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 LIFE 
 
 OF 
 
 YOLTAIEE. 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES PARTON. 
 
 C"est dommage, i la v^rit^, de passer ime partie de sa vie a detruire de vieux chateaux enchanWs. 
 II vaudrait mieux 6tablir des V(5rit(i8 que d examiner des mensonges ; mais ou sont les Teritds? 
 
 Voltaire, 1760 
 
 VOLUME I. 
 
 1 -,',«> 
 
 ' ' » » » J 4 
 
 
 % 1 ^ 
 
 BOSTON: 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. 
 
 1881. 
 
 83545
 
 Copyright, 1881, 
 Br JAMES PARTON. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 t tec - *■ - 
 
 
 r/ie Riverside Press, Cambridge : 
 Stereotj ped and Printed b3' II. 0. Houghton & Co.
 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 I ATTEMPT in these volumes to exliibit to the American 
 people the most extraordinary of Frenchmen, and one of the 
 most extraordinary of human beings. 
 
 When first I ventured, many years ago, to think of this 
 task, I soon ceased to wonder "why a subject so alluring had 
 not been undertaken before by any one employing the whole 
 \ of the existing material. Voltaire Avas then buried under a 
 ■^ mountain of heterogeneous record. The attempts of essayists, 
 even those of the first rank, to characterize him truly were in 
 some degree frustrated by an abundance of unsorted informa- 
 tion that defied all ordinary research. Since that time the 
 CD Voltairean material has continued to accumulate, and never so 
 03 rapidly as during the last three years. 
 
 ^ At this moment, if I lift mjr eyes from the desk on which 
 (i> I write, I see before me volumes containing fifty thousand 
 -^ printed pages of his composition, including more than two 
 ^ hundred and sixty separate publications. The published cor- 
 respondence of Voltaire now comprises more than ten thou- 
 sand letters. The works relating to him and his doings form 
 a catalogue of four hundred and twenty-eight entries, which 
 will probably be increased before these volumes see the light. 
 Scarcely a month passes without some addition to the wonder- 
 ful mass. At one time it is a series of letters found in a gro- 
 cer's shop, or rendered accessible by the death of an heir of 
 one of his princely correspondents ; now, an enterprising editor 
 gives his readers an unpublished poem ; recently, Mr. Gallatin 
 deposited in the library of the New York Historical Society 
 sixty-six pieces of paper and card containing words written or 
 dictated by him; and in September, 1880, came from Paris
 
 / 
 / 
 
 11 PREFACE. 
 
 the announcement of " Le Sottisiev de Voltaire," from one of tlie 
 eighteen volumes of manuscript in his library at Petersburg. 
 No sooner is an edition of his works published than it is made 
 incomplete by a new discovery. Since the issue of the ninety- 
 seven-volume edition in 1834, enough matter has accumulated 
 to fill six or seven volumes more. 
 
 Still more strange, the mass of his writings, and, I may 
 even say, every page of them, has to this hour a certain vital- 
 ity and interest. If it has not intrinsic excellence, it possesses 
 the interest of an obsolete kind of agreeable folly ; if it is not 
 truth, it is a record of error that instructs or amuses. He was 
 mistaken in supposing that no man could go to posterity laden 
 with so much baggage. In some cases it is the baggage that 
 floats him, and many readers of to-day find his prefaces, notes, 
 and introductions more entertaining than the work hidden in 
 the midst of them. Nearly every page of this printed matter 
 contains at least an atom of biography, and I can fairly claim 
 to have had my eye upon it, indexed it, and given it considera- 
 tion. 
 
 At the elad of this volume will be found a list of the pub- 
 lications relating to Voltaire (Appendix I.), and this is fol- 
 lowed by the catalogue of his own works (Appendix II.) ; 
 both lists being arranged in the order of their publication, 
 and the titles translated into English. 
 
 The reader is probably aware that every circumstance in the 
 histoi'y of this man, from the date of his birth to the resting- 
 place of his bones, is matter of controversy. If I had paused 
 to state the various versions of each event and the interpreta- 
 tions put upon each action, this work would have been ten vol- 
 umes instead of two. It would have been, like many other 
 biographies, not a history of the man, but a history of the 
 struggles of the author in getting at the man. Generally, 
 therefore, I have given only the obvious or most probable 
 truth, and have often refrained from even mentioning anec- 
 dotes and statements that I knew to be groundless. Why pro- 
 long the life of a falsehood merely for the sake of refuting it ? 
 
 The Voltaire of these volumes is the nearest to the true one 
 that I have been able to gather and construct. I think the
 
 I 
 
 PREFACE. iii 
 
 man is to be found in these pages delineated by himself. But 
 he was such an enormous personage that another writer, 
 equally intent upon truth, could find in the mass of his re- 
 mains quite another Voltaire. I received once from Paris, in 
 the same parcel, two books about him, both written, as it 
 seemed, by honest, able, and resolute men. One was the work 
 of the Abbe Maynard, a canon of Poictiers, who ended his two 
 thick volumes of laborious vituperation by saying that Voltaire 
 was a mere " monkey of genius, who amused and diverted by 
 his funny tricks." The other work, " Le Vrai Voltaire," by 
 Edouard de Pompery, spoke of him as the most virtuous man 
 of his age, because he did the most good to his kind, and be- 
 cause there was in his heart the most burning love of justice 
 and truth. " Voltaire," this author continued, " was the best 
 Christian of his time, the first and the most glorious disciple 
 of Jesus." 
 
 There was space in Voltaire to include these extremes. He 
 was faulty enough to gratify the prejudice of that honest priest ; 
 he was good enough to kindle, justify, and sustain the enthusi- 
 asm of that young philanthropist.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 -»- 
 
 CHAPTER L 
 
 ANCE8TOE9 ^ 
 
 CHAPTER 11. 
 Notaries in France 12 
 
 CHAPTER HI. 
 Birth and Home ..." 16 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 His Childhood 21 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 At School 29 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 The School Poet 40 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 Wild Oats •"'0 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 Head over Ears in Love 59 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 Solicitor'.s Clerk 69 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 At the Chateau of Saint-Ange 75 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 Exiled for an Epigram 83 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 In the Bastille 95
 
 VI CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER XIIL 
 Eleven Months in Prison . 109 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 " (Edipe " Pekeormed . 116 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 From Chateau to Chateau 127 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 Beginnings op his Fortune 139 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 Journey to Holland 145 
 
 CHAPTER XVin. 
 "La Henriade" Published 158 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 Voltaire a Courtier 171 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 In the Bastille Again 184 
 
 CHAPTER XXL 
 ,| First Impressions of England 195 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 \ Residence in England 209 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 Return to France 237 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 Pursuit of Literature under Difficulties 247 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 The Convulsionist Miracles 260 
 
 CHAPTER XXVL 
 The Tender "Zaire" 271 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIL 
 The English Letters Published 284
 
 CONTENTS. vii 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 Madame du Chatelet and hee Chateau 298 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 Man of Business 314 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 Literary Work at Cirey 331 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 Frederic, Prince Royal of Prussia 343 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIL 
 Flight into Holland 353 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 Voltaire and Science 363 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 Visitors at Cirey .... 376 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 The Abbe Desfontaines 397 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI. 
 Frederic becomes King of Prussia 414 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII. 
 First Meeting of Voltaire and Frederic 429 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIIL 
 Voltaire as Amateur Diplomatist 43.5 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX. 
 " Mahomet " and " Merope " 449 
 
 CHAPTER XL. 
 Voltaire and Madame Study History together .... 464 
 
 CHAPTER XLI. 
 Amateur Diplomatist Again 475 
 
 CHAPTER XLIL 
 Voltaire at the Court of France 486
 
 viii CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIII. 
 Oct op Favor at Court 513 
 
 CHAPTER XLIV. ; '. 
 Precipitate Flight from Court 522 
 
 CHAPTER XLV. 
 Death of Madame du Chatelet 547 
 
 CHAPTER XLVI. 
 The Widower 570 
 
 CHAPTER XL VII. 
 Householder in Paris 577 
 
 CHAPTER XLVIII. 
 Settling in Prussia 597 
 
 APPENDIX I. 
 
 List of Publications relating to Voltaire and to his Works, ar- 
 ranged according to the Dates of Publication so far as known, 
 and with their Titles translated into English .... 615 
 
 APPENDIX II. 
 
 A List of the Works of Voltaire, in the Order, so far as known, 
 OF their Publication, with THE Titles translated INTO English . 632
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIPvE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ANCESTORS. 
 
 Francois-Marie Arouet, who at the age of twenty-four 
 assumed the name of Voltaire, was born at Paris on Sunday, 
 November 21, 1694. 
 
 At that time Louis XIV. liad been for fifty-one years styled 
 King of France, and had twenty-one years to live. William 
 and Mary reigned in England. Prussia was a dukedom. 
 Charles XII. of Sweden was a good and studious boy of twelve 
 under his father's tutelage, and Peter I. of Russia, twelve 
 years Czar, had not begun to build the present capital of tlie 
 Russian Empire. The great Newton, still in the prime of his 
 years, liad done the immortal part of his work, and was about 
 to become Master of the Mint. Racine lived, the first name 
 in the literature of the Continent, and Dryden, the head of 
 English literature, was translating Virgil. Pope was six years 
 of age. 
 
 Fran Qois- Marie was the first of the Arouets to acquire dis- 
 tinction, and he neither knew nor cared for his pedigree. In 
 one of the last weeks of his life, when a local genealogist 
 wrote to him to say that two cities of old Poitou were con- 
 tending for the honor of having nourished his ancestors, he 
 replied by a jocular allusion to the seven cities that claimed 
 to be the birthplace of Homer, and added, " I have no way of 
 reconciling this dispute." ^ In his vast correspondence, all 
 topics are more frequently touched upon than that of his own 
 family and origin. In old age he wrote once to a neighbor 
 who meditated buying a piece of land in which he held a life 
 interest, " Now, sir, I give you notice that I count upon living 
 to the age of eighty-two at least, since my grandfather, who 
 1 Voltaire to Du Moustier de La Fond, April 7, 1778
 
 10 LIB^E OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 was as dried up as I am, and wrote neither verse nor prose, 
 lived to eiglity-tliree." ^ 
 
 This dried-up grandfather was Francois Arouet, of Paris, a 
 retired draper, living in 1666 in his own house, Rue St. Denis, 
 with his two children, Marie and Fran^-ois. Country born 
 and bred, he had come up to Paris in early Hfe, probably with 
 some capital, and, having establislied himself in business, had 
 thriven, married, and gained a competence. It was a time 
 when a Paris tradestnau could comfortably retire upon a capi- 
 tal of a hundred thousand francs. 
 
 The family was ancient and respectable. The earliest an- 
 cestor of whom anything is known was Heleuus Arouet, who 
 was living in 1525 at a village in the valley of the Tliouet, a 
 tributary of the Loire, not far froui Poitiers, and about two 
 hundred miles southwest of Paris. He was a tanner by trade, 
 married a tanner's daughter, and brought up one of his sons 
 a tanner. He possessed and transmitted two small estates. 
 Probably the family had been established in the region for 
 generations : an ancestor may have witnessed the battle of 
 Poitiers in 1356, whence the Black Prince bore away captive 
 to England John, King of France. There is no part of France 
 more purely and primitively French than that portion of the 
 old province of Poitou. A grandson of this Helenus Arouet, 
 who was also named Helenus, passed his days at the little 
 town of St. Loup, in the same neighborhood, where he became 
 the father of five cliildren, and inherited one of his grand- 
 father's small estates. Francois, the retired cloth merchant 
 of Paris, was one of his sons. After serving the usual long 
 apprenticeship to a weaver in a village of the same neighbor- 
 hood, Francois Arouet passed some years in business at his 
 native city of St. Loixp, and then made a bold stroke to im- 
 prove his circumstances in removing to Paris. This he did 
 about the year 1621, when the Pilgrim Fathers of New Eng- 
 land were starving through their first summer at Plymouth. 
 When he died, in 1667, a dried-up grandfather of eighty-three, 
 his son Fran9ois was eighteen years of age, and his daughter 
 Marie was twenty. She married Mathurin JNIarchand, a " pur- 
 veyor to Monsieur, the brother of the king." 
 
 Besides these lineal ancestors of Voltaire, we have slight 
 1 2 Lettres Inedites de Voltaire, 163. Paris, 1857.
 
 ANCESTORS. 11 
 
 occasional notices of otlier connections and relations, all in- 
 dicating the respectable boui-geois rank of the family. He 
 speaks himself, in his '* Charles XII." (Book V.), of deriving 
 important information from " the letters of M. Bru, my re- 
 lation, first dragoman (^drogman, he spells it) at the Ottoman 
 Porte." Jean Arouet, a near relation of his father, was the 
 apothecary of St. Loup for many years, and Samuel Arouet, an- 
 other relation, was the notary of the same place. But there 
 is no trace of a literary man in any record of the family yet 
 discovered : for that Ren 6 Arouet, notary and poet of Poi- 
 tou, who died in 1499, and who has been reckoned among the 
 progenitors of Voltaire for a century past, proves to be Rend 
 Adouet.^ 
 
 It was then not alone the extremely dry grandfather of Vol- 
 taire who wrote neither prose nor verse. No known Arouet 
 has ever written except Frangois-Marie Arouet, the subject 
 of this work. A thriving, painstaking race they seem to have 
 been, with some spirit of enterprise among them ; trustworthy, 
 vivacious, irascible, but not gifted, nor interested in the prod- 
 ucts of the gifted. The occupations often chosen by them — 
 tanner, weaver, draper, apothecary, purveyor, notary — are 
 such as required exactness, fidelity, patience, and contentment 
 with moderate gains. 
 
 St. Loup, in or near which for many generations the Arou- 
 ets exercised such useful and homely vocations, is an ancient 
 little city, the centre of the wine, leather, and wool trade of 
 the vicinity, containing at present seventeen hundred inhab- 
 itants. Sheep, cattle, asses, and the vine, then as now, made 
 the wealth of the region round about, and the trades of the 
 Arouets, particularly tanner, weaver, and draper, are still 
 among those that most flourish there. In portions of the de- 
 partment, now named Deux-Sevres, industry is almost confined, 
 says Reclus, to tanning and weaving, and to the breeding of 
 horses, asses, and mules. During the Revolution, St. Loup, 
 mindful of its Arouets and their famous descendant, changed 
 its ancient name to Voltaire. But the new appellation did not 
 adhere. At present they who would find the name upon the 
 map of the world must look for it among the possessions of 
 Great Britain. Cape Voltaire is a headland of Australia. 
 1 La Jeuncsse dc Voltiiiie, par Desuoiresterrea, page 6.
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 NOTARIES IN FRANCE. 
 
 P Francois Aeouet, the father of Voltaire, was a Paris no- 
 tary in large practice. Left an orphan at the age of eighteen, 
 joint heir with his sister Marie of a considerable estate, he 
 :could choose an occupation deemed more eligible than that of 
 'draper, by which his father had thriven. He became, therefore, 
 by purchase, one of the hundred and thirteen notaries licensed 
 in Paris under Louis XIV. 
 
 In the Latin nations of Europe, as frequenter's of the Ital- 
 ian opera and all readers of French and Spanish literature 
 must have observed, notaries are more important functionaries 
 than they are now with us. Columbus and the other naviga- 
 tors of his age had notaries with them to witness and attest 
 their taking possession of discovered lands. A royal notary 
 witnessed the king's signature when he gave a coronet or re- 
 nounced a crown. Readers will readily recall the notary of 
 comed}^ and opera, who enters in the closing scene, — an odd 
 figure in a black robe, with long, curling wig, and a hat of any 
 preposterous and unauthorized shape which the resources of 
 the theatre can supply. He advances to a table provided for 
 him, and salutes the company with ofl&cial gayety or official 
 gloom, according to the nature of the service he is about to 
 render. He is the personage waited for, and his entrance 
 often crowns the occasion ; for in France, as in Italy and 
 Spain, no betrothal, marriage contract, will, agreement, or rec- 
 ord has legal validity unless it bears the attestation of a li- 
 censed notary. Hence his importance in life and his utility 
 in literature. The entrance of the notary, followed by his 
 clerk, both robed in black, deepens the gloom of a tragic 
 finale ; and the same personages are available for the farcical 
 element in a romantic drama, and add comic force to an act of 
 Moliere.
 
 NOTARIES IN FRANCE. 13 
 
 In countries where few can write, but all are subject to the 
 same laws, some such practitioner as the Roman notarius^ the 
 French notaire, the English notary, is indispensable ; and we 
 should still find him so in the United States and Great Britain 
 if most of us had not learned to write our documents for our- 
 selves. The father of John Milton was a London notary in 
 the reign of James I., and the business was then so lucrative 
 in England that he earned by it the estate that enabled him to 
 give his son every educational advantage which the wealthiest 
 nobleman could have procured for an heir, including twenty 
 consecutive years of study and fifteen months of foreign travel. 
 All that a London notary was in 1620, when John Milton was 
 a boy, a Paris notary was when Voltaire was born, seventy- 
 four years after. 
 
 Under Louis XIV., there was required to be one notary in 
 every parish of the kingdom that contained sixty households ; 
 two in the smaller market towns, from four to ten in the 
 larger ; twenty in towns having a parliament, and one hundred 
 and thirteen in Paris : so many, but no more. The notaries 
 were commissioned by the king ; they were allowed to exhibit 
 over their door the royal arms as a sign ; they could stand in 
 the exercise of their vocation at the door of the king's cabinet. 
 As most charges in the time of Louis XIV. were purchasable, 
 a notary could buy, sell, give, and bequeath his business, pro- 
 vided the recipient was a Catholic Frenchman of twenty-five 
 years, had satisfied the conscription, had studied the profes- 
 sion of notary six years, and served one year as a notary's first 
 clerk. 
 
 Besides the more interesting duties mentioned above, nota- 
 ries drew, attested, and registered such documents as leases, 
 deeds, transfers, agreements of all kinds, papers relating to an- 
 nuities, bankruptcies, gifts, reversions, apprenticeships, and all 
 other services. Their legal fee was very small. The old nota- 
 rial manuals enumerate fifty-one acts for which a notary could 
 charge but one franc, and these comprised nearly all that 
 W'Ould commonly be required in the country or in country 
 towns. There were two fees allowed of two francs, seven of 
 three francs, three of five francs, one of ten francs, four of fif- 
 teen francs, one of twenty-five francs. Reading over the list 
 of these moderate fees, we wonder how a notary, even as busy
 
 14 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 and thriving as the father of Voltaire, could have gained a 
 revenue of several thousand francs a year, until we come to the 
 transactions for which he was allowed to charge a percentage 
 of the sum involved. If a gentleman had money to lend, it 
 was to his notary that he applied to find a borrower, and the 
 notary received a percentage of the amount. The lending of 
 money and the purchase of annuities were important branches 
 of notarial business, the judicious cultivation of which ren- 
 dered the notary himself a capitalist, and enabled him to use 
 to his own signal advantage the knowledge of families and es- 
 tates which it belonged to his vocation to possess. A very 
 large proportion of the business done among us by solicitors, 
 attorneys, conveyancers, brokers, note discounters, life insur- 
 ers, and confidential family lawyers was and is performed in 
 France by notaries. 
 
 The profession bears an honorable name, which is justified 
 by the excellent character of its members. Their commission 
 being an estate, which can be sold, transferred, or bequeathed, 
 but which can also be lost by misconduct, notaries are subject 
 to that force and composition of motives to do right which ex- 
 perience shows to be generally necessary and generally suffi- 
 cient. From the earliest ages the profession has increased in 
 importance, even to the present time, when a notary, in such 
 practice as Voltaire's father had, gains a quarter of a million 
 francs a year, and when there is a stately edifice in Paris, called 
 The Chamber of Notaries, which is in fact the real-estate ex- 
 change of France, as well as the Paris notaries' rendezvous. 
 The profession boasts a literature. Even in a New York 
 library is a massive volume of 816 pages, " Nouveau Manuel 
 des Notaires," published in 1818, and " Le Parfait Notaire," 
 in three larger volumes, published in 1821. 
 
 The rank of a French notary in the time of Louis XIV. is 
 difficult to fix, because, strictly speaking, he had no rank, 
 either in the legal profession or in the social scale. In Roman 
 times he was a slave, as most men were who performed useful 
 offices. A French author discovered, some years since, among 
 stray parchments, an ordinance of Philippe le Bel, dated 1304, 
 which forbade members of this profession to exercise tlie bar- 
 ber's trade, because, being the depositary of family secrets, a 
 notary ought not to be trusted with the use of a barber's im-
 
 NOTARIES IN FRANCE. 15 
 
 plements, which then included the lancet and the knife, as well 
 as the razor and the shears. The ordinance added that, since 
 the business of a notary did not furnish the means of subsist- 
 ence, he could exercise any trade except that of barber.^ As 
 life grew more complicated in France, the business of notaries 
 increased, until their importance had far outgrown their tech- 
 nical rank, and given them a standing not unlike that of a so- 
 licitor in an English town, whose tin boxes are stuffed with 
 family papers, and who knows the secrets of half the county 
 families. 
 
 In a satirical romance, published in Paris when Voltaire was 
 a boy, there is a " tariff or valuation of matches," designed, as 
 the author says, to exhibit the "corruption of the age which 
 had introduced the custom of marrying one sack of money to 
 another sack of money." This table, burlesque though it be, 
 is the burlesque of a not unskillful hand, and it may help us to 
 understand the social importance of notaries in Paris then. 
 According to this authority, a girl who had a dowry of two 
 thousand to ten thousand francs was a match for a retail 
 trader, a lawyer's clerk, or a bailiff. A dowry of ten to twelve 
 thousand francs justified a maiden in aspiring to a dealer in 
 silk, a draper, an innkeeper, a secretary to a great lord. A 
 young lady of twelve to twenty thousand francs was a match 
 for a clerk of court, an attorney, a court registrar, A NOTARY. 
 She who possessed twenty to thirty thousand francs might 
 look as high as an advocate or a government officer of consid- 
 erable rank. Higher grades in the law and government serv- 
 ice could be matched by dowries rising from thirty thousand 
 francs to a hundred thousand crowns ; which last could be 
 fairly wedded to " a real marquis," a president of a parliament, 
 a peer of France, a duke.^ 
 
 By courtesy a notary was called maitre, a word which has 
 as many shades of meaning as our word master, and, like 
 master, is not always a title of honor. Applied to a notary, 
 it was a flattering intimation that he, too, belonged to the 
 law, — la robe, — which had its noblesse, its retainers, and its 
 servants of many grades. 
 
 1 Histoire de la Detention des Philosoplies et Gens de Lettres b, la Bastille, etc., 
 par J. Deloi-t. Paris, 1829. Vol. ii. p. 11. 
 
 2 Le Roman Bourgeois. Paris, 1712. Page 18.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 BIRTH AND HOME. 
 
 r Maitee Feancois Aeouet is known to have been a com- 
 petent notary ; but, in accordance with the system into which 
 I he was born, he obtained every step in his profession by pur- 
 i chase. In 1675, when he was twenty-six years of age, his 
 seven years' apprenticeship being accomplished, he bought for 
 ten thousand francs, duly paid to his predecessor, the place of 
 notary to the city court of Paris, called the Chatelet. The 
 sum was large for that primitive day, before John Law had 
 inflated the mind, as well as the money, of France. We can 
 get an idea of its value from one of Madame de Maintenon's 
 letters of 1680, in which she says that her brother and his 
 wife kept house handsomely in Paris, paying rent, having 
 a good dinner every day, keeping ten domestics, two coach- 
 men, and four horses, upon nine thousand francs a year, of 
 which they allowed three thousand for the theatre, cards, 
 fancies, and "magnificences." In other words, Maitre Arouet's 
 ten thousand francs was equivalent to at least sixty thousand 
 francs of the present time. 
 r^ A thriving young notary, with a good office, several im- 
 I portant clients, and some capital of his own to lend them, 
 could marry out of his sphere, even under Louis XIV. In 
 1683, when he had reached the prudent age of thirty-four, 
 Maitre Arouet married Mademoiselle Marguerite d'Aumard, 
 of a noble family of Poitou, the ancient province of the 
 Arouets. Nicholas d'Aumard, her father, had held a post of 
 dignity in the parliament of his province, and her brother 
 an office of some authority under the king. Their marriage 
 contract, which is still preserved and accessible, indicates 
 that her rank had its influence upon the terms of the union ; 
 she brinffing to him a smaller dowry than he might have 
 demanded from an equal, and he making for her, in case sh<^
 
 BIRTH AND HOME. 17 
 
 survived him, a more liberal provision than was usual in his 
 rank. A French author, who has recently read the docu- 
 ment, reports that the marriage, on the part of the husband, 
 was far from being " a marriage of money." ^ 
 
 Of this lady, the mother of Voltaire, we know too little.; 
 In all the multifarious writings of her son, I find but five 
 meagre lines about his mother, though she lived till he was; 
 seven years of age. Only twice in his works, I believe, 
 occur the words ma mere, when he means his own mother; 
 and he records of her three particulars, not unimportant, 
 but all needing explanation. One is that Ninon de Lenclos 
 had formerly known ma mere ; another is that ma mere had 
 been much the friend of the Abb<^ de Chateauneuf, Ninon's 
 last lover ; and the third that ma mere had once seen the 
 poet Boileau, and said of him that he was " a good book and 
 a silly man." ^ 
 
 As Fran^'ois Arouet was notary both to Ninon and to 
 Boileau, his name still being legible upon the poet's will, 
 his wife's acquaintance with both may have been accidental 
 and momentary. The notarial office was, for some years, 
 only a room in the famil}'^ abode. But the gay, the witty, 
 the worldly Abbe de Chateauneuf, we know, was an intimate 
 friend of the mother and of the house, — a fact which goes far 
 to prove that the incongruous element now introduced into 
 the ancient line of the steady-going Arouets was brought 
 to it by Marguerite d'Aumard, of the old Poitou noblesse. 
 
 The marriage was too fruitful for the delicate mother's' 
 welfare. Within ten months, twin boys were born, one of^ 
 whom soon died, and the other, Armand by name, lived to' 
 succeed his father. Less than thirteen months after was 
 born Marguerite-Catherine, the sister whom Voltaire loved, 
 mother of Madame Denis. In twenty months more, Robert 
 was born, who died in infancy. On Sunday, November 21, 
 1694, after an interval of five years, the child was born: 
 who named himself, twenty-four years after, Voltaire, but 
 who received, on Monday, November 22, 1694, at the 
 baptismal font of a church in Paris, the name of Fran^ois^ 
 Marie. 
 
 1 Jeunesse de Voltaire, page 9. 
 
 2 63 CEuvres de Voltaire, page 168. 80 CEuvres de Voltaire, page 300. 
 
 VOT,. I. 2
 
 18 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 He seems to have always supposed that lie was born 
 February 20, 1694 ; but the baptismal register, drawn under 
 the eye, and perhaps by the hand, of his own father, one of 
 the first notaries of Paris, bears date November 22d, and 
 adds, " Born the day previous." A letter has also been 
 recently discovered which removes the last doubt. A Poitou 
 cousin, who wrote home from Paris, November 24, 1694, 
 gives this item of family news : " Father, our cousins have 
 another son, born three days ago. Madame Arouet will give 
 me the christening cakes for you and the family. She has 
 I been very sick ; but it is hoped she will now mend. The 
 ' child has but a weakly appearance, resulting from the mother's 
 low condition." ^ 
 
 ^ He was the last child of his parents, and when he was born 
 I his brother Armand was ten years old, and his sister Margue- 
 
 frite nine. 
 He was born into an affluent and, as it appears, a cheerful 
 and agreeable home. His father, in the prime of life, had ac- 
 ' quired the title of counselor to the king, as well as the post of 
 notary to the Chatelet. This latter place, owing apparently to 
 the increase of his private practice, he sold in 1692. Among 
 his clients were the heads of several historic houses, ducal and 
 other. " Many a time," says the Duke de St. Simon, " I have 
 seen him [Maitre Arouet] bring papers for my father to 
 sign ; " and again, " He was my father's notary, and mine as 
 long as he lived." ^ The Duke de Sully, the Duke de Praslin, 
 the Duke de Richelieu, the Count de Morangi^s, are men- 
 tioned among his clients ; upon whom, we may infer, he waited 
 assiduously in their houses, but received ordinary clients at his 
 own abode in " the city," decorated and designated by the royal 
 arms. The Duchess de St. Simon held one of his children at 
 the font, with the Duke de Richelieu by her side, and there are 
 other indications that Maitre Arouet was the man of confi- 
 dence to his noble clients, and held in high esteem by them. 
 Always thriving, he bought in 1701 another office, — one more 
 lucrative than that of notary to the Chatelet, if not of more 
 importance. 
 
 There was then a certain ancient high court in Paris, called 
 
 1 Jeunesse de Voltaire, page 4. 
 
 2 13 M^moires de St. Simon, 55. 14 Memoires de St. Simon, 10, Paris. 187*.
 
 BIRTH AND HOME. 19 
 
 the Chamber of Accounts, which stood above all the collectors 
 of the revenue, decided questions relating to the king's claims 
 and dues, and, in general, saw that the royal treasury received 
 no detriment. Duplicates of documents relating to titles, suc- 
 cessions, reversions, and estates were stored away in the pile 
 of ancient structures in which it had its seat. It performed, 
 or professed to perform, much that is done with us by auditors, 
 registrars, the court of claims, and investigating committees. 
 Being an ancient court of an ancient monarchy, and having in 
 charge the king's most vital interest, it had grown to prepos- 
 terous proportions, and gave pretext to such an extraordinary 
 number of snug offices, useful only to the incumbents of the 
 same, that the Chamhre des Comptes became a by-word in 
 France for hoary abuse and cumbrous inadequacy, like the 
 English Court of Chancery at a later day. 
 
 It was an office in this ancient court which Maitre Arouet 
 bought in 1701, and which, after holding for the rest of his 
 life, he resigned to his eldest son, Armand, who enjoyed it as 
 long as he lived. The office was that of " payer of fees to the 
 Chamber of Accounts." At that period, litigants in French 
 courts paid fees to the judges who tried their causes. It was 
 the duty of Maitre Arouet to collect such fees in the court to 
 which he was attached, and pay them to the judges, receiving 
 at the same time a fee for his own services. Either the causes 
 were numerous or the fees were large, for it is a matter of rec- 
 ord that the revenue of this office in the year 1700 was thir- 
 teen thousand francs. 
 
 As he retained always his private notarial practice, Maitre 
 Arouet could henceforth be reckoned among the opulent bour- 
 geois of Paris, his annual income being, as probable tradition 
 reports, twenty-four thousand francs. From an attested docu- 
 ment we learn that he possessed a country-house at Chatenay, 
 a beautiful village five miles from the city. That he kept 
 a gardener his undutiful son has told us. " I had a father 
 formerly," wrote Voltaire, in 1772, to La Harpe, " who was as 
 bad a scold as Grichard [in the comedy of the " Grondeur"]. 
 One day, after he had horribly and without cause scolded his 
 gardener, and had almost beaten him, he said to him, 'Get 
 out, you rascal ! I wish you may find a master as patient as I 
 am.' I took my father to see the ' Grondeur,' having before-
 
 20 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 hand asked the actor to add those identical words to his part ; 
 and my good father corrected himself a little." ^ 
 
 This anecdote of the prosperous, irascible bourgeois is nearly 
 all the light which the writings of the son cast upon the fa- 
 ther. He mentions more than once tbat on a certain occasion 
 his father saw the aged poet. Corneille, and even took wine 
 with him. The young notary was no more pleased with the 
 old dramatist than his wife with Boileau. " My father told 
 me," wrote Voltaire in 1772, " that that great man was the 
 most wearisome mortal he had ever seen, and the man of the 
 lowest conversation." 2 
 
 \ 191 CEuvres de Voltaire, 246. 
 
 2 80 CEuvres de Voltaire, 433.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 HIS CHILDHOOD. 
 
 -"1 
 
 Feancois-Mame, the last born of a weakly and declining 
 mother, was abandoned to the care of a nurse, who had 
 charge of him in an upper room of the paternal abode. He 
 had at first but the feeblest breath of life, and the family 
 did not expect to rear him. Every morning, for several 
 months, the nurse came down-stairs to tell his mother that the 
 child was dying, and every day the Abbe de Chateauneuf, 
 godfather of the infant and familiar friend of its parents, 
 went up-stairs to discuss with the nurse some new expedient 
 for saving its life. So reports the Abbe Duvernet, who 
 heard from an old friend of Voltaire all that he usually 
 told of his earliest days. It was not till the child had lan- 
 guished the greater part of a year that he began to mend 
 sufficiently to give his parents hopes of saving him. Grad- 
 ually from that time he gained strength, and became at 
 length a healthy and active child, though never robust. 
 
 It fared otherwise with the mother, who, so far as we 
 know, contributed nothing to the formation of this boy ex- 
 cept the friends whom she attracted to her home and who 
 continued to frequent it when she was no more. She lingered 
 seven years after his birth, dying July 13, 1701, aged forty. 
 
 His father, a busy, thriving man, occupied with his office, 
 his clients, and his growing capital, appears to have con- 
 cerned himself no more about the boy than busy fathers 
 usually did about their young children. He must have been 
 a liberal and agreeable man, if only to keep about him the 
 learned and gifted persons whom his wife may have originally 
 drawn. But, so far as we know, he taught his son nothing 
 but the art of thriving, and this he did without intending 
 it. Such knowledge pervaded the air of the notary's home,
 
 22 LIFE OF ^ 
 
 and the boy inhaled it unconsc luities, reversions, 
 
 estates, revenues, interest, sh mortgages, all of 
 
 which the son came to unders mdle better than 
 
 any other literary man of an the stuff out of 
 
 which his father's business ai vere made. The 
 
 old man little thought what an accomj^lished notary his 
 younger son was learning to be, when he disturbed the 
 clerks assiduously copying in the notarial office, and played 
 with the rolls of parchment. He caught the secret of all 
 
 ,^hat exact and patient industry, though it disgusted him. 
 -^~~ Of his sister we know little more than that she was his 
 favorite in the small household, as far as a sister of six- 
 teen might be to a boy of seven. She was married young to 
 one of the numerous officers of the Chamber of Accounts, 
 and became the mother of four children, descendants of whom 
 are still living in France, and have even figured in French 
 politics within living memory. One of her grandsons, M. 
 d'Hornoi, was a member of the House of Deputies in 1827. 
 Her children and grandchildren supplied the sole legitimate 
 domestic element in Voltaire's life, and connected him with 
 his country's social system. To this boy of seven, left mother- 
 less, she could be only the good elder sister ; not always 
 patient with his whims, not capable of directing his mind, 
 and much absorbed, doubtless, as girls naturally are, with 
 the opening romance of her own life. 
 
 Her brother Armand, who w-as seventeen years of age at 
 
 > the death of their mother, had already imbibed at the semi- 
 nary of St. Magloire, in Paris, extreme and gloomy views of 
 religion, which he held through life. He touched Voltaire 
 only to repel him. " My Jansenist of a brother," he fre- 
 quently calls Armand, — a term equivalent to Roman Catholic 
 Calvinist. Credulous, superstitious, austere, devout, Armand 
 passed his days, as many Avorth}^ people did in that age, and do 
 in this age, in making virtue odious and repulsive. The con- 
 trast which he presents to his brother is not unusual in re- 
 ligious communities, but is seldom so complete and striking 
 as in this instance. It recalls to mind that inconofruous 
 brother of John Milton, the long-forgotten Christopher Mil- 
 ton ; extreme tory and High Churchman, partisan most zeal- 
 ous of the three Stuarts, knighted and raised to the bench
 
 HIS CHILDHOOD. 23 
 
 by James 11. Armand Arouet carried his credulity to the / 
 point of writing a work defending the Convulsionist miracles, > 
 which is said to exist among the Voltaire manuscripts at 
 Petersburgh ; and Duvernet assures us that in 1786 there 
 could still be seen, above the pulpit of the church in which 
 Voltaire was baptized, a votive offering, placed there by Ar- 
 mand Arouet in expiation of his brother's unbelief. 
 
 This elder brother, then, had little to do with forming the, 
 motherless child, except to make him recoil with loathing; 
 and contempt from whatever savored of the serious and the' 
 elevated. 
 
 Among the frequenters of the Arouet home were three 
 persons who enjoyed the ecclesiastical title of abbe without 
 possessing other ecclesiastical quality. In old Paris there 
 were many such, most of them younger sons of noble fami- 
 lies, who had taken nominally a course of theology, in case 
 anything good should fall in their way which a secular abbe 
 could enjoy, — a canonicate, or a portion of the revenues of 
 a veritable abbey. In the olden time, it seems, the monks 
 were accustomed to place their convent under the protection 
 of a powerful lord, by electing him their abbd and assigning 
 him a part of their income. From the chief of a great house 
 to a younger son of the same was a natural transition ; and 
 hence the swarm of abb^s, in semi-clerical garb, more or 
 less endowed with clerical revenue, who figured in French 
 society of that century, — gentlemen of leisure, scholars by 
 profession, and much given as a class to the more decorous 
 audacities of unbelief. The French are not particular in 
 the matter of titles. In the course of time any man in 
 France who had a tincture of the ecclesiastic in him might 
 style himself abb^, — a word that, after all, only means 
 father. 
 
 The Abb^ Rochebrune was one of these, described by 
 Voltaire himself, in after years, as an agreeable poet, and still 
 known to collectors as the author of a cantata upon the story 
 of Orpheus, which was set to music by Cldrambault, a noted 
 composer and organist of Paris. This cantata was performed 
 at court before Louis XIV., with great applause, at a time 
 when such compositions were in the highest vogue. 
 
 Nicholas G^doyn, another of the abbds, was a more ini-
 
 24 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 portant and more interesting person. Like Rocliebrune, lie 
 was the scion of an ancient race, a circumstance that gave him 
 a canonicate and a revenue from two abbeys while he was still 
 in the prime of manhood. He had a passion for the classic 
 authors of antiquity, and published free translations of Quin- 
 tilian and Pausanias, which remained for two generations 
 popular works in France, and are still read. He was one of 
 that antique race of scholars who could not go anywhere with- 
 out their pocket Horace. He loved his Horace, and wrote 
 a "Conversation" upon him. The titles of his works show 
 the bent of his mind : " Life of Epaminondas," " Roman 
 Urbanity," " The Pleasures of the Table among the Greeks," 
 " Apology for Translations," " The Ancients and the Mod- 
 erns," " The Judgments of Photius upon the Greek Ora- 
 tors." He also wrote a treatise upon the " Education of Chil- 
 dren," that explains in part the warm interest which we know 
 he took in the education of the little Francois Arouet, whom 
 
 <Jie influenced powerfully and decisively. Jesuit, canon, and 
 abbe as he was, he was as much pagan as Christian; or, 
 as Voltaire more politely expresses it, in his list of the au- 
 thors of Louis XIV.'s time : " The Abbe Gedoyn was so 
 warmly enamored of the authors of antiquity that he willingly 
 pardoned their religion in consideration of the beauties of 
 their works and their mythology." The genial abbe had little 
 love of modern authors. He thought the human mind had 
 lapsed and narrowed under Christianity, and that great poetry 
 \ and great eloquence had passed away with the mythology of 
 \ the Greeks. Milton's " Paradise Lost " seemed to him a 
 
 I "barbarous poem, of a fanaticism dismal and disgusting, in 
 
 J which the Devil howled without ceasin^ ac^ainst the Messiah." 
 This amiable and enthusiastic scholar, nourished and lim- 
 
 /ited by the literature of the past, loved the child, associated 
 / familiarly with him all through his forming years, and 
 breathed into him that love of the ancient models which his 
 ^ works so remarkably exhibit. Gedoyn, like Rochebrune, was 
 interested in music. He goes so far as to say that the 
 moderns cannot in the least appreciate the poems of Pindar, 
 because the music is lost to which they were sung. 
 
 Chateauneuf was the third of our abbes, the early guides 
 and tutors of this susceptible spirit. Here we touch music
 
 HIS CHILDHOOD. 25 
 
 again, for tliis abb^ has a place in the catalogue of French 
 writers only as the author of a " Treatise upon the Music of 
 the Ancients." The particular tie which bound these abbes 
 together was probably their common regard for Ninon de 
 Lenclos, whose father was an amateur lutist of celebrity and 
 learning, and she was well skilled in the instruments of the 
 time. They were all members of the elegant and distin- 
 guished circle w^hich gathered round Ninon in her old age, 
 one charm of whose abode was the excellent music furnished 
 by herself and h&r guests. The little Arouet had no ear 
 for music, but he had an ear very susceptible and attentive 
 to other lessons taught him by his abbes. 
 
 Chateauneuf loved the French classics as much as Gedoyn 
 loved the Greek and Roman ; Racine was his favorite among 
 the French poets, who always remained Voltaire's. " Sixty 
 years ago," wrote Voltaire in 1766, " the Abbe de Chateau- 
 neuf said to me, 'My child, let the world talk as it will, 
 Racine wall gain every day, and Corneille lose.' " 
 
 This last lover of Ninon was brother to the Marquis de 
 Chateauneuf, a person of note in the diplomacy of the time, 
 ambassador to Holland and to Turkey at a later day. The 
 abb^ was a gay, decorous, and genial man of the world, 
 known in all agreeable circles, and, as St. Simon records, 
 " welcome in the best." In particular, he frequented the opu- 
 lent and elegant abode of the Abb^ de Chaulieu, poet and 
 epicure, who drew thirty thousand francs a year from the 
 revenues of country abbeys, which he spent in Paris, enter- 
 taining princes, poets, and literary churchmen. This lux- 
 urious ecclesiastic lived near the Arouets, and his house was 
 the door through which the youngest of them was to make 
 his way to the elevated social spheres. 
 
 But it was the Abb6 Chateauneuf who was the child's first 
 instructor. In his character of godfather, he had promised to 
 see that the boy was duly instructed in religion, and reared 
 in accordance with the laws and usages of the Catholic Church. ' 
 Voltaire told his intimate friends how his godfather fulfilled 
 this vow. He first made the child read and repeat the rhymed 
 fables of La Fontaine, — new works then, the author having 
 survived till this boy was half a year old. Duvernet mentions 
 a piece by another hand, which, he says, the boy knew by heart
 
 { 
 
 26 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 wlien he was three years of age, — " La Moisade," a fugitive 
 poem then in great vogue among these gay abb^s, who lived 
 upon the revenues of a church which they despised and under- 
 mined. 
 
 We need not believe that the boy knew this piece by heart 
 -at three years of age ; but it was among the pieces of verse 
 which he first heard and longest remembered. Such produc- 
 tions, common as they afterwards were, had in 1697 the com- 
 bined charm of novelty and danger. They circulated in man- 
 uscript from hand to hand, and from circle to circle ; grave 
 men and famous women copied them into their diaries, where 
 they may still be read, together with those satires and squibs 
 which caused the government of the Bourbons to be described 
 as a despotism tempered by epigrams. This " Muisade " is a 
 short poem in the deistical taste ; its main purport being that 
 all of religion is a device of interested men, excepting alone the 
 doctrine of a Supreme Being. Moses, according to this poet, 
 availed himself of the credulity of the ignorant multitude in 
 order to secure obedience to good laws. It concludes thus : — 
 
 " Men vain and fanatical receive, without difficulty, the most chi- 
 merical fables. A little word about eternity renders them benign and 
 peaceful ; and thus the whole of a stupefied people are reduced to kiss 
 the ligatures that strangle them. By such arts Moses knew how to 
 fix the restless spirit of the Hebrews, and took captive their credulity 
 by ranging his politic laws under the standard of the Divinity. He 
 pretended to have seen upon a distant moxmtain celestial visions. He 
 gave those rustics to understand that God, in his splendor and maj- 
 esty, had appeared before his dazzled eyes. Authentic tables he 
 showed them, containing God's will. He supported by pathetic tones 
 a tale so well invented, and the entire people was enchanted with 
 those magnificent fooleries. Cunning falsehood passing for truth 
 established the authority of that legislator, and gave currency to the 
 politic errors by which the world was infected." 
 
 Such was the lesson taught the infant Arouet through the 
 instrumentality of his godfather; and probably the whole 
 Arouet household and circle approved it, except his brother 
 Armand. Such was the tone of the circle of abbds, poets, 
 and placemen who lived in the neighborhood, and had to do 
 with the formation of this most susceptible boy, from his in- 
 j fancy to mature age.
 
 HIS CHILDHOOD. 27 
 
 There was sucli a stir in matters religious during the ten 
 years spent at his father's house that so eager and intelligent 
 a boy as he was could not have failed to know something of 
 it. In writing certain passages, half a century later, of his 
 " Age of Louis XIV.," he may have drawn upon his o^vn rec- 
 ollections as a little child. It was about 1702, as he therein 
 records, that a strong feeling arose within the church itself 
 against the filthy relics with which every altar then reeked. 
 Readers who have chanced to see the old English ballad of 
 Cromwell's time, called " A Journey into France," may have 
 supposed that its list of the relics in Notre Dame of Paris 
 was a mere invention of a " natural enemy." Besides a sleeve 
 and a slipper of the Virgin Mary, the poet enumerates among 
 "the sights of Nostre Dame," — 
 
 '' Pier Breasts, her Milk, her very Gown 
 Which she did weare in Bethlem town, 
 
 When in the Inne she lay ; 
 Yet all the world knows that 's a fable, 
 For so good Cloaths ne'r lay in stable, 
 Upon a lock of Hay. 
 
 " There is one of the Crosses Nails, 
 Which whoso sees his bonnet vailes, 
 
 And if he will, may kneel : 
 Some say, 't is false, 't was never so, 
 Yet, feeling it, thus much I know, 
 
 It is as true as Steel." ^ 
 
 This catalogue of disgust was probably not invented by the 
 poet, for we know that offensive objects, similarly described, 
 were actually exhibited in the chief church of France when 
 Francois-Marie A^ouet was a child in his father's house, near 
 by. It was in 1702, when he was eight years of age, he tells 
 us, that there arose in France a bishop — Gaston-Louis de 
 Noailles — who was brave enough to take from his metropoli- 
 tan church, at Chalons on the Marne, a relic which had been 
 adored for ages as the navel of Jesus Christ. This bishop 
 had the courage to throw away the monstrous thing. 
 
 "All Chalons murmured against the bishop. Presidents, counsel- 
 ors, placemen, royal treasurers, merchants, men of note, canons, 
 priests, protested unanimously, in legal form, against the enterprise 
 of the bishop, demanding the return of the navel, and supporting 
 
 1 Musarum Deliciae, London, 1656.
 
 28 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 their demand by referring to the robe of Jesus Christ preserved at 
 Argenteuil, his handkerchief at Turin and at Laon, one of the nails 
 of the cross at St. Denis, and so many other relics which we preserve 
 and despise, and which do so much wrong to the religion that we 
 revere. But the wise firmness of the bishop carried the day at last 
 over the credulity of the people." ^ 
 
 This movement had indeed originated some years before 
 with Jean de Launoi, a famous and learned doctor of Paris, who 
 made such effective war against the falsities of the Roman cal- 
 endar as to acquire the name of Saint Expeller (JDinicheur de 
 Saints). He had the mania to scrutinize the historical claims 
 of popular saints, and, if he found the testimony insufficient, 
 erased them from his list. " He is terrible alike to heaven 
 and earth," says a writer of that day, " for he has tumbled 
 more saints out of Paradise than any ten Popes have put 
 there." A witty priest remarked that whenever Doctor de 
 Launoi came into his parish he made profound reverences to 
 him, for fear he should take away his St. Roch. A country 
 magnate begged him not to harm St. Yon, the patron saint 
 of one of his villages. " How shall I do him any harm," 
 said the Denicheur, "since I have not the honor to know 
 him ? " On another occasion he declared that he did not turn 
 out of heaven the blessed whom God had placed there, but 
 only those whom ignorance and error had slipped in. He 
 held " a Monday " at his house for the discussion of saintly 
 claims and traditions, when he made such havoc of favorite 
 saints, male and female, and turned into ridicule so many 
 pious and romantic fictions, that Louis XIV. asked him to dis- 
 continue those assemblies. Witty and gay churchmen laughed 
 at his honest zeal ; the king feared it ; and so the beginning 
 of reform within the church could not go far. 
 
 All this was "in the air" while Voltaire was a little boy 
 at his father's house ; and during the whole forming period of 
 his life he lived in the very thick of it. He had also an elder 
 brother in Paris, who made conscientious living ridiculous and 
 offensive. 
 
 1 Si^cle de Louis XIV., chap. xxxt.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 AT SCHOOL. 
 
 The boy remained at home three years after his mother's ' 
 death, with his father, sister, and elder brothei', instructed in 
 a desultory way by the Abbd Chateauneuf. The family lived 
 liberally and with some elegance, enjoying, as documents at- 
 test, a large garden, a summer residence in a suburban village, 
 with a farm adjacent, horses, vehicles, books, an ample in- 
 come, consideration, and a ch'cle of agreeable friends, whom 
 these alone never command. " I wrote verses from my cra- 
 dle," Voltaire remarks more than once, and Duvernet adds 
 that Armand Arouet also wrote them, even while both were 
 boys at home. The family, he says, used to amuse themselves 
 by pitting the brothers against one another in verse-making, 
 and the verses of the younger were so good as at first to 
 please and afterwards to alarm his father, who was a man of 
 judgment, and dreaded the development of so unprofitable a 
 talent. 
 
 Maitre Arouet, like a true French father, had a scheme of . 
 life for each of his sons. The elder, as a matter of course, 
 would follow his father's business of notary, and succeed by 
 inheritance to his father's offices. For his younger son he 
 cherished more ambitious views : he designed to make a solic- 
 itor or an advocate of him. A notary, in such practice as he 
 enjoyed, would be almost a sufficient patron to a young advo- 
 cate, and it would be both convenient and advantageous to 
 have a lawyer in the family. We still hear of solicitors in 
 London, in large practice, bringing up a son or a nephew as 
 a barrister, because it is solicitors who choose barristers for 
 their clients. There were also places open to the legal profes- 
 sion in France, procurable by purchase, by interest, or by a 
 blending of the two, wliich led to the higher magistracy, if 
 not to the court and cabinet of the king.
 
 30 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 r' This father, it is evident, had set his heart upon seehig his 
 younger son enter a career in which he could push him on to 
 fortune with advantage to himself ; and to this end he took 
 precisely the course which an opulent father of his rank would 
 adopt at the present time : he sent him to the great school of 
 the day, — tlie Eton of France, — the Jesuit College Louis-le- 
 Grand, attended then by two thousand boys of the most distin- 
 guished families in the kingdom. This school, which still exists 
 upon its ancient site in the Rue St. Jacques, in the heart of old 
 Paris, presented almost every attraction which could weigh 
 with a fond or an ambitious parent. The Jesuits were in the 
 highest credit with king, court, and hierarchy, and this school 
 was among their most cherished and important institutions. 
 Years before, when Louis XIV. visited it in state to witness a 
 play performed by the pupils, he let fall an expression which 
 gave it the name it bore, and brought it into the highest fash- 
 ion. A spectator said, " Everything is admirable here." The 
 king, hearing the remark, responded, " Certainly, it is my col- 
 lege." The next morning, before the dawn of day, the old 
 name of " College of Clermont " had disappeared from the 
 gate- way, and in its stead was placed a new name, " College 
 Louis-le-Grand." 
 
 The urbane and scholarly Jesuits held this king in firm pos- 
 session. That plain-spoken lady, Madame, mother of the Re- 
 gent, tells us in her Memoirs that the priests had made the 
 king believe all men damned except those whom Jesuits had 
 instructed. If any one about the court, she adds, wished to 
 ruin a man, he had only to call him a Huguenot or a Jansen- 
 ist, and his business was done. Her son, the Duke of Orleans, 
 desired to take a gentleman into his service who had been ac- 
 cused of Jansenism. " Why, nephew," said the king, " do 
 you think of such a thing as receiving a Jansenist into your 
 service ? " The prince replied, " I can positively assure your 
 majesty that he is no Jansenist. It is rather to be feared that 
 he does not even believe in God." " Oh," said the king, " if 
 that 's all, and you give me your word he 's no Jansenist, 
 take him." It is doubtful if INIaitre Arouet thought better of 
 the Jansenists than the king, since his son Armand had come 
 from their teaching a narrow and cheerless devotee. 
 jit was in the autumn of 1704, a few weeks after the battle
 
 AT SCHOOL. 31. 
 
 of Blenheim, that Francois-Marie Arouet, aged ten years, was 
 placed in this famous school. His home was within an easy 
 walk of the miscellaneous aggregation of buildings belonging 
 to the college in the Rue St. Jacques, on the southern side of 
 the Seine ; but his father, left a widower three years before, 
 had given away his only daughter in marriage, and therefore 
 entered his son among the boarders, five hundred in number. 
 
 The child was not turned loose among this great crowd of 
 boys, to make his way as best he could. There were privi- 
 leges which wealth could buy, and Maitre Arouet provided for 
 his son one of the most valuable of these. The price of board 
 and tuition was four hundred francs a year ; which entitled 
 the pupil to no special care or comfort. A prince, or indeed 
 any man who chose to pay the extra cost, could establish his 
 son in a private room, and provide him with a servant and 
 tutor ; and there were usually thirty or forty boys in the col- 
 lege thus favored. The private rooms were in such request 
 that it was necessary to speak for one of them years before 
 it was wanted. There were thirty or forty larger rooms for 
 groups of five, six, or seven pupils, each group under the care 
 of a, p7'efet, a priest, who served them as father and tutor, aid- 
 ing them in their lessons, and keeping them from harm. It 
 was in one of these groups that ]\Iaitre Arouet placed his child, 
 under the care of Father Thoulier, a young priest (twenty- 
 two in 1704) of noted family and attainments. What better 
 could a generous father do for a promising, motherless boy of 
 ten in the Paris of 1704? Clad in a scholar's modest frock 
 and cap, brown-haired, bright-eyed, not robust, already prac- 
 ticed in gay mockery of things revered, Frangois Arouet took 
 his place in that swarm of French boys of the College Louis- 
 le-Grand. There he remained for seven years, and it was his 
 only school. 
 
 We must think of it simply as a boys' school, not a col- 
 lege ; a humming, bustling hive of boys, given to mischief, 
 and liable to the most primitive punishments when detected in 
 the same. It was while Voltaire was a pupil that the Duke 
 de Boufflers and the Marquis d'Argenson conspired with other 
 boys to blow a pop-gun volley of peas at the nose of the un- 
 popular professor. Father Lejay, and were condemned to be 
 flogged for the outrage. The marquis, a boy of seventeen,
 
 32 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 the son of a king's minister, managed to escape ; but the 
 younger duke, though he was named " Governor of Flanders " 
 and colonel of a regiment, was obliged to submit to the pun- 
 ishment. Voltaire, too, speaks of his prefet giving him and 
 his comrades some slaps sur les f esses by way of amusement.^ 
 The discipline, however, was far from being severe, and there 
 was evidently a friendl}' sympathy between pupils and teach- 
 ers, which, in the case of Voltaire, survived school-days. 
 
 In no important particular did this school differ from a 
 Jesuit school of the present moment, such as we may visit in 
 Rome, Vienna, Montreal, New York. Sixty years after leav- 
 ing it, Voltaire recalled to mind the picture, twelve feet square, 
 which adorned one of its halls, of St. Ignatius and St. Xavier 
 going to heaven in a resplendent chariot drawn by four white 
 horses, the Father Eternal visible on high, wearing a beauti- 
 ful white beard flowing to his waist, the Virgin and her Son 
 by his side, the Holy Spirit beneath in the form of a dove, 
 and a choir of angels waiting with joined hands and bowed 
 heads to receive the illustrious fathers of the order.^ He re- 
 membered, too, that if any one in France had presumed to 
 ridicule this childish legend, the reverend Pere la Chaise, con- 
 fessor of the king, would have had the scoffer in the Bastille 
 with promptitude. Just such pictures still hang in many a 
 school, and the general view of the universe intended to be in- 
 culcated by them is not materially changed. But the Bastille 
 is gone, and the power of Pere la Chaise is diminished. 
 
 The boy took his place in the lowest class, the sixth, and 
 began his Rosa, la Hose, in the crabbed old " Rudimenta " of 
 Despauteres, written in Latin, and stuffed with needless diffi- 
 culties of the good old-fashioned kind. At many schools a 
 better book was used, written in French, and every way more 
 suitable ; but no Jesuit of that generation would adopt it be- 
 cause it was written by the Fathers of Port Royal, odious 
 Jansenists ! In Greek he was given a little book of easy sen- 
 tences, by Jean Stobde, a compiler who lived in the fourth 
 century ; and this was followed, in his second year, by a selec- 
 tion of J^^sop's Fables. Early in the course he was set to read- 
 ing the Latin poems of Father Commire, who put into such 
 
 1 88 CEuvres de Voltaire, 261. 
 
 2 55 CEuvres de Voltaire, 280.
 
 AT SCHOOL. 
 
 hexameters as he could command the stories of Jonah, Daniel, 
 and the Immaculate Conception, for the edification of youth ; 
 also, some pompous eulogies of the Virgin Mary. And so he 
 worked his way up through all the classes, meeting every day 
 similar incongruities, at the recollection of which he laughed 
 all his life : Epictetus one hour, and St. Basil's Homilies the 
 next ; now Lucian, now St. Chrysostom ; Virgil in the morn- 
 ing, Commire in the afternoon ; Cicero alternating with lea- 
 ther Lejay's Latin Life of Joseph ; Sallust followed by a 
 Psalm of David, in what he calls " kitchen Latin ; " the col- 
 lege course being that wondrous mixture of the two Romes — 
 Cicero's Rome and the Pope's Rome, both imperial — which 
 for ages constituted polite education. The teachers were ami- 
 able and worthy gentlemen, who did the best they knew for 
 their pupils. It merely happened that they now had a pupil 
 in whom the ingredients would not mix. 
 
 The most gifted boy, in the most favorable circumstances, 
 can only make a fair beginning of education from ten to sev- 
 enteen. Voltaire, at the end of his course, could not have 
 entered such universities as Oxford, Cambridge, Berlin, and 
 Harvai'd are now. He may have had Latin enough, but not 
 half enough Greek ; no modern language but his own ; scarcely 
 any tinctui'e of mathematics ; no modern history ; no science ; 
 not even a tolerable outline of geography. The school-books i 
 still held to the ancient theory that rivers were formed by the 
 ocean running into deep caverns under the mountains ; and if 
 any of the fathers had yet heard of the new astronomy of 
 Professor Isaac Newton (adopted at Oxford in 1704, Voltaire's 
 first year at school), they had heard of it only to reject it as 
 heresy. He did not learn the most remarkable events even of 
 French history, unless he learned them out of class. " I did 
 not," he intimates, " know that Francis I. was taken prisoner 
 at Pavia, nor where Pavia was ; the very land of my birth was 
 unknown to me. I knew neitlier the constitution nor the inter- 
 ests of my country ; not a word of mathematics, not a word 
 of sound philosophy. I learned Latin and nonsense." ^ 
 
 We have a work upon education by Jouvency, a Jesuit 
 father of that generation, in which no mention is made of 
 geography, history, mathematics, or science. Much Latin, 
 
 1 54 CEuvres de Voltaire, 209. 
 
 VOL. I. 3 
 
 r*
 
 34 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 a little Greek, and plenty of wliat Voltaire called nonsense 
 (^sottises') made up the mental diet of the pupils of the Col- 
 lege Louis-le-Grand. 
 r — The main strength of the worthy fathers was expended in 
 ' teaching their pupils to use words with effect and grace. The 
 nonsense (^les sottises) was a necessity of their time and voca- 
 tion. Grave and learned men could still gravely and learn- 
 edly discourse upon the grades of angels, the precise difference 
 between a "throne" and a "dominion," the language em- 
 ployed by Adam and Eve, the parents of Melchisedech, and 
 the spot whence Enoch had been translated to heaven. Boys 
 could not escape such sottises ; but in a fashionable school of 
 the learned and courtly Jesuits they were taught with more 
 of formality and routine than among Jansenist orders, who 
 were rude enough to take such things seriously. 
 \ Literary skill was what this boy acquired at school, and 
 scarcely any other good thing. He studied and loved Virgil, 
 his " idol and master." He studied and loved Horace, the 
 model of much of his maturest verse. He loved to recall, in 
 later years, the happy hour when, as a school-boy, he came 
 upon that passage of Cicero's oration on behalf of the poet 
 Archias, which has been a favorite sentence with school-boys 
 for many a century : " Studies nourish youth, cheer old age, 
 adoim prosperity, console adversity, delight at home, are no 
 impediment abroad, remain with us through the night, accom- 
 pany us when we travel, and go with us into the country." In 
 a letter to Madame du Chatelet, written in the first warmth 
 of their affection, he speaks of having often repeated to her 
 those words, which, he says, he early adopted as his own.^ He 
 speaks more than once, in his letters, of his boyish sensibility 
 to the charms of poetry, — his first passion and his last. He- 
 brew he mentions having tried in vain to learn. In a letter 
 of 1767, in repudiating the doctrine of the natural equality 
 of minds, he adduces his own incapacities : " As early as my 
 twelfth year I was aware of the prodigious number of things 
 for which I had no talent. I knew that my organism was net 
 formed to go very far in mathematics. I have proved that I 
 have no capacity for music. God has said to each man, Thus 
 far shalt thou go, and no farther. 1 had some natural power 
 
 1 5 (Envres de Voltaire, 112.
 
 AT SCHOOL. 35 
 
 to acquire modern languages ; none for the Oriental. We can- 
 not all do all things." ^ 
 
 His teachers seemed chosen to nourish his reigning tastes. 
 Father Thoulier, his tutor, known afterwards as Abb^ d'Oli- 
 vet, was one of the most enthusiastic and accomplished Latin- 
 ists in Europe, his translations of Cicero remaining classic to 
 this day in France. He spent a long life in the study of Ro- 
 man literature, his love for which had originally drawn him 
 into the order, against the wishes of his family. " Read 
 Cicero ! Read Cicero ! " he exclaimed in a public address ; 
 and these words, as one of his biographers remarks, were the 
 moral of his life. He could almost have added, " Read noth- 
 ing but Cicero ! " He was a familiar, genial teacher, whom 
 Voltaire, half a century later, used to address as " my dear 
 Cicero;" and the abbe would return the compliment by tell- 
 ing his pupil that he was tired of men, and passed his days 
 " with a Virgil, a Terence, a Moliere, a Voltaire." In his 
 latest years he became a kind of literary bigot, vaunting his 
 favorite authors and reviling the favorites of others. He was 
 m the ardor and buoyancy of youth when he breathed into 
 this susceptible boy the love of Cicero, and gave him familiar 
 slaps by way of amusement. 
 
 But the prefet only saw him safely to the door of the class- 
 rooms. His chief professor of Latin was Father Por^e, whose 
 labor of love was to write Latin plays for the boys to per- 
 form, some of which are still occasionally presented in French 
 schools.2 M. Pierron declares that he shall not to his dying 
 day forget the " prodigious ennui " that he endured in read- 
 ing these productions, characterized, as he remarks, by inanity 
 
 1 2 Lettres Inedites de Voltaire, 560. 
 
 2 One of the Latin plays of Father Force was performed at Boston, Mass., at 
 the Commencement of Boston College, June 27, 1877. It was called Philedonus, 
 or the Romance of a Poor Young Man, the argument of which was given thus : 
 While pursuing his studies in Paris, Philedonus neglects his religious duties, and 
 yields to the fascinations of the luxurious capital. Learning that his friend, 
 Erastus, is dangerously ill, Philedonus becomes the victim of melancholy, and 
 no longer listens to the voice of the tempter. Through the salutary influence of 
 K heavenly vision, in which his mother and a guardian angel appear, and partially 
 arouse the long-dormant energies of his better nature, the student resolves to 
 amend. Various circumstances — among others the dying curse of Erastus — 
 strengthen the good resolutions of Philedonus, who at length escapes from the 
 toils of parasites plotting to effect his ruin, reforms his companions, and returns 
 to his home in Italy.
 
 36 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 of conception, absence of interest, puerility of style, and jests 
 in bad taste.^ They were, however, sufficient for their purpose, 
 and gave the author a great reputation. He was a handsome, 
 imposing, fluent, and agreeable man, who knew how to hold 
 his classes attentive, and to adorn the platform on state occa- 
 sions. Voltaire speaks of Father Por^e with respect and fond- 
 ness thirty years after leaving school, when his old master was 
 at the head of the college. 
 
 It was Father Por^e who said of the boy that " he loved to 
 weigh in his little scales the great interests of Europe ; " which 
 calls to mind a remark of his own, written half a century 
 later : " In my infancy I knew a canon of P^ronne, aged ninety- 
 two, who was reared by one of the most infuriate commoners 
 of The League. He always said [in speaking of the assassin 
 of Henry IV.], Hhe late Ifonsieur de Ravaillac.'' " "^ Being at 
 a Jesuit college, he could not fail to hear something, from time 
 to time, of the wondrous attempts of the Jesuits in Canada, 
 , made familiar to modern readers through the works of Dr. 
 1 Francis Parkman. He even knew a M. Br^beuf, grand-nephew 
 ' of that Father Brebeuf, martyr, bravest of the brave, whom 
 I Dr. Parkman has so nobly delineated in his " Jesuits in North 
 America." Voltaire heard from M. Brdbeuf an anecdote that 
 may have come from the missionary's lips : " He told me that 
 his grand-uncle, the Jesuit, having converted a pretty little 
 Canadian boy, the tribe, much offended, roasted the child, ate 
 him, and gave a choice portion \une fesse] to the reverend 
 Father Brebeuf, who, to get out of the scrape, said it was a fast 
 with him that day." ^ 
 
 From such slight indications as these we can infer that, little 
 as the fathers may have formally taught him of modern histor}', 
 he was not inattentive to the events of his time, and gained 
 some knowledge of the heroic ages of France. 
 
 A comrade of Porde was Father Tournemine, an inmate of 
 the College Louis-le-Grand, though not officially connected 
 with it. He conducted a monthly magazine for the Jesuits, a 
 kind of repository of historical memoirs and pious miscellany. 
 He was a doting lover of such literature as he liked, a man of 
 
 1 Voltaire et ses Maitres, page 77. 
 
 2 58 CEuvres de Voltaire, 7. . 
 8 37 CEuvres de Voltaire, 146.
 
