THE SIRVENS AND LA BARRE
Desnoiresterres has well observed that this mad eighteenth century
produced the extraordinary anomaly of being at once that of scepticism
and intolerance, of the most degraded superstition and the most
barefaced irreligion. It might be thought--it is generally thought--that
persecution would certainly not proceed from persons who were too
indifferent to their faith to make the slightest attempt to live up to
it. But if the history of religious hatred be closely followed,
it will be seen that it is precisely these persons who are the
cruellest persecutors. Perhaps they act on that old principle of
compensation--“Give me the desire of my soul, and the gratification of
my flesh, and by the scaffold, the torture, and the wheel, I will bring
souls to the faith _I_ only profess.” There seems no other explanation
of the fact that this “rotten age whose armies fled without a fight
before a handful of men; this age which laughed at everything and cared
for nothing but wit,” was as fiercely intolerant and besottedly bigot as
the age of Ignatius Loyola and Catherine de’ Medici.
The case of Calas was but one of many. It was not finished when another,
scarcely less sombre and terrible, was brought under Voltaire’s notice.
In 1760 there lived near fanatic Toulouse, at a place called Castres, a
Protestant family of the name of Sirven. Sirven _père_, aged about
fifty-one, was a professional _feudiste_; that is to say, he was a
person learned in feudal tenures, who kept registers and explained the
obsolete terms of ancient leases, and thus was brought much in contact
with the great families of the province. Thoroughly honest, honourable,
and respectable, his wife shared these qualities with him. They had
three daughters--Marie Anne, who was now married, Jeanne and Elizabeth,
who both lived at home.
Elizabeth, the youngest, was feeble-minded: but on that very account--on
that old, tender parental principle of making up by love for the cruelty
of fortune--she was the dearest to her parents. On March 6, 1760, the
poor girl suddenly disappeared. After vainly hunting for her all day,
when Sirven reached his home at night he was told that the Bishop of
Castres desired to see him. He went. The Bishop informed him that
Elizabeth, whose deficient brain was certainly not equal to weighing the
_pros_ and _cons_ of different religions, had ardently desired to become
a Roman Catholic, and that to receive instruction in that faith she had
been placed in the Convent of the Black Ladies. The poor father received
the news more calmly than might have been expected. He said that he had
no idea his daughter wished to change her religion; but that if the
change was to be for her good and happiness, he would not oppose it.
The situation was a strange one. But it had a very common solution. The
Bishop had a strong-minded sister who had caught that “epidemic of the
time,” which the infected called religious zeal.
Meanwhile poor Elizabeth in her convent, having been first “taught her
catechism by blows,” as Voltaire said, began, like many another weak
intellect under strong suggestion, to see visions and to dream dreams.
She became, in short, what a nun might call a saint, but what a doctor
would call a lunatic. The Black Ladies declared that she implored them
to corporally chastise her for the good of her soul; and it was
certainly a fact that when she was returned to her parents in the
October of 1760, quite insane, her body was “covered with the marks of
the convent whip.” If her father complained loudly of her treatment,
such complaints, though natural, were infinitely imprudent. My Lord
Bishop and the authorities kept a very keen official eye on M. Sirven,
and harried him on the subject of his daughter whenever a chance
offered. The sheep had gone back to the wolves, the brand to the
burning. Rome never yet sat down with folded hands, as other Churches
have done, and calmly watched her children desert her.
In the July of 1761 the Sirvens moved to a village called St. Alby, that
Sirven might be near some business on which he was engaged.
On December 17, 1761, when he was staying at the château of a M.
d’Esperandieu, for whom he was working, Elizabeth slipped out of her
home at night, and never returned. Her mother and sister had at once
given notice of her disappearance, and prayed that a search might be
made. Sirven, called home, arrived on the morning of the 18th, and
caused a still further search to be prosecuted. But in vain. A fortnight
passed. On January 3, 1762, the unhappy father, who fancied, not
unnaturally, that Elizabeth might have been decoyed away by her Roman
friends, had to go in pursuit of his trade to a place called Burlats.
That same night the body of Elizabeth was discovered in a well at St.
Alby.
The authorities were at once communicated with, and the judge of
Mazamet, the David de Beaudrigue of the case. The body was taken to the
Hôtel de Ville. There was abundant local testimony to the effect that
the poor girl, had often been seen looking into the well, muttering to
herself. The case was clearly one of suicide or misadventure. Either was
possible. But that it was one of the two was morally certain.
