“CANDIDE,” AND “ÉCRASEZ L’INFÂME”
On February 10, 1759, Voltaire’s “Natural Law,” Helvétius’s book “On the
Mind,” and six others were publicly burnt in Paris by the hangman.
In March the “Encyclopædia” was suspended.
“Natural Law,” it will be remembered, was nothing but a seeking for an
answer to that everlasting question “What is truth?”
“On the Mind” was the naïve expression of the materialism of the
wittiest freethinker in Paris, Helvétius, _maître d’hôtel_ to the Queen
and Farmer-General. But the Dauphin showed it to his mother, and it
received the compliment of burning. “What a fuss about an omelette!”
said Voltaire contemptuously. The destruction of his own “Natural Law”
disturbed him as little. “Burn a good book, and the cinders will spring
up and strike your face” was one of his own axioms. From the flames of
its funeral pyre, the thing would rise a phœnix gifted with immortal
life and fame.
But the suspension of the “Encyclopædia” hit him hard.
Since the attempted assassination of the King by Damiens the laws
against the freedom of the press had been growing daily more severe.
True, the poor creature had had a Bible in his pocket, but the churchmen
argued somehow that it was the New Learning which had guided the dagger.
Then France had had reverses in war. Suppose these misfortunes all came
from these cursed philosophers and their “Encyclopædia”! As, later,
whole nations attributed the rot in the crops and the ague in the bones
of their children to the withering influence of that great little
Corporal, hundreds of miles away from them, so in the eighteenth
century in France a great party in the State attributed to the extension
of learning every disaster which their own folly or foolhardiness
brought upon them.
They turned, and brought all their power, influence, and money against
the Encyclopædists. D’Alembert was no fighter. Student, recluse, and
gentle friend--he was not one of those who could write with a pen in one
hand and a sword in the other. “I do not know if the ‘Encyclopædia’ will
be continued,” he wrote to Voltaire as early as the January of 1758,
“but I am sure it will not be continued by me”; and though the
pugnacious little warrior of Délices wrote and passionately urged his
peaceful friend not to do what his absurd enemies wished--not to let
them enjoy “that insolent victory”--still, d’Alembert withdrew. On
February 9, 1759, Voltaire wrote that he seemed to see the Inquisition
condemning Galileo.
But it was as he said. The cinders from the burning sprang up and burnt
the burners. They could mutilate the “Encyclopædia,” but they could not
kill it. Its very mutilations attracted interest, and “Natural Law” and
“On the Mind” continued to be sold--in open secrecy--a hundred times
more than ever.
It will not have been forgotten that with “Natural Law” had originally
been published “The Disaster of Lisbon”; and that the doctrines of
“Lisbon” had been refuted, by the request of the Genevans, in a long,
wild, rambling letter by Jean Jacques Rousseau, wherein that absurd
person had pointed out that if we lived in deserts, not towns, the
houses would not fall upon us, because there would not be houses to
fall.
Answer a fool according to his folly! A few gay bantering lines were all
Voltaire’s reply at the moment. To strike quickly--or wait long--this
man could do both. He loved best to strike at once; but if he could have
patience and wait to gather his weapons, to barb his arrows, to poison
his darts, why, he was of nature the more deadly. This time he had
waited long. The bantering note was but a sop thrown to his impatience.
Rousseau’s Letter on Optimism bears the date
[Illustration: VOLTAIRE
_From the Bust by Houdon_]
of August, 1756. It was not till the early part of 1759 that there crept
out stealthily, secretly, quietly, the gayest little volatile laughing
romance called “Candide.”
Written in some keen moment of inspiration--perhaps at the Elector
Palatine’s, perhaps at Délices, where, it matters not--in that brief
masterpiece of literature Voltaire brought out all his batteries at once
and confronted the foe with that ghoulish mockery, that bantering jest,
and that deadly levity which few could face and live.
If the optimists had talked down the passionate reasonings of the “Poem
on the Disaster of Lisbon” with that reiterated “All is well,” “All
chance, direction which thou canst not see--all partial evil, universal
good,” “Candide’s” laugh drowned those affirmations--so loudly and so
often affirmed that the affirmers had come to mistake them for argument.
