Nowhere and at no epoch had literature shone with so vivid a lustre as
in the reign of Louis XIV.; never has it been in a greater degree the
occupation and charm of mankind, never has it left nobler and rarer
models behind it for the admiration and imitation of the coming race;
the writers of Louis XV.’s age, for all their brilliancy and all their
fertility, themselves felt their inferiority in respect of their
predecessors. Voltaire confessed as much with a modesty which was by no
means familiar to him. Inimitable in their genius, Corneille, Bossuet,
Pascal, Moliere left their imprint upon the generation that came after
them; it had judgment enough to set them by acclamation in the ranks of
the classics; in their case, greatness displaced time. Voltaire took
Racine for model; La Mothe imagined that he could imitate La Fontaine.
The illustrious company of great minds which surrounded the throne of
Louis XIV., and had so much to do with the lasting splendor of his reign,
had no reason to complain of ingratitude on the part of its successors;
but, from the pedestal to which they raised it, it exercised no potent
influence upon new thought and new passions. Enclosed in their glory as
in a sanctuary, those noble spirits, discreet and orderly even in their
audacities, might look forth on commotions and yearnings they had never
known; they saw, with astonishment mingled with affright, their
successors launching without fear or afterthought upon that boundless
world of intellect, upon which the rules of conscience and the
difficulties of practical life do not come in anywhere to impose limits.
They saw the field everywhere open to human thought, and they saw falling
down on all sides the boundaries which they had considered sacred. They
saw pioneers, as bold as they were thoughtless, marching through the
mists of a glorious hope towards an unknown future, attacking errors and
abuses, all the while that they were digging up the groundwork of society
in order to lay new foundations, and they must have shuddered even in
their everlasting rest to see ideas taking the place of creeds, doubt
substituted for belief, generous aspirations after liberty, justice, and
humanity mingled, amongst the masses, with low passions and deep-seated
rancor. They saw respect disappearing, the church as well as the kingly
power losing prestige every day, religious faith all darkened and dimmed
in some corner of men’s souls, and, amidst all this general instability,
they asked themselves with awe, “What are the guiding-reins of the
society which is about to be? What will be the props of the new fabric?
The foundations are overturned; what will the good man do?”
[Illustration: Montesquieu----269]
Good men had themselves sometimes lent a hand to the work, beyond what
they had intended or foreseen, perhaps; Montesquieu, despite the wise
moderation of his great and strong mind, had been the first to awaken
that yearning for novelty and reforms which had been silently brooding at
the bottom of men’s hearts. Born in 1689 at the castle of La Brede, near
Bordeaux, Montesquieu really belonged, in point of age, to the reign of
Louis XIV., of which he bears the powerful imprint even amidst the
boldness of his thoughts and expressions. Grandeur is the distinctive
characteristic of Montesquieu’s ideas, as it is of the seventeenth
century altogether. He was already councillor in the Parliament of
Bordeaux when Louis XIV. died; next year (1716) he took possession of a
mortar-cap president’s (_president d mortier_) office, which had been
given up to him by one of his uncles. “On leaving college,” he says,
“there were put into my hands some law-books; I examined the spirit of
them.” Those profound researches, which were to last as long as his
life, were more suited to his tastes than jurisprudence properly so
called. “What has always given me rather a low opinion of myself,” he
would say, “is that there are very few positions in the commonwealth for
which I should be really fit. As for my office of president, I have my
heart in the right place, I comprehend sufficiently well the questions in
themselves; but as to the procedure I did not understand anything about
it. I paid attention to it, nevertheless; but what disgusted me most was
to see fools with that very talent which, so to speak, shunned me.” He
resolved to deliver himself from the yoke which was intolerable to him,
and resigned his office; but by this time the world knew his name, in
spite of the care he had taken at first to conceal it. In 1721, when he
still had his seat on the fleurs-de-lis, he had published his _Lettres
persanes,_ an imaginary trip of two exiled Parsees, freely criticising
Paris and France. The book appeared under the Regency, and bears the
imprint of it in the licentiousness of the descriptions and the witty
irreverence of the criticisms. Sometimes, however, the future gravity of
Montesquieu’s genius reveals itself amidst the shrewd or biting
judgments. It is in the _Lettres persanes_ that he seeks to set up the
notion of justice above the idea of God himself. “Though there were no
God,” he says, “we should still be bound to love justice, that is to say,
make every effort to be like that Being of whom we have so grand an idea,
and who, if He existed, would of necessity be just.” Holy Scripture,
before Montesquieu, had affirmed more simply and more powerfully the
unchangeable idea of justice in every soul of man. “He who is judge of
all the earth, shall not He do right?.” Abraham had said when
interceding with God for the righteous shut up in Sodom.
The success of the _Lettres persanes_ was great; Montesquieu had said
what many people thought without daring to express it; the doubt which
was nascent in his mind, and which he could only withstand by an effort
of will, the excessive freedom of the tone and of the style scared the
authorities, however; when he wanted to get into the French Academy, in
the place of M. de Sacy, Cardinal Fleury opposed it formally. It was
only on the 24th of January, 1728, that Montesquieu, recently elected,
delivered his reception speech. He at once set out on some long travels;
he went through Germany, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and ended
by settling in England for two years. The sight of political liberty had
charmed him. “Ambassadors know no more about England than a six months’
infant,” he wrote in his journal; “when people see the devil to pay in
the periodical publications, they believe that there is going to be a
revolution next day; but all that is required is to remember that in
England as elsewhere, the people are dissatisfied with the ministers and
write what is only thought elsewhere. England is the freest country in
the world; I do not except any republic.” He returned to France so
smitten with the parliamentary or moderate form of government, as he
called it, that he seemed sometimes to forget the prudent maxim of the
_Lettres persanes_. “It is true,” said the Parsee Usbeck, “that, in
consequence of a whimsicality (_bizarrerie_) which springs rather from
the nature than from the mind of man, it is sometimes necessary to change
certain laws; but the case is rare, and, when it occurs, it should not be
touched save with a trembling hand.”
On returning to his castle of La Brede after so many and such long
travels, Montesquieu resolved to restore his tone by intercourse with the
past. “I confess my liking for the ancients,” he used to say; “this
antiquity enchants me, and I am always ready to say with Pliny, ‘You are
going to Athens; revere the gods.’” It was not, however, on the Greeks
that he concentrated the working of his mind; in 1734, he published his
_Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur et de la decadence des
Romaine_. Montesquieu did not, as Bossuet did, seek to hit upon God’s
plan touching the destinies of mankind; he discovers in the virtues and
vices of the Romans themselves the secret of their triumphs and of their
reverses. The contemplation of antiquity inspires him with language
often worthy of Tacitus, curt, nervous, powerful in its grave simplicity.
“It seemed,” he says, “that the Romans only conquered in order to give;
but they remained so positively the masters that, when they made war on
any prince, they crushed him, so to speak, with the weight of the whole
universe.”
Montesquieu thus performed the prelude to the great work of his life; he
had been working for twenty years at the _Esprit des lois,_ when he
published it in 1748. “In the course of twenty years,” he says, “I saw
my work begin, grow, progress, and end.” He had placed as the motto to
his book this Latin phrase, which at first excited the curiosity of
readers: _Prolem sine matre creatam_ (Offspring begotten without a
mother). “Young man,” said Montesquieu, by this time advanced in years,
to M. Suard (afterwards perpetual secretary to the French Academy),
“young man, when a notable book is written, genius is its father, and
liberty its mother; that is why I wrote upon the title-page of my work,
“Prolem sine matre creatam.”
It was liberty at the same time as justice that Montesquieu sought and
claimed in his profound researches into the laws which have from time
immemorial governed mankind; that new instinctive idea of natural rights,
those new yearnings which were beginning to dawn in all hearts, remained
as yet, for the most part, upon the surface of their minds and of their
lives; what was demanded at that time in France was liberty to speak and
write rather than to act and govern. Montesquieu, on the contrary, went
to the bottom of things, and, despite the natural moderation of his mind,
he propounded theories so perilous for absolute power that he dared not
have his book printed at Paris, and brought it out in Geneva; its success
was immense; before his death, Montesquieu saw twenty-one French editions
published, and translations in all the languages of Europe. “Mankind had
lost its titledeeds,” says Voltaire; “Montesquieu recovered and restored
them.”
