We are intelligent beings; and intelligent beings can not have been
formed by a blind, brute, insensible being. There is certainly some
difference between a clod and the ideas of Newton. Newton's
intelligence came from some greater Intelligence.
--_The Philosophical Dictionary_
[Illustration: VOLTAIRE]
The man, Francois Marie Arouet, known to us as Voltaire (which name he
adopted in his twenty-first year), was born in Paris in Sixteen Hundred
Ninety-four. He was the second son in a family of three children. During
his babyhood he was very frail; in childhood sickly and weak; and
throughout his whole life he suffered much from indigestion and
insomnia.
In all the realm of writers no man ever had a fuller and more active
career, touching life at so many points, than Voltaire.
The first requisite in a long and useful career would seem to be, have
yourself born weak and cultivate dyspepsia, nervousness and insomnia.
Whether or not the good die young is still a mooted question, but
certainly the athletic often do. All those good men and true, who at
grocery, tavern and railroad-station eat hard-boiled eggs on a wager,
and lift barrels of flour with one hand, are carried to early graves,
and over the grass-grown mounds that cover their dust, consumptive,
dyspeptic and neurotic relatives, for twice or thrice a score of years,
strew sweet myrtle, thyme and mignonette.
Voltaire died of an accident--too much Four-o'Clock--cut off in his
prime, when life for him was at its brightest and best, aged
eighty-three.
The only evidence we have that the mind of Voltaire failed at the last
came from the Abbe Gaultier and the Cure of Saint Sulpice. These good
men arrived with a written retraction, which they desired Voltaire to
sign. Waiting in the anteroom of the sick-chamber they sent in word that
they wished to enter. "Assure them of my respect," said the stricken
man. But the holy men were not to be thus turned away, so they entered.
They approached the bedside, and the Cure of Saint Sulpice said: "M. de
Voltaire, your life is about to end. Do you acknowledge the divinity of
Jesus Christ?"
And the dying man stretched out a bony hand, making a gesture that they
should depart, and murmured, "Let me die in peace."
"You see," said the Cure to the Abbe, as they withdrew, "you see that he
is out of his head!"
* * * * *
The father of Voltaire, Francois Arouet, was a notary who looked after
various family estates and waxed prosperous on the crumbs that fell from
the rich man's table.
He was solicitor to the Duc de Richelieu, the Sullys, and also the
Duchesse de Saint-Simon, mother of the philosopher, Saint-Simon, who
made the mistake of helping Auguste Comte, thus getting himself hotly
and positively denounced by the man who formulated the "Positive
Philosophy."
Arouet belonged to the middle class and never knew that he sprang from a
noble line until his son announced the fact. It was then too late to
deny it.
He was a devout Churchman, upright in all his affairs, respectable, took
snuff, walked with a waddle and cultivated a double chin. M. Arouet
pater did not marry until his mind was mature, so that he might avoid
the danger of a mismating. He was forty, past. The second son, Francois
fils, was ten years younger than his brother Armand, so the father was
over fifty when our hero was born. Francois fils used to speak of
himself as an afterthought--a sort of domestic postscript--"but," added
he musingly, "our afterthoughts are often best."
One of the most distinguished clients of M. Arouet was Ninon de Lenclos,
who had the felicity to be made love to by three generations of
Frenchmen. Ninon has been likened for her vivacious ways, her flashing
intellect, and her perennial youth, to the divine Sara, who at sixty
plays the part of Juliet with a woman of thirty for the old nurse. Ninon
had turned her three-score and ten, and swung gracefully into the
home-stretch, when the second son was born to M. Arouet. She was of a
deeply religious turn of mind, for she had been loved by several
priests, and now the Abbe de Chateauneuf was paying his devotions to
her.
Ninon was much interested in the new arrival, and going to the house of
M. Arouet, took to bed, and sent in haste for the Abbe de Chateauneuf,
saying she was in sore trouble. When the good man arrived, he thought it
a matter of extreme unction, and was ushered into the room of the
alleged invalid. Here he was duly presented with the infant that later
was to write the "Philosophical Dictionary." It was as queer a case of
kabojolism as history records.
Doubtless the Abbe was a bit agitated at first, but finally getting his
breath, he managed to say, "As there is a vicarious atonement, there
must also be, on occasion, vicarious births, and this is one--God be
praised."
The child was then baptized, the good Abbe standing as godfather.