 AT SCHOOL. 37 
 
 the world, a genial, easy companion to young and old, and 
 held in high esteem in the college as literary ornament and 
 arbiter. Between this editor and young Arouet there grew an 
 attachment which lasted many years beyond the college course 
 of the boy, and intluenced both their lives. " While his com- 
 rades," says Duvernet, "strengthened their constitutions, though 
 thinking only of amusing themselves, in games, races, and 
 other bodily exercises, Voltaire withdrew from the playground 
 to go and strengthen his mind in conversation with Fathers 
 Tournemine and Poree, with whom he passed most of his lei- 
 sure ; and he was accustomed to say to those who rallied him 
 upon his indifference to the pleasures natural to his age, 
 ' Every one jumps and every one amuses himself in his own 
 way.' " 
 
 It so chanced that Tournemine was as strenuous a partisan 
 of Corneille as Abb^ Chateauneuf was of Racine, whom the 
 Jesuits held to be a Jansenist, and therefore neither poet nor 
 Christian. " In my infancy," says Voltaire, in his edition of 
 Corneille, " Father Tournemine, a Jesuit, an extreme partisan 
 of Corneille, and an enemy of Racine, whom he deemed a 
 Jansenist, made me remark this passage [Agesilaus to Lysan- 
 der], which he preferred to all the pieces of Racine." The pas- 
 sage amply justifies the remark which the commentator adds : 
 "Thus prejudice corrupts the taste, as it perverts the judg- 
 ment, in all the concerns of life." ^ Nevertheless, that very 
 prejudice of the amiable Jesuit may have served the pupil as 
 a provocative ; and we can easily fancy this boy defending his 
 favorite dramatist against the attacks of the fathers, aiming at 
 them tlie arguments he had heard at home from his mentor, 
 Abb^ Chateauneuf. 
 
 In a lai'ge school there must be, of course, the unpopular 
 teacher, who is not always the least worthy one. Father Le- 
 jay, professor of rhetoric of many years' standing, filled this 
 "role" in the College Louis-le-Grand. He was a strict, zeal- 
 ous, disagreeable formalist; "a good Jesuit," devoted to his 
 order, who composed and compiled many large volumes, still 
 to be seen in French libraries ; a dull, plodding, ambitious 
 man, with an ingredient in his composition of that quality 
 which has given to the word Jesuit its peculiar meaning in 
 
 1 67 CEuvres de Voltaire, 301. 
 
 83545
 
 38 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE 
 
 modern languages. He wrote a book of pious sentences for 
 Every Day of the Week, and a discourse upon the " Triumph 
 of Religion under Louis XIV." He translated and annotated 
 the " Roman Antiquities " of Denys of Halicarnassus, compiled 
 a vast work upon rhetoric, wrote upon the " Duties of a Chris- 
 tian with Regard to Faith and Conduct," wrote tragedies and 
 comedies in Latin and in French, which were played at the 
 college by the boys, with the "success" that invariably at- 
 tends such performances. These dramas of the professor of 
 rhetoric, which are described by a French explorer as among 
 the curiosities of inanity, reveal the interesting fact that Father 
 Lejay had a particular antipathy to " philosophers," and knew 
 very well how to flatter Louis XIV. by abusing them. He was 
 indeed much given to politic flattery, each of his works being 
 dedicated to some great man of the hour whom his order or 
 himself was interested to conciliate. 
 
 Plays w^ere often performed at this school. One of the first 
 comedies presented after the entrance of Francois Arouet was 
 Lejay 's " Damocles," in which the friend of Dionysius is held 
 up to scorn as a "philosopher," and the tyrant is presented to 
 the admiration of the auditors as an ancient Louis XIV. Dam- 
 ocles is remarkable for the flowing amplitude of his beard, in 
 which his foolish soul delights, and his favorite saying is, " Na- 
 tions will never be happy until kings become philosophers, or 
 philosophers kings." The king says, at length, " Very well, 
 be it so ; reign in my place." Damocles reigns. He commits 
 every imbecile folly which the crude mind of Father Lejay 
 could imagine or boys laugh at. The people rise against the 
 " philosopher," and recall Dionysius, who tears the royal man- 
 tle from Damocles, and dooms him to lose his noble beard, 
 more precious to him than life. The crowning scene is the 
 last, in which a barber, with abundant ceremony and endless 
 comic incident, cuts off the beard, amid applause that shook 
 the solid walls of the college.^ It was only with Father Lejay 
 that the young Arouet was not in pleasant accord during the 
 seven years of his school life. The anecdote of their collision, 
 vaguely related by Duvernet, came doubtless from Voltaire 
 himself, even to some of the words which Duvernet employs in 
 telling it : — 
 
 1 Voltaire et ses Maitres, page 108.
 
 AT SCHOOL. 39 
 
 " Among the professors, who were very much attached to him, 
 Father Lejay, a man of mediocre ability, vain, jealous, and held in 
 little esteem by his colleagues, was the only one whose good-will Vol- 
 taire could not win. He was professor of eloquence, and, like most 
 of those who plume themselves upon that gift, he was very little 
 eloquent. He was regarded as the Cotin ^ of orators. Voltaire had 
 with him some literary discussions ; the master felt himself humili- 
 ated by his pupil, and this was the source of that antipathy which 
 Father Lejay had for Voltaire, — a feeling which he could not con- 
 quer, nor even disguise. One day, the pupil, exasperated by the 
 professor, gave him a retort of a certain kind, which ought not to 
 have been provoked, and which it had been discreet in the instructor 
 not to notice. Father Lejay, in his rage, descends from his plat- 
 form, runs to him, seizes him by the collar, and, rudely shaking him, 
 cries out several times, ' Wretch ! You will one day be the stand- 
 ard-bearer of deism in France ! ' " 
 
 Such a scene would not, in that age, have injured the auda- 
 cious boy in the opinion of his comrades. It might even have 
 made him the hero of a day ; for it was of this period that 
 Madame of Orleans wrote, when she entered in her diary, 
 " Religious belief is so completely extinct in this country 
 that one seldom meets a young man who does not wish to 
 pass himself off as an atheist. But the oddest part of it 
 is that the very person who professes atheism in Paris plays 
 the saint at court." 
 
 1 A pompous and arrogant court preacher of Louis XIII.'s time, satirized 
 by Boileau and Moliere.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE SCHOOL POET. 
 
 All things pressed tins boy toward the path he was to 
 follow. Every influence to which he was subjected, whether 
 Vwithin or without the college, stimulated the development of 
 pis peculiar aptitudes. 
 
 In the France of Louis XIV. there were five illustrious 
 names that did not belong to men of rank in church or state, 
 and they were all the names of poets : Corneille, Racine, 
 [Moliere, Boileau, and J. B. Rousseau. These alone of the 
 commoners of France could be supposed worthy to be guests 
 at great houses, and sit with princes in the king's presence. 
 These five : Corneille, a lawyer's son ; Racine and Boileau, 
 sons of small placemen ; Moliere, the son of a Paris up- 
 holsterer ; J. B. Rousseau, the child of the Arouet family's 
 shoemaker. The boy Rousseau may have carried home shoes 
 to the notary's house ; but the proudest head in France was 
 proud to bow to Rousseau the poet. The diaries of that gen- 
 eration attest the estimation in which the verse-making art 
 V was held, and the great number of persons who tried their 
 
 hands at it. Yerse was the one road to glory open to name- 
 less youth, the career of arms being an exclusive preserve of 
 feudal rank. 
 
 We have seen that the professors with whom this lad had 
 most to do wrote plays in prose and in verse. The per- 
 formance of those works on the great days of the school year 
 absorbed such an amount of time and toil that we might 
 suppose the college a training-school of actors. There was 
 the little drama and the grand drama : the first consisting of 
 farces and burlesques, in Latin or in French, or in both ; the 
 second of tragedies, in Latin. The little drama was pre- 
 sented in one of the college halls a few days before the end 
 of the school year, and was witnessed only by the inmates ;
 
 THE SCHOOL POET. 41 
 
 the plays being short, the comic effects simple, and the 
 mounting inexpensive. The grand drama, reserved for the 
 final day, when the prizes were given, — the solemn day of 
 judgment of a French school, — was given in the great court 
 of the college, converted for the occasion into a vast tent. 
 The play was usually m five acts, and " entire months " were 
 employed in drilling the young performers, rehearsing the 
 play, and preparing the scenes. The stage was set up at the 
 further end of the court, opposite the great gate-way, and the 
 interior was all gay with banners, flags, streamers, lapestiy, 
 emblems, devices, and mottoes. The families of the pupils 
 were invited, and places of honor were reserved for the chiefs 
 of the Jesuit order, for bishops and archbishops, and for 
 members of the royal family ; the king himself being some- 
 times present. The five-act Latin play, on some subject of 
 classic antiquity, was tlie prelude to the great event of the 
 occasion, the distribution of the prizes ; and as the performers 
 were generally the boys who were to receive prizes, it was a 
 day of intoxicating glory to them, the applause bestowed 
 upon the actor being renewed and emphasized when he stood 
 up to receive the public recognition of a year's good con- 
 duct. On some occasions there was a mock trial, and the 
 reading of poems composed by the pupils. The acting of cha- 
 rades was also a part of the school festivities, and they were 
 performed very much as we do them now at holiday times, 
 although with more formality.^ 
 
 If these provocatives to literature were not sufficient, there 
 were Literary Societies in the institution, not unlike those of 
 American colleges at the present time. These were styled in 
 the Jesuit schools of that period " Academies ; " and, as the 
 Jesuits invented them, no reader needs to be told that the ses- 
 sions were presided over by one of the father professors. In 
 other respects, there was no material difference between the 
 Academy for which Fran(^ois Arouet composed and declaimed 
 and any Gamma-Delta society of an American college of the 
 present time. The members debated, read poems of their own 
 composition, declaimed those of others, and did all those acts 
 and things which readers remember as part of their own joy- 
 ous school experience. The tradition of the college is that 
 1 Voltaire et ses Maitres, page 28, etc.
 
 42 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 the violent scene with Father Lejay, just related, occurred, 
 not in class, as Duvernet has it, but during a debate in the 
 Academy, Lejay presiding. 
 
 Thus stimulated to productivity young Arouet soon became, 
 and to the end of his course remained, the prodigy of the Col- 
 lege Louis-le-Grand. Some of his early spurts of verse have 
 been preserved. Father Por(^e, being surprised one day by 
 the end of the hour, and having no time to dictate a theme, 
 hastily said, as the bell summoned the class away, " Make 
 Nero speak at the moment when he is about to kill himself." 
 The boy handed in these lines : — 
 
 " De la mort d'une mere execrable complice, 
 Si je meurs de ma main, je I'ai bien me'rite; 
 Et, n'aj'ant jamais fait qu'actes de cruaute, 
 J'ai voulu, me tnant, en faire un de justice."^ 
 
 On another occasion, in the same class, he amused himself 
 by throwing up and catching a snuff-box. Father Por^e took 
 it from him, and required him to redeem it by composing some 
 verses. He produced the following : — 
 
 SUE UNE TABATlfeRE CONFISQUfiE. 
 
 Adieu, ma pauvre tabatiere ; 
 
 Adieu, je ne te verrai plus ; 
 
 Ni soins, ni larmes, ni priere, 
 Ne te rendront a moi ; mes efforts sent perdus. 
 
 Adieu, ma pauvre tabatiere ; 
 
 Adieu, doux fruit de mes ecus ! 
 S'il faut a prix d'argent te racheter encore, 
 J'irai plutot vider les tresors de Plutus. 
 Mais ce n'est pas ce dieu que Ton veut que j'implore ; 
 Pour te revoir, helas ! il faut prier Phebus. 
 Qu'on oppose entre nous uue forte barriere ! 
 Me demander des vers ! helas ! je n'en puis plus. 
 
 Adieu, ma pauvre tabatiere ; 
 
 Adieu, je ne te verrai plus.'^ 
 
 1 Of the death of a mother the execrable accomplice, if I die by my own hand, 
 I have deserved it well ; and, having until now done only acts of cruelty, I have 
 wished, in killing myself, to do one of justice. 
 
 2 UPON A CONFISCATED SNUFF-BOX. 
 
 Adieu, my poor snuff-box ; adieu, I shall never see thee more; nor pains, nor 
 tears, nor prayer will give thee back to me ; my efforts are lost. Adieu, my poor 
 snuff-box ; adieu, sweet fruit of my crowns. If money was the price of thy re- 
 demption, I would rather go and empty the treasury of Pluto. But it is not that 
 god whom I am required to implore. To get a sight of thee again, I must, alas ! 
 address a prayer to Phoebus. What an obstacle is interposed between us ! To 
 ask verses of me ! Alas ! I can produce no more of them. Adieu, my poor 
 snuff-box ; I shall never see thee more.
 
 THE SCHOOL POET. 43 
 
 Other light verses, composed in his earlier school years, have 
 been preserved ; but these will suffice to show that, while still 
 a child, he had a degree of the literary tact of which he was 
 afterwards a master. As if to make amends to Father Lejay, 
 he translated into French verse a Latin poem of that professor, 
 of a hundred lines or more, upon Sainte Genevieve, always a 
 very popular saint in Paris, even to this day. The poem is of 
 the purest orthodoxy. A more popular effort among his com- 
 rades was a translation into four French lines of an old Latin 
 stanza upon bell-ringers, in which the poet gives utterance to 
 a desire, common to students, that the rope held in the hand 
 of the ringer might be twisted around his neck. 
 
 It is not possible to fix the date of these poems, but we are 
 sure of one thing : before he was eleven years of age, and be- 7 
 fore he had been at school a year, he was recognized and -^ 
 shown as a wonder of precocious talent. We are sure of this, 
 because it was in the character of a wondrous boy-poet that 
 Abb^ Chateauneuf presented him to a personage still more 
 wondrous. Mademoiselle Ninon de Lenclos, then in her nine- 
 tieth year, but still the centre of a brilliant circle. She died 
 in October, 1705, when Franqois Arouet was not quite eleven 
 years of age. Ladies of the higliest rank, we are assured, 
 paid court to this anomalous being, and besought her, even in 
 extreme old age, to " form " their sons by permitting them to 
 frequent her evening parties. An uncomely young dandy hav- 
 ing boasted that he had been " formed " b}'^ her, she said, " I 
 am like God, who repented that he had made man." Moliere 
 consulted her upon his comedies, and .caught from her conver- 
 sation some traits of his masterpiece, Tartuffe. She lived in 
 elegance and luxury all her days, courted by the courted, ad- 
 mired by the admired, envied by the envied, sung by poets, 
 loved by priests, reprobated, so far as we can perceive, by no 
 one. 
 
 And who was Ninon de Lenclos ? She Avas a country 
 beauty, the child of gentle parents: her mother a good Cath- 
 olic ; her father a " philosopher " of the sect of Epicurus, who 
 taught her early that there ought not to be one moral law for 
 the male of our sj^ecies, and another for the female. She be- 
 lieved him, and inferred that there was no moral law for 
 either. At seventeen she became the mistress of the Cardinal
 
 44 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 de Richelieu, who gave her a pension for life of two thousand 
 francs a year, a competence at that period, upon which she set 
 up in the vocation of Epicurienne. Ninon was " an honest 
 man," sa3'S a French writer, " because she only had one lover 
 at a time." But she changed them so suddenly that she was 
 unable herself to decide a claim to the paternity of one of her 
 children, and the two contestants decided the matter by a cast 
 of the dice. The boy who thus won a father rose to high rank 
 in the French navy, and died in battle. 
 
 An anecdote more astounding is related of her by Voltaire, 
 who doubtless heard it from the Abbd de Chateauneuf. Near 
 the gate St. Antoine there was a restaurant, much frequented 
 by " honest people," like Mademoiselle de Lenclos and her 
 abb^. One evening, after supper there, a young man of nine- 
 teen, who had been one of the party, met her in the garden, 
 and made such importunate love to her that she was obliged 
 to tell him that she was his mother. The young man, who 
 had come to the place on horseback, took a pistol from his 
 holsters and shot himself dead in the garden. This tragic 
 event made her " a little more serious," but it did not change 
 her way of life, nor lower her in the regard of her friends. 
 
 She was a strict observer of the proprieties of life, took such 
 care of her fortune as to quadruple the income her first lover 
 assigned her, and gradually drew around her the most agree- 
 able and distinguished people in the kingdom, — ladies as well 
 as men. For seventy years she held her ground : admired at 
 first for her beauty, grace, and hereditary musical gifts ; ad- 
 mired later for her "prudence," her "judgment," her good 
 nature, her social talents, and her sure taste in literature. She 
 is said to have held in contempt and abliorrence certain foibles 
 occasionally noticed in other women, such as falsehood, jeal- 
 ousy, malice, and ill-temper. Friendship she deemed a pre- 
 cious and sacred thing ; but as to love, she looked upon it, 
 says Voltaire, as a mere pastime, imposing no moral obliga- 
 tions; and it was her boast that her lovers remained her 
 friends and the friends of one another. The father of the 
 young man who shot liimself abandoned Madame de Mainte- 
 non (afterwards the king's wife) to pay court to Ninon, and 
 yet madame remained her friend, and pressed her to come and 
 live in the palace, and help amuse her unamusable old king. 
 She used to say that she had never offered but one prayer.
 
 THE SCHOOL POET. 45 
 
 " My God, make me an honest man, but never an honest 
 woman." ^ 
 
 All this being scarcely conceivable by us, it were of no avail 
 to enlarge upon it. To feel the full force of the contrast be- 
 tween the social laws of two contemporary communities, both 
 called Christian, we have only to reflect that this was the pe- 
 riod assigned by Hawthorne to the incidents of the " Scarlet 
 Letter." 
 
 She was "as dry as a mummy" when the little poet was 
 taken to see her, — "a wrinkled, decrepit creature, who had 
 nothing upon her bones but a yellow skin that was turning^ 
 black." He gives this account of their meeting : — 
 
 " I had written some verses, which were of no value, but seemed 
 very good for my age. Mademoiselle de Lenclos had formerly known 
 my mother, who was much attached to the Abbe de Chateauneuf ; and 
 thus it was found a pleasant thing to take me to see her. The abbe 
 was master of her house ; it was he who had finished the amorous his- 
 tory of that singular person. He was one of those men who do not 
 require the attraction of youth in women ; and the charms of her so- 
 ciety had upon him the effect of beauty. She made him languish two 
 or three days ; and the abbe having asked her why she had held out 
 so long, she replied that she had wished to wait until her birthday for 
 so beautiful a gala ; and on that day she was just seventy. She did 
 not carry the jest very far, and the Abbe de Chateauneuf remained 
 her intimate friend. For my part, I was presented to her a httle 
 later ; she was then eighty-five [eighty-nine]. It pleased her to put 
 me in her will ; she left me two thousand francs to buy books with. 
 Her death occurred soon after my visit." 
 
 This legacy, which, as Voltaire more than once records, was 
 punctually paid, confirms the version of the Abbe Duvernet, 
 who says that the aged Ninon was delighted with the boy. 
 Her house, in the Rue des Tournelles, was, he assures us, " a 
 school of good breeding, and the rendezvous of philosophers 
 and wits, whom she knew how to please and interest even in 
 her decrepitude." All pleased her in the lad, — his confidence, 
 his repartees, and, above all, his information. She ques- 
 tioned him upon the topic of the day, — the deadly feud be- 
 tween the sincere, austere Jansenists and the politic, scholarly 
 Jesuits, then approaching its climax in the destruction of Port 
 Royal. Doubtless he had his little say upon that subject, and 
 
 1 63 CEuvrcs de Voltaire, 163.
 
 46 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 spoke in the " decided tone " whicli the abb^ mentions. Ninon, 
 he remarks, " saw in him the germ of a great man ; and it was 
 to warm that germ into hfe that she left him the legacy to buy 
 books, — a gift at once the most flattering and the most useful * 
 to a young man whose sole passion was to instruct himself." 
 
 The legacy was indeed most flattering. What a stimulus 
 to a susceptible boy of eleven, already conscious of his powers, 
 and living in the midst of a society who assumed that the com- 
 position of good French verse was among the most glorious of 
 all possible feats of the mind ! The next year, being in the 
 fifth class, he began a tragedy upon the story, told in Livy, of 
 Amulius, king of Alba, the wicked uncle of those babes in 
 the woods, Romulus and Remvis. He called his play " Amu- 
 lius and Numitor." He kept it many years among his papers, 
 but threw it at length into the fire. 
 
 While still in the fifth class his fame reached the court. 
 An invalid soldier, who had served under the immediate com- 
 mand of the king's only son and heir, came to the college one 
 day, and asked the regent to write for him a petition in verse 
 to the prince for aid in his sickness and poverty. The regent 
 referred him to Arouet, who wrote twenty lines for him in 
 half an hour. He made the old soldier address the prince as 
 " the worthy son of the greatest of kings," his love, the peo- 
 ple's hope, " who, without reigning over France, reigned over 
 the hearts of the French." " Will you permit me," ran the 
 petition, " to present a new year's gift to you, who only re- 
 ceive them from the hand of the gods ? At your birth, they 
 say. Mars gave you valor, Minerva wisdom, Apollo beauty ; 
 but a god more powerful, whom in my anguish I implore, de- 
 signed to bestow new year gifts upon me in giving you liber- 
 ality." The petition brought a few golden louis to the sol- 
 dier, and made some little noise at Versailles and Paris. It 
 is said also to have renewed the alarm of his father, lest so 
 much flattery bestowed upon a casual exertion of his son's tal- 
 ents should lure him from the path wliich leads to rich clients 
 and liberal fees. This versified petition was the best of his 
 school poems that has been preserved, and was really turned 
 with much elegance and ingenuity. For a boy of twelve to de- 
 vise a compliment for Louis XIV. or his race, after half a cent- 
 ury of incense, that should attract a moment's attention from 
 king or court must certainly be accounted a kind of triumph.
 
 THE SCHOOL TOET. 47 
 
 He did not neglect the ordinary studies of the school. At 
 the close of his sixth year, in August, 1710, on the day of the 
 distribution of prizes, he enjoyed extraordinar}^ honors. Prize 
 after prize, crown after crown (if we may believe tradition), 
 was awarded him, until he was covered with crowns and stag- 
 gered under the weight of his prize books. Among the guests 
 in the grand pavilion was the poet J. B. Rousseau, then in the 
 prime of manhood, the lustre of his fame undimmed. The 
 name of Franqois-Marie Arouet caught his ear, and he asked 
 one of the fathers if the lad was the son of Maitre Arouet, of 
 the Chamber of Accounts, whom he knew. The professor said 
 he was, and that he had shown for some years a marvelous tal- 
 ent for poetry. Then the professor took the boy by the hand, 
 all covered with crowns and laden with glory, and presented 
 him to the poet. Rousseau kissed him on both cheeks, as the 
 French do at such times, congratulated him warmly upon the 
 honors he had received, and foretold for him a brilliant future. 
 The scholar, with equal enthusiasm, threw his arms around 
 the poet's neck, amid the emotion and applause of the as- 
 sembly. 
 
 And so he went on, triumphantly and happily, to the end of 
 his seven years' course ; a good scholar, a favorite of his teach- 
 ers, admired by all his companions, and by some of them be- 
 loved. His friends at school remained his friends as long as 
 they lived, and some of them lived to witness and to solace his 
 last days. The warmest, tenderest, and longest friendships of 
 his life were formed at the College Louis-le-Grand, and his in- 
 structors followed his career with interest and pride, despite the 
 human foibles and the French faults that marred it. There is 
 no question that his life at school was happy and honorable, 
 and both in a high degree. He made the most of his chances 
 there, such as they were. 
 
 These seven years, so brilliant and so fortunate for him in 
 the safe seclusion of a school, were the darkest France had 
 known since the time of Jeanne Dare ; for it was then that the 
 French people had to pay large installments of the penalty of 
 enduring for half a century an ignorant and incomi)etent king. 
 The defeat of Blenheim, in Arouet's first year at school, was 
 followed by that of Ramilies in 1706, while he was writing his 
 tragedy upon the bad uncle of Romulus and Remus. Defeat
 
 48 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 followed defeat, until in 1709 occurred the crowning disaster 
 of Malplaquet. There were times, as this boy remembered, 
 when Paris itself dreaded the victor's approach ; and he never 
 forgot the famine of 1709, when, besides the catastrophe of 
 Malplaquet, the olives failed, the fruit trees were nipped by 
 frost, the harvest was ruined, the British fleet captured the 
 grain ships coming from the East, and the cold of the winter 
 was extreme. His father had to pay a hundred francs extra 
 for him at the college that year, and yet he had to eat brown 
 bread. Probably he meant oaten bread, which Madame de 
 Maintenon set the example of eating at Versailles. The king 
 sent to the mint that year four hundred thousand francs' worth 
 of gold plate, and there was a general melting of silver plate 
 from great houses. 
 
 The old king had his share of sorrow and humiliation. It 
 was in April, 1711, young Arouet's last year at school, that 
 the series of deaths began in the royal family, the mere rec- 
 ollection of which, many years after, brought tears to suscep- 
 tible French eyes. The king's only son, the dauphin, died of 
 i small-pox in that month. The next February his son, the new 
 \ dauphin, died ; and, three weeks after, his son, leaving to 
 France only a boy of two years, " within two fingers of death," 
 who became Louis XV. Paris saw father, mother, and son all 
 borne to the tomb in the same hearse. The hardest hearts, the 
 wisest heads, forgave the stricken king for the woes unnum- 
 bered he had brought upon his country through his subservi- 
 ence to priests. Our young student, when he came, half a 
 century later, to treat of these events, in his " Age of Louis 
 XIV.," wrote, " This time of desolation left in the hearts of 
 men an impression so profound that, during the minority of 
 Louis XV., I knew several persons who could not speak of 
 these losses without tears." ^ 
 
 He remembered, also, that at the period when Marlborough 
 seemed about to come thundering at the gates of Paris, the 
 minds of men were distracted by what seem to us trifling re- 
 ligious disputes. But at that time nothing was trifling that 
 savored of religion, for behind it all there was the dungeon, the 
 torture-chamber, the ba3^onet, the axe, the wheel, the fagot. 
 He remembered that, about the time when he was crowned and 
 applauded in the presence of Rousseau, a Jewess and her daugh- 
 
 1 26 CEuvres de Voltaire, 376.
 
 THE SCHOOL POET. 49 
 
 ter were burned at Lisbon for some trivial act of eating lamb 
 at the season when priests said meat must not be eaten. The 
 story circulated in the school that the girl was ravish ingly 
 beautiful, but he declares that it was not her beauty that drew 
 the tears from his eyes when he heard the tale. 
 
 And at that very time, perhaps at the moment when the 
 young poet heard his name called in the splendid pavilion, the 
 light of victory may have gleamed in the eyes of every Jesuit 
 in Paris on account of the destruction of the convent of Port 
 Royal, near Versailles. The fundamental article of religion 
 with Louis XIV. was the royal authority, and hence he re- 
 garded heresy as rebellion. Long he hesitated before proceed- 
 ing to extremities with the Jansenist ladies of Port Royal in 
 the Fields, so renowned were they for piety and good works, 
 so revered by the solid men of Paris. But his confessor, Tel- 
 lier, gave him no peace, and the bewildered old king sent a 
 confidential servant of his household to the convent to see 
 what manner of persons its inmates were. " By my faith, 
 sire," said the man on his return, " I saw there nothing but 
 saints, male and female." The king sighed, and said nothing. 
 The confessor, divining his thought, assured him that there 
 was nothing in the world so dangerous as the virtues with which 
 the poison of heresy was frequently covered. The fatal order 
 was given. The ladies were distributed among the convents of 
 the kingdom, and their abode was utterly destroyed, so that 
 not one stone remained upon another.^ 
 
 Young Arouet could not escape a knowledge of these events, 
 so dear to every Jesuit. In the very street in which his college 
 was situated there was the Abbey of Port Royal of Paris, a 
 kindred establishment to the one near Versailles. He lived 
 close to these events, and was old enough to feel the infinite 
 frivolity of the dispute which a priest could use as a pretext for 
 such atrocities. During his last year at school, 1711, he may 
 have seen men digging up the bones of the eminent persons 
 buried near the destroyed convent, and conveying them to a 
 village church-yard near by ; and, during his whole school life, 
 the soldiers of the king were hunting Protestants in the mount- 
 ains of Cdvennes for magistrates to break upon the wheel, to 
 hang upon gibbets, to put to the torture, and burn at the stake. 
 
 ^ Me'moires Secrets, par Duclos. 
 
 VOL. I. 4
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 WILD OATS. 
 
 After the poetry of school comes the prose of life. 
 Youth, young companions, zealous and friendly teachers, 
 mental food composed chiefly of the sweets and dainties of 
 three or four literatures, render school and college a land of 
 enchantment, compared with which the ordinary life of man, 
 with its unromantic duties and jostling indifference, seems 
 at first a cheerless highway. It seems such even to an ordi- 
 nary student, who has won no crowns, written no verses, and 
 had no legacy left him by a famous personage. But this boy 
 was (the young Voltaire, who, at ten, had gone from a no- 
 tary's abode to associate familiarly for seven years witli the 
 sons of grand seigneurs, colonels and governors from their 
 cradles, and destined to all kinds of alluring brilliancies. 
 And he had gained a kind of triumph over them. He had 
 discovered that he had something within him which could 
 hold its own, in favorable circumstances, against stars and 
 titles. 
 
 In August, 1711, when he left school, he was nearly seven- 
 teen, tall for his age, not handsome, having only one decided 
 beauty, — brilliant, piercing eyes, which strangers always 
 remarked. The Jesuit fathers took great pains to form 
 the manners of their pupils, and this lad had profited by it. 
 He was always nice in his person and in his personal habits, 
 particular to have about him the more elegant conveniences 
 of the toilette, and keenly alive to the importance of being 
 agreeable. The flashing quickness of his mind rendered his 
 conversation at all times interesting, and gave him a talent 
 for repartee which the French at that time excessively over- 
 valued. From his twelfth to his eighty-fourth year he was a 
 sayer of smart things that minister to the necessities of the 
 vast multitude who are indebted to their memory for their 
 jests.
 
 WILD OATS. 51 
 
 The vacation over, Maitre Arouet pressed his son to think 
 of a profession. " I desire none," said the youth, " except 
 that of literature." The father replied, " Literature is the 
 profession of a man who wishes to be useless to society, a bur- 
 den to his relations, and to die of hunger." ^ The rest of 
 the family sided with the father in combating the young 
 man's choice ; and, at that moment, the very servants in his 
 father's kitchen may have joined in dissuading him. " The 
 affair of the couplets " had broken out in Paris, covering 
 literature itself with opprobrium, and overwhelming with 
 shame and ruin one of its most ilkistrious living ornaments, 
 the poet J. B. Rousseau. From being the favorite of princes, 
 ladies, and bishops, he had suddenly come to naught, and 
 had fled from Paris, never to return to it in honor. Strange 
 to say, there was involved in his peril and disgrace a cob- 
 bler's apprentice, the son of Maitre Arouet's charwoman. It 
 was a childish business ; but, under a " paternal government," 
 an affair too trivial for mention may become terrible and des- 
 olating. 
 
 Some scandalous, vituperative couplets had been mys- 
 teriously dropped in a noted cafe much frequented by the 
 literary men whom the couplets assailed. Rousseau, sus- 
 pected of having wi'itten them, accused Joseph Saurin, a 
 teacher of mathematics in the neighborhood, and made out 
 so strong a case against him that he was arrested and held 
 for trial. But Saurin was an able and resolute man, with 
 powerful friends, and he defended himself with so much 
 skill and effect as to secure his own release and Rousseau's 
 arraignment. One of Saurin's witnesses was the boy just 
 mentioned, who had been employed to convey some of the 
 couplets to the coffee-house, — a task in which he had been 
 assisted by a little shoe-black. The terror of the mother, on 
 hearing of her son's arrest, was extreme, and she deafened 
 all the quarter with her outcries, saying that her son would 
 be hanged. Francois Arouet, as it chanced, was at home ; 
 the outbreak having occurred in the vacation following his 
 scene with the poet. " Take comfort, my good woman," 
 said he ; " there is no hanging to be afraid of. Rousseau, 
 a shoemaker's ^on, suborns a cobbler, who, you say, is the 
 
 1 Duvemet, chapter iii.
 
 52 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 accomplice of a shoe-black. All that does n't go above the 
 ankle." 
 
 The case looked so black for Rousseau that he did not 
 appear at his trial, and was consequently condemned as " con- 
 tumacious," and sentenced to banishment and the confiscation 
 of his goods. He was a ruined man. 
 
 On his death-bed he solemnly declared his innocence ; and 
 he probably was innocent of writing the couplets. Voltaire 
 knew the truth, and drops intimations of it here and there 
 in his writings. A knot of witty fellows, Saurin being one 
 of them, who were in the habit of meeting for convivial pur- 
 poses, amused themselves by writing personal couplets, which 
 Rousseau may have been mischievous enough to bring to the 
 notice of the subjects of them. This trivial affair, besides 
 blasting the career of an exquisite poet, one of the glories of 
 French literature, rent Paris into two impassioned factions, 
 brought reproach upon literary pursuits, and remains to this 
 day a discredit to all who were concerned in it.^ 
 
 Maitre Arouet, the prudent father, and Armand Arouet, 
 " my Jansenist of a brother," could both find argument in 
 it against a literary career. Armand was then twenty-seven 
 years of age, and, more a Jansenist than ever, carrying an ex- 
 ( treme to an extreme. Our youth yielded to their united op- 
 position ; he was enrolled among the students of law in Paris, 
 and attended the lectures. He also entered upon a course of 
 lessons in geometry and metaphysics with Saurin, whose con- 
 duct in the affair of the couplets had given him a great in- 
 crease of celebrity. For three years he studied under Saurin. 
 He owns that he heard the geometer recite couplets against 
 La Motte like those for which poor Rousseau was exiled. 
 
 A French student who now begins the study of the law 
 buys for three francs a copy of the " Code Civil," a volume 
 about as large as a pocket Testament, and as easy to under- 
 stand as the Ten Commandments. Napoleon may have caught 
 the idea of reducing French law to this simple form from 
 a sentence in one of Voltaire's letters of 1739. \" What dis- 
 gusted me with the profession of advocate," he wrote, " was 
 the profusion of useless things with which they wished to load 
 
 1 See 35 CEuvres de Voltaire, 238, 240 ; 75 same, 517 ; 24* same, 185; 63 same, 
 268 ; all contemporary memoirs ; Factum, by Joseph Saurin.
 
 WILD OATS. 53 
 
 my brain. To the point is my device." French law, in 
 fact, was very much the same as Enghsh law and American 
 law before the era of codifying and simplification. The old 
 legal forms and customs, both French and Englisli, were well 
 adapted to their purpose of making justice expensive and law- 
 yers indispensable. A glance at an old edition of Coke upon 
 Lyttleton will convey a lively idea of the crabbed nature of 
 the pursuit from which this young man instantly recoiled. 
 But he had harder nuts than this to crack ; at least, less at- 
 tractive. " An advocate," he wrote half a century later, " is 
 a man who, not having money enough to buy one of those 
 brilliant offices upon which the universe has its eyes fixed 
 (such as Counselor to the Salt Commissioners), studies for 
 three years the laws of Theodosius and Justinian in order to 
 know the practice of Paris, and who, being at last matricu- 
 lated, has a right to plead for money, if he has a strong 
 voice." To complete his disgust, the place in which the law 
 school was held was repulsive, "a kind of barn," says Duver- 
 net. " That country," remarks the same chronicler, " seemed 
 to him barbarous and the laws a chaos." He continued to at- 
 tend the classes, however, and may have even been admitted 
 to practice. 
 
 Meanwhile, he was eighteen ; he was Francois Arouet ; he 
 was in Paris ; and he had an occupation which it was a pleas- 
 ure to neglect. 
 
 Ahh6 de Chateauneuf did not live to see his pupil's later 
 triumphs at the college. He died in 1709' but not before he 
 had exhibited the young prodigy to certain votaries of verse 
 and pleasure besides the incredible Ninon ; among others to 
 the Epicureans of the Temple, so frequently mentioned in the 
 memoirs of that time. The Temple was what remained of the 
 ancient monastery of the Templars, — a great square tower, 
 with a smaller tower at each corner, where, in later times, 
 Louis XVI. and his family were confined. Adjacent was the 
 palace of the Grand Prior of France, Philippe Vendume, one 
 of the notorious voluptuaries of his generation, the last of the 
 VendSmes, a ducal line descended from Henry IV. and one of 
 his mistresses. The entire mass of building in the inclosure 
 was called the Temple, but the ancient towers were then pri- 
 vate property, and were let in suites to various tenants, the 
 " Templars " of the age of Louis XIV.
 
 54 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 If these people liad had to choose a Madonna, a majority of 
 them would have been likely to cast their votes for Nmon de 
 Lenclos, whom they had known in her old age. The Grand 
 Prior, who, besides enjoying the revenues of a prince, had rich 
 benefices to bestow, lived only for pleasm-e, and had little 
 notion of pleasure that was not sensual : " carried to bed every 
 night for thirty years dead drunk," reports St. Simon. Years 
 before, he had taken a fancy to the Abbd Chaiilieu, poet and 
 refined sensualist, to whom he had given abbey after abbey, 
 until his income amounted to thirty thousand francs a year, 
 for which the abbe rendered no service whatever, seldom going 
 near one of his abbeys, but living always in a sumptuous abode 
 within the Temple. This personage was never dead drunk, 
 for he and most of the Templars valued themselves upon not 
 lessening the sum-total of pleasure by vulgar excess. They 
 wrote verses, gave elegant repasts, said witty things, culti- 
 vated the art of pleasing, observed the decorums, and prac- 
 ticed the vices. It is not necessary to know whether Paris 
 exao-o-erated their immoralities, since there was at the base of 
 their lives one immorality which sufficed to vitiate their whole 
 existence : they wore the garb, shared the revenues, and en- 
 joyed the honors of a church whose creed they despised and 
 whose ordinances they disobeyed. Besides the churchmen, 
 there were certain witty and dissolute noblemen who fre- 
 quented the society of the Temple : the Marquis la Fare, more 
 Bacchanalian than Epicurean, whose name is joined to that 
 of Abbe de Chaulieu on the title-page of a volume of gay verse, 
 still procurable. This good-natured reprobate died of a gorge 
 of cod-fish the year after Frangois Arouet left school. The 
 Duke de Sully, the Duke de Vendome, the Prince de Conti, 
 and other persons of rank were glad to escape the formalities 
 and observances of the court, and join the easy livers of the 
 Temple. 
 
 Our law student was early welcomed to their circle, and we 
 can see from his verses and letters of those years that he was 
 upon a footing of perfect familiarity with its members. Other 
 great houses and noted salons were opened to him ; his school- 
 mates bore him in mind; and we soon see him, mere youth as 
 he was, living the life and taking the tone of a young man of 
 fashion. He was le hel esprit a la mode, caressed by ladies.
 
 WILD OATS. 55 
 
 and made much of by men, supping with princes, and making 
 impromptu verses in the salon of the Abbe de Chaulieu. The 
 complacent Duvernet, himself an abbd, describes the Templars 
 as a society of Epicurean philosophers, " all of a severe prob- 
 ity," who enjoyed the charms of merry and friendly conver- 
 sation at a time when Paris was rent into theolosic factions. 
 Every one of them, he remarks, composed verses, which made 
 the student say, one day, at the house of the Prince de Conti, 
 as they were taking their places at table, " We are here all 
 princes or all poets." 
 
 He abandoned himself to this gay and splendid life, drinking 
 deep draughts of a kind of pleasure that is peculiarly captivat- 
 ing to a young man of his temperament and circumstances. No 
 doubt he was a wild lad, for a time ; for at eighteen it is not 
 possible to be a very philosophic Epicurean. There were no 
 latch-keys in those primitive times, and Maitre Arouet was 
 not a father who would often sit up late for a prodigal, nor 
 willingly go to bed leaving him to be let in at an hour un- 
 known. One night, his patience being exhausted, he had the 
 keys brought to him, locked up the house, and went to bed, 
 taking the keys with him. The youth came home late (that 
 is, at ten o'clock) from a verse-making carouse with his fine 
 friends, and found the front door inexorably shut. He had to 
 seek a lodging, and found refuge at last in a porter's chair in 
 the court of the Palace of Justice, where he fell into that deep 
 sleep which late carousers know. In the morning, two law- 
 yers, going by to early court, found him still fast asleep, 
 recognized him, and had him carried, chair and all, into a caf^ f ^_ 
 near by, in the midst of which he woke, to find himself the 
 centre of a group, merry at his exponse.^ And of course he 
 found his allowance of money insufficient, — the latch-key con- 
 troversy and the money question bearing to one another a cer- 
 tain relation. Writing of this period long after, he said : — 
 
 " I remember that, being one day under the necessity of borrowing 
 money of a pawnbroker, I found two crucifixes upon his table. I 
 asked him if he had taken them in pledge. He said, No ; he never 
 made a bargain except in presence of a crucifix. I told him that, in 
 that case, one was enough, and I advised him to place it between the 
 two thieves. He called me impious, and declared he would lend me no 
 1 Vie Privee de Voltaire et Madame du Chatelet, par Madame Grafiguy, page 17.
 
 56 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 money. I took leave ; but he ran after me, and said, making the sign 
 of the cross, that if I could assure him that I had no ill intentions in 
 sj^eaking to him in that way he might be able, with a good conscience, 
 to accommodate me. I told him that I had only very good inten- 
 tions. Then he concluded to lend me some money on my pledges, 
 \^ at ten per cent., deducting the interest in advance^ and at the end of 
 
 six months he disaj^peared with my pledges, which were worth four or 
 five times the sura he had lent me. The countenance of this fine 
 fellow, his tone, all his ways, were so comic that I have often made 
 my companions laugh by imitating them."^ 
 
 There is an anecdote, also, of a great lady giving him a hun- 
 dred louis for correcting her verses, and of the use he made 
 of the money, which may have some basis of truth. Going 
 along the street, overjoyed to find himself the possessor of so 
 large a sum, he came to where an auctioneer was selling a car- 
 riage, a pair of horses, and the liveries of a coachman and foot- 
 man. He bid a hundred louis for the lot, and it was knocked 
 down to him. All day he drove about Paris, giving his friends 
 rides, supped gayly in the city, and continued to ride till late 
 in the evening, when, not knowing what else to do with them, 
 he crowded the horses into his father's stable, already full. 
 The thundering noise of this operation woke the old man, who, 
 on learning its cause, turned young scapegrace out-of-doors, 
 and, the next day, had the carriage and horses sold for half 
 price. 
 
 - Voltaire has idealized all this in his comedy of " Le D^posi- 
 taire," in which two brothers figure, resembling in some degree 
 himself and his brother Armand : one a bigot and devotee ; the 
 other a young fellow of society, agreeable and fond of pleas- 
 ure. Ninon is the leading female character, a woman of the 
 world and an " estimable man," in contrast with whom there 
 is a cheating Tartuffe of a church-warden. The elder brother 
 -; * is described as " a serious fool," who had formed the "extrava- 
 
 gant design of being a perfect man ; " sad and dismal, regard- 
 less of appearances, bent over an old Greek book, his face hid- 
 den in a greasy cap, ink on his fingers, and his body half buried 
 in a heap of papers. The younger, on the contrary, lives to 
 please and be pleased ; a little wild, perhaps, but entirely ami- 
 able and honorable, — a universal favorite. " I love people of 
 
 1 11 (Euvres de Voltaire, 394.
 
 WILD OATS. 67 
 
 '^orth," says Ninon, " but bigots I hate ; and I fear rogues 
 who govern fools." There are things in this comedy which our 
 law student may often have said to his severe and credulous 
 brother : " You take a great deal of trouble to be unhappy. 
 What would you say to a fool who should tear and tread 
 down the flowers of his garden, lest he should enjoy their de- 
 lightful fragrance ? Oh, the pleasant glory to spoil your wine 
 for fear of drinking too much ! " 
 
 But the elder is not silent. " Go ! " he cries. " Plunge neck- 
 deep into the brilliant filth of that frenzied world, whose glit- 
 ter enchants you. Turn into amusing ridicule virtuous men. 
 Swim in pleasures, — in those shameful pleasures whose sweet- 
 ness produces so much bitterness." And then he soliloquizes : 
 " What a sweet and noble pleasure to hate pleasure ; to be 
 able to say to one's self, ' I am without desires, master of my- 
 self, just, serene, wise, my soul a rock in the midst of the 
 storm ! " He speaks also of his " fool of a brother," who, with- 
 out taking the least trouble, delights all the world; a plain 
 proof that the world is no better than he, and only fit to be 
 renounced. 
 
 All this, doubtless, Frangois and Armand repeated many 
 times, wliile their irascible father regarded them as equally per- y, 
 
 verse and out of the way. " I have a pair of fools for sons,"- 
 said he, — "one in verse, and the other in prose." His sou 
 Francois seldom said a neater thing. *^ 
 
 The father was, indeed, distressed and alarmed to see his 
 younger son neglecting his law studies, associating with princes 
 and philosophers, and playing pranks highly unbecoming a 
 youth who had his own way to make in the world. He bore 
 it with what little patience he had for a year and a half, and 
 then felt that the time was come to get the young man out of 
 seductive Paris, beyond the reach of his friends of the Temple. 
 He sent him first to the ancient Norman city of Caen, a hun- 
 dred and forty miles from Paris, within sight of the English 
 Channel, — that quaint and venerable Caen, the residence and 
 tomb of William the Conqueror. But Caen was a polite city 
 of several thousand inhabitants, the seat of a university, with 
 an ancient and large library, and a considerable circle of people 
 interested in literature and learning. All doors at Caen opened 
 to receive this hel esprit d la mode de Paris. Madame d'Oa-
 
 58 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Seville, whose poems still rest in manuscript in the Caen Library, 
 gave him welcome, dazzled by the brilliancy of his conversa- 
 tion and the flash of his impromptus; until, learning that he 
 wrote libertine verses also, she invited him no more. But there 
 was a Father Couvrigny, of the Jesuit college there, who, 
 having no scruples of the kind, associated with him constantly, 
 and foretold for him a splendid future. And still his father 
 urged him to return and settle to a career, offering to buy for 
 him, in due time, the high post of counselor to the parliament 
 of Paris. " Tell my father," said he to the bearer of this offer, 
 " that I do not desire any place which can be bought. I shall 
 know how to make one for myself that will cost nothing." J 
 And, indeed, in the midst of his reckless gayety, he did not 
 lose sight of his object. He exerted his better powers ; he 
 wrote serious verse ; he was already revolving subjects and 
 schemes which he was to treat erelong with an effect that jus- 
 tified his confident reply to his father's generous offer. 
 
 Caen did nothing to wean him from his choice, and he re- 
 turned to Paris, after an absence of some months, to resume 
 his former way of life.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 HEAD OVER EARS IN LOVE. 
 
 After more years of disastrous and humiliating war than 
 Frangois-Marie Arouet could remember, France, in the spring 
 of 1713, enjoyed peace again. The Treaty of Utrecht be- 
 tween England, Holland, and France, signed in April, was to 
 France like air to a man suffocating, like sudden deliverance 
 to a hopeless prisoner. There is no news so exhilarating as 
 the news of peace after a long war. On the lOtli of June 
 the King of France, to the profound joy of his subjects, ai> 
 pointed an ambassador to reside at the capital of the Nether- 
 lands, and the person chosen was the Marquis de Chateauneuf, 
 brother to the late abb^, the boy poet's guide, philosopher, and 
 fiiend. The old diplomatist was good enough to appoint the 
 youth one of his pages, or, as we should term it, attaches un- 
 paid ; and so, amid the general joy of that summer, our stu- 
 dent of law had the additional pleasure of a journey to the 
 Hague in the train of an ambassador. Virtue itself is not al- 
 ways so agreeably rewarded. 
 
 The marquis and his retinue reached the Hague September 
 28, 1718, though his formal reception occurred later. " It is 
 a pleasant jest," wrote the page, " to make a solemn entry 
 into a city where you have been living for several weeks." 
 
 This appointment in the diplomatic line was not, perhaps, 
 the mere expedient of an exasperated father to get a trouble- 
 some son out of Paris. Voltaire all his life had a certain 
 hankering to be employed in diplomacy. Pierre de Ronsard, 
 French poet of the sixteenth century, had begun his truly fine 
 career as page to an ambassador, a post from which he ad- 
 vanced to the most confidential trusts a subject could fulfill. 
 Maitre Arouet might well have accepted this proceeding as 
 a happy compromise with his unmanageable son, and might 
 have indulged a rational expectation of his advancement.
 
 60 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 With a quarter of his talents and ten times his prudence, he 
 might have come to be ambassador to a small kingdom at 
 sixty-five. 
 
 His diplomatic career was short, and very much in the style 
 of an ambassador's page in an Italian comedy. Among the 
 great number of French people then living in Holland, as in 
 all Protestant countries and colonies, refugees from the sav- 
 age intolerance of Louis XIV. 's priests, there was a Madame 
 Dunoyer, Protestant by birth, the wife of a French Catholic 
 gentleman of repute, from whom she was separated. Exiled 
 by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, she had lived in 
 Switzerland, in London, in Holland, the precarious, demoraliz- 
 ing life of a woman without any of the usual means of sup- 
 port. She had written various kinds of trash, and in 1704 
 published at Cologne a work in seven volumes', entitled " Let- 
 ters Historical and Gallant," full of the scandal and gossip by 
 which the dullest and meanest of our kind can make a certain 
 sensation in the world. The letters were fictitious, supposed 
 to be the correspondence between a woman of fashion in Paris 
 and a lady living in the country. These volumes had made 
 Madame Dunoyer an object of interest to a portion of the 
 public, and an object of dread to another portion. She was 
 feared, courted, and despised, as the editor of a scurrilous 
 journal is sometimes feared, courted, and despised ; for what 
 she had done once she could do again. 
 
 A moth does not fly to a candle by a more inevitable im- 
 pulse than such a page as Arouet at nineteen gets within 
 range of such a woman, living in such a place. She had two 
 daughters : the elder married and living in Paris ; the younger, 
 Olirape, not pretty, as he used to say sixty years after, but 
 extremely amiable and winning. He fell in love with her, 
 — he nineteen and without a profession, she twenty-one and 
 ^^' without a sou. It was an honest and virtUjQUS love on his 
 part, creditable to him as a human being, nor quite as rash 
 and reckless as it seemed. It was the best love he ever ex- 
 perienced, and, in other circumstances, might have had its 
 natural issue, to the lasting good of both. His scheme was to 
 get her to return to France, where her father still lived, where 
 she had influential connections, and where no one was more 
 sure of a welcome than a stray lamb returning to the fold of
 
 HEAD OVER EARS IN LOVE. 61 
 
 Louis XIV.'s church. " The king wishes every one in France 
 to be of his religion," truly said a blunt soldier to the Protest- 
 ants whom he was sent to convert, at the head of a body of 
 cavalry. The mother, according to this sage lover, was a . 
 dragon, who treated her daughter harshly, and did not deserve 
 to possess such an adorable creature. In other words, Madame 
 Dunoyer, who had made a promising match for one daughter, 
 was intent on getting for " Pimpette " a husband w^ho would 
 be both able and willing to establish comfortably a mother-in- 
 law. A page of nineteen, a notary's son, without fortune, 
 bore no resemblance whatever to that son-in-law of her dreams 
 who was to end her long and bitter struggle with adverse fort- 
 une. 
 
 All went prosperously with his love for a few weeks, the 
 young lady returning his affection, and the mother not remark- 
 hig it. October and November passed, and still they were 
 happy. But one dreadful evening, about the first of Decem- 
 ber, when the lover returned late to the embassy, the ambas- 
 sador confi-onted him, told him all was discovered, and he 
 must start for home the next day. The Marquis de Chateau- 
 neuf, with the timidity natural to a public man at the critical 
 hour of a ticklish mission, dared not make an enemy of this 
 woman of the audacious pen, and feared she might affront his 
 page in some way which he could not avoid officially noticing. 
 The lover begged for mercy, but all he could get was a single 
 day's grace, with the condition annexed of not leaving the ^ 
 embassy until the moment of his final departure. He must 
 go in forty-eight hours, and not see his Pimpette again. 
 
 His valet was a cunning Norman named Lef(5vre, a true 
 valet of comedy, whom he could implicitly trust, and by him 
 he sent a long letter to Pimpette, relating the disaster, and 
 unfolding his plans for their speedy reunion. Already she had 
 / agreed to rejoin her father, and this explosion, as he urged, 
 should only hasten her flight from a mother unworthy of her. 
 
 " Send me three letters," he wrote, " one for your father, one 
 for your uncle, and one for your sister ; that is absolutely neces- 
 sary ; but I shall only deliver them when circumstances favor, es- 
 pecially the one for your sister. Let the shoemaker be the bearer 
 of those letters ; promise him a reward ; and let him come with a " 
 last in his hand, as if to mend my shoes. Add to those letters a
 
 62 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 note for me ; let me have that comfort on setting out ; and, ahove 
 all, in the name of the love I bear you, my dear, send me your 
 portrait; use all your efforts to get it from your mother; it had 
 better be in my hands than in hers, for it is already in my heart. 
 The servant I send you is wholly devoted to me, and if you wish 
 to pass him off to your mother as a snuff-box maker, he is a Nor- 
 man and will play the part well. ... I shall do all that is possi- 
 ble to see you to-morrow before leaving Holland ; but, as I cannot 
 assure you of it, I bid you good-by, my dear heart, for the last 
 time, and I do it swearing to you all the tender love which you 
 merit. Yes, my dear Pimpette, I shall love you always. Lovers 
 the least faithful say the same ; but their love is not founded, as 
 mine is, upon perfect esteem. [I love your goodness as much as I 
 love your person, and I only ask of Heaven the privilege of im- 
 bibing from you the noble sentiments you possess^ . . . Adieu, once 
 more, my dear mistress ; think a little of your unhappy lover, but 
 not so as to dash your spirits. Keep your health if you wish to 
 preserve mine. Above all, have a great deal of discretion ; burn 
 my letter and all that you get from me ; it were better to be less 
 generous to me, and take better care of yourself. Let us take 
 comfort from the hope of seeing one another very soon, and let us 
 love one another as long as we live. Perhaps I shall even come 
 back here in quest of you, and, if so, I shall be the happiest of 
 men. But, after all, provided you get to Paris, I shall be only 
 too well satisfied ; for, wishing only your welfare, I would willingly 
 secure it at the expense of my own, and should feel myself richly 
 recompensed in cherishing the sweet assurance that I had contrib- 
 uted to restore you to happiness." 
 
 So far, so well. Tliis was tlie letter of an honest lover, and 
 the scheme seemed feasible. But when he summoned Le- 
 fdvre to convey the epistle to the young lady, the valet told 
 him he had received orders to deliver to the ambassador any 
 letters his master might charge him with. Away with pru- 
 dence ! He would see his mistress, despite the vigilance of 
 his chief, one of the most experienced diplomatists in Eu- 
 rope. Favored by an unavoidable delay in setting out, he 
 engaged in a series of manoeuvres, precisely such as we laugh 
 at at the theatre, when an imaginary Figaro exerts his tal- 
 ents to help or baffle a fictitious Count. He wrote a letter 
 • to Pimpette, which he meant the marquis to read, and told 
 his valet to deliver it to him, as ordered. He corresponded
 
 HEAD OVER EARS IN LOVE. 63 
 
 with her continually, and had several interviews with her. 
 One night, at the rising of the moon, he left the embassy 
 in disguise, placed a carriage near the adored one's abode, 
 made the usual comedy signal under her window, received 
 her to his arms, and away they rode, five miles into the 
 country to the sea-side village of Scheveningen ; and there, 
 with the ink and paper which he had provided, she wrote 
 the three letters that he desired for use in Paris. This cer- 
 tainly'- was the entertainment to which he invited her, and which 
 appears to have been carried out. 
 
 She was as mad as he ; or at least she fooled him to the 
 top of his bent. The shoemaker's family, who lived near her 
 abode, were in their interests ; the lovers sometimes met at 
 their house, and when he visited Pimpette in the evening, it 
 it was the wife of the shoemaker who mounted guard and 
 signalized the approach of an enemy. One evening, it ap- 
 pears, the woman was mistaken, and gave a false alarm, which 
 caused the page to take flight with needless precipitation. The 
 woman thought she saw approaching the secretary of legation, 
 but it was no such matter. The only letter of the young 
 lady which has been preserved is one which explains this error 
 of judgment on the part of the sentinel, and urges him to come 
 again. This eager and ill-spelt letter he appears to have car- 
 ried about his person for years after, and it bears a formal 
 attestation, still legible, that it was found upon him when he 
 arrived at the Bastille, in 1717. 
 
 *' Do all you can," she concluded, " that I may see you this even- 
 ing. You will only have to go down into the shoemaker's kitchen, 
 and I answer for it that you have nothing to fear, for my mother 
 believes you half-way to Paris. So, if you please, I shall have the 
 pleasure of seeing you this evening. And if that cannot be, let me 
 attend the mass at the embassy ; I will ask M. de la Bruyere [secre- 
 tary of legation] to show me the chapel. To women curiosity is 
 permitted. And then, without any disguise, I shall ask him if they 
 have received any news from you yet, and when you started. Do 
 not refuse me this favor, my dear Arouet ; I ask it of you in the 
 name of the tenderest of all things, — the love I bear you. Adieu, 
 my amiable child. I adore you, and I swear that my love will last as 
 long as my life." ^ 
 
 1 Jeunesse de Voltaire, page 67.
 
 64 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 This note was signed " Dunoyer," and had a postscript, 
 begging him, if they failed to meet that evening, to send her 
 some dear news of himself. 
 
 An experienced ambassador had an eye upon this uncon- 
 trollable page of his, and was not long ignorant of any of 
 his escapades. He gave the young man formal orders, in the 
 king's name, not to leave the embassy ; which only caused 
 tlie love-stricken youth to declare to Pimpette that he would 
 visit her, though it should bring his head to the block. 
 And he did see her again and again. Closely watched by 
 day, he would drop from a window at midnight, and go to 
 her house, near which she would join him, if she could man- 
 age to steal unperceived from her mother's bed. The ambas- 
 sador came to the point with him at last, and gave him his 
 choice, — either to leave Holland instantly, or wait a week for 
 the next official opportunity, and, in the mean time, engage 
 not to go out of the hotel. 
 
 The distracted lover chose to remain a prisoner. Then he 
 dispatched Lef^vre with his maddest note to Pimpette, ex- 
 plaining the new situation, and begging her to come to him, 
 since he could not go to her. " Send Lisbette about three," 
 he wrote ; " I will give her a parcel for you containing a suit 
 of man's clothes. You can put them on in her room ; and if 
 you have regard enough for a poor prisoner who adores you, 
 you will take the trouble to come to the embassy about dusk. 
 To what a cruel extremity are we reduced, my dear ! Is it 
 your part to come to -me? But it is our only way of seeing 
 one another. You love me, and so I hope to see you this day 
 in my rooms." 
 
 It was his own clothes that he sent ; but, fearing they might 
 be recognized, he hired a cloak and doublet, with which she was 
 to conceal them. Pimpette actually assumed the disguise and 
 visited him, to his great content, but not without being sus- 
 pected. The ambassador summoned Lefdvre to his presence, 
 and questioned him closely; but the cunning Norman con- 
 trived, as he thought, to throw dust in the eyes of the chief, 
 and even found out that a trap was to be set to catch Pim- 
 pette if she should repeat the visit. The page at once sent his 
 valet to bring back his clothes, and that night he got out of 
 his window once more, and met her at their usual rendezvous.
 
 HEAD OVEK EARS IN LOVE. 65 
 
 The old diplomatist discovered this also, and wrote in a rage 
 to Maitre Arouet, giving him such an account of his son's 
 conduct as an angry ambassador might, who saw the success 
 of his mission hazarded by a comedy of love between a rash 
 boy of nineteen and an experienced virgin of twenty-one. 
 
 December 18th, the lover left the Hague, and began his 
 journey to Paris, sending her long letters to the last day of his 
 stay, and continuing to write from the cabin of the yacht that 
 bore him away from the enchanted shore. A very long and 
 tumultuous epistle, indeed, was the one which he sent back to 
 her from the frontier, swearing eternal constancy and unfolding 
 his plan for her deliverance. Her mother, as it appears, had 
 assailed the incomparable Pimpette with something more ter- 
 rible than words, and he entreats her to burn his letters, lest 
 her mother should find them and again " maltreat " her. " Do 
 not expose yourself to the fury of your mother : you know 
 what she is capable of — alas ! you have experienced it but too 
 well. Dissemble with her ; it is your only chance. Tell her 
 (which I hope you never will do) that you have foi'gotten me ; 
 tell her that you hate me ; and then love me all the more for 
 it." 
 
 He told her what he meant to do as soon as he should reach 
 Paris. Already he had taken measures ; he had written a 
 letter to the friend and patron of his college days. Father 
 Tournemine, Jesuit, and asked his aid in bringing back a 
 stray lamb to the fold. " The first thing I shall do, on my 
 arrival at Paris, will be to enlist Father Tournemine on your 
 behalf. Next, I shall deliver your letters. I shall be obliged 
 to explain to my father the cause of my return, and I flatter 
 myself that he will not be entirely displeased with me, pro- 
 vided they have not prejudiced him against us beforehand. 
 But even if I should have to face his anger, I shall always 
 consider myself too happy, when I think that you are the 
 most lovely being in the world, and that you love me. In my 
 short life I have passed no moments so sweet as those in 
 which you have sworn to me that you returned my tender 
 love." 
 
 He was a week in performing the journey from the Hague 
 to Paris, — from eight A. M. on Monday, December 18th, to 
 the evening of Sunday, the 24th ; the distance being about 
 
 VOL. I. 5 .
 
 66 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 three hundred miles. Only couriers, diplomatists, and lovers 
 averaged forty miles a day in 1713. It was Christmas Eve 
 when he arrived, and he went promply to Father Tournemine 
 at his old quarters in the College Louis-le-Grand. Joyful 
 tidings greeted him. Tournemine had received, approved, 
 and answered his letter; he had communicated with the 
 Bishop of Evreux, cousin of Pimpette ; he was zealous in the 
 cause of the stray lamb. The lover, finding the priest so apt, 
 intrusted him with the three letters that Pimpette had written 
 to her relations in Paris ; and he agreed to use all his influ- 
 ence to induce her father to receive her. This was, indeed, a 
 most hopeful beginning. 
 
 f But he had a father according to the flesh, who might not 
 find the return of stray lambs of twenty-one so interesting. 
 The young diplomatist deemed it best to reconnoitre the 
 ground a little before coming within range of an irascible 
 parent ; and he soon discovered that he had better not think 
 of joining the family at their Christmas dinner that year. 
 The ambassador had not only written to his father a " bloody 
 letter," giving a full account of his proceedings in Holland, 
 but had sent also the infuriate letters of Madame Dunoyer to 
 himself, in which those proceedings were related with an en- 
 raged mother's emphasis and fluency. 
 
 :-i>The notary's patience gave way ; he had borne from this 
 
 young man all that he could. He formally disinherited him. 
 He went to the minister and procured a lettre de cachet, with 
 which to get him arrested and confined ; and when the friends 
 of the family, at the young man's request, remonstrated with 
 him, all that they could obtain was a change of sentence from 
 imprisonment to exile beyond the seas, in the French West 
 Indies. Fran9ois might well write to his adored one, "I dare 
 not show myself." 
 
 His consolation was to write long letters, telling her, over 
 and over again, that his heart was wholly and unalterably hers, 
 and that nothing was of any consequence to him so long as 
 she loved him. Fathers might do their worst; he was un 
 shaken ; but if she held back, if she determined to remain in 
 Holland, if she abandoned him, he assured her that the mo- 
 ment he heard the news he would kill himself. "Never love 
 equaled mine," he wrote ; "for never was there a person bet-
 
 HEAD OVER EARS IN LOVE. 67 
 
 ter worthy of love than you. . . . Sorrow, fear, love, agitate 
 me violently; but I always return to bear myself the secret 
 testimony that I have done nothing unbecoming an honest 
 man ; and that enables me to support my miseries. . . . 
 My dear Pimpette, my lovely mistress, my dear heart, write 
 to me very soon ; nay, at once. As soon as I receive your let- 
 ter I shall know my fate. What will become of me I know 
 not. I am in frightful uncertainty about everything; I only 
 know that I love you. Ah, when shall I embrace you, my 
 dear heart ? " 
 
 The sage maiden, versed in love, who had drawn on this 
 susceptible page to such a point, was naturally the first to re- 
 cover her self-possession. She still wrote kindly to him, but, 
 gave him good advice, telling him he must make it up wi_th , 
 h is fath er at any sacrifice, even if he had to take seriously to 
 the study of the law. The young man obeyed her, and wrote 
 to his father from his hiding-place the most submissive letters 
 every day, in one of which he said, " I consent, O father, to go 
 to America, and even to live there on bread and water, if only, 
 before I go, you will let me embrace your knees." Fathers 
 generally relent in such cases ; but Maitre Arouet exacted a 
 hard condition, that must have seemed most reasonable and 
 generous to all except this unfledged Voltaire : he must set- 
 tle to his work of preparing to practice law, and, to that end, 
 reside with a solicitor, attend his office regularly, and apply 
 himself to the business of drawing and copying documents. 
 He did not shrink from giving his Pimpette even this proof of 
 his affection. January 20, 1714, he had the melanclioly pleas- 
 ure of informing her that he had obeyed her command, and 
 had already been a week at work in the oflice of a solicitor, 
 " learning the trade of pettifogger, to which my father des- 
 tines me, and hoping in that way to regain his good-will." 
 
 Meanwhile, he pushed on his scheme for the recovery of the 
 stray lamb, and with such effect that Father Tellier, the 
 king'^ confessor, was interested in it, and urged the Marquis 
 de Chateauneuf to lend his aid. But that accomplished di- 
 plomatist knew why and for whom the lamb was wanted in 
 France. The lover had forborne to mention to Father Tour- 
 nemine that he had ever so much as seen Mademoiselle Olimpe 
 Dunoyer, and probably the ambassador supplied this omission.
 
 68 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 , The young lady wrote with less frequency, said less and less 
 about love, and lent a willing ear to the addresses of others. 
 L T A year or two later her mother, after desperate exertions, saw 
 
 ^^ the fascinating Olimpe a countess, — Madame la Comtesse de 
 ^ Winterfield. The young lover consoled himself as best he 
 could, and, years after, when he had become a celebrated per- 
 son, he had the pleasure of seeing fourteen of his letters to 
 Pimpette printed as an appendix to a new edition of her moth- 
 er's " Lettres Historiques et Gallantes." But to the end of 
 his life he preserved a tender recollection of the woman he 
 had passionately loved at this spring-time of his life, and found 
 i opportunities of testifying his good- will toward her.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 SOLICITOR'S CLERK. 
 
