“ŒDIPE,” AND THE JOURNEY TO HOLLAND
On November 18, 1718, there was produced in Paris the tragedy of
“Œdipe,” by M. Arouet de Voltaire.
The subject of the play is classical and the plot entirely impossible.
Love interest there is none. The style is not a little bombastical and
long-winded. The characters are always talking about what they are going
to do, instead of doing it. The good people are very, very good, and the
bad ones very, very bad. At the best they are brilliant
automatons--masks, not faces.
The play has indeed the perfect smoothness and elegance dear to the
French soul. All the unities are nicely observed, and there is never an
anachronism. But to make it the astounding success it was, it must have
had in it something better even than the brilliant ingenuity of a
Voltaire--something better even than a Voltaire’s perfect knowledge of
the human nature for which he was writing. It contained the first
trumpet call of the Voltairian message.
The house was crowded. It was the custom of the day for the playwright
to beat up his friends and engage them to applaud the first steps of the
child of his brain. But here also were enemies and neutrals--all Paris
agog to see the next move in the game of a daring player. Among the
audience, half grumbling, half delighted, was old Maître Arouet. “The
rascal! the rascal!” he muttered, as some bold touch brought down the
house. Brother Armand should have been there too, to have heard the
strangely passionate enthusiasm with which was received the couplet
which, after all, merely referred to the pagan priesthood of a long dead
age:
Our priests are not what a foolish people think them!
Our credulity makes all their knowledge.
But “when fanaticism has once gangrened a brain, the malady is
incurable,” said Voltaire; and neither he nor any other could alter an
Armand. A certain Maréchale de Villars--_galante_, coquette, with all
the easy _ton_ learnt in Courts, and all the French woman’s _aplomb_ and
grace to make five-and-thirty more dangerous than five-and-twenty--leant
curiously out of her box presently to watch a young buffoon of an actor
who was doing his best to ruin M. de Voltaire’s play. The high priest,
in a scene essentially grave and tragic, has as train-bearer a
lean-faced, narrow-shouldered, boyish-looking youth who must needs take
_his_ part as comic, and make a fool not of himself only but of his high
priest also. Who is the ridiculous boy? M. de Voltaire. It appears
deliciously piquant to the Maréchale that an author should run the risk
of damning his own work for a jest. What a refreshing person to have to
stay when one is a little bored! Madame receives him in her box--he
knows quite well how to behave and how to be as affable, daring, and
amusing as could be wished--and they begin a friendship, not without
result.
There were some allusions to the Regent and Madame du Berri in “Œdipe,”
very vociferously applauded, which must have made Maître Arouet groan in
spirit and think that after all his Armand, his rigid “fool in prose” at
home, was safer to deal with than this “fool in verse” on the boards,
who would _not_ be warned and _must_ come to the gallows. But the
Regent, like a wise man, hearing of that astounding first night and the
allusions, presented the author with a gold medal and a thousand crowns;
talked with him publicly at the next Opera ball, and made a point of
coming to the performance to show that the arrows could not have been
really intended for him after all.
As for the Duchesse du Berri, _she_ came five nights in succession to
the piece. And of course all the little, witty, disaffected Court of
Maine were there too, enjoying those allusions and looking hard at their
enemies, the Regent and his daughter.
The curtain went down on perhaps the most successful _début_ that ever
playwright had made. “Œdipe” ran for forty-five nights. Clever Philip
commanded it to Court to be performed before the little Louis XV. The
enterprising and energetic young author asked, and obtained, permission
to dedicate it, in book form, to downright old Charlotte Elizabeth, the
Regent’s mother. He sent a copy, with a flaming sonnet, to George I. of
England; and yet another copy to the Regent’s sister, the Duchess of
Lorraine, with a letter wherein is to be found his first signature of
his new name, Arouet de Voltaire. When the Prince de Conti, his old
Temple companion, complimented “Œdipe” and its author in a poem of his
own, “Sir,” said Voltaire airily, “you will be a great poet; I must get
the King to give you a pension.”
The young playwright gained from “Œdipe”--not including the Regent’s
present--about four thousand francs, besides a fine capital of fame. He
was the old notary’s son to some purpose after all, and began to invest
money. As to the fame, he took _that_ very modestly. When the women
declared his “Œdipe” to be a thousand times better than his old hero
Corneille’s play on the same subject, the young man made the happiest
quotation from Corneille himself, disclaiming superiority.
He attended every one of the forty-five performances--a learner of his
own art and of the actors’.