The intense labor, the immense courses of reading, to which Montesquieu
had devoted himself, had exhausted his strength. “I am overcome with
weariness,” he wrote in 1747; “I propose to rest myself for the remainder
of my days.” “I have done,” he said to M. Suard; “I have burned all my
powder, all my candles have gone out.” “I had conceived the design of
giving greater breadth and depth to certain parts of my _Esprit;_ I have
become incapable of it; my reading has weakened my eyes, and it seems to
me that what light I have left is but the dawn of the day when they will
close forever.”
Montesquieu was at Paris, ill and sad at heart, in spite of his habitual
serenity; notwithstanding the scoffs he had admitted into his _Lettres
persanes,_ he had always preserved some respect for religion; he
considered it a necessary item in the order of societies; in his soul and
on his own private account he hoped and desired rather than believed.
“Though the immortality of the soul were an error,” he had said, “I
should be sorry not to believe it; I confess that I am not so humble as
the atheists. I know not what they think, but as for me I would not
truck the notion of my immortality for that of an ephemeral happiness.
There is for me a charm in believing myself to be immortal like God
himself. Independently of revealed ideas, metaphysical ideas give me, as
regards my eternal happiness, strong hopes which I should not like to
give up.” As he approached the tomb, his views of religion appeared to
become clearer. “What a wonderful thing!” he would say, “the Christian
religion, which seems to have no object but felicity in the next world,
yet forms our happiness in this.” He had never looked to life for any
very keen delights; his spirits were as even as his mind was powerful.
“Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against the disagreeables of
life,” he wrote, “never having had any sorrow that an hour’s reading did
not dispel. I awake in the morning with a secret joy at beholding the
light; I gaze upon the light with a sort of enchantment, and all the rest
of the day I am content. I pass the night without awaking, and in the
evening, when I go to bed, a sort of entrancement prevents me from giving
way to reflections.”
Montesquieu died as he had lived, without retracting any of his ideas or
of his writings. The priest of his parish brought him the sacraments,
and, “Sir,” said he, “you know how great God is!” “Yes,” replied the
dying man, “and how little men are!” He expired almost immediately on
the 10th of February, 1755, at the age of sixty-six. He died at the
beginning of the reign of the philosophers, whose way he had prepared
before them without having ever belonged to their number. Diderot alone
followed his bier. Fontenelle, nearly a hundred years old, was soon to
follow him to the tomb.
[Illustration: Fontenelle----274]
Born at Rouen in February, 1657, and nephew of Corneille on the mother’s
side, Fontenelle had not received from nature any of the unequal and
sublime endowments which have fixed the dramatic crown forever upon the
forehead of Corneille; but he had inherited the wit, and indeed the
brilliant wit (_bel esprit_), which the great tragedian hid beneath the
splendors of his genius. He began with those writings, superfine
(_precieux_), dainty, tricked out in the fashion of the court and the
drawing-room, which suggested La Bruyere’s piquant portrait.
“Ascanius is a statuary, Hegio a metal-founder, AEschines a fuller, and
Cydias a brilliant wit. That is his trade; he has a sign, a workshop,
articles made to order, and apprentices who work under him. Prose,
verse, what d’ye lack? He is equally successful in both. Give him an
order for letters of consolation, or on an absence; he will undertake
them. Take them ready made, if you like, and enter his shop; there is a
choice assortment. He has a friend whose only duty on earth is to puff
him for a long while in certain society, and then present him at their
houses as a rare bird and a man of exquisite conversation, and thereupon,
just as the musical man sings and the player on the lute touches his lute
before the persons to whom he has been puffed, Cydias, after coughing,
pulling up his wristband, extending his hand and opening his fingers,
gravely spouts his quintessentiated ideas and his sophisticated
arguments.”
Fontenelle was not destined to stop here in his intellectual
developments; when, at forty years of age, he became perpetual secretary
to the Academy of Sciences, he had already written his book on the
_Pluralite des Mondes,_ the first attempt at that popularization of
science which has spread so since then. “I believe more and more,” he
said, “that there is a certain genius which has never yet been out of our
Europe, or, at least, has not gone far out of it.” This genius, clear,
correct, precise, the genius of method and analysis, the genius of
Descartes, which was at a later period that of Buffon and of Cuvier, was
admirably expounded and developed by Fontenelle for the use of the
ignorant. He wrote for society, and not for scholars, of whose labors
and discoveries he gave an account to society. His extracts from the
labors of the Academy of Science and his eulogies of the Academicians are
models of lucidness under an ingenious and subtle form, rendered simple
and strong by dint of wit. “There is only truth that persuades,” he used
to say, “and even without requiring to appear with all its proofs. It
makes its way so naturally into the mind, that, when it is heard for the
first time, it seems as if one were merely remembering.”
Equitable and moderate in mind, prudent and cold in temperament,
Fontenelle passed his life in discussion without ever stumbling into
disputes. “I am no theologian, or philosopher, or man of any
denomination, of any sort whatever; consequently I am not at all bound to
be right, and I can with honor confess that I was mistaken, whenever I am
made to see it.” “How did you manage to keep so many friends without
making one enemy?” he was asked in his old age. “By means of two
maxims,” he answered: “Everything is possible; everybody may be right”
(_tout le monde a raison_). The friends of Fontenelle were moderate like
himself; impressed with his fine qualities, they pardoned his lack of
warmth in his affections. “He never laughed,” says Madame Geoffrin, his
most intimate friend. “I said to him one day, ‘Did you ever laugh, M. de
Fontenelle?’ ‘No,’ he answered; ‘I never went ha! ha! ha!’ That was his
idea of laughing; he just smiled at smart things, but he was a stranger
to any strong feeling. He had never shed tears, he had never been in a
rage, he had never run, and, as he never did anything from sentiment, he
did not catch impressions from others. He had never interrupted anybody,
he listened to the end without losing anything; he was in no hurry to
speak, and, if you had been accusing against him, he would have listened
all day without saying a syllable.”
The very courage and trustiness of Fontenelle bore this stamp of discreet
moderation. When Abbe St. Pierre was excluded from the French Academy
under Louis XV. for having dared to criticise the government of Louis
XIV., one single ball in the urn protested against the unjust pressure
exercised by Cardinal Fleury upon the society. They all asked one
another who the rebel was; each defended himself against having voted
against the minister’s order; Fontenelle alone kept silent; when
everybody had exculpated himself, “It must be myself, then,” said
Fontenelle half aloud.
So much cool serenity and so much taste for noble intellectual works
prolonged the existence of Fontenelle beyond the ordinary limits; he was
ninety-nine and not yet weary of life. “If I might but reach the
strawberry-season once more!” he had said. He died at Paris on the 9th
of January, 1759; with him disappeared what remained of the spirit and
traditions of Louis XIV.’s reign. Montesquieu and Fontenelle were the
last links which united the seventeenth century to the new era. In a
degree as different as the scope of their minds, they both felt respect
for the past, to which they were bound by numerous ties, and the boldness
of their thoughts was frequently tempered by prudence. Though naturally
moderate and prudent, Voltaire was about to be hurried along by the ardor
of strife, by the weaknesses of his character, by his vanity and his
ambition, far beyond his first intentions and his natural instincts. The
flood of free-thinking had spared Montesquieu and Fontenelle; it was
about to carry away Voltaire almost as far as Diderot.
[Illustration: Voltaire----277]
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire was born at Paris on the 21st of
November, 1694. “My dear father,” said a letter from a relative to his
family in Poitou, “our cousins have another son, born three days ago;
Madame Arouet will give me some of the christening sugar-plums for you.
She has been very ill, but it is hoped that she is going on better; the
infant is not much to look at, having suffered from a fall which his
mother had.” M. Arouet, the father, of a good middle-class family, had
been a notary at the Chatelet, and in 1701 became paymaster of fees
(_payeur d’epices_) to the court of exchequer, an honorable and a
lucrative post, which added to the easy circumstances of the family.
Madame Arouet was dead when her youngest son was sent to the college of
Louis-le-Grand, which at that time belonged to the Jesuits. As early as
then little Arouet, who was weak and in delicate health, but withal of a
very lively intelligence, displayed a freedom of thought and a tendency
of irreverence which already disquieted and angered his masters. Father
Lejay jumped from his chair and took the boy by the collar, exclaiming,
“Wretch, thou wilt one of these days raise the standard of Deism in
France!” Father Pallou, his confessor, accustomed to read the heart,
said, as he shook his head, “This, child is devoured with a thirst for
celebrity.”