There must be something, after all, in prenatal influences, for as the
little Francois grew up he evolved the traits of Ninon de Lenclos and
the Abbe much more than those of his father and mother.
When the boy was a little over six years old the mother died. Of her we
know absolutely nothing. In her son's writings he refers to her but
once, wherein he has her say that "Boileau was a clever book, but a
silly man."
The education of the youngster seemed largely to have been left to the
Abbe, his godfather, who very early taught him to recite the "Mosiad," a
metrical effusion wherein the mistakes of Moses were related in churchly
Latin, done first for the divertisement of sundry pious monks in idle
hours.
At ten years of age Francois was sent to the College of Louis-le-Grand,
a Jesuit school where the minds of youth were molded in things sacred
and secular.
In only one thing did the boy really excel, and that was in the matter
of making rhymes. The Abbe Chateauneuf had taught him the trick before
he could speak plainly, and Ninon had been so pleased with the wee poet
that she left him two thousand francs in her will for the purchase of
books. As Ninon insisted on living to be ninety, Voltaire discounted the
legacy and got it cashed on dedicating a sonnet to the divine Ninon. In
this sonnet Voltaire suggests that a life of virtue conduces largely to
longevity, as witness the incomparable Ninon de Lenclos, to which
sentiment Ninon filed no exceptions.
In one of the school debates young Francois presented his argument in
rhyme, and evidently ran in some choice passages from the "Mosiad," for
Father le Jay, according to Condorcet, left his official chair, and
rushing down the aisle, grabbed the boy by the collar, and shaking him,
said, "Unhappy boy! you will one day be the standard-bearer of deism in
France!"--a prophecy, possibly, made after its fulfilment.
Young Francois remained at the college until he was seventeen years old.
From letters sent by him while there, it is evident that the chief
characteristic of his mind was already a contempt for the clergy. Of two
of his colleagues who were preparing for the priesthood, he says, "They
had reflected on the dangers of a world of the charms of which they were
ignorant; and on the pleasures of a religious life of which they knew
not the disagreeableness." Already we see he was getting handy in
polishing a sentence with the emery of his wit. Continuing, he says: "In
a quarter of an hour they ran over all the Orders, and each seemed so
attractive that they could not decide. In which predicament they might
have been left like the ass, which died of starvation between two
bundles of hay, not knowing which to choose. However, they decided to
leave the matter to Providence, and let the dice decide. So one became a
Carmelite and the other a Jesuit."
* * * * *
Arouet, at first intent on having his son become a priest, now fell back
on the law as second choice. The young man was therefore duly articled
with a firm of advocates and sent to hear lectures on jurisprudence. But
his godfather introduced him into the Society of the Temple, a group of
wits, of all ages, who could take snuff and throw off an epigram on any
subject. The bright young man, flashing, dashing and daring, made
friends at once through his skill in writing scurrilous verse upon any
one whose name might be mentioned. This habit had been begun in college,
where it was much applauded by the underlings, who delighted to see
their unpopular teachers done to a turn. The scribbling habit is a
variant of that peculiar propensity which finds form in drawing a
portrait on the blackboard before the teacher gets around in the
morning. If the teacher does not happen to love art for art's sake,
there may be trouble; but verses are safer, for they circulate secretly
and are copied and quoted anonymously.
The thing we do best in life is that which we play at most in youth.
Ridicule was this man's weapon. For the benefit of the Society of the
Temple he paid his respects to the sham piety and politics of
Versailles. He had been educated by priests, and his father was a
politician feeding at the public trough. The young man knew the faults
and foibles of both priest and politician, and his keen wit told truths
about the court that were so well expressed the wastebasket did not
capture them. One of these effusions was printed, anonymously, of
course, but a copy coming into the hands of M. Arouet, the old gentleman
recognized the literary style and became alarmed. He must get the young
man out of Paris--the Bastile yawned for poets like this!
A brother of the Abbe de Chateauneuf was Ambassador at The Hague, and
the great man, being importuned, consented to take the youth as clerk.
Life at The Hague afforded the embryo poet an opportunity to meet many
distinguished people.
In Francois there was none of the bourgeois--he associated only with
nobility--and as he had an aristocracy of the intellect, which served
him quite as well as a peerage, he was everywhere received. In his
manner there was nothing apologetic--he took everything as his divine
right.
