THE “HENRIADE,” AND A VISIT TO COURT
Considered as a poem, the “Henriade” is the kind of fighting epic which
is the delight of schoolboys and a little apt to bore their elders.
The subject is the life of Henry of Navarre; the chief event, the
Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Truth, Discord, and other abstract virtues
are embodied, and talk at some length. The poem is modelled on, if not
imitated from, Horace and Virgil. Regarded on the surface it is nothing
but a dramatic story, easy, swinging, smooth, and with the lilt and
rhythm such a story requires.
But beneath that surface, not seen but felt, beneath the easy couplets
and running rhymes, there beats a spirit alert for liberty--the wings of
the wild bird against the cage which keeps it from life, sunshine, and
freedom. The pivot on which the poem turns is that supreme intolerance,
the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Its atmosphere throughout is that of
hatred of priestly power, fanaticism, superstition; the love of peace,
justice, enlightenment. Its religion is Deism. And its dedication to
Louis XV. contains these astounding words: “You are king only because
Henry IV. was a great man; and France, while wishing you as much virtue,
and more happiness than he had, flatters herself that the life and the
throne you owe to him will bind you to follow his example;” and “The
astonishment we feel when kings sincerely love the happiness of their
people is a thing very shameful to them.” Voltaire himself said
afterwards that he had advocated in it peace and tolerance in religion
and told Rome many home truths. No wonder the censor damned it.
If anything had been needed--but nothing was needed--to make Voltaire
more alert, eager, and determined to give his epic to the world, it
would have been that ministerial prohibition. Its publication in Holland
was conditional on its publication in Paris. Voltaire, as has been well
said, had not written an epic to keep it in a portfolio. He lost no
time. With the help of the Bernières and ever ready and good-natured
Theriot, he surreptitiously printed two thousand copies at Rouen. That
occupation took at least five months--from the June of 1723 until the
October. He was himself mostly in Paris, staying with the Bernières on
the Quai des Théatins, where the noise nearly drove him distracted; or
in a very poor lodging of his own. Garret or château, what did it
matter? The “Henriade” was everything--his world.
In September he was back at Rivière Bourdet. Everyone concerned in the
scheme was infinitely active and secret. “Little de Génonville” died in
this September of a very bad kind of smallpox then epidemic in Paris.
Voltaire mourned him much and long. He had a new tragedy in hand to keep
his mind from the tragedies and trials of life, and turned to “Mariamne”
for the comfort and change of thought he needed. It was finished early
in November, and the author put it in his pocket and went to stay with
his friend M. de Maisons, at the Château of Maisons, in the forest of
St. Germains, nine miles from Paris, where were fêtes, parties,
gaieties, and where Adrienne Lecouvreur was coming to read “Mariamne” to
the guests.
Maisons was but four-and-twenty, delicate, noble, accomplished;
destined, it seemed, for all great things, but to die too soon. Madame,
his wife, was the friend of that old love of Voltaire’s, Madame de
Villars.
By November 4th, at least two of the guests, Voltaire and Adrienne
Lecouvreur, had arrived. Two days later Voltaire developed smallpox.
No one can gain an adequate idea of his character without realising in
what “a thin and wretched case” Nature had enveloped “what is called my
soul.” No other great man, perhaps, ever fought such a plucky fight
against physical weakness, weariness, and infirmities. Voltaire was not
always ill, but he was never well. One of his valets said that his state
of indisposition was natural and permanent and accompanied him from the
cradle to the grave. He himself said he had never passed a single day
without suffering, and could not even imagine what it must be like to be
in robust health. But he had what he called his “infallible
secret”--work. Others have used physical weakness as an excuse for
mental idleness, and indisposition as a natural holiday from labour. But
not Voltaire. He dictated when he was too ill to write and when he was
too ill to think, he read dull books for information which he might find
useful and make amusing; and when he was yet worse, and could do nothing
else, he read and wrote that gay mockery of his leisure, his “Pucelle.”
The body was but the ragged covering of the soul at its best; at its
worst, it was a subtle and seducing enemy, and one must be ever up and
at it, with a thrust here and a lunge there, lest by any means it get
the mastery. Voltaire fought it his whole life long--and always won.