In this novel of two hundred pages Voltaire withered by a grin the
cheap, current, convenient optimism of the leisured classes of his day,
and confounded Pope as well as Rousseau. This time he did not argue with
their theories. He only exposed them. In that searching light, in that
burning sunshine, the comfortable dogmas of the neat couplets of the
“Essay on Man” blackened and died, and Rousseau was shown forth the
laughing-stock of the nations.
One of the few literary classics which is not only still talked about
but still sometimes read, is “Candide.” Nothing grows old-fashioned
sooner than humour. The jests which amuse one age bore and depress the
next. But it is part of Voltaire’s genius in general, and of “Candide”
in particular, that its wit is almost as witty to-day as when it was
written. It still trips and dances on feet which never age or tire.
Nothing is more astounding in it than what one critic has called its
“fresh and unflagging spontaneity”--its “surpassing invention.” Its
vigour is such as no time can touch. It reads like the work of a
superabundant youth. Yet Voltaire was actually sixty-four when he wrote
it; and if indeed “we live in deeds, not years: in thought, not breaths:
in feelings, not in figures on a dial,” he was a thousand.
The story is, briefly, that of a young man brought up in implicit
belief in the everything-for-the-best doctrine, who goes out into a
world where he meets with a hundred adventures which give it the lie.
Life is a bad bargain, but one can make the best of it. That is the
moral of “Candide.” “What I know,” says Candide, “is that we must
cultivate our garden.” “Let us work without reasoning: that is the only
way to render life supportable.”
As children read the “Gulliver’s Travels” of that past master of irony,
Jonathan Swift, as the most innocent and amusing of fairy tales, so can
“Candide” be read as a rollicking farce and as nothing else in the
world.
Who knows, indeed, when he puts down that marvellous novelette, whether
to laugh at those inimitable traits of the immortal Dr. Pangloss--“noses
have been made to carry spectacles, therefore we have spectacles; legs
have been made for stockings, therefore we have stockings; pigs were
made to be eaten, and therefore we have pork all the year round”--or to
weep over the wretchedness of a humanity which perforce consoles itself
with lies, and, too miserable to face its misery, pretends that all is
well?
One woman, with her heart wrung by that cruel mockery, speaks of
“Candide’s” “diabolical gaiety.” “It seems to be written by a being of
another nature than our own, indifferent to our fate, pleased with our
sufferings, and laughing like a demon or a monkey at the miseries of
that humankind with which he has nothing in common.” Some have found in
it the blasphemies of a devil against the tender and ennobling
Christianity which has been the faith and the hope of sorrowing
millions; and others discover in it only one of the most potent of
arguments for embracing that Christianity--the confession that no other
system so consolatory can be found. To one reader it is the supreme
expression of a genius who, wherever he stands, stands alone--“as high
as mere wit can go”; to another, shorn of its indecency, it is, like
“Gulliver,” but a _bizarre_ absurdity for youth; while a third finds it
“most useful as a philosophical work, because it is read by people who
would never read philosophy.”
Perhaps the genius of “Candide” lies partly in the fact that it is both
serious and frivolous, ghoulish and gay, tragedy and comedy; and equally
perfect as the one or the other.
Voltaire assigned “this little sort of romance” to that convenient
person, the Chevalier de Mouhy, on whom, in 1738, had been fathered the
“Préservatif.” The real author declared that the thing was much too
frivolous for him to have written. He had read it, to be sure. “The more
it makes me laugh the more sorry I am it is assigned to me.” Almost
every letter of this spring of 1759 contains a mocking allusion to
_optimism_. “Candide” was much to the fore in its writer’s mind.
On March 2d, the Council of Geneva condemned the book to be burnt; and
once more, as in the case of the “Pucelle,” Voltaire watched a bonfire
with a very twisted smile. He revenged himself by flooding Geneva with
anonymous irreligious pamphlets with such religious names--“Christian
Dialogues” and “The Gospel of the Day”--as to deceive the very elect.