In this brilliant little coterie at The Hague was one Madame Dunoyer, a
writer of court gossip and a social promoter of ability, separated from
her husband for her husband's good. Francois crossed swords with her in
an encounter of wit, was worsted, but got even by making love to her;
and later he made love to her daughter, a beautiful girl of about his
own age.
The air became surcharged with gossip. There was danger of an explosion
any moment. Madame Dunoyer gave it out that the brilliant subaltern was
to marry the girl. The Madame was going to capture the youth, either
with her own charms or those of her daughter--or combined. Rumblings
were heard on the horizon. The Ambassador, fearing entanglement, bundled
young Arouet back to Paris, with a testimonial as to his character,
quite unnecessary. A denial without an accusation is equal to a plea of
guilty; and that the young man had made the mistake of making violent
love to the mother and daughter at the same time there is no doubt. The
mother had accused him and he said things back; he even had shown the
atrocious bad taste of references in rhyme to the mutual interchange of
confidences that the mother and daughter might enjoy. The Ambassador had
acted none too soon.
The father was frantic with alarm--the boy had disgraced him, and even
his own position seemed to be threatened when some wit adroitly accused
the parent of writing the doggerel for his son.
M. Arouet denied it with an oath--while the son refused to explain, or
to say anything beyond that he loved his father, thus carrying out the
idea that the stupid old notary was really a wit in disguise, masking
his intellect by a seeming dulness. No more biting irony was ever put
out by Voltaire than this, and the pathos of it lies in the fact that
the father was quite unable to appreciate the quip.
It was a sample of filial humor much more subtle than that indulged in
by Charles Dickens, who pilloried his parents in print, one as Mr.
Micawber and the other as Mrs. Nickleby. Dickens told the truth and
painted it large, but Francois Arouet dealt in indiscreet fallacy when
he endeavored to give his father a reputation for raillery.
A peculiarly offensive poem, appearing about this time, with the Regent
and his daughter, the Duchesse de Berri, for a central theme, a rescript
was issued which indirectly testified to the poetic skill of young
Arouet. He was exiled to a point three hundred miles from Paris and
forbidden to come nearer on penalty, like unto the injunction issued by
Prince Henry against the blameless Falstaff. Rumor said that the father
had something to do with the matter.
But the exile was not for long. The young poet wrote a most adulatory
composition to the Regent, setting forth his innocence. The Regent was a
mild and amiable man and much desired peace with all his
subjects--especially those who dipped their quills in gall. He was
melted by the rhyme that made him out such a paragon of virtue, and made
haste to issue a pardon.
The elder Arouet now proved that he was not wholly without humor, for he
wrote to a friend, "The exile of my dear son distressed me much less
than does this precipitate recall."
In order to protect himself the father now refused a home to the son,
and Francois became a lodger at a boarding-house. He wrote plays and
acted in them, penned much bad poetry, went in good society and had a
very rouge time. Up to this period he knew little Latin and less Greek,
but now he had an opportunity to furbish up on both. He found himself an
inmate of the Bastile, on the charge of expressing his congratulations
to the people of France on the passing of Louis the Fourteenth. In
America libel only applies to live men, but the world had not then
gotten this far along.
In the prison it was provided that Sieur Arouet fils should not be
allowed pens and paper on account of his misuse of these good things
when outside. He was given copies of Homer, however, in Greek and Latin,
and he set himself at work, with several of the other prisoners, to
perfect himself in these languages. We have glimpses of his dining with
the governor of the prison, and even organizing theatrical performances,
and he was finally allowed writing materials on promise that he would
not do anything worse than translate the Bible, so altogether he was
very well treated.
In fact, he himself referred to this year spent in prison as "a pious
retreat, that I might meditate, and chasten my soul in quiet thought."
He was only twenty-one, and yet he had set Paris by the ears, and his
name was known throughout France. "I am as well known as the Regent and
will be remembered longer," he wrote--a statement and a prophecy that
then seemed very egotistical, but which time has fully justified.
It was in prison that he decided to change his name to Voltaire, a
fanciful word of his own coining. His pretended reason for the change
was that he might begin life anew and escape the disgrace he had
undergone of being in prison. There is reason to believe, however, that
he was rather proud of being "detained," it was proof of his power--he
was dangerous outside. But his family had practically cast him off--he
owed nothing to them--and the change of name fostered a mysterious noble
birth, an idea that he allowed to gain currency without contradiction.