“Toujours allant et souffrant” was his definition of himself. He hardly
ever made a happier.
In the present case, his disease was of that confluent type which a
couple of months earlier had killed de Génonville. Voltaire was very
ill. He went so far, he said, as to call the _curé_, make his
confession, and his will, “which, you will well believe, was very
short.”
But he was placed under the enlightened care of a Doctor Gervasi,
physician to the Chevalier de Rohan, who saved his life with much
lemonade and more common-sense.
Voltaire had always that interest in medicine which by no means implies
faith in doctors. With two famous exceptions--Gervasi was one--he
mistrusted that eighteenth-century faculty as it deserved to be
mistrusted. He wrote afterwards a very minute description of his
symptoms and treatment for the benefit of an old Baron de Breteuil, the
father of Madame du Châtelet.
Adrienne Lecouvreur, it is said, who once had been something more than
Voltaire’s friend, never left his bedside until Theriot, whom she had
summoned, came to be with him.
The Maisons were prodigal of kindnesses. The day after he was out of
absolute danger, the patient was writing verses. On the twenty-sixth day
from his seizure, that is December 1, 1723, he left for Paris. He was
not more than two hundred feet away from the château when the wing he
had been occupying caught fire and was burnt to the ground.
As such accidental disinfectants were the only ones known to that age,
the conflagration was a blessing in disguise. But Voltaire naturally
felt overwhelmed with compunction, as if he had burnt the château
himself. As for the Maisons, the letters they wrote him are examples of
that exquisite grace and tact known to complete perfection only to
France, and to the France before the Revolution.
In the very early days of 1724 certain innocent-looking, plodding
agricultural vans arrived in Paris from Rouen. By the exertions of
Madame de Bernières the great packages they contained got through the
_douane_--somehow. Theriot was ready in the capital with his two
thousand bindings. Voltaire’s injunctions that his child should be
properly clad had not been in vain.
The August of 1723 had seen the death of Cardinal Dubois; the December
the death of the Regent. Surely the time was favourable! The censor had
condemned the book--what advertisement could be better?
And lo! on a sudden the “League” was all over the city--on the toilet
tables of the women, in the salons, in the coffee-houses; aye, and in
the King’s palace itself. It was of course a thousand times more
tempting and delicious for being forbidden fruit.
Was it absurdly imitated from the “Æneid?” Did Henry of Navarre and
Elizabeth of England, who never met in real life, meet in the poem for
an immense interview? Well, what of that? It was daring, impetuous, and
prohibited. That was enough. It was soon all over Europe translated into
many languages, fulsomely admired, parodied, burlesqued, abused,
pirated, copied. It had all the successes. A year
[Illustration: LOUIS XV.
_From the Picture by Carle Van Loo in the Museum at Versailles_]
later Voltaire could say truthfully in his airy manner that he had made
poetry the fashion.
The production of his tragedy “Mariamne” at the Comédie Française in
this March of 1724 came like a dash of cold water on his rising spirits.
It was a failure. A wag in the pit spoilt the critical moment of the
heroine’s death with a foolish _mot_.
The author withdrew “Mariamne” to rewrite it, as was his indefatigable
fashion, and went to recover his disappointment and his always ailing
health at the waters of Forges, near Rouen, whither he was accompanied
by the young Duke of Richelieu.
At Forges the invalid drank the waters, lost his money at faro, wrote a
gay little comedy called “L’Indiscret,” and made the acquaintance of the
French Court, then at Chantilly, near Forges.
The French Court then consisted of a King of fourteen; the Duke of
Bourbon, who had obtained the post of Prime Minister simply by asking
for it; and the Duke’s mistress, Madame de Prie. The mistress may be
said to have ruled the kingdom, since she ruled the Duke, and the Duke
ruled the King.
This wary Voltaire propitiated her, dedicated to her “L’Indiscret,” and
made her his very useful friend. Drinking the waters (“There is more
vitriol in a bottle of Forges water than in a bottle of ink,” he wrote;
“and I do not believe ink is so very good for the health”) was brought
to a tragic conclusion by the Duc de Melun, who was out hunting with
Richelieu, being gored to death by a stag. The hunt was at Chantilly,
and the unhappy Melun died in the arms of the Duke of Bourbon and in the
presence of the Court. Voltaire, who never abandoned a friend, stayed
another fortnight to console Richelieu, and then went back to Paris,
which he had reached by August 15th.