 At present, then, the bird is caged. Love has done for 
 him what authority had failed to do, and we see him, in Jan- 
 uary, 1714, junior clerk in the office of Maitre Alain, a Paris 
 solicitor in extensive practice, who had at least two clerks be- 
 sides this new acquisitionjl He had to board in the house of 
 the solicitor, over which Madame Alain presided, a lady who 
 scarcely knew there was such a thing in the world as poetiy. 
 One of his fellow-clerks was Thieriot, a gay lad like himself, 
 fond of verses, of the drama, of pleasure generally, learned 
 in actors and actresses. These two young men were illustra- 
 tions of the Goethean maxim, not then promulgated : In faults 
 men are much alike ; in good qualities they differ. This Thi- 
 eriot, his intimate friend for sixty years, was an Arouet in 
 everything but genius and constancy ; an Arouet in everything 
 except that energy of soul which enables some men to rise su- 
 perior to an imperfect education and misleading companions, 
 and rescue a portion of themselves and a part of their lives 
 for something nobler than pleasure. Thieriot became exces- 
 sively fond of his new comrade, and trumpeted him with such 
 ardor and frequency that he was long known in Paris, King 
 Frederic tells us,^ as Voltaire's hawker. Another clerk of 
 Maitre Alain was one Bainast, who seems also to have been a 
 companionable person, with a taste for literature. 
 
 It needs but a slight acquaintance with the manners of the 
 time to know that our young poet's life with the solicitor was 
 a form of penal servitude, including hard work, unsavory fare, 
 homely lodgings, assiduous deference to Maitre and Madame 
 Alain, with but occasional surreptitious glimpses of that brill- 
 iant world of which, till lately, he had been a shining atom. 
 
 1 Correspondence of Frederic II., of Prussia, Letter to D'Alenibert, October 
 27, 1772.
 
 "^ 
 
 70 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 He could have borne it all, if Olimpe had been h 
 him, for he was constancy's own self ; he could nt 
 constant. He was not long in discovering that his 
 Pimpette was bestowing suiiles upon another, and 
 his situation in the solicitor's office intolerable. E 
 had cut down his allowance of money, and he beca 
 quent borrower, putting his name to bills which he fo 
 cult to meet. For some years of this part of his liie ne was 
 in straits for money, and thus acquired a sense of its value 
 which poets do not always possess. A note promising to pay 
 live hundred francs upon his coming of age was given by 
 him soon after he heard of the Ninon legacy, and the doc- 
 ument graces at the present moment a collection of autographs 
 in Orleans. Traces of similar transactions of his have been 
 discovered in old court records, and some of them appear to 
 have given him trouble many years after their date.^ It is 
 probable that the chief advantage which he derived from the 
 Ninon legacy was its providing a basis, small but solid, for his 
 credit with money lenders. 
 
 To complete his discontent, he suffered humiliation this 
 year even in his character of poet. The Academy had offered, 
 a year or two before, a prize of a group in bronze for the best 
 poem upon the king's magnificent generosity in fulfilling a 
 vow of his father, Louis XHL, by completing a new choir in 
 the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Arouet had not only sent in 
 a poem to compete, but had read it to friends, and forwarded 
 a copy to the exiled Rousseau, who returned generous praise 
 to the young poet. August 25, 1714, the award of the Acad- 
 emy was published, and it was not Frangois-Marie Arouet who 
 received the bronze. By a favoritism so obvious that every 
 person of taste in Paris remarked it, the prize was given to a 
 garrulous old Abbe du Jarri, author of two volumes of " Pane- 
 gyrics of the Saints," and another upon the " Eloquence of the 
 Pulpit, or the Best Way of preaching the Word of God," — 
 works which I find advertised in booksellers' catalogues of that 
 period. Du Jarri was so unlucky as to declare in his poem 
 that the glory of the king was known throughout the whole 
 earth, at the burning poles as well as at the frozen, which 
 gave the wits of the Temple a fair opportunity of jesting at 
 1 Voltaire, Sa Vie et ses (Euvres, par Abbe' Maynard, vol. i. p. 103.
 
 SOLICITOR'S CLERK. 71 
 
 his expense. It was the poet La Motte who had decided the 
 award, — the La Motte who had taken the lead of the liter- 
 ary faction that objected to the ascendency of the ancients 
 over the moderns, and were disposed to underrate Homer, Vir- 
 gil, and Horace. Du Jarri, it appears, belonged to this fac- 
 tion, a circumstance which was supposed to have influenced the 
 decision. When the unfortunate allusion to the burning poles 
 was pointed out to La Motte, he said that no one knew for 
 certain whether there was or was not a burning pole, and the 
 question was, in any case, an affair of the Academy of Sci- 
 ences, not of the French Academy. The wits of the city 
 laughed at the successful poet, and the disappointed compet- 
 itor relieved his mind by epigrams and satirical verses, in 
 which the aged abb^, his poem, the bronze group, the Acad- 
 emy, and La Motte were all ridiculed. But he could not rail 
 the seal of the Academy off the award. He remained un- 
 known to the great public, while Du Jarri, elated and ridicu- 
 lous, hastened to press with a volume of " Poems, Christian, 
 Heroic, and Moral." 
 
 Arouet and some of his roystering friends had a ludicrous 
 interview with the abb^, perhaps in one of the booksellers' 
 shops of Paris, which were numerous and important even then.^ 
 Du Jarri, not aware that one of the young men was his com- 
 petitor, showed them some of the proofs of his new volume, the 
 first page of which bore the device, " To Immortality." Not 
 supposing that they recognized him as the author, he proceeded 
 to explain these words in a style that seemed highly absurd to 
 the young men : — 
 
 Du Jauri. — " This is the device of the French Academy. The 
 piece, however, is not of the Academy, though the Academy has adopted 
 it ; and if those gentlemen had actually composed the poem they would 
 not have treated the subject otherwise. You must know that every 
 other year the Academy offers a prize for poetry, and in that way 
 every other year immortalizes somebody. You see in my hands the 
 work which has won the prize this year. Oh, how fortunate is the 
 author of this poem ! For forty years he has been composing without 
 
 1 In the eighteenth century, publishing and printing formed one of the most im- 
 portant industries of Paris. A list published in 1701 gives the names of one hun- 
 dred and seventy-eight master booksellers iu business, thirty-five out of business, 
 twenty-seven widows still keeping shop, thirty-six master printers, and nineteen 
 widows carrying on printing-offices." (5 Journal De Barbier, 4.)
 
 72 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 becoming known to the public ; and now, for a little poem, we see 
 him a sharer in all the reputation of the Academy." 
 
 Arouet. — " But does it never happen that an author who is de- 
 clared immortal by the Forty is consigned to the rank of the Cotins 
 by the public, the judge in the last resort ? " 
 
 Du Jarri. — " That cannot be ; for the Academy was instituted 
 for the purpose of fixing the taste of France, and there is no appeal 
 from its decisions." 
 
 A Comrade of Arouet. — "I have some good proofs that an 
 assembly of forty persons is not infallible. Among others, there is 
 the Cid and Furetiere's Dictionary, which sustained themselves against 
 the Academy ; and, since it has censured good books, it might happen 
 to approve some very bad ones." 
 
 Du Jarri (reading in a loud voice by way of triumphant answer to 
 this remark). — " Christian prize poem, by Monsieur the Abbe du 
 Jarri." 
 
 Arouet. — " Before you begin we ought to know who Monsieur 
 the Abbe du Jarri is ; also the subject of his poem and the nature of 
 the prize." 
 
 Du Jarri. — " Formerly, Monsieur the Abbe Jarri published sev- - 
 eral funeral orations and some sermons. At present he is getting 
 through the press a volume of his poems, and there is reason to be- 
 lieve he is as good a poet as great orator. The subject of his poem 
 is the praise of the king upon the occasion of the new choir of Notre 
 Dame, erected by Louis XIV., and promised by Louis XIII. The 
 prize is a beautiful group in bronze, in which there is a wonderful 
 blending of the fabulous and the sacred ; Renown appearing in it near 
 Religion, and Piety supported by a Genius. For the rest, the rivals 
 of Monsieur the Abbe du Jarri were young people, nineteen or twenty 
 years old, while Monsieur the Abbe is sixty-five, and it is very just 
 that honor should be paid to his age." 
 
 Having delivered this modest explanation to the mischiev- 
 ous youngsters before him, the abbe coughed, and read with 
 all an author's fond, discriminating emphasis his Christian 
 poem in honor of the king. Such, at least, is the report of the 
 scene given by the young rival of nineteen or twenty, in a let- 
 ter to a friend.^ 
 
 This was harmless fun ; but among the verses which the so- 
 licitor's clerk wrote on this occasion was a short and extremely 
 disagreeable satire called "Mud" (^Le Boiirhier'), — a word 
 which describes as well as names the piece. It was aimed at 
 
 1 67 OEuvres de Voltaire, 39.
 
 SOLICITOR'S CLERK. 73 
 
 La Motte, whose fables are still reckoned among the excellent 
 things produced in that age, and it was in every sense and to 
 the uttermost degree unbecoming and improper, as the author 
 of it afterwards admitted. But the writing of this piece led to 
 his deliverance from the thraldom of the solicitor's office, and 
 from the meagre housekeeping of Madame Alain. His father, 
 who had seen Rousseau ruined and banished for couplets not 
 worse than the " Mud " hurled by his son at La Motte, was 
 alarmed anew on his account, berated him soundly, and threat- 
 ened to exclude him from his house unless he changed his way of 
 life and attended more punctually to the business of the office. 
 
 No doubt he gave his father abundant cause of uneasiness. 
 Forty years after, in writing to a man of science, he had occa- 
 sion to discuss the prevalent opinion of the poisonous nature of 
 powdered diamond, and he was able to draw an illustration of 
 his point from this wild period of his youth. Powdered glass, 
 he then learned, could be swallowed with impunity ; and if 
 glass, why not diamond ? He told his learned friend that he 
 remembered seeing young men, in their revels, after emptying 
 their glasses in honor of some eminent toast of the day, chew 
 those wine-glasses to pieces and swallow them. " I had the 
 misfortune," he adds, " to sup sometimes, in my youth, with 
 gentlemen of that kind. They broke their glasses with their 
 teeth, and neither the wine nor the glass did them any harm.^ 
 
 He could not have done much of such revelry as this ; his 
 constitution did not admit of it, and we know that he had al- 
 ways serious compositions in course of execution, upon which 
 he founded confident hopes of a career which should justify 
 his aversion to the profession of his father's choice. 
 
 Meanwhile, his father remained unconvinced, and strongly ^-— 
 disapproved of his son's conduct. He was right and he was 
 wrong, as parents are apt to be whose offspring prove to be 
 soaring falcons instead of respectable chickens. This irasci- 
 ble father stood indignant and alarmed to see his fledgeling 
 resolved upon attempting the airy heights, Avithout being yet 
 strong enough upon the wing to keep out of le bourbier. The 
 young man, on his part, loathed the work of Maitre Alain's 
 office, and believed he had a right to loathe it, as being in 
 itself absurd and not his vocation. 
 
 1 75 CEuvres de Voltaire, 63.
 
 74 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Among his fine friends of the Temple was a young gen- 
 tleman named Caumartin, nephew of Louis-Urbain de Cau- 
 martin, Marquis de Saint-Ange, a magistrate of honorable 
 and old renown. The marquis was just such a personage as 
 Maitre Arouet desired his younger son to become ; for he had 
 made his career in the law, and now, after filling high places 
 with honor, had retired to a chateau and estate which he pos- 
 sessed, nine miles from the royal palace of Fontainebleau. 
 The younger Caumartin, it seems, conveyed to Maitre Arouet 
 an invitation for his reprobate son to take up his abode at 
 Saint-Ange, and there pursue legal studies in a larger and 
 more agreeable way than was possible in the office of a Paris 
 solicitor. The reprobate, as Duvernet intimates, made those 
 profuse and emphatic promises which reprobates usually do 
 in such cases, and the notary gave his consent. Behold vir- 
 tue again rewarded ! In the lovely autumn days of 1714 we 
 see the solicitor's clerk turning his back upon involved and 
 tedious copying, and riding out through a beautiful country 
 to an ancient and singularly interesting chlteau, where he was 
 installed the permanent guest of the man in France who was 
 fullest of what he wanted most !
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 AT THE CHATEAU OF SAINT-ANGE. 
 
 No memory is so likely to be stored "with tilings curious 
 and interesting as that of an old lawyer and magistrate. M. 
 de Caumartin was one of those old lawyers and magistrates 
 who have a particular curiosity with regard to contemporary 
 events and persons, and a memory from which no detail es- 
 capes. The Duke de St. Simon, not a lenient judge, describes 
 him as a man of large person, handsome and well formed, 
 very capable in law and finance, honest, obliging, and polite, 
 though a little given to play the great lord in a harmless way. 
 1 " He knew everything," continues the diarist, " in history, in 
 genealogy, in court anecdotes ; and remembered everything 
 that he had ever heard or read, even to repeating in conversa- 
 tion whole pages." iHis father also had been a public man, in 
 the confidence of the government of his time ; so that the 
 present lord of Saint-Arige knew familiarly the men, the 
 events, the gossip, the scandal, the " inside truth " of the last 
 three reigns, from the stirring days of Henry IV. and the 
 League to these sad closing weeks of Louis XIV. A library, 
 rich in the works of the great age of French literature, was 
 one of the special treasures of the chateau, and the walls of 
 the edifice were covered with portraits of the men of whom 
 the old counselor most loved to converse and the young poet 
 most loved to hear. 
 
 Imagine an American youth of twenty, educated in the lit- 
 eratures of Greece, Rome, and Judea, but knowing scarcely 
 anything of the history of his own country, established as an 
 inmate of one of our few historic houses, and listening day 
 by day to some fluent, enthusiastic grandson of a Lee, an 
 Adams, a Jefferson, a Madison, a Jay, a Schuyler, — one who 
 had seen the heroes of the Revolution and taken part in the 
 administrations of the earlier presidents. Imagine the joy
 
 76 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 and pride with which the young man would discover that he, 
 too, had a countr}', and that there had been heroes, statesmen, 
 orators, and patriots on his native soil as well as in the lands 
 of old. M. de Caumartin loved most to dwell upon Henry 
 IV., that bold Henry of Navarre, whose career had so much 
 in it that all men admire, and so little that Frenchmen cannot 
 easily forgive. How varied, how strange, how fascinating, 
 how long, the tale ! What incident, what vicissitude, what 
 men, what interests ! Our young poet heai'd the old man re- 
 late it spell-bound, and fancied that here was the great theme 
 for an epic poem, — the Iliad of France ! Without knowing, 
 as he says, anything of the nature or laws of an epic, he be- 
 gan tumultuously to write passages of a " Henriade," and thus 
 entered upon a work which occupied him at intervals for the 
 next ten years, and upon which he expended more toil than 
 upon any other of his works. 
 
 It was, however, the long reign of Louis XIV. which M. de 
 Caumartin personally knew, and of which he could relate those 
 trivial, interesting details which make the life of conversation 
 and narrative. From him the young guest heard the anecdote 
 of Louis XIV. and the battle of Ramilies, which has been so 
 often repeated. Upon receiving the news of the defeat, the 
 king said, " Has God, then, forgotten all that I have done for 
 him ? " This, was a rare story for such ears ! Many such he 
 heard, and in this agreeable way he began to collect the stores 
 of material for a work which saw the light forty years later, 
 — " The Age of Louis XIV." 
 
 If he came to Saint- Ange to study law, he forgot his pur- 
 pose. With a manuscript tragedy in his trunk which critics 
 had praised ; with an epic poem begun ; with the history of 
 France, all unw'ritten, surging in his brain ; with short poems 
 in manuscript circulating in Paris drawing-rooms, and escap- 
 ing now and then into print ; with a sympathetic circle of ac- 
 complished persons urging him on toward the goal of his am- 
 bition ; living in an historic chateau furnished with an ample 
 library, and listening daily to one of the most interesting talk- 
 ers of his generation, he could not but yield to manifest des- 
 tiny, and embrace finally the literary career. He lived, as it 
 appears, several months at Saint-Ange, visiting Paris occasion- 
 ally, and always attentive to those last events of the reign of
 
 AT THE CHATEAU OF SAINT-ANGE. 77 
 
 Louis XIV., which he was to relate by and by. Paris was 
 only forty miles distant, and could easily be reached in a day. 
 
 The king was approaching the close of his seventy-seventh 
 year in the summer of 1715, and there was scarcely an intelli- 
 gent individual in France who did not long for his death. As 
 the news of his decline reached Saint-Ange, from time to time, 
 what topics of discourse were furnished for the ancient master 
 of the chateau sitting at table with so receptive a person as 
 Francois Arouet ! No one could better explain than the old 
 financier why the king's treasury was a thousand million 
 francs behindhand, and why the king's paper was selling in 
 Paris at an average discount of seventy per cent. For four- 
 teen years there had been a large annual deficit, which had 
 been met by every kind of device which finance ministers had 
 been able to invent. The lord of Saint-Ange knew them all. 
 
 But it was not the empty treasury and the distressed king- 
 dom which then occupied men's minds. It was a theological 
 imbroglio, puerile and frivolous in its nature, but terrible and 
 devastating in its consequences. The Bull Unigenitus had re- 
 cently been let loose upon France, by Le Tellier, the keeper 
 of the old king's conscience ; and no wild beast breaking from 
 an Indian jungle ever carried into a defenseless village more 
 alarm. M. de Caumartin could relate the whole history of 
 this childish and tragic controversy ; and we can easily imag- 
 ine how such a tale would strike the mind of his young guest. 
 Maitre Arouet was the father of Francois- Marie, but the Bull 
 Unigenitus had much to do with engendering Voltaire. I 
 think I see this inquisitive, laughing youth, trained to mock- 
 ery, but most capable of compassion, listening to the old coun- 
 selor's story of the Bull: how, as long ago as 1552, the 
 learned Dr. Baius " took it into his head " to sustain a number 
 of propositions touching predestination, much to the prejudice 
 of the doctrine of free-will ; how some monks of the Cordelian 
 order, hostile to Baius, selected " seventy-six of these proposi- 
 tions," denounced them to the Pope as heretical, and obtained 
 a Bull condemning them ; how the Bull contained a doubtful 
 passage, the meaning of which depended upon the position of 
 a comma, and the friends of Baius sent to Rome to know 
 where the comma was to be placed; how Rome, busy with 
 other matters, sent as an answer a copy of the Bull in which
 
 78 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 the doubtful sentence had no comma at all ; how a learned 
 priest assured Dr. Baius that a papal Bull must be believed 
 and obeyed, even though it contained errors ; and how Dr. 
 Baius then peacefully retracted, — which was a much better 
 plan, remarks Voltaire, than reducing a hundred cities to 
 ashes in the cause. 
 
 Thus ended the first chapter of the history of the Bull. 
 The second included the Jansenist and Molinist controversy, 
 one result of which our young mocker had witnessed in his 
 own home, in the un pleasing, irrational demeanor of his brother 
 Armand. Molina was a Spanish Jesuit, who sustained the 
 old doctrine of free-will with a new subtlety all his own. 
 Man's will is free, said Molina, but God foresees how he will 
 exercise his will, and arranges all events in .accordance there- 
 with. Jansenius was a French bishop, who wrote a huge 
 book, in which the doctrine of predestination was carried to 
 the extreme of asserting that God commands some things 
 which are impossible, and that Christ did not die for all men. 
 The Jesuits obtained a Bull in 1641 condemning the five 
 leading propositions of Jansenius. But the Jansenists de- 
 nied that those five propositions were to be found in the 
 Latin folio of their author, and thus the controversy was re- 
 newed and embittered, until another Bull in explanation gave 
 a momentary peace to the church. 
 
 All this seems too silly to be recounted. But consider the 
 prize which ambitious men were playing for, who used this 
 monks' quarrel as a pretext. That prize was the king's ear, 
 the control of the benefices, the supreme authority of the na- 
 tion ! This it was which converted a theological controversy 
 into an engine of oppression, which filled prisons, ruined fam- 
 ilies, exiled virtuous men, and rendered hypocrisy one of the 
 necessaries of life. It is also a noteworthy circumstance, well 
 known to all the English-speaking world, that the Jansenist 
 theory of the universe, monstrous as it seems to men of the 
 world, had formerl}^ an attraction for educated persons, who 
 placed religion first, and everything else second. Theology, 
 indeed, never came so near the uglier truth of man's life and 
 duty as in the Jansenist creed, and no further advance toward 
 truth was possible, except by a change of method. Very much 
 that was worthiest, highest, strongest, noblest, in France was
 
 AT THE CHATEAU OF SAINT-AXGE. 79 
 
 Jansenist, from valiant, self-denying Arnauld and gifted Pascal 
 to the frugal, industrious, and virtuous business men of French 
 cities and towns, the main-stay of the kingdom, who have kept 
 it solvent and strong in spite of so many wasteful kings and 
 conquerors. French catalogues contain the titles of seven 
 hundred and sixty works relating to this affair of Jansenism 
 and Molinism, which plagued France for two centuries. 
 
 The quarrel, in the life-time of young Arouet, had dwin- 
 dled to the miserable question whether the five propositions 
 were or were not contained in the work of Jansenius. The 
 Jesuits presented a formula to all the " suspect : " "I con- 
 demn from my heart and with my mouth the doctrine of 
 the five propositions contained in the book of Cornelius Jan- 
 senius, which doctrine is not that of St. Augustine, whom 
 Jansenius has ill explained." This sufficed to destroy the 
 Port Royalists, since those young ladies had never read the 
 Latin folio of Jansenius, nor any other Latin, and could 
 not conscientiously declare that the five propositions were 
 contained in the book. A miracle, as Voltaire assures us, 
 retarded their downfall by some years. He may have heard 
 the story at Saint-Ange. A niece of Pascal, who attended 
 the school of the contumacious sisters, had a diseased eye, 
 which Avas instantly cured by the application of a thorn from 
 Christ's crown, one of the venerated relics of the convent. 
 He adds, " Some persons who lived a long time with her 
 assured me that her cure was very slow, whicli is highly 
 probable. But it is not very probable that God, who per- 
 forms no miracles to lead to our religion nineteen twentieths 
 of our race to whom that religion is unknown or abhorrent, 
 should have interrupted the order of nature on behalf of 
 a little girl, in order to justify a dozen nuns in sustaining 
 that Cornelius Jansenius did not write a dozen lines attrib- 
 uted to him." The Jesuits attempted miracles on their side, 
 but Jesuit miracles had no weight with the people ; and, 
 later in the controversy, when a sister of Port Royal had a 
 swollen leg miraculously cured, the prodigy did not save their 
 convent from demolition. "The time was passed for such 
 things, and Sister Gertrude had no uncle Pascal." ^ 
 
 At last, no man in France, from the Cardinal de Noailles 
 ^ Siecle de Louis XIV., chaptiT xxxvii.
 
 80 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 to the obscurest peasant in La Vendue, could live in safety, 
 or die in peace, or be sure of burial, unless he was prepared 
 to sign any absurd or self-contradictory form of words which 
 Le Tellier might choose to present to him. The confessor 
 made the ignorant old king believe that a refusal to sign 
 was flat rebellion, and he made the Pope sanction a refusal 
 of the sacraments to such rebels. The Bull Unigenitus, so 
 named from its first word, was the last of the anti-Jansen- 
 ist thunder-bolts, launched in 1713, — the device of Le Tel- 
 lier for bringing France completely under his authority. It 
 condemned one hundred and one propositions, several of 
 which seemed to good Catholics harmless and true. All the 
 prisons were full of Jansenists, and Le Tellier was about to 
 proceed to the extremity of calling a council to depose Car- 
 dinal de Noailles, the chief opponent of the Bull, when his 
 hand was arrested, at midsummer, 1715, by the serious ill- 
 ness of the kinsf. The cardinal had become the idol of the 
 nation, which was now divided into two impassioned parties, 
 Accepters and Refusers. The Accepters, as Voltaire remarks, 
 were a hundred bishops, the Jesuits, the Capuchins, and the 
 court; the Refusers were fifteen bishops and all the nation. 
 To such a point can a priest in power reduce a great and 
 intelligent nation when, in addition to the ordinary foibles 
 and faults of man, he labors under the infirmity of believ- 
 ing a narrow creed. 
 
 This dismal business of the Bull was the absorbing topic 
 in every circle during Arouet's stay at Saint-Ange. The con- 
 troversy presented to his consideration a baleful mSlange of 
 incongruities : ambition and disinterestedness, cowardice and 
 audacity, credulity and conviction, cruelty and tenderness, sin- 
 cerity and craft, — a combination of the worst and best in 
 man, which, in later years, this master of words could find 
 no adequate word for in any language, and was therefore 
 obliged to call it The Lifamous Thing. 
 
 In August, 1715, heaving of the king's danger, he left his 
 safe and advantageous retreat of Saint-Ange, and went to 
 Paris, to witness the change in all things which the coming 
 event was to effect. He should have gone to Versailles, 
 where the king and court then were, and seen how ruthlessly 
 the confessor used the king's dying agonies for his o^vn pur-
 
 AT THE CHATEAU OF SAINT-ANGE. 81 
 
 poses. The memoirs of the Duke de Simon, which make this 
 reign an eternal admonition to mankind, were not published in 
 the lifetime of Voltaire, and he probably never knew precisely 
 what passed in the palace at Versailles during the last few 
 days of the king's life. The old man died with that peace 
 and dignity with which the most injurious members of our 
 race usually take leave of the world they have preyed upon. 
 Men who pined for his death were moved at the spectacle, — 
 all the court, perhaps, except one priest and one woman : his 
 confessor, Le Tellier, and his wife, Madame de Maintenon. 
 As the king grew weaker the priest pressed him all the more 
 to fill the vacant bishoprics and abbeys, several of which were 
 important. He had the list ready, and a partisan of his own 
 designated for each of the fat things. But the king persisted 
 in refusing. He said he had enough to answer for without 
 taking upon himself, in the last hours of his life, the respon- 
 sibility of making those appointments ; and so, as the plain- 
 spoken St. Simon expresses it, Le Tellier saw that rich prey 
 escape him.^ 
 
 The poor old king, as the end drew near, had some misgiv- 
 ings as to his ecclesiastical policy. He began to doubt whether 
 the best mode of propitiating God is to force men to subscribe 
 formulas they loathe, and to drive from their homes and coun- 
 try a hundred thousand virtuous families. His heart relented, 
 too, toward the Cardinal de Noailles, his benevolent and gen- 
 tle Archbishop of Paris, who had been high in his favor un- 
 der the milder reign of his former confessor, Pere la Chaise. 
 Fixing his eyes upon Le Tellier and two cardinals who stood 
 by, the king said, four days before his death, •' I am sorry 
 to leave the affairs of the church in the condition in which 
 they are. In such matters I am perfectly ignorant. You 
 know, and I call you to witness, that I have done nothing in 
 relation thereto except what you wished, and I have done all 
 that you wished. It is you, then, who must answer before 
 God for what I have done, whether too much or too little. 
 Once more I declare it, and I charge you with it before God. 
 My conscience is clear; it is that of an ignorant man, who ab- 
 solutely abandoned himself to you during the whole of this 
 business." 
 
 1 11 St. Simon, 437, ed. of 1874. 
 VOL. I. 6
 
 82 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 The cardinals replied only by new flatteries, and the king 
 resumed in a strain still more affecting : " In my ignorance 
 I thought I could not do better for the peace of my con- 
 science than to give myself up to you in full confidence. As 
 to the Cardinal de Noailles, God is my witness that I do not 
 bate him, and that I have always been sorry for what I felt it 
 my duty to do against him." 
 
 Two of the courtiers exchanged glances at these words, and 
 one of them said, in a low voice, " Ought we to let the king 
 die without seeing his archbishop, and assuring him of pardon 
 and reconciliation ? " 
 
 The king, overhearing them, declared that, so far from ob- 
 jecting, he desired it. Here was a thunder-bolt, indeed, fallen 
 into the midst of this group of serene and smiling priests and 
 the woman, their tool, who was packing her trunks to be off 
 before the breath was out of the king's body. They were 
 equal to the emergency. " Oh, yes," said they, in substance, 
 " let him come, by all means ; but first, for the honor and safety 
 of the good cause, he should obey the king by accepting the 
 Bull." The king, fatigued, gave his consent without argu- 
 ment, and Le Tellier enjoyed a few days more of supremacy. 
 
 For eight days the drawing-room of the Duke of Orleans, 
 who was to be regent during the minority, was so crowded 
 with courtiers in the afternoon that, " speaking literally, a pin 
 could not fall to the floor." But, August 29th, the king re- 
 vived, ate two biscuits and drank a little wine with some 
 relish. On that day, about two in the afternoon, the Duke de 
 St. Simon visited the Duke of Orleans, and found no one 
 there except the master, who, however, took this desertion in 
 good part. He laughed, and told his visitor that not another 
 human being had crossed his threshold all that day. " Such is 
 man," remarks St. Simon. Voild le monde / Two days after, 
 on Sunday morniug, September 1, 1715, the king's reign of 
 seventy-two years was at an end. Our diarist concludes his 
 narrative by an impressive statement: "The king's stomach 
 and intestines were found to be of at least twice the capacity 
 of men of his stature, — a very extraordinary circumstance, 
 and the cause of his being so large and equal an eater." '
 
 ^5 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 EXILED FOR AN EPIGRAM. 
 
 Our young poet is in Paris again, never a safe place for 
 him, from youth to hoary age. He has brought with him liis 
 play, — that "QEdipe" upon which he has been fitfully work 
 ing for the last two years, and upon which he has staked his 
 hopes of fame and fortune ; for, even then, a successful play 
 upon the Paris stage gave the author some standing and con- 
 siderable gain. 
 
 As yet he possesses nothing, and is nobody ; for, at twenty- 
 two, even a good poet was no longer a prodigy. Nothing short 
 of a striking and sustained success could justify his rejection 
 of the career offered him by his father. At present, great 
 lords, who laugh at his sallies, copy his verses, and make room 
 for him at their suppers, speak and think of him as " little 
 Arouet," and smile, perhaps, at the way he has of assuming 
 an equality with them, — an amusing little fellow, with a sur- 
 prising knack at hitting off verses. The old government of 
 France was well enough described as a despotism tempered by 
 epigrams ; but the epigram-makers were always liable to find 
 themselves in the condition of shorn lambs, without any one 
 to temper the wind to them. To get " CEdipe " played was 
 his object, a thing of vast difficulty to an untried author. 
 Meanwhile, in the early days of the regency, he came near 
 reaching fortune by a short cut, and he may well have been 
 attentive to passing events. It was not certain, when the 
 breath left the old king's body, who was to wield his author- 
 ity, and certain friends of the poet had hopes of having a voice 
 in the bestowal of good things. 
 
 Louis XIV., who was married at twenty-two to a princess 
 of Austria, reared but one legitimate child, — Louis, the D.ui- 
 phin, born in the second year of the marriage. The gossips 
 of the court, in speaking of this prince, used to apply to liim
 
 j4 LITE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 an old saying, which proved to be his history: "Son of a 
 king, father of a king, never a king." But he lived to the age 
 of fifty ; and as late as April, 1711, when his father was sev- 
 enty-three, he seemed likely to disappoint the prophets. He 
 I had then three sons : (1) Louis, Duke of Bourgoyne, twenty- 
 nine ; (2) Philippe, Duke of Anjou, King of Spain, twenty- 
 eight ; (3) Charles, Duke of Berri, twenty-five. The hope and 
 pride of France was the eldest of these sons, the Duke of Bour- 
 goyne, who was married to an amiable and popular princess, 
 ' and was the father of two little boys, one six years of age and 
 the other fourteen months. This little family stood between 
 France and calamities which France had abundant reason to 
 dread, — a long minority and a disputed succession. 
 
 But it seemed sufficient. There were four males in the im- 
 mediate line of succession, to say nothing of the hale and 
 hearty old king, who could still tire out most of his court in 
 the hunting-field, and bring down a bird on the wing as surely 
 as the best of them. In April, 1711, Monseigneur the Dau- 
 phin died of the small-pox. In February following, of the 
 same or a similar disease, died, in quick succession, the new 
 dauphin, his wife, and their eldest son, leaving only their 
 youngest boy, then two years old, sick and sickly, who became 
 Louis XV. That feeble, flickering life was all that interposed 
 between France and complications threatening civil war. And, 
 finally, the Duke of Berri, as if to complete the ruin of this 
 house, was killed in 1714 by a fall from his horse. Knowing 
 what we know of the history of France, we cannot wonder 
 that the people of Paris should have rushed into the streets 
 and filled the churches whenever it was noised abroad that this 
 little boy had a bad cold. 
 
 The old king had a dozen or more illegitimate children, 
 most of whom he caused to be formally legitimated. He as- 
 sio-ned them magnificent chateaux and princely revenues, and 
 compelled their recognition as princes of the blood royaL His 
 favorite among them was Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, Duke du 
 Maine, a man of forty, married to a profuse, ambitious princess, 
 who lived in reckless magnificence at Sceaux, six miles south 
 of Paris. For some years, the "court" of the Duchess du 
 Maine at Sceaux had presented an intentional contrast to that 
 of the old king, who, during the thirty years' ascendency of
 
 EXILED FOR AN EPIGRAM. 85 
 
 Madame de Maintenon, had a smile for no courtier whom he 
 often missed at the daily mass. The Duchess du Maine loved 
 pleasure, loved literature as one of the forms of pleasure, culti- 
 vated literary persons, gave splendid fetes out-of-doors and in- 
 doors, and played a conspicuous part in the pageantry of life. 
 The duke, her husband, was a well-disposed, weak man, who 
 stood in awe of his father, and was also very submissive to his 
 wife. 
 
 The people of France were far from approving the lawless, 
 enforced ascendency of these hdtards over the whole nobility 
 of the kingdom. France was still — nay, had been always, 
 and is now — a virtuous nation. In spite of the bad example 
 of her kings and priests, in spite of her agreeable Ninons and 
 her repulsive saints, her sour Jansenists and her gay abbes, 
 the mass of the people of Fiance and the best of her educated 
 class have believed in virtue, have practiced self-control, have 
 observed those fundamental moralities from which all happi- 
 ness comes. They could not, therefore, be brought to regard 
 this Duke du Maine as a prince of their royal line, — a soldier 
 who had not behaved well in the presence of the enemy, when 
 a doting Xerxes of a father had intrusted him with the lives 
 and honor of Frenchmen better than himself. 
 
 The dying king was persuaded to impose this favorite son 
 upon France as the guardian of the heir to the crown, the com- 
 mander of the royal guards during the minority, and King of 
 France if the little Louis should die before maturity. 
 
 Louis XIV. had lived seventy-seven years, reigned seventy- 
 two, and governed fifty-four, without ever meeting one human 
 being who could stand before him and oppose his will. The 
 spirit of mastery, a thing essentially barbarous, had been 
 nourished in him to such a point that he will remain for this 
 alone an interesting study to all time. His tutors began early 
 to instill it into him. Among the curiosities shown in the im- 
 perial library at Petersburgh is a leaf of a copy-book used by 
 Louis XIV. when he was a dull little boy, learning to write. 
 His writing-master set him as a copy, at the top of the page, 
 French words signifying, — 
 
 Homage is due to kings; they do whatever they 
 
 LIKE. 
 
 The child wrote these words six times upon the leaf, in a
 
 86 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 large, unstead}' liand,^ and it was nearly all lie ever learned of 
 the kingly state. When he came, late in life, to write instruc- 
 tions for the guidance of his son, he did little more than enlarge 
 ujDon this copy-book text. Thus he wrote : " He who has 
 given kings to men walls that they should be respected as his 
 lieutenants, reserving to himself alone the right to inquire into 
 their conduct. His will is that whosoever is born a subject 
 should obey without question. Everything there is, in the 
 whole extent of our dominions, belongs to us. The money in 
 our treasui-y, the money remaining in the hands of our collect- 
 ors, and the money which we leave as currency in the business 
 of our people ought to be equally under our control." Again, 
 " As the lives of subjects are the king's own property, he ought 
 to have all the more care to preserve them." ^ Holding such 
 opinions as these, he was induced by the Duke du Maine and 
 Madame de Maintenon, a week before his death, to sign a codi- 
 cil, which gave the duke the substance of power during the 
 minority, and left to the Duke of Orleans little more than the 
 title of regent. Then the usual mass was performed, and the 
 king communed; after which he sent for his nephew of Or- 
 leans, and, as the terror-stricken St. Simon records, " With 
 Jesus Christ still upon his lips, he assured the duke that he 
 would find nothing in his will with which he would not be con- 
 tent." 
 
 There is a great deal of difference between a living and a 
 dead lion. The old king had not been dead two days before 
 the codicil had been set aside, the Duke du Maine reduced sev- 
 eral degrees toward his native nullity, and the Duke of Orleans 
 confirmed Regent of France, with power all but absolute. The 
 brilliant court of the Duchess du Maine at Sceaux suffered an 
 eclipse. It remained the haunt of " the pleasures," but did not 
 become the seat of power. No woman, as Voltaire once re- 
 marked, ever ruined a husband with more grace than she ; but 
 she did not enjoy the opportunity, which women have since 
 done, of ruining France. The duchess set seriously at work 
 intriguing to undo what had been done, and thus Sceaux be- 
 came a sort of rendezvous of disaffection, veiled by an apparent 
 devotion to pleasure. 
 
 ' Histoire de France, par Henri Martin, tome xiv. page 616. 
 2 2 CEuvres de Louis XIV., 336, etc., edition of 1806.
 
 EXILED FOR AN EPIGRAM. 87 
 
 The literary circle of the Temple were also disappointed Ut 
 the beginning of the regency. The Grand Prior, Philippe 
 de Vendome, returned to his palace in the Temple after long 
 exile, and his ancient comrade, the Duke of Orleans, desired to 
 appoint him a member of his council. The virtuous St. Simon 
 rose indignant at the I'umor, and roused all his bi'other dukes. 
 Finally, he told the regent that if that debauched scoundrel 
 entered the council, and thus took precedence of the nobility, 
 the dukes would resign their places and leave the court. The 
 Grand Prior was not appointed, and had nothing to give little 
 Arouet except verses, suppers, too much wine, and a bad ex- 
 ample of getting drunk every evening. 
 
 That young man (a moth amid these flaming candles), not 
 aware how fate was playing with him, resumed his old way 
 of life in Paris, always busy and inquisitive. Old things 
 were passing away, and he was observant of the change. On 
 the day of the king's funeral, he was out on the road to St. 
 Denis, near Paris^ where for eleven hundred years kings of 
 France had been buried. It was more like a festival than a 
 funeral. " I saw little tents," he records, " set up along the 
 road, in which people drank, sang, laughed. The sentiments 
 of the citizens of Paris had passed into the minds of the popu- 
 lace. The Jesuit, Le Tellier, was the principal cause of this 
 miiversal joy. I heard several spectators say that the torches 
 which lighted the procession ought to be used for setting fire 
 to the houses of the Jesuits." France, as he says elsewhere, 
 forgave the king his mistresses, but not his confessor. He 
 may have contributed to the merriment of the crowd by a bur- 
 lesque invitation to the funeral of the Bull Unigenitus, which 
 was circulating in these days of gayety and relief. He Avas 
 getting a kind of reputation that led knowing people to point 
 to Jiim when anything particularly impudent appeared. The 
 burlesque spoke of the deceased Constitution as the natural 
 daughter of Clement XL, and she was said to have died of 
 grief at the loss of seventy-seven per cent. Le Tellier was to 
 head the mourners, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, who 
 bad profited much by the dame's decease, had been named to 
 the Abbey of Notre Dame des Victoires. And, indeed, it was 
 through the aid of the Cardinal de Noailles that the regent 
 quieted that ridiculous and deadly dispute. A sinner with a
 
 88 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 little sense and good nature found it easy to heal a wound 
 which the pious old king had only touched to inflame.^ 
 
 What a joyful opening of prison doors the young poet wit- 
 nessed in those days ! The first time the regent sat in his 
 official seat in his cabinet, he called for a list of all the persons 
 then in prison through lettres de cachet, — the mere order of 
 the king. Upon inquiring into the causes of their detention, 
 he discovered that in the case of many prisoners no living 
 creature knew any cause, nor was there any record of a cause. 
 They had been simply forgotten ! A large number of pris- 
 oners did not themselves know, and could not guess, why they 
 had been arrested. The worst case, out of a number of ex- 
 tremely bad ones, was that of an Italian, who had been in the 
 Bastille thirty-three years without knowing why. Thirty- 
 three years before, on the day of his arrival in Paris, he had 
 been arrested and conveyed to the Bastille, and there he had 
 lived and grown old, surviving all his family and friends. 
 When the regent set free all these forgotten victims of priestly 
 arrogance and ministerial intrigue, this poor Italian asked to 
 be allowed to remain in the Bastille ; and he lived there, by 
 the regent's allowance, all the rest of his days. But the 
 Duke of Orleans did not abolish lettres de cachet, which made 
 these appalling abuses of the royal authority possible, — nay, 
 easy and unavoidable. 
 
 The autumn and winter following the king's death, our 
 young poet frequented more than ever the society of the Tem- 
 ple, working zealously also to perfect his play and procure its 
 acceptance at the theatre. It was through his zeal to improve 
 his " CEdipe " and make friends for it that the moth came too 
 near the flame, and had its flight suddenly arrested. He read 
 " QEdipe," one evening, at the abode of a literary and fes- 
 tive member of the Temple coterie, Abb^ de Bussi, where, 
 among the guests, were the Abbe Chaulieu and the Grand 
 Prior, then in full intrigue to be reckoned among the princes 
 of the blood royal. Supper over, the young poet read his 
 play, a wonderful work, indeed, for a lad of nineteen to con- 
 
 1 Le Tellier, appointed by the will of the late king confessor to Louis XV., 
 and having nothing to do, owing to the tender age of that monarch, asked the re- 
 gent what was to be his present distinction. " That is no affair of mine," answered 
 the regent ; " address yourself to your superiors." (Me'moires de Duclos.)
 
 EXILED FOR AN EPIGRAM. 89 
 
 ceive, — a poem full of spirit and fire, cast in the ancient 
 mould, but containing passages, and even scenes, only sur- 
 passed by Racine and Corneille. The old critics favored the 
 young dramatist with their remarks. " That supper," he wrote 
 to Chaulieu soon after, " did great good to my tragedy, and I 
 believe it would be only necessary to drink four or five times 
 with you to produce an excellent work. Socrates gave lessons 
 in bed, and you at table ; hence your lessons are doubtless 
 more agreeable than his were." This reading was the more 
 delightful to the Abb(i de Chaulieu because he was then sev- 
 enty-seven years of age, and, from the failure of his eyesight, 
 could scarcely read himself. 
 
 Old as the abb^ was, his continent and temperate ancestors 
 had put such vigorous life into him that he was in love this 
 winter with a young lady in the service of the Duchess du 
 Maine in the capacity of reader ; and when the duchess re- 
 moved from Sceaux to the Tuileries he had convenient op- 
 portunity of pajdng court to his beloved. The lady (Baron- 
 ess de Staal) gives us in her Memoirs extensive love poems 
 which the amorous old abb^ sent her, as well as several anec- 
 dotes showing unusual ardor in a lover of seventy-seven. He 
 lent her his carriage every day when she would accept it. He 
 wrote every morning and came every evening. He assailed 
 her with costly presents; and when he reproached her for 
 refusing them, and alluded to the extreme plainness of her 
 attire, she made him the celebrated answer, " I am adorned 
 with all that my costume lacks." The abbe's little lackey, 
 who usually conveyed his tender epistles, came to her one day 
 in sorrow, and told her his master had dismissed him. " Go 
 home," said she, " and tell him you are going to stay, for 
 such is my pleasure." The abbe submitted ; the tiger was re- 
 tained. ^ 
 
 The abbd could not omit to pay homage to the duchess, who 
 was more than ever disposed to favor literary men, of whom 
 she made use in her struggle to keep her rank. Every kind 
 of writing appeared on behalf of the " legitimated princes," 
 — poems, satires, couplets, memoirs, — the duchess herself 
 lending a hand, and all her court rummaging for precedents 
 in former reigns. " She employed most of her nights in this 
 1 Memoires de Madame de Staal.
 
 90 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 work," records tlie Baroness de Staal. " The immense vol- 
 umes heaped upon her bed, like mountains overwhelming her, 
 made her look, as she said, like the giant buried under Mount 
 ^tna." Never was she in better mood to listen to the Abbe 
 de Chaulieu's praises of the wondrous Arouet, and the fine 
 tragedy he was trying to get accepted at the theatre. The 
 poet was presented to her most serene highness ; he joined in 
 her moonlight festivals — her "white nights" — at Sceaux ; 
 he had the honor of reading " Qidipe " to her ; and he became 
 one of the frequenters of her " court." 
 
 He knew how to adapt himself to such scenes as these, and 
 even at this age he had the art of assuming an equality with 
 these artificial magnates of the world without offending them. 
 No man ever equaled him in this art, and no man ever had so 
 much occasion for it. The Grand Prior, for example, who 
 was of princely rank, was desirous of being styled Royal High- 
 ness, instead of plain Highness. It was a stroke of art, as 
 well as wit, in this youth to address him as his Warbling 
 Highness (^so7i Alt esse Chansoniere^. The Marquis d'Argen- 
 son, a school-fellow of Arouet, relates this anecdote in his 
 Memoirs, as an instance of " the tone of ease which he al- 
 ways took with great lords ; " and it was to the same marquis 
 that Voltaire once explained the secret of his ability to hold 
 this tone. 
 
 " Souls," said Voltaire, " communicate with souls, and can 
 measure one another without need of an intermediate body. 
 It is only the greatness or the worth of a soul that ought to 
 frighten or intimidate us. To fear or to respect the body and 
 its accessories — force, beauty, royalty, rank, office — is pure 
 imbecility. Men are born equal and die equal. Let us re- 
 spect the virtue, the merit of their souls, and despise the im- 
 perfections of those souls." 
 
 This principle, he said, he had early adopted and practiced. 
 But there was another lesson which he learned later, though 
 he needed it now. 
 
 " Doubtless," he continued, " we should by prudence avoid 
 the evil which that physical force can do us, as we should 
 guard ourselves against a crowned bull, an enthroned monkey, 
 a savage dog let loose upon us. Let us beware of such. Let 
 us even endeavor, if possible, to moderate them, to soften
 
 BAI^ISHED FOR AN EPIGRAM. 91 
 
 them ; but this sentiment is very different from the esteem 
 and respect which we owe to souls." 
 
 Elsewhere he gives this maxim : " By having it well at 
 heart that men are equal, and clearly in the head that exter- 
 nals distinguish them, one can get on very well in the world." 
 
 Time passed, and he made no progress with the actors. 
 During the winter he read his play and parts of it to other 
 friends, never weary of retouching it. In the Lent of 1816 he 
 was again a guest at Saint- Ange ; " living upon pheasants and 
 partridges," as he wrote in verse to the Grand Prior, "in- 
 stead of red herring and water-cress, which, in these days, 
 blessed of God, every monk and bigot eats." Again he 
 listened to M. de Caumartin, who " carried in his brain the 
 living history of his time, — all the deeds and all the words of 
 the great men and of the wits, a thousand charming trifles, 
 songs new and old, and the exhaustless annals of the fools of 
 
 aris. 
 
 In May, 1716, he was in Paris swelling those annals. The 
 press still teemed with writings, in prose and verse, against 
 the regent, most of which, as the regent well knew, were in- 
 spired by the Duchess du Maine. He was a good-natured 
 prince, but we know from St. Simon that verses accusing him 
 of monstrous crimes against nature and natural affection cut 
 him to the heart sometimes. One innocent epigram Arouet 
 composed about this time, and how many more we know not. 
 Among other reforms the regent reduced the horses in the 
 royal stables one half. Arouet's epigram intimated that His 
 Royal Highness would do better to dismiss one half the asses 
 that had surrounded his late majesty. There were also coup- 
 lets and other verses afloat which reflected upon the young 
 widow of the late Duke of Berri, the regent's own daughter. 
 This lady was a conspicuous defier of the conventionalities. 
 Maflame de Genlis reports that she herself saw a portrait of 
 the Duchess of Berri as Europa riding upon the bull, painted 
 from life. Be that as it may, there were satirical verses in 
 every hand assuming that she was a woman capable of every 
 excess and every indecorum. 
 
 Nothing is more probable than that Arouet gratified the 
 Duchess du Maine by writing satirical poems. " The duch- 
 ess," says the biographer of the regent (M. Capefigue), " die-
 
 92 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 tated ideas to the poets, and young Arouet was not tlie last to 
 throw himself into the struggle against the Duke of Orleans." 
 He did not struggle long. Early in May, 1716, the old Mar- 
 quis of Dangeau made the following entr}'^ in his diary : " Lit- 
 tle Arouet, a ver}^ satirical and a very imprudent poet, has 
 been exiled. He has been sent to Tulle, and is already out of 
 Paris." 
 
 The order of exile, dated May 5, 1716, vouchsafed no ex- 
 planation of the cause : " The intention of His Royal Highness 
 is that the Sieur Arouet, the son, should be sent to Tulle." 
 No more. Tulle was then, as it is now, a manufacturing town, 
 nearly three hundred miles south of Paris, — three hundred 
 miles from the theatre, from the Temple, from Sceaux, from 
 Saint-Ange, from everything to which this imprudent poet 
 looked for a career. Tulle ! What a cutting retort from a 
 regent unable to meet epigram with epigram ! Tulle had not 
 yet given its name to a delicate and beautiful fabric which 
 ladies love. In 1716 it was a town of many tan-yards, the 
 savor of which was familiar to the ancestors of our poet, but 
 not on that account the less offensive to him. Candles were 
 made there, and nails, and coarse woolen cloths, and other 
 commodities, of little interest to the author of " (Edipe " and 
 the guest of Saint-Ange. 
 
 Even Arouet, pere^ deemed Tulle too severe, and it was at 
 his solicitation that the regent changed the place of exile 
 from Tulle to Sully-upon-the-Loire, less than a hundred miles 
 from the theatre of his hopes. Why Sully ? Because, said 
 Maitre Arouet, the young man has relations there who, " he 
 hoped, would be able by their good advice to correct his impru- 
 dence and moderate his vivacity." The youth may have had 
 relations in that region, but he lived during the whole of his 
 exile in a fine old chateau belonging to the Duke of Sully, 
 which Henry IV. had given to the family when the voice of a 
 Sully was second only to his own in the councils of the state. 
 This young man had remarkable luck in falling upon his feet. 
 What better could the Duke of Sully himself do than repair 
 to his chateau on the Loire during the delightful days of May ? 
 " I write to you," the poet said to the Abb^ de Chaulieu, 
 after two months' stay at the chateau, " from an abode that 
 would be the most agreeable in the world if I had not been
 
 BANISHED FOR AN EPIGRAM. 93 
 
 exiled to it, and where there is nothing wanting to ray perfect 
 happiness except the liberty of leaving." 
 
 To the Marquise de Mimeure, a lady to whom he had read 
 " CEdipe," he wrote some time after : " It would be delicious 
 for me to remain at Sully if I were only allowed to go away. 
 The duke is the most amiable of men, and the one to whom I 
 am under the greatest obligations. His chateau is in the most 
 beautiful situation in the world, with a magnificent wood near* 
 by. ... It is quite just that they should give me an agreea-f 
 ble exile, for I am absolutely innocent of the unworthy songs 
 attributed to me. You would be astonished, perhaps, if I should' 
 tell you that in this beautiful wood we have some tvhite nights^ 
 as at Sceaux, in a grand saloon of elms lighted by an infinite 
 number of lanterns, where was served, the other evening, a 
 magnificent supper to the music of a band, followed by a ball 
 of more than a hundred masks superbly attired." 
 
 The hunting season filled the chateau with sportsmen, 
 " who," as he wrote, " spend the lovely days in assassinating 
 partridges." For his own part, he had " some interest with 
 Apollo, but not much with Diana." " I hunt little, and 
 rhyme a great deal." He told his correspondent not to make 
 known his happiness in Paris, for they might let him stay at 
 Sully long enough for him to become unhappy there. 
 
 But all this time he was scheming to get back to Paris. 
 As it was his pen that exiled him, it was his pen that brought' 
 about his return. He wrote a poem, addressed to the regent, 
 in that mingled tone of familiarity and homage which marked 
 his dealings with " the great." He concluded by an adroit 
 allusion to his own case : " Beneficent toward all, to me 
 alone severe, you doom me to a rigorous exile. But I dare 
 appeal from yourself to yourself. Before you I wish no sup- 
 port but innocence. I implore your justice, not your clem- 
 ency. Do but read these lines, and judge of their worth. 
 See what verses are imputed to me, and see what I write." 
 
 He sent copies of this poem to favorites of the regent, ask- 
 ing them to " cast an eye over it," and tell him frankly if it 
 was worthy of such a prince. He begged them to send crit- 
 ical comments upon the poem, that he might improve it to the 
 uttermost of his powers. To one, " It shall not see the light 
 until you judge it worthy of publication." To another, " If
 
 94 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 I had the honor to be better known to you than I am, you 
 would see that in this composition I speak as I think." These 
 tactics were rewarded with success ; and about the time when 
 great lords, tired of assassinating partridges, came to Paris 
 to pursue fair and featherless bipeds, Arouet also arrived, to 
 resume his efforts to get his tragedy accepted at the theatre. 
 fit was time he had something to show in reply to his father's 
 remonstrances ; for he was approaching twenty-three, and was 
 still a hanger-on at the houses of other men, dependent upon 
 his father for all except his lodging. A Duchess du Maine 
 may have given him some golden louis; princes and prin- 
 cesses did such things then, and poets submitted to accept the 
 bounty, though they usually refrained from recording it. 
 
 As a specimen of the songs of which he was accused in 
 these green days, take this upon Madame de Maintenon, 
 which has waited a hundred and sixty years to see the light 
 of print: — 
 
 " Que I'Eternel est grand ! Que sa boute puissante 
 A comble mes desirs, a pave' mes travaux ! 
 Je naquis demoiselle et je devins servante : 
 Je lavai la vaisselle et frottai les bureaux. 
 
 " J'eus bientot des amants : je ne fus point ingrate; 
 De Villarceaux longtemps j'amusai les transports ; 
 II me fit epouser ce fameux cul-de-jatte 
 Qui vivait de ses vers, comme moi de mon corps. 
 
 " II mourut. Je fus pauvre, et vieille devenue, 
 Mes amants, de'goute's, me laissaient toute nue, 
 Lorsqu'un tyran me crut propre encore au plaisir. 
 
 " Je lui plus, il m'aima : je fis la Madeleine, 
 Par des refus adroits j'irritai ses desirs; 
 Je lui parlai du diable, il eut peur . . . . Je suis reine."i 
 
 The Duke of Orleans did not love Madame de Maintenon, 
 but the regent of France could not allow such verses, aimed 
 at the wife of the late king. 
 
 1 Le Sottisier de Voltaire, Paris, 1880.
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 IN THE BASTILLE. 
 
 The Duke of Orleans, regent during the minority of the 
 young king, was forty-one years of age at the death of Louis 
 XIV. He was of medium stature, inclining to stoutness, of 
 open, engaging countenance, rosy-cheeked and black-haired. 
 We may say of him that he deserved to be virtuous, so well 
 disposed was he, so amiable in his demeanor, so affectionate 
 in his family, so attentive to all the ameliorating etiquettes of 
 his rank. In his public capacity he did several wise and lib- 
 eral actions. He promptly suppressed the odious Le Tellier, 
 and stopped the ravages of tlie Bull Unigenitus. He refused 
 even to entertain the proposition of expunging the vast op- 
 pressive debt of France by a formal bankruptcy. He lessened 
 the expenses of the court, dismissing, as our Arouet saucily 
 advised, a portion of the late king's asses, as well as selling 
 half his majesty's horses. 
 
 But one condition of all genuine and lasting success in this 
 world is habitual obedience to the physical laws. Bad men 
 are as much subject to this condition as good men, because 
 violation of those laws is a waste of power. This rosy 
 Bacchus of a prince did not comply with the indispensable 
 preliminary. He was a child of his period, — of our period, — 
 when so many young men, on discovering that there are er- 
 rors in the accepted scheme of the universe, assume also that 
 ginger will not burn in the mouth. Add to this his absurd 
 " rank," his pernicious wealth, his perverse education, the ex- 
 ample of his ancestors, living and dead, and the force of habit. 
 After living twenty years of mature life with no object but 
 pleasure, suddenly, by a series of deaths which no one could 
 have thought remotely probable, this round and ruddy Bour- 
 bon finds himself master of France. And of such a France ! 
 A fair and fertile land exhausted by the long reign of the
 
 9G LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 most expensive and incompetent of kings, and required to 
 confront, all at once, a cruel accumulation of evils. The old 
 king was dead and forgotten. The new king was a little boy, 
 shooting sparrows for his amusement. The regent had the 
 honor of serving his countrymen in the character of scape- 
 goat, and in that character his success was complete. 
 
 At first he attended to public business with some steadi- 
 ness and assiduity; but he soon fell into that routine of self- 
 indulgence which gave so much plausibility to the worst cal- 
 umnies. He began the labors of the day, as his friend, the 
 Duke of St. Simon, sorrowfully records, about two or half- 
 past two in the afternoon, when he entered his dressing-room, 
 took his chocolate, and received " all the world,'' that is, 
 all the coui't and nobility who had the entree at the king's 
 lever. He chatted familiarly with them for half an hour or 
 more, and then gave formal audience to individuals having 
 business with him. He usually paid, next, a brief visit to the 
 duchess, his wife ; and, invariably, once during the day, he 
 went to see the little king in his wing of the palace. The 
 court remarked with pleasure that the regent, both on enter- 
 ing and on leaving the presence of the child, then seven 
 years old, bowed as low and as " reverently " as if the king had 
 been of full age. Frequently he visited his mother, that 
 plain-spoken princess whose wondrous Memoirs complete our 
 knowledge of the later court of the old king; and her also he 
 treated with due respect. He next presided at a short ses- 
 sion of the council, and transacted with ministers the indis- 
 pensable routine of business. 
 
 This brought him to five or six o'clock, after which he 
 gave himself wholly up to pleasure. On returning from the 
 opera or the theatre he liked to have a gay and free supper 
 with his familiars, of which the virtuous St. Simon gives 
 us a sorry account. The company at these suppers he justly 
 describes as " strange." The regent's mistress of the hour 
 was sure to be present ; sometimes, a number of opera girls ; 
 often.) the Duchess of Berri, the regent's daughter ; usually, 
 a dozen men noted for their debauchery or their talents, — 
 dukes, ministers, lords, and poets ; also, some ladies of " mid- 
 dling virtue" (moyenne vertu). The fare at these repasts was 
 " exquisite." It was cooked in kitchens made on purpose,
 
 IN THE BASTILLE. 97 
 
 adjoining the supper-room, in silver vessels ; and often the 
 guests lent a hand to the cooks in preparing some of the 
 dishes. The conversation was the freest possible, and spared 
 no one, living or dead, present or absent, man or Avoman. 
 Such a supper, at which the best wine in the world flows free, 
 cannot but become at last a noisy, vulgar debauch ; and, 
 doubtless, our Polonius, St. Simon, uttered only the literal 
 truth when he wrote, " They drank deeply and of the best 
 wine ; they grew warm ; they talked shamelessly with un- 
 covered bosom, and strove which could utter the grossest 
 impieties ; and when they had made some noise, and were 
 very drunk, they went to bed, to recommence on the morrow." 
 From the moment of the regent's sitting down to supper 
 until the next morning, he was " barricaded " against all 
 approach of business. He would see no one, and receive no 
 message, upon the most pressing affair of state, even though 
 it concerned his own immediate safety. 
 
 To increase the ill effect of this example, he trampled upon 
 the most cherished decorums of his country, having some- 
 times a wilder orgy than usual on such a day as Good Fri- 
 day, — a thing which even bad Catholics usually avoid. Ro- 
 bust and capable of enduring great excesses, he had a particu- 
 lar admiration for men who could go farther than himself 
 in debauchery. "I have heard him," says St. Simon, "ex- 
 press ceaseless admiration, carried to the point of esteem, for 
 the Grand Prior, because he had gone to bed drunk for forty 
 years, had always kept mistresses openly, and spoken contin- 
 ually against piety and religion." The old king, indeed, once 
 said of him : " Do you know what my nephew is ? He is a 
 braggart of crimes which he does not commit." 
 
 A prince who lives so in the sight of a distressed and 
 anxious people will be taken seriously, and will be accused of 
 offenses far worse than those he commits. The old king 
 brought the kingdom to the verge of ruin ; he drove from it 
 the most valuable citizens it possessed; he suspended the 
 growth of its intellect ; he prepared the way for evils from 
 which France has not yet ceased to suffer ; he was to France 
 all the harm and hindrance an individual could be. But he 
 observed the decorums ; he was studious of appearances. 
 Every day he went to mass; his mistresses were ladies of 
 
 VOL. I. 7
 
 98 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 rank; he never passed any woman of any degree without 
 a courteous salutation ; he exacted and observed every eti- 
 quette. He never appeared except to dazzle or impress; he 
 was the histrionic king to perfection ; and to this day he 
 stalks across the historic scene in his favorite character of the 
 " Grand Monarque," much to the satisfaction of many spec- 
 tators. 
 
 The regent, on the contrary, was most harshly judged. 
 Even his doting fondness for his daughter, the Duchess of 
 Berri, received from the lying scribblers of the time the 
 worst conceivable interpretation, and a hundred epigrams 
 insinuated that he had destroyed by poison the many lives 
 that had till lately interposed between himself and the su- 
 preme power. There never lived a man less capable than 
 he of such enormities ; but accusations of that nature were 
 the inevitable penalty of a disregard of appearances in so 
 conspicuous a personage, and there were powerful individuals 
 interested in making the regent odious. 
 
 Among the scurrilous things circulating from hand to hand 
 in Paris, in the spring of 1717, was an inscription, in school- 
 boy Latin, of the following purport : — 
 
 A BOY REIGNING ,' 
 A MAN NOTORIOUS FOR POISONING3 
 
 AND INCESTS ADMINISTERING ; 
 
 COUNCILS IGNORANT AND UNSTABLE ; 
 
 RELIGION MORE UNSTABLE ; 
 
 THE TREASURY EMPTY ; 
 
 PUBLIC FAITH VIOLATED; 
 
 INFURIATE WRONG TRIUMPHANT ; 
 
 DANGER OF GENERAL SEDITION IMMINENT ; 
 
 THE COUNTRY SACRIFICED 
 
 TO THE HOPE OF A CROWN; 
 
 AN INHERITANCE BASELY ANTICIPATED; 
 
 FRANCE ABOUT TO PERISH. 
 
 This inscription was probably appended to a dravring of 
 some kind, — a weeping figure of France, perhaps, or of a 
 monumental structure. Under a paternal government nothing 
 of this nature can be too trifling for official notice, and, accord- 
 ingly, the " Puero Regnante," as the inscription was called from 
 its opening words, was considered by the ministry, as well as 
 eagerly scanned and circulated in society.
 
 IN THE BASTILLE. 99 
 
 Anotlier piece had a much wider circulation, and made its 
 way even into the provinces. The French know better than 
 any other people how to catch the attention of readers languid 
 from a satiety of sweets; and, among their other devices, there 
 is one of beginning every verse or stanza of a poem with the 
 same word or words. This piece was so arranged, nearly 
 every line beginning with J'ai vu, " I have seen ; " and hence 
 the poem was commonly called the " I-have-seens." These 
 are specimen sentences, from which the reader will perceive 
 that the poem was written by a Jansenist : — 
 
 " I have seen the Bastille and a thousand other prisous filled with 
 brave citizens, faithful subjects. 
 
 ^^ I have seen the people wretched under a rigorous servitude. 
 
 " 1 have seen the soldiery perishing of hunger, thirst, indignation, 
 and rage. 
 
 ^^ I have seen a devil in the guise of a woman [Maintenon] ruling 
 the kingdom, sacrificing her God, her faith, her soul, to seduce the 
 spirit of a too credulous king. 
 
 " I have seen the altar polluted. 
 
 " I have seen Port Royal demolished. 
 
 ^^ I have seen the blackest of all possible acts, which the waters of 
 the entire ocean could not purge, and which remote posterity will 
 scarcely be able to believe, — bodies stamped with the seal of im- 
 mortality removed by profane and sacrilegious hands from that sojourn 
 of gracious men. Port Royal. 
 
 '■^ I have seen the prelacy sold or made the reward of imposture. 
 
 '■'■ I have seen nonentities raised to the highest rank. 
 
 " I have seen — and this includes all — the Jesuit adored. 
 
 " I have seen these evils during the fatal reign of a prince whom 
 formerly the wrath of Heaven accorded to our ardent desires. 
 
 " I have seen these evils, and I am not twenty years old." 
 
 This poem was written by A. L. le Brun, the author of the 
 words of a long-forgotten opera and other hack work of that 
 day. It had been circulating for some months, and as yet 
 the detectives of the police had not discovered the writer. 
 They were equally at fault in their chase after the author of 
 the " Puero Regnante." But every knowing finger in Paris 
 pointed to Arouet as the probable author of both these effu- 
 sions, and certainly of the " I-have-seens." Had he not been 
 exiled last year for something of the kind ? Was he not liv- 
 ing, after his return from exile, in furnished lodgings, and not
 
 100 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 at his father's house ? Did he not frequent the apartments 
 and the chateaux of the disaffected ? And was he not notori- 
 ous for satire? True, he was nearly twenty-three years old, 
 instead of not twenty; but few people knew his age, and ho 
 was supposed to be imprudent enough for much less than 
 twenty. 
 
 In vain he denied being the author of the " I-have-seens," 
 which was running: in his name before he had so much as 
 heard of it. As he was passing through a small country town, 
 — probably on his return from a visit to Saint-Ange, in the 
 spring of 1717, — the literary people of the place insisted on 
 his reciting to them this poem, which they said was a master- 
 piece. " It was useless," he records, " for me to assert that I 
 was not the author, and that the piece was miserable. They 
 would not believe me, but admired my reticence ; and I thus 
 gained among them, without thinking of it, the reputation of 
 a great poet and a very modest man." 
 