He must have gone back gay and well pleased enough on those evenings to
his furnished room in the Rue de Calandre.
In the spring of 1719 the faithless and charming Mademoiselle de Livri
insisted on his using his influence to get her a good part in his play.
Perhaps she, Voltaire, and “little de Génonville” enjoyed themselves
about Paris together as before. “Que nous nous aimions tous trois!...
que nous étions heureux!” the forsaken lover wrote ten years later in
his graceful poem to the memory of de Génonville.
Mademoiselle was no actress, though she wished to be one. Her very
accent was provincial. She was laughed off the stage when “Œdipe” was
revived after Lent, and Voltaire very nearly came to blows with one of
the laughers, Poisson, who was one of the actors too. He had Poisson
thrown into prison, and then himself obtained his release. Poisson and
the public were right after all, and Voltaire soon knew it.
Mademoiselle retired from the boards, and married.
When a few years later, Voltaire went to call on her in her fine house
when she was the Marquise de Gouvernet, and her huge Swiss porter, not
knowing him, refused him admission, he sent her “Les Vous et Les Tu,”
one of the most charmingly graceful and bantering of all his poems. In
his old age at Ferney, when the first rose of the year appeared he would
pluck it and kiss it to the memory of Mademoiselle de Livri. Perhaps it
was of her he thought when he wrote one of the few tender lines to be
found in his works, and one of the tenderest in any poetry:
C’est moi qui te dois tout, puisque c’est moi qui t’aime.
On his last great visit to Paris, when he was nearly eighty-four and she
not much younger, the two met for the last time--ghosts out of
shadowland--in a strange new world.
In this same spring of 1719 there appeared in Paris another satire on
the Regent, called the “Philippics.” M. de Voltaire had not written it,
to be sure. But it was clever, and sounded as if he had. Besides, he was
known to be the friend of the Duchesse du Maine, at the present moment
shut up, with her Court, in the Bastille; of the gorgeous Duke of
Richelieu and of the Spanish ambassador who were accomplices in a
conspiracy against Orleans. So in May the authorities requested M. de
Voltaire to spend the summer in the country; and he spent it at Villars.
If the Maréchale had been charming in Paris, she was a thousand times
more so here. If she had flattered a brilliant young author in her box
at the theatre, she flattered and petted him a thousand times better now
she had him to herself, an interesting young exile. Such a clever boy!
so witty! so cynical! so amusing! He certainly ought to have been clever
enough to guess that this woman of the world was only playing with him.
But he was vain too--and did not guess it. “Friendship is a thousand
times better worth having than love,” he wrote disconsolately in a
letter after a while. “There is something in me which makes it
ridiculous for me to love.... It is all over. I renounce it for life.”
The renunciation was not so easy as he expected. He was, at least for a
time, out of gear, restless, discontented. The husband, Louis XIV.’s
famous marshal, had a thousand anecdotes of the Sun King to relate. And
the future author of the “Century of Louis XIV.” was almost too
_distrait_ to listen to them. He forgot Paris and his career. He forgot
the dazzling success of “Œdipe.” He would not indeed have been Voltaire,
but some lesser man, if he had let this or any other passion ride over
him rough-shod. He had the “Henriade” and a new play with him. He turned
to his work--worked like a fury--until he had worked the folly out of
him. But, not the less, “he never spoke of it afterwards but with a
feeling of regret, almost of remorse.”
By June 25, 1719, he was at Sully, where he wrote most of his new play,
“Artémire,” and spent the autumn and part of the winter. Paris had gone
mad over the financial schemes of John Law, and it was well that a young
man of five-and-twenty, with a taste for speculation and money in his
pocket for the first time, should be out of the way of temptation. From
Sully he went back to Villars, and from Villars to the Duke of
Richelieu’s. “I go from château to château,” he wrote. He liked the life
well, no doubt. It was gay, easy, witty. For anyone else it would have
been idle too; but not for a Voltaire.
He had already complained that his passion for his Maréchale de Villars
had lost him a good deal of his time. But, all the same, by February,
1720, “Artémire” was finished, and its author was back in Paris
superintending its rehearsals.
Its first appearance took place on February 13, 1720. It is not too much
to say that it was a most dismal failure.