A lodger in the Sirvens’ house at St. Alby could swear that only the
footsteps of one person had been heard descending the stairs of the
house on the night of December 17th, before Jeanne had hastened to those
lodgers and told them of Elizabeth’s flight. In addition to this, while
the poor girl herself had been tall and strong, her mother was feeble
and old; her married sister, who was staying with her parents, was also
feeble and in ill-health; and Elizabeth could easily have resisted
Jeanne, had she attempted, unaided, to be her murderess.
Singly, then, none of the three could have killed Elizabeth; and that
they had done it together, apart from the inherent improbability and the
inhuman nature of such a crime, there was not an iota of evidence to
prove. As in the case of Calas, no cries had been heard, and there were
no signs of a struggle.
As for Sirven himself, he could declare an _alibi_. On the night in
question he had supped and slept at the château of M. d’Esperandieu.
But such evidence, or any evidence, weighed nothing with a people who
had at the moment innocent Calas in irons in the dungeon of Toulouse.
“It passes for fact among the Catholics of the province,” wrote Voltaire
in irony that came very near to being the literal truth, “that it is one
of the chief points of the Protestant religion that fathers and mothers
should hang, strangle, or drown all their children whom they suspect of
having any _penchant_ for the Roman faith.” Sirven’s public, like
Calas’s, had “a need of dramatic emotion enough to change truth into a
legend.”
What use to examine the body? No facts will alter _our_ conviction.
Beaudrigue, savage bigot though he was, had known his profession; the
Beaudrigue of this case, Trinquier, the judge of Mazamet, was a little
ignorant tradesman, who through the whole affair showed himself to be a
tool in clever hands, a wire pulled--at Rome.
At first, Sirven was mad enough to rely on his own innocence, and the
innocence of his family, to save them all. January 6 to 10, 1762, was
spent in examining the witnesses. The honest Catholic villagers of St.
Alby bore testimony to a man in favour of Sirven. But the attitude of
the doctors who examined the body might well have alarmed him. It
alarmed his friends; on their advice he employed an _avocat_, Jalabert.
Jalabert was devoted and expert. But the devotion of a saint and the
brilliancy of a genius would not have helped the Sirvens.
They were charged with the murder of Elizabeth, and instantly took their
decision. Proofs had not freed Calas--why should they save them?
Remembering the fury of the people of Toulouse, “they fled while there
was yet time.”
They stayed at their old home, Castres, at the house of a friend, for
one night. Under the cover of the next they walked through rain, mire,
and darkness to five-miles distant Roquecombe. So far, they had at least
been together.
But they saw very clearly now that they could not hope to escape notice
if they travelled _en famille_.
On January 21st or 22d, the unhappy father tore himself from them, and
for a month remained hidden among the mountains, only ten miles from
Castres. Then he moved on. Through the snows of an icy winter he crossed
the frontier, arrived at Geneva, and early in the April of 1762, at
Lausanne.
His family, after having endured infinite perils and hardships, arrived
there in June. On the way, among the glaciers and in the bitter cold of
a mountain winter, Marie Anne had borne a dead child.
They had one consolation. Their flight was not unnecessary. Three
Declarations had been published against them; though it was not until
March 29, 1764, that the court formally sentenced the parents to be
hanged, and the daughters to witness that execution, and then to
perpetual banishment under pain of death.
On September 11th this sentence was carried out in effigy.
By that time the generous republicans of Berne had given Madame and her
daughters, who were living at Lausanne, a little pension; their property
having, of course, been confiscated to the King. Père Sirven was working
at his trade at Geneva, and so was a near neighbour of Voltaire’s.
Moultou, the friend and correspondent of Rousseau, brought the Sirvens
one day to Ferney. Voltaire already knew their history. But the time was
not ripe for another Quixotic knight-errantry. Calas was not yet
vindicated. Apart from the inordinate amount of work it would entail, to
take a second case in hand might militate against the interests of the
first. Then the affair of the Sirvens would present far greater legal
difficulties. They had fled the kingdom. They would have to be
acquitted, if they were to be acquitted, not by the Parliament of Paris,
but by the Parliament of Toulouse. And Voltaire was too much of an
artist not to be perfectly aware that this cause would not have the
_éclat_ and the dramatic effects of the Calas’. “It lacked a scaffold.”