But it was not only his suspected paternity in the case of “Candide,”
but a suspected paternity of an even more dangerous child, that
prevented Voltaire in this spring giving up his whole soul peacefully to
rebuilding Ferney and laying out gardens. Frederick was in the midst of
a disastrous campaign; but, unfortunately, no disaster stopped him
writing to Voltaire or composing verses. Wilhelmina’s death had only
healed the old wounds for a while. They broke out afresh. In March this
strange Damon and Pythias were again squabbling over that ancient bone
of contention, Maupertuis; and then, as inconsistently as if they had
been a couple of schoolgirls, passionately regretting their old amity.
“I shall soon die without having seen you,” wrote Voltaire on March
25th. “You do not care, and I shall try not to care either.... I can
live neither with you nor without you. I do not speak to the King or the
hero: that is the affair of sovereigns. I speak to him who has
fascinated me, whom I have loved, and with whom I am always angry.” Then
they remembered Frankfort and Freytag, and began snarling and growling
again.
And then--then--a book of Frederick’s poems which abused Louis XV. and
Madame de Pompadour was opened in the post on its way from Frederick to
Voltaire. And in a trice Voltaire is quaking lest he should be thought
to have inspired, or positively written, verse so dangerous and
disrespectful.
No emergency had ever yet robbed him of his cleverness. He took the
packet to the French envoy at Geneva and showed him the broken seal; and
then, by the envoy’s advice, sent the whole thing to Choiseul, the head
of the French Ministry. Choiseul was himself a verse-maker; he wrote a
virulent versified satire upon Frederick and sent it to Voltaire. “Tell
your King, if he publishes his poems I shall publish mine.”
Voltaire says that if he had wished to amuse himself he might have seen
the Kings of France and Prussia engaged in a war of verses. But he was
the friend of peace as well as the friend of Frederick. He begged
Frederick not to shut every door of reconciliation with the King of
France by publishing that ode; and added, that in mortal fear of its
being attributed to Uncle Voltaire, Niece Denis had burnt it. Frederick
would not have been human had he not immediately felt convinced that
those ashes contained the finest lines he had ever written. But they
_were_ ashes. The episode closed.
On July 27, 1759, Maupertuis died at Bâle, “of a repletion of pride,”
said Voltaire. Akakia, busy with his history of “Peter the Great,” and
with touching up “Tancred,” or his “Chevaliers” as he called it
sometimes, must needs push them aside and shoot an arrow or two of his
barbed wit at that poor enemy’s dead body. “Enjoy your hermitage,”
Frederick wrote back to him gravely. “Do not trouble the ashes of those
who are at peace in the grave.... Sacrifice your vengeance on the shrine
of your own reputation ... and let the greatest genius in France be also
the most generous of his nation.” The counsel was just and noble. Alas!
it was even more needed than Frederick guessed. At this very time
Voltaire was writing his secret “Memoirs for the life of M. de
Voltaire.” They were not published till after his death. They were never
meant to be published at all. They contain what Morley has well called
“a prose lampoon” on the King’s private life, “which is one of the
bitterest libels that malice ever prompted.”
Its incomprehensible author was still actually compiling it when, for
the third time, he took up his _rôle_ of peacemaker between France and
Frederick.
This time, Tencin and Richelieu having been tried in vain, the medium
was to be Choiseul, Choiseul being approached by Voltaire’s angel,
d’Argental. The moment was favourable. The campaign of 1759 was wholly
disastrous to Frederick: and on August 12th he was beaten by the united
armies at Kunersdorf. Chased from his States, “surrounded by enemies,
beaten by the Russians, unable to replenish an exhausted treasury,”
“Luc,” as Voltaire phrased it, “was still Luc.” He still kept his head
above the foaming waters that would have engulfed any other swimmer.
