Mémoires. _Madame d’Épinay._
Journal. _Collé._
Mémoires. _Comte de Ségur._
Mémoires et Correspondance. _Diderot._
Souvenirs d’un Citoyen. _Formey._
La Jeunesse de Florian, ou Mémoires d’un jeune Espagnol.
Mémoires de Madame du Hausset.
Mémoires et Lettres du Cardinal de Bernis.
Madame de Pompadour. _De Goncourt._
Letters of an English Traveller. _Martin Sherlock._
The State of Music in France and Italy. _Dr. Burney._
A View of Society and Manners in France, etc. _Dr. John Moore._
Mémoires. _Lekain._
Lettres. _Madame Suard._
Lettres et Pensées du Maréchal Prince de Ligne.
The Private Correspondence of Garrick.
Lettres du Chevalier de Boufflers sur son Voyage en Suisse.
Letters of Horace Walpole.
Frederick the Great. _Carlyle._
Frederick the Great and his Times. _T. Campbell._
Œuvres. _Frederick the Great._
La Jeunesse du Grand Frédéric. _Lavisse._
Mes Souvenirs de Vingt Ans à Berlin. _Thiébault._
Critical and Historical Essays. _Macaulay._
Œuvres du Marquis de Villette.
The Early History of Charles James Fox. _Trevelyan._
Lettres de l’Abbé Galiani.
Causeries. _Sainte-Beuve._
Autobiography. _Lady Morgan._
Autobiography. _Gibbon._
Lettres de Mdlle. de Lespinasse.
Essay on Shakespeare. _Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu._
Mémoires. _Mademoiselle Clairon._
Mémoires de Madame de Staal-Delaunay.
Le Conseiller François Tronchin et ses Amis. _Henry Tronchin._
Correspondance Littéraire. _Grimm._
Correspondance inédite du Roi Stanislas-Augustus Poniatowski et de
Madame Geoffrin.
Lettres inédites de Madame la Marquise du Châtelet.
Biographie de Albert de Haller.
Mémoires. _Bachaumont._
Le Salon de Madame Necker. _D’Haussonville._
Les Mots de Voltaire. _Lefort et Buquet._
La Philosophie de Voltaire. _Bersot._
Correspondance complète de Madame du Deffand.
Œuvres. _D’Alembert._
Mémoires. _Comte de Montlosier._
Mémoires. _Duc de Richelieu._
Vie Privée du Maréchal de Richelieu.
Rousseau et les Génevois. _Gabarel._
Rousseau. _Morley._
Jean Calas et sa Famille. _Coquerel._
Dix-huitième Siècle: Études Littéraires. _Faguet._
Histoire du Dix-huitième Siècle. _Lacretelle._
Stanislaus et Marie Leczinska. _Des Réaulx._
Vie de Maupertuis. _La Beaumelle._
THE LIFE OF VOLTAIRE
CHAPTER I
THE BOYHOOD
In 1694, when Louis XIV. was at the height of that military glory which
at once dazzled and ruined France, there was born in Paris on November
21st a little, puny, weak, sickly son.
The house into which the infant was born was the ordinary house of a
thoroughly comfortable well-to-do _bourgeois_ of the time and place. A
notary was M. Arouet _père_. _His_ father had been a prosperous
linen-draper; and Arouet the son, shrewd and thrifty in affairs, had
bought, after the custom of his time and his profession, first one post
and then another, until he was a man of some wealth and, for his class,
of some position. Among his clients he could number the Dukes of Sully
and of Richelieu, memoir-writing Saint-Simon, the poet Boileau, and the
immortal Ninon de l’Enclos. He had a country house at Châtenay, five
miles from Paris. Plenty of sound common-sense, liberal, practical,
hospitable; just enough taste for literature to enjoy a doze over a book
in the evening when his day’s labour was done; eminently respected and
respectable; decently acquiescing in the national religion as such, and
with no particular faith in anything but hard work and monetary
prudence; not a little hasty in temper and deadly obstinate--such was
Maître Arouet.
At thirty-four years old he had been prosperous enough to marry one
Mademoiselle d’Aumard, of Poitou, whose gentle birth and a certain
refinement of type, not at all shared by her husband, formed the chief
part of her dowry. The biographers of her younger son have done their
best to prove the d’Aumard family something more noble, and the Arouet
family something less _bourgeois_, than they were. They need not have
troubled. The man who afterwards called himself Voltaire valued his
ancestry not at all, and owed it nothing. The most painstaking research
has been unable to prove that there was a single one of his forbears who
had the smallest taste for literature, or mental endowments above the
common. Some have pretended that he owed to his mother the delicacy of
his wit, as he certainly owed to her the delicacy of his body. Beyond
the fact that she was the friend of her husband’s brilliant and too
famous client Ninon, and of three abbés--clever, musical, and
profligate--who were the _amis de la maison_ Arouet and always about it,
the theory is without the smallest foundation. Her great son does not
mention her half a dozen times in that vast bulk of writings he left the
world. To him she was but a shadow; to the world she must needs be but a
shadow too.
She had two living children when this last frail baby was born on that
November Sunday--Armand of ten and Catherine of nine. She had lost two
infants, and she never really recovered this last one’s birth.
He himself had at the first but a poor chance of life. He was hurriedly
baptised on Monday, November 22, 1694, by the names of François Marie.
Every morning the _nourrice_ came down from the attic where she tended
him to say he could not live an hour. And every day one of those abbés,
who had taken on himself the office of godfather and was called
Châteauneuf, ran up to the attic to see the baby and suggest remedies to
the nurse.
Perhaps the nurse did not try the remedies. At any rate, the puny infant
disappointed the expectations of his relatives, and lived. Zozo they
called him, or, from the wilfulness of his baby temper, “le petit
volontaire.” Châteauneuf’s interest in him increased daily. He must have
detected an extraordinarily precocious intelligence in the small
creature, since, when he was but three years old, the abbé had begun to
perform his godfatherly duties as he understood them, and to teach the
child a certain ribald deistical poem by J. B. Rousseau called “Le
Moïsade.”
It is not too much to say that at this period, and for about a hundred
years afterwards, the name of abbé was synonymous with that of
scoundrel. Free liver and free thinker, gay, base, and witty--“qui
n’était d’église que pour les bénéfices,” as that little godson said of
him hereafter--Châteauneuf was not worse than most of his kind, and
perhaps, if anything, was rather better. He accepted, indeed, the
emoluments of a religion in which he did not only not believe but at
which he openly scoffed, in order to live at his ease a life quite
profligate and disreputable. It is said, or he said, that he had the
honour of being Ninon de l’Enclos’ last lover. But he was both
goodnatured and kindhearted, and after his fashion was really fond of
the little godson and doing his best to lead his baby mind away from a
superstition which he himself had found, to be sure, tolerably
profitable.
What a strange picture it is! This child lisped scoffings as other
children lisp prayers. He had very big brown eyes, bright with
intelligence, in his little, wizened, old man’s face. The precocity
greatly entertained Châteauneuf. Père Arouet may have been amused too,
in private, at this infant unbeliever--the state of the Church making it
hard then for any man, at once honest and reasonable, to put faith in
her teachings. The society of her three abbés and her Ninon must have
made delicate Madame pretty used to free thought.
So the little boy learnt his “Moïsade” by heart and was taught to read
out of the “Fables” of La Fontaine.
He was but seven when his mother died. Sister Catherine of sixteen was
already thinking of a _dot_ and a husband, as a prudent French girl
should. Brother Armand of seventeen--“my Jansenist of a brother”--had
imbibed extreme religious opinions at the seminary of Saint Magloire and
was an austere youthful bigot.
So Zozo scrambled up as best he might among mortgages, bonds, and
shares; designed from the first by his father to be _avocat_ (wherein
the family influence would be powerful to help him), a lonely and
precocious little creature, and still the infant _protégé_ of
Châteauneuf.
In the December of 1704, when he was ten years old, he first affixed his
name--his baby name of Zozo--to a letter which Brother Armand dutifully
wrote at his father’s request to wish an aunt in Poitou the compliments
of the New Year 1705. That letter may be taken as the small beginning of
one of the most enormous correspondences in the world, which new
discoveries are still increasing in bulk, and which, as has been said,
seems likely to go on increasing until the Day of Judgment.
In that very same year 1704, Zozo was sent to the Jesuit College of St.
Louis-le-Grand as a parlour boarder. The school was only a few minutes’
walk from his own home. But in that home there was no one to look after
him save the busy middle-aged notary fully occupied in affairs.
Catherine was married. Armand had already succeeded in repelling a
volatile child’s spirit with his narrow harshness. So Zozo went to
school, and took up his place in the very lowest class.
St. Louis-le-Grand--“the Eton of France”--had two thousand pupils,
mostly belonging to the French aristocracy. Louis XIV. had visited it,
and left it his name. It was entirely under Jesuit influence, and
taught, or omitted to teach, exactly according to the royal pleasure and
the fashion of the day.
A very thin-faced, keen-witted little youth was its new ten-year-old
scholar. It did not take him long to conceive a passion for Cicero, for
Horace, and for Virgil. He soon discovered that he was learning “neither
the constitution nor interests of my country: not a word of mathematics
or of sound philosophy. I learnt Latin and nonsense.” But he applied
himself to that “Latin and nonsense” with that passionate voracity for
information, useful or useless, good, bad, or indifferent, which he
retained till his death. He must have been one of the quickest boys that
ever Jesuit master taught. He had an intelligence like an arrow--and an
arrow which always went straight to the mark. Before he was eleven he
was writing bad verses with a facility and enthusiasm alike
extraordinary. The masters were, with one exception, his friends and
admirers. While the other boys were at their games this one would walk
and talk with the Fathers; and when they told him that he should play
like the others, he looked up with those brilliant eyes that lighted the
little, lean, sallow face like leaping flames--“Everybody must jump
after his own fashion,” said he.
His especial tutor was a certain Abbé d’Olivet, then a young man, for
whom the promising little scholar conceived a lifelong friendship.
Another tutor, called Tournemine, was also first the boy’s teacher and
then his pupil. Yet another Father, called Porée, would listen long and
late to the child’s sharp questions on history and politics. “That boy,”
said he, “wants to weigh the great questions of Europe in his little
scales.”
He had friends among the boys too, as well as the masters. It was at
school he met the d’Argensons--afterwards powers to help him in the
French Government--Cideville and d’Argental, his lifelong friend, whom
he called his guardian angel.
In 1705, those fluent verses he had written came to the notice of
Godpapa Châteauneuf. As a reward the abbé took him to see Ninon de
l’Enclos, that marvellous woman who was as charming at eighty as at
eighteen, who “looked on love as a pleasure which bound her to no duties
and on friendship as something sacred,” and was in some sort an answer
to her own prayer, “God make me an honest man but never an honest
woman!” She received the child in the midst of her brilliant circle with
that infinite tact and kindness which have made her as immortal as her
frailties. His bright, quick answers, his self-confidence, his childish
store of information delighted her. Châteauneuf said that she saw in him
“the germ of a great man.” Perhaps she did. When she died a few months
later, she left him two thousand francs in her will, with which to buy
books. And the “great man,” many years after, wrote an account of the
interview as if it had happened yesterday.
He went back to school after that episode and learnt, and knew he was
learning, though he was only twelve years old, “a prodigious number of
things” for which he had no talent.
Porée taught him a good deal of Latin, and the primers a very little
Greek. He learnt no history, no science, and no modern languages. That
he acquired a knowledge of the history and government of France is as
undoubted as that he was never formally taught it.
Young Abbé d’Olivet inspired him with his own love of Cicero.
Châteauneuf had taught his godson to worship Corneille; and young Arouet
championed him valiantly against Father Tournemine’s dear hero, Racine.
Other seeds which Châteauneuf had sown in a childish heart were growing
and ripening fast. His one enemy among the masters, Father Lejay,
answered a too brilliant and too daring retort with the words, “Wretch!
you will one day be the standard-bearer of Deism in France!”
The enterprising Deist was still only twelve when, encouraged by Ninon’s
pension perhaps and the success of some impromptu verses made in class,
he attempted a tragedy called “Amulius and Numitor.” He burnt it
thereafter--very wisely no doubt. But verse-making was in his blood,
though his blood was Maître Arouet’s and the noble, dull Aumards’ of
Poitou. Play-acting at the school prize-givings encouraged a love of the
drama, also inborn. François Marie Arouet was not yet thirteen when he
wrote a versified petition to Louis XIV. to grant an old soldier a
pension, wherein the compliments were so delicately turned as to attract
the momentary attention of the best flattered monarch who ever sat upon
a throne. The old soldier obtained his pension, and François Marie
enough fame and flattery to turn a youthful head.
When he was fifteen, in 1709, Châteauneuf died, Malplaquet was lost, and
France starving to pay for her defeats. In the midst of that bitter
winter of famine, when young Arouet’s high place in class always kept
him away from the comforting stove, he called out to the lucky dullard
who was always near it, “Get out, or I’ll send you to warm with Pluto!”
“Why don’t you say hell?” asked the other. “Bah!” replied Arouet; “the
one is no more a certainty than the other.”
Here spoke the religious influence of the priestly godfather,
[Illustration: NINON DE L’ENCLOS]
who, before he died, had tried to form the godson’s mind by recounting
to him some of Ninon de l’Enclos’ most marvellous adventures.
In 1710, at the midsummer prize-giving, Arouet, runs the story, took so
many prizes as to attract the notice of the famous J. B. Rousseau, the
author of the “Moïsade,” the first poet in France, and once shoemaker to
the Arouet family. The great man congratulated and encouraged the boy
who was to be so much greater. To be sure he was an ugly boy for all
that keen look of his! Ugly boy and mediocre poet were to fight each
other tooth and nail hereafter, with the ugly boy the winner for ever.
If young Arouet was anything like an older Voltaire, he knew how to play
as well as how to work, and how to work gaily with a jest always ready
to relieve the tedium.
The defeat of Blenheim had shadowed the year 1704 when he went to
school. In 1711, when he left it, three heirs to the throne died one
after the other as if the judgment of God had already fallen upon their
wicked house. Abroad, were Marlborough and defeat; at home, death,
hunger, and religious persecution. Arouet had a heart always sensitive
to misfortune, but he was gay, seventeen, and fresh from drudgery.
When he came home from St. Louis-le-Grand in that August of 1711 it was
with every intention on his father’s part, and no kind of intention on
his own, that he should become _avocat_.
Was it the passing success of that poetical petition to the king which
had put the idea of literature as a profession into his head? Was it
Ninon’s pension? or the approval of poet Rousseau? The love of letters
had been in this boy always, a dominant taste, a ruling passion, which
he could no more help than he could help the feebleness of his body or
the astounding vigour of his mind.
He took the earliest opportunity of announcing to his father that he
intended to devote himself to writing.
M. Arouet received the announcement exactly as it might have been
expected he would. Literature! Better be a lackey or a play-actor at
once. Literature! What did that mean? The Bastille for a couplet, ruin,
poverty, disgrace. Rousseau himself had just been degraded from the
highest place to the lowest for verses he was only supposed to have
written. “Literature,” said Maître Arouet with the irate dogmatism which
takes no denial, “is the profession of the man who wishes to be useless
to society, a burden to his relatives, and to die of hunger.” The
relatives, fearing the burden, vociferously agreed with him.
Arouet _père_ had most unluckily once taken wine with the great
Corneille and found that genius the most insufferable old bore, of the
very lowest conversation. The indignant parent made the house of Arouet
exceedingly unquiet with his fumings and growlings. Pressure was very
strong and François Marie was eighteen. The youth who said that his
motto was “To the point” was soon engaged in the matchless intricacies
of French law, as yet unsimplified by a master mind into the Code
Napoleon.
What would be the natural result of a distasteful occupation, youth,
wit, and gaiety in eighteenth-century Paris? Such a result supervened
with young Arouet almost at once. Boy though he was, Châteauneuf had
already introduced him into a brilliant, libertine society called “The
Epicureans of the Temple.” At its head was the usual abbé--one
Chaulieu--“the dissolute Anacreon” who drew a revenue of thirty thousand
francs from his benefices to pay for his excesses. Vile, witty, and
blasphemous, he was not more so than the noble and titled company over
which he presided. It had every vice but one--that of dulness. Most of
its members were old men, and as literary critics of the evanescent
literature of the hour, unrivalled. To them, it is said, virtue and
faith were alike the prejudices of fools. The notary’s son, who was
nobody and had done nothing, had but two claims for admission to such a
society: one was the mental emancipation he had received from his
godfather, and the other the daring brilliancy all his own. The Temple
suppers were soon incomplete without him. Young Arouet was already
showing himself a versifier of astounding audacity. The company of dukes
and nobles, of men vastly his superior in age and acquirements, did not
daunt him in the least. A penniless boy, he had that careless ease with
great people--a certain charming air of familiarity--which never
offended if it made old men smile at a boyish vanity, and which he never
afterwards lost. Some of his _mots_ at those suppers have come down to
posterity, and were not less acceptable to the Temple because they are
no longer transcribable. At an epicurean supper at the Prince of
Conti’s, young Arouet could turn to the company and exclaim, “Here we
are all princes or poets!”
One poet received very short shrift from respectable, sensible old M.
Arouet _père_, when he came home in the small hours of the morning from
these orgies. The determined old man locked the house and went to bed,
and behold! François Marie must pay for his amusements by walking the
streets till morning. That did not daunt him. Nothing daunted him. He
was young and enjoying himself, with the keenest sense of the ludicrous,
and perfectly willing to take his pleasures--at a cost. One day, finding
himself shut out as usual, he went to sleep in the porter’s chair in the
Palais de Justice, and was carried, still asleep, the next morning, into
a café hard by, by two legal wags, his friends. The recollection of
Brother Armand’s long, disapproving face at home only lent additional
piquancy to Arouet’s revels abroad. Another day, a noble lady with
literary aspirations gives him a hundred louis for tactfully correcting
her bad rhymes. Young Arouet, idly watching an auction, bids for a
carriage and pair and has them knocked down to him. He drives about
Paris all day with his friends, and at three o’clock in the morning
takes the carriage home and tries to get the horses into his father’s
stables. The noise wakes up Maître Arouet, who turns his scapegrace out
of doors there and then, and sells the horses and carriage the very next
day. One likes the peppery old father with his dogged determination. He
would have won the battle over any other son but this one, and deserved
to win. He sent the prodigal to Caen in disgrace, and Caen fell in love
at once with a youth so clever and amusing, and turned the exile to a
delight. There was a charming literary lady here also, who abandoned her
_protégé_, however, when she found he could write indecorous verses too,
and there was a Jesuit Father who prophesied a great future for this
brilliant madcap. Then the old notary at home sent a message to his
François Marie--if he would come back and settle to work he would buy
him a good post; in time, get him made Counsel to the Parliament of
Paris. “Tell my father,” was the answer, “I do not want any place that
can be bought. I will make one for myself that will cost nothing.”
Twenty-six years after, one Voltaire, in his “Life of Molière,” wrote
that all who had made a name in the _beaux-arts_ had done so in spite of
their relations. “Nature has always been much stronger with them than
education;” and again, “I saw early that one can neither resist one’s
ruling taste, nor fight one’s destiny.” It was so in this boy’s case at
any rate. Some of the monetary prudence inherited from the old notary,
and which was so greatly to distinguish a later Voltaire from most of
his brothers of the pen, was in embryo within him now. Yet when he got
back to Paris after those few months at Caen he was as gay, wild, and
determined as ever, and M. Arouet, in despair, procured for him the post
of page or _attaché_ to the Marquis de Châteauneuf (brother of the abbé)
and shipped him off with that ambassador to the Netherlands in the
September of 1713.
The Marquis de Châteauneuf and suite reached The Hague on September 28,
1713, but did not formally enter the town until later. “It is amusing,”
one of the suite wrote, “to make an entry into a city where you have
already been living several weeks.”
Page, _attaché_, or diplomat, whichever people called him, _this_ page,
_attaché_, or diplomat was going to enjoy himself. Before they were well
established at The Hague he must needs fall head over ears in love with
a certain Olympe Dunoyer, the daughter of an adventurous mother who
lived by her wits and an audacious society periodical called _The
Quintessence_. Olympe, or, more endearingly, Pimpette, was
one-and-twenty. She knew something of the world already. With such a
mother and the impecunious roving life they had led, that was
inevitable. She was not pretty, her lover said long after. She was what
is a great deal more dangerous--fascinating and impulsive. He gave her
from the first a boy’s honest ardent affection. He wrote her immensely
long, vigorous, passionate epistles. He originated the most beautiful
youthful scheme by which Protestant Pimpette (Madame Dunoyer and her
daughter were Protestant) was to be brought back to the true Church, and
to Paris, where her Catholic father and sister were living. For a couple
of months, the worldly mother not suspecting its existence, the course
of true love ran smoothly. But one fatal night Arouet coming home late
after a blissful interview, encountered his chief. Madame Dunoyer will
certainly disapprove of the addresses of a penniless boy of nineteen!
Having a wholesome fear of that libellous “Quintessence,” the ambassador
felt bound to disapprove too. The _attaché_ must go back to France
to-morrow. The _attaché_, with his irresistible energy and daring, got
forty-eight hours’ grace. His valet, Lefèvre, was his accomplice; a
certain shoemaker was Pimpette’s. A further unavoidable delay in the
time of Arouet’s departure came to the lovers’ assistance. One moonlit
night Arouet disguised himself, signalled beneath his mistress’s window,
and drove her away to Scheveningen, five miles off, where he made her
write three letters which were designed to help his scheme of getting
her to Paris. Sometimes they met at the obliging shoemaker’s, daring,
frightened, and happy, with the shoemaker’s wife for a sentinel outside.
Of course the ambassador got wind of the interviews and forbade his
_attaché_ to leave the embassy. But the irrepressible lover _would_ see
his mistress--“though it bring my head to the block.” He let himself
down from a window by night, and met a trembling Pimpette who had
escaped, heaven knows how! from the Argus-eyed mother--outside her home.
Then the ambassador offered this impossible _attaché_ his choice--to
leave Holland immediately--or in a week’s time with a solemn vow not to
leave his quarters meanwhile. Arouet chose the week and the vow. He sent
Lefèvre with a letter to Pimpette. “If I cannot come to you, you must
come to me! Send Lisbette at three o’clock and I will give her a parcel
for you containing a boy’s dress.” The mad night came, and Pimpette, the
most endearing boy in the world, with it. The whole escapade was wild
enough. It says something for this impassioned Arouet of nineteen that
at its worst it was nothing but an escapade. “My love is founded on a
perfect esteem,” he had written, and “I love your honour as I love you.”
He rallied her, not a little gaily, in prose and verse, after that dear
meeting. She was such a pretty boy! “I fear you did not take out your
sword in the street, which was all that was needed to make a perfect
young man!” “But while I am teasing you I learn that Lefèvre suspected
you yesterday.” Of course he did. But Lefèvre would not betray his
master to the ambassador, who had more than a suspicion of the
interview. And the next night Arouet broke his parole, got out of the
window, and met Pimpette outside her house once more. The ambassador
heard of this too, wrote a furious letter to Maître Arouet describing
the whole affair, and on December 18, 1713, the lover was despatched
home.
He went on writing to Pimpette, of course. It was _her_ fate that
agitated him--not his. She must be sure to burn his letters--she must
not expose herself to the fury of that termagant of a mother. She must
take heart; she must be true to him! The letter from the boat which was
carrying him to France was full of that capital, clever plan for
bringing her over to the Jesuits--to be converted, as near to Arouet as
possible, in Paris. All these love letters to Pimpette are much more
loving than witty. They are so enthusiastic and earnest and young, so
energetic and devoted, so unselfish and hopeful! They make one feel
young to read them. It has been said that they are not the letters of
Mirabeau. They are those of an honester man.
The very first thing Arouet did when he reached Paris on this Christmas
Eve of 1713 was exactly what he had told Pimpette he would do. He went
straight to his old master, Father Tournemine, at St. Louis-le-Grand, to
whom he had already written some of the circumstances, to arrange with
the Jesuits for bringing back the lost Protestant sheep to the Roman
fold. Arouet did not think it necessary to mention that the lost sheep
was, in point of fact, a lamb--charming, and one-and-twenty--or that he
had ever seen her. Good Tournemine promised to do his very best to get
Pimpette’s father to take her in. In fact the whole scheme was working
beautifully when that irascible and dogged old Maître Arouet, who had
received not only the ambassador’s version of the affair but the furious
Madame Dunoyer’s, positively obtained a _lettre de cachet_ for his
scapegrace son, with which to get him arrested and imprisoned.
Young Arouet had not been home, which was very prudent of him. His
presence would only have further exasperated his father. The _lettre de
cachet_ was not put into effect. The lover went on loving, adoring, and
writing to his mistress. What was an angry father after all? A necessary
rôle in the comedy. What was distance or opposition, what was anything
or anybody to Arouet if Pimpette only loved him? Of the two, she was far
the more cool and reasonable. She urged him to study law as his father
bade him. And for her sake he did even that. A year or two later she
became Countess of Winterfeld. Some years later still, he had the
pleasure of seeing some of his own love letters to her figuring in a
scandalous work of her mother’s called “Lettres Historiques et
Galantes.” Even these events did not disturb a certain tender respect
for her memory which he bore to the end of his life. When he was
imprisoned in the Bastille four years later, he still carried about with
him a little, undated, misspelt letter about one of those dear, stolen
interviews--half maternal, half tender in tone--the only letter of
Pimpette’s which has come down to posterity.
January, 1714, then, beheld Arouet at the bidding of Pimpette, and
having made the most abject apologies to his father (François Marie was
nothing if not thorough), installed as clerk to a Maître Alain, and
living with that dull and worthy solicitor and his wife. He learnt
something of law here, no doubt. Nay, he must have learnt a great deal
to be hereafter that shrewd and capable man of affairs he proved
himself. But it was a dull time and an unfortunate. Maître Arouet kept
his prodigal very close in the matter of money; and his prodigal affixed
his name to certain bills which gave him trouble hereafter. Pimpette’s
letters were getting fewer and fewer. Pimpette was false. Then, in the
August of this 1714, young Arouet tried for a prize offered by the
French Academy for a poem celebrating the King’s generosity in giving a
new choir to Notre Dame; and failed. The failure attacked La Motte, the
judge--the unjust judge, Arouet thought him--with epigrams, and then
wrote a satire, called “Mud,” on La Motte’s “Fables.” Old Arouet was
furious again, and young Arouet’s only consolation in life was the
friendship of one Theriot, also clerk to the Alains, an idle,
goodnatured, amusing scapegrace, nobody’s enemy but his own, and to be
Arouet’s friend, though not always a faithful friend, for sixty years.
Caumartin, an old Temple acquaintance, reappeared on young Arouet’s
horizon again presently. Caumartin had an uncle, a famous old
magistrate, the Marquis de Saint-Ange, living at Saint-Ange, nine miles
from Fontainebleau. When young Caumartin conveyed an invitation to old
Arouet that his prodigal should go and stay with Saint-Ange and resume
his studies there, the notary naturally supposed an acceptance would be
the best thing for Arouet’s legal prospects.
And not for his legal prospects only. The boy had that satire, couplets,
and epigrams running through Paris. He did not yet know what message he
had to deliver to the world; did not know perhaps that he had any
message. But he was fast learning the language in which it was to be
spoken, and speak in that language he must, were the whole earth peopled
by angry fathers and conscientious Alains.
So it was as well that the autumn of 1714 saw him away from Paris and
established in the fine old château of the Saint-Anges.
The old magistrate, however, was not magistrate only, or chiefly; he was
also a man of the world, and courtier. So it soon came about that,
instead of learning maxims of the law, the keen-witted visitor sat and
listened, a most eager and intelligent audience, to gossip, scandal,
_bons-mots_ of the Court of a bygone day--anecdotes of Henry of Navarre
and personal recollections of Louis XIV. The château had a splendid
library. But it was hardly needed--“Caumartin carries the living
history of his age in his head,” said his courtly young guest in a
quatrain.
It was while he was at Saint-Ange he dashed on to paper the beginning of
what was afterwards the “Henriade”; and started that vast collection of
anecdotes which formed the material for the “Century of Louis XIV.”
Arouet stayed several months in the château, occasionally paying a
flying visit to the capital. The end of the Sun King’s reign was fast
approaching. The famous Bull Unigenitus was the one great topic of all
men’s conversation; and no doubt was freely discussed at Saint-Ange. If
the young visitor had come there meaning to be author, he left a hundred
times more fixed in that idea. In August, 1715, Louis XIV. was dying.
Arouet hastened to Paris to see the strange things that death would
bring about.
In his pocket he had a play, “Œdipe,” on which he had now been working
for two years.
In his soul were the courage, the conscious power, the clear outlook to
a future all unwarranted by the present, which are the consolations of
genius.
Arouet was beginning the world.
CHAPTER II
EPIGRAMS AND THE BASTILLE
At the death of Louis XIV. Paris was still the typical Paris of the old
_régime_. Magnificence and squalor, dirt and splendour, a few men living
like gods and most men living like beasts; narrow and filthy streets,
and the sumptuous glory of the Court of the Sun King; a hungry
_canaille_, and a _noblesse_ whose exquisite finish of manner concealed
the most profound corruption of morals the world has seen. Such was the
Paris of 1715.
For the last few years of his life a woman and a priest had absolutely
ruled the absolute King. “France forgave Louis his mistresses,” said
Arouet, “but not his confessor.” The great Bull Unigenitus, that
thunderbolt hurled at once against Jansenism and liberty, was the first
rock on which the French monarchy struck. Everybody was to think as the
King did! And France, who had starved patiently to pay for his conquests
and his pleasures, received with open joy the news of the death of the
man who had tried to strangle her soul with Unigenitus. Paris was
flooded with satires as it had never been flooded even with panegyrics.
The Court shook off the mantle of austerity which it had of late been
wearing over its depravity. The flagrant vice of the Regency flaunted
boldly in daylight, and men laughed openly at a religion in which for
years they had concurred devoutly--with the tongue in the cheek.
The world wagged thus when Arouet came up from Fontainebleau. The great
majority of men go through life accepting what they find in it without
question--supposing that because things are, they will be and ought to
be. But this boy had the order of mind which takes nothing for granted.
A state religion? Well, what had it done for that state and for the
souls of men? A paternal government that left its children to starve?
Arouet had from the first “lisped in numbers, for the numbers came;” but
when he saw on the one hand the crowded prisons and brutalised
peasantry, and on the other the luxurious debauchery of the Regent’s
Court, the numbers began for the first time to have a careless little
note in them of a most piquant satire.
Louis died on September 1, 1715. Arouet was at his funeral--that funeral
which was gayer than a _fête_. When a burlesque invitation to the
obsequies of the Bull Unigenitus appeared, there were not wanting
fingers to point at the notary’s son of one-and-twenty, who had come
back to Paris more audacious than ever, and had immediately resumed his
connection with his wild friends of the Temple.
He read aloud his “Œdipe” to them presently. That, and his epigrams,
quickly opened to him half the salons in Paris. Then Chaulieu--President
of the Temple--introduced him to the magnificent Duchesse du Maine,
“that living fragment of the Grand Epoch,” and mistress of the famous
“galères du bel esprit” at Sceaux. Madame must have him, and at once, in
her salon. To be sure the boy has nothing but his play in his pocket and
is of no birth at all! But what a wit and daring in his spirit! What a
matchless sarcasm in those piercing eyes! The Duchess and her set
worshipped cleverness and hated the Regent. It was the only religion
they had. What could they do but fall in love with this “little Arouet”
who could hardly have been dull if he had tried; and was much more than
suspected of the authorship of a too-telling epigram on Philip of
Orleans and his infamous daughter, du Berri?
“Little Arouet” read aloud “Œdipe” to the Duchess’s court. He was at
ease in this society as he was at ease in all societies. “Men are born
equal, and die equal.” “It is only externals which distinguish them.”
Those were the sentiments of one Arouet de Voltaire. He must have known,
not the less, that here, there was no one who was _his_ equal. But he
sentimentalised gaily in the moonlit gardens of Sceaux--her “white
nights” the Duchess called them--and watched senile old Chaulieu making
love to the Duchess’s companion, Mademoiselle de Launay; wrote wicked
satirical poems to please his hostess; and was so clever and daring that
at last all the bold brilliant things that were whispered in Paris were
fathered on the presumptuous youth, the son of Saint-Simon’s notary.
In the spring of 1716 he stayed with Saint-Ange again. In May he was
back in the capital. He did say, no doubt, when the Regent put down half
the horses in the royal stables, that he would have done better to have
dismissed half the asses who had surrounded the late King. Then a
shameful epigram on the shameful du Berri came to the ears of the
persons chiefly concerned. Young Arouet was exiled to Tulle--Tulle being
changed pretty easily, at his father’s request, to Sully. No reason was
assigned by the Government for this order of exile.
The Duke of Sully readily became a most hospitable host. The Duchess had
a most charming poor companion, Mademoiselle de Livri. It was but an
exile _pour rire_, after all--a warning fatherly rap from that paternal
Government on the knuckles of an impertinent child.
It is strange to see how the boy chafed under that agreeable courtly
life of hunting and conversation. “It would be delightful to stay at
Sully,” he wrote, “If I were only allowed to go away from it.” The Duke
was the most delightful of hosts, and his estate most charmingly
situated. The young people of the château, in pairs, sonneted the
midsummer moon in the gardens; and wrote each other dainty little
quatrains and flatteries. Arouet loved verses and the society of
charming and vivacious young women in general, and, here, of one
charming and vivacious young woman in particular; and he was
two-and-twenty. But he wrote himself back to Paris by poetic compliments
to the Regent so finely turned that the author must have had some
unusual spur on his imagination. He was, in fact, beginning to wonder if
there was not a work waiting for him in the world.
If it was not his fault, it was the fault of the reputation he had made,
that when there appeared in Paris, immediately he returned to it in the
spring of 1717, two stinging satires on the state of France and the
Regent’s manner of life called respectively “J’ai Vu” and “Puero
Regnante,” they should at once be assigned to him.
“Puero Regnante” is a dog-Latin inscription.
A boy reigning;
A poisoner
Administering;
Councils ignorant and unstable;
Religion more unstable;
An exhausted treasury;
Public faith violated;
Injustice triumphant;
Sedition imminent;
The country sacrificed
To the hope of a Crown;
The inheritance anticipated;
France perishing.
The “J’ai Vu” is a short poem.
I have seen ... the prisons full;
I have seen ... the people groaning;
I have seen ... Port Royal demolished--
“I have seen,” in short, everything to which a prudent person with a
proper regard to his safety would have been conveniently blind.
Arouet had not written them. But that did not matter. He might have
written them. They were after his manner. Besides, had he not been in
exile and disgrace, and was he not still so wicked that his good old
father would not have him in the house, and he was living an outcast in
furnished lodgings? These reasonings would have been conclusive alone.
Then he was known to be the moving spirit at Sceaux, and Sceaux was but
another name for disaffection.
A spy, Beauregard, swore to a conversation he had had with Arouet, in
which Arouet, with a most unnatural imprudence, avowed himself the
author of both satires with much circumstantial detail; and added
“things not mentionable” about the Duchesse du Berri.
He went his way quite gaily for a while, however. His “Œdipe” had been
accepted, and was actually in rehearsal at the theatre. Here was a
triumph indeed. He was still beloved of all the salons and the
women--dear, delightful, dangerous. He had the keenest sense of humour
to help him through these little _contretemps_ of existence. He would,
now at least, hardly have missed his _mot_ to save his skin--and he held
that dear, as the physically weak are apt to do. He was sauntering one
day, on May 15, 1717, through the Palais Royal Gardens, runs the story,
when he was called into the presence of the Regent, also sauntering
there.
“I bet you, M. Arouet,” says Philip, “I will show you something you have
never seen before.”
“What is that, Monseigneur?”
“The inside of the Bastille.”
“I take it as seen,” replies Arouet airily.
He could, all things considered, have been very little surprised when on
May 16th, Whitsunday, while he was still sleeping calmly in bed, he was
served with a _lettre de cachet_, his room and person ignominiously
searched, and himself removed the next day to that historic prison.
Perhaps he smiled a little, but not bitterly, when they discovered on
him Pimpette’s poor little note. “I am not made for the passions,” he
said a year or two later. He was not. A great work and a great passion
seldom run together. The work must be the only passion one has.
The prison was not very painful, it appears. Arouet was allowed an
excellent room, books, a fire, good wine, first-rate coffee, the use of
the bowling-green and the billiard-room, visitors, to a reasonable
extent, and often a seat at the governor’s dinner-table. Some of the
King’s guests might be rotting forgotten for unknown crimes in the
dungeons beneath; but, although almost all the literary men of the
period were bastilled some time or other in their lives, they unite in
praising the prison as very reasonably comfortable.
The present prisoner was nothing if not a philosopher. Since I am here,
I may as well be as easy as I can! The captives were allowed to make
purchases. Arouet entered the Bastille, Monday, May 17, 1717. On the
following Thursday he signed a receipt for a couple of volumes of Homer,
two Indian handkerchiefs, a little cap, two cravats, a nightcap, and a
bottle of essence of cloves. He had everything he wanted, in fact, save
two things. For the first few weeks of his imprisonment it seems almost
certain that he was not allowed pen and ink.
But if he could not write, he could and did compose. There was that
poem. Should it be called the “League,” the “Henriade,” or “Henry of
Navarre,” or what? What’s in a name after all? He had a memory so
marvellous and so exact that he could not only invent, without
committing to paper, whole cantos of that infant epic, but remember
them. The subject possessed him. He said he dreamt in his sleep, in the
Bastille, the second canto on the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew exactly
as it stands to-day. It is not unlikely. Now and ever when he was
writing, _what_ he was writing was to him food, air, warmth, light,
life. “His prison became his Parnassus,” said Frederick the Great in his
funeral oration on Voltaire. Hundreds of projects besides that epic, to
be called the “Henriade” finally, coursed through that brain, which was
surely the most active ever given to man. From his captivity he could
look out on his world. What was there not to do there? He must have
asked himself a thousand times what part his was to be on the great
stage of human existence.
“I knew how to reap benefit from my misfortune,” he wrote afterwards. “I
learnt how to harden myself against sorrow, and found within me a
strength not to be expected from the lightness and follies of my youth.”
And at Court, honest memoir-writing Saint-Simon was apologising for
mentioning to his readers so insignificant a fact as that one Arouet,
“the son of my father’s notary,” was imprisoned for some audacious
verses; while at home that good old notary announced vindictively: “I
told you so! I knew his idleness would lead to disgrace. Why did he not
go into a profession?”
Something else Arouet did in the Bastille besides dreaming epics. He
changed his name. It is now generally thought that he called himself by
that one with which he has gone among the gods, after a family who were
his mother’s ancestors. Before the existence of this family was
discovered some supposed that Voltaire was an anagram on the paternal
Arouet--Arouet, L. J. (_le jeune_). Others believed that, remembering
not untenderly from a prison those who had called him “le petit
volontaire” in his childhood’s home, he corrupted and abbreviated it
into the Voltaire he was to make immortal. As to the reason for the
change--“I was very unlucky under my first name,” he wrote; “I want to
see if this one will succeed any better.” Beyond the wildest dream that
ever Hope dreamt, “this one” was to succeed indeed.
The real author, a certain Le Brun, confessed to that terrible “J’ai Vu”
presently, and the irrepressible supposed author, who was imprisoned for
it, sat down in his prison and wrote a burlesque and very profane poem
on his arrest, which had taken place, it will be remembered, on
Whitsunday.
As he now had only that dog-Latin epigram, the “Puero Regnante” hanging
over him, Voltaire was released from the Bastille on April 11, 1718, and
exiled merely to his father’s house at Châtenay. The authorities do not
seem to have thought it necessary to apologise for their little
mistake--a mistake which kept a brilliant boy of three-and-twenty shut
up in a prison for eleven months for somebody else’s rhymes. The little
justice there was in France in those days miscarried so frequently that
miscarriage was more the rule than the exception. The ex-prisoner wrote
from Châtenay letters to the authorities begging to be allowed to return
to Paris, and denying that “abominable inscription, the ‘Puero,’” pretty
vigorously. Only allow me to return to Paris, if but for a couple of
hours, and throw myself at the feet of the Regent and explain all! I
have proof now of the double-dealings of the spies who betrayed me! “A
little journey, situated as I am, would be like the drop of water to the
wicked rich man in the parable!” He was permitted to make that little
journey, and to see Regent Philip.
“Be prudent,” said Orleans, “and I will provide for you.”
“I shall be delighted if your Highness will give me my board,” replied
the audacious young wit, “but beg that you will take no further trouble
about my lodging.”
Some authorities place this story at a later date and under different
circumstances. If the present be its true place and time, the _mot_ did
not greatly help Arouet to regain his freedom, though a _mot_ had done
something to lose it. He was allowed to pay flying visits to the
capital, but it was not until October 12, 1718, that he was given
official permission to return to Paris and to stay there as long as he
liked.
Either now, or before the Bastille adventure, he must needs fall in love
with that pretty Mademoiselle de Livri, the Duchess of Sully’s companion
and relative, who would fain be an actress, with a Voltaire to teach her
elocution and tenderness. The pair rode about Paris together in a bad
hackney coach, and had bad suppers together--in Elysium. A friend of
Voltaire’s, de Génonville, fell in love with Mademoiselle presently, and
she with him--to Voltaire’s passing displeasure. He vented his feeling
in a few graceful verses--and it vanished into air. The whole thing was
but an episode after all, a _penchant_ more than a passion, the light
fancy of the senses that touched the deeper soul not at all. But
posterity should be grateful to Mademoiselle. Voltaire had his portrait
painted for her by Largillière, and may be seen to-day as he looked
then--flowing wig, wide mouth, the ruffled hand thrust lightly in the
waistcoat; a lover, young, satisfied with his mistress, himself, and all
the world; and in the eyes and forehead, latent but present, power and
will extraordinary. The mockery, the humour, and the cynicism which make
later portraits of Voltaire like no other man’s, are not in this one.
His relations with women--niece or mistress--always show him in some
respects in his best light; patient, forbearing, and faithful; generous
to the memory of a false woman, giving honour where honour was due,
respecting intelligence, and never weary of trying to turn a fool into a
sensible companion.
But he had now other things to think of besides the sentiments. He had
made his _début_, as has been well said, in epigrams. If he had not
written “J’ai Vu,” he _could_ have written it a thousand times more
damning and deadly. The most beautiful sting that ever wasp concealed
beneath a gay coat, he was keeping for his enemies yet. He was still the
despair of M. Arouet and the spoilt child of salons. He had a reputation
but the more widespread for being evil. He was rather vain and
inimitably amusing. He was so clever--he might surely do anything! He
was, in fact, that most unsatisfactory creature in the world--a youth of
promise.
The performance was to come.
CHAPTER III
“ŒDIPE,” AND THE JOURNEY TO HOLLAND
On November 18, 1718, there was produced in Paris the tragedy of
“Œdipe,” by M. Arouet de Voltaire.
The subject of the play is classical and the plot entirely impossible.
Love interest there is none. The style is not a little bombastical and
long-winded. The characters are always talking about what they are going
to do, instead of doing it. The good people are very, very good, and the
bad ones very, very bad. At the best they are brilliant
automatons--masks, not faces.
The play has indeed the perfect smoothness and elegance dear to the
French soul. All the unities are nicely observed, and there is never an
anachronism. But to make it the astounding success it was, it must have
had in it something better even than the brilliant ingenuity of a
Voltaire--something better even than a Voltaire’s perfect knowledge of
the human nature for which he was writing. It contained the first
trumpet call of the Voltairian message.
The house was crowded. It was the custom of the day for the playwright
to beat up his friends and engage them to applaud the first steps of the
child of his brain. But here also were enemies and neutrals--all Paris
agog to see the next move in the game of a daring player. Among the
audience, half grumbling, half delighted, was old Maître Arouet. “The
rascal! the rascal!” he muttered, as some bold touch brought down the
house. Brother Armand should have been there too, to have heard the
strangely passionate enthusiasm with which was received the couplet
which, after all, merely referred to the pagan priesthood of a long dead
age:
Our priests are not what a foolish people think them!
Our credulity makes all their knowledge.
But “when fanaticism has once gangrened a brain, the malady is
incurable,” said Voltaire; and neither he nor any other could alter an
Armand. A certain Maréchale de Villars--_galante_, coquette, with all
the easy _ton_ learnt in Courts, and all the French woman’s _aplomb_ and
grace to make five-and-thirty more dangerous than five-and-twenty--leant
curiously out of her box presently to watch a young buffoon of an actor
who was doing his best to ruin M. de Voltaire’s play. The high priest,
in a scene essentially grave and tragic, has as train-bearer a
lean-faced, narrow-shouldered, boyish-looking youth who must needs take
_his_ part as comic, and make a fool not of himself only but of his high
priest also. Who is the ridiculous boy? M. de Voltaire. It appears
deliciously piquant to the Maréchale that an author should run the risk
of damning his own work for a jest. What a refreshing person to have to
stay when one is a little bored! Madame receives him in her box--he
knows quite well how to behave and how to be as affable, daring, and
amusing as could be wished--and they begin a friendship, not without
result.
There were some allusions to the Regent and Madame du Berri in “Œdipe,”
very vociferously applauded, which must have made Maître Arouet groan in
spirit and think that after all his Armand, his rigid “fool in prose” at
home, was safer to deal with than this “fool in verse” on the boards,
who would _not_ be warned and _must_ come to the gallows. But the
Regent, like a wise man, hearing of that astounding first night and the
allusions, presented the author with a gold medal and a thousand crowns;
talked with him publicly at the next Opera ball, and made a point of
coming to the performance to show that the arrows could not have been
really intended for him after all.
As for the Duchesse du Berri, _she_ came five nights in succession to
the piece. And of course all the little, witty, disaffected Court of
Maine were there too, enjoying those allusions and looking hard at their
enemies, the Regent and his daughter.
The curtain went down on perhaps the most successful _début_ that ever
playwright had made. “Œdipe” ran for forty-five nights. Clever Philip
commanded it to Court to be performed before the little Louis XV. The
enterprising and energetic young author asked, and obtained, permission
to dedicate it, in book form, to downright old Charlotte Elizabeth, the
Regent’s mother. He sent a copy, with a flaming sonnet, to George I. of
England; and yet another copy to the Regent’s sister, the Duchess of
Lorraine, with a letter wherein is to be found his first signature of
his new name, Arouet de Voltaire. When the Prince de Conti, his old
Temple companion, complimented “Œdipe” and its author in a poem of his
own, “Sir,” said Voltaire airily, “you will be a great poet; I must get
the King to give you a pension.”
The young playwright gained from “Œdipe”--not including the Regent’s
present--about four thousand francs, besides a fine capital of fame. He
was the old notary’s son to some purpose after all, and began to invest
money. As to the fame, he took _that_ very modestly. When the women
declared his “Œdipe” to be a thousand times better than his old hero
Corneille’s play on the same subject, the young man made the happiest
quotation from Corneille himself, disclaiming superiority.
He attended every one of the forty-five performances--a learner of his
own art and of the actors’.
He must have gone back gay and well pleased enough on those evenings to
his furnished room in the Rue de Calandre.
In the spring of 1719 the faithless and charming Mademoiselle de Livri
insisted on his using his influence to get her a good part in his play.
Perhaps she, Voltaire, and “little de Génonville” enjoyed themselves
about Paris together as before. “Que nous nous aimions tous trois!...
que nous étions heureux!” the forsaken lover wrote ten years later in
his graceful poem to the memory of de Génonville.
Mademoiselle was no actress, though she wished to be one. Her very
accent was provincial. She was laughed off the stage when “Œdipe” was
revived after Lent, and Voltaire very nearly came to blows with one of
the laughers, Poisson, who was one of the actors too. He had Poisson
thrown into prison, and then himself obtained his release. Poisson and
the public were right after all, and Voltaire soon knew it.
Mademoiselle retired from the boards, and married.
When a few years later, Voltaire went to call on her in her fine house
when she was the Marquise de Gouvernet, and her huge Swiss porter, not
knowing him, refused him admission, he sent her “Les Vous et Les Tu,”
one of the most charmingly graceful and bantering of all his poems. In
his old age at Ferney, when the first rose of the year appeared he would
pluck it and kiss it to the memory of Mademoiselle de Livri. Perhaps it
was of her he thought when he wrote one of the few tender lines to be
found in his works, and one of the tenderest in any poetry:
C’est moi qui te dois tout, puisque c’est moi qui t’aime.
On his last great visit to Paris, when he was nearly eighty-four and she
not much younger, the two met for the last time--ghosts out of
shadowland--in a strange new world.
In this same spring of 1719 there appeared in Paris another satire on
the Regent, called the “Philippics.” M. de Voltaire had not written it,
to be sure. But it was clever, and sounded as if he had. Besides, he was
known to be the friend of the Duchesse du Maine, at the present moment
shut up, with her Court, in the Bastille; of the gorgeous Duke of
Richelieu and of the Spanish ambassador who were accomplices in a
conspiracy against Orleans. So in May the authorities requested M. de
Voltaire to spend the summer in the country; and he spent it at Villars.
If the Maréchale had been charming in Paris, she was a thousand times
more so here. If she had flattered a brilliant young author in her box
at the theatre, she flattered and petted him a thousand times better now
she had him to herself, an interesting young exile. Such a clever boy!
so witty! so cynical! so amusing! He certainly ought to have been clever
enough to guess that this woman of the world was only playing with him.
But he was vain too--and did not guess it. “Friendship is a thousand
times better worth having than love,” he wrote disconsolately in a
letter after a while. “There is something in me which makes it
ridiculous for me to love.... It is all over. I renounce it for life.”
The renunciation was not so easy as he expected. He was, at least for a
time, out of gear, restless, discontented. The husband, Louis XIV.’s
famous marshal, had a thousand anecdotes of the Sun King to relate. And
the future author of the “Century of Louis XIV.” was almost too
_distrait_ to listen to them. He forgot Paris and his career. He forgot
the dazzling success of “Œdipe.” He would not indeed have been Voltaire,
but some lesser man, if he had let this or any other passion ride over
him rough-shod. He had the “Henriade” and a new play with him. He turned
to his work--worked like a fury--until he had worked the folly out of
him. But, not the less, “he never spoke of it afterwards but with a
feeling of regret, almost of remorse.”
By June 25, 1719, he was at Sully, where he wrote most of his new play,
“Artémire,” and spent the autumn and part of the winter. Paris had gone
mad over the financial schemes of John Law, and it was well that a young
man of five-and-twenty, with a taste for speculation and money in his
pocket for the first time, should be out of the way of temptation. From
Sully he went back to Villars, and from Villars to the Duke of
Richelieu’s. “I go from château to château,” he wrote. He liked the life
well, no doubt. It was gay, easy, witty. For anyone else it would have
been idle too; but not for a Voltaire.
He had already complained that his passion for his Maréchale de Villars
had lost him a good deal of his time. But, all the same, by February,
1720, “Artémire” was finished, and its author was back in Paris
superintending its rehearsals.
Its first appearance took place on February 13, 1720. It is not too much
to say that it was a most dismal failure.
Adrienne Lecouvreur, the great tragic actress, had hoped everything from
it. At a private reading a certain Abbé de Bussi had shed so many tears
at its pathos that he had caught cold from them. The public was not so
soft-hearted. It was in no mood for plays. Law had just ruined half
Paris. When the crash came--“Paper,” said Voltaire, with his usual neat
incisiveness, “is now reduced to its intrinsic value.” Someone says that
this mot was the funeral oration of Law’s system. Law’s system was the
funeral oration of “Artémire.” It was a dull, feeble play. Not all its
author’s rewritings and correctings and embellishments--and it was his
custom to rewrite, correct, and embellish all his works until labour and
genius could do no more for them--could ever make it good enough for him
to publish as a whole. But when the public took it exactly at his own
valuation, he was not a little hurt. It was a later Voltaire who said
that he envied the beasts because of their ignorance of evil to come and
_of what people said of them_. He was not less sensitive now than then.
The last performance of the rewritten “Artémire” took place on March 8,
1720. When, soon after, the “Henriade” was criticised at a private
reading, he threw it disgustedly into the fire; and President Hénault
saved it at the price of a pair of lace ruffles. Perhaps the fire was
not very bright, or the author had a very shrewd idea that one of his
friends would not let a masterpiece be lost to posterity.
He went to stay again with Richelieu after his “Artémire”
disappointment; and from there wrote to Theriot telling him to copy out,
in his very best handwriting, cantos of the “Henriade” which were to be
propitiatingly presented to the Regent. From Richelieu Voltaire went to
Sully, and from Sully to La Source, the home of the great St. John, Lord
Bolingbroke, and his French wife.
In the June of 1721, he went back to Villars again. He could trust
himself to see his Maréchale now. They had “white nights” here as at
Sceaux and at Sully. They gaily astronomised through opera glasses in
the long, warm, starlit summer nights in the garden--with the assistance
of that fashionable “Plurality of Worlds” by M. de Fontenelle. “We
mistake Venus for Mercury,” Voltaire wrote to him gaily in verse, “And
break up the order of the Heavens.”
From that modish courtly life the man who had been François Marie Arouet
was summoned home in the December of 1721 to the death-bed of his old
father. A strange group gathered round it--Catherine, Madame Mignot, a
middle-aged married woman; Armand, the austere and surly Jansenist of
eight-and-thirty; and the most brilliant man in France. Good old Maître
Arouet went the way of all flesh, trusting greatly neither in his “fool
in prose” nor his “fool in verse,” but leaving Prose a post in the
Chamber of Accounts which brought in thirteen thousand francs yearly,
and Verse a sum which afforded him four thousand odd francs per annum.
He had appointed a trustee and guardian, with whom Verse, who was always
what his valets thereafter charitably called _vif_, immediately
quarrelled.
The guardian was indeed such a dilatory old person that it took him four
years to divide the estate among Maître Arouet’s children; and two years
after his father’s death Voltaire was writing lugubriously to Theriot,
“I shall be obliged to work to live, after having lived to work.”
Things were not quite so bad as that, however. When he left the Bastille
the Regent had given him a pension of twelve hundred francs. And now, a
few days after his father’s death, in January, 1722, the boy King, Louis
XV., made him a further pension of two thousand francs. From this moment
Voltaire never spent his whole income.
In no other concern of his life has he been so much misrepresented as in
his dealings with money matters.
It is hard to see why for all other men independence should be
considered honourable and a freedom of the spirit, and grinding poverty
an inspiration and liberty only to the man of letters. But the
peculiarly foolish idea that genius cannot be genius if it understands
its bank-book, and that great truths can only come from a garret and an
ill-fed brain, is not yet extinct. Many of Voltaire’s biographers feel
that they have to apologise for him paying his bills regularly, hunting
out his creditors, and investing his money with shrewdness and caution.
It would have been so much more romantic to have flung it about
royally--and then borrowed someone else’s!
But Voltaire knew that “poverty enervates the courage.” He never uttered
a truer word. If it was his mission to whip the world’s apathy into
action with unpalatable truths, he could not depend on that world for
the bread he put into his mouth and the coat he put on his back. “Ask
nothing of anyone; need no one.” “My vocation is to say what I think
_fari quæ sentiam_.” If Voltaire had been insolvent the Voltairian
message could never have been uttered.
In this May of 1722, he further sought to improve his monetary position
by running to earth, for Cardinal Dubois--the first, greatest, and
vilest of the Regent’s Prime Ministers--a spy, one Salamon Levi.
Voltaire does not appear to have thought the occupation a derogatory
one. Nor did it hurt his cynic and elastic conscience to flatter
“Iscariot” Dubois to the top of his bent both in verse and prose, and
declare that he (Voltaire) would be eternally grateful if Dubois would
employ him somehow, in something.
The pension from the King--very irregularly paid at first, and soon not
paid at all--was not taken by him as the authorities must have hoped it
would be, and neither shut his mouth nor quenched his spirit. It was
nominally a tribute to a talented young playwriter. He took it virtually
as such. His old talent for getting into mischief was as lively as ever;
and spies at this period seem to have had an unlucky fascination for
him. One night in July, 1722, at the house of the Minister of War he met
Beauregard, the spy who had been the instrument of putting him into the
Bastille. “I knew spies were paid,” he said, “but I did not know that it
was by eating at the minister’s table.” Beauregard bided his time, and
fell on the poet one night on the Bridge of Sèvres as he was crossing it
in his sedan chair, beating him severely. To give blows with a cane was
thereafter translated “_Voltairiser_” in the mouth of Voltaire’s
enemies. He had many of them. He had made so many _mots_! They denied
him his proper share of physical courage. D’Argenson, his friend, though
he said he had in his soul a strength worthy of Turenne, of Moses, and
of Gustavus Adolphus, yet added that he feared the least dangers for his
body and was “a proven coward.” He was certainly, now and ever, a most
nervously organised creature. When he was at fever heat he could be
plucky
[Illustration: J. B. ROUSSEAU
_From an Engraving after a Picture by J. Aved_]
enough. But there is as little doubt that he dearly loved his safety as
that he spent his whole life in endangering it.
He pursued Beauregard with a most nimble, passionate, vivid intensity.
He must have had an extraordinary persistence to get that unwieldy mass
of muddle and jobbery which called itself French law to administer any
kind of justice; but he did it. It took him more than fifteen months to
compass his revenge, and cost him immense sums of money as well as
immense labour. The game was not worth the candle. But Voltaire was
never the person to think of that. To him the game was everything while
he pursued it. It was to this characteristic he owed some of his success
in life.
The affair of the Bridge of Sèvres was, not the less, one of the most
unfortunate incidents of his experience. To the day of his death it was
a whip in the hands of his enemies which they used without mercy and
without ceasing.
He must have been tired of fighting and failure, and in need of quiet
and change when one of his philosophic marquises--a certain Madame de
Rupelmonde--“young, rich, agreeable,” took him with her in July, 1722,
as her guest, on a trip to Holland. Her witty companion of
eight-and-twenty was in no sense her lover. The few _convenances_ there
were left in those days quite permitted such an association. The two had
for each other merely a gallant friendship. Madame was a widow, of easy
virtue, and fashionable enough to have religious doubts--to wish to be
taught to think. As they jolted leisurely in her post-chaise over the
rough roads of old France they had plenty of time to discuss fate, free
will, life, death, and the theologies. Voltaire found time, too, during
the trip, to answer Madame’s questions by an “Epistle to Uranie”--in
which he gave, in a few graceful pages, and with the admirable terseness
and lucidity which were to be the hall-mark of all his writings, the
most powerful objections to Christianity. It was his first open avowal
of Deism. How long he had cherished that belief and outgrown all others,
cannot be told. The whole temper of his mind was rationalistic.
Christianity had come to him through the muddy channel of French Roman
Catholicism in the eighteenth century. He began by disbelieving the
shameless superstitions with which the Churchmen darkened and debased
the understanding of the people. He ended by disbelieving everything
which his reason could not follow. The process is easy and not uncommon.
The philosophic pair were much fêted _en route_. “Œdipe” was performed
when they were at Cambrai, as a delicate compliment. There was a
Congress going on there too; and Voltaire wrote gaily therefrom to
Cardinal Dubois (who was archbishop of the place but had never even seen
it) one of those audacious, easy letters which were his _forte_, and
which Dubois and Theriot between them passed round the salons of Paris.
Voltaire and Madame were at Cambrai for some five or six weeks, and then
went on to Brussels. Here lived now J. B. Rousseau, fifty-two years old,
who from wit and licence had passed to dulness and orthodoxy. Of course
the poets met. Voltaire had not seen Rousseau since he was a schoolboy,
and Rousseau had been shown him as a prodigy for imitation. To the gay,
unsparing logic of the younger poet the old one did not appear at all in
the light of a prodigy now. “He despises me because I neglect rhyme, and
I despise him because he can do nothing but rhyme,” said Voltaire
carelessly.
At first, however, all went well. Voltaire read his “master” as he
called him, a part of the “Henriade.” Rousseau praised it, only
criticising such passages as would be likely to give offence to the
Church. Then came a meeting, when the poets read to each other some of
their minor poems; and Madame de Rupelmonde was a gracious and
sympathetic listener. Rousseau read his satire, the “Judgment of Pluto”;
which was nothing but an account of the wrongs which had exiled him. And
Voltaire said the “Judgment” was unworthy of the Great and Good
Rousseau. Then Rousseau must needs read out his “Ode to Posterity,” on
the same subject. “That is a letter, master,” says Voltaire, “which will
never reach its address.” Then Voltaire takes his “Epistle to Uranie”
and reads _that_. “Stop, stop!” cries old Rousseau, still smarting under
the audacious boy’s criticisms. “What horrible profanity!” And Voltaire
asks since when the author of the “Moïsade” has become devout.
There was the making of a very pretty quarrel here. The one sun was
rising, the other setting. Both men were not a little vain, sensitive,
and jealous. Henceforth, it was war to the knife. They parted; and if
Voltaire forgave at the last, Rousseau never did.
Rousseau recorded afterwards how Voltaire attended Mass on the first day
of his arrival at Brussels and shocked the congregation by his
profanity. The story was true, though it was written by an enemy.
Voltaire was born irreverent. When he left Brussels he did not even
revere that hero of his youth, Rousseau.
By October, 1722, he and Madame had gone on to The Hague and Amsterdam.
The young man was always out dining and playing tennis there, reading
aloud his works, keen, active, enjoying himself. His health, of which he
was exceedingly fond of talking and complaining was better than it had
ever been; but that did not prevent him from drinking up one day as a
kind of medical experiment--“from greediness,” said Madame de
Rupelmonde--a bottle of medicine from her bedside which she was going to
have taken, from necessity.
Perhaps in the midst of gaiety and enjoyment Voltaire recalled the last
time he was here, Pimpette, and that wild episode of his youth. But this
was the man who was always agog for the future; never a dreamer of the
past--a doer, an actor, the most energetic spirit in history.
When he was at The Hague he was busy arranging for the publication of
his “Henriade” there, in that freer country, and continually reading and
reciting extracts from it to his friends. After a few weeks’ visit he
started on his journey home. Madame de Rupelmonde had a house at The
Hague, and as there was no other agreeable marquise with a travelling
carriage returning to France just then, M. de Voltaire did the journey
on horseback alone, and as economically as he could.
He was at Cambrai again on October 31, 1722, announcing the forthcoming
publication of his epic. At the beginning of the new year, 1723, he was
once more staying at La Source, near Orleans, with that exiled Lord
Bolingbroke who had, said his guest, “all the learning of his own
country and all the politeness of ours.” The guest read aloud that dear
epic. He called it “The League or Henry IV.” now, or “The League,” or
“Henry IV.” only. He advertised it industriously at every château he
stayed at. In Paris Theriot was trying to get subscriptions for it, and
to propitiate the censor. From La Source Voltaire went to stay with
other friends at Ussé, who were also friends of a charming early friend
of his own, Madame de Mimeure.
By February 23, 1723, he was back again in Paris seeing a new play by
Alexis Piron, called “Harlequin Deucalion,” wherein the failure of
“Artémire” was piquantly satirised. “Deucalion” is remarkable as having
obeyed a prohibition of the censor, designed to stop comic opera in
Paris, that not more than one person should appear on the stage at a
time, and as having succeeded in spite of that obedience.
Then the active Voltaire was off to Rouen, where lived his old friend
Cideville. Then he went on to Rivière Bourdet, near Rouen, the country
home of the Bernières, a married couple, also very much his friends. All
the time he was planning, scheming, working, for the production of his
“Henriade.” Almost all his letters of the year 1723 are to Theriot or
Madame de Bernières, and almost all on this topic. In May he was staying
at the Bernières town house, on what is now the Quai Voltaire and was
then the Quai des Théatins, opposite the gardens of the Tuileries. The
“Henriade” was finished at last. The subscription lists had not gone
well; their ill-success had been burlesqued in the play which succeeded
“Deucalion.” That was mortifying. Still, it was but the chagrin of a
moment. The “Henriade” was about to appear. It must and should succeed!
Had not its wary author read parts to the Regent, and changed phrases
which might have offended Dubois? The only thing he would not do was to
alter its principles to suit the blindest and most autocratic powers
that ever brought a country to ruin.
It must take its chance! It took it, and was prohibited by the censor
immediately.
CHAPTER IV
THE “HENRIADE,” AND A VISIT TO COURT
Considered as a poem, the “Henriade” is the kind of fighting epic which
is the delight of schoolboys and a little apt to bore their elders.
The subject is the life of Henry of Navarre; the chief event, the
Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Truth, Discord, and other abstract virtues
are embodied, and talk at some length. The poem is modelled on, if not
imitated from, Horace and Virgil. Regarded on the surface it is nothing
but a dramatic story, easy, swinging, smooth, and with the lilt and
rhythm such a story requires.
But beneath that surface, not seen but felt, beneath the easy couplets
and running rhymes, there beats a spirit alert for liberty--the wings of
the wild bird against the cage which keeps it from life, sunshine, and
freedom. The pivot on which the poem turns is that supreme intolerance,
the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Its atmosphere throughout is that of
hatred of priestly power, fanaticism, superstition; the love of peace,
justice, enlightenment. Its religion is Deism. And its dedication to
Louis XV. contains these astounding words: “You are king only because
Henry IV. was a great man; and France, while wishing you as much virtue,
and more happiness than he had, flatters herself that the life and the
throne you owe to him will bind you to follow his example;” and “The
astonishment we feel when kings sincerely love the happiness of their
people is a thing very shameful to them.” Voltaire himself said
afterwards that he had advocated in it peace and tolerance in religion
and told Rome many home truths. No wonder the censor damned it.
If anything had been needed--but nothing was needed--to make Voltaire
more alert, eager, and determined to give his epic to the world, it
would have been that ministerial prohibition. Its publication in Holland
was conditional on its publication in Paris. Voltaire, as has been well
said, had not written an epic to keep it in a portfolio. He lost no
time. With the help of the Bernières and ever ready and good-natured
Theriot, he surreptitiously printed two thousand copies at Rouen. That
occupation took at least five months--from the June of 1723 until the
October. He was himself mostly in Paris, staying with the Bernières on
the Quai des Théatins, where the noise nearly drove him distracted; or
in a very poor lodging of his own. Garret or château, what did it
matter? The “Henriade” was everything--his world.
In September he was back at Rivière Bourdet. Everyone concerned in the
scheme was infinitely active and secret. “Little de Génonville” died in
this September of a very bad kind of smallpox then epidemic in Paris.
Voltaire mourned him much and long. He had a new tragedy in hand to keep
his mind from the tragedies and trials of life, and turned to “Mariamne”
for the comfort and change of thought he needed. It was finished early
in November, and the author put it in his pocket and went to stay with
his friend M. de Maisons, at the Château of Maisons, in the forest of
St. Germains, nine miles from Paris, where were fêtes, parties,
gaieties, and where Adrienne Lecouvreur was coming to read “Mariamne” to
the guests.
Maisons was but four-and-twenty, delicate, noble, accomplished;
destined, it seemed, for all great things, but to die too soon. Madame,
his wife, was the friend of that old love of Voltaire’s, Madame de
Villars.
By November 4th, at least two of the guests, Voltaire and Adrienne
Lecouvreur, had arrived. Two days later Voltaire developed smallpox.
No one can gain an adequate idea of his character without realising in
what “a thin and wretched case” Nature had enveloped “what is called my
soul.” No other great man, perhaps, ever fought such a plucky fight
against physical weakness, weariness, and infirmities. Voltaire was not
always ill, but he was never well. One of his valets said that his state
of indisposition was natural and permanent and accompanied him from the
cradle to the grave. He himself said he had never passed a single day
without suffering, and could not even imagine what it must be like to be
in robust health. But he had what he called his “infallible
secret”--work. Others have used physical weakness as an excuse for
mental idleness, and indisposition as a natural holiday from labour. But
not Voltaire. He dictated when he was too ill to write and when he was
too ill to think, he read dull books for information which he might find
useful and make amusing; and when he was yet worse, and could do nothing
else, he read and wrote that gay mockery of his leisure, his “Pucelle.”
The body was but the ragged covering of the soul at its best; at its
worst, it was a subtle and seducing enemy, and one must be ever up and
at it, with a thrust here and a lunge there, lest by any means it get
the mastery. Voltaire fought it his whole life long--and always won.
“Toujours allant et souffrant” was his definition of himself. He hardly
ever made a happier.
In the present case, his disease was of that confluent type which a
couple of months earlier had killed de Génonville. Voltaire was very
ill. He went so far, he said, as to call the _curé_, make his
confession, and his will, “which, you will well believe, was very
short.”
But he was placed under the enlightened care of a Doctor Gervasi,
physician to the Chevalier de Rohan, who saved his life with much
lemonade and more common-sense.
Voltaire had always that interest in medicine which by no means implies
faith in doctors. With two famous exceptions--Gervasi was one--he
mistrusted that eighteenth-century faculty as it deserved to be
mistrusted. He wrote afterwards a very minute description of his
symptoms and treatment for the benefit of an old Baron de Breteuil, the
father of Madame du Châtelet.
Adrienne Lecouvreur, it is said, who once had been something more than
Voltaire’s friend, never left his bedside until Theriot, whom she had
summoned, came to be with him.
The Maisons were prodigal of kindnesses. The day after he was out of
absolute danger, the patient was writing verses. On the twenty-sixth day
from his seizure, that is December 1, 1723, he left for Paris. He was
not more than two hundred feet away from the château when the wing he
had been occupying caught fire and was burnt to the ground.
As such accidental disinfectants were the only ones known to that age,
the conflagration was a blessing in disguise. But Voltaire naturally
felt overwhelmed with compunction, as if he had burnt the château
himself. As for the Maisons, the letters they wrote him are examples of
that exquisite grace and tact known to complete perfection only to
France, and to the France before the Revolution.
In the very early days of 1724 certain innocent-looking, plodding
agricultural vans arrived in Paris from Rouen. By the exertions of
Madame de Bernières the great packages they contained got through the
_douane_--somehow. Theriot was ready in the capital with his two
thousand bindings. Voltaire’s injunctions that his child should be
properly clad had not been in vain.
The August of 1723 had seen the death of Cardinal Dubois; the December
the death of the Regent. Surely the time was favourable! The censor had
condemned the book--what advertisement could be better?
And lo! on a sudden the “League” was all over the city--on the toilet
tables of the women, in the salons, in the coffee-houses; aye, and in
the King’s palace itself. It was of course a thousand times more
tempting and delicious for being forbidden fruit.
Was it absurdly imitated from the “Æneid?” Did Henry of Navarre and
Elizabeth of England, who never met in real life, meet in the poem for
an immense interview? Well, what of that? It was daring, impetuous, and
prohibited. That was enough. It was soon all over Europe translated into
many languages, fulsomely admired, parodied, burlesqued, abused,
pirated, copied. It had all the successes. A year
[Illustration: LOUIS XV.
_From the Picture by Carle Van Loo in the Museum at Versailles_]
later Voltaire could say truthfully in his airy manner that he had made
poetry the fashion.
The production of his tragedy “Mariamne” at the Comédie Française in
this March of 1724 came like a dash of cold water on his rising spirits.
It was a failure. A wag in the pit spoilt the critical moment of the
heroine’s death with a foolish _mot_.
The author withdrew “Mariamne” to rewrite it, as was his indefatigable
fashion, and went to recover his disappointment and his always ailing
health at the waters of Forges, near Rouen, whither he was accompanied
by the young Duke of Richelieu.
At Forges the invalid drank the waters, lost his money at faro, wrote a
gay little comedy called “L’Indiscret,” and made the acquaintance of the
French Court, then at Chantilly, near Forges.
The French Court then consisted of a King of fourteen; the Duke of
Bourbon, who had obtained the post of Prime Minister simply by asking
for it; and the Duke’s mistress, Madame de Prie. The mistress may be
said to have ruled the kingdom, since she ruled the Duke, and the Duke
ruled the King.
This wary Voltaire propitiated her, dedicated to her “L’Indiscret,” and
made her his very useful friend. Drinking the waters (“There is more
vitriol in a bottle of Forges water than in a bottle of ink,” he wrote;
“and I do not believe ink is so very good for the health”) was brought
to a tragic conclusion by the Duc de Melun, who was out hunting with
Richelieu, being gored to death by a stag. The hunt was at Chantilly,
and the unhappy Melun died in the arms of the Duke of Bourbon and in the
presence of the Court. Voltaire, who never abandoned a friend, stayed
another fortnight to console Richelieu, and then went back to Paris,
which he had reached by August 15th.
He had a lodging in the Rue de Beaune now, but the unbearable noise of
the street drove him into an _hôtel garni_, and the discomforts of the
_hôtel garni_ back again to the Rue de Beaune. Finally, he completed an
arrangement begun the year before, and rented a room from the Bernières
in their noisy house.
Wherever he was, he was working as usual. He rewrote “Mariamne.”
He obtained for Theriot the offer of the secretaryship to
Richelieu--Richelieu having been appointed ambassador to Vienna. And M.
Theriot is too idle to be bothered with regular work, and twice declines
the offer. Voltaire was not a little mortified, and found forgiveness
difficult; but he forgave. His letters on the subject are an admirable
lesson in the arts of friendship and of forbearance.
In April of the next year, 1725, the rewritten “Mariamne” was produced,
with that gay little _bagatelle_, “L’Indiscret,” after it. “L’Indiscret”
was said to justify its name in that it took too much liberty with the
upper classes. “Mariamne” was very fairly successful now. But, after
all, the author had had it and “L’Indiscret,” as well as the “Henriade,”
all printed at his own expense, and at a very great expense. Fame, he
observed, was agreeable but not nourishing. His thrifty soul began to
look out for the nourishment.
In this summer of 1825, Louis XV., aged fifteen, was to be married to
Marie Leczinska, aged twenty-one, daughter of Stanislas, ex-King of
Poland. Madame de Prie gave Voltaire the refusal of rooms in her house
at Fontainebleau, where the royal honeymoon was to be spent. Here was an
opportunity! He had said not a year ago that he had renounced Courts for
ever through the weakness of his stomach and the strength of his reason.
But in many respects, and in this respect above all, he was nothing if
not inconsistent. He cried for royal favour as a spoilt child cries for
the moon; and when he had it, it bored, wearied, and irritated him. But
in his day, if the King, and the person who ruled the King, did not
smile on talent, talent had small chance of success. “To make one’s
fortune,” Voltaire wrote bitterly hereafter, “it is better to speak four
words to the King’s mistress than to write a hundred volumes.”
So on August 27, 1725, he came up to Madame de Prie’s house at
Fontainebleau. The festivities were in full swing, though the marriage
was yet to come. Voltaire was one-and-thirty. He was there by his own
choice. He knew himself to be for the first time in his life well
placed. Yet his visit had not lasted three days when he wished himself
away again. There was a dreadful rumour, too, that all the pensions
were to be discontinued, and a new tax imposed instead to pay for the
bride’s chiffons! Then Voltaire wrote a little _divertissement_ to amuse
the royalties, and the master of the ceremonies preferred “Le Médecin
Malgré Lui.” On Wednesday, September 5th, the wedding took place. Then
the bride accorded her gracious permission to M. de Voltaire to dedicate
to her “Œdipe” and “Mariamne.” Things were a little better! Her father,
with whom Voltaire was to have much to do hereafter, begged for a copy
of the “Henriade” on his daughter’s recommendation. Voltaire was
presented to her Majesty. Things were better still. “She has wept at
‘Mariamne,’ she has laughed at ‘L’Indiscret,’ she talks to me often, she
calls me her ‘poor Voltaire.’” Charming! charming! but just a little
bit--well, unsubstantial. And then she allowed her poet a pension of
fifteen hundred livres.
Voltaire’s state of mind at Court was the state of mind of many--perhaps
of most--courtiers. It is a dreadful bore to be here--but it is very
advantageous! The cage is really so exquisitely gilded that one must try
not to see the bars through the gilt! I want to get out, and I could get
out--but I am so very lucky to be here, and so many people envy me, that
I certainly will _not_. What an inexplicable and yet what a very common
state of mind it is!
Voltaire could now count on the friendship, not only of the Queen, but
of Madame de Prie, and of the minister Duverney. He was a pensioner of
both their Majesties. The Court acknowledged him the first poet in
France. Epigrams and the Bastille were in the background. He had hopes
of being useful to his friends.
All this was not ungenerous payment for three months’ ennui at the
finest Court in the world. But was it sufficient? Voltaire had indeed
his gift of satiric observation to make the dullest entertainment
amusing. “The Queen is every day assassinated with Pindaric odes,
sonnets, epistles, and epithalamiums,” he wrote; “I should think she
takes the poets for the Court fools; and if she does she is right, for
it is a great folly for a man of letters to be here.” The boredom was
stronger than the satisfaction after all. To hang about in the
antechamber, tickling the jaded fancy of the Court gentlemen with one’s
_mots_--to try and rouse the sleepy selfishness of a callow king with
one’s finest wit--to flatter and cajole a duke’s mistress and a poor,
honest, simple little foreigner because she happened to be a king’s
wife--to play for apples of Sodom that turned to dust and ashes at one’s
touch--was it worth while? “It is better to be a lackey of wits than a
wit of lackeys”--better to do any work than none--better any life than
this narcotic sleep of easy idleness. In Voltaire’s ear that siren,
Verse, was always whispering and calling him away. In his heart were
passionate convictions throbbing to be spoken. He had been glad to go to
Court. He was more than glad to get away.
His zeal for a fight must have been more to the fore than ever after
those three months of amiable apathy. He had it soon enough.
It was in the December of 1725 that the great Chevalier de Rohan,
meeting this lean, brilliant, impertinent upstart of an author at the
opera, said to him scornfully, “M. de Voltaire--Arouet--whatever your
name is----?”
The Chevalier de Rohan was himself the representative of the haughtiest
and most illustrious family in France, and of the same house as that
Rohan who was to drag its pride through the mud of the episode of the
Diamond Necklace.
A middle-aged debauchee; “a degenerate plant, a coward and a usurer”--in
the vigorous words of a contemporary--was this great Chevalier whom
Voltaire met that night.
He made no answer at the moment. Two days after, at the Comédie
Française--most likely in Adrienne Lecouvreur’s box there--Rohan
repeated the question.
“I do not drag about a great name, but I know how to honour the name I
bear,” was the answer. There is another version of it: “I begin my name;
the Chevalier de Rohan finishes his.” Or, as Voltaire himself wrote
after in “Rome Sauvée”:
My name begins with me: your honour fend
Lest yours with you shall have an end.
The answer was at least one which made the Chevalier raise his cane; and
Voltaire clapped his hand on his sword. Adrienne, of course, fainted,
and the incident closed.
A few days later Voltaire was dining with the Duke of Sully. He was
called from the table to speak to someone in a carriage outside. He went
unsuspiciously enough. A couple of Rohan’s lackeys fell on him and beat
him over the shoulders. Rohan, it is said, looked out of the window of
his coach and called out: “Don’t hit his head! something good may come
out of that!” And the bystanders, cringing to rank and success as they
needs must, observed admiringly, “The noble lord!” Voltaire, beside
himself with fury, flung off his assailants at last, rushed back to
Sully, begged him to redress the wrong, to go to the police, to speak to
the minister. Voltaire had been as “a son of the house” for ten years,
and had immortalised Sully’s ancestors in the “Henriade.” But Sully was
not going to brave the wrath of such a great man as his cousin Rohan for
a _bourgeois_ author with a talent for getting into disgrace. Voltaire
left the house--never to enter it again. He went straight to the opera,
where he knew he would find Madame de Prie, told her his story, and
enlisted her sympathy. For a few days it seemed as if she would succeed
in getting her lover, the Duke of Bourbon’s, influence for Voltaire. But
the friends of Rohan showed the Duke an epigram on his one eye, which
sounded clever enough to be Voltaire’s, and ruined his credit at once.
He was baffled on every side. Marais, that keen old legal writer of
memoirs, declares that, though he showed himself as much as he could in
town and Court, no one pitied him, and his so-called friends turned
their backs. He had been publicly caned! He was ridiculous! And the fear
of being absurd was a thousand times stronger than the fear of hell in
eighteenth-century Paris. Any other but Voltaire would have hidden his
head in obscurity and have been thankful to be forgotten.
But with this man an insult raised all the vivid intensity of his
nature. “God take care of my friends,” said he; “I can look after my
enemies myself.” For more than three months he led a life of feverish
indignation and was every moment busy with revenge. He learnt fencing.
He had no aptitude for any bodily exercise. But he perfected himself in
this one with all the persistency and thoroughness of his nature. If he
was not normally courageous, he had plenty of daring now. The Rohans,
anyhow, feared him so much that they kept him under police supervision.
On April 16, 1726, the lieutenant of police recorded that Voltaire
intended to insult Rohan with _éclat_ and at once; that he was living at
his fencing master’s, but continually changing his residence. On April
17th Voltaire went to Adrienne Lecouvreur’s box at the Comédie, where he
knew he would find Rohan. Theriot accompanied him and stood without the
box, but where he could hear everything. “Sir,” said Voltaire, “if you
have not forgotten the outrage of which I complain, I hope you will give
me satisfaction.” The great man agreed. The hour fixed was nine o’clock
the next morning; the place, St. Martin’s Gate. But before that,
Voltaire found himself for the second time in the Bastille. One can
hardly fancy a meaner revenge. By March 28, 1726, the influence,
cunning, and poltroonery of Rohan had succeeded in getting signed the
warrant for his enemy’s arrest and detention. Rohan, in fact, was a
great noble; and Voltaire, as his rival playwright Piron said to
himself, was “nothing, not even an Academician.” Armand and his faction
were only too glad to be rid of such a stormy petrel.
It is not hard to understand what a passion against the bitter injustice
of his gorgeous day must have surged in Voltaire’s heart. “You do not
hear in England,” he wrote but a very short time after, “of _haute_,
_moyenne_, and _basse_ justice.” It was in fact literally true that in
France at that period there was not only really, but avowedly, one
“justice” for the noble, another for the _bourgeois_, and a third for
the _canaille_. Voltaire was in the Bastille only a fortnight. He was
very well treated. “Everyone he knew,” wrote Delaunay the governor, came
to see him; so his visitors had to be limited to six a day. Theriot
brought him English books. He dined at Delaunay’s table. Also imprisoned
in the Bastille was the famous Madame de Tencin--young, clever, and
corrupt. “We were like Pyramus and Thisbe,” Voltaire wrote, “only we
did not kiss each other through the chink in the wall.” He could still
write gaily. As some people never speak without a stammer, Voltaire
never spoke without a jest. But what food in his heart for new strange
thought! Under what crushing laws was this great French people bound in
darkness, wretchedness, ignorance! “We are born in slavery and die in
it.” It has been said that Voltaire left France a poet and returned from
England a philosopher. But that fortnight in the Bastille must have made
him realise, if he had not known already, that he was born for a destiny
far weightier and greater than that of a Corneille or a Racine.
“What is done with people who forge _lettres de cachet_?” he asked the
lieutenant of police one day, when he was in prison. “They are hanged.”
“Good!” was the answer, “in anticipation of the time when those who sign
genuine ones shall be hanged too.”
A few days after his imprisonment he wrote to the Minister of the
Department of Paris:
“Sieur de Voltaire humbly represents that he has been assaulted by the
brave Chevalier de Rohan, assisted by six cut-throats, behind whom the
chevalier was courageously posted; and that ever since Sieur de Voltaire
has tried to repair, not his own honour, but that of the chevalier,
which has proved too difficult.”
He went on to beg permission to go to England. His order of liberty was
signed on April 29, 1726. But there were many formalities to be observed
before it could be put into execution. On May 2d, Delaunay received it
with its accompanying conditions. Voltaire was free--to go to England,
accompanied as far as Calais by Condé, one of the turnkeys of the
Bastille, to see that he really _did_ go there.
The businesslike prisoner asked Madame de Bernières to lend him her
travelling carriage to take him to Calais. She, Madame du Deffand, and
Theriot came to say good-bye to him. He left the Bastille on May 3d. On
May 5th he was writing to Theriot from Calais. He stayed there three or
four days, and about the end of the first week, in May, 1726, landed at
Greenwich.
CHAPTER V
ENGLAND, AND THE “ENGLISH LETTERS”
It was the last year of the reign of George I. Swift was Dean of St.
Patrick’s. Pope was writing that masterpiece of brilliant malice, the
“Dunciad,” at Twickenham. Gay, Young, and Thomson were in the plenitude
of their poetic powers. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was compiling her
memoirs at Blenheim. Bolingbroke, Hervey, and the Walpoles shed their
lustre on politics. Even at the boorish Court there was one brilliant
woman--Caroline, Princess of Wales. Newton was near his dying. And Locke
being dead yet spoke.
It was one of those rare spring days, with a cloudless sky and a soft
west wind, when Voltaire first set foot in England. Greenwich was _en
fête_, with its Fair in full progress--Olympian games and the pretty
daughters of the people, whom, in their gala dress, the traveller
mistook for fine ladies. When he met the fine ladies that very evening
in London, most likely at the house of his old friend Lord Bolingbroke,
their hauteur and malice disgusted him, and he said very frankly that he
preferred the maidens of Greenwich.
He tells how the very next morning he went to a coffee-house in the
City, and gives a gay description of the phlegmatic apathy of the
company. If they were laughing in their sleeves at the foreigner, the
foreigner’s description of them remains to-day a notable example of that
keen, clear-cut, airy, bantering humour of which he was so perfect a
master.
But if he wrote lightly hereafter, his mood when he landed in England
was no laughing one.
This _vif_ and sensitive child of fortune could not forget that he was
an exile--and exiled unjustly. His pensions both from King and Queen
had been stopped. He had an exchange letter on a Jew in London, but
before he presented it the Jew was bankrupt and could not pay him, and
he was forced to accept a few guineas King George I. “had the generosity
to give me.” His health was as indifferent as usual. He was in a country
of which he knew little or nothing of the language or the customs. He
had begun the world brilliantly perhaps, but he had greatly fallen.
Those first few weeks in England are likely to have been among the
unhappiest in his life.
He had been on English shores but a very short time when he slipped back
_incognito_ to Paris (he had promised the paternal government to _go_ to
England, not to _stay_ there), and, with his life in his hands, waited
about in the capital for two months for the man Rohan, “whom the
instinct of his cowardice hid from me.” Theriot knew of the escapade,
but no one else. Voltaire wrote him an account of it on August 12, 1726.
He was hardly back in England again when, in September and in the first
budget of letters he had had in his exile, he received the news of the
death of his sister Catherine. She was nine years older than himself.
She had long been married to M. Mignot, and had children and cares of
her own to engross her affections and her thoughts. It does not seem
that Voltaire had of late seen very much of her. But all the mothering
he had had since he was seven years old she had given him. Her death
filled his soul with a gloomy despair. “I should have died and she have
lived,” he wrote to Madame de Bernières. “It was a mistake of destiny.”
To the end of his days he benefited her children with a large
generosity. Bearing evident reference to her death is that letter,
called the Letter of Consolation, written from England in 1728 to a
friend in sorrow. No reader of it who has himself suffered will doubt
that its writer knew how to suffer too, and will find in that wise and
patient philosophy a soothing of the troubles common to a Voltaire and
to all men.
He had plenty of introductions in England. His acquaintance with the
Count de Morville, the intimate of the Walpoles, gave him the _entrée_
of the great Whig houses. Bolingbroke, who had returned from France in
1723, would present him to the Tories. He further knew, it is said,
Lord Stair and Bishop Atterbury. He had a talent--that delightful French
talent--for making new friends. And he was soon engrossed in an
astounding application to the English language, and a study of its
government, laws, literature, and progress which remains the best ever
made by a Frenchman.
It is doubtful if, when he landed here in May, 1726, he knew a single
syllable of English except what he had gathered from the English books
Theriot had procured for him when he was in the Bastille. There is a
letter to a wine merchant, in very bad English certainly, but still in
English, which he is supposed to have written when he had been at the
most a few months in England.
The year 1726 was not out when he was writing to other friends in that
intricate tongue and attacking its idioms with a splendid dash and
audacity.
In 1727, he composed some melodious English verses to Lady Harley; and
in his English letters of this and the next year to Theriot and others
it will be seen that the language was sufficiently his own for him to
stamp it with his inimitable style. Authorities differ as to how good or
how bad was the accent with which he spoke.
He is said, when he discovered that the word “plague” was pronounced as
one syllable, to have wished that plague would take one half of the
language and ague the other; and to have complained a good deal of a
tongue in which a word spelt _handkerchief_ was pronounced _’ankicher_.
That he was fluent in it there is no doubt. An uncharitable person
declared that he had soon mastered the language, even to the oaths and
curses. Why not? Oaths and curses adorned the polite conversation of the
day, and why should a Voltaire omit them? But besides that dinner-table
English he could soon speak easily the very different English required
for discussing science, philosophy, religion--the speciality of an
English expert, in that expert’s mother tongue.
Soon after he returned to France he declared, in the dedication of his
play “Brutus” to Lord Bolingbroke, that, having “passed two years in a
constant study of the English language,” he found it awkward to write
in French. “I was almost accustomed to think in English.”
Thirty years after he had left England behind him forever, he wrote
English letters to English friends. He quarrelled in that tongue with
his mistress in middle life, wrote a couplet in it when he was eighty,
and talked in it with his friends in his extreme old age.
He made his headquarters at Wandsworth, already a colony of French
refugees, with one Everard Falkener, whom he had met in Paris, the best
type of an English merchant, cultivated, hospitable, enlightened. The
two bore each other a lifelong friendship. The visitor was never of the
idle kind, waiting about to be amused. He was always, on the other hand,
indefatigably busy. He was supremely interested in everything, greedy of
information, matchlessly quick to observe. Besides, he could never have
been very long together at Falkener’s Wandsworth villa.
Three months out of the thirty-four he spent in England he stayed at
Lord Peterborough’s. He was constantly at Lord Bolingbroke’s, either at
his town house in Pall Mall or in the country. He speaks himself of
having known Bishop Berkeley, and Gay of the “Beggar’s Opera.” Before he
left England he had visited almost every celebrated person in it.
It is easy to understand Voltaire’s passionate admiration for a country
in which genius was everywhere the best passport to glory, riches, and
honour. He had lived under a system so different! Here his own talent
immediately procured him an entrance into that noblest aristocracy, the
aristocracy of intellect. When was it that he went to stay at Bubb
Dodington’s at Eastbury in Dorsetshire, and at that Liberty Hall of the
Muses met Young of the “Night Thoughts” and Thomson of the “Seasons”?
The man who was to be English parson and author of those solemn
religious periods of the “Thoughts” was now writing his “Satires” and
had not a little in common with the sceptical, cynic Frenchman of the
“Epistle to Uranie.” The one was as brilliant a conversationalist as the
other. As for the “Seasons,” though Voltaire politely praised them, he
considered Nature an ill-chosen subject for a Scotchman who knew
nothing of the warmth and glow of the South.
At Lord Peterborough’s Voltaire met Swift--“Rabelais in his Senses,”
that greater than any Rabelais--“one of the most extraordinary men that
England has produced.” That was Voltaire’s judgment of him. He did not
like him the less because he was “a priest and mocked at everything.” At
bottom, the dark and awful genius of Swift and the vivid and passionate
inspiration of Voltaire had something in common. At Peterborough’s table
there sat then the two finest masters of invective who ever lived.
Voltaire was still quite new to the country when he made the
acquaintance of little, crooked, papist Mr. Pope of Twit’nam. It has
been maliciously said that on the occasion the visitor talked so
blasphemously and indecently that he sent Pope’s poor old mother
shuddering from the room. But as at the time Voltaire did not know
English and Pope and his mother did not know French, the story may be
taken for what it is worth. A great and very natural admiration had the
French author, to whom precision, the unities, and poetical neatness
were so dear, for the polished easy rhythm of Mr. Pope; but that did not
prevent him, long after, when he was talking to James Boswell of
Auchinleck at Ferney, from diagnosing the respective merits of Pope and
Dryden in a truly Voltairian criticism. “Pope drives a handsome chariot
with a couple of neat nags, and Dryden a coach and six stately horses.”
Nor did his love of Mr. Pope’s style prevent him loathing Mr. Pope’s
philosophy.
One day he went to see old Sarah Marlborough at Blenheim, and
audaciously asked her to let him see the memoirs she was writing. “You
must wait,” answered Sarah; “I am just altering my account of Queen
Anne’s character. I have begun to love her again since the present lot
have become our rulers.” Is it hard to fancy the delighted cynic humour
on her guest’s shrewd face at that naïve reply?
Goldsmith says that she _did_ show him the memoirs, and when he
remonstrated with her for abusing her friends therein, seized them out
of his hands in a rage. “I thought the man had sense, but I find him at
bottom either a fool or a philosopher.”
Presently Gay was reading aloud to him that “Beggar’s Opera” before its
publication; and he went to see old Congreve, who spoke of his plays as
trifles beneath notice, “and told me to look upon him merely as a
private gentleman.” That literary snobbishness was very little to the
taste of a Voltaire. “If you had the misfortune to be only a gentleman
like any other,” he answered, “I should never have come to see you.” It
is to be hoped the foolish old playwright felt duly snubbed.
The great Lord Chesterfield--“the only Englishman who ever recommended
the art of pleasing as the first duty of life”--invited Voltaire to
dinner. When he was asked a second time, he had to decline, as the
gratuities expected by the servants were too much for his slenderly
equipped pockets.
He visited Newton’s niece, Mrs. Conduit, who told him the famous story
of Newton and the apple. Voltaire twice repeated it in his works, and
thus preserved it for posterity. He frequently met and talked with
Newton’s friend and disciple, Clarke.
In 1727, he was introduced at the English Court. Had he not dedicated
“Œdipe” to its King? Just as in 1728 he was to dedicate his English
edition of the “Henriade” to “that amiable philosopher on the throne,”
Caroline, the wife of George II. At Court, doubtless, he met that lean
malice, my Lord Hervey, and Lady Hervey, “beautiful Molly Lepell.” He
met everybody, in fact, and saw everything. He went to Newmarket races
and to a Quakers’ meeting. He was continually at the play. He mixed with
bishops and boatmen, lords, play-actors, merchants and politicians. When
on one of his rambles round London he was insulted by a mob, he mounted
on a few handy steps: “Brave Englishmen!” said he, “am I not already
unfortunate enough in not having been born among you?” And they were
with him at once.
Perhaps he was not sorry to get away from the wits and the parties, to
the quiet of Falkener’s villa. He had always something better to do
than to be a social light for his own or other men’s entertainment.
When he was at Wandsworth he wrote, in English prose, the first act of
“Brutus.” In these thirty-four months he composed nearly the whole of
his “History of Charles XII.” of Sweden. In 1727, he took up his abode
for a time at the Sign of the White Peruke, Maiden Lane, Covent Garden,
that he might the more conveniently arrange for the publication by
subscription of the new edition of his “Henriade.” “The English
generally make good their words and promises,” he said long after. They
did in 1728. The book went into three editions. From them Voltaire had
omitted the tale of the noble exploits of Rosny, the ancestor of his
false friend Sully.
Swift pushed the “Henriade” in Ireland. The English were inclined to
think it too Catholic, as the Catholics had thought it too Protestant.
But, in their character of a free and generous people, they bought and
read it not the less.
After a few months’ residence in the country this amazing Frenchman was
turning “Hudibras” into French verse.
After eighteen months, he wrote, in English, a little volume containing
two essays: “An Essay upon the Civil Wars of France,” and upon “The
Epick Poetry of the European Nations.” A presentation copy of the first
edition of this daring little work, published in 1727, may still be seen
in the British Museum with a few words in Voltaire’s handwriting in the
corner--“to Sr. hanslone from his most humble servant voltaire.” Sir
Hans Sloane was the President of the Royal Society. This book is now so
rare as to be practically unobtainable. It went into a second edition in
1728, and into a fourth in 1731.
By it, by “Brutus,” and the “Henriade” Voltaire gained a sum of about
two thousand pounds.
The chronology of the events of his English visit remains, and must
remain, very imperfect. He wrote very few letters during that period and
dates are not the _forte_ of his English hosts. So much, however, is
certain. He arrived in England about the end of the first week in May,
1726. By September, he had paid his stolen visit to France and returned
to these shores. In January, 1727, he was presented at Court. On March
28th, he was at Newton’s lying-in-state in Westminster Abbey. In July
the French authorities gave him permission to return to France for a
while to see to some business, but he did not go. He spent the greater
part of the year preparing his English edition of the “Henriade” and
writing “Charles XII.” In December, 1727, appeared the two English
essays. The year 1728 saw the publication of the English edition of his
“Henriade.”
Archibald Ballantyne’s “Voltaire’s Visit to England” gives the best and
most exhaustive account of that visit yet published.
By far the most momentous and the most influential, both on Voltaire’s
own fortunes and on the public intellect, of any of his works written
for the most part in England, were his “English Letters” or the
“Philosophical Letters.”
They were originally written to Theriot; but they must always have been
meant for publication. They are not the best example, but they are no
bad example, of the Voltairian manner--polished, easy, witty, sarcastic,
not so much daring in word as daring in meaning, more remarkable for
what they imply than for what they say--yet of all letters in the world,
perhaps, those which have had the most far-reaching as well as the
profoundest effect on the human mind.
Read casually, they are chiefly remarkable for their luminous and
amusing criticisms on the genius of England, and on the men and events
of that day.
Voltaire found Shakespeare exactly, after all, what a Voltaire _would_
have found him--“nature and sublimity,” “force and fecundity,” “an
amazing genius”--he was too great a genius himself not to recognise in a
Shakespeare such matchless traits as these. But Voltaire was also an
eighteenth-century Frenchman, with his dramatic gift pinioned by the
unities, by a hundred prim, foolish, and artificial rules, and he was
the writer who above all other writers valued style, polish, finish, and
culture. How should he have forgiven Shakespeare what he called his
“heavy grossness,” his “barbarisms,” his “monstrosities”? Voltaire did
not know, with the moderns, that many of the clowns and the clownish
jokes to which he took a just objection were interpolations, not
Shakespeare himself. And what wonder that this most impressionable child
of a country and an age where an abstraction called Taste was as a god,
should have missed its polite influence in a Shakespeare, and have found
the rugged grandeur of that vast intelligence imperfect without it? Not
the less, it was Voltaire who first revealed this man, who had been “the
ruin of the English stage,” to the French; who copied and translated
him; and then abused him so fiercely in the famous preface to
“Semiramis” and the quarrel with Letourneur, as to make him of as
supreme an interest on the Continent as in his own country.
Voltaire wrote one admirable letter “On Mr. Pope and other famous
Poets,” another “On Comedy,” a third “On Tragedy,” and a fourth “On
Nobles who cultivate Literature.” He praised Swift; adored “the
judicious Mr. Addison”; and did due homage to Wycherley and Congreve.
But if the “English Letters” had been nothing but a series of literary
criticisms, however brilliant, they would not have been the Letters
which made Lafayette a republican at nine, and which Heine spoke of as a
stepping-stone to the Revolution.
In the “Henriade” the bird’s heart had throbbed against the bars of the
cage; in the “English Letters” it had found the gate of liberty and
taken its first sweeping flight through free air.
Voltaire came straight from the Bastille to the most liberal and
enlightened country in the world. What wonder that he conceived that
hero-worship for England and the English which no time could change, and
which in his old age at Ferney was still a burning and a shining light?
He was from the first an impassioned admirer of almost every Anglican
institution. “The English, as a free people, chose their own road to
heaven.” “You do not see any imbeciles here who put their souls into the
keeping of others.”
“You have no priests then?” said I. “No, friend,” answered the Quaker;
“and we get on very well without them.” “When the English clergy know
that in France young men famous for their excesses and raised to the
prelature by the intrigues of women, make love publicly, amuse
themselves by composing love songs, give every day elaborate and elegant
suppers and go straight from them to ask the illumination of the Holy
Spirit and boldly call themselves successors of the Apostles, they thank
God that they are Protestants. But they are vile heretics, fit for
burning with all devils, as Master François Rabelais said; that is why I
do not mix myself up with their affairs.”
The last touches are admirably Voltairian.
The live-and-let-live policy of a country where thirty religions dwelt
together quite amicably and comfortably could not but appeal to the man
who was Armand’s brother and who remembered Unigenitus.
As for the government--what a contrast he saw there too! In this country
the sovereign was only powerful to do good “with his hands tied from
doing evil”; the great were “great without insolence and without
vassals”; and “the people share in the government without disorder.”
What a contrast indeed! what a glaring contrast! The pen trembled in the
man’s nervous hand as he wrote; and his soul was on fire. “It has taken
seas of blood to drown the idol of despotism; but the English do not
think they have bought their laws too dearly.” How much more dearly
France was to buy hers, this man, who himself expended the work and
genius of his life to gain Frenchmen a little liberty, had no idea. He
had seen Newton buried at Westminster with the honours due to so great a
genius. When Voltaire was very old it is said “his eye would grow bright
and his cheek flush” when he said that he had once lived in a land where
“a professor of mathematics, only because he was great in his vocation,”
had been buried “like a king who had done good to his subjects.”
What a country to live in! to be proud of! where there were better ways
to glory than the favour of a royal mistress or the unearned virtue of
an ancestral name!
He saw Mrs. Oldfield, the actress, buried with the honours due to her
far different and very inferior talent. Perhaps the honours were
greater than her desert. But Voltaire, with his passion for the stage,
was not the man to think of that.
Thirty-five years later he recalled how he had heard when in England
that the daughter of the poet Milton was in London--old, ill, and poor.
“In a quarter of an hour she was rich.”
“What would you have done if you had been born in Spain?” said his
secretary to Voltaire long after. “I would have gone to mass every day:
kissed the monks’ robes: and set fire to their convents. I was not made
to live in Spain, nor in France.” “Where then?” “In England.”
But if Voltaire loved the tolerant English religion and the liberal
English government and the generous English people, he loved far more
“the noble liberty of thinking.” His Letters on Bacon and on Locke, on
Descartes and Newton, on the History of Attraction and on Newton’s
Optics, are a worship of that free thought that dared to doubt, that
searched and tried the old truths which men believed because they _were_
old and for no better reason, and which found them too often to be no
truths, but a prejudice, a delusion, and a lie. Voltaire passionately
declared that it was the theologians, and not the Lockes, the Bayles,
the Hobbes, the Spinozas, who sowed “discord in a state.” He spoke of
Locke as “the wisest of human beings”; of Bacon as “the father of
experimental philosophy.” “A catechism reveals God to children,” he
said; “but Newton has revealed Him to sages.” “Before Locke, the great
philosophers had positively decided what the soul of man is, but as they
did not know in the least, it is only natural they should all have been
of different opinions.... Locke dares sometimes to speak positively but
he also dares to doubt.” “How I love English daring!” he cried _à
propos_ of Swift’s “Tale of a Tub.” “How I love people who say what they
think! We only half live if we dare only half think.”
Voltaire was fully alive at all events. However widely one may differ
from his opinions they are at least entitled to respect. They were
passionately genuine, the vivid convictions of his soul. He was no
_dilettante_, fine-gentleman unbeliever--too bored and idle to find in
the world “the footmarks of a God.” He was from this time henceforth and
always one of the most zealous seekers after truth who ever lived. It
was to be no more “a fountain sealed”; no more a luxury for a few, but
the common property of all. To free Frenchmen by bringing to them the
light and knowledge of England--to destroy, so far as in him lay,
everywhere and for all men, darkness, ignorance and superstition--that
was the Voltairian mission. “He swore to devote his life to that end,
and kept his word.”
CHAPTER VI
PLAYS, A BURLESQUE, AND THE APPEARANCE OF THE “LETTERS”
In the middle of March, 1729, there was a man calling himself M.
Sansons, living over a wigmaker’s at St. Germain-en-Laye. At the end of
the month M. Sansons came to Paris, and lived for a while at the house
of one of his father’s old clerks. Being so advised by his friends he
applied for a warrant, annulling his order of exile. He obtained it; and
lo! M. de Voltaire, after an absence of nearly three years, is returned
from his English travels, and once more at work on his profession in the
capital.
He had no thought at present of bringing out those “English Letters.”
The time was not yet ripe; and discretion here, certainly, was the
better part of valour. He applied himself instead to his “Charles XII.”
He spoke of it himself as his favourite work, and “the one for which I
have the bowels of a father.” Its breathless race of incident swept him
along, and he had hardly time even to be sociable. Refusing one of
Theriot’s invitations to dinner on May 15th, he said that he would drop
in at the end of the entertainment “along with that fool of a Charles
XII.” The subject engrossed him, as the subject he had in hand always
engrossed him. Then, since he was no more an exile, he set to work with
Theriot to get his pensions restored--and, succeeded.
One night when he was out at supper he heard talk of a lottery formed by
Desforts, the controller-general. One of the guests observed that anyone
who took all the tickets in the lottery would be greatly the gainer.
Voltaire was as swift to act as swift to see. He formed a company who
bought up all the tickets: and found himself the winner of a large sum.
To be sure he had offended Desforts, who was thus written down an ass.
So off went the poet to Plombières with Richelieu in August for a visit.
When he returned to Paris the squall had blown over, and M. de Voltaire
had made an uncommonly successful speculation.
He made others, too, about this period, and never again was in need of
money.
In this December of 1729 Voltaire invited the actors of the Comédie
Française to dinner and read them his new play, “Brutus.” It was
accepted, rehearsed, and then suddenly and mysteriously withdrawn.
Voltaire said there was a plot against it--a cabal of Rohan and his
kind, and of Crébillon--famous rival playwright and gloomy tragic poet.
But worse than any plot was the feebleness of the play itself and its
fatal absence of love interest. The actors themselves thought it
unworthy of a Voltaire and his public. Voltaire knew it to be so
himself, and at once set about revising and rewriting it.
On March 20, 1730, there died after four days’ acute anguish, aged only
thirty-eight, the great actress, Adrienne Lecouvreur. Her death was the
supreme event of this period of Voltaire’s life. Perhaps it was one of
the supreme events of his whole life. He had been, he said, “her
admirer, her friend, her lover.” If the last word is to be taken
literally, that relationship had long ceased. But he had for ever a
passionate admiration for her talents. The last piece she played in was
“Œdipe,” and she was taken ill upon the stage. Voltaire with his quick
instinct of a passionate pity, hastened to her bedside, and she died in
his arms in agonies for which there could be found no remedy. She was an
actress, so she could have neither priest nor absolution, and dying
thus, was refused Christian burial, and taken without the city at night
and “thrown in the kennel,” like a dead dog.
What wonder if Paris was stirred to its soul? And if Paris was stirred,
what must a Voltaire have been? Adrienne, it has been well said, had
“all the virtues but virtue.” She was generous and disinterested to a
high degree. She was a woman of supreme talent and achievements. She was
at least morally no worse, as she was intellectually far greater, than
those kings’ mistresses over whose graves prelates had thought it no
shame to lift their voices in eulogies and orations, and who had been
buried with royal honours and splendour.
In Voltaire’s mind England and Mrs. Oldfield’s burial were still fresh
impressions. Injustice had begun to play the part with him that the
lighted torch plays to the fagot. His soul was ablaze at once.
It is not fashionable to look upon him as a man of feeling. In the
popular idea he is the scoffer who jeered at everything. Read the “Poem
on the Death of Adrienne Lecouvreur” written, not on the passionate
impulse of the moment, but many months later, and see in it a soul
stirred to its profoundest depths--the ebullition of a feeling as deep
as it is rare.
“Shall I for ever see ... the light-minded French sleeping under the
rule of superstition? What! is it only in England that mortals dare to
think?”
“Men deprive of burial her to whom Greece would have raised altars.”
“The Lecouvreur in London would have had a tomb among genius, kings, and
heroes.” “Ye gods! Why is my country no longer the fatherland of glory
and talent?”
Such words were enough to endanger its author’s safety.
It was well that when Theriot was showing them about the salons of Paris
in June, 1731, Voltaire was living _incognito_ in Rouen, and was
supposed to be in England.
Paris forgot; but not Voltaire. For sixty years he never ceased to try
and improve the condition of actors. Thirty years after Adrienne’s death
he wrote as if it had happened yesterday: “Actors are paid by the King
and excommunicated by the Church; they are commanded by the King to play
every evening, and by the Church forbidden to do so at all. If they do
not play, they are put into prison; if they do, they are spurned into
the kennel. We delight to live with them, and object to be buried with
them; we admit them to our tables and exclude them from our cemeteries.
It must be allowed we are a very reasonable and consistent nation.” In
his old age, his one dread was not the mysterious Hereafter, but that he
too, dying unabsolved, might be “thrown into the gutter like poor
Lecouvreur.”
By the spring of 1730, “Charles XII.” was almost ready for the press.
The censor--its satire of current superstition was so very delicate the
good man had not noticed it--passed the book.
The author was delighted, and was more than busy in preparing a large
edition of the first volume for the press.
By the autumn of 1730, when he had two thousand six hundred copies on
the eve of publication, the whole edition was suddenly seized by the
paternal government. The censor had passed it? True. But a change in the
political outlook made France uncommonly nervous of displeasing
Augustus, the usurping King of Poland, of whom Voltaire, forsooth, had
spoken disrespectfully. “It seems to me,” he wrote very reasonably,
“that in _this_ country Stanislas [the Queen’s father and ex-King] ought
to be considered rather than Augustus.”
It is easy to fancy what a maddening irritation such a prohibition, and
the delays, worries, and waste of time it caused, must have had on such
an impatient and energetic temperament as Voltaire’s.
But he never gave up hope, as he never gave up work.
On December 11th of this year 1730 the rewritten “Brutus” was performed:
very favourably received on the first night--by an audience composed
entirely of the author’s friends--and damned with faint praise on the
second. The author had quite enough vanity to be bitterly mortified.
But, not the less, he wrote the kindest and most considerate of letters
to the terrified _ingénue_ of fifteen who had played one of the chief
parts hopelessly badly. “Ce coquin-là,” one of his bitterest enemies
said of him, “has one vice worse than all the rest; he has sometimes
virtues.”
The last performance of “Brutus” took place on January 17, 1731. There
had been but fifteen in all. In the Revolution it was revived, and
received with tumultuous applause. Its _motif_, that of a father
sacrificing his sons for the common good, appealed to those stirring
times of reckless deeds, but not to the cultivated and sentimental
_dolce far niente_ of 1731.
By February, Voltaire was writing to Cideville at Rouen that the new
edition of the “Henriade” was tacitly permitted in Paris by the
authorities. While they had been busy suppressing it, those authorities
had also been busy reading and admiring it themselves. Henceforth, it
was allowed in France.
In March, M. de Voltaire announced his intention of returning to his
dear England, and insinuated that he was going to print “Charles XII.”
at “Cantorbéry.” In truth, Cideville had found his friend “a little
hole” in Rouen--a very dirty and uncomfortable little hole as it turned
out--where he could live _incognito_ and superintend the secret printing
and publishing there. He removed from the first little hole to the house
of Jore, his printer and publisher, with whom he was to have only too
many dealings in the future. He passed as an English gentleman. He had
the society of Cideville to console him. He was five months in Rouen
altogether, from March of 1731 until August. One of these months he
spent in bed. Part of his time he was in the country. The whole time he
was correcting the proof-sheets of the first part of “Charles XII.” and
writing the latter, and composing two tragedies--“The Death of Cæsar”
and “Ériphyle.”
He returned to Paris in August, 1731. On September 13th died the noble
young Maisons, aged only thirty-one, of the smallpox which had spared
him before. “He died in my arms,” said Voltaire, “not through the
ignorance but through the neglect of the doctors.”
In October the secretly printed “Charles XII.” was introduced
surreptitiously into Paris, as the “Henriade” had been. Like the
“Henriade,” it became the mode and was read by all the educated classes;
and soon, in translations, by the educated of other countries as well.
It is indeed a bold and vigorous story. Plenty of anecdote and action--a
vivid drama wherein the characters play their parts with extraordinary
spirit and energy. In the heat of so many battles the author has no time
for reflections. But throughout, not the less, he shows very plainly his
contempt for his hero, and his love for all those strange things--peace,
liberty, enlightenment--which that hero had done so much to crush.
Many of his facts he had obtained first-hand from the Duchess of
Marlborough, who remembered her husband’s dealings with Charles; and
from Baron Goertz, who had been Charles’s favourite minister and then
Voltaire’s personal friend.
Voltaire, as has been seen, loved his “Charles XII.” himself; and as
usual had spared nothing to make it as good as he could.
“My great difficulty,” he wrote, “has not been to find memoirs, but to
sift out the good ones. There is another inconvenience inseparable from
writing contemporary history. Every captain of infantry who has served
in the armies of Charles XII. and lost his knapsack on a march, thinks I
ought to mention it. If the subalterns complain of my silence, the
generals and ministers complain of my outspokenness. Whoso writes the
history of his own time must expect to be blamed for everything he has
said and everything he has not said; but these little drawbacks should
not discourage a man who loves truth and liberty, expects nothing, fears
nothing, asks nothing, and who limits his ambition to the cultivation of
letters.”
By December of this year 1731 Voltaire was staying with a certain gay
old Comtesse de Fontaine Martel who had a house in the Palais Royal, to
which she made her visitor free, as to her carriage, her opera-box, and
her fine company.
His friendship with the Bernières had cooled by this time. To be sure,
he was no small acquisition to this corrupt old Countess, whose one aim
in existence was to be amused if she could. “To be bored near Voltaire!
Ah, Dieu! that is not possible!” said an enthusiastic lady admirer
thereafter. He sonneted his hostess now, as only he knew how--delicate,
graceful, French, delightful. “Ériphyle” was performed at her house very
early in 1732. The guests were much too polite not to sob at its pathos
and applaud it to the echo.
On March 7, 1732, it was played to a public who received it with a very
tepid warmth; until the fifth act, of which they unmistakably
disapproved. “One forgives the dessert when the other courses have been
passable,” Voltaire wrote cheerily to Cideville. But one of his critics
was not far from the truth when he said that if it had not been for its
hits at the great, at princes, and at superstition, it would have had
nothing of Voltaire in it at all.
It was dull; and Voltaire knew it. He employed the Easter holidays in
writing a very good prologue to it. But if a bad dessert cannot spoil a
good dinner, a good _hors d’œuvre_ will not save a bad one. On May 13th
Voltaire wrote to Theriot that he was resolved not even to print it, and
it was withdrawn from Jore’s hands at the last moment. Some of its
material was used in “Semiramis.”
The author of “Œdipe,” of the “Henriade,” and of “Charles XII.” had
already not unnaturally turned his thoughts to that mistress who was the
object of all literary men’s hopes, vows, and adorations--the French
Academy. By December, 1731, there was a vacant chair there. Who had a
right to it if not he? He was almost forty years old. He had already
done great things; he was ripe to do greater. Even the authorities could
not be blind to his deserts and to his powers. Richelieu was his friend,
and used all his influence to help him. The thing was as good as done,
when by secret malice, or very ill fortune, there appeared in print in
the spring of 1732 that luckless “Epistle to Uranie,” written ten years
earlier to that fair travelling companion, Madame de Rupelmonde.
There is nothing in that poem but its grace, cleverness, and sincerity
which would excite comment if it appeared in a magazine to-day. Voltaire
had called it “Le Pour et le Contre,” but it was certainly much more
_against_ revealed religion than _for_ it. Yet it is in no sense
offensively anti-Christian. It is not the poem of a scoffer, but of one
who seeks truth diligently and “gropes through darkness up to God.”
The fact did not soften the authorities in the least.
“What do you think of it?” said the Chancellor of France to his
secretary.
“Voltaire ought to be deprived of pen, ink, and paper,” was the answer.
“That man has a mind which could destroy a state.”
“Uncertain Uranie” had before this solved _her_ doubts by going into a
convent. Her mentor saw but one course open to him. It was a very
characteristic course--and used by him afterwards very freely. He denied
the authorship of the ill-omened little work _in toto_; and, true to his
principles of doing everything thoroughly, declared that the Abbé
Chaulieu was the writer thereof, and that he (Voltaire) had heard him
recite it at the Temple.
Nobody believed the story, it appears. At any rate, the Academy doors
remained closed to him.
Many worldly-wise old friends of Voltaire’s--Fontenelle and Madame de
Tencin among others--took the opportunity of the failure of “Ériphyle”
to beg him about this time to give up that dramatic career for which he
was evidently unsuited.
“What answer did you make?” someone said to him.
“None; I brought out ‘Zaire.’”
“Zaire” was written in twenty-two days.
“The subject carried me away with it; the piece wrote itself.” It is a
tragedy full of love and pathos, which still in some degree keeps its
popularity. It has been ably criticised as being not the best of
Voltaire’s tragedies, but the most inspired. It reads as if its author
were a lover of five-and-twenty--quick with the emotions he describes.
“Whoso paints the passions has felt them,” he said himself. What an
unknown Voltaire “the tender Zaire” must have revealed to his friends!
It was his first real dramatic success since “Œdipe.” It was a greater
success than “Œdipe” had been. At the first performance, indeed, on
August 6, 1732, the pit was somewhat noisy, and vociferously called
attention to defects arising from hasty writing. But, after all, the
play moved the heart. At the fourth performance the author was called
from his box to receive the unanimous plaudits of the house. He himself
wrote a notice of the play in the “Mercure”--the first time such a thing
had ever been done. On October 14th it was played before the King and
Queen at Fontainebleau. It brought its author much of what he called
“that smoke of vainglory” for which he had written ‘Ériphyle’ and
‘Brutus’ all over again, and in vain. He himself superintended the
performance. He was at Court six weeks. “Mariamne” was also performed;
and the “Gustave” of that rival playwright, Alexis Piron, was _not_.
Voltaire met Piron at Court one day. “Ah! my dear Piron, what are _you_
doing here? I have been here three weeks. The other night they played my
‘Mariamne’; they are going to play ‘Zaire.’ How about ‘Gustave’?” Bitter
Piron himself tells the story. It does not sound like truth. An enemy’s
ill-luck nearly always killed the Voltairian spite at a blow. But if it
be true, it is easy to understand that this cool, witty Arouet, the son
of the notary, was not precisely popular. While at Court he rewrote his
“English Letters” on “Newton” and “Gravitation”; read aloud to Cardinal
Fleury, with a few judicious omissions, that one on the Quakers, and
corresponded with a man who was now his scientific teacher and, to be,
his admired friend and his bitter enemy. His name was Maupertuis.
When Voltaire had returned to his comfortable quarters at the Palais
Royal, “Zaire” was acted there by amateurs in January, 1733. Voltaire
himself took the part of Lusignan, the heroine’s father, in spite of his
health, which was so bad that “I dread being reduced to idleness, which
to me would be a terrible disgrace.”
In that very same month of January the Comtesse de Fontaine Martel died
very suddenly. She had her card parties and her salon to the last. She
was quite old, wicked, godless, charming and generous, a perfect type of
her class and her age. Voltaire was at her bedside when she died. “What
time is it?” she asked with her last breath. Before she could be
answered--“Thank God!” said she, “whatever time it is, there is
somewhere a _rendezvous_.”
Voltaire said that he lost, by her death, a good house of which he was
the master, and an income of forty thousand francs which was spent in
amusing him.
He stayed on in her house for some time. He was there when there swept
over him one of the noisiest hurricanes of all his stormy existence.
In 1731, that envious old exiled J. B. Rousseau had circulated in Paris
a very venomous letter on the subject of Voltaire. The brilliant success
of ‘Zaire’ was the signal for him to attack it with fury. The criticism
was so manifestly unjust and so manifestly dictated by jealousy, that
Voltaire might have been well content to leave it alone. But almost the
only thing he could not do was to do nothing. So he wrote “The Temple of
Taste.”
“The Temple of Taste” is a brilliant burlesque, half prose, half verse.
Pope’s “Dunciad” is the only English poem with which it can be compared.
Its story is that Cardinal Fleury and the poet go together to the
“Temple of Taste” criticising every foible of the age on their way
there. Near the entrance they meet the candidates for admission to the
“Temple,” great among whom is J. B. Rousseau.
The “Temple” is one of the most graceful and easy of the works of an
author who always possessed those two qualities in an extraordinary
degree. It shows, as no other writing of Voltaire’s had yet shown, his
delicate and perfect critical judgment. He expresses his damning
opinion--so gaily, so charmingly, so innocently--on many other
over-rated celebrities besides Rousseau. The piquancy of the thing lies
in the fact that three fourths of those celebrities were then living. It
hits off every passing craze. Every line contains a deadly allusion.
Every other word is a _mot_ almost. No translation can give any idea of
the full and deadly effect of that easy, trifling, bantering style. “The
Temple of Taste” is a flame which still leaps and shines, though it
burns no more.
By February “the Temple,” wrote its builder, “had become a Cathedral.”
In April it was in the hands of the censor. Voltaire quite expected to
be given a privilege for it. The censor did not seem to see anything
objectionable in it.
It is easy to fancy what a success a work so gay, witty, and daring
would meet with, when it dropped red-hot from the press, while it was
still in the hands of the authorities awaiting the coveted yellow seal.
If it _was_ a cathedral, it was one which afforded the author no
sanctuary. The old dangers and the old outcries, to which he should have
been getting wearily used by now, met him as usual. There was a
threatened _lettre de cachet_. “Here is little villain of a writer who
ought to be sent over the sea again,” said Marais.
All Paris was up in arms in fact. “This ‘Temple of Taste’ has roused
those whom I have not praised enough for their liking,” Voltaire wrote
to Theriot on May 1st, “and still more those whom I have not praised at
all ... add to that the crime of having printed this _bagatelle_ without
a permission, and the anger of the minister against such an outrage; add
to that the howlings of the Court and the menace of a _lettre de
cachet_, and, with all, you will have but a feeble idea of the
pleasantness of my position and of the protection afforded to
literature.”
“I must then rebuild a second Temple,” he added cheerfully; and he
positively set to work to do it, missing out some of the stones of
offence in the first.
On May 15th he left the late Comtesse de Martel’s comfortable house and
went to live at the mean lodging of his man of business--“in the worst
quarter of Paris in the worst house”--opposite the Church of St.
Gervais. “The place is more deafened with the sound of bells than a
sacristan,” said he, “but I shall make so much noise with my lyre the
bells will be nothing to me.”
One hardly knows whether to admire more the man’s admirable indifference
to things material, or that genius for hard work which stood him in as
good stead in a garret as in a palace.
He was not long alone in these rooms. He soon had with him two literary
_protégés_ whom he fed, lodged, and entertained “like my own children.”
One of them, Lefèvre, died young. For the other, Linant, Voltaire had
done his very best to get the good offices of Madame de Fontaine Martel.
But that worldly-wise old person, who had already been much tried by
friend Theriot, declined to accommodate Linant in her house. Then
Voltaire besought Madame du Deffand for him.
The _protégés_ were always going to do great things and never did them.
Voltaire believed in them exactly as devout and simple persons will long
believe in the reclamation of the irreclaimable. “I am persuaded,” he
had said in that “Temple of Taste,” “that if a man does not cultivate a
talent it is because he does not possess it; there is no one who does
not write poetry if he is a poet; or music, if he is a musician.”
[Illustration: GABRIELLE EMILIE DE BRETEUIL.
_MARQUISE DU CHÂTELET._
Morte a Luneville en 1749, agée de 43 Ans.
_Paint par Marianne Loir._ _et Gravé par P. G. Langlois, 1786._
MADAME DU CHÂTELET
_From an Engraving after Marianne Loir_]
But his heart was softer than his judgment. Now, as later, he believed
in the capacity as in the generosity of his fellows, with an enthusiasm
which outlasted experience, and wholly contradicts the gay cynicism of
his utterances.
On July 3, 1733, there is a little innocent, ominous sentence in a
letter of Voltaire’s to Cideville. “Yesterday I began an epistle in
verse on Calumny, dedicated to a very amiable and much calumniated
woman.” That nameless lady, who had Voltaire’s Richelieu for a lover,
had already written to Richelieu highly praising Voltaire’s new play,
“Adélaïde du Guesclin.” In this July she, a certain Comte de Forcalquier
and a gay young duchess, paid a surprise visit to Voltaire in his dingy
lodging, which occasioned the poet to break into charming verse and to
compare his guests to the three angels who visited Abraham. The summer
also saw him busy buying pictures, writing an opera, “Samson,” to music
by Rameau, and rewriting his “Adélaïde.” It was to have been performed
in the April of this 1733, but the illness of the chief actress delayed
its appearance, and gave the author more time to correct and improve it.
But paramount in his mind to any opera and tragedy, aye, to any amiable
and calumniated woman of fashion too, was his haunting fear, which never
left him all through this year, that the “English Letters,” which were
being printed at Rouen privately and under his own supervision, should
slip out and become public property before he gave the signal at what he
took to be the psychological moment. By July they were already published
in England--free England who received them with delight. “The Letters
philosophical, political, critical, poetical, heretical, and diabolical
are selling in English in London with great success.” But here?
The outcries against “The Temple of Taste” were still loud and vehement.
Voltaire’s terror lest “our incorrect Jore” should play him false with
regard to this far more dangerous work, vibrates passionately in every
letter of the period he wrote. “These cursed Letters,” he called them.
They were damned on their reputation alone in Paris, before anyone had
seen them. It is almost impossible now to believe that any government
should have thought it dangerous to the state and its citizens to
understand the theory of gravitation or the principles of light. But,
after all, those authorities were not such fools as they looked. Once
allow the people to reason, and the Bourbon dynasty would fall like a
pack of cards.
The author had already toned down some of his freer utterances. But he
could never tone the free soul which breathed in them.
He had “a mortal aversion to prison,” he wrote. He had a reason, a
stronger reason than he had ever had in his life, for wishing to remain
quietly in France. But speak his message to the world he must. “The more
liberty one has, the more one wants.” He had tasted of that deep nectar
of the gods, and his countrymen must drink of it with him. He feared his
gay manner of conveying grave truth would offend. “If I had not
lightened matter, nobody would have been scandalised; but then nobody
would have read me.”
The _vif_ and anxious author paid Jore and worried him freely enough.
And then he tried to propitiate the fickle French public, as he had
propitiated it before, by a play. On January 18, 1734, was performed the
long-delayed “Adélaïde du Guesclin.” The first act was received with
hisses, which redoubled in the second. In the fifth, the ruin was
completed by one of those _mots_ at which a Parisian _parterre_ is only
too apt. On the second evening Voltaire spoke of himself as attending
Adélaïde’s funeral. One critic, indeed, and no mean critic, had found
the play “tender, noble, and touching.” But then that critic already
looked on Voltaire with eyes more than friendly. “Adélaïde,” far from
smoothing the way for the “Letters,” was but another stumbling stone in
it.
Then the versatile Voltaire, at once a friend and a notary’s son, must
needs arrange personally for the marriage of his friend Richelieu to
Mademoiselle de Guise.
To be sure, Richelieu was _amant volage_ if ever man was; but he took
Mademoiselle without a _dot_, and the manners of the time were such that
neither husband nor wife would in any case have expected fidelity of the
other. Voltaire left for Montjeu, near Autun, the residence of the
bride’s parents, on April 7th. “I have drawn up the contract, so I shall
not write any verses,” said he. But he did his duty all the same a few
days after, and composed an “Epithalamium.” The bridegroom left shortly
to join his regiment. Among the wedding guests was that old love of
Richelieu’s, the tender critic of “Adélaïde,” “the most amiable and
calumniated of women,” Émilie de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet. Between
composing love verses for the newly married pair, and perhaps some on
his own account, Voltaire enjoyed a brief holiday, idle and content.
Then the storm burst in such a clap of thunder as had never shaken even
his world before.
By April 24, 1734, the “English Letters” had appeared without the
slightest warning to the author and with his name on the title-page, and
were running through Paris like a firebrand. Appended was his Letter on
the “Thoughts of Pascal,” in which he had dared to doubt the omniscience
and infallibility of that thinker, and which he had done his best to
suppress altogether. Jore was thrown into the Bastille. The book was
denounced. On June 10th it was publicly burnt in Paris by the hangman as
“scandalous, contrary to religion, to morals, and respect for
authority.” Voltaire’s lodging in the capital was searched. When the
officer arrived to arrest him at Montjeu on May 11th he was told that he
had gone five days earlier, that is, on May 6, 1734, to drink the waters
of Lorraine, not yet a French possession.
But in reality Voltaire was making his way quietly to the Château of
Cirey-sur-Blaise, in Champagne, a country home of the Marquis and the
Marquise du Châtelet.
CHAPTER VII
MADAME DU CHÂTELET
In 1706, there was born one Émilie, the daughter of the Baron de
Breteuil. Émilie grew up into a tall slip of a girl with very long legs,
very bright eyes, very little grace, and a great deal of intelligence.