Even at school and among the Jesuits, that passion for getting talked
about, which was one of the weaknesses of Voltaire’s character, as well
as one of the sources of his influence, was already to a certain extent
gratified. The boy was so ready in making verses, that his masters
themselves found amusement in practising upon his youthful talent.
Little Arouet’s snuff box had been confiscated because he had passed it
along from hand to, hand in class; when he asked for it back from Father
Poree, who was always indulgent towards him, the rector required an
application in verse. A quarter of an hour later the boy returned with
his treasure in his possession, having paid its ransom thus:
“Adieu, adieu, poor snuff-box mine;
Adieu; we ne’er shall meet again:
Nor pains, nor tears, nor prayers divine
Will win thee back; my efforts are in vain!
Adieu, adieu, poor box of mine;
Adieu, my sweet crowns’-worth of bane;
Could I with money buy thee back once more,
The treasury of Plutus I would drain.
But ah! not he the god I must implore;
To have thee back, I need Apollo’s vein. . .
‘Twixt thee and me how hard a barrier-line,
To ask for verse! Ah! this is all my strain!
Adieu, adieu, poor box of mine;
Adieu; we ne’er shall meet again!”
Arouet was still a child when a friend of his family took him to see
Mdlle. Ninon de l’Enclos, as celebrated for her wit as for the
irregularity of her life. “Abbe Chateauneuf took me to see her in my
very tender youth,” says Voltaire; “I had done some verses, which were
worth nothing, but which seemed very good for my age. She was then
eighty-five. She was pleased to put me down in her will; she left me two
thousand francs to buy books; her death followed close upon my visit and
her will.”
Young Arouet was finishing brilliantly his last year of rhetoric, when
John Baptist Rousseau, already famous, saw him at the distribution of
prizes at the college. “Later on,” wrote Rousseau, in the thick of his
quarrels with Voltaire, “some ladies of my acquaintance had taken me to
see a tragedy at the Jesuits in August, 1710; at the distribution of
prizes which usually took place after those representations, I observed
that the same scholar was called up twice. I asked Father Tarteron, who
did the honors of the room in which we were, who the young man was that
was so distinguished amongst his comrades. He told me that it was a
little lad who had a surprising turn for poetry, and proposed to
introduce him to me; to which I consented. He went to fetch him to me,
and I saw him returning a moment afterwards with a young scholar who
appeared to me to be about sixteen or seventeen, with an ill-favored
countenance, but with a bright and lively expression, and who came and
shook hands with me with very good grace.”
Scarcely had Francois Arouet left college when he was called upon to
choose a career. “I do not care for any but that of a literary man,”
exclaimed the young fellow. “That,” said his father, “is the condition
of a man who means to be useless to society, to be a charge to his
family, and to die of starvation.” The study of the law, to which he was
obliged to devote himself, completely disgusted the poet, already courted
by a few great lords who were amused at his satirical vein; he led an
indolent and disorderly life, which drove his father distracted; the
latter wanted to get him a place. “Tell my father,” was the young man’s
reply to the relative commissioned to make the proposal, “that I do not
care for a position which can be bought; I shall find a way of getting
myself one that costs nothing.” “Having but little property when I began
life,” he wrote to M. d’Argenson, his sometime fellow-pupil, “I had the
insolence to think that I should have got a place as well as another,
if it were to be obtained by hard work and good will. I threw myself
into the ranks of the fine arts, which always carry with them a certain
air of vilification, seeing that they do not make a man king’s counsellor
in his councils. You may become a master of requests with money; but you
can’t make a poem with money, and I made one.”
This independent behavior and the poem on the _Construction du Choeur de
Notre-Dame de Paris,_ the subject submitted for competition by the French
Academy, did not prevent young Arouet from being sent by his father to
Holland in the train of the Marquis of Chateauneuf, then French
ambassador to the States General; he committed so many follies that on
his return to France, M. Arouet forced him to enter a solicitor’s office.
It was there that the poet acquired that knowledge of business which was
useful to him during the whole course of his long life; he, however, did
not remain there long: a satire upon the French Academy which had refused
him the prize for poetry, and, later on, some verses as biting as they
were disrespectful against the Duke of Orleans, twice obliged their
author to quit Paris. Sent into banishment at Sully-sur-Loire, he there
found partisans and admirers; the merry life that was led at the
Chevalier Sully’s mitigated the hardships of absence from Paris. “Don’t
you go publishing abroad, I beg,” wrote Arouet, nevertheless, to one of
his friends, “the happiness of which I tell you in confidence: for they
might perhaps leave me here long enough for me to become unhappy; I know
my own capacity; I am not made to live long in the same place.”
A beautiful letter addressed to the Regent and disavowing all the
satirical writings which had been attributed to him, brought Arouet back
to Paris at the commencement of the year 1717; he had been enjoying it
for barely a few months when a new satire, entitled _J’ai vu_ (I have
seen), and bitterly criticising the late reign, engaged the attention of
society, and displeased the Regent afresh. Arouet defended himself with
just cause and with all his might against the charge of having written
it. The Duke of Orleans one day met him in the garden of the
Palais-Royal. “Monsieur Arouet,” said he, “I bet that I will make you
see a thing you have never seen.” “What, pray, monseigneur?” “The
Bastille.” “Ah! monseigneur, I will consider it seen.” Two days later,
young Arouet was shut up in the Bastille.
I needs must go; I jog along in style,
With close-shut carriage, to the royal pile
Built in our fathers’ days, hard by St. Paul,
By Charles the Fifth. 0 brethren, good men all,
In no such quarters may your lot be cast!
Up to my room I find my way at last
A certain rascal with a smirking face
Exalts the beauties of my new retreat,
So comfortable, so compact, so neat.
Says he, “While Phoebus runs his daily race,
He never casts one ray within this place.
Look at the walls, some ten feet thick or so;
You’ll find it all the cooler here, you know.”
Then, bidding me admire the way they close
The triple doors and triple locks on those,
With gratings, bolts and bars on every side,
“It’s all for your security,” he cried.
At stroke of noon some skilly is brought in;
Such fare is not so delicate as thin.
I am not tempted by this splendid food,
But what they tell me is, “‘Twill do you good
So eat in peace; no one will hurry you.”
Here in this doleful den I make ado,
Bastilled, imprisoned, cabined, cribbed, confined,
Nor sleeping, drinking, eating-to my mind;
Betrayed by every one, my mistress too!
O Marc Rene! [M. d’Argenson] whom Censor Cato’s ghost
Might well have chosen for his vacant post,
O Marc Rene! through whom ‘tis brought about
That so much people murmur here below,
To your kind word my durance vile I owe;
May the good God some fine day pay you out!
Young Arouet passed eleven months in the Bastille; he there wrote the
first part of the poem called _La Henriade,_ under the title of _La
Ligue;_ when he at last obtained his release in April, 1718, he at the
same time received orders to reside at Chatenay, where his father had a
country house. It was on coming out of the Bastille that the poet took,
from a small family-estate, that name of Voltaire which he was to render
so famous. “I have been too unfortunate under my former name,” he wrote
to Mdlle. du Noy er; “I mean to see whether this will suit me better.”
The players were at that time rehearsing the tragedy of _OEdipe,_ which
was played on the 18th of November, 1718, with great success. The daring
flights of philosophy introduced by the poet into this profoundly and
terribly religious subject excited the enthusiasm of the roues; Voltaire
was well received by the Regent, who granted him an honorarium.
“Monseigneur,” said Voltaire, “I should consider it very kind if his
Majesty would be pleased to provide henceforth for my board, but I
beseech your Highness to provide no more for my lodging.” Voltaire’s
acts of imprudence were destined more than once to force him into leaving
Paris; he all his life preserved such a horror of prison, that it made
him commit more than one platitude. “I have a mortal aversion for
prison,” he wrote in 1734; once more, however, he was to be an inmate of
the Bastille.
Launched upon the most brilliant society, everywhere courted and
flattered, Voltaire was constantly at work, displaying the marvellous
suppleness of his mind by shifting from the tragedies of _Artemise_ and
_Marianne,_ which failed, to the comedy of _L’Indiscret,_ to numerous
charming epistles, and lastly to the poem of _La Henriade,_ which he went
on carefully revising, reading fragments of it as he changed his quarters
from castle to castle. One day, however, some criticisms to which he was
not accustomed angered him so much, that he threw into the fire the
manuscript he held in his hand. “It is only worth burning, then,” he
exclaimed in a rage. President Henault dashed at the papers. “I ran up
and drew it out of the flames, saying that I had done more than they who
did not burn the AEneid as Virgil had recommended; I had drawn out of the
fire _La Henriade,_ which Voltaire was going to burn with his own hands.