But when the Sirvens clung with tears about his feet and implored him,
as the saviour of Calas, to save them also--“What was I to do? What
would you have done in my place?” “It is impossible to picture so much
innocence and so much wretchedness.” When the d’Argentals reproached him
as unwise, “Here are too many parricide lawsuits indeed,” he wrote.
“But, my dear angels, whose fault is that?” And, again, as his excuse,
“I have only done in the horrible disasters of Calas and the Sirvens
what all men do: I have followed my bent. That of a philosopher is not
to pity the unfortunate, but to serve them.” He records himself how a
priest said to him, “Why interfere? Let the dead bury their dead”; and
how he replied, “I have found an Israelite by the roadside: let me give
him a little oil and wine for his wounds. You are the Levite: let me be
the Samaritan.”
That priest’s answer, if any, is not recorded.
In short the thing was done.
On March 8, 1765, the day before the Calas suit was triumphantly
concluded, Voltaire wrote joyfully that the generous Élie de Beaumont
would also defend the Sirvens. After that March 9th Voltaire could throw
himself yet more thoroughly into the case. Calas is vindicated! So shall
the Sirvens be!
But if there had been need for patience in the first affair, there was a
hundred times greater need in the second.
The Parliament of Toulouse declined to give up its papers, as it had
declined before. And then that flight--“the reason of their condemnation
is in their flight. They are judged by contumacy.”
In June, too, the death of Madame Sirven--“of her sorrows”--removed a
most important and most valuable witness for the defence. Then the
Sirvens had no money. Voltaire had to supply all--brains, wealth,
influence, labour, literary talent. For seven years he worked the case
with an energy that never tired, an enthusiasm that never cooled. When
it had been going on for four years, he wrote that it “agitated all his
soul.” “This ardour, this fever, this perpetual exaltation”--what
worker, however hot and persevering he fancy himself, is not ashamed by
it, and astounded?
Voltaire wrote Memoirs for the Sirvens. He won over the disapproving
d’Argentals to be as “obstinate” about it (the phrase is his own) as he
was himself. He got up a subscription to which the great Frederick and
the great Catherine of Russia gave generously; and Madame Geoffrin made
her _protégé_, Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski--now King of
Poland--contribute too.
Finally, Voltaire succeeded in persuading Sirven to return to Mazamet,
where the case was re-tried; and on December 25, 1771, when Voltaire was
seventy-seven years old, the Parliament of Toulouse met and completely
exculpated the accused. As Voltaire said, it had taken them two hours to
condemn innocence, and nine years to give it justice. Still, the thing
was done.
In 1772, the Sirvens came to Ferney to thank their benefactor, and
afforded him one of the highest of human pleasures: “the sight of a
happiness which was his own work.”
The year 1765, in which Voltaire showed so much public spirit, was not
privately uneventful. In it he gave up Délices, which he had bought in
1755, and whose place Ferney had altogether usurped in his heart. In
1829, Délices was still in possession of the Tronchin family, from whom
Voltaire had rented it. In 1881, it was a girls’ school.
In 1766, he also gave up the lease of Chêne, his house in Lausanne.
In the January of 1765, Voltaire and Frederick the Great were again
reconciled after a quarrel and a break in their correspondence which had
lasted four years. Frederick, forsooth, had chosen to take as a personal
insult the fact that Voltaire should waste his talents writing that
stupid history about “the wolves and bears of Siberia”! And why in the
world should he want to dedicate his “Tancred” to that old enemy of the
Prussian monarch’s, Madame de Pompadour? Voltaire, on his side, was
minded to write any history he chose, and dedicate his plays to anybody
he liked, and would thank Frederick not to interfere.
Then, at the end of 1764 he hears that Frederick is ill--and to the wind
with both his heat and his coldness at once.
Frederick replied rather witheringly to the peace overtures on January
1, 1765: “I supposed you to be so busy crushing _l’infâme_ ... that I
did not dare to presume you would think of anything else.”
But the ice was broken. Both succumbed to the old, old, fatal, potent
charm. They wrote to each other about “once a fortnight”; discussed
everything in heaven and earth; and until they should be mortal enemies
again, were, once more, more than friends.