Moliere had changed his name from Poquolin--and was he not really
following in Moliere's footsteps, even to suffering disgrace and public
odium?
* * * * *
The play of "Oedipe" was presented by Voltaire at the Theater
Francaise, November Eighteenth, Seventeen Hundred Eighteen. This play
was written before the author's sojourn in prison, but there he had
sandpapered its passages, and hand-polished the epigrams.
It was rehearsed at length with the help of the "guests" at the Bastile,
and once Voltaire wrote a note of appreciation to the Prefect of Police,
thanking him for his thoughtfulness in sending such excellent and
pure-minded people to help him in his work.
These things had been managed so they discreetly leaked out, and the
cafes echoed with the name of Voltaire.
Very soon after his release the play was presented to a crowded house.
It was a success from the start, for into its lines the audience was
allowed to read many veiled allusions to Paris public characters. It ran
for forty-five nights, and was the furore. On one occasion when interest
seemed to lag, Voltaire, on a sudden inspiration, dressed up as a
bumpkin page, and attended the Pontiff, carrying his train, playing
various and sundry sly pranks in pantomime, a la Francis Wilson.
In one of the boxes sat a famous beauty, the Duchesse de Villars. "Who
is this strange person who is intent upon spoiling the play?" she asked.
On being told that he was the author of the drama, her censure turned to
approbation and she sent for the young man. His appearance in her box
was duly noted. The Regent and his daughter, the Duchesse de Berri,
could not resist the temptation to attend the play, and see how much
they were satirized. Voltaire did his little train-bearing act for their
benefit, with a few extra grimaces, which pleased them very much, and
seeing his opportunity, wrote a gracious letter of thanks to His
Highness for having deigned to visit his play, winding up with thanks
for the years in the Bastile where, "God wot, all of my evil
inclinations were duly chastened and corrected."
It had the desired effect--each side feared the other. The Regent wanted
the ready writers on his side, and the playwright who was opposed by the
party in power could not hope for success. The Regent sent a present of
a thousand crowns to Voltaire and also fixed on him a pension of twelve
hundred livres a year. At once every passage in the play that could be
construed as bearing on royalty was revised into words of adulation, and
all went merry as a marriage-bell. Financially the play was a success,
and better yet was the pension and the good-will of the young King and
his Regent.
Thus at twenty-two did Voltaire have the world at his feet.
* * * * *
When Voltaire was twenty-four, his father died. The will provided that
the property should be equally divided between his three children, but
it was stipulated that the second son should not come into possession of
his share until he was thirty-five, and not then unless he was able to
show the Master in Chancery that he was capable of wisely managing his
own affairs.
This doubt of the father concerning the son's financial ability has
often been commented upon ironically, in view of the pronounced thrift
shown by Voltaire in later life.
But who shall say whether the father by that provision in his will did
not drive home a stern lesson in economy? Commodore Vanderbilt had so
much distrust of his son William's capacity for business that he exiled
him to a Long Island farm, on an allowance. Years after, when William
had shown his ability to outstrip his father, he rebuked a critic who
volunteered a suggestion to the effect that the father had erred in the
boy problem. Said William, "My father was right in this, as in most
other things--I was a fool, and he knew it."
Voltaire's vacation of a year in the Bastile had done him much good.
Then the will of his father, with its cautious provisions, tended to
sober the youth to a point where he was docile enough for society's
needs.
A good deal of ballast in way of trouble was necessary to hold this man
down.
Marriage might have tamed him. Bachelors are of two kinds--those who are
innocent of women, and those who know women too well. The second class,
I am told, outnumbers the first as ten to one.
Voltaire had been a favorite of various women--usually married ladies,
and those older than himself. He had plagiarized Franklin, saying, fifty
years before the American put out his famous advice, "If you must fall
in love, why, fall in love with a woman much older than yourself, or at
least a homely one--for only such are grateful."
In answer to a man who said divorce and marriage were instituted at the
same time, Voltaire said: "This is a mistake: there is at least three
days' difference. Men sometimes quarrel with their wives at the end of
three days, beat them in a week and divorce them at the end of a month."
Voltaire was small and slight in stature, but his bubbling wit and
graceful presence more than made amends for any deficiency in way of
form and feature. Had he desired, he might have taken his pick among the
young women of nobility, but we see the caution of his nature in
limiting his love-affairs to plain women, securely married. "Gossip
isn't busy with the plain women--that is why I like you," he once said
to Madame de Bernieres. What the Madame's reply was, we do not know, but
probably she was not displeased. If a woman knows she is loved, it
matters little what you say to her. Compliments by the right oblique
are construed into lavish praise when expressed in the right tone of
voice by the right person.