“Very embarrassed, and not less embarrassing to other people;
astonishing and impoverishing Europe, and writing verses,” Frederick as
if to give himself time--as if, though he never meant to yield to such
advances, he yet did not dare to openly refuse them--coquetted with the
peace offers of M. de Choiseul, sent through that “Bureau d’adresse,”
Voltaire. It is not a little wonderful that Voltaire, with his itching
fingers for action, could suffer himself to be a “Bureau d’adresse,” a
passive medium, even for a while. But he did. An immense correspondence
passed between himself and Frederick--for the benefit of Choiseul.
Frederick was alluded to as Mademoiselle Pestris or Pertris: and very
coy was Mademoiselle over the matter. Shall it be peace? shall it not?
It was a delicate negotiation, said that “Bureau d’adresse,” very truly.
It was like the play of two cats--each with velvet paws to hide its
claws.
It came to nothing. Though, perhaps, when in December there appeared in
Paris a book entitled “The Works of the Philosopher of Sans-Souci,”
containing those freethinking effusions a Most Christian King had
written under the rose, and which he would not at all wish to see
daylight, Choiseul’s claw had been active in the matter. Fortunately
Voltaire could not be suspected. Had not Freytag taken from him at
Frankfort that “Œuvre de Poëshie du Roi Mon Maître,” which was none
other than the “Works of the Philosopher of Sans-Souci” under a
different name? Still, the year 1760 opened as 1759 had done, with Damon
and Pythias still sparring at each other. “You have embroiled me for
ever with the King of France, you have lost me my posts and pensions,
you have ill-treated me at Frankfort, me and an innocent woman,” writes
Voltaire to Frederick from peaceful Tourney in April, 1760.
And in May Frederick wrote back. “If you were not dealing with a fool in
love with your genius,” what might I not do and say? As it is--“Once for
all, let me hear no more of that niece who bores me, and has nothing but
her uncle to cover her defects.”
The niece who bored Frederick must have been very nearly as bored
herself throughout the remainder of this year 1759 as she confessed to
have been at the beginning. Uncle Voltaire was always so engrossed with
writing, or with those stupid farms and gardens. “The more you work on
your land, the more you will love it,” he had written to Madame de
Fontaine in the summer. “The corn one has sown oneself is worth far more
than what one gets from other people’s granaries.” And then, there were
so few visitors.
Valette, a needy, clever, unsatisfactory acquaintance of d’Alembert’s,
was at Délices in December; and during the year a man named d’Aumard had
arrived on a visit. But that was all.
D’Aumard was a young soldier cousin of Voltaire’s mother. Of very
ordinary abilities, and morals rather below the very low average of his
day, that distant cousinship was the only claim he had upon Voltaire’s
notice. But it was more than sufficient. Voltaire had already sent him
presents of money through Madame Denis, and made him a promise of a
pension for life. Directly he arrived at Délices he was attacked by what
was at first taken to be rheumatism. Tronchin was called in. Voltaire
sent d’Aumard to Aix for the waters. But neither the first physician nor
the most fashionable cure in Europe was of any avail. D’Aumard became a
helpless and hopeless cripple. In 1761, Voltaire said that it required
four persons to move him from one bed to another. In this condition he
lived in Voltaire’s house for at least ten years, and finally died
there. His host engaged in a long correspondence about his case with the
surgeon of the Royal Footguards, and entered into every detail with
infinite pains and minuteness. To a busy and active Voltaire the fate of
this young man, shut out of all work and interest--hearing, as he lay on
the bed from which he was never to rise, the stir and movement of a life
in which he could never join--seemed peculiarly pitiable. He makes a
hundred sympathetic allusions to him. That his own conduct was
infinitely generous he seems to have wholly lost sight of in the fact
that d’Aumard’s fate was infinitely sad. Yet Voltaire had a reward if he
wanted one. To Madame du Deffand’s question if life were worth living he
could reply, “Yes. I know a man completely paralysed who loves it, to
folly.” The man was d’Aumard.
In this year Voltaire obtained, after the exercise of even more than his
usual persistence, and after working himself and his friends to death to
attain his aim, the grant of two letters-patent for his lands of Tourney
and Ferney. He set great value on these letters as declaring him a
French subject.
