A YEAR OF STORMS
After the death of Madame du Châtelet, Longchamp, Voltaire’s secretary,
rescued from the flames in which many of her papers were burning, a
number of letters in a very small handwriting. They were the “Treatise
on Metaphysics.” Voltaire dedicated them to her in a quatrain which is
as graceful in the original as it is clumsy in the translation.
He, who wrote these metaphysics
Which he gives you as your own,
Should die for them, as a traitor,
But he dies for you alone.
They were intended only for her eye. They contain the whole Voltairian
creed in brief, but in every essential. They were indeed, in the opinion
of that day, fit matter for the hangman, and to bring their author to
the Bastille.
The title is not alluring, it must be confessed. But the matter has that
witchery of style which Voltaire’s writings never missed. There is no
thinking man but must some time or other have asked himself such
questions on God and the soul, free-will, liberty, vice, and virtue, as
Voltaire here proposes and answers. Like his hero Newton, he knows how
to doubt. He passionately seeks truth and pursues that quest even when
he has found the truth is not what he wishes it to be. No man ever made
a more clear, logical, and honest statement of his religion, as far as
it had then progressed, than Voltaire in the “Treatise on Metaphysics”:
and no student of his works or character can afford to pass it by.
The “Discourses on Man” form seven epistles in easy verse: and may be
said to be founded on Pope’s “Essay on Man” in much the same way as the
ribald “Pucelle” was founded on the “Maid of Orleans” of the dull and
respectable Chapelain. Their sentiments certainly differ widely from the
comfortable optimism and orthodox theology of Mr. Pope. In this work, as
in all his others, Voltaire was not so much the enemy of religion, as of
_a_ religion: and less the foe of Christianity than of that form of it
called Roman Catholicism. The Epistles are upon the Nature of Pleasure,
the Nature of Man, True Virtue, Liberty, the writer’s favourite
subjects. They are easy reading--light, graceful, delicate, witty. In
brief, they are Voltaire.
On January 27, 1736, was produced in Paris Voltaire’s Peruvian comedy
“Alzire.” “My Americans” he called it usually. It was a brilliant
success, and ran for twenty consecutive nights. Voltaire gave all the
proceeds to the actors. He had no great opinion of it. “As for comedy, I
will have nothing to do with it: I am only a tragic animal,” said he:
and again, “You must be a good poet to write a good tragedy, a good
comedy only requires a certain talent for versemaking.” He was
right--with regard to himself at least. His comedies are all sprightly
and vivacious, but not much else. Between the lines, indeed, even of
“Alzire”--which the author, with a twinkle in his eye, called “a very
Christian piece ... which should reconcile me with some of the
devout”--may be read the most characteristic of the Voltairian opinions.
But he was too true an artist to allow those opinions to override his
play, and never forgot to disguise the powder in a great deal of jam. It
was twice performed at Court.
He was living quietly at Cirey when it was pleasing the popular taste of
Paris. One is not surprised that overtaxed Nature had her revenge at
last. By February, he was thoroughly ill. Madame du Châtelet sat on the
end of his bed and read aloud Cicero in Latin and Pope in English. They
were not wasting their time anyhow! One of them, at least, considered it
nothing short of “a degradation” to allow bodily ill-health to stop
mental industry.
In March, he wrote that he was “overwhelmed by maladies and
occupations.” By April, he was well enough to be plunged into a quarrel
with the faithless Jore, bookseller of Rouen.
If Voltaire was a very good friend, he was also a very good enemy. A
more hot-headed, energetic, pugnacious foe certainly never existed.
While he hated, he hated well. He lashed his enemy with such brilliant
invective, such delicate gibes, such rollicking sarcasms, that one must
needs pity the poor wretch if he deserved his fate ever so fully. Did he
get up and retaliate, Voltaire was at him again in a moment, dancing
round him, goading him to madness with the daintiest whip flicked with
_mots_ and jests and little cunning allusions, which looked so innocent,
and always caught the victim on the raw. Diatribe, gaiety, quip,
mockery,--this man had all the weapons. He never used one where another
would have done better. He had a dreadful instinct for finding out the
weak place in his adversary’s armour and logic. “God make my enemies
ridiculous!” was one of his few prayers. It was granted in full measure.