She was about eight years old, and presumably living in Paris with her
parents, when she saw one day, possibly at the house of Caumartin, that
lean-faced scapegrace, François Marie Arouet, of twenty. Arouet was not
yet out of love with Pimpette Dunoyer. Émilie was a child who ought to
have been thinking about games and dolls and was thinking, with a quite
undesirable precocity, of lessons and learning. The meeting made not the
slightest impression on either of them. Arouet went on climbing the
steep and rugged way that leads to glory. Émilie learnt Latin and
Italian, devoted herself to the Muses, and at fifteen began to write a
versified translation of the “Æneid.”
In the eighteenth century learning was a mode among women which they put
on exactly as they put powder on their hair and patches on their cheeks.
They talked philosophy as charmingly as they had once talked chiffons.
They sentimentalised over the Rights of Men, neglected their children,
and treated their servants like dogs. Culture was hardly a pose with
them, as it has been with less clever women since, but it was a garment
which they wore when and as they chose. There have been few women in any
age “devoted from all eternity to the exact sciences,” impassioned for
learning for learning’s sake, capable of that keen delight in the
discovery of a new truth which is like the delight of the sportsman when
he has run his quarry to earth. There were few such women even in the
eighteenth century. But there were some: and Émilie de Breteuil was one
of them.
She was married at nineteen to the Marquis du Châtelet. It was hardly
even an episode in her career. This _bonhomme_ was so stupid and so
earthy! Madame always appears to have agreed with him well enough. But
there were so many other things to think about! First of all, there was
a Marquis de Guébriant. When he was false, his vehement young mistress
took so much opium that she would have died, but for his timely
assistance. The brilliant Duke of Richelieu became her lover presently:
and she wore his portrait in a ring and loved him, temporarily, but
sincerely enough, and exacted from him, if this girlish Marquise was
anything at all like a later Madame du Châtelet, a quite extraordinary
amount of attention and devotion. Pretty early in her career she became
addicted to that modish pastime, gaming. She played on the spinet and
sang to it. She loved dress and had a very bad taste in it. She loved
society and talked in it much and brilliantly. She was an amateur
actress of no mean ability. She had three children who interfered with
her scheme of life not at all and on whom she seems to have wasted none
of that effervescent emotion she felt for her lovers. There are many
strange portraits in the great gallery of eighteenth-century France
before the Revolution, but no one stranger than that of this bony,
long-limbed woman, whose flashing intelligence made her harsh-featured
face almost beautiful, who was familiar with Horace and Virgil, with
Cicero, Tasso and Ariosto, with Locke, with Newton and with Euclid--a
philosopher with a passion for metaphysics--a being at once excitable
and sensual, who united to an entire lack of the moral sense,
intellectual passions the most pure and sincere that ever raised a woman
above the pettiness, the backbitings, and the meannesses common to her
sex.
In 1731, before Voltaire knew her personally, her learned reputation had
reached him and he had written her some lines on the Epic Poets. To 1732
belongs an “Ode on Fanaticism,” also addressed to the “charming and
sublime Émilie.”
Early in 1733, when Madame was seven-and-twenty years old, studying
mathematics under Maupertuis, one of the courtiers of the Duchesse du
Maine at Sceaux reintroduced her to Voltaire, famous and forty. Then,
with her modish Duchess and Marquis as chaperons, she visited him in his
rooms. It took the man but a very little while to recognise in her a
kindred passion for that noblest liberty, enlightenment; to see
reflected in her his own genius for hard work; to find out that she too
was tired of this Paris “at once idle and stormy” and would fain find a
life where there should be more of the gods’ best gift--time--to think,
to write, to speak one’s message for the benefit of that world which
_must_ listen at last.
He had soon written her an Epistle on her scientific connection with
Maupertuis, as well as that one dated 1733, to the “respectable Émilie,”
on Calumny.
By August 14, 1733, he was writing to his dear Cideville “You are Émilie
in a man and she is Cideville in a woman”: and a few days later to the
Abbé de Sade giving his brilliant first impressions of his Marquise. In
November he was writing to Sade again, proudly telling him how Émilie
had learnt English in a fortnight.
Then she was with him at Richelieu’s wedding. Far from finding the
situation embarrassing, she was in heaven, she said--until the fear of
Voltaire’s arrest, and the news that it would not be safe for him to
remain in France made her discover that men were insupportable. “I shall
retire at once to my château,” she added. For her Château of Cirey was
on the extreme edge of France; on the borders of Lorraine, and but a
stone’s throw from safety.
Its position thus decided two destinies.
Of what did Voltaire think as he fled from Montjeu through the pleasant,
budding country on those spring days, towards that desolate spot he was
to make famous? The Marquise was not with him. She was going to Paris to
use her noble name and influence at Versailles to obtain the revocation
of that horrible _lettre de cachet_. Voltaire was already her lover;
though he was not now, any more than he was hereafter, in love with her.
He had a boundless and most generous admiration for her talents--the
warmest enthusiasm for her whom he called “a great man whose only fault
was being a woman.” He was indeed as faithful to her person as he was
faithful to his belief in her great intellectual gifts. She was for ever
his ideal of feminine erudition--“who listens to Virgil, and Tasso, and
does not disdain a game of picquet,” “who understands Newton and loves
verses and the wine of Champagne as you do”--the sorceress whose charms
worked all their magic on his mind, but never touched his heart. To be
at once a great creative genius and capable of an all-absorbing love
passion is given to few men. It was not given to Voltaire. No doubt, as
his carriage jolted along the roads under the May sunshine towards
quiet, peace, and safety, he honestly supposed himself to be devotedly
in love with his “divine Émilie.” He had chosen her to be the companion
of life. Those eight volumes of his letters to her, which were destroyed
at her death, were very likely in some sort the letters of a lover; but,
arguing from the known to the unknown, they must have been the letters
of the lover who worshipped his mistress’s scientific acquirements, her
passion for knowledge, and her matchless intellectual industry, a
thousand times more than any qualities of her heart and soul.
By May 23, 1734, Voltaire was at Bâle and writing from there to Madame
du Deffand. She, as well as Madame du Châtelet, was doing her best to
get him back into ministerial favour. They were of the opinion that the
usual disavowal would be the best thing. Very well! “I will declare that
Pascal was always right ... that all priests are disinterested: that the
Jesuits are honest ... that the Inquisition is the triumph of humanity
and tolerance: in fact I will say anything they like, if they will but
leave me in peace.” Of course, no one could believe the disavowal. But
they could pretend they believed it. Madame du Châtelet worked harder
than ever among her influential friends and, when her mind grew easier
respecting her lover, continued her lessons from Maupertuis. She spent
the summer at Versailles. The government no doubt had never been very
anxious to bring back such a troublesome fugitive as Voltaire. The
matter dropped.
In June, 1734, Voltaire first saw the Château of Cirey. No one was there
when he arrived. The obliging Marquis was with his regiment. He was
generally with his regiment when he was not wanted at home. And he was
very seldom wanted at home. It was the custom of the day for a fine lady
to have a lover. The husband was the last person in the world to object
to an arrangement so ordinary. Provided everything was done with a
decent respect for the _convenances_--why, then, one might do anything.
“Modesty has fled from our hearts and taken refuge on our lips” said
Voltaire. The words may stand as the motto of French eighteenth-century
morality. It shuddered horror-struck at the ill-bred word and connived
gaily at the coarse thing. No one thought the worse of Émilie for her
lovers; and rather thought the better of her for keeping them so long.
One of Voltaire’s biographers has adduced as an excuse for that
“Pucelle” of his that chastity was the peculiar boast of the Church, so
that Voltaire, hating the Church, despised chastity too. Perhaps that
excuse might serve for his attachment to Madame du Châtelet. But he
himself considered that no excuse was needed at all. He was following
the usual custom of his age. If the Church objected to immorality it was
in theory only. In practice, the abbés who had influenced his boyhood
and been the companions of his youth were a thousand times more vicious
than he had ever been. That he never showed himself to better advantage
than in that position, does not make his long connection with the
Marquise less reprehensible. But it remains a fact, that he was loyal
and patient when she was shrewish and unreasonable: that he was true to
what he knew was no bond, and had long become a bondage: faithful when
she was faithless: abundantly generous in appreciation of her mental
gifts: and staunch to her false memory to the end.
Cirey-sur-Blaise is situated in Champagne, to the south of the wine
country. It is surrounded by almost impenetrable forests. It lies one
hundred and forty bad miles from Paris, four from Vassy, the nearest
village, eight from St. Dizier, a little town. It is near Domrémy, the
birthplace of Joan of Arc. In 1734, a coach came two or three times a
week from Paris, bringing news of the world, some of the necessaries
and a few of the luxuries of life. The château itself was utterly
tumbledown, old, huge, bare, and desolate. A chapel adjoined it, and the
gardens had long fallen into overgrown neglect. A lady visitor, who came
there in 1738, spoke of the place in words which were at least admirably
descriptive of her own character, and said it was “of a desolation
shocking to humanity, four miles from any other house, in a country
where you can see nothing but mountains and uncultivated land and where
you are abandoned by all your friends and hardly ever see anyone from
Paris.” The last words denoted the climax of horror in the vulgar little
mind of roundabout Madame Denis, Voltaire’s niece. _She_ had not “the
insurance of a just employment” against ennui and melancholy.
The first sight of its solitary beauty may have been delighting her
uncle’s soul when in Paris his “English Letters” were being burnt by the
hangman and himself denounced by every opprobrious term in the
vocabulary of the government. He had been there but a very short time
when he heard news of a duel in which the Duke of Richelieu was engaged;
and hastened to the camp of Philippsburg near Baden, where he arrived on
July 1, 1734. The duel had arisen out of Richelieu’s marriage: so
Voltaire, having made that, felt responsible for the duel too. Richelieu
was at Philippsburg with his regiment. His injuries were not serious.
The camp received Voltaire with so much _éclat_ and delight that Madame
du Châtelet warned him the French authorities were offended and he
returned to Cirey. He had scarcely set foot in its tangled garden before
he became a gardener, busily setting it to rights: or looked at the
tumbledown château, before he was, in his own words, “mason and
carpenter.” He had never had a home before. What matter if the place
were desolate, ruined, and forlorn? It was on the borders of safety; it
could be repaired, improved, beautified. He fell in love with it, with
that impulsive idealism which was always a part of his nature and always
at variance with the gay, deadly, careful cynicism of nearly all his
writings. He had “a passion for retirement,” he said. He lent the
absent Marquis forty thousand francs (at five per cent. interest,
“never paid”) that the repairs might be set on foot. By August they were
well in train and the house becoming habitable.
Voltaire hunted boar in the forest and exchanged country produce with an
amiable neighbour, Madame de la Neuville. He wrote gallant letters to
another, the fat and good-natured Madame de Champbonin, who was to be
hereafter, a constant visitor at Cirey. He was working of course--at his
“Century of Louis XIV.”--at new plays--at a certain “Treatise on
Metaphysics” and some “Discourses on Man,” at once light and wise. The
glory of summer was on the land. Voltaire was now a man of substance
through his shrewdness and economy rather than through his writings. To
the money he derived from them he was always strangely indifferent. For
them he was to be paid, not by gold, but by their gigantic influence on
the human mind.
On the whole, those first few solitary months at Cirey must have been
some of the happiest he knew. The future shone rosy like dawn. Peace,
love, and work--there is no better life. That was the life to which
Voltaire looked forward now.
In October he spent, for some reason not certain, a few weeks at
Brussels: and then returned to Cirey.
In November, there arrived from Paris, laughing and vigorous, not having
slept a single wink on the journey, and preceded by mountains of
chiffons and books, boxes, pictures, necessities, luxuries, and
superfluities--Madame du Châtelet.
The extraordinary pair wasted no time at all in sentiment. They turned
their energetic attention to the dilapidated house and grounds at once.
Madame became “architect and gardener.” She found the secret, with
plenty of old china and tapestry to help her, “of furnishing Cirey out
of nothing.” Voltaire had valuable pictures to contribute to the general
effect. Both workers were so thoroughly practical, so indefatigable, so
clever! It was in these early days of happiness that Voltaire wrote a
blissful quatrain which was placed over one of the summer-houses in the
garden and which may be broadly translated by the quatrain of another
poet:--
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
The du Châtelet children, little Pauline of eight and Louis of six (the
third had died a baby in the January of this year, 1734), kept much in
the background, were, if anything, an additional charm to the
illustrious visitor. He found Louis a _doux_ and sensible little boy:
discovered him a tutor on one occasion: gave him a silver watch on
another: and saved his life, for the guillotine, by dosing him with
lemonade when he had smallpox. Pauline, early sent to Joinville, sixteen
miles away, to be educated, was frequently recalled therefrom when, a
little later, she was wanted to act in the Cirey theatricals, for which,
like her mother, she had a pretty talent.
Madame la Marquise did not herself pretend at any time to a great
interest in her offspring. When her husband foolishly returned presently
from his regiment she wrote to her old lover, Richelieu, that her
situation was very embarrassing, “but love changes all thorns into
flowers.” She and Voltaire both spoke of the Marquis as _le bonhomme_.
Beyond being a sad bore in conversation, and as incapable of
appreciating wit in others as he was of originating any himself, he
seems to have given no trouble provided he had his meals regularly: and
remains for posterity what he was for his contemporaries--a stupid,
good-natured, complacent, slip-slop person whom one could neither much
dislike nor at all respect.
When he was at home, his wife and her famous guest left him to his
sport, his dinner, and his nap, and themselves plunged into work of
every kind, but particularly into that intellectual work which was the
passion of their lives. It was a strange household in that tumbledown
château in the depths of primæval forests--a strange mixture of the
laxity and wickedness of the evil Paris of the day and of the highest
mental effort and enjoyment--of the meanest sensual indulgence and the
noblest aspirations towards light and liberty--the clear voices of
children and the biting and dazzling sarcasms of a Voltaire against
those who would keep men in bondage and ignorance, children for ever.
In the December of 1734, Madame du Châtelet went to Paris, taking with
her to d’Argental a new tragedy Voltaire had written, called “Alzire.”
At the end of 1734, Voltaire first makes allusion in his letters, to one
of the most famous--and certainly the most infamous--of his works, the
“Pucelle.” The idea of it had been suggested at a supper at
Richelieu’s--Richelieu, equally celebrated for both kinds of
gallantry--in 1730. The “Pucelle” is Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans.
Dull Chapelain had spoilt the subject already. It did not occur as a
promising one to poet Voltaire. Richelieu and his guests over-persuaded
him to try his hand upon it. In a very short time, he was reading aloud
to them the first four cantos of that gay masterpiece of indecent
satire. How very little he could have guessed then what a plague,
danger, torment, solace and delight “my Jeanne,” as he called her, was
to be to him for the rest of his days! He had indeed many other things
to think of. “Jeanne” could only be an interlude to weightier
occupations. He turned to her as one man turns to gaming and another to
dissipation. She was the self-indulgence of his life, and it must be
owned a very pernicious one.
He must have found Cirey’s neighbourhood to Domrémy inspiring. By
January, 1735, eight cantos were complete.
Voltaire received in March the revocation of his _lettre de cachet_--the
end for which his friends had used all their influence. He was told
almost in so many words that he might go back to Paris if he would be a
good boy. On March 30, 1735, he _did_ go back. The capital was always to
him the gorgeous siren who fascinated him from far and disillusioned him
near. Cantos of that dangerous “Pucelle” were already flying about the
salons. Voltaire busied himself in finding a tutor for little Louis du
Châtelet and characteristically engaged that Linant, his unsatisfactory
_protégé_--ignorant and indolent--“for fear he should starve”--and
trusting to the Marquise’s Latin to improve the master’s. The Marquis
had desired that the tutor should be an abbé. It looked more
respectable! But when Voltaire said decisively “No priests chez les
Émilies!” the _bonhomme_ contented himself with the stipulation that the
youth should have a _penchant_ for religion.
One night when in Paris, Voltaire supped with the famous Mademoiselle
Quinault, actress of the Théâtre Français. She told him how she had seen
at a fair a dramatic sketch with a good idea in it--and of which she was
going to tell Destouches, the comic playwright. The other playwright
listened in silence: but the next morning he brought her the plan of a
comedy on the subject and vowed her to secrecy. Not only was the idea
not to be divulged, but the very name of the author of the play, which
was called “The Prodigal Son,” was to be a mystery. Theriot knew of
course, and one Berger. “It is necessary to lie like the devil,”
Voltaire wrote to them, “not timidly or for a time but boldly and
always. Lie, my friends, lie. I will repay you when I can.”
He thought, not wrongly, that if its authorship were known, the play,
good, bad, or indifferent, would be hissed from the stage. “I made
enough enemies by ‘Œdipe’ and the ‘Henriade,’” he said.
He was weary, as he might well be, of quarrels, of dangers, and of
jealousies. The visit to Paris was a very flying one. He left there on
May 6th or 7th. On May 15th he was writing to Theriot from Lunéville,
soon to be the Court of Stanislas, ex-King of Poland, and where Voltaire
now found a few philosopher friends and the charming and accomplished
bride, Madame de Richelieu. He was there but a very short time.
How good it was to see the Cirey forest again--the garden growing daily
into order and beauty--balconies and terraces being built here--an
avenue planted there--and within, everywhere delightful evidence of
Madame’s clever touch! He rode about the country on her mare,
Hirondelle. He urged on the workmen--and enjoyed doing it. He flung
himself with ardour and enthusiasm into small things as into great. He
had so many interests and was so much interested in them, no wonder he
was happy. There was that idle Linant to spur to industry, and Mesdames
de la Neuville and de Champbonin to vary the home party. Cirey was
_Cirey-en-félicité_--Cireyshire, in memory of that dear England. Émilie
was still “the divine Émilie,” “the goddess,” the cleverest, the only
woman in the world.
In August, 1735, Voltaire’s play “The Death of Cæsar,” imitated from
(Voltaire thought it an improvement on) the “Julius Cæsar” of
Shakespeare, was played by the pupils of the Harcourt College on the day
of their prize-giving. “I have abandoned two theatres as too full of
cabals” wrote the author gaily, “that of the Comédie Française and that
of the world.” The truth was “The Death of Cæsar” was unsuited to the
stage, and of what its author called “a Roman ferocity.” It had no love
interest and no female characters.
Voltaire was not a little indignant when the piece appeared in print in
Paris--totally unauthorised and shamefully incorrect. “The editor has
massacred Cæsar worse than Brutus and Cassius ever did,” said he. Its
appearance was the chief trouble of this autumn of 1735. In its
November, Algarotti, the Italian _savant_, and the friend of Prince
Frederick of Prussia, came to stay at Cirey. He read aloud his
“Dialogues on Philosophy”: and Voltaire read aloud a canto of the
“Pucelle,” or “Louis XIV.,” or a tragedy. The rest of the time they
laughed over their champagne and studied Newton and Locke. What
extraordinary people! The _bonhomme_, if he was there at all, did not
count. The Marquise, who, as has been seen, had learnt English in a
fortnight, already translated at sight and had her inborn genius for
philosophy and science.
The year waned in such studies. Algarotti left. In eighteen months,
besides the seventy-five pages of the “Treatise on Metaphysics” which he
had written in answer to Émilie’s question as to what she was to think
on life, death, God, man, and immortality, Voltaire had also written a
comedy--“my American Alzire,” “my savages”--the three-act tragedy “The
Death of Cæsar,” cantos of the “Pucelle,” chapters of “Louis XIV.,” some
part of “The Prodigal Son” and at least four of the rhymed “Discourses
on Man.” His letters of the period which survive, and which only include
a single fragment out of the number he must have written to Madame du
Châtelet, fill a fourth of a large volume. Add to this that he was
personally supervising the building and decorating, that he was the
lover of the Marquise--a position that always occupied a good deal of
time with that _exigeante_ lady--correcting the incorrigible Linant,
busy making all kinds of chemical experiments and collecting old
pictures by proxy in Paris, and it will be seen that he was the living
proof of his own saying, “One has time for everything if one chooses to
use it.”
CHAPTER VIII
A YEAR OF STORMS
After the death of Madame du Châtelet, Longchamp, Voltaire’s secretary,
rescued from the flames in which many of her papers were burning, a
number of letters in a very small handwriting. They were the “Treatise
on Metaphysics.” Voltaire dedicated them to her in a quatrain which is
as graceful in the original as it is clumsy in the translation.
He, who wrote these metaphysics
Which he gives you as your own,
Should die for them, as a traitor,
But he dies for you alone.
They were intended only for her eye. They contain the whole Voltairian
creed in brief, but in every essential. They were indeed, in the opinion
of that day, fit matter for the hangman, and to bring their author to
the Bastille.
The title is not alluring, it must be confessed. But the matter has that
witchery of style which Voltaire’s writings never missed. There is no
thinking man but must some time or other have asked himself such
questions on God and the soul, free-will, liberty, vice, and virtue, as
Voltaire here proposes and answers. Like his hero Newton, he knows how
to doubt. He passionately seeks truth and pursues that quest even when
he has found the truth is not what he wishes it to be. No man ever made
a more clear, logical, and honest statement of his religion, as far as
it had then progressed, than Voltaire in the “Treatise on Metaphysics”:
and no student of his works or character can afford to pass it by.
The “Discourses on Man” form seven epistles in easy verse: and may be
said to be founded on Pope’s “Essay on Man” in much the same way as the
ribald “Pucelle” was founded on the “Maid of Orleans” of the dull and
respectable Chapelain. Their sentiments certainly differ widely from the
comfortable optimism and orthodox theology of Mr. Pope. In this work, as
in all his others, Voltaire was not so much the enemy of religion, as of
_a_ religion: and less the foe of Christianity than of that form of it
called Roman Catholicism. The Epistles are upon the Nature of Pleasure,
the Nature of Man, True Virtue, Liberty, the writer’s favourite
subjects. They are easy reading--light, graceful, delicate, witty. In
brief, they are Voltaire.
On January 27, 1736, was produced in Paris Voltaire’s Peruvian comedy
“Alzire.” “My Americans” he called it usually. It was a brilliant
success, and ran for twenty consecutive nights. Voltaire gave all the
proceeds to the actors. He had no great opinion of it. “As for comedy, I
will have nothing to do with it: I am only a tragic animal,” said he:
and again, “You must be a good poet to write a good tragedy, a good
comedy only requires a certain talent for versemaking.” He was
right--with regard to himself at least. His comedies are all sprightly
and vivacious, but not much else. Between the lines, indeed, even of
“Alzire”--which the author, with a twinkle in his eye, called “a very
Christian piece ... which should reconcile me with some of the
devout”--may be read the most characteristic of the Voltairian opinions.
But he was too true an artist to allow those opinions to override his
play, and never forgot to disguise the powder in a great deal of jam. It
was twice performed at Court.
He was living quietly at Cirey when it was pleasing the popular taste of
Paris. One is not surprised that overtaxed Nature had her revenge at
last. By February, he was thoroughly ill. Madame du Châtelet sat on the
end of his bed and read aloud Cicero in Latin and Pope in English. They
were not wasting their time anyhow! One of them, at least, considered it
nothing short of “a degradation” to allow bodily ill-health to stop
mental industry.
In March, he wrote that he was “overwhelmed by maladies and
occupations.” By April, he was well enough to be plunged into a quarrel
with the faithless Jore, bookseller of Rouen.
If Voltaire was a very good friend, he was also a very good enemy. A
more hot-headed, energetic, pugnacious foe certainly never existed.
While he hated, he hated well. He lashed his enemy with such brilliant
invective, such delicate gibes, such rollicking sarcasms, that one must
needs pity the poor wretch if he deserved his fate ever so fully. Did he
get up and retaliate, Voltaire was at him again in a moment, dancing
round him, goading him to madness with the daintiest whip flicked with
_mots_ and jests and little cunning allusions, which looked so innocent,
and always caught the victim on the raw. Diatribe, gaiety, quip,
mockery,--this man had all the weapons. He never used one where another
would have done better. He had a dreadful instinct for finding out the
weak place in his adversary’s armour and logic. “God make my enemies
ridiculous!” was one of his few prayers. It was granted in full measure.
But if he was a dangerous and an untiring foe, he was not an ungenerous
one. In this case, Jore was certainly the aggressor. He had played
Voltaire false in the matter of the “English Letters.” He had endangered
the author’s safety and condemned him to exile. He wrote now from the
Bastille saying that if Voltaire would avow himself the author of the
book, he, Jore, would be released. Voltaire was as quick to compassion
as he was quick to anger. If he had hated a pigmy like Jore with a
fierceness he should have kept for a worthier foe, the moment the man
was fallen, his enemy became his friend. He wrote the letter asked of
him, declaring himself to be the writer of the abominable thing. Then
Jore demanded fourteen hundred francs, the cost of the confiscated
edition. On April 15th Voltaire hurried up to Paris. There he saw Jore,
and, though denying that he had any claim upon him, offered him half the
sum he had demanded. Jore refused it: brought a lawsuit against
Voltaire, and published a defamatory account of him. Voltaire’s quick
passions were up in arms in a moment. He was as much agog to get at his
enemy as a terrier is agog for a rat. He would have shaken the wretched
little bookseller in just such a terrier fashion, if he could have got
hold of him. But all Voltaire’s friends advised compromise with such
insistence that he at last yielded. He spent twelve breathless indignant
weeks in the capital. He had to pay Jore five hundred francs, in lieu of
the fourteen hundred he had demanded. “I sign my shame,” he wrote. But
he signed and paid all the same. He returned to Cirey in July sick in
mind and body, baffled, bitter, and sore. In a year or two Jore
professed penitence, and lived for the rest of his life on a small
pension allowed him--by Voltaire.
While he was in Paris, two seats had fallen vacant in the Academy. But
what chance could there be of one for the hero of a public scandal, a
notorious firebrand, like Voltaire? Villars and Richelieu did their best
for him--in vain.
He professed himself gaily indifferent, and _was_ bitterly disappointed.
He had to further postpone too the production of his “Prodigal Son.” He
could not give that son, he said, so unpopular a father.
The man needed rest after his battles. He had soon what was far better
than rest to one of his vivid temperament--a victory. In August began
his correspondence with Prince Frederick of Prussia, afterwards
Frederick the Great. It comprises many letters remarkable on both sides,
extraordinary on Voltaire’s. It lasted for many years--before they met,
in the early golden days of an almost lover-like infatuation--and long
after they had quarrelled and parted. Voltaire was not the man at any
time to be insensible to the honour of being the correspondent of one
who was “almost a king.” He was a great deal too impressionable not to
be in some sort the child of his age. In all his glowing dreams of
liberty, he never wished royalty abolished--only restrained,
enlightened, ennobled. And behold! the means were given him now, himself
to show a king the way in which kings should walk--to influence a man
who would influence a great people--to teach Europe, by a master to whom
it _must_ listen, those emancipating truths which were the passion of
Voltaire’s own soul. What an opportunity! It was characteristic of the
man that he realised and seized it at once.
“Believe that there have never been any good kings save those who, like
you, have begun by teaching themselves, by knowing men, by loving the
truth, by hating persecution and superstition. There is no prince who,
thus thinking, cannot bring back the golden age to his country. Why do
so few sovereigns seek this great good? You know why it is, monseigneur;
it is because they all think more of royalty than of humanity.”
These words occur in Voltaire’s very first letter, written August 26,
1736. They are the text of all the others. If there were compliments and
flatteries, French grace and _politesse_, and the adulation of the
“Solomon of the North” somewhat overdone, those were the inevitable
courtly trappings which adorned all letters of the time. The monitor of
Solomon, as shown in that very first letter, knew himself to be the
monitor; and, for all that exquisite turn of phrase and those pretty
eulogies, was going to remain the monitor to the end. The flattery was
by no means all humbug either. This royal pupil was the aptest that ever
man had. He answered his Voltaire, not unworthily. At five-and-twenty he
was himself philosopher and thinker: as great a natural genius as he was
a natural barbarian. All learning and cultivation left him as much the
one as the other.
The correspondence, once started, went on its way with a will. On
Voltaire’s side it was from the first profoundly philosophic. His style
was as clear, easy, and lucid when he wrote on the deepest and subtlest
problems of free-will and personal identity as when he wrote scandal to
Theriot or _bagatelles_ to Mademoiselle Quinault. He wrote on the most
abstruse subjects with a limpid simplicity of language, unachieved by
any other writer before or since. It is the greatest glory of Voltaire
as an author in general, as well as the author of the letters to
Frederick the Great, that he made profound truths, common truths, and
the knowledge that had been the heritage of a few, the heritage of all.
Madame du Châtelet read the letters, of course, before they were
despatched from Cirey. One fills eleven large pages of print and is
practically an Essay on Personal Liberty--reasonable enough, said
Madame, to bring its author to the stake. Theriot showed Frederick’s
letters about the salons of Paris: the prudent Voltaire thinking that
the correspondence with a king might just as well do him all the good it
could, and proclaim to his enemies that _all_ temporal powers did not
hate and fear him. At Cirey, the royal association certainly gave
pleasure at first. Madame was singularly superior to kingly attractions:
but Frederick was a thinker as well as a prince and loved philosophy as
she did. She had not begun to look upon him as a rival in her lover’s
affections. In his very first letter Voltaire had declined an invitation
to be his visitor on the score that friends should always be preferred
before kings.
The bloom of that summer of 1736 came and went on Cirey. Jore was hardly
silenced and by no means forgotten when Voltaire flung aside his
princely philosopher, as it were, to reply to a long, scandalous, and
very personal attack which bitter old J. B. Rousseau, infuriated by the
“Temple of Taste,” had made upon his rival, in a publication called the
“Bibliothèque Française.” That attack dated from the May of this year.
It was not until September 20th Voltaire decided to answer it. He had
been very patient, or had crouched awhile for a surer spring. His answer
is a masterpiece of gay and biting satire. “Rousseau has printed in your
journal a long letter on me in which, happily for me, there are only
calumnies, and, unfortunately for him, there is no wit. What makes the
thing so bad, gentlemen, is that it is entirely his own ... it is the
second time in his life he has had any imagination. He has no success
when he is original.... As for his verses, I can only wish for the sake
of all the honest people he attacks, that he should go on writing in the
same style.”
And in answer to Rousseau’s insinuations on Voltaire’s origin, “I have a
valet who is his near relative and a very honest man. The poor youth
begs me every day to pardon his relation’s bad verses.”
And in reply to that little story Rousseau had once circulated about
Voltaire’s profane behaviour at a mass, “Do you think ... it sits well
on the author of the ‘Moïsade’ to accuse me of having talked in church
sixteen years ago?... Thank God, that Rousseau is as clumsy as he is
hypocritical. Without this counterpoise he would be too dangerous.” The
letter finishes by recalling all the humiliating episodes in Rousseau’s
life he would have most wished forgotten.
From which it will be seen that Voltaire did not scruple to employ his
adversaries’ weapons--and to use them with a most deadly skill and
finish.
On October 10, 1736, a play called “Britannicus” could not be played at
the Théâtre Français in Paris on account of the illness of the principal
actress. A new comedy called “The Prodigal Son” by an anonymous author
was therefore produced in its stead, and performed to a crowded house
with enormous success.
It had been acted already by a company beaten up in that desolate
neighbourhood of Cirey. Voltaire had written reams of letters about it
to Mademoiselle Quinault, filled with rather doubtful jokes--which were
apparently, however, to the taste of Mademoiselle and of the period. The
“Prodigal” is in verse and five acts, and perhaps reaches a higher level
than most of Voltaire’s easy comedies. There were many surmises as to
its authorship. Voltaire himself suggested that it was by one Gresset.
Before he withdrew the veil of anonymity, “The Prodigal Son” had been
lavishly praised by most of its father’s enemies.
He had other pleasures just now, too, besides that success, to distract
him from the thoughts of his health which, as usual, “went to the
devil.” “Émilie, reading Newton, ... terraces fifty feet wide,
balconies, porcelain baths, yellow and silver rooms, niches for Chinese
trifles, all that takes a long time,” he wrote to Theriot. Passing
travellers too came to Cirey, and told travellers’ tales about it when
they returned to Paris. In this year, 1736, Voltaire began an immense
correspondence with a Parisian agent of his, an Abbé Moussinot, to whom
he wrote about investments and speculations, and whom he commissioned to
buy tapestries, diamond shoe-buckles, and scrubbing brushes; reflecting
telescopes and hair powder; thermometers, barometers, scent, sponges,
dusters--everything in the world. “If you do not want to commit suicide,
always have something to do” was one of his own axioms.
Even now, unfortunately for him, all these varied occupations did not
give him so much to do that he could not read, re-read, delight in, and
talk about until it became public property, a certain little
_bizarrerie_ of his versatile mind called “Le Mondain.” A gay little
piece is the “Mondain,” three or four pages long, in very flowing verse,
a little impertinent, perhaps, and quite volatile and careless. It was
written about the same time as “Alzire.” It contains a flippant allusion
to Adam and Eve, and the famous expression “le superflu, chose très
nécessaire.” Those are the most memorable things in it. The most
memorable thing about it is the fury of persecution it brought down on
the author and the storm of hatred it excited. The offence was supposed
to lie in the allusion to our first parents. The real offence was the
name and reputation of Voltaire.
On December 21, 1736, he received a warning letter from his friend
d’Argental in Paris, telling him that the “Mondain” rendered its
author’s position once more unsafe. It is said that the authorities
thought of warning the Marquis that he must no longer give refuge to
such a firebrand. Voltaire and Madame had a hurried consultation. Madame
wept not a little: for though she was a philosopher she was also a
woman, and as a woman, and after her capacity, she loved Voltaire. She
strongly opposed the idea of his taking refuge with Prince Frederick:
but agreed that he must fly across the frontier. She went with him as
far as four-mile distant Vassy, and they parted there, with many tears.
The man’s heart was hot with anger and bitterness. The old serpent of
injustice and oppression entered into every Eden he found. Madame only
remembered that she loved him and that he must leave her. The strange
_convenances_ of the day, which permitted so many things, had a few
rules, and those few had to be observed rigidly to make up for many
laxities. If the Marquise could have gone with Voltaire to England or
Prussia, all would have been well. But that was not permitted. Neither
she could go with him nor he stay with her. They said good-bye in a
bitter cold. It was winter--the winter had come so soon! A few days
later there arrived in Brussels, in deep snow, one M. Renol, merchant.
No personal injustice which he ever suffered so deeply affected Voltaire
as this one. In some cases if he did not deserve, he at least tempted,
the anger of the authorities. But here! “Is it possible that anyone can
have taken the thing seriously?” he wrote. “It needs the absurdity and
denseness of the golden age to find it dangerous, and the cruelty of the
age of iron to persecute the author of a _badinage_ so innocent.” He
went to Antwerp, to Amsterdam, and to Leyden. At Brussels “Alzire” was
performed in his honour--for all that he was travelling _incognito_, and
M. Renol, merchant, had no reason to be more interested in “Alzire” than
anybody else. At Leyden crowds flocked to see him, and he was introduced
to Boerhaave, the great doctor. He was at Amsterdam in January, 1737,
received with all honour, “living as a philosopher,” studying much,
working at Newton--as Voltaire alone knew how to work--at any hour of
the night and day, passionately, thoroughly, devotedly. He superintended
the printing of his “Elements of Newton’s Philosophy” then in the Dutch
press. He tried to forget. But he could not. The offence was rank and
smelt to heaven. He was abroad until March. Then in answer to the tears
and prayers of his Marquise, he gave out he was going to England--and
went to Cirey. But for those tears, but for that faith unfaithful which
kept him falsely true, he _would_ have gone to England as he said. “If
friendship stronger than all other feelings had not recalled me, I would
willingly have spent the rest of my days in a country where at least my
enemies could not hurt me: and where caprice, superstition, and the
power of a minister need not be feared.... I have always told you that
if my father, brother, or son were Prime Minister in a despotic state I
would leave it to-morrow. But Madame du Châtelet is more to me than
father, brother, or son.” She was. She had been not a little sore and
wretched while he was away. Prudence had made his letters perforce so
cold! “He calls me ‘Madame’!” The overwhelming vigour of her affection
brought him back to her. But even _her_ entreaties for prudence could
not keep him from writing a “Defence of Le Mondain,” and an answer to
the criticisms thereon, called the “Use of Life.” His heart was hot
within him. Fifteen years later the fever burnt still.
“You will say fifteen years have passed since it all happened” he wrote
to d’Argental. “No! only one day. For great wrongs are always recent
wounds.”
CHAPTER IX
WORK AT CIREY
The spring of 1737 passed quietly enough. Voltaire and Madame du
Châtelet were occupied in scientific experiments, and as delighted as
two children with wonderful discoveries and a dark room. They paid very
little heed to the summer which was coming, tender and fragrant, to
crown desolate Cirey with loveliness. Nothing was so unfashionable as
Nature in the eighteenth century. Even the poets neglected her--save one
ploughman in his barren North. To painters she served only as the
unheeded background to a trim Watteau shepherdess courting a bashful
shepherd on a fan. To Voltaire and his Marquise she hardly formed even a
background. In all his writings there is not the slightest evidence that
he had so much as a perception of natural beauty. He was fond of
pointing out how much better off was a modern, cultivated, luxurious
Frenchman, than a happy Adam in some wild Eden, and hereafter was
quickly irate, after his fashion, with that absurd theory of Jean
Jacques Rousseau’s that the “state of Nature is the reign of God.”
About midsummer there arrived at Cirey on a visit, one Kaiserling, a
Prussian, young, gay, delightful, with a pretty talent for making French
verses--_tant bien que mal_--and the social ambassador of Prince
Frederick. Kaiserling brought his master’s portrait as a present to his
master’s guide, philosopher, and friend, and the warmest of greetings
and messages, besides the second part of somebody’s Metaphysics and the
whole of somebody else’s Dissertations. He was received, he said, as
Adam and Eve received the angel in Milton’s garden of Eden, only the
hospitality was better and the _fêtes_ more gallant. There were plays
and conversations. Eve, as Madame du Châtelet, was the easiest and most
delightful hostess in the world, who sang to the celestial organ, played
the spinet, spoke all languages, and no doubt amused the visitor, if he
were not of nervous habit, by driving him about the country in her
“phaeton for fairies drawn by horses as big as elephants.”
In the evenings, if one did not read aloud a canto of that wicked
“Pucelle” or a chapter of “Louis XIV.,” there were fireworks, the most
beautiful fireworks with letters of flame spelling Frederick’s name and
surrounded by the motto “To the Hope of the human race.” It is not a
little curious to note the naïve delight Voltaire took to the very end
of his days in these, and such, amusements. He had always something of
the child in him--the child’s love of laughter, the child’s love of the
gaudy, as well as the child’s hot temper, generous impulse, and
quickness to forgive. Nothing was so small that he was too great to be
amused by it. “Rire et fais rire” was one of his mottoes. He threw
himself into those firework preparations as thoroughly as a very few
months later, and after days passed in the most abstruse studies, he
devoted himself body and soul to marionnettes, charades, and a
magic-lantern. To say that he was a versatile Frenchman is some
explanation: but it is not a sufficient one. He worked and thought so
hard that the more frivolous the recreation, the more it recreated. “The
divinity of gaiety,” Catherine the Great called him. “If Nature had not
made us a little frivolous we should be most wretched,” he said himself.
“It is because one can be frivolous that the majority of people do not
hang themselves.” It was because Voltaire could always laugh and work
that it could be truly said of one of the most impressionable and
sensitive of human creatures that “sixty years of persecution never gave
him a single headache.”
After three weeks’ stay, Kaiserling left, taking with him to his Prince
a part of “Louis XIV.” and some short poems. They both wanted--and
begged--just a few cantos of the “Pucelle.” But on this point the
goddess of Cirey was perfectly firm. “The friendship with which she
honours me does not permit me to risk a thing which might separate me
from her for ever,” Voltaire wrote. Entrust King and Kaiserling with a
bomb which might explode at any moment and scatter love, liberty, peace,
to atoms! Madame was too clever a woman for that. The guest left without
his “Pucelle,” and Émilie and Voltaire plunged deeply again into the
scientific studies and experiments which were the particular madness of
the hour.
At the end of the year 1737, the lazy Linant, the tutor, was very
rightly discharged by Madame du Châtelet. She had extended her kindness
to both his mother and sister. But the sister was as unpromising as the
brother. They left Cirey. Voltaire said he had given his word of honour
not even to write to his former _protégé_; “but I have not promised not
to help him.” Through a mutual friend he was weak and generous enough to
send this “enfant terrible,” as Diderot called him, fifty livres: and
thereafter took no little pride and interest in Linant’s third-rate
writings.
There are some very characteristic letters of Voltaire’s written at this
period in which he economically tries to arrange, through Moussinot, for
the engagement of a young priest, who is also to be something of a
chemist, so that he can say mass in the Cirey chapel on Sundays and
Saints’ days and devote himself to the laboratory all the others. This
_factotum_ did not turn out a success, and a separate young man had to
be engaged for each occupation.
In the November of 1737 died M. Mignot, the husband of Voltaire’s dead
sister Catherine. M. Mignot left behind two slenderly portioned and
unmarried daughters--and behold! the versatile Voltaire in the part of
the paternal uncle, seeking them husbands and furnishing them with
_dots_. He wanted Louise, the elder, to marry the son of his Cirey
neighbour, the stout, good-natured Madame de Champbonin. But Louise, who
was a bouncing young woman of four-and-twenty, with a pronounced love of
pleasure and the sound of her own voice, entirely declined to be buried
alive for the rest of her life in an impossible country neighbourhood:
and expressed these sentiments quite distinctly to Uncle Voltaire. In
practice, as well as principle, he was for freedom of action. In his
day, the father, or the person who stood in place of the father to a
marriageable girl, disposed of her literally without consulting her, and
exactly as it seemed best to himself.
“They are the only family I have,” Voltaire wrote of his nieces rather
sadly. “I should like to become fond of them.... If they marry
_bourgeois_ of Paris I am their very humble servant, but they are lost
to me.” But he had said too that to restrict the liberty of a fellow
creature was a sin against Nature. So on February 25, 1738, Louise
Mignot married a M. Denis, who was in the Commissariat Department in
Paris, and received from Uncle Voltaire a wedding present of thirty
thousand francs.
In March, the young couple came to spend part of their honeymoon at
Cirey. It has already been said that Madame Denis found the country
horribly, abominably, and dismally dull. There was a theatre, to be
sure! But where was one to find actors in this desert? The bride had to
put up with a puppet show, which, indeed, was very good, she added
grudgingly. They were received in “perfect style” too. That must have
been comforting to the soul of a Madame Denis. Uncle Voltaire was
building “a handsome addition to the château”--also comforting perhaps
to the Denisian temperament. The bride added naively that her uncle was
very fond indeed of M. Denis, “which does not astonish me, for he is
very amiable.”
But what an eerie enchanted castle it was amid these tangled forests of
Champagne! Its sorceress--pretty and charming as well as clever, niece
Denis found her--brewed every potion that could keep a lover, humoured
his whims, dressed for him, sang to him, decorated the house to his
fancy and--strange love-philtre!--quoted him “whole passages of the best
philosophers.” The captive was an unconscious captive, but a captive
still. The chains were gold, but there were chains. And even gold chains
chafe and bruise and eat into the flesh at last. The commonplace niece
saw much to which the brilliant Madame and her Voltaire were both as yet
blind. She loudly regretted that her uncle should be lost to his
friends and bound hand and foot by such an attachment. Voltaire and
Émilie parted from the bride and bridegroom, it may be assumed, pretty
cheerfully. They were not only still happy in each other, they had a
prodigious amount of work to get through. And your idle people, not
content with doing nothing themselves, are the surest prevention of work
in others and grudge the industry they will by no means imitate.
In the June of 1738, the second Mademoiselle Mignot was married to a M.
de Fontaine. Voltaire did his duty and gave the bride twenty-five
thousand francs: but he hated weddings and was not to be persuaded to go
to this one, any more than to Madame Denis’s.
Lazy, good-natured Theriot came to stay at Cirey in October, and no
doubt did _his_ idle best to wean his indefatigable host from the
scientific labours to which he was devoted, soul and body. The Cirey
goddess did not care about M. Theriot. If she was not married to
Voltaire she was at least wifely in her failings, and not at all too
disposed to like her lover’s old friends. Voltaire went into the parting
guest’s bedchamber, and under pretence of helping him to pack, slipped
into his box fifty louis. He was a man of substance by now. It is
estimated that at this period his income must have been about three
thousand pounds per annum (English money). Few men who have made wealth
as hardly and thriftily as he did, and are of temperament naturally
shrewd and prudent, have been as generous with it when made. Voltaire
was not only fully alive to the claims of his relatives and to the needs
of his friends, but had a strangely soft spot in his cynic heart for
anyone who was forlorn and poor. It was in 1737 he had written to
Moussinot to go, from him, to a certain Demoiselle d’Amfreville and, for
no better reason than that she was needy and had once had “a sort of
estate” near Cirey, “beg her to accept the loan of ten pistoles, and
when she wants more, I have the honour to be at her service.”
Ever since Voltaire returned from England he had been the most
enthusiastic hero-worshipper of the great Newton and the great Newtonian
system. In England, he had talked with Clarke, the dead Newton’s
successor and friend. The year following his arrival at Cirey he had
devoted himself to science as only a Voltaire understood devotion. At
his side was the woman who was the aptest pupil of Maupertuis and almost
the only other person in France who understood Newtonianism, save
Maupertuis himself, Voltaire, and one Clairaut. The rest of the world
was Cartesian. The philosophy of Descartes was _de rigueur_.
Fontenelle’s “Plurality of Worlds,” which clothed that philosophy with
all the grace and charms of a perfect style, was on the toilet table of
every woman of fashion. The government said Descartes was infallible, so
he _must_ be infallible. With what a passion of zeal those two people
set themselves to seek truth for truth’s sake--to seek truth whether it
agreed with the fashionable belief and the text-books or whether it did
not--to find it, and to give it to the world! To make Newton
intelligible to the French people--to present his theories so that they
would read as delightfully as a romance--to teach his countrymen to
think boldly as Newton had thought--to weigh, to ponder, and consider
whether the popular faiths were the true faiths--to believe
intelligently or to deny, not afraid--that was Voltaire’s aim. “Nothing
enfranchises like education.” “When once a nation begins to think, it is
impossible to stop it.” The French were to be taught to think by the
“Elements of Newton’s Philosophy.” The censor prohibited the work with
its dangerous and terrible anti-Cartesian theories when it appeared. But
in ten years’ time, the Cartesian theories were proscribed in the
schools of Paris and the Newtonian taught everywhere in their stead.
Voltaire hardly ever won a finer victory.
In 1735, there had begun, then, to arrive by that bi-weekly coach from
Paris air-pumps, crucibles, prisms, compasses, almost every kind of
scientific appliance then known. One day the coach brought a practical
young chemist (not a priest)--also purchased by the useful Mouissinot.
Voltaire and Madame were by no means going to be content with reading of
Newton’s experiments. They must try them themselves! One day, with a
good deal of outside help, it may be presumed, they weighed a ton of
red-hot iron. The dark room gave an almost childish pleasure to them
both. Voltaire tried experiments of his own. He was so absorbed in them
that he neglected his correspondence even. For the time being he was the
most scientific scientist who ever breathed--in a fever of interest in
his work, agog to know more, for more time, more power to labour,
longing for a body that never wanted sleep or rest, change or
refreshment. “How will you be the better,” a friend inquired of him,
“for knowing the pathway of light and the gravitation of Saturn?” It was
a stupid question, to be sure, to ask a Voltaire. All knowledge was a
priceless gain, he thought. We must open our souls to all the arts, all
the sciences, all the feelings! Poetry, physics, history, geometry, the
drama--everything. What! to miss knowing what one might have known! to
have a mind only ready for one kind of learning, when it had room in it,
if properly arranged, for every kind! Friend Cideville had mistaken his
man.
The Marquise was no whit less enthusiastic. Voltaire’s own mathematical
education had been neglected. But not hers. The pupil of Maupertuis
could help out her lover’s defects. Metaphysics was her passion. She had
the accuracy of Euclid, Voltaire said, and algebra was her amusement. In
his dedicatory Epistle to the “Elements,” which was the fruit of their
joint labour, he spoke of her in terms which were, at once, high-flown
compliment and hard fact. She _had_ penetrated “the depths of
transcendent geometry” and “alone among us has read and commented on the
great Newton.” She _had_ “made her own by indefatigable labour, truths
which would intimidate most men,” and had “sounded the depths in her
hours of leisure of what the profoundest philosophers study
unremittingly.” She had corrected many faults in the Italian
“Newtonianism for Ladies” written by their visitor Algarotti, and knew a
great deal more about the subject than he did himself. It is not hard to
understand how Voltaire came by what he called his “little system”--that
women are as clever as men, only more amiable. He had Madame du Châtelet
always with him--Madame whose whole aim in life then was to work, and
to please him. Her industry was as great as his own. The word “trouble”
was never in her vocabulary. He loved her intellect if he did not love
her. They should have been happy. If they ever were, it was over the
“Elements of Newton’s Philosophy.”
The book was ready at last. To make the theory of gravitation clear--and
entertaining--had been Voltaire’s chief difficulty. If any man was
adapted to enlighten obscurity, he was that man. His own mind was not
only extraordinarily brilliant, but it was extraordinarily neat. In the
“Elements” sequence follows sequence, and effect, cause, as incisively
as in a proposition of Euclid.
It has been seen that while Voltaire was in Holland in the spring of
1737 he was superintending the printing of these “Elements.” Before
forwarding the last chapters to the printers he sent the whole book for
the inspection of the Chancellor of France, full of hope. “The most
imbecile fanatic, the most envenomed hypocrite can find nothing in it to
object to,” he wrote in his vigorous fashion. Six months passed, and no
answer. And then the French authorities sent a refusal. “It is dangerous
to be right in things in which those in power are wrong,” wrote
Voltaire. Very dangerous. And how unmannerly of this presumptuous
Voltaire to dare to treat the beloved Descartes with cool logic and
relentless scrutiny just as if he were not sealed, signed, and stamped
by the infallible decree of fashion!
But, though it was not permitted, as Voltaire said, to a poor Frenchman
to say that attraction is possible and proved, and vacuum demonstrated,
yet, as usual, the pirate publishers would by no means miss their
chance.
The printers of Amsterdam produced an edition of the work which they
called the “Elements of Newton’s Philosophy Adapted to Every Capacity”
(_Mis à la Portée de Tout le Monde_). Of course there was not wanting to
Voltaire an enemy to say the title should have been written _Mis à la
Porte de Tout le Monde_--shown the door by everybody. The author raged
and fumed not a little over the printers’ blunders and incorrectness.
The usual host of calumnies attacked him again. Society and the gutter
press united in feeling that a person who dared to doubt their darling
Cartesian system _must_ be of shameful birth and the most abandoned
morals. They insulted him with all “the intrepidity of ignorance.” He
was accused of intrigues with persons he had never seen or who had never
existed. The vile licence of that strictly licensed press is the finest
argument for a free press to be found: the freest is less scurrilous
than those much watched and prohibited journals of old France.
Not the less, the storm which heralded its birth thundered the “Elements
of Newton’s Philosophy” into fame. It is forbidden: so we _must_ read
it! If Fontenelle had made the system of Descartes intelligible,
Voltaire made the system of Newton amusing. In 1741, he brought out an
authorised edition. In ten years, as has been said, there were hardly so
many Cartesians in France.
To this same year 1738 belongs a Prize Essay which Voltaire wrote for
the Academy of Sciences on the “Nature and Propagation of Fire.” There
were plenty of foundries near Cirey, where he could make practical
observations on the subject. So he went and observed. Time? The man had
on his hands, to be sure, a lawsuit, a tragedy, a history, an enormous
correspondence, a “Pucelle,” a love affair, an estate, and a couple of
chattering lady visitors who had to be amused in the evenings with
music, with readings, and charades. He had nearly finished writing the
essay when Madame du Châtelet, whose opinions differed from his and who
always had the courage of them, must needs write, in secret, a rival
essay on the same subject.
She began to work on it but a month before it had to be sent in. She
could only write at night, since Voltaire did not know she was doing it.
Her husband--strange confidant!--was the only person in the secret. For
eight nights, she only slept one hour in each. Every now and then she
thrust her hands into iced water to refresh herself, and paced her room
rapidly. The idea possessed her. “I combated almost all Voltaire’s
ideas,” she said herself.
He once very happily defined their connection as “an unalterable
friendship and a taste for study.” It _was_ friendship and would have
been happier for both if no softer feeling had entered it. They were
friends who could intellectually differ and be friends still: who never
sacrificed truth to sentiment, and whose bond of union was not a passion
for each other, but for knowledge.
Both of them sent in their efforts. Madame’s was chiefly remarkable for
the statement that different-coloured rays do not give an equal degree
of heat: since proved indisputably correct by repeated experiments.
Voltaire’s paper, as well as Émilie’s, contained many new ideas. That of
itself was sufficient to disqualify their efforts for the prize. It did
do so. It was divided between three other competitors, who were
correctly orthodox and anti-Newtonian.
Then Madame told her secret, and Voltaire wrote a favourable anonymous
review of that essay which contradicted his own, and should have made
Madame du Châtelet famous in a better way than as his mistress.
Both of them were as disappointed as two children might have been at
their failure. “Our Essays really _were_ the best!” they wrote and told
Maupertuis, almost in so many words. They were, although neither of them
is now worth much as science. Some of their theories have been
superseded; or proved absolutely wrong. But they were wise for their
age, and brilliantly expressed. That may be said, but not much more than
that, for all Voltaire’s scientific works. They were the alphabet of the
language--to teach a scientific childhood to think for itself. It is
because they accomplished that aim to the full that they are forgotten
to-day.
CHAPTER X
PLEASURE AT CIREY
On December 4, 1738, there arrived at Cirey, having been almost upset
out of her post-chaise, and actually compelled to wade through the
midwinter mud of the worst roads in France, a visitor, Madame de
Graffigny.
Fat and forty was Madame: a vulgar, cheerful, gossiping old nurse,
already an ardent hero-worshipper of Voltaire, whom she had met at
Lunéville, and with something of literary taste on her own account. The
Graffigny had, in fact, caught that eighteenth-century epidemic which
showed itself in easy wit, easy writing, and easy morals. She had a
brute of a husband from whom she had just obtained a divorce. She had no
money. She had any number of friends. Voltaire seems to have liked her
because she was poor, good-natured, and adored him. He came to meet his
guest in her room when she arrived at two o’clock on that December
morning, with a flat candlestick in his hand, and looking for all the
world, said the effusive lady, like a monk. Émilie was there, too. Her
greetings were only a shade less warm than her lover’s. Madame de
Graffigny was left alone: so that she could then and there sit down to
her writing-table and for the benefit of a dear confidant, called
Panpan, ring up the curtain on one of the most intimate and minute of
domestic comedies ever given to the public.
Some years later Madame de Graffigny obtained some contemporary
celebrity by her “Letters of a Peruvian.” They are altogether forgotten.
But her “Vie Privée de Voltaire et de Madame du Châtelet” will live as
long as the fame of that strange pair and the popularity of gossiping
memoirs.
Since their arrival there in 1734, both Voltaire and Émilie had been
busy in improving, not only the outside, but the inside of their
thirteenth-century château. Voltaire had a little wing to himself which,
by the irony of fate or choice, adjoined the chapel. He could open his
bedroom door and sacrifice to the _convenances_ by seeing mass
performed, while he went on with his own occupations. Sometimes the
visitors fulfilled their religious duties in this way too. They were all
very particular not to miss the attendance on Sundays and _fête_ days.
Their religion was a concession to social laws, like powdering the hair.
When Voltaire was ill in bed, which was pretty often, he had his door
opened so that he could hear the penitential litanies being recited, and
had a screen drawn round him to exclude draughts. His rooms were very
simply furnished, for use not show, spotlessly clean, so that you could
kiss the floor, said Madame de Graffigny, in the enthusiastic hyperbole
of her early letters. There was very little tapestry and a good deal of
panelling which formed an admirable background to a few good pictures.
There was a small hall, where their guests took their morning coffee
sometimes, where a stove made the air like spring, and where there were
books and scientific apparatus, a single sofa, and no luxurious
armchairs at all. The dark room--still unfinished--led out of the hall,
and there was a door into the garden.
The Goddess’s apartments were far more gorgeous. The lady visitor went
into ecstasies over that bedroom and boudoir upholstered in pale blue
and yellow--even to the basket for the dog--the pictures by Watteau and
the fireplace by Martin, the window looking on the terrace, and the
amber writing-case, a present from the politic Prince Frederick.
The rest of the castle was ill-cared for enough, she said. The
thirty-six fires which blazed in it daily could not keep it warm. In her
own room, in spite of a fire “like the fire of Troy,” she sat and
shivered. On Christmas Eve the draught from the windows blew out the
candles--although the visitor had solemnly vowed those draughts should
be stopped with canvas bags, “if God gives me life.” It may not unfairly
be surmised that most of the guests suffered as she did. Voltaire was a
very good host--hospitable, kind, warm-hearted, very anxious they should
not be bored, and indefatigable in amusing them with entertainments in
the evenings and talking to them at meals. But their comfort in their
rooms was naturally not his province. He did not think of it, and Émilie
did not care. She did not object to visitors so long as they left her
plenty of time and solitude to work: and then was ready enough to be
charming in the evenings. Experimental science and good housekeeping are
not necessarily incompatible: but each must have its own hours. Science
had all Madame du Châtelet’s. She seems to have been the sort of
mistress who provided a liberal table for her friends because it is much
less trouble to be liberal than economical, and had occasional fits of
frugality which took the form of feeding her servants very meanly. She
was sublimely inconsiderate towards them, as she was, in a lesser
degree, inconsiderate towards her own friends. She was of her age! The
_noblesse_ of that time treated their dependents exactly as if they were
animals, and animals who were at once dumb, deaf, blind, and stupid.
Behind their masters’ chairs, the valets listened to theories on which
the masters talked and the servants acted. Longchamp, who was later half
secretary, half valet to Voltaire, and before that in Madame du
Châtelet’s service, has left on record how he assisted at her toilet as
if he had been her maid. For her, he was not a human creature but a
thing--not a man, but a machine.
When Madame de Graffigny arrived she found two fellow-visitors also at
Cirey--Madame de Champbonin, Voltaire’s near neighbour and distant
relative, and her son. Madame de Champbonin was variously and elegantly
known as the “fat lady” or the “great tomcat.” Voltaire made her in some
sort a confidante. Perhaps the stout placidity of her disposition was
restful after the tumultuous emotions of the “effervescent Émilie.” The
son was employed as Émilie’s amanuensis, and copied for hours and hours
manuscripts of which he did not understand a single word. The two lady
visitors seem to have walked about the castle a good deal and admired
its beauties, sympathised with each other concerning the draughts and
the hostess’s sublime indifference to such trifles, and hugged
themselves with delight at the thought that half France was dying to be
in their position as guests at Cirey. To be sure, there were drawbacks
even in this earthly Paradise: but half France did not know that, and
the daily journal addressed to Panpan was still rapturous.
Presently the Abbé de Breteuil, Madame du Châtelet’s brother, also came
to stay. He was _grand vicaire_ at Sens. He was in every sense a typical
abbé of the period--not much pretending to believe in the religion he
professed--with a pronounced taste for broad stories--and “assez bon
conteur” himself. The connection between his sister and Voltaire seemed
to him only a thing to be proud of. He had countenanced it by his
presence here before. The Marquis countenanced it too. Why should anyone
else be particular? The abbé had come to enjoy himself, and he did.
While he was there the day began with coffee in Voltaire’s hall between
10.30 and 11.30. Even Madame du Châtelet seems to have roused herself
dimly to the sense that she had visitors and that something might be
expected of her in the way of entertaining them. Both she and Voltaire
tore themselves away a little oftener and for a little longer time from
their beloved Newton, during Breteuil’s visit. Everybody stayed with
them in the hall till noon, when the Marquis and the two Champbonins
went off to their _déjeuner_. The Marquis was always threatening to go
to Brussels to see about an endless lawsuit he was concerned in there,
and putting off his departure; which was a pity, as no one wanted him.
After coffee, Voltaire, the abbé, Émilie, and Madame de Graffigny talked
on all things in heaven and on earth for a while, and then separated.
The Marquise drove her great horses in her _calèche_ sometimes in the
morning. Once she would have insisted on nervous Madame de Graffigny
going with her, but Voltaire interfered and said people must be happy in
their own way. So Émilie, who had herself no time for nerves, went out
alone.
Sometimes the party met again for _goûter_ at four--sometimes not till
the nine o’clock supper. That was the appointed hour for relaxation.
Who would not have been of those evenings? Voltaire was inimitably gay,
brilliant, and amusing. Madame de Graffigny had him on one side of her,
and that pitiless bore, the unfortunate Marquis, on the other. _He_ said
nothing, fell asleep, and “went out with the tray.”
The supper was elegant and sufficient, without being profuse. Voltaire
had his valet always behind his chair to look after him, besides two
other lackeys also in attendance. Émilie was geometrical no more. She
was a woman of the world, trained in the first Court in Europe, witty,
easy, charming, delightful. The stories had been broad at previous
suppers; but they were broader than ever now, for the especial benefit
of Breteuil. He told some of the same kind himself which entertained
everybody immensely and which Madame de Graffigny, who had laughed at
them fit “to split her spleen,” retailed for Panpan’s benefit the next
day. The company drank Rhine wine or champagne which loosened their
tongues and brightened their wits, though they were a temperate little
gathering, by nature as well as from prudence. Voltaire improvised
verses over the dessert, or read something aloud, or quoted from memory.
The bare mention of J. B. Rousseau or Jore or any other enemy drew from
him a quick torrent of vivacious indignation. One night, after dessert
and the perfume handed after the dessert, there was a magic-lantern.
Voltaire showed it with “_propos_ to make you die of laughing,” said
Madame de Graffigny. Another night there were charades. A third, there
was a reading of the “Mondain.” A fourth, the entire party migrated to
the bathroom--an exquisite room with porcelain tiles, marble pavement,
pictures, engravings, and _bric-à-brac_--where Voltaire read aloud a
canto of the “Pucelle.” Panpan’s correspondent avowedly enjoyed _that_
immensely. So did everyone else. To hear something really shocking and
dangerous read aloud in a bathroom with closed doors--how _piquant_!
Madame de Graffigny gave Panpan epitomes of the cantos she heard, and
lived to wish she had not. After the cantos they amused themselves by
making punch.
Another evening they rehearsed “The Prodigal Son” and a farce Voltaire
had written, “Boursouffle.” Private theatricals were one of the Cirey
manias. The little theatre was reopened for Breteuil’s benefit. Pauline
du Châtelet of twelve was interrupted in her education at Joinville to
play the part of “Marthe,” which she learnt in the post-chaise coming
home. One night they danced in the theatre. Another, Voltaire read one
of the “Discourses on Man.” Yet another they discussed Newtonianism.
Once, Voltaire showed them the scientific apparatus--which still stood
in the hall awaiting the completion of the dark room--and they looked at
globes and through telescopes. Twice he read his new play “Mérope” to
them, and on the second occasion the effusive Graffigny “wept to sobs.”
She had also told them her own melancholy family history, when it had
been Voltaire’s turn to weep, and Madame du Châtelet was unable to
pursue her geometrical studies for the evening.
Breteuil did not stay more than a week or so in all. The fun had been
fast and furious while it lasted. It may be surmised that Voltaire and
Émilie were not sorry to relax their efforts to keep the social ball
rolling. They plunged deeper than ever into hard work. Madame worked all
day as well as all night--and never left her room except for the morning
coffee and the evening supper. Voltaire often could not tear himself
from his desk until that supper was half over, and directly it was
finished could hardly be prevented from returning to his writing. He did
his best--he had the true French _politesse_ all his life long--to talk
and tell stories and amuse his guests; but his thoughts were far away.
He was shut up in his own room the whole day too, now, except for a few
minutes when he called on his two lady guests. He would not even sit
down. “The time people waste in talking is frightful,” he said on one of
these brief visits. “One should not lose a minute. The greatest waste
possible is waste of time.” Madame de Graffigny was thrown on the stout
lady for all companionship, and was in the melancholy position of the
person who has to pretend she likes quiet, solitude, and reflection, and
does not. After a very little while her graphic and garrulous pen goes
much less easily and gaily over the paper.
Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet had troubles of which their guest did
not know the cause, but of which she felt the effect. The Christmas Day
of 1738 was one of the darkest of both their lives. To be unhappy is
seldom to be very amiable. This Graffigny too was, on her own showing,
something of a fool. Voltaire and Madame lived in a Paradise about which
a serpent, called the French authorities, was for ever lurking, ready to
spoil. Voltaire was always writing something he should not have written.
And Madame de Graffigny was always writing those voluminous, gushing,
confidential, imprudent epistles to Panpan. What _did_ she say in them?
On December 29, 1738, a tempest which had long been gathering in petty
mistrusts, small jealousies, opened or kept back letters, suspicions,
fears, hatreds--burst in a clap of thunder. There was a constrained and
silent supper. Then Voltaire came to Madame de Graffigny’s rooms and
accused her of having betrayed his trust and endangered his safety by
having copied cantos of the “Pucelle” and sent them to Panpan. She
denied the accusation _in toto_. Voltaire, beside himself with fury,
made her sit down and write and ask Panpan and Desmarets, her lover,
both for the original canto she had sent and the copies which had been
made of it. The unfortunate lady entirely lost her head. Then enter
Madame du Châtelet in a rage royal, besides which Voltaire’s was
calmness, temperance, and reason. She produced a certain letter from her
pocket as a proof of infamy and flung it, very nearly literally, in her
guest’s face. She accused her of having stolen a canto of the “Pucelle”
from her desk. She reminded her that she had never liked her, and had
only invited her to Cirey because she had nowhere else to go. The
Graffigny was a monster, the most _indigne_ of creatures--all the
opprobrious things in the du Châtelet dictionary, which was a very full
one. Voltaire put his arm round his furious mistress and dragged her
away at last. The quarrel was so loud that the Graffigny’s maid, two
rooms off, heard every word of it. Madame de Champbonin came in, in the
middle, but very prudently retired at once. When Madame de Graffigny was
calm enough to read the letter which Emilie had flung at her, she
discovered it was one of Panpan’s which Emilie had intercepted and read
and wherein was the remark “The canto of ‘Jeanne’ is charming.” Madame
de Graffigny was able to explain to Voltaire in a very few words that
this sentence referred to her description of the pleasure one of those
readings of the “Pucelle” had given to herself, and that there had been
no question of stealing, copying, and sending a canto to anybody in the
world.
Cannot one fancy how that little, sensitive, _vif_, angry Voltaire was
on his knees to his offended guest at once, begging her a thousand
pardons, kissing her hands, apologising, furious with Émilie and ashamed
of himself? It was already five o’clock in the morning. But Émilie was
recalled not the less (Megæra, poor Graffigny named her now). Voltaire
argued long with her, in English, to bring her to reason, and was so far
successful that the next day she coldly apologised to her guest. She was
too much in the wrong to forgive easily or thoroughly. As for Voltaire,
_he_ asked pardon again and again with tears in his eyes. He could not
do too much to make up for his suspicions and mistake. Émilie was
diabolically cold and haughty. The unfortunate visitor was “in hell,”
she said. But she had no money and nowhere to go to. There were silent
uncomfortable suppers. Voltaire’s “pathetic” excuses and nervous anxiety
for her comfort and well-being, when he came to see her in her rooms,
did not make her position much easier.
After waiting three weeks Madame de Graffigny obtained confirmation of
her story from Desmarets and Panpan.
Émilie at last relented so far as to give her guest the very doubtful
pleasure of driving her out in that _calèche_ of hers, and talking to
her more freely and amicably. But though such wounds as Madame de
Graffigny had received may heal, the scars remain for ever.
On January 12, 1739, the mathematical Maupertuis, Madame du Châtelet’s
tutor, came to stay a few days. The unlucky Graffigny suffered a good
deal from her eyes about this time, and stayed much in her room.
Voltaire himself was in wretched health; so there was no play-acting.
Madame de Champbonin left for Paris on a mission of whose nature the
Graffigny was ignorant. On January 18th the Marquis du Châtelet went to
Seineville bearing with him many letters and messages for dear Panpan.
Early in the next month, Desmarets, the lover of Madame de Graffigny,
came to stay and Cirey roused itself to another burst of gaiety. It
acted “Zaire” and “The Prodigal Son” and a play called “The Spirit of
Contradiction.” One rehearsal lasted till three o’clock in the morning.
Once the party spent the whole day in Émilie’s room where she was “in
bed without being ill.” The next, she was singing to the clavecin,
accompanying herself. Another, she sang through a whole opera after
supper. She and Desmarets went out riding. In one twenty-four hours the
company had rehearsed and played thirty-three acts of tragedies, operas,
and comedies. Desmarets read Panpan’s letters to the Graffigny while she
was at her toilette, as she had no time herself. Desmarets was
“transported, intoxicated”--enjoying himself immensely.
His mistress may be presumed to have been more unhappy than ever, since
the first thing he had done on his arrival at Cirey was to tell her he
no longer felt for her the feelings of a lover. He went away.
About the middle of February, 1739, Madame de Graffigny herself left
Cirey, having been there less than three months--not six, as the
title-page of her book declares. For the rest of her life Voltaire was
one of the most staunch and generous friends she had in the world.
Nothing in Madame de Graffigny’s “Vie Privée de Voltaire et de Madame du
Châtelet” is so interesting as the light she throws on their
relationship to each other. The golden chains had begun to eat into the
flesh. Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet, like lesser persons, had to pay
the inexorable penalty of a breach of moral law. “Wrong
committed--suffering insured.” Their punishment was the severest of
all--it came, not from outward circumstances, but from themselves. The
very relationship which had been a sin and a delight, was now at once
sin and torment. The gods are just.
The visitor was not long in discovering clouds in the blue heavens of
Voltaire’s “Cirey-en-félicité.” There was the “eternal cackle” of
Émilie’s tongue, and her sublime indifference to trifles like the hours
of meals. Did not she love power too? Not only to have power but,
womanlike, to show she had it. One day her lover’s coat does not please
her. He shall change it! He agrees--for peace, one may suppose, since
the coat is good enough and he does not wish to catch cold by putting on
another--and his valet is sent for; but cannot be found. Let the matter
rest! Not Madame. She persists. They quarrel with a great deal of
vivacity, in English. They always quarrel in English. Voltaire goes out
of the room in a rage, and sends word to say he has the colic. They are
very like two children. Presently they are reconciled--also in English
and tenderly. “Mais elle lui rend la vie un peu dure.”
Another time the quarrel is about a glass of Rhine wine. Rhine wine
disagrees with this imprudent Voltaire! The imprudent Voltaire, is, not
to put too fine a point upon it, very much out of temper with Émilie’s
interference in the matter. And it takes the united and warmest
persuasions of Breteuil and Graffigny to make him read “Jeanne” after
supper as he has promised.
At one of the readings of “Mérope,” Madame du Châtelet, with her
abominably clever tongue, turns it into ridicule and laughs at it. She
knows her vain and sensitive Voltaire’s tender places, it seems, and for
the life of her cannot help putting her finger on them just to see if he
will wince. He always winces. He will not speak all supper time. After
supper it is the nymph’s turn to be cross, and Voltaire shows the
visitors his globes while she sits sulking in a chair, pretending to be
asleep.
What an old, old story it is! What a weary, dull, aggravating old story!
and what a happy world it might be still if all the miseries men
carefully manufacture for themselves were taken out of it!
Yet another day, and there is a very bitter quarrel about some verses.
Émilie says she has written them. Voltaire does not believe it. They
both lose their tempers, and it is even said Voltaire takes a knife from
the table and threatens her with it, crying, “Do not look at me with
your squinting, haggard eyes!” Perhaps the story is exaggerated. It is
to be hoped so. Madame de Graffigny speaks too of Voltaire’s wretched
health; of his system of doctoring and starving himself; of his
disposition at once kind, nervous, and petulant. He told her one day,
she says, that Émilie was a terrible woman who had no “flexibilité dans
le cœur” although that heart was good. The Graffigny adds on her own
account that it was not possible to be more “spied” than Voltaire was,
or to have less liberty. It must indeed be remembered that the Graffigny
was speaking of a woman of whose superior powers she was always jealous,
and whom she had learnt to hate. Émilie had at least one great good
quality: she never abused other women behind their backs.
It has been said that lovers’ quarrels are but the renewal of love.
There was never a falser word. Every quarrel is a blot on a fair page;
forgiveness may erase it, but, at the best, the mark of the erasure is
there for ever and the page wears thin. Perhaps Voltaire and Madame du
Châtelet acted on the dangerous assumption that, since they could be
reconciled to-morrow, it was no matter if they quarrelled to-day. Their
attachment had now lasted not quite five years. It lingered nearly
another ten. Every day Émilie drew the cords by which her lover was
bound to her tighter--and a little tighter still; until that dramatic
moment when she cut them for ever. As for Voltaire, he still warmly
admired her genius; wrote her verses; forgave her temper, and held
himself unalterably hers.
The life at Cirey--already the subject of a burlesque in Paris--was not
what he had dreamed it might be. He was himself hasty, capricious, not
easy to live with. But he was also most generous, most affectionate, and
most forgiving. And faithful to the end.
CHAPTER XI
THE AFFAIR DESFONTAINES
In 1724, when Voltaire was thirty years old and in Paris, Theriot had
introduced to him Desfontaines, then a journalist, and an ex-abbé. Their
acquaintance was of the slightest. It had lasted only a few weeks when
Desfontaines was accused of an abominable crime (then punished by
burning), arrested, and cast into the Bicêtre. The impulsive Voltaire
must needs get up off a sick bed, travel to Fontainebleau, and throw
himself at the feet of the influential Madame de Prie and obtain
Desfontaines’s discharge--on the sole condition that he should not live
in Paris. Not content with this good office, he obtained from his friend
Madame de Bernières the permission for Desfontaines to reside on her
estates. Finally, he procured the revocation of the edict of banishment.
Desfontaines could live in Paris and pursue his calling as before. All
this for a man he hardly knew, who was an ex-priest, and a very bad
writer, if not a very bad man. It was generous, unnecessary and
imprudent. In brief, it was Voltaire.
He might have expected gratitude. He did expect it. Desfontaines wrote
him a letter of warm thanks. Eleven years later he was scoffing in a
weekly Parisian paper at Newtonianism, as revealed to the French in
Voltaire’s “English Letters.” Then he must translate the “Essay on Epic
Poetry,” which Voltaire had written in English, into French, very badly,
so that the tireless author felt the necessity of re-translating it
himself. Then, forsooth, M. l’Abbé must damn with faint praise “Charles
XII.” and the “Henriade.” Even a sensitive Voltaire could only laugh at
bites from such a miserable gnat. “I am sorry I saved him,” he wrote
lightly in 1735. “It is better to burn a priest than to bore the
public. If I had left him to roast I should have spared the world many
imbecilities.” But even a gnat may hurt if it sting often and long
enough. The early bliss of Cirey was disturbed by that petty malice. Now
in one way, now in another, Desfontaines showed the truth of the shrewd
saying that the offender never pardons. The gnat bites grew feverish and
swollen. Voltaire had reason to believe, though he still found it hard
to believe, that Desfontaines was in league with those other enemies of
his, Jore and J. B. Rousseau. Was it possible? Could there be such
ingratitude in the vilest thing that lived? It is to the credit of
Voltaire’s character, that he gave his abbé the benefit of the doubt
till there was doubt no longer. It was in 1736 he wrote that memorable
“I hear that Desfontaines is unhappy, and from that moment I forgive
him.” And the Thing stung again in a criticism on Voltaire’s “Elements
of Newton”--meant to be offensive. He was again forgiven. Then he stung
once more, and turned his benefactor into the liveliest, keenest,
deadliest foe that ever man had.
When Algarotti was at Cirey in the November of 1735, Voltaire had
addressed to him a few gay and graceful lines, meant only for his own
eye, and in which the real nature of the relationship between the poet
and Madame du Châtelet was plainly acknowledged. The verses fell into
the hands of Desfontaines. He wrote to ask permission to publish them in
his journal. Publish them! If all the world knew that Voltaire was
Émilie’s lover, all the world had at least the decency of feeling to
pretend that it knew nothing of the kind. Publish them! Voltaire,
Émilie--nay, the dull _bonhomme_ himself--protested passionately.
Publish them! Not for a kingdom! But they were published. And Voltaire
woke to revenge.
He would have been a worse man than he was if every bitter feeling in
his soul had not been stirred now. He was always acutely sensitive to
any slight put on his mistress’s name, honour, intellect--on anything
that belonged to her. If he was a good fighter when he was roused on his
own account, he was a ten times better fighter when he was roused on
hers. He was roused now. And he wrote the “Préservatif.”
It begins by a collection of all the slips, mistakes, misstatements,
printers’ errors and illiteracies which he was able to find in two
hundred numbers of Desfontaines’s weekly paper which was called
“Observations on New Books.” They were grouped together with all a
Voltaire’s ability--never a point missed, and so arranged as to make M.
l’Abbé supremely ridiculous. The “Préservatif” purported to be by a
Chevalier de Mouhy, a real person. At the end, the Chevalier presents to
the public a letter he has received from M. de Voltaire giving the whole
history of the Desfontaines affair in 1724--only not mentioning the
nature of the crime of which the abbé had been accused.
The “Préservatif” ran through Paris at the end of 1738 as such a
pamphlet would. With it, there ran a deadly epigram, and then a
caricature, with another epigram beneath. Neither epigrams nor
caricature would be tolerated by a decent age. They were all from the
pen of M. de Voltaire. They told the nature of the abbe’s crime. They
were a shameful weapon, shamefully used: and most deadly. Voltaire gave
Madame de Graffigny the “Préservatif” to read. To mention the name of
Desfontaines to him had soon the same effect as a red flag on a bull. He
was beside himself when he thought of the man’s base treachery and
ingratitude. He was beside himself when he wrote the epigrams and drew
the caricature. It is their only excuse. They need one.
He also wrote against Desfontaines, anonymously, a little comedy called
“L’Envieux”: but it was never played.
On that Christmas Day of 1738, Madame du Châtelet received a document by
the post. She read it alone and said nothing about it to Voltaire.
Whatever else she was, she was a woman of very strong sense and very
just judgment. The document she had received was the “Voltairomanie” by
Desfontaines--the retort to the “Préservatif”--the blasphemous shriek of
a lunatic--“the howl of a mad dog.” She herself wrote a reply to
it--still preserved. Voltaire must not see it! His health was wretched
as ever. He had just had an access of fever. He was acutely sensitive.
She did right to hide it from him. He was not less considerate. He had
also received a copy of that “gross libel” and was hiding it from _her_.
There must have been something good in the feeling these two people had
for each other--in spite of quarrels and bickerings and the testimony of
all the old women visitors in the world--they were so anxious to save
each other pain. They discovered their mutual deception on New Year’s
Day, 1739, and were the easier for being able to talk over the affair
together.
The “Voltairomanie” is too savage to be sane. It brought that old
accusation against Voltaire--a lack of personal courage. It recalled the
affair of the Bridge of Sèvres and the affair of Rohan in terms which
practice had made perfect in falsehood and offensiveness. It declared
Voltaire liar as well as coward. In the “Préservatif” he had said that
Theriot had shown him a libel Desfontaines had written against his
benefactor, while Desfontaines was staying with the Bernières at Rivière
Bourdet and only just released, by that benefactor’s efforts, from
Bicêtre. “And behold!” says Desfontaines in the “Voltairomanie,” “M.
Theriot has been obliged to deny all knowledge of the affair.”
Cirey at first was pretty calm, even under the matchless audacity of
this last statement. Theriot had been staying at Cirey last October and
had told with his own lips that very story just as Voltaire had told it
in the “Préservatif.” Voltaire did not take the matter so much to heart
as Madame du Châtelet had feared. He decided at once to treat
Desfontaines’s attack as a criminal libel, and to take legal proceedings
against him. He had witnesses as to the truth of _his_ story. Madame de
Bernières herself was one of them and prepared to write the most violent
letters on behalf of a friend. And Theriot--Theriot whom Voltaire had
made, loved, and trusted--why, Theriot had nothing to do but tell his
tale as he had told it in letters to Voltaire and over the Cirey
supper-table last autumn.
And Theriot never uttered a word. How hardly and slowly the conviction
of his treachery took possession of Voltaire’s mind, there is evidence
in his letters to show. Theriot false! Theriot time-server, coward,
frightened of the sting of a Desfontaines--impossible! The softest spot
in Voltaire’s heart was for this easy-going ne’er-do-weel who had been
the friend of his youth--confidant and intimate for five-and-twenty
years. Another man convinced of such a baseness as that, would have
shaken the creature off--flung himself free of the traitor who had eaten
his bread, accepted his money, lived on his fame, fattened on his
benefits--and denied him.
And Voltaire wrote pleading, persuading, imploring: counselling
repentance, eager to forgive: as a woman might have written to a
scapegrace son whose sin she knows, whose reformation she hopes, and
whom she must needs love for ever.
“Will you not have the courage to avow publicly what you have written to
me so many times?... My honour, your honour, the public interest demand
... that you should own that this miserable Desfontaines _did_ write an
abominable libel called the “Apology of Sieur Voltaire” and had it
printed at Rouen, and that you showed it me at Rivière Bourdet.”
“I am your friend of twenty years.... Will it be to your honour to have
renounced me and the truth for a Desfontaines?”
“Once again, do not listen to anyone who will counsel you to drink your
champagne gaily and forget all else. Drink, but fulfil the sacred duties
of friendship.”
“Make reparation, there is still time.”
“Everybody helps me but you. Everyone has done his duty, save you only.”
And at last, “All is forgotten, if you know how to love.”
There are many such letters of the early days of this year
1739--generous and pathetic enough. It was certainly Voltaire’s interest
to make Theriot speak the truth. But it may be believed that it was
Voltaire’s heart that was hurt by his silence. Émilie wrote to the false
friend, imploring: so did the easy-going Marquis, and the fat lady
watered _her_ letter with her tears. The affair would not have been
Voltaire’s if he had left a single stone unturned. Madame du Châtelet
wrote for him to obtain the influence of his prince--Frederick of
Prussia. And all the wretched Theriot would say was, that if the episode
had occurred, he had forgotten all about it. Madame de Graffigny
recorded how, when she was at Cirey in that February of 1739, Voltaire
received letters which threw him into a sort of convulsions, and Émilie
came into her guest’s room (“with tears in her eyes as big as her fist”)
to say the comedy they were to have played must be put off. The
Graffigny was too graphic a writer to be literally accurate. But there
is no wonder if Voltaire and Madame were greatly agitated and harassed
as to what course to pursue next. The mission which took Madame de
Champbonin, who must certainly have been one of the most good-natured
women who ever breathed, to Paris in January, 1739, was to try the
weight of _her_ moral influence on Theriot. And at last the wretched
creature, buffeted on all sides by letters at once heart-breaking,
entreating, and indignant, _did_ so far repent of his treachery as to
eat his words and consent to appear in some sort as the accuser of
Desfontaines.
And now Voltaire, having won his Theriot, must move heaven and earth
that in all points his libel suit may be carried to a successful issue.
It was the custom of that day for as many of the complainant’s friends
as possible to appear before the magistrate when the suit was
brought--just to see how they could influence impartial justice.
“Nothing produces so great an effect on a judge’s mind,” the plaintiff
in the present case wrote off plainly to Moussinot, “as the attendance
of a large number of relatives.... Justice is like the kingdom of
Heaven. The violent take it by force.” Voltaire had, then, not a
friendly acquaintance in Paris who was not to be roused to help him. It
was judged best that he himself should remain at Cirey. So Moussinot
became his agent, and a very active agent he had to be. He was to hire
carriages for the friends. He was to pay their expenses. All other
business was to go to the winds. He was to search out nephew
Mignot--Madame Denis’s brother--so that he might be useful in stirring
up _his_ relatives. He was conjured to pursue the affair “avec la
dernière vivacité.” “No _ifs_, no _buts_: nothing is difficult to
friendship,” the energetic Voltaire wrote cheerfully. The Marquis du
Châtelet was sent up to Paris to see what _he_ could do. Voltaire’s old
school friends, the d’Argensons and d’Argental, were not a little
active. Prince Frederick wrote influential letters to his Court at home.
Paris was in a ferment. Europe itself was interested. It was a _cause
célèbre_ of quite extraordinary vivacity. Through January, February, and
March of 1739, Voltaire himself was working feverishly at Cirey. He
rained letters on his friends. He wrote anonymous ones on Desfontaines
to be circulated in Paris, not at all decent and very much to the taste
of the age. He was certainly a matchless foe. He thought of everything.
The resources of his mind were as wonderful as its energy. He had the
gift of making other people very nearly as enthusiastic as he was
himself. To read his letters of this time, in cold blood one hundred and
sixty years after, stirs the pulses still. The most apathetic reader
himself feels for the moment Voltaire’s dancing impatience for revenge,
his hot anxiety for fear miserable Theriot should be false at the last
after all, his throbbing, vivid determination that he _shall_ be true.
The vigour of the man seems to have worn out at last even the malice of
his enemies. Desfontaines was told that he must disavow his
“Voltairomanie”--or go to prison. So the honourable magistrate drew out
a formula in which the honourable Desfontaines repudiated with horror,
and in sufficiently servile terms, all idea of his being the author of
that blasphemy and expressed “sentiments of esteem” for M. de Voltaire!
The whole case may be said to have rained lies. Everybody lied.
Desfontaines’s final lie was “done in Paris, this 4th of April, 1739.”
Moussinot was commissioned to give Madame de Champbonin two hundred
francs--which, to be sure, she deserved--and one hundred to the needy
and complaisant Mouhy, who had been dubbed the author of the
“Préservatif,” “telling him you have no more.”
The buffeting of that storm left Voltaire panting, feeble, and
exhausted. “There are some men by whom it is glorious to be hated,” was
an axiom of his own. Desfontaines was certainly one of them. But
Desfontaines’s hatred had power to the end of his life to rouse him to a
frenzy of indignation. “Take honour from me and my life is done,” had
not, alas! been the spirit of either defendant or plaintiff in this
case. But it had one good thing about it, though only one,--Voltaire’s
dealing with Theriot. Theriot was forgiven as if Voltaire had been the
Christian he was not.
On May 8, 1739, the two du Châtelets, Koenig (Madame’s mathematical
professor--a very good mathematician and a very dull man), M. de
Voltaire and suite left Cirey for Brussels. Voltaire had been at Cirey
nearly five years. He had learnt to love its solitude, its calm, its
facilities for hard work. He had learnt to dread towns if he had not
learnt to love Nature. But Émilie wanted a change, so was quite sure
that a journey and a different air were the very things for her lover’s
deplorable health. The process of reasoning is not unusual. Was there
not too a certain du Châtelet lawsuit, of which they were always
talking, which was already eighty years old and could only be settled in
Brussels? So to Brussels they went.
Voltaire had to be dragged away from a tragedy, from “Louis XIV.,” from
elaborate corrections which he was making to the “Henriade,” and from
the study of Demosthenes and Euclid. Madame had an iron constitution
herself, and could be at a dance all night and up at six the next
morning studying mathematics--for fear Koenig should find her a dunce.
_En route_ for Brussels, they stopped at Valenciennes, where they were
entertained with a ball, a ballet, and a comedy. They had no sooner
reached their quiet house in the Rue de la Grosse Tour, Brussels, than
they left it to visit some du Châtelet relations, at Beringen, ten miles
distant, and at Hain. They were back in Brussels by June 17th. The city
put herself _en fête_ for them. J. B. Rousseau, who lived there, was “no
more spoken of than if he were dead.” Anyone with a human nature must
have been pleased at _that_. Voltaire exerted himself and had a
beautiful garden-party with fireworks one of those fine days to the Duc
d’Aremberg and all the other polite society in Brussels. Of course he
must needs superintend the firework preparations himself. Two of his
unfortunate workmen fell from the scaffolding on to him, killing
themselves, and nearly killing him. The event affected him not a little.
Then the Duc d’Aremberg invited his entertainers to stay with him at
Enghien. The gardens were so exquisite that they almost reconciled even
a Voltaire and a Marquise du Châtelet to a house where there was not a
single book except those they had brought themselves. They played
_brelan_: they played comedy: and the author of the “Century of Louis
XIV.” listened to the Duke’s anecdotes of the days when he had served
under Prince Eugene. They were back in Brussels by July 18th. Useful
Moussinot was there too. On September 4, 1739, and after an absence from
it of more than three years, Voltaire found himself again in Paris.
If he had not wished to move to Brussels, he had much less wished to
move to Paris. But “the divine Émilie found it necessary for her to
start for Paris, _et me voilà_.” That was the situation. They were both
immediately engulfed in a social whirlpool--suppers, operas and
theatres, endless visitors and calls--“not an instant to oneself,
neither time to write, to think, or to sleep.” Voltaire wrote rather
sorrowfully of the dreadful ennui of these perpetual amusements to
placid old Champbonin, at Cirey. As for Madame du Châtelet--
Son esprit est très philosophe,
Mais son cœur aime les pompons
her lover had written of her to Sade in 1733, in perhaps the most apt
and descriptive couplet ever made. She was enjoying the _pompons_ now.
Paris was _en fête_ for the marriage of Louis XV.’s eldest daughter to a
prince of Spain. Madame was as energetic in her amusements as she was
energetic in acquiring knowledge. She gratified her tastes for dress,
talk, and gaiety and her taste for mathematics all together. Koenig had
come to Paris with them. Poor Voltaire wrote of her, not a little
dolorously and enviously, “Madame du Châtelet is quite different; _she_
can always think--has always power over her mind.” But to compose plays
in this tumult!--it was impossible to the man at this time at any rate.
His health was really as wretched as Madame said. It is not a little
characteristic of him to find him ill in bed being copiously bled and
doctored on Sunday, and gaily arranging a supper party on Thursday. But
even his versatility and courage, even the good-humoured patience with
which he watched Émilie enjoying herself, were not inexhaustible. He had
two plays to be produced in Paris. He did not wait to see either of them
even rehearsed. Early in November, 1739, he and Madame du Châtelet were
spending a week or two at Cirey on their way back to Brussels.
CHAPTER XII
FLYING VISITS TO FREDERICK
Since that first letter of the August of 1736 the correspondence and
friendship between Voltaire and Prince Frederick of Prussia had grown
more and more enthusiastic. The devoted pair had from the first
interspersed abstract considerations on the soul and “the right divine
of kings to govern wrong” with the most flattering personalities and
hero-worship. Each letter grew more fervent and more adoring than the
last. By 1740 Voltaire was Frederick’s “dearest friend,” “charming
divine Voltaire,” “sublime spirit, first of thinking beings.” In
Voltaire’s vocabulary Frederick was Marcus Aurelius, the Star of the
North, not a king among kings but a king among men. Voltaire dreamt of
his prince “as one dreams of a mistress,” and found his hero’s
Prussian-French so beautiful “that you must surely have been born in the
Versailles of Louis XIV., had Bossuet and Fénelon for schoolmasters, and
Madame de Sévigné for nurse.”
Not to be outdone, Frederick announced that his whole creed was one God
and one Voltaire.
There was indeed no extravagance of language which this Teutonic
heir-apparent of six or seven and twenty and the brilliant withered
Frenchman of six-and-forty did not commit. They _did_ adore each other.
For Voltaire, Frederick was Concordia, the goddess of Peace--the
lightbringer--the hope of the world--veiled in the golden mist of
imagination, unseen, unknown, and so of infinite possibility and capable
of all things. While heir-apparent Frederick was quite shrewd enough to
know that a Voltaire might add lustre even to a king’s glory, and be as
valuable a friend as he was a dangerous foe.
By 1740 and the return of Voltaire and the Marquise from Paris to
Brussels, Frederick had begun compiling the most sumptuous and beautiful
_édition de luxe_ of the “Henriade” ever seen. He counselled his author
friend to omit a too daring couplet here and there, and his author would
have none of such prudence. Then Frederick must turn writer himself, and
sent his Voltaire a prose work called “Anti-Machiavelli” and an “Ode on
Flattery.”
“A prince who writes against flattery is as singular as a pope who
writes against infallibility,” said Voltaire. The “Anti-Machiavelli” is
a refutation in twenty-six prosy chapters of the entire Machiavellian
system. Voltaire called it “the only book worthy of a king for fifteen
hundred years,” and declared it should be “the catechism of kings and
their ministers.” He wept tears of admiration over it. He had it bound
and printed. He wrote a preface for it. His transports of delight were
sincere enough, no doubt. He was also sincere enough to criticise it to
Frederick pretty freely, and to recommend “almost a king” to be a little
less verbose, and to cut out unnecessary explanations. It must be
confessed that the “Anti-Machiavelli” appears a very dull and trite
composition to-day, and that the beautiful moral sentiments on the
iniquities of war and the kingly duty of keeping peace lose a good deal
of their weight when one knows that a very few months after they were
written their author invaded Silesia and plunged Europe into one of the
most bloody wars in history.
But when Voltaire waxed enthusiastic over the princely periods at
Brussels in the January of 1740 he had no premonition of that future.
Compared with other royal compositions “Anti-Machiavelli” _is_ a
masterpiece. Even to one of the shrewdest men who ever breathed it might
well have given hopes that its author would be a king not as other
kings, a benefactor and not an oppressor of humanity, a defender of all
liberal arts, a safeguard of justice, freedom, and civilisation. Old
Frederick William was dying. The time was at hand when his son might
make promise, practice. On June 6, 1740, he wrote to Voltaire: “My dear
friend, my fate is changed, and I have been present at the last moments
of a king, at his agony and at his death”; and prayed friend Voltaire
to regard him not as king but as man. And Voltaire replied to him as
“Your Humanity” instead of “Your Majesty,” and saw in the heavens the
dawn of a golden day, and on earth all things made new.
On July 19th, Voltaire arrived at The Hague to see about recasting and
correcting a new edition of the “Anti-Machiavelli,” now being printed
there. There were certain things in it safe enough for a crown prince to
have written anonymously, but hardly prudent to appear as the utterances
of a king.
Voltaire was quite as active and thorough on that King’s behalf as on
his own. He wasted a whole fortnight of his precious time on Frederick’s
business in Holland. He had infinite trouble with the printer, Van
Duren, and stooped to trickery (to be sure, Voltaire thought it no
abasement) to get the necessary alterations made in the royal
manuscript. At length this most indefatigable of beings himself brought
out an authorised version of the “Anti-Machiavelli.” Voltaire’s
corrected edition and Frederick’s original version both appear in a
Berlin issue of the Works of King Frederick the Great. A comparison of
the two shows the versatile Voltaire to be the most slashing and daring
of editors. He cut out, as imprudent, as much as thirty-two printed
pages of the royal composition. The time had not yet come when Frederick
was grateful for such a hewing and a hacking as that. But the time was
very soon to come when he would have been but too glad if Voltaire had
flung into the fire the whole of “Anti-Machiavelli,” and the memory
thereof.
The friendship between editor and author grew apace, meanwhile, daily.
They sent each other presents of wine and infallible medicines. Voltaire
had an escritoire, designed by Martin, specially made in Paris for
Frederick’s acceptance. But they had long discovered that the handsomest
of presents and the most adoring of letters were but a feeble bridge to
span the space that separated them, and the question of a meeting, long
and repeatedly urged by Frederick, became imminent.
Since Frederick’s first letter it had been the _rôle_ of Madame du
Châtelet to stand by and watch a comedy in which she was not offered a
part. To be a passive spectator was little to the taste of her supremely
energetic temperament. It was not long before she learnt to be jealous.
She was a great deal too clever not to know from very early times that,
but for her, Voltaire would have been a satellite to the Star of the
North, instead of to any woman in the world. When his friendship with
Frederick began he was no doubt true to her because he wished to be
true. But how short a time was it before he was true only from a sense
of duty! Madame du Châtelet, with her vigorous passions, was not the
woman to be satisfied with a cold, conscientious affection like that.
She must be first--everything! Her woman’s instinct told her to mistrust
Frederick, and she did mistrust him. Then the mistrust grew to dislike;
dislike to hate; and hate, war to the knife.
Oh what beautiful compliments that pair exchanged through Voltaire, or
directly in the most flattering letters to each other--in those four
years between 1736 and 1740! Frederick said the most charming things
about Émilie. She was always the goddess, the sublime, the divine.
Flattery costs so little and may buy so much.
When he read her “Essay on the Propagation of Fire,” he wrote to
Voltaire that it had given him “an idea of her vast genius, her
learning--and of your happiness.”
Did Madame look over her lover’s shoulder and smile not a little grimly
with compressed lips at those last words? “Of your happiness”! Very
well. Leave him to it then. What can your court or kingship give him
better than happiness, after all? It is to be feared that if Émilie had
rendered Voltaire’s life “un peu dure” in the time of Madame de
Graffigny she rendered it much harder now, and that there was not much
question of real happiness between them. To be fought over was a much
more trying position for a nature like Voltaire’s than to be one of the
fighters. And there is no hell on earth like that made by a jealous
woman.
Within easy reach too, in tempting sight, were the pleasures of a king’s
congenial society, honours to which a worldly-wise Voltaire could be by
no means insensible. Yet in almost all his letters to Frederick he
reiterates his decision that he will not leave his mistress; that he is
bound to her in honour and gratitude; that he has chosen his fate and
must abide by it.
In the spring of 1740 she had published her “Institutions Physiques,” in
which she now championed Leibnitz against Newton, as Voltaire had
championed Newton against Leibnitz. Frederick went into ecstasies over
it--to its authoress; and damned it with very faint praise indeed to his
confidant, Jordan. Madame may have suspected that perfidy. King
Frederick, when he became king in that May of 1740, guessed he had met
his match in that resolute woman whom he addressed variously as “Venus
Newton” and the “Queen of Sheba.” If Frederick wanted to see
Voltaire--well, then, he must have Venus too. Of that, Venus was
determined. Voltaire returned to Brussels from The Hague in the early
days of August, 1740. It was not the slightest use Frederick’s writing
to him on the 5th of that month from Berlin: “To be frank ... it is
Voltaire, it is you, it is my friend whom I desire to see, and the
divine Émilie with all her divinity is only an accessory to the
Newtonian Apollo”; and more plainly still the next day, “If Émilie
_must_ come with Apollo, I agree; although I would much rather see you
alone.” Madame du Châtelet was for Voltaire a sovereign far more
absolute than any on earth. He pulled a very wry face, shrugged his
shoulders, and resigned himself to her determination with as much
good-humour and nonchalance as he could compass. It was arranged that
Frederick should meet Voltaire and Venus at Antwerp on September 14th,
and should return with them for a brief visit, _incognito_, to the du
Châtelet’s hired house in Brussels.
One can fancy the baffled rage of the Marquise when at the very last
moment the news arrived that that subtle Frederick had artfully
developed an attack of ague which would quite prevent him meeting Émilie
at Antwerp and Brussels, but need be no obstacle in the way of Voltaire,
alone, coming to see his sick friend for two or three days at the
Château of Moyland, near Cleves. Even Madame du Châtelet’s jealousy and
resource could find no excuse to keep her lover now. He went--feeling no
doubt rather guilty and very glad to get away--the precise sensations
of a schoolboy who has escaped for a day’s holiday from a very exacting
master. He was not going to play truant for long! After all, Madame
_had_ been dreadfully _exigeante_! One thinks of her with pity
somehow--Voltaire thought of her with something very like pity too--left
alone in Brussels, beaten, angry, and restless, and adding daily to an
already magnificent capital of hatred for Frederick.
That meeting at Moyland is one of the great _tableaux_ of history.
Voltaire himself painted it in letters to his friends when its memory
was green and delightful; and twenty years after, with his brush dipped
in darker colours. The ague, though convenient, was not a sham. Voltaire
found Solomon, Marcus Aurelius, the Star of the North, huddled up in a
blue dressing-gown in a wretched little bed in an unfurnished room,
shivering and shaking and most profoundly miserable. “The sublime spirit
and the first of thinking beings” sat down at once on the edge of the
royal pallet, felt the King’s pulse and suggested remedies. The day was
Sunday, September 11, 1740: very cold and gloomy, as was the disused
château itself. It is said Voltaire recommended quinine. Any how, the
fit passed, and by the evening Frederick was well enough to join a
supper of the gods.
Three men, who had been visitors at Cirey and were all renowned for
learning or brilliancy, were of it--Maupertuis, Algarotti, and
Kaiserling. Frederick forgot his ague, and Voltaire his Marquise. They
discussed the Immortality of the Soul, Liberty, Fate, Platonics. On the
two following nights the suppers were repeated. At one of them Voltaire
declaimed his new tragedy “Mahomet.” Frederick wrote of him just after
as having the eloquence of Cicero, the smoothness of Pliny, the wisdom
of Agrippa, and spoke, with a more literal truth, of the astounding
brilliancy of his conversation. As for Voltaire, he found for a brief
space the realisation of his dream--the incarnation of his ideal. Here
was the philosopher without austerity and with every charm of manner,
forgetting he was a king to be more perfectly a friend. Writing after
twenty years--after strife and bitterness--Voltaire still spoke of
Frederick as being at that day witty, delightful, flattering--aye,
still felt in some measure what he felt in fullest measure at the
Château of Moyland in 1740, the siren seduction of the King’s “blue
eyes, sweet voice, charming smile, love of retirement and occupation, of
prose and of verse.” With a mind keenly acute and searching, Voltaire
was youthfully susceptible to fascination. He had to the end a sort of
boyish vanity, and Frederick greatly admired him. But that alone would
not account for the fond pride and affection with which he regarded this
young King--and which might have been almost the partial and sanguine
love of a father for a promising son. No man ever wore better than
Frederick the Great that fine coat called Culture. He fitted it so well
that even a shrewd Voltaire thought it his skin, not his covering; and
when he flung it on the ground and trampled on it, still regretfully
loved him--not for what he had been, but for what he had seemed.
The three days came to an end. On September 14th, Frederick took
Maupertuis to Paradise, or Potsdam, with him, and condemned Voltaire to
Hell, or Holland (this is how Voltaire put it), where he was to stay at
The Hague in an old palace belonging to the King of Prussia and complete
his arrangements for the publication of his edition of the
“Anti-Machiavelli.” The Marquise was at Fontainebleau paving the way for
Voltaire’s return to Paris, and writing to Frederick to ask him to use
his influence to win Cardinal Fleury, the Prime Minister’s, favour, for
“our friend.” Fleury had formerly met Voltaire at the Villars’, “where
he liked me very much”; but that liking had since turned to dislike.
Madame worked at once with enthusiasm and with wisdom--that rare
combination of qualities which can accomplish everything. She said
herself, not a little bitterly, that she gave her lover back in three
weeks all he had laboriously lost in six years: opened to him the doors
of the Academy; restored to him ministerial favour. He sent a
presentation copy of the “Anti-Machiavelli” to Cardinal Fleury
presently, and the powerful Cardinal, now that Voltaire was a great
King’s friend and the active Marquise was at Court, suddenly discovered
that he never had had any fault but youth. “You have been young; perhaps
you were young a little too long”--but nothing worse than that; really
nothing. The two exchanged flattering letters. Then came events which
changed the face of Europe. On October 20, 1740, died the Emperor
Charles VI. He was succeeded by Maria Theresa of three-and-twenty. The
Powers were looking hard into each other’s faces to see if peace or war
were written there. “The slightest twinkle of Fleury’s eyelashes” was
hint sufficient for this daring and versatile Voltaire to try a new
_rôle_. When he started off to Remusberg on November 4 or 5, 1740, to
pay another little visit, already arranged, to friend Frederick, he went
not only as a visitor, but to discover the pacific or bellicose
disposition of Anti-Machiavelli who had already written, a little oddly,
that the Emperor’s death upset all his peaceful ideas.
The journey from The Hague to Remusberg took a fortnight. Voltaire had
as companion a man called Dumolard, whom Theriot had recommended for the
post of Frederick’s librarian. Their travelling carriage broke down
outside Herford, and Voltaire entered that town in the highly
picturesque and unpractical costume of his day on one of the carriage
horses. “Who goes there?” cried the sentinel. “Don Quixote,” answered
Voltaire.
Remusberg was _en fête_ when they reached it. There were suppers,
dances, and conversation, a little gambling, delightful concerts--the
gayest Court in the world. Frederick played on the flute and was
infinitely agreeable. The Margravine of Bayreuth, his sister, was of the
party. Voltaire showed Frederick Cardinal Fleury’s complimentary letter
on the “Anti-Machiavelli.” There was no change on the King’s face as he
read it; or if there was a change, it escaped even a Voltaire. If
Voltaire had been brilliant at Moyland he was twice as brilliant
here--in spite of the fact that he could only describe himself to
Theriot as “ill, active, poet, philosopher, and always your very sincere
friend.” He busied himself in procuring for that faithless person a
pension from Frederick, for having been the King’s agent in Paris. All
the time, through the suppers and the talk and the parties, he was
watching, watching, watching. The visit lasted six days. Voltaire had
never in his life tried to find out anything for so long without finding
it. But when he parted from Frederick at Potsdam he had not the faintest
suspicion that that invasion of Silesia upon which the King was to start
in twelve days’ time was even a possibility.
Frederick pressed his guest to prolong his stay. He went to Berlin for a
brief visit to pay his respects to the King’s mother, brother, and
sisters; but left there on December 2 or 3, 1740, and then returned to
Potsdam to say good-bye to his royal host--and to look into the royal
heart, if that might be. But it was not to be.
Voltaire was anxious to be back in Brussels in time to receive Madame du
Châtelet on her return from Paris, where her husband had just bought a
fine new house. He wrote a little epigram to his host before he left, in
which he gaily reproached the King as a coquette who conquers hearts but
never gives her own. He had been at least astute enough to divine that
there was Something his master hid from him. And his master responded
with a little _badinage_ on that other coquette who was drawing Voltaire
to Brussels.
They parted friends--and warm friends. But there was a highly practical
side to both their characters which came to the fore when Frederick bade
Voltaire send him the bill of his expenses at The Hague, and Voltaire
added to that bill the expenses of the journey to Remusberg, taken at
Frederick’s request. It was a large total--thirteen hundred écus--but it
was not an unjust one. It has been happily suggested that it at least
contained no charge for Man’s Time, and this man’s time was of quite
exceptional value. “Five hundred and fifty crowns a day” grumbled
Frederick to Jordan; “that is good pay for the King’s jester, with a
vengeance.” But when the King’s jester is a Voltaire, the King must
expect to pay for him. That was Voltaire’s view of the question, no
doubt.
A series of accidents befell him on his journey home. He was a whole
month getting from Berlin to Brussels, and twelve days of the time
ice-bound in a miserable little boat after leaving The Hague. In a
wretched ship’s cabin he worked hard on “Mahomet” and wrote voluminous
letters.
One of them, dated “this last of December,” 1740, was to
Frederick--cordial, flattering, and expansive. Having been dutiful
enough to tear himself away from “a monarch who cultivates and honours
an art which I idolise” for a woman “who reads nothing but Christianus
Wolffius,” Voltaire was a little disposed to grudge that act of virtue,
and to make the most of it. He was anxious, too, to prove to Frederick
that he had left him chiefly to finish the du Châtelet lawsuit--not
merely “to sigh like an idiot at a woman’s knees.” “But, Sire ... there
is no obligation I do not owe her. The head-dresses and the petticoats
she wears do not make the duty of gratitude less sacred.” The last cloud
of illusion must have been dispelled long before the Marquise du
Châtelet’s ex-lover could have written those words.
He saw her now not only as she was, but at her worst. “Men serve women
kneeling: when they get on their feet they go away.” Shall it not be
accounted for righteousness to a Voltaire that he got on his feet and
went back to her?
CHAPTER XIII
TWO PLAYS AND A FAILURE
Before Voltaire reached Brussels--nay, before he had written to
Frederick that letter from the ice-bound boat off the coasts of
Zealand--he had received one of the greatest mental shocks of his life.
The news of the invasion of Silesia came upon him like a thunderclap.
This--after the “Anti-Machiavelli”! This--after all they had hoped,
planned, dreamed! Where was that smiling kingdom, Arcadia, wherein all
liberal arts were to flourish, where were to be for ever peace,
tolerance, plenty? Where indeed? But Voltaire was nothing if not
recuperative. There is not a single instance in his life when he sat
down and cried over spilt milk. He was disillusioned now--and bitterly
disillusioned. “After all, he is only a King,” he wrote; and again, “He
is a King, that makes one tremble. Time will show”; and to English
Falkener, in English, “My good friend the King of Prussia, who wrote so
well against Machiavelli and acted immediately like the heroes of
Machiavelli ... fiddles and fights as well as any man in Christendom.”
Fiddles and fights! Well, since it was impossible to adore Frederick as
Concordia, one might as well admire him as Mars. Making the best of it
was part of Voltaire’s creed. He did what he could to live up to it now.
He congratulated Frederick on his victories. The pair continued to write
each other long letters, much interspersed with facile rhymes. They were
still friends. But it was no longer the boy-hero, the Messiah of the
North, the youthful benefactor of human kind whom Voltaire adored: it
was a far cleverer and a far less lovable person--the real Frederick the
Great.
Voltaire’s interminable journey did near its end at last. By January 3,
1741, he was in Brussels. Did he feel a little bit like the truant
schoolboy returning in the evening expecting a whipping, and all his
excuses for so long an absence disbelieved? Of course Madame du Châtelet
disbelieved them! A month getting back from Berlin to Brussels! That was
a very likely story indeed, and quite on a par with friend Frederick’s
artful ague at Moyland! Had quite planned to be back in Brussels before
I arrived from Paris! Had you indeed? And you expect me to believe that
too?
The unhappy Marquise had been eating her heart out in suspicion and
impatience, waiting for him. “I have been cruelly repaid for all I have
done for him,” she wrote to d’Argental out of this angry solitude; and
again, “I know the King of Prussia hates me, but I defy him to hate me
as much as I have hated him these two months.” She overwhelmed Voltaire
with reproaches directly she saw him. Her tongue was dreadfully voluble
and clever. The Marquis was away, as usual. There was nothing to
distract her attention, and Voltaire’s excuses _did_ sound very lame
indeed. He had a very bad quarter of an hour; but, after all, it was
only a quarter of an hour. They were reconciled--and tenderly. If Madame
was scolding and exacting, devoted to the metaphysics of Christianus
Wolffius, extraordinarily clad and with a painful taste in headgear, she
loved her lover and had done much for him. And Frederick the Great had
invaded Silesia. If that invasion was a triumph for him, it was also a
triumph for one of the bitterest foes he had, Madame du Châtelet.
At Brussels, in that January of the year 1741, there was then, for a
time, some sort of renewal of the brief honeymoon days of Cirey, before
the Prussian heir-apparent’s earliest letter, when the chains that bound
the first man in Europe to his Marquise were forged of warm admiration
and not barren duty.
Voltaire was soon writing that it was not Frederick’s perfidy that had
hastened his return--that if he had been offered Silesia itself he would
have come back to his mistress just the same. She had never seemed so
far above kings as she did now. Her unjust reproaches even were sweeter
than the flatteries of all courts. He had left her once for a monarch,
but he would not leave her again for a prophet. And she--a true woman
after all--wrote that Frederick could take as many provinces as he
pleased, provided he did not rob her of the happiness of her life.
Voltaire was busy in these early months of 1741 with his play “Mahomet,”
for which he had a quite fatherly love and admiration. The English Lord
Chesterfield, with whom he had dined in London, was a visitor at Madame
du Châtelet’s Brussels establishment, and to him Voltaire read
selections from the new drama. It would have been immediately produced
in Paris; but the best actors were unable to take part in it, and it was
judged better to postpone its appearance there.
In this April Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet went to Lille, to stay
with Madame Denis and her husband. At Lille, “Mahomet” was performed by
a company of French players, who had been half engaged by Voltaire to go
to Prussia in the employ of Frederick, and then thrown over by that busy
monarch. The audience, each of the three nights the play was performed,
was numerous and passionately enthusiastic. The clergy of Lille were
powerfully represented and entirely approving. M. Denis and his plump
three years’ bride of course came to clap the latest effort of Uncle
Voltaire. Uncle Voltaire had a keen eye on the face, and a lean
forefinger on the pulse of that audience to see how certain daring
passages affected it. What Lille applauded, Paris might pass. On the
first night, at the end of the second act, a despatch from the King of
Prussia was handed to M. de Voltaire in his box. He read it aloud. “It
is said the Austrians are retreating, and I believe it.” It was the
declaration of the victory of Mollwitz. Lille had its own reasons for
being passionately Prussian, and received the news with shouts of
delight. If anything had been needed to complete the success of
“Mahomet,” that despatch would have done it. The bearer of good news is
always a popular person. But nothing was needed. The clergy of Lille
begged, and were granted, an extra performance of the play for their
especial benefit at the house of one of the chief magistrates. Orthodoxy
seemed to be taking this Voltaire under her strong wing at last, and
Voltaire accepted the situation with a very cynic grimace and a great
deal of satisfaction. He and Madame du Châtelet left Lille with the most
sanguine hopes of seeing “Mahomet” shortly and successfully produced in
Paris. Until November, 1741, they were mostly in Brussels, watching the
progress of the du Châtelet lawsuit. Madame had a little quarrel on hand
with her tutor Koenig, in which Maupertuis joined.
In November they went to Paris and stayed, not in that splendid Palais
Lambert which the Marquis du Châtelet had bought, but which was not yet
completely furnished, but in Voltaire’s old quarters--the house which
had belonged to Madame de Fontaine Martel. In December they returned to
Cirey for a month; and in the January of the new year 1742 were again in
Brussels. The lawsuit was positively progressing, and so favourably that
they felt justified in spending the rest of the winter in Paris.
Immediately on their arrival in the capital they were plunged into that
“disordered life” which the Marquise loved and Voltaire loathed.
“Supping when I ought to be in bed, going to bed and not sleeping,
getting up to race about, not doing any work, deprived of real pleasures
and surrounded by imaginary ones”--as a description of fashionable life
the words hold good to this day. “Farewell the court,” he wrote again;
“I have not a courtier’s health.” He spoke of himself as being always at
the tail of that lawsuit--which the indefatigable and persistent
Marquise _must_ pursue to the bitter end.
They lingered in Paris through May, June, July--in their fine Palais
Lambert now--and all the time no “Mahomet.” Voltaire should have been
used to disappointments and delays, if any man should. He brought out
everything he ever wrote at the point of the sword. There were always
anxiously waiting to take offence the acutely susceptible feelings of a
Church, a king, a court, a nobility, and a press censor. This time,
first of all, it was the Turkish envoy who was being _fêted_ in Paris,
“and it would not be proper to defame the Prophet while entertaining his
ambassador,” said the polite Voltaire. The second cause of delay was
much more serious. Exactly at a moment when the policy of Frederick the
Great appeared peculiarly anti-French and that monarch was enjoying the
brief but vivid hatred of Paris, there crept out one of Voltaire’s
rhyming letters to the Prussian King, in which the courtly writer
lavishly praised and flattered his correspondent. M. de Voltaire had to
be alert and active in a moment. He pursued his old line of policy.
First of all, I did not write the letter. Secondly, if I did, it has
been miscopied. Thirdly, if I did write it and it has not been
miscopied, the reigning favourite of Louis XV., Madame de Mailly, must
help me out of my dilemma. Voltaire wrote and asked her assistance. She
could not do much. But Cardinal Fleury still looked upon Voltaire as a
person to be conciliated as an influence on Prussia. He read the play,
and approved. The censor did likewise. The murmur of the streets and the
_cafés_ was still against the too Prussian Voltaire. But for once the
authorities actually seemed to be with him.
On August 19, 1742, “Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet” was performed
to a house crammed with the rank, wit, and fashion of Paris, who
applauded it to the echo. D’Alembert appeared for literature. The Bar
and the Church were generously represented. The author himself was in
the pit. This might be another “Zaire,” only a “Zaire” written in the
plenitude of a man’s mental powers--stern, not tender--grand, not
pathetic--the expression of matured and passionate convictions, instead
of vivid, impulsive feelings. Voltaire was eight-and-thirty when he
produced “Zaire,” and eight-and-forty when he produced “Mahomet.” How
fully he had lived in those ten years! Then he felt: now he knew. He had
often dared greatly in his plays: in “Mahomet” he dared all.
Lord Chesterfield had regarded the tragedy as a covert attack on
Christianity. It must have been the sceptical reputation of M. de
Voltaire which made Lord Chesterfield so think. No impartial person
reading it now could find an anti-Christian word in it. It is a covert
attack on nothing. It is an open attack on the fanaticism, bigotry,
intolerance, which degrade any religion. It is a battle against the
“shameful superstition which debases humanity.” Worth, not birth, is
its motto. “All men are equal: worth, not birth, makes the difference
between them,” says Omar, one of the characters. In this play is found
that famous and scornful line, “Impostor at Mecca and prophet at
Medina.” There is scarcely a sentence in it which is not a quivering and
passionate protest against the crafty rule of any priesthood which would
keep from the laity light, knowledge, and progress. “I wished to show in
it,” said Voltaire to M. César de Missy, “to what horrible excess
fanaticism can bring feeble souls, led by a knave.”
If there were dissentient voices--and there were--the applause of that
brilliant first night drowned them. The play was repeated a second time
and a third. Voltaire may have begun to feel safe: to congratulate
himself that at last free thought uttered freely was permissible even in
France. He was always hopeful. But his enemies were too mighty for him.
Working against him always, untiring, subtle, malicious, was the whole
envious Grub Street of Paris led by beaten Desfontaines and jealous
Piron. The man in the street was now bitterly against him too. The
Solicitor-General, who, on his own confession, had not read a word of
the play, much less seen it acted, was soon writing to the Lieutenant of
Police that he “believed it necessary to forbid its performances.” On
the valuable evidence of hearsay, he found “Mahomet” “infamous, wicked,
irreligious, blasphemous,” and “_everybody says_ that to have written it
the author must be a scoundrel only fit for burning.” It was still in
the power of this remarkable officer of most remarkable justice to
prosecute Voltaire for the “Philosophic Letters,” which he threatened to
do, if “Mahomet” were not removed. Feeling ran so high that friend
Fleury himself was compelled to advise the withdrawal of the play. It
was performed once more--that is, in all four times--and then withdrawn.
A man of much more placid disposition might have been roused now. But
this time Voltaire was too disgusted, too sick at heart with men and
life, to have even the strength to be angry. He and Madame du Châtelet
left for Brussels on August 22d. He was ill in bed by August 29th--ten
days after that first brilliant performance--trying to sit up and make
a fair copy of the real “Mahomet” to send to Frederick the Great.
The spurious editions, shamefully incorrect, which were appearing all
over Paris, must have been the overflow of the invalid’s cup of
bitterness.
“It is only what happened to ‘Tartuffe,’” he wrote from that sick bed to
Frederick. “The hypocrites persecuted Molière, and the fanatics are
risen up against me. I have yielded to the torrent without uttering a
word.... If I had but the King of Prussia for a master and the English
for fellow-citizens! The French are nothing but great children; only the
few thinkers we have among us are so splendid as to make up for all the
rest.” And a day or two later to another friend: “This tragedy is
suitable rather for English heads than French hearts. It was found too
daring in Paris because it was powerful, and dangerous because it was
truthful.... It is only in London that poets are allowed to be
philosophers.”
The words sound as if the writer were weary, _las_, at the end of his
tether. On September 2, 1742, he went for a very few days’ rest and
refreshment to Aix-la-Chapelle to see Frederick the Great, who had just
signed a treaty of peace. Madame du Châtelet did not object to that
brief holiday, and entertained no idea of making a third person thereat
herself. She was more confident of her Voltaire now--hopeful that he was
hers, body and soul, for ever. When he was at Aix, Frederick offered him
a house in Berlin and a charming estate--peace, freedom, and honour for
the rest of his life. And Voltaire said he preferred a second storey in
the house of his Marquise--slavery and persecution in Paris, to liberty
and a king’s friendship in Berlin. “I courageously resisted all his
propositions,” was his own phrase. For this man when he was virtuous
always knew it, and keenly felt how much pleasanter it would have been
to be wicked instead. Fleury approved of the little visit, and though it
_was_ a holiday and Frederick _was_ his friend, Voltaire did still his
best to subtly find out the royal disposition towards France.
On September 7th he returned to Brussels, not having been absent a
week. Madame du Châtelet longed to get back to the gaieties of Paris,
though Voltaire, who was ill enough to be able to write nothing but
verses, said Madame, was well content in Brussels.
He went back to the capital, however, in this November of 1742, and was
not a little _vif_ and active in getting imprisoned certain publishers
who had produced “the most infamous satire” on himself and Madame du
Châtelet.
He was soon also busy on a scheme which he had tried successfully ten
years before. When “Êriphyle” failed he brought out “Zaire.” When the
authorities damned “Mahomet” he produced “Mérope. “ Ten years--ten years
of battles and disappointments, of wretched health and domestic
vicissitudes--had not robbed him of one iota of his pluck, energy, and
enterprise. He flung off that lassitude and despair of life which came
upon him in those few dismal days in Brussels: searched among his
manuscripts: discovered “Mérope,” and went out to meet the enemy with
that weapon in his hand. It had been written in the early days at Cirey,
between 1736 and 1738. It was the play over which Madame de Graffigny
had “wept to sobs.” Voltaire had wept over it himself. He felt what he
wrote when he wrote it, so acutely that there was no wonder his readers
were moved too. His own wit and pathos always retained their power to
touch him to tears or laughter whenever he read them, which is more
unusual.
“Mérope” is a classic tragedy--“a tragedy without love in it and only
the more tender for that,” wrote Voltaire to Cideville. It turns on
maternal affection. The idea is uncommon and daring enough. Would the
venture be successful? Madame de Graffigny had wept indeed; but then
Graffignys weep and laugh easily, especially when the author is also the
host. Mademoiselle Quinault and d’Argental had told him that “Mérope”
was unactable to a French _parterre_.
The Marquise had mocked at it; but then the Marquise had happened to be
in a very bad temper with the playwright. Who could tell? If taking
pains could make it succeed, a success it would be. The author, himself
no mean actor, attended the rehearsal and coached the players. When
Mademoiselle Dumesnil, who was cast for “Mérope,” failed to rise to the
height of tragedy demanded in the fourth act where she has to throw
herself between her son and the guards leading him to execution, crying
“Barbare! il est mon fils!”--she complained she would have to have the
devil in her to simulate such a passion as Voltaire required. “That is
just it, Mademoiselle,” cried he. “You _must_ have the devil in you to
succeed in any of the arts!” There was never a truer word. He did manage
to put a good deal of the devil into Mademoiselle. She became a famous
actress. His own fervour was infectious. The players, who had disliked
the play at first, caught his own enthusiasm for it at last. On February
20, 1743, it was first represented to a house crowded with persons who
had admired “Mahomet” and sympathised with the treatment of “Mahomet’s”
author. It was the best first night on record. Mademoiselle Dumesnil
kept the house in tears throughout three acts, it is said. For the first
time in any theatre the enthusiastic audience demanded the appearance of
the author. He was in a box with the Duchesse de Boufflers and the
Duchesse de Luxembourg and entirely declined to present himself on the
stage. His Duchesses tried to persuade him, with no better success than
the audience. He kissed the Duchesse de Luxembourg’s hand and left the
box, “with a resigned air,” and tried to hide himself in another part of
the house. But he was discovered, and drawn into the box of the
Maréchale de Villars for whom he had once felt something more than the
feelings of a friend. How long ago that was--Villars and its white
nights--a young man of five-and-twenty, and Madame, gracious, _svelte_,
and woman of the world to the tips of her fingers! She had become
_dévote_ since. “She was made to lead us all to Heaven or Hell,
whichever she chooses,” wrote Voltaire airily. As for himself, _he_ had
his Marquise du Châtelet. The moment was not one for reminiscences in
any case. The _parterre_ was not to be silenced. The story runs that it
vociferously insisted that Madame de Villars, the young daughter-in-law
of his old love, should kiss M. de Voltaire. The Maréchale ordered her
to do so, and Voltaire wrote after that he was like Alain Chartier and
the Princess Margaret of Scotland--“only he was asleep and I was awake.”
He enjoyed that evening as only a Frenchman can enjoy. He was all his
life intensely susceptible to the emotions of the moment; vain with the
light-hearted vanity of a very young man; loving show and glitter,
applause and flattery--a true child of France, though one of the
greatest of her great family. Was it not a triumph over his enemies too?
What might not follow from it? Voltaire said thereafter that the
distinction between himself and Jean Jacques Rousseau was that Jean
Jacques wrote in order to write, and he wrote in order to act. Of what
use was the dazzling success of “Mérope” if it could not buy him a place
he had long coveted and gratify one of the darling desires of his soul?
On January 29th of this same year 1743 had died Voltaire’s friend,
Cardinal Fleury. He left vacant one of the forty coveted chairs in the
French Academy. Who should aspire to it if not the man who had written
the “Henriade” and the “English Letters,” “Zaire,” “Alzire,” “Mahomet,”
and “Mérope”? It would be no empty honour, but a safeguard against his
enemies: the hall-mark of the King’s favour.
The King was for his election; so was the King’s mistress, Madame de
Châteauroux; but against it, and bitterly against it, were Maurepas,
Secretary of State, and Boyer, Bishop of Mirepoix, and tutor of the
Dauphin. Voltaire always called Boyer the “âne de Mirepoix” from the
fact that he signed himself “anc: de Mirepoix,” meaning that he was
formerly bishop of that place--and it must be conceded that, if
conscientious, he was one of the most narrow-minded old prelates who
ever fattened at a court. He has been well summed up as a man who
“reaped all the honours and sowed none.” _His_ argument was that it
would offend Heaven for a profane person like M. de Voltaire to succeed
a cardinal in any office. To be sure, the chairs in the Academy were
designed to reward literary, not ecclesiastical, merit. But what was
that to a Boyer?
Voltaire wrote long letters which are masterpieces of subtlety and
special pleading to prove what a good Christian and Churchman he was,
and how suited in character, as well as ability, to be the successor of
a prelate. He did not stop at a lie. In a letter to Boyer written at the
end of February he declared himself a sincere Catholic, and added that
he had never written a page which did not breathe humanity (which was
true enough) and many sanctified by religion (which was very untrue
indeed). He conclusively proved (cannot one fancy the twinkle in his
eager eyes as he penned the words?) that “the ‘Henriade’ from one end to
the other is nothing but an _éloge_ of a virtue which submits to
Providence,” and that most of the “English Letters,” current in Paris,
were not written by him at all. The mixture of the false and the true is
so clever that it _might_ have deceived anybody. Voltaire may have
argued with himself that since he knew it _would_ deceive nobody, the
lying was very venial indeed. What did it matter what he said now? It
was the master motives which had ruled his life, the passion for freedom
of thought and action, the sceptical temper, the burning longing for
light and knowledge which panted in every page of every play, in every
line almost of his graver works, which counted against him. He was
excluded from the Academy. The Ass of Mirepoix won M. de Voltaire’s seat
for a bishop--of very slender literary capacity indeed. Voltaire wrote
lightly that it was according to the canons of the Church that a prelate
should succeed a prelate, and that “a profane person like myself must
renounce the Academy for ever.”
But he was bitterly disappointed not the less. Frederick the Great, in a
kingly pun, said that he believed that France was now the only country
in Europe where “âncs” and fools could make their fortunes. In 1743
England elected Voltaire a member of her Royal Society. During the year
four other chairs fell vacant at the French Academy. But the greatest
literary genius of the age, perhaps of any age, was not even mooted as a
candidate. It was Montesquieu, the famous author of “L’Esprit des Lois,”
who said scornfully of the occasion and of Voltaire:
“Voltaire n’est pas beau, il n’est que joli. It would be shameful for
the Academy to admit him, and it will one day be shameful for it not to
have admitted him.”
In what a far different and far larger spirit it was that Voltaire
criticised his critic--“Humanity had lost its title-deeds. Montesquieu
found them and gave them back.”
CHAPTER XIV
VOLTAIRE AS DIPLOMATIST AND COURTIER
Voltaire had a little distraction from his disappointment about the
Academy in the April of this 1743 in the marriage of Pauline du
Châtelet, the vivacious little amateur actress of Cirey. Pauline was
fresh from a convent and aged exactly sixteen. The Italian Duc de
Montenero-Caraff, the bridegroom, was distinctly elderly, and, as
sketched in a few lively touches by Voltaire, very unprepossessing. The
Marquise maintained _she_ had not arranged the alliance. But _mariages
de convenance_ were the established custom of the day. Who knows?
Voltaire had been for freedom of choice in the case of niece Denis, it
is certain. Pauline was not his to dispose of. He would appear to have
shrugged his shoulders and given her his blessing. With it, she
disappears out of the history of his life.