Frederick was once again, too, the friend not only of Voltaire, but of
Voltaire’s country. The Seven Years’ War had been concluded in 1763 by
the peace of Hubertsburg. Frederick kept Silesia; and France, with her
feeble ministry and her doddering King, lost, to England, Canada, Saint
Vincent, Grenada, Minorca.
Changes were rife elsewhere too. Voltaire’s friend Elizabeth, Empress of
Russia, had died in 1762, and was succeeded nominally by the miserable
Peter, but really by his wife, Catherine the Great. In 1763, Peter
disappeared under strong suspicions of poison, and Catherine reigned in
his stead.
Many kings and potentates have been named the Great, but few so justly
as Catherine.
If she was the perpetrator of great crimes, this woman of
three-and-thirty was, even at her accession, of vast genius, of
extraordinary capacity as a ruler, broad and liberal in her aims, and an
enlightened lover of the arts. She declared that since 1746 she had been
under the greatest obligations to Voltaire; that his letters had formed
her mind. With the telepathy of intellect, these two master-minds had
from their different corners of the world detected each other’s
greatness. They never met in the flesh. But from their correspondence it
is easy to see their close spiritual affinity. Their earliest letters,
which are preserved, date from the July of this 1765.
Voltaire shocked even Paris and Madame du Deffand by the airy way in
which he took that little peccadillo of the Empress’s, “that _bagatelle_
about a husband.” “Those are family affairs,” he said, not without a
wicked twinkle in his eyes, “with which I do not mix myself.” It is
certain that, whether or no he believed Catherine a murderess, he
regarded her as a great woman and served her when he could.
There came an opportunity in August. Her Majesty is pleased to admire
girls’ education as conducted in Switzerland, and sends Count Bülow to
arrange for a certain number of Swiss governesses to be brought to
Moscow and Petersburg to instruct the noble _jeunes filles_ of those
cities.
Splendid idea! says Voltaire. But that “_bagatelle_ about a husband”
weighs on the Puritan conscience of Geneva. It is extraordinary now to
think that any civilised Government could have dared so to interfere
with personal liberty as to prevent women over age going to teach anyone
they chose, anywhere they liked. But this is precisely what Geneva did.
Voltaire was exceedingly angry. The refusal reflected on him. But he had
done his best for Catherine, though in vain.
While this little affair was going on, a new friend, the young
playwright La Harpe, of whom Voltaire was to see more hereafter, and an
old friend, whom he had not seen for seventeen years, were both staying
with him at Ferney.
On July 30th had arrived there “the sublime Clairon.” She had been the
first actress of her day when Voltaire had known her in Paris. Now she
was the finest tragic actress of the eighteenth century, and in the rich
maturity of her two-and-forty years a most clever and cultivated woman.
She had helped Voltaire’s plays enormously; some she had made for him.
He said so, at least. Further, she was one of the philosophers. In 1761
she had protested against the excommunication of actors as a class; and
Voltaire, remembering Adrienne Lecouvreur, had seconded her with all the
force and irony of his style.
When she reached Ferney her host was so ill that she had to declaim her
_rôle_ in his “Orphan of China,” which cured him on the spot. Part of
her visit he hobbled about on crutches, crippled by an attack of
sciatica and half blind from an affection of the eyes, but as mentally
lively and alert as if he had had both of those requisites for
happiness, “the body of an athlete and the soul of a sage.”
Mademoiselle was not well herself, and under Tronchin. But she went on
acting against the express orders of that good physician. It was in her
blood, as it was in Voltaire’s. He had entirely rebuilt his theatre for
her. He went quite mad over her superb talent; and declared that for the
first time in his life he had seen perfection in any kind. Blind though
his avuncular affection might be, when he beheld Clairon in the flesh he
did not suggest that Madame Denis (who, with her sister, was acting too)
could in any way be her rival.
Clairon was still at Ferney in August. Soon after she left, that
faithful Damilaville paid a visit there; and during the summer had come,
under the chaperonage of Lord Abingdon, the famous John Wilkes.
“Voltaire is obliging to me beyond all description” was Wilkes’s record
of his reception; while Voltaire, on his part, bore enthusiastic
testimony to the great demagogue’s inexhaustible life and wit.
