T H E L I F E
OF
V O L T A I R E

Voltaire
from the statue by Houdon at the Comédie Française.

T H E L I F E
OF
V O L T A I R E

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

ILLUSTRATIONS

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,

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

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

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.