In June he had another chagrin. The performance of his play, “The Death
of Cæsar,” already acted in August, 1735, by the pupils of the Harcourt
College, was stopped on the very evening before it was to have been
produced in public. Not many days after, M. de Voltaire left Paris on
his fourth visit to Frederick the Great. Frederick wanted him socially
as the wittiest man in the world, the most daring genius of the age. If
the French Academy would have none of him, the Prussian Court knew
better. Besides--besides--could not this subtle Solomon of the North
rely on himself to find out from his guest something of the temper and
the disposition of France toward Prussia? The guest was not less astute.
The _rôle_ of amateur diplomatist pleased his fancy and his vanity. What
if he had not been successful in it before? A Voltaire could always try
again. He left Paris then in June pretending that his journey was the
outcome of his quarrel with Boyer, but really as the emissary of
Richelieu on a secret mission to Frederick to warn him of the danger of
allowing King George of Hanover and England to help Maria Theresa to her
rights, and meaning to win over the cleverest monarch in Europe to an
alliance with France. It was a beautiful scheme. It had first “come into
the heads” of friend Richelieu and Madame de Châteauroux; then the King
had adopted it, and Amelot, the Minister for Foreign Affairs. It was
ambitious enough to particularly appeal to Voltaire’s audacity. The King
of France was to pay all expenses: which was not unjust. The Bourbons
seldom spent their money so wisely. Madame du Châtelet was the only
person intrusted with the secret of the journey’s real object. She felt
that it was due to herself to have a fit of hysterics since her Voltaire
was leaving her for this Frederick, and she had it. But she kept the
secret. If she was a little proud in her heart of the honour such a
mission implied, yet her grief at the departure of her “ami” was so
unrestrained as to make her and it the laughing-stocks of Paris.
Frederick “is a very dangerous rival for me,” she wrote on June 28,
1743. “If I had been in Voltaire’s place I should not have gone!” “I am
staying here in the hopes of getting ‘Cæsar’ played and so hastening his
return.”
Voltaire set off in very excellent spirits. It would so annoy Boyer to
see his enemy protected by the most powerful monarch in Europe--and by a
monarch who was not at all above making _mots_ on an “anc: de Mirepoix”!
“I had at once the pleasure of revenging myself on the Bishop ... of
taking a very pleasant little trip, and being in the way of rendering
services to the King and the state.” In July he was writing to his
friends, and to Amelot, from “a palace of the King of Prussia at The
Hague”--a little humanly proud of being able to date his letters from
such a place, keen for the fray, sick in body as usual, and vividly
alert in mind.
On August 31st he arrived at Berlin. The first news he had to
communicate to Amelot was the victory of George II. of England at
Dettingen. What honours could be too great for a man who, at such a
juncture, made Prussia the friend of France? Madame du Châtelet, keeping
her counsel at home, must have had high hopes for her Voltaire. And her
Voltaire, at Berlin, cherished them for himself.
To all appearances indeed the visit was but a _fête_, and a gorgeous
_fête_. Berlin was gay with balls, operas, and parties. Sometimes there
were ballets, and nightly almost those royal suppers where, said the
guest, “God was respected, but those who had deceived men in His name
were not spared.” Voltaire had a room adjoining Frederick’s, and the
King came in and out of the visitor’s apartment familiarly. The old
potent charm which these two men had for each other was at work again.
But not the less, through the glamour, the wit, the wine, and the
laughter, each pursued his secret object, adroit, thorough, and
unsleeping.
Voltaire played the _rôle_ of diplomatist as he played all
_rôles_--brilliantly. He was delightfully gay and easy. He seemed so
volatile and so gullible. He threw himself into the pleasures of the
hour with all his French soul. An ulterior motive? The man was _bon
enfant_, _bon conteur_, _bon_ everything. He had come to enjoy himself
and was doing it to the full.
“Through all,” he wrote, “my secret mission went forward.” He despatched
immense diplomatic documents to his country _via_ Madame du Châtelet. He
drew up a famous series of questions, to which friend Frederick was to
append such answers as would bare the secrets of his Prussian soul to
France. The diplomatist had immense conversations with the monarch,
which he reported. Frederick wrote Voltaire a most beautiful open letter
to show in Paris, wherein he complimented France on her Louis XV., and
Louis XV. on his Voltaire. He renewed his pressing invitations to
Voltaire to come and live at Berlin--nay, did more. He worked behind his
back so as to further embroil him with Boyer, and make France too hot to
hold him. “That would be the way to have him in Berlin.”
Frederick was his guest’s friend, and his devoted friend. But he thought
it no breach of friendship to trick him where he could, and kept closed
the book of his intentions and his soul.
The fact was that where Voltaire was but a brilliant amateur, Frederick
was the sound professional; that what this daring Arouet took upon
himself for the nonce, was the business of the King’s life. Voltaire was
not above trickery: but Frederick tricked better. His answers to that
famous series of questions are evasive, or buffoonery. Voltaire counted
that he had not done badly in his mission. But Frederick had done
better.
The visit finished with a fortnight at Bayreuth in September, 1743,
where Voltaire and the King were the guests of the King’s sisters, where
were gaiety, laughter, and wit--“all the pleasures of a court without
its formality.” Voltaire distinguished himself by writing three charming
madrigals to the three royal ladies. They do not admit of translation.
It is only in their original tongue that their grace, ease, and delicacy
can be appreciated. But for that kind of versifying they are the model
for all time. If Voltaire had not far more splendid titles to fame, he
would have gone down the ages as the daintiest and wittiest writer who
ever made sonnets on his mistress’s eyebrow, trifled with graceful
jests, and flattered with daintiest comparisons.
In the early days of October he was back in Berlin for a few days _en
passant_. On October 12th he and his King parted there, not without much
show of sorrow, and some of the reality of it.
Voltaire had found out “that little treason” whose aim was to keep him
in Prussia; but at these parting moments “the King excused himself and
told me he would do what I liked to make reparation.” As for Frederick,
he, in Voltaire’s own words, had “scented the spy.” They could no longer
trust each other. To the misfortune of both, they loved each other
still.
On October 12th, then, Voltaire left for Brussels. On the 14th his
travelling carriage was upset and he was robbed by the people who came
to his assistance. The wretched village in which he hoped for shelter
that evening, he found in the process
[Illustration: MADAME DE POMPADOUR
_From the Painting by François Boucher in the Possession of Baron
Nathaniel de Rothschild_]
of a conflagration. At last he reached Brunswick, where for a few days
he was royally entertained by the Duke. Finally, he returned to
Brussels.
It is not to be supposed that the divine Émilie had been sitting
contented and smiling in Paris while her lover was addressing tender
rhymes to princesses in Bayreuth. Voltaire had been away four
months--four heart-burning, chafing, angry months. What unsatisfying
food for the heart were diplomatic despatches after all! Voltaire was
one whole fortnight without writing a single letter to his mistress. She
had to learn his movements “from ambassadors and gazettes.” “Such
conduct would alienate anyone but me,” she wrote to d’Argental, always
her confidant. Then, to add insult to injury, was that delay at the
court of the Duke of Brunswick. Courts and kings! Madame du Châtelet was
weary of them. She started up in a passion and left Paris: was ill with
a nervous fever at Lille, and feverishly reproachful still when she met
her Voltaire at last. That inevitable storm blew over as it had blown
over before. The sun came out again, though it was a sun in a clouded
sky. The pair went to Paris together about the middle of November, 1743:
Voltaire to report on his mission and to be, he hoped, substantially
rewarded.
But the ill-fortune which always dogged him beset him now. Amelot, the
Foreign Minister, fell out of favour, and with him his _protégé_,
Voltaire.
No two people in the world were so used to chagrins and disappointments
as the two who returned to Brussels in February, 1744, and in the spring
to Cirey, and applied their old panacea for every evil in life--work. It
succeeded. It was generally successful. Very few letters belong to the
early months of this year. There was not time even for letter-writing.
Monsieur Denis died in April, leaving behind him a bouncing widow of
seven-and-thirty.
It was in April too that Voltaire received a very satisfactory little
courtly consolation, to compensate him for many rebuffs. Richelieu
engaged him to write a play for the wedding festivities of the Dauphin
and the Infanta of Spain, which were to take place in the autumn, and
which would presently demand the presence of M. de Voltaire at
Versailles.
It is not necessary to say that Voltaire took immense trouble over this
_bagatelle_, because he always took immense trouble over everything. All
his works are as good as he could make them. He called his play “The
Princess of Navarre.” He laid the scene there in delicate compliment to
the Infanta--and for the practical reason that he could introduce into
it both French and Spaniards, with their gorgeous medley of costume.
Rameau was to write the music. There were to be the loveliest ballets,
processions, and songs. The scenery was to be unique in splendour. “The
Princess of Navarre” is what would now be called a comic opera, and as
such was certainly unworthy of the genius of Voltaire. But it was not
unworthy of his shrewdness. If it would but gain him some trifling post
at Court, the favour instead of the fear of the King, why, then it would
give him, too, the right to live where he liked in peace, would cripple
the power of Boyer, of censors, of Desfontaines, might open to him the
doors of the Academy and gain him liberty to think--aloud. It _was_
worth while after all. He worked at it night and day. He wrote immense
letters about it to Richelieu and to d’Argenson. Cirey was delightful,
priceless--“Cirey-en-félicité” once more. “To be free and loved ... is
what the kings of the earth are not.” Nevertheless, to be free and loved
in Cirey alone was not enough. “I am engaged in writing a
_divertissement_ for a Dauphin and Dauphiness whom I shall not divert,”
said he, and again to Cideville: “Me! writing for the Court! I am afraid
I shall only write foolery. One only writes well what one writes from
choice.”
But he wrote, rewrote, altered, improved, not the less. On July 7th,
President Hénault, the friend of Voltaire’s friend Madame du Deffand,
came to spend the day at Cirey. He found it “a delightful retreat, a
refuge of peace, harmony, calm, and of mutual esteem, philosophy, and
poetry.” Voltaire was in bed when the guest arrived: working hard there,
as usual. Summer was on the land. The house was a marvel. Madame,
recalled from her exact sciences, was a charming hostess. If Voltaire
was fifty years old and ailing, if he had to look back on many honours
missed and favours given to meaner men, his “Princess of Navarre” was
but the more delightful a compliment for being paid so late and so
unexpectedly. He read it to the President, who wept (though the
“Princess” is not at all pathetic), and was very nearly as interested in
it, and as pleased with it, as the eager author himself.
In September, Voltaire and Madame came up from Cirey to
Champs-sur-Marne, a village only five leagues from Paris, to take part
in the rejoicings which celebrated Louis XV.’s recovery from an illness
and return from a campaign, and to arrange about the production of the
“Princess.”
One night Madame insists on her Voltaire driving up with her those five
leagues to Paris, to witness the fireworks and festivities. Madame has
her own carriage and her country coachman, unused to the city. She is in
_grande tenue_ and diamonds. The carriage gets into a crowd--that
light-hearted, light-headed mob of Paris--and cannot move an inch until
three o’clock in the morning. Out gets Madame followed by her lean
Voltaire (not a little disgusted and amused and having the very greatest
admiration for this extraordinary woman’s pluck and spirit), pushes her
way through the crowd, marches straight into President Renault’s house
in the Rue Saint-Honoré and takes possession of it. The President is
away from home. Madame sends for a chicken from the restaurant, and she
and her Voltaire sit down to supper with perfect philosophy and
enjoyment, and drink to the President’s very good health.
Voltaire recounted the story to Hénault a few days afterwards. The man
who had undertaken to write a court _divertissement_ had laid himself
open to all kinds of social adventures, amusements, boredoms. In the
beginning of the January of 1745 he took up his abode at Versailles to
superintend rehearsals, arrange scenery, and accommodate his verses to
Rameau’s music.
It was twenty years since Voltaire had stayed at the French Court. Did
he remember how it had wearied and sickened him? He forgot nothing. The
Court was but a means to an end then, and was but a means to an end now.
He wrote to Theriot that he felt there like an atheist in a church.
“Don’t you pity a poor devil who is a king’s fool at fifty?” he asked
Cideville; “...worried to death with musicians and scene-painters,
actors and actresses, singers and dancers.” He complained how he had to
rush from Paris to Versailles, and write verses in the post-chaise; how
he must take care to praise the King loudly, the Dauphine delicately,
the royal family softly, and to conciliate the Court without displeasing
the town. Since it must be done, Voltaire was the man to do it as it had
never been done before.
On February 18, 1745, died Armand Arouet, aged nearly sixty. Voltaire
received the news only seven days before the _fête_ was to take place,
and hastened from the Court to the funeral of his “Jansenist of a
brother.” The two had met little of late. But they had always been
separated by a gulf wider than that of any physical distance--a
diversity of character and ideas. Voltaire could no more understand an
Armand than an Armand a Voltaire. Long after, at Ferney, Voltaire told
Madame Suard how his brother had had so great a zeal for martyrdom that
he had once said to a friend, who did not seem to care about it, “Well,
if _you_ do not want to be hanged, at least do not put off other
people!”
The fanatic left the sceptic as little of his fortune as he dared,
having due regard to public opinion. Voltaire was enriched by his
brother’s death only by six thousand francs per annum. He feigned no
overwhelming sorrow at his loss. He was back at Versailles before the
contents of the will were known to him, putting the last touches to his
“Princess.”
The _fêtes_ began on February 23d. They were as gorgeous as that old
_régime_ knew how to make them--with a prodigal gorgeousness which
perished with that _régime_ itself and will be no more for ever.
A special theatre had been built in the horse-training ground near the
palace. Time, labour, money--the lavish expenditure of each was
incalculable. At six o’clock on the evening of February 25th there
assembled one of the most brilliant and splendid audiences that ever
gratified the heart of a playwright. The King, who was certainly nothing
in the world if he was not an imposingly decked figurehead, was there
with his royal family. The great ladies glittered in diamonds. The
nobles were in the splendid robes of their order. It was a night to
remember.
“The Princess of Navarre” was acted to an audience who talked gaily all
through it and went into raptures of delight and applause when it was
finished. M. de Voltaire compared the chatter to the hum of
bees round their queen. But the King--that dullest of all gross
mortals--condescended to express himself amused. He commanded a second
performance. If that fashionable audience _did_ make more noise than the
_parterre_ of the Comédie, Voltaire could afford to shrug his shoulders.
“The King is grateful. The Mirepoix cannot harm me. What more do I
want?” he wrote to d’Argental. His Majesty told Marshal Saxe that that
“Princess” was above criticism, and Voltaire thereupon told Madame du
Châtelet that he looked on Louis XV. as the very best critic in the
kingdom. The moment was one of laughter and triumph. To be sure, it had
not been gained without hard work. In addition to the “Princess,”
Voltaire had written a poem on the “Events of the Year” (1744) in which
he may be said to have fooled Louis to the top of his bent, and paid
that monarch the most outrageous compliments upon his personal courage
and his popularity.
But it was the means to an end--an end which, to Voltaire, justified any
means. This brilliant M. de Voltaire was so very entertaining and
fair-spoken that he must on the spot be made Historiographer of France
at an annual income of two thousand francs, and on the very next vacancy
Gentleman-in-Ordinary to Ourself! What nobler reward could wit and merit
hope for? On April 1, 1745, the brevet of Historiographer was signed by
Louis XV. On April 16th Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet hastened to the
bedside of her son, sick of the smallpox at Châlons, to save him, if
that might be, from the “ignorant tyranny of the physicians.” Voltaire,
as has been said, did so save him, with much lemonade and a little
common-sense. He became ambassador in England under the Ministry of
Choiseul; and, at last, victim of the Revolution.
After forty days of quarantine the Historiographer of France rejoined
the Court.
CHAPTER XV
THE POPE, THE POMPADOUR, AND “THE TEMPLE OF GLORY”
The new favour Voltaire had obtained had to be paid for like any other
advantage of fortune. Then, as now, the finer the post, the more ennui
and exaction in filling it. The nearer he climbs to the sun, the more
scorched and weary the climber. Voltaire found out that simple fact of
nature very soon.
The truth is he was a great deal too clever to be wasted. Was it a
diplomatic letter that was required? The Historiographer had had
practice in such things, and would naturally do them better than anyone
else. A poem? He was a poet. An epigram? Once upon a time his epigrams
had been so dangerously clever that he had positively been bastilled for
them. Four days after the _fête_ the newly made courtier had written to
Theriot that he was so utterly weary he had neither hands, feet, nor
head. He spent the whole day hunting up anecdotes and the whole night
making rhymes. He had the reputation of a wit, and the Court felt
defrauded if he did not make a _bon mot_ every time he opened his lips.
Then came the French victory of Fontenoy over the English--and of course
the Historiographer must celebrate that historical event in an ode. It
is but just to Voltaire to say that if he was in some sort belying his
principles by being at Court at all, when there, he did, in so far as
might be, live up to them. He had pleaded for peace pretty openly in
those official documents, and pointed out better ways to glory than the
way of battle.
But, after all, though war is deplorable, if war there must be, let _Us_
win by all means if we can. Even a peace advocate might feel some such
sentiment. One peace advocate, with his facts drawn direct from a
letter of d’Argenson’s, written from the scene of action itself about
May 16, 1745, sat down in a fine glow of enthusiasm and produced his
heroic poem, of three hundred lines and entitled “Fontenoy,” on the
spot. Paris was delighted. The King was content. Five editions were sold
in ten days. The Historiographer, of course, corrected, embellished,
altered, indefatigably. “This battle has given me a great deal more
trouble to celebrate than it gave the King to win it,” he observed, very
truly. He was plagued out of his life by the Court ladies who really
_must_ insist on the poet flattering in his poem all their cousins and
lovers who had taken even the smallest part in the fight. “My head
swims,” he wrote. He grumbled. But he was not ill content. Presently,
“Fontenoy” received the compliment of being clumsily burlesqued, and a
gay Voltaire answered the burlesques in a “Critical Letter from a Fine
Lady to a Fine Gentleman of Paris”--dainty, light, rallying,
graceful--and as good-humoured as witty. If his “Princess” had won him
favour, “Fontenoy” had sealed it. He had gained the King. To keep him
there remained but to gain also the woman and the priest who ruled him.
Looking back long after on this period of his life--“It was not the time
of my glory if I ever had any,” said Voltaire. It was not. To fawn on
that sensual stupidity the King, to cajole the Pope, to flatter the
mistress--they were not occupations that commended themselves to a man
with such a passion for work and such a supreme consciousness of a
mission in life crying aloud to be fulfilled, as Voltaire. But the
end--the end was everything. How should he speak truth if he were
gagged? What hope of freedom to speak in these times without the royal
indulgence? The means were contemptible enough, be it granted. But they
were the only means. What matter how dirty the road if it led to the
goal? That was Voltaire’s idea--not high-minded, nor quite without
excuse, and perfectly characteristic. He plunged through that Court mire
alert, gay, and vigorous; flattered the women; amused the courtiers; was
eternally witty and gallant; and just sarcastic enough in his wit to
make himself respected.
And then he set to work to gain the Pope. Hardly any other transaction
of his life shows him as matchlessly clever and ingenious as this one.
He _was_ a sceptic--that is, if a sceptic be one who believes in a creed
of his own rather than the creed of other persons. He had the reputation
of an atheist. The Church had banned his books, and discovered some
subtle innuendo against herself in every line he wrote. Worse than all,
the man was a satirist, a jester, a mocker, who viewed the huge
pretensions and the gigantic claims of Rome with a cynic gleam in his
eyes and a laugh on his lips.
He started his bold campaign by reading the whole of the Pope’s works
and complimenting that very good-natured representative of St. Peter,
Benedict XIV., on their ability. Benedict thereupon sent his “dear son”
a couple of beautiful medals with his own portrait engraven thereon as a
return civility. “He looks like a _bon diable_,” wrote the graceless
Voltaire to d’Argenson, “who knows pretty well how much _all that_ is
worth.”
And then on August 17th Voltaire wrote to beg permission to dedicate
that “Mahomet,” which Lord Chesterfield had considered a covert attack
on Christianity, to his Holiness himself. The letter with which he sent
the play is a masterpiece of subtlety. The Voltairian daring and
adroitness, which are without their counterpart in history, succeeded of
course. If one can be at once supremely bold and supremely clever,
success is a foregone conclusion. Voltaire was lucky in his man--and
knew his man to perfection. Benedict XIV. was _bonhomme_ rather than an
ideal pope, and _did_ accept his own infallibility and the astounding
assumptions of his Church, with a great many comprehensive
qualifications.
He was quite wise enough in his generation to perceive that it was
better to have a subtle Voltaire for a friend than an enemy. He
therefore sent him his Apostolic Benediction: and accepted the
dedication of “your admirable tragedy” in a charming letter dated
September 19th. Voltaire, on his part, said he laid a work against the
founder of a false religion at the feet of the chief of the true
religion: “kissed the Pope’s holy feet” and “sacred purple”
indefatigably in every letter he wrote; flattered the cardinals and
went into ecstasies over Benedict’s virtues. The correspondence between
the two was printed as a preface to a new edition of “Mahomet” in French
and Italian; and M. de Voltaire, with his tongue in his cheek and not a
little satisfaction in his soul, is proclaimed before all men the
_protégé_ of Rome!
Long before this desirable consummation, as far back as May 3d of this
1745, he had written with a gay confidence that the devout might now ask
_his_ protection for this world and the next. The subject never ceased
to afford his sense of irony the most delicious amusement. But better
than being amused he was henceforth “covered from his enemies by the
stole of Heaven’s vicegerent.” The Pope, it has been seen, did not
accept the dedication of “Mahomet” until September. Before that Voltaire
was hard at work to win another influence--the influence of Madame
d’Étioles, afterwards the Marquise de Pompadour.
The summer of 1745 was but a dull summer at Court. In May the King
joined his army. What were the courtiers and flatterers to do with no
one to flatter and toady? The firmament was dark without its Sun: and
would have been darker yet but for the steady rising of one brilliant
star. Clever head and cold heart, a cool and persistent ambition, a most
subtle intellect, and a morality which never interfered with an early
and plainly avowed intention to become the King’s mistress--such was the
woman who “with her harlot’s foot on its neck” ruled France for nineteen
years, lost it India and Canada, and spurred it, galloping, to the
Revolution. With every charm, every grace, every accomplishment that can
make a woman irresistible--all carefully learnt for that one noble end,
the King’s subjugation--five-and-twenty years old, the wife of a wealthy
_bourgeois_, M. d’Étioles, living in the country, and having already
begun, and coolly waiting to finish, her conquest of the royal
heart--such was the Pompadour when Voltaire first knew her. In May he
was her correspondent. In June he was her visitor--drinking her tokay,
and paying her the loveliest compliments, and discussing with her
gravely all subjects in heaven and earth, for she had not only natural
cleverness, but a fine cultivation, and, in her heart, said Voltaire,
was always “one of us.” She confided in him her design on--she called it
her passion for--the King.
In July Voltaire was addressing verses to his “dear and true Pompadour”
and saying he might well call her in advance by a name which rhymed with
“amour” and would soon be the loveliest name in France. She was formally
created Marquise and came up to Court. She was the mistress of Louis.
She was the mistress of France. And--she was the friend of Voltaire.
If he had thought it necessary to justify himself for that friendship,
only he did not think it necessary at all, he might have argued, as he
might have argued as to his alliance with the Pope, that it was a pity
kings should be governed by priests and women; but that since they were,
the best and wisest thing to do was to get the influence of the priests
and women on the right side. What might a Pompadour not do? “One of
us”--that meant a philosopher, mentally capable of seeing new points of
view, acquiring new truths, breaking from old superstitions. In the
hollow of her hand she held the happiness or the misery of thousands.
Not only the welfare of a proud kingdom but the well-being of those
silent suffering units who peopled the kingdom, hung, as too often
before, on a shameless woman’s smile or frown. And if she could make or
mar a country and a nation, how much more a Court poet?
Voltaire had begun writing to Rameau’s music an opera called “The Temple
of Glory,” to celebrate Louis XV.’s victories in his campaign. It was
just as well from Madame de Pompadour’s point of view to be on the right
side of such a very poignant wit as M. de Voltaire’s. She _was_ on the
right side of it. With all his usual audacity the poet inserted in his
opera the most unmistakable and complimentary allusions to her and her
King and to the relations between them. He was busy with other work too.
Only one disease--it was an internal complaint this time--and an opera
on hand at once would have been idleness indeed. All through the autumn
of this 1745 he was writing the authorised historical account of the
King’s campaigns, an honour which d’Argenson had procured for him, and
which afterwards swelled into his “History of Louis XV.” Now, it was
known as the “Campaigns of the King.” With a very rare love of justice,
at a time when national feeling ran high, he wrote to Sir Everard
Falkener, now secretary to the Duke of Cumberland, to ask him for
first-hand facts regarding the war so that the historian might do
justice to the “many great actions done by your nation”--our enemies,
the English. He had time to read the back numbers of three past years of
the “London Magazine” in English. Madame du Châtelet was always with
him. In June they had been at Châlons for a fortnight with Madame du
Deffand. In October they went to Fontainebleau--Madame creating not a
little talk and scandal by insisting, on the way there, on a right, or a
supposed right, of her family to ride in the best place in the first
coach after the Queen’s--to the exclusion of other noble and indignant
ladies, who had, or thought they had, similar rights.
In the comparative quiet of Fontainebleau Voltaire worked at his
“Campaigns”--“as I always work--with passion.”
He and Madame returned to Versailles in November in time to welcome the
King. On the 26th of that month the Sun was beaming graciously in his
firmament again--after a campaign in which he had done nothing but look
on from a very cautious distance. And on November 27, 1745, appeared
“The Temple of Glory.”
The two principal characters in it are Trajan, great in war but the
friend of peace, emperor, Roman--and lover; and Plotine, the beloved.
The dullest among the audience must have seen whom these characters
represented.
Ta plus belle gloire
Vient du tendre amour,
sang the chorus to Trajan. And did not _amour_ rhyme with Pompadour for
ever and ever? Among the spectators were the injured Queen, who had no
reason now to love this M. de Voltaire; and Madame du Châtelet, taking
advantage of another hereditary right and sitting in her royal
mistress’s presence. Rameau’s music was delightful and the dancing
perfection. Richelieu had superintended the _mise-en-scène_. The curtain
went down on a tumult of applause. And Voltaire, with that boyish French
capacity of his for being intoxicated by the very thin wine of a social
success, strolled up to the royal box and said to Richelieu, to be
overheard of the King, “Trajan est-il content?”
There are a dozen versions of the story. There are several vehement
denials that any such incident took place. But there is no smoke without
fire, and the episode is characteristic enough of a pleased and
audacious Voltaire. He does not ever allude to it himself: but that may
be accounted for by the fact that Trajan was _not_ very content with the
too daring question. He had reason to be a little sulky at his royal
name being so openly coupled--with Plotine’s. One authority has it that
he turned his back on Voltaire and addressed compliments to Rameau.
But “The Temple of Glory” was repeated; and the Sun came out from behind
the little cloud as bright as ever.
The next court _divertissement_, performed on December 22d, was not
indeed written by Voltaire, but by Jean Jacques Rousseau, citizen of
Geneva, with whom Voltaire was now brought into a polite correspondence,
and with whom he was hereafter to fight as he had never fought even with
Rousseau’s old exiled namesake at The Hague.
On January 16th of the new year, 1746, Longchamp entered as a kind of
confidential valet into the service of Madame du Châtelet, and from her
service was shortly drafted into that of M. de Voltaire. Half secretary,
half servant, and all observer, Longchamp lived to write memoirs of
unusual interest and fidelity, and to make Voltaire a proof of the
fallacy of the saying that no man is a hero to his valet. Longchamp,
Collini, Wagnière, who were in turns the servant-secretaries of
Voltaire, have all painted his picture as most generous, hasty, and
kind, with the sensitive temper of genius and the forethought and
consideration for others, even for dependents, which genius too often
lacks. To Voltaire’s generation the _canaille_ were as dirt beneath the
feet; but not to Voltaire. Irritable and impulsive in speech, he had at
times to his servants the manners of the old _régime_; but he had ever
the heart of a better age.
Abundantly generous--“a miser of nothing, but his time”--one servant
speaks in warm terms of his “solid and durable indulgence and goodness,”
and another of his kindness, sympathy, and forgiveness. The character
that masters give their servants is often unreliable through ignorance
or weak indulgence; but the character that servants give their masters
rarely falls into either of these errors.
From that fiery inquisition, the inquisition of the domestic eye,
Voltaire is one of the few great men in history whose character comes
out better than it went in.
All the early months of 1746 were taken up in keeping the vantage ground
he had gained and in gaining more. He wrote letters to Italian cardinals
in Italian. He reminded the Pope of the dutiful existence of his dutiful
son. He pleased Madame de Pompadour. He amused sulky Trajan. He began a
regular Voltairian battle against Charles Roy, an old scurrilous minor
poet, who stood not ill at Court, himself hoped for a chair in the
Academy, and had written an unsuccessful rival piece to Voltaire’s
“Princess.” These occupations were very fatiguing. But they were
essential. On March 17th a fresh vacancy fell in at the French Academy,
and who should have it if not Voltaire? The gods were more favourable
now. The candidate canvassed for himself feverishly. He wrote an artful
letter to the Lieutenant of Police and a beautiful one to Father La
Tour, one of his old schoolmasters, expressing a warm affection for
religion and the Jesuits. If the thing was to be done at all it must be
done thoroughly.
On April 25, 1746, the greatest literary man of the age, who was
fifty-two years old and a member of almost every other Academy in
Europe, was at last formally elected to the Literary Society of his own
country. On May 9th he read before it his preliminary discourse,
Voltairian in every line.
CHAPTER XVI
THE ACADEMY, AND A VISIT
Who is it that having climbed to a height does not look on the prospect
that it affords him, and wonder if that prospect be worth the bogs and
the mire, the stones and the boulders, the steep places and the thorns
that lay on the way to it? Voltaire was not given to useless
reflections. Yet it could but occur to his cynic soul that his
friendship with a king’s mistress had gained him a reward that all his
writings and genius could not; just as he had declared in a verse, whose
gay bitterness is Voltaire’s only, that his “Henriade,” his “Zaire,” and
his “Alzire” had not won him a single glance of kingly favour, while for
a “farce of the fair,” “The Princess of Navarre,” honours and fortune
had rained on him. He might well be a cynic.
What use would that coveted chair among the Forty be to him now he had
it? Was it the hall-mark, the sign and seal of talent? That sign and
seal were on every line the man had written. He, who had made by his
works so startling an impression on the human mind that, though he had a
host of enemies, adorers, fearers, none could be indifferent with regard
to him, had surely no need of the cold distinction of an academical
honour. But he thought that it would be valuable as a refuge from
_lettres de cachet_ and official interference. It conferred various
legal privileges. It would be his passport, obtained from red-tapeism,
to be flaunted in the face of it, to show the Voltairian right to say
what a Voltaire pleased. The position further gratified a naïve and very
human vanity. And now I _am_ here I will be so uncommonly active,
lively, and reforming as to drive my thirty-nine solemn, pompous,
formal, conservative, elderly brethren pretty well distracted!
It was _de rigueur_ in the inaugural address to do nothing but praise
Cardinal Richelieu and flatter one’s predecessor in the chair. And up
gets M. de Voltaire and delivers a brilliant discourse on the French
language and French taste--smooth, polished, graceful, and with the grip
of the iron hand felt always through the velvet glove.
“Gentlemen, your founder put into your society all the nobility and
grandeur of his soul: he wished you to be always free and equal.”
“No great things without great trouble.”
“It is precisely, gentlemen, because there is so much wit in France that
there is so little real genius.”
No doubt those thirty-nine literary fogies had some sort of notion what
a daring spirit they had admitted into their prosy body before that
discourse was ended. The artful Voltaire did not forget to introduce
into it dainty compliments to such varied persons as the King of France,
the Empress of Russia, and the Pope; Frederick the Great and Maupertuis
(who spoke and wrote the great French language as if it were their own);
Montesquieu, Fontenelle, and Hénault, who adorned it; and my old
schoolmaster, d’Olivet.
Sympathising and delighting in his genius and success was a certain new
obscure young friend of Voltaire’s, who had just come up to Paris to
seek his fortune, and who was named Marmontel.
“Sine virtute amicitia existere non potest,” says Cicero. If a man may
be judged by the company he keeps, Voltaire’s character should not be
meted a wholly unmerciful sentence. He had too in himself, in an
extraordinary degree, the noble talent of friendship.
Fifty years after his school days he was still writing to Abbé d’Olivet,
in terms of tenderest respect and affection. He began, as has been seen,
his lifelong attachment to his “guardian angel,” d’Argental, at the same
date and place. “I am not like most of our Parisians,” he wrote to
Cideville, “I love my friends better than superfluities; and I prefer a
man of letters to a good cook and two carriage-horses. One always has
enough for others when one knows how to restrict oneself.” He acted on
that principle through life. There must surely have been something more
than commonly lovable in a character which three years earlier than
this, in 1742, had commanded the love and admiration of Vauvenargues,
the young soldier, the splendid thinker--daring spirit and noble mind.
That friendship appealed not in vain to Voltaire on the finest side of
his character, at the very moment when a Court, a king, a Pompadour,
worldly gain, and the bauble of official favour tempted him on his
worst. The pair wrote each other long letters, philosophic, thoughtful,
enlightened. Vauvenargues loved to call Voltaire his “dear master.” And
the master had for the pupil the tender respect, the generous admiration
which a great father might feel for the possibilities of a son whom his
fond hopes love to fancy greater still. The son went the way of all
flesh in 1747, aged thirty-two. He left the world only one work; but
those “Maxims” have been justly said to give the soul of man an impetus
towards truth. They are too little known.
Marmontel was of a different _calibre_. A young, struggling, literary
man in the provinces, he wrote to the chief of his profession, now
sunning in court favour, for his advice. “Come up to Paris,” wrote the
impulsive Voltaire at the end of 1745. He thought letters the noblest of
all professions. To be sure, it was one not merely precarious, but
generally ruinous. But then, to deliver one’s message--to help truth by
speaking it--a Voltaire, if he could, would have encouraged the merest
stutterer to do it, such as Marmontel was not. In the midst of the
preparations for “The Temple of Glory” he had time to obtain the promise
of a post for his _protégé_ from the Comptroller-General of Finance. Up
comes Marmontel to Paris, six louis in his pockets, and a translation.
And the Comptroller-General has fallen out of favour and has no place to
give away! Voltaire broke the news as gently as he could. Perhaps he
looked the while out of his brilliant eyes to see how this new metal
stood the furnace. Marmontel said that Adversity was his oldest
acquaintance and that he was not afraid of her. And M. de Voltaire took
upon himself to provide for him until his talents should make him
independent. A hundred and fifty years ago and in Paris such conduct
does not strike the reader as nearly so generous and Quixotic as if the
same event had occurred in London and to-day. Yet the profession of
letters was very much worse then than it is now. Voltaire had had
unsuccessful literary _protégés_ dependent on him for an unpleasantly
long time before this, it will be remembered. _He_ remembered it, no
doubt. He was more fortunate in the present instance. Taught, advised,
encouraged by Voltaire, Marmontel became the Marmontel of successful
tragedies, of the “Contes Moraux,” of “Bélisaire,” and of the “Memoirs.”
In his hope that his chair at the Academy would afford him a little
peace and rest, Voltaire was at first very much mistaken. His new honour
was a signal for every enemy he had in the world--and he had a great
many--to set upon him. Every envious, snarling cur of the scurrilous
Grub Street of Paris came yelping at the mastiff’s heels. Old Roy
burlesqued and lampooned him; and the thin-skinned poet, who should have
been true enough to his own philosophy to have laughed at such a poor,
miserable, effete old foe, was up and at him in a trice, whipping and
stinging him with verses and epigrams whose rancour still glows and
burns.
Other skits and satires followed. And Voltaire, with authority on his
side for once--to say nothing of Madame de Pompadour--hunted out,
accused, prosecuted the authors in a vehement activity and enthusiasm.
To be sure, on one occasion, in his zeal he had the wrong person
arrested, and had to pay damages in a law court for false imprisonment;
besides promising after the fashion of the time, never to do anything so
naughty again.
These skirmishes lasted for many months; nay, the Travenol case, for
wrongful imprisonment, went on for two or three years. Voltaire came out
of such affairs with neither success nor glory. He was always both too
quick to anger, and too quick to forgive. The latter quality was as much
a snare to him as the former.
By the August of 1746 this energetic courtier had reached the fourth act
of a play written to order for the Dauphine, and entitled “Semiramis.”
The Dauphine died at that juncture; but its author continued “Semiramis”
all the same. He paid a flying visit in September to a very old friend,
the Duchesse du Maine. In October he and Madame du Châtelet came up to
Fontainebleau with the Court, and stayed at Richelieu’s house there,
which he had lent them. Just as she was about to leave Versailles, the
whole of Madame’s servants, except Longchamp, had left her in a body.
Now, as at Cirey, she was a mistress not a little expectant and
inconsiderate, and by fits and starts, if not habitually, mean. The
invaluable Longchamp saved the present situation. He was not sorry when,
at Fontainebleau, he was allowed to renounce a post in which he
sometimes appears to have acted, literally, as the Marquise’s lady’s
maid, for that of secretary to the quick-tempered and kind-hearted M. de
Voltaire.
A new weapon was put into Voltaire’s hands in December wherewith to
defend himself from his enemies, and, having been promised the post for
two years, he was made Gentleman of the Chamber to Louis XV. What an
honour, what a splendid honour, for the author of the “Henriade” and the
“English Letters”--for the man who had already begun to inaugurate a new
era of thought in Europe, and who was to make Voltairism such a power in
the world that it would one day shake Catholicism on her immemorial
foundations! What an honour--what a noble honour! M. de Voltaire did not
meet with at all a warm reception from his brother Gentlemen. Bah! the
creature was but a _bourgeois_. Where were his pedigree and his
letters-patent of nobility? In his books? We do not want any literary
hacks among Us! One youthful Gentleman of the Chamber, noble, but very
uncertain as to his spelling, wrote to his uncle that the appointment of
“ce Voltere” was a “dezoneur” to gentlemen of name and arms, and the
King really should have known better. The naïve youth consulted his
“respequetable oncle” as to whether it would not be best for the Chamber
to refuse to receive “this Person named Arouet.” But at a very early
date this Person named Arouet showed himself more than a match for the
noble young gentleman and all his brethren at once.
Talking of the coming marriage of a lord’s daughter with a
Farmer-General--that synonym for dishonesty and extortion--one of the
Gentlemen inquired where the pair would be married. “At the tax-office,”
suggested someone. “There is no chapel there,” said another. “Pardon me,
gentlemen,” said Voltaire, who hitherto had not spoken a word, “there is
the Chapel of the Impenitent Thief.”
It may be guessed that the Gentlemen of the Chamber at least learnt to
respect a brother with such a killing tongue.
He passed the early months of 1747 busy with his Travenol lawsuit,
taking patent pills which he was always warmly recommending to
Frederick, and “making his court” to Madame de Pompadour. On July 2d he
was congratulating the Minister of War on the French victory of Lawfeld;
which he afterwards celebrated in an epistle, not at all equal to his
“Fontenoy.”
He had now reached the climax of his favour. The Historiographer of
France, the Gentleman of the Chamber, and the favourite of the mistress,
may well have seemed a fixture at Court.
He was not sorry to escape from it on August 14th for a few days’ visit
to the Duchesse du Maine, now at Anet. Voltaire must have altered
greatly since he was first her guest as a promising boy of twenty-one,
two-and-thirty years ago. The promise had become fulfilment. Once, he
had been honoured in being the Duchess’s visitor; now, she was honoured
in being his hostess. She allowed him to bring Madame du Châtelet with
him, because he would by no means have been allowed to come without her.
The Duchess was still the “sublime personage” Voltaire remembered. With
her haughty and imperious temper, her brilliant grace and wit, her
stately courtesy, and her magnificent condescension, she was the living
type of those women who went later to the guillotine, scornful to the
last of the _canaille_ that brought them there--the women who lived so
ill, and died so well. A little deformed was the great Duchess: very
small; fair-haired; loving amusement and hating boredom above everything
in this world and
[Illustration: MARIE LECZINSKA
_From the Picture by Carle Van Loo in the Louvre_]
the world to come; seventy years old, but as appreciative of a Voltaire
as she had been at forty.
With her was Madame de Staal, formerly Mademoiselle de Launay, whom
Voltaire already knew; half maid, half companion, very observant and
with a brilliant, satirical pen, much in use for writing famous Memoirs
and recounting the gossip of the Maine court to Madame du Deffand in
Paris.
There were various other visitors. The Duchess liked society, she said,
because everybody had to listen to her and she had to listen to nobody.
Play-acting was much in vogue. Cleverness was _de rigueur_. To be moral
was unnecessary--but to be a bore, that was not to be dreamt of. It was
upon this court that the erratic Émilie, with her lover and a great
quantity of luggage in her train, descended very late on the evening of
the day before she was expected.
There was a fine fuss, according to the acid, elderly de Staal. The pair
wanted supper. One of the visitors had to give up his bed to Madame du
Châtelet, who complained of it the next morning. She tried two other
rooms, and grumbled at _them_. She was determined, as usual, to carry on
her studies, and required a bedroom where she could have silence, not so
much by night, as by day. She shut herself up there and worked hard at
Newton, joining the other visitors only in the evenings. Sublimely
indifferent to social obligations was the Marquise. The stupid rules
which govern guests in most polite societies she ignored entirely. She
preferred work to tittle-tattling with the other women; so she worked.
There were not enough tables in her room for her papers, her jewels, and
her _pompons_; so she made a foraging expedition round the house and
appropriated six or seven for her use. Anyone with a taste for
occupation, and condemned to polite idleness, will understand and
sympathise with Madame du Châtelet. It is also easy to understand that
the old Duchess, who invited her guests solely to amuse herself, was
offended. And that Voltaire, whose own passion for work kept him shut up
alone almost as much as Émilie, felt it necessary to atone for their
conduct by writing the Duchess lovely, gallant verses, and when he
_did_ appear, by being delightfully amusing and agreeable.
In a few days the company began to rehearse Voltaire’s farce
“Boursouffle,” which had formed the amusement of a Cirey evening nine
years before. Madame du Châtelet took a part and would not submit, wrote
the acrimonious de Staal, to the simplicity of costume it demanded, but
persisted in dressing it like a Court lady.
She and Voltaire had a passage of arms on the point, de Staal added.
“But she is the sovereign, and he the slave”; and of course the slave
had to submit. It is noticeable here, again, that it was the other women
who abused Émilie, and not Émilie the other women. Perhaps her eternal
Newton, at which they sneered, kept her from the meanness and the
backbiting which disfigured their own conduct. Let her sublime
inconsideration for other people’s feelings and her childish fondness
for fine clothes be granted. Those failings were common to most of the
great ladies of the eighteenth century, and, no doubt, to Émilie’s
detractors among them. Her passion for work and her noble intellectual
endowments were her own alone.
“Boursouffle” was an immense success. Voltaire and Madame took leave of
the Duchess on August 25, 1747, the morning after its performance, and
in their usual confusion of bandboxes, chiffons, and papers, left
“Boursouffle” behind them. Madame de Staal, whose temper was perhaps
rendered uncertain by her post of polite maid-of-all-work to all the
Duchess’s guests, received agonised letters from Voltaire imploring her
to send the farce by a safer means than the post, for fear it should be
copied, and to keep the list of characters “under a hundred keys.” He
and Madame were back at Court again--with the sun of kingly favour
shining on them, it seemed, as brightly as ever. Six weeks passed
without any distinguishing events. On October 14, 1747, the Court was at
Fontainebleau, and Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet, its constant
attendants, still staying at the house of the Duke of Richelieu in the
same place.
CHAPTER XVII
COURT DISFAVOUR, AND HIDING AT SCEAUX
It was one of the very doubtful privileges of Madame du Châtelet’s rank
that she was permitted to play cards at the Queen’s table. Émilie had
never done anything in moderation in her life. She not only loved,
worked, and dressed to excess, but she gambled to excess also. High play
was in the air of that eighteenth century. In England, as well as in
France, men lost an estate or a fortune in an evening, and women staked
the diamonds on their breast and the doweries of their children.
The thrifty Voltaire regarded the dangerous craze in Madame du Châtelet
with not a little apprehension. He had known poverty not by name, but in
person; and had no desire to renew the acquaintance.
One night at Fontainebleau, probably at the end of October, 1747, but
the actual date is not quite clear, Émilie lost four hundred louis. She
must have exerted all her power over the man who had ceased to love her,
but not to fear her or to be faithful to her, to make him lend her two
hundred more. She played again the next evening, and lost those. One can
fancy the scene--the crowded ante-chamber of royalty; the flushed and
excited players; lights, laughter, and talk; Émilie, desperate and
breathless, forgetting alike her fine clothes which were the sign she
was but as other women, and her cool reason which set her far above
them--and at her side, Voltaire, urging her in fervent English whispers
to come away, that the game was played, and the loss must be accepted
with a shrug of the shoulders and as good a grace and philosophy as one
could muster.
A fly buzzing at her ear could not have moved her less. The intoxication
of play was upon her. She sent out and raised from her man of business
and a friend, Mademoiselle du Thil, three hundred and eighty louis more.
She lost them. Luck had been against her. It _must_ turn now! She played
on and on. At last she owed eighty-four thousand francs. The quick
Voltaire at her elbow, robbed of all prudence and discretion (to be
sure, he never had much of either), bent over her desperately at last
and said in an agitated whisper in English: “Don’t you see you are
playing with cheats?” The words were hardly out of his mouth before he
realised that they had been overheard and understood, or before one of
the quickest intelligences that ever man had, had decided on action.
Madame du Châtelet, sobered suddenly, was herself far too clever not to
see the danger of the situation. The pair rose at once and left the
palace. The room was full of their enemies; noble Gentlemen-in-Ordinary
jealous of a brother whose pedigree was his brain and who had no
birthright but genius; and women angry with Émilie for her absurd airs
of youth, and her passion for learning which must be affected in _her_,
because it certainly would be affected in _us_!
Would Madame de Pompadour’s patronage save her brilliant _protégé_? By
no means. The play was at the Queen’s table; and the silent Queen had no
reason to love the Pompadour’s friends. Historiographer of France and
Member of the French Academy--even that would not save a Voltaire, with
a Voltaire’s record behind him, from the consequences of such an
utterance as this.
The two returned post-haste to Richelieu’s house where they had their
quarters. It was half-past one in the morning. They waited for nothing.
The horses were put to at once. Longchamp was sent in search of their
servants who were lodging at different houses in the place. Émilie’s
_femme de chambre_ had only time to throw together a few packages of
chiffons. She, Voltaire, and Émilie got into the carriage just as the
October day was breaking. Longchamp was left behind to pack. The
carriage was driven towards Paris, and the desperate pair within hastily
sketched in the details of their scheme of action. A wheel of the
carriage broke when they were near Essore, and the wheelwright, who had
no mind to be cheated of his dues even by fine folk in gala attire,
declined to let the carriage proceed till his bill was paid. Neither
Voltaire nor Émilie had a single sou. A _lettre de cachet_ and the
Bastille loomed much too close for delays to be endurable. Luckily, an
old acquaintance of the du Châtelets, coming by post-chaise from Paris,
recognised Madame and paid the wheelwright. They drove on. At a little
village near Paris, Voltaire alighted. Madame proceeded to the capital.
It had been arranged that there she should make arrangement for the
payment of her gambling debts, and if possible smooth the way for
Voltaire’s return. She was used to that office.
From a wayside inn Voltaire wrote to the Duchesse du Maine, now hard by
at Sceaux; and sent the letter by messenger. He had asked his old friend
for hiding, shelter, refuge, till the storm blew over. She responded,
telling him to come that night to the château, where one Duplessis,
known to Voltaire, would meet him and conduct him to the rooms she was
keeping for him. He did as she said. He entered the house unknown to any
save Duplessis and the Duchess.
For not less than a month he lived in those rooms on the second floor,
with the shutters barred night and day. Longchamp joined him there,
bringing luggage, books, and papers. All day long the master wrote and
the valet copied. Voltaire never slept more than five or six hours; but
wrote, wrote, wrote by that eternal candle-light. At two o’clock every
night, when the rest of the house was asleep, he came softly downstairs
into the Duchess’s bedroom, where the little, great lady was already in
bed and where, propped on pillows, she royally waited to be amused by
her guest. She was never disappointed. A servant, the only one in her
confidence, brought M. de Voltaire a little supper which he ate on a
little table between his hostess’s bed and the wall. The valet left the
room. During the meal the old Duchess told her visitor the most
delightful, wicked stories of the Court of Louis XIV.--from her own
experience. And then, M. de Voltaire produced a manuscript and read to
the Duchess the charming result of his imprisonment--those miniature
masterpieces of romance, “Zadig,” “Scarmentado,” “Micromégas,” and
“Babouc.”
Only children of that astonishing eighteenth century could have enacted
such a scene entirely without awkwardness, self-consciousness, or
exaggeration. It was worth days of labour and darkness to find a
listener as acute, as sympathetic and intelligent as this little old
woman who had lived so fully and knew human nature to the core.
While this lean M. de Voltaire with his startlingly brilliant eyes, and
the sardonic mouth and drooping hook-nose more nearly meeting year by
year--his conversation alone could turn night into day, and make one
forget that such things as fatigue, ennui, sleep, are part of man’s
portion. Out of gratitude for her goodness--gratitude was never a virtue
he lacked--he was wittier now than ever. Gratitude guided his pen as
well as his speech, and made his stories the most easy, graceful, and
delightful in the world.
Voltaire had not been a romancer hitherto. He did not find it in him to
invent plots now. “Zadig” is founded on a story by English Thomas
Parnell; and “Micromégas” pretty openly taken from Cyrano de Bergerac’s
“Journey to the Moon.” But as the “amazing genius” of Shakespeare took
the stillborn children of lesser men’s brains and breathed on them the
breath of life, so did Voltaire. Everything that makes a story immortal
is his own in those matchless _contes_. Charm, wit, delicacy, an
exquisite lightness of touch, the finest taste in satire, humour,
variety, epigram, gaiety--with that ever-present undercurrent of biting
meaning--almost all the Voltairian gifts are here. Every story is a
pungent satire on the King, Court, _régime_, or religion of that evil
day. The characters are very palpably drawn from life. In “Zadig” there
is a certain Yebor who could by no possibility be anyone else than
Boyer, the Âne of Mirepoix.
The graceless old Duchess, sitting up in bed, thoroughly enjoyed hearing
her order castigated. She laughed loud and long to see how this Voltaire
always had his whip on the raw.
No wonder she was eager for the tales to be given to the larger public
of her court. The imprisonment was becoming wearisome. The unlucky
Longchamp was ennuied to death. Voltaire’s health began to suffer for
want of light and fresh air. The secret of his whereabouts had been kept
so well, that his enemies at Court supposed him to be on the road to
Frederick and Berlin.
Everybody was glad when one fine day, probably about the end of
November, Madame du Châtelet appeared with the news that the storm had
blown over, that the unlucky utterance was more or less forgotten, and
the gambling debts settled--somehow. The autocratic little Duchess was
not going to part with her Voltaire now she might enjoy him openly. He
and Madame du Châtelet joined her throng of gay satellites. There were
comedies, operas, and balls. Voltaire, Émilie, and Madame de Staal all
took parts in his play of “The Prude,” imitated from Wycherley’s “Plain
Dealer,” and now played for the first time--December 15, 1747. They
acted “Issé” by La Motte, “Zélindor” by Moncrif, and “Les Originaux,” a
comedy by Voltaire, first performed at Cirey. Émilie took the part of
_Issé_; was _Fanchon_ in the “Originaux,” and _Zirphé_ in the opera of
“Zélindor.” If she _was_ one-and-forty years old and _would_ dress her
parts, not to suit them, but her own love of finery, it must be
confessed that she was matchlessly accomplished and versatile.
Voltaire, after the manner of the days when he was lover indeed,
improvised gay verses of compliment to her. “Madame du Châtelet,” he
wrote to a friend, “sang _Zirphé_ correctly and acted with nobility and
grace: a thousand diamonds were her least ornament.”
Besides play-acting there was an orchestra of marquises and viscounts.
Dancers from the Opera amused the pleasure-loving little court. A
delightful girl of thirteen carried that art to its highest perfection
and charmed everyone with her grace and talent. And, in the bad quarter
of an hour before dinner, Voltaire read the _contes_ composed for the
Duchess, to the Duchess’s guests gathered together in the great salon.
The visit came to an end about the middle of December, when Voltaire had
been at Sceaux about two months. Once more in Paris, he busied himself
with a very pretty little _ruse_, by which he evaded the piracy of
publishers and had two hundred private copies of “Zadig” printed to give
to the Duchess and her friends, before the rest of the world had read
it.
Then came the pleasing news that on December 30th “The Prodigal Son” had
been played in the private apartments before the King by a distinguished
company of amateurs: and that his Majesty had deigned to be amused.
Amateur theatricals had a vogue only second to gaming in
eighteenth-century France. To play the smallest parts in the feeblest
piece in the King’s presence, men and women made incredible sacrifices
of fortune, of honour, and of truth. Madame de Pompadour’s _femme de
chambre_ obtained a commission in the army for one of her friends by
procuring, for a duke, the very minor _rôle_ of a policeman, who had
only two lines in his part, in “Tartuffe.” The clever Pompadour herself
was an actress of no mean ability. She took a part in the “Prodigal.”
Voltaire had not been behindhand in encouraging her histrionic tastes.
He does not appear to have been present at this performance of his
comedy. When a play had already been performed in public (and “The
Prodigal Son,” it will be remembered, was played, anonymously, in
October, 1736), it was not etiquette to invite its author to witness its
_début_ before royalty. But it pleased his bored Majesty so much that,
on the strength of it, Madame de Pompadour obtained for her brilliant
Voltaire the delightful right and privilege of being henceforth always a
spectator at the plays acted in the private apartments. And this unlucky
Voltaire, in his enthusiasm and gratitude, must needs look among his
papers and discover a poem, which, with a little artful alteration, will
express his thanks to the mistress.
Nothing would ever have made Voltaire cautious. Audacity was in his
nature, and there was no preventing it oozing out, like Bob Acres’s
courage, at the tips of his fingers whenever he got a pen in his hand.
To be sure, if he had been circumspect he could not have been half so
witty. If wit is not spontaneous, it is rarely wit at all. And this
verse really would not have done him the slightest harm, if the
favourite had but kept it to herself.
Every grace and charm and art,
Pompadour, in you is found.
And it is alike your part
To be the treasure of one heart
And a Court’s delight.
So much blest, then, live for aye
Lovely years with pleasure crown’d.
The King brings peace with him. Oh may
Your foes be nothing: and alway
You both your conquests keep!
But, after all, though she was an astute, cool-blooded Pompadour, she
was a woman too and loved a compliment; and that her _entourage_ should
be aware she received such beautiful ones as that.
It soon reached the ears of poor Marie Leczinska, patient and dignified
in the dreary and respectable seclusion of her apartments. The days were
long gone when, a bride of one-and-twenty, she had called Voltaire “my
poor Voltaire” and pensioned him from her own purse. The ugly daughters,
Mesdames, too, had still some influence over their royal father, the
King, and were not slow to use it.
Old Roy took occasion to sententiously point out in a dreary poem how
abominable it was to allude to royal--mistakes: and how the loves of
gods and kings were never meant for the comment of the vulgar. The
unlucky Voltaire was further suspected at the moment of having been the
author of some lines to the Dauphine, whose gay philosophy offended the
King. He denied the authorship, of course, _in toto_. But that was very
little use. It was whispered that Mesdames, the daughters, so worked
upon Louis that he signed a decree of banishment for Voltaire, without
even consulting Madame de Pompadour. That would seem to have been an
addition to make a good story better. There was most likely no edict of
banishment on paper. Voltaire himself denied that there was ever any
idea of such a thing. But on January 13, 1748, coming gaily to
Versailles and not in the least anticipating any evil effect from the
charming audacity of his verses, he found the Court too hot to hold him.
He dined in Paris that night at a coffee-house, with a few other
literary men. He arrived rather late. He had come straight from
Versailles, and alone of the company knew what had occurred there. He
made his dinner, after his frugal fashion, off seven or eight cups of
black coffee and a couple of rolls, and was very talkative and amusing.
The conversation turned on the newly imposed tax on playing-cards, and
on luxury. When the dinner was over other visitors at the coffee-house
gathered round him and “plied him with questions.”
He was not exiled. But he had committed an offence which made it
expedient to Go. He knew the Pompadour much too well to suppose she
would put her position in jeopardy by trying to save a friend, even if
he were a Voltaire. “Circumspection is all very well,” he had once
written to d’Argenson, “but it is a melancholy thing in poetry: to be
reasonable and cold is almost the same thing.” For his part, he would
rather write even compliments and madrigals as he chose, and be banished
for them, than remain at Court, tongue-tied and careful. If the
Historiographership and the Academy and the solemn joy of signing
oneself Gentleman-in-Ordinary to the King did not give one freedom, they
were useless. Neither Voltaire nor Émilie had seen Cirey for many
months. On the whole, it was best to go. They left Paris in the deep
midwinter at nine o’clock on a January evening, 1748, with the snow
thick on the ground and a temperature many degrees below
freezing-point.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE MARQUIS DE SAINT-LAMBERT
One of Madame du Châtelet’s idiosyncrasies was to travel only by night;
and another, to overload the travelling carriage with luggage. She
insisted on having her way in both particulars this time. It has been
aptly said of Voltaire that he was at once patient and hasty. He
certainly must have been patient to take the road with a woman whose
packages frequently numbered a hundred and who could never travel
without her lady’s maid. That he usually lost his temper on such
journeys, is simply to say that he was human.
On the present occasion, as they were nearing Nangis, the hind spring of
the carriage broke, and the overladen vehicle fell over on the side of
Voltaire. Madame du Châtelet, large and bony, the _femme de chambre_
(whose weight and figure history does not record), and a vast quantity
of bandboxes and parcels, came tumbling on the top of him. He relieved
his feelings by uttering “piercing shrieks.” Two footmen, by getting on
the roof of the overturned carriage and dragging their mistress, the
lady’s maid, and the bandboxes up through the doors “as from a well,” at
last released M. de Voltaire in the same manner. It was bitterly cold
and a brilliant starlight night. The two footmen, aided by the
postillions, tried to set the carriage straight again, and failed. One
of the postillions rode on into the next village for further assistance.
And Voltaire and Émilie sat by the roadside on the carriage cushions,
and would have been “perfectly happy” shiveringly studying astronomy, if
they had only had a telescope. They _were_ philosophers, after all.
The carriage was mended at last. But it had not gone fifty paces before
it broke down again. The workmen, who considered Madame had underpaid
them, had to be brought back by force--and promises. At last the
carriage was able to proceed at a walking pace the nine miles to the
Château of Chapelle, where the travellers halted. They reached Cirey
about the middle of January, 1748, without further adventure.
The month they spent there was a gay one. Neither was anxious for too
many _tête-à-têtes_. The honeymoon had set for ever. When they were
alone, each wrote all day; in the evenings they read aloud together or
played trictrac. Émilie had an aggravating habit of keeping her Voltaire
waiting till supper was cold while she finished “a little calculation.”
That her Voltaire, himself orderly and punctual, was extremely _vif_ at
the delay need not be doubted. Madame du Deffand had once said that he
followed Émilie like a faithful dog with the collar round his neck.
Well, the dog was faithful still. But the collar irked and worried him;
and there were times when he snapped at the hand that had put it there.
Madame de Champbonin reappeared on the scene very soon, with a hoydenish
twelve-year-old niece in her train. She had been very warmly invited--if
only to finish that solitude _à deux_. The whole neighbourhood received
invitations presently to act in, or to witness, theatricals. Émilie
wrote charades for the occasion. She played comic parts as well as any
other. Sometimes the servants were pressed into the cast and acted too.
The _bonhomme_ would seem to have been conveniently absent, as usual.
Voltaire doubtless enjoyed the freedom of private life after the slavish
etiquette of the Court. He was certainly able to enjoy theatricals to
his last breath.
About the middle of February he and Madame went to visit another Court,
at Lunéville, where the etiquette was not slavish at all, and where a
king was a great deal more anxious to have them than ever dull Louis had
been.
Stanislas, once King of Poland, had been not a little thankful to
exchange that quarrelsome and much quarrelled over kingdom for the
peaceful little duchy of Lorraine, the tranquil enjoyment of a pipe six
feet long and the _dolce far niente_ of his lazy and easy-going
mistress, Madame de Boufflers. He still had the title of King. He still
had a position--he was the father of Marie Leczinska. His miniature
Court had all the pleasures and intrigues of a greater, with no weary
formalism. Stanislas had his Jesuit, Menou, to rule him just as other
kings had their priests to rule them. The priest fought the mistress for
the command of the royal puppet, in the approved, courtly fashion; and
the mistress fought the priest, when she was not too lazy.
The little Court was further ornamented by a child dwarf, who could
sleep in a _sabot_, and a most beautiful young guardsman, six feet high.
Following the example of Frederick, Stanislas was a feeble author
himself and a very enthusiastic admirer of the literary Voltaire. The
literary Voltaire was not sorry to show the offended Court of France
that he stood well with its offended Queen’s royal father. So the
visitors and the visited were gratified alike.
The visit was a gay one. “Issé” was played; and “Mérope,” when everyone
sobbed just as they had done in Paris. In the evenings they played
lansquenet or talked. It was an agreeable, idle life. Voltaire, ailing
as usual, was humoured and made much of by the King. Émilie overwhelmed
the inert and voluptuous Madame de Boufflers with her energetic
friendship. And then--
The Marquis de Saint-Lambert is one of the most picturesque figures of
his century. Poet and soldier, handsome, haughty and cold, with just
enough disdain in his perfect manner to make every woman adore him and
long to thaw that flawless ice--he had almost every quality which makes
riches superfluous. He was, in fact, nothing but the officer of a
company of Lorraine guards. He was much in Lunéville because he had,
said the world, a fancy for his King’s mistress, Madame de Boufflers.
His own age accounted him celebrated because he wrote the loveliest
drawing-room verses and was the author of a poem called “The
Seasons”--much duller than Thomson’s. The present age only knows him as
the man who robbed Rousseau of Madame d’Houdetot and Voltaire of Madame
du Châtelet.
In 1738, when Madame de Graffigny, who was a friend of his, was at
Cirey, she had corresponded with him. He had much wished to be asked to
stay there. Since he knew how “to read and rest in his own room during
the day” and would only expect to be amused in the evenings, Madame du
Châtelet desired to have him for a visitor. But the plan, probably owing
to the rupture with Madame de Graffigny, had never been carried out.
Madame du Châtelet was now two-and-forty years old, and, on the
unanimous testimony of all her female friends, not at all beautiful. But
that inflammable temperament, which years before had made her fling
honour and prudence to the winds and give her heart and life to
Voltaire, was hers still. Age had not quenched the fire. Abstruse
thought and long devotion to the exact sciences had still left her, on
one side of her nature, passionately a woman. Voltaire had passed
quickly and easily from love to friendship--but not Émilie. Her jealousy
of Frederick the Great was a proof that she loved her lover as he had
long ceased to love her. As early as 1741, in Brussels, after his return
from his second Prussian visit, she had bitterly reproached him with no
longer caring for her. He had replied to her in verses of which the
following give the keynote.
If you want me still to love
Give me back love’s golden morn;
To the twilight of my days
Join, forsooth, love’s happy dawn.
Even the sunrise touches night.
One hour is mine: and is no more.
We pass: the race which follows us,
Another follows: all is o’er.
In the year after he first met her, on the occasion of Richelieu’s
marriage to Mademoiselle de Guise, in April, 1734, he had written:
Love not too much: and so you may
Love alway.
For were it not the better far to be
Friends for eternity
Than lovers for a day?
He had always been honest at least. If he had been still lover indeed,
it might yet never have occurred to him that there could be cause for
jealousy of Émilie of two-and-forty and a young guardsman of
one-and-thirty.
When did that wild passion begin? Did it begin in those idle, early days
of the Lunéville visit, gradually nourished by propinquity, that gay,
easy life, those lovely society verses, and the tantalising fact that
Saint-Lambert was a little bit in love with that stupid, lazy,
self-indulgent de Boufflers? It would have been an irresistible
temptation to Émilie’s cleverness and energy to win away such a man from
such a woman.
But it seems more likely that she had no time for designs, that she fell
head over ears in love madly, recklessly, and at once--with that utter
_abandon_, all foolish and half pathetic, with which an old woman too
often loves a young man. Was it the handsome face and cold manner and
heart that attracted her? The whole eighteenth century found them
attractive. Saint-Lambert had so much, too, of that particularly vague
quality called taste! He liked being amused, though he found it too much
trouble to be amusing himself. And here was one of the cleverest women
of her day, or of any day, who could not be dull if she tried and wanted
nothing better than to entertain him. She was an invigorating change
from the sleepy de Boufflers, at any rate. He was not sorry, too, to
obtain the _cachet_ which would accrue to him for having robbed a
Voltaire.
But whether the passion on both sides was born full-grown, dominant, and
irresistible, or had slower roots in vanity and idleness, matters not.
It was soon an accomplished fact. Madame du Châtelet wrote her
Saint-Lambert the most mad, adoring letters on rose-coloured or sky-blue
notepaper with an edge of lace. She put the letters in Madame de
Boufflers’s harp in the salon. And when everyone had gone to bed, the
young guardsman came and found them there. He replied of course. If he
did not adore, he graciously submitted to be adored. “Come to me as soon
as you are up,” wrote the deluded woman. And sometimes, secretly
creeping round by the thickets of the garden, _she_ would visit _him_.
She hardly thought her conduct required apology. She loved him. That
was enough. Or if it did, well then, for years Voltaire had been but her
friend when he should have been her lover. “I loved for both.” “I had
reason to complain and I forgave all.” She had tried to be satisfied
with friendship: but she could not. She wrote thus to d’Argental in a
letter not devoid of genuine feeling and even of pathos. She _had_ some
excuse. But she made the common mistake of thinking that an excuse and a
justification are the same thing.
The Abbé Voisenon has recorded how once Madame du Châtelet, after, it
may be guessed, a quarrel with Voltaire, spoke of herself as entirely
alienated from him. The Abbé took down one of the eight volumes of
Voltaire’s manuscript letters to her and read some aloud. All his love
letters contained, says the Abbé, more epigrams against religion than
madrigals for his mistress. But when the reader stopped, Émilie’s eyes
were wet. She was not cured yet. A few years later, in 1749, her
priestly friend tried the same experiment. She listened unmoved. She was
cured indeed: and the doctor had been Saint-Lambert.
The Lunéville visit lasted from about February, 1748, until the end of
April. Then Madame du Châtelet left the Court, and returned to Cirey,
where she and Saint-Lambert may have spent a few blissful, uninterrupted
days together. Voltaire prolonged his visit to Stanislas a short time.
By May 15th he and Madame du Châtelet were both once more at Cirey _en
route_ for Paris.
During her stay at Lunéville the energetic Marquise had not only found a
lover, but obtained for her _bonhomme_ the lucrative post of the Grand
Marshal of the Household to Stanislas, and a commission in the army for
her son.
But her thoughts were not with husband, son, or friend (as, she still
called her Voltaire), but with M. de Saint-Lambert. Wherever she was she
wrote to him continually--letters filled with passion, _abandon_,
tenderness, bitterness, doubt. He had purposed taking a journey in
Italy, but renounced it at her pleading. She thanked him with the
melancholy effusion and the humiliating gratitude of the woman who has
obtained from her master a sacrifice she knows to be unwilling. She and
her unsuspecting Voltaire came up to Paris. If she spent her time
writing to her lover, Voltaire spent his in superintending the
rehearsals of his new tragedy “Semiramis.” One day his versatility
appeared in a new character, and he wrote a prologue for his “Death of
Cæsar” for a girls’ school that proposed to act it. It is characteristic
of the man that he adapted himself to this entirely new _rôle_ with the
most perfect flexibility and thoroughness. The prologue’s chief
characteristics are its “ease and orthodoxy.” He wrote it leaning on a
mantelpiece, on the spur of the moment. He included a charming little
letter to the Sister Superior and even begged the prayers of that good
lady on his behalf!
On June 28th he and Madame du Châtelet left Paris for Commercy, another
seat of Stanislas, where that King then was.
Voltaire was ill and miserable and Madame a more impossible travelling
companion than ever. On their route, at Châlons-sur-Marne, she must
needs engage in the most vociferous, fatiguing dispute with the landlady
of an inn over a basin of soup.
Commercy was as gay as Lunéville. There were the inevitable operas and
comedies, and on July 14th Providence kindly arranged a total eclipse of
the sun to further amuse the little Court. One of its number had
astronomised ever so many years ago at Sceaux and at Villars: and had
not forgotten those times.
On August 26th he returned to Paris, leaving Madame du Châtelet behind
him. She did not complain of his neglect this time. King Stanislas also
came up to Paris to stay for a few days with his daughter, the Queen.
Voltaire arrived in the capital on the very day of the production of
“Semiramis”--probably August 29, 1748.
There had long been forming a cabal against the piece, headed by enemy
Piron and joined by most of the adherents of that dismal old playwright
Crébillon, who had himself written a clumsy “Semiramis” in 1717. Well,
conspiracy for conspiracy. What weapons you use against me, I have the
right to use against you. That was Voltaire’s theory now as ever. He met
cunning with cunning. He bought up half the seats in the house. He gave
them to persons who could be absolutely relied upon to clap and cry at
the right moments, and to drown all hisses with applause. Theriot helped
him. The d’Argental husband and wife had been already active on his
behalf. Voltaire too had boldly asked the patronage of King Louis and
Madame de Pompadour, and the King, in consideration of the piece having
been originally written for the late Dauphine, agreed to pay the
expenses of putting it on the stage. If the play but once had a hearing
Voltaire believed that no conspiracy could damn it.
The little scheme succeeded fairly well. M. de Voltaire’s friends wept
and applauded to perfection. But the first three acts were received by
the audience as a whole with only a very moderate warmth. And in the
fourth, the play was nearly ruined. It was then the custom in France for
the spectators to sit and walk about on the stage. During this fourth
act, at a scene at the tomb of Ninus, there were so many of them, that
the too enthusiastic player who took the part of the sentinel and was
guarding the tomb, called out: “Make way for the ghost, if you please,
gentlemen. Make way for the ghost!” which set the house in a roar. The
playwright, to be sure, had no reason to find the incident amusing. He
complained to the Lieutenant of Police, and in future performances of
“Semiramis” the abuse was corrected.
That first night, then, was by no means so decidedly successful as its
author had hoped.
On the second night, August 30th, M. de Voltaire, wanting to hear what
his friends as well as his enemies said of the piece behind his back,
disguised himself and went to the famous Café Procope, opposite the
Comédie Française, and largely frequented by literary and theatrical
people. He had been an amateur actor to some purpose, and understood the
art of make-up as well as any professional on the boards. With cassock
and bands, an old three-cornered hat, and an immense full-bottom
unpowdered wig that showed hardly anything of his face except the sharp
end of his long, pointed nose, he looked the part of an abbé to
perfection. He put a breviary under his arm; arrived at the _café_;
possessed himself of a newspaper; chose a dark corner; put on his
spectacles, and read the paper over a modest repast of a cup of tea and
a roll. The _café_ filled presently--journalists, actors, some of the
partisans of Crébillon and some of Voltaire--all fresh from the play and
all anxious to air their views thereon. That sensitive, thin-skinned,
long-nosed abbé in the corner had to exercise all his self-control to
keep himself from contradicting an enemy who criticised unjustly, or a
friend who praised foolishly. But he did it. The _rôle_ pleased his
sense of humour. And one or two of his critics quoted some of his fine
passages not amiss. He sat there for an hour and a half, keenly
attentive to the conversation. The result as a whole was not
unsatisfactory. The play would do.
It ran for fifteen nights in succession. When a month or so later a vile
parody appeared on it, Voltaire, supported by her father’s friendship,
begged Marie Leczinska to suppress that parody. But the Queen,
remembering Voltaire not as the man whose “Indiscret” and “Mariamne” had
charmed her youth, but as the imprudent friend of Madame de Pompadour,
coldly declined to interfere. The Pompadour herself could do little. But
the parody did not much harm the original after all. On October 24,
1784, “Semiramis” was performed at Fontainebleau and well received. The
play is still of interest to English people--not for itself, but for the
“Advertisement” which precedes it: and which contains the most famous
and the most adverse criticism upon Shakespeare in the world. He was “a
drunken savage”; and “Hamlet” “a coarse and barbarous piece which would
not be endured by the dregs of the people in France or Italy.” In his
head “Nature delighted to bring together the noblest imagination with
the heaviest grossness.” This was Voltaire’s most remarkable word on the
great Englishman. But it was not his last.
Before “Semiramis” was performed at Court Voltaire had returned to
Lunéville. The excitements of Paris had been too much for him. From
being always ailing, he was now really ill. Longchamp was his travelling
companion. By the time they reached that unlucky Châlons, on September
12th, Voltaire was in a high fever and compelled to take to his bed in a
wretched post-house. Longchamp, seeing that his condition was critical
(Voltaire never gave in to illness until he could neither stand nor
speak), told the bishop and intendant of the place. They hastened to the
patient and offered him hospitality, which he declined; and then they
sent him a doctor. He listened to the professional advice very
patiently. Long ago, at Cirey, Madame de Graffigny had noted his good
humour and politeness in sickness: and recorded how he was grateful even
for advice and prayers! His gratitude for advice fortunately did not
extend to following it. On the present occasion he heard meekly and
replied laconically when he was told he must be bled and swallow various
violent and nauseous mixtures. But he was not bled and he did not take
the medicines. Temperance and exercise in health, and abstinence and
rest in illness, were the main principles of the system which he
followed all his life. That with a wretched constitution and a fatal
habit of taking too little sleep and doing far too much brain-work, he
lived to be eighty-four at a period when the threescore years and ten of
the Psalmist were accounted very old age, is a proof that his _régime_
was not wholly a mistaken one.
On the present occasion he was so ill that he thought himself dying. But
he still read and still dictated letters to Longchamp; though he was so
weak he could only sign himself “V.” After a few days on a self-imposed
diet of tea, toast, and barleywater, the fever left him. He was far too
feeble to stand. But he made Longchamp wrap him up in his dressing-gown
and carry him into the post-chaise, in which they proceeded towards
Lunéville. He was still so ill that he travelled thirty miles without
uttering a single word. Before this, unknown to him, Longchamp, who was
very sincerely attached to him, had written to tell Madame du Châtelet
and Madame Denis of his condition. Once, Émilie would have hastened to
him, and half killed him with her vigorous, overwhelming affection and
attentions. It was as well for his health that she was quite engrossed
with her lover at Lunéville and simply sent a courier with a message.
That message cheered the sick man a little. If he was but her friend, he
was her very faithful friend. And friendship meant much more to Voltaire
than to most people.
He was better by the time he reached Lunéville. The urgent desire to get
well as soon as possible, on that old principle that illness was a kind
of degradation, may have helped his recovery.
Madame du Châtelet insisted upon his being cheerful because she felt so
herself. He was soon fairly well again, and that miserable journey faded
into a bad dream.
In the early part of the October of 1748, Stanislas, and his little
Court with him, moved again to Commercy. The guilty loves of Madame du
Châtelet and Saint-Lambert were still not even suspected by Voltaire.
The guardsman, who soon resigned his commission to become Grand Master
of Stanislas’s Royal Wardrobe, seems to have been not a little
embarrassed by the vehemence of Émilie’s passion. But in exact
proportion as he was cold, she was ardent. His letters to her have not
survived; but from hers to him it is evident that while she was
imprudent, headlong, and reckless, he was at least cool enough to see
danger and discourage the maddest of her schemes.
The discovery of their secret was of course only a matter of time. One
night early in that October of 1748 at Commercy, Voltaire walked into
Madame du Châtelet’s apartments, unannounced as his habit was, and there
in a little room at the end of the suite, lighted by only one candle, he
found the handsome young soldier and his clever, foolish, elderly
mistress “talking upon something besides poetry and philosophy.”
CHAPTER XIX
THE DEATH OF MADAME DU CHÂTELET
If the invasion of Silesia by King Anti-Machiavelli-Frederick-the-Great
had given Voltaire a moral shock difficult to recover from, he
experienced a shock far greater in degree and kind now.
He had been slow to see anything. But when he did see, he saw all. He
broke into the most passionate and violent reproaches. The lofty
Saint-Lambert responded that no one had the right to criticise _his_
conduct, and that if M. de Voltaire did not like it, he had better leave
the château. The remark irritated Voltaire to a frenzy. Émilie stood by,
nonplussed for once in her life, not at all ashamed, but in very
considerable difficulty. One can fancy the half dark study, the
abominably aggravating coolness of Saint-Lambert, and the inarticulate
fury of Voltaire. He flung himself out of the room in one of the
greatest passions of his life. He called Longchamp, said that he must
beg, borrow, or steal a post-chaise, and make ready to start for Paris
that very night. The artful valet went straight to Madame du Châtelet
for an explanation. “No post-chaise is to be found on any
consideration,” said Émilie. An outcry would ruin her reputation. (It is
inconceivable, but true, that Madame du Châtelet considered her
reputation as yet immaculate.) At two o’clock in the morning Longchamp
came to his master’s rooms and announced that a post-chaise was an
impossibility. Then ride to Nancy at daybreak and get one! M. de
Voltaire’s passion had not yet spent its force. He went to bed. And
Longchamp crept down again to Madame du Châtelet. That marvellous woman
was writing at her desk, and announced the extraordinary intention of
going to see M. de Voltaire herself, then and there, and bring him to
reason.
She did it. She took a seat on the end of his bed. She spoke to him in
English, that old language of their quarrels and love, and by a tender
name, long disused. Longchamp lit a couple of candles and retired--to
listen to the conversation through the wall. It was the most marvellous
conversation in the world. They spoke in French now. Émilie tried to
excuse herself--somehow. The lean, furious, exhausted, unhappy man in
bed started up.
“Believe you!” he cried. “Now! I have sacrificed health and fortune for
you, and you have deceived me.”
And Émilie proceeded to explain with a perfect plainness of speech that
Voltaire had long ceased to love her as a lover, and that since she
_must_ love someone, he should be pleased that her choice had fallen on
a mutual friend, like M. de Saint-Lambert.
How the piercing eyes in the thin face on the pillow must have looked
her through and through! Voltaire answered with a very fine irony:
“Madame, you are always right; but if things must be so, do not let me
see them.”
Before she left him, she embraced him. She had succeeded in her aim so
far that he was calmer.
The rest of the night the energetic woman spent in appeasing
Saint-Lambert, who considered Voltaire had insulted him.
Voltaire was ill in bed the next day. It must be allowed he had an
excuse for illness this time. And behold, as the evening drew in, the
young Marquis comes in person to make inquiries after the invalid’s
health, and the invalid admits him. Saint-Lambert makes very handsome
apologies for the hasty words which had escaped him in a moment of
agitation. Voltaire takes him by both hands and embraces him. “_Mon
enfant_, I have forgotten all. It was I who was wrong. You are at the
happy age of love and pleasure. Make the most of both.”
The very next day the three met at supper at Madame de Boufflers’s, and
all enjoyed themselves immensely. All idea of the post-chaise and Paris
was dismissed. Did Voltaire recall that gay episode of his youth when
he and de Génonville had shared the smiles of Mademoiselle de Livri?
In 1749, he actually wrote Saint-Lambert a beautiful gallant poem on the
event which had for the time being so much disturbed his peace:
Saint-Lambert, it is all for thee
The flower grows:
The rose’s thorns are but for me:
For thee, the rose--
and went on to say in flowing couplets how the “astronomic, Émilie” had
renounced mathematics and inky fingers for those “beautiful airs which
Love repeats and Newton never knew.”
By October 17th, the ex-lover, the lover, and the mistress had returned
to Lunéville with Stanislas’s Court (of which Voltaire justly complained
as being “a little ambulant”) on terms of perfect amity. The whole
episode had occupied only a few days. And presently Voltaire was once
more engrossed heart and soul in his “History of Louis XV.”
The explanation of his conduct lies, as ever, in character.
He was angry at first because he had an uncommonly quick temper and a
great provocation. But he was always a philosopher as he grew calmer. It
was a very bad world. That was his lifelong conviction. So much the more
reason to make the best of it! He had lost a selfish, irritating, and
exigeante mistress. But there was no reason why he should not keep a
clever woman for a friend. Émilie had, after all, but acted on a
principle which was his as well as hers; that, in the relation of the
sexes, when duty ceases to be a pleasure, it ceases to be a duty also.
(It is but just to Voltaire and to Madame du Châtelet to say that they
did not carry this remarkable theory, not yet out of vogue, into any
other department of morals.)
The age looked upon such irregularities simply as subjects for a jest or
an epigram. And every man sees in some degree with the eyes of the time
in which he lives.
So Voltaire wrote “Louis XV.” The pain passed, as sharp pains are apt to
do, quickly. He and Madame du Châtelet, unaccompanied by Saint-Lambert,
left Lunéville for Cirey about December 20, 1748. The journey was very
like a hundred they had made in old times. At that fatal Châlons, Émilie
_would_ call on the bishop and keep the post-horses waiting the whole
day while she played cards, and Voltaire lost his temper with her just
as if he had been her lover still. Once at Cirey, he was engrossed in
hard work, and she wrote a preface to her Newton when she was not
writing love letters to Saint-Lambert. Her infidelity would hardly have
altered the course of her life were it not for that rigorous law that
“every sin creates its own punishment.”
The events that followed are such as are best passed over in the fewest
words possible. In this December of 1748 at Cirey, Madame du Châtelet
found that she was again to be a mother. Saint-Lambert was summoned. He,
Voltaire, and the unhappy woman consulted together on what course they
would take. Émilie was in tears at first; and they all ended in
laughter. They decided on a daring comedy. The Marquis--that simple
_bonhomme_--was summoned home, fêted, caressed--and deceived. It is
sufficient to say that he was delighted with his wife’s prospects, and
thought he had reason to be so delighted. He left Cirey, spreading the
good news abroad. And Madame du Châtelet complacently considered that
her reputation was saved.
Nothing damns the eighteenth century deeper than the fact that this
loathsome story was its darling anecdote; and that his criminal
connection with Madame du Châtelet, and the sinister events which were
its consequence, made Saint-Lambert the very height of fashion. Every
memoir of the period has the tale in detail. Longchamp gloats over it.
The fine ladies of Paris made _mots_ upon it, of which in our day a
decent bargee would be ashamed. If the French Revolution immolated some
of the very persons who brought it about, was the injustice so gross? A
Voltaire shared the vices of the social conditions he condemned, and was
himself in some sort a part of that system which set itself above
decency and duty and which he knew to be fatal to the good of mankind.
He came out of this unclean comedy less smirched than the other actors
therein. But that is to say very little. To be a part of it at all was
defilement enough.
By February 17th of the new year 1749 Voltaire and Émilie were installed
in the Rue Traversière-Saint-Honoré in Paris.
The _bonhomme_ had rejoined his regiment. Saint-Lambert was in
attendance at Lunéville.
Voltaire had written a “Panegyric of Louis XV.” which was to be recited
to his Majesty by Richelieu when the Academy went in a body on February
21st to offer their congratulations to the King upon the establishment
of peace. But, as so often happened with Voltaire’s writings, the thing
had become public too soon. Friend Richelieu, enraged at hearing his
recitation being murmured and quoted by the courtiers about him, would
not recite it at all. Voltaire was not present on the occasion. When he
heard what Richelieu had done, he flung his old friend’s portrait into
the fire in a rage.
March 10th saw a brief revival of “Semiramis”: but all the same it was
the fashion just now to prefer Crébillon and his “Catilina.”
On May 27th, Voltaire obtained the privilege of selling his useless post
of Gentleman-in-Ordinary, while he was allowed to retain its title. But
privilege or no privilege, he did not stand well at Court. King
Stanislas had written a work called the “Christian Philosopher”: in
which his good daughter, Queen Marie Leczinska, saw, disapprovingly, the
freethinking influence of Voltaire. He still courted Madame de
Pompadour; but no Pompadour ever yet imperilled her own position for any
friend in the world.
Another king and court were, indeed, particularly anxious that Voltaire
should return to them, but Voltaire refused Frederick’s invitation
firmly. He _was_ really ill, as he said. But there was another reason.
He had resolved not to leave Madame du Châtelet until the dark hour that
was coming upon her had passed.
They fell, even in Paris, into their old habit of hard work. Émilie
worked to kill thought, to stifle a dreadful foreboding which was with
her always. She studied mathematics with Clairaut, who had once visited
Cirey and was “one of the best geometricians in the universe.” She shut
herself up with him for hours and hours, resolving problems. She plunged
into all kinds of gaiety. Her letters to Saint-Lambert are the letters
of a very unhappy woman--tortured with jealousy and doubts, _exigeante_,
fearful, unquiet. He was true to her--and cold. She tried to thaw his
ice at the fire of her own passion. “I do not even love Newton,” she
wrote; “only you. But it is a point of honour with me to finish my
work.”
One day, she and Clairaut were so engrossed in their labours, that
Voltaire, whose philosophy never could endure being kept waiting for
meals, bounded up from the supper-table, ran upstairs “four steps at a
time,” found the door locked, and smashed it in with his foot in a rage.
“Are you in league to kill me?” he cried as he went down again, followed
by the too-zealous mathematicians, who had the grace to be ashamed of
themselves. There was a very cross, silent supper _à trois_. The next
morning Madame du Châtelet, feeling she owed her friend a reparation,
suggested that she should take her morning coffee in his rooms. She did
so, out of a priceless porcelain cup and saucer, which Voltaire, whose
temper was still rather irritable, broke by a clumsy movement. Madame
reproached him sharply. He retaliated. He grumbled a good deal at the
exorbitant sum he had to pay to replace the _bric-à-brac_. Both he and
Émilie were at the end of their tether. Yet they were good to each
other. Émilie felt she owed Voltaire much for his pardon, and his
reasonableness. And Voltaire never appears even to have thought that her
faithlessness as his mistress could exonerate him from fidelity to her
as his friend. He knew that she was unhappy. Compassion was in his
nature. It is that quality which made him to the last hour of his life,
in spite of his gibes and cynicisms, something more than commonly
lovable.
In April, Stanislas had come up for a fortnight to the French Court. The
unhappy Marquise had then been able to make arrangements for a future
sojourn at Lunéville, of great importance to her: and of which she
wrote, eagerly and feverishly, to Saint-Lambert.
Voltaire was now writing a play, “Nanine”--founded on Richardson’s
“Pamela.” When it was produced on June 16, 1749, he had followed his old
plan of filling the house as much as possible with his friends. There
were a few spectators in the gallery, however, who would talk aloud. The
nervous and sensitive author could by no means endure _that_. Up he got
on to his feet. “Silence, you boors, silence!” he cried; and silent they
were. Whenever he saw his own plays he found it impossible to contain
himself. He not only trained the actors beforehand; but he must lead the
laughter and the tears of the _parterre_ at the performance. And, to be
sure, if there is anyone who should know where a play is pathetic and
where it is comic, it is the man who wrote it.
He and Émilie were in Paris from February until the end of June.
Frederick repeated his invitation warmly. “You are not a _sage-femme_
after all,” he wrote to Voltaire scornfully, “and Madame will get on
very well without you.” Any sarcasm penetrated Voltaire’s thin skin. But
he replied gravely, “Not even Frederick the Great can now prevent me
fulfilling a duty I believe to be indispensable. I am neither doctor nor
nurse, but I am a friend and will not leave, even for your Majesty, a
woman who may die in September.”
He was true to his word. Late in June, while “Nanine” was still running,
he and Madame du Châtelet went to Cirey at her urgent desire. When they
were there, the most versatile of human creatures, the author of the
“Pucelle” and the prim prologue for a girls’ school, wrote at her
request a eulogy of Saint-Louis, and a very good eulogy too, for an abbé
who had to deliver one before the Academy and could by no means compose
it himself.
It was at Émilie’s desire, too, that they left Cirey, after only a
fortnight’s stay there--“these delightful rooms, books and liberty, to
go and play at comets” at Lunéville. A few days at Commercy had preceded
their stay at Lunéville, which they reached on July 21, 1749. It was
there that Madame would find Saint-Lambert. It was there that the event
which she dreaded more every day was to take place. Voltaire was not
only sick to death of that wearisome mockery of astronomy with which
Stanislas’s little Court was still amusing itself, but was further
annoyed by being very uncomfortable and ill-attended to in his rooms, in
which he shut himself up as much as he could. He bore the
discomfort--not at all in silence indeed--but he bore it.
A quarrel on the subject with Alliot, who was commissioner-general of
the household of Stanislas, and a very economical commissioner too,
burst out on August 29th, and Voltaire relieved his feelings in some
_vif_ little notes: one of which he addressed to the King himself, and
besought his Majesty to remedy the defects in the meals, lighting, and
firing supplied to his guest. Émilie, who had so urgent a reason for
remaining at Lunéville, did her clever best to soothe her _ami_. He was
soothed apparently.
Meanwhile the little Court went its usual way. Madame de Boufflers was
her smiling, easy self--that _dame de volupté_ “who,” as she said in her
epitaph, “for greater security, made her Paradise in this world.” There
were also the austerer, priestly influences trying to gain Stanislas.
Poetry was a fashion among the guests and the courtiers, as also the
inevitable play-acting. Saint-Lambert was still at work on that lengthy
poem, “The Seasons.” The summer was waning. Émilie plunged into every
excess of gaiety, and every excess of work. She forgot that she was
three-and-forty, not three-and-twenty. To forget everything--that was
her aim--to have no time to think of past or future. His duties often
called Saint-Lambert away to Nancy, and when he was absent the wretched
woman endured torments of loneliness, helplessness, and foreboding. He
reassured her when he was there. He was always so calm! As September
drew near she sent for Mademoiselle du Thil from Paris, that ill-advised
friend of hers, once her lady-companion, who on one memorable occasion
had lent her money--to lose at the Queen’s table. The _bonhomme_
appeared on the scene. Voltaire was writing constant letters to his
friends, anticipating the coming event gaily. Madame had a herculean
constitution. All would be well! She was still constantly at her desk.
She employed many hours in doing up her manuscripts and letters in
parcels, and giving Longchamp directions as to the persons who were to
receive them--if--if----. It was a point of honour with her, as she had
said, to finish Newton. On August 30, 1749, she wrote her last letter to
Saint-Lambert. “I am wretched to a degree which would frighten me if I
believed in presentiments,” she said.
On September 4th, Voltaire was writing delightedly to announce the birth
of a little girl and the well-being of the mother. The infant was sent
straight into the village to be nursed, and in the stress of the painful
events which followed, died almost unnoticed. Madame du Châtelet
progressed favourably. The little Court was in the highest spirits and
spent most of its time in her room. On September 9th, the weather being
exceedingly hot, the patient asked for an iced drink. It was given her
and she was seized with convulsions.
Stanislas’s physician hastened to her and for the moment she seemed
better. The next day, September 10th, the convulsions returned: and two
doctors from Nancy were called in. The Marquise again appeared better.
In the evening Voltaire and the Marquis du Châtelet went down to supper
with Madame de Boufflers--still not the least anticipating any danger.
Longchamp, Saint-Lambert, and Mademoiselle du Thil were left in the room
with the sick woman. Eight or ten minutes later, they heard a rattle in
her throat. They did what they could. Mademoiselle hastened downstairs
to tell Voltaire and the Marquis. The horrified supper-party hurried to
the bedroom and a scene of dreadful confusion ensued. Madame du Châtelet
was already quite unconscious. No one had time to think “of priest, of
Jesuit, or of Sacrament.” But the Marquise was past their help. “She
knew none of the horrors of death,” wrote Voltaire. “It was her friends
who felt those.”
His own anguish of spirit, when the dreadful truth was borne in upon
him, rendered him beside himself. He and Saint-Lambert remained by the
bed awhile. And then Voltaire, who had loved his mistress longer and
better than his supplanter, dragged himself away, blind and dull with
misery. He stumbled at the foot of the staircase without, and when
Saint-Lambert, who had followed, would have helped him, Voltaire turned
upon him with a bitter reproach. Its terms are so unrepeatable that the
eighteenth century repeated them _ad nauseam_: and the twentieth may as
well forget them if it can.
The brief remainder of that fatal day Voltaire spent in writing the
bitter news to his friends.
If any proof be needed of the vehemence and sincerity of his feeling for
the dead woman, those letters give it.
The next day Madame de Boufflers took from the Marquise’s ring a
portrait of Saint-Lambert and bade Longchamp give the ring to the
Marquis du Châtelet. A little later Voltaire asked Longchamp for the
ring in question. Thirteen years before, he had given Émilie his own
portrait for it, with these lines,
Bavier ’graved this likeness for you.
Recognise it, and his art.
As for me, a greater Master
Has engraved you--on my heart.
His portrait had displaced one of the Duke of Richelieu’s--and now his,
in its turn, had made way for Saint-Lambert’s.
Voltaire might well turn away saying that all women are alike; and
trying to comfort himself with the antique and barren reflection that,
after all, it was the way of the world.
Among Madame du Châtelet’s effects was a large parcel of letters. She
left a memorandum to beg her complaisant husband to burn them unread.
“They can be of no use to him and have nothing to do with his affairs.”
He did so, on his brother’s prudent advice. But Longchamp observed him
make a very wry face at certain ones of which, being uppermost, he
caught sight. The cautious valet rescued from the flames the whole of
Voltaire’s “Treatise on Metaphysics” and some letters, afterwards also
burnt. Among the destroyed manuscripts were historical notes of
Voltaire’s, of which he deplores the loss in his preface to his “Essay
on the Manners and Mind of Nations.” It has been thought, but it is not
certain, that the whole of his eight volumes of letters to Madame du
Châtelet also perished in this conflagration. If they did not, a new
Voltaire, a new world, rich in human interest, as no doubt in wit and
philosophy, still remains to be discovered by some literary Columbus. At
present, of all the letters he wrote to her, the human being with whom
he was most intimate and who shared the deepest secrets of his soul and
the highest aspirations of his genius, there can be found but one gay
little note.
Madame du Châtelet was buried with all honour at Lunéville. Paris had
already flayed her dead body with epigrams. She had not been too immoral
for its taste. That was impossible. But she had been far too clever. One
indignant person said that it was to be hoped the cause of her death
would be the last of her airs. “To die in childbed at her age is to wish
to make oneself peculiar: it is to pretend to do nothing like other
people.” Frederick the Great wrote her epitaph. “Here lies she who lost
her life in giving birth to an unfortunate infant and a treatise on
philosophy.” Maupertuis and Marmontel spoke of her in terms of warm
admiration. And Voltaire prefixed to her translation of Newton,
published in 1754, at once the kindest and the truest estimate of her
character yet made.
Madame du Châtelet was intellectually a very great woman. She had a mind
essentially clear and logical--the mind of a clever man. She had not
only a passion for learning rare in her sex, but for exactly the kind of
learning in which her sex generally fails. She had, too, an intellectual
fairness strangely unfeminine. She was long the champion of Leibnitz
against Newton; and then, convinced of her mistake, acknowledged it, and
made it the business of her life to prove it and to translate and
explain Newton for the benefit of the French people. In an age busily
idle, she was distinguished by a noble and untiring industry. In an age
of scandal, she was charitable. For all those terrible fine clothes and
that passion for high play and taking youthful parts in amateur
theatricals, the laugh of the de Staals and the du Deffands at her
expense turns against them now.
Still preserved among her letters are her “Reflections on Happiness.”
She plainly avows there that “rational self-indulgence” was her idea of
it. Upon that rock her barque split. She chose pleasure before duty and
gained a faithless Richelieu, fifteen jealous, feverish years with
Voltaire, and a wretchedness from the cool love of the lofty
Saint-Lambert, of which every letter she wrote him is proof.
Out of the picture painted by Loir there still looks down the shrewd,
smiling face--reflective eyes, clever forehead, mobile lips, drooping
nose--of the woman who was at once Voltaire’s curse and blessing--who,
if she had been all good might have been his blessing only, and if she
had been all bad would have been curse alone. At the Revolution, some
wretches broke open her coffin to steal the lead.
There had been gold in her heart once, but the world and the flesh had
overlaid it in dross.
CHAPTER XX
PARIS, “ORESTE” AND “ROME SAUVÉE”
The death of Madame du Châtelet marks one of the great epochs of
Voltaire’s life.
For a while he was utterly crushed and broken. He wrote of himself to
his friends as the most wretched of men. He was alone, abandoned, dying.
Everything that made life worth having had been taken from him--and he
would live no longer.
There is not the slightest doubt that he felt passionately every word he
wrote, and that he suffered wretchedly. It was characteristic of his
nation and himself to give grief words. It was characteristic of himself
to remember nothing but good of that “friend of twenty years” who had
been taken from him. He recalled Cirey and the springtime of their
passion, and forgot Lunéville and Saint-Lambert. He remembered the woman
of a splendid intellect and a most just judgment: who was learned
without affectation of learnedness; who had “the genius of Leibnitz,
with feeling”; and the literary style of a Pascal or a Nicole. He
remembered “her imperial sympathy” and not her “shrewish temper.” “The
_pompons_ and the world are of her age, and her merit is above her age,
her sex, and ours,” he had written to the Abbé de Sade in 1733. He
thought that now. Her brilliant and ready understanding of his
philosophies, thoughts, aims, came back to him overwhelmingly. She had
sinned against him in the flesh. Her mind had been his for ever.
It would indeed have been impossible but that a fifteen years’
connection with such a woman as Madame du Châtelet should have had
lifelong effects upon a character so impressionable as Voltaire’s. Her
relentless logic and her passion for hard facts did a work, and a good
work, upon his vivid, sensitive, bantering, and versatile intelligence.
She added correctness to a style which has no equal in the world for
interest, gaiety, and satire. She forced him to sound the depths his
matchless sparkle hid, to examine first principles, to advance step by
step in argument with the stern accuracy of a Euclid.
From his acquaintance with her he formed his conviction of the mental
equality of women with men. In his first grief at her loss, says
Longchamp, he wrote of her:
The world has lost her! She, sublime, who, living
Loved pleasures, arts, the truth. The gods in giving
Her their soul and genius, kept but for their own
That immortality which is for gods alone.
Voltaire denied the verses. He was in no mood for making mediocre
rhymes, he said. But in 1754 he certainly _did_ write that noble eulogy
of her which forms the preface to her translation and commentary of
Newton, and never afterwards spoke of her--and he spoke of her
often--but in terms of a reverent and a passionate admiration.
For the first few days his grief was overwhelming. King Stanislas was
full of compassion, and three times a day mingled his tears with the
mourner’s.
Lunéville was now naturally horrible to Voltaire. He thought of going to
stay with a certain priestly friend at the Abbey of Senones. Perhaps he
would go back to England! He would have preferred the grave--or thought
he would have preferred it--to either of these alternatives. About
September 14, 1749, he ended by accompanying the Marquis du Châtelet to
Cirey.
It is not difficult to realise that such a temperament as Voltaire’s
might derive a melancholy consolation from revisiting the scene “de ces
heureux jours quand nous étions si malheureux!” It was for the last
time. Every room in the house must have recalled her. Every corner in
the garden had its own memory. There was that inscription over the
summer-house--
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough ...
A Jug of Wine ... and Thou....
Here, they had been tender. There, they had quarrelled. It is not always
the most perfectly loved who are the most bitterly mourned. The keenest
grief is called remorse.
That good-natured old lady--Madame de Champbonin--came to Cirey to
mingle her tears with Voltaire’s.
Longchamp was kept busy packing books, furniture, _vertu_, to be
transmitted to Paris. Voltaire and the Marquis settled their money
affairs--much to the advantage and the satisfaction of that remarkable
_bonhomme_. It was arranged that Voltaire should take the whole of the
house in the Rue Traversière-Saint-Honoré in Paris--of which hitherto he
had only rented a part from the Marquis. They parted at the end of a
fortnight: “on the best of terms,” though they never saw each other
again. Voltaire also retained a friendship--for Saint-Lambert.
He left Cirey about September 25th, and proceeded by melancholy, slow
stages to Paris. He stopped for a day or two at kindly Madame de
Champbonin’s; at Châlons, and at Rheims, and finally reached the
capital.
If the unhappy man had been miserable at Cirey he was a thousand times
more so in Paris. He was alone. The house was in a dreadful confusion
with the du Châtelet furniture being moved out and the Voltaire
furniture being moved in. Voltaire was as sick in body as in mind. He
tried to work. He did work--with his loss and his wretchedness thrusting
themselves on his consciousness all the time. Sometimes in the dead of
night, half dreaming, he would get up and wander about the disordered
rooms, and fancying he saw Madame du Châtelet, call to her. Once, in the
dark and cold, he got up and walking a few steps was too weak to go
farther and leant shivering, supported against a table--“yet reluctant
to wake me,” says Longchamp. The unhappy man stumbled into the next room
presently, and against a great pile of books lying on the floor.
Longchamp found him there at last, speechless and half frozen, in the
chilly dawn of the October morning. All his letters of the month are
miserable enough. A few chosen friends were admitted to see him after a
while--Richelieu, the d’Argentals, nephew Mignot, and Marmontel. They
would come and sit by his fire in the evenings and try to distract his
thoughts with talk of the drama, which he had loved. They did their best
to rouse him. He had certainly never needed rousing before. Frederick
the Great wrote brusquely to Algarotti that this Voltaire talked about
his grief so much he was sure to get over it quickly. Marmontel speaks
of him as one moment weeping and the next laughing. Tears and laughter
were both genuine enough, and to such a temperament, quite natural.
There was something of the child in this Voltaire to the very last--the
warm, quick emotions, so keenly felt, and so keenly felt to be eternal.
That they were not eternal does not impair their sincerity in the least.
He was so lonely and miserable during that dismal autumn in Paris that
one day, exactly upon the same principle as a sorrowing widower marries
his cook and with much the same disastrous results, he asked his niece,
Madame Denis, to come and live with him. She could not do so till
Christmas. Before then, Longchamp declares he had helped his master’s
cure by showing him some letters in which Madame du Châtelet had spoken
slightingly of him. There was certainly bark in that tonic if it was
administered, which seems a little doubtful. How did Longchamp come by
such letters?
There was a sharper bark in the fact that while Voltaire was weeping for
a woman who had been false to him, that dreary old Crébillon was making
fine headway at Court, had a pension from the false Pompadour, and all
Paris applauding his bad verses.
It was his enemy, not his friends, who roused Voltaire at last. He woke
as after a disturbed dream--at first dazed; shook himself; looked round;
and began life afresh.
He was, to be sure, fifty-five years old. But fifty-five in a Voltaire,
though it meant an old and decrepit body, meant a vigorous and eager
mind, thirsting for life and action. He was a man of substance, and a
man whose time was his own. He had no ties. He had a reputation not a
little feared. He had the world before him yet, and a world only he
could save. The fighting zest to turn “dead Catilina of Crébillon into
‘Rome Sauvée’ of Voltaire” was the spur that urged him back to “life and
use and name and fame.”
“Rome Sauvée” had been written in a fortnight in this August of 1749, at
Lunéville. “The devil took possession of me, and said ‘Avenge Cicero and
France: wash out the shame of your country.’” Crébillon had made the
subject a weariness and a foolishness in “Catilina.” How could a
Voltaire better avenge France and himself--particularly himself--than by
turning the same subject into a masterpiece and a _furore_?
The pages of “Rome Sauvée” were still wet, when he took another dull
play of Crébillon’s--“Électre”--and turned it into “Oreste.”
He called together a few friends at the house of his “angels,” the
d’Argentals, and a few of the chief actors and actresses, for a reading
of “Rome Sauvée”; and read them “Oreste” instead. The truth was the
actors were in want of a play to act immediately, at the end of a week.
If M. de Voltaire could not give them one--well, there were other
playwrights who could! M. de Voltaire considered that his “Rome Sauvée”
would require at least six weeks’ rehearsal; so he read “Oreste.” He
went in person to obtain the censor’s permission for it, and did obtain
it. “Oreste” appeared in public on January 12, 1750, to a house equally
crowded with the author’s friends and with the faction of Crébillon,
headed by Piron as usual. Voltaire had written an opening speech in
which, with a touching innocence, he disclaimed all idea of being the
rival of Crébillon and “Électre.” Half the house received the play with
applause which had nothing to do with its merits, and the other half
with hisses which had nothing to do with its defects. The impulsive
author, who was in the d’Argentals’ box and supposed to be _incognito_,
forgot all about _that_, and leant over the side, crying, to encourage a
burst of applause, “Courage, brave Athenians! This is pure Sophocles.”
For a few nights the vivid energy of Voltaire
[Illustration: FREDERICK THE GREAT
_From an Engraving by Cunejo, after the Painting by Cunningham_]
kept the piece going. He was improving and correcting it the whole time.
“Voltaire is a strange man,” said Fontenelle. “He composes his pieces
during their representation.” He kept the actors and actresses to their
work with a dreadful determination. He was always altering and adding to
their parts. Mademoiselle Clairon received at least four notes from him,
full of the handsomest compliments and of apologies for making so many
changes; but making them all the same. Mademoiselle Desmares at last
totally declined to have her lines changed any more, or even to receive
Voltaire. So, never baffled, on a day when she was giving a dinner-party
he sent her a _pâté_ of partridges--and behold! each partridge had a
little note in its beak containing emendations to her _rôle_.
If the story be true or not, the fact remains that Voltaire was a very
_exigeant_ manager. He had dedicated “Oreste” to the Duchesse du Maine;
and took the pains to write her a very long letter to reproach her for
not having attended the first performance. But in spite of all pains
“Oreste” was hardly a success. It was exceedingly tragic and had no love
interest. It was revived, after being withdrawn for a time, which the
author spent in rewriting it, and on its revival it was acted nine
times. Its last performance took place on February 7, 1750.
Voltaire’s grief was certainly by this time on the high road to a cure.
He had to fight so hard there was no time to sit at home, dull and
wretched. He did not realise at first the strength of his enemy,
Crébillon. The truth is, the Court was afraid of the Voltairian pen, and
meant to stand by Crébillon and applaud his dulness to the echo, only
because he was Voltaire’s rival. The Comédie Française--good, loyal
toady--must needs think like the King. When Voltaire realised the nature
of the conflict, he resolved to fight the enemy by a new method of
warfare.
At Christmas, 1749, Madame Denis had come to live with him. A plump
widow of forty, not at all disinclined to try matrimony again, was
Madame Denis by this time. She had attempted to be a playwright when
Voltaire was at Lunéville; and her dear uncle had written with dreadful
plainness of language to d’Argental that to write mediocre plays was
the worst of careers for a man and “the height of degradation for a
woman.”
Not the less, he saw his niece as a rule through very kindly spectacles,
and let his good nature so far warp his judgment as to make him think,
or at any rate say, that if she was no playwright she was an actress of
the highest ability. It is true that she was very fond of that
amusement, having a vast appetite for pleasure of any kind. At the
beginning of the year 1750 both she and her sister, Madame de Fontaine,
were in the Rue Traversière; and Madame Denis was making a very
goodnatured, easy-going hostess for her uncle’s guests.
Voltaire had begun to go out and about again, too. It was at some very
inferior amateur theatricals one night that he discovered an uncommonly
good amateur actor: sent for him, and received the trembling and
delighted youth the next morning. He embraced him, and thanked God for
having created a person who could be moved, and moving, even in speaking
such uncommonly bad verses. The pair drank chocolate together, mixed
with coffee. Lekain--that was the youth’s obscure name--announced his
intention of joining the King’s troupe. Voltaire offered to lend him ten
thousand francs to start on his own account. Eventually, he received the
young actor and his company into his house, and paid all his expenses
for six months--“and since I have belonged to the stage I can prove that
he has given me more than two thousand crowns,” says the famous Lekain
in his “Memoirs.”
There was plenty of space in the house in the Rue Traversière now the
Marquis du Châtelet no longer shared it. Voltaire turned the second
floor into a theatre capable of holding a hundred and twenty persons,
and in a very short time had there a playhouse, players, and plays which
were the height of the mode and made Court and Comédie, with all their
hopes pinned on poor old Crébillon of seventy-six, green with jealousy.
The Voltairian amateurs began with “Mahomet.” There were only half
a-dozen intimates, and a few of the servants, as spectators. Lekain was
in the title _rôle_, and the heroine was played by a shy little girl of
fifteen, who--thanks, partly at least, to the energetic coaching of M.
de Voltaire--became a pleasing actress. Actors and audience all stayed
to supper; and, after it, M. de Voltaire produced the parts of “Rome
Sauvée,” distributed them, and begged the actors to learn them as soon
as they could. He coached and rehearsed his company himself. He
superintended the scenery. He saw personally to the smallest details.
Nothing was too much trouble if Voltaire could but outvie Crébillon, and
“Rome Sauvée” “Catilina.” The audacious playwright actually had the
coolness to make Richelieu get him the loan of the gorgeous costumes in
which “Catilina” had been played at the Comédie.
“Rome Sauvée” appeared on the boards of the theatre of the Rue
Traversière before an audience composed almost exclusively of the
greatest literary men of the age and country. Here were d’Alembert, the
prince of mathematicians, and, to be, perpetual secretary of the
Academy; Hénault, President of the Chambre des Enquêtes, and of at least
two of the most famous salons in Paris; young Marmontel, rising in the
world; Diderot, the encyclopædist of unclean lips; gallant and
accommodating friend Richelieu; and schoolmaster d’Olivet. The
performance was a brilliant success. “Rome Sauvée” was worthy of its
author.
At a second representation that untiring person himself played the part
of Cicero, and excited the enthusiasm of the audience.
The fame and ability of the troupe of the Rue Traversière reached the
ears of Court and Comédie of course. They had players as good; but where
were they to find such plays?
One of the aims of the performance of “Rome Sauvée” in the Rue
Traversière was attained when on February 28th, “after long
hesitations,” that shifty Pompadour--a little bit to oblige Voltaire and
chiefly because no other play so suitable could be found--had “Alzire”
acted by a distinguished company of amateurs in the royal apartments.
Madame de Pompadour herself played “Alzire.” The Queen was not present;
nor her daughters; nor the Dauphin; nor the playwright himself.
But on March 6th “Alzire” was repeated: with Voltaire in the audience.
The King was well pleased with “Alzire,” but not with its author.
When the play was over he said loudly that he was astonished that the
author of so good a play as “Alzire” could also have written “Oreste”;
and the writer of “Oreste” had to swallow that royal rebuff in silence.
It was in this same March of the year 1750 that Voltaire was stung to
fresh action by the attacks of Fréron, enemy and journalist, the tool of
Boyer, and the acknowledged foe of all the light and knowledge in
France. Fréron had written an unsuccessful poem on the victory of
Fontenoy, and had never forgiven Voltaire for winning where he had
failed. All the aggressions seem to have been on the part of Fréron.
Voltaire was only aggravatingly successful and good-humoured. Fréron had
not found it an easy task to goad him to anger. But he had done it at
last. “That worm from the carcase of Desfontaines” was Voltaire’s
vigorous epithet for him now. And when in this March there was question
of this “worm” being made Parisian correspondent to Frederick the
Great--“to send him the new books and new follies of our
country”--Voltaire flung on to paper a warm remonstrance to his King
against any such appointment; and then recommended in writing to Darget,
Frederick’s friend, the Abbé Raynal for the post instead. Raynal was not
appointed; but then neither was Fréron. For many years, Fréron was to
Voltaire the wasp who stung, and stung, and stung again--with a sting
not deadly indeed, but infinitely annoying and malicious.
The death of Madame du Châtelet had, not unnaturally, been the signal
for King Frederick to renew his pressing invitations to Voltaire to
visit him. In the November of 1749 this most persistent of monarchs and
of men had written to reproach his friend for making excuses for not
coming. They must be excuses now! And Voltaire was so apt in them! In
December the King wrote again. In the January of 1750, more persistently
still. In February--“well, I will not press an immediate visit: but I
will hold you bound to come when the weather is better and Flora has
beautified this climate of mine.”
It was all very flattering. Voltaire felt it to be so. He was in the not
uncommon position of the man who likes to be asked but does not want to
go. There were many reasons against his going. He had just settled into
his house in Paris. Niece Denis had come to look after it for him. All
his friends lived hard by. The feverish events of the past year had made
rest and quiet peculiarly desirable. His health made them almost
necessary. Travelling was exceedingly expensive. But if these were all
good reasons for remaining in the Rue Traversière-Saint-Honoré, there
were better ones for leaving it.
Running now through Paris were those gay satirical _contes_ of his which
ridiculed every vice of the old _régime_ and made King, Court, and
confessor supremely ridiculous. The graceless old Duchesse du Maine,
sitting up in bed at three o’clock in the morning, had laughed to hear
her order burlesqued in “Zadig.” But all her class had not her saving
sense of humour. The satire was too keen not to cut--the portraits too
lifelike to be unrecognised.
If he had stopped at “Zadig,” at “Barbouc,” at “Scarmentado,” there was
no reason in the world why Voltaire should be a popular member of the
society he had chastised with such whips. And when he chastised it with
the scorpions of that deadly pamphlet of brief paragraphs called the
“Voice of the Sage and the People,” there was very small wonder that he
should once more find Paris getting too hot to hold him.
The “Voice of the Sage and the People” is the voice of the man who could
sting with bald truths as well as lively satires. It hacked at
superstition and the Mirepoix with a hatchet that always went to the
root of the tree. “A government in which it is permitted a certain class
of men to say, ‘Let those pay taxes who work: we should not pay because
we are idle’--is no better than a government of Hottentots.” “A woman
who nurses a couple of children and spins does more for the State than
all convents have ever done.” “The Church ought to contribute to the
expenses of the nation in proportion to its revenues.... The body set
apart to teach justice should begin by giving an example of it.” Forty
years later these truths were enforced by the blood of the Revolution.
Could Voltaire have thought even in 1750 that they were politic truths
to utter in a city where he had just bought a house and was much minded
to settle down and be at peace? It is to his infinite and lifelong
credit that he seldom cared whether a truth were politic or not. The
moment he saw it to be truth he must utter it in scorn of consequence.
Even “Rome Sauvée” and “Oreste” could not shield a man responsible for
the paternity of such writing as this, nor the uncertain smile of a
Pompadour save him from its consequences. Well, he had better go! He had
always wished to travel in Italy. He would take Potsdam and Berlin _en
route_. His visit there could be brief. On May 8, 1750, he wrote to
Frederick saying that, though he was rich, “even very rich for a man of
letters,” his house in Paris and the du Châtelet affairs had made him so
short of money that he must beg the royal permission for Mettra, an
exchange dealer of Berlin, to advance him four thousand crowns for the
expenses of his proposed journey. The delighted King wrote back on May
24th enclosing a letter of exchange for sixteen thousand francs. He was
willing to pay, and to pay highly, for a man who was “a whole Academy of
_belles-lettres_ in himself.” Voltaire was gratified of course. But he
wrote dismally that he was more in need of a doctor than a king, and on
June 9th spoke of himself to that King, in verse which was meant to be
gay and sounds a little dreary, as “your very aged Danaë, who leaves his
little home for your star-spangled dwelling-place, of which his years
make him unworthy.” A little home is so much more comfortable than a
star-spangled dwelling-place, after all! Voltaire in fact needed a spur
to make him undertake that long-talked-of visit with alacrity. And he
had it.
Among the many other poor and generally worthless literary hangers-on,
whom the most generous literary genius of any age had commissioned his
agent Moussinot to assist with gifts of money, was one Baculard
d’Arnaud. A conceited young writer of very fluent rhymes and three,
dull, unacted tragedies, was d’Arnaud.
But he was needy and a man of letters. That was enough for Voltaire. He
procured him the post of Paris correspondent to King Frederick for which
Raynal and Fréron had competed unsuccessfully, and on April 25, 1750,
young d’Arnaud arrived in Berlin, with letters and verses from Voltaire
to the King. A personable young man was Baculard. A gay head, very
easily turned. Was it to pique Voltaire that Frederick gave Voltaire’s
_protégé_ a pension of five thousand francs yearly, and compliments much
above his merits? If so, that aim failed at first. On May 19th, Voltaire
wrote to young d’Arnaud the kindest of friendly letters. On May 31st,
d’Arnaud wrote to Voltaire saying that he was waiting for him “as a
child awaits his father.” The father was not hurrying himself, it
appears.
On June 22d, Voltaire and his company of clever amateurs were at Sceaux,
and played “Rome Sauvée” to the Duchesse du Maine and her court,
Voltaire taking Cicero, and Lekain, Lentulus Sura.
On June 23d, Collé, writer of memoirs, meets Theriot, that idle gossip
of a Theriot, who tells Collé a most _piquant_, incredible story about
the great Frederick and little Baculard d’Arnaud. Then friend Marmontel,
also writer of memoirs (and of memoirs written, it must be remembered,
many years after the events they chronicle), tells how he and Theriot
went together to see Voltaire one morning and found him writing in bed
as usual. Theriot played the part of candid friend. “I have news to tell
you,” says he. “Well, what is it?” asks the writer in bed. “D’Arnaud has
arrived at Potsdam and the King has received him with open arms.” “With
open arms?” says Voltaire. “And that d’Arnaud has written him an
Epistle.” “Dull and bombastic, I suppose?” “On the contrary, very good,
and so good the King has replied by another Epistle!” “What! the King of
Prussia an Epistle to d’Arnaud?” says the person in bed, roused a
little. “Someone has been gaming you, Theriot.” But Theriot produces
copies of the two Epistles from his pockets. Voltaire stretches out a
lean hand, seizes and reads them. “What rubbish! What platitudes!” says
he, reading d’Arnaud’s verses to Frederick. But Frederick had not
thought so. Then he comes to Frederick’s verses to d’Arnaud, and reads
“for a moment in silence and with an air of pity.”
D’Arnaud, by your genius fair
You will warm our bleak North air;
And the music of your lyre
Kindle quick my muse’s fire--
and so on; and so on. Not much in _that_, to be sure. But when he came
to the last verse--
The French Apollo ’gins to die
And his term of fame is nigh.
Come then, you, and take his place,
Rise and shine: outgrace his grace.
The sunset of a gorgeous day
A finer sunrise brings alway--
he sprang out of bed as if he had been stung and danced about the room
in a fury. “I will go! I will go!” he cried, “if only to teach him to
know mankind!”
That “sunset” had accomplished Frederick’s purpose. Perhaps he had
guessed it would. He was certainly too astute to really think that a
d’Arnaud’s twinkle would show at all in a sky where the sun of a
Voltaire’s genius beamed and burnt.
“To sit high is to be lied about.” Many of Marmontel’s “facts” are
conspicuously inaccurate. But if this story be true--and having regard
to Voltaire’s character it sounds at least as if it had truth in it--no
doubt remains that he was quite clever enough to disguise his anger. A
gay little versified reproach to Frederick dated June 26, 1750--that was
all. The very reproach was written from Compiègne, whither the
Gentleman-in-Ordinary had gone to beg the permission of Louis XV. to
visit Frederick II. Frederick was to pay all expenses of the journey.
Voltaire would put the _cachet_ of genius on the King’s prose and verse
which just missing that, just missed everything. He left his house in
the Rue Saint-Honoré in the joint care of Longchamp and Madame Denis,
giving the latter a handsome income for its maintenance. He apologised
to his friends for leaving them.
And on June 26th the “domestique” of the King, as he called himself, was
at Compiègne, as has been seen, taking leave of his master. The farewell
was hardly a success. Louis wanted the dangerous Voltaire gone, and was
offended at his going. What room was there in France for the author of
those shameless _contes_ and that loud passionate “Voice of the Sage and
the People”? None. That “Voice” had been the sensation of the year among
the orthodox. A hundred “Voices” had been raised to answer it--in
parody, in refutation, in agreement. Even Madame de Pompadour was
offended--this clever Voltaire had whispered in her ear too apt and
impudent a couplet. True, when he took farewell of her, she smiled on
him a little and sent her kind regards to King Frederick. When Voltaire
gave the message, that astute boor of a monarch curtly observed, “I do
not know her”--and the artful Voltaire wrote the Pompadour some very
pretty verses to tell her that he had the honour to give Venus the
thanks of Achilles!
As for his French Majesty, when Voltaire begged permission to visit the
Prussian, _he_ turned his back on the greatest man in his kingdom and
said indifferently, “You can go when you like.”
Even now, a word would have detained Voltaire. But that word was far
from being spoken. After he was gone, there arose at Court one day some
question of the royal treatment of this child of genius. “After all,”
said Louis, “I have treated him as well as Louis XIV. treated Racine and
Boileau.... It is not my fault if he aspires to sup with a king;” and
proceeded to add that if he had been too good-natured to talent “_all
that_”--which included d’Alembert, Fontenelle, Maupertuis, Montesquieu,
Prévost--“would have dined or supped with me.” Comment is needless.
Voltaire left France with Boyer keeping the conscience of King and
Dauphin; and keeping from the people light, knowledge, and advancement.
The _ânes_ of Mirepoix were the sworn enemies, not of Voltaire alone,
but of all his friends, of all the intellect of France. Fréron, that
“worm from the carcase of Desfontaines,” was their tongue and pen. They
were busy now refusing the Sacrament to dying Jansenists who could not
produce a certificate to show they had accepted the Bull Unigenitus.
Voltaire could not resist a parting shaft at them. Two little pamphlets,
gently satirical and both directed against the clergy, were the final
bolts which shut the gates of Paris upon him for eight-and-twenty years.
In the belief that he was leaving it for a very few months at the most,
he set out from Compiègne on a day towards the end of June; but
precisely what day is not certain. On July 2d he was at Cleves. On July
10, 1750, he arrived at the palace of King Frederick the Great, at
Potsdam.
CHAPTER XXI
GLAMOUR
Clean, quiet Potsdam stands on the river Havel and is sixteen miles from
Berlin. In 1745, the great Frederick had begun to build there the
little, white, one-storied palace called Sans-Souci. He desired to be
buried at the foot of a statue of Flora on one of its terraces--“when I
am there I shall be _sans souci_.”
The French tastes of the royal architect are everywhere evident.
Sans-Souci is a kind of miniature Versailles. It stands on a hill.
Formal terraces slope to a formal park. Here are statues, and a
fountain--all the artificial and no natural beauties. Within the palace
may still be seen, almost unaltered, the rooms where the great King
lived and died--his chair, his clock, his portrait. In the picture
gallery he walked and talked with Voltaire. And in the west wing is the
room occupied by that favoured guest, and before him by the Maréchal de
Saxe.
Voltaire arrived then at Sans-Souci on July 10th, after a journey which
cost thrifty Frederick 600_l._, and during which the traveller had
visited the famous battlefields of Fontenoy, Raucoux, and Lawfeld.
It was ten years since Voltaire had escaped from his Madame du Châtelet
to first see in the flesh the hero of his dreams. It was fourteen years
since the pair had first exchanged adoring letters. Their friendship was
of European fame. They were the two greatest men of their age. Half the
world watched their meeting--and awaited results.
The pair fell metaphorically, and perhaps literally too, into each
other’s arms. This day had been so long delayed. The host had worked for
it so persistently, doggedly, and consistently! The visitor had so
warmly wanted it when it had been wholly impossible--and when it was
inevitable had done his best to recall that early enthusiasm.
The enthusiasm may well have come back to him now. It did come back.
Instead of sulky Louis’s cold shoulder, was “_my_ Frederick the Great,”
flattery, honour, and consideration. Potsdam was gay and busy with
preparations for a splendid _fête_ to be held in Berlin in August. But
it forgot gaiety and business alike to do honour to Voltaire.
Saxe’s apartments left nothing to be desired. The royal stables were at
the guest’s disposal. There were music and conversation. On July 24th,
the guest sketched Potsdam for d’Argental--“one hundred and fifty
thousand soldiers ... opera, comedy, philosophy, poetry, grandeur and
graces, grenadiers and muses, trumpets and violins, the suppers of
Plato, society and liberty--who would believe it? Yet it is very true.”
And on August 1st to Thibouville, “To find all the charms of society in
a king who has won five battles; to be in the midst of drums and to hear
the lyre of Apollo; ... to pass one’s days half in _fêtes_, half in the
delights of a quiet and occupied life”--here was glamour indeed.
And then on a day before August 14th, and before Voltaire had been five
weeks at Potsdam, Frederick, who perfectly understood the policy of
striking while the iron is hot, offered his dearest friend, if he would
but stay with him for ever, the post of Chamberlain, a Royal Order,
twenty thousand francs per annum, and niece Denis a yearly pension of
four thousand francs if she would come and keep her uncle’s house in
Berlin.
The offer was so sudden and so brilliant! That impetuosity which had
made all his shrewdness of no avail a hundred times before, was still at
once Voltaire’s charm and stumbling-block. He forgot “Anti-Machiavelli”
and d’Arnaud. Everything that makes life delightful surrounded him at
the moment. Behind him lay the Bastille of his youth, flight to Holland,
hiding at Cirey, the “English Letters” burnt by the hangman, the fierce
persecution for that babbling trifle the “Mondain,” the Pompadour’s
false smile, the kingly scowl, Crébillon, Desfontaines, Boyer. At its
best his country had given him grudging and empty honours. If he had won
fame and fortune, it had been in spite of Courtly malice and for ever at
the point of the sword. He was sick to the soul of gagging and
injustice. It was not the least part of his bitterness against his
Louis, that he had cringed to and flattered such a creature--in vain. He
was fifty-six years old. The fifty-six years had been one long
persecution. He had still the daring spirit of a boy. He had still such
deeds to do that the gods would make him immortal, if need be, to do
them. A new heaven and a new earth lay before him. He accepted the
offer--and began the world again.
There is still preserved his letter to Madame Denis, dated August 14,
1750, wherein he tells her of Frederick’s bounty. It has the spontaneous
enthusiasm of youth. “You _must_ come, niece Louise,” it says in effect.
“Think of the magnificence of the offer! And then--Berlin has such
operas!” (shrewd Uncle Voltaire!) He had hardly been given time to
breathe, much less to think, since he arrived at Potsdam. Pleasure had
succeeded to pleasure and flattery to flattery. For three hours at a
time he would criticise his royal host’s writings. Crafty Frederick gave
up whole days to _belles-lettres_. There was everything to intoxicate
the excitable brain of this French child of genius. The great Frederick
was cool enough. _He_ had no glamour. Does it make the great Voltaire
less lovable that he saw things all _en rose or en noir_, was led
dangerous lengths by his emotions, and for all that rasping cynicism
could be a dreamer of dreams, a visionary, and a sentimentalist?
Practical niece Denis, with her vulgar, shrewd instincts, wrote back and
said that no man could be the friend of a king. Toady or slave--but
friend, never. And Voltaire, carried to Berlin in the whirl of the Court
for the Carrousel, wrote to d’Argental begging him to persuade her, and
asking d’Argental’s forgiveness for the course upon which he was
resolved.
On August 23d, Frederick, having read Madame Denis’s letter,
condescended to write with his own royal hand from his private
apartment to beg Voltaire to stay with him. What more flattering? Yet
even now Voltaire was not quite sure he was wise. He took such immense
pains to prove himself so. But he had decided irrevocably--and flung the
responsibility of that choice on destiny at last. “I abandon myself to
my fate,” he wrote on August 28th, “and throw myself head foremost into
that abyss.”
The fall was soft enough at first.
The Carrousel had begun about August 8th.
Berlin was crowded with noble and distinguished guests from all lands.
Frederick rode about the city on horseback, personally supervising the
preparations for the _fête_. Red of face, portly of figure,
eight-and-thirty years old, and much addicted to snuff--one of his
English guests thus described him, not ungraphically. With his five
great battles behind him and such a future before him as might well
surpass the wildest flights of fancy, he was a great man to call
“friend.”
And in Berlin, among the notables of all Europe convened to celebrate a
Carrousel which should make Louis XIV.’s famous _fête_ of the Tuileries
dull and obscure, the great Voltaire was only less honoured than the
great Frederick himself. He may be forgiven for thinking he had chosen
well.
Among the guests was the Margravine of Bayreuth, Frederick’s sister, and
very much Voltaire’s friend. In 1743, he had spent ten days with her at
Bayreuth. French plays were acted--but, strangely enough, no plays by M.
Arouet de Voltaire. He was a spectator on the occasion. He had said
truly of himself that he loved good verses so much that he loved other
people’s--“which is a great deal for a poet.” On August 17th the French
players acted the “Mauvais Riche” of his vain little rival, Baculard
d’Arnaud. But Voltaire was in the mood when he was ready to be pleased
with anything. On August 26th was played the “Iphigénie” of Racine, and
on the 27th the “Médecin Malgré Lui.”
“The language least talked at Court was German,” said Voltaire. “Our
tongue and literature have made more conquests than Charlemagne.” He
wrote delightedly of the King’s brother and sister, Henry and Amelia, as
the most charming reciters of French verse. His spectacles were
rose-coloured indeed.