Adrienne Lecouvreur, the great tragic actress, had hoped everything from
it. At a private reading a certain Abbé de Bussi had shed so many tears
at its pathos that he had caught cold from them. The public was not so
soft-hearted. It was in no mood for plays. Law had just ruined half
Paris. When the crash came--“Paper,” said Voltaire, with his usual neat
incisiveness, “is now reduced to its intrinsic value.” Someone says that
this mot was the funeral oration of Law’s system. Law’s system was the
funeral oration of “Artémire.” It was a dull, feeble play. Not all its
author’s rewritings and correctings and embellishments--and it was his
custom to rewrite, correct, and embellish all his works until labour and
genius could do no more for them--could ever make it good enough for him
to publish as a whole. But when the public took it exactly at his own
valuation, he was not a little hurt. It was a later Voltaire who said
that he envied the beasts because of their ignorance of evil to come and
_of what people said of them_. He was not less sensitive now than then.
The last performance of the rewritten “Artémire” took place on March 8,
1720. When, soon after, the “Henriade” was criticised at a private
reading, he threw it disgustedly into the fire; and President Hénault
saved it at the price of a pair of lace ruffles. Perhaps the fire was
not very bright, or the author had a very shrewd idea that one of his
friends would not let a masterpiece be lost to posterity.
He went to stay again with Richelieu after his “Artémire”
disappointment; and from there wrote to Theriot telling him to copy out,
in his very best handwriting, cantos of the “Henriade” which were to be
propitiatingly presented to the Regent. From Richelieu Voltaire went to
Sully, and from Sully to La Source, the home of the great St. John, Lord
Bolingbroke, and his French wife.
In the June of 1721, he went back to Villars again. He could trust
himself to see his Maréchale now. They had “white nights” here as at
Sceaux and at Sully. They gaily astronomised through opera glasses in
the long, warm, starlit summer nights in the garden--with the assistance
of that fashionable “Plurality of Worlds” by M. de Fontenelle. “We
mistake Venus for Mercury,” Voltaire wrote to him gaily in verse, “And
break up the order of the Heavens.”
From that modish courtly life the man who had been François Marie Arouet
was summoned home in the December of 1721 to the death-bed of his old
father. A strange group gathered round it--Catherine, Madame Mignot, a
middle-aged married woman; Armand, the austere and surly Jansenist of
eight-and-thirty; and the most brilliant man in France. Good old Maître
Arouet went the way of all flesh, trusting greatly neither in his “fool
in prose” nor his “fool in verse,” but leaving Prose a post in the
Chamber of Accounts which brought in thirteen thousand francs yearly,
and Verse a sum which afforded him four thousand odd francs per annum.
He had appointed a trustee and guardian, with whom Verse, who was always
what his valets thereafter charitably called _vif_, immediately
quarrelled.
The guardian was indeed such a dilatory old person that it took him four
years to divide the estate among Maître Arouet’s children; and two years
after his father’s death Voltaire was writing lugubriously to Theriot,
“I shall be obliged to work to live, after having lived to work.”
Things were not quite so bad as that, however. When he left the Bastille
the Regent had given him a pension of twelve hundred francs. And now, a
few days after his father’s death, in January, 1722, the boy King, Louis
XV., made him a further pension of two thousand francs. From this moment
Voltaire never spent his whole income.
In no other concern of his life has he been so much misrepresented as in
his dealings with money matters.
It is hard to see why for all other men independence should be
considered honourable and a freedom of the spirit, and grinding poverty
an inspiration and liberty only to the man of letters. But the
peculiarly foolish idea that genius cannot be genius if it understands
its bank-book, and that great truths can only come from a garret and an
ill-fed brain, is not yet extinct. Many of Voltaire’s biographers feel
that they have to apologise for him paying his bills regularly, hunting
out his creditors, and investing his money with shrewdness and caution.
It would have been so much more romantic to have flung it about
royally--and then borrowed someone else’s!
But Voltaire knew that “poverty enervates the courage.” He never uttered
a truer word. If it was his mission to whip the world’s apathy into
action with unpalatable truths, he could not depend on that world for
the bread he put into his mouth and the coat he put on his back. “Ask
nothing of anyone; need no one.” “My vocation is to say what I think
_fari quæ sentiam_.” If Voltaire had been insolvent the Voltairian
message could never have been uttered.
In this May of 1722, he further sought to improve his monetary position
by running to earth, for Cardinal Dubois--the first, greatest, and
vilest of the Regent’s Prime Ministers--a spy, one Salamon Levi.
Voltaire does not appear to have thought the occupation a derogatory
one. Nor did it hurt his cynic and elastic conscience to flatter
“Iscariot” Dubois to the top of his bent both in verse and prose, and
declare that he (Voltaire) would be eternally grateful if Dubois would
employ him somehow, in something.