The Regent had allowed Voltaire another pension of two thousand francs,
at the same time intimating that he hoped the writer's income was
sufficient so he could now tell the truth. Voltaire took the hint, so
subtly veiled, to the effect that if he again affronted royalty by
unkind criticisms, his entire pension would be canceled.
From this time on to the end of his life, he was full of lavish praise
for royalty. He was needlessly loyal, and dedicated poems and pamphlets
to nobility, right and left, in a way that would have caused a smile
were not nobility so hopelessly bound in three-quarters pachyderm. He
also wrote religious poems, protesting his love for the Church. And here
seems a good place to say that Voltaire was a member of the Catholic
Church to his death. Many of his worst attacks on the priesthood were
put in way of defense for outrageous actions which he enumerated in
detail. He kept people guessing as to what he meant and what he would do
next.
Immediately after the death of President McKinley there was a fine
scramble among the editors of certain saffron sheets--to get in line and
shake their ulsters free from all taint of anarchy. Some writers, in
order to divert suspicion from themselves, hotly denounced other men as
anarchists.
Throughout his life Voltaire had spasms of repentance, prompted by
caution, possibly, when he warmly denounced atheists, and swore, i'
faith, that one object of his life was to purify the Church and cleanse
it of its secret faults.
In his twenty-sixth year, when he was trying hard to be good, he got
into a personal altercation with the Chevalier de Rohan, an
insignificant man bearing a proud name. The Chevalier's wit was no match
for the other's rapier-like tongue, but he had a way of his own in which
to get even. He had his servants waylay the luckless poet and chastise
him soundly with rattans.
Voltaire was furious; he tried to get the courts to take it up, but the
prevailing idea was that he had gotten what he deserved, and the fact
that the whole affair occurred after dark and the Chevalier did not do
the beating in person, made conviction impossible.
But Voltaire now quit the anapest and dactyl and devoted his best hours
to taking fencing lessons. His firm intent was to baptize the soil with
Rohan's blood. Voltaire was of enough importance so the secret police
knew of all his doings. Suddenly he found himself taking a post-graduate
course in the Bastile. I am not sure that the fiery little man was
entirely displeased with the procedure. It proved to the world that he
was a dangerous character, and it also gave him a respite from the
tyranny of the fencing-master, and allowed him to turn to his first,
last and only love--literature. In Voltaire's cosmos was a good deal of
the Bob Acres quality.
There were plenty of reasons for locking him up--heresy and treason have
ever been first cousins--and pamphlets lampooning Churchmen high in
office were laid at his door. No doubt some of the anonymous literature
was not his--"I would have done the thing better or not at all," he once
said in reference to a scurrilous brochure. The real fact was, that that
particular pamphlet was done by a disciple, and if Voltaire's writings
were vile, then was his offense doubled in that he vitalized a ravenous
brood of scribblers. They played Caliban to his Setebos.
Voltaire's most offensive contributions were always attributed by him to
this bishop or that, and to various dignitaries who had no existence
save in the figment of his own fertile pigment.
He once carried on a controversy between the Bishop of Berlin and the
Archbishop of Paris, each man thundering against the other with a
monthly pamphlet wherein each one gored the other without mercy, and
revealed the senselessness of the other's religion. They flung the
literary stinkpot with great accuracy. "The other man's superstition is
always ridiculous to us--our own is sacred," said Voltaire, and so he
allowed his controversialists to fight it out for his own quiet joy, and
the edification of the onlookers.
Then his plan of printing an alleged sermon, giving some unknown prelate
due credit on the title-page, starting in with a pious text and a page
of trite nothings and gradually drifting off into ridicule of the things
he had started in to defend--all this gives a comic tinge to his wail
that "some evil-minded person is attributing things to me I never
wrote," If an occasional sly Churchman got after him with his own
weapon, writing things in his style more hazardous than he dare express,
surely he should not have complained.
But this was a fact--the enemy could not follow him long with a literary
fusillade--they hadn't the mental ammunition.
Well has Voltaire been called "the father of all those who wear
shovel-hats."