August 25th was the crowning point of the _fête_, one of those splendid
revelries which were the boast of the old _régime_--and died with it.
The Carrousel of the Sun King had been glorious. The Berlin Carrousel
far outvied it. It was, too, one of the golden nights of Voltaire’s
life, and lives in history for that reason.
The courtyard of the great palace in Berlin had been turned into an
amphitheatre. Three thousand soldiers under arms lined the approaches to
the place. Forty-six thousand lights illuminated it. Tier above tier,
brilliantly apparelled, blazing with jewels, the nobility of all lands,
sat the spectators. Among them were Lord Melton and Jonas Hanway--“a
chiel amang ye, takin’ notes”--and Collini, a young Florentine. Save
only the royal box, every seat was occupied. The hush of expectation was
on the audience. And then, on a sudden, gorgeous in dress, as that
period alone knew how to be gorgeous, “among a group of great lords,” a
lean figure moved towards the King’s enclosure. For an instant the house
was silent. And then there swept through it a murmur like the wind among
the trees--“Voltaire!” “Voltaire!”
It was a moment worth life and worth death. A stranger and foreigner
raised by genius alone to that mighty eminence of fame to which genius,
a proud line of royal ancestors, and five great battles had raised
Frederick the King! Every eye was upon this son of a notary, this Paris
_bourgeois_, Voltaire. Collini noticed the delight in the piercing eyes,
and a certain modesty of demeanour very pleasing. Voltaire _had_ chosen
rightly after all! There could have been no doubt in his impressionable
mind at that magnificent minute.
Then in the arena the tournament began. Voltaire described it as
fairyland, the _fête_ of Chinese lanterns, and the Carrousel of Louis
the Magnificent, all in one. The competitors in the fray were royal, and
a princess--Venus and the apple--gave away the prizes. After the
tournament was a supper, and after the supper a ball. Voltaire did not
go to that. He was surfeited with delight--_las_ with adulation. He had
already written of his great host that he scratched with one hand and
caressed, with the other. To-night it had been all caresses. And would
surely be caresses for ever! “When a clever man commits a folly, it is
not a small one.”
The plan as now formed was that Voltaire, with Prussia as home, should
travel in Italy in this autumn of 1750 and so gratify a desire of years,
and that in the spring of 1751 Madame Denis should join him in Berlin.
In the meantime, Prussia was heaven.
On September 12th, he wrote again to his niece earnestly trying to
persuade her of its charms. And would have succeeded very likely if she
had not had particular reasons of her own at the time for preferring
Paris.
Even at Berlin and during a Carrousel Voltaire had entire liberty. Or at
least as much liberty as fame and distinctions allow any man. His days
were his own. In the morning he studied “to the sound of the drum.” In
the evening queens asked him to supper, he said, and were not offended
when he denied them. He spent hours correcting Frederick’s works, and
observed gallantly “Cæsar supra grammaticam” to excuse the noble pupil’s
defects in that department. He gave up the kingly dinners
presently--there were too many generals and princes, forsooth, for this
M. de Voltaire.
On September 14th, “Rome Sauvée” was played in the rooms of the Princess
Amelia at Berlin and on a stage especially erected by its author, who
took the part of Cicero as he had done at Sceaux and in the Rue
Traversière. He also trained the company and lost his temper with them,
exactly as he had lost it with his troupe in Paris. When the tumult of
_fêtes_ was past the Court went back to Potsdam. Life was a thousand
times more delightful than ever. “I have my whole time to myself, I am
crossed in nothing.” “I find a port after thirty years of storm. I find
the protection of a king, the conversation of a philosopher, the charms
of an agreeable man united in one who for sixteen years consoled me in
misfortune and sheltered me from my enemies.... If one can be certain of
anything it is of the character of the King of Prussia.” “I have the
audacity to think that nature has made me for him. I have found so
singular a likeness between his tastes and mine that I have forgotten he
is the ruler of half Germany and the other half trembles at his
name....” “The conqueror of Austria loves _belles-lettres_, which I love
with all my heart.” “My marriage is accomplished then. Will it be happy?
I do not know. I cannot help myself saying ‘Yes.’ One had to finish by
marriage after coquetting for so many years.”
Even the d’Arnaud affair “does not prevent the King of Prussia from
being the most amiable and remarkable of men.” Nay, d’Arnaud himself was
“bon diable” after all. And the Prussian climate so rigorous? Not a bit
of it. What are a few rays of sunshine more or less to make us give
ourselves such airs? The glamour was complete.
All the letters from which these extracts are taken were written less
than four months after Voltaire’s arrival in Prussia, and when the
contrast between his treatment there and the treatment meted to him in
France, was fresh and glaring. All the letters were written to persons
who only half approved or wholly disapproved, of what Lord Chesterfield
called Voltaire’s “emigration.”
His friends, enemies, and niece were all united in fearing and disliking
it. In Paris a caricature was being sold in the street: “Voltaire the
famous Prussian! Look at him with his great bear skin bonnet to keep out
the cold! Six sous for Voltaire the famous Prussian!”
At the French Court the offended attitude of King Louis had not changed.
King Frederick wrote very civilly to borrow the great Voltaire from his
brother of France. And his brother of France, says d’Argenson, replied
he should be very glad to make the loan, and turning to his courtiers,
added that there would be one fool more at the Court of the King of
Prussia “and one fool less at mine.”
On October 27th, Voltaire wrote to tell the d’Argentals that his post of
Historiographer had been taken away from him; though Madame de Pompadour
had told him, in a little note, that King Louis had had the goodness to
allow him to keep an old pension of two thousand livres.
“I do not know why the King should deprive me of the Historiographership
and let me retain the title of his Gentleman-in-Ordinary,” Voltaire
wrote rather disgustedly to Madame Denis on October 28th. But after all,
what did it matter? In return for the Historiographership he had the
post of Chamberlain to the King of Prussia, that Royal Prussian Order,
and that yearly Prussian pension.
He had exchanged strife for peace; slights for honour; and Louis XV. for
Frederick the Great. How _could_ he be wrong?
It is always far harder to guess the mind of Frederick on any given
occasion than the mind of Voltaire. Frederick at least was sure that
Voltaire was worth keeping even at a heavy price to be “the glory of
one’s own Court and the envy of the world.” Gay, witty, and easy--a past
master of the art of conversation--and with an impulsive susceptibility
to the impressions of the moment wholly fascinating--the King was not
wrong in placing a high estimate on the companionship of Voltaire. The
King knew genius when he saw it. He meant to keep it now he had it. So,
after a day spent in the ardours of government and military duty, at
five he became the verse-maker, the man of ease and letters, the
polished Frenchman instead of the great German soldier.
At seven, he had his evening concert, small, select, delightful. “If you
think the King loves music,” said someone, “you are wrong. He loves only
the flute and only his own flute.” (To be sure, such an egoism has been
known as a love of music both before and since.) No women were admitted.
Frederick the Great’s dislike of that sex is historical, and was always
consistent and unmoved. And then, at nine o’clock began those immortal
suppers of the gods. Voltaire was of course of them from the earliest
days of his stay in Prussia.
Half Europe watched them from afar. Much more than half the genius of
Europe would have paid a high price to have been of them. They generally
consisted of about ten persons. The only language spoken was French, and
more than half the _habitués_ were of that favoured nation. The other
half included two Scotchmen, one Prussian, and that great
Prussian-Frenchman, Frederick himself. Baculard d’Arnaud, though living
at Potsdam and under the immediate eye and favour of the King, was not
invited. The meal was severely sober and frugal. The King rose at
twelve, as clear-headed as he had sat down. Sometimes his guests
prolonged that feast of reason far into the morning. The servants who
waited on them contracted, it is said, swellings in the legs from too
much standing. Occasionally, Frederick was not of the party at all. He
supped with Colonel Balby instead. “What is the King doing this
evening?” it was asked of Voltaire. “Il balbutie” was the ready answer.
Great among the _convives_ of the supper was Maupertuis, the pompous and
touchy geometrician, the President of the Berlin Academy, and once the
friend and the tutor of Madame du Châtelet. He had stayed at Cirey in
1739. Voltaire had never liked anything about him but his talents.
Surly, solemn, and unsociable, he was already antipathetic in every
attribute of his character to the brilliant Frenchman.
Another visitor of Cirey, was also of the suppers--Algarotti, the
amiable Italian, the agreeable man of the world, the “Swan of Padua,”
whose “Newtonianism for Ladies” Émilie’s Newton had so completely
eclipsed.
Here too was La Mettrie, a freethinking French doctor of medicine, with
his ribald rollicking stories and his bold atheism, “the most frank and
the most foolish of men.” He had become notorious as the author of a
book called “The Man Machine” in which he had gaily proved, to his own
satisfaction, the material nature of the soul.
Then there was “the brave Major Chasot,” an excellent type of a gallant
eighteenth-century French gentleman. He had saved the King’s life at the
battle of Mollwitz, but owed the coveted _entrée_ to the suppers less to
that heroism than to the facts that he was French and flute-player.
Here too was d’Argens, a profligate French marquis, whom Frederick loved
for “his wit, his learning, and his person”; and who was at once
credulous and sceptical, freethinking and superstitious.
The other Frenchman was Darget, reader, confidant, and secretary to the
royal host, very discreet, reserved, and judicious, a man to be
trusted. It did not take a subtle Voltaire long to recognise the value
of the friendship of this friend of the King. Frederick often wrote to
Voltaire through Darget, and Voltaire replied to Darget in terms of
tenderness and admiration.
Then there was the French ambassador of Irish birth--Lord
Tyrconnel--famous for giving heavy dinners, whose _rôle_ “was to be
always at table,” and who had the brusque honest speech of British
forbears. Lady Tyrconnel had receptions in Berlin and presently acted in
Voltaire’s company of noble amateurs.
The Scotchmen were the two brothers George and James Keith, Jacobites
and gentlemen, “not only accomplished men, but nobles and warriors,” the
only friends of the King whom his bitter tongue spared. Nay more, George
Keith was, says Macaulay, “the only human being whom Frederick ever
really loved.” Earl Marischal of Scotland, he had fought with his brave
young brother for that forlorn hope, the cause of the Stuarts, in 1715.
They had long wandered on the Continent, and at last found a home in
Potsdam with Frederick.
The only Prussian of the suppers was Baron Pollnitz, and he was
cosmopolitan, had many times visited Paris, and had a rich store of
travellers’ tales. Clever and well born, he was extravagant and
miserably poor; and since he could not afford to lose Frederick’s
favour, was the butt of his royal master’s cruellest jokes--the wretched
scapegoat who could not escape and whose very helplessness goaded
Frederick’s bitter wit to new effort.
Of such an assembly as this, versatile and brilliant though it was,
Voltaire and the King were the natural leaders.
Sulzer, who had listened to it, declared that it was better to hear the
conversation of Voltaire, Algarotti, and d’Argens than to read the most
interesting and best written book in the world. The talk was on “morals,
history, philosophy.” It was the boast of the talkers that they had no
prejudices. They explored all subjects as one explores a newly
discovered country, knowing neither whether it be sterile or fertile,
rich or poor--eager to learn, sharp-set to see--and without fear of
consequence. No topic was debarred them. The only intoxication was of
ideas. “One thinks boldly, one is free,” said Voltaire. “Wit, reason,
and science” abounded. Frederick stimulated the conversation by always
taking one side of a question when his guests took the other. His own
tongue was so caustic that it has been said that it is difficult to
conceive how “anything short of hunger should have induced men to bear
the misery of being the associates of the great King.” But that is to
take a very one-sided view of his character. If one hand could scratch,
the other could caress. If on one side of his nature he was a brutal
jester, an untamed barbarian, on the other he was a thinker and a
philosopher with all the light, the ease, the charm, and the cultivation
of France.
Besides, there was one man at the suppers whom the King feared.
Frederick’s satire was a saw; but Voltaire’s was a knife: and the
clumsier instrument dreaded the finer. A needy Pollnitz or a patient
Darget might bear the royal insolence in silence. But it did not yet
dare to encounter that “most terrible of all the intellectual weapons
ever wielded by man, the mockery of Voltaire.” Saw and knife seem both,
for the while, to have been quietly put away.
A Voltaire with his splendid capacity for living in the present moment
may sometimes have forgotten the very existence of the King’s weapon.
“No cloud,” “far less a storm,” marred the harmony of those suppers.
Between them, operas, receptions, correcting the royal compositions, and
spending long days with his own, the September and October of this
autumn of 1750 passed away. Now and again a courtly Voltaire went to pay
his devoirs at the Court of the Queen Mother and read her cantos of the
“Pucelle,” which he assured the good Protestant lady was nothing in the
world but a satire on the Church of Rome. Nor did he neglect to attend
the dull and frugal receptions of Frederick’s unhappy wife, the pretty
and accomplished Elizabeth Christina. Hanbury Williams was in Berlin in
September as English envoy, and made Voltaire complimentary verses on
“Rome Sauvée.” The exile continued to write long letters to his
friends, speaking of his speedy return to France and of the thousand
delights of life in his present “paradise of philosophers.”
He _had_ chosen rightly after all! All would be well. All _was_ well.
But----
CHAPTER XXII
THE RIFT WITHIN THE LUTE
ON November 6, 1750, at Potsdam, and after he had been in Prussia rather
less than three months, Uncle Voltaire took his versatile pen in hand
and wrote to Louise Denis a famous letter--the letter of Buts. Prussia
had fulfilled all his hopes, nay, had exceeded them, but--. “The King’s
suppers are delightful, but--.” “My life is at once free and occupied,
but--.” “Operas, comedies, carousals, suppers at Sans-Souci, military
manœuvres, concerts, study, readings, but--.” “Berlin splendid with its
gracious queens and charming princesses, but--.” “But, my dear, a very
fine frost has set in.”
That letter might serve not only as a description of life at Potsdam,
but of all human life. A most delightful world, but--. The truth was
that Voltaire had begun to feel the grip of Frederick’s iron hand. On
November 17th he wrote again to his niece and told her a little, ugly
story. Secretary Darget had lost his wife. And the great Frederick wrote
to him a letter of sympathy, “very touching, pathetic, and even
Christian”; and the same day made a shameful epigram upon the dead
woman. “It does not bear thinking about,” wrote Voltaire. Whose turn
might it not be next? “We are here ... like monks in an abbey,” he
added. “God grant the abbot stops at making game of us!”
There was another source of trouble going on at the same time. Who could
have expected that a Voltaire and a d’Arnaud could share a kingdom in
peace? “Do you not know,” Voltaire said once, “that when there are two
Frenchmen in a foreign court or country one of them must die?” He had
forgiven that “rising sun” affair; but he had not forgotten it. This
d’Arnaud, too, was the most absurd, conceited, ungrateful simpleton
imaginable.
Voltaire had not only lent him money. He had done much more than that.
He had tried to make his _protégé_ fit for some good post--to make him
improve, for instance, a shameful handwriting. He had introduced him to
Helvétius. He is “as my son,” “he has merit,” “he is poor and virtuous.”
In return Baculard had paid his master some fine compliments; and in
1739 had written a preface for a new edition of M. de Voltaire’s works,
in which the flattery was so fulsome that M. de Voltaire himself cut
out, or toned down, some of the most eulogistic passages.
Then came Baculard’s invitation to Prussia. He gave himself the finest
insolent airs. He pretended to be surprised at the smallness of the
handsome pension Frederick had given him. If he was not of the suppers,
he had every other honour. He was received by the princes, and
play-acted with them. The story goes that being given a part in
“Mariamne” too small for his conceit, he did it as badly as he could;
and Voltaire lost his temper with him and cried out “You are not clever
enough for the _rôle_; you do not even know how to speak the words!” But
Baculard’s hot head was turned. The princes, and that negligible
quantity, Frederick’s wife, had taken him up and were playing him off
against Frederick’s Voltaire. Then the misguided young man was
positively foolish enough to ally himself with Voltaire’s enemy, Fréron,
and to attack the wickedest, cleverest foe that ever man had. Baculard
wrote Fréron a letter to be shown about Paris, in which he not only
denied the authorship of that flattering preface written in 1739, but
added that Voltaire himself had inserted therein “horrible things”
against France.
And of a sudden, Voltaire flung off the encumbering mantle of
comfortable prosperity he had worn for so short a time and was at his
foolish bombastical minor poet, tooth and nail.
On November 14, 1750, he wrote to tell his Angel of the affair. Then he
wrote to King Frederick and insisted on Frederick taking his part--cool
Frederick who would fain have conciliated both parties. “I cannot meet
the man, Sire! He is going to-day to Berlin in Prince Henry’s carriage,
why should he not stop there to study, to attend the Academy--whatever
you like! I do not mention the word _renvoi_, but that is what I mean.
And I leave all to the goodness and prudence of your Majesty.”
On November 24th a very triumphant uncle wrote to his niece that “the
rising sun has gone to bed.” D’Arnaud in fact had been ordered to leave
Berlin in twenty-four hours and--the King had forgotten to pay the
expenses of his journey. Voltaire was victorious. Most of his friends
and all his enemies both in Paris and Berlin had been watching that
quarrel with a scrutiny seemingly out of all proportion to its
importance. D’Arnaud had gone into obscurity for ever. But the easily
elated Voltaire was not long elated this time somehow. Here again was
food for thought. If one favourite was lost as suddenly as a bright
exhalation in the evening and no man saw him more, why not another? “And
when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, never to hope again.”
The victory left Arouet strangely pensive.
D’Arnaud had not only wrought mischief, it appears, but left a train of
it behind him. His patron, Prince Henry, had long desired a copy of that
firebrand, that stormy petrel, the “Pucelle.” Just before his dismissal,
the obliging d’Arnaud had helped the Prince to corrupt Voltaire’s
secretary, Tinois; and paid him to copy some cantos of the poem for the
Prince, by night. Tinois was a young man whom Voltaire had taken into
his service when he was at Rheims in October, 1749, for no better reason
than that he had written rather a pretty verse after reading “Rome
Sauvée.” On January 3, 1751, Voltaire wrote to Madame Denis that he had
dismissed Tinois, and that Prince Henry had sworn to keep the “Pucelle”
secret and safe. But if “put not your trust in princes” had long been
the burden of Madame du Châtelet’s and of his niece’s warnings, it had
sunk into Voltaire’s soul now. He was not at ease.
The successor of the faithless Tinois gave him further trouble.
The new secretary’s name was Richier. He had a friend called Lessing
who was to be the great German writer, but who was now obscure, poor,
and unknown, two-and-twenty years of age, and trying to make a
livelihood in Berlin by copying and translating. Richier introduced him
to the great Voltaire; and the good-natured Voltaire gave Lessing work
and became very much his friend. Then the foolish Richier lends Lessing
a volume of Voltaire’s “Century of Louis XIV.”--the work and pride of so
many years--and now almost ready for the press. Lessing leaves
Berlin--with the volume. Considering the fact that the upright character
of Lessing was not then a notorious thing, it is not wonderful that
Voltaire was alarmed. Suppose Lessing should publish the volume on his
own account, and in its imperfect state! Voltaire wrote Lessing a very
courteous letter asking for its return. And Lessing sent back the
manuscript with some very ill-timed jokes. Lessing, it must be
remembered, was nobody, and young; and Voltaire was past middle life and
the most famous literary man of his period. The offender never forgave
Voltaire for having suspected that he would make dishonourable use of
his manuscript. But, after all, Voltaire seems to have been more sinned
against than sinning.
There were, too, going on at the same time various mean domestic
disagreeables--literally storms in teacups. Formey, writer of memoirs,
but not always of reliable memoirs, records how Voltaire complained to
the King of the bad sugar, coffee, tea, and chocolate served to him; how
the King apologised, and altered nothing; and how angry the great
Voltaire demeaned himself to be over these trifles. Did he remember that
he had written hotly to Alliot, King Stanislas’s chamberlain at
Lunéville, in 1749, just before the death of Madame du Châtelet, on a
like subject? “I can assure you at Berlin I am not obliged to beg for
bread, wine, and candles.” And now! The truth is best summed up by the
most thorough and minute of all Voltaire’s biographers, Desnoiresterres.
“He used, and thought he was entitled to use largely, a hospitality
which he had only accepted after many invitations and prayers.” He asked
his friends to dine with him on “the King’s roast” without any fear of
exceeding his rights as a guest. Formey adds that he appropriated the
candle-ends which were the servants’ perquisites; and records that,
through meanness, when the Court was in mourning he appeared in a
borrowed black suit and returned it to its portly owner, cut to the
dimensions of the lean Voltairian figure. The story seems to be that lie
which is part of the truth. True or false, it is not worth examination.
No doubtful anecdotes are needed to prove that Voltaire was the
sensitive philosopher whose delicate body made him singularly
unphilosophic in trifles; or that in money affairs he was at once
exceedingly generous and prudently thrifty.
But he had to do now with a money affair in which his prudence, alas!
was only conspicuous by its absence.
In November of 1750 had begun his too-famous affair with Hirsch, Jew
usurer of Berlin.
He had been first brought into relations with the shifty Israelite on
November 9th. On the day following he played “Cicero” in his “Rome
Sauvée”--a blaze of jewels, borrowed from the Hirsch father and son. On
November 23d he received Hirsch _fils_ (Hirsch _fils_ transacted all the
business, Hirsch _père_ being well stricken in years) in his room at
Potsdam quite close to the unconscious Frederick; and there, forsooth,
M. de Voltaire, with the aid of M. Hirsch, plans to do on the quiet a
little illegal stock-jobbing. Several years before, the Elector of
Saxony had established a bank in Dresden. It issued such an immense
number of notes that “the currency of Saxony was inflated: for a time a
note of one hundred thalers was worth but fifty.” Frederick, when the
Silesian war made him master of Dresden, stipulated that _Prussian_
subjects holding these notes should be paid in full. This went on for
three years; but in 1748, Frederick, yielding to the remonstrances of
the Elector, forbade his subjects to purchase these notes or to bring
them into the Prussian kingdom at all. Such notes it was, which on this
fatal November 23, 1750, a cunning M. de Voltaire commissioned Hirsch to
purchase, and then to sell again in Saxony, receiving of course their
full nominal value. To effect this purchase, Voltaire gave Hirsch
negotiable bills worth 2,500_l._
One of these bills was a draft on Voltaire’s Paris banker for 1,600_l._,
“not payable for some weeks.” Bill two was a draft for 650_l._ by old
father Hirsch--or Hirschell, as Voltaire called him--on Voltaire
himself. In exchange for these two bills, Voltaire held the borrowed
jewels.
There is nothing more remarkable about Voltaire, considered in his
character of a literary man, than the fact that he was always
speculating, and except on this occasion, hardly ever unsuccessfully.
But a Court is no place for a secret. By November 29th some rumour of
his guest’s little affair had reached Frederick. On December 1st that
procrastinating Hirsch had not even started on his journey to Dresden.
Hirsch is pretty cool about the whole business, it appears, and not
inclined to hurry himself. Voltaire’s dancing, agitated impatience spurs
him off at last. From December 1st to 12th he is in Dresden--delaying,
making excuses and cashing never a Saxon note. (All he _did_ do was to
raise money on the Paris draft for 1,600_l._ Voltaire had given him, and
trade on his own account.) Voltaire entirely loses his temper, stops the
payment of that draft on his Paris banker, and summons Hirsch home at
once. He comes. Still pretty cool is M. Hirsch. Rather injured, if
anything, in fact. It is not pleasant, M. de Voltaire, “to have sold a
bill of exchange which the drawer protested;” and that is what happened
to me about that Paris draft of yours! I have the paper now--entirely
worthless of course. But M. Hirsch takes care to keep it very securely
all the same. For a Hirsch to have such a document signed Arouet de
Voltaire may be rather an awkward thing for the King’s visitor; and so,
a profitable one for a Hirsch, as giving him a hold over his client. He
has, or fancies he has, the whip hand of M. de Voltaire, who cannot make
himself very disagreeable, thinks Hirsch, since the whole affair is
illegal and under the rose.
On December 16th, Voltaire, come to Berlin with King and Court for the
Christmas carnival, receives Hirsch. The two draw up a document, “a
complete settlement.” Hirsch gives back Voltaire his unused drafts “and
expressly engages to return the bill upon Paris.” Voltaire, in exchange,
is to buy
[Illustration: MOREAU DE MAUPERTUIS
_From an Engraving after a Painting by Tourmere_]
some of the Hirsch jewels he holds, and to give Hirsch the expenses of
his journey and “compensation” for his time and trouble. The dangerous
affair is at an end. M. de Voltaire supposes he has done with it for
ever. He and Hirsch part satisfied. Then Hirsch discovers that Voltaire
considers 9_l._ compensation sufficient. The Jew does not. Voltaire
consults another money-lender, Ephraim, the enemy of the house of
Hirsch, who tells him the jewels he holds are not worth what Hirsch said
they were. “Then you must have changed them,” says Hirsch. That is the
declaration of war.
Until the Christmas Day of that 1750, daily stormy meetings between
Hirsch and Voltaire took place in Voltaire’s room in the palace.
Voltaire was convinced the Jew meant to extract money from him by means
of the Paris bill: and return that bill Hirsch would not. No one who
remembers the character of a youthful and middle-aged Arouet will be in
the least surprised to hear that an Arouet of fifty-six chased the Jew
round the room at last, shook his fist in his face, pushed him out of
the door in a rage, and banged it after him like a passionate child.
The “final total explosion” took place at a meeting at “brave Major
Chasot’s” lodging when the _vif_ infuriated Voltaire sprang at Hirsch’s
throat and sent him sprawling.
The affair had been noised abroad. If Hirsch still thought--and he did
still think--that it would be so singularly unpleasant and impolitic for
Voltaire to have the transaction made public and that he would submit to
any indignity rather than to that catastrophe, he had mistaken his man.
He had reckoned without the marvellous imprudence, mettle, and vivacity
of the enemy of Rohan and Desfontaines and Boyer. Here was he who never
made a compromise, and in his whole life never once bought peace by
submitting to be cheated.
The fuse had been put to the gunpowder: and on December 30th came a
shock which startled Europe.
The great Voltaire, the guest of the King of Prussia, _versus_ Messrs.
Hirsch & Son, Jew money-lenders of Berlin! Here was a _cause célèbre_
with a vengeance!
Voltaire was quite as active and excited as he had been in the affair
Desfontaines. He engaged the best counsel he could get. On January 1,
1751, he obtained a warrant to throw old Hirsch into prison for wrongly
detaining papers belonging to M. de Voltaire. Hirsch was released
therefrom in a few days on bail--and the lawsuit began.
To unravel the truth from that complex tissue of lies has been the
effort of all Frederick’s and of all Voltaire’s biographers. None have
wholly succeeded. The case is infinitely intricate. The Hirsches lied
very freely, and were inartistic enough not always to adhere to the same
lie. It has been seen that though Voltaire preferred truth and honesty
(which is already something) _he_ was not above lying--when there was
necessity. _His_ case, in brief, was, “I _lent_ Hirsch money to help his
business at Dresden in fur and jewels.” (This was the pretext on which
the Jew had undertaken the journey.) “Some diamonds I took from him in
part payment are not worth what he said they were; and he illegally
retains my draft on my Paris banker, and has not kept to the agreement
he signed.”
Hirsch’s case was, “M. de Voltaire _sent_ me to Dresden to deal in Saxon
notes for him. The diamonds I gave him _were_ worth what I said. He has
changed them for diamonds of less value. The agreement he produces,
signed by me, was altered by him, to his advantage, after I had signed
it.”
Documents were produced on both sides. That famous paper of agreement
which Hirsch had signed and of which he now accused Voltaire of altering
the wording, after he, Hirsch, had signed it, has been reproduced in
facsimile.
It proves nothing. The document _has_ been palpably altered. But who is
to say if those illiterate and careless alterations were made before, or
after, Hirsch had signed it? If after, then Voltaire was the most
blundering and ignorant of forgers. But those early chafing months in a
notary’s office must have given a shrewd head such as his a knowledge of
law and legal documents which would have made him a better swindler than
this forgery proves him. Voltaire’s cleverness, not his virtue,
exonerates him from that crime.
The man’s mind was on the rack while the case lasted. His fury against
the Hirsches blinded him to the folly and indignity of having been drawn
into such a suit at all. “I was piqued. I was mad to prove I had been
cheated,” he wrote penitently afterwards. Wretched old Hirsch died
during the progress of the trial--of a broken heart, said his son
pathetically. King Frederick preserved a very ominous silence indeed.
His guest’s health was miserable. He had a fever--of the soul--and
Berlin and Paris were watching, as at a play.
On February 18, 1751, the case was decided in favour of Voltaire. Hirsch
was condemned on every count with which Voltaire had charged him. The
purpose for which Voltaire had advanced the money was not, said the
court shrewdly, the court’s business. But all the waiting and watching
world knew what that purpose had been, and so did the waiting and
watching Frederick. Hirsch was to restore the Paris exchange bill. The
diamonds were to be valued “by experienced jewellers on their oaths.”
Voltaire’s seizure of the person of Hirsch was declared just and right.
As to the famous agreement, Hirsch was fined ten thalers for denying he
had signed it; and Voltaire was to make an affidavit that he had not
changed its wording.
It is said that he asked upon what book he was to take his oath, and
when he was answered, “The Bible,” cried, “What, on that book written in
such bad Latin! Now if it were only Homer or Virgil!” If the story is
true, it was but a flash of the old mocking spirit. Voltaire was in no
mood for jesting. He had won, it is true. But his victory was a sorry
one.
It was such a sorry one that the unlucky victor had perforce to go about
congratulating himself loudly thereon, if only to make other people
congratulate him too. Even now, the settlement was not complete.
The jewels had to be valued. That would take time. Voltaire was worn
body and soul by a case which had kept him at a fever heat of passion
from December 1, 1750, until this February 18, 1751. And in a deadly
silence the King sat aloof in a rage. Voltaire’s friends implored him to
end an affair which had been degrading to everyone concerned in it. And
at last he did come to some sort of compromise with the determined
Hirsch. A few minor points appear to have been still undecided as late
as the December of 1751.
Throughout a whole three months Frederick had uttered never a word.
His attitude towards this case was at once natural and justifiable. It
was a poor, mean, despicable business at the best. Kingly hands, of all
hands in the world, if they touch pitch are defiled therewith. Frederick
shut ears and eyes to the shriekings and the cheatings of this pair of
low money-lenders--and his guest. At first, indeed, his fury with that
guest had got the better of him. On January 12, 1751, the King of France
announced at his _levée_ that the King of Prussia had dismissed
Voltaire. Angry Frederick _had_ turned to Darget, saying, “Write and
tell him that he is to be out of my dominions in four-and-twenty hours.”
Well for Voltaire that he had cultivated the friendship of the discreet
secretary! Darget pleaded for him. “Wait till the case is tried, Sire!
If he is guilty, then will be time enough to send him away.” Frederick
agreed; but during January and February they never met. Voltaire was for
the most part in Berlin, and the King at Potsdam, but sometimes they
were in the same palace divided by a few planks of wood--and the Jew
lawsuit.
The versatility of Voltaire had hardly ever been better exemplified than
by the fact that during this very December and January when rage and
anxiety were tearing him to pieces, and he was breathlessly waiting the
judgment of his case, he was play-acting with the princesses in Berlin
exactly as if nothing were happening, and as if he were in full favour
with the King. On January 5th, “Zaire” was acted and Voltaire played
Lusignan as he had done in happier days at Madame de Fontaine Martel’s:
the Princess Amelia was Zaire; the Princes Henry and Frederick also took
parts; and the Queen was enchanted. “The Death of Cæsar” was also acted,
and other plays. Throughout the winter too Voltaire gave audiences to
great persons; and received marshals, princes, statesmen, and nobles.
Yet, through it all, the man was appealing passionately to the King by
Darget. “Throw yourself at the King’s feet and obtain for me that I may
retire to the Marquisat” (a country house near Potsdam). “My soul is
dead and my body dying.”
When he was not drawing tears from the spectators in that moving part of
the old father, tears of rage and bitterness were very near his own
eyes. “It is not sufficient to be courageous,” he said himself; “one
must have distractions.” He had need of them if any man had.
On January 22d, the King summed up the case to the Margravine of
Bayreuth as “the affair of a rascal who is trying to cheat a sharper....
The suit is in the hands of justice, and in a few days we shall know who
is the greater scoundrel of the two.” On January 30th, Voltaire himself
wrote to the Margravine with a very wry face: “Brother Voltaire is here
in disgrace. He has had a dog of lawsuit with a Jew, and, according to
the law of the Old Testament, he will have to pay dearly for having been
robbed.”
Then Voltaire wrote direct to the King and pleaded and argued with him
personally. Only receive me into favour and I will anger you no more!
And on February 2d Frederick wrote again to the Margravine, softened not
at all; and _she_ wrote on February 18th to her friend Voltaire: “Apollo
at law with a Jew! Fie then! that’s abominable.” Then Voltaire appealed
again to Frederick. “All the genius of our modern Solomon could not make
me feel my fault more than my heart feels it.”
Finally Solomon _did_ give Apollo that Marquisat he had asked for; and
Voltaire’s “quarrel with the Old Testament,” as he called it, being
settled, the King wrote to him icily on February 24th from Potsdam:
“D’Arnaud had done nothing. It was because of you he had to go.... You
have had the most detestable affair in the world with a Jew. It has made
a frightful scandal.... If you can make up your mind to live like a
philosopher I shall be glad to see you.” If not ... “you may as well
stay in Berlin.”
On February 27th, Voltaire replied, volubly explaining, regretting,
apologising. He owned himself in the wrong with a candour and humility
rather engaging.
“I have committed a great fault. I ask pardon of your Majesty’s
philosophy and goodness.... Do with me what you will.” His health was
suffering dreadfully at the time. “The winter kills me”--especially the
winter of our discontent. Even hard work at “Louis XIV.” could not make
him forget that. He pleaded very hard indeed.
On February 28th, Frederick accorded a cold permission to him to come to
Potsdam if he would.
By March 11th he was established at the Marquisat with, as he said,
“pills and pill-boxes” and the fifth canto of a poem by King Frederick
entitled “The Art of War.”
The King no doubt had missed Voltaire’s conversation. He had missed too
his brilliant, delightful, inconsequent, unreliable personality. The old
subtle charm drew the two men together--in spite of themselves, and the
imprudence of their connection. They were sure to quarrel! But, like
many a lover and his mistress, they were dying to see each other, if it
were only to discover fresh reasons for disagreement. “I have committed
a folly,” wrote Voltaire to Madame Denis, “but I am not a fool.” He was
something so infinitely removed from a fool that his living touch of
genius alone could raise, if anything could raise, Frederick’s poems
from a dead mediocrity and the dreadful limbo of dulness. “To the
Prussians” and “The Art of War” were very important factors in the
Treaty of Peace.
Very early in his stay in Prussia the indefatigable Voltaire had begun
learning a little of the despised German language--of which, says
Morley, he never knew more “than was needed to curse a postilion.” To
correct the King’s works, he needed none. By October 28, 1750, he was
busy overseeing the second edition of Frederick’s history of his
country, written in French and entitled “Memoirs of the House of
Brandenburg,” and trying to modify the royal author’s round abuse of his
own grandfather. But Frederick only loved truth the better if it burnt.
“After all,” said Voltaire with a shrug of his lean shoulders, “he is
your grandfather, not mine; do as you like with him.”
The critic was not generally so accommodating, however. He was not a
critic _pour rire_. He gave himself an enormous amount of work. He ran
a thousand risks of offending his royal pupil. He cavilled at this,
queried that, suggested endlessly. The manuscript of “Aux Prussiens” is
still extant, with remarks in Voltaire’s little handwriting all over it.
His minuteness and care were extraordinary. It would have been at least
a hundred times easier for him to have praised lavishly and
indifferently. Any author will accept flattery--on trust. It is only for
blame and disagreement that the critic must give clear reason and proof;
and chapter and verse for his alterations and amendments. If Voltaire
had been a toady and had not loved his art better than all monarchs, he
would have wasted much less of his dearly prized time in “rounding off a
little the works of the King of Prussia.” His “official fidelity,
frankness, and rigorous strictness” are a high testimony to his
character. “The Art of War” is a much more ambitious work than “To the
Prussians” and was subjected to the same relentless criticism. The eager
critic wanted, he said, to enable his royal master to do without his
help. Sometimes Frederick would leave a wrong word purposely. “We must
give him the pleasure of finding some fault,” he wrote to Darget. But on
the whole he accepted not only verbal emendations, but alterations of
his very opinions with a generosity and fairness which prove the true
royalty of the royal soul. This quick, thorough, breathless, aggravating
schoolmaster would be satisfied with nothing less than his pupil’s best.
If a man could be made a great writer without being born one, Frederick
the Great’s literary efforts would not be mouldering in the libraries
to-day.
The reconciliation between the teacher and the taught seems for a while
to have been complete. The worry of the Hirsch affair had made Voltaire
really ill. But Frederick was all goodness to the sufferer. He had a
room kept for his use at Sans-Souci. Formey records how one day he went
to the Marquisat to call upon Voltaire and found him in bed. “What is
the matter with you?” “Four mortal diseases,” answers the invalid. “Your
eyes look nice and bright though,” says the ill-advised Formey, meaning
consolation. “And don’t you know,” shouts the sick man with all his
strength, “that in scurvy people _die_ with their eyes inflamed?” It
must be conceded that though Voltaire never allowed his ailments to stop
his work, he liked to have full credit for them, and took care never to
be ill without impressing upon his friends that he was dying. All the
same, he began to attend those gay, frugal, philosophical little suppers
once more--and was once more permitted to dispense with the ponderous
dinners. Yet once more too, except for that ill-health, the life here
was all he dreamed it. Frederick wrote him little friendly notes--“I
have just given birth to six twins.... The ‘Henriade’ is engaged to be
their godmother. Come to the father’s room at six o’clock this
evening”--the six twins being six cantos of “The Art of War.” And
Voltaire would answer, “Sire, you have the cramp, and so have I; you
love solitude, and so do I.” The pair were again as lovers, in fact;
writing nothings, only for the sake of writing something. The winter was
past, and the summer blossoming again.
The trip to Italy, postponed from the autumn of 1750, had been arranged
to take place in this May of 1751, but was finally abandoned altogether;
partly on account of the Inquisition, but partly also, it may be
surmised, because Frederick having found Voltaire again, was in no mind
to lose him.
Through the summer host and guest were hard at work with their
respective secretaries. Both knew at least one of the receipts for
happiness. Prussia _was_ heaven. Only--only--there was a delightful
earth called Paris where d’Argental was doing his vigorous best to get
the authorities to permit the performance of “Mahomet”--an earth from
which he wrote on August 6th of this 1751, one last, long, pleading
appeal to Voltaire to return, while he could yet return, with honour.
Madame Denis, resolved not to join her uncle in Prussia, added her
entreaties. The foolish woman, who had a _tendresse_ for handsome young
Baculard d’Arnaud in the days when he was her uncle’s _protégé_ in
Paris, was now coquetting with a certain Marquis de Ximenès, or
Chimenès, as Voltaire called him, and less minded than ever to leave the
capital.
The wild La Mettrie, too, was for ever calling on Voltaire--volubly
homesick for Paris himself. Voltaire would have gone, perhaps; but in
August his “Louis XIV.” was actually in the press of Berlin, he had a
hundred prospective engagements, and--he thought Frederick was his
friend.
It was at the end of this same month of August that La Mettrie, calling
on Voltaire, swore to him that he had heard Frederick say of him: “I
shall want him at the most another year: one squeezes the orange and
throws away the rind.” Voltaire would not believe the story. La Mettrie
redoubled his oaths. Voltaire wrote the scene to Madame Denis on
September 2d in his quick, vivid fashion. “Do you believe it? Ought I to
believe it ... after sixteen years of goodness ... when I am sacrificing
all for him?... I shall be justly condemned for having yielded to so
many caresses.... What shall I do? Ignore what La Mettrie has told me,
tell nobody but you, forget it, wait?” If Voltaire thought he really
could do these things, he could have known little of his own character.
He did try to forget. But that rind of an orange! It rankled, it
rankled. _Could_ Frederick have said it? Impossible! But he had written
the “Anti-Machiavelli” and spilled blood in war like water; condoled
piously with Darget and made an epigram on his wife; caressed d’Arnaud
and ruined him. It made one thoughtful.
On September 30th “Mahomet” was successfully performed in Paris. That
was another voice urging Voltaire to return.
“The orange rind haunts my dreams,” he wrote to Madame Denis again, on
October 29th. “I try not to believe it.... We go to sup with the King
and are gay enough sometimes. The man who fell from the top of a steeple
and finding the falling through the air soft, said, ‘Good, provided it
lasts,’ is not a little as I am.”
On November 11th, the tale-bearer, La Mettrie, died from having consumed
a whole _pâté_ (composed of eagle and pheasant, lard, pork and ginger!)
at Lord Tyrconnel’s house. He would make mischief no more. But, then, he
could not undo the mischief he had made. “I should like to have asked La
Mettrie when he was dying,” Voltaire wrote sombrely to Madame Denis on
Christmas Eve, “about that rind of an orange. That good soul, about to
appear before God, would not have dared to lie. There is a great
appearance that he spoke the truth.... The King told me yesterday ...
that he would give me a province to have me near him. _That_ does not
look like the rind of an orange.”
Between doubting and hoping, mistrusting, fearing he knew not what, in
health always wretched (“my distempers ... make me utterly unfit for
kings”), homesick, uneasy, longing at once to go away and to be
persuaded to stay, Voltaire spent his second winter--in heaven. Hirsch
had made the first something very like pandemonium. But there was life,
interest, excitement in a fight. The dull anxiety, the ugly care to wake
up to in the dead nights and the dark mornings--these were worse a
thousand times. Well for Voltaire that now, even more than ever, he had
to comfort him that best relief from all the fears, doubts, problems,
and presentiments of life--hard work.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE QUARREL WITH MAUPERTUIS
In December, 1751, there appeared in Berlin, in two volumes octavo and
anonymously, “The Century of Louis XIV.” by Voltaire.
The earliest idea of it was conceived by a wild Arouet of twenty
listening to personal recollections of the Sun King from the old Marquis
de Saint-Ange at Fontainebleau.
Arouet had heard with his own ears the strange tales told in Paris at
that monarch’s death. In 1719, when he was five-and-twenty and falling
in brief love with the exquisite Maréchale de Villars, her husband
recounted him more anecdotes of that magnificent and miserable age. To
write it had been a relief from Émilie’s shrewish tongue and
inconvenient emotions, at Cirey. It was Voltaire’s “chief employment” in
that first lonely summer there, before she joined him. He worked hard at
it in Brussels. He found in it consolation for his mistress’s
infidelity: and for her death. It involved him in an enormous amount of
reading, and unparalleled labours in research. Since he came to Prussia,
he hardly wrote a letter without alluding to it. He found in it balm for
the wounds inflicted by a d’Arnaud, a Hirsch, and a king. As it drew
nearer completion, his interest and excitement in it deepened daily. “I
am absorbed in Louis XIV.” “I shall be the Historiographer of France in
spite of envy.” Before the author had finished reading the proofs, a
pirated edition of his work appeared in Holland and elsewhere. There was
the usual scramble among the publishers for the profits. Voltaire
appealed to Frederick; and wrote to Falkener, in English, trying,
through him, to get a correct edition circulated in England. His
efforts were astonishingly fruitless. An author had then not only no
right to the moneys his brain had earned, but was not even allowed the
privilege of correcting the work of that brain: and the more famous the
author the worse his chances in both respects. No anonymity could
conceal a Voltaire.
Boyer prohibited “The Century of Louis XIV.” in France, and its
circulation in that country was enormous. The first authorised edition
printed in Berlin was sold out in a few days. Eight new editions
appeared in eight months. In those times, when to be educated was a rich
man’s privilege and not a pauper’s right, such a success was unique.
That it was deserved is proved by the fact that this is still the most
famous history of that reign.
Voltaire had written it, as he always wrote, as a free man. But this
time he had written, as he did not always write, as a free man who has
no desire to offend the prejudices of the slave-dealers. He himself
loved the glitter of that Golden Age: its burning and shining lights of
literary genius, and the glory it gave to France. So far as he could be
true and tactful, he was tactful. He did not run amok at abuses with
that “strident laugh” which has been said to fill the eighteenth
century, as he had run amok at them in that “Voice of the Sage and the
People”--and in a hundred of his writings a thousand times before. When
he wrote the latter part of the book in Prussia, it was in his mind
always that he might some day--one day--soon--who could tell?--be not
sorry to come back to France. If he could still tell the truth and not
offend the authorities! If any man could have done it, that man was
Voltaire. There is no writer in the world who so well knows, if he
chooses, how to put blame as if it were praise, to turn censure into a
dainty compliment, and to trick out harsh realities in a charming dress.
But now, as too often before, his reputation damned him in advance.
Besides, did he not give the place of, and the witnesses to, that secret
marriage of Louis XIV. and Madame de Maintenon? How imprudent! Some
patriots “raised a noble clamour” against him for having praised
Marlborough and Eugene, and a great party of churchmen condemned him
for having gently laughed at Jansenism and Molinism.
The book was full of reason; that in itself was enough. “My book is
prohibited among my dear countrymen,” wrote Voltaire to Falkener on
January 27, 1752, “because I have spoken the truth.” And again, to
President Hénault, “I have tried to raise a monument to truth and my
country, and I hope they will not take the stones of the edifice to
stone me.” The style, too, of the book, that style which has kept it
alive, fresh, and vigorous for a hundred and fifty years, made it
offensive in the nostrils of the solemn and approved historians of the
period who held that an author cannot be learned without being dull, and
if he is readable can be by no means worth reading. “Louis XIV.” is a
bright example of Voltaire’s own aphorism, “A serious book should not be
too seriously written.” Though he had spent years of his life, and
endless trouble and activity in gathering his information, he wrote with
the same spontaneous life and vigour as he wrote the _contes_ he read to
the Duchesse du Maine and her gay court; with not less inspiration than
he flung on to paper in the morning the “Henriade” he had dreamt at
night on his prison bed in the Bastille. In a word, “I tried to move my
readers, even in history.” His own countrymen now understand him better;
but it is to be feared many of his foreign students still suspect the
fidelity of his facts because he puts them so gracefully, and fear that
a sense of humour and a sparkling style are incompatible with sound
judgment and deep learning, and that if an historian is really clever he
must prove it by being excessively dull.
The success of the book must have exceeded its author’s eager hopes. It
delighted England. D’Alembert, in his lodging over the glazier’s shop,
and all the nobility of intellect in Paris, rejoiced in it. What matter
if the Court frowned? Pirated editions appeared in Edinburgh, as well as
London, Prussia, and Holland. The publishers were scrambling wildly for
the proceeds. The author did at last get something--and shrugged his
shoulders and was not ill-satisfied. After all, he had a better success
than a monetary one. Lord Chesterfield called the book “the history of
the human mind written by a man of genius.” Condorcet spoke of it as
“the only readable history of the age.” Renault declared its author “le
plus bel esprit” of the century. “Louis XIV.” excites men’s curiosity at
every page. If the author had been deprived of the Historiographership
of France, he _was_ the Historiographer not the less.
“Louis XIV.,” and correcting Frederick’s works, were not all of
Voltaire’s literary work in Prussia. He was always composing
_bagatelles_ and compliments for the two Queens and the Princesses. He
wrote Frederick--in the room next to him--gay verses as well as many
letters: and was also busy with his famous philosophical poem called
“Natural Law,” not published till 1756. He began here his great
“Philosophical Dictionary”; and was further fanning the flame, by
innumerable suggestions, of that light-bringer of the eighteenth
century, that torch in a darkness which could be felt, the
“Encyclopædia” of Diderot and d’Alembert. Its preface appeared in 1750
and its first volume in 1751. Voltaire called it “the dictionary of the
universe”--“the bureau of human learning,” and should have found in its
splendid audacity--a quality so dear to his soul--an antidote for many
afflictions. Perhaps he did. It was never because he had idle hands that
Satan found them mischief still to do. But he was homesick. He was in
that pitiable state of body which makes the mind irritable and
despondent. Paris had been stormy enough. But here one lived always over
a volcano. That orange rind rankled still. If one royal hand caressed,
there was the other that might scratch at any moment. The never-sleeping
anxiety affected Voltaire’s _vif_ temper, just as anxiety affects the
temper of lesser persons. He was in a mood when he was sure to be
offended by someone. This time the person was Maupertuis.
Born in 1698, in Saint-Malo, Maupertuis was four years younger than
Voltaire, and in his precocious intelligence, ardent imagination, and
unquenchable thirst for knowledge, not unlike him. But there the
likeness stopped. Maupertuis studied in Paris, and then became that rare
anomaly, a _savant-_soldier. He was also elected a member of the
Academy of Sciences; and in 1728 spent six months in England, where he
was made a member of the Royal Society and imbibed Newtonian opinions.
In 1740, after an Arctic expedition which roused much public interest,
he was made by Frederick President of the Berlin Academy, that he might
form it “as you alone can form it.” Maupertuis married one of the
Queen-Mother’s maids of honour, and lived in a fine house in Berlin
close to the Royal Park, which his zoological tastes led him to turn
into a kind of menagerie. Precise, pompous, and positive; boring society
with his worrying exactness upon trifles even more than society bored
him; inordinately vain, and with a sensitive temper made yet more
inflammable by brandy and self-love; acutely conscious of his dignity,
and without any sense of humour, the ex-tutor of Madame du Châtelet was
the sort of person with whom, sooner or later, her lover was sure to
disagree. Added to these facts, Voltaire’s pension from King Frederick
exceeded that of Maupertuis by two thousand crowns; and while Maupertuis
was socially dull, at the King’s suppers Voltaire’s conversation was
even more brilliant than his writings.
On October 28, 1750, the naturalist Buffon had written to a friend,
“Between ourselves, Voltaire and Maupertuis are not made to live in the
same room.”
The first tiff between the uncongenial pair took place, in point of
fact, in that very October of 1750, the autumn after Voltaire’s arrival
in Prussia. There was a vacant chair in the Berlin Academy. Maupertuis
wished it given to d’Argens--Voltaire, further seeing, to that Raynal,
already his friend, afterwards the famous philosopher and historian.
Voltaire won, with the help of Frederick; and Maupertuis was left surly
and jealous. In the Hirsch affair Voltaire asked his help, and
Maupertuis refused it. Maupertuis read “Louis XIV.” and compared it to
“the gambols of a child”--heavy Maupertuis who could not have gambolled
to save his soul.
Then, at the end of the year 1751, a certain book entitled “Mes
Pensées,” by a young French adventurer called La Beaumelle, made some
little stir in Berlin. The “Thoughts” were desultory, unequal, and very
ill put together. D’Argenson wrote of the book that half of it was
excellent, a quarter mediocre, and the other quarter bad. From the
excellent part he quoted a shrewd axiom--“Happy the State where the king
has no mistress, provided that he also has no confessor!” Two Berlin
readers, at the least, included in the bad quarter this extraordinary
sentence: “There have been greater poets than Voltaire, but never one so
well paid.... The King of Prussia overwhelms men of letters with
kindness for precisely the same reasons that a little German prince
overwhelms with kindness a jester or a buffoon.” The passage was the
joke of one of the royal suppers. But if Frederick and Voltaire laughed
at it, it was not the less a joke that left a taste in the mouth. Then
up comes La Beaumelle to Berlin. On November 1, 1751, he calls on the
great Voltaire; and Voltaire, though he asks him to dinner and wastes on
him four hours of his time, treats him with a civil chilliness which
surprises La Beaumelle, who appears to have no idea that Voltaire has
seen those “Pensées”; and attributes his cold manner to an indigestion.
La Beaumelle is much with Lord Tyrconnel, seeks to gain the good graces
of Darget, perhaps even to sup with the King. He has owned to an
admiration for Maupertuis. Voltaire bethinks himself presently of a
little ruse to rid his path of this bramble. “Will you lend me your
‘Thoughts,’ M. Beaumelle?” Beaumelle lends the book; and after three
days Voltaire returns it with the page containing the offensive remark
upon himself and the King turned down.
But La Beaumelle did not take the hint.
On December 7, 1751, the King and Voltaire arrived in Berlin from
Potsdam, and foolish La Beaumelle went again to see Voltaire. He
attempted to explain away that remarkable sentence. But it was hardly
capable of a favourable interpretation. Voltaire, on La Beaumelle’s own
showing, behaved with self-control and dignity.
“Who showed the passage to the King?” says La Beaumelle.
“Darget,” answers Voltaire.
So La Beaumelle goes to Darget. “You had better leave Berlin,” the
prudent secretary advises. Then La Beaumelle seeks, and finds, better
consolation in Maupertuis. “Voltaire gave the passage an offensive
interpretation,” says the President. “Send the King a copy of your
book.” But though La Beaumelle not only did this but addressed petitions
to the King, he received no answer and was not invited to the suppers.
In a sentimental affair of La Beaumelle’s, which was the next scene in
his adventures, Voltaire took his enemy’s part good-naturedly enough,
and did his best to get Beaumelle out of the prison into which an
injured husband had thrown him. He had some reason for wishing to
conciliate the foolish young man. La Beaumelle had in his possession
autograph letters of Madame de Maintenon which would have been of
infinite value to the author of “The Century of Louis XIV.” At their
first interview Voltaire had asked to look at them; and La Beaumelle had
made excuses. The persevering Voltaire tried again and again to attain
his aim; and at last after a furious interview, the two parted for ever,
La Beaumelle crying bitterly that his hatred would long outlive
Voltaire’s verses. Voltaire had not obtained the de Maintenon letters;
and La Beaumelle, after leaving Berlin in May, 1752, revenged himself on
his enemy by bringing out a pirated edition of “Louis XIV.” which
positively ran parallel to Voltaire’s own, and to which La Beaumelle
added “Remarks” offensive to the author and dealing also, with a
dangerous freedom, with the Royal Family of France.
To be sure, Voltaire was fair game; but the House of Bourbon!
In a very little while M. La Beaumelle was expiating his imprudence in
prison.
Throughout the affair Voltaire seems only to have taken offence, and the
audacious Beaumelle to have given it. He was nothing after all. He might
rot in the Bastille and be forgotten. He had no significance, except
that Maupertuis defended him.
In the spring of 1752, while the affair of the “Pensées” was amusing
Berlin, events of importance to Voltaire had occurred both in Paris and
in the King’s _entourage_ in Berlin.
On February 24th, “Rome Sauvée,” much altered and improved by its
author, was successfully performed in Paris through the exertions of
d’Argental and Madame Denis. The niece, not content with superintending
Uncle Voltaire’s plays, had written one herself called “The Punished
Coquette.” Voltaire was in agonies for fear the thing should be a
failure; but his feelings were spared and it was not performed.
On March 2d, Lord Tyrconnel died in Berlin, and on March 4th Darget left
the King’s service; nominally, and perhaps in part really, for his
health’s sake. But he was glad to go, and he came back no more. Voltaire
lost in him a very faithful friend. “I ought to go too,” he wrote
thoughtfully.
Then Longchamp had been triumphantly discovered by Madame Denis
committing the unpardonable sin of copying his master’s manuscripts with
two accomplices who had been servants in the employ of Madame du
Châtelet. Madame Denis abused him for her own satisfaction, and exposed
him for his master’s.
Was it only because Longchamp knew too much and had in his possession
dangerous writings which were more likely to be coaxed than to be
scolded out of him, that his master wrote to him very gently and offered
pardon in return for the truth? The goodness and generosity which made
all his servants love him must have had some foundation in fact. On
March 30th of this 1752, Longchamp replied penitently and burnt the
copies he had made. Voltaire gave him a handsome sum of money over and
above the wages due to him, and Longchamp became a map and chart dealer.
Twenty-six years later he came to see his old master, when he was on his
last visit to Paris.
But the danger that Longchamp’s perfidy had threatened had been no light
one to the man who had already begun to look on that very sensitive and
touchy French capital as a possible refuge, and was soon to find Prussia
too hot to hold him.
Before the end of the year 1751 Frederick had begun to intercept and
keep copies of Voltaire’s and Madame Denis’s letters. Voltaire wrote
bitterly that the Golden Key tore his pocket, that the ribbon of the
Order was a halter round his neck, that nothing in Prussia gave him a
grain of happiness. “I have lost my teeth and my five senses,” he wrote
on February 6, 1752, “and the sixth is leaving me at a gallop. I doubt
if even ‘Rome Sauvée’ will save _me_.” He was sick now with such a
homesickness as only a Frenchman knows. All these things, taken
together, doubled his natural imprudence.
Before La Beaumelle left Berlin in May had begun a quarrel, into which
Voltaire was to plunge headlong, between Maupertuis and the
mathematician Koenig, who had stayed and worked for two years with
Madame du Châtelet at Cirey.
Koenig was a member of the Berlin Academy and a strong partisan of
Leibnitz, as Voltaire and Maupertuis were of Newton; but was all the
same a warm friend and admirer of Maupertuis, whom in September, 1750,
he had visited in Berlin. It was not unnatural that when these two
partisans came to discuss Leibnitz and Newton they should quarrel. They
did quarrel. Koenig, however, apologised handsomely to the touchy
President, and returned to Holland where he lived. There he wrote an
essay on the subject of their dispute--the principle of the least
action--or the theory, which Maupertuis claimed to have discovered, that
Nature is a great economist and works with the fewest materials with
which she can possibly attain her purpose. Koenig disproved this theory,
and quoted in his support a letter written by his dear Leibnitz. He
submitted the essay to Maupertuis, who apparently did not read it, for
he sanctioned its publication, and it appeared in March, 1751, in Latin.
Then Maupertuis did read it, and was deeply offended. Produce these
letters of Leibnitz from which you quote, M. Koenig! I am certain
Leibnitz is of _my_ opinion in the matter! Produce the originals! But
only copies and not the original letters were forthcoming. They were
undoubtedly genuine. Every page bore the unmistakable stamp of the
Leibnitzian style. But there are none so blind as those who won’t see.
On April 13, 1752, Maupertuis, as President, called together a meeting
of the Academy, and caused Koenig to be expelled therefrom as a forger.
Then Voltaire, hard at work at Potsdam, looked up from his books,
thrust aside La Beaumelle, Darget, and those home worries of Madame
Denis and Longchamp, and must needs go down to the shore just to see the
storm coming up and wet his imprudent feet a little in the surf. “I am
not yet well informed,” he wrote to Madame Denis on May 22d, “as to the
details of the beginning of this quarrel. Maupertuis is at Berlin, ill
from having drunk a little too much brandy.” Soon after June 8th the
Berlin Academy, to which Koenig had appealed, ratified its shameful
sentence. By now Voltaire at Potsdam was chafing and snorting to get
into the battle. There were so many spurs to urge him there! One day he
had been giving a dinner-party at which Maupertuis was a guest. Voltaire
airily complimented the President on a pamphlet he had written on
Happiness--Voltaire having really found “Happiness” very dry and
depressing. “It has given me great pleasure--a few obscurities
excepted--which we will discuss later.” “Obscurities!” cries the touchy
President. “Only for you, Sir!” And Voltaire, with his lean hand on the
presidential shoulder and his eyes uncommonly bright and malicious,
answers, “Je vous estime, mon Président; you want to fight--you shall.
In the meantime, let us go to dinner.”
On July 24th, he wrote Madame Denis another little story. Maupertuis had
said that the King having sent Voltaire his verses to correct, Voltaire
had cried “Will he never leave off giving me his dirty linen to wash?”
And Maupertuis had told the anecdote, “in the strictest confidence,” to
ten or twelve people. The King had heard of it, of course. Then, after
the death of La Mettrie, had not Maupertuis declared that Voltaire had
said that the post of the King’s Atheist was vacant? True, _that_ story
did not reach the King. But every story was a whip to goad Voltaire into
the forefront of the fray. He hated tyranny and wrong wherever he found
them. But being human, and chafing and longing to fight with him, he
hated Maupertuis’ tyranny above other persons’. On September 18th, there
appeared an anonymous pamphlet defending Koenig and entitled “A Reply
from an Academician of Berlin to an Academician of Paris.” It was
supposed to be from the pen of Voltaire--the first arrow from his
quiver. A few days later Koenig produced his own “Appeal to the Public,”
which easily proves his case to any fair-minded person. There was one
man, however, who meant to stand by his President, as his President, and
to defend him right or wrong. King Frederick would not even read
Koenig’s “Appeal.” By October 15th he had himself produced a “Letter to
the Public,” which was nothing, said Voltaire, but an attack on Koenig
and all his friends. “He calls those friends fools, jealous, and
dishonest.” Voltaire wrote an account of the thing to his niece, in
which he spoke out as only a Voltaire could speak. In the letter are
these ominous words: “Unluckily for me, I also am an author, and in the
opposite camp to the King. _I have no sceptre, but I have a pen._”
Then Maupertuis produced an extraordinary series of letters which
certainly do not read like the composition of a sane person. He
advocated in them the maddest scientific schemes, such as blowing up one
of the Pyramids with gunpowder to see why they were built; and making an
immense hole in the earth to find out what it contains.
In a preface he had very unpromisingly stated that he should follow no
sequence or order, but write on the impulse of the moment, and no doubt
contradict himself! Voltaire wrote that Maupertuis had previously been
in a lunatic asylum and was now mad. It did seem as if drink and vanity
had turned the poor wretch’s brain. But Frederick stood by his
President; and on November 5th, while recommending him rest and repose,
gravely congratulated him on his book.
On November 17th, from that room looking on to the terrace at
Sans-Souci, Voltaire wrote a letter to Koenig, easy, graceful, and not
exactly impolite to Maupertuis, but explaining that that solemn
Infallibility had been in the wrong. As for those twenty-three
scientific letters, why one must pity, not blame, him for them. And no
doubt, M. Koenig, the same mental misfortune which made him write them,
inspired his conduct to you!
It was a dainty glove thrown down; but it was a declaration of war not
the less.
Frederick was far too shrewd and sane a person not to know very well
who had right and reason on his side in such a dispute. He and Voltaire
continued to meet as friends, and supped together as of old. Now
Tyrconnel and La Mettrie were dead, Darget gone away, and Maupertuis too
sick and sore to attend them, the suppers would have been small and dull
indeed without Voltaire. He had been always the real soul of them. At
one, only this last September, the daring idea of “The Philosophical
Dictionary” had been started; and in a day or two he had sent the King
that matchlessly audacious first article, “Abraham,” which would have
made the Pope laugh and might have made a Frederick forget that “Reply
from an Academician of Berlin” which Voltaire had written, under a
thinly veiled anonymity, but a few days earlier. But though the chain
which bound the royal Damon to his Pythias still held, it was weak in
every link. Voltaire declared of himself that he was a hundred years
old--that the suppers were suppers of Damocles--the world a
shipwreck--“sauve qui peut!” He was, in fact, too wretched to fear
anything, and so ready to dare all. There was a pause. The tiger
crouched a moment before it sprang, and then leapt on Maupertuis in the
“Diatribe of Doctor Akakia.”
There is no more scathing and burning satire in literature. The deadly
minuteness of Swift’s malign and awful irony is not so terrible as the
pungent mockery of this jester who laughed, and laughed; looked up and
saw his victim writhing and mad with impotent rage, and held his sides
and laughed the more. The great English-Irishman at least paid his
victims the compliment of taking them in some sort seriously; of
bringing great and terrible weapons to slay them; and gave them the poor
satisfaction of feeling like martyrs if they wished. But Voltaire made
Maupertuis a byword and a derision; the sport of fools, the
laughing-stock of Europe: a buffoon, a jest, a caricature: such that men
seeing, stopped, beheld open-mouthed, and then laughed to convulsions.
Akakia means guilelessness; and Akakia is a physician who takes the
remarkable effusions of Maupertuis with a serious innocence, very
deadly; who asks the most simple questions in the world; and turns upon
the President’s theories the remorseless logic of the gayest and
easiest commonsense. Read a hundred and fifty years after, when of
necessity many allusions must be missed and the point of many a jest be
lost, “Akakia” is still one of the wittiest productions in the French
language.
There could have been no style better than Voltaire’s for making
Pomposity mad. One can still see the “sublime Perpetual President”
writhing under that pitiless mockery and that infectious laugh of
malicious delight. The wickedest, cleverest little picador in all the
world goaded this great, lumbering, heavy-footed old bull to impotent
frenzy. The lithe tiger, agile as a cat, sprang on his foe, showing all
his teeth in his grin, and, grinning still, tore him limb from limb.
“I have no sceptre,” Voltaire had said, “but I have a pen.” He had
indeed.
Before that mild letter to Koenig was written from Sans-Souci on
November 17th, the first part of “Akakia” had been finished. But if
nothing could stop a man writing imprudence, under the absolute monarchy
of Prussia there was everything to stop him printing it. Trickery was in
Voltaire’s blood; and practice had made him perfect in the art.
Frederick had dealt treacherously with him; so why not he with
Frederick? He went to the King, and read aloud a pamphlet he had written
on Lord Bolingbroke. Will his Majesty sign the royal permission for that
pamphlet to be printed? By all means. Frederick signs the last page of
the manuscript. Voltaire sends it to the printers; asks for it back, to
make some trifling alterations, and puts “Akakia” in front of
Bolingbroke. What more simple?
It only remained to get a few printed copies sent out of Prussia, and
then one could face destiny bravely. One story runs that Frederick, who
heard everything, got wind of this “Akakia,” and that Voltaire, armed
with the manuscript, brought it to the King; and the King, who loved wit
very nearly but not quite so much as he loved his own greatness, laughed
till he cried. How should a Frederick the Great, with his bitter humour,
not laugh at a Maupertuis thus ridiculed by a Voltaire? Under the rose,
one could laugh at anything--God, man, or devil--even one’s own
Perpetual President. If those “Matinées du Roi de Prusse, écrites par
lui-même” are genuine, Frederick stands proven as one of the most
accomplished actors on the world’s stage. “One must think according to
the rank he occupies,” says he. So he laughed “to dislocation” and added
that there must be no publishing of such a wicked, delightful, malignant
document--and then laughed afresh. Voltaire flung the manuscript on the
fire, as a proof of good faith. He could afford to be thus generous.
Frederick rescued the papers, says the story, and burnt his sleeve. And
the friends parted, still vastly entertained--and each pair of clever
eyes looking into the other pair--wondering--wondering----.
The anecdote, though it is recorded by two different persons and is
picturesque, is, however, of doubtful veracity. The more probable truth
is that Frederick, first discovering on November 20th that “Akakia” had
been printed at Potsdam by his own printers and in his own
printing-office, and on the strength of the permit signed by himself,
was furiously enraged. He sent off Fredersdorff--his servant, valet,
friend--post-haste both to the printer, who confessed all, and to the
author; and warned the author, who simply denied everything as usual, of
awful consequences to follow.
Then Frederick wrote Voltaire that famous letter, very badly spelt,
which under the circumstances was not immoderate. “Your effrontery
astonishes me.... Do not imagine that you will make me believe that
black is white.... If you persist in going on with the business I will
print everything, and the world will see that if your works merit
statues, your conduct deserves chains.”
And the irate host put, it is said, a sentinel outside the guest’s door.
Voltaire wrote his answer on the foot of Frederick’s letter and
continued to deny everything. The whole thing is a hideous calumny, and
I am very ill! But Frederick was not moved; and the sentinel was not
moved either. Fredersdorff was sent to Voltaire again--this time bearing
with him the signed confession of the printer. Then the crafty Voltaire
thought he had better turn the matter into a joke. A joke! On November
27th, Frederick wrote out for him a very elaborate promise to be a good
boy. Voltaire did not sign it. He wrote beneath it, calling attention to
its weak points instead. But, not the less, Frederick, on November 29th,
was able to console Maupertuis with the news that Voltaire had been
forced to give up the whole edition of the “Diatribe,” which had been
solemnly burnt in the royal presence. He had also been forbidden to
print the thing elsewhere. So, poor, mad, beaten Perpetual President,
you can be at peace!
After an “arrest” of eight days the sentinel was removed from Voltaire’s
door. He had behaved abominably. But he was very amusing--and so still
infinitely worth having.
On December 10th the King announced comfortably to Maupertuis, “The
affair of the libels is over.... I have frightened Voltaire on the side
of his purse (by the threat of a fine), and the result is as I
expected.” Before December 16th the Court came up to Berlin for
Christmas. Voltaire lodged at a friend’s house, the house of M. de
Francheville, whose son he employed as a temporary secretary. There
seems no doubt he would have been again of that _société intime_, the
suppers--but for one little event.
One edition of “Akakia” had been burnt; but M. de Voltaire had known
very well it was not the only one. King and Court had hardly arrived at
Berlin, when lo and behold! “Akakias” sprang up all over it as quickly
and plentifully as mushrooms and to be far longer lived.
Berlin hated Maupertuis and enjoyed “Akakia” as it had never enjoyed
anything before. The neat, staid town went mad with laughter and
delight. And in his lodgings the father of “Akakia” looked thoughtfully
to the future. “The orange has been squeezed--one must think now how to
save the rind.” The words were written to Madame Denis on December 18th,
and Voltaire, with the scales fallen at last from the sharpest eyes that
ever man had, added his “little dictionary as used by kings.”
“_My friend_ means my _slave_.
“_My dear friend_ means _I am more than indifferent to you_.
“_For I will make you happy_ read _I will endure you as long as I have
use for you_.
“_Sup with me to-night_ means _I shall mock at you this evening_.”
Voltaire might well feel that that three years’ dream was over, and that
it remained only “to desert honestly.”
On the afternoon of the Christmas Eve of 1752, Collini, that intelligent
young Italian who had seen Voltaire at the Carrousel at the giddy height
of glory and had now become his secretary, was standing at the window of
his master’s lodgings. There was a great crowd in the street, watching a
fine bonfire. Italian Collini did not understand the meaning of the
scene. But Voltaire, with his rich experience, knew in a flash. “I’ll
bet it’s my Doctor!” said he.
It was.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE FLIGHT FROM PRUSSIA
With the exception of the Hirsch affair there is no episode in
Voltaire’s life about which so many statements (usually conflicting)
have been made as about the quarrel with Maupertuis and Voltaire’s
flight from Prussia. Collini wrote _his_ version of the story. Prussia
naturally has its own. Voltaire has _his_ own. All the Lives of Voltaire
and of Frederick--French, English, and German--have their versions. To
quote authorities for every statement is the general custom of the
biographer. But the sifting for truth is surely a process which may be
well carried on behind the scenes; and then the result of that sifting
given clear and clean to the public. If the public cannot trust the
ability or the honesty of the biographer, the sources of his information
are not inaccessible, and the public with a little extra trouble can
verify his facts, even though he does not assist it by cumbering his
text with that annihilation of all interest, the perpetual footnote. If
the subject is not considered worth the extra trouble, the reader may
well take the biographer--on faith. It may be added that the custom of
learning a man’s life and character from other people and not from
himself, is far too closely followed. After all, the great do not tell
so many lies about themselves as their too partial friends, their
malicious enemies, and their interested, gossiping servants tell about
them. The best biographer of Voltaire is Voltaire himself. If any writer
can lead his reader to throw away the biographies, even his own, and
study Voltaire at first-hand--his letters, the wittiest in the world,
and his works, which in matchless adroitness can be compared to no other
production of the human mind--he will have done much and should be well
satisfied.
The light of that Christmas bonfire made “Akakia,” as it might have been
expected to make it, more conspicuous than ever. Thirty thousand copies
were sold in Paris in a few weeks. By January, 1753, in Prussia, twelve
presses were kept busy printing it night and day. The Prussian
newspapers held up their hands at it in holy horror, and did their best
for it by their abuse. For a week Voltaire lay _perdu_. He had thoughts
of escaping to Plombières on the very good excuse of his health. A
flight to England was often in his mind.
On New Year’s Day, at half-past three in the afternoon, he sent back to
Frederick “the bells and the baubles he has given me,” which comprised
the Cross and Ribbon of the Order of Merit and the Chamberlain’s Key.
On the outside of the packet he wrote the well-known quatrain:
Oh! tenderly I took your tender gifts
And sadly render them to you again,
As bitter lover to lost love gives back
Her pictured image, in his hot heart’s pain.
He accompanied the parcel with a letter--a melancholy reflection on the
Vanity of Human Wishes. “My resignation is equal to my sorrow. I shall
remember nothing but your goodness. I have lost everything; there only
remains to me a memory of having once been happy in your retreat at
Potsdam.... I made you my idol: an honest man does not change his
religion, and sixteen years of a measureless devotion are not to be
destroyed by a single unlucky moment.”
His sorrow was genuine; but so was his determination to go.
At four o’clock on this afternoon a _fiacre_ drew up at the door of his
rooms. Fredersdorff had come from the King, bringing back the Order and
Key. There was a long consultation. Collini, who was apparently
eavesdropping in the next room, said his master only consented to
receive them again after a very lively argument. The King’s Chamberlain,
in fact, made a very wry face at finding himself his Chamberlain still.
Go he would; but go with peace and honour he certainly would if he
could. On January 2d, he wrote his King a conciliatory letter. “Do with
me what you will,” it said. “But what in the world _will_ you do with
me?” it _meant_. As for the suppers--I will be of them no more.
On January 18th, Voltaire published a declaration denying the authorship
of “Akakia.” It was a form--hardly a deceit, in that it deceived nobody.
It was to oblige the King--the King who still hungered and thirsted for
his Voltaire and could not let him go. True, it was a humble, obedient,
penitent, reformed Voltaire he wanted--in short, an impossibility.
Frederick went back to Potsdam on January 30th, and begged his
Chamberlain to come back there too, to his old quarters.
“I am too ill,” says the Chamberlain, but inconsistently pleased with
the friendly offer and taking care to have it recorded in the
newspapers, and to tell it to all his correspondents in Paris. Still, in
the very letters in which he announced the King’s favour like a pleased
child, the shrewd man was arranging to leave. On February 16th, he was
still at Berlin with dysentery. His royal host sent him quinine. But
that did not cure him. Nothing would cure him but some air which was not
Prussian air--some diet which the kingly table could not produce--some
company which was not Prussian company.
He could not go to Potsdam; but about March 1st he wrote to beg formal
permission for leave of absence, to journey to French Plombières and
take there the waters which were much recommended for his complaints. He
awaited the answer with a feverish impatience. He made Collini arrange
his papers and pack his things. Here was a book to be returned to the
royal library; then, there were the coming expenses to be considered.
But no answer came from Frederick. Voltaire, restless and irritable,
must needs, on March 5th, move from the rooms he occupied in a house in
central Berlin to another in the Stralau quarter--almost in the country.
Here he lived at his own expense with Collini, a manservant, and a cook.
His doctor, Coste, came to see him--Coste, who was not afraid to say
Plombières was the only cure for his patient’s health, though he knew
the recommendation would be displeasing to the King.
What if the King refused permission? Such things had been done by men of
his temperament, and might be done again.
Voltaire would walk in the garden of that Stralau house with young
Collini. “Now leave me to dream a little,” he would say. And he paced up
and down alone--conjecturing, fearing, scheming. He _must_ go somehow.
He invented the wildest, absurdest plans of escape; and laughed at them
gaily enough with that capacity for seeing the humorous side of the
worst troubles, which was the best gift the gods had given him.
At last Frederick broke his silence; and Voltaire wrote to his niece on
March 15th that the King had said there were excellent waters in
Moravia! “He might as well tell me to go and take waters in Siberia.”
Not the least curious of the many human documents preserved in the
archives of Berlin is that famous dismissal which at last, on March 16,
1753, Frederick the Great flung upon paper in a rage.
“He can quit my service when he pleases: he need not invent the excuse
of the waters of Plombières; but he will have the goodness, before he
goes, to return to me the contract of his engagement, the Key, the
Cross, and the volume of poetry I have confided to him. I would rather
he and Koenig had only attacked my works; I sacrifice _them_ willingly
to people who want to blacken the reputation of others; I have none of
the folly and vanity of authors, and the cabals of men of letters appear
to me the depth of baseness.”
The Abbé de Prades put that dismissal in a politer official form, and
thus sent it to Voltaire. But this keen-sighted Arouet was not minded to
be expelled like a schoolboy by an angry master. Wherever he might go,
that master’s iron arm could reach him. He wrote, therefore, a gay
letter of entreaty to Prades, asking for a parting interview with the
King. Permission was granted him. On March 18th, after a stay of
thirteen days at Stralau, Voltaire went to Potsdam. That evening he was
once more installed in his old rooms at Sans-Souci.
The next day, after dinner, he and the King met in private, and once
again met as more than friends. It has been said before that there was
between these two men something of the glamour and the fitfulness of
passion. “I could live neither with you nor without you,” wrote Voltaire
after they had long parted for ever. “You who bewitched me, whom I
loved, and with whom I am always angry.” That was the summing up of
their whole relationship. The enchantment was at work again to-night. It
is said that they talked over the Maupertuis affair. Collini affirms
that they laughed at the President together. The harsh dismissal was
altered into a gracious royal permit for a necessary change and holiday.
Voltaire was to drink the waters, recover his health, and return. He was
still the King’s Chamberlain. He was to retain his Cross, his Key, and
alas! alas!--the royal volume of poems. The interview lasted two hours.
Voltaire came from it radiant and satisfied. For a week Potsdam laid
herself out to delight him. Perhaps she and the King would be so
charming, Voltaire would not want to leave them even for a time!
Frederick may have hoped so. Voltaire submitted to the blandishments;
nay, enjoyed them. But behind the bright eyes and the gay, vain,
susceptible, pleasure-loving French heart lay the purpose and iron
resolution which make greatness. Voltaire was going. On March 26, 1753,
about eight o’clock in the morning he went on to the parade ground where
Frederick was holding the last review of his regiment before he started
for Silesia.
“Sire, here is M. de Voltaire, who comes to take his orders.”
“Eh bien! M. de Voltaire, you are resolved then to set out?”
“Sire, urgent business and my health make it necessary for me to do so.”
“Monsieur, I wish you a pleasant journey.”
They never met again.
Voltaire hurried back to his rooms. Everything was ready for flight.
Collini had arranged all money matters. The travelling carriage was at
the door. Voltaire hastily wrote a brief farewell to d’Argens. By nine
the travellers were _en route_. They never paused or looked back. By
six o’clock in the evening of March 27th they had covered ninety-two
miles of road, and were in the rooms prudent Voltaire had engaged in
advance at Leipsic. Did he then recall and wonder at that strange
tragi-comedy of the last three years? Whatever his lips uttered, his
heart knew he had left Frederick for ever. The time had not yet come,
though it did come, for regret, remorse, and affection.
Voltaire had brought with him in that travelling carriage two
supplements to his “Doctor Akakia.” Almost his last words from Potsdam,
in a letter to Formey, were, “When I am attacked I defend myself like a
devil; but I am a good devil and end by laughing.” But it was better to
be attacked by a Voltaire than to be mocked by him--which Maupertuis,
when he read those supplements, once more knew to his cost.
On April 3d, that very ill-advised person saw fit to write a threatening
letter to Voltaire at Leipsic, in which he said, almost in so many
words, If you attack me again, nothing shall spare you. “Be grateful to
the respect and obedience which have hitherto withheld my arm and saved
you from the worst affair you ever had.”
Voltaire’s answer was a new edition of “Akakia” with the two supplements
added, a travesty of the letter he had just received from Maupertuis,
and a burlesque epistle to Formey in his official character of Secretary
of the Berlin Academy. If the first part of “Akakia” had been laughable,
the second was exquisitely ludicrous. It reached Frederick soon enough,
as everything reached him.
On April 11th, he wrote a very memorable and famous order to his
Resident at Frankfort--one Freytag. The King commanded Freytag to demand
of Voltaire, when he passed through Frankfort, the Chamberlain’s Key,
the Cross and Ribbon of the Order of Merit, every paper in his Majesty’s
handwriting, and a book “specified in the note enclosed.” If Voltaire
declined to do as he was told, he was to be arrested. On April 12th,
Frederick wrote to his sister of Bayreuth a letter wherein he spoke of
his “charming, divine Voltaire,” that “sublime spirit, first of thinking
beings,” as the greatest scoundrel and the most treacherous rascal in
the universe; and said that men were broken on the wheel who deserved it
less than he.
The Margravine confessed that, for the life of her, she had not been
able to keep her countenance while reading that second part of “Akakia”;
but her brother was in no laughing mood. To soothe Maupertuis he had
caused his curt dismissal to Voltaire of March 16th to appear in the
newspapers. “Akakia” may be fairly said to have been one of the most
famous jokes of the eighteenth century, and to have been the delight of
every person who read it, save only Maupertuis and Frederick the Great.
For two-and-twenty days Voltaire passed his time not unhappily at
Leipsic. He visited the University there. He arranged his books and
papers. He had with him, besides Collini, a copyist and a manservant,
both of whom he employed in literary work. He now was busy defending
“Louis XIV.” against La Beaumelle’s criticisms. To be sure “Louis XIV.”
was its own defence; but it was never in Voltaire’s irritable and
pugnacious nature to let the curs bark at his heels unheeded. He must be
for ever kicking them or stinging them with his whip and so goading them
to fresh fury. To sit serene above the thunder was quite impossible to
this god: he was always coming down from his Olympus to answer the
blasphemies of the mortals and to fight the meanest of them.
On April 18th, after he had been in Leipsic rather less than a month,
the travelling carriage stood once more at his door. The luggage which
was heaped into it did not contain the book to which Frederick had
alluded in his letter to Freytag. That luckless volume, in which were
compiled the poetic effusions of Frederick the Great, freethinking,
imprudent, and not a little indecent, had been given in charge of a
merchant of Leipsic, who was to forward it, with many other of
Voltaire’s books, to Strasburg.
Chief among the royal poems was a certain “Palladium,” imitated from the
“Pucelle,” but very much more ribald and insulting to the Christian
religion; and, in that it abused other kings who might be dangerous
foes, certainly not a work of which King Frederick would care to own
himself the author. It had been secretly printed in the palace at
Potsdam in 1751.
Voltaire hoped to meet at Strasburg, not only his books, but the person
whom Frederick spoke of as “that wearisome niece.” The criminal’s next
stopping-place after Leipsic was Gotha. M. de Voltaire and suite
intended to put up at the inn there, but were not installed in it when
the delightful Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, not the least charming of
Voltaire’s philosophic duchesses and with whom he had corresponded when
he was at Cirey, begged him to be her guest, in her château. Forty years
old, gentle, graceful, accomplished, with that love of learning without
learnedness which was the peculiar charm of the women of the eighteenth
century, Voltaire may well have found her, as he did find her, “the best
princess in the world.” “And who--God be thanked,” he added piously,
“wrote no verses.” She received him and his attendants with a delighted
hospitality. She had a husband, who was not of much account on the
present occasion. And there was a Madame de Buchwald, who also had all
that fascination which seems to have been the birthright of the women of
that time.
In all lives there are certain brief halcyon periods when one forgets
alike the troubles that are past and the cares that are to come and
enjoys oneself in the moment, defiant of fate, and with something of the
_abandon_ of a child. This month was such a period for Voltaire. After
the fights and the worries of the past three years, he was peculiarly
susceptible to the soothing flattery and the caressing admiration of
this couple of gracious women.
He read them his “Natural Law.” He read them new cantos of the
“Pucelle.” (Modesty was the lost piece of silver for which the woman of
this period never even searched.) Nothing was bad about Gotha save its
climate, said he. To please his dear Duchess and to instruct her son,
the obliging Voltaire embarked here on a popular history of the German
Empire from the time of Charlemagne.
“Annals of the Empire” is one of the least successful of Voltaire’s
works. Truth compels the critic indeed to say that it comes very near
to being hideously, preposterously, and unmitigatedly dull. It was
written to order and without inspiration. It is laborious, monotonous,
and long. That its conscientious list of Kings, Emperors, and Electors,
and its neat little rhyming summary of each century, may have proved
useful to the young gentleman they were designed to instruct, is very
likely. But Voltaire did not put his soul in it. In the mechanical
effort it required of his brain he was soon indeed to find great, and
greatly needed, soothing. The month passed on winged feet. But Voltaire
had to proceed, leisurely it might be, but still to proceed to Strasburg
to embrace his niece.
He had had an idea of visiting the clever and delightful Margravine of
Bayreuth with whom he so often corresponded; but all the circumstances
considered, he thought she was too nearly related to Frederick, and that
a visit to her might endanger the little liberty he had obtained.
No doubt, as he lumbered along in the great travelling carriage, he
congratulated himself on at last getting out of Prussia, at once easily
and gracefully.
He left Gotha on May 25, 1753.
He rested a night or two with the Landgrave of Hesse at Wabern, near
Cassel. At Cassel, Baron Pollnitz of the suppers was staying; as
Frederick’s spy, Voltaire seems to have suspected. By May 30th the
travelling party were at Marburg. After leaving there they passed
through Fredeburg, where they visited the Salt Springs. And on May 31,
1753, Voltaire reached the “Golden Lion” at Frankfort-on-Main, meaning
to proceed on his journey the next day.
CHAPTER XXV
THE COMEDY OF FRANKFORT
Frederick the Great had the misfortune to suffer now from subordinates
so loyal that they went beyond their master’s commands, and officials
with a blundering zeal not according to knowledge.
The second part of “Akakia” had flung him into one of the greatest
furies of his life. The unmeasured terms in which he wrote of Voltaire
to his sister have been recorded. Wilhelmina’s propitiating answer did
not propitiate him. Voltaire was maddeningly and devilishly clever. The
sting of the “Akakia” supplements lay in part for Frederick the Great in
the fact that he could hardly prevent himself from laughing at such an
exquisite humour, nor withhold his admiration of such a dazzling and
daring genius. But add to this, that in making a fool of his President,
Voltaire had also made a fool of the President’s friend and King; that
that King had cringed to win Voltaire to Prussia, and cringed to keep
him. Still extant were the royal letters filled with the wildest
hyperbole of devotion and of admiration. He had stooped to entreat. He
had licked dust to keep the Frenchman his property; and he had done it
in vain. It may be forgiven him that, like Naaman the Syrian, he went
away in a rage.
Before he went to Silesia he had caused to be written on April 11th that
memorable order to Freytag, before alluded to, wherein he commanded
Freytag to deprive Voltaire on his arrival at Frankfort of that Key,
Cross and Order, all papers in the King’s handwriting, and--“the book
specified in the note enclosed.” Only--there was no note enclosed, and
no book specified at all.
A conscientious and fussy old busybody was Freytag; worryingly anxious
to do right, and fretfully and rightly suspecting himself to be no match
for Voltaire. Back he writes to Potsdam on April 21st, asking further
instructions about that unspecified book; and “If Voltaire says he has
sent on his luggage ahead, are we to keep him a prisoner at Frankfort
till he has brought it back?”
“Yes,” comes back the answer on April 29th. “Keep him in sight till the
luggage is brought back and he has given to you the royal manuscripts,
especially the book called ‘Œuvre de Poésie.’”
For six weeks, while Voltaire was amusing himself with his Duchess and
his “Annals,” fussy Freytag awaited him. Voltaire spent the night of May
31st in perfect tranquillity at the inn of the “Golden Lion.” On June
1st, Freytag, Councillor Rucker, who represented a Councillor Schmidt
who was ill, and Lieutenant Brettwitz called upon Voltaire at eight
o’clock in the morning at the “Golden Lion,” and in the name of his
Prussian Majesty requested his Prussian Majesty’s ex-guest to deliver up
immediately all the royal manuscripts, the Key, the Cross and the Order.
It was not wonderful, perhaps, that at this request Voltaire flung
himself back in his chair and closed his eyes, overcome. Even to
Freytag’s unemotional vision the Frenchman appeared ill, and was nothing
better than a skeleton. Collini ransacked Voltaire’s trunks at his
order. He delivered up all the royal manuscripts--save one which he sent
to Freytag the next morning, saying he had found it later under a table.
The Key and the Ribbon--that Key which had long torn his pocket, and
that Ribbon which had been a halter round his neck--he also gave to
Freytag. He sent on to him in the evening his commission as King’s
Chamberlain. As for the “Œuvre de Poésie”--why, _that_, says Voltaire, I
packed up with other books in a box, and, for the life of me, cannot
tell you whether the box is at Leipsic or at Hamburg.
Considering the passionate nature of his desire to be out of this
Prussia; considering his wretched health, which really did need
Plombières waters, or some waters or some great change of scene and of
air; considering the affront that was being put upon him; considering
the fact that that “Œuvre de Poésie” was his own, a present from the
King, corrected and embellished by M. de Voltaire himself, it must be
conceded that he took the news that he was to be a prisoner at the
Frankfort inn until that unlucky book was forthcoming, pretty
philosophically. He did indeed beg vainly to be allowed to pursue his
journey. It was not pleasant to have to sign a parole not to go beyond
the garden of one’s hotel; to have for host a man under oath not to let
his guest depart. It was not pleasant to have three blundering German
officials turning over one’s effects for eight consecutive hours, from
nine in the morning till five o’clock in the afternoon. The facts that
Freytag--who certainly meant very well--confided Voltaire’s health to
the best doctor in the place, and offered the captive the pleasure of a
drive with himself, the great Freytag, the Resident, in the public
gardens, were insufficient consolations for delay and indignity. Freytag
signed a couple of agreements wherein he declared that as soon as the
book arrived, Voltaire could go where he liked. One copy of the
agreement Voltaire kept. He and Collini declared that Freytag spelled
Poésie, _Poëshie_; and on the second copy which Voltaire sent to Madame
Denis, to reassure her, her uncle wrote “Good for the Œuvre de _Poëshie_
of the King your master!” Voltaire could still joke; and still work. He
was not all unhappy.
He went on with his “Annals.” He received visitors--as a famous person
whose extraordinary detention had already got wind in the town. He
walked in the garden with Collini. He wrote several letters, without
even alluding to his present circumstances. He was still a laughing
philosopher. He enjoyed that _Poëshie_ joke immensely. He also enjoyed
boxing the ears of Van Duren, once printer at The Hague and now retired
to Frankfort, who waited on him with a bill thirteen years old. Collini
found his master, as ever, good and benevolent.
Five days later he had begun to grow a little impatient. Worthy Freytag
was shocked when he visited his captive on that fifth day of his
detention, June 5th, to hear him ask if he could not change his
residence, and go and call on the Duke of Meiningen; and, worst of all,
break out into invectives against that solemn old conscientious
stupidity, the Resident himself. Freytag, not a little flurried, went
home and wrote for more explicit commands from Potsdam. Since that first
order, dated April 11th, none had proceeded directly from Frederick. He
was still away on his tour: and to Fredersdorff in Potsdam and Freytag
in Frankfort, his too zealous servants, belongs most of the dishonour
and ridicule the affair heaped on the name of Frederick.
Freytag was no sooner out of the house than Voltaire, who still pursued
his old, old policy of leaving no stone unturned, sat down and wrote a
very cunning letter to the Emperor of Austria beseeching his
interference in his, Voltaire’s, behalf. The day before, on June 4th, he
had written a similar one to d’Argenson, showing how it would really be
to the best interest of the French Ministry to come to his rescue. On
June 7th, he wrote to d’Argental of his detention with a calm and
philosophy which, as has been well said, people keep as a rule for the
misfortunes of others.
On the ninth day of his captivity, that is to say, June 9, 1753, there
drew up at the door of the “Golden Lion” a post-chaise containing a very
fat, hot, breathless, and excited lady of uncertain years, who fell upon
the captive’s neck and fervently embraced him, crying out “Uncle! I
always said that man would be the death of you.”
Marie Louise Denis was at this time about three-and-forty years old.
Idle, self-indulgent, and extravagant, she was a good-humoured person
enough if a vast appetite for pleasure were gratified to the full.
Voluble, bustling, and impetuous; foolish, but not without a certain
vulgar shrewdness; affectionate, until the objects of her affections
were out of sight, when she entirely forgot all about them; vain,
greedy, and good-natured; much too lazy to be long offended with anyone,
and quite incapable of speaking the truth--Madame Denis was a type of
woman which has never been uncommon in any age. So long as she was happy
and comfortable herself, she was quite ready to allow her neighbours to
be so too. She was a cordial hostess; and talked a great deal and at
the very top of her voice. With a mind as wholly incapable of real
cultivation as was her heart of any great or sustained feeling, from
long association with Voltaire she caught the accent of cleverness, as
after living in a foreign country one catches the accent of a language
though one may know nothing of its construction, its grammar, or its
literature.
If Voltaire had been in many respects unfortunate in the first woman who
influenced his life, he was a thousand times more so in the second. If
Madame du Châtelet had had a shrewish temper, she had had transcendent
mental gifts; Madame Denis had the shrew’s temper with a mind
essentially limited and commonplace. Madame du Châtelet had once loved
Voltaire; Madame Denis never loved anything but her pleasures. From the
first moment of her connection with him, his niece was a worry and a
care to him--making him, as well as herself, ludicrous with her
_penchant_ for bad playwriting and her elderly coquetries. It is not
insignificant that Longchamp, Collini, and Wagnière hated her from their
souls. (Collini, indeed, politely praised her in his memoirs, written
long after the events they chronicled, and roundly abused her in his
letters written at the time.) Voltaire kept her with him, partly no
doubt because the tie of relationship bound them. But his enemies may
concede that if he had not been in domestic life one of the most
generous, patient, good-humoured, forbearing, and philosophic of men, he
would have snapped that tie in the case of Louise Denis without
compunction.
It must be briefly noted here that those enemies declare that there was
another tie between Voltaire and Madame Denis than that of uncle and
niece. But if there had been why should it not have been legalised by
marriage? An appeal to the Pope and the payment of a certain sum alone
were necessary. Voltaire was not too moral, but he was too shrewd, and
had had far too much experience of the painful consequences of acting
illegally, to do so when it was totally unnecessary. He had been, too,
but a cold lover to Madame du Châtelet with her _éblouissante_
personality. What in the world was there to make a decrepit uncle of
nine-and-fifty fall in love with a lazy, ugly niece of forty-three, who
bored him? The thing is against nature. The tone in which he speaks of
Madame Denis in his letters--good-humoured and patronising--is certainly
not the tone of a lover. Add to this, that the foolish relict of M.
Denis was always the victim of gallant _penchants_ for quite other
persons than Voltaire, now for d’Arnaud, now for Ximenès, presently for
young secretary Collini, and a handsome major of twenty-seven.
The age was a vile one; and Voltaire was in it and of it. No woman, were
she ever so old and ugly, could have been at the head of his house and
escaped calumny. But he may be exonerated from being his niece’s lover.
It was a sin he had no mind to.
He was undoubtedly very sincerely glad to see her at the present moment.
And if she was not quite heroic enough to keep herself from saying, “I
told you so!” she was quite good-natured enough to sympathise with her
uncle, even if he had brought his misfortunes at least in part upon
himself. This meeting, too, had been so long planned, written of, and
delayed. Both uncle and niece--not yet knowing each other as fatally
well as they were soon to do--had heartily desired it. One of the very
first things practical Madame Denis did was to sit down and write on
June 11th a very sensible and moving letter to Frederick the Great,
which, if her uncle did not help in its composition, is an example of
the truth of the axiom that one intuition of a woman is worth all the
reasoning of a man. It was not Madame Denis’s fault that that appeal to
Frederick to let Voltaire go free did not reach Frederick until it was
too late to be of use. She had already implored the good offices of Lord
Keith, who had been of Frederick’s suppers, and was now in France as
Prussian envoy; and the prudent Scotchman had replied advising her to
recommend Uncle Voltaire to keep quiet, and to remember that “Kings have
long arms.” Nothing daunted, Madame Denis wrote to Keith again. This
letter, too, though in the niece’s hand, bears evidence of the uncle’s
brain. The energetic pair (Madame Denis declared in every letter that
they were both very ill) further wrote to d’Argenson and Madame de
Pompadour to lay before France the astonishing facts of their case.
It only remained for Madame Denis after this to try and cheer the
captivity of the prisoner of the “Golden Lion,” and to help him
entertain the illustrious local notables who came to call upon him.
Early on the morning of Monday, June 18th, the chest containing that
famous “Œuvre de _Poëshie_” was delivered at Freytag’s house. “Now we
can go!” thinks Voltaire. He completed his preparations. He sent Collini
to Freytag’s house to be present at the opening of the parcel. But
cautious Freytag was awaiting clearer orders from Potsdam: and would not
open the case. Voltaire sent Collini many times during that morning;
nay, many times in a single hour: and Freytag sent him away again. At
noon comes a despatch to Freytag from Fredersdorff. “Do nothing,” says
that official, “until the King returns here next Thursday, when you
shall have further orders.” And Freytag, in a note of the most excessive
politeness, conveys this message to Voltaire.
Voltaire’s patience had had eighteen days to run out: and the supply was
pretty well exhausted. At his side was his niece dying to go, and
anticipating, not unnaturally, that Frederick intended something very
sinister indeed by these delays. Voltaire went to Freytag and asked to
see Fredersdorff’s despatch. And Freytag refused, in a rage. That night
Madame Denis wrote to the Abbé de Prades--as the intimate of
Frederick--telling him of this new insult and delay. And Voltaire
resolved upon action.
Leaving Madame Denis to look after the luggage and await events at the
“Golden Lion,” on Wednesday, June 20th, about three o’clock in the
afternoon, Voltaire and Collini slipped out of the inn and went to
another hostelry, called the “Crown of the Empire,” where they got into
a post-chaise which was returning to Mayence. A servant followed them as
far as the “Crown of the Empire” and put into the post-chaise a cash-box
and two portfolios. But for the fact that one of the escaping criminals,
sombrely dressed in black velvet for the occasion, dropped a notebook in
the city and spent four minutes of priceless time looking for it, they
would have been out of Frankfort and the jurisdiction of Freytag before
that breathless and flurried official caught them up and arrested them,
with the assistance of the officer at the Mayence gate, which they had
actually reached.
It is not necessary to say that Voltaire did not submit to this arrest
tamely. He argued with no little passion and adroitness. Collini
supported all his statements impartially. “The worst bandits could not
have struggled more to get away,” said unfortunate Freytag. But the
Resident had might on his side, if not right. He left Voltaire and
Collini under a guard of six soldiers and “flew” back to the Burgomaster
of Frankfort, who confirmed the arrest. When the unhappy official got
back to the city gate, he found Voltaire had spent his time burning
papers. What he did not know, was that Voltaire had further taken
advantage of his absence to abstract a sheaf of manuscript from one of
the portfolios and to give it to Collini, saying, “Hide that somewhere
about you.”
Freytag brought his prisoners back to the city in his carriage, which
was surrounded by a guard of soldiers, and very soon by a crowd. He took
them to the house of that Councillor Schmidt (whose office had been
temporarily filled on June 1st by Councillor Rucker) because, said
Freytag, the landlord of the “Golden Lion” would not have Voltaire in
his house any longer “on account of his incredible meanness.” Freytag
then made the prisoners give up the cash-box and their money. “Count the
money,” said Schmidt; “they are quite capable of pretending they had
more than they really had.” From Voltaire were also taken “his watch,
his snuff-box, and some jewels that he wears.” Collini recounts that
Voltaire feigned illness to soften the hearts of his captors. But this
very transparent ruse failed entirely; as might have been expected.
After two hours’ waiting, Dorn, Freytag’s clerk, a disgraced solicitor
of Frankfort, took the pair to a low tavern called the “Goat,” where
Voltaire was shut up in one room guarded by three soldiers with
bayonets; and Collini in another. Voltaire’s cash-box and portfolios had
been left in a trunk at Schmidt’s, and the trunk padlocked.
Madame Denis, hearing of Voltaire’s arrest, had flown to try the effect
of feminine eloquence upon the Burgomaster.
He replied by putting her under arrest at the “Golden Lion”; and
presently sent her, under guard of Dorn and three soldiers, to the
“Goat” tavern, where she was placed in a garret with no furniture in it
but a bed; “soldiers for _femmes de chambre_, and bayonets for
curtains.” Madame Denis appears to have spent the night in hysterics.
The miscreant Dorn actually persisted in taking his supper in her room
and emptying bottle after bottle in her presence and treating her with
insult. The truth was, Freytag and Dorn did not believe in her nieceship
to Voltaire and mistook the poor lady for a wholly disreputable
character.
Collini spent _his_ night, dressed, on his bed. Beneath the shelter of
its curtains he drew forth from his breeches that sheaf of manuscript
Voltaire had given him at the Mayence gate. It was the manuscript of the
“Pucelle,” so far as it was then written.
If Voltaire spent _his_ night in a rage, he had every excuse for it. At
ten o’clock in the evening he wrote to that good friend of his, the
Margravine, laying his desperate case before her and begging her to send
his letter on to her brother. He had broken his parole--true; but not
until Freytag had broken his written agreement that when that “Œuvre de
_Poëshie_” arrived he should go where he listed. He had borne a most
galling delay not impatiently. For being in possession of a book which
had been given to him, he, his niece, and his servant had been hustled,
jostled, and insulted. If the book was blasphemous, indecent, and a
dangerous work for a king to have written, was that Voltaire’s fault? He
had but corrected its blunders and its grammar. If its model was the
“Pucelle”--the royal author had chosen that model himself. Voltaire
suffered for the King’s imprudence and for the King’s official’s folly.
He was in a situation not too common to him--he really was not the
aggressor.
The following day, Thursday, June 21st, the Potsdam mail arrived
bringing orders dated June 16th from Frederick--just returned from his
tour--that Voltaire, on giving his promise and a written agreement that
he would send back the “_Poëshie_” to Freytag within a given time, and
without making any copies of it, was to be allowed to go “in peace and
with civility.”
That is all very well, thinks fussy Freytag. But when the King wrote
that, he did not know this Voltaire had set at naught his Resident’s
solemn authority and had had the audacity to try and escape. He must
wait to go until we hear what the King’s commands are when he knows of
this abominable breach of discipline.
Voltaire, goaded to desperation, wrote again to the Margravine of
Bayreuth, begging her to send to his Majesty a most indignant statement
of the wrongs done to Madame Denis--the statement having been drawn up
by that outraged lady herself. As a good niece, she also wrote again
passionately, direct to the King, on behalf of her uncle. He himself
implored Freytag in quite humble terms to at least let them go back to
the “Golden Lion,” which was a more decent habitation than the “Goat”;
and, besides, would save the prisoners from paying for two prisons.
A few hours after, he appealed again to the mercy of that harassed and
unfortunate jailer. All these letters are of June 21st. It must have
been a busy day. It is strange that at such a juncture Voltaire himself
did not write direct to the King. It could not have been his pride that
prevented him. If pride was an obstacle in the way of attaining his end,
an impulsive Voltaire could always kick it aside. Besides, he stooped to
entreat a Dorn and a Freytag. In answer to his requests Madame Denis and
Collini were allowed to go out of doors. But Voltaire was kept to his
room in that wretched “Goat” and guarded by two sentinels as if he had
been a dangerous criminal awaiting hanging. Four days went by. Then, on
June 25th, came clearer and more positive orders from Frederick to let
the prisoners go. Frederick was sick of the business and ashamed of it.
But still, argues Freytag, when he sent those orders, he did not know of
the attempt to escape. So the only effect of them was that the guards
were removed from the door, and Voltaire was put on his honour not to
leave the room.
The chest of books from Strasburg had meanwhile been opened; and the
“_Poèshie_” extracted therefrom. But for the punctilious idiocy of one
dull official, Voltaire might long ago have been at his Plombières and
have done with Prussia for ever. The very burgomaster began to pity him.
Frankfort was near regarding him as a martyr. Freytag, a little nervous,
splendidly allowed the captive the freedom of the whole inn; and then he
and that captive fought tooth and nail over money matters. For Voltaire
had not only endured the miseries of arrest and detention, but had had
to pay their whole expenses. He and Collini swore they had been robbed
of jewels, money, and papers, and of various trifles as well.
On July 5th--after they had been detained thirty-five days--came sharp
orders from Potsdam that Voltaire was to be released at once. Even a
Freytag could doubt and delay no more. On July 6th the party returned to
the “Golden Lion”: where Voltaire called in a lawyer and laid before him
a succinct account of the events of those five-and-thirty days. Collini
completed their preparations for departure. On the very morning when
they were going, the impetuous Voltaire caught sight of Dorn passing his
door and rushed out at him with a loaded pistol. Collini intervened.
They had been in scrapes enough already.
On July 7, 1753, Voltaire and Collini left Frankfort. That fighting,
scrambling, wearying month of folly and indignity was over. The same
night they reached Mayence-on-the-Rhine--a city which knew not
Frederick. The day following, Madame Denis left Frankfort for Paris.
Nothing is more remarkable about the Frankfort affair than the
moderation Voltaire, considering he was Voltaire, displayed in it. When
the Margravine wrote on the subject to her brother and described
Voltaire as “intense and bilious” and “capable of every imprudence,” the
description was not unfair. When Frederick wrote to his sister and said
plainly that Voltaire and Madame Denis lied in their descriptions of the
event and coloured it and embroidered on it to suit their own ends, he
was not precisely lying, though he was not precisely truthful, himself.
But leaving the account of Voltaire, Madame Denis, and Collini
altogether alone, from the account of Freytag the prejudiced, it is
proved that Voltaire behaved, all things considered, with a great deal
of philosophy and an unusual amount of patience.
Why?
He was leaving Prussia--with enormous difficulty to be sure--but he
_was_ leaving it at last. He was returning, as he hoped, to France. He
had made a final trial of courts and kings--and found them wanting.
Liberty was whispering and wooing him again--the siren he had loved and
deserted, and whom he was to love again and desert no more. His blessed
monotonous work at his “Annals” made him “forget all the Freytags.” For
five hours a day, whether he was living in palaces or in prison, with
princes or with jailers, he “laboured tranquilly” at that book. The
comic side of the situation appealed to him. He knew, or said he knew,
that he deserved some of his misfortunes. And above all--far above
all--the dream and the night were ending, and with the dawn of a new day
came the courage, the fight, and the energy to win it.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE “ESSAY ON THE MANNERS AND MIND OF NATIONS”
The arrival of Voltaire at Mayence rang down the curtain upon the
greatest act of one of the most famous dramas of friendship in the
world. It left Frederick enraged: first of all with himself; secondly,
with blundering Freytag, whose blunders the King ostensibly approved,
according to his principle, in a formal document written for that
purpose; and only thirdly with Voltaire. With his muse taught by that
Voltaire, Frederick abused the teacher in spiteful epigrams, and then
dealt him a blow which shook Voltaire’s whole life, as a lover will kill
the mistress who has been false to him not because he has loved her too
little, but too much.
As for Voltaire, he was both angry and sorry. In that mean, world-famous
story of their quarrel he must have known well enough that he had been
too often most aggravating, _méchant_, and irrepressible. Yet that
letter he wrote on July 9th from Mayence to Madame Denis, seen and meant
to be seen by Frederick, gave a view of the situation not wholly false.
The King “might have remembered that for fifteen years he wooed me with
tender favours; that in my old age he drew me from my country; that for
two years I worked with him to perfect his talents; that I have served
him well and failed him in nothing; that it is infinitely below his rank
and glory to take part in an academical quarrel and to end as my reward
by demanding his poems from me at the hands of his soldiers.”
Adoring and quarrelling, passionately admiring and yearning for each
other when they were apart, admiring and fighting each other when they
were together--that is the history of the friendship of Frederick and
Voltaire. If it be true that the great are no mates for common people,
still less are they mates for each other. Even in fabled Olympus, gods
could not live in peace with gods.
It is not unworthy of remark that their connection conferred far greater
benefits on the King than on the commoner. Voltaire _had_ consistently
trained and taught the royal intellect from that first letter written in
August, 1736, to the Prussian heir-apparent. He had been such a master
as kings do not often find--and his royal pupil had gained from him such
advantages as kings are seldom wise enough to use.
But for Voltaire himself--for the most fruitful literary producer of any
age--those three years in Prussia were comparatively barren and
unprofitable. True, in 1751, “The Century of Louis XIV.” had appeared;
but all the materials for it had been collected, and by far the greater
part of the book written, before Voltaire came to Prussia at all. The
“Poem on Natural Law” (not published till 1756), a few improvements to
“Rome Sauvée,” the beginnings of that “magnificent dream,” “The
Philosophical Dictionary,” were, as has been seen (except “Akakia”), his
only other works written in Prussia. For a while the author of the
“Henriade” and the “English Letters” was chiefly famous as the enemy of
d’Arnaud, Hirsch, and Maupertuis; as the hero of the low comedy of
Frankfort; and as the guest “who put his host’s candle-ends into his
pockets.”
If without Voltaire the glory of Frederick would have been something
less glorious, without Frederick the great Voltaire would have been
greater still.
Flourishing Mayence, with its Rhine river flowing through it, its fine
castles, its fine company, its indifference to the opinion of Frederick,
and its warm enthusiasm for Frederick’s guest, friend, enemy, might well
have seemed Paradise to Voltaire. He was free. His social French soul
was delighted with many visitors. He worked hard too. He spent three
weeks in “drying his clothes after the shipwreck,” as he phrased it
himself. But for one fear, he would have been happy. It was not only in
Prussia that Frederick was Frederick the Great. His name was everywhere
a power and terror. Why should prudent France embroil herself with the
greatest of European sovereigns for the sake of clasping to her breast
an upstart genius who was always making mischief whether he was at home
or abroad, and who had been punished for his abominable, free, daring,
unpalatable opinions a hundred times without changing them?
Voltaire had arrived in Mayence on July 7, 1753. On July 9th he was
writing to Madame Denis that letter for the public eye in which he gave
_his_ account of the affair with Frederick; and went on to prove that he
had never been a Prussian subject, or anything but a Frenchman to the
bottom of his soul, which was true enough; and to assert, the truth of
which he felt to be very doubtful, that Frederick would be the first to
ask of the King my master (I am still Gentleman-in-Ordinary, you will be
pleased to remember) that I may be allowed to end my days in my native
land. Madame Denis was working hard to attain that same end in Paris:
and thought herself likely to succeed. Her sufferings in Frankfort had
been such that the emotional lady had to be bled four times in a week,
she said. She still hoped, in italics, that her old prophecy that the
King of Prussia would be the death of Uncle Voltaire would not be
fulfilled after all; and recalled Frankfort in terms so agitating that
there was no wonder her uncle--who greatly overestimated his niece’s
goodness in coming to him there--harped on the treatment she had
received, on Freytag, Fredersdorff, and the “Goat,” in every letter he
wrote. In one at least, written at this period, he ominously signed
himself Gentleman of the Chamber of the King of France. Voltaire was
coming home.
He and Collini left Mayence on July 28th for Mannheim, where Charles
Theodore, the Elector Palatine, had invited Voltaire to stay with him.
They passed a night at Worms _en route_. Voltaire’s spirits were light
enough for him to pretend to be an Italian for the benefit of the Worms
innkeeper, and make the supper what his secretary called “very
diverting.” At Mannheim, the Elector Palatine’s Court being in the
country, Voltaire spent a short time putting money matters in order, and
changing his German money into French. He was nearly in his “patrie”; no
wonder he was lighthearted. In a few days the Elector fetched him to
Schwetzingen, his country house, where was held the gayest and most
charming of little Courts. Voltaire always dined with the Elector, and
after dinner read aloud to him one of his works. There were _fêtes_ and
concerts. The court theatrical company came to visit the author of
“Zaire” and “Alzire,” of “Mahomet” and “Mérope.” Four of his own plays
were acted. He was only too delighted to show the actors how to render
this passage, and give to that character its true weight and
significance. He began here (“like an old fool,” he said) a new love
drama called “The Orphan of China.” If liberty was the passion of his
life, the drama was the pet child of his leisure. An agreeable fortnight
passed away. The distinguished guest was taken to see the Elector’s
library at Mannheim and presented to it the companion volume to that
ill-omened “Poëshie” of the King my master--Frederick’s “Memoirs of the
House of Brandenburg.”
While unconscious Voltaire was still at Schwetzingen, training actors,
or reading the “Annals” to the Elector, d’Argenson, Voltaire’s old
school friend and member of the French Cabinet, recorded in his diary
“Permission to re-enter France is refused to M. de Voltaire ... to
please the King of Prussia.”
On August 16th, Voltaire and Collini reached Strasburg and put up there
at a poor little inn called the “White Bear,” because it was kept by the
father of a waiter at the inn at Mayence; and good-natured Voltaire had
promised to patronise it to oblige him. He moved shortly to a little
house outside the city gate, and received there everyone of note in
Strasburg.
He was still hard at work on the “Annals.” He spent the evening
sometimes with the agreeable Countess de Lutzelburg, who lived near. He
took counsel about his “Annals” with Schoepflin, the German historian.
Altogether he would have passed a couple of months quite after his
heart--if--if--Madame Denis had been able to tell him that it was safe
for him to proceed further into France. Alsace was the borderline. On it
was written, it seemed, “Thus far shalt thou come, but no further.” But
still--patience, patience! Voltaire did not yet despair. He knew
nothing of that entry in d’Argenson’s diary. But much bitter experience
had taught him that discretion is the better part of valour. On October
2d he left Strasburg, and arrived the same evening at Colmar.
Colmar was a well-chosen spot for several reasons. One was that
Schoepflin’s brother, who was a printer, was going to print Voltaire’s
“Annals” for him there. Another was that Colmar had plenty of agreeable
literary society. And a third--and most important--it was very
conveniently situated for the receipt of Madame Denis’s communications.
Within a drive of it was Lunéville. Two days’ journey from it was Cirey.
Its upper classes all spoke French. And though the Jesuits were no small
power in it, Voltaire seems to have forgotten that unpleasant little
fact, when he came. He went into modest rooms; and was his own
housekeeper, with a young peasant girl called Babet, whose gaiety,
simplicity, and volubility much entertained him, as cook. He played
chess after dinner with Collini. His way of life delighted tastes always
modest; and his health improved rapidly. He drew plans for his “Orphan.”
With a brilliant play he had successfully defied his enemies before. Why
not again? But the dramatic muse required much wooing this time; and the
most versatile writer in the world began compiling articles for the
“Encyclopædia” instead.
In this October Voltaire buried himself in the village of Luttenbach,
near Colmar, for a fortnight, where he was happy enough proof-correcting
his “Annals” and still hoping for good news from France. On October
28th, he came back to Colmar, had a fit of the gout, and, as usual,
gaily bemoaned his ill-health in all his letters.
He still liked Colmar. He still thought he was creeping home. Prussia
was behind him; and, though he was nearly sixty years old and always
talked of himself as dying, he knew there was still a world before.
And then, in this December of 1753, Fate struck him one of those
stunning blows she had too often dealt him.
Just as he was hoping for the best, as his friends in Paris were
straining every nerve to smooth the way for his return, as he was
laboriously wooing the histrionic muse that he might captivate the
capital with a comedy; just as he had renounced Frederick and Prussia
and remembered that he was Gentleman-in-Ordinary to his French Majesty
and a Frenchman body and soul, and no Prussian after all, there appeared
at The Hague, in a shamefully incorrect pirated edition, the most
ambitious, the most voluminous, the most characteristic, and the most
daring of all Voltaire’s works, the “Essay on the Manners and Mind of
Nations.”
If Madame du Châtelet “despised history a little,” it had not the less
been her and her lover’s chief employment at Cirey. “The Century of
Louis XIV.” was not enough to occupy such an energy as Voltaire’s. That
cramped him to one time and to one country. And behold! there was the
world to look back upon; the history of all nations to study--the
progress of mankind to regard as a whole.
The “Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations” is of all Voltaire’s
works the one which has exerted the most powerful influence on the mind
of men. On July 10, 1791, when his body was taken to Paris and placed on
the ruins of the Bastille on the very spot where he himself had been a
prisoner, on the funeral car were written the memorable words, “He gave
the human mind a great impetus: he prepared us for freedom.” That line
might have served as the motto of his great essay. It prepared men for
freedom. It records the history of human progress from Charlemagne to
Louis XIII. It was the first history which dealt not with kings, the
units, but with the great, panting, seething masses they ruled; which
took history to mean the advance of the whole human race--a general view
of the great march of all nations towards light and liberty. It was the
first history which struck out boldly, and hit prejudice and oppression
a staggering blow from which they have not yet recovered. Yet its style
is infinitely frank, gay, and daring. It is such easy reading, so light,
clear, and sarcastic. It is the one book of its kind the frivolous will
finish for pleasure. It has such a jesting manner to hide its weighty
matter. It is infinitely significant; and yet sounds as if it were
simply meant to be amusing. It is said that Voltaire put it into such a
form to overcome Madame du Châtelet’s dislike of history. But it was his
lifelong principle as a writer that to be dull is the greatest of all
errors. He was always wishing that Newton had written vaudevilles; and
praying that his own taste might never be “stifled with study.” What
Frederick the Great called the “effervescence of his genius” bubbles
over in the “Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations,” as in all his
works. But it must be remembered that easy reading means hard writing;
and that this “picture of the centuries,” this “history of the human
mind,” needed, as its author declared, “the patience of a Benedictine
and the pen of a Bossuet.” When he wrote “Finis” on the last page of the
last edition in 1775, the book numbered six volumes, and was in every
sense the greatest of its author’s works. Parton has justly said that to
it “Grote, Niebuhr, Gibbon, Colenso, and especially Buckle, are all
indebted.” That it is full of mistakes which any fairly well-educated
person of to-day could easily correct does not make it a less
extraordinary production for the age in which it was produced. That it
is now obsolete, only proves how thoroughly it accomplished its aim. The
great new truths for which Voltaire fought with his life in his hand are
the commonplaces and the truisms of to-day.
But then he made them so.
Jean Néaulme, the pirate publisher at The Hague, said he had bought the
manuscript from a servant of Prince Charles of Lorraine--Charles having
obtained it either by persuasion or treachery from Frederick the Great.
Voltaire had given a manuscript copy of the book to his royal friend. In
his present state of mind, it was only natural he should suspect
Frederick of foul play.
However this might be, the thing was printed. It was called, and
miscalled, “An Abridgment of Universal History.” It was filled from end
to end with astounding, and, very often, wilful blunders. It confused
the eighth century with the fourth, and the twelfth with the thirteenth,
and Boniface VIII. with Boniface VII. The unhappy author, with tears in
his eyes, called it “the disgrace of literature.” He had, of course,
never corrected the proofs. Since writing that first
[Illustration: LEKAIN
_From an Engraving after a Painting by S. B. Le Noir_]
manuscript, intrusted to Frederick, he had written other manuscripts
wherein he had not only modified but actually changed his first ideas.
This time at least, when he followed his old plan of loudly disavowing
the work, he had much justification. The “pretended Universal History,”
as he called it, _was_ his “Essay,” but so mauled and disfigured he may
be forgiven for refusing to acknowledge it.
But far stronger than any merely literary reasons for denying such a
paternity was the bold, free-spoken character of this son of his genius.
Voltaire knew that no work he had ever written would so bar his way back
to his country as this one. Every line glowed with some truth hateful to
Boyers and to tyranny. There was never any mistaking a Voltaire’s
meaning. Now, more than ever, he had written in luminous words which,
like sunbeams, being much condensed, greatly burnt. His principles were
as lucid as daylight. There was hardly a phrase which would not draw
upon him “the implacable wrath of the clergy.” How could he forget in it
such remarks as the following--“Rome has always decided for the opinion
which most degraded the human mind and most completely annihilated human
reason”?
“Whoso thinks makes others think.”
How could he help remembering that he had taken the Protestant
Reformation as a new tyranny--not an emancipation; that he had degraded
war “from the highest to the lowest place in the historian’s regard”;
and had declared that “Tyrants sacrifice the human race to an
individual”--a dangerous sentence in itself, and which that abominable
pirate publisher had rendered a thousand times more dangerous by
misquoting as “Kings sacrifice the human race to a caprice”? He had
offended every powerful class, and every cherished prejudice. But action
was now, not less than ever, his _forte_. If it could not save him from
his enemies, it could save him from himself--from that worst
combination, idleness with misery.
On December 28, 1753, he wrote to Néaulme, and told M. Jean his candid
opinion about that edition. He also wrote not a little piteously, a very
few days after, to his old friend Madame de Pompadour--the publication
of that “Essay” forcing him to prove, he said, his innocence to his
master the King--of France.
But it was in vain he reminded Louis XV., through her, that he had spent
years of his life in writing the history of Louis’s predecessor; “and
alone of the Academicians had had his panegyric translated into five
languages.” That surly Bourbon, with that intuition which saved his
degraded race a hundred times from earlier and completer ruin, saw in
the genius of Voltaire the fuse which was to set ablaze the gunpowder of
sedition and misery with which his France was undermined. He turned to
Madame de Pompadour and said that he “did not wish” Voltaire to return
to Paris. It is not difficult to imagine the exile’s state of mind. “I
have no comfort but in work and solitude,” he wrote; and to Cideville,
on January 28th of this new year 1754: “My dear Cideville, at our age
one must mock at everything and live for self. This world is a great
shipwreck. _Sauve qui peut!_ but I am far from the shore.”
On what shore would he be allowed to land if he could gain one?
Colmar, he soon discovered, was “a town of Hottentots governed by German
Jesuits.” On February 17th, he wrote a very meek, artful letter to one
of those Jesuits, Father Menou (whom he had known at the Court of
Stanislas and of whom he speaks in his “Memoirs” as “the boldest and
most intriguing priest I ever knew”), pleading his cause with him. He
pleaded it, too, with the Archbishop of Paris through M. de Malesherbes.
But it was all in vain. The Church was as offended as the King.
On February 2Oth, pushed to extremity, and neither able to leave nor to
stay in this wretched Colmar without the sanction of his French Majesty,
the unhappy man asked d’Argenson to “sound the King’s indulgence”--to
know if he might travel.
On February 22d, he called in two notaries, who compared the correct
manuscript of his “Essay” with the two incorrect volumes published at
The Hague; and drew up a formal declaration in which they affirmed that
the Dutch edition was “surreptitious, full of errors, and worthy of all
contempt,” and that the real “Essay” was at least eight times longer
than the false one. But that also was useless. Neither Court nor
Catholic meant to be convinced.
Then, as if her uncle’s cup of misfortune were not brimming over
already, niece Denis’s bad management and extravagance with his money in
Paris forced him to appoint an agent to look after her affairs; and she,
living on his bounty, turned and accused him of avarice. No public
wrongs are so cruel as private ones. Beside Madame Denis’s ingratitude,
excommunication, said Voltaire, would have been a light penalty. He had
given her an ample fortune--a larger one than old Maître Arouet had left
his Voltaire. Her reproaches were the unkindest cut of all.
That they were singularly ill-timed may be gathered from the fact that
sixty thousand francs of Voltaire’s income were derived from annuities
or bonds of the City of Paris, of which at any moment angry Louis might
deprive him, by a line of writing and the royal signature, for ever. Two
kings were now his enemies. Jesuitical Colmar hated him. Prussia and
France were barred to him. Denis had turned upon him. The Pompadour was
helpless. The “Essay,” filled with blunders and pregnant with daring and
danger, was all over Europe. Such was Voltaire’s position in the month
of March, 1754.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE ARRIVAL IN SWITZERLAND
Receiving no answer to his request to be allowed to travel, Voltaire
prudently resolved to consider that silence gave consent. But he was
still not a little nervous that if he took refuge in a foreign country
Louis XV. might consider himself justified in seizing the pensions of
his truant subject.
And then, where was he to go? It seems most likely that if it had not
been for that unromantic disorder called _mal de mer_ he would have
ended his days in Pennsylvania. He had still his _bizarre_ liking for
the Quakers; and America was the country of the free. To be sure _mal du
pays_ was a worse and a longer lived disorder with him than the other:
and if he had tried Pennsylvania on one impulse, he would quickly have
left it on another.
He looked back lovingly, too, on bold little England, “where one thinks
as a free man.” And on March 19, 1754, he asked M. Polier de Bottens,
who had been a Calvinist minister at Lausanne, if he could assure him of
as much freedom in Lausanne as in Britain. Meanwhile, there was no
reason why, in the near future, that long-deferred and greatly discussed
Plombières visit should not take place.
And, for the time, he was in Colmar. On January 12th of this year he had
sent his Duchess of Saxe-Gotha twelve advance copies of those “Annals of
the Empire” written at her request, and just printed under Voltaire’s
own eye at Colmar by Schoepflin. In return, Madame had done her gracious
best to reconcile him with Frederick. He was anxious to be reconciled.
Frederick could influence France to receive back her prodigal, as could
no one else. “Brother Voltaire,” as he signed himself in his letters to
her, also pleaded his cause once more with the Margravine of Bayreuth;
and then sent Frederick himself a copy of those “Annals” as a tentative
olive branch. Frederick accepted the book, and declined the peace
overtures in a letter, dated March 16, 1754, which contained bitter
allusion to the Maupertuis affair and showed that the kingly heart was
still sore and that the kingly soul still angrily admired the great
gifts of his Voltaire.
The famous suppers “went to the devil” without him. But if the King
missed his wit much, he dreaded it more; and if Voltaire wanted the
King’s powerful friendship--he did not want the King’s society. They
were better apart. And, for the first time, both were wise enough to
know it.
To this spring belongs a very active correspondence between Voltaire,
the most voluble correspondent who ever put pen to paper, and Madame du
Deffand. Blind, bored, and brilliant, the friend of Horace Walpole, a
courtier at Sceaux, and the head of one of the most famous salons in
Paris, Madame du Deffand had long been a friend of Voltaire’s, and had
visited him in the Bastille in 1726, just before his exile in England.
If she thought, as Frederick the Great wrote to Darget on April 1st of
this same year 1754, that Voltaire was “good to read and bad to know,”
her cynic old soul loved his wit if she feared it. Perhaps she even
loved him--though mistrustingly. Blindness had just fallen upon her. And
“the hermit of Colmar”--neither now nor ever only _méchant_--wrote to
her with the finest sympathy and tact, cheering, amusing, rallying her.
“My eyes were a little wet when I read what had happened to yours.... If
you are an annuitant, Madame, take care of yourself, eat little, go to
bed early, and live to be a hundred, if only to enrage those who pay
your annuities. For my part, it is the only pleasure I have left. I
reflect, when I feel an indigestion coming on, that two or three princes
will gain by my death: and I take courage out of pure malice and
conspire against them with rhubarb and sobriety.”
As Voltaire could have had nothing to gain by continually writing to
amuse this blind old _mondaine_, it may be conceded that he did it out
of kindness; and that if he loved her cleverness, he also pitied her
misfortune. The eighteenth century, which failed so dismally in all
other domestic relationships, perfectly understood the art of
friendship.
On the Easter Day of this 1754, Voltaire, having first confessed to a
Capuchin monk, received the Sacrament. _Faire ses Pâques_ declares the
laxest Catholic to be still a son of the Church. What Voltaire’s motives
were in this action, it is not easy to see. It is said that his anxious
friends in Paris recommended the action as an answer to the charges of
unbelief brought against him. But a Voltaire must have known well enough
that such an answer as that would impose on no one. Besides, it was not
like him to be governed by the advice of fools--even if they happened to
be his friends. The reasons he himself gave for the action were that at
Rome one must do as Rome does. “When men are surrounded by barbarians
... one must imitate their contortions.... Some people are afraid to
touch spiders, others swallow them.” “If I had a hundred thousand men, I
know exactly what I should do: but I have not, so I shall communicate at
Easter, and you can call me a hypocrite as much as you like.”
The hypocrisy was but ill acted. Voltaire received the Sacrament with an
irreverence painful to believers and harmful to his own reputation. To
him the thing was a jest--“the contortions of barbarians.” He was quite
mocking and gay. When he got home, he sent to the Capuchin convent a
dozen of good wine and a loin of veal. I despise you too much to be
ill-natured to you! If you believe in this mummery, you are fools! If
you connive at it, unbelieving, you are knaves! Knaves or fools, I can
laugh at you quite good-humouredly. If ever present conveyed a message,
this was the message conveyed by the dozen of wine and the loin of veal.
To justify Voltaire for this act is not possible. It was at best a
_méchanceté_. It was the mocking, jesting nature of the man getting the
upper hand alike of his prudence and of his consideration for others. He
was himself a Deist, and a firmly convinced Deist. To him the religion
of Rome was not merely a folly but the stronghold of tyranny and of
darkness. The fact that millions of faithful souls had found in her
bosom consolation for the sorrows, and a key to the mysteries of life
and of death, did not soften him.
In Voltaire was lacking now and ever that “crown of man’s moral
manhood,” reverence. To find in “the last restraint of the powerful and
the last hope of the wretched” only subject for a laugh was the greatest
of his faults. If he had been a nobler nature, he would have seen the
beauty and the virtue which lie even in the most degrading theologies:
and respecting them, would have stayed his hand from the smashing blow,
and for the sake of the virtue which sweetens corruption, have let
corruption alone.