He had a lodging in the Rue de Beaune now, but the unbearable noise of
the street drove him into an _hôtel garni_, and the discomforts of the
_hôtel garni_ back again to the Rue de Beaune. Finally, he completed an
arrangement begun the year before, and rented a room from the Bernières
in their noisy house.
Wherever he was, he was working as usual. He rewrote “Mariamne.”
He obtained for Theriot the offer of the secretaryship to
Richelieu--Richelieu having been appointed ambassador to Vienna. And M.
Theriot is too idle to be bothered with regular work, and twice declines
the offer. Voltaire was not a little mortified, and found forgiveness
difficult; but he forgave. His letters on the subject are an admirable
lesson in the arts of friendship and of forbearance.
In April of the next year, 1725, the rewritten “Mariamne” was produced,
with that gay little _bagatelle_, “L’Indiscret,” after it. “L’Indiscret”
was said to justify its name in that it took too much liberty with the
upper classes. “Mariamne” was very fairly successful now. But, after
all, the author had had it and “L’Indiscret,” as well as the “Henriade,”
all printed at his own expense, and at a very great expense. Fame, he
observed, was agreeable but not nourishing. His thrifty soul began to
look out for the nourishment.
In this summer of 1825, Louis XV., aged fifteen, was to be married to
Marie Leczinska, aged twenty-one, daughter of Stanislas, ex-King of
Poland. Madame de Prie gave Voltaire the refusal of rooms in her house
at Fontainebleau, where the royal honeymoon was to be spent. Here was an
opportunity! He had said not a year ago that he had renounced Courts for
ever through the weakness of his stomach and the strength of his reason.
But in many respects, and in this respect above all, he was nothing if
not inconsistent. He cried for royal favour as a spoilt child cries for
the moon; and when he had it, it bored, wearied, and irritated him. But
in his day, if the King, and the person who ruled the King, did not
smile on talent, talent had small chance of success. “To make one’s
fortune,” Voltaire wrote bitterly hereafter, “it is better to speak four
words to the King’s mistress than to write a hundred volumes.”
So on August 27, 1725, he came up to Madame de Prie’s house at
Fontainebleau. The festivities were in full swing, though the marriage
was yet to come. Voltaire was one-and-thirty. He was there by his own
choice. He knew himself to be for the first time in his life well
placed. Yet his visit had not lasted three days when he wished himself
away again. There was a dreadful rumour, too, that all the pensions
were to be discontinued, and a new tax imposed instead to pay for the
bride’s chiffons! Then Voltaire wrote a little _divertissement_ to amuse
the royalties, and the master of the ceremonies preferred “Le Médecin
Malgré Lui.” On Wednesday, September 5th, the wedding took place. Then
the bride accorded her gracious permission to M. de Voltaire to dedicate
to her “Œdipe” and “Mariamne.” Things were a little better! Her father,
with whom Voltaire was to have much to do hereafter, begged for a copy
of the “Henriade” on his daughter’s recommendation. Voltaire was
presented to her Majesty. Things were better still. “She has wept at
‘Mariamne,’ she has laughed at ‘L’Indiscret,’ she talks to me often, she
calls me her ‘poor Voltaire.’” Charming! charming! but just a little
bit--well, unsubstantial. And then she allowed her poet a pension of
fifteen hundred livres.
Voltaire’s state of mind at Court was the state of mind of many--perhaps
of most--courtiers. It is a dreadful bore to be here--but it is very
advantageous! The cage is really so exquisitely gilded that one must try
not to see the bars through the gilt! I want to get out, and I could get
out--but I am so very lucky to be here, and so many people envy me, that
I certainly will _not_. What an inexplicable and yet what a very common
state of mind it is!
Voltaire could now count on the friendship, not only of the Queen, but
of Madame de Prie, and of the minister Duverney. He was a pensioner of
both their Majesties. The Court acknowledged him the first poet in
France. Epigrams and the Bastille were in the background. He had hopes
of being useful to his friends.