* * * * *
A few months in the Bastile, and Voltaire's indeterminate sentence was
commuted to exile. He was allowed to leave his country for his country's
good. Early in the year Seventeen Hundred Twenty-six he landed in
England, evidently knowing nobody there except one merchant, a man of no
special prominence.
Voltaire belonged to the nobility by divine right--as much as did
Disraeli. Both had an inward contempt for titles, but they knew the
hearts of the owners so well that they simply played a game of chess,
and the "men" they moved were live knights, bishops, kings and queens,
with rollers under the castles. The pawns they pushed here and there
were the literary puppets of the time.
The first thing Voltaire had to master in England was the language, and
this he did passably inside of three months. He took Grub Street by
storm; dawdled at Dodsley's; met Dean Swift, and these worthies
respected each other's wit so much that they simply took snuff, grimaced
and let it go at that; Pope came in for a visit, and the French poet
crossed Twickenham ferry and offered a handmade sonnet in admiration of
the "Essay on Man," which he had probably never read. Gay gave Voltaire
"The Beggar's Opera," in private, and together they called on Congreve,
who interrupted the Frenchman's flow of flattery long enough to say that
he wished to be looked on as a gentleman, not a poet. And Voltaire
replied that there were many gentlemen but few poets, and if Congreve
had had the misfortune to be simply a gentleman he would not have
troubled to call on him at all. Congreve, who really regarded himself as
the peer of Shakespeare, was won, and sent Voltaire on his way with
letters to Horace Walpole of Strawberry Hill. Thomson, who lived at
Hammersmith, and wrote his "Seasons" in a "public" next door to
Kelmscott, corrected and revised some of Voltaire's attempts at English
poetry. Young evolved some of his "Night Thoughts" while on a visit with
Voltaire at Bubb Dodington's.
A call on the Duchess of Marlborough led to a dinner at Lord
Chesterfield's. Next he met Queen Caroline and assured her that she
spoke French like a Parisian. King George the Second quite liked
Voltaire, because Voltaire quite liked Lady Sandon, his mistress. Only a
Frenchman could have successfully paid court to the King, Queen and Lady
Sandon at the same time, as Voltaire did. His great epic poem,
"Henriade," that he had been sandpapering for ten years, was now
published, dedicated to the Queen. The King headed the subscription-list
with more copies than he needed, at five guineas each, on agreement.
Voltaire afterward said that he would not be expected to read the poem.
The Queen's good offices were utilized--she became for the time a royal
book-agent, and her signature and the author's adorned all deluxe
copies. A suggestion from the Queen was equal to an order, and the
edition was soon worked off.
Voltaire now spent three years in England. He had written his "Life of
Charles the Twelfth," several plays, an "English Note-Book," and best of
all, had gotten together a thousand pounds good money as proceeds of
"Henriade," a stiff and stilted piece of pedantic bombast, written with
sweat and lamp-smoke.
The "Letters on the English" were published a few years later in Paris
with good results, considering it was only a by-product. It is a deal
better-natured than Dickens' "American Note-Book," and had more humor
than Emerson's "English Traits." Among other things quite Voltairesque
in the "Letters" is this: "The Anglican Church has retained many of the
good old Catholic customs--not the least of which is the collection of
tithes with great regularity."
* * * * *
The priestly habit of Voltaire's life manifested itself even to the
sharp collecting from the world all that the world owed him.
The snug little sum he had secured in England would have shown his
ability, but there was something better in store, awaiting his return to
France. It seems the Controller of Finance had organized a lottery to
help pay the interest on the public debt. A considerable sum of money
had been realized, but there was still a large number of tickets unsold,
and the drawing was soon to take place. Voltaire knew the officials who
had the matter in charge and they knew him. He organized a syndicate
that would take all tickets there were left, on guarantee that among the
tickets purchased would be the one that called for the principal prize
of forty thousand pounds. Just how it was known in advance what ticket
would win must be left to those good people who understand these little
things in detail. In any event, Voltaire put in every sou he had--and
his little fortune was then a matter of about ten thousand dollars.
Several of his friends contributed a like sum.
The drawing took place, and the prize of forty thousand pounds was
theirs. It is said that Voltaire took twenty-five thousand pounds as his
share--the whole scheme was his anyway--and his friends were quite
satisfied with having doubled their money in a fortnight.