But if he was a dangerous and an untiring foe, he was not an ungenerous
one. In this case, Jore was certainly the aggressor. He had played
Voltaire false in the matter of the “English Letters.” He had endangered
the author’s safety and condemned him to exile. He wrote now from the
Bastille saying that if Voltaire would avow himself the author of the
book, he, Jore, would be released. Voltaire was as quick to compassion
as he was quick to anger. If he had hated a pigmy like Jore with a
fierceness he should have kept for a worthier foe, the moment the man
was fallen, his enemy became his friend. He wrote the letter asked of
him, declaring himself to be the writer of the abominable thing. Then
Jore demanded fourteen hundred francs, the cost of the confiscated
edition. On April 15th Voltaire hurried up to Paris. There he saw Jore,
and, though denying that he had any claim upon him, offered him half the
sum he had demanded. Jore refused it: brought a lawsuit against
Voltaire, and published a defamatory account of him. Voltaire’s quick
passions were up in arms in a moment. He was as much agog to get at his
enemy as a terrier is agog for a rat. He would have shaken the wretched
little bookseller in just such a terrier fashion, if he could have got
hold of him. But all Voltaire’s friends advised compromise with such
insistence that he at last yielded. He spent twelve breathless indignant
weeks in the capital. He had to pay Jore five hundred francs, in lieu of
the fourteen hundred he had demanded. “I sign my shame,” he wrote. But
he signed and paid all the same. He returned to Cirey in July sick in
mind and body, baffled, bitter, and sore. In a year or two Jore
professed penitence, and lived for the rest of his life on a small
pension allowed him--by Voltaire.
While he was in Paris, two seats had fallen vacant in the Academy. But
what chance could there be of one for the hero of a public scandal, a
notorious firebrand, like Voltaire? Villars and Richelieu did their best
for him--in vain.
He professed himself gaily indifferent, and _was_ bitterly disappointed.
He had to further postpone too the production of his “Prodigal Son.” He
could not give that son, he said, so unpopular a father.
The man needed rest after his battles. He had soon what was far better
than rest to one of his vivid temperament--a victory. In August began
his correspondence with Prince Frederick of Prussia, afterwards
Frederick the Great. It comprises many letters remarkable on both sides,
extraordinary on Voltaire’s. It lasted for many years--before they met,
in the early golden days of an almost lover-like infatuation--and long
after they had quarrelled and parted. Voltaire was not the man at any
time to be insensible to the honour of being the correspondent of one
who was “almost a king.” He was a great deal too impressionable not to
be in some sort the child of his age. In all his glowing dreams of
liberty, he never wished royalty abolished--only restrained,
enlightened, ennobled. And behold! the means were given him now, himself
to show a king the way in which kings should walk--to influence a man
who would influence a great people--to teach Europe, by a master to whom
it _must_ listen, those emancipating truths which were the passion of
Voltaire’s own soul. What an opportunity! It was characteristic of the
man that he realised and seized it at once.
“Believe that there have never been any good kings save those who, like
you, have begun by teaching themselves, by knowing men, by loving the
truth, by hating persecution and superstition. There is no prince who,
thus thinking, cannot bring back the golden age to his country. Why do
so few sovereigns seek this great good? You know why it is, monseigneur;
it is because they all think more of royalty than of humanity.”
These words occur in Voltaire’s very first letter, written August 26,
1736. They are the text of all the others. If there were compliments and
flatteries, French grace and _politesse_, and the adulation of the
“Solomon of the North” somewhat overdone, those were the inevitable
courtly trappings which adorned all letters of the time. The monitor of
Solomon, as shown in that very first letter, knew himself to be the
monitor; and, for all that exquisite turn of phrase and those pretty
eulogies, was going to remain the monitor to the end. The flattery was
by no means all humbug either. This royal pupil was the aptest that ever
man had. He answered his Voltaire, not unworthily. At five-and-twenty he
was himself philosopher and thinker: as great a natural genius as he was
a natural barbarian. All learning and cultivation left him as much the
one as the other.