The pension from the King--very irregularly paid at first, and soon not
paid at all--was not taken by him as the authorities must have hoped it
would be, and neither shut his mouth nor quenched his spirit. It was
nominally a tribute to a talented young playwriter. He took it virtually
as such. His old talent for getting into mischief was as lively as ever;
and spies at this period seem to have had an unlucky fascination for
him. One night in July, 1722, at the house of the Minister of War he met
Beauregard, the spy who had been the instrument of putting him into the
Bastille. “I knew spies were paid,” he said, “but I did not know that it
was by eating at the minister’s table.” Beauregard bided his time, and
fell on the poet one night on the Bridge of Sèvres as he was crossing it
in his sedan chair, beating him severely. To give blows with a cane was
thereafter translated “_Voltairiser_” in the mouth of Voltaire’s
enemies. He had many of them. He had made so many _mots_! They denied
him his proper share of physical courage. D’Argenson, his friend, though
he said he had in his soul a strength worthy of Turenne, of Moses, and
of Gustavus Adolphus, yet added that he feared the least dangers for his
body and was “a proven coward.” He was certainly, now and ever, a most
nervously organised creature. When he was at fever heat he could be
plucky
[Illustration: J. B. ROUSSEAU
_From an Engraving after a Picture by J. Aved_]
enough. But there is as little doubt that he dearly loved his safety as
that he spent his whole life in endangering it.
He pursued Beauregard with a most nimble, passionate, vivid intensity.
He must have had an extraordinary persistence to get that unwieldy mass
of muddle and jobbery which called itself French law to administer any
kind of justice; but he did it. It took him more than fifteen months to
compass his revenge, and cost him immense sums of money as well as
immense labour. The game was not worth the candle. But Voltaire was
never the person to think of that. To him the game was everything while
he pursued it. It was to this characteristic he owed some of his success
in life.
The affair of the Bridge of Sèvres was, not the less, one of the most
unfortunate incidents of his experience. To the day of his death it was
a whip in the hands of his enemies which they used without mercy and
without ceasing.
He must have been tired of fighting and failure, and in need of quiet
and change when one of his philosophic marquises--a certain Madame de
Rupelmonde--“young, rich, agreeable,” took him with her in July, 1722,
as her guest, on a trip to Holland. Her witty companion of
eight-and-twenty was in no sense her lover. The few _convenances_ there
were left in those days quite permitted such an association. The two had
for each other merely a gallant friendship. Madame was a widow, of easy
virtue, and fashionable enough to have religious doubts--to wish to be
taught to think. As they jolted leisurely in her post-chaise over the
rough roads of old France they had plenty of time to discuss fate, free
will, life, death, and the theologies. Voltaire found time, too, during
the trip, to answer Madame’s questions by an “Epistle to Uranie”--in
which he gave, in a few graceful pages, and with the admirable terseness
and lucidity which were to be the hall-mark of all his writings, the
most powerful objections to Christianity. It was his first open avowal
of Deism. How long he had cherished that belief and outgrown all others,
cannot be told. The whole temper of his mind was rationalistic.
Christianity had come to him through the muddy channel of French Roman
Catholicism in the eighteenth century. He began by disbelieving the
shameless superstitions with which the Churchmen darkened and debased
the understanding of the people. He ended by disbelieving everything
which his reason could not follow. The process is easy and not uncommon.
The philosophic pair were much fêted _en route_. “Œdipe” was performed
when they were at Cambrai, as a delicate compliment. There was a
Congress going on there too; and Voltaire wrote gaily therefrom to
Cardinal Dubois (who was archbishop of the place but had never even seen
it) one of those audacious, easy letters which were his _forte_, and
which Dubois and Theriot between them passed round the salons of Paris.
Voltaire and Madame were at Cambrai for some five or six weeks, and then
went on to Brussels. Here lived now J. B. Rousseau, fifty-two years old,
who from wit and licence had passed to dulness and orthodoxy. Of course
the poets met. Voltaire had not seen Rousseau since he was a schoolboy,
and Rousseau had been shown him as a prodigy for imitation. To the gay,
unsparing logic of the younger poet the old one did not appear at all in
the light of a prodigy now. “He despises me because I neglect rhyme, and
I despise him because he can do nothing but rhyme,” said Voltaire
carelessly.