It has been done many times. “No man can achieve great things for his
country without some loss of the private virtues.” A reverent
Voltaire--what a contradiction in terms!--to spare some goodness, must
have spared much vice. To arouse eighteenth-century France, steeped to
her painted lips in superstition, and the slavery which had debased her
till she came to love it, the shrieks and the blasphemies of a Voltaire
and a Rousseau were necessary. No calmer voice would have waked her from
her narcotic sleep. “Without Voltaire and Rousseau there would have been
no Revolution.” No honest student of eighteenth-century France can doubt
that that Revolution, though it crushed the innocent with the guilty and
left behind it some of the worst fruits of anarchy, left behind it too a
France which, with all its faults, is a thousand times better than the
France it found.
By the middle of April the Plombières arrangements were well advanced.
The d’Argental household was to be there; and Madame Denis, more or less
penitent and more or less forgiven, had asked to join the party. The
waters would be good for a health--ruined, said her temperate uncle, by
“remedies and gourmandising.” Voltaire would come, with a couple of
servants at the most. He was anticipating the change with pleasure when
at the very last minute Madame Denis wrote to tell him that Maupertuis
was at Plombières too. It was certainly not big enough to hold both him
and his enemy. The events of the last months had taught even Voltaire
some kind of caution. He was absolutely _en partant_ when Madame
Denis’s letter came; but on June 8th, though he left Colmar, it was to
stop halfway between it and Plombières, at the Abbey of Senones, as the
guest of Dom Calmet, who had himself been a visitor at Cirey. Calmet had
a splendid library. His visitor, who was condemned, as he said, to work
at a correct edition of that “General History, printed for my
misfortune,” made good use of it, during his three weeks’ visit. Absurd
reports were noised abroad--which the Dom did not contradict--that he
had converted “the most pronounced Deist in Europe.” But, as the Deist
himself said, his business was with the library--not with matins and
vespers. Directly Maupertuis left Plombières, Voltaire took leave of
Calmet and his monks, and on some day not earlier than July 2d left for
Plombières, where he found not only his dear d’Argentals and Madame
Denis, but her sister, Madame de Fontaine, as well.
The little party passed here an agreeable fortnight or so. About July
22d, Voltaire returned to Colmar with Madame Denis, who from this time
forth managed, or mismanaged, his house for him till his death. The
“Universal History” greatly occupied him after his holiday. But there
was another subject which was even more engrossing.
It was the idea of living in Switzerland. Since March the plan of
seeking “an agreeable tomb in the neighbourhood of Geneva,” or possibly
near Lausanne, had been growing--growing. There were many reasons why
the little republic was a suitable home for Voltaire. In the first
place, it _was_ a republic. It was quite close to France, though not in
it; and though France might not like to have such a firebrand as
Voltaire burning in her midst, she would not object to be lit by his
light if it were burning near.
Then Switzerland was Protestant--and in Voltaire’s English experience of
Protestantism he had found that faith singularly tolerant and
easy-going--in practice, that is, not in principle. By August he was
negotiating actively with M. de Brenles, a lawyer of Lausanne, about “a
rather pretty property” on the lake of Geneva. It was called Allamans;
and Voltaire was not a little disappointed when his negotiations for
buying it fell through. In October he was inquiring if a Papist could
not possess and bequeath land in the territory of Lausanne. He urged
secrecy on de Brenles; and entered fully into money matters. If he
bought land, it was to be in the name of his niece, Madame Denis. There
was a danger throughout these months of that bomb the “Pucelle”
bursting--into print--“and killing me.” That fear made the Swiss
arrangements go forward with a will.
On October 23d, Voltaire went to supper at a poor tavern of Colmar,
called the “Black Mountain,” with no less a personage than his friend
Wilhelmina of Bayreuth. She overwhelmed him with kindness and attention;
asked him to stay with her; begged she might see Madame Denis, and made
a thousand excuses for the bad behaviour of brother Frederick; so that
impulsive Voltaire jumped once more to that favourite conclusion of his
that “women are worth more than men.” To be sure, if he had seen an
account of the interview his clever Princess wrote to her brother, he
might have thought something less highly of her and her sex. But he did
not see it; nor Frederick’s bitter reply. If he had, neither flattery
nor opprobrium would have moved him now from one fixed resolve--to
shelter in Switzerland.
On November 11th, Voltaire, Collini, Madame Denis, a lady’s maid, and a
servant left Colmar to visit the Duke of Richelieu at Lyons. Voltaire
had lived at Colmar on and off for thirteen months--among Jesuits who
five years earlier had publicly burnt the works of Bayle, the prophet of
tolerance. He could not have left with regret. Just as they were
starting off, Collini declares that his master, finding the travelling
carriage overladen with luggage, gave orders that everything should be
taken out except his own trunk and Madame Denis’s; and that he told
Collini to sell _his_ portmanteau and its contents. The hot-tempered
young Italian refused to do so, and gave notice on the spot. On his own
showing, his impetuous master made at once the handsomest apologies for
his little burst of temper; gave the secretary generous presents of
money as a peace-offering; and made him re-pack his portmanteau and put
it back in the carriage. The storm blew over; but Collini, like almost
all Voltaire’s servants, was beginning to take advantage of his master’s
indulgence, and to trespass on a kindness which Voltaire made doubly
kind to compensate for his irritability.
By November 15th, the party were installed in a very bad inn, called the
“Palais Royal,” at Lyons. Voltaire complained that it was “a little too
much of a joke for a sick man to come a hundred _lieues_ to talk to the
Maréchal de Richelieu.” But he and Richelieu were not only very old
friends but, in spite of little disagreements such as that affair of the
“Panegyric of Louis XV.” at Court in 1749, very faithful friends. The
brilliant author and the brilliant soldier had still for each other the
attraction which had been potent twenty years earlier in those June days
at Montjeu, when Voltaire had negotiated the marriage between
Mademoiselle de Guise and the gallant Duke. The charming wife had died
young; and her husband and Voltaire had met little of late. But Voltaire
received Richelieu in the bad inn, and clever Richelieu made the five
days he stayed at Lyons so infinitely soothing and agreeable for his
much tried and harassed friend, that when Richelieu left, Voltaire said
he felt like Ariadne in Naxos after the desertion of Theseus.
While he was at Lyons the enterprising traveller also went to call on
Cardinal de Tencin, head of the Church there, uncle of d’Argental, and
brother of that famous Madame de Tencin who had played Thisbe to
Voltaire’s Pyramus when Voltaire was in the Bastille in 1726. The wary
Lord Cardinal stated to M. de Voltaire that he could not ask a person in
such ill-favour with his Majesty of France to dine with him. Voltaire
replied that he never dined out, and knew how to take his own part
against kings and cardinals; and, so saying, turned his back on his
Eminence and went out of the room. As he and Collini were returning from
that brief visit, the visitor observed absently that this country was
not made for him. The officer in command of the troops in Lyons received
him in much the same way. All the authorities were cold, in fact, to
propitiate that Highest Authority at the Court of France, who was colder
still. However, their disapproval was not very afflicting. The town of
Lyons saw Voltaire with bolder eyes. It acted his plays at the theatre;
and when he appeared in his box there, loudly applauded him. On November
26th, he formally took his seat in the Lyons Academy, of which he had
long been an honorary member. Then, too, Wilhelmina was in Lyons; and
Wilhelmina used her shrewd influence with de Tencin, and at a second
interview, behold! the Church and Deism on quite friendly terms.
As a whole, the Lyons visit was a success; or would have been but for
Voltaire’s ill-health and “mortal anxieties” about “that cursed
‘Pucelle.’” He was afraid that it was in the possession of Mademoiselle
du Thil, once companion to Madame du Châtelet, who had found it among
Émilie’s effects. The ill-health, too, which took the form of gouty
rheumatism this time, was so painful and annoying that many of his
friends had strongly recommended him to try for it the waters of
Aix-in-Savoy. In the meantime he had been lent “a charming house
halfway.” On December 10, 1754, he, Madame Denis, and Collini left Lyons
for ninety-three miles distant Geneva, which they reached on December
13th and found gaily celebrating a victory gained in 1602 over the Duke
of Savoy. The gates of the city were shut for the night when they
arrived. But the great M. de Voltaire was expected: and they were flung
open for him. He supped that night in Geneva with a man who was to be
till his death one of the best and wisest friends he ever had, the
famous Dr. Tronchin.
No account of Voltaire’s life in Switzerland could be complete without
mention of that honourable and celebrated family, who in the eighteenth
century nobly filled many important posts in the Swiss republic and
whose descendants are well known in it to the present day. One Tronchin,
the Swiss jurisconsult, is celebrated as having provoked, by certain
“Letters from the Country,” the famous “Letters from the Mountain” of
Jean Jacques Rousseau. Another, the Councillor François Tronchin, the
most delightful and hospitable of men, was at once the constant
correspondent, the legal adviser--in brief, the factotum of Voltaire.
But the most famous of the family, as well as the one most intimately
associated with Voltaire, was Theodore Tronchin, the doctor. Handsome
face, noble mind, fearless spirit, with the stern uprightness of the
Puritan, and an infinite benevolence and compassion all his own--if
greatness meant only goodness, friend Theodore was a greater man than
his great patient, Voltaire.
Yet, though no spark of the Voltairian genius was in him, he was the
most enlightened doctor of his age. It is not only as the intimate of
that “old baby” as he called him, the Patriarch of Ferney, that Tronchin
may well interest the present day: but as the earliest discoverer--after
eighteen centuries of stuffiness--of the value of fresh air; as the
first of his class who preached the Gospel of Nature; recommended
temperance, exercise, cleanliness in lieu of the drugs of the
Pharmacopœia; and, after years of labour, taught the woman of his age to
be very nearly as good a mother to her children as is the lioness to her
cubs. Tronchin deserves to be famous.
It was he who discountenanced the idea of Voltaire trying the waters of
Aix. Tronchin’s diagnosis always went through the body to the soul. No
doubt he saw that this _vif_, irritable, nervous patient--torn to pieces
with the quarrels and the excitement of the last five years--wanted, not
the waters of Aix, but of Lethe: peace, quiet, monotony, and a home.
After four days’ stay in Geneva, Voltaire and suite reached the
“charming house” which had been lent him, and which was ten miles from
Geneva and called the Château of Prangins. It stood on very high ground,
overlooking the lake from thirteen immense windows. There was too much
house and too little garden. The house was only half furnished, and
beaten by every wind that blew. And it was mid-winter in Switzerland.
Was it really so charming? Madame Denis was volubly discontented.
Italian Collini, who felt he had been cheated out of going to Paris, was
extremely cross and cold. His master and mistress were always calling
him to make up the fires, shut the windows, and bring them their furs.
The draughts were really abominable. And what was one to do here? “Be
bored; in a worse temper than usual; and write a great deal of history;
be as bad a philosopher as in the town; and have not the slightest idea
what is to become of us.” This was discontented Collini’s account of
Prangins. He was pluming his wings for flight, and not at all in the
mood to make the best of things.
It was Voltaire who did that. Between the grumbling niece and secretary,
acutely sensitive himself to physical discomfort, not a little worried
by the memory of that “abortion of a Universal History,” compelled to
wait for a package of absolutely necessary books that ought to have come
from Paris and had not, so ill that by January 3, 1755, he could not
even hold a pen, he was still, in spite of angry Collini’s insinuations,
the same true philosopher who had astronomised with Madame du Châtelet
sitting by the roadside on a January evening on the cushions of their
broken-down carriage. He was still busy and cheerful. “_They_ have need
of courage,” he wrote of his companions, very justly. As for himself, he
worked and forgot the cold. It was in these early days of his life in
Switzerland that he arranged with the Brothers Cramer, the famous
publishers of Geneva, to bring out the first complete edition of his
writings. Then he heard from d’Argental that the public of Paris
resented his exile. What warmth and comfort in that! “Nanine” was played
there with success; and a play of Crébillon’s was a failure. That would
have made one glow with satisfaction in any climate. And if Prangins was
cold, two at least of the influential persons in the neighbourhood had
written warmly to assure the famous newcomer of their good offices.
And better than all, better a thousand times, through this chill,
discontented January, Voltaire was eagerly looking for a house and
property of his own, in this free little Switzerland, where he might
settle down at last and be in peace. On January 31, 1755, he was in
active negotiation about two houses. On February 1st there appeared in
the Registers of the Council of State of Geneva a special permission to
M. de Voltaire--who alleged the state of his health and the necessity
for living near his doctor, Tronchin, as a reason for wishing to settle
in Switzerland--to inhabit the territory of the republic under the good
pleasure of the Seigneury.
On February 8th or 9th the Councillor Tronchin bought a property quite
close to Geneva, called Saint-Jean, which he let on a life lease to
Voltaire, and which, in a characteristic enthusiasm and before he had
had any practical experience of it, Voltaire rechristened “Les Délices.”
Thus he was enabled to evade the law of the republic, and, Papist though
he nominally was, to live and hold property under the Genevan republic.
A few days later he acquired a second house, called Monrion, on the way
from Lausanne to Ouchy.
He was now sixty-one years old. Strong in his heart all his life had
been his love of a home. For a while Cirey had seemed like one. But it
had never belonged to him. It was, too, in France; and there had been
often the painful necessity of leaving it as quickly as possible, and
without any surety of being allowed to come back again. The man’s whole
life had been a buffeting from pillar to post.
But the fretted youth in Paris, the restless middle age at Lunéville,
Brussels, Cirey, and the angry hurry of Prussia were over for ever.
When he settled in Switzerland Voltaire took a new lease of his life. He
entered upon its last, greatest, noblest, and calmest epoch.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE DÉLICES, AND THE “POEM ON THE DISASTER OF LISBON”
In 1755, the little republic of Geneva contained twenty thousand of some
of the most simple, honest, frugal, and industrious persons in the
world. Calvin had been dead two centuries. But his influence yet lived
in laws which regulated not only the worship but the food and the drink
of his followers; which bade them rise at five in summer and at six in
winter, under penalty of a fine; allowed but two dishes at their tables;
and made more than one fire in a house appear unjustifiable
extravagance. In many respects the Genevan Calvinists of the time of
Voltaire were not unlike a certain section of Scottish society. Austere
in morals, and shrewd in mind, narrow, laborious, economical, equally
exempt from degrading poverty and degrading luxury, content with stern
pleasures, and a brief and rigid creed--the Calvinist was but a severer
Presbyterian after all. By the middle of the eighteenth century, indeed,
one party of the Genevans had been influenced not a little, on the side
of their intellect, by the new science, the new literature, the new
philosophy, which were remoulding Europe; and beneath the Calvinistic
gloom still felt the gay heart-beats of the Frenchman. But the other and
larger party were Puritan to the marrow--who believed, with all the
morbid intensity of their founder, that enjoyment was sinful, musical
instruments had been invented by the devil, and play-acting was the
abomination of desolation.
It was among such a people that this cynic Voltaire, whose motto was
“Rire et fais rire,” whose darling amusement was the drama, and whose
incorrigible indulgence was the “Pucelle,” had elected to live.
On the very day, February 9, 1755, when he completed his negotiations
for buying the lease of Délices, a certain Pastor Vernet wrote to him,
begging him to respect religion, and saying that the serious persons of
the neighbourhood were not without their apprehensions on that count.
But when it came to writing, Voltaire was more than a match for any
pastor who ever lived. He responded by a letter brilliantly ambiguous;
to which Vernet could take no exception, but in which he must have found
much food for thought.
Les Délices stood on the top of a hill on the Lyons road and quite near
to the town of Geneva. It was therefore in that republic, while it was
ten minutes’ walk from the Sardinian province of Savoy, half an hour’s
ride into France, and an hour’s ride into Vaud. Altogether, a most
prudent situation for a Voltaire. Lake Leman lapped the foot of its
terraces. It was surrounded by gardens, whose beauty was only marred by
high walls which shut out the lovely surrounding country. His signature
on the lease was still wet when this enthusiastic Voltaire began pulling
down those walls that he might look uninterruptedly upon one of the most
beautiful views in Switzerland--across the city of Geneva, the junction
of the rivers Arne and Rhone, to the Jura and the Alps. He called the
place the Délices, he said, because “there is nothing more delightful
than to be free and independent.” Certainly, the Delights were his
torments in some respects. He complained that the architect of Prangins
had forgotten to make a garden, and the architect of Délices had
forgotten to make a house. Its builder had built for himself; and the
guest-rooms were inadequate and uncomfortable. But such defects could be
remedied. The last occupant of Délices was the son of that Duchess of
Saxe-Gotha who had inspired the “Annals.” _That_ seemed like a good
omen.
Monrion, the second purchase, was on the way from Lausanne to Ouchy--at
the other end of the lake from Délices. “Les Délices will be for the
summer, Monrion for the winter, and you for all seasons,” Voltaire wrote
to Lawyer de Brenles, the very day he acquired Délices. “I wanted only
one tomb. I shall have two.” Monrion was comfortable and “sheltered
from the cruel north wind”--“my little cabin,” “my winter palace”--a
“clean, simple house” such as its master loved. After his time it was
inhabited by Tissot--a celebrated doctor, only second in reputation to
Tronchin.
It is pleasant to see the keen youthful enjoyment and ardour with which
Voltaire turned to the improvement of his new homes. The first letter he
wrote from Délices is dated March 5, 1755, but, as has been noted, even
before that date he was enthusiastically pulling down walls in the
garden and planning new rooms for the house. By March 24th, he and
Madame Denis were actually in the midst of building the “accommodation
for our friends and our chickens--planting oranges and onions, tulips
and carrots. One must found Carthage.” The new fascination--the safest
and best he had ever known--the fascination of home and garden, of
country life, of pride in simple things--took possession of the most
susceptible of men. He said with his cynic smile that he “was born faun
and sylvan.” He was at least strangely free from love of the pavement
for a man who had spent on it all the most pliable years of his life. He
wrote in this March that his whole conversation was of “masons,
carpenters, and gardeners.” Even Madame Denis, whose “natural aversion
to a country life” her poor uncle was to have bitter cause to lament,
liked the hurry and bustle of moving, and was for a while content.
There was much to be done, too, within doors. For himself, Voltaire’s
own tastes were always quite frugal and simple. He wanted neither fine
furniture nor many servants. And as for rich eating and drink, from
those, if he had ever desired them--which he had not--his health would
have precluded him. His sternly frugal fare and love of simplicity about
him should have pleased his Calvinistic neighbours. But he was a friend
before all things. And Délices and Monrion were to be open to all his
friends--who must be received with every hospitality and with every
generous comfort of which their host could think. For them he would live
like a rich man. For them he began spending that comfortable fortune he
had acquired with so much sagacity, and very often with so much
self-denial. He bought half a dozen horses and four carriages. He kept
a couple of lackeys, a valet called Boisse, a French cook, and a cook’s
boy; maidservants, coachmen, a postilion, and gardeners; beside Collini,
whose duties were only less universal than Longchamp’s had been. That
French cook soon had to provide a great many dinners for a great many
diners; and generous suppers after evening theatricals. The carriages
had to be sent to bring the economical, quiet-going neighbours to and
from the dinner parties. The carriage Voltaire kept for his own use was
of antique build, with a blue ground speckled with gold stars; but it
was his fancy always to drive this remarkable equipage into Geneva with
four horses to it--to the great excitement and astonishment of the grave
little republic. On one occasion the people so crowded round him to see
him alight from this extraordinary conveyance, that he called out, “What
do you want to see, boobies? A skeleton? Well, here is one,” and he
threw off his cloak. The establishment of Délices was further completed
by a tame bear and a monkey. The monkey, who bit the hand that caressed
him, was called Luc. So in his letters of the time Voltaire soon began
to allude to a certain royal friend as Luc too.
Voltaire had been established at Délices about a month, when in April
his first visitor, Lekain the actor, came to stay with him. Lekain, who
in 1750 had been nobody at all but a clever young dependent on the
bounty of the famous M. de Voltaire, was himself famous now, as one of
the best tragedians in Paris. Of course the amateur dramatic talents of
Délices took advantage of the professional genius of Lekain. “Zaire” was
rehearsed; and then read aloud in one of the large rooms of the house.
Denis and Lekain were in the principal parts. Voltaire took his
favourite _rôle_ of Lusignan, and declared gaily that no company in
Europe had a better old fool in it than himself. The frigid Calvinists
and the Tronchins, who formed the audience, were in tears. Lekain had
more sentiment than voice, said Voltaire; and was so moved sometimes as
to be inaudible. But then he moved his audience too. That was the great
thing. He and his amateurs also read some part of the new play, “The
Orphan of China”; and when Lekain left he carried away most of it in
his box with the view of producing it in Paris.
But even at Délices the man who had written the “Pucelle” could not long
expect to find only the pleasures of play-acting and the agreeable
troubles of an estate. Since he began it, in 1730, the thing had been
copied, and miscopied, read, re-read, quoted, and travestied a thousand
times. It had been imitated by King Frederick in the “Palladium”; and
read aloud to the Prussian princesses and the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha. It
had been transcribed _for_ Prince Henry, and _by_ Longchamp. It was
everybody’s secret; but still it _was_ a secret. There was one indecorum
it had not yet committed--that of print.
And in this January of 1755 had come that unpleasant news that a
manuscript _was_ in the possession of Mademoiselle du Thil; and then,
like a clap of thunder, the announcement that the thing “was printed and
being sold for a louis in Paris.”
The publication of such a work would have been disastrous for Voltaire
at any moment; but it was doubly disastrous now. Here he was just
settling down upon his estate as a sober, respectable country gentleman,
very much minded to stand well with his strait-laced neighbours, very
fond of his new home, not at all inclined to leave it, and having
nowhere to go if he did leave it--yet holding his land and his right to
live on it only at the “good pleasure” of a very strict Seigneury. To
make matters worse, the printed “Pucelle” was (of course) full of
errors; and while it was much less witty than the original, was not at
all less indecent. At first there seemed to be nothing to be done but to
follow the old, old plan. The thing is not mine at all! Here, for
instance, is a passage abusing Richelieu--and Richelieu is my friend!
And then, to make assurance doubly sure, Voltaire tried another very
artful and most characteristic _ruse_. He employed hundreds of copyists
in Paris to copy it as incorrectly as possible. Then all his friends, as
well as himself, denied loudly and vehemently that he was the author
thereof. A Voltaire write such bad verse--so _fade_, so _plat_, so
prosy! Impossible! At the same time, Voltaire sent copies of such a
“Pucelle”--or such parts of _the_ “Pucelle”--as he wished to avow, to
all his acquaintance and all persons in authority. It was a very good
idea. It cost a great deal of money, and a great deal of trouble; and
might have been of some use if M. de Voltaire’s character and writings
had not been known and feared these forty years.
On July 26th, Grasset, a publisher of Lausanne, appeared at the Délices
and kindly offered to sell M. de Voltaire the incorrect copy of his own
“Pucelle” for fifty louis. Voltaire had already written to Grasset to
tell him in no mild terms that those “rags of manuscript” were not his
“Pucelle” at all, but the work of some person who had neither “poetic
art, good sense, nor good morals”; and that of such a thing Grasset
would not sell a hundred copies. His rage, therefore, may be imagined.
He denounced Grasset to the Genevan authorities; and had the
satisfaction of seeing that misguided person made fast in prison--for a
time. On July 27th, factotum Collini was sent up to Paris to see if he
could not better matters there. But Paris burnt the “Pucelle.” The Pope
prohibited it; and it sold lustily. It is not a little curious that
Voltaire himself never in all his life suffered anything worse from it
than frights: though of those he had enough and to spare. In 1757, a
Parisian printer was sentenced to nine years at the galleys for printing
an edition. Geneva--pretending to believe, and trying to believe, that
M. de Voltaire was not its author--burnt the accursed thing as Paris had
done; knowing that M. de Voltaire could only be glad to see the
destruction of such a wicked travesty of his respectable poem. With what
a wry smile he must have watched that bonfire!
The republic, however, for the moment, ostensibly gave him the benefit
of the doubt. And then in this very July, just when he ought to have
been most cautious and circumspect, if this imprudent, mischievous
person does not begin making a stage of inverted wine-barrels, painting
scenery, getting together theatrical costumes, flashing sham lightning
in a dust-pan, preparing sham thunder by means of the rims of two
cartwheels--and, worse than all, a thousand times worse--recruiting a
theatrical company from among the young people of Geneva! The young
people were only too willing. The Council of State had swallowed--in
disapproving silence--that reading of “Zaire” when Lekain had reduced
“Tronchins and syndics” to tears. But this was a little too much. So on
July 31st the Council met, and, as the result of a solemn confabulation,
reminded M. de Voltaire that the drama, played publicly or privately,
was contrary to their regulations, and that no Calvinists were allowed
to take part in, or to witness, the same. Voltaire replied with a
suspicious meekness that his only desire was to obey the “wise laws” of
the government. He further wrote to Councillor Tronchin in terms quite
abject. “No man who owes to your honourable body the privilege of living
in this air ought to displease anyone who breathes it.”
In brief, there was a different and quite as good an air in Lausanne,
where the “wise laws” of Geneva had no sway. Lausanne loved play-acting;
and M. de Voltaire had a house at Monrion.
In Paris, too, on August 20th, “The Orphan of China” was performed with
brilliant success. Here was excellent consolation for the solemn
resolutions of Genevan Councils. They might take offence at “Zaire,” but
Paris applauded “my Chinese baboons” to the echo. Poor Marie Leczinska,
indeed, who not unnaturally saw evil in everything this sceptic, this
Pompadour’s favourite, did, saw it here too. But even her objections,
that the piece contained lines hostile to religion and to the King, were
too obviously unjust to harm it. The censor had passed it. Its first
performance declared it Voltaire’s greatest success since “Mérope.” If
Lekain _did_ fall into his old fault and speak dreadfully indistinctly,
Mademoiselle Clarion made the most charming of heroines, and the play
was “all full of love”--tender, graceful, picturesque. It was played
twelve or thirteen times in Paris; and when it was moved to
Fontainebleau the Court delighted in it as much as the capital had done.
In the annals of the French stage it is still remembered as the first
play in which the actresses consented to forego their _paniers_.
Collini was present on the opening night. Even his grumbling pen allows
that his master had made a very palpable hit. The pleasure-loving
secretary had spent six weeks in Paris, almost entirely engaged in
enjoying himself, before Voltaire recalled him in the friendliest of
terms.
On August 30, 1755, Voltaire wrote from Délices one of his most famous
letters; perhaps one of the most famous letters in the world. It was to
Jean Jacques Rousseau, and thanked him for the “Discourse on the Origin
of Inequality among Men,” which Rousseau had written as a prize essay at
the Academy of Dijon, and now sent for the approval of the great master.
The “Discourse” was nothing but an elaboration of Rousseau’s famous
theory--the advantage of savage over civilised life. Years before, at
the French Court in 1745, Voltaire and Rousseau had had dealings with
each other. They now renewed that acquaintance. Voltaire’s letter began,
“I have received, Sir, your new book against the human race.... No one
has ever employed so much wit in trying to make us beasts: one longs to
go on four paws when one reads your book, but, personally, it is sixty
years since I lost the habit, and I feel it is impossible for me to
resume it.” He went on to agree with Jean Jacques that literature and
science brought many troubles to their votaries; and instanced his own
case with as quick a feeling as if all his wrongs were of yesterday.
But, “literature nourishes, rectifies, and consoles the soul ... one
must love it, in spite of the way it is abused, as one must love
society, though the wicked corrupt its sweetness: as one must love one’s
country, though one suffers injustice from it; and one’s God, though
superstition and fanaticism degrade His service.”
On September 10th, Rousseau replied from Paris in warm terms of
friendship, and agreeing with the superior wisdom of his master’s
argument. As yet, each could see the other’s genius--and reverence it.
They could disagree and be friends.
The autumn at Délices was further marked by the visit of Patu, a poet,
who was a friend of David Garrick’s and wrote him an ecstatic account of
his boyishly energetic host; and by a _fracas_ with Madame Denis.
The facts that that foolish person was fat, short, forty-five years old,
and squinted, did not, it has been said, make her less fond of
admiration from the opposite sex, or less prone to make a fool of
herself in a flirtation when opportunity offered.
In the present case Uncle Voltaire suspected her of being a party to a
theft her old admirer, the Marquis de Ximenès, had made of some
manuscript notes for Voltaire’s “Campaigns of the King.” Ximenès had
sold the notes to a publisher. Madame Denis’s voluble denials would
certainly prove nothing. Voltaire was already quite aware of what Madame
d’Épinay discovered after a very short acquaintance with her, that his
niece was constitutionally a liar.
And then, on November 24th, came news which staggered Voltaire’s soul;
and beside which all petty trouble seemed shameful. On November 1, 1755,
Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake. It was All Saints’ Day, and the
churches were full. In six minutes, fifteen thousand persons were dead;
and fifteen thousand more were dying.
In these days, when every morning has its “crisis” and every evening its
“appalling disaster,” it is difficult to realise the effect of the
earthquake at Lisbon upon the eighteenth century. The less news there
is, the more is that news felt. In the eighteenth century, too, all
thoughtful persons saw signs in the heavens and the earth of some great
change; and felt in the social order throes, which might be the death
pangs of the old world, or the birth pains of a new. Further, men had
begun to think and to reason for themselves: to ask why? from whence? to
what end? and to brush aside the answers of the old theologies to those
ancient questions as trite, unproven, and inadequate.
And if this was the temper of mind of most thoughtful persons, how much
more of a Voltaire!
The news took nearly a month to reach him. For many months after he
received it, there is hardly one of his letters which does not allude to
it in terms of a passionate horror or a passionate inquiry. “The best of
all possible worlds!” “If Pope had been there would he have said
‘Whatever is, is right’?” “All is well seems to me absurd, when evil is
on land and sea.” “I no longer dare to complain of my ailments: none
must dare to think of himself in a disaster so general.” “Beaumont, who
has escaped, says there is not a house left in Lisbon--this is
_optimism_.” Over and over again he reverts to the comfortable dogmas of
Mr. Pope’s “Essay on Man”--conceived sitting safe and easy in a
Twickenham villa. The stories of the earthquake reached Voltaire
exaggerated. But the bald truth was enough. “Voltaire,” said Joubert,
“is sometimes sad; he is moved; but he is never serious.” He was serious
once--over the Earthquake of Lisbon.
When the horrors were still fresh in his mind, when the burning
questions to which they gave rise were still loudly demanding an answer,
he wrote the most passionate and touching of all his compositions; one
of the most vigorous and inspired works of any author of the age.
The “Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon” is only two hundred and fifty lines
long; but it contains a statement of almost all those searching problems
which every thinking man, of whatever belief or unbelief he be, has to
face at last.
What am I? Whence am I? Whither go I? What is the origin of evil? What
end is accomplished by the suffering and sorrow I see around me? “Why is
Lisbon engulfed while Paris, no less wicked, dances?” Your “whatever is,
is right” may be an easy doctrine for the happy, the rich, the healthy;
but a hard saying for the poor, the sick, and the wretched. I will none
of it! All Nature gives it the lie. The lips that utter it in prosperity
to-day will deny it in misery to-morrow. At the end, the note of
consolation is struck in the story of the caliph who, dying, worshipped
God in the prayer “‘I bring to Thee all that which Thou hast not in Thy
immensity--faults, regrets, evils, ignorance.’ He might have added also
Hope.”
The philosophy of “The Disaster of Lisbon” is the philosophy of “In
Memoriam.”
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last--far off--at last, to all,
And every winter change to Spring.
Voltaire’s poem has not the tender beauty of the other: but it is not
less reverent, and not less religious.
One line of it, at least, has found a place in the immortalities of
poetry:
Que suis-je, où suis-je, où vais-je, et d’où suis-je tiré?
and one phrase, “Autres temps, autres mœurs,” has become part not only
of the French language, but of our own.
On January 1st of the new year 1756, Voltaire sent an incomplete copy of
the poem to the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha. On the margin he wrote the word
“Secret.” But on January 8th he was telling d’Argental, “My sermon on
Lisbon was only for the edification of your flock. I do not throw the
bread of life to dogs.” So many confidences and so many confidential
friends had their usual result. “The Disaster of Lisbon” appeared in
Paris. With it was also published the “Poem on Natural Law,” begun in
Prussia in 1752.
CHAPTER XXIX
“NATURAL LAW,” THE VISIT OF D’ALEMBERT, AND THE AFFAIR OF BYNG
The “Poem on Natural Law” was an answer to Frederick the Great’s version
of the stupendous question of Pilate--“What is truth?” The poem is in
four short parts and an “easy and limpid versification.” In it, Voltaire
calls it a “seeking for the law of God.” Condorcet says it is “the most
splendid homage man ever paid to Divinity.” Desnoiresterres speaks of
its “incontestable orthodoxy.” At once profound and simple--the simple
expression of profound problems--“Natural Law” and “The Disaster of
Lisbon” are almost the only works of the man who has been called the
Prince of Scoffers which are completely reverent. They are pre-eminently
_not_ the writings of an atheist, but of one who gropes for a God he
knows to exist, though he knows neither how nor where.
But, not the less, the whole world, and all the Churches fell upon them
both, tooth and nail. In 1759, “Natural Law” was publicly burnt by the
hangman in Paris; and immediately after it appeared, the pious Genevans
begged J. J. Rousseau to refute the horrible heterodoxy of “The Disaster
of Lisbon.” In July, 1757, Marie Leczinska, going to mass, saw a copy of
“Natural Law”--which was then commonly entitled “Natural Religion”--on a
bookstall. On her return from church she took the pamphlet and tore it
across, and told the astonished shop woman (“who had supposed, from its
title, the work to be one of edification”) that if she sold such things
her licence should be taken from her. It is true, there was a smile for
Voltaire and all the world in such stories. There is a smile still in
the fact that works far more freethinking than “Natural Law” and
“Lisbon” are avowed now by persons who continue to call themselves not
only Christians, but orthodox Catholic churchmen.
The January of 1756 passed quietly at Monrion, where Voltaire had
arrived for the winter at the end of December. In spite of his opinions,
Lausanne ministers, always more liberal-minded than the Genevans, came
much to see him. He liked them not a little. “They are very amiable and
well read,” he wrote. “It must be granted there is more wit and
knowledge in that profession than in any other. It is true I do not
listen to their sermons.” Other visitors were Lawyer de Brenles and his
charming young wife. Voltaire, disappointed of his play-acting in
Geneva, had greatly encouraged a scheme for building a theatre here in
Lausanne. But the earthquake had made all men thoughtful. They
mistrusted their love of the drama, and filled the churches instead.
That wave of austerity swept also over Paris and the Court. They were in
the vanguard of this new mode of seriousness, as of every other. To
quite propitiate an angry heaven Madame de Pompadour renounced her
connection with the King. His private entrance to her apartments was
closed; and in February Madame was created Maid of Honour (of honour!)
to the Queen.
Voltaire had dedicated “Lisbon” to a certain courtier friend--the Duc de
la Vallière--grandson of the hapless Louise de la Vallière, the mistress
of Louis XIV. In return, possibly, for the compliment of that dedication
the good-natured Duke consented to be the emissary of Madame de
Pompadour, and to write from Court on March 1st to make a really most
advantageous proposal to M. de Voltaire. We are all serious here now,
you know! Can you not take advantage of our seriousness and versify some
of the Psalms which I, the Duke, will at once have printed at the
Louvre? The typical wit of the eighteenth century has no doubt lost
something by the fact that Voltaire’s two letters in reply to this
proposal are missing. He did not versify the Psalms. Condorcet says that
he could not be a hypocrite even to be a cardinal. It seems, if not
certainly, at least very likely, to be true that a red hat _was_ held
out to him--in those fairest of white hands--as an inducement to fall
in with the grave vogue of the Court and employ that matchless irony and
that scathing wit for, instead of against, the established religion.
It was the chief duty of the mistresses of Louis XV. to keep him from
being bored; and the Pompadour knew her business to perfection. What
reason was there why Voltaire, who could do it so well, should not help
her to “_égayer_ the King’s religion”--for a reward? That age had had
worse cardinals than he would have been. It still remembered Iscariot
Dubois, traitor, usurer, debauchee; and Mazarin, that synonym for lies.
Carlyle, who, by every instinct of his character and every racial trait,
was necessarily out of sympathy with such a man as Voltaire, said of
him, “that he has never yet in a single instance been convicted of
wilfully perverting his belief; of uttering in all his controversies one
deliberate falsehood.”
He was at least too honest a man to be a cardinal. A little later he did
write “a free, too free imitation” of Ecclesiastes and the Song of
Solomon. But he cannot be charged with pandering in these works to the
popular creed. His Notes on his paraphrases are profane and coarse; and
the paraphrases themselves miss all the dignity and beauty of the
original. The only merit they have is that they truthfully express the
unpalatable opinions their writer held--to his loss.
In May, Voltaire paid a brief visit to Berne. On June 12th, Collini left
his service. He had been with him four years. Bright-witted,
quick-tempered, too fond of pleasure, and “loving women,” said Madame
Denis, “like a fool,” Collini had never been a satisfactory servant. It
is only a very noble character which can remain unspoilt by spoiling.
Voltaire certainly did not understand the Napoleonic principle of
government--to be feared before you are loved. He had apologised to
Collini. He had forgiven him a hundred times; nay more, when it was the
servant who was in the wrong it was the master who had won him back to
good temper by a thousand injudicious indulgences. Voltaire was lax
enough on the subject himself, heaven knows; but now his foolish
secretary must needs conduct himself in a love affair in a manner which
offended even this easy-going master. Then, Collini speaks ill of us
behind our backs! That seemed one of the worst failings in the world to
a man who understood the art of friendship so completely as Voltaire.
And then--then--the foolish secretary--called away suddenly to get a
carriage for Madame de Fontaine, who was just going to arrive at Délices
from Paris--leaves open on his desk a letter in which he had laughed at
Madame Denis; and Madame Denis’s maid, coming in, reads the letter and
carries it to her mistress. Voltaire had been infinitely loyal to Madame
du Châtelet. He was not less so to this chattering _bourgeoise_ of a
niece. He gave the secretary his _congé_ the next day--sadly, but firmly
at last--as a decision that admitted of no appeal. Collini must go!
Collini implies in his Memoirs that a kind of flirtation between himself
and Madame Denis was one of the causes of his dismissal. Madame Denis
was certainly foolish enough. It is also on his testimony that when his
master said good-bye to him, he talked with him for more than an hour
and asked if he had enough money for his journey to Paris--“and to last
some time.” As he spoke Voltaire went to his desk and took from it a
_rouleau_ of louis, saying “Take that: one never knows what may happen.”
And Collini adds, “with tears in my eyes I left the Délices.” Three
years later, Voltaire procured a post for him at the Court of the
Elector Palatine, which Collini is believed to have kept till his death.
Written long after their parting are many friendly letters from the
master to the servant.
Collini had his significance and his uses. From his “Séjour auprès de
Voltaire,” wherein he tries to make Voltaire appear as faulty and
himself as faultless as he can, the master still comes out better than
the servant. There is no more reliable testimony to character than that
wrung out of an unfriendly witness. On one point at least the
ill-tempered young Italian has cleared his master’s reputation for ever.
“Stinginess never had a place in his house I have never known a man
whose servants could rob him with greater ease. I repeat it, he was
miser of nothing but his time.”
Collini’s place was at once filled by Wagnière, a Genevan boy, now
sixteen years old, who had been in Voltaire’s service since 1754. As if
he had nothing else to do in the world Voltaire taught him Latin and
trained him in his duties himself.
Collini’s departure for Paris seems to have suggested to his master that
he too would like to pay a visit to the capital--just a very flying
visit to see about some business. So he wrote off to one d’Argenson, to
ask him to get the requisite permission from the other d’Argenson, the
Secretary of State. But in spite of that old school friendship, the
minister was not at all too friendly just now to this presumptuous
exile. The permission was refused: and Voltaire revenged himself by an
epigram. He had a richer revenge, if he had wanted it in the January of
the next year, 1757, when the Secretary was banished to please her
Mightiness the Pompadour. But he did not want it. The spiteful epigram
relieved his feelings and his temper. And it will be remembered of an
earlier Voltaire, that from the moment an enemy became unfortunate, this
inconsistent person could not help regarding him as a friend.
In August, J. J. Rousseau wrote, as the Genevan ministers had asked him,
to remonstrate with Voltaire on that unorthodox “Disaster of Lisbon.”
Jean Jacques permitted himself to admire the grace and beauty of M. de
Voltaire’s poem, while continuing to find the optimism of Mr. Pope much
more consolatory, and deducing from the earthquake a splendid argument
for his darling theory of the advantages of savage over civilised life.
Do you not see, my dear M. de Voltaire, that if people did not build
themselves houses seven stories high and huddle together in great towns,
earthquakes really would not be nearly so disastrous?
The letter was scarcely one which called for a serious reply. But it was
instinct with all the glow and passion of that matchless style which
made men forget to examine the common-sense of the ideas it clothed; and
it fitted in admirably with the fashionable optimism which was naturally
popular with the well-to-do and the powerful. The world _did_ take it
gravely. And in September M. de Voltaire sent a reply of airy badinage.
“Madame de Fontaine has been in danger of her life, and I have been ill
too; so I am waiting till I am better and my niece cured, to dare to
think as you do.”
The note was a little trifling, certainly; but Rousseau wrote to
Tronchin that he was charmed with it. As for Voltaire, the very idea of
that further scathing rollicking answer that was to come had not yet
even occurred to him. He had as little time as desire to quarrel with
anybody at the present moment. Besides all his new duties as a landed
proprietor, a tragedy, history, verses, correspondence, he was engrossed
with d’Alembert as a visitor and the “Encyclopædia” as a hobby.
The story of the foundling who, thirty-nine years earlier, had been
discovered on the steps of a Parisian church, is hardly less familiar to
our own century than it was to the eighteenth. Brought up by a
compassionate poor woman, a glazier’s wife, it was not until he had
become the great d’Alembert, the first geometrician and philosopher of
the day, that the false mother who had borne and abandoned him--Madame
de Tencin, the old acquaintance of Voltaire--would fain have avowed a
child so creditable. But that child had not a characteristic in common
with her. He denied her. He had no mother but the glazier’s wife. In her
home he grew up to be one of the wisest and gentlest of great men. In
her home he learnt the blessings of peace and privacy, of work and
obscurity. “Simple, sober, and proud,” too well acquainted with Poverty
to be afraid of her, he always shunned a society which could give him
nothing and might rob him of the time to work out the work of his life.
Above that glazier’s shop, after long throes and travail of delightful
pain, he brought forth in 1750 the first-born son of his genius, the
Preliminary Discourse of the great “Encyclopædia.” In 1756 he became a
member of the French Academy. In 1772 he was made its perpetual
secretary. His long passion for that most ardent and unhappy woman,
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, was for eleven years of his later life at
once its consolation and its despair. As a writer his style has all the
clumsiness of the _savant_ who has so much to say that he has no time to
take care how he says it, and all the coldness of the mathematician. But
it was only his writing that was cold.
For all his “stately irony,” for all his recluse student ways and frugal
life, d’Alembert inspired his century not so much with admiration as
with love. Once, when Voltaire was asked to write something in an album,
he saw in it the name of d’Alembert. Beneath, he wrote his own--_Hic
fuit Dalemberti amicus_.
D’Alembert arrived at Délices some time about August 10, 1756. He stayed
five weeks. It must have been a delightful visit. Voltaire had that rare
combination of qualities as a host--he knew both how to amuse his guest
and how to leave him to amuse himself. It was during this stay that at a
dinner party at Délices, at which Dr. Tronchin and others were present,
the company began telling robber stories. Each anecdote was more
thrilling than the last. Then Voltaire looked up--“Once, Gentlemen,
there was a Farmer-General ...” and he relapsed into silence, with the
honours of the evening. That ancient story still has point. How much
more it must have had when it was new--in 1756!
The five weeks passed only too quickly. Summer was on that beautiful
country. Madame de Fontaine was also staying at Délices. She was now a
widow of about forty, rather tall and good-looking, and with a taste for
painting--the subjects not too decorous, for choice. Madame was not
exactly decorous herself. When she arrived at Délices she had brought
with her the Marquis de Florian, her lover. Uncle Voltaire accepted that
intimacy with perfect nonchalance and amiability. On the present
occasion Madame de Fontaine was useful to keep Madame Denis company, and
so leave Voltaire and d’Alembert to themselves.
They had much to do and to say. From 1746 they had been correspondents;
but the “Encyclopædia” was a link which had bound them closer far.
Founded on the “English Encyclopædia” of Chambers, which had been
translated into French about 1743, the “immense and immortal work” of
Diderot and d’Alembert wholly eclipsed its prototype. It was, is, and
will be, not _an_ “Encyclopædia” but _the_ “Encyclopædia.” It includes,
indeed, neither history nor biography: the vast discoveries of modern
times make men smile to-day at its science; and its hardy philosophy
seems timid to our bolder age.
But it was not the less the Guide to the Revolution, the first great
public invitation to all men to drink of that knowledge which
enfranchises the soul. To it Grimm, Rousseau, Holbach, Marmontel, and
Condorcet were contributors. There was not an enlightened man in France
who did not recognise it as the primer of a new language--the handbook
to a better country. The authorities burnt it. Voltaire loved it. It
suggested to him his own Philosophical or, as he called it, “pocket
Dictionary.” To the “pocket Dictionary” could be relegated what was too
bold even for the Encyclopædia. It has been seen that in Prussia he
wrote articles for it, and reams of letters about it. It was not his
own. He called himself “the boy in your great shop”; and his
contributions to it “pebbles to stick into the corners of the immortal
edifice you are raising.” But he loved it as if it had been his own, and
as he loved the d’Alembert who had created it.
That summer visit at Délices was the cause of the most famous and
fought-over article the “Encyclopædia” contains. Geneva delighted in
d’Alembert. Besides being gentle, modest, and accomplished, it also knew
him to be hostile to the Church of Rome; and naturally concluded that
hostility to Rome meant friendliness to Calvin. The ministers flocked to
Délices, and gave parties themselves for their host and his guest. The
guest was quite as charmed with them as they were with him. They were so
free from superstition, so learned, tolerant, and open to reason! It was
equally pleasant and surprising to find a religion--and the ministers of
a religion--nearly as agnostic as the philosophers themselves.
The next thing to do when I get back to Paris is to write an article on
Geneva and compliment the children of Calvin on their freedom of
thought! There is no doubt that d’Alembert talked over that proposed
article with his host. Nor is there any doubt that Voltaire knew
perfectly well that such compliments would set all the Calvinists in
Geneva by the ears and create a fracas which would ring through Europe;
nor that he anticipated that fight with the richest enjoyment, and
secretly and gleefully rubbed his hands together at the prospect of it.
And as you _are_ going to write the article, my dear d’Alembert, can you
not put in just a few lines to say that the only thing the Genevans
really need to make them entirely delightful is to permit theatrical
representations among them--not for enjoyment, of course, but just to
“improve their taste” and give them “tact and feeling”?
The amiable d’Alembert naturally agreed to oblige his host on so small a
matter.
In September he packed up his boxes and went back to Paris with the
article on Geneva much in his mind; and those casual observations on
play-acting, not to be forgotten.
He was missed at Délices. Madame de Fontaine was ill there in the
autumn. Her uncle’s cook was too good for both her and her sister, who
were always calling in Tronchin to cure them of “a little indigestion.”
And of course Voltaire (though certainly not from the same cause) was
ill himself. “We have been on the point, my dear universal philosopher,”
he wrote to d’Alembert on October 9th, “of knowing, Madame de Fontaine
and I, what becomes of the soul when separated from its partner. We hope
to remain in ignorance some time longer.”
On December 9th Voltaire received a visit from an old friend, George
Keith, Earl Marischal of Scotland.
He did not come as the emissary of Frederick; or to recall, though no
doubt he did recall, to Voltaire those early golden days of the Prussian
visit when they had sat together at the most famous supper-table in the
world. He introduced many of his countrymen to the “old owl of Délices.”
But that was not the reason either of his visit. He came to plead the
cause of Admiral Byng.
Richelieu had just taken Minorca from the English. The fleet sent by
England to its relief retired under Byng, before the French. Paris went
mad with delight as only Paris can, and sang the exploits of Richelieu
in one of those national songs whose glow and vigour keep them fresh for
ever:
Plein d’une noble audace
Richelieu presse, attaque la place----
Voltaire was nearly as enthusiastic as Paris. He had prophesied such
splendid things of his hero! And it would have been very damping to his
ardour to have had his prophecies and hero-worship proved wrong. Then,
too, England had been so confident of victory; and so dreadfully rude
and aggressive in her confidence. Such pride deserved a fall; and great
was the fall of it. To be beaten on the sea by the French seemed to
Britain like being struck across the face by the open hand of insult.
She forgot that love of fair play which she has some right to call her
national instinct. She did what, with all her faults, she very seldom
does--she hit a man when he was down, and wreaked upon him, in the
bitterness of her disappointment, the anger she should have kept for the
blundering ministry who had commanded him impossibilities. Byng was
arraigned on a charge of treason and cowardice. But he had a friend--and
the friend remembered Voltaire. True, Voltaire was a Frenchman, and the
closest intimate of Richelieu. But Keith knew that he was first of all a
humanitarian; and that he had a passion for justice and a rage against
tyranny which made him love his enemies if they were oppressed, and hate
even his friends if they were oppressors. On December 20th, Voltaire
wrote to Richelieu telling Byng’s story. Richelieu replied in an open
letter which generously vindicated the character of his foe. Had Byng
continued the fight, the English fleet must have been totally destroyed.
A clever sailor and a brave man, his misfortunes were from the Hand of
God--and the valour of the French.
Voltaire sent that letter to Byng with a letter of his own. He had known
the Admiral as a young man, when he was in England; but he judged it
better not now to mention that they were acquainted, lest his
interference might be attributed to personal partiality. The sequel is
very well known. The miserable ministry wanted a scapegoat. Though Byng
was recommended to mercy by the court which tried him, he was shot on
March 14, 1757, meeting his death with the courage with which his foes
declared he had met them.
He left grateful messages to Richelieu and to Voltaire; and to Voltaire
a copy of his defence.
The author of “Candide” added later to that famous satire a few stinging
and immortal lines on this _cause célèbre_. “In this country it is good
to put an admiral to death now and then, _to encourage the others_.”
Voltaire’s part in the affair of Byng is not only of importance as being
of interest to English people. It began a new era in his life.
The scoffer, the jester, the uprooter had found nobler work for his
hands at last. The defender of Byng became the avenger of La Barre, of
Sirven, of Montbailli, and of Calas.
CHAPTER XXX
THE INTERFERENCE IN THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR, THE “GENEVA” ARTICLE, AND LIFE
AT DÉLICES
On January 5, 1757, Damiens, an unfortunate lunatic, made a very feeble
attempt upon the life of Louis XV. As is usual in such cases, the King
was accredited with infinite calm and courage, though his heroism had
consisted entirely in being the unwilling victim of a very small wound
from a very small penknife. However, he took the penknife to be the
chosen instrument of the wrath of heaven; went to bed; sent a contrite
message to the Queen; and for ten days declined to have any dealings
with the lively Pompadour.
On January 6th, d’Argenson wrote Voltaire a very courtier-like account
of the affair. To say that when Voltaire heard that a New Testament had
been found in the poor lunatic’s pocket he was delighted, is to express
his sentiments feebly. A Testament! I told you so! All assassins have “a
Bible with their daggers.” But have you ever heard of one who had a
Cicero, a Plato, or a Virgil?
He turned, twisted, and tossed the subject with all that gibing
buffoonery which was his _forte_ and other men’s fear. Damiens died
under tortures which were a disgrace to civilisation. D’Argenson,
Secretary of State, and Machault, Keeper of the Seals, who had been bold
and foolish enough to suppose that the King would be able to kill time
without his Pompadour, united, in her brief disgrace, to crush her. With
her return to power, she crushed them. On February 1st they were both
exiled. A few days earlier, the other brother d’Argenson (the better
friend of the two to Voltaire) had died. Voltaire might well say that
his own fate was more worth having than that of a Secretary of State
who was banished; and that he would rather scold his gardeners than pay
court to kings. In February he received a very flattering invitation
from Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, to go to Petersburg to write “The
History of Peter the Great,” her father. He undertook to write the
history. But he declined the invitation. Frederick, too, was trying
coquetries on him--such a tender letter, for instance, from Dresden on
January 19th! But here again he was firm: “I want neither king nor
autocracy. I have tasted them ... that is enough.”
The early months of the year 1757 were passing, indeed, not a little
pleasantly at Monrion.
The society of Lausanne, living up to its character of being more
liberal than that of Geneva, was only too delighted to welcome such an
amusing person as Voltaire in its midst. Many Lausannois were
French--all French in their social charms and their language--and only
Swiss in their sincerity and simplicity. Voltaire said that, as an
audience, there were a couple of hundred of them who were worth the
whole _parterre_ of Paris, and who would have hissed Crébillon’s
“Catilina” off the stage. What higher praise could he have given to
anybody? Lausanne, indeed, would not have been Swiss if there had not
been a certain section of its society who held themselves aloof from
this volatile Deist and his more volatile entertainments. Nor would it
have been a country town if there had not been in it some touchy and
discontented persons who were offended with M. de Voltaire because he
had not asked them often enough or had asked someone else too often.
Voltaire gaily divided the society into two parts: first, the Olympe,
which included both the strait-laced and the offended; and, second, the
Sensible People. That classification spoke for itself. He was not a
little amused one day when, hearing that an Olympe lady had had a parody
of “Zaire” acted at her house, he said to a young girl of the same name,
“Ah! Mademoiselle, it is you who have been laughing at me!” and the
naïve girl replied, “Oh no, Monsieur, it was my aunt!”
But, Olympes notwithstanding, Lausanne as a whole was only too
delighted to come to M. de Voltaire’s theatricals, and the excellent
suppers prepared by his first-rate cook. It did not expect him to pay
visits, which he hated. So he and Madame Denis spent all their leisure
hours learning parts and coaching their company. Madame Denis lived in a
whirl of “tailors, hairdressers, and actors,” and being well amused was
entirely amiable.
The plays acted were “Zaire,” “Alzire,” and the “Enfant Prodigue,” and a
new play of Voltaire’s which he now called “Fanine,” and which was
afterwards called “Zulime.”
Voltaire persistently declared that Madame Denis acted “Zaire”
infinitely better than Gaussin, “though she has not such fine eyes”;
which was a very delicate way of describing her squint.
In March they “preached the ‘Enfant Prodigue,’ with an opera-bouffe
(‘Serva Padrona’) for dessert.” Also in March, they played “Zulime”
“better than it will be played in Paris,” said its author. He proudly
numbered among the audience on its first night twelve Calvinist
ministers and their young students, studying for the Church. Here was
liberal-mindedness indeed! Besides acting plays, there was the house to
improve or to alter. Its master was surrounded with workmen. He had also
a parrot and a squirrel. He had turned to play-acting, he said, because
though “tranquillity is a beautiful thing--ennui is of its acquaintance
and family.” But he knew too well, by that old courtly experience, that
the worst of all boredoms is perpetual amusement. He was happy at
Monrion because there, as everywhere, he knew how to work as well as to
play. In articles for the “Encyclopædia,” rewriting “Zulime,” and
beginning “The History of Peter the Great,” he justified his existence.
He had much to do, so he enjoyed his theatricals and the lovely country
in which he found himself, as only the busy can enjoy anything “From my
bed I can see the lake, the Rhone, and another river. Have you a better
view? Have you tulips in March?... My vines, my orchard, and myself owe
no man anything....”
Was it glamour again? If it was, it was a better glamour than had made
him dream Prussia heaven, and Frederick the Great a faithful friend.
On June 3th, he went back to Délices for the summer. Madame Denis was
still in high good-humour--furnishing the house, entertaining, acting.
Voltaire said she was “a niece who made the happiness of his life.”
Everything was _couleur de rose_. Switzerland had proved a successful
venture indeed. By August the man who now signed himself the Swiss
Voltaire had acquired yet another house in Lausanne--Chêne, in the Rue
de Lausanne, which was the last street in the town on the Geneva side,
and from where he had exquisite views of the lake. He rented it for nine
years. Quite near it was a house called Mon Repos, which belonged to two
of Voltaire’s amateur dramatic company, the Marquis and Marquise de
Genlis. Very soon these two enthusiasts made, in a barn adjoining their
house, a theatre which practically belonged to Voltaire, and where in
future nearly all his theatricals were held. His first letter from Chêne
is dated August 29, 1757. Here he soon received with great gravity the
Lord Bailiffs of Berne: good, sober, pompous people, with a very amusing
idea of their own importance, and a strictly limited sense of humour.
“What the deuce, M. de Voltaire,” said one of them one day, “are you
always writing verses for? What is the good of it, I ask you? It leads
to nothing. Now _I_, you see, am a Bailiff.” And another day, a second
observed solemnly, “They say you have written against God. That is bad,
but I hope He will pardon you; and against religion, which is worse; and
against our Lord, which is worse still: but He will forgive you in His
mercy. Only take care, M. de Voltaire, you do not write against their
Excellencies the High Bailiffs, for _they_ will never pardon you!” It is
not difficult to imagine the zest and delight with which Voltaire
repeated these stories.
These good Swiss had not only charming scenery, cultivated society, and
some kind of freedom, but they were also, without intending it,
positively amusing! It would have been well for Voltaire’s peace of mind
if he could have engrossed himself entirely in their small world, and
forgotten wholly that vaster, louder one, which stretched wide beyond
Délices, Monrion, and Chêne. But he had ever itching fingers for a
fight.
In the August of 1756 had begun the third, longest, and greatest
struggle for Silesia, the Seven Years’ War. Voltaire did not choose to
remember that, though he had tried diplomacy before, he had never tried
it successfully. He flung himself, head foremost in every sense, into
the contest. He began in the spring of 1757 by inventing a war machine:
“an engine of massacre upon the plan of the Assyrian war chariots of
old.” Certainly, he was a peace advocate. But if men must destroy each
other, let them do so by the best and quickest of possible means. He had
had, too, a dozen careers already without adding to them that of a
scientific inventor. It is marvellous, but true, that this “paper
smudger’s” idea--the appellation was his own--was really very excellent.
The machine was also intended to carry ammunition and forage. The
Minister of War thought well of it. The inventor recommended it highly
to Richelieu. The Assyrian chariots were not tried until they were used
for carrying grape-shot, but they were not the less an uncommonly
bright, ingenious, and Voltairian invention.
The inventor relinquished the idea of their immediate use rather sadly.
But the war, considered apart from war chariots, was becoming of
personal moment to him.
In the spring of 1757, the Petticoats, which were the damnation of
France, swept her into it.
In his old Paris days, Voltaire had known, and scornfully liked, a
certain rosy-cheeked _bon conteur_ of an abbé, called Bernis.
Verse-maker and _bon-vivant_--not yet developed into the shrewder and
wiser personage his “Memoirs and Letters” reveal him--Voltaire had named
the abbé the flower-girl of Parnassus, or Babet, after a famous pretty
flower-seller of the day; and loved to tease him on those rosy cheeks
and that cheerful air. Babet, who was nothing if not audacious, had
asked Boyer (the âne of Mirepoix, who had died in 1755) for a post: and
when Boyer told him that as long as he was in power a Babet had nothing
to hope for, replied, “Sir, I shall wait.” The answer ran through Paris.
It was the beginning of success. Madame de Pompadour turned the smile
on this round-faced wit; pensioned him; installed him in the Tuileries;
and made him ambassador to Vienna, and Secretary for Foreign Affairs.
Frederick, who had received the mistress’s kind regards, sent through
Voltaire, with that curt “I do not know her,” had also laughed at
Bernis-Babet in the fatal “Œuvre de Poëshie du Roi Mon Maître.”
Therefore, on May 1, 1757, “the first minister of the state,” Pompadour,
made her willing tool, Bernis, sign an offensive and defensive treaty
with the ambassador of Austria against Frederick the Great, and plunged
France into the blood of the Seven Years’ War.
Voltaire’s interest in it was varied and conflicting. He was the friend
of Richelieu, of Bernis, and the Pompadour: and he was a Frenchman. He
had strong sympathy with brave Maria Theresa and with Austria--the
allies of his country. Her great enemy, Frederick, was both his friend
and his foe: still loved, still admired, and still unforgiven. All
through these seven years one sees that fatal affair of Frankfort
rankling in Voltaire’s heart; struggling with his admiration for
Frederick as a king and a soldier: with his pity for him when beaten,
with his pride in him when victorious. All through the war Frederick
wrote him prose and verse; the deepest sorrows of his soul, reproaches,
confidences, yearnings. And Voltaire answered half bitterly and half
tenderly, with angry allusions to the past, and brave words to comfort
the King’s sore heart for the future: never consistent, not seldom
spiteful, and yet touched, affectionate, and sympathetic.
Explain the attitude who can.
In July, 1757, Voltaire wrote to Richelieu begging him, if he passed by
Frankfort, to send the four ears of those two _coquins_, Freytag and
Schmidt.
In August he was busy trying to bring about peace, through the medium of
the Margravine of Bayreuth and Richelieu, between Freytag’s master and
France. This first diplomatic interference of Voltaire’s in the war was
not badly planned. In his own words, he “wanted Richelieu to add the
quality of arbitrator to that of general.” The scheme was so far a
success
[Illustration: THE CHÂTEAU OF FERNEY
_From an Engraving_]
that, on August 19th, Wilhelmina replied that her brother was as
grateful for such a proposal as herself. The moment for it was
opportune. Frederick was still bruised and broken by the crushing defeat
he had suffered at Kolin on June 18th. He wrote direct to Richelieu on
September 6th, asking him to act as an arbitrator; and Richelieu replied
that he was very willing. Did the hermit of Délices rub his lean hands
and congratulate himself on a good piece of work? Perhaps he knew the
temper of an offended woman and a piqued Bernis too well. The blood of
her children was as water to these rulers of France. The Court declined
arbitration.
The unhappy Margravine wrote to Voltaire on September 12th that
Frederick was reduced to frightful extremities. She might well so write.
In October Voltaire sent to the King one of the wisest and kindliest
letters which he ever penned. He dissuaded Frederick from a
contemplation of suicide. He stimulated him by admiration. He deterred
him by insisting that such an act would not only sadden his friends, but
please his foes. When, in this same month, Voltaire read some dismal
verses Frederick had written to d’Argens on the same unhappy topic, he
wrote a second letter to the King, diplomatically lauding the verses to
the skies, and again passionately dissuading such a poet, and such a
man, from the disgrace of suicide.
In those fatal “Memoirs” (meant to be secret) he was now writing at
Délices, Voltaire, indeed, avenged himself for Freytag and Frankfort by
declaring that much of that Epistle to d’Argens was stolen from Chaulieu
and from himself; while that love of justice which was always getting
the better of his malice, in spite of himself, made him add that, under
the circumstances, it was wonderful for a king to have written two
hundred verses at all.
On October 8th, dismal Luc confided to Wilhelmina that he had “laughed”
at the exhortations of Patriarch Voltaire; and the very next day wrote
to the Patriarch a letter owning that those admonitions had had effect,
and ending:
Though the storm beats high
I must fight, not fly,
And a King live and die.
Meanwhile, at Délices, busy Voltaire was trying his hand a second time
at peace negotiations. This time his medium was de Tencin--that crafty
and haughty Cardinal, who, three years before, at Lyons, had found it
impolitic to invite Voltaire to dinner. But the Cardinal loved intrigue,
and hated Austria and the Austrian alliance with France, from his soul.
When, on November 5, 1757, Frederick beat French and Austrians at
Rossbach with “the most unheard-of and the most complete defeat in
history” (the vigorous words are Voltaire’s), all angry France shared
the Cardinal’s hatred of the rosy-cheeked Bernis’s treaty with the Court
of Vienna. De Tencin allied himself with the man he had
despised--Voltaire--“to engage the Margravine to confide to him the
interests of her brother the King,” and so to procure peace between
France and Prussia. Prussia was willing enough. Voltaire was the
intermediary through whom all the letters passed. He said malignly that
he enjoyed the post because he foresaw the disappointment the Cardinal
was preparing for himself. In reality, he was something less
Machiavellian, and really thought the peace he hoped for might be
brought about. De Tencin communicated directly with Louis XV.; and sent
him a letter of the Margravine, written to be so sent. But Maria Theresa
had bowed her pride to flatter Madame de Pompadour; while Frederick had
said “I do not know her.” The Pompadour’s kingly slave answered de
Tencin icily that the Secretary for Foreign Affairs would instruct his
Eminence of the royal intentions. So Babet, the “flower-girl,” the
verse-maker, the _bon-vivant_, dictated to the astute Cardinal the
unfavourable reply he was to make to the Margravine. De Tencin had to
sign it. He died only a fortnight later--of mortification, said
Voltaire.
Thus ended Voltaire’s second interference in the Seven Years’ War. Both
were useless. His interest in the affair was very far from being ended,
or even weakened. But in the meantime there were disturbances nearer
home.
It was sixteen months since d’Alembert had stayed at Délices, and been
charmed by the liberal-mindedness of Calvinism. The result of that visit
was, as has been noted, the famous article entitled “Geneva” in the
storm-breeding “Encyclopædia.” In this December of 1757 the pious
pastors of that town heard that they were therein complimented as no
longer believing in the divinity of Christ or in hell; as having in many
cases no other religion than “a perfect Socinianism,” rejecting all
mystery; as, among the learned at least, having a faith which had
reduced itself to believe in one God, and which was alone distinguished
from pure Deism by a cold respect for the Scriptures and for Christ.
It is not difficult to fancy what an effect such statements, uttered by
a d’Alembert, and in what was then the most famous book in the world,
would have on that strict, simple, pure-living sect. Was it true? Could
any of it be true? The dreadful fear that it might be--that that stern,
narrow creed, with its brief assertions and its wide negations, might
lead, or tend, unknown to its followers, to something very like a barren
Deism--appears to have taken possession of their souls.
On December 12th, Voltaire, who had been waiting sixteen months for this
_dénouement_, began to enjoy himself. “These droll people,” he wrote to
d’Alembert “actually dare to complain of the praise you have given
them--to believe in a God and to have more reason than faith. Some of
them accuse me of having a profane alliance with you. They say they will
protest against your article. Let them, and laugh at them.”
On December 23d, at a meeting of Calvinistic pastors, they made, with
deep heart-searchings, a formal inquiry to assure themselves that none
of them had given ground for d’Alembert’s--compliments. They then drew
up a commission, which appointed Dr. Tronchin, not less a sincere
Christian than he was a sincere friend of the Deist Voltaire, to reply
to the article in the “Encyclopædia” and “to wipe away the stain” that
d’Alembert had affixed to their character. It was Tronchin’s charm as a
writer that he touched the heart as well as appealed to the head. He
refuted the imputations of d’Alembert in terms not a little touching.
From Paris, on January 6, 1758, d’Alembert replied, as he could but
reply, that he was convinced of the truth of his words: and what he had
written, he had written. When Geneva further asked him to name the
pastors who had given rise to such opinions, he very honourably
declined. On February 8th, the commission produced its Confession of
Faith. As it did not insist on the doctrine of Everlasting Punishment,
or declare that Christ was equal to His Father, or lay stress on the
worship of Him, Voltaire said with some truth, when he wrote to
d’Alembert, that they had declared themselves Christian Deists after
all, and justified the article in the “Encyclopædia.”
“Geneva,” in fact, brought home to the thoughtful Calvinist the logical
outcome of his religion. The shock was great. To stand face to face with
the ultimate consequences of their belief would indeed startle the
votaries of many other creeds besides Calvinism.
Their difference on the most vital of all subjects did not affect the
friendship of the great Voltaire and the great Tronchin.
During this winter of 1757-58, the Doctor was, for the time being,
almost the greater man of the two. He had just returned from Paris,
where he had prescribed for all its rank, wit, and fashion; and where he
and his inoculation had become a _furore_ and the mode. In Geneva he now
started a cure, to which flocked all the _mondaines_ of Paris to learn
the rudiments of hygiene, of temperance, and of common-sense; to be
taught for the first time in their lives the value of simple living; and
to undergo inoculation.
Voltaire always loved the bold and sensible regimen of this good
physician. Like the women, he was also not a little influenced by the
great Doctor’s charming manner, handsome face, and splendid six feet of
height. Then, too, supposing ennui _should_ be “of the acquaintance and
family” of retirement, this “cure” brought half the wit of the capital
to the very doors of the Hermit of Délices. The year 1757 was not over,
and their acquaintance was of the briefest, when Voltaire, with his
usual impulsiveness, was already in the midst of a delightful intimacy
with one of the cleverest and most sympathetic of the Tronchin patients,
Madame d’Épinay. Bright, black-eyed, about two-and-thirty years old, the
ill-treated wife of a Farmer-General, the head of a salon, and the
coquettish friend of Rousseau, Madame d’Épinay reflected in her
sparkling little French mind the cleverness of a clever age, and,
without ever saying or doing anything which gave substantial evidence of
a superior intelligence, had a great deal of that vague quality which is
now called culture. Voltaire delighted in her; played with her; laughed
with her; talked with her; called her his Beautiful Philosopher; wrote
her innumerable little notes about innumerable little nothings; welcomed
her constantly at Délices; and in January, 1758, had her to stay there
for two or three days with her doctor. Madame’s complaint was of the
nerves, and the very best cure for that kind of disease is to be amused,
as everybody knows. So she was delighted to come to Délices, where
Madame Denis was “entirely comic,” and “fit to make you die of
laughing”; short, fat, ugly; quite good-natured; a liar, simply from
habit; clever enough to seem so without being so; always gesticulating,
talking, and arguing, especially when that “Geneva” article--just now
very much on the _tapis_--was mentioned, when she threw her arms and
hands about, abused republics and their laws with a fine generality, and
was entirely absurd.
The little, shrewd, shallow visitor was not quite so sure about the
great Voltaire. He might have been fifteen, he was so gay, lively, and
inconsequent! But then he had a number of quite childish prejudices; and
an air of laughing at everybody, even himself. Madame d’Épinay was not
at all certain she liked _that_. In Paris she had been taken gravely as
a clever woman. The owl of Délices, looking at her through those little,
cynic, half-shut and all-seeing eyes of his, regarded her as an
ingenious little mechanical toy, whom it amused him to set in motion.
That he was very gallant with her was true enough. But gallantry is
hardly a compliment to a woman who wants to be looked upon as _savante_.
Madame d’Épinay was not the only one of Tronchin’s patients who visited
Voltaire. Almost all of them came to peep at him. Here was the Marquise
de Muy--“a very little soul in a very little body much debilitated by
remedies,” said Tronchin--but the _chère amie_ of Choiseul the minister,
and so to be cultivated by a far-seeing Voltaire.
Here, too, came the nephew and niece of de Tencin, the Montferrats--whom
Voltaire received very kindly though he liked neither them nor their
uncle.
Among neighbours who were not of Tronchin’s “cure,” Huber, celebrated as
a painter and wit, had been one of the most constant visitors at Délices
from the first, and was fast dropping into the position he never
afterwards relinquished, of _ami de la maison_. Madam Tronchin--as plain
and disagreeable as her husband was handsome and charming--was a guest
too. “Et que fait Madame Tronchin?” said someone one day to the
sprightly Madame Cramer, herself a visitor. “Elle fait peur,” was the
answer. Madame Cramer, as the wife of Gabriel Cramer, one of Voltaire’s
publishers, and as, in her own person, gay, naïve, and witty, was always
a _persona grata_ at Délices. Her husband and brother-in-law were as
successful socially as in their business; acted in their client’s
theatricals, and were delightfully good-looking and pleasant.
Voltaire’s nearest neighbours at Délices, a Professor Pictet and his
wife and daughter, were constantly of his parties. The daughter
Charlotte was a gay and pretty little person, who had aroused the
jealousy of Madame Denis by embroidering Voltaire a cap to wear on the
top of the great peruke he always affected. Voltaire repaid the present
by trying to find Mademoiselle what he always considered the _summum
bonum_, a husband; and Madame Denis was not precisely pleased when
Charlotte married a handsome major of eight-and-twenty, for whom the
foolish niece herself had had a _tendresse_. In 1757, a Baron Gleichen,
who wrote Souvenirs, also visited Délices.
It is no contradiction to say of Voltaire that he was all through his
life both the most unsociable and the most sociable of men.
At Délices there were nearly always seven or eight persons to supper. On
one occasion at least, the house was so full of guests for theatricals,
that Madame Denis, having no bed, sat up all through the night playing
cards. When he met his guests no host could have been more agreeable
than Voltaire. He had a hundred stories to tell. He made so many _mots_
that half the _mots_ of the eighteenth century have been fathered upon
him by posterity. Sometimes he read aloud, or quoted from memory. He was
inimitably gay, good-natured, and courteous. One woman (who did not love
him) said that he alone of his age knew how to speak to women as women
like to be spoken to. That old quality which had made him revere the
intellect of Madame du Châtelet made him respect now whatever was
respectable in the intellect of his female companions. That surest sign
of inferiority--to be afraid of mental superiority in the weaker
sex--was certainly never to be found in Voltaire. If he toyed with a
d’Épinay, it was because she was but a toy after all. He searched so
diligently for cleverness in his nieces that he actually thought he had
found it. Some of the best and most careful letters he ever wrote are
those to Madame du Deffand--who was old, poor, blind--but splendidly
intelligent.
He certainly took very good care during this social winter of
1757-58--as in all other social winters and summers--not to see too much
of his guests, male or female. He worked twelve or fifteen hours a day;
and generally kept his secretary writing part of the night as well. He
never suffered himself to be interrupted in the mornings; and was fond
of saying that he believed less in optimism at that time than at any
other.
As in the old days at Cirey, he was often too busy to join his friends
at dinner, and ate “no matter what, no matter when,” instead.
In January, 1758, he migrated to Chêne, his newly acquired house in
Lausanne; and, in the formal phrase of one of his guests there, by “his
wit and his philosophy, his table and his theatre, refined in a visible
degree the manners” of that town. That guest was an English youth called
Gibbon, who, having been led into Roman Catholicism at college, had been
sent to a minister at Lausanne to be led out of it again--by Calvinism.
In the intervals of falling in love with the _beaux yeux_ of
Mademoiselle Curchod (afterwards Madame Necker), the self-satisfied
young gentleman found time during two winters to pompously approve of M.
de Voltaire in various _rôles_--in “Zaire,” “Alzire,” “Fanine,” and the
“Enfant Prodigue,” played in that theatre in the granary of Mon Repos.
Gibbon wrote hereafter, in that solemn, polished, rewritten, immortal
Autobiography, that M. de Voltaire’s “declamation was fashioned to the
pomp and cadence of the old stage, and he expressed the enthusiasm of
poetry rather than the feelings of Nature”; while Voltaire, in the gay
impromptu of _his_ style, declared of himself he was “the best old fool
in any troupe. I had rage and tears--attitudes and a cap.” He added that
Madame Denis was splendid in the _rôle_ of mothers; and a little later
quite seriously announced that though she had not _all_ the talents of
Mademoiselle Clairon (!) she was much more pathetic and human! The
observing English youth in the audience considered, on the contrary,
that the “fat and ugly niece” quite ruined the parts of “the young and
fair,” and was not nearly clever enough to make the spectators forget
the defects of her age and person. When she was playing the heroine in
“Zaire” she did herself say, hoping for a compliment, “To take such a
part one ought to be young and beautiful!” and a well-meaning _gauche_
person replied “Ah! Madame, you are a living proof to the contrary!”
Uncle Voltaire would have been very _vif_, no doubt, if he had known of
Gibbon’s unflattering criticism on his niece. As it was, he was not too
pleased on his own account when this heavy young genius must needs,
after having heard them only twice, remember and repeat certain lines
which Voltaire had written in the first enthusiasm of settling at
Délices, and which (of course) contained an allusion which would offend
somebody. M. de Voltaire may be forgiven if he wished this blundering
Mr. Gibbon and his prodigious memory--in England.
In May, after the _ménage_ Voltaire had moved back to Délices, another
visitor came to it. She was Madame du Boccage, famous for her learning,
as modest as she was accomplished, and a woman quite after her host’s
heart. He put off a visit to the Elector Palatine to receive her. He
gave up his bed to her as being the most comfortable in the house; and
got up plays for her benefit. As for Madame, she found him everything
that was kind and agreeable, surrounded by the best company--that is,
the intellectually best company--and always singing the praises of his
rural life. In fact, the only thing she had to complain of was that he
was so very hospitable that, like the nieces, she was always having
indigestion. She left after a visit of five days, and long corresponded
with her host.
Between work and play, the Délices, Monrion, and Chêne, Voltaire had
spent more than three years in Switzerland. That they had been happy
enough to have made him altogether forget that a Paris, a Louis, and a
Pompadour existed--and neglected him--is true enough. But he never
forgot. If on one side of his character he was splendidly a philosopher,
on the other he was always an “old baby” crying for the moon.
CHAPTER XXXI
“THE LITERARY WAR,” AND THE PURCHASE OF FERNEY AND TOURNEY
On June 21, 1758, Voltaire was writing delightedly to his Angel to tell
him that through the offices of the pink-cheeked Bernis, Louis XV. had
been good enough to give a formal permit for the greatest Frenchman of
the age to retain his title of Gentleman-in-Ordinary.
Frederick said, obviously enough, “_That_ will not be the patent that
will immortalise you.” But the Gentleman himself was quite naïvely
delighted. He had always been miserable at Court and in Paris, but he so
much wished to feel he could go back there, if he liked! He seems to
have regarded this formal permission to keep his title as the thin end
of the wedge. But it was not.
“Let him stay where he is,” was the Bien-Aimé’s sole comment on
Voltaire’s exile. Marmontel suggested to Madame de Pompadour that it was
for _her_ to recall him; but Madame could only reply, perhaps not
untruthfully, “Ah, no! it does not rest with me.”
In July, Voltaire visited another Court, which had never looked askance
at him. He spent a fortnight with his old friend the Elector Palatine,
at Schwetzingen. The Elector had arranged some money matters for
Voltaire greatly to his advantage, so the visit was one of gratitude. It
has no importance, except that the story runs that here the guest was so
engrossed by a mysterious Something he was writing that he shut himself
up in his room for three days, only opening his door to have food and
coffee passed in. On the fourth day Madame Denis forced an entry.
Voltaire threw a manuscript at her, saying, “There, curious, that is
for you.” It was the manuscript of “Candide.”
The only drawback to the little anecdote is that Madame Denis was not at
Schwetzingen at all--having been left behind at home with her sister,
learning parts. “Candide” may have been written at the Elector’s; but
the time for its appearance was not yet ripe.
The summer of 1758 passed without much incident at Délices. Elsewhere,
there was only too much. The Seven Years’ War--“the most hellish war
that ever was fought,” said Voltaire--raged with unabated fury.
Frederick had recovered Silesia by a great victory at Leuthen on
December 5, 1757, when he beat an army of Austrians three times as large
as his own. On August 25th of this 1758 he beat the Russians at
Zorndorf. And then his evil star rose again. On October 14th, he was
taken by surprise and defeated with great loss at Hochkirch. But he
suffered a still greater loss that day in the death of Wilhelmina,
Margravine of Bayreuth. Worthy in courage to be the sister of Frederick,
and in intelligence to be the friend of Voltaire, both men mourned her
as she deserved to be mourned. Frederick wrote that there are some
troubles against which all stoicism and all the reasonings of the
philosophers are alike useless. He was face to face with such a trouble
now. Voltaire, at the King’s request, wrote to her memory an ode
beginning, “Dear and illustrious shade, soul brave and pure.” But it is
not always when the writer is himself most moved that his writings are
most moving. There are some griefs which paralyse the brain and make
every utterance cold. Voltaire was no more satisfied with his poem than
was Frederick. He wrote another, which gave the unhappy brother the
first moment of comfort he had had, he said, for five months. For a time
their mutual loss and grief drew the two friends together as of yore.
They put away their grievances. The “old need of communication, of
finding each other again, at least in thought,” was powerfully present.
Over Wilhelmina’s grave they forgot for a while Maupertuis and Akakia,
Freytag and Frankfort.
Voltaire would have known himself forgotten and obscure if he had ever
lived six consecutive months in his life without being plunged in some
or other kind of quarrel. That “Geneva” article was still a tree of
discord bearing fruit. It will not be forgotten that to oblige the most
hospitable host in the world, d’Alembert had introduced into it a few
remarks on the beneficial effects of play-acting in general, and the
peculiar benefits which would accrue from it to Geneva in particular.
In the October of 1758, from the depths of his forest of Montmorency,
Jean Jacques Rousseau--intense, morbid, bitter, with so much amiss in
himself that he supposed all other men to be unreasonable and out of
gear--wrote to d’Alembert his famous “Letter on Plays.”
He had “tried his wings” against d’Alembert’s friend, in his reply to
the “Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon,” and Voltaire had laughed at him
gaily and civilly enough. If Jean Jacques’s impetuosity had ever waited
for reason, there would have seemed none now why he should not enter the
lists again, and tilt once more with this active, mocking, sprightly
little opponent, whom everybody knew to have inspired d’Alembert’s
sentiments.
Jean Jacques, it is true, was a strange person to write against plays.
He had written them himself. He had a genuine admiration for M. de
Voltaire’s. If all plays were but like his! But, then, they are not. So
he brought to bear against them all the magic and the fervour of his
style, and flung on to four hundred pages of paper his astonishing views
not only on play-acting, but on women, on love, and on literature.
No one reads “La Lettre sur les Spectacles” now. But everybody read it
then, and though the stricter of the educated Calvinists only coldly
acknowledged Rousseau as an ally, the common people heard him gladly.
The aristocracy of Geneva had enjoyed Voltaire’s theatrical evenings too
much to bring themselves to disapprove of them.
From Paris the little frail d’Alembert “deigned to overwhelm that fool
Jean Jacques with reasons,” in a letter full of grave and stately irony.
As for Voltaire, he waited, as he could afford to wait. He had taught
some at least of the Genevans to be as “mad for theatres” as he was
himself; and--he had “Candide” up his sleeve.
Running parallel with that controversy on theatres was another. Of
course Voltaire was in it--and the soul of it. That goes without saying.
He had been but a short time settled in Lausanne, when one Saurin, a
poet-neighbour of his there, begged him to contradict a certain history
of Joseph Saurin, his father, as given by Voltaire in a Catalogue of
French Writers, added to his “Century of Louis XIV.” In that catalogue
Voltaire had written of Joseph what not only he, but all the world,
believed to be true. Joseph had been a pastor who, hating the life of
Switzerland, had allowed himself to be very easily brought back by the
preaching of Bossuet to Roman Catholicism and to France. But in France
he was poor, and he hated poverty. Presently came rumours of robbery--of
robbery he had committed in church. In a letter to a Lausanne pastor,
Gonon, Saurin practically confessed to these robberies. This letter was
published in the “Swiss Mercury” of April, 1736, and Saurin did not
attempt to refute it. He had since died; and now, at his son’s
suggestion, this energetic Voltaire must needs unearth the whole story,
and with a very rash good-nature, set to work to prove that that letter
to Gonon was nothing but a forgery after all. He obtained a certificate
from three of the Lausanne ministers who had been principally concerned
in the affair, declaring that they had never seen the original. This
certificate Voltaire put into the second edition of his “Essay on the
Manners and Mind of Nations.”
But in this October of 1758, some impertinent anonymous person
reproduces the whole letter from Saurin to Gonon in another Swiss
newspaper, and positively dares to doubt the authenticity of Voltaire’s
certificate from the three pastors.
On November 15th, M. de Voltaire sits down and writes “A Refutation of
an Anonymous Article,” wherein he dwells on the useless danger and
cruelty to an innocent family of attempting to convict their dead father
of heinous crime.
The impertinent unknown (who turns out to be a pastor, Lervèche, who had
long objected to Voltaire’s theatricals at Mon Repos) writes a “Reply”
to the refutation.
Then who should appear on the scene but Grasset, the publisher, and
Voltaire’s enemy in the latest “Pucelle” fracas. Grasset reprints the
whole correspondence, and adds thereto Voltaire’s “Defence of Lord
Bolingbroke,” and other little _brochures_ from his pen most likely to
give offence. The whole he calls “The Literary War or Selected Pieces of
M. de V----.”
Literary War indeed! says M. de V----; a literary libel! And do you know
who this Grasset is? A scoundrel, a cheat, a common criminal! M. de
V----, in short, not only loses his temper, but seems for the moment to
lose sight of the Saurin cause, and to devote all his energies to
getting Grasset punished. He appeals to all the local authorities. He
“knocks at every door,” and continues to knock till all are opened. He
is once more his own angry, spry, busy little fighting self. Peaceful
landowner and householder--all that is forgotten. Behold again the
restless and terrible little enemy who fought Desfontaines.
Most people listened to him--and sympathised, if not for his rage with
Grasset, at least for his zeal for the Saurins. There was but one man
who threw on his enthusiasm the cold water of irony: and that was
Haller, the great Swiss genius, _savant_, philosopher, linguist,
botanist, poet, philologist. Until Voltaire settled at Délices, Haller
had been _the_ lion of the neighbourhood. Now he was only _a_ lion. The
situation hardly needs further explanation. Suffice it to say that
Haller was as firm a Christian as Voltaire was a Deist: and that Haller
had been a rather sarcastic spectator of M. de Voltaire’s theatricals.
All generous admiration was on the side of Voltaire, who always had
plenty to spare for real talent such as Haller’s.
When Haller returned a very cool answer to Voltaire’s warm pleadings for
the Saurins and suggested that to concern himself in so small a matter
was beneath a great man’s greatness, Voltaire waited a judicious ten
days, and returned a mild and pleading answer.
To be beneath one’s greatness to put wrong, right, and to clear a dead
man’s honour! Haller could have known the Voltaire who was to avenge
Calas, very little. The correspondence continued. Haller was not a
little stiff-necked and difficult: and Voltaire at once persistent and
impulsive. Then Haller published the letters--in which he fancied he
himself played a _beau rôle_--and made an enemy, though a very generous
enemy, of Voltaire, for ever.
Grimm records how Voltaire one day asked an English visitor at Ferney,
from whence he had come.
“From Mr. Haller’s.”
“He is a great man,” cried Voltaire, “a great poet, a great naturalist,
a great philosopher--almost a universal genius in fact.”
“What you say, Sir, is the more admirable,” replied the Englishman,
“because Mr. Haller does not do you the same justice.”
“Ah!” said Voltaire, “perhaps we are both mistaken.”
A like interview is also described as taking place between Voltaire and
Casanova in 1760. Casanova stayed with Haller before he went to visit
Voltaire; and on leaving his first host observed how much he was looking
forward to becoming acquainted with his second.
“Ah!” replied Haller, “many persons, contrary to physical laws, have
found M. de Voltaire greater when seen at a distance.”
Voltaire had presently the satisfaction of hearing that the sale of “The
Literary War” was prohibited, and of seeing Grasset severely censured;
though he would have liked better to see him banished.
The Saurin-Grasset-Haller affair had one important influence upon
Voltaire. It disgusted him with Lausanne.
In this autumn of 1758 Voltaire wrote to a very old friend, King
Stanislas, saying that he had fifty thousand francs which he should like
to invest in an estate in Lorraine--that he might not die on the borders
of Lake Leman. Cautious Stanislas consulted the French Government. Would
this meet its views? Choiseul, representing it, as Bernis’s successor,
replied, “You know Voltaire well enough to decide for yourself.”
So on some date, not before November 20, 1758, Bettinelli--Italian,
Jesuit, poet, and literary man--arrived at Délices as the envoy of
Stanislas, sent to accept the proposed investment and tell Voltaire how
delighted Stanislas would be to have him as a neighbour.
Voltaire was in the garden, gardening, when Bettinelli came, and
presented an extraordinary appearance in a long pelisse, a black velvet
cap, and a peruke which covered almost all his face except the nose and
chin, which by now nearly met. He had a stick in his hand which had a
weeding fork at one end and a pruning hook at the other; and observed,
when he saw Bettinelli, that his crop from his garden was much more
abundant “than from that I sow in my books for the good of mankind.”
The pair talked on all kinds of subjects. Bettinelli, who was not a
little afraid of Voltaire’s cynic wit, nervously remarked the brilliant
flash of the eyes and the sarcastic, mobile lips. He thought his host
spoke slowly because he was preparing something caustic to say next; but
the truth was the host had already lost most of his teeth and spoke
slowly in order to be understood. The pair discussed all kinds of
subjects--Italy, the Inquisition, slavery, Tasso, Ariosto, Tronchin,
Bettinelli’s poetry, and the famous book “On the Mind,” which Voltaire
sharply criticised; and whose author, Helvétius, he summed up “as a fool
who wanted to be a philosopher with courtiers and a courtier with
philosophers.”
They spoke of Madame du Châtelet. In Voltaire’s rooms were several
pictures of the dead woman. “Here is my immortal Émilie,” he said.
Bettinelli records that she was the only person of whom he heard
Voltaire speak with an unchanging admiration and enthusiasm. Before
Bettinelli left he had a little interview with Dr. Tronchin, who
congratulated him on having found Voltaire in a mood unusually serene
and equable. In fact, the visit had been wholly a success--but for one
thing. When Bettinelli handed Voltaire Stanislas’s acceptance of his
proposal to live in Lorraine, Voltaire took it, saying that he had just
bought a little estate near Délices, where he intended to live out the
rest of his life. On November 18th, Voltaire had dated his first letter
from Ferney. Bettinelli was too late.
Since the middle of this September, 1758, Voltaire had been busy
negotiating with a M. de Boisy for the purchase of Ferney--formerly
spelt Fernex--and with a Président de Brosses for the life lease of
Tourney or Tournay.
There were reasons which made both estates peculiarly suitable to a
Voltaire. Ferney was in France, in Burgundy, in the district of Gex; but
it was also on the frontier of Switzerland, only three and a half miles
from Geneva. Here one could laugh at those strait-laced Genevans as
freely as if the three miles were three hundred; and if one offended
France, which was only a question of time, what more simple than to
drive into Geneva? Then, too, Ferney, lying on the north shore of Lake
Leman, almost joined the Délices. Voltaire at first thought it would be
a sort of supplement to his first Swiss home. But, as all the world
knows, Ferney soon supplanted Délices in its master’s affections, and
became the literary capital of Europe.
There were equally strong reasons for buying Tourney. It was in France,
in Burgundy, as Ferney was; and it was under the direction of a foreign
prelate, the Bishop of Annecy. It was on the very frontier of the Swiss
canton of Berne; and at the very gates of that rich, powerful,
intellectual Geneva, and yet entirely independent of its prim
Calvinistic laws. From Tourney one could thus “tease Geneva and caress
Paris; brave orders and _lettres de cachet_; have one’s works printed
without the King’s permission, and get away in the twinkling of an eye
from all prosecutions.” Admirable for a Voltaire, this. Then, too, if
Ferney was a supplement to Délices--Tourney was a prolongation of
Ferney. Add to this, with the life lease of Tourney went the title of
Lord and Count of Tourney. Was not this something to the man who clung
so tightly to the empty honour of Gentleman-in-Ordinary? It was very
much. Voltaire took an enormous pleasure in calling the attention of his
correspondents to his new designation; and presently signed himself,
with a solemn pride and joy, “Gentleman-in-Ordinary to the King of
France and Count of Tourney.” If Tourney was nothing in the world but a
tumbledown old country house with a ruined farm attached to it--what
difference did that make? What was a Gentleman-in-Ordinary? An exile
from France the French King would have none of. The same sort of
pleasure which he received from fine clothes was conveyed to Voltaire by
fine titles. The characteristic is not a grand or ennobling one; but it
is delightfully human.
By September, then, he had these two estates in view--“Tourney for the
title, and Ferney for the land: Ferney for a perpetuity, and Tourney
only for life.” There was not much trouble with M. de Boisy over Ferney.
It was bought for 24,000 écus in the name of Madame Denis, who was to
inherit it after her uncle’s death. The contract for the purchase was
not actually signed until February 9, 1759; but in the middle of
September, 1758, Voltaire had made a kind of state entrance into the
parish, accompanied by Madame Denis. Madame Denis was in her very best
clothes, with all the diamonds the _ménage_ Voltaire could produce. As
for Uncle Voltaire himself, he, in spite of the fact that the weather
was still very warm, enjoyed himself vastly in crimson velvet trimmed
with ermine. The pair drove in the smartest carriage, and attended High
Mass--“droned out--false”--at the parish church, during which the
enthusiastic future tenants of the proprietor of Ferney thumped on tin
boxes to represent a welcome of cannon! That little, lively, black-eyed
French-woman, Madame d’Épinay, has left a vivacious record of the day.
If she saw it as comic, Voltaire did not. Once more he justified
Tronchin’s appellation for him, “an old baby,” and enjoyed himself like
a schoolboy.
But if the Ferney negotiations had been simple, not so the Tourney.
Président de Brosses and Voltaire were soon engaged in a vast
correspondence. A whole book has been written on their relations with
each other. There is no doubt that over Tourney Voltaire showed a great
deal of that spirit which people call business capacity in themselves
and meanness in others.
On September 9th, he made an offer to de Brosses for the life lease of
the little estate. De Brosses said the offer was insufficient. After a
good deal of trouble and haggling over small items on both sides,
Voltaire finally bought the life lease of Tourney (with all seigneurial
rights and that delightful title included) for 35,600 livres. He
undertook to make certain alterations and repairs. A herd of cattle was
included in his purchase. Although he was not to enter into his life
tenancy until February 22, 1759, the agreement is dated December 11,
1758; and on December 24th he made his state entrance into Tourney, as
three months before he had into Ferney.
The second occasion was much the more magnificent of the two. Madame de
Fontaine was with him this time, as well as Madame Denis. Both were in
diamonds. Here, too, was their brother Mignot, the abbé; also _tout
paré_. The village girls handed the ladies baskets of flowers and
oranges. The artillery had come from Geneva, so there was no need to
thump upon tin boxes. There were drums, fifes, cannon: all the music of
flattery. The spectators were not only peasants, as they had been at
Ferney, but all the polite persons of the neighbourhood. There was a
splendid banquet, given by the outgoing tenant of Tourney, and served by
the innkeeper of a neighbouring village. The curé made M. de Voltaire a
beautiful address. M. de Voltaire was wholly delighted--“very gay and
content.” He answered quite _en grand seigneur_, and as was expected of
him, “Ask anything you like for the good of your parish and I will give
it you.” Lord and Count of Tourney! This most impressionable of men
lived up to the part immediately. He wrote an enthusiastic account of
the proceedings to de Brosses on the very same day, when he was back
again at Délices. “I made my entrance like Sancho Panza into his island.
Only his paunch was wanting to me.” “My subjects frightened my horses
with musketry and torpedoes.” The banquet (served by the native
innkeeper) “was a magnificent repast in the style of those of Horace and
Boileau.” In short, the Lord of Tourney saw his new estates all _couleur
de rose_, or almost all. It is infinitely characteristic that in this
very letter he went on to plead for the restitution of certain tithes to
the poor of Ferney, which they had enjoyed for a century, and of which
Ancian, the curé of the neighbouring parish of Moens, “the most
abominable pettifogger in the district,” had deprived them, further
“putting them to fifteen hundred francs of law expenses before they
knew it.” Voltaire had also appealed passionately to the Bishop of
Annecy; and did at last obtain his suit, but only after he had paid a
very large sum out of his own pocket.
He wrote also to Theriot that evening--tired, no doubt, but too charmed
to remember it. “You are mistaken, my old friend; I have four paws
instead of two. One paw in Lausanne, in a very pretty house for the
winter; one paw at Délices, near Geneva, where good company comes to see
me--those are the front paws. The back are at Ferney, and in the
county”--a county, if you please, and not merely an estate--“of
Tourney.”
He went on to point out the advantages of Ferney--how there was plenty
of land and wood for the rebuilding operations he already had in hand;
how he could get marble by the lake; how the extensive estates would
really not be so costly after all. For himself, he would like to live on
them quite simply. But my niece, you know--that victim of
Frankfort--_she_ merits luxury and indulgences. He had already set the
peasants to work to mend the neglected roads about Ferney; so that in a
month or two he was able to say truthfully that they had earned more in
that time than formerly they had been able to do in a year. He had
already chartered more than a hundred workmen, that his rebuilding and
gardening operations might be put in hand at once.
The year closed full of the happiest expectations. Despite gala
entrances to new estates, Madame Denis, indeed, complained that the
winter of 1758-59 was dull. It was all spent at Délices: as being more
out of the way of the troubling of Grassets and Hallers, than Monrion.
True, plenty of visitors came from Lausanne; but there were not many who
came to sleep and stay. True, too, the Délices troupe had privately
acted (“the only pleasure I have in this country,” Madame Denis wrote
dismally) “Aménaïde,” which was to have its name changed to “Tancred”
later; and as “Tancred” become immortal. But Madame Denis apparently was
suffering from an indigestion which Tronchin could not cure, for she
spoke slightingly of that good physician, and discontentedly of life in
general. Uncle Voltaire was so absurdly busy! Trying to do a hundred
things at once, and invincibly obstinate. “It is the only sign of old
age he has.” “If I were not so sensitive I should be very happy.” When a
lady complains she is sensitive, she always means that she is cross and
offended. Uncle Voltaire had shown his invincible obstinacy by
persisting in going on with that Saurin controversy when his niece
thought he had very much better leave it alone.
Then, too, he was getting more and more engrossed every day with pulling
down and putting up, with barns, farms, oxen, sheep, horses; and “adored
the country even in winter,” while Louise, as he said himself, was “very
difficult to reduce to the _rôle_ of Ceres, of Pomona, and of Flora, and
would much rather have been Thalia in Paris.” But when her uncle found
Tourney and Ferney, he found a better life than he had ever known; and
the dearest and crossest of nieces would not make him relinquish it. The
year 1759 was still new-born when he was writing, not once but many
times, that he was wonderfully well and happy, stronger and better than
he had ever been; that he had only really lived since the day he chose
his retreat; that he was so infinitely content “that if I dare I should
think myself wise.”
“Such is my life, Madame, tranquil and occupied, full and philosophic.”
“I love to plant, I love to build, and so satisfy the only tastes which
gratify old age.”
“This kind of life makes one want to live.” “Property in paper depends
upon fortune; property in land depends only upon God.”
“To have found the secret of being independent in France is more than to
have written the ‘Henriade.’”
CHAPTER XXXII
FERNEY
Ferney, as has been said, stood on the north shore of Lake Leman, in the
district of Gex, three and a half miles from Geneva and almost joining
Délices. The village to which it belonged, also called Ferney, was
really nothing but a mean hamlet with forty or fifty miserable
inhabitants, “devoured by poverty, scurvy, and tax-gatherers.” A very
ugly little church stood much too near the house.
That house, when Voltaire bought it, was very old, tumbledown, and
totally inadequate to his requirements. The entrance was through two
towers connected by a drawbridge. If it was picturesque, it was
certainly not comfortable. When Voltaire had rebuilt it, it was
certainly comfortable, and decidedly unpicturesque.
He had begun that rebuilding three months before the deed of purchase
was signed. By December 6, 1758, he had twenty masons at work. By the
24th, what he might well have cynically called his _optimism_ led him to
think it “a pretty house enough.” By June, 1759, it was “a charming
château in the Italian style.”
By July it was “of the Doric order. It will last a thousand years.”
By November it was “a piece of architecture which would have admirers
even in Italy.” While by the March of 1761 it had grown--at any rate in
its master’s fancy--into “a superb château.”
There have not been wanting to Voltaire enemies to argue persistently
and vociferously that Ferney was not at all what he represented it; and
that all his geese were swans. They were. Ferney at its best and
completest was never anything but a plain, sensible, commodious country
house. It had neither wings nor decoration; not any architectural merit,
except that its ugliness was simple and not elaborate. Voltaire was his
own architect; and owned quite frankly that he knew nothing at all about
architecture. The man who had travelled through Holland, Belgium, and
Prussia without once stepping out of his post-chaise to look at a famous
picture, or an immortal sculpture, or the “frozen music” of a grand
cathedral, had as little feeling for art as for Nature.
He thought Ferney a superb château because it was _his_ château. Just as
he was devoted to flowers and gardens, when they were _his_ flowers and
_his_ gardens.
It is certainly not the best way of loving art or Nature, but it is the
only way of many persons besides Voltaire. And, after all, that
comfortable feeling of landed proprietorship, that honest pride in his
cows and his sheep, his bees and his silkworms, sits pleasantly enough
on this withered cynic of sixty-five; and makes him at once more human,
more sympathetic--the same flesh and blood as the simple and ordinary.
He had, as he said, plenty of wood and stone for his building operations
on the premises--“oak enough to be useful to our navy, if we had one”;
and stone, which the architect thought very good, and which turned out
to be very bad. He said gaily that when the house was finished he should
write on the wall “Voltaire fecit”; and that posterity would take him
for a famous architect. As for that marble of which he had talked
largely as being brought up by the lake, the man who declared that he
preferred a good English book to a hundred thousand pillars of it, did
not trouble to obtain much or to make an elaborate use of what he did
obtain. He wanted the house “agreeable and useful,” and he had it. There
was a fine view from it; though not so fine as it might have been, for
it faced the high road. Still, as its happy master said, it was situated
in the most smiling country in Europe; at its feet the lake gleamed and
sparkled; and beyond the warm and gorgeous luxuriance of its perfect
gardens could be seen, in dazzling contrast, the eternal snows of Mont
Blanc.
When the rebuilding was finished the house was, looked at without
prejudice, the well-appointed home of a well-to-do _bourgeois
gentilhomme_--with an unusual love for literature. There was an ordinary
hall with a stone staircase on the left which led up to the fourteen
guest-rooms, all comfortably furnished, said one of those guests, who
was an Englishman and had been used to solid English comfort at home.
Here and there were some good pictures--or copies of good
pictures--copies, most likely, since Voltaire, hardly knowing the
difference, would be apt to reflect that a copy would do as well as an
original, and be much cheaper. A Venus after Paul Veronese and a Flora
after Guido Reni, some of the visitors declared genuine; and some as
hotly pronounced spurious. Wagnière, that Genevan boy who lived to write
memoirs like the other secretaries, stated that his master had about
twenty valuable pictures in all; and some good busts. There were various
family portraits about the house: one of Madame Denis; one of Voltaire’s
young mother; and, soon, a likeness of Madame de Pompadour painted by
herself, and by herself given to Voltaire. In Madame Denis’s room
presently there was a portrait of Catherine, Empress of Russia,
embroidered in silk; and a marble statue of Voltaire. There was a copy
of this statue, or his bust in plaster, in almost every room in the
house.
The library was simple, and, for Voltaire, small. Dr. Burney, the father
of Fanny, who saw it in 1770, describes it as “not very large but well
filled,” and says it contained “a whole-length figure in marble” of its
master “recumbent, in one of the windows.” At Voltaire’s death it
contained only 6,210 volumes. But almost every one had on its margin
copious notes in that fine, neat little handwriting. Six thousand
volumes annotated by a Voltaire! His sarcasm should have made the
dullest ones amusing; and his relentless logic the obscurest ones clear.
There were a great many volumes of history and theology; dictionaries in
every language; all the Italian poets; and all the English philosophers.
The Comte de Maistre, who saw this library after Voltaire’s death when
it had been bought by Catherine the Great, wondered at the “extreme
mediocrity” of the books. By this he explained himself to mean that
there were no rare old editions and no sumptuous bindings, which the
Count took as a sign that Voltaire was “a stranger to all profound
literature.” It was a sign that Voltaire read to act; that books were
his tools, not his ornaments; that he loved literature, not as a
sensuous delight, but as the lever that was to turn the world. “A few
books, very much marked.” That library was infinitely characteristic of
the man who was doer, not dreamer; of the mind to which every poet,
every philosopher, every scientist acted as a spur to new practical
effort; of the man who was to go down the ages not as playwright, or
verse-maker, but as he who “conquered the intellect of France, for the
Revolution.”
The _salle à manger_ was distinguished only by a most extraordinary and
very bad allegorical picture, called “The Temple of Memory,” in which a
Glory, with her hair dressed much _à la mode_, was presenting Voltaire
(who was surrounded with a halo like a saint) to the God of Poetry who
was getting out of his chariot with a crown in his hand. On one side of
the picture appeared busts of Euripides, Sophocles, Racine, Corneille,
and other great men; on the opposite side were caricatures of Fréron and
Desfontaines, who were being most satisfactorily kicked by Furies.
Voltaire laughed at, and enjoyed immensely, this part of the picture
while he was at meals. The artist was Alix, a native of Ferney, and soon
an _habitué_ at the château. It was fortunate for him that Voltaire was
so much better a friend than he was a judge of art.
His bedroom and salon were both small rooms. The salon, entered by
folding doors, contained the master’s bust above the stove, six or seven
pictures, “more or less good,” a portrait of Madame du Châtelet, and
casts of Newton and Locke. One of the pictures, after Boucher,
represented a hunting scene. There were ten tapestry armchairs, and a
table of very common varnished marble. French windows and a glass door
led into the garden.
Voltaire’s bedroom was principally distinguished by a neatness,
cleanness, and simplicity natural to him, but very unusual in his day.
The roughly carved deal bedstead one visitor regretfully regarded as
“almost mean.” It was the fashion then to spend the night in what looked
like a large heavily curtained coffin. Voltaire--to the melancholy
vexation of the fashionable--seems to have dispensed with most of the
curtains, but could not escape a huge baldachino over his head. Inside
it, hung a very bad pastel portrait of Lekain; and a candelabra
containing three wax candles, so that he could see to read. On either
side of the bed hung portraits of Frederick the Great, of Voltaire
himself, and of Madame du Châtelet. Placed between the door and the only
window were five or six other engraved portraits, all in very simple
black frames. The bed hangings and the four armchairs were upholstered
alike in pale blue damask.
The room contained five desks. On each were notes for the various
subjects on which the author was working: this desk had notes for a
play; this, for a treatise on philosophy; a third for a _brochure_ on
science; and so on. All were exquisitely neat and orderly; every paper
in its right place. The writing chair was of cane, with a cover on it to
match the bed curtains. Later on, Voltaire had a second writing-chair
made, which he used much in the last few years of his life: one of its
arms formed a desk, and the other a little table with drawers; and both
were revolving.
Just below the master’s bedroom was Wagnière’s, so that if Voltaire
knocked on the floor during the night the servant could hear him. That
he did so knock, pretty often, rests on the rueful testimony of Wagnière
himself.
Quite close to the house stood a little marble bathroom with hot and
cold water laid on. It was a very unusual luxury in those times, and
considered a highly unnecessary one. It is pleasant to a century much
more particular in such matters than the eighteenth to reflect that
Voltaire was always personally cleanly and tidy to an extent which his
contemporaries considered ridiculous. That fine and dirty age could
hardly forgive his insisting on his ancient perukes and queer old
gardening clothes being kept as trim and well brushed as if they were
new and grand. His passion for soap and water was one of the complaints
his enemies in Prussia had brought against him. Wagnière records that
his master was “scrupulously clean” and also his love of washing his
eyes in pure cold water. Doubtless the habit preserved them, in spite of
the inordinate amount of work they had to do. To the day of his death
they never needed spectacles.
Most of the visitors comment on the well-kept appearance of the house;
though one, Lady Craven, Margravine of Anspach, said the _salle à
manger_ was generally dirty and the servants’ liveries soiled. It was at
Ferney as it had been at Cirey. The master was particular, but the
mistress was not. If Madame du Châtelet had been engrossed with science,
Madame Denis was engrossed with amusement. Her extravagance and bad
household management in that respect were often the cause of
disagreements between her uncle and herself. And, that “fat pig, who
says it is too hot to write a letter,” as Voltaire once described his
niece to Madame d’Épinay, was the sort of person who thought no trouble
too great for pleasure, but any trouble too great for duty.
It is significant that when she went to Paris in 1768 her uncle seized
the opportunity of having Ferney thoroughly cleaned from top to bottom.
It is said that when he caught sight of cobwebs by the pillars and
porticoes of the house, which the servants had neglected to remove, he
used to vigorously flick a whip, crying out, “À la chasse! à la chasse!”
and the whole household, including the guests, had to join in the spider
hunt.
He had in his daily employ sixty or seventy persons, and sometimes more.
Five servants usually waited at table, of whom three were in livery.
Martin Sherlock, the Englishman, says that the dinner consisted of two
courses and was eaten off silver plates with the host’s coat of arms on
them; while at the dessert the spoons, forks, and blades of the knives
were of silver-gilt; and adds that no strange servant was ever allowed
to officiate at meals. Wagnière records how two of the household having
robbed their master, the police got wind of the matter; and Voltaire
bade him go and warn the delinquents to fly immediately, “for if they
are arrested I shall not be able to save them from hanging.” He also
sent them some money for the journey. It is pleasant to learn that the
hearts of the culprits were touched by this generous kindness, and that,
having escaped, they lived honest lives.
It was a rule at Ferney that all peasants who came to the house should
have a good dinner and twenty-four sous given them before they pursued
their way.
“Good to all about him,” was the Prince de Ligne’s description of
Voltaire. It was not an extravagant one.
If the house at Ferney was simple and comfortable rather than
magnificent, the grounds were on a far more elaborate scale. There was
enough land to grow wheat, hay, and straw. There were poultry yards and
sheepfolds; an orchard watered by a stream; meadows, storehouses, and an
immense barn which stabled fifty cows with their calves and served as a
granary, and of which its master was intensely proud.
Then, too, there were farms which Voltaire managed himself, and so made
lucrative. He was pleased to say, with a twinkle in his eye, that he
also did everything in the garden--the gardener was “_si bête_.” That he
had a field which was always called Voltaire’s field, because he
cultivated it entirely with his own hands, is certainly true. Before
long he had four or five hundred beehives; turkeys and silkworms; and a
breeding stable for horses, transferred from the Délices. He was not a
little delighted when, in this May of 1759, the Marquis de Voyer,
steward of King Louis’s stables, made him a present of a fine stallion.
As if he had not hobbies enough, he soon became an enthusiastic
tree-planter--begging all his friends to follow his example--and sending
waggons all the way to Lyons for loads of young trees for his park.
After a while that park stretched in three miles of circuit round the
house, and included a splendid avenue of oaks, lindens, and poplars. In
the garden were sunny walls for peaches; vines, lawns, and flowers. It
was laid out with a charming _imprévu_ and irregularity, most
unfashionable in that formal day. Voltaire had always a “tender
recollection of the banks of the Thames,” and made his garden as English
as he could. It is indeed melancholy to note that artificial water and
prim terraces were soon introduced to spoil--though their master
thought they improved--its luxuriant irregularity; and that objects like
lightning conductors, and fountains presided over by plaster nymphs,
were not considered the least out of keeping with Nature by their lord
and master. Near his silkworm house a thick linden-tree with overhanging
branches formed what was called Voltaire’s study, and there he wrote
verses “for recreation.” Nature certainly never inspired any of _them_.
Now and again there came, it is true, even to this most typical son of
the most artificial of all centuries, as he cultivated his field, or
pruned and weeded in his garden, such reflections as might have fallen
from the lips of his great opposite, Rousseau: “I have only done one
sensible thing in my life--to cultivate the ground. He who clears a
field renders a better service to humankind than all the scribblers in
Europe.”
“You have done a great work for posterity” a friend said to him one day.
“Yes, Madame. I have planted four thousand feet of trees in my park.”
No more incongruous picture could be painted than that of this
“withering cynic,” this world-famous hewer, hacker, and uprooter in his
old grey shoes and stockings, a long vest to his knees, little black
velvet cap and great drooping peruke, tranquilly directing, cultivating,
sowing, “planting walnut and chestnut trees upon which I shall never see
walnuts or chestnuts,” consoling himself for the toads in his garden by
the reflection that “they do not prevent the nightingales from singing”:
and prophesying that his destiny would be “to end between a seedlip,
cows, and Genevans.”
For the time this country life was his element not the less. He wrote
that it was, to Madame du Deffand, a dozen times. True, he had taken to
it late. But perhaps always, deep down in him, undeveloped, stifled by
Paris and by the burning needs of humanity, had been the peaceful
primæval tastes. Cirey had roused them. Délices had nourished them: and
Ferney and Tourney confirmed them.
Tourney had given its master a title, but at first it gave him nothing
else. It was a county _pour rire_, “the land in a bad state,” “a garden
where there was nothing but snails and moles, vines without grapes,
fields without corn, and sheds without cows,” and “a house in ruins.”
Still, the land could be made fertile; and the house, if it _was_ in
ruins, boasted an admirable view, and was but “a quarter of a league”
from Geneva.
By February, 1759, fifty workmen were putting it to rights; and by
November the Count of Tourney could say that he had planted hundreds of
trees in the garden, and used more powder (in rock-blasting) than at the
siege of a town. Everything needed repairing, he added--fields, roads
granaries, wine-presses--and everything was being repaired.
As at Ferney and Délices, the master personally supervised every detail;
and so made his farms, his nurseries, his bees, his silkworms, all pay.
In the house at Tourney he quickly made a theatre-room. If some of the
guests were disposed to laugh at a stage which held nine persons in a
semicircle with difficulty, and to think the green and gold decorations
tawdry, Voltaire adored that “theatre of Punchinello” as a child adores
a new toy. “A little green and gold theatre,” “the prettiest and
smallest possible”--he alludes to it in his letters a hundred times.
From the September of 1760 he was anxious to transfer it to Ferney. But
meanwhile he loved it where and as it was. Tourney also was useful to
provide accommodation for the servants of the innumerable guests who
came to stay at Ferney.
No idea of Voltaire’s life there could be given without mention of that
incessant stream of visitors of all nations and languages which flowed
through it, almost without pause for twenty years. Half the genius--and
but too many of the fools--of Europe came to worship at the shrine of
the prophet of this literary Mecca.
As prim Geneva shut its gates at nightfall, every one who came to sup
with M. de Voltaire had to stay all night in his house. Ferney had no
inn. After fourteen years of his life there, Voltaire might well say
that he had been the hotel-keeper of Europe. He told Madame du Deffand,
as early as 1763, that he had entertained four hundred English people,
of whom not one ever after gave him a thought.
Too many of his guests, indeed, were not merely self-invited: but
remained at Ferney with such persistency that their unhappy host would
sometimes retire to bed and say he was dying, to get rid of them. One
caller, who had received a message to this effect, returned the next
day. “Tell him I am dying again. And if he comes any more, say I am dead
and buried.”
Another visitor, when told Voltaire was ill, shrewdly replied that he
was a doctor and should like to feel his pulse. When Voltaire sent down
a message to say he was dead, the visitor replied, “Then I will bury
him. In my profession I am used to burying people.” His humour appealed
to Voltaire’s. He was admitted. “You seem to take me for some curious
animal,” said Voltaire.
“Yes, Monsieur, for the Phœnix.”
“Very well: the charge to see me is twelve sous.”
“Here are twenty-four,” said the visitor. “I will come again to-morrow.”
He did, and on many to-morrows: and was received as a friend.
But all the importunate were not so clever, and their fulsome flattery
was odious to the man who loved it daintily dressed.
“Sir, when I see you, I see the great candle that lights the world.”
“Quick, Madame Denis,” cried Voltaire. “A pair of snuffers!”
One persistent woman tried to effect an entry by saying that she was the
niece of Terrai, the last, and not the least corrupt, of Louis XV.’s
finance ministers.
Voltaire sent out a message. “Tell her I have only one tooth left, and I
am keeping that for her uncle.”
The Abbé Coyer, on his arrival, calmly announced that he was going to
stay six weeks.
“In what respect, my dear Abbé, are you unlike ‘Don Quixote’? He took
the inns for châteaux, and you take the châteaux for inns.”
Coyer left early the next day.
Still, in spite of such rebuffs, the visitors were incessant.
One said that he could not recollect there being _more_ than sixty to
eighty people at supper after theatricals. Voltaire himself said there
were constantly fifty to a hundred.
Many visitors stayed for weeks; many for months; some for years.
Madame de Fontaine, with her lover _en train_, could come when she
chose--and she often chose. Mignot came when _he_ liked. Great-nephew
d’Hornoy was a constant visitor.
At different times there were two adopted daughters and two Jesuit
priests living in the house. One relative, as will be seen, was at
Ferney for a decade--completely paralysed. And hanging about the house
were generally a trio or a quartette of gentlemen ne’er-do-weels, who
sometimes copied their host’s manuscripts, and sometimes stole them.
In the midst of such a household Voltaire pursued his way and his life’s
work, wonderfully methodically and equably. It was his custom to stay in
bed till eleven o’clock, or later. There he read or wrote; or dictated
to his secretaries with a distressing rapidity. Sometimes he was reading
to himself at the same time. About eleven, a few of his guests would
come up and pay him a brief visit.
The rest of the morning he spent in the gardens and farms,
superintending and giving orders. In earlier years, he dined with his
house party--in an undress, for which he always apologised and which he
never changed. Later on, he always dined alone. After dinner he would go
into the salon and talk for a little with his guests. The whole of the
rest of the afternoon and evening until supper-time he spent in study:
in which he never allowed himself to be interrupted. One at least of his
guests complained that his only fault was to be “_fort renfermé_.”
At supper he appeared in as lively spirits as a schoolboy set free from
school. It was the time for recreation: and a well earned recreation
too. He led his guests to talk on such subjects as pleased them. When a
discussion grew serious, he would listen without saying a word, with his
head bent forward. Then, when his friends had adduced their arguments,
he advanced his own, in perfect order and clearness, and yet with an
extraordinary force and vehemence. He was seldom his best before a large
company, especially of the kind that had come, as he said, “to see the
rhinoceros.” But with a few kindred spirits he was as brilliant as he
had been twenty years before over the supper-table at Cirey. At Ferney
he must have missed indeed that woman who, having flung off her mantle
of science and erudition, became socially what socially all women should
be--an inspirer, a sympathiser, a magnet to draw out men’s wit--a
sorceress who talked so well that she made her companions feel not how
clever she was, but how clever they were.
Niece Denis was certainly the most good-natured of hostesses--if she was
_gaupe_, as Madame du Deffand said--and was grateful to her uncle’s
guests for mitigating the ennui of a country life. She was useful too.
When Voltaire was tired or bored, he could retire directly after supper
to that invariable refuge, bed; and leave his niece to act with his
visitors. When he was not bored and there were no theatricals, he
sometimes read aloud a canto of the “Pucelle” as in old times; or quoted
poetry--any but his own--which he never could recollect; or talked
theatres or played chess. It was the only game in which he indulged, and
he was a little ashamed of it. Games are so idle!
When he went to bed he started work afresh. It was his only
intemperance. If he kept an abundant table for his guests he was still
infinitely frugal himself. His _déjeuner_ consisted only of coffee, with
cream; his supper, of eggs, although there was always a chicken ready
for him in case he fancied it. He drank a little burgundy, and owned to
a weakness for lentils. Of coffee, in which he had indulged freely in
youth, he now took only a few cups a day. He had a habit of ignoring
meals altogether when he was busy--a little idiosyncrasy somewhat trying
to his secretaries. Wagnière also complained that his master was too
sparing in sleep; and called him up from that room below, several times
in the night, to assist him in his literary work. When he had a play on
hand he was “in a fever.”
Many of the visitors who stayed at Ferney have left an account of their
life there. Though the accounts always graphically portray the character
of the writers, they sketch much less vividly the portrait of Voltaire.
But from such accounts--all taken together, and corrected by each other
from Voltaire’s own descriptions, from Wagnière’s and from Madame
Denis’s--Ferney, and the life there, were as nearly as possible what has
been depicted. Changes in habits are inevitable in twenty years.
Differing accounts may all be true--at different times. Feverishly busy
for Voltaire, idle and sociable for Madame Denis; she carried along by
that unceasing stream of guests, and he watching it, half amused and
half bored, from his own firm mooring of a great life’s work--that was
Ferney for its master and mistress from 1758 until 1778. They did not
regularly take up their abode there until 1760. They did not give up
Délices altogether until 1765. But from the autumn of 1758 Ferney was
their real home, the home of Voltaire’s heart; inextricably associated
with him by his friends and his enemies; the subject of a thousand
scandals, and of most beautiful imaginative descriptions. Nearly all
great men have had one place dedicated to them--Florence to Dante;
Corsica to Napoleon; Stratford to Shakespeare; Weimar to Goethe; and
Ferney to Voltaire.
CHAPTER XXXIII
“CANDIDE,” AND “ÉCRASEZ L’INFÂME”
On February 10, 1759, Voltaire’s “Natural Law,” Helvétius’s book “On the
Mind,” and six others were publicly burnt in Paris by the hangman.
In March the “Encyclopædia” was suspended.
“Natural Law,” it will be remembered, was nothing but a seeking for an
answer to that everlasting question “What is truth?”
“On the Mind” was the naïve expression of the materialism of the
wittiest freethinker in Paris, Helvétius, _maître d’hôtel_ to the Queen
and Farmer-General. But the Dauphin showed it to his mother, and it
received the compliment of burning. “What a fuss about an omelette!”
said Voltaire contemptuously. The destruction of his own “Natural Law”
disturbed him as little. “Burn a good book, and the cinders will spring
up and strike your face” was one of his own axioms. From the flames of
its funeral pyre, the thing would rise a phœnix gifted with immortal
life and fame.
But the suspension of the “Encyclopædia” hit him hard.
Since the attempted assassination of the King by Damiens the laws
against the freedom of the press had been growing daily more severe.
True, the poor creature had had a Bible in his pocket, but the churchmen
argued somehow that it was the New Learning which had guided the dagger.
Then France had had reverses in war. Suppose these misfortunes all came
from these cursed philosophers and their “Encyclopædia”! As, later,
whole nations attributed the rot in the crops and the ague in the bones
of their children to the withering influence of that great little
Corporal, hundreds of miles away from them, so in the eighteenth
century in France a great party in the State attributed to the extension
of learning every disaster which their own folly or foolhardiness
brought upon them.
They turned, and brought all their power, influence, and money against
the Encyclopædists. D’Alembert was no fighter. Student, recluse, and
gentle friend--he was not one of those who could write with a pen in one
hand and a sword in the other. “I do not know if the ‘Encyclopædia’ will
be continued,” he wrote to Voltaire as early as the January of 1758,
“but I am sure it will not be continued by me”; and though the
pugnacious little warrior of Délices wrote and passionately urged his
peaceful friend not to do what his absurd enemies wished--not to let
them enjoy “that insolent victory”--still, d’Alembert withdrew. On
February 9, 1759, Voltaire wrote that he seemed to see the Inquisition
condemning Galileo.
But it was as he said. The cinders from the burning sprang up and burnt
the burners. They could mutilate the “Encyclopædia,” but they could not
kill it. Its very mutilations attracted interest, and “Natural Law” and
“On the Mind” continued to be sold--in open secrecy--a hundred times
more than ever.
It will not have been forgotten that with “Natural Law” had originally
been published “The Disaster of Lisbon”; and that the doctrines of
“Lisbon” had been refuted, by the request of the Genevans, in a long,
wild, rambling letter by Jean Jacques Rousseau, wherein that absurd
person had pointed out that if we lived in deserts, not towns, the
houses would not fall upon us, because there would not be houses to
fall.
Answer a fool according to his folly! A few gay bantering lines were all
Voltaire’s reply at the moment. To strike quickly--or wait long--this
man could do both. He loved best to strike at once; but if he could have
patience and wait to gather his weapons, to barb his arrows, to poison
his darts, why, he was of nature the more deadly. This time he had
waited long. The bantering note was but a sop thrown to his impatience.
Rousseau’s Letter on Optimism bears the date
[Illustration: VOLTAIRE
_From the Bust by Houdon_]
of August, 1756. It was not till the early part of 1759 that there crept
out stealthily, secretly, quietly, the gayest little volatile laughing
romance called “Candide.”
Written in some keen moment of inspiration--perhaps at the Elector
Palatine’s, perhaps at Délices, where, it matters not--in that brief
masterpiece of literature Voltaire brought out all his batteries at once
and confronted the foe with that ghoulish mockery, that bantering jest,
and that deadly levity which few could face and live.
If the optimists had talked down the passionate reasonings of the “Poem
on the Disaster of Lisbon” with that reiterated “All is well,” “All
chance, direction which thou canst not see--all partial evil, universal
good,” “Candide’s” laugh drowned those affirmations--so loudly and so
often affirmed that the affirmers had come to mistake them for argument.
In this novel of two hundred pages Voltaire withered by a grin the
cheap, current, convenient optimism of the leisured classes of his day,
and confounded Pope as well as Rousseau. This time he did not argue with
their theories. He only exposed them. In that searching light, in that
burning sunshine, the comfortable dogmas of the neat couplets of the
“Essay on Man” blackened and died, and Rousseau was shown forth the
laughing-stock of the nations.
One of the few literary classics which is not only still talked about
but still sometimes read, is “Candide.” Nothing grows old-fashioned
sooner than humour. The jests which amuse one age bore and depress the
next. But it is part of Voltaire’s genius in general, and of “Candide”
in particular, that its wit is almost as witty to-day as when it was
written. It still trips and dances on feet which never age or tire.
Nothing is more astounding in it than what one critic has called its
“fresh and unflagging spontaneity”--its “surpassing invention.” Its
vigour is such as no time can touch. It reads like the work of a
superabundant youth. Yet Voltaire was actually sixty-four when he wrote
it; and if indeed “we live in deeds, not years: in thought, not breaths:
in feelings, not in figures on a dial,” he was a thousand.
The story is, briefly, that of a young man brought up in implicit
belief in the everything-for-the-best doctrine, who goes out into a
world where he meets with a hundred adventures which give it the lie.
Life is a bad bargain, but one can make the best of it. That is the
moral of “Candide.” “What I know,” says Candide, “is that we must
cultivate our garden.” “Let us work without reasoning: that is the only
way to render life supportable.”
As children read the “Gulliver’s Travels” of that past master of irony,
Jonathan Swift, as the most innocent and amusing of fairy tales, so can
“Candide” be read as a rollicking farce and as nothing else in the
world.
Who knows, indeed, when he puts down that marvellous novelette, whether
to laugh at those inimitable traits of the immortal Dr. Pangloss--“noses
have been made to carry spectacles, therefore we have spectacles; legs
have been made for stockings, therefore we have stockings; pigs were
made to be eaten, and therefore we have pork all the year round”--or to
weep over the wretchedness of a humanity which perforce consoles itself
with lies, and, too miserable to face its misery, pretends that all is
well?
One woman, with her heart wrung by that cruel mockery, speaks of
“Candide’s” “diabolical gaiety.” “It seems to be written by a being of
another nature than our own, indifferent to our fate, pleased with our
sufferings, and laughing like a demon or a monkey at the miseries of
that humankind with which he has nothing in common.” Some have found in
it the blasphemies of a devil against the tender and ennobling
Christianity which has been the faith and the hope of sorrowing
millions; and others discover in it only one of the most potent of
arguments for embracing that Christianity--the confession that no other
system so consolatory can be found. To one reader it is the supreme
expression of a genius who, wherever he stands, stands alone--“as high
as mere wit can go”; to another, shorn of its indecency, it is, like
“Gulliver,” but a _bizarre_ absurdity for youth; while a third finds it
“most useful as a philosophical work, because it is read by people who
would never read philosophy.”
Perhaps the genius of “Candide” lies partly in the fact that it is both
serious and frivolous, ghoulish and gay, tragedy and comedy; and equally
perfect as the one or the other.
Voltaire assigned “this little sort of romance” to that convenient
person, the Chevalier de Mouhy, on whom, in 1738, had been fathered the
“Préservatif.” The real author declared that the thing was much too
frivolous for him to have written. He had read it, to be sure. “The more
it makes me laugh the more sorry I am it is assigned to me.” Almost
every letter of this spring of 1759 contains a mocking allusion to
_optimism_. “Candide” was much to the fore in its writer’s mind.
On March 2d, the Council of Geneva condemned the book to be burnt; and
once more, as in the case of the “Pucelle,” Voltaire watched a bonfire
with a very twisted smile. He revenged himself by flooding Geneva with
anonymous irreligious pamphlets with such religious names--“Christian
Dialogues” and “The Gospel of the Day”--as to deceive the very elect.
But it was not only his suspected paternity in the case of “Candide,”
but a suspected paternity of an even more dangerous child, that
prevented Voltaire in this spring giving up his whole soul peacefully to
rebuilding Ferney and laying out gardens. Frederick was in the midst of
a disastrous campaign; but, unfortunately, no disaster stopped him
writing to Voltaire or composing verses. Wilhelmina’s death had only
healed the old wounds for a while. They broke out afresh. In March this
strange Damon and Pythias were again squabbling over that ancient bone
of contention, Maupertuis; and then, as inconsistently as if they had
been a couple of schoolgirls, passionately regretting their old amity.