 Pursuing his journey, he reached his abode in Paris, where 
 business of the utmost importance awaited him. His " GEdipe " 
 had been accepted at the theatre ! It was about to be put into 
 rehearsal ; the coffee-houses were expecting it ; great lords and 
 ladies were interested in its production. Soon after his arrival 
 he had a visit from one of those gentlemen, much employed 
 by the regent, who were then called spies, but to whom we 
 now apply the politer word, detectives. This individual, Beau- 
 regard by name, a captain in the French army, was a coffee- 
 house acquaintance of the poet. Those were the halcyon days 
 of the coffee-house on both sides of the Channel, — the days 
 when Mr. Addison held court at Button's, and Fontenelle was 
 the oracle at Laurent's. The regent kept spies frequenting 
 those haunts, and so Captain Beauregard obtained the right to 
 drop in upon Arouet, at the Green Basket, on the Island, Rue 
 de la Calandre, near Notre Dame. Beauregard's official re- 
 port of the conversation has been preserved, but it does not 
 read like truth : — 
 
 Arouet (lounging on a sofa). — " Anything new ? " 
 Beauregard. — "A number of things have appeared against the 
 Duke of Orleans and the Duchess of Berri." 
 
 Arouet. — " Are any of them considered good ? " 
 Beauregard. — " There is thought to be much wit in them, and
 
 IN THE BASTILLE. 101 
 
 they are all laid to you. For my part, I do not believe it ; it is im- 
 possible to write such things at your age." 
 
 Akouet. — " You are mistaken in supposing that I am not the au- 
 thor of the works that have appeared during my absence. I sent all 
 my things to M. le Blanc ; and, to put the Duke of Orleans off the 
 scent, I went into the countiy during the carnival, and stayed two 
 months with M. de Caumartin, who saw those writings first ; and after- 
 wards I sent them to Paris. Since I cannot get my revenge upon 
 the Duke of Orleans in a certain way, I will not spare him in my 
 satires." 
 
 Beauregard. — " Why, what has the Duke of Orleans done to 
 you?" 
 
 Arouet (springing to his feet in a rage). — " What ! You don't 
 
 know what that b did to me ? He exiled me because I let the 
 
 public know that that Messalina of a daughter of his was — no better 
 than she should be." 
 
 Tlie interview here ended ; but, the next day, the spy called 
 again at the Green Basket, and found, sitting with the poet, 
 the Count d'Argental, who was to remain his devoted friend 
 for sixty years. The spy took from his pocket-book a copy of 
 the " Puero Regnante." 
 
 Arouet. — "What have you got that 's curious ?" (Recognizing 
 the inscription.) " As to tliat, I wrote it at M. de Caumartin's, but 
 a good while before I left." 
 
 Two days after, the assiduous spy called once more, and 
 again found M. d'Argental with the poet. 
 
 Beauregard. — " How is this, my dear friend ? You boast of 
 having written the ' Puero Regnante,' and yet 1 have just heard, from 
 very good authority, that it was written by a Jesuit professor." 
 
 Arouet. — " It is of no consequence to me whether you believe 
 me or not. Those Jesuits are like the jay in the fable : they borrow 
 the peacock's feathers with which to decorate themselves." 
 
 The spy further reported him as saying everywhere in Paris 
 that the Duchess of Berri was gone to a hunting lodge in the 
 Bois de Boulogne to be confined, and as uttering a " quantity 
 of other things unfit to be recorded." ^ 
 
 If the young man made these avowals, which is doubtful, 
 he must have done so by way of burlesque. He probably 
 did not write the " Puero Regnante." If he wrote it, it is 
 1 La Jeunesse de Voltaire, page 129.
 
 102 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 the only composition in the hundred volumes of his works in 
 which no trace of the Voltairian quality can be discerned. 
 But the spy's report of the conversations served as a basis to 
 the subsequent proceedings. Scurrilous compositions fluttered 
 in every drawing-room. The regent knew that the "court" of 
 the Duchess du Maine was the source of much of this hostile 
 literature, and it was believed that Arouet was " the soul of 
 that society." The duchess herself was the soul of it, and 
 there is no reason to think that Arouet was trusted or em- 
 ployed by her in her political schemes. We know, however, 
 that those who administer paternal governments are content 
 with slight evidence when a victim is very much wanted and 
 their spies are off the true scent. 
 
 There is a tradition that he had a warning of what was in 
 store for him. On an afternoon in May he was strolling in 
 the gardens of the Palais-Rojal, when some one summoned 
 him to the presence of the regent, who was also walking there. 
 "Monsieur Arouet," said the regent, "I bet I will make 
 you see something you have never seen ! " 
 "Indeed, and what is it, Monseigneur? " 
 " The Bastille," replied the regent. 
 
 " Ah, Monseigneur," said the poet, " I consider it seen ! " 
 It may have been on this very Friday, May 14th, that he 
 saw the Czar Peter of Russia, then on one of his tours for im- 
 provement. The Czar had been a week in Paris, hurrying 
 from shop to shop, from lion to lion, himself the lion of the 
 year to the people of Paris. This was one of his busiest days : 
 at six in the morning in the grand gallery of the Tuileries, 
 examining plans and maps ; then to the Louvre ; next to the 
 garden of the Tuileries, from which all other visitors were ex- 
 pelled, and where he lingered to admire a swinging bridge ; 
 dinner at eleven ; after dinner a visit to Madame at the Palais- 
 Royal ; then to the opera with the regent, where he sat in 
 the grand box and called for beer, and the regent gave him 
 the beverage with his own hands ; finally, to supper with the 
 Duke de Villars and other military men. Our poet saw the 
 Czar as he was going the rounds of the shops ; "neither of 
 us," as he wrote forty years later, "then thinking that I 
 Bhould one day be his historian." 
 
 The next morning, Saturday, May 16th, Arouet, not so early 
 
 I
 
 IN THE BASTILLE. 103 
 
 a riser as the Czar, was roused from sleep at his lodgings, 
 at the sign of the Green Basket, by a strange noise on the 
 stairs. Arrests upon lettres de cachet were made with the 
 utmost suavity of manner, but with a considerable show of 
 force ; and half a dozen men cannot ascend a staircase with- 
 out waking a sleeping poet. Upon opening his eyes he saw 
 the crowd at the foot of his bed, one of whom drew near, 
 touched him upon the shoulder with a white wand, and with 
 all possible politeness explained their business ; perhaps hand- 
 ing him a slip of paper, on which it was briefly stated : — 
 
 " The intention of His Royal Highness is that the Sieur 
 Arouet be arrested and conducted to the Bastille." 
 
 He was allowed, it seems, to go to his dressing-room, and, 
 while he and his valet were getting on their clothes, one of 
 the officers sealed up his papers, and another took an inven- 
 tory of his effects. It so chanced that the spy Beauregard, 
 who had given the information upon which the arrest was 
 made, " found himself present " on this occasion, also, and had 
 further conversation with the unsuspecting victim. 
 
 " Why are you arrested?" he asked. 
 
 " I know nothing about it," the prisoner replied. 
 
 " My opinion is," said the spy, " that your writings are the 
 cause." 
 
 " There are no proofs that I have written anything, for I 
 have never confided my writings to any but true friends." 
 
 " Is there nothing in these papers to convict you ? " 
 
 "No; for, luckily, the exempt did not get hold of the pair 
 of breeches in which there were some verses and sonars. I 
 seized an opportunity, while I was dressing, to throw them 
 where — it won't be easy to find them." 
 
 So reports the spy, and it is possible some conversation re- 
 sembling this occurred. The place indicated was searched, to 
 the extreme discomfiture of the inmates of the Green Basket, 
 and to the spoiling of several barrels of beer in its cellar ; but 
 no scrap of offensive writing was found. He was permitted 
 to take with him no article whatever except the clothes he 
 wore ; but before leaving he managed to dash upon paper and 
 send (probably by his valet) a short note to the Duke of Sully, 
 who had so happily alleviated his late exile : — 
 
 " M. de Basin, lieutenant of the short robe, is here to arrest
 
 104 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 me tliis morning. I can tell you nothing more about it. 1 
 know not wluit I am accused of. My innocence assures me of 
 your protection. I shall be too happy if you do me the honor 
 to accord it to me." 
 
 That done, he was conducted down-stairs to the street, 
 assisted into a close carriage, the lieutenant following, and 
 driven slowly away, a file of men walking on each side of the 
 vehicle, and the passers-by looking on with serious counte- 
 nances. By the tortuous streets of old Paris the cortege must 
 have gone a mile and a half before it reached the Bastille, and 
 the prisoner could see through the blinds of the coach the an- 
 cient fortress rising gloomy and vast from the banks of the 
 Seine. 
 
 " Who goes there ?" cries the neai'est sentinel. 
 
 " Command of the king," replies the sergeant of the escort. 
 
 An officer of the guard appears, to whom the lettre de cachet 
 is shown ; upon seeing which he strikes a bell to summon 
 the officials of the chateau, and permits the whole cortege to 
 enter the first inclosure. The guard turns out ; the officials 
 stand reacl}^ ; the coach comes to a stand. The lieutenant of 
 the king opens the door of the carriage. Ever}' soldier covers 
 his face w'ith his hat, so as not to see the prisoner, and if by 
 chance there is some one in the court who has no hat on he 
 turns his back, or instantly withdraws. The prisoner alights. 
 He is the king's guest ; this is one of the royal chateaux ; and 
 he is conducted with the utmost respect to the office of the 
 governor, who gives a receipt to the commander of the escort, 
 and presents him to officers of his own. They conduct the 
 prisoner into the next room, where he is respectfully but thor- 
 oughly searched, deprived of every article he possesses which 
 does not strictly belong to his apparel, and an inventory is 
 taken. 
 
 He was obliged, as we haA^e seen, to surrender at least one 
 letter from his Olimpe, then an unhappy Baroness de Win- 
 terfield ; he a less unhappy prisoner of state. A good pocket- 
 ful of money was found upon him: "six louis of gold" and 
 a dozen or more of other coins, besides " an eye-glass, a pair 
 of scissors, a bunch of keys, tablets, and some papers." After 
 he has signed the inventory, he is taken back to the governor's 
 room, where he is formally handed over to the officers of the 
 Bastille.
 
 IN THE BASTILLE. 105 
 
 The draw-bridge falls ; he is led aci'oss it ; he enters the 
 grand inclosure ; the gate closes ; he is in the Bastille. Un- 
 der-officers show him to an eight-sided room in one of the 
 towers, shut the door upon him, turn the huge key, drive 
 home the bolts, and leave him to his reflections, with ten feet 
 of solid and ancient masonry between him and the bright 
 May-day w^orld of Paris. ^ 
 
 They gave him a pretty good room ; not one of the suites 
 reserved for princes and favorites, but a room of fair size, in 
 the lower story of one of the towers, which had been tenanted 
 by a Duke of Montmorenci, by a Biron, by a Bassompierre, 
 and in which De Saci had translated the Bible. From this 
 time onward, as long as the Bastille stood, it was shown to 
 visitors as Voltaire's room. It had a fire-place, and the occu- 
 pant could add anything to the scanty furniture that he 
 chose. He was the king's guest ; the king maintained him, 
 but if a guest had a fancy for particular articles of furniture, 
 there was a dealer who had bought at a high price the privi- 
 lege of supplying them at a high price. 
 
 The king gave his guests an excellent table ; nay, a lux- 
 urious one. Marmontel's treatment, so amusingly described 
 in his Memoirs, was that of many prisoners during the last 
 century of the Bastille's reign. It was cold when Marmontel 
 entered: the valets of the chateau made him a blazing fire and 
 brought him plenty of wood. He objected to the mattresses : 
 they were changed. A very good Friday dinner was served, 
 with a bottle of tolerable wine, and, after he had eaten it, he 
 was informed that it was meant for his servant. His own din- 
 ner followed : " Pyramids of new dishes, fine linen, beautiful 
 porcelain, silver spoon and fork, an excellent soup, a slice of 
 juicy beef, the leg of a broiled capon swimming in its gravy, 
 a little dish of fried artichokes, one of spinach, a very fine 
 pear, some grapes, a bottle of old Burgund}^ and some of 
 the best Mocha coffee." His servant, on seeing this banquet, 
 said, " Monsieur, as you have just eaten my dinner, allow me 
 in my turn to eat yours." "It is but just," replied his master, 
 and the valet entered upon the work. 
 
 We may conclude, therefore, that Ai'ouet did not have to 
 
 1 Archives de la Bastille. Par Fran9ois Ravaissou, Introduction, page xv. 
 Paris, 18G6.
 
 106 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 wait long for bis breakfast on tbe morning of bis arrest, and 
 that he liad on that day, and every day, whatever was requi- 
 site for his bodily comfort. Indeed, we know that he dined 
 sometimes with the governor. Almost every literary man of 
 note who lived in the reign of Louis XV. was at least once a 
 prisoner in the Bastille, and they agree in describing it as the 
 least painful of prisons. There were but forty-two rooms in 
 the structure, and many of them were usually vacant. There 
 was much familiar intercourse between the prisoners and the 
 ofl&cers of the chateau, and most of the prisoners, as it seems, 
 received visitors in their rooms, and were allowed to keep a 
 private store of wine and dainties for the entertainment of 
 guests. They could send out for books, published with per- 
 mission. There was a billiard-room, a bowling-alley, and a 
 large court-yard for exercise and conversation, to all of which 
 most of the prisoners had some daily access. Persons accused 
 of serious crime, or who had given offense to a favorite or a 
 mistress, were treated with more severity ; were compelled to 
 take their exercise alone, under the eye of a sentinel ; were 
 confined to their rooms, and could not receive visitors. For 
 contumacious or disorderly inmates there were dungeons, damp 
 and dark, at the bottom of each of the eight towers; but 
 these were seldom used, and never except for short periods. 
 The form of a lettre de cachet was in harmony with the mild 
 regimen of the chateau. A person of rank was invited thus 
 to the king's hospitality : 
 
 "My Cousin: As I am by no means satisfied with your 
 conduct, I send you this letter to inform you of my intention, 
 which is that, as soon as you receive this, you shall proceed 
 to my chateau of the Bastille, there to remain till you have 
 my further orders. On which, my cousin, I pray God to have 
 you in his holy keeping." 
 
 M. Delort, among the papers discovered by him in "grocers* 
 shops and second-hand bookstores," found what appears to be 
 the original entry on the secret books of the Bastille of Arouet's 
 arrest and its cause : — 
 
 " FranQois-Marie Arouet, without profession, son of the Sieur Ar- 
 ouet, payer of the Chamber of Accounts, entered the Bastille May 
 17, 1717, accused of having composed some pieces of poetry and inso- 
 lent verses agamst Monsieur the Regent and ]\Iadame the Duchess of
 
 J 
 
 IN THE BASTILLE. 107 
 
 Berri ; among others a piece which has for inscription ' Puero Reg- 
 nante.' Accused also of having said that, since he could not revenge 
 himself upon Monsieur the Duke of Orleans in a certain vr&j, he 
 would not spare him in his satires ; upon which, some one having 
 asked him what His Royal Highness had done to him, he rose in a 
 rage, and replied, ' What ! You do not know what that B. has done 
 to me? He exiled me because I made the public see that his Mes- 
 salina of a daughter was no better than she should be.' Signed, 
 M. d'Argenson ; Deschamps, clerk; Ysabeau, commissioner; Basin, 
 exempt of the short robe." ^ 
 
 The bird is literally caged at last. His cage is of eight 
 stone sides and a vaulted roof, furnished with a plain table, 
 two rush-bottomed chairs, and a narrow bed. Plis family, as | 
 we are told by Duvernet, was in desolation. 
 
 " I foresaw clearly enough," cried his much-enduring father, 
 " that his idleness would lead to some disgrace. Why did he 
 not go into a profession ? " 
 
 His Jansenist of a brother probably added a hearty served- 
 him-riglit to his father's I-told-you-so. The old Marquis de 
 Dangeau made another entry in his diary concerning this 
 young man : " Arouet has been put into the Bastille. He is a 
 young poet accused of writing very imprudent verses. He was 
 exiled some months ago. He seems incorrigible." St. Simon 
 apologizes to himself for recording so trivial a circumstance : 
 " I should not mention here that Arouet was put into tlie Bas- 
 tille for writins: some most audacious verses, but for the celeb- 
 rity which his poems, his adventures, and the caprice of the 
 public have given him since. He is the son of my father's 
 notary, whom I have often seen bringing papers to sign. He 
 could never do anything with that libertine son of bis, whose 
 very libertinage made his fortune at last under the name of 
 Voltaire, which he assumed to hide his own." Thus Polo- 
 nius upon this plebeian Laertes. 
 
 Meanwhile, Laertes, as usual with him in all circumstances, 
 was making himself as comfortable as possible. He was ar- 
 rested on Saturday morning. On Thursday following we find 
 him signing a receipt for certain articles needful to complete 
 the equipment of a young gentleman and scholar, namely, " two 
 volumes of Homer, Latin-Greek, two Lidia handkerchiefs, a 
 1 2 Histoire de la Detention des Philosophes, 24. 
 
 ^
 
 108 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 little cap, t-wo cravats, a night-cap, a small bottle of essence of 
 cloves." Other effects had doubtless preceded this small con- 
 voy, and lie could send for more if the articles were not pro- 
 hibited. It is not certain that he was the sole occupant of his 
 room, for others of the Duchess du Maine's partisans were ar- 
 rested about the same time, and the chateau may have been 
 overfull. Be that as it may, there he was, with his Homer, his 
 night-cap, and his small bottle of essence of cloves, a prisoner 
 in one of the massive towers of the old Bastille, with a deep 
 slit for a window, througb which neither earth nor sky could 
 be seen.
 
 CHAPTER XITI. 
 
 ELEVEN MONTHS A PRISONER. 
 
 Was he, as tradition reports, denied pen, ink, and paper in 
 the Bastille ? We have no letter of his written in that royal 
 chateau, nor any other composition certainly known to have been 
 put on paper there. At first, and perhaps for some weeks, 
 he may have had no writing materials, the improper use of 
 which was the offense charged against him. Diderot was 
 refused them in later years; but he made a passable ink by 
 scraping slate into wine, using a broken wine-glass as an 
 inkstand, cutting his quill tooth-picks into pens, and writing 
 on blank pages, as well as between the lines of wide-printed 
 books. What a Diderot did an Arouet could do. He 
 probably wrote in the Bastille ; and probably enjoyed, during 
 the latter part of his time, tolerable facilities both for study 
 and composition. 
 
 When first he found himself immured in his eight-sided 
 room, all the brightness of the world shut out, he threw 
 himself (as Duvernet reports from the lips of Thieriot) upon 
 his epic poem, " La Henriade," tumultuously planned at the 
 more agreeable chateau of Saint-Ange. He began to com- 
 pose in his mind, without waiting for pen and paper, and soon 
 became, as usual with him, wholly possessed by his subject. 
 Duvernet declares that the second canto, in which Henry of 
 Navarre relates to Queen Elizabeth of England the Massa- 
 cres of St. Bartholomew, came to the captive in a dream, 
 perfect and entire, just as it now stands in the work, — the 
 only canto which he never altered nor corrected. Honest 
 Wagnicre, his last amanuensis, asserts the same thing : " He 
 told me that he composed the second canto of 'La Henriade' 
 in his sleep, that he retained it in his memory, and never found 
 anything to change in it." ^ 
 
 1 1 Me'moires sur Voltaire, par Longchamp et "Wagnicre, page 22.
 
 110 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Frederic of Prussia probably heard the poet relate some- 
 thing similar, but in the funeral oration which he pronounced 
 upon Voltaire he does not repeat the marvel. " Could you, 
 gentlemen," said the king, " have imagined that it was at the 
 Bastille that our young bard composed the first two books of 
 his ' Henriade ' ? Though strange, this is true. His prison 
 became his Parnassus, to which the Muses resorted. It is 
 equally true that the second book is now what it appeared iu 
 this first copy. Not having paper or ink, he learned the 
 verses by rote, and retained them in his memory." ^ 
 
 Many writers have had similar experiences, and will there- 
 fore be able to believe a portion of this prodigy. In the 
 early days of his incarceration, intensely absorbed in the at- 
 tempt to go on with his poem without the means of writing, 
 his health at low tide and his rest imperfect, he may have 
 really dreamed out the narrative of St. Bartholomew, — a 
 story, as he well says, which makes " the pen drop from the 
 hand." 
 f Some substitute for pen and ink coming, then, to alleviate 
 the tedium of his days, the eleven months that he passed. 
 ' within the walls of this old fortress were not the least happy 
 tof his life, and were among the most profitable. How incom- 
 plete and misleading his education hitherto ! This long seclu- 
 sion gave him time to reflect, as well as labor. He discerned, 
 as he afterwards said, that in France a man is born either 
 hammer or anvil. Basking in the smiles of a Duchess du 
 Maine, or sitting down to a supper of princes, he may have 
 been weak lenough to fancy himself hammer ; but, pacing his 
 stone octagonal in the Bastille, it was but too evident that he 
 was nothing but anvil. If he hardened himself to bear in- 
 evitable blows, it was not his intention to remain anvil any 
 longer than he must. " I patiently endured," he wrote, a 
 year or two later, " the rigor of an unjust imprisonment ; but 
 I knew how to draw from my misfortune some advantage : I 
 learned to harden myself against adversity, and I found in 
 myself a fortitude not to be expected from the lightness and 
 the errors of my youth." ^ 
 
 1 13 Posthumous "Works of Frederic II., King of Prussia, page 492. London, 
 1789. 
 
 2 Epitre a M. de Genonville. 17 CEuvres de Voltaire, 49.
 
 \j ELEA^EN MONTHS A PRISOXER. Ill 
 
 His chief gain was intellectual. Besides working upon the 
 poem with all his own fiery ardor, he appears to have read and 
 considered some important books, and he may have met in 
 the chateau men of more mature character than himself. In 
 his burlesque romance, " Llng^nu," he consigns the hero to 
 the Bastille, and gives him an experience there which may 
 have been drawn in part from his own recollections. L'Ingenu 
 is a voung Frenchman reared among the Hurons of Lake 
 Ontario, who comes to France at maturity, ignorant of the 
 usao-es of civilization, and wholly " unformed." In the Bas- 
 
 O ** ••11 
 
 tille he meets a thoughtful and learned Jansenist, with whom 
 he daily converses upon the highest themes. " The old man 
 knew much, and the young man wished to learn much." He 
 studied geometry with passion, read works upon physical 
 science, such as there were then in France, and took up Male- 
 branche's treatise upon the " Search after Truth," a work 
 which suggested much that Voltaire applied. " What ! " 
 exclaims the Huron, " we are deceived to such a point by 
 our imagination and our senses ! " But when the young man 
 had finished the work, he concluded that it was easier to 
 destroy than to construct, and that Malebranche had torn 
 down with his reason, and built up with his imagination 
 and his prejudices. At last, the aged Jansenist asks him 
 what he thinks of the soul, and of the great question of 
 grace and free-will which had tormented France so long. 
 The young man from Lake Ontario answered this question 
 precisely as Voltaire always answered it : — 
 
 '' I think nothing. If I have a thought upon it, it is that 
 we are under the power of the Eternal Being, as the stars are, 
 and the elements ; and that he works by general laws, and 
 not by particular views." 
 
 Then they read history together, which saddened him ; for 
 it was but a record of mingled crime and misery. And yet 
 the spectacle of mighty Rome, " conqueror and lawgiver for 
 seven hundred years, through her enthusiasm for liberty and 
 glory," absorbed and fired his soul. They ran through the 
 dark and bloody history of the church, not failing to note the 
 words of Justinian: "Truth shines by its own light; human 
 minds are not enlightened by the flames of the fagot." The 
 young man becomes the teacher, and the old Jansenist, in the
 
 112 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 presence of the sublime truths of science and the sorrowful 
 facts of history, discerns, at length, the puerility of all sec- 
 tarian controversies. Literature, poetry, drama, art, — all 
 passed in review before them ; and as the days, the weeks, the 
 months, rolled on, the young man found the Bastille almost a 
 happy abode. 
 
 Something of this happened to our captive. He increased 
 his knowledge ; he exercised his powers ; he gathered himself 
 for new attempts ; and during many long days and silent 
 nights he repeated his canto of St. Bartholomew. Nothing, 
 it seems, could occur to this young man which did not, in 
 some way, deepen his sense of the baleful effect of intoler- 
 ance. 
 
 " Religion, raging with inhuman zeal, 
 Arms every hand, and points the fatal steel. 
 To me, however, it will least belong 
 To prove the Roman or Genevan wrong. 
 Whatever names divine the parties claim. 
 In craft and fury they are both the same." ^ 
 
 He was, nevertheless, in the Bastille, with a fine tragedy 
 ready for presentation, and a literary career dependent upon 
 its success. His friends outside were not idle. Le Brun, the 
 author of the "I-have-seens," was found, and he, in the pres- 
 ence of a cabinet minister, and " with tears of contrition in his 
 eyes," confessed himself the author of that harmless work. 
 The captive himself lent a helping hand by composing a comic 
 poem upon his arrest, which was Avell calculated to propitiate 
 a regent who made light of the usages of the church. The 
 Saturday of his arrest happened to be the day of Pentecost, 
 on which the Roman Catholic church celebrates the " descent 
 of the Holy Ghost upon the Apostles." He used this cir- 
 cumstance with an audacity that was calculated to make the 
 regent, the grand prior, and both their supper-tables shake 
 with laughter, and Jansenists shiver with affright. He makes 
 his valet, who had come home drunk the evening before, cry 
 out, on hearing the noise on the stairs of the approaching 
 band, — 
 
 " Master ! The Holy Ghost is out there ! It is he, and no 
 mistake, for I have read in my book that he comes into peo- 
 ple's houses with a thundering racket ! " 
 
 1 La Henriade, cauto ij.
 
 ELEVEN MONTHS A PRISONER. 113 
 
 Roused from sleep, the master sees at the foot of his bed, 
 "not a pigeon nor a dove, the Holy Spirit's tender and faith- 
 ful bird, but twenty crows, ravenous for their prey." The 
 whole poem is in this taste. It calls to mind the light audaci- 
 ties by which Byron, a century later, rescued cakes and ale 
 from the ban of virtuous Southey. 
 
 These measures, in the spri ng of 1718, promised to be suc- 
 cessful, and the captive poet had hopes of looking again upon 
 the sky and the gardens of the Palais-Royal. It was at this 
 time that he determined to make an alteration in his name, 
 by appending to it, after the fashion of his country, a name 
 appertaining to the family of his mother. He had not suc- 
 ceeded well with plain Arouet, and he would henceforth court 
 fortune as Arouet de Voltaire. Arouet was then, apparently, 
 pronounced as though it were written Arroi, an anomaly which 
 caused him to be confounded sometimes with a poet named 
 Roi, now forgotten, but then notorious and odious for low, sa- 
 tirical verse. Much ingenuity has been expended upon the 
 derivation of the word Voltaire. A writer in " Le Derby," a 
 French sporting paper, has the honor of settling this unim- 
 portant controversy. While investigating, in 1869, the pedi- 
 gree of a French horse, he came upon the records of a family 
 named Voltaire, and the family proved to be ancestors of our 
 prisoner's mother.^ The gentle parent, therefore, who gave 
 him his talent, supplied him also with the name by which that 
 talent became known. 
 
 Nothing is less unusual in France than such changes as 
 these. Moliere himself dropped the paternal name of Poque- 
 lin ; and really it is much to be desired that when a man en- 
 ters upon the work of immortalizing his name he would be 
 considerate enough to provide himself with a name fit to be 
 immortalized, one which posterity will take pleasure in pro- 
 nouncing. Our poet did not formally drop the name of his 
 family. He entered the Bastille, May 16, 1717, Francois- 
 Marie Arouet; he came out of the Bastille, April 11, 1718, 
 Arouet de Voltaire. The Arouet, however, soon wore off, and 
 it finally appeared only in legal documents. 
 
 Prisoners released from the Bastille were ordered into exile. 
 This prisoner was " relegated to the village of Chatenay, near 
 
 1 Pall MaU Budget, February 26, 1869. 
 
 VOL. 1. 8
 
 114 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Sceaux, where his father, who has a country-house in the vil- 
 lage, offers to retain him." To Chatenay, accordingly, he was 
 driven on leaving the chateau of the Bastille, and there he 
 remained. It was not his intention to take up his abode at 
 that agreeable sojourn. When he had been at his father's 
 house four days, he wrote to the lieutenant of police, thanking 
 him for having procured his release, adding, " I think I have 
 profited by my misfortunes, and I venture to assure you that 
 I am as much indebted to His Royal Highness for my impris- 
 onment as for my liberation. I have committed many faults : 
 but I beg you, sir, to assure His Royal Highness that I am 
 neither such a knave nor such a fool as ever to have used my 
 pen against him. I have never spoken of that prince but to 
 express my admiration for his genius." 
 
 To the Count de Maurepas, minister of the regent, May 2d, 
 two weeks later : " I do not ask you to shorten the period of 
 my exile, nor for permission to pass one hour in Paris. The 
 only favor I solicit is that you will be so good as to assure His 
 Royal Highness that I am as much obliged to hira for my im- 
 prisonment as for my liberty, and that, as I have profited by 
 the one, I shall never abuse the other. All appearances being 
 against me, I have had no reason to complain of the regent's 
 justice, and all my life I shall praise his clemency. I can as- 
 sure you, as if I had to answer for it with my head, that . . . 
 I have never even seen the abominable inscription attributed 
 to me, and had not the least share in composing any of the 
 songs against the court." 
 
 To Count de Maurepas he wrote again, after an interval of 
 only four days, but in a very different strain. He seems to 
 have discovered, meanwhile, the "perfidy" of the spies who 
 had denounced him, and to have obtained proofs of the same. 
 He now implores, with all the fervor of passionate desire, per- 
 mission to go to Paris for two hours, that he might speak to 
 the count for a moment, and " throw himself at the feet of 
 His Royal Highness." Permission was granted, and he came. 
 He had an interview with the regent, and, as it appears, made 
 a very favorable impression upon him. 
 
 " Be prudent," the prince is reported to have said to him, 
 " and I will take care of you." 
 
 The reply of the poet is one of his famous sallies : " I
 
 ELEVEN MONTHS A PRISONER. 115 
 
 should find it very good if his majesty should be pleased hence- 
 forth to charge himself with my board, but I beg your Royal 
 Highness not to trouble yourself farther with my lodging." 
 
 This reply ought to have made a livelier impression than it 
 did upon a good-natured regent. But this prince, self-indul- 
 gent Bourbon as he was, kept business and pleasure distinct. 
 He never told a state secret to a mistress, and he did not allow 
 his witty exile to live in Paris until six months after his re- 
 lease from the Bastille. There was, indeed, little obstacle to 
 his occasional visits, but^jt^was not untilthe 12th of October, 
 1718, that permission was formally accorded to " le Sieur 
 Arouet de Voltaire to come to Paris whenever he pleases."
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 "CEDIPE" PERFORMED. 
 
 His tragedy is at last in rehearsal at the Theatre-Francais. 
 That " CEdipe," which he had begun five years before, and 
 read so often to princesses, comrades, and critics, is announced 
 for production in November, and the poet is established at 
 Paris none too soon. 
 
 He had written this play in the spirit of an artist formed 
 and necessitated to succeed. It was at one of the noble and 
 beautiful fetes of the period, given to the Duchess du Maine, 
 that he conceived the idea of writing a tragedy upon this oft- 
 used theme. The duchess on that occasion assisted at a rep- 
 resentation of the " Iphigeuia '.' of Euripides, translated into 
 French at her request by M. de Malezieu, herself playing the 
 part of Iphigenia. The young poet was deeply moved by the 
 austere majesty of the play. 
 
 "At that time [as he afterwards told the duchess] I had no fa- 
 miliarity with our French drama, and it did not enter my mind that 
 an affair of love could be mingled with that tragic subject. I yielded 
 myself to the manners and customs of Greece so much the more 
 easily from scarcely knowing any others, and I admired the antique 
 in all its noble simplicity. This performance it was which gave me 
 the first idea of composing my tragedy, before I had even read the 
 ' CEdipe ' of Corneille. I began with translating, by way of experi- 
 ment, the famous scene of Sophocles, which contains the mutual confi- 
 dence of Jocaste and Q^dipe. I read it to some of my friends who 
 went often to the theatre, and to some actors. They assured me that 
 the scene could never succeed in France ; they urged me to read Cor- 
 neille, who had carefully avoided it ; and they all agreed that if I did 
 not follow his example, and put a love affair into ' CEdipe,' the act- 
 ors themselves would not accept my work. I then read the ' CEdipe ' 
 of Corneille, which, without being regarded as equal in merit to his 
 ' Cinna ' and ' Polyeucte,' had then much reputation. I confess 
 that the play revolted me from one end to the other ; but it was nee-
 
 "CEDIPE" PERFORMED. 117 
 
 essary to yield to precedent and to bad usage. In the midst of the 
 terror of that masterpiece of antiquity I introduced, not an affair of 
 love, — that idea appeared to me too shocking, — but at least the rec- 
 ollection of an extinct passion." ^ 
 
 And when he bad written his play his troubles were far 
 from being at an end. Among the papers of Father Poree, 
 his Latin master at the College Louis-le-Grand, was found 
 after his death a letter of 1729, in which the young dramatist 
 mentioned some of the other obstacles he had been obliged to 
 encounter. 
 
 "Young as I was [wrote the pupil to the master], I composed 
 ' OEdipe ' very nearly as you see it to-day. I was full of the read- 
 ing of the ancients and of your lessons, and, knowing very imper- 
 fectly the Paris stage, I worked almost as if I had been at Athens. 
 I consulted M. Dacier,^ who was of that country. He advised me to 
 put a chorus into all the scenes, after the manner of the Greeks ; 
 which was like advising me to walk in Paris wearing Plato's robe. 
 It was all I could do to induce the actors of Paris to perform the 
 chorus that appeared only three or four times in the play ; and I had 
 even more trouble to get them to accept a piece devoid of love. The 
 actresses laughed at me when they saw that there was no part for the 
 amorous lady, and they found the scene of the twofold confidence be- 
 tween OEdipe and Jocaste (drawn in part from Sophocles) entirely 
 insipid. In a word, the actors, who were then coxcombs and great 
 lords, refused to play the piece. I was extremely young. I be- 
 lieved they were right. To please them I spoiled my tragedy by 
 mingling sentiments of tenderness with a legend to which they were 
 so unsuited. When they saw a little love in the play they were less 
 dissatisfied with me, but they would not tolerate in the least that 
 grand scene between Jocaste and CEdipe ; they ridiculed, at once, 
 Sophocles and his imitator. I held my ground ; I gave my reasons ; 
 I set some of my friends at work ; and, after all, it was only through 
 the influence of important persons that I induced them to play 
 ' OEdipe.' Thei-e was an actor named Quinault who said openly that, 
 to punish me for my obstinacy, the piece ought to be played just as it 
 was, including that bad fourth act taken from the Greek. Besides, 
 they regarded me as a j^resumptuous person to dare treat a subject 
 with which Pierre Corneille had succeeded so well. Corneille's 
 * CEdipe ' was at that time considered an excellent work. I deemed 
 
 1 6 CEuvres de Voltaire, 156. 
 
 2 The celebrated translator.
 
 118 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 it a very poor work, and I dared not say so. I did not say it till ten 
 years had passed, when the public was of my opinion." ^ 
 
 But now, owing to the good word of the Prince de Conti 
 and other appreciators of the poet, all difficulties were over- 
 come, and the polite world of Paris was expectant of the sen- 
 sation of a new play by a new poet : a poet just out of the 
 Bastille ; a play of which great things were said and mis- 
 chievous things were whispered in high circles. 
 
 Voltaire himself tells us what a first night then was to the 
 graceful idlers of Paris, — thirty thousand persons, as he com- 
 puted, in a population of half a million. Cabals became ac- 
 tive for and against the new play. There were intrigues for 
 the possession of a box, and by noon of the great day the the- 
 atre was filled with valets keeping seats for their masters. 
 The piece was judged before the curtain rose on the first act. 
 Women argued with women : dandies with dandies ; cliques 
 with cliques. The cafds filled early in the day with people 
 disputing the merits of a production which none of them had 
 seen. Crowds gathered in the street waiting for admission to 
 the parquette. Bets were made, and the fate of the piece was 
 foretold by a throw of the dice. The actors trembled, the 
 author also ; and all his friends were anxious and astir.^ 
 
 On some occasions, when partisans were unusually excited, 
 each spectator was asked, as he entered the parquette, " Do 
 you come to hiss?" "Yes." "Then sit over there." But 
 if he answered, " I come to applaud," he was directed to the 
 other side. Thus the two beUigerent bodies were massed for 
 more effective action.^ 
 
 The hour has come. It is Friday, November 18, 1718. 
 The house is crowded ; the candles are snujffed ; the ladies 
 glitter with jewelry. At that time, and as late as 1759, spec- 
 tators were allowed both to stand and sit upon the stage ; 
 nay, to lounge about, converse, and even smoke. The same 
 dread of the audience which makes our performers nightly 
 submit to the imposition of encores, and destroy illusion by 
 acknowledging applause, preserved this abuse for a century, 
 against the rebuke and ridicule of every lover of the dramatic 
 
 1 Voltaire to Pere Poree. January 7, 1729. 
 
 2 Voltaire to his niece, Madame Denis. March 3, 1752. 
 
 3 16 (Euvres de Voltaire, 268.
 
 "(EDEPE" PERFOKMED. 119 
 
 art. Four rows of benches on each side, one behind and 
 above the other, had now replaced the primeval stools, and 
 formed upon the stage a kind of amphitheatre, which was en- 
 closed by a gilded railing. On important nights like this 
 there would also be a row of seats outside the railing, as 
 well as a solid mass of spectators standing at the back of the 
 stage, through which the actors forced their way to the front. ^ 
 Garrick in England, Voltaire in France, forty years later, 
 cleared the stage of this absurd incumbrance, to the great re- 
 lief and joy of all concerned. 
 
 Imagine, then, an interior not very large, not too brilliantly 
 lighted, crowded with people, all dressed in the showy colors 
 and picturesque garments of the time, with a narrow strip of 
 stage in the midst thereof, upon which the terrible legend 
 of CEdipus is to be presented, set to the music of French 
 rhyme. The audience was homogeneous, at least. There 
 were no " groundlings " to be conciliated, nor " gods " to be 
 kept quiet ; for, at that period, the industrial people of Paris 
 only went to the theatre on certain festive days, when the 
 king paid for all. Dealers in lemonade moved about among 
 the spectators. The rosy regent may have been there with 
 a mistress conspicuous at his side, and the duchess, his wife, 
 may have also been present in her own box, not far off. A 
 chronicler of the time mentions seeing at this very theatre, in 
 the Palais Royal, in 1720, the regent, with one of his mis- 
 tresses seated next to him, and on the other side of the house, 
 " Monsieur le Due," the prince next in rank to the regent, 
 also with his mistress sitting beside him.^ 
 
 A more pleasing tradition is that Maitre Arouet, the much- 
 enduring father of the poet, was among the spectators. The 
 young man himself was behind the scenes, suffering the pangs 
 which all authors know, and, as it seems, affecting the gayety 
 that young authors sometimes affect on such occasions. 
 
 The bell rings to notify the audience that the curtain is 
 about to rise, and that all must leave the theatre who do not 
 intend to witness the performance. To those who go out, 
 if any do, their money is returned. This strange custom ac- 
 commodated people who only came to see the assembly and 
 
 1 7 Jourual de Barbier, 160. 
 
 2 1 Journal de Marais, 495.
 
 120 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 converse with acquaintances. On first nights, however, there 
 were few such visitors, or none. The curtain rises. The 
 Prince of Euboea enters, followed by his convenient friend, 
 Dimas, both dressed in the mode of Paris, mmo 1718, with 
 swords at their sides, precisely similar to those worn by every 
 gentleman in the audience. The first couplet gives the key- 
 note : — 
 
 " Philoctete, est-ce vous ? Quel coup affreux du sort 
 Dans ces lieux empestes vous fait chercher la mort ? " 
 
 Among the last things reached by a student of the beauti- 
 ful language and noble literature of France is an appreci- 
 ation of the rhymed tragedies of the elder dramatists, Cor- 
 neille, Racine, Voltaire. We have, first of all, to forget 
 Shakespeare, and all Shakespearean methods. We have also 
 to pass through a process similar to that by which a country 
 youth learns first to endure, then forgive, and, finally, love 
 the Italian opera ; or that process by which a performer of 
 the " Battle of Prague " on the piano comes to dote upon a 
 Wagnerian opera, — a beautiful legend, gliding slowly by to 
 the sound of heavenly music. 
 
 A French tragedy of the old style is a spoken opera, a 
 series of stately, rhymed dialogue, relieved by little action, 
 burdened with much narration ; the decisive events being us- 
 ually told, not exhibited. There is scarcely any attempt at 
 naturalness or verisimilitude ; there are commonly no forms 
 of salutation or farewell ; and there is nothing approaching 
 a jest. The first words are fraught with the agony of the 
 theme ; the story moves on with little interruption ; and there 
 are few passages of an independent beauty, such as " Mercy is 
 twice blessed," and the suicide soliloquy in " Hamlet." The 
 villains are conscious villains, and expatiate upon their vil- 
 lainy with a simplicity that amuses ; but the good are wholly 
 and romantically good. In Shakespeare there is always the 
 powerful legend, but there is also a varied exhibition of 
 human character. In the old French tragedy the legend 
 dominates, fate is supreme, and the characters are little indi- 
 vidualized. Such, however, is the charm of literary art, that 
 these tragedies retain a place in the world's literature, and 
 will perhaps be read, performed, and loved after most of t)ie 
 subsequent drama of France has faded forever from the mem- 
 ories of men.
 
 " CEDIPE " PERFORMED. 121 
 
 This " Qildipe " of Voltaire's held and thrilled the audience. 
 With much of the excellence of his two great predecessors, he 
 possessed an effectiveness all his own, and he provided his 
 actors with an extraordinary number of " points," which gave 
 them easy opportunities of winning applause. 
 
 All plays that play well, from " Hamlet " to " The Hunch- 
 back," have one quality in common, and only one, — they 
 afford the actors good chances to display their talents. Peo- 
 ple go to the theatre to see acting, and the dramatist's part 
 in the enterprise is to provide opportunity for acting. Vol- 
 taire performed this duty, and did not disdam to insert some 
 passages of the kind which are now styled local hits. Since 
 the play turned upon incest and_ pajricide, the enemies of the 
 regent came to the theatre expecting allusion to the infernal 
 imaginings of base minds then current in Paris. They pre- 
 tended to find what they sought ; and the play contained 
 allusion enough of other kinds, intended by the author. 
 
 Thunders of applause followed the delivery of a powerful 
 passage in the first scene, which reminded auditors of their 
 beloved little king, eight years old, and of the fine example 
 set him by his elders : " The friendship of a great man is a 
 boon from the gods. What had I been without him? Nothing 
 but a king's son ! Nothing but a common prince ! I should 
 have been, perhaps, the slave of ray senses, of which he has 
 rendered me the master ! " 
 
 The friends and the enemies of the regent, the friends 
 and the enemies of the Duchess du Maine, the friends and 
 the enemies of the king's tutor, Fleury, were all equally 
 obliged to applaud this passage. In the same act there were 
 some lines that appealed to the people who were relenting 
 toward the memory of the late king, and remembered with 
 shame how his funeral rites had been slighted : " Kings while 
 they live are obeyed, even in things belonging to the other 
 world. Adored by their subjects, they are gods themselves. 
 But after their death, what are they in your eyes ? You 
 extinguish the incense that you burned to them ; and, as the 
 human soul is controlled by interest, the virtue which is no 
 more is instantly forgotten. The blood of your king rises 
 up against you ! " 
 
 And again, when Jocaste exclaims, " Incest and parri-
 
 122 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 cide ! " the ill-disposed could not but think of a prince pop- 
 ularly accused of both. For the sect of the unbelievers, 
 already numerous and zealous, there were two titbits, one of 
 which was vehemently applauded : " Our priests are not what 
 the foolish people think them ; our credulity makes all their 
 science." 
 
 There was a point, too, in the fourth act, which recalled 
 the parade adopted during the last two reigns whenever the 
 king appeared to the public, — "a hedge of soldiers " lining 
 both sides of the street. The reduction of the twelve thousand 
 royal guards was a topic of the day. 
 
 CEdipe. — " When Laius undertook that fatal journey, had he any 
 guards, any soldiers, with him ? " 
 
 JocASTE. — "I have told you already that one man alone went 
 with him." 
 
 CEdipe. — " Only one man ? " 
 
 JoCASTE. — " That king, greater than his rank, disdained, like you, 
 a wearisome pomp. Before his chariot the gorgeous rampart of a 
 numerous battalion was never seen marching. In the midst of sub- 
 jects submissive to his authority, as he was without fear, he went his 
 way without defense. By the love of his people he believed himself 
 guarded." 
 
 Such passages as these, though they could not have saved 
 a dull play, added greatly to the success of this truly powerful 
 one. The fourth act profoundly moved the audience, and 
 the interest was well sustained to the end. The chorus, spar- 
 ingly used, had a happy effect, and gave variety as well as dig- 
 nity to the performance. 
 
 Tradition reports that in the last scene, when the high 
 priest and the chorus have the stage almost to themselves, 
 the author, hilarious with his triumph, seized the pontiff's 
 train, and came in view of the spectators still bearing it. 
 Madame de Villars, who saw this extravagance, asked, " Who 
 is that young man trying to damn the play? " Upon learn- 
 ing that it was the author, she conceived a high opinion of 
 his magnanimity, and had him presented to her. The ac- 
 quaintance thus formed lasted long, and had important con- 
 sequences. 
 
 pMaitre Arouet, so runs the tale, did not listen in silent 
 {rapture to the fervid verse of his troublesome offspring. " Ah,
 
 "CEDIPE" PERFOEMED. 123 
 
 the rogue ! Ah, the rogue ! " he is said to have muttered from 
 time to time during the performance, and ended by crying out- 
 right at the fourth act. 
 
 One brilliant anecdote of this great night the author him- 
 self recorded, fifty-five years after, in a letter to La Harpe. 
 His grand lady friends kept telling him, during the evening, 
 how superior his piece was to that of Corneille on the same 
 subject. The young poet, always loyal to his great forerun- 
 ners, always a modest author, contrived, by a happy quota- 
 tion from Corneille himself, to accept the compliment, and, at 
 the same time, pay becoming homage to the father of French 
 tragedy. He quoted the lines from Corneille's "Pompey" 
 which the victorious Caesar pronounces over Pompey's dead 
 body : " Remains of a demi-god, never can I equal thy great 
 name, thy conqueror though I am ! " 
 
 " Restes d'un demi-dieu, dont jamais je ne puis 
 Egaler le giaud nom, tout vauqueur que j'en suis." 
 
 (Acte v., Scene 1.) 
 
 It was a pretty story to run from box to box, from drawing- 
 room to drawing-room, from chateau to chateau, in those first 
 weeks of a new-born fame. Subsequent representations con- 
 firmed and enhanced the triumph of the opening night. Both 
 the partisans of the regent and those of the Duke du Maine 
 had an equal interest in promoting the run of the play. Ac- 
 cording to the biographer of the regent, every point was " ap- 
 plied and applauded " by both parties alike, while the author 
 affected not to perceive the existence of the strife, and in- 
 duced the regent to attend a performance with his daughter, 
 the Duchess of Berri. That princess, he adds, came " five 
 nights in succession to see the play, as if to brave public 
 opinion." People spoke of the Regent-CEdipe, and of his 
 daughter as Berri-Jocaste.^ 
 
 The good-natured prince held his ground, and heaped hon- 
 ors upon the fortunate author. He presented him, in the 
 king's name, with a massive gold medal. The original record 
 of this transaction exists in the great Librai-y of Paris: "De- 
 cember 6, 1718. Given to the Sieur Arouet a gold medal, rep- 
 resenting on one side the King, and on the other Monseigneur 
 the Due d' Orleans, Regent, amounting to the sum of six huu- 
 1 Philippe d'Orlcans, par M. Capefigue, page 394.
 
 124 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 dred and sovent3'-five livres ten sous." ^ The duke publicly 
 conversed with the author at the next opera ball. The sub- 
 ject of their conversation was Rabelais, whose works the re- 
 gent extravagantly praised, which caused the young man to 
 think ill of the prince's taste. " I had then," Voltaire says, 
 " a sovereign contempt for Rabelais," from which he long 
 afterwards recovered, on learning more of the times and cir- 
 cumstances in which Rabelais wrote.^ More than all this, 
 the regent permitted the tragedy to be performed in the Tui- 
 leries for the amusement of the boy-king. This last was the 
 crowning triumph of the poet. The Marquis de Daugeau, who 
 disposes of great affairs of state in four lines, devotes to this 
 event a considerable pai'agraph : — 
 
 " Saturday, January 11, 1719, the drama of ' CEdipe ' was 
 played at the king's palace, when Madame de Berri sat beside 
 him in gi-and toilette, and all the ladies who were in the king's 
 view were in grand toilette also. But those who were upon 
 the steps behind the king, and in the galleries, were in their 
 usual clothes. The piece was much applauded. The ambas- 
 sadors of the emperor, those of the king of Portugal and the 
 king of Sardinia, were present. Although the room was small, 
 there was a large company, and very great order was ob- 
 served." 
 
 - The play was performed fortj'^-five successive nights, — a run 
 not previously equaled on the French stage ; and it remains to 
 this day a stock piece, played whenever there is an actress 
 capable of personating the ill-starred heroine. The author, as 
 he tells us, was present every night, watching both the per- 
 formance and the audience, and learning something of his art 
 from both. " Each representation of my ' Qj^dipe ' was for me 
 a severe study, in which I gathered the approval and the cen- 
 sures of the public, and studied the public taste to form my 
 own." Yet he would not always admit the correctness of the 
 public verdict ; he remahied dissatisfied with the first scene of 
 the fourth act, though it was the one that nightly produced 
 the greatest effect. 
 
 The poet pushed and utilized this first success in every 
 possible way and to the uttermost degree. In a few days 
 
 1 Jeunesse de Voltaire, page 158. 
 
 2 Voltaire to Madame du Deffand, October 13, 1759.
 
 "CEDIPE" PERFORMED. 125 
 
 after the opening niglit he was ready with an edition of the 
 tragedy, which bore a most flattering " approbation " from the 
 ofiicial censor, the poet La Motte. " The public, at the rep- 
 resentation of this piece," said La Motte, " promised itself a 
 worthy successor of Corneille and Racine ; and I believe that 
 at the reading of it it will abate nothing of its hopes." With 
 audacious tact, the author dedicated the play to the Duchess 
 of Orleans, the regent's mother, telling her in his epistle that, 
 if the usage of dedicating literary works to the best judges of 
 them were not already established, it would begin with Her 
 Royal Highness, the protectress of the fine arts, the example 
 and the delight of France. He prefixed to the play several 
 letters, gossipy and critical, in which he discoursed upon his 
 late mishap in being suspected of having written a parcel of 
 stuff eutitled " I Have Seen ; " and he let the public know 
 that His Royal Highness had deigned to acknowledge his in- 
 nocence and to compensate him for his detention. He des- 
 canted at some length upon the " CEdipe " of Sophocles, upon 
 that of Corneille, and upon his own, comparing their faults 
 and merits with interesting candor; conceding the general su- 
 periority of his two predecessors, but not concealing his just 
 opinion that, in the matter of " CEdipe," it was M. Arouet de 
 Voltaire who had treated the legend most suitably to modern 
 tastes. A swarm of pamphlets fluttered from the press in re- 
 sponse, some defending the Greek poet, others the French. 
 The Prince de Conti wrote a poem in honor of the new play 
 and poet, in which he said that the new treatment of the old 
 theme was such as to make people think either that Racine 
 had come back from Hades, or else that Corneille in Hades 
 had corrected his style. " Monseigneur," said Voltaire to the 
 prince, '• you will be a great poet ; I must get the king to give 
 you a pension," — a good example of the "tone of ease" which 
 he took with the lords of the earth. He also addressed a 
 poem to the prince, which contains something more and bet- 
 ter than the usual eulogium. He sent a copy of his play to 
 George I. of England, with a sweUing sonnet addressed to the 
 monarch, and another copy to the Duke and Duchess of Lor- 
 raine (the lady being a sister of the regent), with a modest 
 stanza. 
 
 The author's share of the profits of the performance appears
 
 V 
 
 126 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 to have been about four thousand francs, to which must per- 
 haps be ackled a thousand crowns, said to have been given him 
 by the Duke of Orleans, and part of the proceeds of the sale 
 of copies. He was a capitalist! We begin to find intima- 
 tions in his correspondence that he possessed bonds and shares. 
 fo " A good part of my property is in the India Company," he 
 
 writes in these weeks to a lady. All the world was buying 
 shares in one or the other of the schemes of John Law. Mak- 
 ing money was coming into fashion, and it was a very good 
 time for a notary's son to go upon the street with a few thou- 
 sand francs of good money in his pocket. He had something 
 better even than money, namely, a permit, a privilege or mo- 
 nopoly of some kind from the regent, upon which a money- 
 making enterprise was founded, and in speaking of which he 
 takes the tone of the director.^ 
 
 1 1 Lettres Inedites de Voltaire, 2, 3.
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 FROM CHATEAU TO CHATEAU. 
 
 Those were happy days. There are few keener delights 
 enjoyed by mortals than a genuine literary success, whether 
 the motive of the author be public or personal. I have heard 
 a poet of our own time say, apropos of Dante's " Paradise," 
 that he could imagine no bliss of disembodied spirits greater 
 than that of publishing, every three or four years, a little vol- 
 ume which should pervade the civilized world, and cause that 
 world to give back to the author a glance of sympathetic rec- 
 ognition. A dramatic triumph is, perhaps, the most thrilling 
 of all the forms of literary glory, since it is one which the au- 
 thor can himself nightly witness and vividly feel. 
 
 Voltaire at this time had two comrades to share and in- 
 crease his happiness, with whom he had many a gay ride into 
 the country, and many a merry supper in town after the play. 
 One of these was a young man named De G^nonville, to 
 whose " manes " he afterwards addressed the well-known Epis- 
 tle. The other was JMademoiselle de Livri, whom he had met 
 at the chateau of the Duke of Sully, where she served asfemme 
 de chamhre to the duchess, and played comedy parts in the 
 little theatre of the chateau. Voltaire, struck with her talent, 
 and perhaps attracted by her personal charms, gave her lessons 
 in the dramatic art, and promised to use his interest in pro- 
 curing her a debut upon the stage of Paris. The success of 
 "GEdipe" now gave his recommendation so much weight that 
 the young lady was in Paris in the spring of 1719, rehearsing 
 the important part of Jocaste in the new tragedy, which was 
 to be revived after Lent. Hence the gay rides and the merry 
 suppers of the three inseparables — Voltaire, De Genonville, 
 and '• Egcrie." 
 
 "You remember the time," Voltaire sings to the " manes" 
 of his old friend, " when the amiable Egcrie, in the beautiful
 
 128 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 days of our life, heard our songs and shared our enthusiasms. 
 We three loved one another. Reason, folly, love, the enchant- 
 ment of the most tender errors, — all bound together our three 
 hearts. How happy we were ! Even that poverty of ours, 
 sad companion of bright days, could not poison the current 
 of our joy. Young, gay, content, without care, w^ithout fore- 
 thought, limiting all our desires to the cielights of the present 
 moment, what need had we of a vain abundance ? We had 
 richer possessions : we had the pleasures." ^ 
 
 Such was his remembrance of those months, after ten years 
 had rolled over his head, [For a time, it seems, the poet was 
 in love with his engaging pupil, and gave her his portrait, 
 jvhich has been preserved to this day. She came at last to 
 prefer De Genonville ; Voltaire also was drawn away by a more 
 potent attraction ; and these are, as we may conjecture, the 
 " tender errors " of which the poet speaks. One of his own 
 tender errors of that too brief period of joy was intrusting a 
 leading part in high tragedy to a young girl from the country 
 before she had learned to pronounce her native tongue in the 
 Parisian manner. When "Q^dipe"was revived after Lent, 
 Mademoiselle de Livri appeared in the part of the Queen, and 
 with the greater prestige from being represented by the scan- 
 dal of the day as the maitresse of the author. Her failure was 
 complete and hopeless. Some provincial peculiarities of pro- 
 nunciation provoked laughter, and she was so manifestly un- 
 equal to the part that, on the third night, it was resumed by 
 the excellent actress who had originally performed it. 
 
 The author of the play was not long in discovering "the jus- 
 tice" of the public verdict ; but on the fatal evening he was 
 extremely indignant. Observing one of the actors, Poisson, 
 joining in the general laughter, he assailed him with a volley 
 of abusive words. At the end of the performance (so the 
 gossip of the day reports), Poisson waited for him at the door 
 of the theatre, and challenged him. The author declining 
 the combat " against an actor," Poisson threatened to assault 
 him with his cane, and the poet is said to have complained to 
 the police, and caused the actor to be thrown into prison, from 
 which he was released through Voltaire's own intercession. 
 Malign gossip asserts that this intercession was itself a piece 
 V.-^ ^ Epitre aux Manes de M. de Genonville, 1729 ; 17 CEuvres de Voltaire, 82.
 
 FROM CHATEAU TO CHATEAU. 129 
 
 of histrionic performance. Mademoiselle de Livri resumed 
 her corned}' parts, and was heard of on the Paris stage no 
 more. Her subsequent career in the world surpassed in start- '^ 
 ling surprises and splendid transformation scenes any comedy 
 in which she ever performed. Meanwhile, exit Egerie, and 
 the gay trio is dispersed, never to be merry together again. 
 
 Who has ever tasted dramatic success without courting the 
 muse a second time? The poet had already fixed upon a 
 theme for another tragedy, — Artemire, queen to Cassander, 
 a king of the time of Alexander the Great. In the composi- 
 tion of " Q^dipe," he had been aided by previous versions 
 of the awful legend, and owed the supreme effect of the play 
 in the fourth act to the genius of Sophocles. His purpose 
 now was to produce a work which should be wholly his 
 own, including the story, — a feat which a dramatist of his 
 rank has rarely attempted. It was a tale of an innocent 
 queen and an absent husband made jealous by false accusa- 
 tions, which he discovers to be false just after he has received 
 his death wound. He began to compose this piece with his 
 usual ardor, when he was once more exiled from Paris. 
 
 The rejjent continued to live in the self-indulcjent manner 
 described above, and the hostile faction continued, also, to in- 
 trigue and calumniate. Three short poems, called " The Phi- 
 lippics " (the regent's name was Philip), appeared in Paris 
 in the spring of 1719, in which the worst scandals concerning 
 the regent and his court were recounted in verse so melodious 
 and effective that to this day " Les Philippiques " rank as 
 part of the classic literature of France. They had such an 
 immediate circulation all over the country that it seemed 
 the effect of systematic exertion. The French are curiously 
 susceptible to the charm of versification, and, in the dawn of 
 freedom, there is a propensity to exaggerate the faults of -H 
 rulers. These Philippics repeated the hackneyed insinuations 
 with regard to the regent and his daughter, the Duchess of 
 Berri, and distinctl}' accused him of a design to poison the 
 boy-king, his nephew. This regent committed grievous 
 faults ; his daily life was shameful ; but he was a fond father 
 and uncle, and as incapable of the crimes imputed to him as 
 any gentleman in Europe. A moralist might aver that he 
 had done worse things than those of which he was accused, 
 
 VOL. I. 9
 
 130 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 but he had not done those. It was, perhaps, more injurious 
 to France for him to live as he lived, and prepare for that 
 boy the moral atmosphere which his example and policy did 
 prepare for him, than to slay him outright, and seize his crown. 
 But, in his own way, he loved the little king, and performed 
 punctiliously every duty towards him which the moral feeling 
 of that court demanded. These scandalous poems cut him to 
 the heart. He heard of them some time before he saw them, 
 and often asked to see them ; but, as St. Simon records, no 
 one dared show him compositions " which contained all that 
 hell can vomit, both of false and true, expressed in the most 
 beautiful verse." At length he demanded them with such 
 urgency that St. Simon was obliged to obey, declaring, as he 
 handed the sheet to the regent, that as for reading the poems 
 he would never do it. The passage in which the Duke of St. 
 Simon describes the scene that followed is one of the most 
 famous in the memoirs of that age, and it may serve to show 
 us what misery anonymous cowards often inflict when they 
 assail with poniard pen the defenseless chief of a nation : — 
 
 " The regent then took the leaf and read it to himself, standing in 
 the window of his litde winter cabinet, where we were. He found 
 it, as he read along, to be such as it was, for he stopped now and then 
 to speak to me about it, without seeming to be much moved. But, 
 all at once, I saw him change countenance, and turn toward me, 
 tears in his eyes, and almost overcome. ' Ah,' he said, ' this is too 
 much ; this horror is stronger than I.' He was at the place where 
 the scoundrel showed the Duke of Orleans designing to poison the 
 king, and near accomplishing his crime. It is the passage in which 
 the author redoubles his energy, his poetic fire, his invocations, the 
 frightful and terrific beauties of his verse, hideous pictures, touching 
 portraiture of youth, the king's innocence, the hopes he gave, his ap- 
 peals to the nation to save a victim* so precious from the murderer's 
 barbarity : in a word, all that the literary art has of most delicate and 
 most tender, of most powerful and most black, of most stately and 
 most moving. I wished to avail myself of the mournful silence of 
 the duke to take away that execrable paper, but could not succeed. 
 He poured forth just complaints of a calumny so abominable ; he ut- 
 tered expressions of tenderness for the king ; then he wished to finish 
 the reading, which he again, and more than once, interrupted to speak 
 of it to me. Never have I seen a man so penetrated, so deeply 
 moved, so overwhelmed with an injustice so enormous and sustained.
 
 FROM CHATEAU TO CHATEAU. 131 
 
 For my part, I was beside myself. The most prejudiced persons, 
 provided they were disinterested in their prejudice, if they had seen 
 him then, would have yielded to the obvious certainty of his inno- 
 cence and the horror of the crime in which he was plunged. I could 
 scarcely recover from the shock, and I had all the trouble in the 
 world to restore him a little." ^ 
 
 The author of those poems, La Grange-Chancel, a noted 
 dramatist of the day, wrote them, as it seems, merely to 
 avenge a private literary wrong, committed not by the re- 
 gent, but by one of the regent's favorites. As he had pre- 
 viously published nothing equal to them in force or malignity, 
 suspicion passed him over, and fell upon Voltaire, recently 
 from the Bastille, and still a frequenter of disaffected circles. 
 He had been much with Baron de Goertz, minister and emis- 
 sary of Charles XII., intriguer, sham financier, adventurer, 
 whose schemes included the restoration of Stanislas to the 
 throne of Poland, James II.'s return to England, and, perhaps, 
 a change in the dynastic arrangements of Spain and France. 
 In his " History of Charles XII.," Voltaire explains these de- 
 signs in many pages, and gives the baron's character in one 
 line : " What his master was at the head of an army, Goertz 
 was in the cabinet." Among his other bold projects, he had 
 formed the design to capture the author of the new " CEdipe," 
 and bear him off to grace the court of the king of Sweden, 
 who, it was said at the time, " did not know what a poet was." 
 The bullet that pierced the brain of the Swedish king, Decem- 
 ber 11, 1718, put an end to the projects of his minister; and, 
 a few months after, the Swedes brought him to trial and cut 
 off his head for the double crime of inflating their paper and 
 debasing their coin. It was from the Baron Henri de Goertz 
 that Voltaire derived part of the information which enabled 
 him, by and by, to write his " History of Charles XII." All 
 was fish that came to the net of this young man, ever curious 
 to know the more hidden causes of public events. 
 
 He was "suspect." The bullet just mentioned had the 
 most surprising and remote effects. It shut up the Duchess 
 du Maine and her court in the Bastille, and it was among the 
 causes of Voltaire's receiving a polite official intimation in 
 May, 1719, that he had better pass the fine season in the 
 
 1 16 St. Simon, 259, Paris, 1877.
 
 132 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 country. The public, not the regent, believed him to be the 
 author of the " Philippiques ; " he had been an open fre- 
 quenter of the society of intriguers who surrounded the bed 
 of the Duchess du Maine ; he had been a comrade of the 
 beheaded Goertz. It was enough. A storm was heard one 
 djiy crashing along the horizon, filling Paris with dust and 
 noise. " The kingdom of heaven, too" said he, " must have 
 fallen into regency ; " and, with this light word to amuse the 
 saloons he left behind him, he took his unfinished play and his 
 unfinished poem with him, and spent the rest of the year in 
 the provinces. " At present," he writes to the Marquise de 
 Mimeure, "I am at Villars. I pass- my life from chateau to 
 chateau." 
 
 Villars was the country-house of the veteran marshal of 
 Louis XIV. 's Liter wars, the Duke of Villars, a personage of 
 great note and splendor during the regency. The new play of 
 " Artemire " did not advance rapidly under the roof of this 
 old soldier. Again our inquisitive author had daily access to 
 one of the sources of history, and again a public man found in 
 him a listener untiring and sympathetic. j\Iany of the most 
 effective anecdotes in Voltaire's " History of the Age of Louis 
 XIV." are preceded b}', "I have often heard the Marshal de 
 Villars say," or, " The Marshal de Villars assured me ; " and 
 it was during this and subsequent summers, while going about 
 among the chateaux of France, that he obtained and recorded 
 those anecdotes. The veteran loved to fight his campaigns 
 over again, quite as well as his guest loved to hear him do so. 
 - But it was not this that retarded the new play. The Duch- 
 ess de Villars, much younger than her husband, a handsome, 
 luxurious woman, had accepted it as her vocation to disarm 
 the jealousy arising from her husband's too rapid promotion, 
 by being agreeable to all the world. It was she who had sum- 
 moned Voltaire to her box on the opening night of his 
 '• Q^^dipe," and been gracious to him in the susceptible hour 
 of his triumph. She was too agreeable to him. He was fas- 
 cinated. He conceived for her "a grand passion," which for 
 some months, as it appears, absorbed and confused his life, 
 suspending even the power to labor, his usual resource in all 
 times of trouble. She played with him, tradition reports ; 
 never returning his love, but permitting him to hope and Ian-
 
 FROM CHATEAU TO CHATEAU. 133 
 
 guisli. It cost him a long and severe struggle to conquer this 
 passion, but be did conquer it, and found relief at last in re- 
 suming bis work. He was accustomed to express contrition 
 for bis weakness on tbis occasion ; not, indeed, for baving 
 made love to an old soldier's wife under that old soldier's own 
 roof, but because a fruitless passion bad caused bim to lose so 
 mucb time ! He wrote to bis friend, Madame de Mimeure, in 
 tbe true tone of tbe disappointed and bopeless lover : — 
 
 " You make me feel tbat friendsbip is a thousand times 
 more precious than love. It seems to me that I am not at all 
 made for the passions. |l find something ridiculous in w.y be- 
 ingf in love, and I should find it more ridiculous in those who 
 should be in love with me. It is all over. I renounce it for 
 life." 
 