[Illustration: The Rescue of “La Henriade.”----283]
If I liked, I might ennoble this action by calling to mind that picture
of Raphael’s at the Vatican which represents Augustus preventing Virgil
from burning the AEneid; but I am not Augustus, and Raphael is no more.”
Wholly indulgent and indifferent as might be the government of the Regent
and of Dubois, it was a little scared at the liberties taken by Voltaire
with the Catholic church. He was required to make excisions in order to
get permission to print the poem; the author was here, there, and
everywhere, in a great flutter and preoccupied with his literary,
financial, and fashionable affairs. In receipt of a pension from the
queen, and received as a visitor at La Source, near Orleans, by Lord
Bolingbroke in his exile, every day becoming more brilliant and more
courted, he was augmenting his fortune by profitable speculations, and
appeared on the point of finding himself well off, when an incident,
which betrayed the remnant still remaining of barbarous manners, occurred
to envenom for a long while the poet’s existence. He had a quarrel at
the Opera with Chevalier Rohan-Chabot, a court libertine, of little
repute; the scene took place in the presence of Mdlle. Adrienne
Lecouvreur; the great actress fainted they were separated. Two days
afterwards, when Voltaire was dining at the Duke of Sully’s, a servant
came to tell him that he was wanted at the door of the hotel; the poet
went out without any suspicion, though he had already been the victim of
several ambuscades. A coach was standing in the street, and he was
requested to get in; at that instant two men, throwing themselves upon
him and holding him back by his clothes, showered upon him a hailstorm of
blows with their sticks. The Chevalier de Rohan, prudently ensconced
in a second vehicle, and superintending the--execution of his cowardly
vengeance, shouted to his servants, “Don’t hit him on the head; something
good may come out of it.” When Voltaire at last succeeded in escaping
from these miscreants to take refuge in Sully’s house, he was half dead.
Blows with a stick were not at that time an unheard-of procedure in
social relations. “Whatever would become of us if poets had no
shoulders!” was the brutal remark of the Bishop of Blois, M. de
Caumartin. But the customs of society did not admit a poet to the honor
of obtaining satisfaction from whoever insulted him. The great lords,
friends of Voltaire, who had accustomed him to attention and flattery,
abandoned him pitilessly in his quarrel with Chevalier de Rohan. “Those
blows were well gotten and ill given,” said the Prince of Conti. That
was all the satisfaction Voltaire obtained. “The poor victim shows
himself as much as possible at court, in the city,” says the Marais news,
“but nobody pities him, and those whom he considered his friends have
turned their backs upon him.”
Voltaire was not of an heroic nature, but excess of rage and indignation
had given him courage; he had scarcely ever had a sword in his hand; he
rushed to the fencers’ and practised from morning till night, in order to
be in a position to demand satisfaction. So much ardor disquieted
Chevalier de Rohan and his family; his uncle, the cardinal, took
precautions. The lieutenant of police wrote to the officer of the watch,
“Sir, his Highness is informed that Chevalier de Rohan is going away
to-day, and, as he might have some fresh affair with Sieur de Voltaire,
or the latter might do something rash, his desire is for you to see that
nothing comes of it.”
Voltaire anticipated the intentions of the lieutenant of police he
succeeded in sending a challenge to Chevalier de Rohan; the latter
accepted it for the next day; he even chose his ground: but before the
hour fixed, Voltaire was arrested and taken to the Bastille; he remained
there a month. Public opinion was beginning to pity him. Marshal
Villars writes in his memoirs,--
“The chevalier was very much inconvenienced by a fall which did not admit
of his handling a sword. He took the course of having a caning
administered in broad day to Voltaire, who, instead of adopting legal
proceedings, thought vengeance by arms more noble. It is asserted that
he sought it diligently, but too indiscreetly. Cardinal Rohan asked M.
le Duc to have him put in the Bastille: orders to that effect were given
and executed, and the poor poet, after being beaten, was imprisoned into
the bargain. The public, whose inclination is to blame everybody and
everything, justly considered, in this case, that everybody was in the
wrong; Voltaire, for having offended Chevalier de Rohan; the latter, for
having dared to commit a crime worthy of death in causing a citizen to be
beaten; the government, for not having punished a notorious misdeed, and
for having put the beatee in the Bastille to tranquillize the beater.”
Voltaire left the Bastille on the 3d of May, 1726, and was accompanied by
an exon to Calais, having asked as a favor to be sent to England; but
scarcely had he set foot on English territory, scarcely had he felt
himself free, when the recurring sense of outraged honor made him take
the road back to France. “I confess to you, my dear Theriot,” he wrote
to one of his friends, “that I made a little trip to Paris a short time
ago. As I did not call upon you, you will easily conclude that I did not
call upon anybody. I was in search of one man only, whom his dastardly
instinct kept concealed from me, as if he guessed that I was on his
track. At last the fear of being discovered made me depart more
precipitately than I had come. That is the fact, my dear Theriot. There
is every appearance of my never seeing you again. I have but two things
to do with my life: to hazard it with honor, as soon as I can, and to end
it in the obscurity of a retreat which suits my way of thinking, my
misfortunes, and the knowledge I have of men.”
Voltaire passed three years in England, engaged in learning English and
finishing _La Henriade,_ which he published by subscription in 1727.
Touched by the favor shown by English society to the author and the poem,
he dedicated to the Queen of England his new work, which was entirely
consecrated to the glory of France; three successive editions were
disposed of in less than three weeks. Lord Bolingbroke, having returned
to England and been restored to favor, did potent service to his old
friend, who lived in the midst of that literary society in which Pope and
Swift held sway, without, however, relaxing his reserve with its impress
of melancholy. “I live the life of a Bosicrucian,” he wrote to his
friends, “always on the move and always in hiding.” When, in the month
of March, 1729, Voltaire at last obtained permission to revisit France,
he had worked much without bringing out anything. The riches he had thus
amassed appeared ere long: before the end of the year 1731 he put
_Brutus_ on the stage, and began his publication of the _Histoire de
Charles XII.;_ he was at the same time giving the finishing touch to
_Eriphyle_ and _La Mort de Caesar_. _Zaire,_ written in a few weeks, was
played for the first time on the 13th of August, 1732; he had dedicated
it to Mr. Falkner, an English merchant who had overwhelmed him with
attentions during his exile. “My satisfaction grows as I write to tell
you of it,” he writes to his friend Cideville in the fulness of joy:
“never was a piece so well played as _Zaire_ at the fourth appearance.
I very much wished you had been there; you would have seen that the
public does not hate your friend. I appeared in a box, and the whole pit
clapped their hands at me. I blushed, I hid myself; but I should be a
humbug if I did not confess to you that I was sensibly affected. It is
pleasant not to be dishonored in one’s own country.”
Voltaire had just inaugurated the great national tragedy of his country,
as he had likewise given it the only national epopee attempted in France
since the _Chansons de Geste;_ by one of those equally sudden and
imprudent reactions to which he was always subject, it was not long
before he himself damaged his own success by the publication of his
_Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais_.
The light and mocking tone of these letters, the constant comparison
between the two peoples, with many a gibe at the English, but always
turning to their advantage, the preference given to the philosophical
system of Newton over that of Descartes, lastly the attacks upon religion
concealed beneath the cloak of banter--all this was more than enough to
ruffle the tranquillity of Cardinal Fleury. The book was brought before
Parliament; Voltaire was disquieted. “There is but one letter about Mr.
Locke,” he wrote to M. de Cideville; “the only philosophical matter I
have treated of in it is the little trifle of the immortality of the
soul, but the thing is of too much consequence to be treated seriously.