“I shall soon die without having seen you,” wrote Voltaire on March
25th. “You do not care, and I shall try not to care either.... I can
live neither with you nor without you. I do not speak to the King or the
hero: that is the affair of sovereigns. I speak to him who has
fascinated me, whom I have loved, and with whom I am always angry.” Then
they remembered Frankfort and Freytag, and began snarling and growling
again.
And then--then--a book of Frederick’s poems which abused Louis XV. and
Madame de Pompadour was opened in the post on its way from Frederick to
Voltaire. And in a trice Voltaire is quaking lest he should be thought
to have inspired, or positively written, verse so dangerous and
disrespectful.
No emergency had ever yet robbed him of his cleverness. He took the
packet to the French envoy at Geneva and showed him the broken seal; and
then, by the envoy’s advice, sent the whole thing to Choiseul, the head
of the French Ministry. Choiseul was himself a verse-maker; he wrote a
virulent versified satire upon Frederick and sent it to Voltaire. “Tell
your King, if he publishes his poems I shall publish mine.”
Voltaire says that if he had wished to amuse himself he might have seen
the Kings of France and Prussia engaged in a war of verses. But he was
the friend of peace as well as the friend of Frederick. He begged
Frederick not to shut every door of reconciliation with the King of
France by publishing that ode; and added, that in mortal fear of its
being attributed to Uncle Voltaire, Niece Denis had burnt it. Frederick
would not have been human had he not immediately felt convinced that
those ashes contained the finest lines he had ever written. But they
_were_ ashes. The episode closed.
On July 27, 1759, Maupertuis died at Bâle, “of a repletion of pride,”
said Voltaire. Akakia, busy with his history of “Peter the Great,” and
with touching up “Tancred,” or his “Chevaliers” as he called it
sometimes, must needs push them aside and shoot an arrow or two of his
barbed wit at that poor enemy’s dead body. “Enjoy your hermitage,”
Frederick wrote back to him gravely. “Do not trouble the ashes of those
who are at peace in the grave.... Sacrifice your vengeance on the shrine
of your own reputation ... and let the greatest genius in France be also
the most generous of his nation.” The counsel was just and noble. Alas!
it was even more needed than Frederick guessed. At this very time
Voltaire was writing his secret “Memoirs for the life of M. de
Voltaire.” They were not published till after his death. They were never
meant to be published at all. They contain what Morley has well called
“a prose lampoon” on the King’s private life, “which is one of the
bitterest libels that malice ever prompted.”
Its incomprehensible author was still actually compiling it when, for
the third time, he took up his _rôle_ of peacemaker between France and
Frederick.
This time, Tencin and Richelieu having been tried in vain, the medium
was to be Choiseul, Choiseul being approached by Voltaire’s angel,
d’Argental. The moment was favourable. The campaign of 1759 was wholly
disastrous to Frederick: and on August 12th he was beaten by the united
armies at Kunersdorf. Chased from his States, “surrounded by enemies,
beaten by the Russians, unable to replenish an exhausted treasury,”
“Luc,” as Voltaire phrased it, “was still Luc.” He still kept his head
above the foaming waters that would have engulfed any other swimmer.
“Very embarrassed, and not less embarrassing to other people;
astonishing and impoverishing Europe, and writing verses,” Frederick as
if to give himself time--as if, though he never meant to yield to such
advances, he yet did not dare to openly refuse them--coquetted with the
peace offers of M. de Choiseul, sent through that “Bureau d’adresse,”
Voltaire. It is not a little wonderful that Voltaire, with his itching
fingers for action, could suffer himself to be a “Bureau d’adresse,” a
passive medium, even for a while. But he did. An immense correspondence
passed between himself and Frederick--for the benefit of Choiseul.
Frederick was alluded to as Mademoiselle Pestris or Pertris: and very
coy was Mademoiselle over the matter. Shall it be peace? shall it not?
It was a delicate negotiation, said that “Bureau d’adresse,” very truly.
It was like the play of two cats--each with velvet paws to hide its
claws.
It came to nothing. Though, perhaps, when in December there appeared in
Paris a book entitled “The Works of the Philosopher of Sans-Souci,”
containing those freethinking effusions a Most Christian King had
written under the rose, and which he would not at all wish to see
daylight, Choiseul’s claw had been active in the matter. Fortunately
Voltaire could not be suspected. Had not Freytag taken from him at
Frankfort that “Œuvre de Poëshie du Roi Mon Maître,” which was none
other than the “Works of the Philosopher of Sans-Souci” under a
different name? Still, the year 1760 opened as 1759 had done, with Damon
and Pythias still sparring at each other. “You have embroiled me for
ever with the King of France, you have lost me my posts and pensions,
you have ill-treated me at Frankfort, me and an innocent woman,” writes
Voltaire to Frederick from peaceful Tourney in April, 1760.
And in May Frederick wrote back. “If you were not dealing with a fool in
love with your genius,” what might I not do and say? As it is--“Once for
all, let me hear no more of that niece who bores me, and has nothing but
her uncle to cover her defects.”
The niece who bored Frederick must have been very nearly as bored
herself throughout the remainder of this year 1759 as she confessed to
have been at the beginning. Uncle Voltaire was always so engrossed with
writing, or with those stupid farms and gardens. “The more you work on
your land, the more you will love it,” he had written to Madame de
Fontaine in the summer. “The corn one has sown oneself is worth far more
than what one gets from other people’s granaries.” And then, there were
so few visitors.
Valette, a needy, clever, unsatisfactory acquaintance of d’Alembert’s,
was at Délices in December; and during the year a man named d’Aumard had
arrived on a visit. But that was all.
D’Aumard was a young soldier cousin of Voltaire’s mother. Of very
ordinary abilities, and morals rather below the very low average of his
day, that distant cousinship was the only claim he had upon Voltaire’s
notice. But it was more than sufficient. Voltaire had already sent him
presents of money through Madame Denis, and made him a promise of a
pension for life. Directly he arrived at Délices he was attacked by what
was at first taken to be rheumatism. Tronchin was called in. Voltaire
sent d’Aumard to Aix for the waters. But neither the first physician nor
the most fashionable cure in Europe was of any avail. D’Aumard became a
helpless and hopeless cripple. In 1761, Voltaire said that it required
four persons to move him from one bed to another. In this condition he
lived in Voltaire’s house for at least ten years, and finally died
there. His host engaged in a long correspondence about his case with the
surgeon of the Royal Footguards, and entered into every detail with
infinite pains and minuteness. To a busy and active Voltaire the fate of
this young man, shut out of all work and interest--hearing, as he lay on
the bed from which he was never to rise, the stir and movement of a life
in which he could never join--seemed peculiarly pitiable. He makes a
hundred sympathetic allusions to him. That his own conduct was
infinitely generous he seems to have wholly lost sight of in the fact
that d’Aumard’s fate was infinitely sad. Yet Voltaire had a reward if he
wanted one. To Madame du Deffand’s question if life were worth living he
could reply, “Yes. I know a man completely paralysed who loves it, to
folly.” The man was d’Aumard.
In this year Voltaire obtained, after the exercise of even more than his
usual persistence, and after working himself and his friends to death to
attain his aim, the grant of two letters-patent for his lands of Tourney
and Ferney. He set great value on these letters as declaring him a
French subject.
Also in this year he heard of the loss of that very old English friend
of his, Falkener. In 1774, Falkener’s two sons came to stay with him at
Ferney.
He still kept himself well _au courant_ of English affairs and English
literature.
It was in 1759 he wrote to Madame du Deffand that there was nothing
passable in “Tom Jones” but the character of the barber; and of “A Tale
of a Tub” as “a treasure-house of wit.” He also read--and yawned
over--“Clarissa Harlowe” and “Pamela”; and in 1760 he was criticising
“Tristram Shandy.” No other great Frenchman of his day got into the
heart of English literature and English character as Voltaire did. “An
Englishman who knows France well and a Frenchman who knows England well
are both the better for it,” is one of the shrewdest of his sayings, and
he said many shrewd things, on the two races. “The English know how to
think; the French know how to please.” “We are the whipped cream of
Europe. There are not twenty Frenchmen who understand Newton.”
But there was another foreign country besides England which was engaging
his attention now--Russia.
In this 1759 he produced the first volume of that “History of Peter the
Great,” which he had undertaken to write two years earlier, in 1757, at
the request of Peter’s daughter, Elizabeth.
In the spring of 1717, when Arouet was an imprudent young Paris wit of
three-and-twenty, awaiting his first introduction to the Bastille, he
had seen the great Peter in the flesh, being shown the shops of the
capital, the lion of its season--“neither of us thinking then that I
should become his historian.”
But directly Elizabeth made the suggestion, a Voltaire of sixty-three
had embraced it with an enthusiasm which would not have been astonishing
in an Arouet of twenty-three, and set to work at once.
The subject bristled with difficulties. First it involved an enormous
correspondence with Schouvaloff, the Russian minister. Schouvaloff was
ready and eager to shower maps, medals, and documents upon the
historian. But the medals, as the historian pointed out, were not of the
slightest use; the maps were inadequate; and the documents had too often
been tampered with.
Then, too, there was an immeasurable difficulty, for a writer who wanted
to tell the truth, in the fact that his hero’s own daughter was not only
living, but had commissioned him to write the work. When Frederick
wanted to know what in the world made Voltaire think of writing the
history of the wolves and bears of Siberia, he represented the point of
view from which most people then regarded Russia. A cold, ugly,
barbarous, uninteresting place--what in the world can you have to say
about it? The veil of tragedy and romance which now hangs before that
great canvas did not give it the potent charm of mystery in the
eighteenth century. Only Voltaire would then have dared to write “Russia
under Peter the Great,” and only Voltaire could have made it readable.
He took a flying leap into that sea of difficulties, and came up to the
top safely as usual. He gave Schouvaloff a plan of the work in advance.
First, there are to be no unnecessary details of battles; secondly, the
thing will be called not “The History of Peter the Great,” but “Russia
under Peter I.,” as giving me greater liberty, and explaining to my
readers in advance the real aim of the book; thirdly, Peter’s little
weaknesses are not to be concealed when necessary to expose them.
The rough sketch was bold, and so was the finished picture. But to its
boldness were united that grace and charm by which Voltaire could make
disagreeable truths sound like compliments. If to the world generally
Peter was, and should be, but the “wisest and greatest of savages,”
“only a king,” and a badly brought up one at that--to Russia he was, and
ought to be, a great man and a hero; and, Peter apart altogether--and
there is a good deal of the work from which Peter _is_ entirely
apart--the book “revealed Russia to Europe and herself,” and brought
that great country to the knowledge and the interest of other nations.
The style sometimes bears trace of the difficulties its author had to
overcome--the fact that the subject was chosen for him, not _by_ him. “I
doubt,” he wrote to Madame du Deffand, “if it will be as amusing as the
‘Life of Charles XII.,’ for Peter was only extraordinarily wise, while
Charles was extraordinarily foolish.” All the time he was writing it,
“Tancred,” Ferney, “Candide,” Frederick, were calling his attention away
from it.
Not the less, the History was a very successfully executed order, with
which the orderer was so pleased that in 1761 she sent the author her
portrait set in diamonds.
To the end of 1759 also belongs a very different work of Voltaire’s--one
of those spontaneous, impulsive, rollicking, daring things which must
have been no little relief to his _méchanceté_ to turn to from those
grave ploddings through Schouvaloff’s documents. Encouraged by that
burning of “Natural Law” and its companion volumes, and by the
suppression of the “Encyclopædia” in the early part of the year, in
November a weekly Jesuit organ called the “Journal de Trévoux,” edited
by one Berthier, furiously assailed not only “Natural Law,” which fires
could not destroy, but the “Encyclopædia,” which prohibitions could not
suppress, and all the works of enlightenment in France. Voltaire had
always an inconsistent _tendresse_ for the Jesuits. They had been good
to him in his school days: and among them he still numbered some of his
friends. But this thing was too monstrous! Voltaire attacked it with
sharpest ridicule, and wrote anonymously that scathing pamphlet called
“The Narrative of the Sickness, Confession, Death, and Re-appearance of
the Jesuit Berthier.” This he followed by another pamphlet, “The
Narrative of Brother Grasse.” Both were but burlesques. True, there was
a hit in every line; and then, if not now, every arrow went home. But
the real significance of the pamphlets is in the fact that they were a
declaration of war. Gardens and architecture, farms and beehives--in
these things is to be found happiness perhaps. But there has been no
great man in the world who ever thought happiness enough. That hatred of
intolerance, that passion for freedom which had been the motive power of
a young and struggling Arouet, was still the motive power of this
affluent, comfortable Voltaire of sixty-five. To be sure, it is easier
to feel sympathy with the oppressed and the needy when one is oneself
downtrodden and poor: and something more difficult when one is oneself
prosperous and independent. It must be accounted to Voltaire for
righteousness that when he no longer suffered himself, the sufferings of
others appealed to him only with a double force. It was in those smiling
days of Délices and Ferney that he framed his battle-cry and formulated
the creed of all the philosophers, and the aim and the conviction of his
own life, into one brief phrase--_Écrasez l’infâme_.
Friend and foe still remember him by that motto. The one has idly
forgotten, and the other carefully misunderstands, what it means and
meant. To many Christians, “_Écrasez l’infâme_” is but the blasphemous
outcry against the dearest and most sacred mysteries of their religion;
and _l’infâme_ means Christ.
But to Voltaire, if it meant Christianity at all, it meant that which
was taught in Rome in the eighteenth century, and not by the Sea of
Galilee in the first. If it _was_ Christianity at all, it was not the
Christianity of Christ. _L’infâme did_ mean religion, but it meant the
religion which lit the fires of Smithfield and prompted the tortures of
the Inquisition; which terrified feeble brains to madness with the
burning flames of a material hell, and flung to the barren uselessness
of the cloister hundreds of unwilling victims, quick and meet for the
life for which they had been created.
_L’infâme_ was the religion which enforced its doctrines by the sword,
the fire, and the prison; which massacred on the Night of St.
Bartholomew; and, glossing lightly over royal sins, refused its last
consolations to dying Jansenists who would not accept the Bull
Unigenitus. It was the religion which thrust itself between wife and
husband in the person of the confessor--himself condemned to an
unnatural life which not one in a thousand can live honestly and aright;
it was the religion of Indulgences, and the rich: for those who could
pay for the remission of their sins and for large impunity to sin
afresh; it was the religion which served as a cloak for tyranny and
oppression, ground down the face of the poor, and kept wretchedness
wretched for ever.
And above all, _l’infâme_ was that spirit which was the natural enemy of
all learning and advancement; which loved darkness and hated light
because its deeds were evil; which found the better knowledge of His
works, treason to God; and an exercise of the reason and the judgment He
had given, an insult to the Giver.
If there was ever a chance for the foolish to become learned, _l’infâme_
deprived them of it. If the light fought its way through the gross
darkness of superstition, _l’infâme_ quenched it. It prohibited Newton;
burnt Bayle; and cursed the “Encyclopædia.” If men were once
enlightened, _l’infâme_ would be cast down from the high places where it
sat--as Pope or as King, as Calvinist or as Cardinal; but always as the
enemy of that Justice which drives out oppression, as the sun drives out
the night.
_L’infâme_ cannot be translated by any single word. But if it must be,
the best rendering of it is Intolerance.
No one can have any knowledge of the career or of the character of
Voltaire without seeing that this Thing, to which in the year 1759 was
first given the name of _Infâme_, was his one, great, lifelong enemy.
Loathing of it coursed in his _bourgeois_ blood and was bred in his
bones. The boy who had seen France starve to pay for the Sun King’s
wars, and Paris persecuted to please his mistress and his confessor, had
felt surge in him the first waves of that tireless indignation which was
to turn a courtier into a reformer, and make a light soul, deep. By the
time he himself became the Voice crying in the wilderness of men’s
sorrows, the utterer of hard truths, _l’infâme_ had imprisoned,
persecuted, and exiled him. And who is there who does not better hate
wrong-doing when he has himself been wronged? He had revealed God to
sages through Newton; and the hangman burnt the “English Letters.” He
had studied history, especially the history of the religious wars, and
he knew what _l’infâme_ had done in the past as well as in the present.
He declared, with that extraordinary mixture of levity and passion which
is his alone, that he always had an access of fever on St. Bartholomew’s
Day. He had seen the works of Boyer--fanatic and tyrant--the product of
a shameful system, and not the less harmful in fact because he was
honest in intention. He had seen _l’infâme_ prompt Damiens’s knife; and
then, in its besotted inconsequence, avenge the crime of its own scholar
by prohibiting all the works of enlightenment in France.
In 1757, in writing to d’Alembert, Voltaire had first given _l’infâme_ a
name--the Phantom. A few days later he called it the Colossus. Under any
name a d’Alembert would recognise it. On May 18, 1759, Frederick the
Great spoke of it by that title it was to bear for ever, in one of those
bitter yearning letters he wrote to his old friend. “You will still
caress _l’infâme_ with one hand and scratch it with the other; you will
treat it as you have treated me and all the world.” And in June Voltaire
replied: “Your Majesty reproaches me with sometimes caressing
_l’infâme_. My God, no! I only work to extirpate it.” And the next
year--June 3, 1760--“I want you to crush _l’infâme_; that is the great
point. It must be reduced to the same condition as it is in England.
You can do it if you will. It is the greatest service one can render to
humankind.”
Henceforward, his allusions to it in his letters became more and more
frequent. Sometimes, he abbreviated it to _Écr. l’Inf._ Sometimes he
wrote in one corner _“É. l’I._” “The first of duties is to annihilate
_l’inf._; confound _l’inf._ as much as you can.”
“This Mr. _Écrlinf_ does not write badly, said these worthy people.” One
of his theories was that truths cannot be too often insisted on. “Rub it
in! rub it in!” he would cry. He rubbed in his _infâme_. Now in
passionate earnest, now in jest, now cynically, now bitterly, he alluded
to it at all times and seasons and to all kinds of persons. To
Damilaville, who was to take Theriot’s place as his correspondent and
who himself loathed _l’infâme_ with a deadly intensity, Voltaire hardly
wrote a letter without that “Crush the monster!” It was a catchword at
last. “I end all my letters by saying _Écr. l’inf._, as Cato always
said, That is my opinion and Carthage must be destroyed.” By it, he
heated the zeal of his fellow-workers in the cause; quickened the
“phlegmatic perseverance” of d’Alembert; and rallied to new effort
Helvétius, Marmontel, Holbach, and a dozen lesser men.
It has been seen that he had loathed the Thing, a nameless monster, for
fifty years. The insults of the “Journal de Trévoux” were the final spur
to action. If Berthier had not pushed him to extremities, no doubt some
other of “those serpents called Jesuits” would have done it equally
effectually. The time was ripe; and Voltaire was ripe for the time. He
flung down the glove at last and declared upon _l’infâme_ an open war,
which was to be war to the knife till he had no longer breath in his
body, and the sword--his pen--fell from a dead hand.
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE BATTLE OF PARTICLES, AND THE BATTLE OF COMEDIES
On March 10, 1760, M. le Franc de Pompignan took the seat in the French
Academy left vacant by the death of Maupertuis, and delivered an opening
address which was nothing but an attack on the philosophic party.
Marquis and county magnate was Pompignan, rather a good minor poet, a
native of Montauban, and, in his own province and his own estimation, a
very great man indeed. In 1736, he had written a play with which he had
tried, vainly, to supplant Voltaire’s “Alzire.” He and Voltaire met
afterwards, in amicable fashion enough, at the house of a mutual friend.
And then Voltaire retired to Cirey and Madame du Châtelet: and Le Franc
to his magisterial duties in Montauban.
But by the year 1758 Montauban, and his own vanity, had so impressed the
noble Marquis with the idea that his genius was wasted in a province,
that he came up to Paris: stood for a vacant chair in the Academy;
failed to gain it; stood again for another chair in 1760, and, as has
been seen, won it, in succession to Maupertuis. When it is added that Le
Franc was also Historiographer of France in place of Voltaire, and that
he was practically the only nobleman in the kingdom who was at once
clever, educated and orthodox, his design to use that Academical chair
as a stepping-stone to the tutorship of the Dauphin’s sons--always one
of the most influential posts in the kingdom--was not at all a wild
ambition. He began his speech by praising his predecessor, Maupertuis,
as in duty bound, and also as being sure to raise the ire of that
arch-fiend of philosophers, Voltaire; and then abused those philosophers
and their works roundly, soundly, and at length.
The chairman of the Academy made reply in a very fulsome speech, in
which he compared Le Franc to Moses, and his younger brother, the Bishop
of Puy, a not illiberal churchman, to Aaron. “The two brothers are
consecrated to work miracles, the one as judge, the other as pontiff, in
Israel.”
Moses was then granted an interview with the King, in which his Majesty
highly praised that Academical discourse as little likely to be
applauded by the impious, “or by strong minds”--which he took to be the
finest compliment he could pay it.
On March 28th, one of those “esprits forts” was writing comfortably from
Délices that he saw all storms, but saw them from the port. The port! Of
course someone sent him that Academical discourse. He applied the
remarks on the philosophers particularly to himself (to be sure, the cap
fitted), and took upon himself to avenge them all.
One fine day there appeared in Paris, without date, without any
indication as to the place in which it had been printed, a little
_brochure_ of seven deadly pages entitled the “Whens: or Useful Notes on
a Discourse pronounced before the French Academy on March 10, 1760.”
They were the little skiff in which Voltaire sailed into the teeth of
the storm.
All his works are characteristic in a high degree, but hardly any are so
characteristic as those he wielded in this Battle of the Particles.
Exquisitely dainty and gay: as fine and as sharp as needles from my
lady’s work-basket, and yet as “biting and incisive as a poignard”: such
are the hall-marks of those little instruments of torture of which the
“Whens” was the first.
“_When_ one has the honour to be admitted into a respectable company of
literary men, one need not make one’s opening speech a satire against
them.”
“_When_ one is hardly a man of letters and not at all a philosopher, it
is not becoming to say that our nation has only a false literature and a
vain philosophy.”
“_When_ one is admitted into an honourable body, one ought, in one’s
address, to hide under a veil of modesty that insolent pride which is
the prerogative of hot heads and mean talents.”
Voltaire would not have been Voltaire, nor of his century, if he had not
gone on to remind this highly correct Marquis that in a free youth he
had himself coquetted with Deism and translated and circulated “The
Universal Prayer”--then commonly called “The Deists’ Prayer”--of Mr.
Pope. He also added that for his Deistic opinions this proper Le Franc
had been deprived of the charge of his province; which was not true, but
made the story much better.
It is hardly necessary to say that Voltaire denied the “Whens.” “I did
not write them,” he told Theriot on May 20th, “but I wish I had.”
They had roused his party very effectively. If “the shepherd, the
labourer, the rat retired from the world in a Swiss cheese,” was pushed,
as the rat said, into the “deluge of monosyllables,” how should the
philosophers in Paris escape it? The famous Morellet, abbé, writer,
freethinker, one of the “four theologians of the Encyclopædia,” whom
Voltaire called _Mords-les_ (Bite them) from the caustic nature of his
wit, rushed into the fray with the “Ifs” and the “Wherefores”; and a
reproduction of the luckless Le Franc’s translation of “The Universal
Prayer.” Délices followed up at once with the “Yeses” and the “Noes,”
the “Whats,” the “Whys,” and the “Whos.” Délices said that chuckling
sustained old age: no wonder _his_ old age was so vigorous. There was
not a vulnerable inch in the body or soul of that unhappy Marquis which
one of those particles did not wound. A riddle ran through Paris, “Why
did Jeremiah weep so much during his life?” “Because, as a prophet, he
foresaw that after death he would be translated by Le Franc”--Le Franc
having compensated for that “Universal Prayer” by writing the most
devout works ever since. Later were to come the “Fors” and the “Ahs.”
Some were by other hands than Voltaire’s. But his was the spirit that
inspired them all. Some were in verse. All were brief. Then he published
extracts from an early tragedy of Le Franc’s, making them as absurd as
he alone knew how. The affair was the talk of Paris: the most delicious
farce in the world. Madame du Deffand spoke of Le Franc as buried under
“mountains of ridicule.” Wherever he was recognised he excited shouts
of laughter. He solemnly and prosily defended his translation of “The
Universal Prayer” as a mere exercise in English, which it very likely
was. And Paris laughed afresh. Voltaire declared that Tronchin had
ordered him to hunt Pompignan for two hours every morning for the good
of his health. Poor Pompignan, goaded to madness, presented a petition
to the King in which he asked the assistance of their Majesties and
recalled to them the splendid welcome they had accorded to himself and
his Academical discourse.
But Louis XV. could not prevent Paris laughing nor Voltaire answering by
what purported to be an extract from a newspaper of Le Franc’s native
Montauban, wherein the natives of that place were represented as
appointing a committee to go to Paris and inquire into the mental
condition of the unfortunate Marquis. But this thing was a _brochure_--a
nothing.
Délices had not done with Montauban yet. There was a pause. And then
Voltaire produced one of the most scathing and trenchant satires of
which even he was capable. It was in verse, and it was called “Vanity.”
It began:
Well, what’s the matter, little bourgeois of a little town?
and contains many lines which still form part of the common talk of
France.
Gay, fluent, contemptuous--written scornfully in a colloquialism which,
in that day of set and formal phrases, was in itself an
insult--Pompignan, like Maupertuis, was stifled with badinage, and
laughed--to death.
Though all the wit of the thing, and more than half its significance,
are lost in a translation, even in a translation some idea of the
sufferings of that wretched provincial Marquis may be gained still.
The Universe, my friend, thinks of you not at all:
The future less. Look to your house and diet:
Drink: sleep: amuse yourself: be wise: be quiet.
* * * * *
Oh, but my beautiful Discourse, they laugh at it!
The malice of their vulgar gibes hurts so,
That, sure of justice, to the King I’ll go.
* * * * *
He’ll make it law to find my writing good
I’ll tell him of it all without delay
And get the laugher’s licence ta’en away.
The poem ends with lines which, as Voltaire wrote them, stabbed straight
to the enemy’s heart:
Ruined great Alexander’s tomb and town:
And for great Cæsar’s shade no home there be,
Yet Pompignan thinks a great man is he.
He thought so no longer. “Vanity” was his deathblow. The very Dauphin
laughed at it. The Marquis went home to his province, and never again
dared to appear at the Academy.
In 1769, when his play, “Dido,” was acted in Paris, the Comédie
Française announced quite innocently that it would be followed by “The
Coxcomb Punished” of Pont-de-Veyle. Everything was against poor
Pompignan. He died in 1784. The turn of his priestly brother, Aaron, was
yet to come.
If Pompignan had been nothing but a self-satisfied nobleman who
over-estimated his own talents and under-estimated those of the
philosophers and the Academicians, he would certainly not have deserved
the fury of ridicule with which he was assailed, and the laugh would
have turned against the laughers.
But this was no harmless fool. It may have been a small thing that, as
Voltaire wrote, “if Le Franc had not been covered with ridicule, the
custom of declaiming against the philosophers in the opening discourse
of the Academy would have become a rule.” But it would have been no
small thing that a Pompignan should be tutor to the Dauphin’s sons;
should teach the boy who was to rule France a narrow hatred for the
light and learning which alone could save it; and preach the principles
of _l’infâme_ to the susceptible youth who would one day practise them
to the ruin of a great kingdom.
_Écrasez l’infâme!_ Pompignan was but a victim to that purpose. Voltaire
kicked him aside with his foot, and looked out for other foes to
vanquish.
There were always plenty of them. He had on hand at the moment a satire
called “The Poor Devil,” which set out to be an account of the
adventures of that Valette, the friend of d’Alembert and the guest of
Délices, but which ended as a fiercer “Dunciad,” “more than a satire,
more than a _chef d’œuvre_ of incomparable verve and malignity,” and
which reveals to our own day many an ugly secret of the literary life
and men of that strange epoch.
But the general satisfaction of whipping a multitude is nothing to the
personal satisfaction of whipping a unit.
While the Pompignan affair was still running high, news came one
morning--on April 25, 1760--that a comedy by a certain Charles Palissot,
entitled “The Philosophers” and bitterly ridiculing that party, was
about to be played in Paris. “Very well,” says Délices; “I cannot
prevent that. But what I can and will do is to withdraw “Tancred,”
already in rehearsal.” So “Tancred” is withdrawn.
On May 2d, Palissot’s “Philosophers” was performed for the first time.
A clever journalist was Charles Palissot, who, in 1755, had been
Voltaire’s guest at Délices with Patu the poet. His play was clever too,
a rollicking comedy in three acts, which not only laughed at the
philosophic party but represented them as dangerous to society and the
State. Helvétius, Diderot, Duclos, Madame Geoffrin, and Mademoiselle
Clairon were openly satirised. J. J. Rousseau, declared Voltaire, was
represented on all fours, with a lettuce in his pocket for provender.
The “Encyclopædia” was mentioned by name. Two noble ladies openly gave
the play their patronage. One was the Princess de Robecq, the mistress
of Choiseul the minister, and so a force to be reckoned with.
“The Philosophers” had carefully omitted to attack the two greatest of
the philosophers, d’Alembert and Voltaire. But the one wrote an account
of the thing to the other, and that Other began to inspect his weapons.
True, he tried mild measures at first. Palissot sent him a copy of the
play. And Voltaire wrote back trying to win its author over to the right
side, or at least to an impartial attitude of mind. But Palissot did not
mean to be convinced. Then Abbé Morellet-Mords-Les-Bite-Them was flung
into the Bastille, at the instigation of the Princess de Robecq and the
command of Choiseul, for having sneered at the Princess in his comic
answer to Palissot’s comedy, called “The Preface to The Philosophers.”
These things were not precisely soothing. To meet ridicule with reason
had failed. Gibe for gibe, then; foolery for foolery! If Voltaire was
one of the two who could play at that game, he was always the winner
when he played.
He had another, older, deadlier foe than Palissot, who would also be the
better for a beating. The older foe was Fréron. And the beating he
received with Palissot was called “The Scotch Girl.”
Fréron was still a very cool, clever, opulent, successful Parisian
journalist: still the bitterest and shrewdest foe of the philosophers,
and the sharpest tool of the Court. Voltaire, it will be remembered, had
no reason to love this “worm from the carcase of Desfontaines,” the
defender of Crébillon, the supporter of d’Arnaud, the founder of “The
Literary Year,” that review which, appearing every ten days, had been
for twenty-three years “a long polemic against the Encyclopædia in
general and Voltaire in particular.” But Voltaire seldom made the
mistake of underrating his enemy’s powers. He spoke of Fréron as the
only man of his party who had literary taste. He acknowledged him to be
of an amazing energy and courage, of great self-command, and an
excellent critic.
But when it came to sharply criticising “Candide” in that “Literary
Year” and scornfully twitting “Candide’s” author with his dear title of
Count of Tourney, the Count was foolish enough not only to lose his
temper but to enumerate his grievances against Fréron in a letter to
“The Encyclopædic Journal,” the rival organ of “The Literary Year.”
There was certainly a fine air of coolness and indifference in the
letter. But the _vif_, warm genius of a Voltaire only assumed these
qualities. Fréron really had them. Hence, Fréron was a powerful foe.
Athirst for revenge, then, alike on Palissot and on Fréron, Voltaire
wrote “The Scotch Girl” in eight days. An English play, if you please,
by Mr. Hume, brother of the historian; translated into French by Jérôme
Carré; and before it appears, to be read, discussed, laughed over, and
recognised in every boudoir in Paris as a satire on Fréron and on
Palissot’s “Philosophers.” Everything fell out as the author had
desired, and laboured that it should. If he _was_ buried at Délices and
hundreds of miles of vile roads from Paris, he had friends there only
something less active and angry than himself. He had in himself the
vigour and genius which can span space and move mountains.
On July 25th, the day before the play was to appear, he caused to be
circulated in Paris a letter in which Carré, the translator, complained
of the immense efforts Fréron had made to damn “The Scotch Girl” in
advance. These advertisements were perfectly successful. On the first
night--Saturday, July 26th--crowds besieged the door of the theatre
before it opened; some, the friends of Fréron, some of Palissot, some of
Voltaire; and all knowing enough of the piece to be quite sure they
should be amused. In a prominent place in the auditorium shrewd Fréron
had placed his pretty wife, to excite compassion for himself, and anger
against his foes. He himself sat among the orchestra. Malesherbes, the
minister, had a place hard by him. Palissot was in a box. Many neutral
persons, piqued only by curiosity, found seats in the house. It was upon
their pulse Fréron kept his finger. It was their displeasure or approval
which would give the real verdict of the piece.
“The Scotch Girl” is not at all a good play. But it is witty, topical,
and infinitely audacious. “It is not sufficient to write well: one must
write to the taste of the public,” said Voltaire. He had not written
well: but he had written for the psychological moment. His audience had
expected him to take a bold spring from the footboard: and he jumped
from the roof. His old experience of England enabled him to give one of
the first sketches of a comic Englishman ever seen on the French stage.
The character of Freeport is the best in the piece: and the saving of
it. The scene is laid in a London coffee-house--the sub-title of the
play being “Le Café.” Fréron appeared as Frelon: which, being
translated, is wasp or hornet. Wasp is a Grub Street hack “always ready
to manufacture infamy at a pistole the paragraph.” “When I discover a
trifle, I add something to it: and something added to something makes
much.” The tactics of scandalous journalism are unaltered to this day.
“The Philosophers” was broadly burlesqued: and to philosophy were
gravely ascribed all the evils under the sun.
The play was received with delight. Foe as well as friend laughed aloud.
Pretty Madame Fréron nearly fainted when she saw her husband thus
travestied; and did not make matters better by naïvely replying to a
friend, who assured her that Wasp did not in the least resemble her
husband who was neither slanderer nor informer, “Oh! Monsieur, it is too
well done! He will always be recognised.”
The performance took place at five o’clock in the afternoon. The next
day, July 27th, was a Sunday, and the day for the appearance of a number
of “The Literary Year.” It contained an account of that first night
under the title of “The Account of a Great Battle,” written in that cool
and easy style, principally remarkable for its moderation and
self-restraint, which was the finest weapon in Fréron’s armoury. It
ended with a “Te Voltairium,” a sort of parody of the Te Deum, which was
licensed by the censor, to the great indignation of the philosophers who
had so often been profane--and unlicensed.
Meanwhile, at his Délices, Voltaire wrote _his_ account of that first
night--“An Advertisement to the Scotch Girl.” The little, pricking,
red-hot needles of his style were much less effective for his purpose
now than the judicial calm of M. Fréron. But, after all, Voltaire was
the winner. “The Scotch Girl” had what d’Alembert called “a prodigious
success.” The provinces received it with rapture. It was played three
times a week in Paris. Its last performance there took place on
September 2d.
And on September 3d it was replaced by “Tancred.”
No man in the world better understood the force of contrast, and the
infinite value of the striking and the _bizarre_ upon the minds of his
countrymen, than Voltaire. In France, if anywhere, he who strikes must
strike at once; must appeal immediately to emotions which are sooner at
boiling point and sooner cooled than the emotions of any other nation in
Europe. “The Scotch Girl” had made Paris laugh: and Paris loved
laughter. It had quite forgotten for the moment that it had also loved
Fréron, its dear, clever, sociable, amusing journalist, who was
pleasantly renowned for giving charming little suppers, and as the
favourite of the great. Here, then, was the moment for this Swiss exile,
who belonged to the wrong party, who persistently thought--and said--the
wrong things, and was infinitely able and dangerous, to strike in with
his “Tancred.” To ensure its success a hearing was all that it wanted.
Its genius could be trusted to do the rest. Voltaire took at the tide
that flood which leads on to fortune, and sailed straight into harbour.
He began “Tancred,” it is said, in his joy on learning of that decree
which, in April, 1759, forbade spectators henceforth to sit on the
stage. On the 19th of the next month, May, he wrote that this day an old
fool finished a tragedy begun on April 22d. At first he called it
“Aménaïde,” or “My Knights,” or “The Knighthood,” and designed to have
it played by Lekain or Lauraguais as the work of “a young unknown.” “I
have changed the metre,” he wrote on May 29, 1759, “so that that cursed
public shall not recognise me by my style.”
In the October of 1759 he and his amateur company had acted it at
Tourney. It moved the author and Madame Denis to tears; but as he very
justly observed, they were too near relations to the piece for their
emotion to count for much. When Marmontel had stayed at Délices in the
summer of 1760 he, too had wept over it--had returned the manuscript
with his face bathed in tears, which told the author, he said, all he
wanted to know.
Every omen was good. For several weeks during the summer of 1760 the
d’Argentals had the manuscript in their charge in Paris. They had seen
it put into rehearsal. Then Voltaire had withdrawn it to punish a
company which dared to produce “The Philosophers.” But that brave
“Scotch Girl” had effectually killed “The Philosophers.” The time was
ripe indeed.
The theatre was crowded to the full. No more piquant contrast could be
imagined than between the rough English burlesque of last night and the
polished, romantic Sicilian tragedy of this. Yesterday there had not
been a grave face in the house, and to-day every eye was wet. Madame
d’Épinay was there, in the most fascinating grief. “Satan, in the guise
of Fréron,” who was in the amphitheatre, spoke of the thing as having
“the simplicity and natural beauty of the classic, above all of the
Odyssey.” When d’Alembert saw it for the third time the whole audience
was in tears. Mademoiselle Clairon surpassed herself as the heroine: so
that the author, always largely generous in such appreciations, said
that the piece owed to her all its success; and d’Olivet, Voltaire’s old
schoolmaster, declared there had been no such acting since the days of
Roscius. As for Lekain--“nothing is comparable to Lekain, not even
himself.” The truth was, luckily for Voltaire, that the play was so
moving that few were sufficiently masters of themselves to criticise
coolly, and did not even carp at the author for writing in a metre with
which they were wholly unfamiliar. Marmontel, who wept over it, had
declared very justly not the less, that the style was not equal to that
of Voltaire’s earlier tragedies; that it was sometimes tedious, and a
little wanting in vigour. But, after all, he had wept. Marmontel’s
attitude describes “Tancred” exhaustively.
Satan in the amphitheatre criticised the piece with the only criticism
that need ever really hurt--a just one. He had mingled praise with his
blame. Voltaire was sensible enough to recognise the weight of censure
so tempered.
Fréron continued to conduct his “Literary Year” until his death in 1776.
When he gave any of the actors--such as Lekain or Clairon--a bad notice,
they simply revived “The Scotch Girl.” And M. Wasp mended his manners at
once.
In September Voltaire dedicated his “Tancred” to Madame de Pompadour.
But that “chicken-hearted fellow” as he called her, made, at the time,
no acknowledgment of the compliment. The truth was, as twice before in
their history, some jealous scandal-monger about the Court had read an
evil meaning into his flatteries.
Meanwhile the hermit of Délices, if ever in his life, was independent of
her favours. Délices was charming: Ferney nearly finished: and Tourney
the most histrionic place in Europe.
In the June of 1760 Marmontel had come to stay at Délices. Marmontel was
a great man now: a successful playwright; and the author of that once
much read and now wholly forgotten novel, “Bélisaire.” He was not
ungrateful to the benefactor who fourteen years earlier had launched him
on the literary sea of Paris; while Voltaire on his side had always a
fellow-feeling for that brave heart which at eighteen had begun the
world on a capital of six louis, hope, cleverness, and a translation.
Marmontel brought with him one Gaulard; and found at Délices a M.
Lécluse, the King of Poland’s dentist, who, when he was not mending
Madame Denis’s teeth acted and sang most agreeably.
Of course, Marmontel found Voltaire in bed, dying. And of course the
moribund read aloud the “Pucelle” in the most lively and delightful
manner in the world; took the visitors to see the view from Tourney, and
discussed with them theatres, Frederick the Great, J. J.
Rousseau--everything under heaven. He also played chess with Gaulard,
and listened to Marmontel’s poetry. And after a three days’ visit,
thereafter recorded in minutest detail by Marmontel, the visitors left.
Another burst of gaiety marked the autumn. “To get rid of public
misfortunes and my own,” the arch-foe of Fréron conducted another
theatrical season, and asked so many people as actors or audience that,
one night at least, Délices, Tourney, and Ferney all together would not
hold them, and they had to be drafted into neighbouring houses. Ferney
was neither finished nor furnished, but there were attics ready which
accommodated a few guests and their servants. Sometimes the plan was to
dine at Délices, see a play at Tourney, and sleep at Ferney--“on the top
of each other,” as the host said. The theatrical troupe would stroll
about the gardens of Tourney in the moonlight in the intervals of their
labours; and as they were young, and of both sexes, they no doubt took
advantage of so excellent an opportunity for a little love-making.
Corrupter of youth! cried Geneva, who was by no means best pleased just
now with a Voltaire who a little earlier had fought Dr. Tronchin tooth
and nail to establish a troupe of comedians of doubtful morals, only a
quarter of a league from Geneva, though on French soil. Dr. Tronchin
won--for the time; the comedians were ordered away, and Voltaire and his
good doctor were excellent friends again; but it is not in the
Calvinistic temperament in general to forget or to forgive easily.
And then this autumn season was marked by the presence of a most
dissipated _roué_ of a duke, the Duke of Villars, who was a patient of
Tronchin’s, and considerably madder upon theatricals than his host
himself. He had acted from his earliest youth at Vaux Villars, where a
Voltaire of five-and-twenty had fallen in love with that gracious
Maréchale, Villars’s mother. But her son, though he thought great things
of himself and _would_ coach the company in general, was a poor
performer. He casually asked Voltaire one day how he thought he acted.
“Why, Sir, like a duke and a peer,” answers Voltaire. Poor Cramer, the
actor-publisher, was so misinstructed by his noble friend, that it took
him a fortnight to unlearn the lesson of this bad master. When he had
done so, Voltaire cried out to Madame Denis, “Niece, thank God! Cramer
has disgorged his Duke!”
Also of the company was Mademoiselle de Bazincourt, Madame Denis’s
pretty, poor companion, who was destined to a convent from which
Voltaire could not save her, and who meantime played the parts of
“Julia, her friend,” to perfection.
On September 29th, a house-warming took place at Ferney, in the shape of
the marriage there of M. de Montpéroux, the envoy of France. Voltaire
gave a great dinner in his new house to celebrate the event, and from
henceforth lived there--at first generally, and at last entirely.
On October 20th, he and his theatrical company were sharply reminded by
the Council of Geneva that “Sieur de Voltaire had yesterday a piece
played at Saint Jean, the territory of the republic, in distinct
violation of a promise he had made in August, 1755.” They went on acting
as gaily and continuously as ever. It is to be feared that to this
wicked Voltaire prohibitions were only sauce to the _plat_, and made it
a hundred times the more irresistible.
In the December of this 1760, which was one of the most full, varied,
and active years of one of the most energetic lives ever lived by man,
Voltaire appeared in a new _rôle_. He adopted a daughter.
In estimating his character no trait in it has been more lost sight of
than that which, for want of a better word, may be called his
affectionateness. Yet the man who was the lifelong friend of false
Theriot, as well as of faithful d’Argental, who kept a warm corner in
his heart for ungrateful servants and ne’er-do-weel relatives, who
supported tiresome nephews and at least one trying niece, to say nothing
of that crippled profligate d’Aumard, had that quality in a very high
degree. Satire and cynicism were in his every lively utterance. But in
his acts were a tenderness, a generosity, and a charity, to which better
men than he have not attained.
Mademoiselle Marie Corneille was the great-niece of the great Corneille.
Poor and provincial, her father came up one fine day to Paris and
claimed his cousinship with the great Fontenelle. But Fontenelle had so
long lost sight of this branch of the Corneille family that he thought
the man an impostor, and left his money elsewhere. Then who but Fréron
must needs take compassion on this hapless little family of three
persons--father, mother, and daughter--and have a play of their uncle’s
performed for their benefit? But even five thousand five hundred francs
do not go far, when out of the sum debts have to be paid, three persons
to live, and one to be educated. Marie, of nearly eighteen, had to be
removed from her convent. A friend took charge of her for a while. And
then Le Brun, secretary to the Prince of Conti and a second-rate poet,
conceived the happy idea of enlisting Voltaire’s sympathy for her in an
ode.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Voltaire adopted her on the spot.
His only feeling seems to have been one of complete delight at having
the opportunity of doing good in such a charming way; and he considered
it, he said, an honour for an old soldier to serve the granddaughter of
his general.
On November 5th, he was arranging details for her journey and her
education with Le Brun.
He wrote to her direct to assure her she should have every facility for
the practice of her religion, for reading, and for music; that Madame
Denis would supply her with a wardrobe; that she should have masters for
accomplishment; and learn to act so that in six months she would be
playing _Chimène_.
In the second week in December Mademoiselle arrived. Quiet, gentle, and
good, as naïvely ignorant as she was ingenuously ready to learn,
tenderly and faithfully attached to the father she had left as she was
to grow girlishly fond of the father she had found, Marie Corneille
comes like a fresh and virgin air across the tainted and heated
atmosphere of that eighteenth century, like some human angel to the
Voltaire who hardly ever, perhaps never before, had intimately known a
good woman.
He began at once to give her lessons in reading and writing, and in
grammar. Mademoiselle had not much aptitude for that “sublime science,”
or for any science. She had come out of her convent as widely and
profoundly ignorant as even those good nuns could leave a girl. And the
cleverest man of his age taught her to write, and made her send him
little notes, which he returned to her with her very doubtful
orthography corrected; made history as amusing as a novel, and all the
teaching go gaily “without the least appearance of a lesson.” She was to
have a tutor presently, when one good enough could be found. Meanwhile
Voltaire taught her by word of mouth, while she looked up into his lean
face with her clear candid eyes, and he looked back and delighted in her
round girlish prettiness--“a plump face like a puppy’s”--and her
adorable _naïveté_. Madame Denis forgot her comforts and her flirtations
to nurse her when she was “a little ill,” and to teach her needlework
when she was well. All the servants adored her, and vied with each other
to serve her. Presently she had her own _femme de chambre_. Every Sunday
Voltaire and his niece took her to mass. Voltaire did not only preach
tolerance. He did more even than leave her, when she prayed, “her early
Heaven, her happy views.” He made every careful provision, as he had
said he would, for her to follow the faith of her fathers. The sneer on
his lips and the scorn in his soul died as he looked at Marie Corneille.
Trust, simplicity, innocence, appealed not in vain to Voltaire, as they
have appealed not in vain to far worse men. There is a noble touch in
that confession of his that, though he loved her well enough to set a
very high value on her love for him, he liked nothing more in her than
her unforgetting attachment to her father. To that father (who was, it
may be added, a very cavilling and trying person) he wrote himself,
thanking him with the finest tact and delicacy for a loan so delightful,
and repeatedly congratulating himself on being the host of so charming a
visitor. Voltaire certainly knew how to confer a favour.
It was not unnatural that, when the news of this adoption reached them,
the devout should call out loudly at a lamb being entrusted to such a
wolf. But it is noticeable that none of the devout offered to support
the lamb in their own sheepfold. They only demanded a _lettre de cachet_
to get her away from Voltaire.
There was another trouble too. Fréron, though he had helped her himself,
was bitterly angry and jealous at Voltaire’s adoption. In his “Literary
Year” he inserted, with a very venomous pen, calumnies on her father,
and on the mode of education Voltaire was providing for her. Without the
smallest ground for such a charge he declared that her tutor was to be
Lécluse, the dentist and amateur actor, whom Fréron represented as a
kind of disreputable mountebank.
Voltaire instantly rose to the provocation. He always rose. But when its
subject was an innocent girl, he may be forgiven that he was more
furious than wise. He demanded justice from the minister Malesherbes,
and a formal apology from Fréron: and failed to get either. So there
appeared first a cutting epigram, and then an exceedingly scurrilous
publication called “Anecdotes of Fréron,” which Voltaire vehemently
denied, but which that very best and most trustworthy of all possible
editors, Beuchot, has included, not the less, in his Works.
Fréron’s calumnies were not without effect. They lost Marie Corneille a
husband: who must have been well lost, since the sting of a wasp
frightened him away.
Meanwhile the life at Ferney and Délices went a busy and tranquil way;
and Papa Voltaire began to cast about in his mind the means for
providing a _dot_ for his daughter.
CHAPTER XXXV
BUILDING A CHURCH, AND ENDOWING A DAUGHTER
_The_ novel of the winter season of 1760-61, was “The New Eloïsa,” by
Jean Jacques Rousseau.
It is hardly possible to write a life of Rousseau or of Voltaire without
comparing them. Voltaire, all sharp sense: and Rousseau all hot
sensibility; Rousseau, visionary, dreamer, sensualist, sentimentalist,
madman: and Voltaire, the sanest genius who ever lived, practical,
businesslike, brilliant, easy, sardonic. The one’s name stands as a
synonym for a biting wit, the other’s for a wild passion.
Yet they had much in common. Both belonged to the great philosophic
party. In the burning zeal of their mutual hatred of _l’infâme_ Voltaire
sometimes lost his head; and Rousseau lost his heart. Both fought tooth
and nail all their lives for Tolerance and for Liberty. Both foresaw
that stupendous change called the French Revolution, and both foresaw it
bloodless, serene, and glorious.
By January 21, 1761, “Eloïsa”, which had been written in the little
cottage Madame d’Épinay had lent Rousseau in the Montmorency forest, had
been read at Ferney.
Rousseau had already been in opposition to Voltaire both on the subject
of a theatre in Geneva, and on optimism.
But still, though they had greatly disagreed, they had not been
(“Candide” notwithstanding) exactly enemies.
And then, in the October of 1760, Voltaire had written gaily on the
theatre subject--“Jean Jacques showed that a theatre was unsuitable to
Geneva: and I, I built one.” Jean Jacques was at once too womanish, too
impulsive, and too vain to keep long on good terms with a cynical person
who could airily agree to differ in that way. He admired his rival’s
“_beaux talents_,” but he was jealous of them. He was jealous, too, of
his power and influence in Geneva. By the June of 1760 he had worked
himself into something like hating this Voltaire; and, Rousseau-like, he
sat down and wrote a letter to tell him so. Voltaire, still perfectly
cool, observed to Theriot on June 26th that Jean Jacques had become
quite mad. “It is a great pity.”
And then came “The New Eloïsa.”
That tissue of absurdities and genius, of fine, false sentiments and
highly ridiculous social views--set forth with the warmth, the energy,
and the passion which are Rousseau’s alone--would in any case have
aroused Voltaire’s contempt.
But when he added to it their present differences on the theatre topic,
and their past differences on optimism, and the childish rancour of
Rousseau’s last letter--above all, when he saw that those owls, the
public, opened their stupid eyes and were quite dazzled and delighted
with the sham glitter of this false romance about the highly improper
Julie and her no more respectable tutor--his ire was roused.
He dubbed “Eloïsa” “foolish, _bourgeois_, impudent, and wearisome.” It
was “one of the infamies of the century” to have admired it. And he
wrote to Theriot: “No novel of Jean Jacques, if you please. I have read
him for my misfortune; and it would have been for his if I had the time
to say what I thought of it.”
The last words were only the blind which hoodwinked nobody. “There is
time for everything if one likes to use it.” Staying at Ferney at the
moment was the Marquis de Ximenès, ex-admirer of Madame Denis and now
forgiven that unpleasant little business of the stolen manuscript of a
few years back.
There quickly appeared four letters on (or rather against) “The New
Eloïsa,” the first of which bore the signature of the Marquis, and all
of which bore unmistakable traits of a famous style.
Voltaire denied them, according to custom.
But it was the denial _pour rire_.
The wise d’Alembert wrote and remonstrated with his friend for
“declaiming openly” against Jean Jacques, who, after all, was of their
party and with a warmth and ardour which might serve it well.
But Rousseau had begun to sting and irritate the sensitive skin of his
great rival, and would by no means be shaken off. In the October of 1761
Voltaire said that Jean Jacques wrote about once a fortnight to incite
the Genevan ministers against theatres.
In the meantime, fortunately for them both, Voltaire had interests which
eclipsed even that excited by a sentimental rival’s annoying Puritanism
or long-winded romance.
He was fighting the Jesuits and building a church.
On January 1, 1761, he wrote to tell Helvétius that he had reclaimed
from the Jesuits of Ornex, his neighbours, with whom he had hitherto
been on good terms, the estate belonging to six poor brothers, of which
the Jesuits had robbed them during their minority.
To compass this act the Jesuits had allied themselves with a Calvinistic
Councillor of State of Geneva. There is no doubt at all that Voltaire
delighted, as he said, in thus triumphing over both Ignatius and Calvin;
or that the defeat of the Jesuits gave him as much pleasure as the
victory of the brothers. But when it is added that he had lent those
brothers, without interest, all the money necessary to reclaim their
heritage: that he spent on them an incalculable amount of that time
which was more valuable to him than any money, it must be allowed that
if his motives were mixed, good preponderated in the mixture.
And then he turned his extraordinary mind towards building a church.
The church scheme had been on the _tapis_ as far back as the August of
1760. The truth was that the old church at Ferney was not only very
hideous and tumbledown, but spoilt a very good view from the château. If
churches there must be to enslave men’s souls, thinks Voltaire, why,
they need not offend their eyes as well. I will build a new one!
Every Sunday it was now his habit not only to attend mass with Marie
Corneille and Madame Denis, but to be duly incensed thereat as lord of
the manor. He also looked after his poor, and behaved very much as a
conscientious country landowner ought to behave, but as, in the
eighteenth century, he very seldom did.
But still this sceptic, this freethinker, this wicked person who had
just successfully brought home to the good Jesuits an accusation of
robbery, was certainly a character whose every act the devout might well
eye suspiciously.
Voltaire cautiously obtained the permission of the Bishop of Annecy to
change the site of the church, and then began pulling down with a will.
He was to bear all the expenses himself. If the deed was not strictly
right in law, it was so excellent in morals that it had been done with
impunity hundreds of times before.
In the rasing operations, part of the churchyard wall had to be taken
down, and a large cross, which dominated the churchyard, removed.
All would have been well, however, if this unlucky Voltaire had not had,
as usual, an enemy on the spot. When he first came to Ferney, it will be
remembered that he had successfully fought Ancian, the curé of the
neighbouring parish of Moens, for a tithe of which Ancian had long
deprived the poor of the neighbourhood. Ancian, whom Voltaire vigorously
described as “brutal as a horse, cross-grained as a mule, and cunning as
a fox,” had not forgiven that affront easily. But worse was to come.
On December 28, 1760, a young man, wounded and nearly bleeding to death,
had been brought to the doors of Ferney. Voltaire did not only take him
in and care for his body. With that passionate love of fair-play which
was so fatal to the ease and comfort of his life, he determined to
ferret out the rights of the case and get justice done.
It appeared that three young men had been supping, after a day’s
hunting, at the house of a woman of whom Ancian was commonly reported
the lover. Ancian, and “some peasants his accomplices,” rushed in and
violently attacked the three men, nearly killing Decroze, the one who
had been brought to Ferney.
Here is a pretty state of things! says Voltaire. A priest who is not
only thief but murderer as well! He set to work at once. He moved
heaven, earth, and the authorities to get M. Ancian “employment in the
galleys.” He found out Decroze’s father and sister. He tried to rouse
the father’s timidity and apathy to action. The sister told him, on her
oath, that her confessor had refused her absolution if she did not force
that father to renounce his son’s cause.
By January 3, 1761, Voltaire was passionately complaining that a “feeble
procedure” against the criminal had hardly been begun. The province was
divided on the subject. All Voltaire’s letters of the time are full of
it. But Ancian was protected by his order. It was thought, as it has
been often thought before and since, that the scandal of punishing the
crime would be greater than the scandal of leaving it unpunished.
Ancian had to pay Decroze a sum down; but he kept his living, and nursed
his revenge.
When he saw M. de Voltaire pulling down the churchyard wall and removing
the cross, he knew that the time had come. He assured his brother curé
of Ferney and the simple people of the place that this atheist of a
Voltaire had profaned their church; that he had not only moved the cross
without first fulfilling the usual formalities, but had cried out, “Take
away that gibbet!” Ancian, therefore, on the biblical principle of an
eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, denounced Voltaire to the
ecclesiastical judge of Gex as guilty of sacrilege and impiety, and
involved him in a “criminal suit of a most violent character.”
But Ancian did not know, though he ought to have known, the sort of man
with whom he had to deal. Voltaire’s blood was up. A criminal lawsuit,
forsooth, for “a foot and a half of churchyard and two mutton cutlets
which had been mistaken for disinterred bones”! There was an angry note
in that laugh which meant fight. Further, his enemies were saying
publicly that they hoped to see him burned, or at least hanged, for the
glory of God and the edification of the faithful; and meanwhile his
church-building operations were stopped.
It was an old principle of his always to turn their own weapons against
his foes. He had not forgotten it. He put himself into correspondence
with an able ecclesiastical lawyer of Lyons. He read up ecclesiastical
histories, and ancient volumes of Church law; and then suddenly flung at
the head of the enemy such a mass of rules and precedents, of dreary old
parallel cases of mouldering decrees which councils had forgotten to
revoke, of long-winded formulas and by-laws whose existence and
orthodoxy were as indisputable as they had been unheeded, and of
authorities who were infinitely sound, obscure, and confusing--that the
priestly party put its hands to its ears, cried “Peccavi!” and confessed
itself beaten on its own ground.
In the meanwhile its surprising little foe, who “passionately loved to
be master,” had rased the whole church at Ferney to the ground, “in
reply to the complaints of having taken down half of it,” had removed
the altars, the confessional boxes, and the fonts, and sent his
parishioners to attend mass elsewhere.
To crown all, and to leave nothing undone that could be done, by June
21st he had forwarded the plan of his church to the Pope and applied to
his Holiness for a bull granting him absolute power over his churchyard,
permission for his labourers to work on _fête_ days, instead “of getting
drunk in honour of the Saints” according to custom, and for sacred
relics to place in the church.
The letters to Rome are, very unfortunately, lost. But, through
Choiseul, they reached there; and the requests were granted in part. On
October 26, 1761, the Holy Father sent a piece of the hair shirt of St.
Francis of Assisi--the patron saint of François Marie Arouet. On the
same day, in tardy recognition for the dedication of “Tancred,” came a
present of the portrait of Madame de Pompadour. “So you see,” wrote
Voltaire, “I am all right both for this world and the next.”
When his church was finished he inscribed on it _Deo Solo_ (sic), which
by September 14, 1761, he had altered to _Deo erexit Voltaire_. He was
fond of saying that it was the only church in the universe which was
dedicated to God alone, and not to a saint. “For my part I had rather
build for the Master than for the servants.”
He had designed his own tomb jutting out from the wall of the church.
“The wicked will say that I am neither inside nor out.”
In March a public event distracted his thoughts for a moment from
“Eloïsa,” Ancian, and the church building. The Dauphin’s eldest son
died; and Pompignan, as Historiographer of France, lifted his diminished
head from Montauban and from those “mountains of ridicule” which covered
him, and wrote a eulogium of the little boy, which alas! for foolish
Pompignan, was also another attack on the philosophers. Voltaire waited
a little. Then he wrote two pieces of “murderous brevity”--the “Ah!
Ahs!” and the “Fors.”
Down went the head of Pompignan again. If it even peeped up for a
moment, which it still did now and then, Ferney shot an arrow at it from
the richest quiver and with the deadliest aim in the world.
But he had better things to do now than hitting an enemy who was down.
That dear spoilt daughter of the house, who might interrupt even the
chess or the verse reading of _vif_ Papa Voltaire with impunity--who was
pretty and naïve enough to do anything in the world she liked with
him--still had no _dot_.
On April 10, 1761, Voltaire wrote to Duclos, secretary of the Academy,
and proposed that he (Voltaire) should edit and annotate Corneille’s
works, in an edition of the classics then appearing under the patronage
of the Academy, for the benefit of the great Peter’s great-niece.
To say that Voltaire put his whole heart, soul, and body into the thing
and worked at it like a galley slave, and worked till he made all Europe
work too, is no exaggeration. He began by getting up a subscription,
which remains one of the best managed, if not _the_ best managed, and
certainly the most successful thing of its kind ever undertaken. He
advanced all money for preliminary expenses himself. The King of France,
the Empress of Russia, the Emperor and Empress of Austria, Choiseul, and
Madame de Pompadour figured imposingly and attractively on his list.
The nobles and notables of France, courtiers, farmers-general, and
literary men quickly followed suit. In England the givers included good
Queen Charlotte, Lords Chesterfield, Lyttelton, Palmer, Spencer, and the
great Mr. Pitt. To Pitt, Voltaire wrote, in the English he was always
clever enough to remember, when expedient; and Pitt replied favourably.
By May, only a month after the subscription was started, and before a
single copy of the work was ready, enough money had come in to afford
Marie Corneille a yearly income of fifteen hundred francs.
Voltaire was far from finding the labour congenial. To the vigour of his
creative genius work that was so largely mechanical soon became
irritating and tiresome. Still, it consoled him, as he said, for those
public disasters in the Seven Years’ War which were fast making France
the fable of the nations and the laughing stock of Europe; and presently
for that crushing defeat of the French by Frederick the Great at
Villinghausen on July 15th.
That he was an excellent commentator is proved by the fact that his
Commentary remains unrivalled, and is still _the_ text-book on
Corneille. With an ear as exquisitely delicate for a harmony as a
discord, with that single-minded love of good literature which equally
prevented him being flatterer or caviller, Voltaire was the critic who,
like the poet, is born, not made. He admired warmly; but he blamed
candidly. “It is true that Corneille is a sacred authority; but I am
like Father Simon, who, when the Archbishop of Paris asked him what he
was doing to prepare himself for the priesthood, replied, ‘Monseigneur,
I am criticising the Bible.’”
When Martin Sherlock was at Ferney in 1776 he observed that the English
preferred Corneille to Racine. “That,” said Voltaire, “is because the
English do not know enough of the French language to feel the beauties
of Racine’s style or the harmony of his versification. Corneille pleases
them better because he is more striking; but Racine for the French
because he has more delicacy and tenderness.”
When the Commentary was finished it numbered many volumes, and “served
to marry two girls, which never before happened to a Commentary,” said
the Commentator, “and never will again.”
By a peculiarly delicate thought, _poor_ literary men received copies as
gifts.
The autumn of 1761 was not dull at Ferney. Among the visitors were Abbé
Coyer and Lauraguais, wit and playwright, and one of those highly
unsatisfactory clever people who _can_ do everything, and do nothing.
Besides the visitors, the autumn was marked by the progress of the
quarrel with de Brosses, from whom Voltaire had bought Tourney, and with
whom he was still deeply engaged in a lawsuit for “fourteen cords of
firewood.”
The man who gave a home to d’Aumard, to Marie Corneille, and to Father
Adam, and who pensioned his poor relations without in the least
accounting it to himself for righteousness, was incredibly sharp and
mean over this firewood with de Brosses, and wasted his time and his
talents in the fight. The details of the quarrel are long,
uninteresting, and profitless. But it must in justice be said that it
shows Voltaire “at his very worst: insolent, undignified, low-minded,
and untruthful.” Besides quarrelling with de Brosses, with Ancian, and
Rousseau, editing Corneille, writing “Peter the Great,” revising the
“Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations,” and looking after three
estates, this wonderful man also found time in 1761 for his usual
gigantic correspondence, and to write two plays. The correspondence
alone comprises letters to a king and cardinals, prime ministers, and
actresses, _savants_ and _salonières_, besides letters to old friends
like Panpan and Madame de Champbonin; letters in English and Italian,
and in rhyme; and letters _from_ people he had never seen. In this July
a burgomaster of Middleton had written to inquire of him if there is a
God; if, supposing there be one, He troubles about man; if Matter is
eternal; if it can think; and if the soul is immortal. The burgomaster
added that he would like an answer by return of post. “I receive such
letters every week,” Voltaire wrote to Madame du Deffand. “I have a
pleasant life.”
From 1760 until 1768 he was also writing constantly to that Damilaville
who was so steady a foe of _l’infâme_, and who took Theriot’s place as
Voltaire’s Parisian correspondent. Theriot had long sunk into a
good-natured parasite of any rich man who would give him a good dinner
and an idle life; while Damilaville, if he _was_ heavy and mannerless,
as Grimm said, was a patient and tireless disciple; who ran all
Voltaire’s errands in Paris for him; despatched to Ferney constant
packets of books, manuscripts, and news; and, in brief, loved and worked
for Voltaire as sincerely as he loathed, and worked against, _l’infâme_.
On October 20, 1761, Voltaire wrote to tell his Angels that the fever
took him on Sunday and did not leave him till Saturday--which, being
interpreted, meant that at sixty-seven years old he had composed in six
days the tragedy of “Olympie.”
But even in a Voltaire--a Voltaire of whom Joubert justly said that “his
mind was ripe twenty years sooner than other men’s and that he kept it,
in all its powers, thirty years later”--such quick work could not mean
his best work.
The Angels recommended revision.
“It was written in six days,” wrote Voltaire to a friend whose opinion
he desired. “Then the author should not have rested on the seventh,” was
the answer. “He did, and repented of his work,” replied Voltaire. The
play written in six days took six months to correct.
In the meantime, and for fear one should get idle and the brain rust, he
flung on to paper a versified comedy called “Seigneurial Rights” (“Le
Droit du Seigneur”). It had been rehearsed at home by December 17th. It
was to pose as the work of one Picardet, an Academician of Dijon, until
its success was established.
But once again Voltaire had to reckon with an old enemy. Crébillon of
eighty-eight was still envious, and now censor of plays. He recognised
the style of Picardet, Academician of Dijon, and refused to license his
play unless a scene from his (Crébillon’s) hand was added. Chafing
Voltaire called this scene a carnage of all his best points.
Early in the new year 1762, Crébillon died, at peace with all the world,
it was said, even his profligate of a son--and M. de Voltaire. But
Voltaire had too much to forgive in return. He wrote the “Éloge de
Crébillon,” and once more peaceful d’Alembert had to complain of his
_vif_ friend’s losing his temper--“a satire under the name of a eulogy.”
“I am sorry you chose the moment of his death to throw stones on his
corpse.” “He had better have been left to rot of himself: it would not
have taken long.”
D’Alembert was right, as he had been before.
Meanwhile “Seigneurial Rights” had been produced on January 18, 1762,
and had met with a success far above its slender merits.
January also saw another temporary resurrection of poor Pompignan. It
was Voltaire himself who had provoked the poor man to turn in his grave
this time, by writing to a popular tune and in a catching metre “A Hymn
Sung at the Village of Pompignan.”
This he sent round to his friends with a guitar accompaniment. It became
_the_ air of Paris; and the street boys, it is said, sang it _at_ the
Pompignans as they passed. A little later Voltaire wrote a burlesque
“Journey of M. le Franc de Pompignan from Pompignan to Fontainebleau,”
and replied to an attack Brother Aaron de Pompignan, Bishop of Puy, had
been foolhardy enough to make upon the philosophers, with such a running
fire of pamphlets, epigrams, and irony as might have slain a far abler
foe.
And so _exeunt_ the Pompignans for ever.
In January, too, Voltaire published a pamphlet called “The Extract of
the Opinions of Jean Meslier,” Meslier having been a curé who left at
his death papers seeking to prove the falsehood of the religion which he
had professed. Voltaire put it into shape. It was a curious and a very
human document. He was not a little disgusted that “tepid” Paris did not
receive it with more enthusiasm.
But if Paris was tepid, that cold King seemed to be getting a little
warmer. Voltaire wrote to tell Duclos on January 20th that his Majesty
had restored to him an old pension.
“What will Fréron say to _that_? What will Pompignan?” wrote the
delighted pensioner naïvely. There was also a rumour that his Majesty
has been pleased to recall M. de Voltaire. That was false. And Voltaire,
since he could not reach the grapes, took the very sensible _rôle_ of
declaring that they were sour. No doubt they really were. The fruit of
his own labours was at least far sweeter. To work in the Ferney garden
with Lambert, his stupid gardener--“my privateer”--was safer too. “Love
like a fool when you are young--work like a devil when you are old,” was
one of Voltaire’s rules of life. He had to his hand new work, beside
which even gardening at Ferney was dull and useless, and waiting in a
king’s antechamber a shame and a contempt.
On March 10, 1762, Jean Calas was broken on the wheel.
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE AFFAIR OF CALAS
In 1761 and 1762, Toulouse, the capital of Languedoc and the seventh
city of France, was one of the most priest-ridden in the kingdom. The
anniversary of that supreme crime of history, the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew, was always legally celebrated as a two days’ festival. The
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had been commemorated by two frescoes
erected at the public expense. In Toulouse no Protestant could be a
lawyer, a physician, a surgeon, an apothecary, a bookseller, a grocer,
or a printer; he could not keep either a Protestant clerk or a
Protestant servant; and in 1748, an unhappy woman had been fined three
thousand francs for acting as a midwife without having first become a
Roman Catholic.
The city was further celebrated for its monastic orders, the White, the
Black, and the Grey Penitents; and for a collection of relics which
included bones of the children massacred by Herod and a piece of the
robe of the Virgin.
In such a place, not the less, Jean Calas, a Protestant shopkeeper, had
lived honoured and respected for forty years.
On the evening of October 13, 1761, he, his family, and a young friend
sat at supper in his house over his shop, at No. 16 Rue des Filatiers.
Jean Calas, the father, was sixty-three years old, and rather infirm;
kind, benevolent, and serene; anything but a bigot, in that Louis, one
of his sons, who was a Toulouse apprentice, had embraced the Roman faith
with the full consent of his father, who supposed the matter to be one
in which each must judge for himself.
Madame Calas, though of English extraction, was an excellent type of the
best kind of French _bourgeoise_--practical, vigorous, alert--aged about
forty-five.
Peter, the second son, was an amiable but rather weak youth of about
five-and-twenty. There were two daughters, Rose and Nanette, who were
away from home upon this particular evening, as was also Louis (who was
still in receipt of a money allowance from his father); and Donat, the
youngest boy, who was living at Nîmes.
Mark Anthony, the eldest son of the family, was the only unsatisfactory
person in it. Only twenty-eight years old, he was one of those gloomy
and discontented characters who, the world being “a looking-glass which
gives back to every man the reflection of his own face,” saw all life
_en noir_.
His character had been further soured by the discovery that the
profession he had set his heart on was not open to a Protestant; and
that he could not be admitted to the Bar without producing a certificate
from his curé declaring him a Catholic.
Mark Anthony endeavoured to gain this certificate by simply suppressing
his Protestantism. But he failed. Change his religion he would not. If
there was a bigot among the Calas, he was the one. He alone of the
family had bitterly opposed the conversion of Louis.
Another situation he desired he had to give up through his father’s lack
of capital. He grew more and more morose. He hung about the cafés and
the billiard saloons, bitter and idle. In a theatrical company he had
joined he would declaim, it is said, Hamlet’s monologue on death, and
other pieces dealing with suicide, with an “inspired warmth.”
The establishment at the Rue des Filatiers was completed by Jeannette
Viguière, the _bonne à tout faire_, an ardent Roman Catholic and the
faithful friend and servant of the family for thirty years.
On the evening of this October 13, 1761, a friend of the Calas, Gaubert
Lavaysse, a youth about twenty, came in unexpectedly just as the Calas
were going to sit down to supper.
Hospitable Madame bade Mark Anthony, who was sitting in the shop,
“plunged in thought,” go and buy some Roquefort cheese to add to their
simple meal. He did as he was asked. He joined the party at supper in
the parlour, next to the kitchen. They talked on indifferent topics. It
was remembered afterwards that the conversation, among other things,
fell upon some antiquities to be seen at the City Hall, and that Mark
Anthony spoke of them too. At the dessert, about eight o’clock, he got
up, _as was his custom_, from the table and went into the adjoining
kitchen.
“Are you cold, _M. l’Aîné_?” said Jeannette, thinking he had come to
warm himself.
“On the contrary--burning hot,” he answered. And he went out.
The little supper-party meantime had gone into the salon, where, except
Peter, who went to sleep, they talked until a quarter to ten, when
Lavaysse left. Peter was roused to light him out.
When the two got downstairs into the shop a sharp cry of alarm reached
the salon. Jean Calas hurried down. Madame stood at the top of the
stairs for a moment, wondering and trembling. Then she went down.
Lavaysse came out of the shop and gently forced her upstairs, saying she
should be told all.
In the shop Lavaysse and Peter had found the dead body of the unhappy
Mark Anthony suspended from a wooden instrument used in binding bales of
cloth, which the poor boy had placed between two doorposts, and on which
he had hanged himself. On the counter lay his coat and vest, neatly
folded.
Jean Calas cut the cord, lifted the body down, put it on the ground, and
used all possible means to restore life. Impelled by that awful sense of
unknown disaster, Madame and Jeannette came down too, and with tears,
and calling the boy’s name, tried all remedies--unavailingly.
Meanwhile, Calas had bidden Peter go for the doctor. He came, by name
one Gorse, but he could do nothing. Then Peter, beside himself, would
have rushed into the street to tell their misfortune abroad. His father
caught hold of him: “Do not spread a report that he has killed himself;
at least save our honour.”
The feeling was in any case a perfectly natural one. But how much more
natural in that dreadful day when, as Calas knew well, the body of a man
proven a suicide was placed naked on a hurdle with the face turned to
the ground, drawn thus through the streets, and then hanged on a gibbet.
Lavaysse had also run out of the house. Peter, finding him at a
neighbour’s, told him to deny that Mark Anthony had committed suicide.
Lavaysse agreed. Voltaire spoke hereafter of that decision as “a natural
and equitable” one. It was. But it was one of the most fatal ever
uttered.
The neighbours were roused by now. Many rushed in to give assistance.
Among others was an old friend of the family’s, Cazeing by name.
Clausade, a lawyer, said the police ought to be fetched. Lavaysse ran to
fetch them.
Meanwhile a crowd had gathered outside the house. It had the
characteristics of most crowds--perhaps of all French crowds--it was
intensely excited; it was exceedingly inventive; and it would follow a
leader like sheep. What _had_ happened in that house? In 1835 there
still stood over the door a signboard with the inscription, “Jean Calas,
_Marchand d’Indiennes_”. It stood there then. Calas? Calas? Why, Calas
was a Huguenot. From among the people came a word--one of those idle
words for which men shall give account in the Day of Judgment--“These
Huguenots have killed their son to prevent him turning Catholic!” The
idea was dramatic and pleased. The crowd caught it up. It was the match
to the fagot, and the whole bonfire was ablaze at once.
But there was one man there at least, David de Beaudrigue, one of the
chief magistrates of the city, whom, from his position, it should have
been impossible to move a hair’s breadth by an irresponsible word, and
who is eternally infamous that, hearing such a cry, he believed it. But,
for the doom of Calas, Beaudrigue was both bigot and fanatic. It has
been well said by Parton, one of Voltaire’s biographers, that “if the
words had blazed ... across the midnight sky in letters of miraculous
fire,” Beaudrigue “could not have believed them with more complete and
instantaneous faith.”
He hastened into the house with his officers and arrested every person
in it, including young Lavaysse, who had fought his way back there
through the crowd, and Cazeing the friend. Through the ill-lit streets,
thronged with an excited mob, the little party were taken to the Hôtel
de Ville. Mark Anthony’s body was borne on a bier before them. The Calas
and their friends thought, as they might well think, that they were only
going to give testimony of what had occurred. Grief, not fear, was in
their hearts. So little did they anticipate not returning to their house
that evening that Peter had put a lighted candle in one of the windows
to light them when they came back. “Blow it out,” said David. “You will
not return so soon.”
On every step of that dreadful journey to the Hôtel de Ville the ardent
imagination of that southern crowd grew hotter. From saying that Calas
had murdered his son to prevent him turning Catholic, it was only a step
to the assertion that among the Huguenots such an act was common,
encouraged, and esteemed a virtue. Before that town hall was reached
Mark Anthony had become a martyr to the true faith; and Jean, his
father, was already condemned to the most horrible of all deaths, on the
most horrible of all accusations.
When the prisoners reached the place they still persisted in that most
natural but most fatal falsehood, that Mark had not committed suicide.
It still did not occur to their simplicity and their innocence that they
could ever be accused of murdering one so dear to them. They were soon
to be enlightened. They were separated, locked, with irons on their
feet, into separate cells. Jean Calas and Peter were left in complete
darkness. Cazeing was soon released. But Lavaysse, the unhappy young
visitor, was imprisoned too. On the days following they were each
separately examined on oath. All then confessed that the boy had
committed suicide, and all told stories which tallied with each other.
Their depositions were such that if clear evidence, reason, and justice
ever appealed to bigots, they would have been liberated at once.
But David had been occupying his time in still further infuriating the
people. The priests seconded him. One of his own colleagues warned him
not to go so fast.
“I take all the responsibility,” he answered. “It is in the cause of
religion.”
It is noticeable that, in his bloody haste, and though he assumed the
case to be one of murder, he had never examined the shop at the Rue des
Filatiers to see if it bore marks of a struggle, or the clothes of the
supposed murderers. Yet how could it be thought that “the most vigorous
man in the province,” eight-and-twenty years old, would allow his feeble
father of sixty-three to strangle and hang him without making any
resistance? And if resistance was made, where were the rents and the
bloodstains?
If, too, the boy had been killed because he was about to change his
religion, should not his room have been searched for some object of
Catholic piety, some signs of the dreadful struggle of the soul? His
person _was_ searched. On it were found a few papers of ribald songs.
For three weeks the body of this strange martyr was kept embalmed, lying
in the torture chamber of the Hôtel de Ville. As it had been assumed
without a shred of evidence that Mark Anthony had been about to join the
Roman Church, it was equally easy to assume that he had also been about
to enter one of the monastic orders. Popular fancy chose the White
Penitents as the order of Mark’s intentions. He was buried on a Sunday
afternoon, “with more than royal pomp,” in the great cathedral, and with
the full and splendid rites of the Roman Church. Thousands of persons
were present, and a few days after a solemn service for the repose of
the soul of their Brother was held by the White Penitents.
For three successive Sundays from the pulpits in all the churches was
read an admonition to give testimony, “by hearsay or otherwise,” against
Jean Calas.
To be sure, such testimony would never be difficult to obtain in any
case or in any place, but in priest-ridden Toulouse, against Jean Calas,
it might well have been on all lips.
After the five prisoners had spent five months in separate dungeons,
chained by the feet, the trial began. It must be remembered that of the
accused one was Jeannette, an ardent Roman Catholic, who had not only
helped to convert Louis, but who had given no offence to his Protestant
relatives by so doing.
On March 9, 1762, Jean Calas was tried first, and alone, for the murder
of his son on the previous October 13th. He was tried by thirteen
members of the Toulouse Parliament who held ten sessions. The witnesses
against him were of this kind: a painter named Mattei said that his wife
had told him that a person named Mandrille had told her that some person
unnamed had told _her_ that he had heard Mark Anthony’s cries at the
other end of the town. Some of the witnesses against Calas disappeared
before the trial came on, feeling the strain on their inventive powers
too great.
It was assumed by the prosecution that Mark Anthony _could_ not have
hanged himself in the place where the Calas swore they had found him;
but, as has been noted, the prosecution never went to see the place.
_For_ the prisoner, on the other hand, was the most overwhelming
evidence.
First, it was the most unnatural of crimes. Secondly, it was impossible
at the father’s age and weakness that he should have murdered his strong
son alone. If he had not murdered him alone, it must have been with the
assistance of the family party, of whom one was Jeannette, the ardent
Catholic, and another was Lavaysse, the casual visitor.
The testimony of all these people _for_ Calas agreed absolutely--except
on one or two minor and wholly immaterial points.
But, in the case of this prisoner, it was not merely that the law of his
day declared him guilty until he was proved innocent. Calas was declared
guilty without being allowed a chance of proving himself innocent. The
accused was never then permitted a counsel. But with Calas, the people
sat on the judgment seat with Pilate; assumed the prisoner’s guilt, not
without evidence, but in the teeth of it, and had condemned him before
he was tried. Some of the magistrates themselves belonged to the
confraternity of the White Penitents.
One of them only--M. de Lasalle--had the courage to object to the
mockery of the proceedings. “You are all Calas,” said a brother judge.
“And you,” answered Lasalle, “are all People.”
By eight votes to five, then, “a weak old man was to be condemned to the
most awful of all deaths” (first the torture, and then to be broken on
the wheel) “for having strangled and hanged with his feeble hands, in
hatred of the Catholic religon, his robust and vigorous son who had no
more inclination towards that religion than the father himself.” The
words are the words of him who, said Madame du Deffand, became all men’s
_avocat_, Voltaire.
Out of those thirteen judges three voted for torture only, and two
suggested that it might be better to examine the shop at the Rue des
Filatiers and see if a suicide _were_ impossible. One hero alone voted
for complete acquittal.
The terms of the sentence display a savage ferocity, of which only a
religious hatred is capable. To the exquisite tortures to which Calas
was condemned, even the brutes who, drunk with blood and believing in
neither God nor devil committed the worst excesses of the French
Revolution, never fell.
This mock trial had taken place on March 9th. On March 10th that
sentence of ghoulish and delighted cruelty was read to the victim. He
was taken straight to the torture-room, the oath was administered, and
with the rack in front to remind him of the fate awaiting him, he was
cross-examined. He answered as he had always answered--He was innocent.
When asked who were his accomplices, he replied that as there had been
no crime there could be no accomplices. One witness speaks of his
“calmness and serenity.” Yet he was a feeble man, not young, who for
five months had been chained in a dark dungeon, accused of the most
awful of crimes, and knowing that in his downfall he had dragged down
with him everything he loved best in the world.
He was then put to the first torture--the _Question Ordinaire_. The very
record of such horrors still makes the blood run cold. But what man
could bear, man can bear to hear. First bound by the wrists to an iron
ring in the wall, four feet above the ground, “and his feet to another
ring in the floor of the room,” with an ample length of rope between,
“the body was stretched till every limb was drawn from its socket.” The
agony was then “increased tenfold by sliding a wooden horse under the
lower rope.” Thus, in mortal torment, Calas was questioned again. He
maintained his innocence, and “neither wavered nor cried out.”
After a rest--a rest!--of half an hour, during which the magistrates and
a priest questioned him again, he was put to the _Question
Extraordinaire_. Water was poured into his mouth by force until “he
suffered the anguish of a hundred drownings.”
He was then questioned again; and again maintained his innocence. Then
more water was poured into him, until his body was swollen to twice its
natural size. He was again questioned; with the same results.
Then the devils called Christians, who persecuted him in the name of
Christ, saw that their aim would be defeated. Calas would not confess.
But he could die.
He was taken on a tumbril in his shirt only--how many were to go thus to
doom after him!--to the place of execution. From time to time he said “I
am innocent.” The crowd--in temper and intent the crowd who eighteen
hundred years before had cried “Crucify Him!”--reviled him as he went,
as they had reviled his Master. At the scaffold a priest, whom he knew
personally, once more exhorted him to confess. “What, Father!” he said.
“Do you too believe that a man could kill his own son?” Then, again like
the Truth for Whom he suffered, he was bound on a cross. The executioner
broke each of his limbs in two places with an iron bar. He lived thus
for two hours, praying for his judges.
A few moments before his death a priest again exhorted him to confess.
“I have said it,” he answered. “I die innocent.” At that supreme moment
he mentioned Lavaysse--the boy upon whom he had brought so unwittingly
ruin and disgrace. Then David de Beaudrigue, who felt that he was in
some sort cheated of his prey without a confession, bade him turn and
look at the fire which was to burn him, and confess all. He turned and
looked. The executioner strangled him; and he died without a word.
His noble courage at least saved the lives of his family. Peter was
condemned to perpetual banishment, “which if he was guilty was too
little; and if he was innocent was too much.” He was forced into a
monastery; and, being a weak character and told that if he did not
abjure his religion he should die as his father had died, he recanted in
a terror not unnatural.
His mother was liberated. She crept away with Jeannette into the country
near Toulouse, to hide her broken heart. Her two daughters were flung
each into a separate convent. Young Lavaysse was sent back to his
family, ruined alike in health and in prospects.
Donat Calas, the youngest of the family, the apprentice at Nîmes, had
had to leave France when the trial came on, for fear of being indicted
as an accomplice. He went to Geneva.
On March 22, 1762, only twelve days after the death of Jean Calas,
Voltaire mentioned the case in writing to Le Bault. He was not at once
moved to take any side. The affair was not his. But if he did take any,
it was the side of Catholicism. “We are not worth much,” he said airily,
“but the Huguenots are worse than we are. _They_ declaim against
comedy.”
But the affair made him think. Two days later he wrote that it “took him
by the heart.” Then he learnt that Donat was near him--at Geneva; that
the boy had fled there on hearing of the trial. _That_ seemed like
guilt. “I am interested as a man, and a little as a philosopher. I want
to know _on which side_ is this horror of fanaticism.” At the end of
March, Audibert, a merchant of Marseilles, who had happened to be in
Toulouse when the Calas tragedy was enacted, called on Voltaire and told
him the facts of the case as they had appeared to him. Foul play
somewhere, thinks Alain’s pupil and Arouet’s son, putting those facts
together. But where? “I told him (Audibert) that the crime of Calas was
not probable; but it was still more improbable that disinterested judges
should condemn an innocent man to be broken on the wheel.”
Disinterested? There lay the crux. Voltaire’s feelings were roused; but
they had not run away with him. On March 27th, he wrote to d’Argental:
“You will ask me, perhaps, why I interest myself so strongly in this
Calas who was broken on the wheel? It is because I am a man.... Could
you not induce M. de Choiseul to have this fearful case investigated?”
Every day, nay every hour, a mind far keener and shrewder than any
Choiseul’s was investigating it then: collecting evidence; writing
innumerable letters; working, working; tempering with cool discretion a
zeal that burnt hotter every moment as the innocence of Calas forced
itself upon his soul; labouring with that “fiery patience,” that
critical judiciousness, which in such a case alone could win.
At the end of April he went from Ferney to Délices, that he might be
nearer Donat Calas; study him; hear an account of his family from his
own lips. The boy was only fifteen; cried when he told that piteous
story; and spoke of both his father and mother as infinitely kind and
indulgent to all their children.
Lest he should be moved by those emotions which grew stronger every day,
or by a moral conviction in the innocence of Calas not fully borne out
by physical facts, Voltaire sought the opinion of wise and capable
friends. He employed Végobre, an able (and notably unimaginative) lawyer
of Geneva, to investigate legal points; and for hours and hours would
remain closeted with him. Ribotte-Charon, a merchant of Toulouse,
himself warmly interested in the case, Voltaire induced to examine the
site of the supposed murder and to study local details. Chazel, a
solicitor of Montpellier, he engaged to interview the leading
magistrates of the Languedoc district and to procure documents.
But to obtain a formal investigation of the affair it was necessary to
get the ear of the Chancellor of France, the Count of Saint-Florentin.
Voltaire incited every powerful friend he had in the world to assail
this person. Villars and Richelieu were made to bombard him. What was
the use of Dr. Tronchin’s famous and influential patients if they could
not be induced to attack M. Florentin too? Tronchin roused them, and
they did as they were told. At Geneva was the Duchesse d’Enville, also a
Tronchin patient, clever, powerful, and enlightened. Voltaire fired her
with his own enthusiasm, and she wrote direct to Saint-Florentin. As for
Madame de Pompadour and Choiseul, Voltaire undertook them himself. The
Pompadour was always “one of us” in her heart; and while she hated the
Jesuits, Choiseul did not love them.
By the end of June, Voltaire had brought Madame Calas up to Paris and
begged his Angels, “in the name of humankind,” to take her broken life
under their wings. She had not been easy to persuade to come. She was
crushed to the earth, as she might well be. Hope for the future, or hope
for vengeance for the past, she had none. Only one passionate desire
seems to have been left her--to get back her daughters from the convents
into which they had been forced. The property of criminals was then
confiscated to the King, and she had not a farthing in the world. But
Voltaire paid all her expenses--content to wait until the generosity of
Europe should refund him. For counsel he gave her d’Alembert and the
famous _avocat_, Mariette. On June 11th, he appointed Élie de Beaumont
as Mariette’s colleague. It is always a part of cleverness to discover
the cleverness of others. Beaumont was young and unknown; but he was a
most able choice.
On July 4th, Peter Calas escaped from his monastery, and joined Donat at
Geneva. Voltaire had thus the two brothers under observation. He put
them through searching inquiries. Peter was naturally a most important
witness.
On July 5th, Voltaire first spoke to d’Argental of the “Original
Documents concerning the Calas” which in this month he gave to the
world. They are for all time a model of editorial genius. They consist
only of an extract from a letter from Madame Calas, and of a letter from
Donat Calas to his mother. Voltaire’s name did not appear at all. They
contain that most damning of all evidence--a perfectly clear and simple
statement of plain facts. If the editor contributed order and brevity,
he left the quiet pathos of the woman and the passionate eagerness of
the boy to speak for themselves.
The “Original Documents” he quickly followed up by a “Memoir and
Declaration”: the “Memoir” purporting to be by Donat Calas, the
“Declaration” by Peter.
Once again he wholly obliterated himself. Only a Voltaire’s genius could
have curbed a Voltaire’s passion and made him rein in, even for a while,
his own fiery eloquence, speak as those poor Calas would have spoken,
and wait.
He knew now, by every proof which can carry conviction to the mind, that
they were innocent: and he had given those proofs to the world.
But that was not enough. In August he published “The History of
Elizabeth Canning and of the Calas.” Nothing he ever wrote shows more
clearly how perfectly he understood that April nation, his countrymen.
“Documents” and “Declarations”! Why, they at least _sounded_ dull; and
eighteenth-century Paris was not even going to run the risk of a yawn.
“One might break half a dozen innocent people on the wheel, and in Paris
people would only talk of the new comedy and think of a good supper.”
But Paris loved to be made to laugh one moment and to weep the next; to
have its quick pity touched and its quick humour tickled--in a breath.
“The History of Elizabeth Canning” is sarcastically amusing--an account
of that enterprising young Englishwoman who nearly had another woman
hanged on the strength of a story invented by herself and her relatives.
“It is in vain that the law wishes that two witnesses should be able to
hang an accused. If the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury
depose that they have seen me assassinate my father and my mother, and
eat them whole for breakfast in a quarter of an hour, the Chancellor and
the Archbishop must be sent to Bedlam, instead of burning me on their
fine testimony. Put on one hand a thing absurd and impossible, and on
the other a thousand witnesses and reasoners, and the impossibility
ought to give the lie to all testimonies and reasonings.”
“The History of the Calas” was that sombre and terrible story told by a
master mind: passionate, and yet cool; moving, and yet cautious in
argument; the work at once of the ablest, keenest, shrewdest lawyer in
the case, and of the man who said of himself, almost without
exaggeration, that for three years, until Calas was vindicated, a smile
never escaped him for which he did not reproach himself as for a crime.
He did not appeal to “that great and supreme judge of all suits and
causes, public opinion,” in vain. The Calas case became the talk of
Europe. Men felt, as Donat had been made to say in his Memoir, that “the
cause was the cause of all families; of Nature; of religon; of the
State; and of foreign countries.”
Voltaire had his Calas pamphlets translated and published in Germany and
England. Generous England came forward with a subscription list for the
unhappy family, headed by the young Queen of George III., and to which
the Empress of Russia and the King of Poland became contributors.
But still, to rouse men’s interest was but a means to an end. The end
was to obtain first from the Council of Paris a decree ordering that the
case should be re-tried, and then that fresh trial itself. The obstacles
were not few or trifling. Louis XV. and Saint-Florentin, in spite of the
influence brought to bear upon them, were both opposed to such a course.
A too strict and searching justice did not suit the monarchy of France.
Louis XV. was always wise enough to let sleeping dogs lie if he could,
instead of convening States-General and dismissing and recalling
ministers to please the people they governed, like that weak fool, his
successor. “Why can’t you leave it alone?” was the motto of both King
and Chancellor over the Calas case. And they would have lived up to it,
but that the public opinion which had a Voltaire as its mouthpiece was
too strong for them.
Another difficulty lay in the fact that Lavaysse _père_ was so terrified
by the Parliament of Toulouse that he took much persuading before he
would appear openly on the side of Voltaire and as a witness for his own
son. Then, too, the natural passionate eagerness of Madame Calas to get
back her daughters, immediately and before the time was ripe, had to be
curbed; and, far worse than all, that miserable Toulouse Parliament had
so far entirely declined to furnish any of the papers concerning the
trial, or even the decree of arrest.
[Illustration: MADEMOISELLE CLAIRON
_From an Engraving after a Picture by Carle Van Loo_]
In September, Élie de Beaumont was ready with an able “Memoir” on the
case, signed by fifteen of his brother barristers. He showed that there
were “three impossibilities” in the way of Calas having murdered his
son. “The fourth,” said Voltaire, “is that of resisting your arguments.”
The “Memoir” was naturally more technical than Voltaire’s, but it was
not more clever, nor half so moving.
Another friend of the case, the brave Lasalle, who had become “the
public _avocat_ for Calas in all the houses of Toulouse,” and had been
challenged to a duel on the subject by a brother magistrate, was also in
Paris in November. In December, through the untiring exertions of the
Duchesse d’Enville, herself a mother, Nanette and Rose, the daughters,
were restored to Madame Calas.
On December 29th, Voltaire wrote that this restoration was an infallible
test of the progress of the case. But, he added, “it is shameful that
the affair drags so long.”
Drags so long! Through the kindly veil that hides the future, even a
Voltaire’s keen eyes could not penetrate. For nine months he had now
dreamt Calas, worked Calas, lived Calas. Every letter he wrote is full
of him. For that one man whom he had never seen, and who died as, after
all, thousands of others had died, the victim of religious hatred,
Voltaire forgot the drama which his soul loved, and that aggravating
Jean Jacques’s latest novel, “Émile,” which his soul scorned. Calas!
Calas! For those nine months the thing beat upon his brain as regularly
and unremittingly as the sea breaks on the shore. For Calas was more
than a case: he was a type.
Voltaire had first thought that he saw in that dreadful story _l’infâme_
in the garb of a cold and cruel Calvinism, changing the tenderest
instincts of the human heart into a ferocity which made a father the
murderer of his own son. And then he had discovered that it was that old
_l’infâme_ he knew better--_l’infâme_ who in the person of priest and
magistrate kept the people ignorant, and then inflamed that ignorance
for their shameful ends.
What Calas had suffered, others might suffer. While he was unavenged,
while that criminal law and procedure which condemned him went
unreformed, while his judges were not rendered execrable to other men
and hateful to themselves, who was safe?
To Voltaire the cause of Calas was the cause of Tolerance; that
Tolerance which was the principle and the passion of his life.
CHAPTER XXXVII
THE “TREATISE ON TOLERANCE”
One of the disadvantages of biography as compared with fiction is, that
in real life many events occur simultaneously, and the dramatic effect
of a crisis is often spoilt by that crisis being extended over a long
period of time and being interrupted by trivialities.
The Calas case, at whose “dragging” Voltaire had cried out at the end of
nine months, lasted for three years--a period which is certainly a
severe test of enthusiasm. Voltaire’s triumphantly survived that test.
At the end of those three years he was only more eager, passionate, and
laborious than he had been at the beginning.
But in the meantime there were Ferney, Tourney, and Délices to manage;
Madame Denis always needing amusement and Marie Corneille always needing
instruction; that busy, hot-headed rival, Rousseau, to be taken into
account, to say nothing of friends and enemies, visitors and plays.
On March 25, 1762--just about the time when the first rumours of the
Calas story reached Voltaire--“Olympie” took what may be called its
trial trip at Ferney. Two or three hundred people sobbed all through it
in the most satisfactory manner, and all felt cheerful enough to enjoy a
ball and a supper afterwards.
In April, these enthusiastic amateurs were once more delighted by a
visit from the great actor Lekain. He had been at Délices in 1755; but
there was a beautiful new little theatre at Ferney now, where “Olympie”
was played again. Lekain looked on as a critic; and Voltaire did the
same, being debarred from his dear acting by a cold in the head.
“Tancred” was played too, and when there came that line:
Oh cursed judges! in whose feeble hands--
the whole house got upon its feet and howled itself hoarse. It would not
have been like Voltaire to hide from his friends, even if he could have
done so, a subject that so possessed him as the subject of Calas. “It is
the only reparation,” he said, writing of the scene, “that has yet been
made to the memory of the most unhappy of fathers.”
Charming the audience with her soft voice and round girlish freshness,
Marie Corneille was now always one of the actresses. She had by this
time a pretty _dot_ as well as a pretty face; and Papa Voltaire, in
addition to the proceeds of the Corneille Commentary, had settled a
little estate upon her. A suitor naturally appeared soon upon the
_tapis_. But though he was warmly recommended by the d’Argentals, M.
Vaugrenant de Cormont seems to have been chiefly remarkable for large
debts, a very mean father, and the delusion that he was conferring a
very great honour on Mademoiselle by marrying her. He had taken up his
abode at Ferney, and when he had received his _congé_ was not to be
dislodged without difficulty. Mademoiselle was serenely indifferent to
him; so no harm was done.
Marrying and giving in marriage was to the fore in the Voltaire _ménage_
just then. In May, Madame de Fontaine became the wife of that Marquis de
Florian who had stayed with her at Ferney and long been her lover.
Voltaire was delighted--not in the least on the score of morality--but
because he thought the pair would suit each other, which they did.
On June 11, 1762, “Émile, or Education,” Jean Jacques’s new novel, was
publicly burnt in Paris. Nine days after, it was condemned to the same
fate in Geneva. “Émile” expresses in nervous and inspired language some
of those theories which Voltaire’s friend, Dr. Tronchin, had worked so
hard to bring into practice. It was not so much the education of
children that “Émile” dealt with as the education of parents. To abolish
the fatal system of foster-motherhood, instituted that the real mothers
might have more time for their lovers, their toilettes, and their
pleasures, to portray a child brought up in natural and virtuous
surroundings--even an eighteenth-century censor could not have found
matter meet for burning in this. But “Émile” was only a scapegoat. “The
Social Contract,” published a little earlier, was what the authorities
really attacked.
Neither the publication of “Émile,” nor its burning, particularly
attracted Voltaire’s notice at first. Like Lasalle, he was all Calas. On
July 21st, he wrote indifferently to Cideville that Rousseau had been
banished from Berne and is now at Neufchâtel, “thinking he is always
right, and regarding other people with pity.” For the “Profession of
Faith of a Savoyard Vicar” which was “imbedded in ‘Émile,’” Voltaire
indeed not only felt, but expressed, a very sincere admiration. But your
“Eloïsa” and your “Émile,” and your hysterics generally, why, they bore
me, my dear Jean Jacques! And you are so dreadfully long-winded, you
know! However, the “Savoyard Vicar” had shown that Rousseau had the
courage of his unbelief. It was the kind of heroism in which Voltaire
was not going to be behindhand. In July, 1762, appeared his “Sermon of
Fifty,” whose excellent brevity was a reproach and a corrective to the
four immense volumes of “Émile,” and whose virulent attack upon the
Jewish faith was at least as outspoken and unmistakable as the Vicar’s
“Profession.”
This fifty-page pamphlet is noticeable as the first of Voltaire’s works
which is openly anti-Christian. Goethe declared that for it, in his
youthful fanaticism, he would have strangled the author if he could have
got hold of him.
Rousseau, of course, took “The Sermon of Fifty” amiss, as he was fast
coming to take amiss everything Voltaire did. Jean Jacques was quite
persuaded, for instance, that it was Voltaire who had incited the
Council of Geneva to burn “Émile”; and, presently, that it was
Voltaire’s hand which guided the pen of Robert Tronchin’s “Letters from
the Country,” which favoured the burning of “Émile,” and to which
Rousseau was to make reply in the brilliant and splendid inspiration of
his famous “Letters from the Mountain.”
The truth seems to have been that Voltaire laughed at Jean-Jacques
instead of losing his temper with him; or, rather, that he lost his
temper with him for an occasional five minutes, and then laughed and
forgave him. Végobre, the lawyer, who is described as having “no
imagination” to invent such stories, was once breakfasting at Ferney
when some letters came detailing the persecution inflicted on Rousseau
for his “Vicar.” “Let him come here!” cried Voltaire. “Let him come
here! I would receive him like my own son.”
The Prince de Ligne also records how, after Voltaire had vehemently
declared that Jean Jacques was a monster and a scoundrel for whom no law
ever invented was sufficiently severe, he added, “Where is he, poor
wretch? Hunted out of Neufchâtel, I dare say. Let him come here! Bring
him here: he is welcome to everything _I_ have.”
All the sentiments were genuine, no doubt. It would have been perfectly
in Voltaire’s character to abuse Rousseau by every epithet in a
peculiarly rich vituperative vocabulary, and to have received him with
all generous hospitality and thoughtful kindness as a guest in his house
for months; to have quarrelled with him and abused him again, and once
more to have received him as a brother.
After all, Voltaire was not a perfect hater.
That sodden, worthless Theriot came to Délices for a three months’ visit
in July, with all _his_ treachery and ingratitude amply forgotten; and
in October that very showy hero, Richelieu, who was always in money debt
to Voltaire, descended upon his creditor with a suite of no fewer than
forty persons. They had to be accommodated at Tourney, and _fêtes_ and
theatricals devised for their master’s benefit. The Duchesse d’Enville
and the Duke of Villars were also staying with Voltaire, who was quite
delighted to discover that a Richelieu of sixty-six still kept up his
character for gallantry, and to surprise him at the feet of a charming
Madame Ménage, a Tronchin patient. The pretty face and wit of Madame
Cramer also quite vanquished the susceptible elderly heart of the
conqueror. Voltaire offered to get rid--temporarily--of her husband. But
Richelieu had reckoned, not without his host indeed, but without his
hostess. Sprightly Madame Cramer laughed in his face.
The first authorised publication of a work which had been suggested at
Richelieu’s supper-table thirty-two years earlier belongs, by some
_bizarrerie_ of destiny, to this 1762, which also saw the noblest work
of Voltaire’s life--the defence of Calas and the preaching of the Gospel
of Tolerance.
Whoso has followed its author’s history has also followed the
“Pucelle’s.”
Alternately delight and torment, danger and refuge; now being read in
the Cirey bathroom to the ecstatic bliss of Madame de Graffigny, now
passed from hand to hand and from salon to salon in Paris, now being
copied in Prussia, and then burnt in Geneva, hidden in Collini’s
breeches at Frankfort, and stolen from Émilie’s effects by Mademoiselle
du Thil--the adventures of the “Pucelle” would form a volume.
Considered intrinsically, it is at once Voltaire’s shame and fame. It is
to be feared that there are still many people who are only interested in
him as the author of the “Pucelle”; while there are others to whom the
fact that he wrote it blots out his noble work for humanity, and the
bold part he played in the advancement of that civilisation which they,
and all men, enjoy to-day.
That Voltaire took in vain the name of that purest of heroines, Joan of
Arc, is at least partially forgivable. He did not know, and could not
have known, the facts of her life as everybody knows them to-day. His
offences against decency may be judged in that well-worn couplet:
Immodest words admit of no defence,
And want of decency is want of sense.
Only one excuse need even be offered. Voltaire wrote to the taste of his
age. As the coarse horseplay and boisterous mirth of the novels of
Fielding perfectly portrayed humour as understood by eighteenth-century
England, so the gay indelicacies of the “Pucelle” represent humour as
understood by eighteenth-century France.
The fact that women, and even women who were at least nominally
respectable, were not ashamed to listen to and laugh at those airy,
shameful _doubles ententes_, proves that the thing was to the taste of
the time; as the fact that “Tom Jones” and “Joseph Andrews” were read
aloud to select circles of admiring English ladies proves that Fielding
likewise had not mistaken the taste of his public.
The “Pucelle” is infinitely bright, rollicking, and amusing. Voltaire’s
indecency was never that of a diseased mind like Swift. He flung not a
little philosophy into his licence, and through sparkling banter
whispered his message to his age. Those ten thousand lines of burlesque
terminated, it has been said, the domination of legends over the human
mind. Condorcet goes so far as to declare that readers need only see in
the author of the “Pucelle” the enemy of hypocrisy and superstition.
But the fact seems to be that though Voltaire was constantly hitting
out, as he always was hitting, at hypocrisy and superstition, the blows
this time were only incidental; and that he wrote first to amuse
himself, and then to amuse his world.
That he succeeded in both cases, condemns both it and him.
If Voltaire’s connection with Madame du Châtelet was a blot on his moral
character, the “Pucelle” was a darker blot. It spread wider to do harm.
His passionate and tireless work for the liberation of men’s souls and
bodies, for light and for right, make such blots infinitely to be
regretted. That the best work in the world is not done by morally the
best men is a hard truth, but it is a truth.
Of the “Pucelle” it can only be said,
But yet the pity of it, Iago!--O Iago, the pity of it!
On February 12th of 1763 the man who had not only written the most
scandalous of epics, but had tended Marie Corneille with as honest a
respect and affection as if she had been his own innocent daughter,
married her to M. Dupuits, cornet of dragoons, handsome, delightful,
three-and-twenty, and head over ears in love with Mademoiselle. M.
Dupuits united to his other charms the fact that his estates joined
Ferney, and that he was quite sufficiently well off. One little trouble
there had been. Père Corneille disapproved not only of this marriage,
but of any marriage, for his daughter. Voltaire sent him a handsome
present of money to assuage his wounded feelings, but did not invite him
to the ceremony lest young Dupuits should have cause to be ashamed of
his father-in-law, and that graceless Duke of Villars, who was also at
Ferney, should laugh at him. The ceremony took place at midnight on
February 12th, and the wedding dinner was at least magnificent enough to
give Mama Denis as Marie called her, an indigestion. There were no
partings. The young couple took up their abode at Ferney, where their
love-making gave the keenest delight to a large element of romance still
left in Voltaire’s old heart, and where presently their children were
born.
It was not wonderful that the good fortunes of Marie Corneille should
have incited many other offshoots of that family to “come pecking
about,” as Voltaire said, to see if there was anything for them. Only a
month after she was married, Claude Étienne Corneille, who was in the
direct line of descent from the great Corneille, and not in the
indirect, like lucky Marie, appeared at Ferney. But Voltaire, though he
thought Claude an honest man and was sorry for him, could not adopt the
whole clan. His mood was still adoptive, however.
In this very year he took to live with him Mademoiselle Dupuits, Marie’s
sister-in-law; and a certain Father Adam. Mademoiselle Dupuits was not
less pretty than Marie, and very much more intelligent. Several of the
noble Ferney visitors amused themselves by falling in love with her.
On March 2d, Voltaire had written, “We are free of the Jesuits, but I do
not know that it is such a great good.”
The suppression of the Order of Ignatius (it was not confirmed by royal
edict until 1764) first occurred to him as a splendid tilt at
_l’infâme_--as the happiest omen for the future that those who had been
so intolerant should themselves be tolerated no more. But reflection
cooled him. What is the good of being rid of Jesuit foxes if one falls
to Jansenist wolves? “We expel the Jesuits,” he wrote to that good old
friend of his, the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, in July, “and remain the prey
of the convulsionists. It is only Protestant princes who behave
sensibly. They keep priests in their right place.”
None of these reflections taken singly, nor all of them taken together,
prevented Voltaire from receiving into his house--“as chaplain,” he said
sardonically--the Jesuit priest called Father Adam, whom he had known at
Colmar in 1754, and whose acquaintance he had since renewed at
neighbouring Ornex. To be sure, Voltaire had no need to be afraid of any
priestly influence, especially from one of whom he was fond of saying,
that though Father Adam, he was not the first of men.
Like the Protestant princes, Voltaire knew very well how to keep _his_
priest in his proper place. The Father was an indolent man, with a
little fortune of his own and a rather quarrelsome disposition. But he
made himself useful at Ferney for thirteen years by entertaining the
visitors and playing chess with his lord and master. One of the visitors
declared that Adam was Jesuit enough to let himself be beaten at the
game--his opponent so dearly loved to win! But another, La Harpe, who
was at Ferney a whole year, denies this and declares that Voltaire
frequently lost the game, and his temper, and when he saw things were
going badly with him told anecdotes to distract his adversary’s
attention. A third authority states that when the game was practically
lost to him, M. de Voltaire would begin gently humming a tune. If Adam
did not take the hint and retire at once, Voltaire flung the chessmen
one after another at the Father’s head. Prudent Adam, however, usually
left at once. When Voltaire had become calmer, he would call out
profanely, “Adam, where art thou?” The Father came back; and the game
was resumed as if nothing had happened.
Another member of a colony, which, as Voltaire said, was enough to make
one die of laughter, was the fat Swiss servant, Barbara or Bonne-Baba,
who showed her contempt for her illustrious master quite plainly and to
his great enjoyment, and assured him she could not understand how
anybody could be silly enough to think he had an ounce of common-sense.
If it was a laughable household, it was, as its master also said, a
household that laughed from morning till night, and could be, that
lively cripple d’Aumard included, as light-hearted as childhood.
But through all, never forgotten for a moment or put aside for a day,
was the affair of Calas.
On March 7, 1763, that affair had its first triumph. On that day the
Council of Paris met at Versailles, the Chancellor presiding, and all
the councillors and ministers, religious and civil, attending, and
decreed that there should be a new trial and that the Toulouse
Parliament should produce the records of the old. Madame Calas and her
two girls were present. All through the winter it had been considered an
honour to call upon them, or to meet them at the d’Argentals’ house.
Councillors and officials vied with each other in thoughtful attentions
to them all. During the sitting of the court one of the girls fainted,
and was nearly killed with kindness. Some person, thought to be young
Lavaysse, with a style charmingly candid and simple, has written an
account of the day. Not only was the court “all Calas”--its eighty-four
members unanimously voted for the case to be retried--but her Catholic
Majesty, Marie Leczinska herself, who had by no means forgotten to hate
their great _avocat_, Voltaire, received Madame Calas and her daughters
with kindness. The King himself had “formally approved” that the papers
of the procedure at Toulouse should be sent to the Council of Paris. The
hostile influence of Saint-Florentin had been more than counteracted by
the favourable, though secret, influence of Choiseul.
When Voltaire, waiting feverishly at Ferney, heard the long-hoped-for
decree, his heart gave one great leap of joy. “Then there _is_ justice
on the earth; there _is_ humanity,” he wrote. “Men are not all rogues,
as people say; ... it seems to me that the day of the Council of State
is a great day for philosophy.”
He eagerly concluded that this at last was the beginning of the end. But
there was still infinite room for that slow courage called patience.
Now being passed from hand to hand in Paris, and having been so passed
since the beginning of the year 1763, was what may be called the fruit
of the Calas case: fruit of which men to-day may still eat and live: the
pamphlet of two hundred pages which advanced by many years the reign of
justice, of mercy, and of humanity--the “Treatise on Tolerance.”
That sermon, of which the text is Calas, is one of the most powerful
indictments ever written against the religious who have enough religion
to hate and persecute, but not enough to love and succour. Voltaire was
no Protestant, but that “Treatise” helped the “definite affranchisement”
of the Protestant in Catholic countries as no party tract ever did. It
gave the fatal blow to that “Gothic legislation” which, if it was dying,
still showed now and then a superhuman strength in acts of fiendish
barbarism. Sooner or later, said Choiseul, such seed as is sown in
Voltaire’s Gospel of Tolerance _must_ bear fruit. What if the author of
it had thrown decency to the winds in the “Pucelle”? What if, basing his
attack on seemingly irreconcilable statements and incorrect dates, he
had in keen mockery attacked the Scripture and Christianity? Not the
less “the true Christian, like the true philosopher, will agree that in
making tolerance and humanity prevail, Voltaire, whether he wished it or
no, served the religion of the God of peace and mercy: and, instead of
anger, will feel a reverent admiration for the ways of a Providence
which, for such a work, chose such a workman.”
Voltaire did not avow his little Treatise. What censor would or could
have licensed such a thing? For a long time it was not even printed. By
Voltaire? What could make you think so? The old owl of Ferney screwed up
his brilliant eyes and chuckled. “Mind you do not impute to me the
little book on Tolerance.... It will not be by me. It could not be. It
is by some good soul who loves persecution as he loves the colic.”
That he foresaw it would be one of his best passports to posterity, did
not make him in the least degree more anxious to own it to his
contemporaries. Abundant experience had proved to him that if it is “an
ill lot to be a man of letters at all, there is something still more
dangerous in loving the truth.”
So through the year 1763 the “Treatise on Tolerance” was passed from
hand to hand in Paris: by a good priest, you understand; by nobody in
particular. And at Ferney, Voltaire, having preached tolerance,
practised it.
At the convent into which Nanette Calas had been thrown was a good
Superior who had loved and pitied the girl and poured out upon her the
thwarted maternal instincts of her woman’s heart. It is very pleasant to
see how a hot partisan like Voltaire not only gave the Sister her due,
but dwelt tenderly on her tenderness; sent on to his brethren, the
philosophers, her kind little letters to Nanette; and warmed his old
heart at the pure flame of the affection of this “good nun of the
Visitation.”
Then, too, when in June the liberal-minded citizens of Geneva appealed
against the condemnation of rival Rousseau’s “Émile,” and when on August
8th that condemnation was revoked at their request, Voltaire was quite
as delighted as if Jean Jacques had always been his dearest friend, and
as if he had thought anything about that hysterical “Émile,” except the
“Profession of the Savoyard Vicar,” worth the paper it was written on.
Tolerance! Tolerance!
About the same time he produced the “Catechism of an Honest Man,” which
had a like burden; and before the year 1763 was out he was deeply
engaged in helping other unfortunates whom the case of Calas and that
“Treatise” threw at his feet.
In 1740, a daring Protestant gentleman of that fatal Languedoc, called
Espinas, or Espinasse, gave supper and a bed to a minister of his faith.
For this heinous crime he was condemned to the galleys for life, and had
been there three-and-twenty years when his story reached Ferney. Through
Voltaire’s exertions he was released in 1763, and came to Switzerland,
where his wife and children were living as paupers, on public charity.
After interceding passionately for them for not less than three years,
Voltaire succeeded in getting back a small part of the property which
Espinas had forfeited on his imprisonment.
After Espinas came the case of Chaumont. In February, 1764, Voltaire
was writing to Végobre to say that Choiseul had delivered from the
galleys one Chaumont, whose crime had consisted in listening to an
open-air Protestant preacher--“praying to God in bad French.” He had
companions in irons whom Voltaire’s power and pity could not free. But
Chaumont himself came to Ferney to thank his benefactor; and all
Voltaire’s little _entourage_ made him compliments, including Father
Adam.
Though that “Tolerance” was not yet tolerated in Paris; though at the
beginning of 1764 it was forbidden to go through the post, as if it
contained the germs of some infectious disease; though Calas was still
unexculpated, and even powerful Choiseul could not push his authority
far enough to liberate the innocent companions of Chaumont, still
Voltaire thought that he saw light in the sky, and in the east the
beginning of a beautiful day. “Everything I see,” he wrote in prophetic
utterance on April 2d, “sows the seeds of a Revolution which must
infallibly come. I shall not have the pleasure of beholding it. The
French reach everything late, but they do reach it at last. Young people
are lucky: they will see great things.” And again: “I shall not cease to
preach Tolerance upon the housetops ... until persecution is no more.
The progress of right is slow, the roots of prejudice deep. I shall
never see the fruits of my efforts, but they are seeds which must one
day germinate.”
Tolerance! Tolerance! Between writing it, living it, dreaming it, the
thing might have become a monomania, a possession. Only its great
apostle was also a Frenchman--the most versatile son of the most
versatile people on earth.
At the end of 1763 he had been privately circulating in Paris a gay
novelette in verse called “Gertrude, or the Education of a Daughter”;
and a little later he was reviewing English books for a Parisian
literary paper.
Then, too, in the autumn of 1763 the young Prince de Ligne--eighteen
years old, bright, shallow, amusing, “courtier of all Courts, favourite
of all kings, friend of all philosophers”--had been staying at Ferney.
It is said that before his arrival Voltaire, dreadfully fearing he
should be bored, took some strong medicine, so that he could say
(truthfully this time) he was too ill to appear. The very self-pleased
and much-admired young Prince is now chiefly known to the world by the
account he has given of Voltaire _intime_.
He writes vividly both of his host’s greatness and littleness; tells how
he loved the English, bad puns, and his best clothes; how his torrents
of visitors wearied him, and what artful designs he invented to get rid
of them; how good he was to the poor; how “he made all who were capable
of it think and speak”; was charmed to find a musical talent in his
shoemaker--“_Mon Dieu!_ Sir, I put you at _my_ feet--I ought to beat
yours”--how he thought no one too obscure and insignificant to cheer
with the liveliest wit and the most amazing vivacity ever possessed by a
man of sixty-nine.
Ligne says he was quite delighted with the “sublime reply” of a
regimental officer to the question “What is your religion?”
“My parents brought me up in the Roman faith.” “Splendid answer!”
chuckles Voltaire. “He does not say what _he_ is!”
Early in 1764, young Boufflers, the son of that Madame de Boufflers who
was the mistress of King Stanislas, and perhaps Madame du Châtelet’s
predecessor in the heart of Saint-Lambert, also came to Ferney.
Boufflers was travelling _incognito_ as a young French artist. He did
not forget to write and tell his mother of his warm reception by her old
acquaintance. Voltaire, with that rare adaptability of his, easily
accommodated himself to his guest’s youth and treated him _en camarade_;
while Boufflers, on his part, drew with his artist’s pencil a clever
rough sketch of his host when he was losing at chess with Father Adam.
A further distraction from “Tolerance” and the Calas came in the shape
of the first public performance of “Olympie” in Paris, on March 17,
1764. It had already been named by the public “O l’impie!”--a title the
author was by no means going to apply to himself; while as for it
applying to the piece--“Nothing is more pious. I am only afraid that it
will not be good for anything but to be played in a convent of nuns on
the abbess’s birthday.”
“Olympie” was well received. But it was feeble, in spite of those many
alterations of which the indefatigable author vigorously said “You must
correct if you are eighty. I cannot bear old men who say ‘I have taken
my bent.’ Well, then, you old fools, take another!”
He also said that he had written it chiefly to put in notes at the end
on suicide, the duties of priests, and other subjects in which he was
interested; so it was not wonderful that even his friends had to own it
a failure.
When another play of his, called “The Triumvirate,” was performed in
July--purporting to be the work of an ex-Jesuit, and having cost its
dauntless master more trouble in rewriting and altering than any of his
other pieces--it was confessed a disaster by everyone.
But, after all, both pieces had served as a distraction to their author;
so they had their worth and use.
Another event in the spring of 1764 also changed the current of his
thoughts, turned them back to his far-away youth, and to the strifes and
weariness of a Court he had renounced for ever. On April 15th died
Madame de Pompadour. Voltaire was not behindhand in acknowledging that
he owed her much. To be sure, she had supported “that detestable
Crébillon’s detestable ‘Catilina,’” and had not been always a faithful
friend in other respects; but she had been as faithful as her position
permitted. She had had, too “a just mind”: she “thought aright.”
Of the easy manner in which Voltaire and his century regarded her morals
it need only be said that it affords an excellent insight into theirs.
“Cornélie-Chiffon” (as Voltaire called Marie Dupuits) “gave us a
daughter” in June. Before that date, Mademoiselle Dupuits, her
sister-in-law, portioned out of the “Corneille Commentary,” had been
married. Ferney was the resort of innumerable English, who came to see
M. de Voltaire’s plays, and told him what they thought of them with
their native candour. The first volume of “The Philosophical Dictionary”
slipped out in July, 1764, anonymously, “smelling horribly of the
fagot.” Voltaire of course swore industriously that he had nothing to
do with that “infernal Portatif,” and of course deceived nobody.
In September, he smuggled it, by a very underhand trick and with the
connivance of some booksellers of Geneva, into that town.
His friends, the Tronchins, were so angry at the _ruse_ that through
their agency the “Dictionary” was burnt there in the same month by the
executioner.
And then that great work, the rehabilitation of the Calas, was completed
at last. In June, 1764, the new trial had been begun. On March 9, 1765,
exactly three years since he had paid for it the extreme penalty of that
savage law, Calas was declared innocent of the murder of his son. With
his innocence was re-established that of his whole family, of Jeannette
Viguière, and of young Lavaysse. The accused had to constitute
themselves prisoners at the Conciergerie as a matter of form. There all
their friends visited them, including Damilaville, who wrote of the
visit to Voltaire. Still well known is Carmontel’s famous engraving of
this prison scene, with Lavaysse reading to the family, including
Jeannette, his “Memoir” on their case.
The Council who tried them had five sittings, each four hours in length,
and a sixth which lasted eight hours. There were forty judges who were
unanimous in their verdict--“Perfectly innocent.”
As all the money subscribed for Madame Calas by Voltaire’s efforts had
been swallowed up in law expenses and long journeys, these forty judges
petitioned the King for a grant to her and her children. And his Majesty
presented them with handsome gifts of money. The family then asked him
if he would object to them suing the Toulouse magistrates for damages.
But of this course Voltaire disapproved. “Let well alone,” he said in
substance: and they did.
It must be observed that not only had the sullen Parliament of Toulouse
put every obstacle in the way of the new trial taking place, but that it
never ratified the judgment of the Council of Paris. But that mattered
little. The worst that Toulouse could do was done.
One of the magistrates, the infamous David de Beaudrigue, “paid dearly
for the blood of the Calas.” In February, 1764, he was degraded from his
office. He afterwards committed suicide. That innocent blood was indeed
on him and his children. His grandson fell a victim to the fury of the
tigers of the Revolution, who had not forgotten the drama of the Rue des
Filatiers.
When the courier came with the news of the verdict to Ferney, young
Donat Calas was with Voltaire, and Voltaire said that his old eyes wept
as many tears as the boy’s. In a passion of delight he wrote to
Cideville that this was the most splendid fifth act ever seen on a
stage.
But he had not done with the Calas yet. The King’s gifts of money were
insufficient. So Voltaire got up subscriptions for engravings of
Carmontel’s picture, and made all his rich friends subscribe handsomely
for copies. One hung over his own bed for the rest of his life.
Peter and Donat Calas settled in Geneva. When in 1770 their mother and
Lavaysse visited them there, they all came on to Ferney. Voltaire said
that he cried like a child. He never forgot to do everything in his
power to benefit and help the two young men, and gave at least one of
them employment in his weaving industry when he established it at
Ferney.
The Calas case was not without wide results on current literature, art,
and the drama.
Coquerel, who wrote a history of the case, states that there are no
fewer than one hundred and thirteen publications relating to it. It
forms the subject of ten plays and “seven long poems.”
Besides Carmontel’s engraving, there are pictures of “Jean Calas saying
Good-bye to his Family,” “Voltaire promising his support to the Calas
Family,” and many others.
But its most important, its one immortal result, was the “Treatise on
Tolerance”--the work of the man without whom Calas would never have been
avenged, and _l’infâme_ been left unchecked till the Revolution.
It is hardly possible to overestimate the nobility of Voltaire’s part in
the redemption of the Calas.
A man who did not love him said justly that such a deed would cover a
multitude of sins. “_Oh mon amie! le bel emploi du génie!_” wrote
Diderot to Mademoiselle Voland.... “What are the Calas to him? Why
should he stop the work he loves to defend them? If there were a Christ,
surely Voltaire would be saved.”
When one reflects on the enormous expenditure of time, labour, and money
the case required of him, and the fact that he thoroughly knew the value
of each, Diderot’s words do not seem greatly exaggerated.
To suppose he had any thought of his own glory in the matter is not
reasonable. He persistently gave the lion’s share of the credit to Élie
de Beaumont. He himself had already as much fame as man could want. If
he _had_ wanted more, he knew to it a thousand avenues quicker and safer
than the long Via Dolorosa of a legal reparation.
That kind of fame would only endanger his person and prestige, and make
his chances of being well received by King and Court weaker than ever.
But that he _did_ recognise Calas as one of the best works of his nobler
self seems likely from a trifling incident.
Thirteen years later, on his last visit to Paris, someone, seeing the
crowds that surrounded him whenever he went out into the street, asked a
poor woman who this person was who was so much followed.
“It is the saviour of the Calas,” she replied.
No flattery, no honour, no acclamation of that glorious time gave
Voltaire, it is said, so keen a pleasure as that simple answer.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
THE SIRVENS AND LA BARRE
Desnoiresterres has well observed that this mad eighteenth century
produced the extraordinary anomaly of being at once that of scepticism
and intolerance, of the most degraded superstition and the most
barefaced irreligion. It might be thought--it is generally thought--that
persecution would certainly not proceed from persons who were too
indifferent to their faith to make the slightest attempt to live up to
it. But if the history of religious hatred be closely followed,
it will be seen that it is precisely these persons who are the
cruellest persecutors. Perhaps they act on that old principle of
compensation--“Give me the desire of my soul, and the gratification of
my flesh, and by the scaffold, the torture, and the wheel, I will bring
souls to the faith _I_ only profess.” There seems no other explanation
of the fact that this “rotten age whose armies fled without a fight
before a handful of men; this age which laughed at everything and cared
for nothing but wit,” was as fiercely intolerant and besottedly bigot as
the age of Ignatius Loyola and Catherine de’ Medici.
The case of Calas was but one of many. It was not finished when another,
scarcely less sombre and terrible, was brought under Voltaire’s notice.
In 1760 there lived near fanatic Toulouse, at a place called Castres, a
Protestant family of the name of Sirven. Sirven _père_, aged about
fifty-one, was a professional _feudiste_; that is to say, he was a
person learned in feudal tenures, who kept registers and explained the
obsolete terms of ancient leases, and thus was brought much in contact
with the great families of the province. Thoroughly honest, honourable,
and respectable, his wife shared these qualities with him. They had
three daughters--Marie Anne, who was now married, Jeanne and Elizabeth,
who both lived at home.
Elizabeth, the youngest, was feeble-minded: but on that very account--on
that old, tender parental principle of making up by love for the cruelty
of fortune--she was the dearest to her parents. On March 6, 1760, the
poor girl suddenly disappeared. After vainly hunting for her all day,
when Sirven reached his home at night he was told that the Bishop of
Castres desired to see him. He went. The Bishop informed him that
Elizabeth, whose deficient brain was certainly not equal to weighing the
_pros_ and _cons_ of different religions, had ardently desired to become
a Roman Catholic, and that to receive instruction in that faith she had
been placed in the Convent of the Black Ladies. The poor father received
the news more calmly than might have been expected. He said that he had
no idea his daughter wished to change her religion; but that if the
change was to be for her good and happiness, he would not oppose it.
The situation was a strange one. But it had a very common solution. The
Bishop had a strong-minded sister who had caught that “epidemic of the
time,” which the infected called religious zeal.
Meanwhile poor Elizabeth in her convent, having been first “taught her
catechism by blows,” as Voltaire said, began, like many another weak
intellect under strong suggestion, to see visions and to dream dreams.
She became, in short, what a nun might call a saint, but what a doctor
would call a lunatic. The Black Ladies declared that she implored them
to corporally chastise her for the good of her soul; and it was
certainly a fact that when she was returned to her parents in the
October of 1760, quite insane, her body was “covered with the marks of
the convent whip.” If her father complained loudly of her treatment,
such complaints, though natural, were infinitely imprudent. My Lord
Bishop and the authorities kept a very keen official eye on M. Sirven,
and harried him on the subject of his daughter whenever a chance
offered. The sheep had gone back to the wolves, the brand to the
burning. Rome never yet sat down with folded hands, as other Churches
have done, and calmly watched her children desert her.
In the July of 1761 the Sirvens moved to a village called St. Alby, that
Sirven might be near some business on which he was engaged.
On December 17, 1761, when he was staying at the château of a M.
d’Esperandieu, for whom he was working, Elizabeth slipped out of her
home at night, and never returned. Her mother and sister had at once
given notice of her disappearance, and prayed that a search might be
made. Sirven, called home, arrived on the morning of the 18th, and
caused a still further search to be prosecuted. But in vain. A fortnight
passed. On January 3, 1762, the unhappy father, who fancied, not
unnaturally, that Elizabeth might have been decoyed away by her Roman
friends, had to go in pursuit of his trade to a place called Burlats.
That same night the body of Elizabeth was discovered in a well at St.
Alby.
The authorities were at once communicated with, and the judge of
Mazamet, the David de Beaudrigue of the case. The body was taken to the
Hôtel de Ville. There was abundant local testimony to the effect that
the poor girl, had often been seen looking into the well, muttering to
herself. The case was clearly one of suicide or misadventure. Either was
possible. But that it was one of the two was morally certain.
A lodger in the Sirvens’ house at St. Alby could swear that only the
footsteps of one person had been heard descending the stairs of the
house on the night of December 17th, before Jeanne had hastened to those
lodgers and told them of Elizabeth’s flight. In addition to this, while
the poor girl herself had been tall and strong, her mother was feeble
and old; her married sister, who was staying with her parents, was also
feeble and in ill-health; and Elizabeth could easily have resisted
Jeanne, had she attempted, unaided, to be her murderess.