 He wrote, also, a very pretty, but very saucy epistle, in 
 verse, to the object of bis passion, complaining of her insensi- 
 bility to his devotion. He concludes thus : " The Future, in 
 reading this work, since it is made for you, will cherish its 
 delineations. This author, readers will say, who painted so 
 many charms, had for his share only some little suppers, where 
 the guests drank very freely ; but be deserved more." All of 
 which was in accord with Ninon de Lenclos's maxim, tbat 
 " love is a pastime, involving no moral obligation," — the falsest 
 thing, perhaps, which words ever uttered. 
 
 From chateau to chateau. This expression describes his 
 way of life for many years, — nay, for tbe greater part of his 
 existence ; for be was near sixty years of age before he was 
 settled in a chateau of his own. From Villars he went to 
 his old quarters at the house of the Duke of Sully ; thence 
 to Villars again ; often to the magnificent abode of the Duke 
 of Richelieu, filled with evidences of the profusion and taste 
 of the great cardinal ; going tbe round of the great houses ; 
 always, however, keeping rooms in Paris for himself and his 
 old comrade, Thieriot ; often writing to bis Paris friends, 
 both in prose and verse. 
 
 His enforced absence from Paris during the latter half of 
 1719 saved him from the danger of being drawn into the 
 vortex of ruin resulting from the schemes of John Law, 
 inventor of money-making, who brought upon frugal France 
 tbe catastrophe of an inflated currency, one of the greatest 
 
 A
 
 134 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 a nation can suffer. Law had been four years at work upon 
 the finances of the country, and the result was eight months 
 
 ?* > of delirium, — June, 1719, to February, 1720, — followed by a 
 collapse more woful and lasting than any other country has 
 since suffered from the practice of Law's methods. 
 
 "^^ Louis XIV. died in 1715, leaving behind him an empty 
 treasury, a vast debt, and more than a thousand millions of 
 depreciated paper, worth about twenty-seven per cent, of its 
 nominal value. Law sold shares in his various schemes on 
 these terms : one quarter of the price in coin ; three quarters 
 in the king's paper, at its nominal value. Frugal, cautious 
 France hesitated ; but Law was an advertiser of genius, fer- 
 tile in expedients, unscrupulous ; and, at last, the shares sold, 
 and that great flabby volume of paper, held by princes, 
 lackeys, servants, merchants, clerks, everybody, began to 
 swell, and went on swelling, until it reached par, and, still 
 rising, brought a premium, and people sold solid family plate 
 to get the means of buying paper. Our poet knew not what 
 to make of the reports that reached him from Paris. He had 
 seen, as he tells us, this Scotchman become French by natu- 
 ralization, from Protestant become Catholic, from adventurer 
 to be lord of fine estates, from banker to be minister; he had 
 seen him arrive at the Palais-Royal, " followed by dukes and 
 peers, marshals of France and bishops ; " and, now that he 
 was absent from Paris, every post brought tidings more mar- 
 velous still. 
 
 " It is a fine thing, my dear friend [he wrote to his little De 
 Genonville, from the chateau of Villars], to come into the country, 
 while Plutus is turning every head in town. Have you really be- 
 come all lunatics at Paris ? I hear nothing but millions spoken of. 
 They say that all who were well off are in misery, and that all 
 the beggars swim in riches. Is it a reality? Is it a chimera? 
 Has half the nation found the philosopher's stone in paper-mills ? Is 
 Law a god, a scoundrel, or a quack who poisons with the drug 
 which he distributes to all the world ? Are people content with 
 imaginary wealth? It is a chaos which I cannot see through, and 
 of which, I imagine, you understand nothing. For my part, I give 
 myself up to no other chimeras than those of poetry." 
 
 A few months later, when the mania to "realize " had sup- 
 planted the mania to speculate, the true character of these
 
 TROM CHATEAU TO CHATEAU. 135 
 
 operations was revealed. One hundred thousand persons, it 
 was computed, were ruined ; business in France lay paralyzed ; 
 and moral harm was done, from which the world has suffered 
 ever since. A new disease was generated by John Law, which 
 occasionally rages in every land like an epidemic, the accursed 
 itch of getting wealth by a rise in values, by "corners," and 
 other similar devices. A memorial of that time is the city 
 of New Orleans, founded in 1718 by Law's company, and 
 named by him in honor of the regent. The Pitt diamond, 
 that still glistens among the national jewels of France, where 
 it is called "the Regent," is also a memento of John Law, 
 who persuaded the virtuous Duke of St. Simon to recom- 
 mend the regent to buy it for two millions of francs. With 
 how little wisdom great kingdoms were governed ! The re- 
 gent, strange to say, objected to make this purchase, on the 
 ground that the country was deep in debt and could scarcely 
 pay its troops. Stranger to say, St. Simon, one of the few 
 disinterested and irreproachable gentlemen about the court, 
 was vehement for the purchase. He admitted that a large 
 number of persons to whom the government was indebted 
 were suffering for want of their money, and he praised the 
 Duke of Orleans for sympathizing with them ; but he main- 
 tained that the finances of "the greatest king in Europe" 
 ought not to be managed like those of a private person. The 
 honor of the crown must be considered, and an opportunity, 
 which could not return, of acquii'ing a priceless gem that 
 would " efface " the diamonds of all Europe ought not to be 
 let slip. It would be a glory for the regency that would 
 endure forever. The regent yielded ; and, to his surprise, 
 as well as oui's, the public applauded the acquisition. The 
 patriotic Duke of St. Simon, to his dying da}^ cherished it 
 among his dearest recollections that it was he, and no other 
 man, who had persuaded the Regent of France to buy (on 
 credit) a diamond as large as a Queen Claude plum, nearly 
 round, colorless, flawless, spotless, weighing nearly five hun- 
 dred grains. He styles it " an illustrious purchase " {une em- 
 plette illustre)} 
 
 The Law mania was at an end in February, 1720, when 
 "Voltaire was allowed to remain at Paris to superintend the 
 
 1 14 St. Simon, 13. Paris, 1877.
 
 136 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 rehearsals of his new play, " Artemire." He pronounced the 
 epitaph of " the System," as Law's finance was called, when 
 he remarked that " paper was now reduced to its intrinsic 
 value." 1 
 
 The curtain rose upon " Artemire " for the first time Feb- 
 ruary 13, 1720, at the worst moment of the collapse, to a 
 house yielding five thousand one hundred and sixty-seven 
 francs. The play had been read at Sully, at Villars, and else- 
 where, with the applause invariably bestowed by friendly cir- 
 cles upon works submitted to their judgment. The Abbe de 
 Bussi attended a reading of the play by the first actress of the 
 time, Madame Lecouvreur, and cried to such an extent that 
 he caught a cold from his own tears. The friends of the author 
 were present in force. Happily for art, the public, just mas- 
 ter of us all, has no friends ; but pays its money, and lets the 
 author know, to an ■ absolute certainty, whether it has or has 
 not received an equivalent in jjleasure. " I told the author," 
 says a letter of the day (Brossette to J. B. Rousseau), " that 
 this tragedy, in which he had nothing to depend on but his 
 0"wii genius, would not have the destiny of his ' Q^dipe.' It is 
 too much work at once, especially for a young man, to have 
 to invent the plot, the characters, the sentiments, and the ar- 
 rangement, to say nothing of the versification." And so it 
 proved. The opening lines, melodious and strong, were ap- 
 plauded : — 
 
 " Oui, tons ces conquerants rassembles sur ce bord, 
 Soldats sous Alexandre et rois apres sa mo it, 
 Fatigues de forfaits, et lasses de la guerre, 
 Oat rendu le repos qu'ils otaient a la terre." ^ 
 
 The passage opened the play happily, and seemed to prom- 
 ise a worthy presentation of a great period. But the story 
 was fatally defective, and could not interest. The action was 
 slow, the characters were hateful, the heroine unattractive, the 
 hero absent. Powerful passages and epigrammatic lines can- 
 not retain attention, nor long disarm censure. Before the end 
 of the first act, ominous hisses were heard ; and during one of 
 the later scenes the noise and contention were so violent that 
 
 1 Duvernet, chapter iv. 
 
 ^ " Yes, all these conquerors assembled on this shore, soldiers under Alexander 
 and kings after his death, sated with crimes and tired of war, have given back 
 the repose of which they deprived the earth."
 
 FROM CHATEAU TO CHATEAU. 137 
 
 the author — so tradition reports — sprang from his box to the 
 stage, and addressed the spectators. As soon as he was recog- 
 nized, we are told, the confusion subsided, and the rest of the 
 play was listened to without interruption. He perceived, 
 however, as soon as he saw his play through the eyes of an 
 audience, that the story was weak beyond remedy, and he re- 
 solved to withdraw the piece from the stage. The mother of 
 the Duke of Orleans, who was well disposed towards him, and 
 to whom he had dedicated his first play, desired to see it per- 
 formed again. He employed ten days in altering it. The 
 piece was better received than before, and was repeated eight 
 times, with some applause, to diminishing audiences ; until, on 
 the 8th of March, 1720, it was presented for the last time to a 
 house of two thousand three hundred and fifty-three francs. 
 The stringency of the times may have had something to do 
 with the failure. The author, however, refrained from pub- 
 lishing his piece, used some of its lines in other plays, and left 
 nothing of " Artemire " but fragments and scenes. 
 
 The regent had discovered, meanwhile, the true author of 
 " Les Philippiques," and was inclined, as it seems, to atone for 
 exiling the wrong poet. Voltaire caused some cantos of " La 
 Henriade " to be copied for him in Thieriot's best handwrit- 
 ing ; and, besides accepting these, the regent heard the poet 
 himself read some passages of the poem. The partial failure 
 of his play may have abated his self-confidence a little, and 
 made him over-sensitive to criticism ; for it was at this period 
 that, on hearing some friends criticise with unusual freedom 
 his " Henriade," he suddenly cried out, " It is only fit to be 
 burned, then," and tossed it into the fire. The President Hd- 
 nault, who was one of the critics on this occasion, relates what 
 followed : — 
 
 " I ran after him, and drew the manuscript from the midst 
 of the flames, saying that I had done more than the heirs of 
 Virgil when they refrained from burning the J^neid, as Vir- 
 gil had recommended, since I had snatched from the fire ' La 
 Henriade,' which Voltaire was going to burn with his own 
 hands. If I wished, I might glorify this action by recalling 
 to mind that beautiful picture by Raphael, in the Vatican, 
 which represents Augustus preventing Virgil from burning the 
 J^neid. But I am not Augustus, and Raphael is no more."
 
 138 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 H^nault handed the manuscript back to the author, saying, 
 " Do not think the poem better than the hero whom you cele- 
 brate. Despite his faults, he was a great king and the best of 
 men." So " La Henriade " was saved. " Do you remember," 
 the president wrote, years after, " that your poem cost me a 
 pair of lace ruffles ? " 
 
 Voltaire's friend and comrade, De Gdnonville, whom he had 
 known in the days when both were copying law papers in the 
 office of the solicitor Alain, died suddenly this spring, to Vol- 
 taire's lasting sorrow. The Duchess of Villars, to distract his 
 mind from sombre thoughts, took him away with her to her 
 country-house, which was always full of company in the fine 
 season, and thus he resumed his life of wandering from chateau 
 to chateau. From Villars he wrote in June to Fontenelle, an 
 amusing letter, — half in prose, half in verse, — in which he 
 tells the veteran author that his work on the " Plurality of 
 Worlds " was keeping the ladies out-of-doors a great part of 
 the night observing the stars, much to the displeasure of the 
 gentlemen, who were obliged to humor and accompany them. 
 " As we pass the night," he added, " in observing the stars, we 
 greatly neglect the sun, not returning his visit until he has run 
 two thirds of his course." He did not forget the interest ex- 
 cited in the gay company of the chateau by Fontenelle's pop- 
 ularization of astronomical science.
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 BEGINNINGS OF HIS FORTUNE. '^ 
 
 Feom tLe gay and brilliant life of the chateau he was sum-| 
 moned, in December, 1721, to the bedside of his father, dying | 
 of dropsy in Paris. The incongruous family of the Arouets 
 was once more assembled in their old home, — Armand, Fran- 
 9ois-Marie, their sister Marguerite, and her husband, M. Mig- 
 not, of the Chamber of Accounts. The family letters of Vol- 
 taire have not been preserved, and, consequently, we know 
 little of the terms upon which these ill-assorted relations lived. 
 Armand, the elder son, a bachelor thirty-eight years of age, 
 had developed into a_xdigionistof the most credulous and ab- 
 ject type. He was one of the~Revots of lEaTage, who wore 
 hair shirts, fasted in Lent to a perilous extreme, believed in the 
 " miracles " of the day, and gave money profusely to any Tar- ^ 
 tuffe who knew how to play his part. Francois, on the con- S''^ 
 trary, had become the man-of-the-world of the period, sobered 
 a little by his twenty-eight years, as well as by his arduous, 
 though desultory, pursuit of his vocation. Their sister was a 
 married woman with children, always dear to her younger 
 brother. 
 
 What the old man thought at this time of his fool in prose 
 and his fool in verse we can infer from the manner in which 
 he disposed of his property. December 29, 1721, two daysX, 
 before his death, he resigned his office in the Chamber of Ac- 
 counts, then yielding thiiteen thousand francs a year, to Ar- 
 mand, his eldest child ; charging him, however, as it seems, 
 with part of the portions of his other children. To Voltaire 
 he bequeathed property yielding an annual revenue of four 
 thousand two hundred and fifty francs. Both these sons had 
 reached the years of discretion, but, as their father thought, 
 only the years, — not the discretion. He feared that his fool 
 in prose would waste his substance upon Jansenist devotees,
 
 140 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 and that his fool in verse would waste his life among the 
 grandees whom he amused. He accordingly confided his 
 estate to a trustee, M. de Nicolai, president of the Chamber 
 of Accounts, and gave him unusual powers. He made him, 
 in fact, guardian of his sons, as well as trustee of his prop- 
 erty ; and M. de Nicolai, we are told, " adopted both the 
 brothers, and continued to regard Voltaire as his son " long 
 I af ter his duty as trustee was performed.^ 
 
 These arrangements made, the old man, on the first day of 
 the year, 1722, breathed his last, and on the next day, as the 
 parish record shows, he was followed to the grave in Paris by 
 his two sons and his son-in-law. 
 C There was, as Voltaire intimates, a brief revival of tender- 
 ness among the members of the family on this occasion, fol- 
 lowed by increased estrangement of the brothers. M. de Ni- 
 eolai, their guardian, was a personage of old descent and high 
 rank, one of tlie noblesse de robe, not accustomed to be in 
 haste, and he was four years in giving each his share of the 
 paternal estate. Voltaire, as his letters show, fretted under 
 this delay, threatened an appeal to the law, seems actually to 
 have brought a suit of some kind ; and, although he came to 
 his inheritance at last, his circumstances for the time were not 
 improved by his father's death. He had even lost the possible 
 asylum of his father's house, and, as yet, possessed no secure 
 status of his own. The regent, probably, had this view of the 
 case presented to his consideration. A few days after the 
 funeral of the poet's father, " Le Mercure," a Paris gazette of 
 the time, published the following notice : — 
 
 " M. Arouet de Voltaire, the death of whose father was re- 
 cently announced, has obtained from the king, through the 
 recommendation of the Duke of Orleans, a pension of two 
 thousand francs. His poem of Henry IV. will appear very 
 soon, and it is confidently expected that the work when printed 
 will sustain the reputation which it has acquired from perusals 
 of the manuscript." 
 
 Here was something at last which the deceased notary him- 
 self would have confessed to be solid, if insvifficient. The re- 
 cipient of the royal bounty was aware of its insufficiency, and 
 was much employed, from this time onward, in improving his 
 
 1 1 Maynard, 102.
 
 BEGINNINGS OF HIS FORTUNE. 141 
 
 circumstances. JThe father, indeed, as fathers often do, mis- 
 interpreted both his sons ; for Arinand acquired a very good 
 estate, a share of which his brother inherited, and Francois, as 
 all the world knows, became the richest man of letters that 
 ever lived. He had discovered at twenty-eight that (to use 
 the language of the late Lord Lytton) " the man who would 
 raise himself to be a power must begin by securing a pecun- 
 iary independence." 
 
 " I am often asked [Voltaire writes in his " Memoires "] by what 
 art I have come to live hke a farmer-general, and it is good to tell 
 it, in order that my example may be of service. I saw so many men 
 of letters poor and despised that I made up my mind a long time 
 ago that I would not increase their number. In France a man must 
 be anvil or hammer : T was born anvil. A slender patrimony be- 
 comes smaller every day, because in the long run everything increases 
 in price, and government often taxes both income and money. It is 
 necessary to watch the operations which the ministry, ever in arrears 
 and ever on the change, makes in the finances of the state. There is 
 always some one of these by which a private person can profit without 
 incurring obligation to any one ; and nothing is so agreeable as to be 
 the author of your own fortune. The first step costs some pains ; the 
 others are easy. You must be economical in your youth, and you 
 find yourself in your old age in possession of a capital that surprises 
 you ; and that is the time of life when fortune is most necessary to 
 us." 1 
 
 Particulars of the transactions by which he profited so well 
 will meet us from time to time. For a bachelor who lived in 
 other people's chateaux, he was already in tolerable circum- 
 stances, and probably never spent, after his father's death, his 
 whole income. He generally had capital at command with 
 which to avail himself of any chance which the exigencies of 
 a ministry or the needs of an individual might throw in his 
 way. He liked to lend money to a lord of good estate upon 
 interest at ten per cent., and had no objection to buying an 
 annuity at a rate favorable to himself, from the apparent fra- 
 giUty of his constitution. The list of his debtors included at 
 length a considerable number of the dukes, princes, and other 
 grand seigneurs, at whose houses he was frequently a guest, 
 and where he seemed to be nothing but the entertaining " lit- 
 tle Arouet," a poet of promise, who arranged moonV\g\\i fetes 
 for the ladies, and supplied original verses for the same. 
 
 1 2 CEuvres, 80,
 
 142 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 The owners of the world are they who strongly desire to 
 
 own ; and this is the only trait common to them all. Voltaire 
 
 possessed this qualification, and was able to gratify it without 
 
 Po '^f , a loss of time fatal to his proper pursuits. He usually spent 
 
 c4. ^*- Wery little money, and always carefully invested his surplus, 
 
 j — a process which, as he remarks, yields surprising results 
 
 Im a long life. 
 
 He pushed his fortune at this time in evei-y way open to 
 him. Cardinal Dubois, notorious for his debauchery and pro- 
 fusion, who held benefices and civil posts that yielded him a 
 million and a half of francs per annum, was the regent's first 
 minister and confidant. A bad minister and worse man, he 
 was not as pernicious to France as the austerely moral priests 
 who made Louis XIV. expel the Huguenots and loose the 
 Bull Unigenitus. He had some taste in the arts, and was not 
 inclined to make the interests of France quite subordinate to 
 those of the church. Voltaire paid diligent court to him, and 
 offered him his services ; having then, as always, a taste for 
 public employment. The cardinal gave him a piece of work 
 to do, the relation of which presents neither of them in an 
 heroic light. It was to unearth (^deterrer is Voltaire's OAvn 
 word) a French Jew, Levi Salomon by name, who was sup- 
 posed to be a spy of the emperor, and, perhaps, charged with 
 designs hostile to France. Our tragic poet got upon his 
 track, drew up a "M^moire" concerning him, giving an ac- 
 count of his past career and present condition, but not un- 
 earthing any very valuable information. 
 
 " Monseigneur [he writes to the cardinal, May 28, 1722], I send 
 your Eminence a little memorandum of what I have heen able to dis- 
 cover touching the Jew of whom I had the honor to speak to you. If 
 your Eminence judges the thing important, shall I presume to suggest 
 that a Jew, being of no country except the one in which he makes 
 money, can as well betray the king to the emperor as the emperor 
 to the king ?....! can, more easily than any one else in the 
 world, pass into Germany under the pretext of visiting J. B. Rous- 
 seau, to whom I wrote two montlis ago that I wished to show my 
 poem to Prince Eugene and to himself [the poet Rousseau being still 
 in exile, with asylum at the court of Prince Eugene]. I have even 
 received some letters from the prince, in one of which he does me the 
 honor to say that he should be very glad to see me. If these consid- 
 erations could induce your Eminence to employ me in something, I
 
 BEGINNINGS OF HIS FORTUNE. 143 
 
 entreat you to believe that you would not be dissatisfied with me, and 
 that 1 should be eternally grateful for being allowed to serve your 
 Eminence." 
 
 This was followed by the memorandum referred to, from 
 which we learn that Levi Salomon had been employed by 
 many ministers as a spy ; that he had been a spy upon the 
 Duke of Marlborough, and probably had a good many secrets 
 worth knowing. The cardinal appears to have given the poet 
 a roving commission to visit Germany, taking the old French 
 city of Cambrai on the way, of which Cardinal Dubois was 
 archbishop. There was to be a great meeting of diplomatists 
 at Cambrai this year, for the settlement of affairs in Europe 
 which had been left unsettled by the last peace. Voltaire was 
 to attend this important congress, holding apparently some 
 commission or license from the cardinal archbishop of Cam- 
 brai, either general or special, private or public. Cambrai is 
 a hundred and fifty miles northeast of Paris, near to what is 
 now Belgium, and on the high road to Brussels. 
 
 All the continental governments appear then to have placed 
 much dependence upon the spy system, and under Dubois 
 Paris swarmed with spies. In his later works Voltaire men- 
 tions the fact with reprobation ; as well he might, for he was 
 indebted to the spy Beauregard for his eleven months in the 
 Bastille. That very Beauregard, spy as he was, held a captain's 
 commission in a noted regiment of the royal army, which im- 
 plied noble lineage ; and Voltaire, as we have seen, did not 
 disdain to act as a spy upon a spy. While he was at Ver- 
 sailles this summer, going about among the cabinets preparing 
 for his journey and making interest for his poem, he had a 
 startling insight into the spy system, which led to conse- 
 quences far more painful than a polite detention at the king's 
 chateau of the Bastille. He was in the rooms of M. Claude 
 Leblanc, the minister of war, one of the most distinguished 
 members of the regent's administration, a statesman of long 
 experience and wide renown, who is remembered to this day 
 for some improvements introduced by him into tlie military 
 system of France. Who should enter but Captain Beaure- 
 gard, as if he were a guest invited to dinner ! The minister 
 received the spy with more than distinction, — with familiar- 
 ity. The irascible poet, at this astounding spectacle, lost bis 
 self-control, and said, among other things, —
 
 14i LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 " I was well aware that spies were paid for their services, 
 but I did not know that their recompense was to eat at the 
 minister's own table ! " 
 
 He withdrew, leaving Beauregard furious, who at once 
 declared his purpose to be avenged. " Then manage it so," 
 said the minister, " that no one will see anything of it." ^ 
 
 Shortly after, as Voltaire was crossmg one of the bridges 
 in a sedan chair, Beauregard met him and assaulted him 
 with a cane, inflicting many blows, and leaving a mark 
 upon his face. The assailant immediately after rejoined his 
 regiment in the country. Voltaire entered a complaint in a 
 criminal court, and pursued his criminal with a sustained vi- 
 vacity all his own, and never rested till he had him in prison. 
 The minister Leblanc, falling into discredit in the nick of 
 time, the spy remained in confinement for several months, 
 and we see Voltaire directing the prosecution against him 
 from remote places, " ruining himself in expense," until, as 
 we conjecture, Leblanc, returning to favor, was able to rescue 
 his agent so far as to change his prison into exile. The 
 poet speaks of Beauregard as " the man of the handcuffs," 
 which is probably a figure of speech. The important fact is, 
 that he sought redress from the laws, and sought it with un- 
 flagging energy till he obtained it in some degree. Redress is 
 of course im^^ossibM for an injury so gross, and Voltaire, 
 during his long life of battle with the powers of this world, 
 was never allowed long to forget that he had been beaten by 
 a spy on the bridge of Sevres. 
 
 Once, as we learn from himself, he was taken for a spy by 
 some soldiers of the regiment of the Prince de Conti. " The 
 prince, their colonel," he adds, " happened to pass by, and 
 invited me to supper, instead of having me hanged." If it 
 had been Levi Salomon who had pointed him out to the 
 soldiers as a spy, and had showed them his letter and memo- 
 randum to Cardinal Dubois, the Prince de Conti would not 
 the less have invited him to supper, but it is not clear how 
 the accused poet could have explained away the charge to the 
 
 soldiers. 
 
 1 2 Memoires de M. Marais, 302.
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 JOURNEY TO HOLLAND. 
 
 He did not set out alone upon this long and interesting 
 journey. One of the grand ladies whom he had met in coun- 
 try chateaux, the Marquise de Rupelmonde, chanced to be 
 going to Holland this summer, and he accepted her invitation 
 to take a seat in her post-chaise. She was the daughter of a 
 marshal of France, an old soldier of the wars of the late 
 king, now governor of Metz. She was also the widow of a 
 Flemish nobleman, who had fallen in battle, after a display 
 of valor that gave his name wide celebrity. Young, rich, 
 agreeable, and thus doubly distinguished, she was appointed, 
 in 1725, one of the dames de palais to the coming queen of 
 France. At present slie had interests in the Low Countries, 
 and appears to have still kept an establishment at La_Hagiie. 
 Cambrai was on the high-road to Holland, and there our poet 
 may have had something to do for Cardinal Dubois. Brussels 
 could be reached by a slight detour^ where he desired to meet 
 " our master," Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, as he styled the exiled 
 poet, and to read to him some cantos of the new poem. At 
 the Hague, which had not yet ceased to be a type-foundry 
 and book mart of Europe, he had important business of his 
 own. It was a piece of his usual good luck to find traveling 
 his road a grande dame who loved his poetry, relished his 
 conversation, and paid all expenses. 
 
 We know one of the chief subjects of conversation between 
 the young widow and the young bachelor, as they traveled 
 northward in the pleasant days of July, 1722. The lady had Ni> 
 asked him what she ought to think concerning the vexed sub- 
 ject of religion. It was on this journey that he put the sub- 
 stance of his answer in the form- of an Epistle in verse, ad- 
 dressed to her under the name of the "beautiful Uranie." 
 This poem is noted as being the first of his works in which 
 
 VOL. I. 10
 
 
 146 LITE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 he gives with any fullness his opinions upon religion. It is 
 simply an elegant and very spirited statement of the deism of 
 that century, the chief position of which was that the prodi- 
 gies related in the sacred books of all religions are to be taken 
 as legends, not as history. As legends, they possess value and 
 beauty ; regarded as histoiy, they become pernicious and in- 
 finitely absurd. This Epistle is very much in the style of 
 that " Moisade " taught him in childhood by the Abbd de 
 Ch^teauneuf. He dwelt upon the folly of supposing that the 
 Creator of men had " drowned the fathers and died for the 
 children," without having reclaimed the race from wickedness 
 by either method. Upon this theme he enlarged in more than 
 a hundred melodious lines, and, doubtless, added many effect- 
 ive points in conversation on the road. One of his topics 
 was the account given in the Gospels of the life and death of 
 Jesus ; and this he treated with a freedom which, in 1722, 
 niust have been startling to a lady whose mind, he intimates, 
 was not yet made up : — 
 
 " He sprang from a people obscure, imbecile, unstable, in- 
 sensate lovers of superstition, conquered by their neighbors, 
 crouching in slavery and the eternal contempt of other na- 
 tions. The Son of God, God himself, makes himself the 
 countryman of this odious people. Born of a Jewess, he 
 creeps under his mother ; he suffers under her eyes the infirm- 
 ities of infancy. Long a low workman, plane in hand, his 
 early days are lost in this base employment." 
 
 The narrative is continued in this spirit, and then the poet 
 descants upon the vast absurdity of supposing the Americiin 
 tribes and other remote nations to be consigned to eternal an- 
 guish for not being acquainted with these events. He con- 
 cludes his poem by telling the " uncertain Uranie " what to 
 believe : — 
 
 "Believe that the eternal wisdom of the Most High has, 
 with his own hand, engraved at the bottom of thy heart nat- 
 / ural religion. Believe that the native candor of thy soul will 
 
 not be the object of God's eternal hate. Believe that before 
 his throne, in all times and in all places, the heart of the just 
 person is precious. Believe that a modest bonze, a charitable 
 dervish, finds favor in his eyes sooner than a pitiless Jansenist 
 or an ambitious pontiff. . . . God judges us according to our 
 virtues, not our sacrifices."
 
 JOURNEY TO HOLLAND. 147 
 
 Doubtless the inexhaustible theme was amply discussed on 
 the way to Carabrai, and probably he found iu the lady a 
 pupil willing to learn from his philosophy " to despise the 
 horrors of the tomb and tlie terrors of another life." 
 
 They reached, in due time, the archiepiscopal city of Cara- 
 brai, noted then for a magnificent cathedral destroyed in the 
 Revolution, but known to us as having given a word to the 
 English language, — cambric, — because the fabric of that 
 name was first made there. The town was full of distin- 
 guished company, with nothing to do, awaiting the opening of 
 the congress, and they received Madame de Ilupelraonde and 
 her poet with enthusiasm. Parties were given in their honor, 
 and ladies disputed with one another the privilege of enter- 
 taining them. At one grand supper, given by the wife of the 
 French ambassador, the cry arose that they must have the 
 pleasure of seeing "Q^dipe" performed the very next day, in 
 the presence of the author. There was a difficulty : the 
 Spanish ambassador had already ordered " Les Plaideurs " of 
 Racine, and no diplomatist was willing to risk offending so 
 weighty a personage. Voltaire undertook the task of in- 
 ducing the Spaniard to allow the change desired, and pro- 
 duced upon the spot a rhymed petition in " the name of Ru- 
 pelmonde." The petition being instantly granted, he brought 
 back to the company a reply in rhyme, also of his own com- 
 position, in which he informed them that on the next day the 
 actors Avould play both " O^dipe " and its author ; that is, 
 " ffidipe," and, afterwards, the travesty of the same, as per- 
 formed in the minor theatres of Paris. It marks the manners 
 of that age that this response, made as if to Madame de Ru- 
 pelmonde, mentioning her by name, and read to the finest 
 company in Europe, both ladies and gentlemen, should have 
 opened with as palpable a double entendre as language could 
 convey. 
 
 Even more remarkable was the letter that he wrote from 
 Cambrai to Cardinal Dubois ; a melange of prose and verse, 
 of banter and homage, which the cardinal allowed to be 
 handed about in Paris drawing-rooms, as something too good 
 to be kept to himself. On tnking leave of the cardinal at 
 Versailles, Voltaire is reported to have said, "I pray you, 
 Monseigueur, not to forget that formerly the Voitures were 
 
 /r
 
 148 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 protected by the Richelieus." To which the minister is said to 
 have made the rude reply, " It is easier to find Voitures than 
 Richelieus." Nothing abashed, this young dramatist of one 
 success wrote thus to the cardinal prime minister, from Cam- 
 brai : — 
 
 " A beauty whom they name Rupelmonde, with whom the Loves 
 and I run about the world of late, and who gives law to us all, wishes 
 that on the instant I write you. My muse, as attentive to please her 
 as you, accepts with transport so charming an employ. 
 
 " We arrive, Monseigneur, in your metropolis, where, I believe, all 
 the ambassadors and all the cooks of Europe have given one another 
 rendezvous. It seems that all the ministers of Germany are at Cam- 
 brai for no other purpose than to drink the health of the emperor. 
 As for the ambassadors of Spain, one of them hears two masses a 
 day, and the other directs the troop of actors. The English ministers 
 send many couriers to Champagne, but few to London. For the rest, 
 no one expects your Eminence here. It is not thought likely that 
 you will leave the Palais Royal to come to visit your flock. You 
 would be too much annoyed, and we also, if you had to leave the min- 
 istry for the apostolate. 
 
 " May the gentlemen of the congress, in drinking at this retreat, 
 assure the peace of Europe ! May you love your city, my lord, and 
 never come to it ! I know that you can make homilies, can walk 
 with a cross-bearer, and can mumble litanies. Give, give rather ex- 
 amples to kings ; unite always spirit with prudence ; let your great 
 deeds be published everywhere ; make yourself blessed of France, 
 without giving at Cambrai any benedictions. 
 
 " Remember sometimes, Monseigneur, a man who has, in truth, no 
 other regret than not to be able to converse with your Eminence as 
 often as he could desire, and who, of all the favors you can do him, 
 regards the honor of your conversation as the most flattering." 
 
 This is the letter which a prince of the church permitted 
 to " run " in Paris in 1722. " How could it have got out ? " 
 writes Voltaire to his trumpeter, Thieriot; and, three months 
 later, he asks whether Thieriot still hears his letter to Cardi- 
 nal Dubois spoken of, and what is said of it.^ Part of the 
 joke was that the Archbishop of Cambrai had never seen Cam- 
 brai ; and he never did see it. The congress, too, during the 
 four years of its continuance, accomplished nothing but num- 
 berless fetes and suppers ; and it may be that the design of 
 1 Lettres Ine'dites de Voltaire, page 15.
 
 JOURNEY TO HOLLAND. 149 
 
 the cardinal in letting the letter escape was to accustom the 
 public to regard it as a brilliant nullity. 
 
 After five or six weeks of gayety and glory among the am- 
 bassadors and ladies at Cambrai, we find him at Brussels, 
 seventy miles beyond, where he was to meet " our master," 
 Rousseau, and submit an epic poem to his judgment. J. B. 
 Rousseau, then fifty-two years of age, was no longer the sa- 
 tiric and scoffing Rousseau of other days. He had returned 
 to the bosom of the church ; he was writing those fine psalms 
 that figure in his later works ; he was conspicuously and, as 
 his enemies thought, ostentatiously religious. It is not nec- 
 essary to suppose him insincere, as French writers usually do. 
 Men who discard religion because they dislike the restraints 
 which it imposes hold their unbelief by a very uncertain ten- 
 ure, and are liable in the decline of life to relapse into su- 
 perstition. It was common then to see persons who were 
 thoughtless unbelievers at twenty become thoughtless devo- 
 tees at fifty. Voltaire, on the contrary, had developed the 
 merry license of his youth into a clear, intelligent, and posi- 
 tive rejection of all the theological dogmas, except that of a 
 Supreme Being. 
 
 He was now in a country that swarmed with rosy and jovial 
 priests, and he regarded them with no more reverence than 
 the people of our prairies regard locusts and grasshoppers. 
 The brave old Duchess of Marlborough had been at Aix and 
 Brussels since the peace, and she was good enough to record 
 her impressions of what she saw there. She thought she dis- 
 covered in Flanders the cause of atheism. It was the priests' 
 owning three quarters of all the land, and still " squeezing " 
 the half-starved people for money. " In one church where I 
 was lately," she wrote, " there were twenty-seven jolly -face 
 priests that had nothing in the world to do but to say mass 
 for the living and take the dead souls the sooner out of purga- 
 tory by their prayers." ^ Voltaire had an opportunity ere- 
 
 1 The duchess writes from Flanders, 1712 : " Since I have Room I can't end 
 without giving you some Account how I pass my Time in this Place, which is ia 
 visiting Nunnerys and Churches, where I have heard of such Marvells and seen 
 such ridiculous Things as would appear to you incredible if I should set ahout to 
 describe them, tis so much beyond all that I ever saw or heard of in England of 
 that Religion which I am apt to think has made those Atheists that are in the 
 "World, for tis impossible to see the Abuses of the Priests without raising strange
 
 150 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 long of talking over these matters with the duchess, and, we 
 may be sure, agreed with her. Indeed, on the first day of his 
 arrival at Brussels, he behaved so irreverently at mass that the 
 peo)3le were on the point of turning him out of the church. 
 So Rousseau records, and the culprit himself admits that his 
 behavior was a little disorderly. 
 
 The two poets met, neither being aware of the change that 
 had taken place in the other. At first all was cordiality be- 
 tween them, and they were inseparable. Voltaire, as I think, 
 knew Rousseau's innocence of the charge that had exiled him, 
 and must have been sensible to the charm of his verse. He 
 called him by no other name than Master ; and, besides read- 
 ing him portions of " La Henriade," he intrusted the precious 
 manuscript to his keeping for several daj'S. Rousseau praised 
 the poem, only objecting to a few passages wherein the Pope 
 and the priests were not treated quite in the manner of a good 
 Catholic, — passages which the autlior himself was striving to 
 tone down to the pitch demanded by the official censor. All 
 was well between them until one fatal day, when the two poets, 
 in the presence of Madame de Rupelmonde, read to one an- 
 other some of their recent minor poems; Rousseau, his " Juge- 
 ment de Pluton," which ouglit to have been excellent, for no 
 man has ever employed the Greek legends more happily than 
 he. But the poet had a grievance of ten years' standing, — his 
 exile, — and this grievance was the real subject of the poem. 
 Who can treat with effective grace and dignity an ancient, 
 rankling grievance of his own ? Voltaire, being asked his 
 opinion of the satire, answered truly, " It is not in the style 
 
 Thoughts in one's Mind, which one checks as soon as one can, and I think tls un- 
 naturall for any Body to have so monstrous a Notion as that there is no God, if 
 the Priests (to get all the Power and Mony themselves) did not act in the Man- 
 ner that they doe in these Parts, where they liave three Parts or four of all the 
 Land in the Country, and yet they are not contented, but squeeze the poor de- 
 luded People to get more, wlio are really half-starved by the vast number of 
 Holydays in which they can't work, and the Mony they must pay when they have 
 it for the Forgivenesse of their Sins. I believe tis from the Charm of Power and 
 Mony that has made many of our Clergymen act as they have don ; but my Com- 
 fort is, tho a very small one, that if by their Assistance all are quit undon they 
 will not bee the better for it, there is such a vast Number of Priests that must 
 take Place of them, for in one Church where I was lately there were 27 jolly-face 
 Priests that had Nothing in the World to doe but to say Mass for the living and 
 to take the dead Souls the sooner out of Purgatory by their Prayers." (Letters 
 from Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. London, 1875.)
 
 JOURNEY TO HOLLAND. 151 
 
 of our master, the good and great Rousseau." The elder poet, 
 of course, was doubly enamored of this production, and did not 
 conceal his chagrin. He read on the same occasion another 
 poem on the same unfortunate subject, — his own wrongs and 
 the sublime manner in which he had borne them. It was en- 
 titled, " To Posterity." The single step between the subUme 
 and the ridiculous was taken by Rousseau in this vainglorious 
 ode, and it drew from Voltaire the well-known comment, 
 " That is an ode, master, which, in my opinion, will never 
 reach its address." He was mistaken, it is true, for the ode 
 is printed every year or two in new editions of Rousseau's 
 poems ; but such witticisms sting and are not forgotten. 
 
 " Take your revenge ! " cried Voltaire. " Here is a little 
 poem which I submit to the judgment of the father of Numa." 
 It was the " Epistle to La Belle Uranie " mentioned above. 
 Rousseau listened to the reading of the audacious work as far 
 as the passage where Jesus Christ is introduced as exercising 
 the low (Idche) trade of carpenter. Rousseau broke in upon 
 the reading at this point, saying, " Spare yourself, sir, the 
 trouble of reading more ; it is a horrible impiety ! " Voltaire 
 replaced his poem in the portfolio, and is reported to have 
 said, " Let us go to the theatre. I am sorry the author of the 
 ' Moisade ' did not notify the public that he had turned 
 devotee." Something resembling this he may have said. 
 They went to the theatre, but not with happy effect upon 
 their minds, and the estrangement thus begun was aggravated 
 iuto hostility, which time only embittered. 
 
 At Brussels, where, as at Cambrai, he seemed to be im- 
 mersed in pleasure, he did not lose sight of the main ob- 
 ject, the publication of his poem ; and he sent to Thieriot de- 
 signs for nine engravings, one for each canto, to be executed 
 at Paris. 
 
 Early in October he was at the Hague, the scene of his 
 early love and folly. At Brussels he had his letters ad- 
 dressed to the French ambassador's ; at the Hague he lived 
 at the hotel of Madame de Rupelmonde. His business in the 
 Dutch capital w^as to make arrangements for getting his 
 poem printed and published there simultaneously with the 
 Paris edition, for which he confidently hoped to get the 
 ** privilege." In case the censoi's should refuse the privilege
 
 / 
 
 152 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 for France, the Holland edition might perhaps serve for both 
 countries. He found a willing publisher, and we see liira 
 busy enough prej^aring to print, and still softening the pas- 
 ^ sages in which a Paris censor might find heresy, political or 
 theological. He was much matured since his last visit, and 
 he had time now to observe and consider the wondrous spec, 
 tacle that gi'eeted him on every side in a city where the 
 human mind was not in suppression. In glorious HoUaud 
 valiant men had conquered a part of their heritage of freedom, 
 <^N ^"f and had reduced the priest to something like safe dimen- 
 X sions. In those beautiful days of October he found the 
 jf country a paradise of meadows, canals, and foliage ; Amster- 
 dam the storehouse of the world, with a thousand vessels in 
 port, and half a million people, among whom he discovered 
 not one idler, not one pauper, not one dandy, not one inso- 
 lent. He met the prime minister on foot in Amsterdam, 
 without lackeys, in the midst of the people. In the absence 
 of personal government, no one in Holland had any court to 
 make, and people did not " put themselves in hedge " to see 
 a prince go by. At the Hague, the crowd of ambassadors 
 made more magnificence and more society. " I pass my life 
 there," he writes, " between labor and pleasure, and thus 
 live Holland fashion and French fashion. We have here a 
 -/' detestable opera, but, by way of compensation, I see Calvinist 
 ministers, Arminians, Socinians, Rabbis, Anabaptists, who 
 discourse to admiration, and who, in truth, are all in the 
 right." 
 
 He passed the time very agreeably in Holland, floating on 
 the canal between Amsterdam and the Hague, riding daily 
 on horseback, playing at tennis, drinking tokay, composing 
 circulars and proposals, dining out, and declaiming portions 
 of his poem to admiring circles. As the fine season drew to 
 an end, he was obliged to turn his thoughts toward Paris, 
 where Thieriot was getting subscriptions to " La Henriade," 
 and making interest in its behalf in all possible ways. No 
 grande dame or ambassador happening to be going to Paris, 
 with a seat to spare in a vehicle, he was to perform the 
 journey, as he remarked, on his own ill-covered bones (^mes 
 maigres f esses) ; that is, on horseback, taking his own sad- 
 dle, and getting a fresh horse at each post-house. " Pray
 
 JOUENEY TO HOLLAND. 153 
 
 to God," he -writes to his comrade, " that I may have good 
 horses on the journey." He asks him, also, to buy an excel- 
 lent horse for him at Paris for two hundred or two hun- 
 dred and fifty francs. " You have only to charge with this 
 commission," he adds, " the same people who sold my horses." 
 The cost of this mode of traveling was moderate, but the 
 thrifty poet probably got home for nothing, even if he did 
 not profit a little by the journey. He writes to Thieriot to 
 send him the exact price paid in France for an escalin, a 
 florin, a pantagon, a ducat, and a Spanish- pistole, coins cur- 
 rent in Holland, and perhaps a little cheaper there than 
 in France. The exchange upon a bagful of pistoles and 
 ducats might well pay for the cost of traveling with his 
 own saddle on hired horses.^ On the last day of October, 
 1722, he was as far on his return as Cambrai, where he dis- 
 tributed circulars announcing his poem as about to apjDear, 
 and inviting subscriptions. 
 
 Never was an enterprise more vigorously " pushed " than 
 this one of publishing an epic poem upon Henry of Navarre. 
 While Thieriot at Paris was receiving subscriptions, and 
 endeavoring to remove the scruples of the censor, the author 
 of the work was riding from post to post, from chateau to 
 chateau, all the way from Holland, down through Brabant, 
 skirting Germany, and so working his way by the end of 
 the year to the city of Orleans, a hundred miles south of 
 Paris, exciting everywhere an interest in the forthcoming 
 work. Near Orleans was the abode of Lord Bolingbroke, 
 La Source, a bewitching estate, bought with money gained 
 by speculation in the schemes of John Law, and brought to 
 high perfection by English taste and liberality. The exiled 
 statesman was living there with his French wife, the Marquise 
 de Villette, — himself a Frenchman in his literary tastes, as 
 well as in his easy morals. Voltaire was his guest at La 
 Source in the early days of the year 1723, and the poet ^^ 
 wrote a letter there to Thieriot, which was perhaps meant to 
 be handed about in Paris. At least, we know it ivas handed 
 about, and with effect. He assured Thieriot that, in the 
 illustrious Englishman he found all the learning of his own 
 country and all the politeness of theirs, a master of the 
 
 1 Voltaire a Ferney, page 304.
 
 154 LITE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 French language, and a discriminating appreciator of the excel- 
 lent literature of all lands. 
 
 " After such a portraiture of Lord Bohugbroke, it is hardly becom- 
 ing in me to say that madame and himself have been infinitely satis- 
 fied with toy poem. In the enthusiasm of their approbation, they 
 place it above all the poetical works which have appeared in France, 
 but I know how much I ought to abate of such extravagant eu- 
 logium. I am going to pass three months in meriting a part of 
 it. It seems to me that, by dint_of correcting, the work is taking 
 at length a suitable form." 
 
 " The diarizing Mathieu Marais, advocate to the parliament 
 of Paris, no friend to notaries' sons who visited lordly cha- 
 teaux, read this letter, and was almost persuaded by it to 
 think better of "the little Arouet " for a moment. 
 
 " He has been charmed [wrote the advocate in his journal] 
 with the mind of that Englishman, and has written to Paris a 
 marvelous letter about him. So highly did miloi'd praise his poem, 
 which he read to him, that they are printing it in Plolland by sub- 
 scription, with beautiful illustrations. If it is as fine as that of 
 Racine £son of the great dramatist, and author of " La Grace," 
 a religious poem in four cantos, published in 1720], we shall have 
 two great poets who are petty men : for this Racine, whom I have 
 seen two or three times, has but a frivolous mind, and is without 
 tact in conversation ; and the other is a fool, who despises the Sopho- 
 cles and the Corneilles, who has thought to be a man of the court, 
 who has got himself caned, and who will never know anything be- 
 cause he thinks he knows everything." -^ 
 
 An amusing specimen of contemporary judgment. The 
 Duke of St. Simon alludes to Voltaire in the same lofty man- 
 ner, as a person who had gained " a kind of standing in the 
 world " through his follies and the general decline of morals 
 and manners. 
 
 We must own that these puffs preliminary and the general 
 system of " pushing " carried on for some years by Voltaire 
 and Thieriot do not present a poet in a romantic light. We 
 are accustomed, in these happier days, to think of our poets as 
 living in pleasant suburban places, in houses of their own, 
 picturesque or venerable, maturing their works in peaceful se- 
 clusion, and having them spread abroad over the earth without 
 1 2 Journal of Mathieu Marais, page 377,
 
 JOURNEY TO HOLLAND. 155 
 
 any interference on the part of the author. It was far other- 
 wise in the France of 1722, when Voltaire submitted his poem 
 to the censure. The system of publishing, as we find it now, 
 did not exist ; nor did the laws exist by which an author holds 
 proj)erty in the products of his own mind. The measures 
 taken by Voltaire to create an interest in his work before its 
 publication were all necessary in a country governed by caprice. 
 Such expedients were as necessary in 1722 as they were in 
 1789, when Beaumarchais, by similar arts and equal persist- 
 ence, forced his " Figaro " upon the Paris stage against the 
 king himself. 
 
 The literary sensation of this very year, 1722, well illus- 
 trates the precarious tenure by which literary men then held 
 their subsistence. A stroke of a minister's pen suspended the 
 labors of Le Sage, the author of " Gil Bias," as well as of the 
 whole coterie of authors and composers who sustained the 
 comic opera. The comic opera had become too popular. It was 
 drawing away the fashionable world of Paris from the Theatre 
 Fran^ais, in which the works of the classic dramatists were 
 performed, and the actors had interest eno.ugh to procure an 
 order designed to suppress the comic opera, and to reduce the 
 minor theatres to their former repertoire of songs, music, reci- 
 tations, Punch, and the ballet. Instead of expressing this in- 
 tention in plain language, the order set forth that on the 
 minor stage thei'e should be only one speaking character at a 
 time. Le Sage and his colleagues, refusing to work under this 
 hard condition, resorted in despair to a certain Alexis Piron, an 
 untried hanger-on of the theatre, the only man in Europe, per- 
 haps, capable of producing an effective three-act comedy, and 
 keep within the iron limits of the new decree. The order of 
 1722 brought the manager of the comic opera a suppliant to his 
 garret, and in forty-eight hours Alexis produced a play which 
 filled the void. Nothing gave the Parisians of that generation 
 keener delight than to see an arbitrary decree like this at once 
 obeyed and evaded. But, in truth, the comedy which the 
 merry Alexis produced on this occasion would have amused 
 even a hostile audience, so full was it of those broad, strong 
 comic effects which audiences cannot resist. He had but one 
 speaker on the stage at a time, but he enabled an anxious 
 manager to exhibit every night, to the utmost advantage, his
 
 156 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 whole company of actors, singers, dancers, and gymnasts. 
 " Harlequin-Deucalion " was the name of the play. It opens 
 while the storm is still raging which has drowned all the world 
 except Deucalion, who has saved himself by getting astride of 
 a barrel. In the midst of the tempest, this sole survivor of 
 the human family comes bounding upon the stage, barrel and 
 all, with a huge knapsack on his back. The first scene con- 
 sists of a long soliloquy, in which he makes several humorous 
 local allusions, and spouts passages parodied from plays that 
 were running at the time, and were perfectly familiar to the 
 audience. Every sentence in this soliloquy was a distinct hit, 
 and would make a French audience laugh. As he sits down 
 to dinner, talking to himself, he notices that his language has 
 a sort of mad propensity to rhyme, which puzzles him, and 
 causes him to look around to see where he is. He discovers 
 that he and his barrel have landed upon Mount Parnassus, 
 which accounts for his poetizing. The reader, who knows 
 what a curious creature an audience is, can easily imagine 
 what boisterous fun this rhyming trick would create, partic- 
 ularly when it manifested itself in burlesque parodies of plays 
 as well known to Frenchmen then as Hamlet is to us now. 
 
 And so the play goes on, until every folly of the day is hit, 
 and every member of the company appears. The failure of 
 Voltaire's play " Artemire " does not escape. In the second 
 act, Deucalion appears mounted upon Pegasus, He spurs and 
 lashes the noble animal until he has roused himself to a high 
 pitch of exaltation, when he declaims those opening verses of 
 Voltaire's play that promised such great things : — 
 
 " Oui, tous ces conquerants rassembles sar ce bord, 
 Soldats sous Alexandre, et rois apres sa mort." 
 
 Having delivered these famous lines in a tragedian's most 
 swelling manner, he falls headlong from Pegasus upon his 
 back, and gets up dolefully rubbing himself, and saying, as if 
 he had lost the word, " Apres sa mort, apres sa mort ; I am 
 gone all lame. By Jove, it is a pity; I was getting on so 
 well." 
 
 The play was a prodigious success, and the government tac- 
 itly permitted so audacious and brilliant a defiance of its de- 
 cree. Voltaire was present at one of the performances of the 
 piece, and he may have learned from it how safe it was to evade
 
 JOURNEY TO HOLLAND. 157 
 
 the strong measures of a government that was itself not strong. 
 According to the jolly Alexis, the author of " Artemire " 
 was not displeased at the allusions to himself in " Deucalion," 
 saying to the author at the close, "I felicitate myself, sir, 
 I upon having had a part in your success ; " whereupon Piron 
 protested he did not know whose the lines were that he had 
 caused to be spouted from the back of Pegasus. 
 
 To this day, French people love to relate encounters of wit 
 between Voltaire and Piron. Piron himself records many of 
 them, in which the author of " Harlequin-Deucalion " inva- 
 riably comes off victorious. " Eo rus," wrote Voltaire, one 
 day, to notify Piron that he was "going into the country." 
 Piron, to surpass this epistle in brevity, replied by one letter, 
 " /," which is Latin for " Go." But then this anecdote is 
 related of other men. For fifty years, Piron and Voltaire, 
 known generators of anecdotes, were accustomed to have spu- 
 rious offspring laid at their doors.
 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 "LA HENRIADE" PUBLISHED. 
 
 It is May, 1723. Voltaire and his friend Thieriot are estab- 
 lished at Paris, in the town-house of the Marquis de Bernieres, 
 a distinguished magistrate of Rouen (jjvesident d mortier), 
 whose wife had long been one of Voltaire's most familiar cor- 
 respondents. M. de Bernieres was good enough to let part of 
 his house to the author of " CEdipe " at six hundred francs per 
 annum, and to permit him to pay a further sum of about 
 twelve hundred francs per annum for other expenses of Thie- 
 riot and himself when they were in Paris, — an arrangement 
 creditable to the good sense of both parties. The compact 
 was drawn in proper form by a notarj'^, — Armand Arouet, 
 mon frere, — who also gave legal receipts for the rent, and 
 seems always at this period to have had money of Francois's 
 in his hands. During: Voltaire's long absences from Paris, he 
 occasionally sends Thieriot to mon frere for money, and often 
 urges him not to forget to " dine a little " now and then with 
 his sister. 
 
 The house of M. de Bernieres was situated on that part of 
 the bank of the Seine which was then called Quai des Thda- 
 tins, now Quai Voltaire, and it was nearly opposite the gar- 
 dens of the Tuileries. It ouglit to have been an agreeable 
 site ; but Voltaire complains of " this noisy quai,''' and ex- 
 plains the cause of the noise. Paris in 1723 was very far from 
 being either the elegant or the commodious city which it is 
 now. Servants and others came down in great numbers to the 
 river to draw water, and one of the places convenient for the 
 purpose was this Quai des Theatins, under the windows of a 
 laborious and susceptible author, correcting an ej^ic and com- 
 posing a new play. He writes to Madame de Bernieres, who 
 was about to return from Rouen to Paris, telling her that her 
 rooms were making ready, and urging her to come sooner than 
 she had intended.
 
 "LA HENRIADE" PUBLISHED. 159 
 
 "At least [he adds], grant me another favor, which I solicit 
 with the utmost urgency. I find myself, I know not how, burdened 
 with three servants, whom I cannot afford to keep, and have not the 
 resolution to discharge. One of these three messieurs is poor La Brie, 
 whom you saw long ago in my service. He is too old to be a lackey, 
 incapable of being, a valet, and just the man for a door-keeper. You 
 have a Swiss who is not in your service to please you, but to sell at your 
 door bad wine to all the water-carriers, who come here every day and 
 make your house a nasty wine-shop. If the desire of having at your 
 door an animal with a shoulder-knot, whom you pay dearly every year 
 to serve you ill three months and sell bad wine twelve ; if, I say, the 
 desire of having your door decorated with such an ornament is not 
 very near your heart, I ask it of you as a favor to give the place to 
 my poor La Brie. You will oblige me sensibly. I have almost as 
 strong a wish to see him at your door as to see you arrive at your 
 house. The place will be the making of him ; he will cost you much 
 less than a Swiss, and will serve you much better. If, besides that, 
 the pleasure of obliging me counts for something in the arrangements 
 of your house, I flatter myself that you will not refuse me this favor, 
 which I ask with importunity. I await your answer to reform my 
 little establishment." 
 
 A- moving epistle, but it did not suffice. Next year there 
 was a robbery in the house, and the poet wrote to his com- 
 rade, " This comes of having an imbecile and interested Swiss 
 at your door, keeping a wine-shop, instead of an attached por- 
 tiere Poor La Brie remained upon his hands, and he was 
 obliged to reform his household otherwise. Behold him, then, 
 settled in his new quarters with his factotum Thieriot. " La 
 Henriade " was substantially finished, including notes, remarks, 
 pictures, an outline of the history of Henry IV., and a dedica- 
 tion to the king, then a rude, robust boy of thirteen, delight- 
 ing in the slaughter of small birds. Subscription papers had 
 been accessible to the public for some months, with results far 
 from flattering. " You have undertaken a work," said M. de 
 Malezieu to the author, one day, " which is not suited to our 
 nation. The French have not the epic head. Thougli you 
 should write as well as Racine and Boileau, it will be much if 
 they read you." ^ The comparative failure of the subscrip- 
 tions was broadly burlesqued at the theatre which had been 
 the recent scene of Piron's triumph, and the poet did not rel- 
 
 1 Essai sur la Poesie flpique par Voltaire, 13 CEiivres, 542. 
 
 <:
 
 160 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 ish the jest, for he was not in the best humor. Beauregard 
 was still in jail, and a cause of expense to him ; he was kept 
 out of his share of his father's estate ; the subscriptions were 
 not as productive of cash as he had hoped ; expense followed 
 upon expense, with dim prospect of reimbursement. Worst of 
 all, it now began to be agonizingly doubtful Whether the poem 
 Avould be allowed to appear in France, and he dared not use 
 
 V the proceeds of the subscriptions, for fear of having to return 
 them. Once he ventured to take two hundred francs from 
 that " sacred fund," but made haste to restore it. We cannot 
 
 -A— wonder, then, to find him writing to Thieriot this j-ear that 
 the burlesque at the theatre had not sharpened the bitterness 
 of his cup, and that he willingly /or^awe those scoundrels of 
 authors the buffooneries which were their trade. 
 
 How could he, at the age of twenty-nine, have been so little 
 acquainted with the court as to expect the " privilege " of pub- 
 lishing in France such a work as " La Henriade"? He did 
 expect it most confidently. He had softened or removed, as 
 he supposed, every passage that the most limited priest or 
 T the most arrogant prelate could seize upon as objectionable. 
 He had read large portions of it to the regent, and had 
 changed certain passages with a particular view to conciliate 
 Cardinal Dubois. But, heavens ! there was a tone in the very 
 dedication to the king which must have startled the censor of 
 a goveimment like this, which, at the best, could only hand the 
 reins of power from a dissolute Dubois to a virtuous Fleury, 
 both priests and both cardinals, — a government destined for 
 the next sixty-six years to invest with the attraction of for- 
 bidden fruit every bright and free utterance of the human 
 mind. 
 
 " Sire : Every work in which the great deeds of Henry TV. are 
 spoken of ought to be offered to your majesty. It is the blood of that 
 hero which flows in your veins. You are king only because he was 
 a great man ; and France, that wishes you as much virtue as he pos- 
 sessed, and more happiness, flatters itself that the life and the throne 
 which you owe to him will engage you to imitate him. 
 
 " Fortunate in having known adversity, he felt for the miseries of 
 men, and softened the rigors of a rule from which he had suffered 
 himself. Other kinsfs have courtiers ; he had friends. His heart was 
 full of tenderness for his true servants.
 
 "LA HENRIADE" PUBLISHED. 161 
 
 " Tliat king, who truly loved his subjects, never regarded their 
 complaints as sedition, nor the remonstrances of magistrates as en- 
 croachment upon the sovereign authority. Shall I say it, sire ? Yes ; 
 truth commands me so to do. It is a thing very shameful to kings, 
 this astonishment we experience when they sincerely love the happi- 
 ness of their people. May you one day accustom us to regard that 
 virtue as something appertaining to your crown ! It was the true 
 love of Henry IV. for France which made him adored by his sub- 
 jects." 
 
 There is something in this dedication that savors of the free 
 air of Holland which the author had Litely inhaled. It was 
 the utterance of a citizen, not of a courtier, and it did not con- 
 ciliate. The poem itself related the bloodiest triumph of in- 
 tolerance Europe has known, — the massacres of St. Bartholo- 
 mew, one hundred andiifty years before. The natural effect 
 of the poem upon every intelligent mind was to excite a hor- 
 ror of intolerant religion, as the one baleful and hideous thing 
 of modern history, attesting its hellish character in every age 
 by fire and massacre ; the direct cause of the worst things man 
 has ever done against man. The poem exhibited brave and 
 humane men turned into monsters by intolerant religion ; "in- ^ 
 voking the Lord while slaughtering their brothers, and, their ^v^ 
 
 arms wet with the blood of innocent children, daring to offer 
 to God that execrable incense." It showed French rivers 
 flowing red with French blood, and bearing to the sea the 
 bodies of Frenchmen slain by Frenchmen, set on to the fell 
 work by crafty priests. It showed Elizabeth, queen of the 
 " proud, indomitable English," saying to Henry of Navarre, 
 " A great man ought not to dread the futile thunders of 
 Rome," — a power *' inflexible to the conquered, complaisant -/, 
 to conquerors, ready, as interest dictates, either to absolve or 
 condemn." It gave in harmonious and powerful verse a cata- 
 logue of the unspeakable things done by fanatics in every 
 age : mothers offering to Moloch the smoking entrails of their 
 own children ; Iphigenia led by her father a sacrifice to the 
 altar ; the early Christians hurled from the summit of the 
 capitol ; Jews burned every year (twenty were burned in 1717 
 by Portuguese) for "not abandoning the faith of their fore- 
 fathers." It showed religion used by ambitious chiefs as a 
 pretext, but accepted by ignorant followers as the most real 
 
 VOL. I. 11
 
 162 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 of all possible causes of hostility. " To him who avenges the 
 church all becomes legitimate : murder is just ; it is author- 
 ized ; na}', it is commanded b}'^ Heaven ! " The poem dwells 
 upon the doctors of divinity whose fierce and bloody lessons 
 drive weak men mad, and make them the assassins of good 
 kings ; and upon " those priests whose fatal eloquence kindled 
 the fires that had consumed France." 
 
 Apart from such passages as these, the spirit of the poem 
 was secular, and its morale was that of the deism then in 
 vogue, a system that had no room in it for priests. The very 
 passages inserted to conciliate the censorship had offense in 
 them ; for if the author spoke of the Protestant doctrines as 
 " erroi'," he must needs add that " error, too, had its heroes." 
 Enough ; after some weeks of suspense the poet learned that 
 the " privilege " would not be granted; and, consequently, all 
 the arrangements hitherto made, in Holland and in France, 
 were of no effect. He could not supply copies to his sub- 
 scribers, nor " copy " to his Dutch printer ; for it seems that 
 his bargain with the publisher at the Hague was conditional 
 upon his obtaining the privilege in France. 
 
 A French commentator upon these events judiciously re- 
 marks that Voltaire did not write a poem in nine or ten cantos 
 for the purpose of keeping it in a portfolio. He resolved to 
 print his poem and supply copies in Paris without a " privi- 
 lege." As Alexis Piron had evaded with impunity a positive 
 prohibition, so he, with the help of Thieriot, now set about 
 eluding a negative one. Sixty eight miles from Paris, on the 
 banks of the river Seine, is the city of Rouen, the chief abode 
 of his landlord, M. de Bernieres, where also lived M. de Cide- 
 ville, another magistrate, a fellow- student at the College Louis- 
 le-Grand, and ever since a faithful friend. There was much 
 going to and fro this year between the Quai des Theatins at 
 Paris and a certain printing-house at Rouen. Voltaire was at 
 Rouen for a while ; then Thieriot ; then Voltaire again ; then 
 both. Such was the slowness of the old printers that it re- 
 quired five months to put the two hundred and thirty pages 
 of the first edition in type ; and, meanwhile, Thieriot in Paris 
 was settinsi; two thousand bindings readv against the arrival 
 of the printed sheets. All was done with the utmost secrecy. 
 The poem was spoken of in Voltaire's letters as mon Jils, mon
 
 "LA HENEIADE" PUBLISHED. 163 
 
 hdtard, mon petit bdtard, and the bindings as "my two thou- 
 sand jackets." Doubtless, Madame de Bernicres, as well as 
 M. de Cideville, assisted in the scheme ; for it was at her 
 house that Voltaire and Thieriot lived while they remained 
 near Rouen. The dates are all in confusion here ; but, hap- 
 pily, it is of no great consequence. We can discover, by long 
 groping in the dim cross-lights, that, during a great part of 
 1723, this business of getting two thousand copies of " La 
 Henriade " manufactured was a grand object with our impetu- 
 ous and irresistible poet. 
 
 It was a business that left him many vacant hours, part of 
 which he employed in writing a new tragedy, " JMariamne." 
 The scene of this drama was laid in Palestine. Herod, the 
 king, was the chief personage ; and his young wife, Mariamne, 
 was the innocent, suspected heroine. He toiled at this play 
 with even more than his usual assiduity, in the hope of oblit- 
 erating by it the memory of his dramatic failure in Arte- 
 mire, some passages and incidents of which he employed in 
 the new tragedy. In November he was to have an opportu- 
 nity of hearing it read by Madame Lecouvreur, the first act- 
 ress of her generation, before a company of great note and 
 splendor at the Chateau de Maisons, in the forest of St. Ger- 
 main, nine miles from Paris. 
 
 At this chateau he had been a frequent guest for consid- 
 erable periods. The rooms in which he lived and wrote used 
 to be shown to visitors long after his death. The remains 
 of the chateau, one of the first built by Mansard, and occu- 
 pied by a number of famous persons, show how capable it 
 must have been of entertaining fine company in the early 
 years of Louis XV. M. de Maisons, the young lord of the 
 mansion, was accustomed to bring together those who prac- 
 ticed and those who enjoyed the arts; or, as the chronicles 
 of the period have it, " all the arts, all the talents, and all 
 the agreeablenesses." Voltaire was doubly welcome, as poet 
 and as friend of Madame de Villars, who was a near relation 
 of Madame de Maisons. 
 
 A grand three-days fete was announced for the early days 
 of November, 1723, at the Chateau de Maisons, to which 
 sixty lords and ladies were invited. The' Abbe de Fleury, 
 preceptor and favorite of the king, who was soon to be car-
 
 164 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 dinal and minister, was expected. Plays were to be per- 
 formed and concerts given ; all the usual round of diversions 
 and divertisements were to be presented ; and, as a special 
 entertainment, there was to be a formal reading of the new 
 tragedy by Madame Lecouvreur, in the presence of the au- 
 thor. The 4th of the month had arrived. Madame Lecou- 
 vreur, the first lady of her profession, it is said, who ever 
 associated on apparently equal terms with her sister artists, 
 the grand ladies of the old regime^ had reached the chateau. 
 Voltaire arrived, and preparations for the festival were going 
 forward. On that very day, November 4th, the lord of the 
 castle and himself were indisposed. According to the usage, 
 of the time, they had themselves bled ; which relieved the host, 
 but not the guest. 
 
 After two days of fever, a slight eruption revealed, late at 
 night, the dread malady of that century, the small-pox ! The 
 consternation was such that guests, roused from sleep, set off 
 in the middle of the night for their homes. Couriers were 
 dispatched to the Abbe de Fleury and other invited persons, 
 warning them not to come. Madame Lecouvreur, with 
 the proverbial kindness of her profession, sent an express to 
 Rouen to call Thieriot from the printing of the poem to 
 the bedside of the poet. M. de Maisons summoned Gervasi, 
 the physician of Paris most noted for his successful treat- 
 ment of this disease. We possess, from the pen of Voltaire, 
 a curiously minute account of the treatment to which he was 
 subjected on this occasion, as well as of the system in vogue, 
 written in January, 1724, at the request of the aged Baron 
 de Breteuil, father of that Marquise du Chatelet, with whom 
 he was to be so intimately and so long connected. This 
 epistle, one of the longest he ever wrote, is a valuable chap- 
 ter for the historian of the healing art, though much too exten- 
 sive for insertion here. 
 