Also in this year he heard of the loss of that very old English friend
of his, Falkener. In 1774, Falkener’s two sons came to stay with him at
Ferney.
He still kept himself well _au courant_ of English affairs and English
literature.
It was in 1759 he wrote to Madame du Deffand that there was nothing
passable in “Tom Jones” but the character of the barber; and of “A Tale
of a Tub” as “a treasure-house of wit.” He also read--and yawned
over--“Clarissa Harlowe” and “Pamela”; and in 1760 he was criticising
“Tristram Shandy.” No other great Frenchman of his day got into the
heart of English literature and English character as Voltaire did. “An
Englishman who knows France well and a Frenchman who knows England well
are both the better for it,” is one of the shrewdest of his sayings, and
he said many shrewd things, on the two races. “The English know how to
think; the French know how to please.” “We are the whipped cream of
Europe. There are not twenty Frenchmen who understand Newton.”
But there was another foreign country besides England which was engaging
his attention now--Russia.
In this 1759 he produced the first volume of that “History of Peter the
Great,” which he had undertaken to write two years earlier, in 1757, at
the request of Peter’s daughter, Elizabeth.
In the spring of 1717, when Arouet was an imprudent young Paris wit of
three-and-twenty, awaiting his first introduction to the Bastille, he
had seen the great Peter in the flesh, being shown the shops of the
capital, the lion of its season--“neither of us thinking then that I
should become his historian.”
But directly Elizabeth made the suggestion, a Voltaire of sixty-three
had embraced it with an enthusiasm which would not have been astonishing
in an Arouet of twenty-three, and set to work at once.
The subject bristled with difficulties. First it involved an enormous
correspondence with Schouvaloff, the Russian minister. Schouvaloff was
ready and eager to shower maps, medals, and documents upon the
historian. But the medals, as the historian pointed out, were not of the
slightest use; the maps were inadequate; and the documents had too often
been tampered with.
Then, too, there was an immeasurable difficulty, for a writer who wanted
to tell the truth, in the fact that his hero’s own daughter was not only
living, but had commissioned him to write the work. When Frederick
wanted to know what in the world made Voltaire think of writing the
history of the wolves and bears of Siberia, he represented the point of
view from which most people then regarded Russia. A cold, ugly,
barbarous, uninteresting place--what in the world can you have to say
about it? The veil of tragedy and romance which now hangs before that
great canvas did not give it the potent charm of mystery in the
eighteenth century. Only Voltaire would then have dared to write “Russia
under Peter the Great,” and only Voltaire could have made it readable.
He took a flying leap into that sea of difficulties, and came up to the
top safely as usual. He gave Schouvaloff a plan of the work in advance.
First, there are to be no unnecessary details of battles; secondly, the
thing will be called not “The History of Peter the Great,” but “Russia
under Peter I.,” as giving me greater liberty, and explaining to my
readers in advance the real aim of the book; thirdly, Peter’s little
weaknesses are not to be concealed when necessary to expose them.
The rough sketch was bold, and so was the finished picture. But to its
boldness were united that grace and charm by which Voltaire could make
disagreeable truths sound like compliments. If to the world generally
Peter was, and should be, but the “wisest and greatest of savages,”
“only a king,” and a badly brought up one at that--to Russia he was, and
ought to be, a great man and a hero; and, Peter apart altogether--and
there is a good deal of the work from which Peter _is_ entirely
apart--the book “revealed Russia to Europe and herself,” and brought
that great country to the knowledge and the interest of other nations.
The style sometimes bears trace of the difficulties its author had to
overcome--the fact that the subject was chosen for him, not _by_ him. “I
doubt,” he wrote to Madame du Deffand, “if it will be as amusing as the
‘Life of Charles XII.,’ for Peter was only extraordinarily wise, while
Charles was extraordinarily foolish.” All the time he was writing it,
“Tancred,” Ferney, “Candide,” Frederick, were calling his attention away
from it.
Not the less, the History was a very successfully executed order, with
which the orderer was so pleased that in 1761 she sent the author her
portrait set in diamonds.