On the 8th or 9th of that August, when Voltaire was acting or telling
stories, nimbly gesticulating with those crutches, events of sinister
importance to him, and of importance to all men who hated _l’infâme_,
were taking place in Abbeville.
On one of those days, two large crucifixes in the town, one on a bridge,
the other in a cemetery, were shamefully and blasphemously mutilated.
The town was naturally very angry. It set itself busily to work to find
the culprits. A few days later three suspected persons, all boys under
one-and-twenty, were brought up before the authorities and questioned.
While their examination was proceeding, the Bishop of the diocese
organised a solemn procession through the streets to the places where
the sacrilege had been committed, and, kneeling there, invoked pardon
for the blasphemers in ominous words, as “men who, though not beyond the
reach of God’s mercy, had rendered themselves worthy of the severest
penalty of this world’s law.”
The mutilated crucifixes were placed in a church, to which the people
flocked in crowds, and in a temper of mind very different from that of
Him who hung there in effigy and in the supreme agony had prayed for His
murderers.
On September 26th, a formal decree of arrest was issued against the
three young men, d’Étallonde de Morival, Moisnel, and the Chevalier de
la Barre.
D’Étallonde had already fled to Prussia; partly, no doubt, because his
conscience was ill at ease, but partly, too, because he, or his friends,
knew the times and the people. In Prussia he was afterwards made,
through Voltaire’s influence, an officer in Frederick’s army.
Moisnel was a timid and foolish boy of eighteen.
Jean François Lefebre, Chevalier de la Barre, was a young Norman, not
yet twenty years old. He had been educated by a country curé. His aunt,
the Abbess of Willancourt, had given him masters, and he had rooms
assigned to him in her convent. It is thought, but is not certain, that
La Barre was in the army. What _is_ certain is that this clerical
education had been a very bad one. The Abbess, if not a wicked woman,
was certainly one who loved pleasure; who enjoyed a joke, even if it
were against the religion she professed; who gave rollicking little
supper-parties; adored her good-looking lively young scapegrace of a
nephew, and permitted him not only to sing roystering and indecent
drinking songs with foolish companions within her sacred walls, but to
keep there a library which included not only some very indecorous
books--but that little volume which “smelt of the fagot,” “The
Philosophical Dictionary.”
At her supper-parties young La Barre had often met one Duval, or
Belleval, who, it is said, had been in love with the Abbess, and was not
a little jealous of her handsome nephew. It was Duval who had heard
young La Barre chant Rabelaisian ditties, and quote “what he could
recollect” from the “Pucelle” and the “Epistle to Uranie.” It was Duval
who hated him, and Duval who denounced him.
On October 1, 1765, La Barre was arrested in the Abbey of Longvilliers,
near Montreuil. Moisnel was also arrested.
On October 4th, the Abbess burnt her nephew’s library, which would have
been a prudent act if she had done it thoroughly, but she did not. On
October 10th, the authorities searched the boy’s rooms, and found in a
press some indecent literature--_and_ that “Philosophical Dictionary.”
After five cross-examinations, unhappy young Moisnel said practically
what his judges told him to say, not only respecting himself, but
respecting La Barre. He swore that d’Étallonde had mutilated the
crucifixes, an assertion to which La Barre also swore. D’Étallonde was
safe in Prussia. Moisnel, who was delicate in health and in horrible
fear of death, lost in the trial the very little sense he had ever had.
Young La Barre, on the other hand, kept all his pluck, wit, and
coolness.
To a charge that, on the Feast of the Holy Sacrament, he and his two
companions had lingered near a religious procession in the street, and
neither knelt nor uncovered as reverence and custom demanded, he pleaded
“Guilty.” He was in a hurry, he said, and had no evil intentions.
To the charge that to a person who bade him take another route if he
could not behave himself, he had replied that he looked upon the Host as
nothing but a piece of pastry and for his part could not swallow all the
apostolic assertions, he answered that he might have used some such
words.
It is not unworthy of remark that, though under torture he confessed to
having mutilated the crucifix in the cemetery, the judges discovered no
proof, and no proof ever was discovered, that he had mutilated the
crucifix on the bridge. It is very much more remarkable that in his
sentence the affair of the crucifixes was not even mentioned, and that
he and absent d’Étallonde were condemned for “impiously and deliberately
walking before the Host without kneeling or uncovering; uttering
blasphemies against God, the Saints, and the Church; singing blasphemous
songs, and rendering marks of adoration to profane books.”