It had to be mangled so as not to come into direct conflict with our
lords the theologians, gentry who so clearly see the spirituality of the
soul that, if they could, they would consign to the flames the bodies of
those who have a doubt about it.” The theologians confined themselves to
burning the book; the decree of Parliament delivered on the 10th of June,
1734, ordered at the same time the arrest of the author; the bookseller
was already in the Bastille. Voltaire was in the country, attending the
Duke of Richelieu’s second marriage; hearing of the danger that
threatened him, he took fright and ran for refuge to Bale. He soon left
it to return to the castle of Cirey, to the Marchioness du Chatelet’s, a
woman as learned as she was impassioned, devoted to literature, physics,
and mathematics, and tenderly attached to Voltaire, whom she enticed
along with her into the paths of science. For fifteen years Madame du
Chatelet and Cirey ruled supreme over the poet’s life. There began a
course of metaphysics, tales, tragedies; _Alzire, Merope, Mahomet,_ were
composed at Cirey and played with ever increasing success. Pope Benedict
XIV. had accepted the dedication of Mahomet, which Voltaire had
addressed to him in order to cover the freedoms of his piece. Every now
and then, terrified in consequence of some bit of anti-religious
rashness, he took flight, going into hiding at one time to the court of
Lorraine beneath the wing of King Stanislaus, at another time in Holland,
at a palace belonging to the King of Prussia, the Great Frederick.
Madame du Chatelet, as unbelieving as he at bottom, but more reserved in
expression, often scolded him for his imprudence. “He requires every
moment to be saved from himself,” she would say. “I employ more policy
in managing him than the whole Vatican employs to keep all Christendom in
its fetters.” On the appearance of danger, Voltaire ate his words
without scruple; his irreligious writings were usually launched under
cover of the anonymous. At every step, however, he was advancing farther
and farther into the lists, and at the very moment when he wrote to
Father La Tour, “If ever anybody has printed in my name a single page
which could scandalize even the parish beadle, I am ready to tear it up
before his eyes,” all Europe regarded him as the leader of the open or
secret attacks which were beginning to burst not only upon the Catholic
church, but upon the fundamental verities common to all Christians.
Madame du Chatelet died on the 4th of September, 1749, at Luneville,
where she then happened to be with Voltaire. Their intimacy had
experienced many storms, yet the blow was a cruel one for the poet; in
losing Madame de Chatelet he was losing the centre and the guidance of
his life. For a while he spoke of burying himself with Dom Calmet in the
abbey of Senones; then he would be off to England; he ended by returning
to Paris, summoning to his side a widowed niece, Madame Denis, a woman of
coarse wit and full of devotion to him, who was fond of the drama and
played her uncle’s pieces on the little theatre which he had fitted
up in his rooms. At that time Oreste was being played at the
_Comedie-Francaise;_ its success did not answer the author’s
expectations. “All that could possibly give a handle to criticism,” says
Marmontel, who was present, “was groaned at or turned into ridicule. The
play was interrupted by it every instant. Voltaire came in, and, just as
the pit were turning into ridicule a stroke of pathos, he jumped up, and
shouted, ‘O, you barbarians; that is Sophocles!’ _Rome Sauvee_ was played
on the stage of Sceaux, at the Duchess of Maine’s; Voltaire himself took
the part of Cicero. Lekain, as yet quite a youth, and making his first
appearance under the auspices of Voltaire, said of this representation,
‘I do not think it possible to hear anything more pathetic and real than
M. de Voltaire; it was, in fact, Cicero himself thundering at the bar.’”
Despite the lustre of that fame which was attested by the frequent
attacks of his enemies as much as by the admiration of his friends,
Voltaire was displeased with his sojourn at Paris, and weary of the court
and the men of letters. The king had always exhibited towards him a
coldness which the poet’s adulation had not been able to overcome; he had
offended Madame de Pompadour, who had but lately been well disposed
towards him; the religious circle, ranged around the queen and the
dauphin, was of course hostile to him. “The place of historiographer to
the king was but an empty title,” he says himself; “I wanted to make it a
reality by working at the history of the war of 1741; but, in spite of my
work, Moncrif had admittance to his Majesty, and I had not.”
In tracing the tragic episodes of the war, Voltaire, set as his mind was
on the royal favor, had wanted in the first place to pay homage to the
friends he had lost. It was in the “eulogium of the officers who fell in
the campaign of 1741” that he touchingly called attention to the memory
of Vauvenargues. He, born at Aix on the 6th of August, 1715, died of his
wounds, at Paris, in 1747. Poor and proud, resigning himself with a sigh
to idleness and obscurity, the young officer had written merely to
relieve his mind. His friends had constrained him to publish a little
book, one only, the _Introduction de la connaissance de l’esprit humain,
suivie de reflexions et de maximes_. Its success justified their
affectionate hopes; delicate minds took keen delight in the first essays
of Vauvenargues. Hesitating between religion and philosophy, with a
palpable leaning towards the latter, ill and yet bravely bearing the
disappointments and sufferings of his life, Vauvenargues was already
expiring at thirty years of age, when Provence was invaded by the enemy.
The humiliation of his country and the peril of his native province
roused him from his tranquil melancholy. “All Provence is in arms,” he
wrote to his friend Fauris de St. Vincent, “and here am I quite quietly
in my chimney-corner; the bad state of my eyes and of my health is not
sufficient excuse for me, and I ought to be where all the gentlemen of
the province are. Send me word then, I beg, immediately whether there is
still any employment to be had in our newly raised, levies, and whether I
should be sure to be employed if I were to go to Provence.” Before his
friend’s answer had reached Vauvenargues, the Austrians and the
Piedmontese had been forced to evacuate Provence; the dying man remained
in his chimney-corner, where he soon expired, leaving amongst the public,
and still more amongst those who had known him personally, the impression
of great promise sadly extinguished. “It was his fate,” says his
faithful biographer, M. Gilbert, “to be always opening his wings and to
be unable to take flight.”
Voltaire, quite on the contrary, was about to take a fresh flight. After
several rebuffs and long opposition on the part of the eighteen
ecclesiastics who at that time had seats in the French Academy, he had
been elected to it in 1746. In 1750, he offered himself at one and the
same time for the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Inscriptions;
he failed in both candidatures. This mishap filled the cup of his
ill-humor. For a long time past Frederick II. had been offering the poet
favors which he had long refused. The disgust he experienced at Paris
through his insatiable vanity made him determine upon seeking another
arena; after having accepted a pension and a place from the King of
Prussia, Voltaire set out for Berlin.
But lately allied to France, to which he was ere long to deal such heavy
blows, Frederick II. was French by inclination, in literature and in
philosophy; he was a bad German scholar; he always wrote and spoke in
French, and his court was the resort of the cultivated French wits too
bold in their views to live in peace at Paris. Maupertuis, La Mettrie,
and the Marquis of Argens had preceded Voltaire to Berlin. He was
received there with enthusiasm and as sovereign of the little court of
philosophers. “A hundred and fifty thousand victorious soldiers,” he
wrote in a letter to Paris, “no attorneys, opera, plays, philosophy,
poetry, a hero who is a philosopher and a poet, grandeur and graces,
grenadiers and muses, trumpets and violins, Plato’s symposium, society
and freedom! Who would believe it? It is all true, however!” Voltaire
found his duties as chamberlain very light. “It is Caesar, it is Marcus
Aurelius, it is Julian, it is sometimes Abbe Chaulieu, with whom I sup;
there is the charm of retirement, there is the freedom of the country,
with all those little delights of life which a lord of a castle who is a
king can procure for his very obedient humble servants and guests. My
own duties are to do nothing. I enjoy my leisure. I give an hour a day
to the King of Prussia to touch up a bit his works in prose and verse; I
am his grammarian, not his chamberlain. The rest of the day is my own,
and the evening ends with a pleasant supper. . . . Never in any place
in the world was there more freedom of speech touching the superstitions
of men, and never were they treated with more banter and contempt. God
is respected, but all they who have cajoled men in His name are treated
unsparingly.”
The coarseness of the Germans and the mocking infidelity of the French
vied with each other in license. Sometimes Voltaire felt that things
were carried rather far. “Here be we, three or four foreigners, like
monks in an abbey,” he wrote; “please God the father abbot may content
himself with making fun of us.”
Literary or philosophical questions already gave rise sometimes to
disagreements. “I am at present correcting the second edition which the
King of Prussia is going to publish of the history of his country,” wrote
Voltaire; “fancy! in order to appear more impartial, he falls tooth and
nail on his grandfather. I have lightened the blows as much as I could.
I rather like this grandfather, because he displayed magnificence, and
has left some fine monuments. I had great trouble about softening down
the terms in which the grandson reproaches his ancestor for his vanity in
having got himself made a king; it is a vanity from which his descendants
derive pretty solid advantages, and the title is not at all a
disagreeable one. At last I said to him, ‘It is your grandfather, it is
not mine; do what you please with him,’ and I confined myself to weeding
the expressions.”
Whilst Voltaire was defending the Great Elector against his successor,
a certain coldness was beginning to slide into his relations with
Maupertuis, president of the Academy founded by the king at Berlin.