 "The malady [wrote Voltaire] appeared after two days of fever, 
 and revealed itself by a slight eruption. I had myself bled a second 
 time, on my own responsibility, despite the popular prejudice. M. 
 de Maisons had the goodness to send me the next day M. de Ger- 
 vasi, physician to the Cardinal de Rohan, who visited me with re- 
 luctance. He feared to be engaged in treating uselessly, in a deli- 
 cate and feeble constitution, the small-pox already at the second day
 
 "LA HENRIADE" TUBLISHED. 165 
 
 of the eruption, and the development of which had been hindered only 
 by two insutlicient bleedings, without any medicine. 
 
 " He came, nevertheless, and found me with a malignant fever. 
 From the first, he had a bad opinion of my case ; the servants who 
 attended me perceived it, and did not permit me to remain in igno- 
 rance of it. They announced to me, at the same time, that the 
 priest of the parish, who took an interest in my health, and who 
 was not afraid of the small- pox, had inquired if he could see me 
 without giving me inconvenience. I admitted him at once; I con- 
 fessed ; and I. made my will, which, as you may well believe, was 
 not very long. After that, I awaited death with sutHcient tranquil- 
 lity ; regretting, however, to go without having put the last hand 
 to my poem and to ' INIariamne,' and sorry to leave my friends so 
 soon. Nevertheless, M. de Gervasi did not abandon me for a mo- 
 ment. He studied with attention all the movements of nature ; he 
 gave me nothing to take without telling me the reason of it ; he 
 let me partly see the danger, and showed me clearly the remedy.^ 
 His reasonings carried conviction and confidence to my mind, — a 
 method very necessary with a sick person, because the hope of cure 
 is itself half a cure. Eight times he was obliged to make me take 
 an emetic ; and, instead of the cordials usually given in this disease, 
 he made me drink two hundred pints of lemonade. This treatment, 
 which will seem to you extraordinary, was the only one that could 
 have saved my life, every other road conducting me to certain death ; 
 and I am persuaded that most of those who have died of this dread- 
 ful malady would be still alive if they had been treated as I was. 
 
 "Popular prejudice abhors, in cases .of small-pox, bleeding and 
 medicine. People wish nothing but cordials given ; wine is admin- 
 istered to the sick man, and even broth. Error triumphs, fi'om the 
 fact that many persons recover under this regimen. People do not 
 consider that the only cases of small-pox successfully treated in this 
 manner are those which no fatal accident accompanies, and which are 
 in no degree dangerous." 
 
 He continues to defend the bridge which had carried him 
 over, and to pour forth expressions of gratitude to ]\I. and 
 Madame de iNlaisons, as well as to his devoted Thierot, who 
 flew to him, post haste, as soon as he received INIadame Le- 
 couvreur's message, and remained with him till he recovered. 
 On the eleventh day from his seizure he was out of danger; on 
 the twelfth he wrote verses ; on the twenty-sixth he was well 
 enough to be removed to Paris, and thus relieve his generous 
 friends from a presence which had cost them and their circle
 
 166 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 /r^ 
 
 n 
 
 ^J 
 
 f.' 
 
 j>V 
 
 so much inconvenience. His carnage had scarcely gone two 
 hundred paces from the chateau when the floor of the room 
 which he had occupied burst into flames from a charred beam 
 under the fire-place; and before the fire was subdued damage 
 was done to the extent of one hundred thousand francs. The 
 chateau itself, one of the finest in Europe, was only saved by 
 the help of engines brought from Paris. 
 
 The invalid did not hear of this calamity until the next 
 morning. " I had the same grief," he wrote to the Baron, 
 " as if I had been the guilty cause of it : the fever seized me 
 again, and I assure you that at that moment I vras' not grate- 
 ful to M. Gervasi for having saved my life.'' M. and Madame 
 de Maisons, anticijoating his feelings, wrote consoling letters 
 to him, as if they had burned a chateau of his instead of his 
 having occasioned damage to one of theirs. 
 
 Many months passed before he recovered his health ; and, 
 indeed, from this time to the end of his life, he was more lia- 
 ble than before to those indispositions and that feeling of 
 bodily insufficiency to which literary men are liable. 
 
 A great joy was in store for him at the beginning of the 
 new year, 1724, one of the keenest known to mortals. After 
 a year of intrigue and suspense, after nine years of fitful, im- 
 passioned toil, copies of his poem were in existence ! It only 
 remained to get them from Rouen to Paris, — a difficult task 
 under paternal government. Madame de Bernieres, who had 
 wagons and barges frequently going between the two cities, 
 gave the conspirators her assistance ; and so, at last, as if " by 
 miracle," the great packages were got past the barriers, and 
 safely housed somewhere in Paris. The public curiosity, the 
 author's tact, Thieriot's zeal, and the cooperation of the elect 
 did the rest ; and early in the year 1724 copies began to cir- 
 culate. The poem becoming a topic of conversation, it was a 
 distinction to have seen a copy ; then a merit to have read 
 the work ; until, at length, nobody's secret drawer was com- 
 plete without it. Its success with the " reading public " of 
 the day was immediate, immense, and universal ; that is, it 
 reached at once and strongly moved the few hundred persons, 
 here and there in Europe, who shared the intellectual life of 
 their generation. The very defects and faults of the work, 
 which exclude it from the rank of the three or four immortal
 
 "LA HENEIADE" PUBLISHED. 167 
 
 epics, enhanced its effect upon French readers of that day. 
 Hear the verdict of Mathieu Marais, old lawyer, a man prej- ^ 
 udiced against this high-aspiring son of a notary. Marais ' ■ . 
 did but give utterance to the general feeling when he wrote /C ' r 
 in his diary for February, 1724, the well known entry : — i^ „ ^; 
 
 " The poem of ' The League,' [so it was called in the first edition] 
 by Arouet, of which so much has been said, is selling secretly. I 
 have read it. It is a wonderful work, a masterpiece of the mind, as 
 beautiful as Virgil ; and behold our language in possession of an epic 
 poem, as of other poetical works ! I know not how to speak of it. 
 There is everything in the poem. I cannot think where Arouet, so 
 young, could have learned so much. It is like inspiration. What an 
 abyss is the human mind ! The surprising thing is that every part of 
 the poem is temperate, well ordered, urbane ; we find in it no crude 
 vivacity, no merely brilliant passages, but everywhere elegance, cor- 
 rectness, happy turns, an eloquence simple and grand, — qualities be- 
 longing to mature genius, and nowise characteristic of the young man. 
 Fly, La Motte, Fontenelle, and all of you, poets of the new style ! 
 From this marvelous poem, at once the glory and the shame of our 
 nation, learn to think and to write ! " ^ 
 
 From such contemporary notices as these it is evident that 
 the similarity in form of "La Henriade" to the "jEneid," 
 which sometimes makes the modern reader smile and the ir- 
 reverent school-boy laugh, was part of its charm and an ele- 
 ment of its power in 1724. These two poems frequently fill 
 a corner of the same school-desk, and usually we come to the 
 study of the French epic when we are somewhat familiar 
 with the Latin one. The resemblances, merely external, but 
 needlessly obvious, and very numerous, strike the unformed 
 mind most forcibly, and are fatal to the effect of " La Henri- 
 ade," as a whole, upon mature readers. Voltaire's second 
 book, for example, is as different as possible in spirit from ^ 
 Virgil's second book, but in form it resembles it. In Virgil, 
 ^neas recounts to Queen Dido the fall of Troy; in Voltaire, 
 Henry of Navarre relates to Queen Elizabeth of England the 
 civil wars of France. Voltaire himself assures us that he 
 purposely modeled his sixth canto upon Virgil's sixth. The 
 large ingredient of the supernatural in the " JEneid " we ac- 
 cept as readily as we do the ghost in " Hamlet ; " but it re- 
 
 1 3 Memoirs de M. Marais, 89. ^ , \.^
 
 168 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 pels in " La Henriade." We do not so much enjoy the long 
 interview between the English queen and the French prince 
 when Ave know that Henry of Navarre never crossed the 
 Channel, nor looked upon Elizabeth's face. To the French 
 reader of 1724 devices of that nature seemed legitimate, and, 
 such was the ignorance of educated Frenchmen then of their 
 own history, that most readers could accept the narrative as 
 substantially true. " In my childhood,"' says Voltaire, " no 
 one knew anything of Henry IV." Most readers of that 
 generation brought to the perusal of this poem minds less ac- 
 quainted with the great contest between Protestants and Cath- 
 olics in France than with the condemnation of Socrates or the 
 wars of Ca3sar and Pompey. 
 
 The best office that literature renders a nation is to keep it 
 vividly acquainted with its history, and to give that history its 
 true interpretation. In publishing this poem, Voltaire did not 
 add to the treasures of the human mind one more immortal 
 epic ; but he began the arduous work, not yet complete, of 
 '"making France understand how it was that in the sixteenth 
 century, when the nations came, one after another, to the 
 parting of the ways, and had to choose between the upward 
 and the downward road, France was prevented from making 
 the right choice. There was more heat than liglit in the 
 . poem. The author of it had more heat than light. He felt, 
 
 <i as few have ever felt, the evils that come to men from intoler- 
 
 • ant religion ; but he could not, at that early day, regard intol- 
 erant religion merely as a mark of imperfect development: its 
 -'-T^jcause, the ignorance and timidity of man ; its cure, increase 
 [of knowledge and safer abundance. 
 
 The poem continued to make its way over Europe, receiv- 
 ing in due time all the honors: translation, imitation, sup- 
 pression, papal anathema, piracy, parody, burlesque, general 
 approval, and universal currency. A French bibliographer 
 computes the sale in the first hundred and twenty-five years of 
 its existence at 335,000 copies, in seven languages, — French, 
 Italian, Latin, German, Russian, Dutch, and English.^ " All 
 the world is making epic poems," wrote Voltaire in 1725; "I 
 have brought poems into fashion." Marais has a similar entry 
 in his diary : " The poets write nothing but epics," — " Clovis," 
 
 1 Bibliographie Voltairienne, par J. M. Querard, page 23. 
 
 \
 
 I 
 
 "LA HENRIADE" PUBLISHED. 169 
 
 in eio-lit cantos, one of them. The career of the robber Car- 
 touche, lately executed, was the subject of one parody. A 
 poem called "La Demoniade," or magic unmasked, was an- 
 other. A pirate printer published an edition in Holland, and 
 got many copies into Paris. The police, when everybody had 
 read the poem, and most collectors possessed it, hunted it 
 down with such exemplary vigilance that it became at length 
 as Marais records, really difficult to buy a copy, and finally, 
 for a short time, impossible. 
 
 In the midst of his first elation, just as friends and sub- 
 scribers were receiving their copies, and every hour brought to 
 the author some new reminder of his glory, the new tragedy 
 "Marianme" was performed at the Theatre FranQais for the 
 first time. Mon day, March 6, 1724, was the date. The thea- 3 3 
 tre was crowded almost beyond precedent, the money taken 
 amounting to five thousand five hundred and thirty francs. 
 The part of the Queen of Palestine, the ill-starred Mariamne, 
 was played by Madame Lecouvreur, the queen of the tragic 
 stage. The author was present, with a crowd of his friends 
 and admirers, many of whom had shed tears on hearing the 
 play read. All went well until the middle of the third act, 
 when King Herod enters for the first time upon the scene 
 It is a risk to hold so long in reserve a chief character, whose 
 entrance may not fulfill the expectation created. Moliere vent- 
 ures this in Tartuffe, and with success, for Tartuffe fills and 
 holds the stage at every instant when he is visible. It was 
 otherwise with a King Herod, who was as odious as Tartuffe, 
 but not as interesting. " I perceived," says Voltaire, " the 
 moment Herod appeared, that it was impossible the piece 
 should succeed." The audience bore it, however, very good- 
 naturedly, it seems, until near the close of the play, when the 
 hapless queen, lifts the cup of poison to her lips. A wag in 
 the pit broke the silence of the moment by crying out, " The 
 QUEEN DRINKS ! " 
 
 This was an allusion to the revels of Twelfth Night, famil- 
 iar then to every auditor, at which a king and queen were 
 chosen by lot ; and whenever one of them lifted a flagon to 
 drink this cry was raised, and a prodigious uproar ensued, 
 in burlesque imitation of that ancient usage which Hamlet 
 thought more honored in the breach than the observance :
 
 170 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 " The king doth wake to-night, .... and, as he drains his 
 draughts of Rhenish down, the kettle-drum and trumpet thus 
 bray out the triumph of his pledge." '■'• La reine hoit^'''' said 
 the voice in the middle of the pit. The audience relieved its 
 feelings by making the usual Twelfth Night uproar, and the 
 rest of the play was performed in dumb show. The new trag- 
 edy had failed. The docile, indomitable author, agreeing with 
 the audience, withdrew it from the theatre to alter and try it 
 again. " The new tragedy," remarks Marais, " fell at the first 
 representation. Dramatic poetry differs from epic, and one 
 man has not all the talents." 
 
 11
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 VOLTAIRE A COUETIER. 
 
 liiPORTANT events were occurring at court during these 
 years. A virtuous woman was coming to preside over it, as if 
 to give the rSgime another chance for its life. Kind death, in 
 August, 1723, relieved France of Cardinal Dubois, debauchee of 
 sixty-seven, who died cursing the surgeons for the pain they 
 had given him in trying to prolong his shameful existence. 
 By way of epitaph, the Duke of St. Simon gives the list of 
 the eight rich benefices held by this consecrated sarcasm, 
 worth 324,000 francs per annum, as well as of his civil posts, 
 which yielded 250,000 ; to say nothing of his annual bribe 
 from England of 960,000 more. Funereal ceremonies of the 
 usual magnificence were held in Notre Dame, Cardinal de 
 Noailles officiating ; " but," says honest St. Simon, " there 
 was no oration ; they dared not hazard it .'' " ^ 
 
 They dared not, because the government of France was a 
 despotism tempered by epigrams. 
 
 His master, the regent, followed him soon. In Decem- 
 ber of the same year, while sitting before the fire with 
 the Duchess of Phalaris, one of his mistresses, chatting gayly 
 enough with her before going in to the young king on busi- 
 ness, the Duke of Orleans was seized with apoplexy, and died 
 in half an hour. He was in the prime of his age, forty-nine, 
 and owed his death wholly to sensual indulgences of all 
 kinds, sustained with a continuity of excess of which no ani- 
 mal but man is capable, and few men besides Bourbons. 
 
 The person highest in rank after the Duke of Orleans 
 was the Prince of Condd, then commonly styled the Duke 
 of Bourbon, — an avaricious young man, not yet thirty-two, 
 governed by his mistress, the Marquise de Prie. While the 
 king, a boy of fourteen, was still in tears for his uncle s 
 
 1 19 M^moires, 137.
 
 172 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 sudden death, the Duke of Bourbon asked for the place of 
 prime minister. The bewildered lad gave a nod of assent ; 
 and behold fair France the helpless prey of a reckless, fasci- 
 nating woman ! Such is personal government. In July, 1724, 
 the king and court were the guests of the Duke of Bourbon 
 at Chantilly, the magnificent seat of the Condes, twenty-four 
 miles northeast of Paris, where there was a hunting-park of 
 seven thousand acres, one of the finest in Europe. AJl that 
 France had of sj^lendid and alluring was gathered in that 
 superb chateau, wherein the great Condd had loved to wel- 
 come the princes of the blood and the princes of the mind. 
 The frequent presence of Racine, Boileau, and Moliere had 
 rendered this chateau a kind of classic edifice. 
 (--^ > Strange to say, all these resounding events touched and 
 nearly concerned our invalid poet. An intellectualized per- 
 son of his temperament and constitution cannot undergo two 
 bleedings, a course of medicine, two hundred pints of lemon- 
 ade, and the small-pox without languishing a long time 
 afterwards in ill health. In the summer of 1724, be fled 
 from the noise of the Quai des Th^atins and the hootings 
 of the loarterre^ and accompanied the young Duke of Riche- 
 lieu to Forges, twenty miles beyond Rouen, the waters of which 
 were brought into repute by Cardinal de Richelieu in the 
 reign of Louis XIII. To this day one of its springs is called 
 " La Cardinale." Voltaire was much caressed at this time 
 by the nobleman who bore the name rendered illustrious by 
 the great statesman. We find him employed, in 1724, in 
 selecting a "governor for the duke's pages," and choosing a 
 young man of intelligence, noble birth, good appearance, a 
 geometer, and " one every way suitable to pages." But the 
 duke wanted a draughtsman, not a geometer, and thought the 
 post beneath the merits of the candidate. 
 
 He improved in health at Forges, but not, as he thought, 
 by drinking its acrid waters. " There is more viti'iol," he 
 wrote, " in a bottle of Forges water than in a bottle of ink ; 
 and, candidly, I do not believe that ink is so very good for the 
 health." It was not indeed in his case, his passion for using it 
 filwavs making it ditficult for him to regain lost vigor. Even 
 here he was busy recasting " Mariamne," retouching " La 
 Henriade," and writing, for one of his duke's fetes^ a one- 
 
 1
 
 VOLTAIRE A COUIITIER. 173 
 
 act comedy in verse, the agreeable and sprightly trifle called 
 "• L'Indiscret," read at Forges with drawuig-room success. " Ex- 
 act regimen," however, had its effect, and he was soon able, 
 as he said, to think of something besides his bodily pains. " I 
 am ashamed," lie wrote to Madame de Bernieres, " to present 
 mysell: to my friends with a weak digestion and a downcast 
 mind. I wish to give you only my beautiful days, and to suffer 
 incognito^ 
 
 A tragic event, which brought the royal festivities of Chan- 
 tilly to an abrupt conclusion, detained him at Forges. The 
 Duke of Richelieu and the Duke of Melun, while hunting one 
 Saturday of this July in the great park of Chantilly, brought 
 to bay a huge stag in a narrow defile, and the animal, in a 
 blind fury, charged upon them. The Duke of Melun's horse, 
 at the moment when he was trying to cross the stag, received 
 in his side the full force of the blow, when horse, stag, and 
 rider all fell together. The two sportsmen were alone. 
 Richelieu rescued his friend from the struggling animals, 
 staunched his bleeding wounds, and sustained him three quar- 
 ters of an hour, until, the huntsmen coming up, the injured 
 man was conveyed to the chateau. He lingered from Sat- 
 urday afternoon until Monday morning at half past six, when 
 lie died in the Duke of Bourbon's arms, in the presence of 
 all the court. The king instantly departed for Versailles, 
 leaving death and desolation at this magnificent abode, where, 
 until the accident, all had been adjusted and attuned to 
 profuse and splendid hospitality. Richelieu, idle profligate as 
 he was, was overwhelmed with sorrow. " I cannot abandon 
 him in his grief," wrote Voltaire. He remained at Foi'ges 
 with the duke fifteen days longer, returning to Paris _m 
 September, where he lived at the Hotel de Bernieres " in 
 solitude and suffering, relieving both by moderate labor." 
 
 A pleasing prospect of a long journey to new scenes rose 
 before him in the month of his return to Paris. The Duke 
 of Bourbon consoled the surviving Richelieu by appointing 
 him ambassador to Vienna, and Voltaire hastened to get the 
 place of ambassador's secretary for his comrade Thieriot, 
 promising to follow him to Vienna as soon as he could work 
 himself free of immediate literary engagements. " I told the 
 duke," he wrote to Thieriot, " that, since I could not go so 

 
 174 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 soon to Vienna, I would send half of myself, and the other 
 half would quickly follow ; " adding that he cared little for the 
 " titled minxes of the court," which he renounced forever, 
 " through the weakness of his stomach and the force of his 
 reason." Great was his disappointment when he received in 
 reply to his exultant letter a note from Thieriot, dryly and dis- 
 dainfully refusing the post, saying that he was not made to be 
 the domestic of a great lord. Voltaire, upon whom the idle 
 young duke had devolved the business of finding a secretary, 
 offered the place to another, who accepted it. Then he wrote 
 to Thieriot, patiently explaining and apologizing, upon which 
 Thieriot accepted also. 
 
 Here was an embarrassment. But Voltaire, irascible, sus- 
 ceptible, impetuous, was patience itself whenever the matter 
 in hand was to serve a friend. He exhibited Thieriot to the 
 ambassadoi" in a light so pleasing that, finally, rather than 
 lose such a treasure, Richelieu agreed to take two secretaries. 
 Then Thieriot, to his friend's extreme mortification, declined 
 the post again. Voltaire, with wonderful moderation, wrote 
 to him, " You have caused me a little trouble by your irreso- 
 lution. You have made me give two or three different replies 
 to M. de Richelieu, who believed that I was trifling with him. 
 I heartily forgive you since you remain with us. I did too 
 much violence to my feelings when I wished to tear myself 
 from you in order to make your fortune. If the same princi- 
 ple of friendship which forced me to send you to Vienna hin- 
 ders you from going thither, and if, besides, you are content 
 with your destiny, I am sufficiently happy, and have nothing 
 more to desire except better health." And so ended the first 
 of a long series of attempts, on the part of Voltaire, to get 
 some better footing in the world for this thriftless, agreeable 
 companion of his youth. Thieriot objected mortally to steady 
 toil and leaving Paris, and he passed a long life in ingen- 
 iously avoiding both. 
 
 The year 1725 brought various good fortune to Voltaire. 
 
 His " Mariamne," recast, was played in April with respectable 
 success, having eighteen successive representations, besides 
 many occasional repetitions and short runs, during the year. 
 His little comedy of court life, " LTndiscret," was playe^ with 
 the tragedy as an afterpiece, with applause, and both were 
 
 fi
 
 VOLTAIRE A COURTIER. 175 
 
 printed and pirated in the usual way. He was obliged to 
 print both plays at his own expense, because, as he wrote, 
 " the pirate editions cut the publisher's throat." He was 
 gaining with the public in many ways, and doubtless other 
 Frenchmen said in conversation what Matliieu Marais entered 
 
 in his diary in April, 1725, " Voltaire is the greatest poet we 
 
 possess." 
 
 If the court had been as sensitive as the church to satire, 
 the censor would not have given him the privilege of printing 
 " L'Indiscret," which exhibits court life and character very 
 much in the spirit of Beaumarchais's " Figaro." The hero is 
 a court puppy, who loses his " adorable widow " by blabbing 
 boastfully of his conquest. " Colonel at thirteen," remarks 
 the indiscreet lover, " I think it but reasonable to expect a 
 marshal's baton at thirty." Many other Figai^o strokes mark 
 this comedy ; but the regime felt itself invincible and invul- 
 nerable, and therefore the little comedy got afloat upon the 
 current, to amuse and assist to form unborn Beaumarchais. 
 The boxes, as Marais reports, were not too well pleased to find 
 themselves so accurately delineated ; but the play succeeded, 
 notwithstanding. Voltaire was winning credit and celebrity, 
 which, as he remarked, are agreeable, but not nourishing. It 
 does not improve an author's fortune, nor his temper, to print 
 his works at his own expense against pirated editions at home -rr^ 
 and abroad, — two of the " Henriade," three of " Mariamne," 
 and one of " L'Indiscret." 
 
 But a great event was impending in the summer of 17257? 
 full of hope to poets and artists in that age of patronage audi 
 pensions: nothing less than the marriage of the rude boy- , 
 king, whom the " titled minxes of the court " had tried in vain , 
 to seduce, so well had the Abbe de Fleury made him learn his [ X;, 
 catechism. Whom should he marry ? A friend of our poet, ) 
 and of all poets, pointed out the lady. ' » 
 
 This regime of personal government in France could not 
 have long maintained itself if it had been tempered by epi- 
 grams only. It was tempered and saved by solid merit and 
 genuine ability, won from the uncorrupt classes. The incom- 
 petent young man styled the Duke of Bourbon, prime minis- 
 ter of the king, had for secretary and man of confidence one of 
 the best business heads in Europe, Paris-Duverney, one of four 
 
 X- 
 
 y
 
 176 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 able brothers, sons of an innkeeper. He was antidote in 
 France to the inflating adventurer, John Law, and saved his 
 country more than once from the imbeciles who patronized 
 such adventurers. Paris-Duverney it was who suggested the 
 policy which gave to the French court for forty years the 
 presence of the virtuous woman just alluded to. Voltaire, 
 Avho records this fact, was connected with Paris-Duverney in 
 various ways for half a century, and owed to him, ten years 
 later, a vast increase of fortune. "It was Paris-Duverney," 
 says Voltaii'e, " who conceived the idea of marrying the king 
 to the daughter of Stanislas Leczinski." ^ 
 
 Both Stanislas and his daughter are characters in Voltaire's 
 eventful story : the daughter at this period, the father at a 
 later day. 
 
 JVIarie Leczinski, Queen of France from 1725 to 1768, 
 
 makes her first appearance in history as an infant, twelve 
 months old, lying at the bottom of a horse-trough in front of 
 a village inn in Poland. She was the daughter of that young 
 Stanislas whom Charles XII. placed upon the throne of Po- 
 land, after having driven from it its rightful occupant, Augus- 
 tus the Strong. The reign of this young gentleman was short 
 and troubled. Only a few days after his coronation, learning 
 that he was about to be attacked by the dethroned king, he 
 suddenly sent his family to a place of safety, under the guard 
 of a faithful troop of soldiers. It was during this flight that 
 the nurse of his daughter Marie, either from fatigue or terror, 
 laid the child in the horse-trough and abandoned it to its fate. 
 It was fovmd the next morning by accident, and conveyed to 
 its mother. 
 
 After reigning four years. King Stanislas, sharing in the 
 misfortunes of the Swedish king, lost his crown, and became 
 a wanderer over Europe. First he took refuge in Germany ; 
 then fled to Sweden ; next he sought safety in Turkey ; and 
 finally established himself in one of the small German states, 
 where he lived upon a small annuity which was irregularly 
 paid. During these wanderings, which lasted many years, his 
 daughter Marie grew to womanhood. She was a young lady 
 of small stature and pleasing appearance, though not of strik- 
 ing beauty. Her education, conducted in part by her parents, 
 1 Histoire du Parleraent de Paris, chapter Ixviii.
 
 VOLTAIRE A COURTIEE. 177 
 
 embraced several languages, as well as drawing and music, and 
 she was reared in the pious habits inculcated by the Catholic 
 religion. At the age of twenty she had as little prospect of 
 being Queen of France as any young lady in Europe. One 
 morning her father, entering the room where she was seated 
 at work with her mother, said, in a joyful tone, — 
 
 " Let us kneel and thank God ! " 
 
 " Father," said Marie, " are you recalled to the throne of 
 Poland?" 
 
 " Ah, my daughter," was the reply, " Heaven is far more 
 favorable to us than that. You are Queen of France ! " 
 
 As he said these words he showed her the letter in which 
 the prime minister of France asked her hand in marriage for 
 the young king, Louis XV. 
 
 This remarkable change of fortune was as much a surprise 
 to France and to Europe as it was to herself. When Louis 
 XV. inherited the throne of France he was, as we have seen, 
 a sickly boy, five years of age. This poor little life was all 
 there was between France and the danger of civil war; since, 
 if he died, the Bourbon King of Spain had claims to the 
 throne, and those claims would have been resisted by other 
 princes of the reigning house. It is difficult for an American 
 citizen to realize the fond anxiety with which the French peo- 
 ple watched the growth and listened to bulletins of the health 
 of this little boy. When he was sick the churches filled with 
 people, who, prostrate upon their knees, implored his restora- 
 tion ; and when he appeared in Paris, in improved health and 
 vigor, the whole city rejoiced, and blazed into an illumination 
 in the evening. The Duke of Orleans had made a match for 
 him with a daughter of the King of Spain, when she was but 
 three years of age and Louis eight. To make assurance doubly 
 sure, the little princess was brought to Paris, where she was 
 to reside until of suitable age for marriage ; and there, indeed, 
 she lived for several years. In the mean time, the boy-king 
 had been growing up into a vigorous and muscular youth. 
 When he was but fifteen years of age, one of his courtiers said 
 to him, " Sire, your majesty is old enough to give a dauphin 
 to France." 
 
 Upon this hint the ministry acted, and it was certainly a 
 matter of the greatest importance to the kingdom that another 
 
 VOL. I. 12
 
 178 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 life sliovild be interposed between Fi-ance and civil war. But 
 the Spanish princess, to whom the young king was solemnly 
 pledged, was not yet eleven years of age, and Louis, from the 
 moment of his first interview with her, had exhibited an aver- 
 sion to her person. It was resolved, therefore, at the risk of 
 mortally offending Spain, to send her home to Madrid, and 
 look about Europe for another princess for the king's hand. 
 By means of the French ministers resident at foreign courts, 
 and by more private agents, a catalogue was drawn tip of all 
 the marriageable princesses in Europe, seventeen in number, 
 with a description of the person, character, expectations, and 
 religion of each. None of them, it appears, would quite an- 
 swer the purpose. One came of a family in which madness 
 was hereditary ; another was a Protestant, and would object 
 to be converted ; another was already engaged ; another was 
 ill-looking ; another was too young ; another was of too little 
 importance in the politics of Europe ; another was said to be 
 humpbacked; and another was suspected of being scrofulous. 
 ~n These objections being fatal to the pretensions of the seven- 
 teen, it occurred to the Duke of Bourbon's astute secretary 
 that it would be a master stroke of policy to select a princess 
 who would owe the throne entirely to that prince, and who 
 would feel herself bound in common gratitude to exert all her 
 influence in his favor. 
 
 It was this idea which led to the choice of Marie. "When 
 the news of the strange selection was buzzed about the court, 
 one of the anti-Bourbon party spread the report that the 
 Polish princess was subject to fits, which so terrified the min- 
 istry that they sent in haste a secret agent to the village in 
 which Stanislas lived to inquire into the truth of the report. 
 He sent home word that the lady had never had a fit, and was 
 in all respects in sound condition for marriage. She was next 
 accused of having something the matter with one of her hands, 
 and this calumny was refuted by no less a person than the 
 Cardinal de Rohan. All obstacles to the marriage being thus 
 removed, the letter was written to which reference has already 
 been made. Neither the father nor tlie daughter made the 
 slightest objection to the match, although the prhicess was 
 twenty-one and the king fifteen. Preparations for the mar- 
 riage were made in the greatest haste. One of the secret
 
 VOLTAIRE A COURTIER. 179 
 
 agents of the ministry sent a petticoat of the princess to Paris 
 for the guidance of her dressmakers ; also one of her gloves, 
 and an old slipper for the benefit of her shoemaker. She was 
 conveyed to Paris with all possible pomp and splendor, and 
 the marriage was performed with the customary magnificence. 
 The father of the bride took up his abode in one of the French 
 provinces, where he lived to a great old age upon a munificent 
 pension from the French government. Queen Marie appears 
 to have been a truly estimable lady. Some sayings of hers 
 which have come down to us do honor to her memory. The 
 following, for example : " If there were no little people in the 
 world, we should not be great, and we ought not to be great 
 except for their sakes." " To boast of one's rank is to show 
 that we are beneath our rank." " Good kings are slaves, and 
 their people are free." " The treasures of the state are not 
 ours ; we have no right to spend in arbitrary gifts the money 
 earned by the artisan and the laborer." " It is better to listen 
 to those who cry to us from afar, ' Solace our misery,' than to 
 those who whisper in our ears, ' Increase our fortunes.' " 
 
 It is pleasing to know that the object of the Duke of Bour- 
 bon in promoting this marriage was not accomplished. The 
 Abbe de Fleury, preceptor to the king, had obtained that 
 ascendency over the dull boy that belonged to his place and 
 character. Whatever virtue and purity this king ever pos- 
 sessed he owed to his governess, Madame de Ventadour, and to 
 this priest, a man at least free from the lower vices of the 
 court and time. It is not saying much for the tutor, but so 
 much may be said. For ten years Louis XV. lived decently 
 with his wife ; and, at a later period, when he was the most 
 licentious king in Europe, he was never quite at ease in his 
 conscience. He was liable to fits of alarm, if not of contrition. 
 It is recorded of him — oh, wondrous fact ! — that he could 
 not, with a good conscience, in his most debauched period go 
 to bed without first kneeling down and saying his pi-ayers I 
 Such is the power and such is the impotence of early drill in 
 pious observances ! The coming of the good queen was fol- 
 lowed within a few months by the abrupt dismissal of the 
 Duke of Bourbon and his scandalous, extravagant De Prie. 
 The virtuous, frugal, cautious Cardinal de Fleury ruled France 
 for twenty years. The reign of mistresses was suspended for
 
 L 
 
 180 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 a while ; the court was comparatively decent ; expenditure waa 
 curtailed ; a policy of peace was maintained ; and France had 
 M another chance of escaping revolution by reform. Cardinal de 
 Fleury was not a Richelieu ; but, in the circumstances, he 
 was, perhaps, as good and as great a minister as could have 
 kept the place. 
 ( In the festivities of this royal marriage Voltaire took part, 
 and it was the Mai'quise de Prie who gave him the opportu- 
 nity. During the summer of 1724 he had paid court to her, 
 as all the world in that century paid court to the woman who 
 governed the man who governed the state. He sent her a 
 copy of " L'Indiscret," with an epistle in verse, in which he 
 assured her that if the adorable widow of his comedv had 
 possessed Tier beauty the hero's blabbing would have been 
 pardonable ; for what lover would not have been tempted to 
 speak of such a mistress, either by excess of vanity or excess 
 of tenderness ! He had his reward. Madame de Prie, before 
 leaving Paris, gave him an order upon the door-keeper of her 
 house at Fontainebleau, whei'e the honeymoon was to be 
 passed, assigning him rooms therein. " I shall see the mar- 
 riage of the queen," he wrote to Madame de Bernidres. " I 
 shall compose verses for her, if she is worth the trouble. I 
 would rather write verses for you, if you loved me." In Sep- 
 tember, therefore, with all the gay and splendid world of 
 France, he was first at Versailles, then at Fontainebleau, 
 bearing his part in the marriage festival, sometimes as po_et, 
 sometimes as spectator, always as expectant. 
 
 One incident, interesting to Americans, made such an im- 
 pression on his mind that he mentions it three or four times 
 in his works : " In 1725 I saw four savages who had been 
 brought from the Mississippi to Fontainebleau. Among them 
 was a woman, ash-colored like her companions, whom I 
 asked, through their interpreter, whether she had ever eaten 
 human flesh. 'Yes,' she replied, very coolly, as to an ordi- 
 nary question." Writing thirty years after, he adds : " I ap- 
 peared a little scandalized, when she excused herself by say- 
 ing that it was better to eat a dead enemy than to let the 
 wild beasts eat him ; the conquerors ought to have the pref- 
 erence." ^ It was a spectacle of extreme curiosity to the 
 ' Essai sur les Ma-urs, chap, cxlvi., aud Diet. Pliilos., article Antliropophages. 
 
 i
 
 VOLTAIEE A COURTIER. 181 
 
 French of 1725, the Indian lodge in the park of Fontaine- 
 bleau ; and to no one more interesting than to this bored 
 poet. . 
 
 He passed three tedious, laborious months at court ; and ! /, 
 his letters of the period show that, courtier as he was, and ^ (^ 
 suitor of court favor, he felt all the ridicule of the situation, | 0^ 
 the unspeakable absurdity of the regime of which he desired 
 to make part. I select a few sentences : — 
 
 [A.t Versailles, just before the marriage.] "Every one here pays 
 court to Madame de Beseuval, who is a distant relation of the (jueen. 
 This lady, who has some esprit, receives with much modesty the 
 marks of baseness which are given her. I saw her yesterday at the 
 house of Marshal de Villars. Some one asked her what relation she 
 was to the queen. She replied that queens have no relations. These 
 nuptials of Louis XV. are an injury to poor Voltaire. They talk of 
 not paying the pensions, and even of not preserving them ; but in 
 recompense a new tax is to be imposed, to buy laces and fabrics for 
 Mademoiselle Leczinska. This is like the marriage of the sun, which 
 made the frogs murmur. I have been but three days at Versailles, 
 and already I wish myself out of it." 
 
 [Fontainebleau, September 17th, after the marriage.] "Two no- 
 blemen died to-night. Assuredly, both of them took their time ill ; for 
 in the midst of all the hullabaloo of the king's marriage, their deaths 
 
 made not the least sensation Every one here is enchanted 
 
 with the queen's goodness and politeness. The first thing she did 
 after her marriage was to distribute among the princesses and ladies 
 of the palace all the magnificent trifles which they call her casket, 
 consisting of jewels of every kind except diamonds. When she saw 
 the casket wherein they were placed she said, ' This is the first time 
 in my life that I have been able to make presents.' She had on a 
 little rouge on her wedding-day, — as much as was necessary to keep 
 her from looking pale. She fainted a moment in the chapel, but only 
 for form's sake. There was comedy the same day. I had prepared 
 a little divertisement, which M. de Mortemart [first gentleman] was 
 not willing to have executed. They gave in its place 'Amphytryon ' 
 and Moliere's ' Le Medecin Malgre Lui,' which did not seem too 
 suitable. After supper there were fire-works of very little ingenuity 
 
 or variety For the rest, there is a confusion here, a pressure, a 
 
 tumult, that are frightful. During these first days of hubbub I shall 
 avoid having myself presented to the queen. 1 shall wait until the 
 crowd has subsided, and her majesty has recovered a little from the 
 bewilderment caused by all this sahhat. Then I shall try to have 
 
 -.i"
 
 182 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. - 
 
 ' Q^dipe ' and ' Mariamne ' played before her. I shall dedicate 
 both to her ; and she has already sent me word that she would be 
 very willing I should take that liberty. The king and queen of Po- 
 land (for here we no more recognize King Augustus) have sent to 
 ask me for the poem of Henry IV., which the queen has already 
 heard spoken of with eulogium. But nothing must be pressed." 
 
 [To Madame de Bernieres, October 8th.] " I have not a moment 
 to myself. We have had to perform ' Qi^dipe,' ' Mariamne,' and 
 ' LTudiscret.' I have been some time at Belebat with Madame de 
 Prie. Besides that, I have been almost always in agitation, cursing 
 the life of a courtier, vainly chasing a little good fortune which 
 seemed to present itself to me, and which fled as soon as I thought 
 I had it ; in ill humor, and not daring to show it ; seeing many ridic- 
 ulous things, and not daring to speak of them ; not ill with the queen ; 
 much in favor with Madame de Prie, — and all that doing nothing 
 for me, except making me lose my time and keeping me from you. 
 .... Oh, madame, I am not in my element here. Have pity upon 
 a poor man who has abandoned his country for a foreign land. 
 Insensate that I am ! In two days I set out to see King Stanislas ; 
 for there is no folly of which I am incapable." 
 
 [To Thieriot, October 17th.] "I have had the folly to abandon 
 my talents and my friends for the illusions of the court, for expecta- 
 tions purely imaginary. ... I have been very well received here by 
 the queen. She has shed tears at the performance of ' Mariamne,' 
 and she has laughed at ' LTndiscret.' She speaks to me frequently ; 
 she calls me 'My poor Voltaire.' A fool would be content with all 
 that; but unfortunately I have sense enough to feel that praise is of 
 small account, that the rule of a poet at court has always something iiL 
 it a little ridiculous, and that it is not permitted to any one lo_be_in 
 this country of ours without some kind of status. Every day they 
 give me hopes, which yield me little nourishment. You would hardly 
 believe, my dear Thieriot, how tired I am of my court life. Henry 
 IV. is very foolishly sacrificed to the court of Louis XV. I mourn 
 the moments which I take away from him. yThe poor child ^lready 
 ought to have appeared in quarto, on fine paper, with a fair margin 
 and handsome type. That will surely be done this winter, whatever 
 
 happens. Epic poetry is my forte, or I am much deceived 
 
 All the poets in the world, I believe, have come together at Fontaine- 
 bleau. The queen is every day assassinated with Pindaric odes, 
 sonnets, epistles, and marriage songs. I imagine she takes the poets 
 for the court fools ; and if so she is very right, for it is a great folly 
 for a man of letters to be here, where he neither gives nor receives 
 pleasure."
 
 VOLTAIRE A COURTIER. 183 
 
 But at length, November 13tli, he wrote in a more cheerful 
 strain, and had an item of good news to communicate to liis 
 friends : " The queen has just given me from her privy purse 
 a pension of fifteen hundred livres, which I did not solicit. 
 This is a first step toward obtaining the things which I do 
 ask. I am in good credit with the second prime minister, 
 M. Paris-Duverney. I count upon the friendship of Madame 
 de Prie. I begin to have a reasonable hope of being able 
 sometimes to be useful to my friends." 
 
 He was now past thirty years of age. He had published a 
 poem which the intelligent mind of his country had sealed 
 with its warm approval. He had written three tragedies, 
 two of which had succeeded upon the stage, had been read 
 all over Europe with pleasure, and remain at this day part 
 of the classic literature of his country. He had composed a 
 hundred agreeable poems : some a little free, as the manner 
 of that age was, many of them both pleasing and meritorious. 
 He had written a graceful comedy, which, trifling as it was, 
 had given innocent pleasure to more persons than one of 
 the grand seigneurs of the period could rationally expect to 
 please in a life-time of fourscore years. He had within 
 him undeveloped capacities from which good works were to 
 be hoped. All these things he had done ; all this and more 
 he was, in December, 1725, when he returned from court to 
 Paris with his little pension in his pocket, and hope in his 
 heart of greater things to follow. Besides his personal merits 
 and his solid claims, he possessed artificial advantages, such 
 as the favor of the queen, of her father, of the prime minis- 
 ter's mistress and secretary, as well as a wide acquaintance} 
 with the grandees of the kingdom. What was he, then?*v .^ — 
 What human rights had he in his native land ? Was he anvil ■ 
 at thirty, or was he hammer ? If, on this subject, he had cher- 
 ished any vainglorious doubts, he was now to be rudely and 
 finally undeceived. He was to discover that he was nobody : 
 in France ; or, as Alexis Piron expressed it, " nothing, not 
 even an Academician."
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 m THE BASTILLE AGAIN. 
 
 i; :. At the opera in Paris, one evening in December, 1725, 
 Voltaire was conversing with acquaintances in the lobby 
 between the acts ; perhaps " laying down the law " with some 
 positiveness, as was his right. Who should lay down the law 
 of the drama if not he ? Among the by-standers was the 
 Chevalier de Rohan, a member of historic families whicli 
 had given to France cardinals, generals, dukes, princes, and 
 ministers in every century since the kingdom was consoli- 
 dated. A Cardinal de Rohan was a personage of weight and 
 splendor at that time, predecessor of the Cardinal de Rohan 
 who figured sixty years later in the affair of the diamond 
 necklace. This chevalier, forty-three years of age, a dissolute 
 man-about-town, broke into the conversation in an insolent tone, 
 saying, — 
 
 " Monsieur de Voltaire, Monsieur Arouet, what is your 
 name ? " 
 (^ The answer which the poet made on this occasion is not 
 ^ recorded, nor whether he made any. Two days after, he was 
 at the theatre, and there again he met the Chevalier de Ro- 
 han, — either in the warming-room Qe chauffoir) or in the 
 box of the actress Madame Lecouvreur, who was present. 
 The chevalier repeated the offensive question, when Voltaire 
 replied, — 
 
 " I do not trail after me a great name, but I know how to 
 honor the name I bear." 
 
 Another version is, " I begin my name ; the Chevalier de 
 Rohan finishes his." 
 
 Rohan raised his cane as if to strike ; Voltaire placed 
 his hand upon his sword ; the actress fainted ; and thus the 
 scene was brought to an end, Voltaire the victor. Two or 
 three days after, the poet was dining with his old patron and
 
 IN THE BASTILLE AGAIN. 185 
 
 protector, the Duke of Sully, when a servant came to his ^ / 
 
 chair, and informed him that some one wished to speak to o / 
 him at the door of the mansion. The Hotel de Sully, where ^- 
 
 these events occurred still stands, and bears the number 143 
 Rue Saint-Antoine. Upon reaching the street, he saw two 
 hackney-coaches standing near. Two men came up to him, 
 and asked him to stand upon the steps of the nearest carriage, 
 which he was proceeding to do, supposing that the person who 
 desired to speak to him was in that vehicle. At the mo- 
 ment when his foot touched the step, he was seized by the 
 coat, and a shower of blows fell upon his shoulders. A voice 
 from the other coach was heard, crying out, — 
 
 " Don't hit him upon the head! Something good may come 
 out of that." 
 
 Voltaire recognized the voice as that of the Chevalier de 
 Rohan, whom he saw sitting in the coach, watching and di- 
 recting the proceedings. Indeed, the brave knight, m relating 
 the exploit to his intimates, would say, " I was in command 
 of the laborers " Qe8 travailleurs), using the military term for 
 the men detailed to throw up intrenchments. Voltaire at 
 length tore himself from the clutch of the hired ruffians, and 
 made his way back to the dining-room, where he related 
 what had occurred. He asked the Duke of Sully to make 
 common cause with him in obtaining legal redress for an out- 
 rage done upon his guest, at his own door, and therefore an 
 affront to the master of the house. He besought the duke, 
 at least, to go with him to a commissary of police, and de- ^ 
 pose to the facts within his knowledge. Rohan was cousin 
 to the duke, and it now appeared that the Duke of Sully 
 was neither aristocrat enough nor man enough to seize this 
 chance of honoring his order and himself. He refused to 
 stand by his guest. Voltaire rushed from the hotel, never 
 again to enter an abode where, for nearly ten years, he had 
 been on the footing almost of a younger brother. 
 
 He hurried away to the opera, where he found Madame de 
 Prie, the mistress of the Duke of Bourbon, not yet deposed 
 from the ministry, though soon to be. To her he related the 
 unspeakable wrong he had suffered. She sympathized with 
 him, took his part with the minister, and, for a few days, they 
 hoped the Duke of Bourbon would do him some kind of jus-
 
 186 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 tice. But, it seems, a friend of the Rohans neutralized the 
 influence of the mistress by showing the one-eyed duke an 
 epigram, addressed to INIadame de Prie, and falsely attributed 
 to Voltaire, which ran thus: "lo, without seeming to feign, 
 knew how to deceive all the hundred eyes of Argus. We 
 have only one eye to fear ; why not be happy ? " Nor was 
 the minister so firm in his seat at that moment that he could 
 safely offend so powerful a family as the Rohans. It was soon 
 manifest that the injured man had nothing to expect from the 
 court, and if ever his wrong was avenged it must be by his 
 own hand or arm. Meanw^hile, the secret police received 
 orders to keep an eye upon both knight and poet, and to take 
 measures for preventing a renewal of strife between them. 
 The language of these orders shows what the great world 
 thought of the affair. 
 
 The lieutenant of police to the commissary of detectives, 
 March 23, 1726 : " Sir, His Royal Highness is informed that 
 Monsieur the Chevalier de Rohan sets out this day ; and, as 
 he may have some new procedure \^procSde^ with the Sieur 
 de Voltaire, or the latter commit some madcap act (^coup 
 d'etourdi), he desires you to have them observed in such a 
 way that nothing of the kind may happen." ^ 
 
 The lieutenant of police uses the polite word procede when 
 anticipating the conduct of a Rohan, and the contemptuous 
 phrase coup d^etourdi when describing the probable behavior 
 of Voltaire. He was not far wrong. For a private person 
 without powerful protection to attempt, in 1726, to get justice 
 against an adversary closely allied to princes in church and 
 state was indeed the act of an etourdi. This valiant chev- 
 alier never received the slightest reprimand for his conduct 
 in this affair, nor was his promotion in the arm}'- retarded 
 by it. At this time he held a rank equivalent to brigadier- 
 general, and, within ten years, without having performed or 
 witnessed any warlike exploit but this battle with a poet, he 
 rose to the rank of lieutenant-general. Nor is there reason to 
 think that the outrage excited indignation in the public mind. 
 Epigi'ams and other versified satire then played the part which 
 scurrilous newspapers have since occasionally filled in our large 
 cities. We do not at present get into a passion of noble wrath 
 ^ Jeunesse de Voltaire, page 353.
 
 IN THE BASTILE AGAIN. 187 
 
 when the irrepressible editor of such a newspaper is assailed 
 either in his pocket or in his person. Voltaire, in all his lit- 
 erary career of sixty years, rarely wrote ill-natured verse, and 
 never except under strong provocation ; but, unfortunately, 
 he had the credit of half the stinging satire that circulated in 
 his early time. " We should be unhappy, indeed," said the 
 Bishop of Blois, when he heard of this affair, " if poets had 
 no shoulders." There is a lurking baseness in many minds 
 which compels them to side always with the man who is at 
 the comfortable end of the stick. Six weeks after the out- 
 rage, Advocate Marais wrote to a correspondent : — 
 
 " I send you a piece of verse all fresh against M. de Fon- 
 tenelle. It is very malign, — worse than blows with a cane. 
 Those of Voltaire are spoken of no more. He keeps them. 
 People remember the reply of the late Duke of Orleans when 
 Voltaire asked for justice on a similar occasion : '■You have had 
 it.'' .... The poor Beaten shows himself as often as he can 
 at court, in the city ; but no one pities him, and those whom 
 he thought to be his friends have turned their backs upon him. 
 The rumor runs that the poet Roy has also had his basting 
 (hastonnade) for an epigram. And so, at last, behold our 
 poets, through fear of the stick, reduced to their legitimate 
 work of learning and pleasing." ^ ^ 
 
 Thus the commonplace man interprets an affair of this nat- 
 ure ; and, doubtless, all that was ordinary and all that was 
 mean in the idle Paris of that day commented so upon the 
 enormous, the inexpiable wrong done upon the man destined 
 to give his name to his era. Doubtless, too, the gift of witty 
 utterance was abused, and epigrams themselves sometimes 
 needed " tempering." " What is the common price of an 
 oak stick, sir?" said Dr. Johnson to Davies. "Sixpence." 
 " Why, then, sir, give me leave to send your servant for a shil- 
 ling one. I 'II have a double quantity, for I am told Foote 
 means to take me off, as he calls it, and I am determined he 
 shall not do it with impunity." Foote was notified, and for- 
 bore to take off Dr. Johnson. 
 
 Paris was very familiar at that time with the appeal to the ip 
 stick in disputes between the owners and the movers of the 
 world. Marais alludes to the poet Roy's mishap. The Count 
 
 1 3 Marais, 393.
 
 188 LIFE or VOLTAIRE. 
 
 de Clermont having been elected one of the forty members of 
 
 ^; the French Academy, Roy had taken the liberty of saying 
 
 that thirty-nine plus zero had never yet made forty. This 
 
 < harmless joke subjected him to blows. The illustrious Mo- 
 
 < Here, after the production of his Misanthrope, passed several 
 days in expectation of similar treatment from a person sup- 
 posed to have been represented in the play. He knew well 
 that he had no protection, and could obtain no redress, from 
 the law. Moncrif, for some jests in his " History of Cats," was 
 assailed by blows in the streets. Advocate Barbier relates an 
 incident of 1721, to this effect: The Duke de Meilleraie, a fool 
 and an etourdi, while driving his phaeton over one of the nar- 
 row bridges of Paris, was in danger of running down a horse 
 carrying in a panzer several little children. A priest who 
 was passing remonstrated ; whereupon the duke sprang to the 
 ground and " gave him twenty strokes with his whip." The 
 priest, through his superior, complained. The Prince de Ro- 
 han, the duke's father-in-law, tried to pacify him ; but he de- 
 manded reparation, and, being a priest, obtained it. The of- 
 fending nobleman was obliged to apologize in the presence of 
 all the priests of the convent, to settle upon the injured man 
 an annuit}^ of two hundred francs, and to pass a year in the 
 chateau of Vincennes. No man of letters, unconnected with 
 the privileged orders, could have had such redress. So many 
 men of letters were subjected to outrage of this nature in that 
 age that the records have furnished M. Victor Fournel with 
 the material for a volume upon the " R61e of the Stick in Lit- 
 erary History." Literature had to make its way in France 
 between the cudgel and the Bastille, after it had outUved the 
 period of the wheel and the fagot. 
 
 In such a time, in such a country, what ought Voltaire to 
 r* have done ? He must have read the song circulated in March, 
 1726, in which he was said to have been brevetted batonnier, 
 staff-bearer to his regiment. He probably heard of the verb 
 newly added to the French language, voUairiser, to voltaire^ 
 to heat. What should he have done? I cannot answer the 
 question. To have submitted in silence to such an infamy he 
 must have been either more or less than man. He was 
 neither. To have taken " wild justice," as Lord Bacon ex- 
 presses it, by putting to death the poor creature who had 
 
 1
 
 IN THE BASTILLE AGAIN. 189 
 
 wronged him, would have involved the spoiling, if not the loss, 
 of his own life. He could have taken a frightful vengeance 
 by his pen, as he often did when the injury was less ; but on 
 this occasion he felt the outrage too keenly to give his feelings 
 effective expression. Effective expression is art, and the artist 
 must have a tranquil mind. Othello was the man in the 
 world who was farthest from being able either to write or to 
 play the Moor of Venice. As to the courts of justice, had he 
 not tried them in the case of Captain Beauregard, and in- 
 volved himself in endless expense and trouble, only to remain 
 in the thoughtless mind " the man who had got himself 
 caned " ? ^ 
 
 He resolved to challenge Rohan to mortal combat with the <<; 
 
 sword, a weapon which he had worn for many years, and 
 knew how to use about as well as a poet of the present time 
 knows how to box. The equalizing pistol was not then em- 
 ployed on "the field of honor." He now abstained from his 
 usual haunts, took lessons in fencing, and sought the advice of 
 men learned in the art of polite combat, not suspecting that 
 he was under surveillance of the police. He was determined 
 not to throw away his life by going to the field too soon, and, 
 accordingly, he spent nearly four months in acquiring skill X 
 with his weapon. 
 
 April 16, 1726, the lieutenant of police sent important in- 
 formation to his chief : — 
 
 " The Sieur de Voltaire intends to insult the Chevalier de Rohan 
 immediately, and with eclat. Several times during the last six weeks '"^ 
 he has changed both his residence and his quarter. We have informa- 
 tion that he is now at the house of one Leynault, a fencing-master, 
 Rue St. Martin, where he lives in very bad company. It is said that 
 he is in relations with some soldiers of the guards, and that several bul- 
 lies [hretteurs] frequent his lodgings. Whatever truth there may be in 
 these last reports, it is certain that he has very bad designs, and it is 
 su^e also that he has had one of his relations [Daumart] come from 
 the country, who is to accompany him in the combat. This relation 
 is a more moderate man than M. de Voltaire, and desires to calm him, 
 but it is impossible. He is more irritated and more furious than ever 
 in his conduct and in his conversation. All this intelligence deter- 
 mines the lieutenant to put the king's orders into execution, if possible, 
 this very night, judging it to be his duty to prevent the disorder of 
 which he has been distinctly notified."
 
 190 LIEE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 That evening, or the next, Voltaire and Thieriot were at 
 L- the Theatre Fran^ais, and observed that the Chevalier de Ro- 
 
 han was, as usual, in the box of Madame Lecouvreur. During 
 the evening, they went to the door of the box, which Voltaire 
 o~"^ entered, leaving Thieriot outside, within hearing. As Thieriot 
 used to tell the story in old age, Voltaire addressed Rohan 
 thus : — 
 
 " Monsieur, if some affair of interest has not made you for- 
 get the outrage of which I have to complain, I hope that you 
 will give me satisfaction for it/' 
 
 The chevalier accepted the challenge, naming time and 
 place, — St. Martin's Gate, the next morning at nine. But 
 the next morning at nine Voltaire was in the Bastille. He 
 was arrested, as it appears, after the scene in the box, either 
 near the theatre or at his lodgings. It is certain that he 
 ^-?^ 1- awoke on the morning of April 18, 1726, within the chateau 
 of the Bastille, a guest of the king, and so missed his appoint- 
 ment. He was provided, according to the ofl&cial report, with 
 pocket pistols at the time of his arrest ; evidently an etourdi 
 of desperate character. Two respectable families were relieved 
 by the lettre de cachet which deprived Voltaire of his weapons 
 and his liberty, the Rohans and the Arouets. The lieuten- 
 ant of police remarked, in his report of the arrest, that " the 
 family of the prisoner applauded unanimously and universally 
 the wisdom of an order which kept the young man from com- 
 mitting some new folly, and the worthy persons of whom that 
 family was composed from the mortification of sharing the 
 confusion of it." 
 
 Considering all the circumstances, the arrest was, perhaps, 
 the kindest thing such a government could have done, and it 
 probably gratified every person who really wished well to the 
 prisoner. The measure, among other effects, brought about 
 a reaction of public feeling in his favor. The veteran sol- 
 dier, the Duke of Villars, so often in later years the host and 
 familiar correspondent of Voltaire, records in his Memoires 
 that the public now censured, and, as he thought, justly cen- 
 sured, all parties : Voltaire, for having offended the Chevalier 
 de Rohan ; the chevalier, for having committed a crime wor- 
 thy of death, in causing a citizen to be beaten ; the govern- 
 ment, for not punishing a notoriously bad action, and for
 
 IN THE BASTILLE AGAIN. 191 
 
 having the beaten man put into the Bastille to tranquilize the 
 beater." ^ 
 
 This was probably the general feeling at the moment. The 
 chevalier was evidently held in odium, and the belief was gen- r 
 eral, though mistaken, that Voltaire had been arrested at the 
 solicitation of the Rohans, who gave out that the chevalier, 
 being lame from a fall, was not in lighting trim. A report was 
 also circulated that the poet, in the violence of his rage, had 
 gone to Versailles and asked for the chevalier at the very door 
 of the Cardinal de Rohan's august abode ! The captive, upon 
 being established once more at the grim chateau, wrote to the 
 minister in charge of the Department of Paris a spirited and ^ci. 
 
 notunbecoming note : — 
 
 " The Sieur de Voltaire very humbly represents that he was 
 assaulted by the brave Chevalier de Rohan, assisted by six 
 hamstringers, behind whom he was boldly posted ; that ever 
 since he has constantly sought to repair, not his own honor, 
 but that of the chevalier, which has proved too difficult. If 
 he went to Versailles, it is most untrue that it was for the pur- 
 pose of asking for the Chevalier de Rohan at the house of the 
 Cardinal de Rohan. It is very easy for the Sieur de Voltaire 
 to prove the contrary, and he consents to remain in the Bas- 
 tille the rest of his life, if he deceives on this point. He asks 
 permission to take his meals at the table of the governor of 
 the Bastille, and to be allowed to receive visitors. With still 
 more earnestness he requests permission to go at once to Eng- 
 land. If there is any doubt of his desire to depart thither, an 
 officer can go with him as far as Calais." ^ 
 
 The minister was complaisant. An order was at once sent 
 to the Bastille, in the king's name, to the effect that the pris- 
 oner should have every liberty and privilege consistent with 
 his safe-keeping. He dined at the governor's table, with other 
 favored guests of the king. His friends, roused by his cap- 
 tivity, flocked in to see him in such numbers that the minis- 
 ter was alarmed, and sent a new order, limitincr his visitors to 
 six, to be designated by the prisoner. Thieriot dined with 
 him almost every day, and brought him English books, which 
 he studied diligently. An old clerk of his father was much 
 with him, arranging affairs of business. Madame de Berni- 
 
 1 23 Memoires. 323.
 
 192 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 dres and other ladies of liis circle shone in upon him, now 
 
 ( and then. Among the prisoners, also, were agreeable per- 
 
 H. ^ \ sons, male and female. And so the days passed in business, in 
 
 ,^r \conversation, in eager study of the English language ; not 
 
 'c without occasional passionate outbursts against the injustice 
 
 , of which he was a victim. He asked the lieutenant of police, 
 
 one day, — 
 
 " What is done with people who forge lettres de cachet^'' 
 
 " They arc hanged," was the reply. 
 
 " It is always well done," said Voltaire, " in anticipation of 
 the time when those who sign genuine ones shall be served 
 in the same way." ^ 
 
 His captivity on this occasion lasted fifteen days. Arrested 
 April 17th, he was released May 2d, on condition of binding 
 himself to go at once to England. But the minister did not 
 rely upon his promise ; for Conde, the chief turnkey of the 
 Bastille, was ordered " to accompany him as far as Calais, and 
 to see him embark and set sail from that port." The prisoner 
 sent this news to jNIadame de Bernieres, and asked her to lend 
 him her traveling carriage for the journey, and to come at 
 once to see him, for the last time, with Madame du Deffand 
 and Thieriot. "To-morrow, Wednesday," he wrote to her, "all 
 who wish to see me can enter freely. I flatter myself that I 
 shall have the opportunity of assuring you once more in my 
 life of my true and respectful attachment." May 3d he en- 
 tered the chaise at the Bastille gate, with Conde, and was 
 driven, in two days, to Calais, where good friends entertained 
 him four days, while he was waiting for the sailing of the 
 packet. He embarked, at length, and saw his native land re- 
 cede from view. 
 
 His powerful friends at Paris did not forget him. Some 
 weeks after his departure from the Bastille, the Count de 
 Morville, minister for foreign affairs, who had been much his 
 ' friend for several years, interposed in his behalf. The Wal- 
 poles were then supreme in England : Sir Robert being prime 
 minister, his eldest son a new peer, his brother Horace am- 
 bassador at the French court, and as noted in the diplomacy 
 of that generation as his nephew and namesake of Straw- 
 berry Hill was in the society of the next. " Old Horace 
 
 1 4 CEuvres dc Voltaire, 122. 
 
 M
 
 IN THE BASTILLE AGAIN. 193 
 
 Walpole," at the instance of Count de Morville, wrote, May 
 29, 1726, a letter, commending the exile to Bubb Doding- 
 ton, a gentlemen of great estate, fond of gathering men of 
 letters under his roof : — 
 
 " Dear Sir, — Mr. Voltaire, a French poet, who has wrote sev- 
 eral pieces with great success here, being gone for England in order 
 to print by subscription an excellent poem, called Henry IV., which, 
 on account of some bold strokes in it against persecution and the 
 priests, cannot be printed here ; M. de Morville, the Maecenas, or, I 
 may truly say, the Dodington here, for the encouragement of wit and 
 learning, has earnestly recommended it to me to use my credit and in- 
 terest for promoting this subscription among my friends ; on which 
 account, as well as for the sake of merit, I thought I could apply my- 
 self nowhere more properly than to you ; and I hope this will an- 
 swer the particular view and interest which I have in it myself, which 
 is to renew a correspondence so agreeable to me ; who am, with the 
 greatest truth and affection, sir, your most obedient and most humble 
 servant, H. Walpole." 
 
 There were circumstances in the politics of the moment 
 which made the Walpoles particularly desirous of obliging 
 Count de Morville. This letter therefore opened to the poet 
 the great whig houses of the kingdom, while his acquaintance 
 with Bolingbroke gave him favorable access to tory circles. 
 He knew, as yet, very little English ; but at that time, George 
 I. being King of England, French was the language of the 
 court, and during a part of every season a company of 
 French comedians performed in London, — " the French ver- 
 min," Aaron Hill called them in 1721. 
 
 Voltaire was going to a very foreign land, farther then from / 
 France than Australia is now from the United States ; a land | 
 less known to Frenchmen of that day than any land on earth 
 now is to us. It was the time, too, when French and English 
 accepted the theory that, being neighbors, only twenty-one 
 miles apart, and having more reasons to be friends than any 
 other two nations on the globe, they were " natural enemies." 
 At least, such was the conviction of the average English mind. 
 " We can do without the English coming among us," wrote 
 Advocate Marais, in 1725, " for they do not love us, and are 
 very haughty with us, notwithstanding our politeness and our 
 civility." Happily, the educated classes of every land have 
 
 VOL. I. 13
 
 194 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 many dear interests in common, and some of them get above 
 the grosser provincial prejudices. J. B. Rousseau had been in 
 England in 1721, and found there subscribers enough to a 
 quarto edition of his poems to put into his pocket a profit of 
 five hundred pounds sterling. ^ 
 
 Voltaire, as his letters show, carried with him across the 
 channel a heart filled wnth bitterness and rage. The indig- 
 nity he had received was one of those which even common- 
 place men bear with equanimity only when they are suffered 
 by others. He could not get over it. The wrong was too 
 recent, and it came upon him with the force of accumulation ; 
 for this was the second time that he had been obliged to en- 
 dure it. Satiric poets of the day insisted that it was the third 
 time, and they did not neglect to repeat the statement when- 
 ever opportunity invited. Could he ever live in France on the 
 principle that, as often as he suffered gross indignity, it was to 
 be himself who should receive the stigma of public punish- 
 ment, while the man who had committed the outrage showed 
 himself nightly, in agreeable and distinguished boxes at the 
 theatre, complacent and boastful ? Could he ever frequent 
 the haunts of men, bearing upon his person a label, legible to 
 every passer-by, This is the Man who may be Beaten ! 
 
 1 42 Nouvelle Biographic Generale, 734.
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 England gave the exile a smiling welcome. The ac- 
 count which he afterwards wi'ote of his arrival and of his 
 first impressions of the country must not be taken quite 
 literally. There is evidently that mingling in it of fact, 
 fancy, and banter which he was often obliged to employ in 
 treating ticklish subjects in the land of the Bastille, and 
 which became at length habitual with him. Instead of land- 
 ing at Dover, as travelers usually did, he sailed, as it ap- 
 pears, up the Thames as far as Greenwich, five miles below 
 London, and there he first set foot on British soil. 
 
 It was one of the most beautiful days of May. The sky, 
 he records, was without a cloud, and a soft breeze from the 
 west tempered the sun's heat, and disposed all hearts to joy. 
 It chanced also to be the day of the great Greenwich Fair, 
 which was then a day of festivity to Londoners, who came 
 in crowds to witness games, races, and regattas. The river 
 was covered, he says, with two rows of merchant-ships for 
 the space of six miles, with their sails all spread to do honor 
 to the king and queen, who were upon the river in a gilded 
 barge, preceded by boats with bands of music, and followed 
 by a tliousand wherries, each rowed by two men in breeches 
 ' and doublet, with large silver plates upon their shoulders. 
 " Tliere was not one of these oarsmen," remarks the stranger, 
 " who did not assure me, by his face, his dress, and his excel- 
 lent condition [embonpoint] that he was a freeman, and lived 
 in plenty." 
 