All this was not ungenerous payment for three months’ ennui at the
finest Court in the world. But was it sufficient? Voltaire had indeed
his gift of satiric observation to make the dullest entertainment
amusing. “The Queen is every day assassinated with Pindaric odes,
sonnets, epistles, and epithalamiums,” he wrote; “I should think she
takes the poets for the Court fools; and if she does she is right, for
it is a great folly for a man of letters to be here.” The boredom was
stronger than the satisfaction after all. To hang about in the
antechamber, tickling the jaded fancy of the Court gentlemen with one’s
_mots_--to try and rouse the sleepy selfishness of a callow king with
one’s finest wit--to flatter and cajole a duke’s mistress and a poor,
honest, simple little foreigner because she happened to be a king’s
wife--to play for apples of Sodom that turned to dust and ashes at one’s
touch--was it worth while? “It is better to be a lackey of wits than a
wit of lackeys”--better to do any work than none--better any life than
this narcotic sleep of easy idleness. In Voltaire’s ear that siren,
Verse, was always whispering and calling him away. In his heart were
passionate convictions throbbing to be spoken. He had been glad to go to
Court. He was more than glad to get away.
His zeal for a fight must have been more to the fore than ever after
those three months of amiable apathy. He had it soon enough.
It was in the December of 1725 that the great Chevalier de Rohan,
meeting this lean, brilliant, impertinent upstart of an author at the
opera, said to him scornfully, “M. de Voltaire--Arouet--whatever your
name is----?”
The Chevalier de Rohan was himself the representative of the haughtiest
and most illustrious family in France, and of the same house as that
Rohan who was to drag its pride through the mud of the episode of the
Diamond Necklace.
A middle-aged debauchee; “a degenerate plant, a coward and a usurer”--in
the vigorous words of a contemporary--was this great Chevalier whom
Voltaire met that night.
He made no answer at the moment. Two days after, at the Comédie
Française--most likely in Adrienne Lecouvreur’s box there--Rohan
repeated the question.
“I do not drag about a great name, but I know how to honour the name I
bear,” was the answer. There is another version of it: “I begin my name;
the Chevalier de Rohan finishes his.” Or, as Voltaire himself wrote
after in “Rome Sauvée”:
My name begins with me: your honour fend
Lest yours with you shall have an end.
The answer was at least one which made the Chevalier raise his cane; and
Voltaire clapped his hand on his sword. Adrienne, of course, fainted,
and the incident closed.
A few days later Voltaire was dining with the Duke of Sully. He was
called from the table to speak to someone in a carriage outside. He went
unsuspiciously enough. A couple of Rohan’s lackeys fell on him and beat
him over the shoulders. Rohan, it is said, looked out of the window of
his coach and called out: “Don’t hit his head! something good may come
out of that!” And the bystanders, cringing to rank and success as they
needs must, observed admiringly, “The noble lord!” Voltaire, beside
himself with fury, flung off his assailants at last, rushed back to
Sully, begged him to redress the wrong, to go to the police, to speak to
the minister. Voltaire had been as “a son of the house” for ten years,
and had immortalised Sully’s ancestors in the “Henriade.” But Sully was
not going to brave the wrath of such a great man as his cousin Rohan for
a _bourgeois_ author with a talent for getting into disgrace. Voltaire
left the house--never to enter it again. He went straight to the opera,
where he knew he would find Madame de Prie, told her his story, and
enlisted her sympathy. For a few days it seemed as if she would succeed
in getting her lover, the Duke of Bourbon’s, influence for Voltaire. But
the friends of Rohan showed the Duke an epigram on his one eye, which
sounded clever enough to be Voltaire’s, and ruined his credit at once.
He was baffled on every side. Marais, that keen old legal writer of
memoirs, declares that, though he showed himself as much as he could in
town and Court, no one pitied him, and his so-called friends turned
their backs. He had been publicly caned! He was ridiculous! And the fear
of being absurd was a thousand times stronger than the fear of hell in
eighteenth-century Paris. Any other but Voltaire would have hidden his
head in obscurity and have been thankful to be forgotten.