To the end of 1759 also belongs a very different work of Voltaire’s--one
of those spontaneous, impulsive, rollicking, daring things which must
have been no little relief to his _méchanceté_ to turn to from those
grave ploddings through Schouvaloff’s documents. Encouraged by that
burning of “Natural Law” and its companion volumes, and by the
suppression of the “Encyclopædia” in the early part of the year, in
November a weekly Jesuit organ called the “Journal de Trévoux,” edited
by one Berthier, furiously assailed not only “Natural Law,” which fires
could not destroy, but the “Encyclopædia,” which prohibitions could not
suppress, and all the works of enlightenment in France. Voltaire had
always an inconsistent _tendresse_ for the Jesuits. They had been good
to him in his school days: and among them he still numbered some of his
friends. But this thing was too monstrous! Voltaire attacked it with
sharpest ridicule, and wrote anonymously that scathing pamphlet called
“The Narrative of the Sickness, Confession, Death, and Re-appearance of
the Jesuit Berthier.” This he followed by another pamphlet, “The
Narrative of Brother Grasse.” Both were but burlesques. True, there was
a hit in every line; and then, if not now, every arrow went home. But
the real significance of the pamphlets is in the fact that they were a
declaration of war. Gardens and architecture, farms and beehives--in
these things is to be found happiness perhaps. But there has been no
great man in the world who ever thought happiness enough. That hatred of
intolerance, that passion for freedom which had been the motive power of
a young and struggling Arouet, was still the motive power of this
affluent, comfortable Voltaire of sixty-five. To be sure, it is easier
to feel sympathy with the oppressed and the needy when one is oneself
downtrodden and poor: and something more difficult when one is oneself
prosperous and independent. It must be accounted to Voltaire for
righteousness that when he no longer suffered himself, the sufferings of
others appealed to him only with a double force. It was in those smiling
days of Délices and Ferney that he framed his battle-cry and formulated
the creed of all the philosophers, and the aim and the conviction of his
own life, into one brief phrase--_Écrasez l’infâme_.
Friend and foe still remember him by that motto. The one has idly
forgotten, and the other carefully misunderstands, what it means and
meant. To many Christians, “_Écrasez l’infâme_” is but the blasphemous
outcry against the dearest and most sacred mysteries of their religion;
and _l’infâme_ means Christ.
But to Voltaire, if it meant Christianity at all, it meant that which
was taught in Rome in the eighteenth century, and not by the Sea of
Galilee in the first. If it _was_ Christianity at all, it was not the
Christianity of Christ. _L’infâme did_ mean religion, but it meant the
religion which lit the fires of Smithfield and prompted the tortures of
the Inquisition; which terrified feeble brains to madness with the
burning flames of a material hell, and flung to the barren uselessness
of the cloister hundreds of unwilling victims, quick and meet for the
life for which they had been created.
_L’infâme_ was the religion which enforced its doctrines by the sword,
the fire, and the prison; which massacred on the Night of St.
Bartholomew; and, glossing lightly over royal sins, refused its last
consolations to dying Jansenists who would not accept the Bull
Unigenitus. It was the religion which thrust itself between wife and
husband in the person of the confessor--himself condemned to an
unnatural life which not one in a thousand can live honestly and aright;
it was the religion of Indulgences, and the rich: for those who could
pay for the remission of their sins and for large impunity to sin
afresh; it was the religion which served as a cloak for tyranny and
oppression, ground down the face of the poor, and kept wretchedness
wretched for ever.
And above all, _l’infâme_ was that spirit which was the natural enemy of
all learning and advancement; which loved darkness and hated light
because its deeds were evil; which found the better knowledge of His
works, treason to God; and an exercise of the reason and the judgment He
had given, an insult to the Giver.
If there was ever a chance for the foolish to become learned, _l’infâme_
deprived them of it. If the light fought its way through the gross
darkness of superstition, _l’infâme_ quenched it. It prohibited Newton;
burnt Bayle; and cursed the “Encyclopædia.” If men were once
enlightened, _l’infâme_ would be cast down from the high places where it
sat--as Pope or as King, as Calvinist or as Cardinal; but always as the
enemy of that Justice which drives out oppression, as the sun drives out
the night.
