Francois Marie Arouet, who called himself Voltaire, was the son of
Francois Arouet of Poitou, who lived in Paris, had given up his office of
notary two years before the birth of this his third son, and obtained
some years afterwards a treasurer's office in the Chambre des Comptes.
Voltaire was born in the year 1694. He lived until within ten or eleven
years of the outbreak of the Great French Revolution, and was a chief
leader in the movement of thought that preceded the Revolution. Though
he lived to his eighty-fourth year, Voltaire was born with a weak body.
His brother Armand, eight years his senior, became a Jansenist. Voltaire
when ten years old was placed with the Jesuits in the College Louis-le-
Grand. There he was taught during seven years, and his genius was
encouraged in its bent for literature; skill in speaking and in writing
being especially fostered in the system of education which the Jesuits
had planned to produce capable men who by voice and pen could give a
reason for the faith they held. Verses written for an invalid soldier at
the age of eleven won for young Voltaire the friendship of Ninon
l'Enclos, who encouraged him to go on writing verses. She died soon
afterwards, and remembered him with a legacy of two thousand livres for
purchase of books. He wrote in his lively school-days a tragedy that
afterwards he burnt. At the age of seventeen he left the College Louis-
le-Grand, where he said afterwards that he had been taught nothing but
Latin and the Stupidities. He was then sent to the law schools, and saw
life in Paris as a gay young poet who, with all his brilliant liveliness,
had an aptitude for looking on the tragic side of things, and one of
whose first poems was an "Ode on the Misfortunes of Life." His mother
died when he was twenty. Voltaire's father thought him a fool for his
versifying, and attached him as secretary to the Marquis of Chateauneuf;
when he went as ambassador to the Hague. In December, 1713, he was
dismissed for his irregularities. In Paris his unsteadiness and his
addiction to literature caused his father to rejoice in getting him
housed in a country chateau with M. de Caumartin. M. de Caumartin's
father talked with such enthusiasm of Henri IV. and Sully that Voltaire
planned the writing of what became his _Henriade_, and his "History of
the Age of Louis XIV.," who died on the 1st of September, 1715.
Under the regency that followed, Voltaire got into trouble again and
again through the sharpness of his pen, and at last, accused of verse
that satirised the Regent, he was locked up--on the 17th of May, 1717--in
the Bastille. There he wrote the first two books of his _Henriade_, and
finished a play on OEdipus, which he had begun at the age of eighteen. He
did not obtain full liberty until the 12th of April, 1718, and it was at
this time--with a clearly formed design to associate the name he took
with work of high attempt in literature--that Francois Marie Arouet, aged
twenty-four, first called himself Voltaire.
Voltaire's _OEdipe_ was played with success in November, 1718. A few
months later he was again banished from Paris, and finished the
_Henriade_ in his retirement, as well as another play, _Artemise_, that
was acted in February, 1720. Other plays followed. In December, 1721,
Voltaire visited Lord Bolingbroke, who was then an exile from England, at
the Chateau of La Source. There was now constant literary activity. From
July to October, 1722, Voltaire visited Holland with Madame de
Rupelmonde. After a serious attack of small-pox in November, 1723,
Voltaire was active as a poet about the Court. He was then in receipt of
a pension of two thousand livres from the king, and had inherited more
than twice as much by the death of his father in January, 1722. But in
December, 1725, a quarrel, fastened upon him by the Chevalier de Rohan,
who had him waylaid and beaten, caused him to send a challenge. For this
he was arrested and lodged once more, in April, 1726, in the Bastille.
There he was detained a month; and his first act when he was released was
to ask for a passport to England.
Voltaire left France, reached London in August, 1726, went as guest to
the house of a rich merchant at Wandsworth, and remained three years in
this country, from the age of thirty-two to the age of thirty-five. He
was here when George I. died, and George II. became king. He published
here his _Henriade_. He wrote here his "History of Charles XII." He
read "Gulliver's Travels" as a new book, and might have been present at
the first night of _The Beggar's Opera_. He was here whet Sir Isaac
Newton died.
In 1731 he published at Rouen the _Lettres sur les Anglais_, which
appeared in England in 1733 in the volume from which they are here
reprinted.