“Maupertuis has not easygoing springs,” the poet wrote to his niece; “he
takes my dimensions sternly with his quadrant. It is said that a little
envy enters into his calculations.” Already Voltaire’s touchy vanity was
shying at the rivals he encountered in the king’s favor. “So it is
known, then, by this time at Paris, my dear child,” he writes to his
niece, “that we have played the Mort de Cesar at Potsdam, that Prince
Henry is a good actor, has no accent, and is very amiable, and that this
is the place for pleasure? All that is true . . . but . . . The
king’s supper-parties are delightful; at them people talk reason, wit,
science; freedom prevails thereat; he is the soul of it all; no ill
temper, no clouds, at any rate no storms; my life is free and well
occupied . . . but . . . Opera, plays, carousals, suppers at Sans-
Souci, military manoeuvres, concerts, studies, readings . . but . .
The city of Berlin, grand, better laid out than Paris; palaces,
play-houses, affable parish priests, charming princesses, maids of honor
beautiful and well made; the mansion of Madame de Tyrconnel always full,
and sometimes too much so . . . but . . . but. . . . My dear
child, the weather is beginning to settle down into a fine frost.”
The “frost” not only affected Voltaire’s relations with his brethren in
philosophy, it reached even to the king himself. A far from creditable
lawsuit with a Jew completed Frederick’s irritation. He forbade the poet
to appear in his presence before the affair was over. “Brother Voltaire
is doing penance here,” wrote the latter to the Margravine of Baireuth,
the King of Prussia’s amiable sister he has a beast of a lawsuit with a
Jew, and, according to the law of the Old Testament, there will be
something more to pay for having been robbed. . . .” Frederick, on his
side, writes to his sister, “You ask me what the lawsuit is in which
Voltaire is involved with a Jew. It is a case of a rogue wanting to
cheat a thief. It is intolerable that a man of Voltaire’s intellect
should make so unworthy an abuse of it. The affair is in the hands of
justice; and, in a few days, we shall know from the sentence which is the
greater rogue of the two. Voltaire lost his temper, flew in the Jew’s
face, and, in fact, behaved like a madman. I am waiting for this affair
to be over to put his head under the pump or reprimand him severely (_lui
laver la tete_), and see whether, at the age of fifty-six, one cannot
make him, if not reasonable, at any rate less of a rogue.”
Voltaire settled matters with the Jew, at the same time asking the king’s
pardon for what he called his giddiness. “This great poet is always
astride of Parnassus and Rue Quincampoix,” said the Marquis of Argenson.
Frederick had written him on the 24th of February, 1751, a severe letter,
the prelude and precursor of the storms which were to break off before
long the intimacy between the king and the philosopher. “I was very glad
to receive you,” said the king; “I esteemed your wit, your talents, your
acquirements, and I was bound to suppose that a man of your age, tired of
wrangling with authors and exposing himself to tempests, was coming
hither to take refuge as in a quiet harbor; but you at the very first, in
a rather singular fashion, required of me that I should not engage
Frerron to write me news. D’Arnauld did you some injuries; a generous
man would have pardoned them; a vindictive man persecutes those towards
whom he feels hatred. In fine, though D’Arnauld had done nothing so far
as I was concerned, on your account he had to leave. You went to the
Russian minister’s to speak to him about matters you had no business to
meddle with, and it was supposed that I had given you instructions; you
meddled in Madame de Bentinck’s affairs, which was certainly not in your
province. Then you have the most ridiculous squabble in the world with
that Jew. You created a fearful uproar all through the city. The matter
of the Saxon bills is so well known in Saxony that grave complaints have
been made to me about them. For my part, I kept peace in my household
until your arrival, and I warn you that, if you are fond of intrigue and
cabal, you have come to the wrong place. I like quiet and peaceable
folks who do not introduce into their behavior the violent passions of
tragedy; in case you can make up your mind to live as a philosopher, I
shall be very glad to see you; but, if you give way to the impetuosity of
your feelings and quarrel with everybody, you will do me no pleasure by
coming hither and you may just as well remain at Berlin.”
Voltaire was not proud; he readily heaped apology upon apology; but he
was irritable and vain; his ill-humor against Maupertuis came out in a
pamphlet, as bitter as it was witty, entitled _La Diatribe du Docteur
Akakia;_ copies were circulating in Berlin; the satire was already
printed anonymously, when the Great Frederick suddenly entered the lists.
He wrote to Voltaire, “Your effrontery astounds me after that which you
have just done, and which is as clear as daylight. Do not suppose that
you will make black appear white; when one does not see, it is because
one does not want to see everything; but, if you carry matters to
extremity, I will have everything printed, and it will then be seen that
if your works deserve that statues should be raised to you, your conduct
deserves handcuffs.”
Voltaire, affrighted, still protesting his innocence, at last gave up the
whole edition of the diatribe, which was burned before his eyes in the
king’s own closet. According to the poet’s wily habit, some copy or
other had doubtless escaped the flames. Before long _Le Docteur Akakia_
appeared at Berlin, arriving modestly from Dresden by post; people fought
for the pamphlet, and everybody laughed; the satire was spread over all
Europe. In vain did Frederick have it burned on the Place d’Armes by the
hands of the common hangman; he could not assuage the despair of
Maupertuis. “To speak to you frankly,” the king at last wrote to the
disconsolate president, “it seems to me that you take too much to heart,
both for an invalid and a philosopher, an affair which you ought to
despise. How prevent a man from writing, and how prevent him from
denying all the impertinences he has uttered? I made investigations to
find out whether any fresh satires had been sold at Berlin, but I heard
of none; as for what is sold in Paris, you are quite aware that I have
not charge of the police of that city, and that I am not master of it.
Voltaire treats you more gently than I am treated by the gazetteers of
Cologne and Lubeck, and yet I don’t trouble myself about it.”
Voltaire could no longer live at Potsdam or at Sans-Souci; even Berlin
seemed dangerous: in a fit of that incurable perturbation which formed
the basis of his character and made him commit so many errors, he had no
longer any wish but to leave Prussia, only he wanted to go without
embroiling himself with the king. “I sent the Solomon of the North,” he
writes to Madame Denis on the 13th of January, 1753, “for his present,
the cap and bells he gave me, with which you reproached me so much. I
wrote him a very respectful letter, for I asked him for leave to go.
What do you think he did? He sent me his great factotum Federshoff, who
brought me back my toys; he wrote me a letter saying that he would rather
have me to live with than Maupertuis. What is quite certain is, that I
would rather not live with either one or the other.”
Frederick was vexed with Voltaire; he nevertheless found it difficult to
give up the dazzling charm of his conversation. Voltaire was hurt and
disquieted; he wanted to get away--the king, however, exercised a strong
attraction over him. But in spite of mutual coquetting, making up, and
protesting, the hour of separation was at hand; the poet was under
pressure from his friends in France; in Berlin he had never completely
neglected Paris. He had just published his _Siecle de Louis XIV.;_ he
flattered himself with the hope that he might again appear at court,
though the king had disposed of his place as historiographer in favor of
Duclos. Frederick at last yielded; he was on the parade, Voltaire
appeared there. “Ah! Monsieur Voltaire,” said the king, “so you really
intend to go away?” “Sir, urgent private affairs, and especially my
health, leave me no alternative.” “Monsieur, I wish you a pleasant
journey.” Voltaire jumped into his carriage, and hurried to Leipsic; he
thought himself free forever from the exactions and tyrannies of the King
of Prussia.
The poet, according to his custom, had tarried on the way. He had passed
more than a month at Gotha, being overwhelmed with attentions by the
duke, and by the duchess, for whom he wrote the dry chronicle entitled
_Les Annales de L’Empire_. He arrived at Frankfort on the 31st of May
only: the king’s orders had arrived before him.
“Here is how this fine adventure came to pass,” says Voltaire. “There
was at Frankfort one Freytag, who had been banished from Dresden, and had
become an agent for the King of Prussia. . . . He notified me on
behalf of his Majesty that I was not to leave Frankfort till I had
restored the valuable effects I was carrying away from his Majesty.
‘Alack! sir, I am carrying away nothing from that country, if you please,
not even the smallest regret. What, pray, are those jewels of the
Brandenburg crown that you require?’ ‘It be, sir,’ replied Freytag,
‘the work of poesy of the king, my gracious master.’ ‘O! I will give
him back his prose and verse with all my heart,’ replied I, ‘though,
after all, I have more than one right to the work. He made me a present
of a beautiful copy printed at his expense. Unfortunately this copy is
at Leipsic with my other luggage.’ Then Freytag proposed to me to remain
at Frankfort until the treasure which was at Leipsic should have arrived;
and he signed an order for it.”