Immediately on securing this money, Voltaire presented himself at the
office of the President of Accounts, and asked for the legacy left him
by his father. As proof of his financial ability, and as a guarantee of
good faith, he opened a hand-satchel and piled on the President's table
a small mountain of gold and bank-notes. The first question of the
astonished official was, "Will M. de Voltaire have the supreme goodness
to explain where he stole all this money?"
This was soon followed by an apology, as the visitor explained the
reason of his visit.
The father's legacy amounted to nearly four thousand pounds, and this
was at once paid over to Voltaire with a flattering letter expressing
perfect faith in his ability to manage his own finances.
There is a popular opinion that Voltaire made considerable money by his
pen, but the fact is, that at no period of his life did literature
contribute in but a very scanty way to his prosperity.
After the lottery scheme, Voltaire embarked in grain speculations,
importing wheat from Barbary for French consumption. In this he made a
fair profit, but when war broke out between Italy and France, he entered
into an arrangement with Duverney, who had the army commissariat in his
hands, to provision the troops. It was not much of a war, but it lasted
long enough, as most wars do, for a few contractors to make much moneys.
The war spirit is usually fanned by financiers, Kuhn, Loeb and Company
giving the ultimatum.
Voltaire cleared about twenty thousand pounds out of his provision
contract.
Thus we find this thrifty poet at forty with a fortune equal to a
half-million dollars. This money he loaned out in a way of his own--a
way as original as his literary style. His knowledge of the upper
circles again served him well. Among the proud scions of nobility there
were always a few who, through gambling proclivities, and other royal
qualities, were much in need of funds. Voltaire picked the men who had
only a life interest in their estates, and made them loans, secured by
the rentals. The loans were to be paid back in annuities as long as both
men lived.
All insurance is a species of gambling--the company offers to make you a
bet that your house will burn within a year.
In life-insurance, the company's expert looks you over, and if your
waist measurement is not too great for your height, a bargain is entered
into wherein you agree to pay so much now, and so much every year as
long as you live, in consideration that the company will pay your heirs
so much at your death.
The chief value of life-insurance lies in the fact that it insures a man
against his own indiscretion, a thing supposedly under his own
control--but which never is. Voltaire's scheme banked on the man's
weakness, and laid his indiscretion open before the world. It was
life-insurance turned wrong side out, and could only have been devised
and carried out by a man of courage with an actuary's bias for
mathematics.
Instead of agreeing to pay the man so much at death, Voltaire paid him
the whole sum in advance, and the man agreed to pay, say, ten per cent
interest until either the lender or the borrower died. No principal was
to be paid, and on the death of either party, the whole debt was
canceled.
Voltaire picked only men younger than himself. It was a tempting offer
to the borrower, for Voltaire looked like a consumptive, and it is said
that on occasion he evolved a wheezy cough that helped close the deal.
The whole scheme, for Voltaire, was immensely successful. On some of the
risks he collected his yearly ten per cent for over forty years, or
until his death.
On Voltaire's loan of sixteen hundred pounds to the Marquis du Chatelet,
however, it is known that he collected nothing either in way of
principal or interest. This was as strange a piece of financiering as
was ever consummated; and the inside history of the matter, with its
peculiar psychology, has never been written. The only two persons who
could have told that story in its completeness were Voltaire and the
Madame du Chatelet, and neither ever did.
* * * * *
Madame du Chatelet--the divine Emilie--was twenty-seven and Voltaire was
thirty-nine when they first met.
He was living in obscure lodgings in Paris for prudential reasons, the
executioner having just burned, in the public street, all the copies of
his last book that could be found.
The Madame called on him to express her sympathy--and congratulations.
She had written a book, but it had not been burned--not even read! She
was tall, thin, angular, far from handsome, but had beaming eyes and a
face that tokened intellect. And best of all, her voice was low, finely
modulated, and was not exercised more than was meet.
She leaned her chin upon her hand and looked at him.
She had met Voltaire when she was a child--at least she said so, and he,
being a gentleman, remembered perfectly. She read to him a little
manuscript she had just dashed off. It was deep, profound and full of
reasons--that is the way learned women write--they write like professors
of rhetoric. Really great men write lightly, suggestively, and with a
certain amount of indifference, dash, froth and foam. When women evolve
literary foam, it is the sweet, cloying, fixed foam of the charlotte
russe--not the bubbling, effervescent Voltaire article.
Could M. de Voltaire suggest a way in which her manuscript might be
lightened up so the public executioner would deign to notice it?