Singly, then, none of the three could have killed Elizabeth; and that
they had done it together, apart from the inherent improbability and the
inhuman nature of such a crime, there was not an iota of evidence to
prove. As in the case of Calas, no cries had been heard, and there were
no signs of a struggle.
As for Sirven himself, he could declare an _alibi_. On the night in
question he had supped and slept at the château of M. d’Esperandieu.
But such evidence, or any evidence, weighed nothing with a people who
had at the moment innocent Calas in irons in the dungeon of Toulouse.
“It passes for fact among the Catholics of the province,” wrote Voltaire
in irony that came very near to being the literal truth, “that it is one
of the chief points of the Protestant religion that fathers and mothers
should hang, strangle, or drown all their children whom they suspect of
having any _penchant_ for the Roman faith.” Sirven’s public, like
Calas’s, had “a need of dramatic emotion enough to change truth into a
legend.”
What use to examine the body? No facts will alter _our_ conviction.
Beaudrigue, savage bigot though he was, had known his profession; the
Beaudrigue of this case, Trinquier, the judge of Mazamet, was a little
ignorant tradesman, who through the whole affair showed himself to be a
tool in clever hands, a wire pulled--at Rome.
At first, Sirven was mad enough to rely on his own innocence, and the
innocence of his family, to save them all. January 6 to 10, 1762, was
spent in examining the witnesses. The honest Catholic villagers of St.
Alby bore testimony to a man in favour of Sirven. But the attitude of
the doctors who examined the body might well have alarmed him. It
alarmed his friends; on their advice he employed an _avocat_, Jalabert.
Jalabert was devoted and expert. But the devotion of a saint and the
brilliancy of a genius would not have helped the Sirvens.
They were charged with the murder of Elizabeth, and instantly took their
decision. Proofs had not freed Calas--why should they save them?
Remembering the fury of the people of Toulouse, “they fled while there
was yet time.”
They stayed at their old home, Castres, at the house of a friend, for
one night. Under the cover of the next they walked through rain, mire,
and darkness to five-miles distant Roquecombe. So far, they had at least
been together.
But they saw very clearly now that they could not hope to escape notice
if they travelled _en famille_.
On January 21st or 22d, the unhappy father tore himself from them, and
for a month remained hidden among the mountains, only ten miles from
Castres. Then he moved on. Through the snows of an icy winter he crossed
the frontier, arrived at Geneva, and early in the April of 1762, at
Lausanne.
His family, after having endured infinite perils and hardships, arrived
there in June. On the way, among the glaciers and in the bitter cold of
a mountain winter, Marie Anne had borne a dead child.
They had one consolation. Their flight was not unnecessary. Three
Declarations had been published against them; though it was not until
March 29, 1764, that the court formally sentenced the parents to be
hanged, and the daughters to witness that execution, and then to
perpetual banishment under pain of death.
On September 11th this sentence was carried out in effigy.
By that time the generous republicans of Berne had given Madame and her
daughters, who were living at Lausanne, a little pension; their property
having, of course, been confiscated to the King. Père Sirven was working
at his trade at Geneva, and so was a near neighbour of Voltaire’s.
Moultou, the friend and correspondent of Rousseau, brought the Sirvens
one day to Ferney. Voltaire already knew their history. But the time was
not ripe for another Quixotic knight-errantry. Calas was not yet
vindicated. Apart from the inordinate amount of work it would entail, to
take a second case in hand might militate against the interests of the
first. Then the affair of the Sirvens would present far greater legal
difficulties. They had fled the kingdom. They would have to be
acquitted, if they were to be acquitted, not by the Parliament of Paris,
but by the Parliament of Toulouse. And Voltaire was too much of an
artist not to be perfectly aware that this cause would not have the
_éclat_ and the dramatic effects of the Calas’. “It lacked a scaffold.”
But when the Sirvens clung with tears about his feet and implored him,
as the saviour of Calas, to save them also--“What was I to do? What
would you have done in my place?” “It is impossible to picture so much
innocence and so much wretchedness.” When the d’Argentals reproached him
as unwise, “Here are too many parricide lawsuits indeed,” he wrote.
“But, my dear angels, whose fault is that?” And, again, as his excuse,
“I have only done in the horrible disasters of Calas and the Sirvens
what all men do: I have followed my bent. That of a philosopher is not
to pity the unfortunate, but to serve them.” He records himself how a
priest said to him, “Why interfere? Let the dead bury their dead”; and
how he replied, “I have found an Israelite by the roadside: let me give
him a little oil and wine for his wounds. You are the Levite: let me be
the Samaritan.”
That priest’s answer, if any, is not recorded.
In short the thing was done.
On March 8, 1765, the day before the Calas suit was triumphantly
concluded, Voltaire wrote joyfully that the generous Élie de Beaumont
would also defend the Sirvens. After that March 9th Voltaire could throw
himself yet more thoroughly into the case. Calas is vindicated! So shall
the Sirvens be!
But if there had been need for patience in the first affair, there was a
hundred times greater need in the second.
The Parliament of Toulouse declined to give up its papers, as it had
declined before. And then that flight--“the reason of their condemnation
is in their flight. They are judged by contumacy.”
In June, too, the death of Madame Sirven--“of her sorrows”--removed a
most important and most valuable witness for the defence. Then the
Sirvens had no money. Voltaire had to supply all--brains, wealth,
influence, labour, literary talent. For seven years he worked the case
with an energy that never tired, an enthusiasm that never cooled. When
it had been going on for four years, he wrote that it “agitated all his
soul.” “This ardour, this fever, this perpetual exaltation”--what
worker, however hot and persevering he fancy himself, is not ashamed by
it, and astounded?
Voltaire wrote Memoirs for the Sirvens. He won over the disapproving
d’Argentals to be as “obstinate” about it (the phrase is his own) as he
was himself. He got up a subscription to which the great Frederick and
the great Catherine of Russia gave generously; and Madame Geoffrin made
her _protégé_, Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski--now King of
Poland--contribute too.
Finally, Voltaire succeeded in persuading Sirven to return to Mazamet,
where the case was re-tried; and on December 25, 1771, when Voltaire was
seventy-seven years old, the Parliament of Toulouse met and completely
exculpated the accused. As Voltaire said, it had taken them two hours to
condemn innocence, and nine years to give it justice. Still, the thing
was done.
In 1772, the Sirvens came to Ferney to thank their benefactor, and
afforded him one of the highest of human pleasures: “the sight of a
happiness which was his own work.”
The year 1765, in which Voltaire showed so much public spirit, was not
privately uneventful. In it he gave up Délices, which he had bought in
1755, and whose place Ferney had altogether usurped in his heart. In
1829, Délices was still in possession of the Tronchin family, from whom
Voltaire had rented it. In 1881, it was a girls’ school.
In 1766, he also gave up the lease of Chêne, his house in Lausanne.
In the January of 1765, Voltaire and Frederick the Great were again
reconciled after a quarrel and a break in their correspondence which had
lasted four years. Frederick, forsooth, had chosen to take as a personal
insult the fact that Voltaire should waste his talents writing that
stupid history about “the wolves and bears of Siberia”! And why in the
world should he want to dedicate his “Tancred” to that old enemy of the
Prussian monarch’s, Madame de Pompadour? Voltaire, on his side, was
minded to write any history he chose, and dedicate his plays to anybody
he liked, and would thank Frederick not to interfere.
Then, at the end of 1764 he hears that Frederick is ill--and to the wind
with both his heat and his coldness at once.
Frederick replied rather witheringly to the peace overtures on January
1, 1765: “I supposed you to be so busy crushing _l’infâme_ ... that I
did not dare to presume you would think of anything else.”
But the ice was broken. Both succumbed to the old, old, fatal, potent
charm. They wrote to each other about “once a fortnight”; discussed
everything in heaven and earth; and until they should be mortal enemies
again, were, once more, more than friends.
Frederick was once again, too, the friend not only of Voltaire, but of
Voltaire’s country. The Seven Years’ War had been concluded in 1763 by
the peace of Hubertsburg. Frederick kept Silesia; and France, with her
feeble ministry and her doddering King, lost, to England, Canada, Saint
Vincent, Grenada, Minorca.
Changes were rife elsewhere too. Voltaire’s friend Elizabeth, Empress of
Russia, had died in 1762, and was succeeded nominally by the miserable
Peter, but really by his wife, Catherine the Great. In 1763, Peter
disappeared under strong suspicions of poison, and Catherine reigned in
his stead.
Many kings and potentates have been named the Great, but few so justly
as Catherine.
If she was the perpetrator of great crimes, this woman of
three-and-thirty was, even at her accession, of vast genius, of
extraordinary capacity as a ruler, broad and liberal in her aims, and an
enlightened lover of the arts. She declared that since 1746 she had been
under the greatest obligations to Voltaire; that his letters had formed
her mind. With the telepathy of intellect, these two master-minds had
from their different corners of the world detected each other’s
greatness. They never met in the flesh. But from their correspondence it
is easy to see their close spiritual affinity. Their earliest letters,
which are preserved, date from the July of this 1765.
Voltaire shocked even Paris and Madame du Deffand by the airy way in
which he took that little peccadillo of the Empress’s, “that _bagatelle_
about a husband.” “Those are family affairs,” he said, not without a
wicked twinkle in his eyes, “with which I do not mix myself.” It is
certain that, whether or no he believed Catherine a murderess, he
regarded her as a great woman and served her when he could.
There came an opportunity in August. Her Majesty is pleased to admire
girls’ education as conducted in Switzerland, and sends Count Bülow to
arrange for a certain number of Swiss governesses to be brought to
Moscow and Petersburg to instruct the noble _jeunes filles_ of those
cities.
Splendid idea! says Voltaire. But that “_bagatelle_ about a husband”
weighs on the Puritan conscience of Geneva. It is extraordinary now to
think that any civilised Government could have dared so to interfere
with personal liberty as to prevent women over age going to teach anyone
they chose, anywhere they liked. But this is precisely what Geneva did.
Voltaire was exceedingly angry. The refusal reflected on him. But he had
done his best for Catherine, though in vain.
While this little affair was going on, a new friend, the young
playwright La Harpe, of whom Voltaire was to see more hereafter, and an
old friend, whom he had not seen for seventeen years, were both staying
with him at Ferney.
On July 30th had arrived there “the sublime Clairon.” She had been the
first actress of her day when Voltaire had known her in Paris. Now she
was the finest tragic actress of the eighteenth century, and in the rich
maturity of her two-and-forty years a most clever and cultivated woman.
She had helped Voltaire’s plays enormously; some she had made for him.
He said so, at least. Further, she was one of the philosophers. In 1761
she had protested against the excommunication of actors as a class; and
Voltaire, remembering Adrienne Lecouvreur, had seconded her with all the
force and irony of his style.
When she reached Ferney her host was so ill that she had to declaim her
_rôle_ in his “Orphan of China,” which cured him on the spot. Part of
her visit he hobbled about on crutches, crippled by an attack of
sciatica and half blind from an affection of the eyes, but as mentally
lively and alert as if he had had both of those requisites for
happiness, “the body of an athlete and the soul of a sage.”
Mademoiselle was not well herself, and under Tronchin. But she went on
acting against the express orders of that good physician. It was in her
blood, as it was in Voltaire’s. He had entirely rebuilt his theatre for
her. He went quite mad over her superb talent; and declared that for the
first time in his life he had seen perfection in any kind. Blind though
his avuncular affection might be, when he beheld Clairon in the flesh he
did not suggest that Madame Denis (who, with her sister, was acting too)
could in any way be her rival.
Clairon was still at Ferney in August. Soon after she left, that
faithful Damilaville paid a visit there; and during the summer had come,
under the chaperonage of Lord Abingdon, the famous John Wilkes.
“Voltaire is obliging to me beyond all description” was Wilkes’s record
of his reception; while Voltaire, on his part, bore enthusiastic
testimony to the great demagogue’s inexhaustible life and wit.
On the 8th or 9th of that August, when Voltaire was acting or telling
stories, nimbly gesticulating with those crutches, events of sinister
importance to him, and of importance to all men who hated _l’infâme_,
were taking place in Abbeville.
On one of those days, two large crucifixes in the town, one on a bridge,
the other in a cemetery, were shamefully and blasphemously mutilated.
The town was naturally very angry. It set itself busily to work to find
the culprits. A few days later three suspected persons, all boys under
one-and-twenty, were brought up before the authorities and questioned.
While their examination was proceeding, the Bishop of the diocese
organised a solemn procession through the streets to the places where
the sacrilege had been committed, and, kneeling there, invoked pardon
for the blasphemers in ominous words, as “men who, though not beyond the
reach of God’s mercy, had rendered themselves worthy of the severest
penalty of this world’s law.”
The mutilated crucifixes were placed in a church, to which the people
flocked in crowds, and in a temper of mind very different from that of
Him who hung there in effigy and in the supreme agony had prayed for His
murderers.
On September 26th, a formal decree of arrest was issued against the
three young men, d’Étallonde de Morival, Moisnel, and the Chevalier de
la Barre.
D’Étallonde had already fled to Prussia; partly, no doubt, because his
conscience was ill at ease, but partly, too, because he, or his friends,
knew the times and the people. In Prussia he was afterwards made,
through Voltaire’s influence, an officer in Frederick’s army.
Moisnel was a timid and foolish boy of eighteen.
Jean François Lefebre, Chevalier de la Barre, was a young Norman, not
yet twenty years old. He had been educated by a country curé. His aunt,
the Abbess of Willancourt, had given him masters, and he had rooms
assigned to him in her convent. It is thought, but is not certain, that
La Barre was in the army. What _is_ certain is that this clerical
education had been a very bad one. The Abbess, if not a wicked woman,
was certainly one who loved pleasure; who enjoyed a joke, even if it
were against the religion she professed; who gave rollicking little
supper-parties; adored her good-looking lively young scapegrace of a
nephew, and permitted him not only to sing roystering and indecent
drinking songs with foolish companions within her sacred walls, but to
keep there a library which included not only some very indecorous
books--but that little volume which “smelt of the fagot,” “The
Philosophical Dictionary.”
At her supper-parties young La Barre had often met one Duval, or
Belleval, who, it is said, had been in love with the Abbess, and was not
a little jealous of her handsome nephew. It was Duval who had heard
young La Barre chant Rabelaisian ditties, and quote “what he could
recollect” from the “Pucelle” and the “Epistle to Uranie.” It was Duval
who hated him, and Duval who denounced him.
On October 1, 1765, La Barre was arrested in the Abbey of Longvilliers,
near Montreuil. Moisnel was also arrested.
On October 4th, the Abbess burnt her nephew’s library, which would have
been a prudent act if she had done it thoroughly, but she did not. On
October 10th, the authorities searched the boy’s rooms, and found in a
press some indecent literature--_and_ that “Philosophical Dictionary.”
After five cross-examinations, unhappy young Moisnel said practically
what his judges told him to say, not only respecting himself, but
respecting La Barre. He swore that d’Étallonde had mutilated the
crucifixes, an assertion to which La Barre also swore. D’Étallonde was
safe in Prussia. Moisnel, who was delicate in health and in horrible
fear of death, lost in the trial the very little sense he had ever had.
Young La Barre, on the other hand, kept all his pluck, wit, and
coolness.
To a charge that, on the Feast of the Holy Sacrament, he and his two
companions had lingered near a religious procession in the street, and
neither knelt nor uncovered as reverence and custom demanded, he pleaded
“Guilty.” He was in a hurry, he said, and had no evil intentions.
To the charge that to a person who bade him take another route if he
could not behave himself, he had replied that he looked upon the Host as
nothing but a piece of pastry and for his part could not swallow all the
apostolic assertions, he answered that he might have used some such
words.
It is not unworthy of remark that, though under torture he confessed to
having mutilated the crucifix in the cemetery, the judges discovered no
proof, and no proof ever was discovered, that he had mutilated the
crucifix on the bridge. It is very much more remarkable that in his
sentence the affair of the crucifixes was not even mentioned, and that
he and absent d’Étallonde were condemned for “impiously and deliberately
walking before the Host without kneeling or uncovering; uttering
blasphemies against God, the Saints, and the Church; singing blasphemous
songs, and rendering marks of adoration to profane books.”
Now it will be allowed by any fair-minded person--whatever be his
religion or irreligion--that to thus insult a faith, dear to millions of
people for hundreds of generations, merited a sharp punishment.
As Voltaire said, “it deserved Saint Lazare.”
On February 28, 1766, d’Étallonde and La Barre were condemned to have
their tongues torn out with hot irons, their right hands to be cut off,
and to be burnt to death by a slow fire. In the case of La Barre this
sentence was so far graciously remitted that he was to be beheaded
before he was burnt; but, on the other hand, he was further condemned to
the torture Ordinary and Extraordinary, to extract from him the names of
his accomplices. Even for that time the sentence was so brutal--“could
they have done more if he had killed his father?”--that no one believed
it would be carried out. Against absent d’Étallonde, of course, it could
not be. A public appeal was made to the King. Ten of the best _avocats_
of Paris declared the sentence illegal. La Barre was taken to the
capital, and his case retried there, where “a majority of five voices
condemned to the most horrible torments a young man only guilty of
folly.” He was taken back to Abbeville. All through the trial he had
borne himself with a high courage. It did not leave him now. He
recognised many old acquaintances on the way, and saluted them gaily. On
the last evening of his life he supped with his confessor--a priest whom
he had often met at his aunt’s gay table. “Let us have some coffee,” he
is reported to have said; “it will not prevent my sleeping.” Bravado,
perhaps. But _bravado_ and _brave_ are of the same origin. The next day,
July 1, 1766, began with the torture. On his way to the scaffold the
poor boy recognised among the cruel crowd of spectators not only many
men whom he had called friend, but, to their everlasting shame, women
too. That “barbarism which would have made even drunken savages
shudder,” the pulling out of the tongue, was so barbarous that the five
executioners only pretended to do it. On his way up to the scaffold La
Barre’s shoe dropped off. He turned and put it on again. He bound his
own eyes, and talked calmly to the executioners, and then died with “the
firmness of Socrates”--a harder death.
It is said that the executioner who cut off the head did it so cleverly
that the spectators _applauded_. The body was thrown to the flames--with
“The Philosophical Thoughts” of Diderot; the “Sopha” of the younger
Crébillon; two little volumes of Bayle; and “The Philosophical
Dictionary,” which was supposed to have inspired the indecent impiety of
which the unhappy boy had been guilty, but which certainly does inspire
a religion not so unlike the religion of Christ as the savage hatred
which killed La Barre.
The event caused a fearful sensation, even in the eighteenth century.
The victim was so young, and had so nobly played the man. To the last
moment, popular opinion had believed in a reprieve. One of the people
who so believed was Voltaire. Vague reports of the case had reached him
at first. Some young fools had been profaning a church, and then
declaring in cross-examination that they had been led to do so by the
books of the “Encyclopædia”! But then wild boys who commit drunken
frolics do not read books of philosophy!
And when the tidings of that 1st of July had come--“My dear brother, my
heart is withered.” Grimm wrote boldly and significantly of the event
that “humanity awaited an avenger.” But this time how could the avenger
be Voltaire? On the lips of all the churchmen were the words--Philosophy
hath done this thing. This is where your fine freethinking, your mental
emancipation, lead men! Certainly, it might have been answered that La
Barre was not the product of philosophy, but of the Church; educated by
a curé, finished by my Lady Abbess; sheltered, after his sin, in the
Abbey of Longvilliers; given for his last confessor a priestly boon
companion of those wild suppers at the convent. If the philosophers
mocked at religion, what of the licentious priests of that wicked day?
Châteauneuf, Chaulieu, Desfontaines--the names of a score of others must
have come to Voltaire’s lips. This boy had put the teaching of such men
into action. The more fool he; but not the greater criminal. There were
a thousand excuses for him; and “tears come easily for the youth which
has committed sins which in ripe age it would have redeemed.”
But Voltaire, with a guilty conscience one may hope, seems to have
remembered that he had written not only “The Philosophical Dictionary,”
but the ribald “Pucelle.” He might thereby have had some hand in La
Barre’s undoing; and when he saw that men flung the whole responsibility
for that sin on him and his brothers, the Encyclopædists, he feared.
By July 14th he had gone to Rolle in Vaud. He had been there in the
spring for his health; now he went for his safety.
But, safe or dangerous, he must write his view of the case. By the 22d
of the same month his account of “The Death of the Chevalier de la
Barre” was complete. Clear, masterly, succinct, it is perhaps one of the
finest tracts in the cause of humanity ever written, even by Voltaire
himself. On July 25th, he was asking clever young Élie de Beaumont if
there was any law, date 1681, by which those guilty of indecent
impieties could be sentenced to death. He had himself looked everywhere
in vain; which was not wonderful. There was no such law. The ignorance
and fanaticism of the judges had “supposed its existence.” “This
barbarity occupies me day and night.” True, La Barre was past the reach
of human help. But Voltaire could hope that his cries “might frighten
the carnivorous beasts from others.” They did that. The popular fury to
which he gave mighty voice saved feeble Moisnel. After La Barre’s death
the judges did not dare to proceed with the suit.
In 1775, when d’Étallonde was staying with him at Ferney, Voltaire wrote
a pamphlet called “The Cry of Innocent Blood,” which had as its object
the restitution of his civil rights to that young officer, to whom
Frederick had accorded a long leave of absence. If he never obtained
that restitution or full justification for the memory of La Barre, at
least he never ceased to try. He worked the case for twelve years, and
his labours were only stopped by death.
Partly for his own safety; partly in horror of a country which could
sanction a vengeance so awful; partly in longing for an Elysium where he
and his brothers might live and speak as free men, in this July of 1766,
at Rolle, this boy Voltaire conceived the mad and hot-headed scheme of
retiring, with all the enlightened, to Cleves, and forming there a
literary society, with a printing press.
A dream! A dream! The other philosophers would not entertain the idea
for a moment. Some of them, at least, felt “little suppers and the
_opéra-comique_” to be among the necessities of existence. D’Alembert,
chief of them all, who had refused the Presidency of the Berlin Academy
and to be tutor to Catherine the Great’s son for a quiet life, and
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, was not going to be tempted from either--for
Cleves!
“I see,” wrote Voltaire, “that M. Boursier” (which was one of his
innumerable _noms de guerre_) “will have no workmen.” So he went back to
Ferney.
“The suit and the sacrifice of the Chevalier de la Barre remain one of
the indelible stains with which the magistracy of the eighteenth century
tarnished and defiled its robes.”
That “Philosophical Dictionary”--of which the thin first volume had been
burnt with La Barre; which in March, 1765, had been publicly destroyed
in Paris by the hangman; which Rome anathematised, and of which liberal
London had already demanded a fifth edition--is one of the greatest of
Voltaire’s works, and one which should still be popular. It stands
alone, without rival or counterpart. Brief articles on an enormous
variety of subjects gave infinite scope for Voltaire’s versatility.
Since he had written that first article, “Abraham,” which had made even
sullen Frederick laugh, the thing had been its author’s commonplace
book. If an article is too daring even for the “Encyclopædia”--put it in
the “Dictionary.” If one feels gay, write buffoonery; or seriously,
write with passion. The “Dictionary” had room for everything. Mockery,
sarcasm, lightness, wit, gaiety, profundity, the most earnest thought,
the most burning zeal, banter, irony, audacity--they are all here. “The
Philosophical Dictionary” has well been said to be “the whole of citizen
Voltaire.”
He had smuggled it into Geneva, and then gaily and without a pang of
conscience denied that he had anything to do with its authorship. “If
there is the least danger about it, please warn me, and then I can
disown it in all the public papers with my usual candour and innocence.”
He kept it by his side, and wrote, now in this mood, now in that, first
one article and then another, until it numbered eight volumes.
Even in this age of many books there is always room for another, if it
be sufficiently piquant and out of the common. The astonishing variety
of the subjects, and the not less marvellous versatility of the style,
the ease, the life and the humour of those eight volumes are qualities
which may well appeal to the most jaded of modern readers. Its frequent
profanity, indeed, is a blot dyed too deeply into the texture of the
book to be eradicable by any editor. But, apart from this, to the bored
person--always in search of a new literary sensation, of something which
has not been done a thousand times before, of something that will not be
done a thousand times again--may be well recommended a volume of “The
Philosophical Dictionary.”
CHAPTER XXXIX
VOLTAIRE AND GENEVA: VOLTAIRE AND LA HARPE
Now Voltaire was not only genius and philanthropist, he was also a
country gentleman.
He played the part to the life. He amicably exchanged seeds and bulbs
with his neighbours, and admired their gardens in return for their
admiration of his; he invited them to dinner-parties and theatricals;
and, like many another of his class, could not for the life of him help
interfering in local politics.
Geneva was a republic. But its constitution was not to modern ideas--or
to Voltaire’s ideas--at all republican.
In the governing class, which consisted of the Great Council of Two
Hundred, the Little Council of Twenty-Five, and the Consistory of the
Clergy, the people were not represented at all.
These people were divided into the shopkeepers, or Bourgeoisie, who
demanded a share of political power; and the journeymen mechanics, who
were not only without any political rights, but could not even set up in
business for themselves, occupy any official post, or go into the
liberal professions. These (so-called) Natives, a very large class, were
the descendants of foreigners who had settled in Geneva. They asked for
the rights enjoyed by the Bourgeoisie; while the Bourgeoisie, scornfully
refusing the demands of the Natives, themselves asked for some of the
privileges enjoyed by the Councils.
Voltaire, now as ever, was on the side not of the governing class, but
of the people who had a right to share in the government, but did not;
and, now as ever, he was irresistibly tempted to interfere in what was
not his business.
In the autumn of 1765, “in spite of Espinas, Calas, and Sirven, who
surround me; of wheels, gallows, galleys, and confiscations; and of
Chevaliers de la Barre who do not precisely pour balm in the blood,” he
began to take upon himself the highly unnecessary and stormy _rôle_ of
peacemaker between the Genevan Bourgeoisie and Magistracy.
He first tried to get up some mediatory dinner-parties at Ferney, at
which the heads of these two parties were to meet and amicably discuss
their differences! The Council of Twenty-Five responded with a chilly
dignity that it was very much obliged to M. de Voltaire, but it was not
going to settle political disputes in _that_ way; while four of the
Bourgeoisie joyfully accepted so pleasant an invitation, and arrived at
Ferney in M. de Voltaire’s carriage, graciously sent for their
convenience.
These four guests showed such a sweet reasonableness on all topics under
discussion, that, says Voltaire, writing to that haughty Council, there
is surely hope of a reconciliation?
The Council, in response, will be obliged if the Lord of Ferney will
consider the matter closed.
Not he.
At the request of the Bourgeoisie he drew up a document stating their
claims, sent it to France and begged her to step in and settle the
dispute.
She selected as mediator her new envoy at Geneva, M. Hennin, who arrived
on December 16, 1765, whose mediation did not prosper at all, but who
was, and remained, much Voltaire’s friend.
By this time the Bourgeoisie had become not a little aggressive and
dictatorial, and the long mediatory dinner-parties had begun to bore
Voltaire.
After all, the most oppressed class were the Natives. Two of them called
at Ferney, and presently brought its lord a written statement of their
grievances against the Bourgeoisie, which were not few or slight. He
promised help, entered into the smallest details, and dismissed them
with memorable words: “You are the largest part of a free and
industrious people, and you are in slavery.... If you are forced to
leave a country which your labours make prosperous, I shall still be
able to help and protect you.”
He wrote a little introductory letter to that statement which the
Natives purposed to present to M. de Beauteville, the new mediator sent
by France, to succeed, if that might be, where Hennin had failed.
“What is the Third Estate?” said the Abbé Sieyès. “Nothing.” “What ought
it to be? Everything.”
In 1766 it was nothing. In the eye of the law, said de Beauteville, it
positively did not exist.
He dismissed the petition with contumacy, and sent the Natives to the
Councils, who received them in the same way.
Then M. de Voltaire himself wrote a petition for them; but before they
sent it to the mediators (three had now been appointed, one by France,
one by Berne, one by Geneva), he warned them of their probable failure,
in a prophecy which Geneva long remembered. “You are like little
flying-fish. Out of the water, you are eaten by birds of prey; in it, by
larger fish. You are between two equally powerful parties: you will fall
victims to the interests of one or the other, or perhaps of both
together.”
When the petition was presented on April 28, 1766, the unlucky Natives
were threatened with imprisonment if they did not reveal its authorship.
They did. Notwithstanding, a few days later, Auzière, their leader, was
thrown into prison, a result Voltaire had long foreseen. Here the affair
ended, for a time at least. Voltaire summed up his own position, with
his usual neatness, in writing to d’Argental on May 6th. “The Natives
say that I take the part of the Bourgeois, and the Bourgeois that I take
the part of the Natives. The Natives and Bourgeois both pretend I pay
too much deference to the Councils, and the Councils say I am too
friendly to both the Bourgeois and Natives.”
The Councils, in point of fact, were exceedingly angry with Voltaire, to
whom happened precisely what happens to the foolish person who separates
fighting dogs. The dogs growl at him and begin fighting again, and their
master considers his interference uncommonly impertinent.
The air of Geneva was sultry with storms in this season of 1766; or
Voltaire had upon him one of those pugnacious moods in which he had rent
limb from limb Pompignan, Fréron, Desfontaines. To be sure, he seldom
gave the first blow; but the moment he saw a chance of a fight he was as
agog to join in it at seventy-two as he had been at twenty-two.
The Protestant minister called Jacob Vernet was the unlucky person who
offended him now. Vernet was clever, and himself a writer. He had been
friendly with Voltaire until 1757, when he sharply criticised the “Essay
on the Manners and Mind of Nations.” Then they further fell out on that
vexed topic, a theatre in Geneva; and when d’Alembert’s famous article
appeared in the “Encyclopædia,” Vernet broke off all intercourse with
Voltaire, telling him the reason. Then Vernet drew a portrait of
Voltaire in his “Critical Letters of an English Traveller.” The likeness
was not sufficiently flattering to please the original, who thereupon
attacked Vernet in a “Dialogue between a Priest and a Protestant
Minister.” Vernet complained to the Councils that he had been libelled.
And in May, 1766, Voltaire wrote against Vernet one of the most virulent
of personal satires which ever fell from his pen--“The Praise of
Hypocrisy.” It lent his hand cunning for that kind of work. His next was
the famous poem entitled “The Civil War of Geneva.”
The excuse for this savage personal polemic was the case of one Covelle,
who in 1763 had been condemned, for an offence against morals, to make
confession of the same to the Consistory of Geneva, to kneel to the
President of the Consistory, be reprimanded, and ask pardon. He
confessed, but more than that he declined to do.
The mode of punishment has long been decided to be an unwise one.
Voltaire, always in advance of his age, considered it an unwise one
then. He took the part of Covelle, who personally was a wretched
creature, as deficient in brains as in morals. But he stood for a cause.
After having been remanded for a fortnight for consideration, he
presented to the Consistory a paper, the substance of which had been
supplied by Voltaire, and which stated that the ecclesiastical laws did
not compel kneeling to the Consistory, being reprimanded by it, or
asking pardon from it.
Covelle published this statement, or rather Voltaire did, and between my
Lord of Ferney and the authorities began a battle of pamphlets. They
fill three large volumes, and may still be seen in Geneva. Voltaire also
wrote twelve public letters in the name of Covelle, allowed him a small
pension, and then made him the hero of “The Civil War of Geneva.”
The hatred expressed in that poem redounded, as hatred is apt to do, on
the hater. Bitterness and anger are not gay. They spoilt, artistically,
“The Civil War of Geneva.”
The poem is, unluckily for Voltaire, not only a satire on parties,
though it is a satire on that retrograde and conservative faction which
he held was ruining Geneva. It is also a savage satire against
individuals. It attacks with a sudden blind fury (Voltaire having
hitherto been temperate in his dislike of him) “that monster of vanity
and contradictions, of pride and of meanness,” Jean Jacques Rousseau. It
tore Vernet’s reputation to shreds. It descended to personal insult,
and, that there might be no possible mistake, its victims were spoken of
by name. The malice kills the wit. More indecent than the “Pucelle,”
“The War of Geneva” is much less clever and amusing. A picture of a
travelling Englishman, that Lord Abingdon who had introduced Wilkes at
Ferney and must needs put _his_ spoke into the wheel of the Genevan
party quarrels, is certainly happy. The young gentleman who, with his
“phlegmatic enthusiasm,” drags his dogs and his boredom all over Europe,
and expects, no matter where he is, the mere fact of his being English
to remove all obstacles and alter all conditions which he is pleased to
dislike, will be certainly recognised as a type.
But as a whole “The Civil War of Geneva” contains Voltaire’s vices
without his virtues. The poem, like all his writings, certainly _did_
something. In 1769 the decree to which Covelle had refused to submit was
abolished. “The War of Geneva,” which was brought out canto by canto,
appeared complete in 1768.
The strife of parties which that poem celebrated, and should have
celebrated exclusively, had not been healed by the mediators sent by
France. Very well, says France--if persuasion will not do, we will try
force. By the January of 1767 French troops were quartered along the
Lake of Geneva with the view of bringing the aggravating little Genevan
republic to its senses by famine and blockade, and unlucky, and
comparatively innocent, Ferney was almost unable to get the necessaries
of life.
Voltaire was not the person to starve in silence. The soldiers were
spoiling the trees in his park; poor d’Aumard could not get his
plasters; Adam was very ill and could have neither doctor nor medicine
(“so he is sure to recover”); and the household generally lacked
everything except snow, “and we have enough of that to stock Europe.”
Choiseul must be written to! Voltaire wrote to him and pointed out that
it was not the Genevans France was punishing, but Ferney; and on January
30th Choiseul sent an order exempting Ferney from the general rule and
giving Voltaire an unlimited passport for himself and his household.
It was a very large one by now. Durey de Morsan, an amiable elderly
ne’er-do-weel, had joined it, and lived there on Voltaire’s charity,
sometimes doing a little copying in return for his board and lodging.
There was also a _protégé_ of Richelieu’s, called Gallien, who repaid
Voltaire’s hospitality with the basest ingratitude; and an ex-Capuchin
monk, known to Ferney as Richard, who, when he had been generously
entertained for two years, decamped with money, manuscripts, and jewels
belonging to his host.
And then, besides its regular inmates, there poured through the house a
continual stream of visitors. In 1766 there had stayed there Madame
Saint-Julien, a gay, good-natured, and highly connected little lady,
whom Voltaire called his “butterfly philosopher”; and La Borde,
playwright for himself, and first _valet de chambre_ for the King.
Here, too, also in 1766, had come James Boswell, Esquire, of Auchinleck,
for whose benefit M. de Voltaire is pleased to assume the manner and
style of Mr. Boswell’s great patron, and to speak of that patron as “a
superstitious dog.”
Voltaire would hardly have been his vain old French self if he had not
modified his opinion of the great Doctor when Boswell told him that
Johnson had said that Frederick the Great wrote as Voltaire’s footboy,
who had acted as his amanuensis, might do.
To be sure, when Boswell got home and asked the Doctor if he thought
Rousseau as bad a man as Voltaire, that staunch old bigot had replied,
“Why, Sir, it is difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between
them.”
But Voltaire did not know of that answer.
Also in 1766, Grétry the musician, then only five-and-twenty, had often
come over from Geneva, where he was staying, to visit Voltaire. Madame
Cramer had first introduced him. The conversation often turned on comic
opera, which Voltaire had once hated, but which, as expounded by Grétry,
he was soon to love and at seventy-four to write gaily himself.
When Grétry spoke of his host’s prodigious reputation, he records that
Voltaire characteristically replied that he would give a hundred years
of immortality for a good digestion.
Chabanon, friend of d’Alembert, musician, poet, dramatist, had also paid
a first visit here in 1766. He came back again on May 1, 1767, and
stayed seven months. He has left behind him a good account of that
visit. He evidently guessed--what not all Voltaire’s friends did
guess--that one day the world would be interested in them only as having
known Voltaire, and would be grateful to them for writing as little
about themselves, and as much about their host, as possible.
While Chabanon was at Ferney, the leisure Voltaire’s “devouring ardour”
for study allowed him was spent, of course, in play-acting. He had just
written a new play, “The Scythians,” and loved it as he always loved his
latest born. He was not a little disgusted when Ferney would have none
of it, and demanded an old favourite, “Adélaïde du Guesclin,” instead.
“I cannot think what they see in that ‘Adélaïde,’” says its author
discontentedly to Madame Denis.
Ferney and Chabanon only ratified the judgment of Paris in disliking
“The Scythians.” Played there on March 26th of this same 1767, the rude
_parterre_ had “no respect for the old age which had written it,” and
made such a noise that the first performances were “regular battles.”
There were only four in all.
The French officers of the blockading troops came _en masse_ to Ferney
in this spring to witness the theatricals. Colonel Chabrillant, the
colonel of Conti’s regiment, stayed for a long time as a guest at the
château; and if he did, after the visit, forget to write a single word
of thanks to his host or Mama Denis, why, that was a sort of ingratitude
to which Voltaire should have been accustomed.
Three companies of the same regiment were quartered in the village of
Ferney, and some of the grenadiers often came as audience to the
performances, and at least once as actors. As a reward for their
services Voltaire gave them supper and offered them money.
“We will not take anything,” they said “We have seen M. de Voltaire.
That is our payment.”
The celebrity was as delighted as a boy. My “brave grenadiers!” he
cried, and invited them all, whenever they wanted a meal or well-paid
work, to come to Ferney.
When his guests were tired of acting themselves, they could, and did,
now go to Geneva and see other people act. Through the influence of
Voltaire upon M. de Beauteville, that French envoy had so far worked
upon the prim Councils of Geneva that they had allowed a theatre to be
opened in their Puritan town in April, 1766. “Olympie” was played there,
and the loveliest comic operas. Voltaire had the whole troupe come to
Ferney, where they acted four for his benefit. The Geneva theatre had
only a short life. It was burnt in February, 1768. The townspeople hated
it so, that when they saw it in flames they made no attempt to save it.
In the light of subsequent events, it seems almost certain that Voltaire
received many of his visitors and gave many of his entertainments to
keep Madame Denis in a good temper, and reconcile her to the country
which she hated; while other festivities he arranged for the benefit of
the light-hearted young people he always liked to have about him.
When there was a supper and a dance after theatricals he himself
appeared for a moment only, and then retired to his room, which adjoined
that where, not the guests, but the servants were dancing, and where he
tranquilly worked or slept to the sound of the music. Sometimes he did
not even appear to do the honours of the house at all; and declared of
himself that he would have been dead in four days if he had not well
known how to live quietly in the midst of uproar, and alone in a mob.
He had the usual quarrel on hand to keep him busy. That conceited La
Beaumelle, who had been a thorn in his flesh in Prussia, assailed him in
the summer of 1767 with no fewer than ninety-four abusive anonymous
letters. Voltaire put the matter into the hands of the police. But in
1770 La Beaumelle, who had further complicated the situation by marrying
the sister of young Lavaysse, the Calas’ unfortunate friend, began an
objectionable commentary on Voltaire’s works, and would have finished it
but that he (La Beaumelle) died in 1773.
That Voltaire spent energy and time in trying to inspire, and that he
knew no greater delight than when he did inspire, his visitors with his
own passion for hard work in place of idle pleasure, is on the testimony
of Chabanon and of a fellow-visitor of Chabanon’s, the famous La Harpe.
La Harpe from the first came to Ferney to be a brilliant pupil to this
great past master of so many arts; to learn from the author of “Zaire”
and of “Alzire,” of “Mahomet” and of “Mérope,” of “The Princess of
Navarre,” “The Prodigal Son,” “Brutus,” and “The Scotch Girl,” how to
write every kind of play that ever playwright has written. It has been
mentioned that La Harpe had been at Ferney in 1765--part of the time
with that noblest exponent of the drama, Clairon. He was here also in
1766 with Chabanon. And now, in the beginning of 1767, he came once
again--this time with his young wife, and for a visit which lasted more
than a year.
La Harpe was a clever, arrogant, and very self-satisfied young man of
about eight-and-twenty. His tragedy, “Warwick,” produced in 1763, made
him famous in his own age. In this, he is only celebrated as the first
writer in France who “made criticism eloquent.” He had led a
disreputable youth, and had just married his landlady’s daughter as a
reparation for wrong done to her. But in that age almost everybody was
disreputable; and if virtue had been a _sine qua non_ in society, there
would have been no society at all.
Voltaire took this promising youth to his warm and sanguine old heart at
once. He was poor! He was clever! He could act! What more did one want?
With Voltaire’s help he had gained a prize at the Academy. And with
further help he should do greater things than that. Nothing is
pleasanter in Voltaire’s character as an old man than the enthusiastic
interest and delight he took in his young literary _protégés_. He worked
with them, corrected them, praised them, went into raptures over their
talents to his friends, financed them, fathered them, housed them, and
in the desire for their fame quite forgot his own.
The memorable La Harpe visit of 1767 opened under the rosiest aspects.
The little bride had the youth in which Voltaire delighted, and she
turned out to be “a comedian without knowing it.” If “The Scythians” had
been hissed in Paris, Madame de la Harpe reciting Act II. made Ferney
sob. La Harpe, too, “declaimed verses as well as he wrote them,” and was
“the best actor in France.”
So there were theatricals galore.
If thorns pricked on the rose stems and there were clouds in the bluest
of skies, it was not Voltaire who spoke of them.
It is Chabanon, the fellow-guest, who sketches La Harpe as overbearing,
impatient of correction, uncommonly quarrelsome, and quite forgetful of
the fact that his host’s position and seniority of nearly fifty years
demanded some sort of respect.
Old Voltaire was good-natured enough to criticise the young man’s plays
for him, and La Harpe received the criticisms with the sulkiness of
offended dignity. Voltaire was not patient by nature, heaven knows. But
he kept his coolness and his temper with this irritating young man to a
degree quite extraordinary. It was always “the little La Harpe,” or “my
dear child,” or “Ah! the little one is angry!” with a good-natured
laugh.
When one day the conceited visitor went so far as to rewrite some verses
in his part in Voltaire’s “Adélaïde”--“which seemed to me feeble”--“Let
us hear them, my son,” says Voltaire. And when he had heard them, as
improved by La Harpe--
“Good,” he said. “Yes, that is better. Go on making such changes. I
shall only gain by them.”
On another occasion, La Harpe, at a dinner-party of twenty persons,
recited an ode by one old foe of Voltaire’s, Pompignan, on the death of
another, J. B. Rousseau, without stating the name of the author.
“Very good,” says Voltaire. “Who wrote it?”
The audacious La Harpe makes him guess. And at last tells him.
“Pompignan.”
That name, as La Harpe himself said, was a _coup de théâtre_ indeed.
There was a silence. “Repeat the lines again,” says Voltaire. As La
Harpe repeats them, the Patriarch listens with fixed attention. “There
is no more to be said. It _is_ a beautiful stanza.”
Was this the same man whom the mere suggestion that d’Arnaud’s sun was
rising and his setting, had spurred to the folly of the Prussian visit?
Was this the man so thin-skinned that every gnat-bite of a criticism
made him raw and mad? The truth seems to be that Voltaire had a very
weak spot in his heart for La Harpe, and loved him better than his own
glory.
Not many years ago, in a grocer’s shop in Paris, was discovered an
autograph letter of Voltaire’s in which he begged the Controller-General
for a pension for his _protégé_.
“It seems to me that, M. de la Harpe having no pension, mine (from the
King) is too large by half, and that it should be divided between us.”
If this could be arranged--“La Harpe, and everyone else, can easily be
made to think that this pension is a just recompense for the services he
has rendered to literature.”
The request was not granted. La Harpe never even knew that it had been
made. But its singular generosity and delicacy are not altered by those
facts. Well might Voltaire’s bitterest enemy, Jean Jacques Rousseau,
write of him: “I know no man on earth whose impulses have been more
beautiful.”
But his treatment of La Harpe was something better even than a noble
impulse.
In the beginning of 1768, after the young couple had been guests in his
house for more than a year, and after one of them at least had received
full measure, pressed down and running over, of help, forbearance, and
kindness, Voltaire discovered that valuable manuscripts had been stolen
from him. Among others were those secret Memoirs written in 1759, which
expressed the feelings of an angry, younger Voltaire, but not of a wiser
and older one. To Paris had been sent not only copies of “The Civil War
of Geneva,” but anecdotes for his Histories which Voltaire was keeping
until the death of the persons concerned left him at liberty to publish
them.
There was a loud domestic explosion at Ferney. The strongest and gravest
suspicion fell upon La Harpe. He vehemently denied everything, and
accused a certain Antoine, a sculptor, of the crime. Antoine simply said
La Harpe was a liar.
Madame Denis, who herself was suspected of a foolish elderly _tendresse_
for La Harpe and of complicity in the affair with him, took his side,
with, one may safely assume, a torrent of eloquence. But eloquence, not
proof, was all either she or La Harpe had to offer. From his room La
Harpe, “putting arrogance in the place of repentance,” wrote his
generous old host many impertinent little notes. He might have spared
him.
Voltaire had often had manuscripts stolen from him before, and always
alas! by his own familiar friends whom he trusted. But this time he felt
the treachery with peculiar bitterness. He was not passionate and
furious as he generally was. His attitude was that of knowing La Harpe
to be guilty and longing to find him innocent. He made as little of it
as he could. “This little roguery of La Harpe’s is not serious,” he
wrote. “But it is certain and proven.” In the November of 1767 La Harpe
had been in Paris for a time, when “he gave the third canto of ‘The
Civil War of Geneva’ to three persons of my acquaintance.”
“I did not reproach him,” Voltaire wrote sadly to Hennin, “but his own
conscience did. He never alluded to the affair and looked me straight in
the face, or spoke of it without turning pale with a pallor not that of
innocence.” Still, if I can help him in the future as I have done in the
past, I shall do so; “only, if Madame Denis brings him back to Ferney I
must lock up my papers.” “His imprudence has had very disagreeable
consequences for me, but I pardon him with all my heart; he has not
sinned from malice.”
Only to his intimate friends did he admit La Harpe had sinned at all.
The sinner was dear to him. He must lie, if need be, to prove his
innocence to the world.
Naturally, the La Harpes had to go away. And since they must go, would
it not be better for their accomplice, Denis, to go too? It was not her
first offence. She had helped Ximenès to steal manuscripts in 1754.
Then, too, she was bored to death with Ferney; and her “natural aversion
to a country life,” wrote poor Voltaire “in confidence” to her sister,
had had very ill effects upon her temper. Not all the _fêtes_ and the
visitors could make up to her for Paris. Voltaire said that he had been
the innkeeper of Europe for fourteen years and was tired of the
profession. “This tumult does not suit my seventy-four years or my
feebleness.” “Madame Denis has need of Paris.” Here was one excuse for
getting rid of her. And if more were wanted, there was her health which
required the air of the capital and fashionable doctors; there were
business affairs there which she might see to for her uncle; and a
necessity of economising at Ferney brought about by her extravagance,
and “muddle, which,” said Grimm, “is carried by Mama Denis to a degree
of perfection difficult to imagine.”
To his friends Voltaire gave her health and the business to be looked
after in Paris as reasons for her visit. They were that lesser part of
the truth which is useful to conceal the greater. If he was loyal to La
Harpe, so he was to Madame Denis. Of her share in the theft of the
manuscripts he uttered not a word.
He gave her twenty thousand francs to spend in Paris, over and above the
yearly income which he had settled on her.
Before March 1, 1768, the two La Harpes, Madame Denis, Marie Dupuits,
and her husband, who had fallen under the ban of suspicion too, and
declined to utter a word or give an iota of evidence on either side, had
all started for the capital.
Voltaire dismissed the servants--except a couple of lacqueys and a
valet. He sold his horses. “An old invalid recluse” had no need of them.
Seven visitors who were staying in the house at the time, seeing their
host’s evident need of solitude, tactfully departed. There only remained
Father Adam, faithful Wagnière, a colleague of Wagnière’s called
Bigex--a Savoyard, who had formerly been trusted servant and copyist in
the service of Grimm--and two of the usual ne’er-do-weels, de Morsan and
an ex-American officer called Rieu. Both these persons seem to have
suppressed themselves with great success when they were not wanted, and
to have been regarded by their benefactor as part of the household
effects. He always spoke of himself as being entirely alone. Ferney was
cleaned and put in order, and the stream of visitors ceased to flow.
It was certainly not because Voltaire was idle, but because his
seventy-four years did not prevent him still being what the French call
_malin_, that this Easter he decided to do what he had done at Colmar:
play once more that ‘deplorable comedy,’ _faire ses Pâques_.
A priest was dining with him one night at Ferney. “Father D----,” says
Voltaire, “I wish, for example’s sake, _faire mes Pâques_ on Easter Day.
I suppose you will give me absolution?”
“Willingly,” says the priest. “I give it you.” No more was said.
On Easter Day, 1768, Voltaire, accompanied by Wagnière and two
gamekeepers, went solemnly to church, preceded by a servant carrying “a
superb Blessed Loaf” which the Lord of Ferney was in the habit of
presenting every Easter Sunday. After the distribution of this bread
Voltaire mounted the pulpit and turned round and preached a little
sermon. Protestant Wagnière had warned him against doing this. He felt
sure it was illegal. But his master’s mood was a wicked one; and,
moreover, several thefts had been committed of late in his parish while
all the people were at church, which gave him a text. His remonstrances
were “vigorous, pathetic, and eloquent,” and he warmly exhorted the
people to the practice of virtue. The unhappy curé, not knowing what to
do, hurried to the altar and proceeded with the mass. Voltaire spoke a
few words in his praise, and then got down from the pulpit and resumed
his own seat.
The story got noised abroad. Good Marie Leczinska mistook it for a
conversion. The philosophers for once were at one with the orthodox, and
condemned the deed. And so of course did Biort, Bishop of Annecy, who
was also Prince and Bishop of Geneva, and of whose diocese Ferney was
part.
In that wicked world of the eighteenth century there were few good
bishops. But the Prelate of Annecy was one of them. He was also of
strong character and of sound judgment and reason, with a fine capacity
for irony.
On April 11, 1768, he wrote Voltaire a very excellent letter. He could
not take, he said, as hypocrisy a deed which, if hypocritical, would
tarnish a great man’s glory and make him despicable in the eyes of all
thoughtful persons. “I hope your future life will give proof of the
integrity and sincerity of your act”; and then, in language of great
dignity and even beauty, he attempted to recall the sinner to a sense of
sin, and reminded him of that hour which could not now be far distant,
when the faith would be his only hope, and his fame and glory the
shadows of a dream.
Voltaire replied on April 15th, purposely misunderstanding the Bishop’s
letter and taking his remarks as compliments. He felt the act needed
excuse. To d’Alembert, who was as freethinking as any man in Paris, he
wrote apologetically, that, finding himself between two
fourteenth-century bishops, he was obliged to “howl with the wolves.”
He abused Biort as a fanatic and an imbecile. But he knew very well that
he was neither. He was not so imbecile, at least, that he put any faith
in a devout and serious letter M. de Voltaire was pleased to write to
him on April 29th, and replied on May 2d in terms which showed very
clearly that he knew his Voltaire--to the soul.
He had already issued a mandate to the clergy of his diocese forbidding
them to give the Sacrament to this profane person. He now sent the whole
correspondence to the King, and, as the only punishment adequate to the
offence, he begged for a _lettre de cachet_ for M. de Voltaire.
Saint-Florentin was bidden to write the culprit a formal epistle, saying
that the King strongly condemned “this enterprise” on the part of his
ex-Gentleman-in-Ordinary. But there was no _lettre de cachet_. The
incident had amused the Court. _That_ covered a multitude of sins.
For the time the affair was over. But alas! only for the time.
Though there were few visitors in Madame Denis’s absence, there were
some. In the August of this 1768 two very lively young men, both about
twenty years old, came over from Geneva to call upon the Patriarch of
Ferney. One of them, named Price, told a friend more than forty years
after, the little he recollected of the occasion. His companion was then
known as the son of Lord Holland, but later and now as Charles James
Fox. He had first visited Ferney in 1764 when he was sixteen.
Voltaire was delighted to see his visitors, but, as usual, declared that
they had only come to bury him; and though he walked about the garden
and drank chocolate with them, did not invite them to dinner.
The only part of their conversation Price recollected after that
interval of forty years was that the host gave them the names of such of
his works as might open their minds and “free them from religious
prejudice,” adding, “Here are the books with which to fortify
yourselves.”
Charles paid other visits to Ferney, and Voltaire soon learnt to love
him, as all the world loved that generous and brilliant youth. “Yʳ son
is an English lad and j an old Frenchman,” the Patriarch wrote to Lord
Holland after Charles’s next visit. “He is healthy and j sick. Yet j
love him with all my heart, not only for his father but himself.”
Voltaire gave the young man dinner this time, in his “little caban”; and
Charles became a _persona grata_ at Ferney, as in all the world.
Another Englishman with whom Voltaire was brought into relation in the
summer of 1768 was Horace Walpole. Voltaire had seen Horace’s “Historic
Doubts on Richard III.,” and characteristically wrote that it was fifty
years since _he_ took a vow to doubt, and reminded Horace that he had
known his father and uncle in England. Horace sent a copy of his book,
and the correspondence drifted on to that favourite topic of contention
between literary Englishmen and Voltaire--Shakespeare. Voltaire, who
wrote in his own language--what need to write in English to “the best
Frenchman ever born on English soil”?--pointed out with just pride in
reply that he had been the first to make Shakespeare, Locke, and Newton
known to the French, and that, in spite of the persecutions of a clique
of fanatics. “I have been your apostle and your martyr: truly English
people have no reason to complain of me.”
If some new friends came into Voltaire’s life in this solitary 1768,
more old ones went out of it.
On June 24th of this year died Marie Leczinska. Friend? Well, once.
There was that pension _sur sa cassette_, and “my poor Voltaire.”
In the autumn died Olivet--a friend indeed--the best of Latinists, the
kindly schoolmaster at Louis-le-Grand.
In December, that silent staunch laborious worker for the philosophic
faith, Damilaville, met death with the resolute courage with which he
had faced life, and left the world poorer for one of those rare people
who say nothing and do much.
Voltaire mourned him as a public as well as a personal loss. He mourned
him characteristically--that such a man should die while Fréron waxed
fat! But since they did, the less time to sit idle and weeping.
Up then, and at them with those little deadly arrows of which the
Voltairian quiver was always full--the arrows called Pamphlets.
CHAPTER XL
THE COLONY OF WATCHMAKERS AND WEAVERS
“What harm can a book do that costs a hundred crowns?” Voltaire had
written to Damilaville on April 5, 1765. “Twenty volumes folio will
never make a revolution; it is the little pocket pamphlets of thirty
sous that are to be feared.”
He had acted on that principle all his life. But he had never acted upon
it so much as in his hand-to-hand battle with _l’infâme_. He never acted
upon it so often as in his eighteen months’ solitude at Ferney in
1768-69.
For many years, from that “manufactory” of his, as Grimm called it, he
poured forth a ceaseless stream of dialogues, epistles, discourses,
reflections, novelettes, commentaries, burlesques, reviews. Hardly any
of them were more than a few pages in length. But each dealt with some
subject near to his wide heart; cried aloud for some reform which had
not been made, and must be made; pointed out with mocking finger some
scandal in Church or State; satirised with killing irony some gross
abuse of power; turned on some miscarriage of civil justice the
searchlight of truth; laughed lightly, in dialogue, at the education of
women by nuns in convents to fit them to be wives and mothers in the
world; drew up damning statistics of the 9,468,800 victims “hanged,
drowned, broken on the wheel, or burnt, for the love of God” and their
religion from the time of Constantine to Louis XIV.; pleaded vivaciously
against the eighty-two annual holidays set apart by the Church on which
it was criminal to work but not to be drunken and mischievous;
enumerated the “Horrible Dangers of Reading,” of knowing, of thinking;
and lashed with the prettiest of stinging little whips a corrupt
ministry, a wicked priesthood, and _l’infâme, l’infâme_.
“_Il fait le tout en badinant._” Serious? Why, no. “Our French people
want to learn without studying”; and they shall. Instruct! Instruct! but
as one instructs a child with a lesson in the form of a story, or the
simplest little sermon with a sugar-plum of a joke at the end. This was
such a laughing philosopher that many persons have doubted if he really
could have been a philosopher at all. He turned so many somersaults, as
friend Frederick put it plaintively. But the somersaults gained him an
audience, and once gained he knew very well how to keep and teach it. It
was one of his own sayings that ridicule does for everything and is the
strongest of arms. He proved the truth of that assertion himself--in the
pamphlets by which he held the attention and commanded the intellect of
the eighteenth century.
Read them now--they are the must amusing reading in the world--and
beneath the sparkling mockery, see the burning meaning.
They are, considered as works of art alone, much more than brilliant
burlesques. Each of them is endowed with Voltaire’s “unquenchable life,”
and “stamped with the express image” of his whole personality. Gay,
crisp, and clear, expressing his ideas in the fewest and easiest words
and in the most vivacious and graceful of all literary styles, they
conveyed to his generation “the consciousness at once of the power and
the rights of the human intelligence.”
Through these pamphlets “the revolution works in all minds. Light comes
by a thousand holes it is impossible to stop up.” “Reason penetrates
into the merchants’ shops as into the nobles’ palaces.”
What better proof could Voltaire himself have wanted of the growth of
that liberty and tolerance which he loved, and strove to make all men
love and have, than the fact that the government, autocratic and
all-powerful as it was, could not prevent those pamphlets selling and
working in their midst?
“Opinion rules the world,” said Voltaire himself. At last he had made
his opinion, Public Opinion. “From 1762 to the end of Voltaire’s life it
was on the side of the philosophers.”
True, the authorities still burnt his works. In 1768 he had written
“The Man with Forty Crowns,” a burlesque story “on the financial chaos
which fifteen years later brought France to bankruptcy.” That must be
burnt of course. France hated unfavourable prophecies. It _was_ burnt.
But by now Voltaire’s pamphlets were like Shadrach, Meshach, and
Abednego. Flames could not hurt them. And when they came out of the
fiery furnace it was only with an added lustre and glory.
Well for Voltaire if those pamphlets could have engrossed all his
solitude. In Beuchot’s edition of his writings they fill ten large
volumes. Here surely was occupation enough for a lifetime! But Voltaire
had time for everything, and was for ever the spoilt boy who loved his
own way.
The Easter of 1769 reminded him of last Easter and the fact that the
Bishop of Annecy had forbidden his priesthood to allow him to confess or
communicate. Very well then! I will do both.
His feeble body had been ill and ailing for a year--a condition of
things which is apt to make the mind unreasonable. There was a recent
case of a man called Boindin, who, dying unfortified by the Sacraments,
had been refused Christian burial. There was always the case of Adrienne
Lecouvreur--“thrown into the kennel like a dead dog.”
Voltaire declared, to persons whom he could have no object in deceiving,
that he had lately had “twelve accesses of fever.” He was seventy-five
years old. And death always was and had been a far more present reality
to him than to most people.
These things taken together form, not at all a valid excuse, but some
sort of honest excuse for an act that needs a great deal of excusing.
Voltaire was in bed one day in the March of 1769, dictating to Wagnière,
when he saw from his window Gros, the Ferney curé, and a Capuchin monk
who had come to help him with the Easter confessions, walking in the
garden. Voltaire sent for the Capuchin and told him that he was too ill
to leave his bed, but as a Frenchman, an official of the King, and
seigneur of the parish, he wished there and then to make his confession.
And he put the usual fee of six francs into the Capuchin’s hand. The
poor man, with the fear of his Bishop before his eyes, nervously
temporised, said he was very busy and would return in a few days.
“Trust me to get even with him!” cries the patient when M. le Capuchin
had retired. Burgos, “a kind of surgeon,” is sent for, and having felt
the invalid’s pulse, is fool enough to say that it is excellent.
“What, you ignorant fellow! Excellent?” roars the sick man.
Burgos feels it again. It is a very different pulse this time, and M. de
Voltaire is in a high fever.
“Then go and tell the priest.”
Six days elapsed and no priest appeared. So the very active-minded
invalid caused the whole household to be roused in a body in the middle
of the night, and to hurry off to the curé saying their master was dying
and presenting a certificate signed by himself, Wagnière, Bigex, and
Burgos, which declared the invalid’s pious desire to die fortified with
the Sacraments and in the bosom of the faith in which he was born and
had lived.
Neither curé nor Capuchin appeared.
Then Voltaire sent a lawyer to the curé, saying that if he did not come,
the Lord of Ferney would denounce him to the Parliament as having
refused the Sacraments to a dying man.
The poor curé was in such a fright that he was attacked on the spot,
says Wagnière, by the colic.
On March 31st, Voltaire drew up before a notary a statement in legal
form declaring himself, in spite of calumnies, to be a sincere Catholic.
Among others the complaisant Father Adam witnessed this statement.
The next day, April 1st, the Capuchin appeared at Ferney. The Bishop of
Annecy had been consulted, and now sent by the Capuchin a profession of
faith for Voltaire to sign.
The invalid, who had already recited a hurried jumble of the Pater, the
Credo, and the Confiteor, replied that the Creed was supposed to contain
the whole faith; and though the unhappy Capuchin went on presenting to
him at intervals the Bishop’s paper to sign, he would do nothing but
repeat his statement about the Creed. After having delivered to the
Capuchin a long homily on morality and tolerance (which Wagnière found
“very touching and pathetic”) the sick man suddenly called out loudly,
“Give me absolution at once,” which the terrified confessor, who had
entirely lost his head, did. Then Voltaire sent for the curé, who
administered the Sacrament.
The notary was also present. “At the very instant the priest gave the
wafer to M. de Voltaire” he declared aloud that he sincerely pardoned
those who had calumniated him to the King “and who have not succeeded in
their base design, and I demand a record of my declaration from the
notary.” He recorded it. No sooner was Voltaire left to himself than
this amazing invalid jumped out of bed and went for a walk in the
garden.
Meanwhile, curé and Capuchin laid their terrified heads together and
bethought themselves of some means to avoid the consequences of having
absolved and given the mass to the scoffer without his having signed the
declaration drawn up by the Bishop.
On April 15th, they summoned seven witnesses whom they had persuaded to
declare on oath that they had heard M. de Voltaire pronounce a complete
and satisfactory confession of faith, which confession they invented and
sent to the Bishop.
The hocus-pocus was on both sides, it will be seen. But Voltaire was
responsible for it all. Paris--even Paris--received the news of his
“unpardonable buffoonery” “pretty badly.” The d’Argentals entirely
disapproved of it, and Dr. Tronchin condemned it with severity.
“Useless _méchancétés_ are very foolish,” Voltaire had said. He regarded
this one as indispensable. When he wrote to his Angels excusing himself,
he declared that he had need of a buckler to withstand the mortal blows
of sacerdotal calumny, and that such a duty, neglected, might at his
death have had very unpleasant consequences for his family. These were
not sufficient reasons for his act. But they at least free him from “the
reproach of erecting hypocrisy into a deliberate doctrine.” As Condorcet
says, “such deceptions did not deceive, while they did protect.”
“Disagreeable as these temporisings are to us,” they damn deeper the
time which made them a pressing expedient, than the time-server.
As the Bishop of Annecy had accused Voltaire of holding impious
conversations at his dinner-table, he now took advantage of Madame
Denis’s absence to have pious works read aloud to him at that meal. When
a President of the Parliament of Dijon was dining with him, Massillon,
of whom Voltaire was a warm admirer, was the author chosen. “What style!
What harmony! What eloquence!” cries the Patriarch of Ferney as he
listens to those magnificent periods, to the denunciations like a god’s.
The reader continued for three or four pages.
“Off with Massillon!” cries Voltaire, and “he gave himself up to all the
folly and _verve_ of his imagination.” Irreverence? Malicious mockery?
It has been generally thought so. May it not rather have been that both
sentiments were perfectly genuine? that in one there expressed itself
the passionate admiration and in the other the irresponsible liveliness,
of which this extraordinary character was equally capable?
Though he had nearly harried the life out of one poor Capuchin of Gex,
though he had wantonly insulted the faith of all the Capuchins, almost
his next act was to obtain for them, through Choiseul, an annuity of six
hundred francs for the Gex monastery, in return for which benefit the
Brothers gave him the title of Temporal Father of the Capuchins of Gex.
He derived a monkeyish delight from it; used to sign his letters with a
cross, “✟, Brother Voltaire unworthy Capuchin”; but then he also derived
an honest delight from the good he had been able to do the monastery.
Who can explain him?
Presently he was writing to Cardinal Bernis to obtain the Pope’s
permission for Father Adam to wear a wig on his bald head during mass.
The climate was cold, the poor Father rheumatic, and his Holiness had
been obliged to forbid wigs to the priesthood as they had so often been
used as a disguise for unworthy purposes.
All through religious controversies and irreligious acts, Voltaire was
engaged in a long, constant and very flattering
[Illustration: VOLTAIRE
_From the Etching by Denon_]
correspondence with Catherine the Great. Even Frederick, in the
beguiling days before the Prussian visits, had not so gratified
Voltaire’s self-love. Voltaire was the teacher, and Catherine, the
greatest of queens and the cleverest of women, his humble pupil. In 1768
she had taken his advice--there is no subtler form of flattery--upon
inoculation, and herself submitted to the operation. And in this 1769
she sent him the loveliest pelisse of Russian sable, a snuff box she had
turned with her own royal hands, her portrait set in diamonds, and an
epitome of the laws with which she governed her great empire. Here
surely was balm for solitude, calumny, sickness, old age, every mortal
misfortune! Voltaire warmed body and soul through the snowy Swiss spring
in that gorgeous pelisse. In March, he had another present, which
delighted his queer old heart hardly less. Saint-Lambert--Saint-Lambert,
who had robbed him of his mistress and wounded him with a wound which
another man could never have forgiven or forgotten--sent him his poem,
“The Seasons.” And the poet Voltaire writes to his brother of the lyre
the most charming compliments and congratulations.
Before this, he was writing the kindest letters to La Harpe again. When
Madame Denis, in the latter half of this October, 1769, and after an
absence of a little less than eighteen months, burst into Ferney, her
uncle seems to have folded her in his arms, received her with as much
delight as if she had always been trustworthy, practical, sensible, and
considerate, and to have let bygones be bygones as only he knew how.
The Dupuits were already home again; and Voltaire was busy with a new
business which had been in his mind since he first came to Ferney, and
in practical existence at least since 1767.
From the moment he had bought his estates he had felt the full weight of
his responsibilities as a landowner, and realised as keenly as Arthur
Young, the philosophic farmer who rode through France prophesying her
downfall, that agriculture is the true wealth of a nation.
“The best thing we have to do on earth is to cultivate it.”
At more than threescore years and ten, this old son of the pavement had
set himself to learn, and did learn, the whole _technique_ of
agriculture. Directly he bought Ferney he began putting the barren land
round it under cultivation, and so occupied all persons on his estates
who were out of work. When he was seventy-eight he was still hard at
work with his own hands on that field which had been called Voltaire’s
Field, because he cultivated it entirely himself.
It has been seen how he planted avenues of trees. Four times over he
lined his drive with chestnut and walnut trees, and four times they
nearly all died, or were wantonly destroyed by the peasants. “However, I
am not daunted. The others laugh at me. Neither my old age nor my
complaints nor the severity of the climate discourage me. To have
cultivated a field and made twenty trees grow is a good which will never
be lost.”
He entered into a long correspondence with Moreau--that rare being, a
practical Political Economist. He delighted in Galiani’s famous
“Dialogues on Corn”--never was man in the right so wittily before--and
in this very 1769 he was thanking Abbé Mords-les-Morellet for his
“Dictionary of Commerce.”
For, after all, the Land meant the People; and commerce there must be,
if the work of the People on the Land were to be remunerative.
Many terrible accounts have been given of the condition of the French
poor before the Revolution. But theirs was a misery which no passion and
eloquence can overstate.
Forbidden at certain seasons to guard their wretched pieces of land by
fences lest they should interfere with my lord’s hunt, or to manure
their miserable crops lest they should spoil the flavour of my lord’s
game; forbidden, at hatching seasons, to weed those crops lest they
should disturb the partridges; and forbidden, without special
permission, to build a shed in which to store their grain--the fruit of
their lands and their labour, if there was any such fruit, was always
lost to them.
Taxes alone deprived them of three quarters of what they earned. On one
side was the _corvée_, or the right of the lord to his peasants’ labour
without paying for it; and the _taille_, or the tax on property, which
exacted a certain sum from each village: so that if the rich would not
pay, the poor _must_.
Add to this the toll-gates, so numerous that fish brought from Harfleur
to Paris paid eleven times its value _en route_; the fines exacted when
land was bought or sold; above all, the enormous tax upon salt, which
soon was as the match to fire the gunpowder of the Revolution; the
tithes exacted by the Church: the fees for masses for the dead, for
burying, christening, and marrying, coupled with the bitter injustice
that the clergy of that Church were themselves exempt from all taxation.
Add to these regular taxes the irregular ones.
On the accession of Louis XV. one was levied, called the Tax of the
Joyful Accession. Joyful! The people who paid it lived in a windowless,
one-room hut of peat or clay; clothed in the filthiest rags; ignorant,
bestial, degraded; creatures who never knew youth or hope: who died in
unrecorded thousands, of pestilence and famine; or lived, to their own
cruel misery, a few dark years “on a little black bread, and not enough
of that.”
Such were the fifty poor of Ferney as Voltaire found them, but not the
twelve hundred he left.
Whatever his sins were--and they were many--he had one of the noblest
and most difficult of virtues--a far higher conception of his duty to
others than the men of his time. It was fashionable to talk philanthropy
in the eighteenth century, but dangerous, as well as unmodish, to
practise it.
“True philosophy ...” wrote the great Doer in the midst of the Dreamers,
“makes the earth fertile and the people happier. The true philosopher
cultivates the land, increases the number of the ploughs, and so of the
inhabitants; occupies the poor man, and thus enriches him; encourages
marriages, cares for the orphan; does not grumble at necessary taxes,
and puts the labourer in a condition to pay them promptly.”
He had begun by getting back for the Ferney poor that tithe of which
Ancian had deprived them, and by making the peasants mend and make
roads--at fair wages. Later, he petitioned the King for “some
privileges for my children”; and Gex was at last declared free from all
the taxes of the farmers-general, and salt, which used to be ten sous
the pound, came down to four.
His building operations at both the church and château gave occupation
to many masons. Then the masons must have decent dwellings in which to
live themselves; and here was more work.
In 1767, he could write that he had formed a colony at Ferney; that he
had established there three merchants, artists, and a doctor, and was
building houses for them. By 1769 he recorded with an honest pride that
he had quadrupled the number of the parishioners, and that there was not
a poor man among them; that he had under his immediate supervision two
hundred workers, and was the means of life to everyone round him.
Nor did he forget to provide them with pleasure as well as with work.
Every Sunday the young people of the colony used to come up to the
château to dance. Their host provided them with refreshments, and was
the happiest spectator of their happiness.
Then he started a school, and himself paid the schoolmaster. There had
been a time when he had thought that “it is not the labourer one must
teach, it is the _bon bourgeois_, the inhabitant of towns: that
enterprise is grand and great enough,” which, for his day, it certainly
was. It was a hundred years in advance of his time. Even that drastic
reformer, Frederick the Great, had announced superbly, “The vulgar do
not deserve enlightenment.” So what wonder that in 1763 even a
clear-sighted Voltaire prayed for “ignorant brothers to follow my
plough?”
The wonder rather is that by 1767 his views had so enormously progressed
that when Linguet, the barrister, wrote to him that in his opinion all
was lost if the _canaille_ were shown that they too could reason, he
emphatically answered, instancing the intelligent Genevans who read as a
relaxation from manual labour--“No, Sir; all is not lost when the people
are put into a condition to see that they too have a mind. On the
contrary, all is lost when they are treated like a herd of bulls, for
sooner or later they will gore you with their horns.”
Prophetic--but if many heard that voice crying in the wilderness, none
acted on his words, save himself.
But in prospering Ferney there was room not only for a school and a
doctor, masons and labourers, but for special industries. From the
first, Voltaire had cultivated silkworms. He was never the man for an
idle hobby. Why should no use be made of the silk? Before 1769, the
Ferney theatre, which Madame Denis had lately used as a laundry, was
turned into a silkworm nursery. From busy Geneva came stocking weavers,
only too glad to colonise in a place where the lord, and master lent
them money “on very easy terms,” built decent dwellings for them, and
gave them the full benefit of his knowledge of affairs.
By September 4, 1769, Voltaire, always alive to the advantages of a good
advertisement, sent to the Duchesse de Choiseul the first pair of silk
stockings ever made on his looms. If she would but wear them they _must_
be the mode! What stocking would not look beautiful on a foot so
charming? Voltaire found time to engage his Duchess to wear them, in a
gay, coquettish, and essentially French correspondence. Madame had made
a mistake, it appears, and sent him, as a pattern, a shoe much too large
for her. Neither his thousand schemes and labours nor his seventy-five
years had spoiled his talent for flattering badinage. His Duchess
accepted his stockings and his compliments, showed both to her friends,
and thus put some fifty to a hundred people, including young Calas who
was helping his benefactor, out of the way of want.
On February 15, 1770, the party quarrels in Geneva came to a climax--and
bloodshed.
The Natives had not forgotten the promise made to them four years
earlier. “If you are forced to leave your country ... I shall still be
able to help and protect you.”
Neither had Voltaire.
On February 10, 1767, in writing to de Beauteville, the French mediator,
he had suggested the scheme of a working colony--the nucleus of the idea
of some enterprising person enticing the great watchmaking industry of
quarrelsome Geneva to form a settlement, which should be managed by its
founder and should bear his name. The scheme had appealed to Choiseul.
In 1768, with Voltaire’s co-operation and approval, that minister
founded the colony of Versoix--or Versoy, as Voltaire spells it--which
was designed to be what Ferney actually became.
The crisis of February 15, 1770, caused great numbers of the Native
watchmakers of Geneva to flee from the city and take refuge at Versoix
and at Ferney. Versoix was unequal to the emergency. There were no
houses for the workers. But Ferney rose to the occasion. That was always
part of its old master’s genius.
Only a few months after the Natives had first consulted him, this
far-seeing person had begun to build workmen’s dwellings in his village.
The overflow from those “pretty houses of freestone,” he now took into
the château itself. So far, so good.
The next thing to do was to obtain the permission for his settlement
from the authorities. The authorities were personified by M. de
Choiseul. Voltaire had helped him with his Versoix. So Choiseul could
not, and did not, refuse to help Voltaire with Ferney.
To start the watchmakers in their new home at their old trade, Voltaire
advanced sixty thousand livres. He at once found occupation for fifty
Genevan workmen, not counting the inhabitants of Gex. He himself bought
gold, silver, and jewels for the work, a better bargain than the
work-people could do for themselves.
In six weeks he had watches ready for sale--of exquisite workmanship,
artistic design, and to be sold at least one third cheaper than they
could be in Geneva. The Duke of Choiseul bought the first six watches
ever made by Voltaire’s manufactory.
By April 9th the old courtier was promising the Duchess that she should
soon have one worthy to wear even at _her_ waist.
Then he began his system of personal advertisement. The handsomest
commission in the world on every watch he sold could not have made the
neediest agent work harder or more cunningly than did this Voltaire, who
received at first no commission, never could expect a large one, and had
need of neither large nor small.
On June 5, 1770, he sent round a circular to all the foreign
ambassadors--“diplomacy _en masse_”--a most beautiful circular from “The
Royal Manufactory of Ferney” (in capital letters), and recommending
watches--“plain silver,” from three louis, to repeaters at forty-two.
That flaming document is still preserved.
The advertiser wrote a letter with it. “I never write for the sake of
writing,” he said; “but when I have a subject I do not spare my pen, old
and dying as I am.”
Catherine the Great was appealed to; and in answer to her “vaguely
magnificent order for watches” to “the value of some thousands of
roubles,” Voltaire had to apologise for his workmen having taken
advantage of her goodness, and sent her watches to the value of eight
thousand!
The Empress replied imperially--as she was obliged to do--that such an
expense would not ruin her. And in his next letter her artful old friend
warmly recommended his pendulum clocks--“which we are now making”--and
asked her to assist him in promoting a watch trade between Ferney and
China. She did.
Ferney was soon sending watches not only to China, but to Spain, Italy,
Russia, Holland, America, Turkey, Portugal, and North Africa, besides
carrying on an enormous trade with Paris.
“Give me a chance and I am the man to build a city,” said Voltaire to
Richelieu. With a chance he could have done anything. Kings and
commoners, cardinals, great ladies--he appealed to them all. Is not
rosy-faced Bernis at Rome? Well, why should not he promote the sale of
watches for me in the Imperial City?
Bernis totally ignored the commission. He was almost the only person to
whom Voltaire applied who behaved so badly. And Ferney wrote him such a
stinging reproach for his neglect that poor Bernis must have regretted
he had not been more obliging.
As for Frederick the Great, he did better even than buy watches by the
cartload like the other great potentate, Catherine.
He gave for twelve years free lodging in Berlin, with exemption from all
taxation, to eighteen families of refugee Genevan watchmakers. This
started the watchmaking industry in his capital.
To Madame Dubarry, who had succeeded to the honours and dishonour of the
Pompadour, the Gentleman-in-Ordinary-to-the-King sent presently the
loveliest little watch set in diamonds.
He left no stone unturned. He supervised every detail. In 1773, Ferney
sold “four thousand watches worth half a million of francs.” All losses
Voltaire bore himself. Capable and alert as he was, they were sometimes
heavy.
He had had a royal order, for instance, on the occasion of the marriage
of the Dauphin with Marie Antoinette, which was encouraging but
expensive. He was never paid.
Nothing daunted him however. By the June of 1770 he had begun building
those much-needed houses in the rival, or rather the sister, colony of
Versoix. And then, as if he found weaving and watchmaking insufficient
for his energy, by 1772 he had started a lacemaking industry. That
butterfly Madame Saint-Julien must make this airiest of gossamer
fabrics--“the beautiful blonde lace which was made in our village”--the
fashion. “The woman who made it can make more very reasonably. She can
add a dozen workers to the staff, and we shall owe to you a new
manufactory.” The vigorous boy who wrote the words, originated the
scheme, and carried it to successful issue, was only seventy-eight. He
personally negotiated with the shop which was to buy and sell his new
wares when made. Cannot one see him haggling and bargaining and enjoying
himself, with a twinkle in his bright old eyes and a very humorous
shrewdness in the curves of his thin lips?
But if he wanted a reward for all his trouble, he had it. The miserable
hamlet had become a thriving village and the desert place blossomed like
a rose. The master’s corn fed his people and his bad wine (“which is
not harmful”) gave them drink. His bees produced excellent honey and
wax, and his hemp and flax, linen.
Here dwelt together, as one family, Catholics and Huguenots. “Is not
this better than St. Bartholomew?” “When a Catholic is sick, Protestants
go and take care of him”; and _vice versa_. The good Protestant women
prepared with their own hands the little portable altars for the
Procession of the Holy Sacrament, and the curé thanked them publicly in
a sermon. Gros had died--of drink, said Voltaire--and his place had been
taken by Hugenot, an excellent priest, generous and liberal-minded, the
friend of all his people whatever their faith, and of M. de Voltaire,
who was supposed to have none at all.
Here surely was the tree of Tolerance he had planted, bearing beautiful
fruit. It might well warm his old heart to see his little colony firm on
“those two pivots of the wealth of a state, be it little or great,
freedom of trade and freedom of conscience.”
The man who worked the case of Calas for three years, the case of Sirven
for seven, and the cases of Lally and d’Étallonde for twelve, was not
likely to grow tired of the little colony always beneath his eyes. Nor
was he unmindful of the claims not only Ferney, but all Gex, had upon
his bounty. When it was devastated by famine in 1771 he had corn sent
him from Sicily, and sold it much under cost price to his starving
children and the poor people of the province. Their sufferings and
sorrows were his own. He pleaded passionately for those who were, and
had been for generations, miserable with the hopeless misery that is
dumb; but who, before many years were past, were to cry aloud their
wrongs with a great and terrible voice which would reach to the ends of
the earth.
All Voltaire’s letters in his later years are full of his watchmakers
and weavers, their prosperity or their poverty, what he had done for
them or what he would do. Did his own glorification play no part in his
schemes? It doubtless played some. But the fact that he may have been
vain does not alter the fact that he set an example which Christians
have nobly followed, but which, in his day at least, they certainly did
not set _him_.
Voltaire, sceptic and scoffer, too often of evil life and unclean lips,
was not only the High Priest of Tolerance, but the first great practical
philanthropist of his century.
[Illustration: LOUIS XVI.
_From the Portrait by Callet in the Petit Trianon_]
CHAPTER XLI
THE PIGALLE STATUE, AND THE VINDICATION OF LALLY
One spring evening of the year 1770 the idea was suggested, at the table
of the Neckers in Paris, of erecting a statue to the great Voltaire.
Necker was a prosperous banker, and, to be, Comptroller-General.
Madame, his wife, once the beloved of Gibbon, was the daughter of a
Swiss minister and one of the first _salonières_ in the capital.
The plan was immediately approved and acted upon by her seventeen
guests. They formed themselves into a committee to receive
subscriptions, and decided that the work should be entrusted to the
famous Pigalle, who was to fix his own price, which he did very
modestly.
Madame Necker herself communicated the plan to Voltaire.
He was boyishly delighted at the compliment. He answered gaily that he
was seventy-six and had just had a long illness which had treated both
his mind and body very badly, and that if Pigalle was to come and model
his face he must first have a face to model. “You would hardly guess
where it ought to be. My eyes have sunk three inches; my cheeks are like
old parchment; ... the few teeth I had are gone.... This is not
coquetry, it is truth.”
It was. Dr. Burney, who visited Ferney in this year, spoke of his host
as a living skeleton--“mere skin and bone”--but he spoke, too, like
everybody else, of the gleaming eyes full of living fire; and d’Alembert
wrote to the model himself: “Genius ... has always a countenance which
genius, its brother, will easily find.”
Subscriptions had flowed in from the first with unprecedented
generosity. The magnificent Richelieu contributed magnificently.
Frederick, one of the first to wish to give, wrote to ask d’Alembert of
what amount his gift should be.
“An écu, Sire, and your name,” says d’Alembert. But Frederick gave more
than money. In noble words and a most generous eulogy, he blotted out
Frankfort and the past for ever. “The finest monument to Voltaire is the
one he has erected himself. His work will endure when the Basilisk of
St. Peter, the Louvre, and all the buildings which human vanity supposes
eternal, have perished.”
Voltaire was delighted at Frederick’s subscription (which of course was
not limited to words), not only because that great name would look
nobly, but for a more characteristic reason. “It would save money to too
generous literary men, who have none.”
Among the “too generous literary men” were four old enemies--Rousseau,
Fréron, Palissot, and La Beaumelle. Their money was returned--except
that of Rousseau. And peace-making d’Alembert had very hard work to get
_vif_ Voltaire to accept Jean Jacques’s gift as a “reparation.”
Another foe more unforgiving--or more honest--declined to give at all.
“I will not give a sou to the _sub_scription,” says Piron, “but I will
undertake the _in_scription.”
About June 16th, Pigalle, sculptor to the King and Chancellor of the
Academy of Painting, arrived at Ferney, on work intent. But the model
was so agreeable a host! True, in spite of the parties and distractions,
he gave the sculptor a sitting every day. But as he never kept still a
moment and was dictating letters, with much vivid French gesticulation,
to Wagnière the whole time, it was not wonderful that on the seventh day
of a visit which was to last eight, M. Pigalle discovered that he had
done nothing at all. Fortunately, on that seventh day--June 23,
1770--the conversation turned upon the Golden Calf of the Children of
Israel. Voltaire was so childishly delighted when Pigalle declared that
such a thing would take at least six months to make--as disproving the
Mosaic testimony that it was made in twenty-four hours--that during the
rest of the sitting the model was as quiet and obedient as possible.
The results were so satisfactory that Pigalle resolved not to attempt
another interview, and the next morning left Ferney quietly and without
seeing anyone.
The Golden Calf incident so pleased Voltaire that he at once wrote it
down and dated it. He repeated it, with much chuckling, to all his
correspondents; wrote an article on Casting for his dear “Philosophical
Dictionary,” where he introduced it again, most amusingly; and in 1776
wrote a pamphlet--“A Christian against Six Jews”--in which he put
Pigalle’s professional testimony in opposition to that of the sacred
writers.
Another account of the episode declares that Pigalle kept his sitter
quiet by talking of his dear “Pucelle.”
There seems no reason why both stories should not be true.
Pigalle’s statue disappointed his own generation, and is only a
curiosity to ours.
The best statue of Voltaire is usually considered to be the one by
Houdon, of a very old, sitting, draped figure, with a face far from
unamiable or unkindly, excessively able and shrewd, with the most
steady, penetrating old eyes, and mocking lips closed over the toothless
mouth.
Pigalle represented his subject entirely unclad--for the best of all
reasons, said Grimm, he could not do drapery. Good Madame Necker,
mindful of her Calvinistic education, objected to the nakedness. But not
old Voltaire. “It is all one to me,” he said airily; and added sensibly,
“M. Pigalle must be left absolute master of his statue.... It is a crime
... to put fetters on genius.”
The want of clothing, however, gave rise to many doubtful jokes in
eighteenth-century Paris, and his enemies made very spiteful epigrams on
the meagreness of the figure. “Posterity will not want to count M. de
Voltaire’s ribs,” says Fréron sarcastically. And though Voltaire
pretended to laugh at such gibes--and laughed himself at all his bodily
defects--he was still morally thin-skinned. “A statue is no
consolation,” he wrote dismally to d’Argental, “when so many enemies
conspire to cover it with mud.”
But there were more friends to cover it with adulation. In 1772,
Mademoiselle Clairon surprised the _habitués_ of her rooms one evening
by drawing back a curtain and showing them the bust of Voltaire on an
altar. She put a laurel crown on the head, and in her “noble and
beautiful voice” recited an ode of Marmontel’s which, particularly in
its Apostrophe to Envy, produced a great effect.
When Voltaire heard of the incident, he got out his old lyre and thanked
Mademoiselle in verse of extraordinary freshness--“very pretty for a
young man of only seventy-nine,” says Grimm.
While his statue was the topic of Paris, the original was entertaining
at least three celebrated visitors at Ferney: Dr. Burney, d’Alembert,
and Condorcet.
Dr. Burney, the father of Johnson’s dear _protégée_, Fanny, came to
Geneva in the course of his Musical Tour through France and Italy.
Hearing that Voltaire relentlessly snubbed the curious idle who only
came “to look at the wild beast,” the good pompous Doctor was a little
nervous of the reception he might meet. But all went well.
A servant, presumably Wagnière, introduced Burney to his master’s
sanctum, and to the library, where Burney saw a portrait of young
Dupuits, whom he supposed to be Voltaire’s brother, though Wagnière told
him Voltaire was seventy-eight (he was really seventy-six), and the
difference in age between the “brothers” must have been forty years at
the least.
Then Dr. Burney was introduced to the great man himself, who still
worked, said Wagnière, ten hours a day and wrote constantly without
spectacles. The conversation turned on English literature, and Voltaire
observed how England had now no one “who lords it over the rest like
Dryden, Pope, and Swift”; and remarked, when critics are silent it
proves not so much that the age is correct, as that it is dull. Burney
was shown the model village--“the most innocent and the most useful of
all my works”--and tactfully departed before he should have taken more
than his share of the great man’s time.
D’Alembert arrived at Ferney in the September of 1770. He was supposed
to be _en route_ to see Rome and die. Frederick the Great had sent him
six thousand francs for the tour. But either, as d’Alembert told the
King, the prospect of the fatigue and the bad inns daunted him, or, as
Duvernet says, Voltaire’s society was too seductive. D’Alembert returned
the King half of his money, and in two months was back in Paris.
The Marquis de Condorcet, who then was celebrated as a philosophic and
freethinking noble who had wholly broken with the religion and the
traditions of his caste, and now is celebrated as the philosopher and
_littérateur_ who wrote a brief and scholarly Life of Voltaire and who
poisoned himself to escape the guillotine, was a fellow-guest with
d’Alembert.
Is it difficult to fancy the conversation between these three men over
the Ferney supper-table at the magic hour when Voltaire was always at
his best, “at once light and learned,” brilliant and subtle? The
tranquil cheerfulness of that true philosopher, d’Alembert--“his just
mind and inexhaustible imagination”--soothed the vexations with which he
found his irritable host overwhelmed.
Condorcet, whom Voltaire spoke of as having “the same hatred of
oppression and fanaticism, and the same zeal for humanity” as he had
himself, was as exempt from what it was then modish to call
“prejudices,” as the gentle d’Alembert.
Of that brilliant little party there was but one man who still clung to
some tenets of the old faith; and that man was Voltaire. Du Pan records
how he heard him give an “energetic lesson” at his supper-table to his
two guests, by sending all the servants out of the room in the middle of
their conversation. “Now, gentlemen, continue your attack on God. But as
I do not want to be strangled or robbed to-night by my servants they had
better not hear you.”
“_Si Dieu n’existait pas il faudrait l’inventer_,” Voltaire had said in
one of the most famous lines in the world.
Baron Gleichen, who was at Délices in 1757, records how a young author
sought to recommend himself to the great man’s favour by saying “I am an
atheist apprentice at your service.” “But I,” replied Voltaire, “am a
master Deist.”
But the pupils he had taught had gone far beyond his teaching. Diderot
spoke of him as “_cagot_”; and the story runs that some fine lady of
Paris dismissed him scornfully in the words, “He is a Deist, he is a
bigot.”
He had no further bigotries, it is certain. A thousand stories are told
to illustrate his indignation against what he took to be a debasing
fanaticism.
A Genevan lady brought to see him her little girl, who was as
intelligent as she was pretty and could learn everything but her
Catechism, and that she could not understand. “Ah!” says Voltaire. “How
reasonable! A child always speaks the truth. You do not understand your
Catechism? Do you see these fine peaches? Eat as many as you like.”
It is recorded, too, that Voltaire had always a special grudge against
Habakkuk: and when someone showed him that he had misrepresented facts
in that prophet’s history, “It is no matter,” he replied; “Habakkuk was
capable of anything.”
There are many other such stories told of him. All profane jests are
fathered on Voltaire. Some of them have lost their point with the
circumstances and surroundings among which they were uttered. Some grow
clumsy in translation. Some are without authenticity. That a searching
wit like Voltaire, quite unhampered by reverence, must have found
abundant subject for witticism in the degraded state of the established
religion of his country in his time, is palpable enough.
D’Alembert left. It was his last visit to Ferney.
On December 24, 1770, the powerful Choiseul was disgraced and exiled by
the far more powerful Dubarry. “The coachman of Europe,” as Frederick
called him, had been infinitely clever and infinitely unlucky. If he had
made the army and remade the fleet, expelled the Jesuits, and promoted
trade, art, and literature, he had involved his country in wars, for
which she had wept tears of blood. He fell: and great was the fall of
him.
The tidings were received at Ferney with the utmost consternation. For
Voltaire personally Choiseul had done much. He had helped in the affairs
of Calas and of Chaumont, in that of the Corneille Commentary, and of
the blockade of Ferney. And, more than all, he had protected, with the
absolutely necessary protection none but a powerful minister could
afford, the colony of watchmakers and weavers.
His disgrace ruined Versoix: and Ferney rocked on her foundations.
The steady resolution, and perhaps the fighting renown, of her old
master tided his children over the crisis. But there was famine as well
as disturbance abroad in the land, and for a while things looked black
indeed.
On January 23d of the new year 1771, Louis XV., d’Aiguillon, the
successor of Choiseul, and Maupeou, the Chancellor, suppressed the
Parliament of Paris, to the general disgust. Voltaire did not share it.
That Parliament, if it had been forced at last to reinstate the Calas,
had condemned La Barre, d’Étallonde, and General Lally: it “was defiled
with the blood of the weak and the innocent”; had burnt the works of the
Encyclopædists; and been so fiercely Jansenist that wise men regretted
the Jesuits it had ruined. In its place were to be established six
Superior Councils or Local Parliaments, which were to give justice
gratuitously and to be the final courts of appeal, thereby saving the
nation the enormous expense of conveying accused persons to the capital.
To be sure, the jury system as practised in ideal England was better
still. But in an imperfect world one must be satisfied with imperfect
progress.
Voltaire believed the six sovereign Councils to be “the salvation of
France”--“one of the best ideas since the foundation of monarchy.” As
far back as 1769 he had attacked the old Parliament, under a very
transparent anonymity, in his “History of the Parliament of Paris.”
All things considered, there was no wonder that a shrewd Maupeou,
knowing how bitterly public opinion was against him, should call to his
aid the man “who had led it and fashioned it to his taste.” Voltaire put
himself at the disposition of Maupeou, and for many a month deafened the
enemy with blast upon blast from his famous old trumpet.
If he was quite disinterested--and he was--in working under Maupeou for
what he felt convinced was “the liberty, salvation, and well-being of
whole populations,” it was not at all unnatural that Choiseul should
find it hard to forgive this active devotion to the policy of his
supplanters.
The Duchess, with whom Voltaire had coquetted so charmingly over that
pair of silk stockings, was as much offended as her husband. Madame du
Deffand, her dearest friend, was offended too. And Voltaire spared
himself neither pains nor time to restore confidence, to assure the dear
exiles of Chanteloup in immense letters of his sincere and unaltering
devotion to them: of his gratitude for the powerful protection of the
one, and the gracious kindness of the other. Of course such letters had
no effect. The haughty little Duchess begged that the correspondence
might end. And the most obstinate of men went on writing to her exactly
the same.
There was division in his own house on the subject of the Parliament
too. His nephew, Mignot, that short-sighted, good-natured, roundabout
abbé, the son of Catherine, and the brother of Mesdames Denis and
Florian, was, like his uncle, on the side of the reforms, and on May 20,
1771, was made senior clerk of the new Parliament.
D’Hornoy, on the other hand, Voltaire’s great-nephew, had been a
councillor of the old Parliament and was exiled with it.
However, politics apart, Voltaire liked both nephews, thought them
honest souls, and made them, as has been noted, handsome allowances.
Brochures against the old Parliament and for the new occupied the Hermit
of Ferney very actively during the whole of the year 1771, but
they did not prevent him carrying on a correspondence with four
sovereigns--Catherine, Frederick, Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski, and
Gustavus III. of Sweden.
On December 18th he began a new tragedy, “The Laws of Minos.” It was
that dismal thing, a play with a purpose--“to make superstition
execrable, and prove that when a law is unequal there is nothing for it
but to abolish it.” It was written in honour of Maupeou. The
Chancellor’s enemies did Voltaire a good turn by preventing it from
being played.
Death was busy just now among both friends and foes of Voltaire. He was
fast reaching the age when he was naturally the last leaf on the tree.
In the December of 1771 died Helvétius, philosopher and farmer-general;
in the spring of 1772, Duclos, who had replaced Voltaire as
Historiographer of France, and preceded d’Alembert as Secretary to the
Academy. Then fell a leaf from the Arouet branch itself. Madame de
Florian, always delicate, went the way of all flesh; and by February 1,
1772, her widowed husband had arrived at Ferney in that loud desolation
which is the herald of speedy consolation.
He met at Ferney a very pretty, vivacious little Protestant who had been
divorced from her first husband for incompatibility of temper. The pair
were gaily married before April 1, 1772--to the disgust of Madame Denis,
who rightly thought her sister was forgotten too soon, but to the
delight of that old matchmaker, Voltaire.
Besides the bride and bridegroom, there was also at hospitable Ferney,
Florian’s nephew, whom Voltaire called Florianet, an observant youth who
lived to write “The Youth of Florian, or Memoirs of a Young Spaniard,”
and who had stayed here before when he was a boy of ten or eleven. He
had acted then as a sort of page to Voltaire, and Father Adam had
furthered his education by setting him Latin exercises. Voltaire used to
help the child out of those intricacies concerning Hostages and the Gate
of a City, play games with him, and try to wake in him liveliness and
wit. “Seem witty, and the wit will come” was the advice of the wittiest
man of his century.
Florianet was seventeen now, and amused himself, during a visit of two
months, with balls, hunting, a quarrel with his new aunt, and games with
Marie Dupuits’s little girl. She was eight years old and very
intelligent, and Voltaire was fond of her with that fondness for all
young creatures which is surely an amiable trait in a busy man.
He was hardly less fond of Wagnière’s children (the Genevan boy was a
married man by this time, rearing a family at Ferney), who used to play
about the room while the Patriarch dictated to their father.
In this spring of 1772, Voltaire was occupied in building a pretty
little house in the neighbourhood for the Florian husband and wife. The
poor bride was not destined to enjoy it long. She died two years later
of a disease which was called by many extraordinary names and received
the most extraordinary treatment, but which appears to have been
consumption. The Marquis immediately fell violently in love with someone
else.
The only significance of his third Marquise lies in the fact that she
was the bearer of a conciliatory letter and a copy of his “Natural
History” from the famous Buffon to Voltaire--the two having previously
been on bad terms.
More visitors flocked to Ferney in the autumn of 1772. Lekain paid a
third visit, and, the Genevan theatre having been burnt, “bewitched
Geneva” at Châtelaine instead.
Châtelaine was a playhouse which Voltaire had built on French soil, but
only a few yards from the territory of the republic, to the great
umbrage of “Tronchins and syndics.”
They did not hate it less in this September, when Lekain’s seductive
genius drew their young people within its walls by half-past eleven A.M.
for a performance which was to take place at four, and the women wept
and fainted at his pathos. Old Voltaire had a box reserved for him,
cried like a schoolgirl at one moment, and the next applauded as if he
were possessed, by thumping his stick violently on the floor and crying
aloud, “It’s splendid! It couldn’t be better!”
A cool-headed English visitor, Dr. John Moore, who was here during one
of Lekain’s visits, described the performances as only “moderately
good.”
Traveller, physician, and writer, the author of a popular novel,
“Zeluco,” and the father of the hero of Coruña, Moore had frequent
opportunities of conversing with the famous old skeleton who had so
“much more spirit and vivacity than is generally produced by flesh and
blood.” He understood Voltaire far better than most of the English
visitors. To be sure, he could not forgive him his adverse criticisms on
Shakespeare--the king who can do no wrong. But Dr. Moore, himself a
sincere Christian, was one of the very few who admitted that Voltaire
was as sincere an unbeliever; that his Deism was not an offensive
affectation to shock the devout, but a
[Illustration: VOLTAIRE’S DECLARATION OF FAITH
_From the Original in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris_]
profound conviction; and that “as soon as he is convinced of the truths
of Christianity he will openly avow his opinion, in health as in
sickness, uniformly to his last moment.”
Dr. Moore also perceived that here was the man who was not afraid of
dying--only of dying before he had said all he had to say. He records
Voltaire’s famous comparison of the British nation to a hogshead of its
own beer--“the top of which is froth, the bottom dregs, the middle
excellent.” Moore’s “Society and Manners in France” contains one of the
best, if not the best, accounts of Voltaire written from personal
observation by an Englishman.
In the midst of theatrical gaieties news reached Voltaire of the death
of Theriot, on November 23, 1772. Old age, that merciful narcotic,
helped to deaden the blow for Theriot’s old friend. Also, Theriot had
long been proven worthless, and he had a great many of Voltaire’s
letters in his possession, which roused Voltaire from grief to anxiety
lest they should appear incontinently in print.
On December 8th he was writing to d’Alembert to recommend “brother La
Harpe” (who had so grievously failed him) for the post, left vacant by
Theriot’s death, of Parisian correspondent to Frederick the Great.
At the end of 1772, the jealousy of foolish Denis made another little
_fracas_ at Ferney. A girl of seventeen, Mademoiselle de Saussure, the
daughter of a famous doctor, and “a very wide-awake little person,” said
Grimm, had the good fortune to amuse, and often visit, a Voltaire of
seventy-eight. Madame Denis, who disliked Mademoiselle, not only for
herself, but as being a relative of her sister’s supplanter, the second
Madame Florian, made a scandal of the affair.
If ever that homely proverb, “Give a dog a bad name and hang him,” was
true of anybody, it was certainly true of Voltaire.
It was wonderful that that sensitive niece did not find a cause of
jealousy when, in the June of 1773, an old friend, La Borde, came back
to Ferney, bearing with him as a present for Voltaire the portrait of
Madame Dubarry, on which that charming and disreputable lady had
imprinted two kisses. Her favour was worth having. Only twenty-seven
years old, and but recently picked up from the gutter, she was the real
ruler of France. She had dismissed Choiseul; she had made Terrai, that
dissolute Comptroller-General of Finances, whose “edicts fell in
showers”; and she used the public treasury as if it were her private
purse.
Voltaire knew King and Court too well to neglect such a power. Somehow,
in Geneva the winters had been getting longer and more snowy than ever;
and always, in his mind, was that old, old idea of seeing Paris once
again before he died. And there was no chance of a return if the
Omnipotent Woman was unfavourable.
So Voltaire replied with that happy mixture of grace and effrontery for
which his youth had been so famous, and in September, 1773, as has been
noted, he sent Madame the sweetest little watch set in diamonds.
She repaid him for his compliments--on the spot. She helped him to
vindicate General Lally.
It must not be thought that statues and visitors, old age in the
present, and death in a near future, made Voltaire forget to fight
_l’infâme_, or the iniquitous legal system which was often _l’infâme’s_
strongest support. He never forgot anything; and his mind had room for a
thousand interests that never jostled or hurt each other.
In 1772, it had been greatly occupied by the case of the Bombelles.
Madame de Bombelles, a Protestant, had the misfortune to be the wife of
a French officer who grew tired of her, and in order that he might marry
someone else, discarded his wife on the excuse that they had been
married by Protestant rites. The unhappy woman pleaded her case at law.
It was decided against her; her marriage declared null and void;
ordained that she should pay the costs of the suit; that her child
should be educated as a Catholic, at its father’s expense. Voltaire
pleaded long and loud against a decision so shameful, and pleaded, as
usual, as if the interest in hand were the only one he had in the world.
But though _l’infâme_ was responsible for much, the cruelly unjust
justice of the day had upon its guilty soul crimes with which _l’infâme_
had nothing to do.
There had been the case of Martin--condemned to the wheel “on an
equivocal meaning.” The wretched man, arraigned on a wholly unfounded
suspicion of murder, when one of the witnesses said that he did not
recognise him as the person he had seen escaping from the scene of
action, cried out, “Thank God! There is one who has not recognised me!”
Which the judge took to mean, “Thank God! I committed the murder but
have not been recognised by the witness.”
The real murderer confessed before long, but not before Martin had been
tortured and broken on the wheel, his little fortune confiscated, and
his innocent family dispersed abroad, so that they never even knew
perhaps that their father was proved innocent--too late.
Voltaire wrote an account of the case to d’Alembert. “Fine phrases! Fine
phrases!” he said once to an admirer complimenting him on his style. “I
never made one in my life!” He never did. He wrote to make men act, as
he had always written; and the substance of his tale was ever so great
and so moving that the simpler the form of it, the more effective.
In 1773, he wrote the “Fragment on the Criminal Lawsuit of the
Montbaillis.”
It is only four pages long. It tells, in language to be understood by
any child, the story of a husband and wife, snuff-makers of St. Omer,
who in July, 1770, had been accused of murdering their drunken old
mother.
The inventive French temperament concluded that they _must_ have
murdered her, because a drunken mother is a trial, and her loss would be
a gain. A quarrel they had had with her on the last evening of her life
(the reconciliation which followed was conveniently forgotten) lent
colour to the theory.
The positive facts that the doctor, who was at once called, attributed
the old woman’s death to apoplexy; that she not only left no money
behind her, but that with her death expired the licence to make snuff,
which was her son’s only means of livelihood; that the accused were
known to have been patient and affectionate in their filial
relationship; were themselves of quiet and gentle character; and that
there was not a single witness to the crime for which they were
arraigned--had no weight with either the populace or the magistrates.
On November 19, 1771, Montbailli was tortured and broken on the wheel;
and his wife, aged only twenty-four, was left in prison in irons,
awaiting the birth of her child, and then death by the hand of the
executioner.
But that dreadful reprieve gave her relatives time to appeal to the only
man in France who could save her.
Voltaire laid the matter before the Chancellor Maupeou. The case was
re-tried. Both the Montbaillis were declared innocent. And that fickle
and dangerous people who had compassed the death of her husband, and
who, but for Voltaire, would have compassed her own, received back the
wife with tears of joy.
Voltaire had not spared himself. If he wrote briefly, he wrote often.
That style, so simple to read, was not nearly so simple to write. Before
things are made clear to the reader they have to be still clearer to the
writer, who must know at least twice as much as he tells. Then, too,
every fresh case brought Voltaire others. While he was writing pamphlets
for the Montbaillis, he was also writing pamphlets on the case of a
certain Comte de Morangiés; he was working hard for young d’Étallonde;
he was appealing for his own poor people of Ferney and Gex; and he was
in the midst of the suit for the vindication of Lally.
General Lally was a hot-headed Irish Jacobite, who had plotted in France
for the restoration of the Stuarts, and who, when he was sent to India
in the service of France, had declared his policy to be “No more English
in India.”
A clerk called Clive frustrated that little plan. Among a shipload of
French prisoners sent to England was General Lally. England released him
on parole. He returned to France--a country never noted for her
tenderness to the unsuccessful. Besides popular indignation, he had to
face that of the disappointed shareholders in the East India Company,
and the ill-will of a government that supposed the best way to appease
England would be to maltreat Lally.
He “was accused of all crimes” of which a man could be capable. He
demanded an investigation. “I bring here my head and my innocence,” he
wrote to Choiseul, “and await your orders.”
He awaited them for fifteen months in the Bastille--untried.
Then a special court was formed of fifteen members of the dying and
rotten Parliament of Paris; and this man, who had “spent his last rupee
in the public service,” was accused of having sold Pondichery to his
bitterest foes, the English, and upon no fewer than one hundred and
fifty-nine other counts.
In the teeth of all testimony the unanimous voice of those fifteen
judges condemned him to be beheaded. Surly, churlish, and embittered,
imprudent speech was proven against him. But no worse offence. “He is
the only man who has had his head cut off for being ungracious.” That
coward, the King, shut himself up in Choisy, so that no petition for
mercy might reach him.
On May 6, 1766, Lally, General, sixty-four years old, and six times
wounded in the service of his adopted country, was taken, gagged and
handcuffed, to the Place de Grève and there beheaded. The gag was
removed at the foot of the scaffold. But he was wise enough to
disappoint the mob, and died without a word.
“It is expedient that one man should die for the people.” That spirit is
not extinct in France yet.
But if Lally’s innocent blood cried in vain from the ground to King,
magistracy, and mob, it reached old ears that to their last hour would
never be deaf to the tale of wrong.
“I have the vanity to think that God has made me for an _avocat_,” said
Voltaire.
He had closely followed the General’s trial. His prosecutor was
Pasquier, who had received a royal pension for condemning poor mad
Damiens to horrible tortures--Pasquier, “with the snout of an ox and the
heart of a tiger,” and Voltaire’s especial detestation.
It may have been that hatred which first made him examine the documents
concerning this trial. Also, he had met Lally at Richelieu’s, and worked
with him at d’Argenson’s.
On June 16, 1766, he wrote to d’Alembert, “I will stake my neck on it he
was not a traitor”; and a few days later, to d’Argental, “It is my fate
to be dissatisfied with the sentences of the Parliament. I dare to be so
with that which has condemned Lally.”
Dissatisfied with wrong? There have been thousands of men good enough
for that, who have lived and died dissatisfied with it, without lifting
a finger to put right in its place.
Months passed, and years. Voltaire inserted in his “History of Louis
XV.” an able exculpation of Lally. It was something. But it was not
enough.
In 1769, he wrote that Lally and his gag, Sirven, Calas, Martin, the
Chevalier de la Barre, came before him sometimes in dreams. “People
think our century only ridiculous, but it is horrible.” In 1773, he
wrote that he still had on his heart the blood of Lally and the
Chevalier de la Barre.
Still? For ever till they were avenged. He had read English books on
Lally’s case. The English had had no reason to love Lally, but they
regarded his sentence as a barbarous injustice.
And then, early in this year 1773, Lally’s young son, whom the father
had charged to avenge his memory, sent his first Memoir on the case to
Voltaire and asked his assistance.
Voltaire had been very ill--really ill, not fancifully so--with the
gout, and he was in his eightieth year. But this “_avocat_ of lost
causes” had his old burning zeal.
He first began by telling the young Chevalier de Lally-Tollendal, out of
his abundant experience, and in a letter dated April 28, 1773, what to
do and what not to do. “As for me, I will be your secretary.”
Lally-Tollendal, then two-and-twenty years old, had at fifteen written a
Latin poem on Jean Calas. He thus already knew his Voltaire. The King
had paid for his education--a confession of, or an _amende_ for, the
injustice which had killed his father. He was to be one of the
aristocratic democrats of the French Revolution, a refugee in England,
and, in 1815, peer of France. But now he was nothing and nobody, and
alone could never have fulfilled his father’s trust.
For many weeks the labour of “The Historical Fragments of the History
of India and of General Lally” occupied Voltaire “day and night.” It
cost him, he told Madame du Deffand, more than any other work of his
life. It had to be amusing in the history because the monkeys, who
formed one half of the nation, would not read history unless it was
amusing; and pathetic enough, as touching General Lally, to melt the
hearts of the tigers who formed the other half.
Then there were pamphlets to be written, and Madame Dubarry to be won
over. Through her, Lally-Tollendal got his commission in the army.
Through Voltaire, on May 26, 1778, Louis XVI. in council publicly
vindicated General Lally.
In a room in the Hôtel Villette, at the corner of the Rue de Beaune in
Paris, a dying old Voltaire received that news. The splendid intellect
which had served him for more than eighty years, as never mind served
man before, was waning too. But for a moment its strength came back. To
Lally-Tollendal Voltaire dictated his last letter.
“The dead returns to life on learning this great news; he tenderly
embraces M. Lally; he sees that the King is the Defender of Justice; and
will die, content.”
With a last flash of his old spirit, he made someone write in a large
hand, on a sheet of paper which he had pinned to the bed hangings where
everyone could see it, the following words:
“On May 26th the judicial murder committed by Pasquier (Councillor to
the Parliament) upon the person of Lally was avenged by the Council of
the King.”
If ever man carried into the other life the hatred of that oppression
and injustice which have made the wretchedness of this to more than half
the human race, surely that man was Voltaire.
CHAPTER XLII
LATTER DAYS
Voltaire’s old age was naturally something less eventful than the
“crowded hour” of his youth and manhood. But if ever his private life
afforded him a chance of quiet, public events always stepped in to
disturb it.
On May 10, 1774, Louis XV. died of the smallpox, to the good and
blessing of the world. His old courtier at Ferney no sooner heard the
news than he put pen to paper and wrote his Majesty’s _Éloge_, “to be
pronounced before an Academy on May 25th.”
Of course a eulogy had to be eulogistic. The old hand had not lost its
cunning. To flatter the dear departed, to speak of him as a good father,
a good husband and master, and “as much a friend as a king can be”; to
offer for his little failings that courtly excuse, “One cannot be always
a king: one would be too much to be pitied,” and to imply that the man
was a fool so that the insult sounded like a compliment, why, Voltaire
was the one writer in the world who could do it. And he did it.
He turned the occasion to practical use, by preaching against the
neglect of inoculation; and then looked to the future.
What wonder that, for the moment, even this prophet should forget to
prophesy Revolution; should think that he saw already the beginning of
the Golden Age--Millennium--all things made new?
To be sure, he told the government plainly that there were still
Frenchmen who were “in the same legal condition as the beasts of that
land they watered with their tears.” And the young King answered by
repealing the Tax of the Joyful Accession; by disgracing Terrai, for
whom old Ferney was keeping his last tooth; by appointing first as
Minister of Finance, then as Comptroller-General, and then as Secretary
of State, the great reforming Turgot, one of the most enlightened men in
France and already the personal friend of Voltaire. “If any man can
re-establish the finances,” wrote Ferney on September 7th, “he is the
man.” And a few days later, when Turgot obtained free trade in grain,
the enthusiastic old invalid thanked Nature for having made him live
long enough to see that day. Free trade in grain had a very personal
application to this master of a town, this founder of a colony. He had
d’Étallonde staying with him now; and next to his arduous and passionate
work for the restitution of that young officer’s civil rights (“he is
calm about his fate, and I--I die of it”), his four hundred children had
the largest share of his mind. That they returned his affection and
repaid him as they could, was proved when, on Madame Denis’s recovery
from a dangerous chest complaint in the spring of 1775, they fêted that
“niece of her uncle” “with companies of infantry and cavalry, cockades
and kettledrums”--all the mummery and millinery which they loved, and
their master had loved all his life.
Madame Denis was, it must be remembered, already the legal owner of
Ferney. She was to be its practical owner. And it was her old uncle’s
too sanguine hope that she would maintain the manufactory after him. She
was certainly pleased at the colonists’ rejoicings, and the colonists
were pleased themselves, and Voltaire was highly delighted; and a quite
cool observer, Hennin, the Resident, noted that it was a grand thing to
see a cavalcade of nearly a hundred men, mounted and in uniform, from a
village where, twelve years before, there were twenty families of
wretched peasants.
So that, although the year 1775, which was to usher into Ferney such a
succession of visitors as might make the most sociable heart quail,
began with sickness, it began with rejoicing too.
D’Étallonde was still staying there. Nephew d’Hornoy was helping
Voltaire to work his case. The Marquis and Marquise de Luchet came to
join the party in the spring, and were here two months--the Marquis, who
was to be one of Voltaire’s biographers, always engaged in mad schemes
for making money out of gold mines; and the Marquise turning her
good-natured and laughter-loving self into a hospital nurse and nursing
the Ferney invalids unremittingly.
Then came the Florians; and the Marquis’s third wife brought with her
another lively visitor, her young sister, whom Voltaire called “Quinze
Ans,” “who laughed at everything and laughed always.”
They were followed by ecstatic little Madame Suard, who worshipped
Voltaire with the tiresome adoration of a schoolgirl; kissed his hands
and clasped her own; flattered, adored, and coquetted with him; and went
so far as to declare in the long and rapturous accounts she wrote of
him, that his every wrinkle was a charm.
With her came her brother, Panckoucke, who wanted to edit Voltaire’s
works, but did not yet obtain that favour. She also found with Voltaire,
Audibert, that merchant of Marseilles, the earliest friend of the Calas;
and Poissonnier, Catherine the Great’s doctor.
In July, Chabanon, and Abbé Morellet were both staying at Ferney. Also
in July, an audacious and wholly unsnubbable person called Denon had
forced his way there too; asked for his host’s bust; was refused; and
revenged himself by sending the poor old Patriarch a most hideous sketch
of his lean features which he, Denon, had made himself. It was very far
from being the only offensive likeness of the great man. Still extant is
a caricature called “Déjeuner at Ferney,” which Voltaire used to think
was by Huber, and which contains grotesque portraits of Voltaire and
Father Adam, and represents poor Madame Denis, who _was_ inclined to
_embonpoint_, enormously fat. But, after all, it was in the January of
this 1775 that Frederick had sent Voltaire, Voltaire’s bust in porcelain
with _Immortali_ written beneath it. Here was compensation for many
caricatures.
Little Madame Saint-Julien, who had made Ferney lace the mode, and was a
fashionable philanthropist when philanthropy was not the fashion, paid
another long visit to Ferney in the autumn, and went back to Paris to
intercede with her influential relatives for Voltaire’s children. She
and their father were so successful that the day soon came when, “in
spite of the obstinate resistance of the farmers-general,” they obtained
for the colonists that “moderate and fixed tariff which freed the
country from the despotism of a pitiless tax,” extorting from the
poverty-stricken province of Gex alone the exorbitant sum of not less
than forty thousand livres annually.
The grateful colonists had fireworks and illuminations on that good
Butterfly’s birthday; and in December they fêted old Voltaire himself,
filled his carriage with flowers, and decorated the horses with laurels.
The visitors did not cease with the new year 1776. Nay, one came who
came to stay. Mademoiselle Reine-Philiberte de Varicourt was the niece
of those six poor gentlemen whose estates Voltaire had reclaimed in 1761
from the Jesuits of Ornex. Bright, honest, and good, well deserving that
charming name of Belle-et-Bonne with which old Voltaire immediately
christened her, the unfortunate girl had no _dot_ and was destined to a
convent.
But Madame Denis took one of her good-natured likings to her. She was
girlishly kind to old Voltaire, while he on his part soon worshipped her
pretty face, virgin heart, and bright intelligence. No “narrowing
nunnery walls” for her! Marie Dupuits had husband and child to think of
now, and Marie had never had Reine-Philiberte’s dignified good sense.
Belle-et-Bonne fell into place at once. She became a regular, and not
the least delightful, member of the heterogeneous Ferney household.
Another Englishman, Martin Sherlock, visited it in April, 1776, and
wrote his experiences, in his “Letters of an English Traveller,” in
French, which has been retranslated into his native tongue.
Voltaire, who was accompanied by d’Hornoy, met his guest in the hall,
showed him his gardens, spoke a few words to him in English, told an
anecdote of Swift, talked of Pope, of Chesterfield, of Hervey, and with
his old passionate admiration of Newton. Stopping before his bust, he
exclaimed, “This is the greatest genius that ever existed!” There was
no dimming of the old mind, no lack-lustre, no weariness. The England he
had not seen for nearly fifty years was still a vivid and a present
reality.
On one of his visits--Sherlock paid two--Voltaire showed his guest his
shelves filled with English books--Robertson, “who is your Livy”; Hume,
“who wrote history to be applauded”; Bolingbroke, “many leaves and
little fruit”; Milton, Congreve, Rochester.
He criticised the English language--“energetic, precise, and barbarous.”
He explained to Madame Denis the scene in Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” where
the King makes love to Katharine in bad French. He spoke “with the
warmth of a man of thirty.”
Quaintly dressed in white shoes and stockings, red breeches, embroidered
waistcoat and bedgown, and a gold and silver nightcap over his grey
peruke, old Voltaire apologised for this singular appearance to his
guest by saying in English that at Ferney they were for Liberty and
Property. “So that I wear my nightcap and Father Adam his hat.” Later,
he added gravely, “You are happy, you can do anything.... We cannot even
die as we will.”
During the conversation he had uttered what his visitor called “horrors”
about Moses and Shakespeare.
Nothing proves better the young vigour of this marvellous old mind than
the strength of its animosities. The “let-it-alone” spirit of old age
was never this man’s while there was breath left in his body. At the end
of 1773 he had attacked another literary foe--an ungrateful _protégé_,
“the inclement Clement”--in the “Cabals,” a satire in which ring out
clearly the notes a younger hand had struck in “Akakia” or in “Vanity.”
Then on March 10, 1776, Fréron died of mortification at the suppression
of his “Literary Year,” and up gets Voltaire and says he has received an
anonymous letter asking him, if you please, to endow Frélon-Fréron’s
daughter! This is too much. Voltaire suggests that Madame Fréron wrote
that letter. And the Frélons say Voltaire invented it himself. And
Voltaire is as spry and alert and angry as when he first hated Fréron,
thirty years ago.
But these enemies he knew, or had known, in the flesh.
To admire or to despise Shakespeare was but a literary question. Old
Eighty-two in this July of 1776 took it as a burning personal one. He
had not precisely adored Shakespeare in the “English Letters.” A
barbarian, a monster--but of very great genius. For the sake of that
genius he had permitted the polished French people to condone that
“heavy grossness” and the shocking lack of taste; and in his famous
criticism on “Hamlet,” written in 1748, though he _had_ called its
author “a drunken savage,” he had found in the play, not the less,
“sublime touches worthy of the loftiest genius.” To Sherlock, but three
months ago, though he had uttered “horrors” in his criticism, he had
admitted that “amazing genius” again.
And now one Letourneur publishes a new translation of the great William,
and takes upon himself to call him the “god of the theatre,” the only
model for true tragedy; and ignores Corneille and Racine (to say nothing
of the author of “Zaire”) _in toto_.
Then Voltaire beat his breast and tore his hair to think that it was
I--I--who showed to the French the pearls in this English dunghill; that
I suffered persecution for telling them that though the god had feet of
clay, the head and heart were gold.
So in a rage M. de Voltaire sat down and wrote a letter to the
Academy--“his factotum against Shakespeare”; gave himself the lie;
literally translated many passages, knowing, as he had said himself,
that in a translation the letter killeth and the spirit giveth life;
presented, as he meant to do, a gross and coarse Shakespeare, an
indecent buffoon who had “ruined the taste of England for two hundred
years.” Various persons rushed into the fray on either side.
On August 25th, Voltaire’s letter was read at a public meeting at the
Academy, and a good-natured Marquis de Villevieille galloped off
post-haste to Ferney to tell of its success. But there had been
dissentient voices. Anglomania was already a power in the land. The
young Queen had her Crawfords and Dillons, her English garden, her
English jockeys, her English billiards. D’Alembert was too cool, too
cool! The untrammelled nature of the great Diderot was formed to
appreciate the broad and daring genius of the great Englishman. And
Madame Necker, with the sure instincts of a clever woman, criticised
Voltaire’s letter in a letter to Garrick. Voltaire had but shown
Shakespeare’s dead body--“But I--I have seen the soul animating it, and
know it is something more even than a majestic ghost which Garrick, the
enchanter, summons from the grave.”
The letter to the Academy was the last utterance on the great Englishman
of the man who--whether he hotly regretted it, as he did now and in the
famous Preface to “Semiramis,” or was, or said he was, proud of it, as
when he wrote to Walpole--first revealed Shakespeare to the people of
France.
August saw the arrival of a visitor who was hereafter herself to be a
celebrity, Madame de Genlis. Now only thirty years old, she was not yet
famous for her literary works or that grave and religious turn of mind
which did not prevent her occupying the very equivocal position of
_gouvernante_ to the children of the Duke of Orleans. As Madame Suard
came to Ferney prepared to go into raptures, so Madame Genlis came
prepared to disapprove.
The serious lady carried out her intention as thoroughly as the
frivolous one. Her account of her visit contains much more about herself
than about Voltaire, but states, no doubt very truly, that the impiety
of his conversation was shocking, and, certainly untruly, that his
manners lacked tact and urbanity. For this too particular lady the very
trees in the Ferney garden grew too low and upset her temper and her
hair; while the wild enthusiasm for their host of her companion, a
painter, M. Ott, quite distressed a person who had so firmly resolved
not to make a fool of herself in that direction.
As her point of view was unfavourable, her testimony as to her host’s
“ingenuous goodness” to his colonists, to the perfect modesty and
simplicity with which he regarded his great work for them, is the more
valuable. She confirmed the opinion of many others as to the piercing
brilliancy of the old eyes--“which have in them an inexpressible
sweetness.” Madame Saint-Julien was there at the same time--little and
gay and kind--and presently Marie Dupuits’s little girl ran into the
room and put her arms round Grandpapa Voltaire’s neck.
During this August, Voltaire, rather proud of the transaction, “borrowed
Lekain,” who was acting at Court, from Marie Antoinette. The Hermit of
Ferney was too toothless to act himself, but his earliest passion was
also his latest. There was the most charming little theatre in the
village of Ferney now. Lekain acted in that and at Châtelaine. The young
Queen’s graciousness in lending her player made artful old Voltaire long
to have “Olympie” acted before her; to have her for his protectress; to
see with his own eyes “her whose least charm,” as he said, “was
loveliness.”
Picture the delight of the whilom author of “The Princess of Navarre”
when he was commissioned to write a _divertissement_ for her benefit. He
wrote, or rather reproduced a sketch of a _fête_ given at Vienna by the
Austrian Court sixty years before, and called it “The Host and Hostess.”
The thing was meritless, but not objectless, though it failed in its
object--the _rapprochement_ of Ferney and Versailles.
Then M. de Voltaire must needs write an allegory, “Sésostris,” to
flatter the _beaux yeux_ of the Queen, and to show what a King might do
for the good of his people.
To the year 1776, besides the Battle of Shakespeare, belong two more
fights--the last of Voltaire’s life. Beauregard, Rohan, Jore--how far
they were away! But the spirit of their old antagonist had not waxed
faint.
The first fight was only a skirmish, it is true. Father Adam had been
spoilt, of course. From being an inoffensive, lazy person--“the only
idler in a houseful of busy people”--he had become assertive, worrying,
and quarrelsome. He had fallen out with Bigex, the copyist, in 1769; and
as a result Bigex had had to leave. And now the Father must go himself.
It was characteristic of the man who had allowed Jore a pension for
life, that he should send after this ungrateful priest who owed him
thirteen years’ hospitality, presents of money.
In the second fight, the very last of his life, occurring in the
December of 1776, Voltaire matched steel with a worthier foe. It was in
answer to an attack made upon him by an Abbé Guénée that he wrote the
bold and brilliant, if neither deep nor sound, “Christian against Six
Jews,” which advanced Pigalle’s evidence on the subject of the Golden
Calf, and might have better confuted Guénée if that reasoner had not
been on his own ground and most cool and subtle in argument.
But if his foes did not spare this old Voltaire, neither did his
friends. In the early days of 1777 Moultou introduced at Ferney a
wearisome playwright called Berthe, who would persist in reading aloud
his tedious play to their host. “Here the Chevalier laughs,” read
Berthe, as a stage direction. “Happy man!” murmured Voltaire. When the
listener could bear it no longer, he feigned the most violent colic that
ever man had suffered. The next day Berthe came again, and so did the
colic. “If God had not come to my aid,” said Voltaire to Grimm, “I
should have been lost.”
It was in 1777 that Voltaire amused himself by competing under a
pseudonym, for a prize offered by the French Academy for the best
translation of the sixth book of the “Iliad.” It did not gain a prize.
It was not even good. But that such a man at such an age should have
been “sleeplessly active” enough to enter into such a competition, makes
the thing worth recording.
But worse than unsuccessful translations and dull plays, worse than
being beaten in a verbal quibble with a priest, was a mortification this
vain old heart received in the June of 1777.
Joseph II., the young Emperor of Austria, brother of Marie Antoinette,
and himself something of a philosopher, had been the lion of the spring
in Paris. It was confidently expected by d’Alembert, Frederick the
Great--everyone, including Voltaire himself--that on his return home the
celebrity would do what all celebrities did--visit the King of their
kind at Ferney.
On June 27th, Voltaire wrote airily to say that he did not expect his
Majesty. What in the world was there for him to see in this manufactory
of watches and verses? But all the same, when the day came, Ferney rose
up very early in the morning and from eight o’clock was ready in its
best clothes, with its master in his great peruke, waiting. A splendid
dinner had been prepared. The condition of the road from Ferney to
Versoix had been improved by its owner. All was in readiness.
Presently the sound of the rumbling of the travelling carriage is heard
in the distance. If his Majesty had not meant to call at the château,
why choose this route? There were others. “This is Ferney!” says the
coachman. “Whip up the horses!” cries the Emperor. And the imperial
_cortège_ dashes through Ferney, and past the windows of the expectant
château itself, at a gallop. When it is added that his Majesty alighted
at Versoix and examined that infant colony, and that when he reached
Berne he paid a special visit to Voltaire’s great rival, Haller, it will
be seen that he meant to offend.
It is to the credit of a plucky old heart that Voltaire quite refused to
acknowledge himself snubbed, pointed out that he had always said his
Majesty would not come, and that “my age and maladies prevented me from
finding myself on his route.” But if he swallowed it with a smile, the
pill was a bitter one not the less. “This disgrace” the poor old man
called it, writing in confidence to his Angel. But the “disgrace,” if
any, was not Voltaire’s, but the man’s who, privately confessing himself
a philosopher, was afraid to visit Voltaire lest he should be openly
accounted one, and offend an austere mother.
The Emperor’s neglected visit was the last mortification of the man who
had had many, and had felt all with an extraordinary sensitiveness.
But, after all, “the end of all ambition is to be happy at home,” and
Voltaire had many consolations.
The good, fat, Swiss servant, Barbara, was one. Voltaire was at last
learning a little how to grow old, and now went to bed at ten and slept
till five, when Baba would bring him his coffee. One day he took it into
his head to mix some rose-water with it, as an experiment. The result
was an acute indigestion. He rang the bell violently. Enter Baba. “I am
in the agonies of death. I put some rose-water in my coffee and am dying
of it.” “Sir,” says the indignant Baba, “with all your cleverness you
are sillier than your own turkeys.”
But nearer and dearer than a Baba could be was Belle-et-Bonne. By this
time she had become like the old man’s daughter. With rare tact she had
succeeded in endearing herself to him without offending Madame Denis.
She would arrange his papers for him, and keep the desk which hung over
his bed, and “which he could lower or raise at pleasure,” in that order
and neatness his soul loved.