Now it will be allowed by any fair-minded person--whatever be his
religion or irreligion--that to thus insult a faith, dear to millions of
people for hundreds of generations, merited a sharp punishment.
As Voltaire said, “it deserved Saint Lazare.”
On February 28, 1766, d’Étallonde and La Barre were condemned to have
their tongues torn out with hot irons, their right hands to be cut off,
and to be burnt to death by a slow fire. In the case of La Barre this
sentence was so far graciously remitted that he was to be beheaded
before he was burnt; but, on the other hand, he was further condemned to
the torture Ordinary and Extraordinary, to extract from him the names of
his accomplices. Even for that time the sentence was so brutal--“could
they have done more if he had killed his father?”--that no one believed
it would be carried out. Against absent d’Étallonde, of course, it could
not be. A public appeal was made to the King. Ten of the best _avocats_
of Paris declared the sentence illegal. La Barre was taken to the
capital, and his case retried there, where “a majority of five voices
condemned to the most horrible torments a young man only guilty of
folly.” He was taken back to Abbeville. All through the trial he had
borne himself with a high courage. It did not leave him now. He
recognised many old acquaintances on the way, and saluted them gaily. On
the last evening of his life he supped with his confessor--a priest whom
he had often met at his aunt’s gay table. “Let us have some coffee,” he
is reported to have said; “it will not prevent my sleeping.” Bravado,
perhaps. But _bravado_ and _brave_ are of the same origin. The next day,
July 1, 1766, began with the torture. On his way to the scaffold the
poor boy recognised among the cruel crowd of spectators not only many
men whom he had called friend, but, to their everlasting shame, women
too. That “barbarism which would have made even drunken savages
shudder,” the pulling out of the tongue, was so barbarous that the five
executioners only pretended to do it. On his way up to the scaffold La
Barre’s shoe dropped off. He turned and put it on again. He bound his
own eyes, and talked calmly to the executioners, and then died with “the
firmness of Socrates”--a harder death.
It is said that the executioner who cut off the head did it so cleverly
that the spectators _applauded_. The body was thrown to the flames--with
“The Philosophical Thoughts” of Diderot; the “Sopha” of the younger
Crébillon; two little volumes of Bayle; and “The Philosophical
Dictionary,” which was supposed to have inspired the indecent impiety of
which the unhappy boy had been guilty, but which certainly does inspire
a religion not so unlike the religion of Christ as the savage hatred
which killed La Barre.
The event caused a fearful sensation, even in the eighteenth century.
The victim was so young, and had so nobly played the man. To the last
moment, popular opinion had believed in a reprieve. One of the people
who so believed was Voltaire. Vague reports of the case had reached him
at first. Some young fools had been profaning a church, and then
declaring in cross-examination that they had been led to do so by the
books of the “Encyclopædia”! But then wild boys who commit drunken
frolics do not read books of philosophy!
And when the tidings of that 1st of July had come--“My dear brother, my
heart is withered.” Grimm wrote boldly and significantly of the event
that “humanity awaited an avenger.” But this time how could the avenger
be Voltaire? On the lips of all the churchmen were the words--Philosophy
hath done this thing. This is where your fine freethinking, your mental
emancipation, lead men! Certainly, it might have been answered that La
Barre was not the product of philosophy, but of the Church; educated by
a curé, finished by my Lady Abbess; sheltered, after his sin, in the
Abbey of Longvilliers; given for his last confessor a priestly boon
companion of those wild suppers at the convent. If the philosophers
mocked at religion, what of the licentious priests of that wicked day?
Châteauneuf, Chaulieu, Desfontaines--the names of a score of others must
have come to Voltaire’s lips. This boy had put the teaching of such men
into action. The more fool he; but not the greater criminal. There were
a thousand excuses for him; and “tears come easily for the youth which
has committed sins which in ripe age it would have redeemed.”
But Voltaire, with a guilty conscience one may hope, seems to have
remembered that he had written not only “The Philosophical Dictionary,”
but the ribald “Pucelle.” He might thereby have had some hand in La
Barre’s undoing; and when he saw that men flung the whole responsibility
for that sin on him and his brothers, the Encyclopædists, he feared.