The correspondence, once started, went on its way with a will. On
Voltaire’s side it was from the first profoundly philosophic. His style
was as clear, easy, and lucid when he wrote on the deepest and subtlest
problems of free-will and personal identity as when he wrote scandal to
Theriot or _bagatelles_ to Mademoiselle Quinault. He wrote on the most
abstruse subjects with a limpid simplicity of language, unachieved by
any other writer before or since. It is the greatest glory of Voltaire
as an author in general, as well as the author of the letters to
Frederick the Great, that he made profound truths, common truths, and
the knowledge that had been the heritage of a few, the heritage of all.
Madame du Châtelet read the letters, of course, before they were
despatched from Cirey. One fills eleven large pages of print and is
practically an Essay on Personal Liberty--reasonable enough, said
Madame, to bring its author to the stake. Theriot showed Frederick’s
letters about the salons of Paris: the prudent Voltaire thinking that
the correspondence with a king might just as well do him all the good it
could, and proclaim to his enemies that _all_ temporal powers did not
hate and fear him. At Cirey, the royal association certainly gave
pleasure at first. Madame was singularly superior to kingly attractions:
but Frederick was a thinker as well as a prince and loved philosophy as
she did. She had not begun to look upon him as a rival in her lover’s
affections. In his very first letter Voltaire had declined an invitation
to be his visitor on the score that friends should always be preferred
before kings.
The bloom of that summer of 1736 came and went on Cirey. Jore was hardly
silenced and by no means forgotten when Voltaire flung aside his
princely philosopher, as it were, to reply to a long, scandalous, and
very personal attack which bitter old J. B. Rousseau, infuriated by the
“Temple of Taste,” had made upon his rival, in a publication called the
“Bibliothèque Française.” That attack dated from the May of this year.
It was not until September 20th Voltaire decided to answer it. He had
been very patient, or had crouched awhile for a surer spring. His answer
is a masterpiece of gay and biting satire. “Rousseau has printed in your
journal a long letter on me in which, happily for me, there are only
calumnies, and, unfortunately for him, there is no wit. What makes the
thing so bad, gentlemen, is that it is entirely his own ... it is the
second time in his life he has had any imagination. He has no success
when he is original.... As for his verses, I can only wish for the sake
of all the honest people he attacks, that he should go on writing in the
same style.”
And in answer to Rousseau’s insinuations on Voltaire’s origin, “I have a
valet who is his near relative and a very honest man. The poor youth
begs me every day to pardon his relation’s bad verses.”
And in reply to that little story Rousseau had once circulated about
Voltaire’s profane behaviour at a mass, “Do you think ... it sits well
on the author of the ‘Moïsade’ to accuse me of having talked in church
sixteen years ago?... Thank God, that Rousseau is as clumsy as he is
hypocritical. Without this counterpoise he would be too dangerous.” The
letter finishes by recalling all the humiliating episodes in Rousseau’s
life he would have most wished forgotten.
From which it will be seen that Voltaire did not scruple to employ his
adversaries’ weapons--and to use them with a most deadly skill and
finish.
On October 10, 1736, a play called “Britannicus” could not be played at
the Théâtre Français in Paris on account of the illness of the principal
actress. A new comedy called “The Prodigal Son” by an anonymous author
was therefore produced in its stead, and performed to a crowded house
with enormous success.
It had been acted already by a company beaten up in that desolate
neighbourhood of Cirey. Voltaire had written reams of letters about it
to Mademoiselle Quinault, filled with rather doubtful jokes--which were
apparently, however, to the taste of Mademoiselle and of the period. The
“Prodigal” is in verse and five acts, and perhaps reaches a higher level
than most of Voltaire’s easy comedies. There were many surmises as to
its authorship. Voltaire himself suggested that it was by one Gresset.
Before he withdrew the veil of anonymity, “The Prodigal Son” had been
lavishly praised by most of its father’s enemies.
He had other pleasures just now, too, besides that success, to distract
him from the thoughts of his health which, as usual, “went to the
devil.” “Émilie, reading Newton, ... terraces fifty feet wide,
balconies, porcelain baths, yellow and silver rooms, niches for Chinese
trifles, all that takes a long time,” he wrote to Theriot. Passing
travellers too came to Cirey, and told travellers’ tales about it when
they returned to Paris. In this year, 1736, Voltaire began an immense
correspondence with a Parisian agent of his, an Abbé Moussinot, to whom
he wrote about investments and speculations, and whom he commissioned to
buy tapestries, diamond shoe-buckles, and scrubbing brushes; reflecting
telescopes and hair powder; thermometers, barometers, scent, sponges,
dusters--everything in the world. “If you do not want to commit suicide,
always have something to do” was one of his own axioms.