_L’infâme_ cannot be translated by any single word. But if it must be,
the best rendering of it is Intolerance.
No one can have any knowledge of the career or of the character of
Voltaire without seeing that this Thing, to which in the year 1759 was
first given the name of _Infâme_, was his one, great, lifelong enemy.
Loathing of it coursed in his _bourgeois_ blood and was bred in his
bones. The boy who had seen France starve to pay for the Sun King’s
wars, and Paris persecuted to please his mistress and his confessor, had
felt surge in him the first waves of that tireless indignation which was
to turn a courtier into a reformer, and make a light soul, deep. By the
time he himself became the Voice crying in the wilderness of men’s
sorrows, the utterer of hard truths, _l’infâme_ had imprisoned,
persecuted, and exiled him. And who is there who does not better hate
wrong-doing when he has himself been wronged? He had revealed God to
sages through Newton; and the hangman burnt the “English Letters.” He
had studied history, especially the history of the religious wars, and
he knew what _l’infâme_ had done in the past as well as in the present.
He declared, with that extraordinary mixture of levity and passion which
is his alone, that he always had an access of fever on St. Bartholomew’s
Day. He had seen the works of Boyer--fanatic and tyrant--the product of
a shameful system, and not the less harmful in fact because he was
honest in intention. He had seen _l’infâme_ prompt Damiens’s knife; and
then, in its besotted inconsequence, avenge the crime of its own scholar
by prohibiting all the works of enlightenment in France.
In 1757, in writing to d’Alembert, Voltaire had first given _l’infâme_ a
name--the Phantom. A few days later he called it the Colossus. Under any
name a d’Alembert would recognise it. On May 18, 1759, Frederick the
Great spoke of it by that title it was to bear for ever, in one of those
bitter yearning letters he wrote to his old friend. “You will still
caress _l’infâme_ with one hand and scratch it with the other; you will
treat it as you have treated me and all the world.” And in June Voltaire
replied: “Your Majesty reproaches me with sometimes caressing
_l’infâme_. My God, no! I only work to extirpate it.” And the next
year--June 3, 1760--“I want you to crush _l’infâme_; that is the great
point. It must be reduced to the same condition as it is in England.
You can do it if you will. It is the greatest service one can render to
humankind.”
Henceforward, his allusions to it in his letters became more and more
frequent. Sometimes, he abbreviated it to _Écr. l’Inf._ Sometimes he
wrote in one corner _“É. l’I._” “The first of duties is to annihilate
_l’inf._; confound _l’inf._ as much as you can.”
“This Mr. _Écrlinf_ does not write badly, said these worthy people.” One
of his theories was that truths cannot be too often insisted on. “Rub it
in! rub it in!” he would cry. He rubbed in his _infâme_. Now in
passionate earnest, now in jest, now cynically, now bitterly, he alluded
to it at all times and seasons and to all kinds of persons. To
Damilaville, who was to take Theriot’s place as his correspondent and
who himself loathed _l’infâme_ with a deadly intensity, Voltaire hardly
wrote a letter without that “Crush the monster!” It was a catchword at
last. “I end all my letters by saying _Écr. l’inf._, as Cato always
said, That is my opinion and Carthage must be destroyed.” By it, he
heated the zeal of his fellow-workers in the cause; quickened the
“phlegmatic perseverance” of d’Alembert; and rallied to new effort
Helvétius, Marmontel, Holbach, and a dozen lesser men.
It has been seen that he had loathed the Thing, a nameless monster, for
fifty years. The insults of the “Journal de Trévoux” were the final spur
to action. If Berthier had not pushed him to extremities, no doubt some
other of “those serpents called Jesuits” would have done it equally
effectually. The time was ripe; and Voltaire was ripe for the time. He
flung down the glove at last and declared upon _l’infâme_ an open war,
which was to be war to the knife till he had no longer breath in his
body, and the sword--his pen--fell from a dead hand.