The volume which Frederick claimed, and which he considered it of so much
importance to preserve from Voltaire’s indiscretions, contained amongst
other things a burlesque and licentious poem, entitled the Palladium,
wherein the king scoffed at everything and everybody in terms which he
did not care to make public. He knew the reckless malignity of the poet
who was leaving him, and he had a right to be suspicious of it; but
nothing can excuse the severity of his express orders, and still less the
brutality of his agents. The package had arrived; Voltaire, agitated,
anxious, and ill, wanted to get away as soon as possible, accompanied by
Madame Denis, who had just joined him. Freytag had no orders, and
refused to let him go; the prisoner loses his head, he makes up his mind
to escape at any price, he slips from the hotel, he thinks he is free,
but the police of Frankfort was well managed. “The moment I was off, I
was arrested, I, my secretary and my people; my niece is arrested; four
soldiers drag her through the mud to a cheese-monger’s named Smith, who
had some title or other of privy councillor to the King of Prussia; my
niece had a passport from the King of France, and, what is more, she had
never corrected the King of Prussia’s verses. They huddled us all into a
sort of hostelry, at the door of which were posted a dozen soldiers; we
were for twelve days prisoners of war, and we had to pay a hundred and
forty crowns a day.”
[Illustration: Arrest of Voltaire----298]
The wrath and disquietude of Voltaire no longer knew any bounds; Madame
Denis was ill, or feigned to be; she wrote letter upon letter to
Voltaire’s friends at the court of Prussia; she wrote to the king
himself. The strife which had begun between the poet and the maladroit
agents of the Great Frederick was becoming serious. “We would have
risked our lives rather than let him get away,” said Freytag; “and if I,
holding a council of war with myself, had not found him at the barrier,
but in the open country, and he had refused to jog back, I don’t know
that I shouldn’t have lodged a bullet in his head. To such a degree had
I at heart the letters and writings of the king.”
Freytag’s zeal received a cruel rebuff: orders arrived to let the poet
go. “I gave you no orders like that,” wrote Frederick, “you should never
make more noise than a thing deserves. I wanted Voltaire to give up to
you the key, the cross, and the volume of poems I had intrusted to him;,
as soon as all that was given up to you I can’t see what earthly reason
could have induced you to make this uproar.” At last, on the 6th of
July, “all this affair of Ostrogoths and Vandals being over,” Voltaire
left Frankfort precipitately. His niece had taken the road to Paris,
whence she soon wrote to him, “There is nobody in France, I say nobody
without exception, who has not condemned this violence mingled with so
much that is ridiculous and cruel; it makes a deeper impression than you
would believe. Everybody says that you could not do otherwise than you
are doing, in resolving to meet with philosophy things so
unphilosophical. We shall do very well to hold our tongues; the public
speaks quite enough.” Voltaire held his tongue, according to his idea of
holding his tongue, drawing, in his poem of _La Loi naturelle,_ dedicated
at first to the margravine of Baireuth and afterwards to the Duchess of
Saxe-Gotha, a portrait of Frederick which was truthful and at the same
time bitter:
“Of incongruities a monstrous pile,
Calling men brothers, crushing them the while;
With air humane, a misanthropic brute;
Ofttimes impulsive, sometimes over-’cute;
Weak ‘midst his choler, modest in his pride;
Yearning for virtue, lust personified;
Statesman and author, of the slippery crew;
My patron, pupil, persecutor too.”
Voltaire’s intimacy with the Great Frederick was destroyed it had for a
while done honor to both of them; it had ended by betraying the
pettinesses and the meannesses natural to the king as well as to the
poet. Frederick did not remain without anxiety on the score of
Voltaire’s rancor; Voltaire dreaded nasty diplomatic proceedings on the
part of the king; he had been threatened with as much by Lord Keith,
Milord Marechal, as he was called on the Continent from the hereditary
title he had lost in his own country through his attachment to the cause
of the Stuarts:--
“Let us see in what countries M. de Voltaire has not had some squabble or
made himself many enemies,” said a letter to Madame Denis from the great
Scotch lord, when he had entered Frederick’s service: “every country
where the Inquisition prevails must be mistrusted by him; he would put
his foot in it sooner or later. The Mussulmans must be as little pleased
with his Mahomet as good Christians were. He is too old to go to China
and turn mandarin; in a word, if he is wise, there is no place but France
for him. He has friends there, and you will have him with you for the
rest of his days; do not let him shut himself out from the pleasure of
returning thither, for you are quite aware that, if he were to indulge in
speech and epigrams offensive to the king my master, a word which the
latter might order me to speak to the court of France would suffice to
prevent M. de Voltaire from returning, and he would be sorry for it when
it was too late.”
Voltaire was already in France, but he dared not venture to Paris.
Mutilated, clumsy, or treacherous issues of the _Abrege de l’Histoire
Universelle_ had already stirred the bile of the clergy; there were to be
seen in circulation copies of _La Pucelle,_ a disgusting poem which the
author had been keeping back and bringing out alternately for several
years past. Voltaire fled from Colmar, where the Jesuits held sway, to
Lyons, where he found Marshal Richelieu, but lately his protector and
always his friend, who was repairing to his government of Languedoc.
Cardinal Tencin refused to receive the poet, who regarded this sudden
severity as a sign of the feelings of the court towards him. “The king
told Madame de Pompadour that he did not want me to go to Paris; I am of
his Majesty’s opinion, I don’t want to go to Paris,” wrote Voltaire to
the Marquis of Paulmy. He took fright and sought refuge in Switzerland,
where he soon settled on the Lake of Geneva, pending his purchase of the
estate of Ferney in the district of Gex and that of Tourney in Burgundy.
He was henceforth fixed, free to pass from France to Switzerland and from
Switzerland to France. “I lean my left on Mount Jura,” he used to say,
“my right on the Alps, and I have the beautiful Lake of Geneva in front
of my camp, a beautiful castle on the borders of France, the hermitage of
Delices in the territory of Geneva, a good house at Lausanne; crawling
thus from one burrow to another, I escape from kings. Philosophers
should always have two or three holes under ground against the hounds
that run them down.”
The perturbation of Voltaire’s soul and mind was never stilled; the
anxious and undignified perturbation of his outer life at last subsided;
he left off trembling, and, in the comparative security which he thought
he possessed, he gave scope to all his free-thinking, which had but
lately been often cloaked according to circumstances. He had taken the
communion at Colmar, to soften down the Jesuits; he had conformed to the
rules of the convent of Senones, when he took refuge with Dom Calmet; at
Delices he worked at the _Encyclopcedia,_ which was then being commenced
by D’Alembert and Diderot, taking upon himself in preference the
religious articles, and not sparing the creed of his neighbors, the
pastors of Geneva, any more than that of the Catholic church. “I assure
you that my friends and I will lead them a fine dance; they shall drink
the cup to the very lees,” wrote Voltaire to D’Alembert. In the great
campaign against Christianity undertaken by the philosophers, Voltaire,
so long, a wavering ally, will henceforth fight in the foremost ranks; it
is he who shouts to Diderot, “Squelch the thing (_Ecrasez l’infame_)!”
The masks are off, and the fight is barefaced; the encyclopaedists march
out to the conquest of the world in the name of reason, humanity, and
free-thinking; even when he has ceased to work at the Encyclopaedia,
Voltaire marches with them.