Even now, unfortunately for him, all these varied occupations did not
give him so much to do that he could not read, re-read, delight in, and
talk about until it became public property, a certain little
_bizarrerie_ of his versatile mind called “Le Mondain.” A gay little
piece is the “Mondain,” three or four pages long, in very flowing verse,
a little impertinent, perhaps, and quite volatile and careless. It was
written about the same time as “Alzire.” It contains a flippant allusion
to Adam and Eve, and the famous expression “le superflu, chose très
nécessaire.” Those are the most memorable things in it. The most
memorable thing about it is the fury of persecution it brought down on
the author and the storm of hatred it excited. The offence was supposed
to lie in the allusion to our first parents. The real offence was the
name and reputation of Voltaire.
On December 21, 1736, he received a warning letter from his friend
d’Argental in Paris, telling him that the “Mondain” rendered its
author’s position once more unsafe. It is said that the authorities
thought of warning the Marquis that he must no longer give refuge to
such a firebrand. Voltaire and Madame had a hurried consultation. Madame
wept not a little: for though she was a philosopher she was also a
woman, and as a woman, and after her capacity, she loved Voltaire. She
strongly opposed the idea of his taking refuge with Prince Frederick:
but agreed that he must fly across the frontier. She went with him as
far as four-mile distant Vassy, and they parted there, with many tears.
The man’s heart was hot with anger and bitterness. The old serpent of
injustice and oppression entered into every Eden he found. Madame only
remembered that she loved him and that he must leave her. The strange
_convenances_ of the day, which permitted so many things, had a few
rules, and those few had to be observed rigidly to make up for many
laxities. If the Marquise could have gone with Voltaire to England or
Prussia, all would have been well. But that was not permitted. Neither
she could go with him nor he stay with her. They said good-bye in a
bitter cold. It was winter--the winter had come so soon! A few days
later there arrived in Brussels, in deep snow, one M. Renol, merchant.
No personal injustice which he ever suffered so deeply affected Voltaire
as this one. In some cases if he did not deserve, he at least tempted,
the anger of the authorities. But here! “Is it possible that anyone can
have taken the thing seriously?” he wrote. “It needs the absurdity and
denseness of the golden age to find it dangerous, and the cruelty of the
age of iron to persecute the author of a _badinage_ so innocent.” He
went to Antwerp, to Amsterdam, and to Leyden. At Brussels “Alzire” was
performed in his honour--for all that he was travelling _incognito_, and
M. Renol, merchant, had no reason to be more interested in “Alzire” than
anybody else. At Leyden crowds flocked to see him, and he was introduced
to Boerhaave, the great doctor. He was at Amsterdam in January, 1737,
received with all honour, “living as a philosopher,” studying much,
working at Newton--as Voltaire alone knew how to work--at any hour of
the night and day, passionately, thoroughly, devotedly. He superintended
the printing of his “Elements of Newton’s Philosophy” then in the Dutch
press. He tried to forget. But he could not. The offence was rank and
smelt to heaven. He was abroad until March. Then in answer to the tears
and prayers of his Marquise, he gave out he was going to England--and
went to Cirey. But for those tears, but for that faith unfaithful which
kept him falsely true, he _would_ have gone to England as he said. “If
friendship stronger than all other feelings had not recalled me, I would
willingly have spent the rest of my days in a country where at least my
enemies could not hurt me: and where caprice, superstition, and the
power of a minister need not be feared.... I have always told you that
if my father, brother, or son were Prime Minister in a despotic state I
would leave it to-morrow. But Madame du Châtelet is more to me than
father, brother, or son.” She was. She had been not a little sore and
wretched while he was away. Prudence had made his letters perforce so
cold! “He calls me ‘Madame’!” The overwhelming vigour of her affection
brought him back to her. But even _her_ entreaties for prudence could
not keep him from writing a “Defence of Le Mondain,” and an answer to
the criticisms thereon, called the “Use of Life.” His heart was hot
within him. Fifteen years later the fever burnt still.
“You will say fifteen years have passed since it all happened” he wrote
to d’Argental. “No! only one day. For great wrongs are always recent
wounds.”