 Near the river, in Greenwich Park, four miles in circum- 
 ference, he observed a prodigious number of well-formed 
 young people on horseback, cantering around a race-course 
 marked with white posts. Among them were women, who 
 galloped up and down with much grace. But he was es-
 
 196 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 pecially pleased with the girls on foot, most of whom were 
 clad in Indian stuffs. Many of them were beautiful ; all 
 were well made ; and there was a neatness in their dress, a 
 vivacity in their movements, and an air of satisfaction in 
 their faces that made them all pleasing. Roaming about 
 the Park, he came to a smaller race-course, not more than 
 five hundred feet long. " What is this for ? " he asked. 
 He was told that this was for a foot-race, while the larger 
 course was for horses. Near one of the posts of the large circle 
 was a man on horseback holding in his hand a silver pitcher, 
 and at the end of the smaller course were two poles, with a 
 large hat at the top of one, and a chemise floating like a flag 
 from the other. Between the two poles stood a stout man 
 bearing a purse. The pitcher, he learned, was the prize for 
 the horse-race, and the purse for the foot-race. But what of 
 the hat and the chemise ? He was " agreeably surprised " to 
 be told that there was to be a race by the girls, and that 
 the winner was to receive, besides the purse, the chemise, 
 " as a mark of honor," while the winning man was to have 
 the hat. 
 
 Continuing his rambles, he had the good fortune to fall 
 in with some English merchants to whom he had letters of 
 introduction. These gentlemen, he saj'S, did the honors of 
 the festival with the eagerness and the cordiality of men who 
 are happy themselves, and wish to make others sharers in 
 their joy. They had a horse brought for him ; they sent for 
 refreshments ; and took care to get him a place whence he 
 could comfortably view the races, the river, and vast Lon- 
 don in the distance. At first he thought himself transported 
 to the Olympic Games ; but when he beheld the beauty of 
 the Thames, the fleets of ships, the immensity of London, 
 he "blushed to have compared Greece with England." Some 
 one told him that at that very moment there was a " com- 
 bat of gladiators " in progress at London ; and then he 
 thouofht he was with the ancient Romans. Near him on the 
 stand was a Danish courier, who had only arrived that morn- 
 ing, and was to set. out on his return in the evening. " He 
 appeared to me," says Voltaire, " overcome with joy and 
 wonder. He believed that this nation was always gay, that 
 the women were all beautiful and animated, that the sky of
 
 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND. 197 
 
 Encrland was always clear and serene, that people there 
 thought only of pleasure, aiKl that every day in the year was 
 like this. He went away without being undeceived. For my 
 part, I was more enchanted even than my Dane." 
 
 Such were his first hours in England. Ben Franklin was a 
 journeyman printer in London then. What more likely than 
 that he was at Greenwich that day ? He may have brushed 
 past the eager Frenchman, whom he was to meet in such sin- 
 gular circumstances fifty-two years after. He may have been 
 one of the stout, well-dressed, fresh-complexioned youths whom 
 Voltaire admired galloping about in the Park ; for at Green- 
 wich Fair many young fellows rode who trudged the rest of 
 the year on foot. *=» 
 
 Voltaire was not long in learning that England was not j 
 always clad in smiles. He was in London the same evening, i 
 probably at the house of Lord Bolingbroke, which was usually ; 
 the place of his abode in London, and to which his letters from 
 France w^ere addressed. 
 
 In the course of his first evening, as he relates, he met 
 some ladies of fashion. He spoke to them of the " ravishing 
 spectacle " which he had witnessed at Greenwich, not doubt- 
 ing that they also had witnessed it, and had formed part of the 
 gay assemblage of ladies galloping round the course. He was 
 a little surprised, however, to observe that they had not that 
 air of vivacity which people usually exhibit who have just 
 returned from a day's pleasure. On the contrary, they were 
 constrained and reserved, sipped their tea, made a great noise, 
 with their fans, talked scandal, played cards, or read the news- 
 paper. At length, one of these fine ladies, "more charitable 
 than the rest," informed the puzzled foreigner that people 
 of fashion never abased themselves so far as to attend mis- 
 cellaneous gatherings like the one which had given him so 
 much delight ; that all those pretty girls, clad in the fabrics 
 of India, were only servants and vilUigers ; that those hand- 
 some young men, so well mounted, and cantering so gayly 
 in the Park, were nothing but scholars and apprentices on 
 hired horses. These unexpected statements he could not be- 
 lieve, and he felt himself moved to anger against the lady 
 who made them. 
 
 Bent on pursuing his investigations into the character of
 
 198 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 this strange people, he went, the next day, into the city, to 
 find the merchants and aldermen who had been so cordial to 
 him at his "supposed Olympic Games." In a coffee-house, 
 which was dirty, ill furnished, badly served, and dimly lighted, 
 he found most of those gentlemen who, on the afternoon 
 before, had been so affable and good-humored. Not a man 
 of them recognized him. He ventured to address a remark to 
 some of them. They either made no reply at all, or else merely 
 answered yes or no. He imagined he must have offended 
 them. He tried to remember if he had rated the fabrics of 
 Lyons above theirs, if he had said that the French cooks 
 were better than the English, if he had intimated that Paris 
 was a more agreeable city th;m London, if he had hinted 
 that time passed more pleasantly at Versailles than at St. 
 James's, or if he had been guilty of any other enormity of 
 that kind. No, his conscience acquitted him of all guilt. 
 -^At length, " with an air of vivacity that appeared very strange 
 to them," he took the liberty of asking one of them why 
 they were all so melancholy. The prospect of being able to 
 " chaff " a Frenchman appears to have put a little animation 
 into this group of silent Britons. One of them replied, with 
 a scowl, " The wind is east." At this moment one of their 
 friends came up, who said, with an unmoved countenance, 
 " Molly has cut her throat this morning. Her lover found 
 her dead in her bedroom, with a bloody razor at her side." 
 The company, " who all were Molly's friends," received this 
 horrid intelligence without so much as lifting their eyebrows. 
 One of them merely asked what had become of the lover. " He 
 has bought the razor," quietly remarked one of the company. 
 
 The stranger, who seemed to take all this seriously and 
 affects to relate it seriously, could not refrain from inquir- 
 ing further into such a terrible tragedy. Appalled at once at 
 the event and at tlie indifference of the company, he asked 
 what could have induced a gii'l, apparently fortunate, to 
 put an end to her existence in so revolting a manner. They 
 only replied that the wind was east. Not being able to per- 
 ceive anything in common between an east wind and the 
 suicide of a young girl or the melancholy humor of the mer- 
 chants, he abruptly left the coffee-house, and sought again 
 his fashionable friends at court. There, too, all was sad ;
 
 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND. 199 
 
 and nobody could talk about anything but the east wind. 
 He thought of the Dane whom he had met on the stand at 
 Greenwich Fair, and was inclined to laugh at the false idea 
 he was carrying home with him of the English climate; but, 
 to his amazement, he found that the climate was haviup" 
 its effect upon himself, — he could not laugh ! Expressing 
 his surprise to one of the court physicians, the doctor told 
 him not to be astonished so soon, for in the months of No- 
 vember and Mai'ch he would have cause indeed to wonder. 
 Tlien people hanged themselves by dozens, everybody was 
 sick with low spirits, and a black melancholy overspread 
 the whole nation ; for in those months the wind blew most 
 frequently from the east. " This wind," continued the doc- 
 tor, " is the bane of our island. The very animals suffer 
 from it, and wear a dejected look. Men robust enough to 
 stand this cursed wind lose at least their good humor. Every 
 one shows a severe countenance and has a mind disposed to 
 desperate resolutions. It was an east wind that cut off the 
 head of Charles I. and dethroned James II." Then, whisper- 
 ing in the ear of the Frenchman, he added, " If you have a favor 
 to ask at court, never ask it unless the wind is west or south." 
 It was not alone the courtiers and the merchants who 
 were disposed to amuse themselves with this inquisitive for- 
 eigner. He was in a boat one day upon the Thames. One of 
 the oarsmen, seeing that he had a Frenchman for a passenger, 
 began to boast of the superior liberty of his country, and 
 declared, with an oath, tluit he would rather be a Thames 
 boatman than a French archbishop. The next day, Voltaire 
 relates, he saw this very man at the window of a prison, 
 stretching his hand through the bars. " What do you think 
 now of a French archbishop?" cried Voltaire. "Ah, sir," 
 replied the man, "the abominable government we have! 
 They have forced me away from my wife and children to 
 serve in a king's ship, and have put me in prison and chained 
 my feet, for fear I should run away before the ship sails." 
 A Frenchman who was with Voltaire at the time confessed 
 that he felt a malicious pleasure in seeing that the English, 
 who reproached the French with tlieir servitude, were as much 
 slaves as they. " I had a sentiment more humane," remarks 
 Voltaire. "I was grieved that there was no more liberty
 
 200 LIFE OF VOLTATRE. 
 
 on earth." He consoled himself, also, with observing that, if 
 the king impressed sailors, everybody in Evigland could speak 
 and write with sufficient freedom. " I have seen four very 
 learned treatises against the reality of the miracles of Jesus 
 Christ printed here with impunity, at a time when a poor 
 bookseller was put into the pillory for publishing a transla- 
 tion of " La Religieuse en Chemise." He thought it a strange 
 British inconsistency that the government should permit the 
 printing of heresy and punish the publication of indecency. 
 A few days after, he observed another oddity at Newmarket. 
 He was told that there he would see the true Olympic 
 Games. He saw, indeed, a concourse of noblemen, the king 
 and royal famil3% and a " prodigious number of the swiftest 
 horses in Europe flying around the course, ridden by little pos- 
 tilions in silk jackets ; " but he also saw " jockeys of quality bet- 
 ting ngainst one another, who put into this solemnity more of 
 swindling than magnificence." ^ He preferred Greenwich Fair 
 to Newmarket races. 
 
 These may be taken as his first impressions of England ; 
 and probably the strange things he saw on every side distracted 
 and amused him for a few days or weeks. But he had not 
 come to England to stay. He had promised the minister to 
 go to England; but he had entered, so far as we know, into 
 
 N no engagement as to the length of his stay. A few weeks 
 
 after his arrival, he returned secretly to France, in quest of 
 Rohan. He concealed himself there, and, as it seems, wore 
 some disguise. He saw no member of his family : not his 
 sister, whom he loved ; still less his brother, whom he did 
 not love. He did not let his comrade, Thieriot, know that 
 he had been in Paris until he was safe out of it, perhaps 
 at Rouen, more than once his hiding-place. Fi'om his retreat 
 in France he wrote, August 12, 1726, to Thieriot a long 
 and melancholy letter. He remained during many months of 
 this year in the depths of gloom. 
 
 " I will confess to you, my dear Thieriot [he wrote], that I made 
 
 a little joiirney to Paris lately. Since I did not see you, you will 
 
 easily conclude that I saw no one. I sought but a single man, whom 
 
 the instinct of his poltroonery concealed from me, as if he had di- 
 
 "' vined that I was on his track. At last, the fear of being discovered 
 
 1 35 CEuvrcs de Voltaire, 7.
 
 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 201 
 
 made me leave more precipitately than I carae. I am still uncertain 
 whether I shall return to London. England is a country, I know, 
 where all the arts are honored and recompensed ; where there is a dif- 
 ference in conditions, but none between man and man except that of 
 merit. It is a country where men think freely and nobly, unrestrained 
 by servile fear. If I should follow my inclination, it is there that I 
 should fix myself, if only to learn how to think. But I know not if 
 my limited fortune, much disordered by my frequent journeys, my bad 
 health, now worse than ever, and my preference for the most profound 
 seclusion, will permit me to encounter the clatter and bustle of White- 
 hall and London. I am well introduced in that country, and I am 
 expected there with cordiality enough ; but I cannot assure you that 
 I shall make the voyage. I have but two things to do in my life : 
 one, to risk it with honor as soon as I can ; and the other, to pass 
 what shall remain of it in the obscurity of a retreat suited to my Way 
 
 iJ 
 
 of thinking, to my misfortunes, and to my knowledge of men. 
 
 " I abandon with good heart my pensions from the king and queen ; 
 regretting only not to have been able to secure you a share of them. 
 It would be a consolation to me in my solitude to think that I had 
 been able, once in my life, to be of some use to you ; but I am fated 
 to be unfortunate in all ways. The greatest pleasure an honest man 
 
 can feel, that of giving pleasure to his friends, is denied to me 
 
 If I have still some friends who pronounce my name in your hearing, 
 speak to them of me with moderation, and cherish the remembrance 
 which they are willing to preserve of me." 
 
 He remained in concealment for about two months ; then 
 crossed the Channel once more, and prepared to settle in Eng- 
 land. A budget of letters awaited him, the first he had re- 
 ceived since leaving the Bastille. Among them was one from 
 a Mademoiselle Bessieres, who had been an inmate of his fa- 
 ther's house, and was in some way closely allied to the family. 
 She may have been his governess. From her he now received 
 the intelligence of his only sister's death. The letter whicb 
 he wrote in reply was all tenderness and contrition. Weaned 
 from the great world which had flattered, deluded, and aban- 
 doned him, his heart softened toward his kindred and the 
 friends of his childhood, even toward that Jansenist of a 
 brother of his, who, as he thought, had behaved less like a 
 brother than ever to him since his father's estate had been in 
 litigation. Thus he wrote to Mademoiselle Bessieres, October 
 15, 1726 : — 
 
 < 
 
 Q^. 
 
 \
 
 202 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 " What can I say to you, mademoiselle, about the death of my sis- 
 ter, if not that it would have been far better for our family and for 
 me if I had been taken away in her stead ? It is not for me to speak 
 to you of the little imijortance I attach to this passage, so short and 
 so difficult, which is called life. Upon that subject you have ideas 
 more enlightened than I, and drawn from purer sources. I am ac- 
 ('^ quainted only with the sorrows of life, but you know their remedies ; 
 and the difference between us is that between patient and doctor. 
 
 " I pray you, mademoiselle, to have the goodness to fulfill even to 
 the end the charitable zeal which you deign to have for me on this 
 mournful occasion. Either prevail upon my brother to give me, with- 
 out a single moment's delay, some news of his health, or else give me 
 some yourself. He alone remains to you of all my father's family, 
 which you regarded as your own. As for me, you must no more 
 count me. Not that I do not still live, so far as regards the respect 
 and affection that I owe to you ; but I am dead for all else. You are 
 gi-eatly mistaken — permit me to say it to you with tenderness and 
 grief — in supposing that I have forgotten you. I have committed 
 "many faults in the course of my life. The chagrins and sufferings 
 which have marked almost all my days have often been my own work. 
 I feel how little worthy I am. My weaknesses seem pitiful to me, 
 and my faults strike me with horror. But God is my witness that I 
 love virtue, and that therefore I am tenderly attached to you for my 
 jwhole life. Adieu ; I embrace you. Allow me to use this expression 
 With all the respect and all the gratitude which I owe to Mademoiselle 
 
 essieres." 
 
 In a similar strain he wrote the next day to Madame de 
 Bernieres, telling her that he was more dead to the world even 
 than his dead sister, and entreating her to forget everything 
 about him except the moments when she had assured him she 
 would always be his friend. " Reckon the moments when I 
 may have displeased you among the number of my misfort- 
 unes, and love me from generosity, if you cannot any longer 
 from inclination." 
 
 To complete his unhappiness, he suffered a considerable loss 
 of money soon after his arrival in England. He brought with 
 him a letter of credit upon Acosta, a Jewish banker, upon 
 presenting wdiich he received a reply which Wagniere thus 
 reports : " Sir, I am very sorry ; I cannot pay you ; for, in the 
 name of the Lord, I went into bankruptcy three days ago." ^ 
 1 1 Mdmoires sur Voltaire, par Longchamp and Wagniere, 23.
 
 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND. 203 
 
 Voltaire, thirty years after, used to tell this story in his ban- 
 tering manner, and state the amount of his loss at twenty thou- 
 sand francs. The banker, he used to say, had " the generos- 
 ity" to pay him some guineas, which a bankrupt could not 
 have been compelled to do ; and secretary Wagniere adds that 
 " the king of England, having heard of the stranger's embar- 
 rassment, sent him a hundred guineas." His pensions from 
 the French court were not paid during his stay abroad. He 
 was not present to call for the money, and under the regime 
 of the period the claims of a pensioner in disgrace were not 
 likely to receive attention at the treasury. Thus, at the age"'' 
 of thirty-two, for a proper and becoming retort to a black- 
 guard's insult, he saw himself obliged to begin the world anew 
 in a foreign land, the very language of which he knew scarcely 
 anything of. To an ordinary traveler ignorance of the lan- 
 guage of a foreign country is merely an inconvenience ; but to 
 this stranger language was the tool of his vocation, and he had 
 deliberately forborne to acquire skill in the use of any other. 
 
 But he rose to the occasion. He put forth that peculiar 
 energy, intense, well-directed, good-humored, sustained, which 
 men exert who conquer the world, and remain victorious to 
 the end. And, first of all, to get possession of the language 
 of his new country. He_ studied English as though he ex- 
 pected to pass the rest of his days in England, and meant to 
 try a career as an English author. His introduction to the 
 Walpoles and his acquaintance with the Bolingbrokes opened 
 to him the most interesting houses, political and literary ; but 
 it was not among the lords of the isle that he found the one 
 helpful friend a stranger needs while he is struggling with a 
 new language. Among the men of business whom he may 
 have met at Greenwich Fair was Everard Falkener, silk and 
 cloth merchant, afterwards Sir Everard Falkener, English am- 
 bassador at Constantinople. This gentleman, who was well 
 versed in the classic languages, a collector of ancient coins and 
 medals, and possessor of a good library, lived at Wandsworth, 
 a pleasant village on the Thames, four or five miles above 
 London, and not far from Richmond. In the hospitable man- 
 ner of the time he took the stranger home, and kept him there 
 a favored guest whenever he was not invited elsewhere. Ever- 
 ard Falkener's house at Wandsworth was, in fact, the home
 
 204 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 of the exile during his stay in England ; and these two re- 
 mained friends and correspondents for thirty-five years after, 
 or as long as both lived. The friendship was continued even 
 to the next generation ; for Voltaire lived to welcome under 
 his own roof at Ferney two grown sons of Sir Everard Falk- 
 ener, to sit between them at his own table, and tell them 
 stories of the time when their father was a father to him in 
 England. Curiously enough, he foretold the ambassadorship 
 of Falkener. " I was a prophet once in my life," he wrote, in 
 1738, to Thieriot, " although not in my own country. It was 
 in London, at our dear Falkener's house. He was only a mer- 
 chant, and I predicted that he would be ambassador at the 
 Forte. He laughed ; but, behold, he is ambassador! " 
 
 The merchant, we may infer, was a contented, cheerful soul, 
 without desire to be ambassador or baronet. Voltaire quotes, 
 in his " Remarks upon Pascal," a few pleasant lines of a letter 
 which he received from Falkener in 1728 : " I am here just 
 as you left me : neither merrier, nor sadder, nor richer, nor 
 poorer ; enjoying perfect health, having everything that ren- 
 ders life agreeable ; without love, without avarice, without am- 
 bition, and without envy, — and as long as all that lasts I shall 
 call myself a very happy man.'' This is a good kind of per- 
 soii for a stranger in a strange land to fall in with. 
 
 An inmate now of an English home, and a frequent guest 
 at others, he was much surprised, it appears, at their plain fur- 
 niture and meagre decoration. London, he afterwards wrote, 
 was very far, in 1726, from being equal to Paris, either in 
 splendor, in taste, in sumptuosity, in costly objects, in agree- 
 ableness, in the fine arts, or in the art of society. He declared 
 that there were " five hundred times more silver plate in the 
 houses of Paris bourgeois than in those of London." A Paris 
 notary, solicitor, or draper, he said, was better lodged, better 
 furnished, better served, than a magistrate of the first city of 
 England ; and Paris consumed in one day more poultry and 
 game than London in a week. Paris, he thought, burned a 
 thousand times more wax candles than London ; for, except at 
 the court end, London was lighted only with tallow.^ 
 
 Under Falkener's hospitable roof, with inmates eager to as- 
 sist him, he improved rapidly in his English. We all under- 
 
 1 61 CEuvres de Voltaire, 403.
 
 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND. 205 
 
 rate the obstacles in the way of making a conquest of another 
 language, a feat so difficult as to approach impossibility, and 
 few men have ever really done it since our race began to artic- 
 ulate. It is probably true, as a writer has recently asserted, 
 that not more than three educated men are ever alive at the 
 same time who know a foreign tongue as well as they know 
 their own. Voltaire evidently meant to be one. English, he 
 would say, was " a learned language," and deserved to be 
 studied as such. The reader shall see for himself what prog- 
 ress he made. He landed on English soil in May, 1726 ; and 
 we have three English letters of his written within the first 
 nine months of his stay. Unfortunately, the least correct one 
 comes to us without date, but we may suppose it written in 
 the summer of 1726. It was copied from the original manu- 
 script without change. The John Brinsden, to whom it was 
 addressed, appears to have been a wine merchant, and to have 
 had relations with Lord Bolingbroke. 
 
 " Sir, — j wish you good health, a quick sale of y'' burgundy, much 
 latin, and greeke to one of y" children, much Law, much of cooke and 
 littleton, to the other, quiet and joy to mistress brinsden, money to 
 all. when you'll drink y'' burgundy with mr furneze, pray tell him 
 j'll never forget his favours. 
 
 " But dear John be so kind as to let me know how does my lady Bol- 
 lingbroke, as to my lord j left him so well j dont doubt he is so still, 
 but j am very uneasie about my lady. If she might have as much 
 health as she has spirit & witt, Sure she would be the Strongest body 
 in england. Pray dear s'' write me Something of her, of my lord, 
 and of you. direct y"" letter by the penny post at m'' Cavalier, Beli- 
 tery square by the li Exchange, j am sincerely & hearlily y'' most 
 humble most obedient rambling friend Voltaire. 
 
 " John Brinsden, esq. 
 durham's yard 
 by charhig cross." ^ 
 
 This being about such a letter as he would be equal to after 
 two or three months of English study, we may presume that it 
 was written before he returned to France in search of his chev- 
 alier. Our next specimen is dated in November ; but probably 
 its mere verbal correctness is due to the English editor who 
 
 1 Notes and Queries, 1868. "I transcribe [says a correspondent of Notes and 
 Queries] the following letter from the Bazar, or Literary and Scientific Reposi- 
 tory, 4to, 1824, an obscure and forgotten periodical published in Birmingham."
 
 206 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. ^ 
 
 first gave it to the public. It is a note addressed to Alexander 
 Pope, after his overturn in Lord Bolingbroke's great six-horse 
 coach, near Dawly, in Shropshire. The accident happened in 
 crossing a bridge, and Pope was thrown into the stream. 
 
 " Sir : — I hear this moment of your sad adventure : the water you 
 fell into was not HipjDOCi-ene's water ; otherwise it would have sup- 
 ported you : indeed, I am concerned beyond expression for the danger 
 you have been in, and more for your wounds. Is it possible, that 
 those fingers which have written ' The Rape of the Lock,' the ' Criti- 
 cism,' and which have so becomingly dressed Homer in an English 
 coat, should have been so barbarously treated ? Let the hand of Den- 
 nis or of your poetasters be cut off, — yours is sacred. I hope, sir, 
 you are now perfectly recovered. Really, your accident concerns me 
 as much as all the disasters of a master ought to affect his scholar. I 
 am sincerely, sir, with the admiration which you deserve, 
 
 " Your most humble servant, 
 
 " Voltaire. 
 
 " In my Lord Bolingbroke's House, 
 Friday, at noon, Nov. 16, 1726.' 
 
 
 Our third specimen is a familiar letter, written in March, 
 1727, to Thieriot, who had asked him to find some books in 
 London ; as Thieriot, too, was deep in English studies, and de- 
 sired to get a popular English book to translate into French. 
 Voltaire began his letter in French, telling him that the parcel 
 of books was on its way to Calais, whence it would be con- 
 veyed by coach to Paris. Then he broke into English in the 
 manner following : — 
 
 ^& 
 
 " It was indeed a very hard task formed to find that damned book 
 which, under the title of ' Improvement of Human Reason ' [a trans- 
 lation from the Arabic], is an example of nonsense from one end to 
 the other, and which besides is a tedious nonsense, and consequently 
 very distasteful to the French nation, that detests madness itself, when 
 madness is languishing and flat. The book is scarce, because it is bad, 
 it being the fate of all wretched books never to be printed again. So 
 I spent almost a fortnight in the search of it, till at last I had the mis- 
 fortune to find it. 
 
 " I hope you will not read it throughout, that spiritless nonsense 
 romance, though indeed you deserve to read it, to do penance for the 
 trouble you gave me to inquire after it, for the tiresome perusal I 
 made of some parts of this whimsical, stupid performance, and for
 
 riEST IMFRESSIONS OF ENGLAND. 207 
 
 your credulity iu believiug those who gave you so great an idea. of so 
 mean a thing. 
 
 '" You will find in the same parcel the second volume of M. Gulli- 
 ver, which (by the by I don't advise you to translate) strikes at the 
 first ; the other is overstrained. The reader's imagination is pleased 
 and charmingly entertained by the new prospect of the lands which 
 Gulliver discovers to him ; but that continued series of new fane-les. 
 of follies, of fairy tales, of wild inventions, pall at last upon our taste. 
 Nothing unnatural may please long : it is for this reason that com- 
 monly the second parts of romances are so insipid. Farewell ; my 
 services to those who remember me ; but I hope I am quite forgot 
 here [there ?]." ^ 
 
 Tliere are sentences in this letter whicli show the beginnino- 
 of facility in English. " The book is scarce because it is 
 bad, it being the fate of all wretched books never to be 
 printed again," is a good English sentence, besides containing 
 a valuable hint for the collectors of antiquated trash. The 
 remark, however, did not apply to the work in question, which 
 was printed several times, — once in Latin, and twice at least 
 in English. Later in 1727, when, perhaps, he had studied 
 English a little more than a year, he wrote a few lines of 
 English verse, which show considerable command of the lan- 
 guage : — 
 
 TO LAURA HARLEY. 
 
 Laura, would you know the passion 
 
 You have kindled iu my breast ? 
 Trifling is the inclination 
 
 That by words can be expressed. 
 In my silence see the lover ; 
 
 True love is by silence known ; 
 In my eyes you '11 best discover 
 
 All the power of your own. 
 
 This Laura Harley was the wife of an English merchant, 
 who obtained a divorce from her, and mentioned these lines 
 in his petition as one of the evidences of his right to a divorce. 
 They were, probably, on the part of Voltaire, a mere exer- 
 cise in English, the husband's complaint being against "two 
 other seducers of his wife." ^ 
 
 From these examples we may conclude that, early in his 
 
 1 Lettres Inedites de Voltaire, page 35. 
 
 2 Les Divorces Anglais, par Chiteauueuf, Paris, 1821. Quoted in 18 CEuvres 
 de Voltaire, 240.
 
 208 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 residence in England, be was able to take part in conversa- 
 tion and to read the autbors witb whom be associated. He 
 continued to work bard in tbe language, and began to write 
 in it for tbe public eye before be bad been eigbteen months in 
 England. We have about thirty letters of bis written in Eng- 
 lish, many of them to Falkener, and some after be bad been 
 absent twenty years from England. These letters show that 
 be was one of those foreigners who could have made English 
 entirely bis own, and that be did actually make great prog- 
 ress towards it. All bis life be was fond of throwing bits of 
 English into bis conversation and letters, and took pleasure 
 in speaking tbe language wben be was a very old man, past 
 eigbty. To that very Franklin who was then setting type in 
 a London printing-bouse, a journeyman of nineteen, be spoke 
 Englisb, when tbey met in Paris, fifty-two years after.
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND. 
 
 He appears to have known almost every person of note 
 in England. " Old Horace Walpole's " letter of recommen- 
 dation made him free of the great whig houses and circles. 
 Writing, forty-one years later, to Horace Walpole, of Straw- 
 berry Hill, nephew to " Old Horace," and son of Sir Rob- 
 ert, he said, " Perhaps I am unknown to you, although I was 
 once honored with the friendship of the Two Brothers." ^ 
 So the Walpoles were often styled at the time when one 
 of them was supreme in home politics, and the other well 
 skilled in those of Continental courts. The conspicuous 
 whig house then was the new seat of Bubb Dodington in 
 Dorsetshire, where authors and artists were among the frequent 
 and most welcome guests, and where also the Two Broth- 
 ers or their colleagues were occasionally t6 be met. Voltaire 
 was soon a familiar guest at this magnificent abode. 
 
 Edward Young, who had not yet written the " Night 
 Thoughts," nor even taken orders, though forty-six years of 
 age, was often there in those years. He was at this period 
 a poet and dramatist of great celebrity, known to the London 
 public chiefly as the author of the hideous and popular trag- 
 edy of "The Revenge," a play that afforded fine howling to 
 the tragedians of two generations. Oddly enough, Voltaire, 
 future author of " La Pucelle," and Young, of the " Night 
 Thoughts," became and long remained very good friends, 
 discoursing much together at Dodington's on matters lit- 
 erary. On one occasion, as Spence records, the conversa- 
 tion turned upon the dialogue in " Paradise Lost " (Book X.) 
 between Sin and Death, beginning, — 
 
 " Within the gates of hell sat Sin and Death, 
 In counterview within the gates, that now 
 
 1 Voltaire a Ferney, page 410. 
 
 VOL. I. 14
 
 " VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Idling outrageous flame 
 xar iruo v^naos, smce the fiend passed through, , 
 
 Sin opening ; who thus now to Death began : 
 ' O son, why sit we here each other viewing ? ' " 
 
 Voltaire, with vehemence, objected to the personification of 
 Sin and Death. The reader has only to glance at the passage 
 in Milton, and then think of Voltaire's reading it before he 
 was at all equal to such English as that, and he will feel how 
 absurd it must have seemed to him. Young replied by the 
 well-known epigram, of which the best version is given by 
 Dr. Johnson : — 
 
 " ' You are so witty, profligate, and thin. 
 
 At once we think you Milton, Death, and Sin."i 
 
 This happy stroke, it appears, softened the severity of the 
 French critic. Young remembered the incident when, many 
 years later, he dedicated his " Sea Piece " "to Mr. Voltaire." 
 
 " ' Tell me,' say'st thou, ' who courts my smile 1 
 What stranger strayed from yonder isle ? ' 
 Ko stranger, sir, though born in foreign climes ; 
 On Dorset Downs, where Milton's page 
 With Sin and Death provoked thy rage, 
 Thy rage provoked, who soothed with gentle rhymes ; 
 Who kindly couched thy censure's eye. 
 And gave thee clearly to descry 
 Sound judgment giving law to fancy strong; 
 Who half inclined thee to confess, 
 Nor could thy modesty do less. 
 That Milton's blindness lay not in his song. 
 But such debates long since are flown, 
 Forever set the suns that shone 
 On airy pastimes ere our brows were gray ; 
 How shortly shall we both forget, 
 To thee, my patron, I my debt, 
 And thou to thine, for Prussia's golden key." 
 
 These lines, written not less than a quarter of a century 
 after the conversation upon Milton, show us, at least, that it 
 made a lively impression upon the mind of the English poet. 
 Another poet, often a guest of Dodington's, may have taken 
 part in it, — Thomson, whose " Winter " was then in its first 
 popularity. He sold the manuscript for three guineas in 1726, 
 saw the third edition before the year was out, and was now 
 brina^ing: forward the other "Seasons." Voltaire mentions" 
 having known him in England, and speaks slightingly of his 
 poetry. 
 
 1 2 Lives of the Poets, 529. N. Y. edition, 1861.
 
 RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND. 211 
 
 Swift was then at the summit of his career ; for in 1724 
 he gave Ireland the " Drapier Letters," and in 172G he pub- 
 lished the first part of " Gulliver's Travels." He was much 
 in England during Voltaire's stay, and the French poet be- 
 came familiar with him. When Swift visited France, in 1727, 
 he carried a letter of introduction from Voltaire to Count de 
 Morville, the French minister for foreign affairs. " I be- 
 lieve," wrote Voltaire in this epistle, " that you will not be 
 sorry to dine with M. Swift and President H6nault ; and I 
 flatter myself that you will regard as a proof of my sincere 
 attachment to your person the liberty I take in presenting to 
 you one of the most extraordinary men that England has pro- 
 duced, and the most capable of feeling all the extent of your 
 great qualities." 
 
 The dramatist Congreve, long retired from active life on 
 munificent pensions and sinecures, was another of Voltaire's 
 English acquaintances. " He was infirm and almost dying," 
 the exile records, " when I knew him. He had one fault, — 
 that of not sufficiently esteeming his first trade of author, 
 which had made his fame and fortune. He spoke to me of 
 his works as trifles beneath him, and told me, at our first con- 
 versation, to visit him only on the footing of a gentleman who 
 lived very simply. I replied that if he had had the misfort- 
 une to be only a gentleman like another, I should never have 
 come to see him; and I was shocked at a vanity so ill placed." 
 It may have been through Congreve that Voltaire became 
 so intimate with the valiant old Duchess of Marlborough^ 
 to whom, rich as she was, Congreve left his fortune. The 
 duchess gave him several choice morsels of information, which 
 he used with effect in later historical works. Slie even told 
 him the amount of her revenue as widow, namely, seventy 
 thousand pounds sterling. The duchess, he says, was con- 
 vinced that Queen Anne, late in her reign, had had a secret 
 interview in England with her brother, James II., and assured 
 him that if he would renounce the Roman religion, " which 
 the English regard as the mother of tyranny," she would des- 
 igu-ate him as her successor.^ Several of the old officers of 
 the Duke of jNIarlborough supplied him with information re- 
 lating to the long contest with Louis XIV., which he kept 
 1 Si^cle de Louis XIV., chapter xxiv.
 
 212 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 safe in Lis memory or note-book for many a year, until the 
 moment came for them to fall into their places. 
 
 He speaks also of having known Bishop Berkeley, the 
 Bishop of Rochester, John Byng, afterwards admiral, and 
 Gay, the author of the " Beggars' Opera." He may have wit- 
 nessed the first performance of Gay's work in 1727, the great 
 hit of that year, — a success that drew the town away from 
 Handel's operas, and spoiled his season. He knew Sir Hans 
 Sloane, president, after Newton's death, of the Royal Society. 
 Sir Isaac Newton he just missed ; for Sir Isaac died in March, 
 1727, before Voltaire had been a year in the country. 
 \ ' Of all the events that occurred in England during his resi- 
 >A \ dence there, the one that appears to have made the deepest 
 \ impression upon his mind was the burial of Sir Isaac Newton. 
 \ He was in London on the 28th of March, when the remains 
 ' of the philosopher lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, and 
 statesmen, nobles, and philosophers gathered there to pay the 
 last homage to a man whose sole claim to distinction was that 
 he had enlarged the boundaries of human knowledge. When 
 the body was carried to its last resting-place in Westminster 
 Abbey, the pall was borne by the lord chancellor, the highest 
 official in the kingdom, by the Duke of Montrose and the 
 Duke of Roxburgh, by the Earls of Pembroke, Sussex, and 
 Macclesfield, — members of the Royal Society, of which New- 
 ton had been president for nearly a quarter of a century. The 
 funeral was attended by a concourse of the men highest in 
 rank and greatest in name in England, and its solemn pag- 
 eantry was witnessed by a multitude of citizens who under- 
 stood little, it is true, of what Newton had done for them and 
 their posterity, but who felt, in some degree, how becoming it 
 was in men great by accident to pay such honors to a man 
 great by nature. 
 
 There were two poets upon whom this scene, so honorable 
 to England and to human nature, made a profound impression. 
 One of these was Thomson. In his poem upon the death of 
 Newton, he expresses the feeling that in honoring him Eng- 
 land redeemed herself : — 
 
 " For, though depraved and sunk, she brought thee forth. 
 And glories in thy name ; she points thee out 
 To all her sons, and bids them eye thy star, 
 While, in expectance of the second life,
 
 RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND. 213 
 
 When time sh:ill be no more, thy sacred dust 
 Sleeps with htr kings, and dignifies the scene." 
 
 What a lasting impression was made upon Voltaire's suscep- 
 tible mind by Newton's stately funeral the numerous allu- 
 sions to it in Lis letters attest. In extreme old age, his eye 
 would kindle and his countenance light up when he spoke of 
 his once having lived in a land where a professor of mathe- 
 matics, only because he was great in his vocation, could be 
 buried in a temple where the ashes of kings reposed, and the 
 highest subjects in the kingdom felt it an honor to assist in 
 bearing thither his body. 
 
 He was curious to know something more of Newton than 
 he could learn from the ordinary sources of information. In 
 his later writings he alhides several times to his having known 
 in England INIrs. Conduit, Sir Isaac's niece. From her lips he 
 heard the apple story, and to him, as it seems, the world owes 
 the preservation of that most interesting of anecdotes. " One 
 day in the year 1666, Newton, then retired to the country, 
 seeing some fruit fall from a tree, as I was told by his niece, 
 Madame Conduit, fell into a profound meditation upon the 
 cause which draws all bodies in a line which, if prolonged, 
 would pass very nearly through the centre of the earth." ^ 
 He preserves on the same page another anecdote of Newton, 
 perhaps derived from the same source: " A stranger asked 
 Newton, one day, how he had discovered the laws of the uni- 
 verse. ' By thinking of them without ceasing,' was the phi- 
 losopher's reply." I wonder if he heard from Madame Con- 
 duit the Newton anecdote related in the " Philosophical Dic- 
 tionary : " " In my youth I believed that Newton had made his 
 fortune by his extreme merit. I imagined that the court and 
 city of London had named him by acclamation Master of the 
 Mint. Not at all. Isaac Newton had a niece, sufficiently 
 amiable, named Madame Conduit, who was very pleasing to 
 the chancellor of tho exchequer, Halifax. Infinitesimal cal- 
 culus and gravitation would have availed nothing without a 
 pretty niece." 
 
 Newton's study of the prophecies amazed, puzzled, and even 
 saddened this studious exile. How such mighty powers of mind 
 could accommodate themselves to the mere consideration of 
 1 Philosophic do Newton, par Voltaire, chapter iii.
 
 214 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 such a subject was a baffling enigma to him. " What a poor 
 species the human race," he exchiims, " if the great Newton 
 believed he had found in the Apocalypse the present history 
 of Europe ! " Elsewhere he adds the famous sentence, " Ap- 
 parently, Newton wished by that commentary uj^on the Apoc- 
 alypse to console the human race for the superiority he had 
 over it."i 
 
 "' Of the authors whom Voltaire met and studied in England, 
 the one who influenced his own writings most w^as, beyond 
 / question, Alexander Pope. The friendship of Bolingbroke 
 
 ' brought him at once into cordial relations with the circle of 
 
 which that nobleman was the idol and Pope the ornament. 
 The affection entertained for Bolingbroke by literary men was 
 as remarkable as the detestation in which he was held by some 
 of his political associates. Pope paid him the most stupen- 
 dous compliment, perhaps, that one mortal ever bestowed upon 
 another. " I really think," said Pope, " that there is some- 
 thing in that great man which looks as if he were placed here 
 by mistake. When the comet appeared to us, a month or two 
 ago, I had sometimes an imagination that it might possibly 
 have come to our world to carry him away, as a coach comes 
 to one's door for other visitors." And when Pope was dying 
 Bolingbroke hang sobbing over his chair, and said, " I have 
 known him these thirty years, and value myself more upon 
 that man's love than " — His voice failed him, and he could 
 utter no more. Voltaire was fond of both these brilliant men. 
 In one of his poetical epistles, published in 1726, he speaks of 
 Bolingbroke as one who possessed the eloquence of Cicero, the 
 intrepidity of Cato, the wit of Maecenas, and the agreeable- 
 ness of Petronius. He loved him living, and he defended him 
 dead. He relates, however, but one trifling anecdote of his 
 inteucourse with Lord Bolingbroke. The conversation turning 
 one day upon the alleged avarice of the Duke of Marlborough, 
 some one appealed to Bolingbroke to confirm the allegation, 
 and with the more confidence because Bolingbroke had been 
 of the party opposed to Marlborough. His reply was, " He 
 was so great a man that I have forgotten his faults." 
 y Pope*s mastery of the art of rhyming would have sufficed to 
 attract the regard of a man who had written only in rhyme, 
 
 1 7 Dictionnaire Philosophique, 172. 
 
 V 
 
 \
 
 RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND. 215 
 
 and who thought that there was no true poetry without rhyme. ' 
 It appears that upon this vexed question of rhyme Pope and 
 Voltaire were of the same opinioiij He tells us that he asked 
 Pope, one day, why Milton had not written " Paradise Lost " in 
 rhyme. " Because he could not," answered Pope. This does 
 not accord with the experience of Pope's successor in Homeric 
 translation. Cowper says that to rhyme in English demands 
 "no great exercise of ingenuity ; " and that he has frequently 
 written more lines in a day " with tags to them " than he ever 
 could without. Voltaire and Pope were in accord upon sub- 
 jects of more importance than the construction of poems. The 
 vein of moralizing that runs through many of Pope's produc- 
 tions was peculiarly pleasing to Voltaire, who constantly in- 
 sists that a poem should do something more than amuse. 
 Pope had not yet written the " Essay on Man," nor the " Uni- 
 versal Prayer ; " but his conversation was much in the spirit 
 of those works, which Voltaire regarded as among the choicest 
 master-pieces of English literature, and which by and by he 
 caused to be translated into French. 
 
 '^_^.L^'.^ilsi-9}l^ ^^^^ ^^^^* prevailed in the circles of Pope and 
 Bolingbroke could^ot have differed materially from that to 
 which the stranger was accustomed in France. Educatedjnen 
 of the world in both countries were very likely to he deists. 
 BiiTm Jb'rance no man then dared print deism in the vulgar 
 tongue, and no moral teaching was allowed which did not ap- 
 pear to concede the claims of the church. The great diction- 
 ary, or cyclopcedia, of Pierre Bayle, published originally in 
 1696, and enlarged to four volumes in 1720, is indeed full of 
 that which makes men doubt and deny. Voltaire was familiar 
 with the work from boyhood, as were all the reading men and 
 thinking men of that generation in France. But not only 
 was Bayle obliged to publish his work at distant Rotterdam, 
 but in treating all the delicate topics he was compelled to use 
 the utmost caution and management, veiling his obvious in- 
 credulity under forms and professions of respect. Glance over 
 the article upon Spinoza, for example. Including the notes, 
 which are much more voluminous than the text, we may say 
 of this article that it suggests and indicates the whole strug- 
 gle of the human mind with the problem of the universe. 
 The opinions and conjectures of the ancients, the beliefs, de-
 
 21G LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 nials, and differences of the moderns, are all sketched or 
 stated ; pantheism, atheism, and deism are described or de- 
 fined ; and the reader is assisted, nay, compelled, to survey 
 the stupendous and ever-fascinating theme from a height above 
 the belfry of the parish church. But the parish church is, as 
 the French say, "managed" from first to last. No pretext is 
 given to the censor or the inquisitor. Take one specimen : 
 *' People who associated "with Spinoza, and the peasants of the 
 villages where he lived for some time in seclusion, agree in 
 saying that he was a man of good habits, affable, honest, oblig- 
 ing, and of strict morality. That is strange ; but, really, it 
 is not more astonishing than to see people living very badly, 
 though they have a full persuasion of the gospel." To this 
 passage profuse notes are appended, exalting still higher the 
 pure and noble character of Spinoza. There is scarcely an 
 important article in all the four ponderous volumes of Bayle 
 that does not hint or insinuate similar dissent from the en- 
 forced way of thinking. 
 
 But in England, as the exile observed, the deists were not 
 obliged to insinuate. Deism, long in vogue in the "great 
 world," was now becoming popular among portions of the peo- 
 ple, and printed its thought with very little reserve or " man- 
 agement." And yet the movement had begun at Paris. One 
 hundred and two years before Voltaire saw England, Lord 
 Herbert, English ambassador at Paris, after getting, as he sup- 
 posed, a revelation from Heaven, published his treatise against 
 revelation, " De Veritate," copies of which he sent to the 
 learned of all Europe, and thus began deism. His five points 
 were : (1.) There is a God. (2.) Man should worship him. 
 (3.) The practice of virtue is the chief part of worship. (4.) 
 Faults are expiated by repentance. (5.) There must be a 
 future of reward and punishment. The ambassador covered 
 his heresies with the safe and decent mantle of the Latin lan- 
 guage ; and so did some of his successors. 
 
 But deism was now getting into language which could be 
 called vulgar in more senses than one. After Herbert, Hobbes, 
 and Sbaftsbury, came Toland, Collins, Tindal, and others, each 
 bolder than the last, until, in 1727, under the eyes of this 
 French exile, all former audacities were eclipsed by Woolston 
 in his " Six Discourses on the Miracles." This writer, a Cam-
 
 RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND. 217 
 
 bridge master of arts, j)ut into coarse, uncompromising English 
 what many deists were accustomed to utter in conversation 
 every time two or three of them found themselves together. 
 He affected to believe that the miracles must be interpreted 
 as allegories, because, if taken literally, they were too absurd 
 for serious consideration. He proceeded to comment upon each 
 miracle in turn with a freedom never before seen in print, 
 but also with the crude and boisterous humor that pleased 
 Londoners when Hogarth was an apprentice. He said, for ex- 
 ample, that the wine miraculously made at the wedding feast 
 for guests already drunk must have been punch, and that the 
 whole story was so monstrous that no one not brutalized 
 by superstition could believe it. This specimen will suffice. 
 Since that day, the reading world has been familiarized with 
 this mode of treating such subjects, and has discovered how 
 inoperative it is when both writers and writing are let alone. 
 It was a startling novelty in 1727. Woolston advertised that 
 he would sell his discourses at his own house, and buyers came 
 thither in great numbers. Voltaire states that thirty thousand 
 copies were sold during the last two years of his stay in Eng- 
 land ; and no one then molested the author. The Bishop of 
 London wrote live pastoral letters warning his flock against 
 these essays, and at length caused Woolston to be prosecuted. 
 He was sentenced to a year's imprisonment and to a fine of a 
 hundred pounds. Refusing to give bonds not to repeat his 
 offense, he was obliged to pass the brief remainder of his life 
 within " the bounds " of King's Bench prison. 
 
 The lightness of AVoolston's sentence and the length of 
 time that elapsed before he was prosecuted indicate the hold 
 which deism had upon the public. Voltaire saw it j)reva- 
 lent in the houses of noblemen and poets, and Woolston 's 
 career showed him that it had made ita way among the 
 multitude in the shop and the street. There were clubs of 
 deists in London, which held weekly meetings in ale-houses, 
 and reconstructed the universe over pots of beer. Young 
 Franklin composed his pamphlet in 1725 upon " Liberty 
 and Necessity," designed to refute Wollaston's " Religion 
 of Nature," which he had assisted to set in type. He car- 
 ried negation in this work far beyond deism. — even beyond 
 atheism, if that is possible ; denying equally the existence of
 
 218 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 good and the existence of evil, and asserting that in every 
 state and stage of conceivable existence pleasure and pain gire 
 and must be equal in quantity. ^ His companions were not 
 shocked, it appears, at these bold speculations ; and, so far as 
 we can discern, such entire freedom from the traditional and 
 the legendary was held in esteem among the workingmen of 
 London. 
 
 None of these things escaped the observation of the exile, 
 abundant in labors as he was. To him England was a univer- 
 sity. Few strangers have ever extracted more in two years 
 and a half from a foreign country than he from England ; 
 although, during his residence there, he performed much work 
 that remains readable, and is constantly read, to the present 
 hour. Note the catalogue of his studies and labors. First, 
 the partial acquisition of the " learned language," which in- 
 volved a wide survey of its literature, and a study of many 
 authors, — Newton, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Locke, Ba- 
 con, Swift, Pope, Addison, the later dramatists, and many 
 others. It was no easy task for a Frenchman of that age to 
 so much as forgive Shakespeare for not being Racine, and 
 Voltaire could never quite succeed in it. We can trace his 
 struggles with the author of " Macbeth " and " Hamlet." 
 
 " Shakespeare [he remarks], the first tragic poet of the English, 
 is rarely spoken of in England except as divine. In Loudon I 
 never saw the theatre as full to witness ' L'Andromaque ' of Racine, 
 well translated as it is by Philips, or Addison's ' Cato,' as when the 
 ancient pieces of Shakespeare were performed. These pieces are 
 monsters in tragedy. There are some plays the action of which 
 lasts several years ; the hero, baptized in the first act, dies of old 
 age in the fifth. You see upon the stage wizards, peasants, drunk- 
 ards, buffoons, grave-diggers digging a grave, who sing drinking songs 
 while playing with skulls. In a word, imagine what you can of 
 most monstrous and most absurd, you will find it in Shakespeare. 
 When I began to learn the English language, I could not under- 
 stand how so enlightened a nation as the English could admire so 
 extravagant an author ; but when I knew the language better, I 
 perceived that the English were right, and that it is impossible for 
 a whole nation to be deceived in a matter of sentiment, and mis- 
 taken as to their being pleased. They saw, as I saw, the crudi- 
 ties of their favorite author, but they felt his beauties better than 
 
 1 For a copy of this pamphlet see Parton's Life of Franklin, vol. i. p. 607.
 
 RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND. 219 
 
 I could, — beauties so much the more remarkable from their having 
 flashed out in the midst of profoundest night. He has enjoyed his 
 reputation for a hundred and fifty years. The authors who came 
 after him have served to augment rather than diminish it. The 
 great understanding of the author of ' Cato,' and his talents, which 
 made him a secretary of state, did not give him a place by the 
 side of Shakespeare. Such is the privilege of genius : it makes for 
 itself a path where no one went before ; it pursues its course with- 
 out guide, without art, without rule ; it goes astray in its career, 
 but it leaves far behind all excellence that is merely reasonable and 
 correct. Such was Homer : he created his art and left it imper- 
 fect ; his works a chaos, where on all sides the light shines." ^ 
 
 Shakespeare, by turns, enraptured and repelled liira. Re- 
 turning from the theatre, one evening, after seeing with a 
 delight he never forgot the " Julius Csesar " of Shakespeare, 
 he began to write a tragedy of Brutus in English prose. He 
 continued the exercise until he had composed the first act 
 very nearly as he afterwards executed it in French rhyme. 
 Lord Bolingbroke, who, he says, gave him lessons in French^ 
 as well as in English, approved the plan, and the work was 
 published before he left England. 
 
 Durmg the whole year 1727 he was full of business, his ! 
 most immediate scheme being the issue of the London edi- 
 tion of "La Henriade" by subscription. He was preparing, 
 also, to write a book upon England, and was already at work 
 upon his "History of Charles XIL," the material for which 
 had been accumulating for some years, and had gained im- 
 portant accessions in London. To promote all these objects 
 he now appeared as an English author. In a London monthly 
 for December, 1727, I read the announcement of his work: — 
 
 " An Essay upon the Civil Wars of France, extracted 
 from Curious M. S. And also upon the Epick Poetry of 
 the European nations, from Homer down to Milton. By 
 Arouet de Voltaire. London. Printed by Samuel Fallason 
 in Prujean's Court, Old Bailey, and sold by the Booksellers 
 of London and Westminster. 1727. In 8vo. pagg. 130." 
 
 The editor of the magazine merely adds a line of comment : 
 " These two essays deserve to be read by all the curious." 
 Among the literary curiosities in the British Museum is Sir 
 
 ^ Essai sur la Poesie Epique, chapter iL 
 
 ' 1
 
 220 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Hans Sloane's copy of the first edition of this work, kept in a 
 glass case under lock and key. It is printed in large, clear, 
 open type, a handsome book, and bears upon the upper part 
 of the title-page, in the right-hand corner, the following words 
 in Voltaire's own hand : — 
 
 To S" hanslone 
 from his most 
 humble servant 
 Voltaire. 
 
 The volume opens with an " Advertisement to the Reader," 
 printed in italics, which reads thus : — 
 
 "It has the appearance of too great presumption in a Traveller 
 who hath been but eighteen months in England, to attempt to write 
 in a Language which he cannot pronounce at all, and which he hardly 
 understands in Conversation. But I have done what we do every 
 Day at School, where we write Latin and Greek, tho' surely we pro- 
 nounce both very pitifully, and should understand neither of them if 
 they were uttered to us with the right Roman or Greek pronuncia- 
 tion. 
 
 " I look upon the English Language as a learned one, which de- 
 serves to be the object of our Application in France, as the French 
 tongue is thought a kind of Accomplishment in England. 
 
 " Besides I did not learn English for my private satisfaction and 
 improvement only, but out of a kind of Duty. 
 
 '' I am ordered to give an Account of my Journey into England. 
 Such an Undertaking can no more be attempted without understand- 
 ing the Language than a Scheme of Astronomy could be laid without 
 the help of Mathematicks. And I have not a mind to imitate the 
 late Mr Sorbieres, who having stayed three months in this Country, ■ 
 without knowing anything either of its manners or of its language, 
 thought fit to print a relation which proved but a dull, scurrilous Sat- 
 ire upon a Nation he knew nothing of. 
 
 " Our European travellers, for the most part, are satirical upon their 
 neighbouring Countries, and bestow large Praises upon the Persians 
 and Chinese ; it being too natural to revile those who stand in Com- 
 petition with us ; and to extol those, who being far remote from us, 
 are out of the reach of Envy. 
 
 " The true aim of a Relation is to instruct Men, not to gratify their 
 Malice. We should be busied chiefly in giving faithful Accounts of 
 all the useful Tilings, and of the extraordinary Persons ; whom to 
 know, and to imitate would be a Benefit to our Countrymen. A 
 Traveller who writes in that Spirit is a Merchant of a nobler kind, 
 
 i
 
 RESIDEXCE IN ENGLAND. 221 
 
 who Imports into his native Country the Arts and Virtues of other 
 Nations. 
 
 " I will leave to others the Care of describing with Accuracy Paul's 
 Church, the Monument, Westminster, Stonehenge, etc. I consider 
 England in another view ; it strikes my Eyes, as it is the Land which 
 hath produced a Newton, a Locke, a Tillotson, a IMilton, a Boyle ; 
 and many great Men, either dead or alive, whose Glory in War, in 
 State-Affairs, or in Letters, will not be confined to the Bounds of tliis 
 Island. 
 
 '* Whoever had the Honour and Happiness to be acquainted with 
 any of them, and will do me the favour to let me know some notable 
 (tho' perhaps not enough known) Passages of their Lives, will confer 
 ail Obligation, not only upon me, but upon the Publick. 
 
 " Likewise if there are any new Inventions or Undertakings which 
 have obtained or deserved Success, I shall be obliged to those who 
 will be so kind as to give me any Information of that Nature : and 
 shall either quote my Authors or observe a religious Silence, accord- 
 ing as they think proper. 
 
 "As to this present Essay, it is intended as a kind of Preface or 
 Introduction to the Henriade ; the Octavo P^dition whereof is sold by 
 N. Prevost ; as also the French Tragedy of Brutus." 
 
 The volume attracted much attention, and reached a fourth 
 edition. The " Essay upon Epic Poetry " is agreeable and sug- 
 gestive reading even at this day. The passage upon Shake- 
 speare, quoted above from the French translation, gives an idea 
 of its manner. The library of the British Museum contains a 
 copy of the fourth edition of the work, published in 1731, cor- 
 rected by the author : " to which is prefixed ' a discourse on 
 tragedy, with reflections on the English and French drama.' 
 Bound with this copy is a critical pamphlet of eighty-one 
 pages, entitled, ' Remarks on j\L Voltaire's Essay upon Epick 
 Poetry, by Paul Rolli. London, 1728,' " in which Milton is 
 defended against Voltaire's censure. In the " Discourse on 
 Tragedy," Voltaire addresses Lord Bolingbroke : — 
 
 " Your Lordship knows that the tragedy of Brutus was struck off 
 in Great Britain. You may remember that whilst I was in Wands- 
 worth, with my excellent friend, Mr. Faulkner, I amused myself with 
 writing the first act of the following tragedy in English prose, which 
 I have since worked up in French verse, with little alteration. I 
 used to mention it to you sometimes, and we both wondered that no 
 English poet had yet attempted to raise a tragedy upon this subject,
 
 222 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 which, of all others, is perhaps adapted to the English stage. Your 
 Lordship prompted me to finish a dramatic piece susceptible of such 
 exalted sentiments. 
 
 " Permit me, therefore, to present you with Brutus, though written 
 in French. 
 
 " At my return from England, when I had closely studied the Eng- 
 lish language for two years put together, 't was with some diffidence 
 that I attempted to write a tragedy in French. I had almost accus- 
 tomed myself to think in English, and I found that the expressions of 
 my own tongue were not now so familiar to me ; 't was like a river 
 whose course having been diverted, both time and pains were re- 
 quired to bring it back to its own bed." 
 
 The Essays promoted, doubtless, the subscriptions to " La 
 Henriade." What, indeed, could have advertised it better? 
 The English quarto edition of that poem, announced in 1726, 
 price one guinea, was not ready till 1728, and dui'ing the in- 
 terval the author lent his personal energy and tact to the 
 work of getting subscriptions, not disdaining to solicit liter- 
 ary friends to hand the proposals about their circle. The 
 copperplates engraved in Paris, and used in the Rouen edi- 
 tion, were made to do duty a second time. The volume was 
 a handsome, gilt-edged quarto, of 202 pages, in large type, 
 with ample margin, and but twenty-two lines on a page. It 
 was announced as " the first edition published with the 
 author's sanction." Queen Caroline, who came to the throne 
 in June, 1727, with her husband, George II., was then one of 
 the most popular princesses in Europe, and to her Voltaire re- 
 dedicated his poem. As Princess of Wales, she had been 
 much the friend of Sir Isaac Newton, a fact of which the 
 author of the dedication was doubtless aware. 
 
 "To THE Qdeen. 
 
 " Madam : — It was the fate of Henry the Fourth to be protected 
 by an English queen. He was assisted by the great Elizabeth, who 
 was in her age the glory of her sex. By whom can his memory be 
 80 well protected as by her who resembles so much Elizabeth in her 
 personal virtues ? 
 
 " Your Majesty wUl find in this book bold, impartial truths ; mo- 
 rality unstained with superstition ; a spirit of liberty, equally abhor- 
 rent of rebellion and of tyranny ; the rights of kings always asserted, 
 and those of mankind never laid aside.
 
 RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND. 223 
 
 "The same spirit in which it is written gave me the confidence 
 to offer it to the virtuous consort of a king who, among so many 
 crowned heads, enjoys almost the inestimable honor of ruling a free 
 nation ; a king who makes his power consist in being beloved, and his 
 glory in being just. 
 
 " Our Descartes, who was the greatest philosopher in Europe be- 
 fore Sir Isaac Newton appeared, dedicated his ' Principles ' to the 
 celebrated Princess Palatine Elizabeth ; not, said he, because she was 
 a princess (for true philosophers respect princes, and never flatter 
 them) ; but because of all his readers she understood him the best, 
 and loved truth the most. 
 
 " I beg leave, Madam (without comparing myself to Descartes) 
 to dedicate ' The Henriade ' to your Majesty upon the like account, 
 not only as the protectress of all arts and sciences, but as the best 
 judge of them. 
 
 " I am, with that profound respect which is due to the greatest vir- 
 tue as well as the highest rank, may it please your Majesty, your 
 Majesty's most humble, most dutiful, and most obliged servant, 
 
 " Voltaire." 
 
 The volume had all the success possible to a work written 
 in a foreign language. The number of guinea subscribers was 
 probably about fifteen hundred, and three octavo editions of 
 the poem were also sold by booksellers about as fast as the 
 books could be made. Eighty copies were subscribed for in 
 France, where, it is to be hoped, the degenerate Sully perceived 
 that the name of his great ancestor was taken out of the jDoem. 
 The queen courteously acknowledged the honor j^aid her in the 
 dedication, and King George II., as the custom was, sent the 
 author a present of two thousand crowns. Voltaire himself 
 mentions this pleasing event, but without telling us the value 
 of the coins {Scuts), so named. If he meant English crowns, 
 the present was the liberal one of five hundi'ed pounds sterling. 
 The fibbing Goldsmith declares that Queen Caroline sent the 
 French poet two hundred pounds and her portrait. The 
 Queen of Prussia, then in full intrigue to marry her daugliter 
 to the Prince of Wales, and her son, Frederic, to an English 
 pi'incess, sent Voltaire a medal bearing, as it seems, the Queen 
 of England's portrait. In his letter of acknowledgment to 
 the Prussian minister, he says he shall keep the medal all his 
 life, because it came to him from so great a queen, and be- 
 cause it represented the Queen of England, who, by her vir-
 
 ' r^ 
 
 224 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 tues and great qualities called to mind the Queen of Prussia. 
 Prince Frederic of Prussia was then a lad of sixteen, and 
 in favor with his mother. Probably he read this letter,, as 
 well as the volume that went with it. He may have noticed 
 the concludinfif sentence of the letter : " The noblest recom- 
 pense of my labor is to find favor with such queens as yours, 
 and to be valued by such readers as you ; for, in matters of 
 taste and science, it is not necessary to make any distinction 
 between crowned heads and private persons." ^ 
 
 The pecuniary result of this London " Henriade " has been 
 usually overstated. M. Nicolardot, who has minutely investi- 
 gated the subject, goes, perhaps, too far the other way, in 
 estimating the Avliole profit of the two London editions of 
 the poem at ten thousand francs." I think it probable that 
 the proceeds of the quarto edition, the octavo edition, the 
 Essays preliminary, and " Brutus," with the gifts of king and 
 queen, may have reached two thousand pounds sterling. It 
 was a large sum for a man who spent little, and was well 
 skilled in the art of investing mone3\ During his stay in 
 England Pope gained six thousand pounds by his translation 
 of Homer, and Gay three thousand by his " Beggars' Opera; " 
 but Dryden only received, as Pope said, twelve hundred 
 pounds for his " Virgil," sixpence a line for his " Fables," ten 
 " broad pieces " for a play, and fifty more for the acting. 
 Thomson's " Spring " brought the author fifty guineas ; 
 Young's "Night Thoughts," two hundred and fifty; and 
 Akenside's " Pleasures of the Imagination," one hundred and 
 twenty. This stranger, therefore, may be considered to have 
 done very well to get so much for the reprint of a poem in a 
 foreign language. And during his residence of nearly three 
 years, how much did he spend ? Perhaps a hundred and fifty 
 pounds, in all, while his revenues from France, without reck- 
 oning his suspended pensions, could not have been less than 
 two hundred and fifty pounds a year. 
 ,f He labored without pause. His " Charles XII." grew under 
 1 his hands. His work upon England was in preparation, for 
 it was never the way of this indefatigable spirit to finish one 
 piece of work before beginning another. Of all his writings 
 
 1 Voltaire k Ferney, page 312. 
 
 2 Menage et Finances de Voltaire, page 40.
 
 ^ 
 
 RESIDENCE IN ENOLAND. 225 
 
 the one most influential upon French minds was his Letters 
 upo n Enn^la nd ; for they revealed to France the bewitching 
 spectacle of a free country, and renewed the fascinating 
 tradition of republican Rome learned at school. Lafayette 
 records that it was reading these " Lettres Philosophiques," 
 as they were entitled, that made him a republican at nine ; 
 and J. J. Rousseau attributes in great part to them the 
 awakening of his late-maturing intelligence. It was a little 
 book, almost forgotten now, merely a traveler's brief and 
 pleasant chat respecting things and men of a foreign land. 
 But the world is governed by a few little books. It is 
 retarded and borne onward by little books. When the 
 French Revolution shall be at length interpreted, in the 
 first chapter of the work will be an account of this brio-ht. in- 
 cisive, saucy, artle ss, artful little book, which revealed free_ 
 England to bound France. It led straight to '89. It was 
 not necessar}^ as the wicked Heine remarks, for the censor 
 to condemn this book ; it would have been read without that. 
 Voltaire may have heard at Lord Bolingbroke's house the 
 anecdote recorded by Spence of Robert Hooke, who said 
 there were three reasons for preferring to live in Eno-land : 
 The first was liberty, the second was liberty, and the third 
 was liberty. Above all things else in England, this exile 
 loved the freedom and toleration that prevailed there, " the 
 noble liberty of thinking," to which he attributed whatever 
 he found most excellent in English politics, science, and lit- 
 erature. To this freedom, also, he attributed the compara- . c ' 
 tive exemption of England fi-om religious antipathies. It . • ^t 
 was freedom, he thought, that enabled the numerous sects ., ^^^.-^ '*^. 
 to live together in harmony. " Enter the London Exchange," 
 he remarks, "a place more respectable than many courts. 
 There you see the representatives of all nations assembled 
 for a useful purpose. There the Jew, the Mahometan, 
 and the Christian treat one another as if they were of the 
 same religion, and give the name of infidel only to bank- 
 rupts. There the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist, and 
 the Church-of-England man takes the word of a Quaker. 
 On leaving this peaceful and free assembly, some go to the 
 synagogue, others go to drink ; this man proceeds to be bap- 
 tized in a great tub in the name of the Father, the Son, and 
 
 VOL. I. 15 
 
 ^
 
 226 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 the Holy Ghost ; that man circumcises his son, and causes to 
 be muttered over the child Hebrew words which are quite 
 unintelligible to him ; others go to their churches to await the 
 insjDiration of God with their hats on ; all are content. If 
 there was in England but one religion, its despotic sway were 
 to be feared ; if there were but two, they would cut one an- 
 other's throats ; but as there are thirty, they live in peace and 
 are happy." 
 
 The Quakers, who were still a novelty in England to 
 foreigners, attracted the particular attention of this most un- 
 quakerlike of men. He knew his public, being himself a 
 member of it, and he therefore gave four letters upon the 
 Quakers. Believing, as he says, that the doctrines and his- 
 tory of so extraordinary a 'peojDle merited the study of an 
 intelligent man, he sought the society of one of the most fa- 
 mous Quakers in England, a retired merchant, who lived in a 
 cottage near London, " well built, and adorned only with its 
 own neatness." The curious stranger visited him in his re- 
 treat. 
 