At first, however, all went well. Voltaire read his “master” as he
called him, a part of the “Henriade.” Rousseau praised it, only
criticising such passages as would be likely to give offence to the
Church. Then came a meeting, when the poets read to each other some of
their minor poems; and Madame de Rupelmonde was a gracious and
sympathetic listener. Rousseau read his satire, the “Judgment of Pluto”;
which was nothing but an account of the wrongs which had exiled him. And
Voltaire said the “Judgment” was unworthy of the Great and Good
Rousseau. Then Rousseau must needs read out his “Ode to Posterity,” on
the same subject. “That is a letter, master,” says Voltaire, “which will
never reach its address.” Then Voltaire takes his “Epistle to Uranie”
and reads _that_. “Stop, stop!” cries old Rousseau, still smarting under
the audacious boy’s criticisms. “What horrible profanity!” And Voltaire
asks since when the author of the “Moïsade” has become devout.
There was the making of a very pretty quarrel here. The one sun was
rising, the other setting. Both men were not a little vain, sensitive,
and jealous. Henceforth, it was war to the knife. They parted; and if
Voltaire forgave at the last, Rousseau never did.
Rousseau recorded afterwards how Voltaire attended Mass on the first day
of his arrival at Brussels and shocked the congregation by his
profanity. The story was true, though it was written by an enemy.
Voltaire was born irreverent. When he left Brussels he did not even
revere that hero of his youth, Rousseau.
By October, 1722, he and Madame had gone on to The Hague and Amsterdam.
The young man was always out dining and playing tennis there, reading
aloud his works, keen, active, enjoying himself. His health, of which he
was exceedingly fond of talking and complaining was better than it had
ever been; but that did not prevent him from drinking up one day as a
kind of medical experiment--“from greediness,” said Madame de
Rupelmonde--a bottle of medicine from her bedside which she was going to
have taken, from necessity.
Perhaps in the midst of gaiety and enjoyment Voltaire recalled the last
time he was here, Pimpette, and that wild episode of his youth. But this
was the man who was always agog for the future; never a dreamer of the
past--a doer, an actor, the most energetic spirit in history.
When he was at The Hague he was busy arranging for the publication of
his “Henriade” there, in that freer country, and continually reading and
reciting extracts from it to his friends. After a few weeks’ visit he
started on his journey home. Madame de Rupelmonde had a house at The
Hague, and as there was no other agreeable marquise with a travelling
carriage returning to France just then, M. de Voltaire did the journey
on horseback alone, and as economically as he could.
He was at Cambrai again on October 31, 1722, announcing the forthcoming
publication of his epic. At the beginning of the new year, 1723, he was
once more staying at La Source, near Orleans, with that exiled Lord
Bolingbroke who had, said his guest, “all the learning of his own
country and all the politeness of ours.” The guest read aloud that dear
epic. He called it “The League or Henry IV.” now, or “The League,” or
“Henry IV.” only. He advertised it industriously at every château he
stayed at. In Paris Theriot was trying to get subscriptions for it, and
to propitiate the censor. From La Source Voltaire went to stay with
other friends at Ussé, who were also friends of a charming early friend
of his own, Madame de Mimeure.
By February 23, 1723, he was back again in Paris seeing a new play by
Alexis Piron, called “Harlequin Deucalion,” wherein the failure of
“Artémire” was piquantly satirised. “Deucalion” is remarkable as having
obeyed a prohibition of the censor, designed to stop comic opera in
Paris, that not more than one person should appear on the stage at a
time, and as having succeeded in spite of that obedience.
Then the active Voltaire was off to Rouen, where lived his old friend
Cideville. Then he went on to Rivière Bourdet, near Rouen, the country
home of the Bernières, a married couple, also very much his friends. All
the time he was planning, scheming, working, for the production of his
“Henriade.” Almost all his letters of the year 1723 are to Theriot or
Madame de Bernières, and almost all on this topic. In May he was staying
at the Bernières town house, on what is now the Quai Voltaire and was
then the Quai des Théatins, opposite the gardens of the Tuileries. The
“Henriade” was finished at last. The subscription lists had not gone
well; their ill-success had been burlesqued in the play which succeeded
“Deucalion.” That was mortifying. Still, it was but the chagrin of a
moment. The “Henriade” was about to appear. It must and should succeed!
Had not its wary author read parts to the Regent, and changed phrases
which might have offended Dubois? The only thing he would not do was to
alter its principles to suit the blindest and most autocratic powers
that ever brought a country to ruin.
It must take its chance! It took it, and was prohibited by the censor
immediately.