But with this man an insult raised all the vivid intensity of his
nature. “God take care of my friends,” said he; “I can look after my
enemies myself.” For more than three months he led a life of feverish
indignation and was every moment busy with revenge. He learnt fencing.
He had no aptitude for any bodily exercise. But he perfected himself in
this one with all the persistency and thoroughness of his nature. If he
was not normally courageous, he had plenty of daring now. The Rohans,
anyhow, feared him so much that they kept him under police supervision.
On April 16, 1726, the lieutenant of police recorded that Voltaire
intended to insult Rohan with _éclat_ and at once; that he was living at
his fencing master’s, but continually changing his residence. On April
17th Voltaire went to Adrienne Lecouvreur’s box at the Comédie, where he
knew he would find Rohan. Theriot accompanied him and stood without the
box, but where he could hear everything. “Sir,” said Voltaire, “if you
have not forgotten the outrage of which I complain, I hope you will give
me satisfaction.” The great man agreed. The hour fixed was nine o’clock
the next morning; the place, St. Martin’s Gate. But before that,
Voltaire found himself for the second time in the Bastille. One can
hardly fancy a meaner revenge. By March 28, 1726, the influence,
cunning, and poltroonery of Rohan had succeeded in getting signed the
warrant for his enemy’s arrest and detention. Rohan, in fact, was a
great noble; and Voltaire, as his rival playwright Piron said to
himself, was “nothing, not even an Academician.” Armand and his faction
were only too glad to be rid of such a stormy petrel.
It is not hard to understand what a passion against the bitter injustice
of his gorgeous day must have surged in Voltaire’s heart. “You do not
hear in England,” he wrote but a very short time after, “of _haute_,
_moyenne_, and _basse_ justice.” It was in fact literally true that in
France at that period there was not only really, but avowedly, one
“justice” for the noble, another for the _bourgeois_, and a third for
the _canaille_. Voltaire was in the Bastille only a fortnight. He was
very well treated. “Everyone he knew,” wrote Delaunay the governor, came
to see him; so his visitors had to be limited to six a day. Theriot
brought him English books. He dined at Delaunay’s table. Also imprisoned
in the Bastille was the famous Madame de Tencin--young, clever, and
corrupt. “We were like Pyramus and Thisbe,” Voltaire wrote, “only we
did not kiss each other through the chink in the wall.” He could still
write gaily. As some people never speak without a stammer, Voltaire
never spoke without a jest. But what food in his heart for new strange
thought! Under what crushing laws was this great French people bound in
darkness, wretchedness, ignorance! “We are born in slavery and die in
it.” It has been said that Voltaire left France a poet and returned from
England a philosopher. But that fortnight in the Bastille must have made
him realise, if he had not known already, that he was born for a destiny
far weightier and greater than that of a Corneille or a Racine.
“What is done with people who forge _lettres de cachet_?” he asked the
lieutenant of police one day, when he was in prison. “They are hanged.”
“Good!” was the answer, “in anticipation of the time when those who sign
genuine ones shall be hanged too.”
A few days after his imprisonment he wrote to the Minister of the
Department of Paris:
“Sieur de Voltaire humbly represents that he has been assaulted by the
brave Chevalier de Rohan, assisted by six cut-throats, behind whom the
chevalier was courageously posted; and that ever since Sieur de Voltaire
has tried to repair, not his own honour, but that of the chevalier,
which has proved too difficult.”
He went on to beg permission to go to England. His order of liberty was
signed on April 29, 1726. But there were many formalities to be observed
before it could be put into execution. On May 2d, Delaunay received it
with its accompanying conditions. Voltaire was free--to go to England,
accompanied as far as Calais by Condé, one of the turnkeys of the
Bastille, to see that he really _did_ go there.
The businesslike prisoner asked Madame de Bernières to lend him her
travelling carriage to take him to Calais. She, Madame du Deffand, and
Theriot came to say good-bye to him. He left the Bastille on May 3d. On
May 5th he was writing to Theriot from Calais. He stayed there three or
four days, and about the end of the first week, in May, 1726, landed at
Greenwich.