By July 14th he had gone to Rolle in Vaud. He had been there in the
spring for his health; now he went for his safety.
But, safe or dangerous, he must write his view of the case. By the 22d
of the same month his account of “The Death of the Chevalier de la
Barre” was complete. Clear, masterly, succinct, it is perhaps one of the
finest tracts in the cause of humanity ever written, even by Voltaire
himself. On July 25th, he was asking clever young Élie de Beaumont if
there was any law, date 1681, by which those guilty of indecent
impieties could be sentenced to death. He had himself looked everywhere
in vain; which was not wonderful. There was no such law. The ignorance
and fanaticism of the judges had “supposed its existence.” “This
barbarity occupies me day and night.” True, La Barre was past the reach
of human help. But Voltaire could hope that his cries “might frighten
the carnivorous beasts from others.” They did that. The popular fury to
which he gave mighty voice saved feeble Moisnel. After La Barre’s death
the judges did not dare to proceed with the suit.
In 1775, when d’Étallonde was staying with him at Ferney, Voltaire wrote
a pamphlet called “The Cry of Innocent Blood,” which had as its object
the restitution of his civil rights to that young officer, to whom
Frederick had accorded a long leave of absence. If he never obtained
that restitution or full justification for the memory of La Barre, at
least he never ceased to try. He worked the case for twelve years, and
his labours were only stopped by death.
Partly for his own safety; partly in horror of a country which could
sanction a vengeance so awful; partly in longing for an Elysium where he
and his brothers might live and speak as free men, in this July of 1766,
at Rolle, this boy Voltaire conceived the mad and hot-headed scheme of
retiring, with all the enlightened, to Cleves, and forming there a
literary society, with a printing press.
A dream! A dream! The other philosophers would not entertain the idea
for a moment. Some of them, at least, felt “little suppers and the
_opéra-comique_” to be among the necessities of existence. D’Alembert,
chief of them all, who had refused the Presidency of the Berlin Academy
and to be tutor to Catherine the Great’s son for a quiet life, and
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, was not going to be tempted from either--for
Cleves!
“I see,” wrote Voltaire, “that M. Boursier” (which was one of his
innumerable _noms de guerre_) “will have no workmen.” So he went back to
Ferney.
“The suit and the sacrifice of the Chevalier de la Barre remain one of
the indelible stains with which the magistracy of the eighteenth century
tarnished and defiled its robes.”
That “Philosophical Dictionary”--of which the thin first volume had been
burnt with La Barre; which in March, 1765, had been publicly destroyed
in Paris by the hangman; which Rome anathematised, and of which liberal
London had already demanded a fifth edition--is one of the greatest of
Voltaire’s works, and one which should still be popular. It stands
alone, without rival or counterpart. Brief articles on an enormous
variety of subjects gave infinite scope for Voltaire’s versatility.
Since he had written that first article, “Abraham,” which had made even
sullen Frederick laugh, the thing had been its author’s commonplace
book. If an article is too daring even for the “Encyclopædia”--put it in
the “Dictionary.” If one feels gay, write buffoonery; or seriously,
write with passion. The “Dictionary” had room for everything. Mockery,
sarcasm, lightness, wit, gaiety, profundity, the most earnest thought,
the most burning zeal, banter, irony, audacity--they are all here. “The
Philosophical Dictionary” has well been said to be “the whole of citizen
Voltaire.”
He had smuggled it into Geneva, and then gaily and without a pang of
conscience denied that he had anything to do with its authorship. “If
there is the least danger about it, please warn me, and then I can
disown it in all the public papers with my usual candour and innocence.”
He kept it by his side, and wrote, now in this mood, now in that, first
one article and then another, until it numbered eight volumes.
Even in this age of many books there is always room for another, if it
be sufficiently piquant and out of the common. The astonishing variety
of the subjects, and the not less marvellous versatility of the style,
the ease, the life and the humour of those eight volumes are qualities
which may well appeal to the most jaded of modern readers. Its frequent
profanity, indeed, is a blot dyed too deeply into the texture of the
book to be eradicable by any editor. But, apart from this, to the bored
person--always in search of a new literary sensation, of something which
has not been done a thousand times before, of something that will not be
done a thousand times again--may be well recommended a volume of “The
Philosophical Dictionary.”