“Good morning, _belle nature_,” he would say when she greeted him in the
morning; and when she kissed his old parchment face would declare it was
Life kissing Death. It was Belle-et-Bonne who could soothe his
irritability or impatience--“You put me on good terms with life.”
And it was Voltaire of eighty-three who taught Mademoiselle
Reine-Philiberte de Varicourt how to dance.
In the summer of this 1777 there arrived unexpectedly one day at Ferney
a worn-out _roué_ of a Marquis de Villette, who had passed two or three
months here in 1765, and with whom Voltaire had since corresponded.
Rich, gallant, well born, a society versemaker, this “ne’er-do-weel of
good company” was the sort of person who sounds attractive on paper, and
in real life is wholly objectionable. Voltaire--Voltaire!--had tendered
him moral advice and urged him to reform. He had known the young man’s
mother--herself a woman of irregular morals--and from these two facts
arose an entirely unfounded scandal, that Voltaire was Villette’s
father.
He was soon to be a sort of father-in-law. Villette, now some forty
years old, and having run away from an intrigue and a duel in Paris, met
Belle-et-Bonne at Ferney; saw her walking in the procession of the
_fête_ of St. Francis (always kept enthusiastically by the colony of
François Marie Arouet), with flowers at her breast, a basket with doves
in it in her hand, and her face bright, beautiful, and blushing.
What was there to do but to fall in love with her? Wagnière, who hated
Villette, said that he played fast and loose with Mademoiselle for three
months. However that may have been, Voltaire approved of his suit. To be
sure, Belle-et-Bonne was too good for him. But she had no _dot_--if a
pretty face, an innocent heart, youth, dignity, and intelligence count
for nothing--so she would have no choice. And any husband is better than
none--when none means a convent. _Enfin_, where to find a French marquis
of stainless reputation in the eighteenth century? It was said that
Voltaire _had_ offered Villette a _dot_ with his wife, and the
disinterested Villette had refused it. And if that is not a sign of
reformation--what is?
So in November, 1777, Mademoiselle de Varicourt was married in the
Ferney chapel at midnight, with her six uncles preceding her up the
aisle, and Papa Voltaire, in Catherine’s sable pelisse, to give her
away.
The young couple spent the honeymoon at Ferney, and through it Voltaire
was working at his last two plays, “Irène” and “Agathocle.”
It is marvellous, not so much that a man of eighty-three should write
bad plays, as that he should write any.
No wonder that the new tragedy, “Irène,” went ill at first. And not so
very wonderful that the old playwright should follow his immemorial
habit and rewrite till it satisfied him. He lost three months over it.
And, as he remarked most truly, “Time is precious at my age.”
So when “Irène” was impossible he turned to “Agathocle.”
Madame Denis’s easy tears and laughter over the two pieces were no sound
criticism. Villette and Villevieille, then staying at Ferney, admired
politely as visitors. The playwright, whose vanity has been excellently
defined as “a gay and eager asking of assurance from others that his
work gave them pleasure,” was delighted with the compliments. But he
accepted correction in that spirit which showed that his vanity “never
stood in the way of self-knowledge.”
“If I had committed a fault at a hundred,” he said, “I should want to
correct it at a hundred-and-one.” So when Condorcet, more honest than
the visitors, paid him the finer compliment of assuring him that such
work as he had produced in “Irène” was not worthy of his genius, he took
that assurance in excellent part; and though by January 2, 1778, “Irène”
had been read and welcomed by the Comédie Française, he went on
correcting and altering it to the end of the month.
He was spurred to do his best by the fact that Lekain declined to play
the _rôle_ written for him. No letters could have been kinder, wiser, or
more conciliatory than those his old host and friend wrote to the great
player.
The part should be rewritten for him!
He was also spurred to do his best by the fact that “Irène” was to be
the means, the excuse, the reason to take him to Paris.
Paris! The idea had been simmering long. Paris! It was twenty-eight
years since he had left it, for a few months at the most. To be sure, he
had been far happier at Ferney than in the riot and fever of that
over-rated capital. In answer to those who talked about the stagnation
of the country, and talked of it as if it were some narcotic trance
which numbed brain and use, Voltaire could point to the best work of his
life. Near him, bound to his heart by many cords, was the smiling cosmos
of the industrial Ferney which he had drawn from the chaos of a barren
and starving province. Here were his gardens and farms; the house he had
built, and loved as one can only love the work of one’s own brain; the
books and pictures he had collected; the thousand household gods from
which the young part easily, but which the old regard with a personal
affection.
Then, Ferney was safe. And in Paris--“Do you not know there are forty
thousand fanatics who would bring forty thousand fagots to burn me? That
would be my bed of honour.” If Louis XV. was dead, so was a friendly
Pompadour. Choiseul and Madame Dubarry were banished.
Good Louis XVI. hated this infidel of a Voltaire, and was just shrewd
enough in his dulness to fear him. It was Louis, still a king, who,
asked what play should be performed at the theatre, replied, “Anything,
so long as it is not Voltaire.” It was Louis Capet in the Temple who is
reported to have said, pointing to the works of Rousseau and Voltaire in
the library of the tower, “Those two men have lost France.”
The brilliant Queen, who had permitted M. de Voltaire to write her a
_divertissement_ and to steal Lekain, was something more favourable. But
the Queen--extravagant and childless--was the most unpopular woman in
France. In 1776, she had compassed the fall of Turgot, Voltaire’s
friend, the hope of his country. In Paris, now, there was but one
minister who was even tepidly favourable to the great recluse of Ferney,
and that was Maurepas.
Altogether, the time seemed hardly ripe. But “if I want to commit a
folly,” Voltaire had written to Chabanon in 1775, “nothing will prevent
me.”
If a king had once been too strong for Voltaire, he may well have known
now that he was stronger than any king. Besides, he had never been
formally banished. “I do not wish Voltaire to return to France”
was not an edict after all. Had he ever forgotten he was still
Gentleman-in-Ordinary? And as for the danger to his person--seriously,
what could be done to an old man of nearly eighty-four. Then, too, he
needed a change. His health, though he was fond of repeating that he had
as many mortal diseases as he had years, was quite good enough to permit
him to take one.
Then there was “Irène,” which he could see put into rehearsal himself:
and then--then--then--there was the domestic influence of all Ferney
urging him to take the step, to make up his mind, to go back to glory,
to honour, to life.
Madame Denis, of course, longed for Paris. Her sixty-eight years and a
chest complaint had not cooled her zest for pleasure and admirers. And
if you do not go, Uncle Voltaire, whether you are banished or no, three
parts of Europe will think you are! She had long ago inspired Marie
Dupuits with her own love of amusement. The Marquis de Villette was
constitutionally even less able to endure the country than Mama Denis.
He had the finest house in the capital, which had once been the
Bernières’ house, where Voltaire had stayed as a young man, which stood
at the corner of the Rue de Beaune on what is now the Quai Voltaire,
opposite the Tuileries, and which is entirely at Papa Voltaire’s
service! Put all these persuadings and persuaders together before a man
already more than half inclined to go, and the result is easily
foreseen.
On the evening of February 3, 1778, Madame Denis and the _ménage_
Villette left Ferney to prepare the Hôtel Villette in Paris against the
arrival of M. de Voltaire.
On February 5th, Voltaire himself, accompanied only by Wagnière and a
cook, set out in their travelling carriage. There was a painful farewell
from the colonists. The poor people felt that their protector was
leaving them for ever. It was in vain he promised them that he would be
back in six weeks at the latest. That he really intended thus to return
is partially proved by the fact that he did not even arrange his
manuscripts and papers before leaving.
The first night was spent at Nantua.
At Bourg, where the horses were changed, Voltaire was recognised and had
to escape from the crowd who surrounded him by locking himself up in a
room in the post-house. Of course the innkeeper produced his best
horses, and called out in his enthusiasm, “Drive fast! Kill the
horses--I don’t care about them! You are carrying M. de Voltaire!”
The _incognito_ Voltaire had resolved to maintain was already a thing of
the past. He had begun to taste what are called the delights or the
drawbacks of fame, according to the temperament of the speaker.
The second night was passed at Sanecey. On the third, at Dijon some of
his adorers insisted on dressing up as waiters and waiting upon him at
supper in order to get a good view of him. Others serenaded the poor man
outside his bedroom window. In Dijon he made an appointment with a
lawyer, and transacted some business.
The next stop was at Joigny. A spring of the carriage broke when they
were near Moret, but Villette arrived to rescue them from that very
common dilemma, and met them with _his_ carriage, in which they pursued
the journey.
The nearer they approached to the capital, the higher rose Voltaire’s
spirits. He told stories with inimitable gaiety. “He seemed twenty.”
At half-past three on the afternoon of February 10th they reached Paris.
When the custom-house officer inquired if they had anything against
regulations, Voltaire replied that there was nothing contraband except
himself. He grew more and more lively every moment. They had no sooner
arrived at the Hôtel Villette than this gay young traveller must step
round to the Quai d’Orsay to see the Comte d’Argental. Friends for sixty
years, their friendship had been strong enough to bridge a gulf of
separation which had lasted more than half their long lives. Madame
d’Argental had died in the December of 1774. There was but one Angel
now. He had taken wing too, for the moment, Voltaire found when he
reached the house. But the old man was no sooner back in the Hôtel
Villette than d’Argental arrived, and the two fell on each other’s
necks. “I have left off dying to come and see you,” says Voltaire. But
there was a shadow on their happiness. D’Argental brought bad news. Two
days earlier, on February 8th, Lekain, whose first part had been Titus
in Voltaire’s “Brutus,” played his last part in “Adélaïde du Guesclin.”
He died, in spite of all the skill of Tronchin. Voltaire “uttered a
great cry.” Lekain had been his friend. Lekain was to have played in
“Irène.”
Belle-et-Bonne tells how the two old men sat up late into the night
discussing the additions Voltaire had made in that play.
But for it, but for the thousand distractions of this new world, the
loud acclamations, the surging stream of visitors the moment brought,
Voltaire might have mourned Lekain longer.
But he was back in Paris. When he left it, he was a power, a danger, a
fear. He had returned to it a king, and awaited his crowning.
CHAPTER XLIII
THE LAST VISIT
Morley speaks of Voltaire’s last visit as “one of the historic events of
the century,” “the last great commotion in Paris under the old
_régime_.” “A ghost, a prophet, an apostle,” says Grimm, “could not have
excited a more fervent interest.”
The Salons worshipped the man who for sixty years had been the first wit
of the wittiest age in history--the author of that dear, daring, ribald,
wicked “Pucelle.”
The Philosophers kissed the hem of the garment of the author of “The
Philosophical Dictionary.”
The Academy fell at the feet of him who had attempted every kind of
literature and failed in none.
The Drama welcomed not only the most famous playwright since Corneille
and Racine, but the man who for sixty years had not ceased to try to
improve the civil status of actors.
The thrifty _bourgeois_ left their shops and stood in crowds outside the
Hôtel Villette, waiting to see him who was himself of their order and
had fought for its rights and rent earth and heaven with cries against
its wrongs.
The Protestant came to worship him who had preached Tolerance, defended
the Calas, and flung all the weight of his scorn and passion against a
law which proclaimed the heretic’s wife his mistress, and their children
bastards.
The submerged, the _canaille_, fierce and hungry-eyed, were among the
street crowds to see him who had pleaded against a criminal code which
punished petty theft, blasphemy, and desertion in time of peace, by
death; meted to the hapless imbeciles, called sorcerers, the vengeance
of superstition and
[Illustration: “TRIOMPHE DE VOLTAIRE”
_From a Contemporary Print_]
fear; and robbed the children of the condemned by confiscating their
goods to the King.
Court and Church paid him the higher compliment of fearing him.
The preachers denounced the apostate from their pulpits. Here is he who
has not only, having examined the evidences of Christianity, boldly
declared that he finds them absurd and inadequate, but has also dared to
attack the evil lives of the believers, tyranny, oppression,
persecution, calling them the inevitable consequence of the Faith, and
so the most powerful of all arguments against it.
Anti-Christ! Anti-Christ!
King and ministers turned and looked at each other in consternation.
Surely there was somewhere an edict of banishment against this person?
But where? If it had been found, no one would have dared to put it into
execution.
The Paris which had once imprisoned him for teaching it how to become
free, and persecuted him for opposing persecution, was at last the Paris
of Voltaire, and not the antechamber of the Kings of France.
On the day after his arrival, Wednesday, February 11, 1778, he received
three hundred visitors. In an outer room were Madame Denis and Villette.
And within, his crown an old nightcap and his royal robes an ancient
bedgown, sat the King of intellectual France. The courtier bred in
Courts knew well how to play his Majesty. Easy and gracious in manner,
no visitor went away without a _mot_, an anecdote, a happy quotation he
could repeat to his friends--“I heard it from the great Voltaire.” One
of the guests was the perfidious La Harpe, who had not seen his old
friend since they parted in anger at Ferney ten years ago, and who
found, he said, the wit undimmed, the memory unimpaired.
In intervals between the departure of one guest and the admission of the
next--if there could have been any such intervals--the old playwright
dictated a new line or a correction for “Irène” to Wagnière, and then
went on receiving half Paris. “All Parnassus was there, from the mire to
the summit,” said Madame du Deffand. In that crowded day, her old
friend found time to write her a little note and tell her how he had
arrived, dead, but was risen again to throw himself at the feet of his
Marquise.
Thursday, February 12th, brought a congratulatory deputation from the
Academy, which was represented by three personal friends of
Voltaire--Saint-Lambert, Marmontel, and the Prince de Beauvau. His
Majesty received them with “a lively recognition,” and sent a cheerful
message to the Academy that he hoped to visit it in person.
Gluck, the great musician, and Piccini the lesser, came to do homage,
one after the other, on February 13th. “Ah! that’s as it should be!”
says old Voltaire. “Piccini comes after Gluck.”
The Comédie Française sent a congratulatory deputation on Saturday, the
14th, and much laboured flattery in an address delivered by Bellecour
and Madame Vestris. Voltaire responded in the same manner--exaggerated.
“We all played comedy beautifully!” he said, with a twinkle, afterwards.
For the rest of that day his talk to his guests was graver than usual.
He discussed politics with them--and the French politics of 1778 were
enough to sober Folly itself. A weak King, a ruined Treasury, a corrupt
Church--and, as Voltaire himself wrote to Florian a week or two later,
in the social state “a revolting luxury and a fearful misery.”
He showed his guests a letter he had just received from another King who
was neither fool nor feeble, and who ruled a kingdom which beside
starving France was Utopia, El Dorado, Paradise.
By Sunday, February 15th, Voltaire was ill. But then Tronchin was in
Paris! Voltaire had not written to that old friend for a matter of ten
years--except “a _billet-doux_ on arriving” in the capital. But though
Tronchin disapproved of almost everything Voltaire did and thought, the
good Doctor loved the man as a woman loves an engaging and ill-trained
child.
He forgave the ten years’ silence and the Châtelaine theatre, even old
Voltaire’s truculent unbelief--came to him, looked at him with those
serene, wise eyes, forbade all going out, and commanded absolute rest.
Voltaire had been going to the theatre to-morrow. Well, he could give
that up. But rest? Madame Necker called to see him this very
day--Sunday. And how, pray, could he decline to receive the wife of her
husband, the woman who had done so much for him in the matter of the
Pigalle statue, and who, distantly related to Belle-et-Bonne, had
sternly disapproved of her innocence being used to reform a wickedness
like Villette’s and had only brought herself with difficulty to enter
that scoundrel’s house? Voltaire received her with the most delightful
_empressement_.
And then, waiting to see him was the “wise and illustrious” Franklin,
philosopher and politician, who until Voltaire’s arrival had himself
been the lion of Paris. How to refuse _him_? He came into the presence
chamber, bringing with him his grandson. Voltaire spoke in English until
Madame Denis told him that Franklin perfectly understood French. There
were twenty persons or so in the room. The two great men talked of the
government and constitution of the United States. “If I were forty,”
says Voltaire, “I should go and settle in your happy country.”
Then Dr. Franklin presented his grandson, a lad about seventeen.
Voltaire raised his hands above the boy’s head and blessed him,
“uttering only these words,” and in English--“God and Liberty.”
He told the story himself to several of his correspondents. It moved his
old heart. And the persons who saw the scene--to be sure, they were
French and ready to be affected at anything--shed tears.
The Franklins had not been gone an hour before Voltaire was receiving
Lord Stormont, the English ambassador, and Belbâtre, a famous performer
on the harpsichord. Rest? Dr. Tronchin already knew the temper and
disposition of his invalid, and something, though not yet all, of the
selfish and pleasure-loving character of his Denis and his Villette.
Voltaire was sent to bed. And prudent Tronchin inserted a notice in the
“Journal de Paris” stating that M. de Voltaire had lived since he came
to Paris on the capital of his strength instead of only on the income,
as all his friends must wish; that that capital would very soon be
exhausted, “and we shall be the witnesses, if we are not the
accomplices, of his death.”
The notice did not appear until February 20th, and by the 19th this
marvellous old man was at least well enough to be assigning the parts in
“Irène.” Richelieu, himself eighty-two, came to help him in this
delicate task. The magnificent marshal, in spite of the care and
splendour of his dress, did not look nearly so young and vigorous as the
attenuated figure in bedgown and nightcap, with his sunken eyes afire
and all his old keenness and spirit. Besides settling parts, he was now
rewriting the play itself so enthusiastically, that wretched Wagnière
did not even have time to dress himself.
The next day, February 20th, that poor, shameful, tawdry favourite,
Madame Dubarry, came out of her social banishment to see this new king,
Arouet. Le Brun, poet, and once benefactor of Marie Corneille, who had
written an inflammatory ode in praise of the monarch and wanted to see
if it had been appreciated, closely followed the Dubarry. He tells how
Voltaire contrasted the fresh, fair innocence of Belle-et-Bonne with the
stale and painted charms of the last avowed mistress of a King of
France.
Le Brun himself was characteristically received with “You see, Sir, a
poor old man of eighty-four, who has committed eighty-four follies.” The
story runs that Voltaire had said the same to Sophie Arnould, and that
that sprightly person had replied, “Why, that’s nothing! I am only forty
and I have committed a thousand.”
It was on this same day, February 20th, that Voltaire received a letter
from Abbé Gaultier, who had been a Jesuit for seventeen years and a curé
for twenty, and now had a post at the Hospital of the Incurables.
Gaultier was anxious for the salvation of Voltaire’s soul, and that he
should have the saving of it. Voltaire responded favourably; and the
next day, the 21st, received the priest. Gaultier and Wagnière both give
accounts of the interview. Both may have lied. One must have. The truth
seems to be that Gaultier was ushered into a salon full of people, whom
Voltaire soon dismissed. He took the priest into his private room,
where--to make a long matter short--Gaultier offered himself as
Voltaire’s confessor. The Patriarch asked if anyone had suggested to him
to make that offer--the Archbishop of Paris, for instance, or the Curé
of Saint-Sulpice, in whose parish Villette’s house was situated.
Gaultier replied, No; and Voltaire said he was glad of the assurance. A
long conversation ensued. Voltaire declared that he loved God; and
Gaultier answered that he must give proofs of it. They were three times
interrupted--by the Marquis de Villevieille, nephew Mignot, and
Wagnière. Madame Denis came in to beg that her uncle might not be tired
and worried. When Gaultier was dismissed, it was with the promise that
he should be received again.
When Wagnière asked Voltaire what he thought of Gaultier, Voltaire
replied that he was “a good fool.” He appears to have thought that he
would be more easily satisfied than shrewder men, and that if it came to
the dreadful necessity of a confession as an insurance of decent and
honourable burial, Gaultier would be the best confessor.
A few days later a certain Abbé Martin thrust himself in and
imperatively insisted that the sceptic should make confession then and
there to him. “I have come for that. I shall not move an inch.”
“From whom do you come, M. l’Abbé?”
“From God Himself.”
“Well, well, Sir--your credentials?”
The Abbé was dumb. The inconsistent old Patriarch, feeling that he had
been severe, went out of his way to be more than usually kind and
agreeable during the rest of the visit.
But such incidents made one ponder. To avoid the sickness which would
make confession a necessity was the obvious thing to do. But to keep
well meant to rest. And every hour that struck, every turn of the wheel,
brought fresh excitements, fresh work, fresh visitors.
On the very day of Gaultier’s visit, February 21st, came Madame du
Deffand, whose long friendship and “herculean weakness” had enabled her
to brave the crowds that surrounded Voltaire, and visit him first about
a week earlier, on February 14th. Her account of that occasion has been
lost. But the most ennuied and world-weary worldling of any time
confessed that it had been delightful.
On this February 21st the event had lost the one great antidote to
boredom--novelty. Denis was “_gaupe_,” and Villette “_a plat_ person of
comedy,” and Belle-et-Bonne damned with faint praise as “said to be
amiable.”
But in the presence of Voltaire, her correspondent since her youth, her
warmest sympathiser when blindness fell upon her, even Madame du Deffand
forgot again for a while what a bitter and empty world that is where
Pleasure is the only god and amusement the be-all and end-all of
existence. Old Voltaire entertained her with a lively account of
Gaultier’s visit.
But, all the same, he had not forgotten that that incident had a very
serious side.
Four days later, on February 25th, about midday, he was dictating in
bed, when suddenly, in a violent fit of coughing, he broke a
blood-vessel. Wagnière, terrified, rang the bell loudly. Madame Denis
ran into the room, and Tronchin was summoned immediately. It had been so
easy to laugh at Gaultier with a blind old _mondaine_ when one felt
lively and well! But now--call him at once! Turning to the persons in
his room, the old man bade them all remember that he had fulfilled “what
they call here one’s duties.” Tronchin came, bled the patient, and, what
was likely to be far more useful, sent him a very excellent and
strong-minded young nurse who was to refuse admission to all visitors,
and a surgeon who was to stay in the house all night.
Meanwhile, Protestant Wagnière, who regarded his master’s dealings with
the priests as disgraceful to his honour in this world and very unlikely
to save his soul for the next, had not summoned Gaultier.
The next day, February 26th, Voltaire wrote the priest a little note:
“You promised, Sir, to come and hear me. Come as soon as you can.”
Madame Denis added her entreaties in a postscript. But, it being nine
o’clock at night when Gaultier received the letter, he did not come to
the Hôtel Villette till the next day, when his penitent could not, or
would not, see him.
By Sunday, March 1st, he was well enough to listen to La Harpe reading a
canto of “La Pharsale”--so loudly that he could be heard in the street.
On the Monday morning d’Alembert came to see the sick man. Voltaire told
him that he had “taken the leap,” and sent for Gaultier. There had been
other priests, said d’Alembert, writing to Frederick the Great, who had
thrust themselves into his room, preaching at him like fanatics, “whom
the old Patriarch, from goodness of heart, had not ordered to be thrown
out of the window.” Gaultier was more moderate and reasonable than his
brethren; and, thinks d’Alembert, if Voltaire has the natural weakness
to feel that it is of consequence what becomes of the remains of poor
humanity after death, he is right to do as he proposes to do--as all the
world does, the good Protestant as well as the godless pagan. This is
d’Alembert’s attitude toward the matter throughout.
Later on that same day, Gaultier reappeared. He was ushered into the
sick room. Voltaire sent the servants out of it. Wagnière listened at
the door, which was luckily only a sort of paper screen. He was very
much agitated by those fears for his master’s honour. When Voltaire
called him and bade him bring writing materials, the servant was too
moved to answer the question as to what ailed him. Voltaire took the
pen, wrote his statement or profession of faith, which declared that he
had confessed to Gaultier, that he died in the Catholic religion in
which he was born, and that if he had scandalised the Church he asked
pardon of God and of it. D’Alembert--the truthful d’Alembert--says that
Voltaire told him he added the last phrase at the request of the priest
“and to have peace.”
But to that “zeal in concessions,” which had always made him as
vigorously thorough in his lies as he was thorough in his good deeds,
the addenda may in part be attributed.
The Marquis de Villevieille and Abbé Mignot readily signed what Gaultier
lightly called “a little declaration which does not signify much.”
Wagnière hotly declined.
Before leaving, Gaultier proposed to give the sick man the Communion.
Voltaire excused himself. He coughed too much, he said. He gave
Gaultier, according to the custom, twenty-five louis for the poor of the
parish, and the priest left.
There was one man about Voltaire, but only one, who wished him to
declare, not what it was expedient to think, but what he really thought:
what were the convictions of his soul, and the creed of his heart.
A few days earlier, on February 28th, at the earnest request of Wagnière
and at a moment when he solemnly believed that his last hour had come,
Voltaire had written down, clearly and firmly, his real faith:
“I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and
detesting superstition. February 28, 1778. Voltaire.”
So far as a few weak words can express any man’s attitude towards the
Supreme Being and his own fellow-sinners, this confession expresses
Voltaire’s.
It is still preserved in the National Library at Paris.
On the Tuesday, March 3d, Gaultier returned. He wanted, or rather his
superiors, the Archbishop of Paris and de Tersac, the Curé of
Saint-Sulpice, to whom he had showed the confession, said that _they_
wanted, one more detailed and less equivocal. The truth was
Saint-Sulpice would have liked the credit of such a conversion himself.
This “man of little understanding and a bigoted fanatic,” as d’Alembert
called him, was not a person to be offended. He had, as parish priest,
the disposal of the bodies of those who died in his parish.
Voltaire would not see Gaultier. But from that stormy sick bed, on March
4th, he wrote the most graceful of conciliatory letters to offended de
Tersac; and laconically announced to poor Gaultier, in a note, that
Villette had given orders that until M. de Voltaire was better, no
priest, except the Curé of Saint-Sulpice, should be admitted to the
house.
Persistent Gaultier returned in a week and was again refused admission.
Death-bed conversions were his speciality, and he was not going to be
cheated of this one without a struggle. Meanwhile Voltaire upset all
his plans by recovering rapidly. Paris, who had heard much more than the
truth concerning this illness and confession, avenged herself for her
anxiety by epigrams. It was right that the Curé of the Incurables should
attempt such a conversion! The patient himself (whose every utterance
was reported) declared that if he had lived on the banks of the Ganges
he would have died with a cow’s tail in his mouth. To die with a lie in
it did not shock Paris in the least.
To find excuses for Voltaire’s act, it is as necessary, as it is now
impossible, to realise fully the conditions of life and death under a
government which permitted no liberty of conscience, and in which men
were either orthodox or anathema.
There were other troubles besides religious ones to harry this old
patient of eighty-four out of a sick bed to the grave before his time.
Tronchin wanted Voltaire’s real good, and Voltaire’s real good meant
Ferney and repose; while Villette was all for himself, pleasure, and
Paris. One day the doctor turned the Marquis by force out of the
sick-room. Villette called in a rival practitioner, Lorry--famous and
freethinking--and no doubt was disappointed when Tronchin worked
amicably side by side with his _confrère_.
A College of Physicians could not have kept Voltaire, when he began to
recover a little, from doing as he liked. He was soon sitting up in bed,
working on “Irène” and dictating to Wagnière as usual. Visitors thrust
themselves in again. Poets came to read their complimentary odes. One
writer announced to Voltaire in a most wearisome prepared speech, that
to-day he had come to visit Homer, to-morrow he would visit Euripides,
the next Sophocles, the next Tacitus, the next ----“Sir, I am very old,”
says the voice from the bed; “if you _could_ pay all these calls in
one----”
Another flatterer said that, having surpassed his brethren in everything
Voltaire would surpass Fontenelle himself in length of days.
“Ah! no, Sir. Fontenelle was a Norman: he cheated even Nature.”
By March 10th the invalid was not unnaturally worse again, and Tronchin
kept him in bed, although, or perhaps because, there was a rehearsal of
“Irène” actually going on in the house at the moment.
The next day, Madame Vestris, who was to play in “Irène,” was allowed to
see him about her part. The maddening placidity with which she delivered
lines intended to be passionately pathetic did not help to soothe the
invalid’s irritable and nervous condition. He told her how fifty years
ago he had seen Mademoiselle Duclos reduce the whole house to tears by a
single line; and talking to Mademoiselle Clairon afterwards, he hit the
imperturbable Vestris hard in a mot well understood by all Paris.
He had himself recited with extraordinary feeling a few lines out of his
last play. “Ah!” said Clairon, “where will you find an actress to render
them like that? Such an effort might kill her.”
“So much the better,” answers the poor old playwright viciously. “I
should be only too glad to render the public such a service.”
The mediocrity of the other actors also grievously afflicted the
overwrought mind and body of the sick man. There came, indeed, times
when he sank into a sort of stupor: when nothing seemed to matter; when
he was indifferent or unconscious that Madame Denis was conducting
rehearsals and giving away the first-night tickets on her own
responsibility, and that d’Argental and La Harpe were making such
alterations in “Irène” as they deemed fit. He must have been really ill.
In four days, it is said, he had aged four years. The trumpet blasts of
adulation in prose or verse, always appearing in the newspapers, had no
power to rouse him; and as for the abuse--“I received such abominations
every week at Ferney,” he said, “and had to pay the postage; here I get
them every day, but they cost me nothing--so I am the gainer.”
On March 14th, Madame Denis presided over the last rehearsal of “Irène,”
and on March 16th was the first performance.
The playwright, who had written and rewritten it, laboured at it, as he
said himself, as if he had been twenty, was in bed in the Hôtel
Villette, not too ill to be interested in its success, but past any
great anxiety concerning it.
The house was crowded. Marie Antoinette was there--Marie Antoinette, who
had been brilliantly imprudent enough to inquire why if Madame Geoffrin,
“the nurse of the philosophers,” had been received at Court, Voltaire
should not be? She had a notebook in her hand, and put down therein all
the pious and edifying passages to prove to her absent lord that M. de
Voltaire’s conversion was real! Her brother-in-law, d’Artois, was there;
the Duke and Duchess of Bourbon: all Versailles, but the King.
The play, or more correctly the playwright, was received with tumultuous
applause. “Irène” was feeble and tired, like the old hand that had
written it. But here and there, where the bright flame of a dying genius
flickered up for a moment, the house applauded madly, and to parts
wholly meritless listened in respectful silence. After each act,
messengers were despatched to tell Voltaire all was well. At the end of
the last, Dupuits rushed to announce a general success, and the
sick-room quickly filled with congratulating friends. “What you say
consoles but does not cure me,” said the poor old invalid. But he roused
himself enough to inquire which verses were the most applauded, and to
chuckle joyfully when he heard of the delighted reception of those which
smote the clergy hip and thigh.
On March 19th, the “Journal de Paris” published a very sanguine account
of Voltaire’s health. “His recent indisposition has left no
after-effects.” It was certainly true that he was better again. He
received a deputation from the Academy congratulating him on “Irène,”
and by March 21st was well enough to go out in a carriage. He was
recognised and surrounded by the people in the streets, and when he
regained the Hôtel Villette there was a deputation of Freemasons waiting
to see him. There was no peace for him, in fact, at home or abroad. His
whole visit to Paris was like the progress of a popular sovereign who
has no officials to ensure his comfort and privacy.
Being better, the most natural thing to do was to go over “Irène.” He
sent for an acting copy. Directly he saw how it had been tampered with,
he fell into the greatest rage in which Wagnière, after twenty-four
years’ service and a much richer experience of his master’s _vifness_
than Collini, had ever seen him. He forced Madame Denis to confess. He
pushed her away so that she fell into an armchair, or rather, says
Wagnière spitefully, into the arms of Duvivier, that dull young man she
afterwards married. Then the indignant uncle sent the niece out (it was
raining too) to d’Argental’s house to fetch the manuscripts and plays
with which he had intrusted that old friend. His rage lasted for twelve
hours. He roundly abused both d’Argental and La Harpe. And then, for he
was the same Voltaire, he apologised to both with a most generous
humility.
On March 28th, he went to see Turgot--“Sully-Turgot”--the man who had
“saved the century from decadence,” and whose disgrace in 1776 Voltaire
had felt as a keen personal grief and an irreparable public disaster.
The meeting was very French and effusive. But it was not, for that,
insincere. “Let me kiss the hands of him,” cries old Voltaire, “who has
signed the salvation of the people.”
The day of this King’s coronation had been fixed for March 30th. The
nominal King sat aloof and sulky at Versailles. But what did that
matter? The Queen, keener-eyed, saw in Voltaire a rival force not to be
disregarded. And when d’Artois heard of Voltaire’s death--“There has
died a great rogue and a great man,” said he. From a d’Artois it was no
bad testimony.
At four o’clock in the afternoon of this March 30th a gorgeous blue,
star-spangled coach waited at the door of the Hôtel Villette.
And presently there gets into it, amid the shouts and acclamations of
his subjects, a very, very lean old figure, in that grey peruke whose
fashion he had not altered for forty years, a square cap on the top of
it, a red coat lined with ermine, Ferney white silk stockings on the
shrunken legs, large silver buckles on the shoes, a little cane in the
hand with a crow’s beak for a head, and over all this extraordinary
fancy dress (it was only rather less remarkable in Paris in 1778 than it
would be in Paris to-day) Catherine’s sable pelisse.
Thus dressed, he was driven through tumultuous crowds to the Louvre,
where two thousand persons received him with shouts of “Long live
Voltaire!”
The Academy met him in their outer hall--an honour never accorded to
anyone, even to princes. Twenty Academicians were present. The absentees
were all churchmen. The King was conducted to the Presidential Chamber,
and there unanimously elected to the next three months’ Presidency. Then
the Perpetual Secretary, friend d’Alembert, rose and read a so-called
Eulogy of Boileau, which was really a Eulogy of Voltaire. The serene
dignity of the Secretary contrasted not a little with old Voltaire’s
painful efforts after self-command. It was twenty-eight years since he
had been among them. It was thirty-five since, as a body, they had
refused him admission. And now----!
He paid a brief visit to d’Alembert’s office, and then got into his
carriage again. The crowds had increased. All sorts and conditions of
men were here to welcome him who had pointed the way to freedom--who,
unlike all other kings, was of the people, and so, for them. Frenzied,
as in another frenzy they had hooted the Calas to judgment through the
streets of Toulouse, and as but a very few years later they might have
hooted Voltaire himself to the Place de la Guillotine, they applauded
and worshipped him now. The Villettes and Madame Denis met him at the
Comédie Française. Their protection was necessary. The people clambered
on the carriage itself to see him, to touch him. One man seized
Belle-et-Bonne’s little hand instead of the Patriarch’s. “Ma foi!” he
said. “This is a plump hand for eighty-four!”
She and Madame Denis preceded him to the box set aside for the
Gentlemen-in-Ordinary. Then, with the women pressing on him and plucking
the fur from his pelisse to keep as souvenirs, Voltaire made his way
through the house to the passionate acclamations of the crowded
audience. He would fain have concealed himself behind Belle-et-Bonne and
his portly niece. “To the front!” cried the gods. And to the front he
came. Opposite him was the royal box, in which was d’Artois who had been
with the Queen at the opera, but had slipped away to do homage to a
greater royalty.
Then another cry shook the house. “The crown!”
Brizard, the actor, came forward and put a laurel crown on the old
poet’s head. “Ah, God! You will kill me with glory!” he said. He took it
off and put it on Belle-et-Bonne’s. And the house bade her give it back
to him. He resisted. And then Prince de Beauvau came forward and crowned
him again. By this time the whole auditorium was on its feet. The
passages were full to suffocation. The actors, dressed for their parts,
came before the curtain to join in the enthusiasm. The delirium lasted
for twenty minutes. The air of the theatre was black with the dust
caused by the movement of so great a multitude, struggling to see.
At last the play began. It was “Irène,” of course--“Irène,” now at its
sixth representation.
The audience had read their own meaning into its lines. They applauded
wildly throughout. At the end the curtain was raised again. On the stage
was a pedestal, and on the pedestal the bust of Voltaire which had been
brought from the hall of the Comédie where it had recently been placed.
Actors and actresses were grouped round it, holding garlands of flowers.
Some of the audience, despite the new regulations, had crowded on to the
stage for a better view.
Then Brizard, dressed for his part of monk in “Irène,” placed his laurel
garland on the head, and the whole company followed his example. From
the house burst a roar which sounded as if it was from one throat as it
was from one heart. For the first time in France, said Grimm, there was
no dissentient voice. “Envy and hatred, fanaticism and intolerance,
dared not murmur.” Perhaps even at that delirious moment the old
Patriarch recognised the triumph, not as his, but as philosophy’s: and
rejoiced the more. “It is then true, Sire,” he wrote on April 1st, in
his last letter to Frederick the Great, “that in the end men _will_ be
enlightened, and those who believe that it pays to blind them will not
always be victorious.”
March 30, 1778, is a great day in the history of France as celebrating,
not the honour of Voltaire, but of that “happy revolution he had
effected in the mind and the conduct of his century.”
Villette drew him forward to the front of the box, and while he stood
there for a moment the applause redoubled.
Then Madame Vestris, who had played “Irène,” came forward and recited an
ode by the Marquis de Saint-Marc. Voltaire, writing to Saint-Marc the
next day, thanked him for having made him immortal in the prettiest
verses in the world. The ode was not bad; but if it had been it would
have been applauded and encored just the same. Copies were circulated
through the house.
On the stage one woman came forward and impulsively kissed the bust, and
other enthusiasts followed her example.
A stranger, entering at the moment, supposed himself to be in a
madhouse.
The curtain fell again; and again rose, this time on “Nanine.” Once
more, it was not the play that counted, but the playwright. When the
curtain fell for the last time, he made his royal way to his carriage
between lines of women sobbing with emotion. Some persons seized his
hands and kissed them with tears. Others fell upon the horses to stop
them and cried for torches. Thus lighting him, crowds accompanied his
carriage home, shouting, dancing, and weeping. When at last he reached
the Hôtel Villette, worn out with the glory and the high-pitched
emotions of the day, the poor old Patriarch himself wept like a child.
“If I had known the people would commit such follies I would never have
gone to the Comédie.”
But it was the next morning which, like all next mornings, was the real
time for reflection. Here was the man who, more than any other Frenchman
who ever lived, understood the national temperament. “Capable of all
excesses,” “the Parisians pass their time in hissing and clapping--in
putting up statues and pulling them down again.” “You do not know the
French,” he said to Genevan Wagnière; “they would have done as much for
Jean Jacques.” “They want to stifle me under roses.”
The reflections showed a just judgment. But, coming at such a time, they
showed, too, a man old, tired, and at the end of his tether. Tronchin
had long said that to survive such a life as he had been living the last
few weeks, his body must be made of steel.
Long and bitterly discussed, but this “next morning” become a pressing
and imminent question, was the return to Ferney. To go--or to stay? On
the one side were Villette and Madame Denis. They were not the rose, but
it was delightful to live near the rose. The one, despite the good and
pretty wife, had already been drawn back again into the vile
dissipations of the capital. The other was not only out at
entertainments all day, but at sixty-eight was coyly coquetting with her
Duvivier.
In the second camp was Wagnière, who besides having left home, wife, and
children at Ferney, was sincerely devoted to his master’s real good; the
judicious, clear-seeing d’Alembert, young Dupuits, and above all, Dr.
Tronchin. Fearless and upright, the great doctor made one last
passionate appeal to his patient to go while there was time. “I would
give a hundred louis to see you back at Ferney. Go in a week.”
“Am I fit to travel?” says the poor old Patriarch.
“I will stake my head on it,” says Tronchin.
The thin trembling hand grasped the strong one.
“You have given me back my life.”
Voltaire was so much moved that the serene Tronchin, nay, the very cook
who happened to be in the room at the same moment, was moved too.
Tronchin wrote off immediately to Ferney for Voltaire’s coachman and
carriage. Madame Denis’s vociferous indignation was wasted on him.
Little Madame Suard, the sprightly visitor of Ferney, must have been as
delighted as all others who put Voltaire’s life above their own
pleasure. She came to see her old host. “We shall kill him,” she said,
“if he stays here.”
But Madame Denis was not going back to the dismal solitude and the ice
and snow of Ferney without a fight. Is it the Villette house you do not
like? She hurried out, and nearly took one in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré,
with a beautiful garden where Uncle Voltaire could fancy himself in the
country. The negotiations for it fell through. But there is what might
be made a very fine house in the Rue Richelieu, and which has the
enormous advantage of being quite close to the home of your butterfly
philosopher, Madame Saint-Julien! Voltaire at eighty-four, and with, as
he pointed out to his every correspondent, at least two mortal
complaints, actually consented to buy this unfinished house. He would
live there eight months of the year, and the other four at Ferney.
Still, those other four were to be taken at once. He would go now--soon!
If he _could_ go, that is. But had he not just been elected to three
months’ Presidency of the Academy? His vacillations were the despair of
Tronchin--ay, and the despair of himself. He longed to go, but he could
not go. Madame Denis, with the most limitless capacity for nagging ever
vouchsafed to mortal woman, volubly assured him that influential friends
had told her that if he did go, he would never be allowed to return.
True, on April 2d “Irène” had been performed at Court. That did not look
like a new edict of banishment. But then the author had not been asked
to see his play. Perhaps that _did_? Then it was said the Queen herself
had had an idea of slipping into the theatre on that great 30th of March
to see the crowning of the people’s King--only--only--the other King had
peremptorily forbidden her. A dog Voltaire had been fond of at Ferney
came to Paris with one of the Ferney servants and bounded in to lick his
master’s hand with the touching, dumb joy of animal affection. “You see
I am still beloved at Ferney,” says the old man. Villette and Madame
Denis took very good care that that dog should never enter the house
again. They tried to get rid of Wagnière--his influence was so bad and
so powerful. They failed in this. But, after all, they succeeded in
their main object.
When a man’s foes are those of his own household, resistance is
peculiarly difficult.
“I have seen a great many fools,” Tronchin wrote on April 6th, “but
never such an old fool as he is.”
The exhaustion consequent on his crowning had passed away. With it
passed away, too, the idea of an immediate return to Ferney.
By that day, April 6th, the “old fool” was well enough to go on foot, in
spite of adoring crowds, to the Academy.
A seller of books on the way naïvely begged him “to write me some and my
fortune will be made.” “You have made so many other people rich! Write
me some books. I am a poor woman.” Among the people he heard himself
often called by that name which was a sweeter flattery to his soul than
all odes and plaudits--“the man of Calas.”
The next day he was made a Freemason, and in the evening went to see the
unacknowledged actress-wife of the Duke of Orleans.
On April 11th he returned Madame du Deffand’s visit. She forgave him for
not coming before; but the Convent of St. Joseph, in which she lived,
found it hard to forgive him for coming at all and profaning their holy
place with his presence. He paid other visits. One old friend, the
Comtesse de Ségur, was dying when he saw her. For a little, the charm of
his reminiscences brought back to her their youth. When he visited her
again, remembering only that he, like herself, stood on the brink of
eternity, she passionately conjured him to cease his “war against
religion.” He turned upon her fiercely, forgetting her womanhood and her
dying. That stern, terse creed he had hammered and forged for himself
was as dear to him as was to her the fuller faith she had accepted
without trouble or thought. The room was full of people. The guests
paused to listen. Voltaire remembered himself: offered sympathy,
suggested remedies, and left, greatly moved.
Another visit was yet more pathetic. He went to see Egérie de Livri,
once the vivacious poor companion of the Duchesse de Sully and would-be
actress, and now the Marquise de Gouvernet. In this withered old woman
of eighty-three what traces were there of the brilliant girl to whom a
Voltaire of five-and-twenty had taught declamation and love, who had
gaily forgotten him for de Génonville, and graciously remembered him
when he had immortalised her in “Les Vous et Les Tu”? Above him, on the
wall, smiled the picture he had given her--his dead self, by
Largillière. A ghost! A ghost! He left her, profoundly saddened. She
sent the portrait to him at the Hôtel Villette, and he gave it to
Belle-et-Bonne.
Another friend came to see him one morning--Longchamp--from whom he had
parted eight-and-twenty years ago, and with whom were connected many
memories, of the Court and of Paris, of Cirey and Madame du Châtelet.
If the man had cheated his master, he had loved him too. The things are
not incompatible.
These meetings made the old heart yearn again for quiet and Ferney. But
there was still so much to do!
Besides his plays to be corrected and personally supervised in
rehearsal, a new grand scheme had been filling his mind, quickening his
last energies, bringing back the resolute passion of his youth.
On April 27th, he attended a _séance_ at the Academy. Abbé Délille read
a translation of Pope’s “Epistle to Arbuthnot.” Well, one Academician
had known the thing in the original and the author in the flesh. He sat
and listened attentively. Then he got up. An admirable translation,
gentlemen. But our language is, after all, poor--poorer than it need be
in poetic expression. Why, for instance, should we not call an actor who
plays tragedy, a tragedian? And why--why should this Academy not
undertake the reconstruction of the French Dictionary? The one we have
is unworthy of us--dull, inadequate, impossible. The Academy is called
the lawgiver of language to the people of France. Let it worthily prove
itself so! The work shall not only be useful, but patriotic. Each member
shall take a letter. As for me, gentlemen, I am willing to consecrate to
such a task the brief remainder of my days. The old man spoke with the
fire and the vigour of youth. Some of his auditors were incompetent for
the task he proposed to them; many were lazy and apathetic.
But the octogenarian who had suggested it went home with his soul on
fire, drew paper and pen towards him, and began, through domestic
disturbance and the ceaseless round of visits, to elaborate his scheme.
Two days later he received an ovation from the Academy of Sciences.
D’Alembert read a Eulogy, written by Condorcet, of Trudain, Councillor
of State, who had helped Voltaire with his colony at Ferney. To eulogise
Voltaire himself followed in natural sequence. Franklin was there too.
Old Voltaire spoke to him. “Embrace in the French fashion!” cried a
voice: and they did.
At the end of April it was decided that Wagnière should leave for
Ferney, to get there papers and books of which Voltaire had need. It was
a bitter parting. The servant had done his best to make his master go
with him. But Tronchin was not always at his side, and Denis and
Villette were. Then there were his plays still needing correction. And
now that Dictionary scheme, so hotly resolved upon--how to abandon
_that_? Then, too, the Abbé Beauregard had preached in glowing
vituperation at Versailles against all the philosophers, and one
philosopher in particular. The kingly party, as well as the
ecclesiastical, was mad to hound this Voltaire out of Paris.
There had been many times in his life when he had perforce to turn his
back on the enemy and fly. But those had gone by for ever.
On April 27th, he signed the contract of purchase for the new house in
the Rue Richelieu.
On the 29th, Wagnière left. Both knew the parting was their last. But
neither could face the fact.
Life went on with a madder rush when the secretary had gone. Visits
succeeded to visits. One ovation brought another. All the _mots_ the
Patriarch uttered (and numbers he did not) were recorded in the
newspapers. His every action was noted--his very motives guessed.
Through all he was working feverishly--without the invaluable help of
Wagnière and with his strength kept up by drugs--on that scheme for the
Dictionary.
It was ready by May 7th. He went to the Academy. Upon some of the
brethren at least--they were almost all young enough to be his
grandsons--had fallen that fatal mental inertia, that deadly sleep
which paralysed the brains of half aristocratic France just before the
Revolution. Nothing matters! Nothing is worth while! With eyes and heart
aglow, this old Voltaire read aloud his brief and masterly plan. It
remains that upon which all great dictionaries in Europe and America
have been modelled to this day.
He recommended it with a zeal of which he alone was capable. Tronchin
speaks of it as his “last dominant idea, his last passion.” If he had
been a boy of twenty, with name and fortune to make by this Dictionary
alone, he could not have been more eager. In the end he obtained a
unanimous consent to his scheme. But it was cool--cool! He insisted on
the immediate division of the letters among the members. He himself took
A. It meant the most work. That he also wrote a part of T is certain.
One old member reminded him of his age, and he turned upon him in reply
with “something more than vivacity.” The _séance_ ended.
“Gentlemen,” says old Voltaire, “I thank you in the name of the
alphabet.”
“And we,” replied Chastellux, “thank you in the name of letters.”
That evening Voltaire was present _incognito_ at the performance of
“Alzire.” Of course he was recognised. For three quarters of an hour the
howls of applause never ceased. Then he himself begged silence from the
house. As he left it, the people, pressing on him, thrust odes of
inflammatory flattery into his hand. This mob was enthusiastic enough.
But those Academicians, his brothers, with all the world to
conquer--their apathy lay heavily on his soul. If death came to him, the
only young man of them all, would they go on with his scheme? He doubted
them. “They are sluggards,” he said passionately to Tronchin, “who
wallow in idleness; but I will make them march.” He must write them a
Discourse to sting them and shame them. No man in the world had so much
and so ably used the fine, pliant, delicate machinery of the French
language, as he had. In the most perfect French in the world he had
alike coquetted with women in drawing-rooms and spoken his great
message to the race. He loved the tool with which he had carved immortal
work. The day was not long enough to say what he had to say upon the
language he had adorned. Far on into the night--brain and nerve
stimulated by strong coffee--he wrote on the subject that possessed his
soul. The sleep he had banished deserted him now when he called it. He
wrote on. There was so little time! There was so much to do! Not afraid
of death, but of dying before he had finished his work--that description
was true to the finest shade of meaning. The coffee aggravated the
internal disease from which he suffered. But he wrote on. On May 11th he
could not go to a meeting of the Academy. But he could still write. The
strong sun of that long life was fast sinking below the horizon, and the
night coming when no man can work. The old brain nerved itself to one
last effort. The old hand wrote on:
“Whoso fears God, fears to sit at ease.”
Doubtful in morals, and a most trenchant unbeliever, the scoffer
Voltaire yet sets a splendid example to all inert Christians who,
comfortably cultivating the selfish virtues, care nothing for the race
and recognise no mission but to save their own miserable souls.
Who has done more good for the world--the stainless anchorite, be his
cloister a religious one or his own easy home; or this sinner, of whom
it was said at his death, with literal truth, that the history of what
had been accomplished in Europe in favour of reason and humanity was the
history of his writings and of his deeds?
CHAPTER XLIV
THE END
The accounts of the dying of Voltaire would fill a volume. Round this
great deathbed were gathered persons who each had a different end to
serve by differently describing it.
Villette wanted to prove himself the wise and unselfish friend; and
Madame Denis must appear the tenderly devoted niece.
The Abbé Depery published an awful description of these last moments,
which he declares he heard from Belle-et-Bonne. She was dead when he
made the statement; and “it is easy to make the dead speak.” But if that
fearful story had been true, this girl, who passionately loved her more
than father and dedicated the remainder of her days to his memory, would
hardly have repeated it. Lady Morgan, who saw her in Paris forty years
later, declared that she spoke of the dying man’s peace, tranquillity,
and resignation.
D’Alembert, Grimm, and Condorcet naturally wished to see a death, firm,
consistent, and philosophic: and they saw it.
Dr. Tronchin, the sincere Christian, would fain have beheld a repentant
sinner. Failing that, what could he see but the “frightful torment” of
the wicked to whom Death is the King of Terrors, “the furies of
Orestes,” the _sæva indignatio_ of Swift?
Gaultier naturally did not wish to own that he had missed so illustrious
a conversion. He did not own it: he said the convert’s mind was
wandering.
But, after all, it matters not how one dies, but how one has lived.
Death-bed utterances, even if truly reported, are to be attributed less
to the illumined soul than to the diseased body. If at last the horrors
of the Great Change and the awful prospect of the unknown Eternity
overwhelmed this unbeliever, as at such an hour they have overwhelmed
many sincere Christians, that fact is no confession that Voltaire gave
the lie to the convictions of his life.
For more than sixty years they had been those not of a man in the
careless vigour of health, or of a thoughtless profligate, or of an
indifferent, but of one who had always known his tenure of life to be
frail; who had realised the consolations of the religion he could not
believe, and yearned for that faith he could never have.
If, at the last, his priestly counsellors did succeed in terrifying the
old dying mind, enfeebled by the dying body, by their threats of
Judgment and Eternity, what use to his soul, or the cause of their
Christianity?
It is the eighty-four years of vigorous life and passionate utterance
that count before God and man, and not the dying minutes.
Out of lies innumerable, then--some witnesses took their testimony of
the death-bed of Voltaire from the cook of the Hôtel Villette--the
following account has been sifted.
On some day, which was either May 12th or shortly after it, the old man
met Madame Denis and Madame Saint-Julien when he was out walking.
He said he was ill and going to bed. Two hours later his good Butterfly
came to see him. She found him very feverish, and begged that Tronchin
might be sent for.
Madame Denis, remembering the Doctor’s counsels, declined to summon him.
The patient grew worse. Villette sent for a local apothecary, who came
with medicine which the sick man was at first too wise to take. But he
was ill and old, and Madame Denis was naggingly persistent. He took, not
enough said Madame Denis; too much said Madame Saint-Julien, who tasted
it. Anyhow, he grew worse. That evening old Richelieu came to see him
and recommended a remedy--laudanum--which he had himself been in the
habit of taking for the gout.
With the night the patient’s sufferings increased. He sent for the
laudanum.
Madame Saint-Julien and a relative (most likely d’Hornoy), who were
there when it came, implored caution. The audacious ignorance of Madame
Denis had no fears.
Wagnière, who of course was not present, declares that his master
characteristically seized the remedy and took too much, too often.
D’Alembert--the notoriously truthful--says that he never took any: the
bottle was broken. However that may be, he grew alarmingly worse.
At last Dr. Tronchin was called. But the patient was already past human
aid. Suffering agonies from his internal disease, a fearful and most
exhausting nausea, all the torments of ruined nerves and exhausted brain
and unable to eat or sleep, the old man could still turn to the good
physician and apologise to him for the liberty he had taken with his
dying body. Tronchin had been right! He should have gone back to Ferney.
Often and often he called for Wagnière. By his side, always one may
hope, was the good and gentle woman he had married to Villette.
Constantly in and out of the sick room were a motley crowd--Madame
Denis, Abbé Mignot, d’Hornoy, Lorry, Villette himself, besides Tronchin
and a servant, Morand.
On May 16th the poor old man revived a little. To this day belong the
last verses of the easiest and most limpid verse-writer of all time.
They were written in reply to some lines of the Abbé Attaignant, and
appeared in the “Journal de Paris.” To them the dying writer added a few
piteous words in prose. “I can do no more, Monsieur.... The mind is too
much affected by the torments of the body.”
On May 25th, d’Hornoy wrote to Wagnière urging his instant return. The
patient was kept alive only by spoonfuls of jelly; and his exhaustion
and feebleness were terrible.
By the next day the watchers had abandoned all hope. He revived, indeed,
to hear the news of the vindication of Lally. That would have roused him
from the dead. He dictated his last letter. For the moment, joy made
mind triumph over matter, as it had done with this man all his life
long. But his doctors could not be deceived. He was dying.
One of them was watching anxiously now for the signs of that repentance
he longed for. “Religious toleration, the most difficult conquest to
wring from the prejudices and passions of men,” Voltaire had not been
able to wring from one of the best friends he ever had. Tronchin wrote
bitterly of this death-bed. In his zeal for some proof, some confession
of the fallacy of that stern creed of negation, since called Voltairism,
the great Doctor almost forgot his compassion and his friendship.
D’Alembert records that on May 28th Mignot went to fetch de Tersac.
De Tersac replied to the effect that it was no use visiting a man whose
reason was already dimmed, but that unless he made a far fuller and more
orthodox profession of faith than he had yet made, he would not accord
him Christian burial.
Mignot, himself a personage, a member of the Grand Council and the head
of an abbey, threatened to apply to the Parliament for justice. De
Tersac replied that he could do as he pleased.
For two days more, Voltaire lingered--sometimes quite unconscious, but
sometimes wholly sensible. On the morning of Saturday, May 30th,
Gaultier again wrote to him offering his services.
At six o’clock in the evening of that day, Mignot fetched Gaultier and
de Tersac.
D’Alembert told Frederick the Great that de Tersac approached Voltaire,
saying loudly, “Jesus Christ!” and that Voltaire, rousing a little from
his stupor, made a motion with his hand--“Let me die in peace.”
Grimm and La Harpe tell the same story with unimportant variations. It
may be true. “Spare me three things,” said Madame du Deffand on her
death-bed--perhaps remembering Voltaire’s--“Let me have no question, no
arguments, and no sermons.”
Saint-Sulpice thought, or said that he thought, Voltaire too ill to
make a confession. The persons about the bed took no pains to contradict
him.
At nine o’clock in the evening the priests left. For three hours
Voltaire was dying--calmly and peacefully, say some; in “all the terrors
of the damned,” say others. But the truth, none knows.
Ten minutes before he died he took Morand’s hand. “Farewell, my dear
Morand. I am dying.” He never spoke again.
At a quarter-past eleven on the evening of Saturday, May 30, 1778, in
the eighty-fourth year of his age, died François Marie Arouet de
Voltaire.
His relatives had concealed the dangerous nature of his illness from the
world. Madame Denis had written, even to Wagnière, and as late as May
26th, a letter of pretended hopefulness. King, priests, and prejudice
were strong. Mignot and d’Hornoy knew well that it would be necessary to
act cautiously, and to act at once. They had been professionally advised
not to contest at law the question of burial.
From de Tersac they obtained a formal consent in writing that the body
of Voltaire might be removed without ceremony. “I relinquish to that end
all parochial rights.”
Gaultier declared, also in writing, that he had been to Voltaire at his
request, and found him “not in a state to be heard in confession.”
On the night of May 30th the body was embalmed. The heart was taken out
and given by Madame Denis to Villette.
Early in the morning of Sunday, May 31st, Mignot, taking with him the
two priests’ declarations and Voltaire’s confession of faith made a few
weeks before, left Paris in a post-chaise for his Abbey of Scellières,
at Romilly-on-Seine, in Champagne, one hundred and ten miles from Paris.
On the same evening, when the capital was dark and the streets deserted,
two other carriages left the Hôtel Villette. In one was the body of the
dead man, dressed, and lying on the seat like a sleeping traveller. A
servant was also in the carriage. In the next came d’Hornoy and two
distant cousins of Voltaire, who, after Mignot, were his nearest male
relatives. This dreadful _cortège_ “stopped at no inn, alighted at no
post-house.”
At midday on June 1st it reached Scellières. The Abbé Mignot had
obtained, on the strength of the clerical certificates and Voltaire’s
written profession of faith, the consent of his prior that the great man
should be buried there.
At three o’clock in the afternoon the body was laid in the choir, and
vespers for the dead were sung over it. It remained there all night,
surrounded by torches.
Early the next morning, June 2d, before many of the assembled clergy of
the district whom the prior had summoned, Voltaire was buried with full
rites and the honourable and decent burial he had desired.
Only a small stone marked his resting-place, with the bald inscription
“Here lies Voltaire.”
After all, he needed no epitaphs. He had avenged the oppressed and
enlightened the ignorant.
On June 3d, the bishop of the diocese sent a mandate forbidding the
burial. It was too late. On that day Mignot and the other relatives
returned to Paris.
The city had heard of Voltaire’s death by now: the devout with
exultation, the philosophers with profound grief. The authorities had,
indeed, forbidden the newspapers to publish any obituary notice of
Voltaire or even to mention his decease. At the theatre no piece written
by him was to be played for twenty-one days. The Academy was forbidden
to hold the service at the Cordeliers customary on the death of a
member.
But these restrictions of a petty tyranny had the effect of all such
restrictions--the exact opposite to what was intended.
The heart of Paris would have throbbed the quicker for a Voltaire’s
death in any case. But for those prohibitions it throbbed with
indignation too.
“You are right, Saint-Sulpice,” said one of many bitter epigrams the
occasion produced. “Why bury him?... Refuse a tomb, but not an altar.”
In this June following his death, his will, made at Ferney in September,
1776, was proved. Terse, lucid, and able, it is characteristic of the
man who wrote it. Voltaire appointed Madame Denis his residuary
legatee. To Mignot and d’Hornoy he left one hundred thousand francs
each; to Wagnière, eight thousand livres; to Madame Wagnière and
Bonne-Baba, his clothes, and to Bonne-Baba eight hundred livres as well.
Each servant was to have a year’s wages. To Rieu, that ex-American
officer, were left such English books from the library as he might
choose: to the poor of the parish of Ferney--“if there are any
poor”--three hundred livres; and to the curé a diamond, five hundred
livres in value. Voltaire also appointed fifteen hundred francs to be
given to the lawyer who was to help Madame Denis in the execution of his
will.
It will be observed that the legacies to the servants, and particularly
to faithful Wagnière, were very small. Hoping against the knowledge he
had of her character, Voltaire had supposed that Madame Denis would
continue his generosity towards them. Wagnière, true to his master’s
person and honour in life, was true to his memory after death. He
uttered not a word of complaint.
In the August of 1778, d’Alembert chose Voltaire as the subject for the
prize poem of the Academy; and until his own death, five years later,
never ceased to work for the posthumous glory of the man he had loved.
The once false La Harpe also eulogised Voltaire, and wrote a play in his
honour; and the scholarly Condorcet wrote his Life.
But it was not Paris alone which did homage to this greatness. If ever
man had been a citizen of the world, Voltaire had been.
On November 26, 1778, Frederick the Great, now President of his own
Academy, read to it Voltaire’s Eulogium. It is a most generous testimony
to the character of that brilliant, irritable, and delightful child of
genius whom the great King had so hotly loved and loathed. As an
appreciation of his works, it is worthless. Frederick the Great was no
literary critic. But it poured burning contempt on the “imbecile
priests” of Paris who had refused such a man the last offices of the
dead, and not all the authorities in the world could keep it out of
their capital.
In the May of the following year, to shame those “imbecile priests” the
deeper, although he had, as he put it, no idea of the immortality of the
soul himself, Frederick had a mass for Voltaire’s said in the Roman
church at Berlin. A little later the faithful and persevering d’Alembert
proposed that that King should erect a statue to his friend in that same
church. Frederick did not see his way to this. He had in his own
possession a finer monument to Voltaire’s greatness--a part of that
correspondence which is one of Arouet’s “surest titles to immortality”
and contains at once “the history of Voltaire _intime_ and of the
eighteenth century.”
No one had mourned Voltaire more passionately than the other great
sovereign, Catherine. “Since he is dead, wit has lost its honour; he was
the divinity of gaiety.” To her, he had been much more than that. He had
“formed her mind and her head.”
He had left his library, except its English books, with his other
effects, to Madame Denis. In the December of 1778, Catherine completed
the purchase of those 6,210 volumes with their copious marginal notes,
with manuscripts, original letters, and papers concerning the trials in
which Voltaire had been engaged. Some months later she sent for Wagnière
to arrange them. When he had finished his work, she came to look at it.
Bowing before Voltaire’s statue she said, “There is the man to whom I
owe all I know and all I am.” Hearing that Wagnière was poorly provided
for, she magnificently gave him a pension for life. He visited
Frederick, and returned to live and die at Ferney. One of Voltaire’s
editors, passing through that village in 1825, found the secretary’s son
still living there--a Justice of the Peace.
To get rid of her uncle’s library was for Madame Denis but to free
herself of one useless encumbrance. There was another. What was the use
of Ferney to such a woman? Ice and snow, weavers and watchmakers,
country, retirement, solitude--she hated them all. Her uncle’s poor
people had never been anything to her--except when they fêted and made
much of her on a birthday. Return to them? Never. She sold Ferney to
Villette. To the indignation of her relations and of the whole
Academy--particularly d’Alembert, who was as jealous for dead
Voltaire’s honour as a mother for her daughter’s good name--she insisted
on marrying her Duvivier. It is a little satisfactory to learn that that
dull person (in society he was popularly known as the Extinguisher)
avenged Voltaire by bullying the woman who had bullied him.
Madame Denis never had any interest but as the niece of her uncle. With
his death she fades into the commonplace obscurity for which she was
made.
The Villettes retired to Ferney. In her old home, when her husband had
once more forgotten the fatal attractions of the capital, he and
Belle-et-Bonne lived not unhappily. But the weaving and watchmaking
industry declined. The pilot was no longer at the helm. The strong hand
and all-directing brain which had turned starving idleness to affluent
industry, and established trade on a sound business basis, were no
longer there to hold and supervise. Ferney fell back into the
nothingness from which a master-mind had drawn it.
Presently Villette became heavily inculpated in the famous Guéménée
bankruptcy for thirty-three millions. He sold Ferney, where he had
retained Voltaire’s rooms as they had been at the time of his death, and
where, a cherished possession, he had kept the dead man’s heart enclosed
in a silver vase. Husband and wife came up to Paris and lived in the
Hôtel Villette, where Belle-et-Bonne continued the tender charities
which were the solace of her life, and surrounded herself with relics
and mementoes of her dead Voltaire.
In March, 1779, M. Ducis was installed in Voltaire’s vacant chair in the
French Academy. According to custom, he read the Eulogy of his
predecessor. The time for official prohibitions was past. No government
had been able to prevent the Hermit of Ferney being known to the whole
world as “the great Voltaire” for many years before his death. He was
the great Voltaire still. Grimm declares that no meeting of the Academy
ever attracted such crowds. When some clerical member dared to suggest
that all expressions contrary to religion and morals should be erased by
some friendly hand from Voltaire’s works, he was hissed and groaned into
silence.
On the first anniversary of his death, “Agathocle,” his last tragedy,
still incomplete, was performed in Paris, with a prologue by d’Alembert.
A complete edition of Voltaire’s works appeared in 1780.
In 1784 there were secretly circulating in Paris the “Memoirs for the
Life of Voltaire,” written by himself in 1759 and revenging himself on
Frederick for Freytag and Frankfort with the most cool and deadly spite.
The man who wrote them, in that perfectly easy and limpid French of
which he was always master even when he was by no means master of
himself, had never intended them to be published. He burnt the original
manuscript; but he had two copies made. It will not be forgotten that La
Harpe and Madame Denis were dismissed from Ferney for having stolen one
of them. One became the property of Catherine the Great. The other,
Madame Denis, remembering that “wearisome niece” and the “Golden Lion,”
sent in 1783 to Beaumarchais, then editing Voltaire’s works. He did not
dare to include the “Memoirs” therein, in Frederick’s lifetime. But they
were passed from hand to hand in Paris, and it was doubtless well for
Voltaire’s fame that Frederick had already eulogised him and said masses
for the peace of his soul. The “Memoirs” are now always included in
Voltaire’s works. It is not, all things considered, wholly his fault
that many people, ignorant of the circumstances under which it was
drawn, have assumed the malicious caricature of Frederick therein
contained to be a faithful portrait.
For thirteen years the body of him “who against monks had never rested,
among monks rested peacefully” enough. The Revolution he foresaw had
come, though not as he had foreseen it.
His ideal of government had been a purified and constitutional monarchy,
but always a monarchy. “My muscles are not very flexible: I do not mind
making one bow, but a hundred on end would fatigue me.” By 1790 Louis
XVI. was a king only in name. In that year the Abbey of Scellières, with
all other religious houses, became the property of the nation. Villette
had not merely fallen in with the views of the Revolution. They had been
his when such convictions were dangerous and awkward, and he never
forgot that Prophet of Revolution, Voltaire. It was through Villette
that the Quai de Théatins, on which the Hôtel Villette stood, was
renamed the Quai Voltaire.
In November, 1790, after a performance of “Brutus,” Charles Villette,
ex-Marquis, harangued the audience and passionately pleaded, “in the
name of the country,” that the remains of Voltaire might be brought to
Paris and honourably buried. “This translation will be the dying sigh of
fanaticism.” The idea pleased a people agog for excitement and drunk
with the first deep draughts of a liberty which for centuries they had
not been allowed even to taste.
On June 1, 1791, the National Assembly made Louis XVI. sign the decree
which ordained that the ashes of his great enemy should be transferred
from the church of Romilly to that of Sainte-Geneviève in
Paris--Sainte-Geneviève, which was henceforth to be called the Pantheon
of France.
On July 6th, a funeral car, decked with laurels and oak leaves, drawn by
four horses and escorted by a detachment of the National Guard, left
Romilly-on-Seine and began its solemn triumphal progress to Paris. On
the front of the car was written, “To the memory of Voltaire.” On one
side, “If man is born free, he ought to govern himself”; on the other,
“If man has tyrants, he ought to dethrone them.”
As it passed through the villages, the villagers came out to greet it
with wreaths of flowers and laurels in their hands. Mothers held up
their babies that they too might say that they had seen this great day;
old men pressed forward to touch and be healed. At night the villages
through which the procession passed were illuminated; by day could be
seen triumphal arches, girls dressed in white, and garlands of flowers.
Out of their ignorance and wretchedness, this _canaille_ recognised him
who had wept and clamoured for the rights of all men and made freedom a
possibility even for them.
At nightfall on July 10th, the _cortège_ reached Paris. The sarcophagus
was placed on an altar on the ruins of that tower of the Bastille in
which Voltaire had been twice a prisoner.
On the altar was the inscription, “On this spot, where despotism chained
thee, receive the homage of a free people.”
All Sunday night the sarcophagus remained there. At three o’clock on the
sunny afternoon of Monday, July 11th, it was placed on a car designed by
David, and drawn through Paris, escorted by an enormous company,
organised, orderly, and representing every rank and condition. Here were
the men who had demolished the Bastille, carrying its flag, and in their
midst that terrible virago who had led them in the fray. Here were
citizens with pikes, Swiss, Jacobins, actors, and bodies of soldiers.
Some carried banners with devices from the dead man’s writings. Some,
dressed in Greek costume, carried a gilt model of the famous statue by
Houdon. Among the self-constituted guard were many who, not a month
before, had brought back that other King to his capital--from
Varennes--with howls, insults, and imprecations.
Singers and music preceded the car itself. Supported on four great
wheels of bronze, it looked like a magnificent altar. On the summit was
the sarcophagus, and on that a full-length figure of Voltaire reclining
in an attitude of sleep and with a winged Immortality placing a crown of
stars on his head. On the sarcophagus was written, in words of noble
simplicity, “He avenged Calas, La Barre, Sirven, and Montbailli. Poet,
philosopher, historian, he gave a great impetus to the human mind: he
prepared us to become free.” The whole structure, forty feet high, was
drawn by twelve white horses, two of which, it is said, had been
furnished by Marie Antoinette. On the car were such inscriptions as--“He
defended Calas.” “He inspired toleration.” “He claimed the rights of
men.”
Behind it walked Belle-et-Bonne and her husband, with their little girl
in her nurse’s arms. Then came deputations from the National Assembly
and the Courts of Justice, and then another detachment of military.
The procession itself consisted of a hundred thousand persons. Six
hundred thousand more witnessed it.
It first stopped at the Opera House. The operatic company came forward
and sang that song in Voltaire’s “Samson” which became, with the
“Marseillaise,” _the_ song of the Revolution--
Wake, ye people! Break your chains!
After the Opera House, the Tuileries was passed. Every window was filled
with spectators, save one. Behind that, closed and barred, sat the most
unhappy of monarchs, Louis and Marie Antoinette, awaiting doom.
The next stop was in front of the Hôtel Villette. Upon a platform
outside it were fifty young girls dressed in white, and before them the
two daughters of Calas in deep mourning. They kissed the sarcophagus of
“the man of Calas”; and Belle-et-Bonne lifted up her child as if “to
consecrate her to reason, to philosophy, and to liberty.”
The next stop was at the old Comédie Française--the scene of Voltaire’s
earliest dramatic triumphs, and where now was his bust with the
inscription, “He wrote ‘Œdipe’ at seventeen.”
At the Théâtre Français, become the Theatre of the Nation, were garlands
and music and the inscription, “He wrote ‘Irène’ at eighty-four.” And
once more a chorus sang the spirited song out of “Samson.”
At last, at ten o’clock at night and in a drizzling rain, the Pantheon
was reached.
The sarcophagus was lifted into the place designed for it--near the
tombs of Descartes and Mirabeau.
The history of Voltaire after death could be elaborated into a volume.
But, after all, it throws no light on his life and character, only on
those of the friends who loved him, the enemies who hated him, and the
mob who went mad over him.
When it is considered that to the excesses of that mob he would have
been passionately opposed, and that the only Revolution he desired was
gradual, temperate, and unbloody, it may well be doubted if, had he
lived till 1791, his last journey would not have been, like that of many
other patriots, to a very different accompaniment and a very different
destination.
For a while he was allowed to rest in that quiet and honoured grave.
But 1814 saw the restoration of those Bourbons whose hatred for him was
hereditary.
With the connivance of the ministry, the tombs of both Voltaire and
Rousseau were violated, their bones removed in a sack at night to a
waste place outside the city, and emptied into a pit filled with
quicklime. That long-dreaded fate--“thrown into the gutter like poor
Lecouvreur”--was Voltaire’s after all.
But those dishonoured ashes and that unhallowed burial keep his memory
more vividly alive than the marble tomb of a Pantheon.
The violation was discovered in 1864, when, the Villette family becoming
extinct, Voltaire’s heart became the property of the nation.
It was decided to place it with his ashes in the Pantheon. But the tomb
was empty.
The Marquis de Villette died in 1793, thereby escaping the guillotine,
to which he had been condemned for refusing to vote for the death of the
King. Belle-et-Bonne, a widow at thirty-six, consecrated her life to
Voltaire’s memory.
In 1878, his centenary was celebrated with the warmest enthusiasm by the
most fickle capital in the world.
Victor Hugo eulogised Voltaire with much emotion and applause, and
fervent words which mean nothing in particular. But the fact that the
Fighter had been dead a century did not prevent him from being still a
cause of strife. Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, hotly attacked the
infidel and demanded an injunction against a new edition of his works,
which was refused.
This was the last famous assault on the Great Assaulter. France, perhaps
even Catholic France, recognises in some sort the debt she owes to
Voltaire. Is not the enemy who shows a nation her weak points, forces
her to look to her ships and her armaments, to remedy abuses in her
organisation, and feebleness, viciousness, and incompetency in her
servants, something very like a friend in disguise?
It may be truly said that Voltaire did good to Roman Catholicism by
attacking much that degraded it; by hooting out of it the superstition
and tyranny which have made some of the noblest souls on earth decline
it; and by forcing its children to give a reason for the faith that was
in them.
Then, too, if the Church of Rome could withstand that deadly,
breathless, and brilliant onslaught called Voltairism, she may well
point triumphantly to the fulfilment of that ancient prophecy and
consolation, “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
To the Church in France it may be acknowledged that Voltaire was not
wholly an evil, while to her country he was a great glory.
In England there is still against him a prejudice, which, said Buckle,
nothing but ignorance can excuse. To the ordinary Briton Voltaire is
only a very profane scoffer who made some rather amusing and very
doubtful jokes.
Yet this was he who, as Frederick the Great said, was extraordinary in
everything. Here was the man who was poet, playwright, novelist,
letter-writer, historian, critic, philosopher, theologian, socialist,
philanthropist, agriculturist, humorist, reformer, wit, and man of the
world.
England has no counterpart for him. But then neither has France, nor any
other country. Think of the great names of earthly fame. Of which can it
be said--with even approximate truth--“Here is another Voltaire?”
As a poet, he was the king of those society verses which he modestly
said himself “are good for nothing but society and only for the moment
for which they are written.”
But such as they are--madrigal, epigram, epitaph, the gracefullest
flattery in four lines, and the daintiest malice in a couplet--if
Voltaire had written nothing else, his supremacy in these alone would
have given him a perpetual place in the literature of his country.
His longer and graver poems are immortal for what he said, not for how
he said it.
As a playwright, his tragedies were the most famous of his age. Ours
applies to them those fatal adjectives--fluent, elegant, correct.
Without any of the indomitable life and swing which characterise almost
all his other works, they were perfectly suited to that exceedingly bad
public taste which preferred smoothness before vigour, and a careful
consideration of the unities to the genius of a Shakespeare.
Voltaire’s comedies are only sprightly and fluent.
As a historian, whether in prose or verse, he is celebrated for his
broad and comprehensive views, his enormous general knowledge (for his
time), “the vehemence and sincerity of his abhorrence of the military
spirit,” his savage hatred of the religious _culte_, and his inimitably
interesting and vivacious style. Until his day the learned rarely had
wit and the witty rarely had learning. Voltaire set an example which has
been singularly little followed: he made facts more amusing than
fiction.
His fiction indeed is, with the multitude, one of his chief titles to
fame. But all his fiction, rhyming or prose, was to teach fact; though
his heart was so perfect that the facts never spoilt the fancy. He was
the pioneer in France of the short story, the _conte_. There may be
traced, in a slight degree, the influence of Swift. But Voltaire’s
satire is gayer, brighter, and cleaner than the great Dean’s.
Voltaire is the first letter-writer in the world. He was himself
interested in everything, and so interesting to everybody.
His letters contain not only his own best biography, and not only the
literary history of the eighteenth century. They touch on all
contemporary history--social, religious, scientific, political. They are
at once the wittiest and the most natural extant. He wrote with that
liquid ease with which a bird shakes out his song. His French is at one
and the same time the most perfect French for the Frenchman and the
stylist, and the simplest for the foreigner to understand.
Besides his letters, with their easy grace and wealth of world-wide
knowledge, Horace Walpole’s are but the gossip of a clique; Madame de
Sévigné’s the chit-chat of a boudoir; Lady Wortley Montagu’s coarse and
clumsy; and Pope’s stilted and artificial. They are also comparatively
free from the indecency which mars many other of Voltaire’s writings and
almost all the correspondence of his age. His letters remain (as early
as 1872 there were seven thousand of them in print, and Beuchot thought
at least as many more undiscovered) an almost inexhaustible gold mine of
literary delight, and a most liberal education.
As a blasphemous mocker at some of the most sacred convictions of their
souls, Voltaire has been naturally, when he touches on religion,
anathema not only to Roman Catholics, but to all Christians. The
liberal-minded will be ready to own that to attack a system he not only
believed to be false but actively harmful, was well within his rights.
It is his method which inspires just indignation. A profoundly serious
subject has a right to profoundly serious treatment. But, after all,
Voltaire’s gibes and laugh turn against himself. Who believes a scoffer?
If he had not jeered at the creed of Christendom, he would have made
more converts to the creed of Voltaire.
What was his creed? It had only one article. “I believe in God.” In that
belief “one finds difficulties; in the belief that there is no God,
absurdities.” “The wise man attributes to God no human affections. He
recognises a power necessary, eternal, which animates all Nature; and is
resigned.”
As for the immortality of the soul, it seems, contrary to the opinion of
many of his biographers, that Voltaire rather longed to believe in it,
than that he did so. “But your soul, Sir--your soul? What idea have you
of it? From whence does it come? Where is it? What is it? What does it
do? How does it act? Where does it go? I know nothing about it and I
have never seen it.” “For sixty years I have tried to discover what the
soul is, and I still know nothing.”
His practical scheme of religion he expressed himself. “To worship God;
to leave each man the liberty to serve Him in his own fashion; to love
one’s neighbours; enlighten them if one can, pity them when they are in
error; to attach no importance to trivial questions which would never
have given trouble if no seriousness had been imputed to them. That is
my religion, which is worth all your systems and all your symbols.”
The stumbling-blocks he found in the road to Christianity--that is to
Roman Catholicism, the only form of Christianity to which he addressed
himself--were twofold. The mental stumbling-block was miracle; and the
moral, the lives of the believers. He considered the second to be the
natural fruit of the first: that the Christian belief must be destroyed
to destroy the wickedness, darkness, cruelty, and tyranny he found in
Christian lives; that men “will not cease to be persecutors till they
have ceased to be absurd.”
It should be remembered--it is not often remembered--that, in the words
of Morley, “there is no case of Voltaire mocking at any set of men who
lived good lives,” and that “the Christianity he assailed was not that
of the Sermon on the Mount.”
Regarding the problems of the future life, of future awards,
punishments, and compensations, and the manifold mysteries of this
world, he was, broadly speaking, an Agnostic.
“Behold, I know not anything.”
But Voltaire’s real claim to eternal remembrance is far less how he
thought or what he wrote, than what his writings _did_.
Some of them are obsolete to-day because they so perfectly accomplished
their aim. Who wants to read now passionate arguments against torture,
and scathing satires on a jurisdiction which openly accepted hearsay as
evidence?
In his own day those writings produced many practical reforms, and paved
the way to many more. Through them, he was himself enabled to be a
philanthropist in an age when the prosperous elder brothers of the world
looked up to God from stricken Abel with that scornful question, “Am I
my brother’s keeper?” Through them, he saved innocent lives and restored
stolen honour.
But his Ferney, his Lally, Calas, Sirven, La Barre, were only types of
his work for all the race.
He found the earth overspread with hideous under-growths of oppression
and privilege, intolerance and cruelty; and he destroyed them.
He found the good land covered with abuses in Church and State and every
social order; abuses political, personal; of the rights of the living,
and the decent respect owed to the dead--and he uprooted them. With a
laugh and blasphemy on his lips, but with eyes and soul afire and the
nervous tireless hands trembling with eagerness, the most dauntless,
passionate, dogged little worker in all human history hewed and hacked
at the monstrous tyrannies of centuries, and flung them, dead, from the
fair and beautiful soil they had usurped.
At last, after sixty years of superhuman effort, he had cleared the
place and made it ready for the planting of the Tree of Liberty.
Whoso sits under that tree to-day in any country, free to worship his
God as he will, to think, to learn, and to do all that does not intrench
on the freedom of his fellow-men--free to progress to heights of light
and knowledge as yet unseen and undreamt--should in gratitude remember
Voltaire.
INDEX
Abingdon, Lord, 455
Adam, Father, 435, 486, 521
“Adélaïde du Guesclin,” 71;
produced, 72
“Agathocle,” 525;
produced, 561
“Akakia, Diatribe of Doctor,” 266-8, 270, 274;
published, 260, 265
Alain, Maître, 13
Alembert, d’, 141, 213, 251, 345-6, 424, 460, 538, 543,
546, 550, 555, 556, 559-562;
history, character, and visit to Délices, 323-6;
and the “Geneva” Article, 336, 337;
withdraws from “Encyclopædia,” 370;
visits Ferney, 500-502
Algarotti, Comte, 84, 102, 118, 132, 229-231
Alliot (commissioner to Stanislas), 201, 236
“Alzire,” 82, 213, 551;
produced, 87
“Amulius and Numitor,” 6
Ancian (curé of Moens), 353, 404-405
“Annals of the Empire,” 272;
published, 296-7
Annecy, Biort, Bishop of, 351, 354, 404, 477, 483-5
“Anti-Machiavelli” (Frederick the Great’s), 128, 133
Aremberg, Duc d’, 125
Argens, Marquis d’, 229, 230, 253, 335
Argenson, the Comtes d’, 5, 123, 164, 294, 322, 329
Argental, Comte d’, 5, 123, 168, 188, 209, 223, 246,
299, 375, 393, 529, 540, 542
Arnaud, Baculard d,’ 216-17, 224, 227, 243;
his quarrel with Voltaire, 233-5
Arnould, Sophie, 534
Arouet, Armand, 2, 3, 4, 8, 25, 31;
his death and character, 156
Arouet, Madame, 2;
her death, 3
Arouet, Maître, 7-13, 23;
position, character, and marriage, 1;
at performance of “Œdipe,” 25-6;
his death, 31
“Art of War, The” (Frederick the Great’s), 244-6
Artois, Comte d’, 541, 542, 544
“Assyrian War Chariots,” 333
Audibert. _See_ Calas, _and_ 516
Aumard, d’, lives with Voltaire, 376
“Babouc,” 178, 215
Barbara (“Bonne-Baba,” servant), 436, 523, 559
Bazincourt, Mlle. de, 396-7
Beaudrigue, David de (magistrate). _See_ Calas;
_see_ Sirvens
Beaumont, Elie de (barrister). _See_ Calas;
_see_ Sirvens
Beauregard (spy), 19, 32
Beauteville, de (French envoy), 465, 470
Beauvau, Prince, de, 532, 544
Belbâtre (musician), 533
“Belle-et-Bonne” (Mlle. de Varicourt, after Marquise de Villette),
517, 524, 544, 553, 561, 564-6
Bellecour (actor), 532
Bernières, M. and Mme. de, 36, 38, 40, 41, 47, 49, 65, 117, 120
Bernis, Abbé (“Babet”), 333, 344, 493
Berri, Duchesse du, 17, 18, 19
Berthe (playwright), 522
Bettinelli (writer), 349-350
Bigex (copyist), 476, 521
Boccage, Mme. du (poetess), 342
Boerhaave, Doctor, 94
Boisy, M. de, 350, 352
Bolingbroke, St. John, Lord, 30, 36, 48-51
“Bolingbroke, Defence of Lord,” 261, 348
Bombelles, Mme. de (affair of), 508
Boswell, James, 52, 468-9
Boufflers, de, 441
Boufflers, Duchesse de, 145
Boufflers, Mme. de, 184-7, 195, 201, 202, 203
Bourbon, Duc de, 41, 45, 541
“Boursouffle,” 110, 174
Boyer, Bishop of Mirepoix, 146-7, 178, 219, 250, 333
Brenles, M. de (lawyer), 301, 308, 319
Breteuil, Abbé de, 109-111, 115
Brettwitz, Lieutenant. _See_ Frankfort
Brizard (actor), 544
Brosses, Président de, 351, 352-3, 409
Brunswick, Duke of, 153
“Brutus,” 50, 54, 61, 63;
produced, 63
Buffon, Comte de, 253, 506
Burney, Doctor, 358, 497, 500
Byng, Admiral, Voltaire’s advocacy of, 326-8
“Cabals, The,” 518
Calas (the affair of), 412-428, 437, 443-5, 491, 565
Calmet, Dom, 300
“Calumny, Epistle on,” 71, 76
“Campaigns of the King,” 315;
and _see_ “Louis XV., Century of”
“Candide,” 328, 345;
published, 371-373
“Canning, Elizabeth, History of,” 425.
_See_ Calas
Cartesian System, 101-104
Casanova, 349
Castres, Bishop of. _See_ Sirvens
“Catechism of an Honest Man,” 439
Catherine II. of Russia (Catherine the Great), 358, 453, 487, 493, 560, 562
Caumartin, 14, 15, 74
Cazeing. _See_ Calas
Chabanon, 469, 471-2, 516
Chabrillant, Colonel, 470
Champbonin, Mme. de, 80, 98, 108, 112-114, 122, 123, 184, 208
Charles VI., Emperor of Austria, death of, 134
“Charles XII., History of,” 54-5, 60, 62-3;
published, 64-6
Chasot, Major, 229, 239
Châteauneuf, Abbé de, 2, 3, 5;
death of, 6
Châteauneuf, Marquis de, 10-12
Châtelet, Emilie de Breteuil, Marqise du, 39, 71, 73, 74, 83, 84, 85, 87,
90, 93 _seq._, 128,
150, 157, 164, 165, 171,
179, 188, 192, 235, 291-2, 341, 350, 359-60;
birth and education, 74;
marriage and character, 74-5;
visits Voltaire, 75;
at Richelieu’s wedding, 76;
in Paris, 76;
as Voltaire’s mistress, 77-8;
arrives at Cirey, 80;
her children, 81;
in the affair of “Le Mondain,” 93;
as a scientific student, 102;
writes “Essay on Fire,” 105;
during Mme. de Graffigny’s visit, 106-116;
quarrels with her, 112-13;
life with Voltaire, 114-15;
in Desfontaines’ affair, 119-23;
visits Brussels, Enghien, Paris, 124-6;
her attitude towards Frederick, 130-2;
work at Fontainebleau, 133;
quarrel and reconciliation with Voltaire, 138;
dissipation in Paris, 140;
marriage of her daughter, 149;
her discontent with Voltaire, 153;
adventure in Paris, 156;
illness of her son, 157;
at the Duchesse du Maine’s, 172-4;
passion for play and flight from court, 175-176;
acting at Sceaux, 179;
adventure on way to Cirey, 184;
life there, 184;
her love affair with Saint-Lambert, 185-8;
its discovery by Voltaire, 193-6;
its consequences, 197;
studies and life in Paris, 198-200;
life at Lunéville, 200-201;
her last illness and death, 202;
her possessions, 203;
her character and influence on Voltaire, 200-208
Châtelet, Louis du, 81, 82, 157, 188
Châtelet, Marquis du, 73, 75, 78, 81, 110, 114,
121, 123, 140, 197, 202, 207, 208
Châtelet, Pauline du, 81, 111, 149
Chaulieu, Abbé, 8, 18, 67, 335
Chaumont, affair of, 439 seq.
Chazel. _See_ Calas
Chesterfield, Lord, 53, 139, 141, 227, 251, 252
Choiseul, Duc de, 339, 349, 374, 375, 468, 492, 502-3
Choiseul, Duchesse de, 491, 504-505
“Christian against Six Jews, A,” 499, 522
“Christian Dialogues,” 373
Cideville, 5, 36, 63-4, 76
“Civil Wars of France, An Essay upon the,” 54
“Civil War of Geneva, The,” 467
Clairaut (mathematician), 101, 198
Clairon, Mlle. (actress), 211, 313, 394, 500, 540;
to stay at Ferney, 454
Clarke, Samuel, 53
Clausade. _See_ Calas
Clement (writer), 518
Collini (servant-secretary), 225, 301, 304, 310;
becomes Voltaire’s secretary, 264;
his part in the flight from Prussia, 265-285;
his dismissal, 320-2
Condorcet, Marquis de, 500-501, 550, 559
Conduit, Mrs., 53
Congreve, 53, 56
“Consolation, Letter of,” 49
Cormont, Vaugrenant de, 430
Corneille, Claude Étienne, 435
“Corneille Commentary, The,” 408-409
Corneille, Marie, 430, 442, 527;
adopted by Voltaire, 397-400;
her marriage, 435
Coste, Doctor, 267
Covelle (case of), 466-7
Coyer, Abbé, 365, 409
Cramer, the brothers (publishers), 305, 340, 396
Cramer, Mme., 340, 432
“Crébillon, Éloge de,” 411
Crébillon, Prosper-Jolyot de (playwright), 61, 189, 198, 210, 213, 305;
his death, 411
“Critical Letter to a Fine Gentleman of Paris,” 160
“Cry of Innocent Blood, The,” 460
Damiens, 329
Damilaville (Parisian correspondent), 410, 443, 455;
his death, 479
Darget (Frederick’s secretary), his character, 229;
Frederick’s epigram on his wife, 233;
intercedes for Voltaire, 241-2;
as friend of La Beaumelle, 254;
leaves Frederick, 255
“Death of Cæsar, The,” 64, 84, 149, 189, 242
Decroze, 404-405
Deffand, Mme. du, 70, 77, 164, 184, 531, 548, 556;
visits Voltaire in Bastille, 47;
as his correspondent, 297, 341;
visits him in Paris, 536
Delaunay (Governor of Bastille), 46-7
Délille, Abbé, 549
Denis, Mme. Louise Mignot, 79, 98-99, 192, 209, 223, 300 _seq._,
331-332, 340, 344, 352-4, 358, 361, 367-8, 374-6, 470,
507, 515, 517, 524, 535, 536, 542-3, 546, 554, 559;
her marriage, 99;
Voltaire stays with her, 139;
death of her husband, 153;
comes to live with Voltaire, 211;
left in charge of his house, 218;
invited to Potsdam, 222-3, 226;
in love with Ximenès, 246;
writes “Punished Coquette” and exposes Longchamps, 255;
in affair of Frankfort, 277-85;
extravagance in Paris, 295;
joins Voltaire at Plombières, 299;
settling into Délices, 309;
steals MSS., 315;
described by Mme. d’Épinay, 339;
as an actress, 342;
complicity with La Harpe, 474-6;
returns to Ferney, 487;
in Voltaire’s last illness, 553-7;
sells his library and Ferney, 561;
marries Duvivier, 561
Denis, M., 99, 139;
his death, 153
Denon (artist), 516
Desfontaines, Abbé, his quarrel with Voltaire, 117-23
Desforts (controller-general), 60
Desmares, Mlle. (actress), 211
Desmarets, M., 112-14
“Dialogue between a Priest and a Protestant Minister,” 466
Diderot, 213, 324, 445
“Disaster of Lisbon, The,” 346, 370;
published, 317-19
“Discourses on Man,” 80, 84, 87
Dodington, Bubb, 51
Dorn. _See_ Frankfort
Dubarry, Mme., 494, 507-8, 534
Dubois, Cardinal, 32, 34, 36, 40
Ducis (playwright), 561
Dumesnil, Mlle. (actress), 145
Dumolard (librarian), 134
Dunoyer, Olympe (“Pimpette”), her love affair with Voltaire, 10-14
Dupuits, Mme. _See_ Corneille, Marie
Dupuits, Mlle., 435, 442
Dupuits, M., 434, 476, 541, 546
Duval. _See_ La Barre
Duvivier, 542, 546, 561
Elector Palatine, Charles Theodore, 288-9, 344
“Elements of Newton’s Philosophy,” 94, 100-2;
published, 103-4
Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, 330, 378;
her death, 453
Enclos, Ninon de l’, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7
“Encyclopædia,” the (Diderot and d’ Alembert), 252, 290, 323-6, 369
“English Letters, The; or, The Philosophical Letters,” 55-59,
68, 71-72, 88, 142;
published, 73
“Envieux, L’,” 119
Enville, Duchesse d’. _See_ Calas _and_ 432
Ephraim (moneylender). _See_ Hirsch
“Epick Poetry of the European Nations, The,” 54, 117
Épinay, Madame d’, 352;
her visit to Délices, 339
“Epistle to Uranie.” _See_ “Uranie”
“Ériphyle,” 64-7;
produced, 65
Espinas (affair of), 439
“Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations,” 203;
published, 291, 347
“Essay on the Nature and Propagation of Fire” (Mme. du Châtelet’s), 105, 130
“Essay on the Nature and Propagation of Fire,” 101-4;
published, 105
Étallonde de Morival, d’. _See_ La Barre
“Eulogy (or Panegyric) of Saint Louis,” 200
“Events of the Year,” 157
Falkener, Sir Everard, 51, 53, 164, 249-51;
his death, 377
“Fanaticism, Ode on,” 75
“Fanine.” _See_ “Zulime”
Fleury, Cardinal, 68, 133-4, 141, 142, 143;
his death, 146
Florian, Marquis de, 324, 430, 504-5, 505
Florian, Marquise de. _See_ Fontaine, Madame de
“Florianet,” 505
Fontaine, Madame de (Mlle. Mignot and Marquise de Florian), 98, 212, 300,
321, 324, 326, 353, 366, 430;
her marriage to M. de Fontaine, 100;
her death, 505
Fontaine-Martel, Comtesse de, 65, 70;
her death, 68
Fontenelle (writer), 30, 67, 101, 211, 397-539
“Fontenoy” published, 160
Fox, Charles James, 478
Frankfort (affair of), 270-84
Franklin, Benjamin, 533, 550
Frederick II. of Prussia (Frederick the Great), 123, 139,
141, 143, 147, 198-200, 209, 214, 227, 296, 311,
330, 344, 360, 452, 494, 501, 516;
his correspondence with Voltaire, 89-90, 127-30;
sends him “Anti-Machiavelli,” 128;
becomes King, 131;
relations to Mme. du Châtelet, 131-2;
meets Voltaire at Moyland, 132;
and at Remusberg, 134;
invades Silesia, 137-8;
entertains Voltaire at Aix-la-Chapelle, 143;
and at Berlin and Bayreuth, 150-2;
his epitaph on Mme. du Châtelet, 204;
as d’Arnaud’s patron, 216-218;
his reception of Voltaire, 221-224;
at the Carrousel, 223-225;
as Voltaire’s pupil, 226;
borrows Voltaire from Louis, 227;
at the Suppers, 228-9;
his conduct to Darget, 233;
in the d’Arnaud quarrel, 234-5;
in the Hirsch affair, 238-43;
his writings, 243-245;
strained relations with Voltaire, 245-7;
in the quarrel with Maupertuis, 253-64;
dismisses Voltaire, 268;
parts from him, 269;
in the affair of the “Œuvre de Poésie,” 275-85;
effects of Voltaire’s visit, 286-7;
relations with him in Seven Years’ War, 333-7, 345-6, 373-5, 408, 453;
subscribes to Voltaire’s statue, 498;
reads his “Eulogium,” etc., 559;
caricatured in his “Memoirs,” 561
Fredersdorff, 262-3, 266, 277, 280
Fréron (critic and journalist), 214, 215, 219, 234, 394-5, 397, 399;
and “The Scotch Girl,” 390-3;
death of, 518
“Fréron, Anecdotes of,” 399
Freytag (the resident), 270-1;
_and see_ Frankfort
Gallien, 468
Gaultier, Abbé, 534-9, 553, 556, 557
Gay, John, 48, 51, 52
“Geneva” Article (d’Alembert’s), 325, 337-8, 346
Genlis, Madame de, 520
Genlis, Marquis and Marquise de, 332
Génonville, de, 23, 27;
his death, 38
George I., 27, 49
George II., 150
“Gertrude, or the Education of a Daughter,” 440
Gervasi, Doctor, 39
Gibbon, Edward, 341
Gleichen, Baron, 340, 500
Gluck (musician), 532
Gonon. _See_ Saurin
Gorse. _See_ Calas
“Gospel of the Day, The,” 373
Gouvernet, Marquise de. _See_ Livri
Graffigny, Mme. de, 119, 122, 186, 192;
her visit to Cirey, 106-15
Grasset (publisher), 312;
_and see_ Saurin
Grétry (musician), 469-70
Gros (curé of Ferney), 483-4, 495
Guébriant, Marquis de, 75
Guénée, Abbé, 522
Guise, Mlle. de. _See_ Richelieu, Duchesse de
Haller (writer), 348-9
Hanway, Jonas, 225
Helvétius, 350, 369;
his death, 505
Hénault, President, 30, 154, 213
Hennin (French envoy), 464
“Henriade, The,” 15, 21, 29, 30, 33 _seq._, 53-4, 56, 63-4, 147, 355;
its publication, 40
Henry of Prussia, Prince, 235
Hirsch (the affair of), 237-43
Hornoy, Abbé d’, 366, 504, 558;
at Voltaire’s death and burial, 555-7
“Host and Hostess, The,” 521
Huber (artist), 340, 516
Hugenot (curé of Ferney), 495, 558
“Indiscret, L’,” 41-3;
produced, 42
“Infâme, l’,” 379-83
“Institutions Physiques” (Madame du Châtelet’s), 131
“Irène,” 525-6, 544-5, 565;
produced, 540
“J’ai Vu,” 19, 22, 23
Jalabert (barrister). _See_ Sirvens
Jore (publisher), 64, 72, 73;
his quarrel with Voltaire, 88-9
Joseph II. (Emperor of Austria), 522-3
Kaiserling, 96-7, 132
Keith, George (Earl Marischal of Scotland), 230, 279, 327
Keith, James, 230
Koenig (mathematician), 124-6, 140;
championed by Voltaire, 257-61
La Barre, Chevalier de (the affair of the), 455-61
La Beaumelle, 271, 471;
his quarrel with Voltaire, 253-4
La Borde (playwright), 468, 507
La Harpe (critic and dramatist), 531, 537, 540-1, 556, 559;
at Ferney, 454, 471-6
Lally, General, his vindication, 510-13
La Mettrie, Doctor, 229, 246-7, 258;
his death, 247
Lasalle, de. _See_ Calas
Launay, Mademoiselle de. _See_ Staal
Lauraguais (playwright), 409
Lavaysse, Gaubert. _See_ Calas
“Laws of Minos, The,” 504
“League, The.” _See_ “Henriade”
Le Brun (poet), 22, 398, 534
Lécluse (dentist), 395
Lecouvreur, Adrienne (actress), 29, 38, 39, 44-5;
her death and burial, 61
“Lecouvreur, Adrienne, Poem on the Death of,” 62
Lekain (actor), 313, 394;
introduced to Voltaire, 212;
visits him, 312-13, 360, 429, 506-7, 521;
his death, 529
Lervéche. _See_ Saurin
Lessing, 236-7
Letourneur (controversy with), 519
“Letter on Plays, The” (J. J. Rousseau’s), 346
“Letter on the Thoughts of Pascal,” 73
“Life, The use of,” 95
Ligne, Prince de, 362, 440
Linant, 70, 82, 98
“Literary War, The” (Grasset’s), 348, 350
Livri, Mademoiselle de (Marquise de Gouvernet), 18, 23, 27, 28, 548
Longchamp, S. G. (servant-secretary), 86, 108,
165, 176, 177, 191, 195, 201, 203-4,
207-9, 219, 278;
becomes Voltaire’s servant, 171;
dismissed, 256;
to see Voltaire in Paris, 548-9
Lorry, Doctor, 539, 555
Louis XIV., 15;
his death, 16-17
“Louis XIV., Century of,” 80, 125, 236, 247, 253, 271, 287, 347;
published, 249-51
Louis XV., 31, 37, 41, 42, 151,
155, 157-66, 171, 180-2, 189,
214, 218-19, 222, 241, 294, 329, 344, 384;
his death, 514
“Louis XV., Century of,” 164
“Louis XV., Panegyric of,” 198, 302
Louis XVI., 526, 563, 565
Luchet, Marquis and Marquise de, 515-16
Luxembourg, Duchesse de, 145
Machault (Keeper of the Seals), 329
“Mahomet,” 132, 139, 161, 212, 246;
produced, 139-42
Mailly, Mme. de, 140
Maine, Duchesse du, 17, 28, 171, 211, 215, 217;
her character, 172;
visited by Voltaire and Mme. du Châtelet, 172-4;
shelters Voltaire at Sceaux, 177-9
Maintenon, Letters of Mme. de, 255-6
Maisons, De, 38-40;
his death, 64
Maistre, Comte de, 358
“Man with Forty Crowns, The,” 482
Margravine of Bayreuth, Wilhelmina, 134,
224, 243, 270, 272, 282, 284, 297,
309-11, 334-5;
her death, 345
Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, 134, 150, 334, 336
“Mariamne,” 38, 43;
produced, 41, 68
Marie Antoinette, 520-1, 526, 541, 564-5
Marie Leczinska, 42-3, 181, 185, 191, 313, 318, 437;
death of, 479
Mariette (barrister). _See_ Calas
Marlborough, Sarah, Duchess of, 48, 52, 65
Marmontel, 168, 209, 213, 217-18, 344, 532;
as Voltaire’s protégé, 169-170;
stays at Délices, 395
Martin, Abbé, 535
Martin (the affair of), 509
Maupeou, Chancellor, 503-4, 510
Maupertuis, Moreau de (philosopher), 68, 76, 113, 132, 133, 140, 229, 270;
history and character, 252-4;
quarrel with Voltaire over Raynal, 253;
over La Beaumelle, 254-5;
over Koenig, 257-261;
visits Plombières, 299;
his death, 374
Melton, Lord, 225
Melun, Duc de, 41
“Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg” (Frederick the Great’s), 244, 289
“Memoirs for the Life of M. de Voltaire,” 335, 374;
published, 562
Menou, Father, 185, 294
“Mérope,” 111, 115;
produced, 144-6
“Micromégas,” 178
Mignot, Abbé, 122, 209, 353, 366, 504, 535, 537, 559;
at Voltaire’s death and burial, 557
Mignot, Catherine (Catherine Arouet), 2, 3, 4, 31;
her death, 49
Moisnel. _See_ La Barre
“Mondain, Le,” published, 93
“Mondain, Le, Defence of,” 95
Montbaillis (the affair of the), 510
Montesquieu, 148
Montferrat, M. and Mme. de, 340
Montpéroux, de (French envoy), 396
Morand (servant), 555, 557
Morangiés, Comte de, 510
Morellet, Abbé, 386, 390, 516
Morsan, Durey de, 468
Mouhy, Chevalier de, 119, 123, 373
Moussinot, Abbé, 92, 122, 125
Muy, Marquise de, 339
“Nanine,” 331;
produced, 199, 305
“Narrative of Brother Grasse,” published, 380
“Narrative of the Jesuit Berthier,” published, 379
“Natural Law,” 252, 272, 369;
published, 317-8
Néaulme, Jean (publisher), 292-3
Necker, Mme. (Mlle. Curchod), 341, 520, 533;
and the Pigalle Statue, 497, 499
Necker, M., 497
Newton, Sir Isaac, 48, 53-5, 57
“Œdipe,” 15, 17, 20, 43, 53, 565;
produced, 25-6, 34
“Œuvre de Poésie” (King Frederick’s). _See_ Frankfort;
_and_ 275, 334, 375
Oldfield, Mrs. (actress), 57
Olivet, Abbé d’, 5, 6, 168, 213;
his death, 479
“Olympie,” 410, 429;
produced, 441-2
“Opinions of Jean Meslier, Extract of the,” 411
“Oreste,” 214;
produced, 210-11
“Originaux, les,” 179
“Orphan of China, The,” 289-90;
produced, 313
Palissot, Charles (journalist), 389-391
Panckoucke (publisher), 516
“Panpan.” _See_ Graffigny
Patu (poet), 314
“Peter the Great, The History of,” 330-31;
published, 378
Peterborough, Lord, 51
“Philippics, The,” 28
“Philosophical Dictionary, The,” 252, 260, 287, 325, 442-3, 461
“Philosophical Letters.” _See_ “English Letters”
Piccini (musician), 532
Pictet, the family, 340
Pigalle (sculptor), 497-9
“Pimpette.” _See_ Dunoyer
Piron, Alexis (poet), 36, 46, 68, 142, 189, 210, 498
Poissonnier, Doctor, 516
Pollnitz, Baron, 230-31, 273
Pompadour, Marquise de, 162-6, 180-81, 213, 219, 227,
279-80, 319, 329, 334, 336, 344, 358, 395;
her character and friendship for Voltaire, 162-3;
his verses to her, 181;
she offers him a cardinal’s hat, 319;
sends him her portrait, 406;
death of, 442
Pompignan, Bishop of Puy, 385, 388, 411
Pompignan, Marquis le Franc de, his quarrel with Voltaire, 384-8,
407, 411
“Poor Devil, The,” 389
Pope, Alexander, 48, 52, 56
Pope Benedict XIV., 161 _seq._
“Pour, Le, et le Contre.” _See_ Uranie
Prades, Abbé de, 268, 280
“Praise of Hypocrisy, The,” 466
“Préservatif, Le,” 119-20;
published, 119
Prie, Mme. de, 41-45, 117
“Princess of Navarre, The,” 154-5;
produced, 156-7
“Prodigal Son, The,” 83, 89, 180;
produced, 92
“Prude, The,” 179
“Prussians, To the” (Frederick the Great’s), 245
“Pucelle, The,” 78, 82, 97, 110, 113, 231, 272, 282, 301, 303;
published, 311-12;
authorised publication, 432-34
“Puero Regnante,” 19, 22
Quinault, Mlle. (actress), 83, 92, 144
Rameau, J. P. (composer), 71, 154, 155, 163, 165
Raynal, Abbé, 214, 217, 253
“Refutation of an anonymous Article, A,” 347
Regent, the (Philip, Duke of Orleans), 17, 20, 22, 26-8, 30;
his death, 40
“Reply, A, from an Academician of Berlin,” 258-60
Ribotte-Charon. _See_ Calas
Richard (monk), 468
Richelieu, Duc de, 28, 29, 41, 42, 61,
66, 71, 75, 79, 89, 150, 209, 213,
333-4, 498;
his marriage, 72;
quarrel with Voltaire, 198;
Voltaire visits him at Lyons, 302;
in the affair of Byng, 326-7;
visits Voltaire at Ferney, 432;
in Paris, 534;
and on his deathbed, 554
Richelieu, Duchesse de (Mlle. de Guise), 72, 83, 303
Richier (secretary), 235-6
Rieu (American officer), 476, 559
Rohan, Chevalier de, his quarrel with Voltaire, 44-7, 61
“Rome Sauvée,” 44, 210, 213, 226, 231, 256;
produced, 213
Rousseau, Jean Baptiste (poet), 3, 7, 118, 124;
quarrels with Voltaire in Holland, 34-5;
over the “Temple of Taste,” 68-9;
attacks him in “Bibliothèque Française,” 91-92
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 146, 165, 299, 370-1, 498;
his “Discourse on Inequality,” 314;
remonstrates on “Disaster of Lisbon,” 322;
his “Letter on Plays,” 346;
his “New Eloïsa,” 401-2;
his “Emile” and “Savoyard Vicar,” 166, 170, 181, 430-1
Roy, Charles (poet), 166, 170, 181
Royal Society, the, 147
Rucker, Councillor. _See_ Frankfort
Rupelmonde, Mme. de, 33-5, 66
“Russia under Peter I.” _See_ “Peter the Great”
Saint-Ange, Marquis de, 14, 18
Saint-Julien, Mme., 468, 494, 516, 520, 554
Saint-Lambert, Marquis de, 185, 193, 197, 208, 487, 532;
his character, 185;
his love affair with Mme. du Châtelet, 185-8;
his conduct on its discovery, 193-6;
at the illness and death of Mme. du Châtelet, 201-3
Saint-Marc, Marquis de, 545
Saint-Sulpice, de Tersac, Curé of, 538, 556-7
“Samson,” 71, 564
Saurin Controversy, the, 347, 355
Saussure, Mlle. de, 507
Saxe-Gotha, Duchess of, 272, 296, 317
“Scarmentado,” 178, 215
Schmidt Councillor. _See_ Frankfort
Schoepflin, the brothers (historian and printer), 290, 296
Schouvaloff, Count, 378-9
“Scotch Girl, The,” 390;
produced, 391-3
“Scythians, The,” produced, 470
Ségur, Comtesse de, 548
“Seigneurial Rights,” 410;
produced, 411
“Semiramis,” 66, 171, 198;
produced, 189
“Semiramis, The Advertisement to,” 191
“Sermon of Fifty, The,” 431
“Sésostris,” 526
Sèvres (affair of the Bridge of), 32-3, 120
Shakespeare, Voltaire’s opinion of, in “English Letters,” 55-6;
in “Advertisement to Semiramis,” 191;
in writing to Walpole, 479;
and in the quarrel with Letourneur, 519
Sherlock, Martin, 361, 408, 517-19
Sirvens (affair of the), 446-52
Sloane, Sir Hans, 54
Staal, Mme. de (Mlle. de Launay), 18, 173, 179
Stanislas Leczinski (ex-King of Poland), 42,
63, 189-91, 193, 198, 200, 207, 349;
his Court and character, 184-5
Stormont, Lord, 533
Suard, Mme., 156, 516, 546
Sully, Duc and Duchesse de, 18, 30, 45, 54
Swift, Jonathan, 48, 52, 54, 56, 58
“Tancred” (“Aménaïde”), 354, 430;
produced, 393
“Temple, Epicureans of the,” 9
“Temple of Glory, The,” 164;
produced, 163-5
“Temple of Taste, The,” 71, 91;
published, 69-70
Tencin, Cardinal de, 302, 336, 340, 375;
his death, 336
Tencin, Mme. de, 46, 67, 302, 323
Terrai, Abbé, 365, 508, 514
Tersac, de. _See_ Saint-Sulpice
Theriot, 31, 34, 38-42, 46-9, 60, 62, 83, 117, 134, 190, 217, 354;
fellow-pupil with Voltaire, 14;
visits Cirey, 100;
his treachery in Desfontaines’ affair, 120-4;
visits Délices, 432;
death of, 507
Thil, Mlle. du, 176, 201, 202, 303, 311
Thomson, James, 48, 51
Tinois (secretary), 235
Tissot, Doctor, 309
Tournemine, Father, 5, 6, 12
Travenol Lawsuit, 170, 172
“Treatise on Metaphysics,” 80, 84, 86, 203
“Treatise on Tolerance,” 438-40, 444
Trinquier (Judge of Mazamet). _See_ Sirvens
“Triumvirate, The,” produced, 442
Tronchin, Doctor Theodore, 303, 324, 326, 350, 352, 354, 376, 396;
his character and régime, 303-4;
and the “Geneva” Article, 337-8;
his “cure” at Geneva, 338-40;
in Voltaire’s last illnesses, 532 _seq._, 546-8, 553
Tronchin, the family, 303-4, 310, 443
Tronchin, Mme., 340
Turgot (Comptroller-General), 515, 527, 542
Tyrconnel, Lord, 230, 247;
his death, 256
Unigenitus, the Bull, 16, 17, 220
“Uranie, Epistle to,” 33;
published, 66
Vallette, 376, 389
Vallière, Duc de la, 319
Van Duren (printer), 129, 276
“Vanity” published, 387-88
Vauvenargues, Marquis de, 169
Végobre (lawyer). _See_ Calas and 432
Vernet, Pastor, 308;
quarrels with Voltaire, 466-7
Vestris, Mme. (actress), 532, 540, 545
Viguière, Jeannette. _See_ Calas
Villars, Duc de, 396, 432, 435
Villars, Mme. de, 145
Villars, Maréchal de, 29, 89, 249
Villars, Maréchale de, 26, 29, 145
Villette, Marquis de, 526, 527, 538, 543, 545, 554, 560, 562;
marries Mlle. de Varicourt, 525;
at Voltaire’s death and burial, 553-4, 555, 557;
and second funeral, 563;
his death, 566
Villette, Marquis de. _See_ Belle-et-Bonne
Villevieille, Marquis de, 519, 525, 535, 537
“Voice, The, of the Sage and the People,” 219, 250;
published, 215
Voisenon, Abbé, 188
Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, birth and parentage, 1-2;
baptism, 2;
first letter, 4;
school life, 4-7;
visits Ninon de l’Enclos, 5;
first tragedy, 6;
sees J. B. Rousseau, 7;
literary leanings, 7;
studies law, 8;
wild life in Paris, 8-9;
sent to Caen and the Netherlands, 10;
love affair with Olympe Dunoyer, 10-14;
clerk to Maître Alain, 13;
writes prize poem and satire, 14;
visits Saint-Ange and begins “Henriade,” 15;
at Louis XIV.’s funeral, 17;
reads “Œdipe” to the Temple, 17;
introduced to Duchesse du Maine, 17;
visits Saint-Ange, 18;
exiled to Sully, 18;
satires assigned to him, 19;
interview with Regent, 20;
in the Bastille, 20-2;
writes “Henriade,” 21;
changes his name, 22;
exiled to Châtenay, 22;
second interview with Regent, 22-3;
love affair with Mlle. de Livri, 23;
acts in “Œdipe,” 26;
his gains from it, 27;
stays at Villars, 28;
at Sully’s and Richelieu’s, 29;
failure of “Artémire,” 29;
to Richelieu’s, Sully’s, Bolingbroke’s, and Villars, 30;
his father’s death, 30;
his economy, 31;
his affair with Levi, 32;
and at the Bridge of Sèvres, 33;
his trip to Holland, 33-5;
writes “Epistle to Uranie,” 33;
quarrels with J. B. Rousseau, 34-5;
to Cambrai, La Source, and Ussé, 35-6;
to Paris and Rouen, 36;
publishing “Henriade,” 37;
goes to Maisons, 38;
has smallpox, 38-9;
produces “Mariamne,” 41;
visits Forges, 41;
produces “L’Indiscret,” 41;
at Court, 41-2;
quarrels with Rohan, 44-6;
second imprisonment in the Bastille, 46-7;
his visit to England, 47-59;
writes “English Letters,” 55-8;
at St. Germains, 60;
engaged in a lottery, 60;
at death of Adrienne Lecouvreur, 61;
writes poem on her death, 62;
his views on actors, 62;
produces “Brutus,” 63;
living at Rouen, 64;
at the death of Maisons, 64;
produces “Charles XII.,” 65-6;
produces “Eriphyle,” 65;
candidate for Academy, 66;
produces “Zaire,” 67;
at Court, 68;
at death of Countess Martel, 68;
produces “Temple of Taste,” 69-70;
his protégés, 70;
visited by Mme. du Châtelet, 70;
produces “Adélaïde du Guesclin,” 72;
at Richelieu’s wedding, 73;
“English Letters” burnt and escape to Cirey, 73;
first meets Mme. du Châtelet, 74;
meets her at Sceaux, 76;
as her lover, 76-8;
arrives at Cirey, 78;
goes to Baden, 79;
life at Cirey, 79-80;
plans “Prodigal Son,” 83;
to Lunéville, 83;
occupations at Cirey, 83;
“Death of Cæsar” in print, 84;
his “Treatise” and “Discourses,” 84;
produces “Alzire,” 87;
quarrels with Jore, 88-9;
candidate for Academy, 89;
as correspondent of Prince Frederick, 89-91;
attacks J. B. Rousseau, 91-2;
produces “Prodigal Son,” 92;
corresponds with Moussinot, 92;
in affair of “Mondain,” 93-4;
visits Brussels, Leyden, and Amsterdam, 94;
writes defence of “Mondain” and “Use of Life,” 95;
Voltaire and nature, 96;
as host to Kaiserling, 96-7;
marrying his nieces, 98-9;
his generosity, 100;
his scientific studies, 101;
writes “Elements of Newton” and “Essay on Fire,” 102-5;
his life during Graffigny’s visit, 106-115;
and with Mme. du Châtelet, 114-16;
quarrels with Desfontaines, 117-23;
visits Brussels, Enghien, Paris, 124-26;
literary correspondence with Frederick, 127-31;
meets him at Moyland, 131-33;
goes to Hague, 133;
and Remusberg, 134;
his journey to Brussels, 135-8;
hears of invasion of Silesia, 137-8;
quarrels with Mme. du Châtelet, 138;
produces “Mahomet” at Lille, 139;
dissipation in Paris, 140;
produces “Mahomet” there, 140-3;
visits Frederick, 143;
produces “Mérope,” 144-6;
candidate for Academy, 146-7;
his mission to Frederick, 150-2;
disagrees with Mme. du Châtelet, 153;
writes “Princess of Navarre,” 154-5;
adventure in Paris, 156;
at Armand’s funeral, 156;
produces “Princess” at Court, 157;
as Historiographer, 158-60;
gains Pope’s favour, 160-2;
and Pompadour’s, 163-4;
produces “Temple of Glory,” 163-5;
his treatment of servants, 165;
elected to Academy, 166-8;
as friend of Vauvenargues and Marmontel, 169-70;
in lawsuits, 170;
Gentleman-in-Ordinary, visits Duchesse du Maine, 171-4;
escapes from Court to Sceaux, 176-7;
life there, 178-80;
his poem to Pompadour, 180-2;
escapes to Cirey, 182-4;
visits Stanislas, 184-9;
Paris and Commercy, 189;
produces “Sémiramis,” 189;
goes to Café Procope, 190;
falls ill at Châlons, 192;
discovers treachery of Saint-Lambert and Mme. du Châtelet, 192-3;
his conduct in the matter, 194-6;
quarrels with Richelieu and sells post of Gentleman-in-Ordinary, 198;
studies in Paris, 198-99;
produces “Nanine,” 199;
stays at Lunéville, 199-200;
during illness and death of Mme. du Châtelet, her effect on him, 202-7;
his despair in Paris, 208;
produces “Oreste,” 210-11;
Mme. Denis to live with him, 211;
acting in Rue Traversière, 212;
produces “Rome Sauvée,” 213-14;
quarrels with Fréron, 214;
reasons for going to Prussia, 216-19;
his departure and arrival at Potsdam, 220;
his enjoyment there, 221-22;
at the Carrousel, 223-25;
in Potsdam, 226-27;
at the Royal Suppers, 228-31;
writes Letter of Buts, 233;
quarrels with d’Arnaud, 233-35;
with Tinois and Lessing, 235-36;
small disagreeables, 236-37;
quarrels with Hirsch, 237-43;
correcting Frederick’s works, 244-46;
his strained relations with him, 246-48;
produces “Louis XIV.,” 249-51;
quarrels with Maupertuis, 252-60;
produces “Akakia,” 260-64;
preparing to leave, 265-67;
is dismissed, 268;
parts from Frederick, 268-69;
goes to Leipzig, etc., 269-73;
detained at Frankfort, 274-85;
results of Prussian visit, 286-87;
visits Mayence, etc., and Colmar, 288-90;
his “Essay” appears, 291-95;
deciding where to live, 296;
publishes “Annals,” 297;
as correspondent of du Deffand, 297;
communicates at Easter, 298;
to Senones and Plombières, 299;
looking for a Swiss property, 300;
visits Richelieu, 301-3;
at Geneva with Tronchins, 303-6;
at Prangins, 305;
acquires Délices and Monrion, 306;
improving Délices, 308-10;
visited by Lekain, 310-11;
denies “Pucelle,” 311-12;
produces “Orphan of China,” 313;
answers Rousseau’s “Inequality,” 314;
writes “Disaster of Lisbon,” 315-16;
and “Natural Law,” 316-18;
offered cardinal’s hat, 319;
dismisses Collini, 320-21;
as d’Alembert’s host, 323-26;
espouses cause of Byng, 327-28;
his opinion of Damiens affair, 329;
and of Lausanne society, 330-31;
at work and play, 331;
invents war-chariot, 332;
interferes in Seven Years’ War, 333-34, 374-75;
in affair of “Geneva” Article, 337-38;
entertaining visitors, 338-43;
to stay with Elector Palatine, 344-45;
writes Ode on death of Margravine, 345;
on the Saurin controversy, 347;
receives Bettinelli, 349-50;
buys Ferney and Tourney, 350-55;
his house, garden, and life at Ferney, 356-68;
his “Natural Law” burnt, 369;
produces “Candide,” 370-73;
in affair of Frederick’s Ode, 373-74;
has d’Aumard to live with him, 376;
reading English books, 377;
writes “Peter the Great,” 378-79;
his battle against _l’infâme_, 379-83;
attacks Pompignan, 384-88;
Palissot and Fréron, 388-91;
produces “Scotch Girl,” 391-93;
and “Tancred,” 393-94;
receives Marmontel and acts plays, 395-97;
adopts Marie Corneille, 397-400;
compared with Rousseau, 401;
criticises “Eloïsa,” 402;
quarrels with Jesuits, 403;
builds a church, 404-7;
annotates Corneille, 407;
quarrels with de Brosses, 409;
writes “Olympie,” 410;
and “Eloge de Crébillon,” and “Opinions of Meslier,” 411-12;
in the affair of Calas, 412-28, 437, 443-45;
has “Olympie” acted at Ferney, 429;
quarrels with Rousseau, 431-32;
receives Theriot and Richelieu, 432;
produces “Pucelle,” 433-34;
marries Marie Corneille to Dupuits, 434;
has Father Adam to live with him, 436-37;
writes “Treatise on Tolerance,” 438-39;
helps Espinas and Chaumont, 439-40;
receives Ligne and Boufflers, 440-41;
produces “Olympie,” 441-42;
in the affair of the Sirvens, 446-52;
reconciled to Frederick, 453;
corresponds with Catherine the Great, 453, 487;
visited by Clairon and Wilkes, 455;
in the affair of La Barre, 455-60;
escapes to Rolle, 460;
his “Philosophical Dictionary,” 461;
in the affairs of Bourgeoisie and Natives, 463-5;
quarrels with Vernet, 466-67;
in the affair of Covelle, 467-68;
in the blockade of Ferney, 467-68;
receives Boswell, etc., 468-70;
quarrels with La Beaumelle, 471;
in La Harpe’s treachery, 471-76;
alone at Ferney, 476-77;
preaches in church, 477;
receives Fox, 478;
corresponds with Walpole, 479;
as a pamphleteer, 481-83;
communicates at Easter, 484-85;
obtains annuity for Capuchins, 486;
his industries at Ferney, 487-96;
his statue by Pigalle, 497-99;
receives Burney, d’Alembert, Condorcet, 500-2;
in the affair of the Parliament of Paris, 503-4;
receives Florians and Dr. Moore, 505-6;
his relations with Mme. Dubarry, 507-8;
in the affairs of the Bombelles, Martin, and Montbaillis, 508-11;
and of Lally, 511-13;
writes “Eulogy on Louis XV.,” 514;
his friendship for Turgot, 515;
has a succession of visitors, 515-17;
adopts “Belle-et-Bonne,” 517;
quarrels with Letourneur, 519;
writes “Sésostris”;
and dismisses Adam, 521;
quarrels with Guénée, 521-22;
chagrin at Joseph II.’s neglect, 522-23;
affection for “Belle-et-Bonne,” marries her to Villette, 523-24;
writing “Irène,” 525-26;
his reasons for and against going to Paris, 526-27;
his journey there, 528-29;
his reception by the capital, 529-31;
his visitors, 531-34;
his dealings with Gaultier, 534-39;
visited by du Deffand and d’Alembert, 535-37;
his declaration of faith, 538;
ill in bed, 538-41;
hears of success of “Irène,” 541;
discovers it has been altered, 542;
sees Turgot, 542;
his reception at Academy and Comédie, 542-45;
indecision as to his movements, 546-47;
visits Mme. du Deffand and Marquise de Gouvernet, 548;
to séance at Academy, 549;
buys a house, 550;
last attendance at Academy and Dictionary scheme, 550-551;
to performance of “Alzire,” 551;
his last illness, 553-56;
his death, 556;
his burial at Scellières, 557-58;
his Will, 558;
as subject of Academy prize poem, 559;
eulogised by Frederick, 559;
his library and Ferney sold, 560;
eulogised at Academy, 561;
his “Memoirs” appear, 562;
second funeral, 563-65;
his tomb violated, 566;
his Centenary, 566;
as foe of Roman Catholicism, 567;
as poet, playwright, historian, 567;
as novelist and letter-writer, 568;
his religion, 569-70;
his work for the world, 570-71
Wagnière (servant-secretary), 278, 358, 360-61, 367, 505, 559-60;
enters Voltaire’s service, 321;
during his last visit to Paris, 531, 534 _seq._, 545-6, 550
Walpole, Horace, 479
“Whens, The,” etc., 385-6
Wilkes, John, 455
Willancourt, Abbess of. _See_ La Barre
Williams, Hanbury, 231
Ximenès, Marquis de (or Chimenès), 246, 315, 402
Young, Dr. (poet), 48, 51
“Zadig,” 178-80, 215
“Zaire,” 67-8, 242;
produced, 68
“Zulime” (“Fanine”), 331, 341
_A Selection from the
Catalogue of_
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
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The Life of Mirabeau
By S. G. TALLENTYRE
Author of “The Life of Voltaire,” “The Friends of Voltaire”
_First American Edition Reprinted from the Second English Edition_
8º. _With Portraits._
The two great representative Frenchmen of the eighteenth century are
Voltaire and Mirabeau. Voltaire was the last great influence of the old
order, and Mirabeau the first of the new. Voltaire, more than any other
one man, undammed the torrent of Revolution. Mirabeau used all the
strength of his mighty genius to turn those rushing waters into the
channel of use, of wisdom, and of safety.
These two notable men have inspired the present biographer, who has the
distinction of having written what may be regarded as the definitive
life of each. _The Life of Mirabeau_ is, like _The Life of Voltaire_, a
penetrating study of character combined with a dramatic conception of
Mirabeau’s rôle in history. It has been entirely reset, and is offered
to the public in a format uniform with _The Life of Voltaire_.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York London
* * * * *
Voltaire in His Letters
Being a Selection from his Correspondence
Translated with a Preface and Notes
By
S. G. Tallentyre
Author of “Life of Voltaire,” “The Friends of Voltaire,” etc.
_8º._
The letters portray the man “in his habit as he lived,” and not only
display his extraordinary mind, but show him in love and in prison,
recovering from smallpox, lamenting a mistress, visiting a king,
righting human wrongs, attacking inhuman laws, belittling Shakespeare,
and belauding Chesterfield.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York London
* * * * *
Matthew Hargraves
By
S. G. Tallentyre
Author of “Bassett,” “Life of Voltaire,” etc.
_12º._
To those discriminating readers of fiction who put human interest above
the eccentric and exceptional, this new book by S. G. Tallentyre,
recounting with rare fidelity the progress through life of Matthew
Hargraves, son of the portly landlord of the _Hope and Anchor_, with all
the qualities one respects and the limitations one recognizes in the
average man, will afford delightful hours. The delicate way in which the
author conveys to the reader the sense of growing sympathy between
Matthew and the girl whom he and his wife have taken into their coldly
correct household is a refreshing escape from the clumsy, or even gross,
manner in which many writers of fiction, with an artistry less perfect,
would have done violence to the situation. But the supreme achievement
of the author’s artistry is to have made a commonplace man thoroughly
interesting.
* * * * *
DRAKE, NELSON, AND NAPOLEON: Studies
By
Sir Walter Runciman, Bart.
Author of “The Tragedy of St. Helena,” etc.
_Illustrated._ _Demy 8vo._ _Cloth._
The author deals first with Drake and what he calls the Fleet Tradition,
of which he regards Drake, the greatest Elizabethan sailor, as the
indubitable founder; next the author deals with Nelson, his relations
with Lady Hamilton, and the various heroic achievements which have
immortalized his name. From Nelson the author passes on to Napoleon, and
shows how his career and policy have had a vital relation to the World
War. As himself a sailor of the old wooden-ships period, Sir Walter is
able to handle, with special knowledge and intimacy, the technique of
the seafaring exploits of Nelson; and Sir Walter’s analysis of the
character of Nelson, a combination of vanity, childishness,
statesmanlike ability, and incomparable seamanship and courage, is
singularly well conceived.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York London
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