The _Essai sur l’Histoire generale et les Moeurs_ was one of the first
broadsides of this new anti-religious crusade. “Voltaire will never
write a good history,” Montesquieu used to say: “he is like the monks,
who do not write for the subject of which they treat, but for the glory
of their order: Voltaire writes for his convent.” The same intention
betrayed itself in every sort of work that issued at that time from the
hermitage of Delices, the poem on _Le Tremblement de Terre de Lisbonne,_
the drama of _Socrate,_ the satire of the _Pauvre Diable,_ the sad story
of _Candide,_ led the way to a series of publications every day more and
more violent against the Christian faith. The tragedy of _L’ Orphelin de
la Chine_ and that of _Tancrede,_ the quarrels with Freron, with Lefranc
de Pompignan, and lastly with Jean Jacques Rousseau, did not satiate the
devouring activity of the Patriarch, as he was called by the knot of
philosophers. Definitively installed at Ferney, Voltaire took to
building, planting, farming. He established round his castle a small
industrial colony, for whose produce he strove to get a market
everywhere. “Our design,” he used to say, “is to ruin the trade of
Geneva in a pious spirit.” Ferney, moreover, held grand and numerously
attended receptions; Madame Denis played her uncle’s pieces on a stage
which the latter had ordered to be built, and which caused as much
disquietude to the austere Genevese as to Jean Jacques Rousseau. It was
on account of Voltaire’s theatrical representations that Rousseau wrote
his _Lettre centre les Spectacles_. “I love you not, sir,” wrote
Rousseau to Voltaire: “you have done me such wrongs as were calculated to
touch me most deeply. You have ruined Geneva in requital of the asylum
you have found there.” Geneva was about to banish Rousseau before long,
and Voltaire had his own share of responsibility in this act of severity
so opposed to his general and avowed principles. Voltaire was angry with
Rousseau, whom he accused of having betrayed the cause of philosophy; he
was, as usual, hurried away by the passion of the moment, when he wrote,
speaking of the exile, “I give you my word that if this blackguard
(_polisson_) of a Jean Jacques should dream of coming (to Geneva), he
would run great risk of mounting a ladder which would not be that of
Fortune.” At the very same time Rousseau was saying, “What have I done
to bring upon myself the persecution of M. de Voltaire? And what worse
have I to fear from him? Would M. de Buffon have me soften this tiger
thirsting for my blood? He knows very well that nothing ever appeases or
softens the fury of tigers; if I were to crawl upon the ground before
Voltaire, he would triumph thereat, no doubt, but he would rend me none
the less. Basenesses would dishonor me, but would not save me. Sir, I
can suffer, I hope to learn how to die, and he who knows how to do that
has never need to be a dastard.”
Rousseau was high-flown and tragic; Voltaire was cruel in his
contemptuous levity; but the contrast between the two philosophers was
even greater in the depths of them than on. the surface. Rousseau took
his own words seriously, even when he was mad, and his conduct was sure
to belie them before long. He was the precursor of an impassioned and
serious age, going to extremes in idea and placing deeds after words.
In spite of occasional reticence dictated by sound sense, Voltaire had
abandoned himself entirely in his old age to that school of philosophy,
young, ardent, full of hope and illusions, which would fain pull down
everything before it knew what it could set up, and the actions of which
were not always in accordance with principles. “The men were inferior to
their ideas.” President De Brosses was justified in writing to Voltaire,
“I only wish you had in your heart a half-quarter of the morality and
philosophy contained in your works.” Deprived of the counterpoise of
political liberty, the emancipation of thought in the reign of Louis XV.
had become at one and the same time a danger and a source of profound
illusions; people thought that they did what they said, and that they
meant what they wrote, but the time of actions and consequences had not
yet come; Voltaire applauded the severities against Rousseau, and still
he was quite ready to offer him an asylum at Ferney; he wrote to
D’Alembert, “I am engaged in sending a priest to the galleys,” at the
very moment when he was bringing eternal honor to his name by the
generous zeal which led him to protect the memory and the family of the
unfortunate people named Calas.
The glorious and bloody annals of the French Reformation had passed
through various phases; liberty, always precarious, even under Henry IV.,
and whilst the Edict of Nantes was in force, and legally destroyed by its
revocation, had been succeeded by periods of assuagement and comparative
repose; in the latter part of Louis XV.’s reign, about 1760, fresh
severities had come to overwhelm the Protestants. Modestly going about
their business, silent and timid, as inviolably attached to the king as
to their hereditary creed, several of them had undergone capital
punishment. John Calas, accused of murdering his son, had been broken on
the wheel at Toulouse; the reformers had been accustomed to these sombre
dramas, but the spirit of the times had marched onward; ideas of justice,
humanity, and liberty, sown broadcast by the philosophers, more imbued
than they were themselves aware of with the holy influences of
Christianity, had slowly and secretly acted upon men’s minds; executions
which had been so frequent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
caused trouble and dismay in the eighteenth: in vain did the fanatical
passions of the populace of Toulouse find an echo in the magistracy of
that city: it was no longer considered a matter of course that
Protestants should be guilty of every crime, and that those who were
accused should not be at liberty to clear themselves. The philosophers
had at first hesitated. Voltaire wrote to Cardinal Bernis, “Might I
venture to entreat your eminence to be kind enough to tell me what I am
to think about the frightful case of this Calas, broken on the wheel at
Toulouse, on a charge of having hanged his own son? The fact is, they
maintain here that he is quite innocent, and that he called God to
witness it. . . . This case touches me to the heart; it saddens my
pleasures, it taints them. Either the Parliament of Toulouse or the
Protestants must be regarded with eyes of horror.” Being soon convinced
that the Parliament deserved all his indignation, Voltaire did not grudge
time, efforts, or influence in order to be of service to the unfortunate
remnant of the Calas family. “I ought to look upon myself as in some
sort a witness,” he writes: “several months ago Peter Calas, who is
accused of having assisted his father and mother in a murder, was in my
neighborhood with another of his brothers. I have wavered a long while
as to the innocence of this family; I could not believe that any judges
would have condemned to a fearful death an innocent father of a family.
There is nothing I have not done to enlighten myself as to the truth. I
dare to say that I am as sure of the innocence of this family as I am of
my own existence.”
For three years, with a constancy which he often managed to conceal
beneath an appearance of levity, Voltaire prosecuted the work of clearing
the Calas. “It is Voltaire who is writing on behalf of this unfortunate
family,” said Diderot to Mdlle. Voland: “O, my friend, what a noble work
for genius! This man must needs have soul and sensibility; injustice
must revolt him; he must feel the attraction of virtue. Why, what are
the Calas to him? What can awaken his interest in them? What reason has
he to suspend the labors he loves in order to take up their defence?”
From the borders of the Lake of Geneva, from his solitude at Genthod,
Charles Bonnet, far from favorable generally to Voltaire, writes to
Haller, “Voltaire has done a work on tolerance which is said to be good;
he will not publish it until after the affair of the unfortunate Calas
has been decided by the king’s council. Voltaire’s zeal for these
unfortunates might cover a multitude of sins; that zeal does not relax,
and, if they obtain satisfaction, it will be principally to his
championship that they will owe it. He receives much commendation for
this business, and he deserves it fully.”
The sentence of the council cleared the accused and the memory of John
Calas, ordering that their names should be erased and effaced from the
registers, and the judgment transcribed upon the margin of the
charge-sheet. The king at the same time granted Madame Calas and her
children a gratuity of thirty-six thousand livres, a tacit and inadequate
compensation for the expenses and losses caused them by the fanatical
injustice of the Parliament of Toulouse. Madame Calas asked no more.
“To prosecute the judges and the ringleaders,” said a letter to Voltaire
from the generous advocate of the Calas, Elias de Beaumont, “requires the
permission of the council, and there is great reason to fear that these
petty plebeian kings appear powerful enough to cause the permission,
through a weakness honored by the name of policy, to be refused.”
Voltaire, however, was triumphant. “You were at Paris,” he writes to
M. de Cideville, “when the last act of the tragedy finished so happily.
The piece is according to the rules; it is, to my thinking, the finest
fifth act there is on the stage.” Henceforth he finds himself
transformed into the defender of the oppressed. The Protestant Chaumont,
at the galleys, owed to him his liberation; he rushed to Ferney to thank
Voltaire. The pastor, who had to introduce him, thus described the
interview to Paul Rabaut: “I told him that I had brought him a little
fellow who had come to throw himself at his feet to thank him for having,
by his intercession, delivered him from the galleys; that it was Chaumont
whom I had left in his antechamber, and whom I begged him to permit me to
bring in. At the name of Chaumont M. de Voltaire showed a transport of
joy, and rang at once to have him brought in. Never did any scene appear
to me more amusing and refreshing. ‘What,’ said he, ‘my poor, little,
good fellow, they sent you to the galleys! What did they mean to do with
you? What a conscience they must have to put in fetters and chain to the
oar a man who had committed no crime beyond praying to God in bad
French!’ He turned several times to me, denouncing persecution. He
summoned into his room some persons who were staying with him, that they
might share the joy he felt at seeing poor little Chaumont, who, though
perfectly well attired for his condition, was quite astonished to find
himself so well received. There was nobody, down to an ex-Jesuit, Father
Adam, who did not come forward to congratulate him.”