 *• The Quaker was an old man of ;fresh complexion, who had 
 never been sick, because he always had been continent and tem- 
 perate. In my life I have never seen a presence more noble nor 
 more engaging than his. He was dressed, like all those of his per- 
 suasion, in a coat without plaits at the sides, or buttons on the pock- 
 ets and sleeves, and wore a broad-brimmed hat like those of our 
 ecclesiastics. He received me with his hat on, and advanced to- 
 wards me without making the least inclination of his body ; but 
 there was more politeness in the open and humane expression of 
 his countenance than there is in the custom of drawing one leg 
 behind the other, and in that of carrying in the hand what was 
 made to cover the head. ' Friend,' said he to me, * I see that thou 
 art a stranger ; if I can be of any use to thee, thou hast only to 
 speak.' ' Sir,' said I to him, with a bow and a step forward, accord- 
 ing to our custom, ' I flatter myself that my reasonable curiosity 
 wUl not displease you, and that you will be willing to do me the 
 honor to instruct me in your religion.' ' The people of thy coun- 
 try,' he replied, ' make too many compliments and bows, but I have 
 never before seen one of them who had the same curiosity as thou. 
 Come in and take dinner with me.' I still kept paying him bad 
 compliments, because a man cannot all at once lay aside his habits ; 
 and, after a wholesome and frugal repast, which began and ended
 
 RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND. 227 
 
 with a prayer to God, I began to question my host. I began with 
 the question which good Catholics have put more than once to the 
 Huguenots : ' My dear sir,' said I, ' have you been baptized ? ' ' No,' 
 replied the Quaker, ' nor my brethren either.' ' How ! Morhleu ! 
 You are not Christians, then?' 'My friend,' he mildly rejoined. 
 ' swear not ; we do not think that Christianity consists in sprinkling 
 water upon the head with a little salt.' ' Heh, hon Dieu ! ' said I, 
 shocked at this impiety ; ' have you forgotten, then, that Jesus 
 Christ was baptized by John ? ' ' Friend, once more, no oaths,' re- 
 plied the benign Quaker. ' Christ received baptism from John ; 
 but he baptized no one; we are not John's disciples, but Christ's.' 
 ' Ah,' cried I, ' how you would be burned by the Holy Inquisition. 
 In the name of God, my dear man, let me have you baptized!' 
 . . . . ' Art thou circumcised .'' ' he asked. I replied that I had 
 not that honor. ' Very well, friend,' said he, ' thou art a Christian 
 without being circumcised, and I without being baptized.'" 
 
 The conversation was continued to great length. In his 
 report of it, Voltaire affects throughout the tone of the 
 good Catholic, — Louis XV. being then King of France, and 
 Cardinal de Fleury his prime minister. He adds that the 
 benign Quaker conducted him, on the following Sunday, to a 
 Quaker meeting, where he heard one of the brethren utter a 
 long, nonsensical harangue, " half with his mouth, half with 
 his nose," of which no one understood anything. He asked 
 his friend why they permitted such silliness (sottises). The 
 Quaker answered that they were obliged to endure it, because 
 they could not know, when a man got up to speak, whether he 
 was moved by the Spirit or by folly. The Quaker meeting 
 appears to have effaced the good impressions of the sect which 
 he had derived from his conversations with the retired mer- 
 chant. Nevertheless, he proceeds to relate the history of the 
 Quakers, and of William Penn. He concludes by remarking 
 that the denomination, though flourishing in Pennsylvania, 
 was on the decline in England, because the young Quakers, 
 enriched by their fathers' industry, desired to enjoy the hon- 
 ors of public office, and to wear fashionable clothes, and to 
 escape the reproach of belonging to a sect ridiculed by the 
 world. 
 
 In his remarks upon the Church of England, Voltaire gives 
 us a taste of his veritable self : " One can have no public em-
 
 228 LITE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 ployment in England, or Ireland, without being of the number 
 of the faithful Anglicans ; this reason, which is an excellent 
 proof, has converted so many dissenters that to-day not a 
 twentieth part of the nation is out of the pale of the Estab- 
 lished Church." " The lower house of convocation formerly 
 enjoyed some credit; at least, it had the privilege of meeting, 
 of debating controverted points of doctrine, and of burning, 
 now and then, some impious books, that is, books against them- 
 selves. The whig ministry, however, does not even permit 
 those gentlemen to assemble, and they are reduced, in the ob- 
 scurity of their parishes, to the mournful business of praying 
 to God for a government which they would not be sorry to dis- 
 turb." " The priests are almost all married. The awkward- 
 ness which they acquire at the universities, and the little ac- 
 quaintance they have here with women, usually has the effect 
 of obliging a bishop to be contented with his own wife. The 
 priests go to the taverns sometimes, because custom permits 
 it ; and if they get drunk, it is in a serious way, and without 
 
 scandal When they are told that in France young 
 
 men, known by their debaucheries and raised to the rank of 
 bishop by female intrigues, openly make love, amuse them- 
 selves by composing love songs, give every day costly and 
 elaborate suppers, and go from those suppers to implore the 
 illumination of the Holy Spirit, and boldly call themselves the 
 successors of the Apostles, then they thank God that they are 
 Protestants. Nevertheless, they are abominable heretics, fit to 
 be burned by all the devils, as Rabelais says ; and that is the 
 reason M'hy I do not meddle with their affairs." 
 
 Upon tiie government of England Voltaire descants in a 
 graver strain. He failed not to inform his countrymen that 
 in Eno-land no tax could be laid except with the consent of the 
 king, lords, and commons, and that every man was assessed, 
 not as in France according to his rank, or rather according to 
 his want of rank, but according to his income. Nor did he 
 omit to remark that in England the peasant's feet were not 
 blistered by wooden shoes. " He eats white bread ; he is well 
 clad ; he fears not to increase the number of his beasts, nor to 
 cover his roof with tiles, lest he should have to pay a higher 
 tax the next year. You see many peasants who have five or six 
 hundred pounds sterling a year, and yet do not disdain to con-
 
 RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND. 229 
 
 tinue to cultivate the lands that have enriched them, and upon 
 which they live as freemen." He observed with pleasure that 
 the younger sons of noble families frequently entered into 
 commerce, — a thing unheard of then in France. "I know 
 not, however," he slyly remarks, " which is the more useful to 
 a state, a well-powdered lord, who knows precisely at what 
 hour the king gets up and goes to bed, and who gives himself 
 airs upon playing the part of slave in a minister's ante-cham- 
 ber, or a merchant who enriches his country, who from his 
 counting-room sends orders to Surat and Cairo, and contrib- 
 utes to the happiness of mankind." — 
 
 Of the philosophers of England, Locke and Newton were 
 those whom he studied longest and admired most. He was one 
 of the first of his countrymen who understood the discoveries 
 of Newton, and it was he who made them popularly known 
 to France. Locke he frequently styles the wisest of human 
 beings, and the only man who had ever Avritten worthily upon 
 metaphysics. Lord Bacon, he thought, "knew not Nature, 
 but he knew and pointed out all the paths that lead to a 
 knowledge of her." "He despised, early in his career, that 
 which fools in square caps taught under the name of philoso- 
 phy, in those mad-houses called colleges ; and he did all that 
 he could to keep them from continuing to confuse the mind by 
 their nature ahliorring a vacuum, their substantial forins, and 
 all those words which not only ignorance rendered respectable^ 
 but which a ridiculous blending with religion rendered sacred. 
 He is the father of experimental philosophy." All of Vol- 
 taire's remarks upon Bacon, Locke, and Newton show that he 
 felt the peculiar importance of each of them. 
 
 Shakespeare, as we have seen, he could not judge aright. 
 He never could. Duels, the first author who " adapted " Shake- 
 speare to the French stage, was misled by Voltaire's estimate, 
 as given in the Letters; and, indeed, it is only in our own 
 time that France has come to the full possession and enjoy- 
 ment of Shakespeare. For a century. Frenchmen generally 
 accepted Voltaire's judgment. " Shakespeare," he told his 
 countrymen, " created the English theatre. He had a genius 
 full of force and fecundity, of nature and sublimity ; but with- 
 out the least spark of good taste, and without the slightest 
 knowdedge of the rules. I am going to say something bold,
 
 230 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 but true : it is, that the merit of this author has ruined the 
 English drama. There are such beautifid scenes, there are 
 passages so grand and so terrible in those monstrous farces 
 which they call tragedies, that his pieces have always been 
 played with great success. Time, which alone gives reputa- 
 tion to men, renders at length their faults respectable. Most 
 of the odd and gigantesque notions of this author have ac- 
 quired, at the end of two hundred years, the right to pass for 
 sublime. Modern authors have almost all copied them ; but 
 that which succeeded m Shakespeare is hissed in them." He 
 proceeds to remark that England has produced but one trag- 
 edy worthy to be ranked with the master-pieces of the French 
 stage, and that was Addison's " Cato." The writings of Vol- 
 taire contain, perhaps, a hundred allusions to^^hak espeare , 
 but most of them in this tone ; and in almost the last piece he 
 ever wrote, he still speaks of him as an inspired barbarian. 
 In one of his essays, in 1761, after giving a ludicrous outline 
 of " Hamlet," he enters into an inquiry how it could be that a 
 nation which had produced the "Cato" of Addison could en- 
 dure such crudities. This is his reason : " The chairmen, the 
 sailors, the hackney-coachmen, the shopmen, the butchers, and 
 even the clergy, in England, are passionately fond of shows. 
 Give them coek-fights, bull-fights, gladiatorial combats, funer- 
 als, witchcraft, duels, hangings, ghosts, and they run in throngs 
 to see them ; and there is more than one lord as curious in 
 these things as the populace. The people of London find in 
 the tragedies of Shakes^jeare all that can please such a taste 
 as this. The courtiers were obliged to follow the torrent." 
 
 Two or three considerations may lessen our astonishment at 
 Voltaire's blindness to Shakespeare. One is that he spoke of 
 Shakespeare very much as the great lights of English litei-a- 
 ture, from Dryden to Goldsmith, were accustomed to speak of 
 him. Dryden styled "Troilus and Cressida" " a heap of rub- 
 bish." Dryden thought he had converted the " Tempest " 
 into a tolerable play when he had spoiled it. Pope spoke of 
 a forgotten play of the Earl of Dorset's as " written in a much 
 purer style than Shakespeare's in his first plays." Boling- 
 broke, as Voltaire mentions, agreed with him upon the irregu- 
 larities of .Shakespeare. Goldsmith speaks of the " amazing, 
 irregular beauties of Shakespeare." When George III. said
 
 RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND. 231 
 
 to Miss Burney that most of Shakespeare was "sad stuff," 
 he probably expressed an opinion that prevailed in the higher 
 circles of his time. There is reason to conclude that, when 
 Voltaire's Letters upon the English appeared in London, his 
 remarks upon Shakespeare were approved by the frequent- 
 ers of such houses as those of Bolingbroke, Dodington, and 
 Pope. 
 
 The customs of the French stage, in Voltaire's day, furnish 
 some furtlier explanation of his insensibility to Shakespeare. 
 The tragic drama in France was a kind of drawing-room pas- 
 time, — decorous, artificial, high-flown. The common people 
 attended the theatre only on festive days, when free admissions 
 were given. To have introduced into a play the name of a 
 prince of the reigning family would have been deemed a very 
 great audacity. No author presumed to do it till Voltaire, 
 emboldened, as he says, by Shakespeare's example, brought 
 upon the scene characters famous in the history of France. 
 At the same time, it was against the " rules " to present to 
 the courtly audiences of that day peasants, mechanics, or any 
 plebeian except a soldier, a valet de chambre^ or a waiting- 
 maid. No one could kill another on the stage. The only 
 killing permitted was decorous and classical suicide. The en- 
 tire action of the play was required to be exhibited in the 
 same apartment, and in the space of time occupied in its rep- 
 resentation. Subject to these rules, — subject, also, to the 
 restraints of rhyme, — what could a French tragedy be but a 
 series of stately dialogues? Accustomed to such a drama as 
 this, Voltaire was shocked at scenes like those of the grave- 
 diggers in " Hamlet," the fool in " Lear," the cobblers in " Ju- 
 lius Csesar." When his " Tancrede " was performed, in 1760, 
 the leading actress implored his consent to the erection of a scaf- 
 fold upon the stage, draped in black. " My friend," he replied, 
 " we must fight the English, not imitate their barbarous thea- 
 tre. Let us study their philosophy ; let us trample under our 
 feet, as they do, infamous prejudices ; let us drive out the 
 Jesuits and wolves ; let us no longer stupidly oppose inocula- 
 tion and the attraction of gravitation ; let us learn from them 
 how to cultivate land; but let us beware of copying their sav- 
 age drama." Moreover, his self-love was interested. If Shake- 
 speare was right, Voltaire was wrong. If "Hamlet" was a 
 good tragedy, what was " Q^dipe "?
 
 232 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 He succeeded little better with Milton. In many passages 
 of bis works be ridicules tbe " odd and extravagant concep- 
 tions " of tbat poet, to whose merit, however, be was not 
 wholly insensible. " Paradise Lost," he concludes, " is a work 
 more peculiar than natural, fuller of imagination than of grace, 
 and of boldness than judgment ; of which the subject is wholly 
 ideal, and which seems not made for man." He admired the 
 " majestic strokes with which Milton dared to depict God, and 
 the character still more brilliant which he gives the Devil." 
 The description of the Garden of Eden pleased him, as well as 
 the "innocent loves of Adam and Eve." But w^hen he comes 
 to speak of the combats between the angels and the fallen 
 sj)irits, of the mountains hurled upon each other, and of the 
 great gathering of the devils in a hall, he can see in those pas- 
 sages only something barbaric and ludicrous. Milton, he re- 
 marks, was a bad prose-writer, and combated the apologists 
 of King Charles as a ferocious beast fights a savage. In all 
 that he says of Milton, we perceive the influence of the Eng- 
 lish circle which he frequented. So Bolingbroke spoke of the 
 author of " Paradise Lost." 
 
 It was during Voltaire's stay in England that news was 
 brought to the literary circle that a daughter of Milton was 
 living in London, old, infirm, and very poor. " In a quarter 
 of an hour," he tells us, "she was rich." He thought of this 
 incident, tliirty-five years later, when he was soliciting sub- 
 scriptions for the edition of Corneille which he published for 
 the benefit of the granddaughter of that poet, whom he had 
 adopted and was educating. He used it as a spur to the zeal 
 of those who were aiding him. ]\Iilton's daughter died soon 
 after, but not before she had related many particulars of her 
 father's life and habits, which Voltaire eagerly gathered and 
 afterwards recorded. 
 
 The English comedy of that time appears to have afforded 
 the stranger much enjoyment. He complains, however, of the 
 indecency of the pojjular comedies. But he appears to have 
 been shocked only at the indecency of the words employed, 
 not at all at the enormous and hideous indecency of the events 
 exhibited. " We are bound to consider," he remarks, "that, 
 if the Romans permitted gross expressions in the satires which 
 only a few people read, they allowed no improper words upon
 
 RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND. 233 
 
 the stage. For, as La Fontaine says, ' Chaste are the ears, 
 though the eyes be loose.' In a word, no one should pro- 
 nounce in public a word which a modest woman may not re- 
 peat." Here we have the explanation of the fact that an Eng- 
 lishman in Paris and a Frenchman in London are equally 
 astounded at the indecency of the plays which they attend. 
 The Frenchman brings to the theatre fastidious ears, and the 
 Englishman chaste eyes. The third and fourth acts of " Tar- 
 tuffe " contain nothing offensive to a French audience, though 
 it would be shocked at some of the words in the first act of 
 Othello. An Englishwoman can endure a gross word or two 
 in the midst of a scene otherwise proper, but would be in- 
 clined to run out of the theatre upon the performance of a 
 whole act of decorous seduction which threatens at every mo- 
 ment to be successful ; the husband of the lady being hidden 
 under the table, and appearing only when the author has ex- 
 hausted every other resource. 
 
 Apropos of " Tartuffe," Voltaire gives an unexpected rea- 
 son for the failure in England of a comedy which has given to 
 the English stage so many of its religious hypocrites, and to ' 
 Dickens perhaps his Uriah Heep. He says that before there 
 can be false devotees there must be true ones ; and one of the 
 great advantages of the English nation is that it has no Tar- 
 tuffes. " The English scarcely know the name of devotee ; 
 but thev know well that of honest man. You do not see there 
 any imbeciles who put their souls into the keeping of others, 
 nor any of those petty ambitious men who establish in a neigh- 
 borhood a despotic sway over silly women formerly wanton 
 and always weak, and over men weaker and more contempti- 
 ble than they." 
 
 Voltaire concludes his review of English literature by re- 
 marking, that, as the English had profited much from works 
 in tlie French language, so the French, in their turn, ought to 
 borrow from them. " We have both," he adds, " we and the 
 English, followed the Italians, who are in everything our mas- 
 ters, and whom we have surpassed in some things. I know 
 not to which of the three nations we ought to give the prefer- 
 ence ; but happy he who knows how to enjoy tlieir different 
 merits." In one particular, however, he awards the palm to 
 England : England honored literature and learning most. In
 
 234 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 France, lie says, Addison might have been member of the 
 Academy, and might have obtained a pension by the influence 
 of a woman ; or he might have been brought into trouble 
 under the pretext that there might be found m his " Cato " 
 some reflections upon the porter of a man in power. In Eng- 
 land, he was secretary of state ; Newton was master of the 
 Mint ; Congreve held an important office ; Prior was plenipo- 
 tentiary ; Swift was dean in Ireland, and much more consid- 
 ered there than the primate ; and if Pope's religion kept him 
 out of office, it did not prevent his gaining two hundred thou- 
 sand francs by his translation of Homer. " What encourages 
 most the men of letters in England is the consideration in 
 which they are held. The portrait of the prime minister is 
 to be found hanging above the mantel-piece of his own study; 
 but I have seen that of Mr. Pope in twenty houses." 
 
 Pope's position in the world of letters in 1728, the year 
 of the "Dunciad," was indeed most brilliant; and I may 
 almost add, terrible ; for the man who can destroy a career 
 or brand a name by a couplet, wields a terrible power. Vol- 
 taire marked the " Dunciad " well, and treasured up the hint it 
 gave him. He could not issue lettres de cachet^ but he saw 
 Pope wreak a deadlier revenge upon his foes than ministers 
 and mistresses did when they consigned men to the Bastille. 
 He watched the career of Pope after he left England, and 
 kept his notice of him in the Letters written up to the date 
 of later editions. 
 
 " Pope [he wrote] is, I believe, the most elegant, the most correct, 
 the most harmonious poet whom the English have possessed. He 
 has reduced the sharp notes of the English trumpet to the soft tones 
 of the flute. It is possible to translate him because he is extremely 
 clear, and because his subjects for the most part are such as interest 
 
 all mankind Pope's ' Essay ou Man ' appears to me to be 
 
 the most beautiful didactic poem, the most useful, the most sublime, 
 that has ever been written in any language. It is true, the basis of 
 the work is found entire in the ' Characteristics of Lord Shaftes- 
 bury,' and 1 do not know why M. Pope gives credit only to M. de 
 Bolingbroke, without sajdng a word of the celebrated Shaftesbury, 
 pupil of Locke. As everything appertaining to metaphysics has 
 been thought in all the ages and by every people who have culti- 
 vated their minds, this system much resembles that of Leibnitz, who 
 
 I
 
 RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND. 235 
 
 maintains that of all possible worlds God was bound to choose the 
 best, and that in this best it was very necessary that the irregularities 
 of our globe and the follies of its inhabitants should have their place. 
 It resembles also the idea of Plato, that, in the endless chain of 
 beings, our earth, our body, our soul, are in the number of necessary 
 links. But neither Leibnitz nor Pope admits the changes which 
 Plato imagines to have happened to those links — to our souls and 
 to our bodies. Plato spoke like a poet in his scarcely intellio-ible 
 prose, and Pope speaks like a philosopher in his admirable verses. 
 He says that from the beginning everything was as it ought to be. 
 
 " I was flattered, I confess it, that he coincides with me in some- 
 thing which I wrote several years ago : ' You are astonished that 
 God has made man so limited, so ignorant, so little happy. Why 
 are you not astonished that he did not make him more limited, 
 more ignorant, more unhappy ? ' When a Frenchman and an English- 
 man think the same thing, they certainly must be right." 
 
 He mentions in this connection that Pope could not con- 
 verse with him in the French language, though Racine the 
 younger had published a French letter horn Pope. " I 
 know," he saj's, "and all the men of letters in England 
 know, that Pope, with whom I lived a good deal in England, 
 could scarcely read French, that he spoke not one word of 
 our tongue, that he never wrote a letter in French, that he 
 was incapable of doing it, and that, if he wrote that letter 
 to the son of our Racine, God, toward the end of his life, 
 must suddenly have bestowed upon him the gift of tongues, 
 to reward him for having composed so admirable a work as 
 the 'Essay on Man.' " 
 
 So passed his exile in England. So our student used his 
 university. The rSgime had better kept him at home ; but, 
 since it did not, he made the best and the most of the oppor- 
 tunit3\ 
 
 During his residence abroad he did not lose his hold upon 
 France. The French ambassador, we perceive, was well 
 disposed toward him. There was already a considerable 
 French colony in London, with head-quarters at the Rainbow 
 coffee-house in Mary-Ie-bone. His old master, the Abbd 
 d'Olivet, and his future enemy, Maupertuis, were both in 
 London during his stay. The frequenters of the Rainbow 
 had not done talking, in 1728, of Mademoiselle de Livri's
 
 236 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 romantic marriage with the Marquis de Gouvernet. Stranded 
 in London, a member of a bankrupt company of French 
 actors, living on charity at a tavern, perhaps at the Rain- 
 bow itself, this young lady, whom Voltaire had introduced 
 to the stage years before, had captivated a French marquis, 
 and in 1727 was married to him, and was then living in 
 Paris as a grande dame. Voltaire could have heard full par- 
 ticulars at the Rainbow, and he used them by and by as 
 material for his comedy of " L'Ecossaise." With old French 
 friends, too, he kept relations, writing once, and in the old 
 familiar manner, to the Duchess du Maine. 
 
 In July, 1727, as the royal archives show, he received per- 
 mission to visit Paris for three months on business, but did 
 not go. Perhaps the business was arranged without him. 
 If so, it was not with his brother Arraand's good will. He 
 could not be friends with Armand, though the Channel rolled 
 between them. In June, 1727, a few weeks before he ob- 
 tained permission to go to Paris, he wrote to Thieriot: 
 " You need not suspect me of having set foot in your coun- 
 try, nor even of having thought of doing so. My brother, 
 especially, is the last man to whom such a secret could be . 
 confided, as much from his indiscreet character as from the 
 ugly (yilaine) manner in which he has treated me since I 
 have been in England. By all sorts of methods I have 
 tried to soften the pedantic clownishness and insolent ego- 
 tism with which he has overwhelmed me during these two 
 years past. I confess to you, in the bitterness of my heart, 
 that his insupportable conduct toward me has been one of my 
 keenest afflictions." 
 
 Armand has left us no means of knowing his side of the 
 story. Deacon Paris had just died of self-torture in France, 
 and the first miracle wrought at his bier bears date May 3, 
 1727 ; a miracle in which Armand Arouet believed with 
 besotted and adoring faith. Strange spectacle ! One brother 
 in Paris gloating over tales of Convulsionirft miracles, and the 
 other brother in London writing " Charles XII.," " Brutus," 
 and " Lettres Philosopliiques," acting powerfully upon the 
 intelligence of Europe, and holding up free England for 
 France to see ! What Darwin will explain to us so myste- 
 rious a fact in the natural history of our race ? 
 
 i
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 RETURN TO FRANCE. 
 
 His exile was long for such an offense as he had committed. 
 When the spring of 1729 opened, more than three years had 
 passed since he had challenged the Chevalier de Rohan in the 
 box of Madame Lecouvreur. He was doing very well in Eng- 
 land, his richly endowed university, getting knowledge and 
 winning prizes. But students are not apt to settle at their 
 university, and no Frenchman so French as he was could be 
 at home out of France. He did not like beer, nor the prac- 
 tice of drinking healths, nor London fogs ; and on one occa- 
 sion, it seems, some rough Londoners hustled him, and showed 
 him how rude Britons in Hogarth's time felt toward the frog- 
 eating French, their " natural enemies." He mounted a stone 
 and harangued the mob : " Brave Englishmen, am I not al- 
 ready unhappy enough in not having been born among you ? " 
 He addressed them so eloquently, Wagniere records, that they 
 " wished, at last, to carry him home on their shoulders ! " ^ 
 
 His portfolio, too, as we have seen, was getting full of 
 things, printed and manuscript, that he yearned to give to a 
 susceptible French public: a better " Henriade," a printed 
 " Brutus," an outlined " Julius Caesar," " English Letters " 
 in a state of forwardness, and, above all, a " History of Charles 
 XH.," gathered from eye-witnesses, compact with every ele- 
 ment of interest, a fresher subject to that generation than 
 Bonaparte was to Sir Walter Scott's, a work which he felt 
 would pervade Europe as fast as printers could print copies. 
 Other schemes were in his mind, for which he had made prep- 
 arations : a something that should commemorate the pictur- 
 esque and eventful reign of Louis XIV., and certain plays in 
 which he would try Shakespearean innovations upon a French 
 audience. 
 
 1 1 Memoires sur Voltaire, 23.
 
 238 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Knowledge is the food of genius. His university of Eng- 
 land had n(juiished him with new and fascinating knowledge 
 \ of many kinds, and we see in his letters that he had a pa- 
 triot's desire, as well as an author's amhition, to make his 
 native land a sharer in his newly found treasures. Why, 
 then, so long in England ? Was the court implacable? The 
 queen, Paris-Duveruey, Richelieu, De Prie, Bourbon, all of 
 whom had smiled upon him and done him substantial ser- 
 vice, could not their influence avail in his behalf? No more 
 than that of the lackeys who served them ! The serene and 
 astute old Cardinal de Fleury had driven them from court, 
 and put the ablest of them, Paris-Duverney, into the Bastille, 
 where he had been in rigorous confinement almost as long as 
 Voltaire had been in exile. 
 
 Under personal government, as in the game of chess, the 
 object of intrigue is to capture the king ; and, as a means to 
 that end, it is an important point to get the queen. But the 
 taking of the queen is not always decisive, because the queen 
 is not always on convenient terms with her husband. Paris- 
 Duverney as financier may be almost said to have saved the 
 monarchy ; his and his three brothers' hard-headed sense be- 
 ing the antidote to the bane of John Law's inflation. But, 
 as court intriguer, he was not successful ; for in that vocation 
 a knowledge of human nature is essential, which financiers do 
 not usually possess. He gave France a queen, but that queen 
 was not able to give him the king. 
 
 An intrigue of Louis XIV.'s cabinet drew those four re- 
 markable brothers Paris from the obscurity of an Alpine 
 hamlet, near Geneva, where their father kept an inn and cul- 
 tivated land ; a man of repute in his neigliborhood ; his four 
 sons, all large, handsome men, intelligent, energetic, and 
 punctiliously honest. Antoine Paris, Claude Paris, Josej^h 
 Paris, and Jean Paris were their real names ; but the French 
 indulge their own fancy in naming themselves, and the most 
 eminent of these four, Joseph Paris, is only known in books 
 as Pavis-Duvemey. Literary men should deal tenderly with 
 his name and memory, for he it was who helped make the 
 fortune of two of their fraternity, Voltaire and Beaumarchais. 
 It is doubtful if the world had ever known its "Figaro" if 
 Paris-Duverney had not sent Beaumarchais to Spain with a 
 pocket full of money to speculate with.
 
 RETURN TO FRANCE. 239 
 
 It was a cabinet intrigue, I say, that gave the Alpine inn- 
 keeper and his four fine boys an opportunity to show the 
 great world the metal they were made of. Minister-of-Finanee 
 Pontchartrain had an interest in frustrating Miiiister-of-VVar 
 Louvois, both being in the service of Lquis XIV., and France 
 being at war with Savoy. Pontchartrain had induced the 
 king to give the contract for supplying the army to a new 
 company offering to do the business cheaper. Louvois, of- 
 fended at this interference, caused the army to move in such 
 a way and at such a time that the contractors could not sup- 
 ply it. Remonstrance was unavailing. " Have thirty tliou- 
 sand sacks of flour on the frontier in depot, on a certain day, 
 or your head shall answer it," was all the concession that 
 could be wrung from the minister of war. The contractors' 
 agent, in despair, opened his heart to his landlord, the Sieur 
 Paris, known to be a man of resources, whose inn lay near the 
 route by which provisions must pass. " Wait," said the land- 
 lord, in substance, " till the boys come in from the fields." A 
 family consultation was held ; the sons agreed that the thing 
 could be done, and that they could do it. In this operation, 
 as in all subsequent ones, the brothers acted together, with 
 common purse, plan, and interest, each doing the part which 
 nature and experience had best fitted him for. One brother 
 scoured the country for mules ; another borrowed the grain 
 at Lyons ; another arranged the lines of the laden beasts, and 
 had them conducted to the frontier by paths known only to 
 Alpine peasants. The business, in short, was accomplished, 
 and the contractors gave these vigorous mountaineers such 
 rewards and chances that before many years were past, they, 
 too, became contractors and capitalists. It was chiefly they 
 who supplied the armies of Louis XIV. while Marlborough 
 was defeating them year after year, and on two or three or 
 four occasions it was their amazing energy and disinterested 
 patriotism that saved defeated armies from annihilation; freely 
 expending all their own capital, and, what is much harder to 
 such men, putting at hazard the millions borrowed on the sole 
 security of their name and honor. When France issued from 
 that long contest, in 1714, with her finances in chaos incon- 
 ceivable, it was still these brothers who began to reduce them 
 to order. Inflator Law drove them into brief exile, and ex-
 
 240 LIFE OF VOLTAITIE. 
 
 aggerated the financial evil tenfold. The universal collapse of 
 Februar}', 1720, brought them back; and then, by five years of 
 constant, well directed, well concerted toil, the proofs of which 
 exist to this day, they put the finances of the kingdom into 
 tolerable ordei", and so enabled the frugal, industrious French 
 people to utilize the twenty years of peace which Cardinal de 
 Fleury was about to give them. And thus it was that Faris- 
 Duverney, the innkeeper's son, came to be, in 1725, the confi- 
 dential secretary of the Duke of Bourbon, prime minister, as 
 well as the trusted counselor of his mistress, the Marquise de 
 Prie. 
 
 But in placing the daughter of a king-out-of-place upon the 
 throne of France, he ventured beyond his depth. The in- 
 trigue both succeeded and failed. Their candidate, indeed, 
 married the boy king, and Paris-Duverney induced her to 
 give her " poor Voltaire " a pension of three hundred dollars 
 a year ; but when the moment came for her to deliver the 
 young king into the hands of the Duke of Bourbon and his 
 mistress, she was grieved to discover that she, young wife as 
 she was, was no match for the old priest. The king liked his 
 tutor, who was a singularly agreeable and placid old gentle- 
 man, and never asked one favor for himself or for a relation. 
 The Duke of Bourbon was neither pleasing in his appearance 
 nor winning in his demeanor. The king felt at home with 
 the preceptor, felt safe with him, relished his company, and 
 had perfect confidence in his fidelity. 
 
 The explosion occurred a few days after the departure of 
 Voltaire for England in 1726. There were two parties at 
 court playing for the possession of the king : one, headed by 
 this quiet and good-tempered old priest ; the other, by the 
 Duke of Bourbon, aided conspicuously and actively by Ma- 
 dame de Prie, who in turn was directed by Paris-Duverney. 
 The mistress was too aggressive, and too hungry for money. 
 She was ill-spoken of out-of-doors ; and, within the palace, she 
 had many enemies. Fleury at length spoke to the prime 
 minister, and advised him to end the scandal by sending the 
 Marquise de Prie from court. The mistress, who was also 
 dame du palais to the queen, resolved, " according to the rules 
 of court warfare," to send away the preceptor.^ The contest, 
 ^ Siecle de Louis XV., par Voltaire, chapter iii
 
 RETURN TO FRANCE. 241 
 
 short and decisive, had these results : the Duke of Bourbon 
 was dismissed and " exiled " to liis own chateau at Chantilly ; 
 Madame de Prie was exiled to her province, where she soon 
 died in "the convulsions of despair;" Paris-Duverney was 
 consigned to an insalubrious apartment in the Bastille ; his 
 chief clerk to a dungeon in the same chateau ; his biothers 
 were exiled ; the Cardinal de Fleury became prime minister, 
 drove many harpies from court, and for twenty years gov- 
 erned France with the minimum of waste possible under that 
 regime. He was as avaricious for the king, St. Simon re- 
 marks, as he was i-egardless of personal emolument. Inci- 
 dentall}^, our exile was affected ; for his friends were in dis- 
 grace and could not help him. 
 
 The queen herself was formally placed under the control of 
 the cardinal whom she had tried to displace. " I pray you, 
 madame," wrote the king of sixteen to the queen of twenty- 
 three, " and if necessary I command you, to do all that the 
 bishop [De Fleury] may tell you to do from me, as if I had 
 said it myself." For some time she was under a manifest 
 cloud. During Voltaire's secret visit to Paris in the summer 
 of 1726, he ventured, it seems, to go in some disguise to the 
 theatre when the king and queen were to attend ; the play be- 
 ing Racine's " Britannicus." " The king and queen," he wrote 
 forty years after, " arrived an hour later than usual. The 
 whole audience perceived that the queen had been crying; 
 and I remember that when Narcisse pronounced this verse, 
 ' Why delay, my lord, to repudiate her ? ' almost every one 
 present looked toward the queen to observe the effect." This 
 was at the crisis of the intrigue, and a few days after, as 
 Voltaire adds, " Paris-Duverney was no longer master of the 
 state." 
 
 The queen's persistence in presenting France with girls, 
 when a boy was so intensely desired, did not help her friends 
 in their time of trouble. The pair of girls with which she 
 began in 1726 might have been pardoned, since their youth- 
 ful sire was so proud of them ; but a third princess in 1728 
 was resented as an impertinence, and not a gun saluted her 
 arrival. While there is life there is hope. The saddened 
 queen, as soon as she was well enough to go out, went in mag- 
 nificent and solemn state to Notre Dame, attended by all her 
 
 VOL. I. 16
 
 242 LITE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 ladies in four eight-horse carriages, and escorted by twenty 
 guards, several pages and twelve footmen, to pray the Virgin 
 to bestow upon her the honor of giving a dauphin to France. 
 An immense concourse of people gathered in the streets to see 
 her pass upon this errand. As she approached the church, 
 a cardinal in his splendid robes, attended by a multitude of 
 priests, advanced to the door to receive her. Advancing along 
 the nave, she ascended a platform, and kneeling upon a cush- 
 ion said her prayer, while thousands of spectators, upon their 
 knees, joined in the entreaty. She rose, and took a seat pre- 
 pared for her ; after which a grand mass was said, accom- 
 panied with new and beautiful music composed for the occa- 
 sion. At the conclusion of the ceremony she retired to an 
 apartment adjacent, where, we are informed, she refreshed her- 
 self with a bowl of broth, and then returned to the palace with 
 the same pomp, followed by the blessings of a countless multi- 
 tude of people. Thirteen months after, to the inconceivable 
 joy of France, the wdshed-for prince was born ! Every bell 
 in Paris rang a merry peal. Cannons were fired. For three 
 eveninofs in succession Paris was ablaze with fire-works and 
 illuminations, and on the following Sunday huge bonfires were 
 lighted in every part of the city. The boy whose birth gave 
 such delight did not live to reign over France ; but he was the 
 father of that Louis XVI. who perished during the French 
 Revolution. 
 
 The cardinal minister was slow to forgive the man who had 
 come near consigning him to the obscurity of a country bish- 
 opric. Paris-Duverney remained a prisoner nearly two years, 
 and it was not till near the close of 1728, that the four bi'oth- 
 ers Paris were restored to liberty, so far as to be allowed to 
 live together fifty miles from the capital. Other circumstances 
 were favorable to the exile, and he resolved, early in 1729, 
 without seeking a formal permission, which might have been 
 refused, to venture to approach Paris as near as St. Germain- 
 en-Laye, fifteen miles from the capital. " Write no more to 
 your wandering friend," he wrote to Thieriot, March 10, 1729, 
 " for at an early moment you will see him appear. Prepare 
 to come at the first summons." 
 
 Rich booty as he brought with him from a foreign land, he 
 did not return as a conqueror. About the middle of March,
 
 RETURN TO FRANCE. 243 
 
 a solitary traveler reached St. Germain-en-Laye, who called 
 himself Monsieur Sansons, and took lodgings at the house of 
 one Chatillon, wig-maker, Rue des R^collets, opposite to the 
 monastery of the fathers so named. The new-comer dispatched 
 a note to Thieriot : " You must ask for Sansons. He inhabits 
 a hole in this barrack, and there is another for you," as well 
 as " a bad bed and short commons." The friends were quickly 
 reunited, and M. Sansons remained for several days in his hole 
 hidden from mankind. The Richelieu chateau was not far off. 
 That of the Duchess du Maine was within easy reach. Ver- 
 sailles was near. Obscure allusions in the letters indicate 
 that a few individuals of his old circle were aware of his re- 
 turn, and took an interest in his safety. Near the end of 
 March he ventured to take up his abode in Paris, at the house 
 of one of his father's old clerks, where he saw no one but the 
 "few indispensables." Every few days he changed his abode. 
 
 Richelieu, Thieriot, and other friends, all joined in advising 
 him to apply for a royal warrant annulling the order of exile. 
 April 7tli he writes to Thieriot a sprightly letter, half in 
 French, half in English, telling him that he will yield to their 
 solicitations. He liked to mix his languages ; this very note 
 containing three. It is dated thus : ^^ Die Jovis, quern barhari 
 Gain nuncupant Jeudi (7 AvrW), 1729." He often makes 
 similar reflections upon the French names of the days and 
 months. The most material sentence of this note runs thus : 
 " Puis done que vous voulez tons que je sois ici avec un war- 
 rant sign^ Louis, go to Saint-Germain ; I write to the Vizier 
 Maurepas, in order to get leave to drag my chain in Paris." 
 The minister gave him the warrant, and he was again a recog- 
 nized inhabitant of his native city. 
 
 Already he had resumed work upon his " Charles XII." As 
 soon as he had a room to work in, he must have begun ; for 
 with this note of April 7th, written eight days after he had 
 reached Paris, he returns two great volumes (the " Diets of 
 Poland," and a " History of Alexander the Great "), and asks 
 Thieriot to find him an account of the topography of Ukrame 
 and Little-Tartary. Assiduous Thieriot sends him maps of 
 those I'egions, and is rewarded by being asked to find " a very 
 detailed and very correct map of the world ; " also a " Life of 
 Peter the Great." So busy was he with this interesting work 
 
 ^. 
 
 >
 
 244 LIFE OF VOLTAIKE. 
 
 that he could not find time to dine Avith Thieriot eyen on a 
 Sunday afternoon, though engaged to do so. "Voltaire," he 
 writes May 15th, " is a man of honor and of his word, if he is 
 not a man of pleasure. He will not be able to take his place 
 at table, but will drop in at the end of your oi'gie, along with 
 that fool of a Charles XII." The orgie probably concluded 
 with a reading of the chapter finished in the mox-ning. On 
 another occasion he tells Thieriot that he will dine with liini 
 " dead or alive." 
 
 After a short period, then, of apprehension and of wander- 
 ing from one obscure lodging to another, we find him settled, 
 restored to his rights and to his friends, hard at work upon his 
 book, and sharing in the social life of Paris. He soon set 
 Thieriot at work getting his pensions restored, and his arrears 
 paid up ; in which they succeeded, minus the deductions im- 
 posed on all pensioners by a cardinal avaricious for his king. 
 Nor did he delay to put to good use those two or three thou- 
 sand solid guineas that he brought from England. Accident 
 helped him to a capital speculation. Supping one evening 
 this spring with a lady of his circle, the conversation turned 
 upon a lottery recently announced by the controller-general, 
 Desforts, for liquidating certain onerous city annuities. La 
 Condamine, the mathematician, who was one of the guests, 
 remarked that any one who should buy all the tickets of this 
 lottery would gain a round million. Voltaire silently reflected 
 upon this statement. At the close of the feast he hurried 
 away to moneyed friends, — doubtless to the brothers Paris, 
 now restored to their career in Paris, who were closely allied 
 to the richest banker of the day, Samuel Bernard. A company 
 was formed ; the tickets were all bought, and the pinzes de- 
 manded. The controller-general, overwhelmed with confusion 
 at this exposure of his blunder, refused to pay. The company 
 appealed to the council, who decided in their favor. Voltaire 
 gained a large sum by this happy stroke, exaggerated by one 
 chronicler to half a million francs. He made, it is true, an 
 enemy of the minister, who was devot ; and he deemed it best 
 to disappear from Paris, and spend some weeks with the Duke 
 of Richelieu at the waters of Plombieres ; as lucky men with 
 as go from Wall Street to Saratoga. But Desforts was soon 
 after displaced, and the poet could safely return. Paris-Du-
 
 ^. 
 
 RETURN TO FRANCE. 245 
 
 verney did not forget the favor done him on this occasion, and 
 before many years had rolled away he was able to make a sub- 
 stantial return in kind, 
 
 Voltaire never wanted money again, and never missed a 
 good opportunity to increase his store. Later in the year 
 1729 we see him dropping work, starting in a post-chaise at 
 midnight for Nancy, a hundred and fifty miles distant, — a ride 
 of two nights and a day, — for the purpose of buying shares 
 in public funds of the Duke of Lorraine. Arriving more dead 
 than alive, he was informed that, by order of the duke, no 
 shares were to be sold to strangers. But, as he related to 
 President Renault, " after pressing solicitations, they let me 
 subscribe for fifty shares (which were delivered to me eight 
 days after), by reason of the happy resemblance of my name 
 to that of one of his Royal Highness's gentlemen. I profited 
 by the demand for this paper promptly enough. I have trebled 
 my gold, and trust soon to enjoy my doubloons with people 
 like you." Ever after, as long as he lived, he was in the habit \ 
 of performing feats of this kind ; as attentive to business as \ w^ 
 though he had no literature ; as devoted to literature as though 
 he had no business. His life was to be henceforth, as it had , 
 been hitherto, a continuous warfare with powers that wielded 
 the resources of a kingdom. He had need to provide himself 
 with the sinews of war. 
 
 Full of his English ideas, it was inevitable that he should 
 speak freely and warmly among his friends of the charms, the 
 power, the safety of freedom ; and it appears, too, that he now 
 saw more clearly than before that there could be no freedom 
 in a country in which existed an order of men clothed with 
 authority to define what men must believe. The citadel of 
 despotism, he discerned, was held by the hierarchy, whose 
 power was founded upon human credulity. The lieutenant of 
 police, we are told, sent for him soon after his return from 
 England, and admonished him concerning the freedoms of his 
 conversation. " I do not believe," replied Voltaire, " that it 
 is designed to liinder me from speaking freely in the houses of 
 my friends. I write nothing, I print nothing, which can ren- 
 der me liable to censure or pursuit on the part of the govern- 
 ment." The lieutenant is said to have interrupted him here. 
 " Whatever you may write," said that officer, " you will never
 
 246 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 succeed in destroying tlie Christian religion." To which Vol- 
 taire replied, "We shall see." 
 
 In resuming his social habits, he cftlled upon the Marquise 
 de Gouvernet, once Mademoiselle de Livri, the companion of 
 his merry days, his protSgee and pupil in the dramatic art. 
 Her Swiss refusing to admit him, he sent her an epistle in the 
 airiest, gayest, sauciest verse, recalling the time when, in an 
 old hackney coach, without lackeys or ornaments, adorned 
 only with her own charms, content with a bad soup, she had 
 given herself to the lover who had consecrated to her his life. 
 AH the pomps and elegancies of her rank, he tells her, — " that 
 large, white-haired Swiss who lies at your door without ceas- 
 ing," " those brilliants hanging from your ears, those fragile 
 marvels of your abode, — all, all are not worth one kiss that 
 you gave in your youth." " The tender Loves and Laughs 
 tremble to appear under your magnificent canopies. Alas ! I 
 have seen them get in by the window and play in your shabby 
 lodgings." She did not resent his witty impudence. She kept 
 the portrait he had given her in their foolish, happy days, for 
 nearly sixty years. They were destined to meet again. 
 
 And so passed the first year of his return. He enjoyed 
 comparative peace, because, as he said to the lieutenant of po- 
 lice, he printed nothing, published nothing. Let us see now 
 how it fared with him when he resumed his vocation.
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 PURSUIT OF LITERATURE UNDER DIFFICULTIES. 
 
 ( " La Henriade " was at length allowed to be sold in 
 France. The applause of Europe, the patronage of friendly 
 courts, the popularity of the work at home, had their effect 
 upon a ministry every member of which, except one, seems 
 to have enjoyed and admired the poem. There is reason to 
 think that the Cardinal de Fleury himself did so. ) This won- 
 drous regime often affords us the spectacle of an administration 
 suppressing a book which nearly every member delighted in, 
 and suppressing it, perhaps, with the more energy because 
 they delighted in it. " La Henriade " was, however, only 
 tolerated. "Tins new edition," the autlior wrote, in 1731, 
 " of the poem of ' La Henriade,' has been issued at Paris by 
 the tacit permission of M. Chauvelin, Master of Requests, 
 and of M. H^rault, Lieutenant of Police, without the Keeper 
 of the Seals yet knowing the least thing about it." There is 
 another sentence in the same letter which the reader will do 
 well to bear in mind : " All M. de Chauvelin desires is to give 
 no pretext to complaints against himself ;" and M. de Chau- 
 velin was the protege and confidant of the Cardinal de Fleu- 
 ry. Of all the cabinet he stood nearest to the prime minis- 
 ter. Henceforth, then, " La Henriade " was a tolerated book 
 in France. 
 
 The tragedy of " Brutus," printed in England in 1727, 
 and since revised, was offered to the manager in December, 
 1729. The author invited the actors to dinner, with Thieriot 
 and one or two other friends. After dinner, he read the 
 play ; which was accepted, put in rehearsal, and announced 
 for presentation. Some places were sold for the opening 
 night, when suddenly the author withdrew the piece, giving 
 two reasons for so doing. " I am assured on all sides," he 
 wrote to Thieriot, " that M. de Crebillon [dramatic author]
 
 248 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 has gone to seek M. de Cliabot [Chevalier de Rohan], and 
 has formed a plot to damn ' Brutus,' which I am unwilling to 
 give them the pleasure of doing. Besides, I do not think 
 the piece worthy of the public. So, my friend, if you have 
 engaged seats, send and get your money back." The second 
 reason French writers think was the controlling one, since 
 Cr^billon was not given to intrigue, and the author of 
 " Brutus" fell to revising the play again. 
 
 In March, 1730, occurred the sudden death of the ac- 
 tress, Adrienne Lecouvreur, aged twenty-eight. She played 
 for the last time, March 15th, in Voltaire's " Qj^dipe," and 
 played, despite her disorder, with much of her accustomed 
 force and brilliancy. In accordance with the barbarous cus- 
 tom of the time there was an afterpiece, in which she also 
 appeared ; and she w^ent home from the scene of her triumphs 
 to die after four days of anguish. Voltaire hastened to her 
 bedside, and watched near her during her last struggle for 
 life ; and when she was seized with the convulsions that pre- 
 ceded her death, he held her in his arms and received her last 
 breath. Being an actress, and dying without absolution, she 
 was denied " Christian burial," and the gates of every recog- 
 nized burial place in France were closed against her wasted 
 body, the poor relics of a gifted and bewitching woman, whom 
 all that was distinguished and splendid in the society of her 
 native land had loved to look upon. At night her body 
 was carried in an old coach (^fiacre') a little way out of town, 
 just beyond the paved streets, to a spot near the Seine now 
 covered by the house No. 109 Rue de Bourgogne. The 
 fiacre was followed by one friend, two street-porters, and a 
 squad of the city watch. There her remains were buried, 
 the grave was filled up, and the spot remained unenclosed 
 and unmarked until the city grew over it and concealed it 
 from view. 
 
 The brilliant world of which she had been a part heard 
 of this unseemly burial with such horror, such disgust, such 
 rage, such "stupor," as we can with difficulty imagine, be- 
 cause all those ties of tenderness and pride that bind families 
 and communities together are more sensitive, if not stronger, 
 in France than with our ruder, robuster race. The idea of 
 not having friendly and decorous burial, of not lymg down
 
 PURSUIT OF LITERATURE UNDER DIFFICULTIES. 249 
 
 at last with kindred and fellow citizens in a place appointed 
 for tlie dead, of being taken out at night and buried at a 
 corner of a road like a dead cat, was and is utterly desolat- 
 ing to the French people. Voltaire, for example, could never 
 face it; he lived and died dreading it. 
 
 And the effect of the great actress's surreptitious burial 
 was increased by various circumstances. That gifted woman 
 possessed all the virtues except virtue; and, unhappily, vir- 
 tue the gay world of Paris did not care for. Nature and 
 history pronounce virtue, whether in man or woman, the 
 indispensable preliminary to well-being, and the church was 
 right in so regarding it. But Paris loved rather to repeat 
 that she had pledged all her jewels to help her lover (on« 
 of her lovers), Maurice de Saxe, son of Augustus, king of 
 Poland. Paris remarked that, if she had not partaken of 
 the sacraments, she had at least left a thousand francs to 
 the poor of her parish. The gay world dwelt much upon 
 her noble disinterestedness in refusing to receive the ad- 
 dresses of Count dArgental, though that infatuated young 
 man loved her to the point of being willing to sacrifice his 
 career to her. That she had borne two children to two 
 lovers, that she had expended the precious treasure of her 
 life and genius in a very few years of joyless excitement, that 
 she had lived in utter disregard of the unchangeable condi- 
 tions of human welfare, as well as those of the highest artistic 
 excellence, — who thought of that? Who could think of 
 that in connection with such an outrage upon her wasted 
 remains? 
 
 Voltaire, who owed so much to this brilliant woman who 
 owed so much to him, was profoundly moved. To the assem- 
 bled company of actors, her companions in glory and in 
 shame, he said : " Announce to the world that you will not 
 exercise your profession, until you, the paid servants of the 
 king, are treated like other citizens in the king's service." 
 They promised him ; but who was to maintain them in the 
 interval ? The chiefs of the company only received from a 
 thousand to two thousand francs a year. " They promised," 
 he wrote thirty years after, " but did nothing further in the 
 matter. They preferred dishonor with a little money, to 
 honor, which would have been worth more to them." ^ 
 1 Voltaire to Mademoiselle Clairon, August 17, 1761.
 
 250 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 It SO chanced that a few months hiter, in the same year, died 
 Anne Oldfield, for many years the glory of the London stage ; 
 ■who also left two children to two of her lovers. She was buried 
 witli public ceremonial in Westminster Abbey, her remains 
 followed b}^ persons eminent in rank and in gifts. It was when 
 Voltaire heard of Mrs. Oldfield's honorable obsequies that his 
 feelings found expression in his well-known poem on the 
 death of Mademoiselle Lecouvreur, which expressed the feel- 
 ings of the public also. In Greece, he cried, such a woman 
 would have had an altar! Living, France hung in rapture 
 upon her lips ; dead, she is a criminal ! " Ah, shall I always 
 see my feeble nation blasting what it admires, sleeping under 
 the dominance of superstition ? O London, happy land, 
 where no art is despised, where every kind of success has its 
 glory, where the conqueror of Tallard, son of Victory, the sub- 
 lime Dryden, the wise Addison, the charming Ophils (Old- 
 field), and the immortal Newton, all have their place in the 
 Temple of Glory ! " 
 
 This poem, handed about in the drawing-rooms for many 
 weeks in manuscript, attracted the notice of the ministry at 
 length, and endangered the safety of the author for a while. 
 Fortunately, he was absent from Paris at the time, and could 
 take measures to avert the peril. His indignation, he con- 
 fessed, may have carried him too far, but he thought it " par- 
 donable in a man who had been her admirer, her friend, her 
 lover, and who, besides, was a poet." So, perhaps, thought 
 the ministry, and the storm blew over. 
 
 It was during this year, 1730, that he began that burlesque 
 poem upon Jeanne Dare, "La Fucelle," which for thirty 
 years disturbed his repose, very much as a packet of gunpow- 
 der might disturb the repose of a man who was obliged to 
 keep it in his wi'iting desk. The work was suggested at tlie 
 supper-table of the Duke of Richelieu ; where, the conversa- 
 tion turning upon the exploits of the Maid of Orleans, some 
 one mentioned Chapelain's heroic poem on the subject, which 
 was satirized so severely by Boileau, and the guests began 
 to quote absurd bits from it, greatly to the general amuse- 
 ment. After this had gone on for some time, the following 
 conversation occurred between the giver of the feast and 
 Voltaire : —
 
 PURSUIT OF LITERATURE UNDER DIFFICULTIES. 251 
 
 Richelieu. — "I bet that if you had treated this subject, you would 
 have produced a better work, and you would not have found it nec- 
 essary, in order to magnify your principal character, to make a saint 
 of her." 
 
 Voltaire. — "I doubt much if I should have been able to make 
 a good serious work of it. In the history of Jeanne Dare there 
 are too many trivial circumstances bordering upon the burlesque, 
 and others altogether too atrocious. How to inspire a great inter- 
 est in the minds of people of taste for a girl in man's dress, who 
 begins by leaving a tap-room and ends by being burnt alive ? Boi- 
 leau himself could not have succeeded in it. My belief is that, 
 under more than one aspect, this subject, drawn from our own 
 annals, would lend itself better to jocular than heroic treatment." 
 
 Richelieu. — "I think so too, and no one would be more capa- 
 ble than you of doing it well, if you would undertake it. You ought 
 to give us something upon it." ^ 
 
 The guests applauding, as guests usually applaud a duke's 
 suggestions at bis own table, tbe poet mentioned various ob- 
 jections. They pressed the subject upon him, and he at last 
 promised to take it into consideration. He had been reading 
 Italian a good deal during late years ; and now, casting aside 
 his serious work, he dashed into a poem upon the " Pucelle " 
 in the manner of Ariosto, and in a few weeks he had four 
 cantos done. The company reassembled at the Hotel de Riche- 
 lieu, to whom these four cantos were read, eliciting boister- 
 ous applause. 
 
 From this time the author worked occasionally upon the 
 poem, relieving thereby the severity of other labors, until he 
 had produced the work in twenty-one cantos as we have it 
 now. He boasted that his burlesque was not as long as that 
 of Ariosto. " I should have been ashamed," he once wrote, 
 " to have employed thirty cantos in those fooleries and de- 
 baucheries of the imasjination. These amusements are the 
 interludes to my occupations. I find that' one has time for 
 everything if one wishes to employ it." 
 
 This mock-heroic poem of nearly ten thousand lines, the 
 longest of his poetical works, is strictly in the line of Vol- 
 taire's accepted vocation, which was to terminate the domina- 
 tion of legends over the human mind. Unfortunately, it was 
 not in his "power at that time to know how much truth there 
 1 Meinoires sur Voltaire, par S. G. Longchump, Article XIV.
 
 252 LIFE or VOLTAIRE. 
 
 was in the legend of the patriotic and devoted girl who bled 
 for her country and began the expulsion of the invader from 
 French soil. Among the manuscripts in the royal archives, 
 not then accessible, was the report of the trial of Jeanne 
 Dare, wbich was published some years ago in five octavo vol- 
 umes by the Historical Society of France. From this valu- 
 able publication, one of the most interesting memorials of that 
 ao-e, we are now able to understand her and her work; and, 
 though we cannot deny that there was an ingredient of im- 
 posture in her career, and even conscious imposture, it becomes 
 plain that the impulse which sent her forth and sustained her 
 to the end was noble and disinterested. The Maid possessed 
 some intelligence, great courage, and great fortitude. Unlike 
 ordinary religious impostors, she bore her banner in the front 
 of the battle, where wounds and death were in the air ; she 
 used religion in such a way as to change the French army 
 from a crowd of roystering thieves, ravishers, and drunkards 
 into moral, resolute, disciplined, victorious soldiers ; and, at 
 last, after baffling for five months the sixty priests who tried 
 her, she couited the stake rather than endure degrading and 
 hopeless imprisonment. 
 
 But Voltaire could have known scarcely anything of all this, 
 and he employed the old legend of the Maid as a vehicle for 
 twenty-one cantos of uproarious burlesque, in which he found 
 opportunity, from time to time, to ridicule all the objects 
 of his aversion, animate and inanimate, tossing in the same 
 blanket saints, poets, critics, bishops, beliefs, rites, usages, hu- 
 man foibles, private enemies, public grievances, — all with the 
 same buoyant, inexhaustible vivacity. Open the poem any- 
 where, and you alight upon something that would bring a 
 grin to the cast-iron visage of a Calvin — if he was alone. It 
 was written for a generation that had no more notion of what . 
 we mean by the word "decency" than the ladies had who told 
 and heard the stories of the " Decameron." For twenty-five 
 years one of the greatest proofs of devotion which one woman 
 of " taste " could give another was to procure for her the pe- 
 rusal of a new canto of " La Pucelle." The Queen of Prussia 
 not only read it, but permitted her young daughter to hear 
 it read. The author's old professor, Abb^ d' Olivet, bantered 
 him upon it, as upon a jest, a little free perhaps, but quite
 
 PUESUIT OF LITERATURE UNDER DIEFICULTIES. 253 
 
 allowable. Ladies were particularly fond of such literature 
 then, and I notice that when an author in that age wrote 
 something for a lady's forfeit, he usually accommodated him- 
 self to the ruling taste of the sex by producing a tale like 
 those in the " Decameron." Voltaire invariably did so. Our 
 conception of decency, in short, is a thing of yesterday ; not 
 on that account the less to be approved and upheld ; but not 
 to be applied as a moral test to the literature of past ages. 
 
 Henceforth, then, we are to imagine a mass of blotted manu- 
 script in the poet's desk, or carelessly left lying about on his 
 table, liable to be copied by curious visitors and by unfaithful 
 secretaries ; a manuscript sure to be called for by guests " of 
 taste," which the owner thereof was only too willing to read 
 aloud for their entertainment ; a manuscript of which vague 
 rumors soon got afloat in the drawing-rooms, and reached the 
 ears of ministers ; a manuscrijjt with exile and the Bastille in 
 it, if not the wheel and the stake. In that immoral age, 
 when living virgins were merchandise which the king himself 
 bought, a light song about the Virgin could bring a man to 
 the fire. 
 
 His English Letters were ready for publication. What 
 trouble it cost him to get that little book before the public of 
 France ! In the autumn of 1730 he sent Thieriot to England 
 with letters to his old friends in that country, to arrange for 
 its translation into English and its publication in London. 
 That was not difficult, and in due time Thieriot accomplished 
 his errand, and gained, as it is said, four hundred pounds ster- 
 ling by it. In France, meanwhile, Voltaire strove to conciliate 
 the powers in favor of the book, and endeavored to reduce the 
 ofi"ense in it to the minimum. "I have been obliged," he wrote 
 to a friend, " to change all that I had written upon M. Locke, 
 because, after all, I wish to live in France, and it is not per- 
 mitted to me to be as philosophic as an Englishman. At 
 Paris I have to disguise what I could not say too strongly 
 in London. This circumspection, unfortunate but necessary, 
 obliges me to erase more than one passage, sufficiently amus- 
 ing, upon the Quakers and Presbyterians. My heart bleeds 
 for it ; Thiei'iot will suffer by it ; you will regret those places, 
 and I also. I have read to Cardinal de Fleury two letters 
 upon the Quakers, from which I had taken great pains to cut
 
 254 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 out all tliat could alarm liis devout and sage Eminence. He 
 found the residue pleasant enougl> ; but the poor man does not 
 know what he lost." 
 
 His " History of Charles XH." was nearly ready for the press 
 early in 1730, and, having submitted it to tlie appointed cen- 
 sor, he received a royal " privilege " to publish it in France. 
 For once, as lie fondly thought, he had produced a work in 
 which no offense could be found, and which must be agreeable 
 to the administration, since it paid abundant honor to King 
 Stanislas, father of the Queen of France. Fortune, indeed, 
 had favored this history from its conception by giving the 
 author familiar access to a great number of individuals who 
 had personal knowledge of the strange events to be related. 
 Nearly every page of it was composed from information de- 
 rived from eye-witnesses. He had lived familiarly with Baron 
 de Goertz, favorite minister of Charles XH., distinguished in 
 history as the only man who ever suffered death for the per- 
 nicious error of inflating a country's currency. King Stanislas 
 himself had given and continued to give him important aid. 
 Maurice de Saxe, son of Augustus of Poland and an actor in 
 the scenes delineated, he had met constantly in the society of 
 Madame Lecouvreur. Bolingbroke, who was in power during 
 part of Charles's wild career, threw light upon the diplomacy 
 and politics of his subject. In England the Duchess of Marl- 
 borough imparted to him much which she remembered of her 
 husband's dealings with the Swedish king. Curious details 
 of the king's life in Turkey he derived from Fonseca, a Portu- 
 guese physician established then at Constantinople, and in 
 practice among the viziers and pachas. A relation of Vol- 
 taire's, INT. Bru, "first dragoman to the Porte," aided him also. 
 Baron Fabrice, long the reader and secretary of the Swedish 
 king, gave him anecdotes and details in great number. The 
 work was made up of " interviews ; " but those interviews 
 were not presented in crude, enormous masses, but digested 
 into a narrative, bright, clear, and serene, that could be read 
 in two evenings. Voltaire told this wild and wondrous tale 
 as Sallust tells the story of Jugurtha ; and there is revealed 
 to the observant reader the author's contempt for the hero, as 
 well as his compassion for a human i-ace so imperfectly devel- 
 oped as to permit a silly and ignorant young man to work
 
 PmiSUIT OF LITEKATURE UNDEU DIFFICULTIES. 255 
 
 such causeless havoc among innocent populations. The book 
 is a satire upon personal government of unequaled force, and ,' 
 the more effective from being so brief and so easily read. ^ 
 
 Superstition, the chief stay of personal government in mod- 
 ern times, is so quietly satirized that the censor did not perceive ■ 
 the satire. The Muscovites, said the sly author, have scruples 
 about drinking milk on fast days, but fathers, priests, wives, and 
 maidens get drunk upon brandy on days of festival. " In 
 that country, as elsewhere, there are disputes upon religion ; 
 the greatest quarrel being upon the question whether the laity 
 ought to make the sign of the cross with two fingers or with 
 three." The passage, too, upon the establishment of the 
 printing-press in Russia was amusing : " The monk objected, 
 and used the printing-press to prove the Czar Antichrist. 
 Another monk, with an eye to preferment, refuted the book, 
 and demonstrated that Peter was not Antichrist, because the 
 number 6QQ was not in his name. The author of the libel 
 was broken upon the wheel ; the author of the refutation was 
 made Bishop of Rezan." 
 
 Happy in his " privilege," Voltaire put the work to press in 
 Paris, and in the autumn of 1730 had an edition of twenty- 
 six hundred copies of the first volume ready for distribution. 
 Suddenly, without cause assigned, by a mere fiat of authority, 
 the privilege was withdrawn and the whole edition seized, ex- j 
 cept one copy which the author chanced to hafe in his own 
 possession. 
 
 What could be the matter? Voltaii-e sought information 
 from the Keeper of the Seals, and obtained it. • A turn in the 
 politics of Europe obliged the French ministry to avoid dis- 
 pleasing Augustus, King of Poland, who was not treated very 
 tenderly in the work ! " In this country," the author wrote 
 to a friend, " it seems to me that Stanislas ought to be consid- 
 ered rather than Augustus, and I flatter myself that Stanislas' 
 daughter, Marie, would not take in ill part the good things I 
 have said of her father." The minister admitted that he saw 
 no harm in the work, and the minister's son declared, soon 
 after, in a moment of enthusiasm, that if Voltaire did not 
 publish it, he would. But the minister was firm in his resolve 
 not to permit the book to appear cum privilegio, alleging al- 
 ways the necessity the King of France was under to menager
 
 256 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 the actual King of Poland instead of his father-in-law, the 
 late king. 
 
 Here was a dead lock, — two works ready to appear, with 
 little chance of their appearing ; both being productions which, 
 for various reasons, an author would naturally be in a fever to 
 see in print. The foaming rage of desire which makes the buf- 
 falo toss the sods of the prairie in the summer day, regardless 
 of the shrieking train, is not stronger than an author's pas- 
 sion to communicate to the public a book in which he has put 
 his convictions, his patriotism, and his ambition. Privilege or 
 no privilege, these two little books must see the light ! Such 
 was the resolve of their author in the late weeks of 1730. 
 He recalled the time when Thieriot and himself had had " La 
 Henriade " printed at Rouen, and had smuggled copies to 
 Paris by barge and wagon. He wrote to his old friend and 
 schoolfellow, M. de Cideville, now settled in the magistracy at 
 Rouen, explaining his dilemma, and asking him if he could 
 find there a place where he could live for some months in strict 
 incognito, and a printer who could do the work required. Yes, 
 replied his friend, Jore, printer and bookseller of Rouen, will 
 be glad to provide lodgings for an anonymous author, and 
 print for him as well. 
 
 Two things detained him at Paris a few weeks. He had an 
 interest in a vessel named The Brutus, coming from Barbary 
 to Marseilles 4aden with grain ; and his tragedy of " Brutus," 
 revised and altered, was again in rehearsal, and announced 
 for presentation December 11, 1730. An immense audience 
 filled the theatre on the opening night, and the piece was re- 
 ceived with that kind of applause which denotes a house 
 packed with friends of the author. But the next night's re- 
 ceipts revealed the truth. First night, 5065 francs ; second 
 night, 2540 francs ; fifteenth and last night, 660 francs. The 
 fable of a father dooming his sons to death may be endured in 
 the reading, but we cannot see him do it, either with pleasure 
 or approval ; and it had been found impossible by dramatists, 
 hitherto, to fill up five acts with interesting pretexts for such 
 atrocious virtue. Voltaire expresses surprise that Shakespeare 
 did not treat a subject that seemed so suitable to the English 
 stage, and lay so obviously in Shakespeare's path. That such 
 a master deliberately forbore to attempt it might well have 
 
 II
 
 PURSUIT OF LITERATURE UlSTDER DIFFICULTIES. 257 
 
 been a warning to after-comers. Voltaire's piece, however, 
 contains three scenes of commanding effect, as well as a great 
 number of striking verses, and when the play used to be given 
 during the delirium of the Revolution, in 1792, it excited tu- 
 multuous enthusiasm. 
 
 On his way home from one of the representations of this 
 play, the author learned that the ship Brutus, reported lost, had 
 arrived safely at her port. "Well," said the poet to his factor, 
 " since the Brutus of Barbary has come in, let us console our- 
 selves a little for the sorry welcome given to the Brutus of 
 ancient Rome. Perhaps a time will come when they will do 
 lis justice." ^ 
 
 The part of Tullie in the new tragedy was performed by a 
 girl of fifteen, who appeared on the stage for the first time. 
 She was terribly frightened on the opening night, and could 
 not play the part as she had played it during the rehearsals. 
 The next morning the author reassured her by a letter which 
 was all tact and goodness. 
 
 " Prodigy [he wrote], I present you a ' Henriade,' a very serious 
 work for your age ; but she who plays Tullie is capable of reading ; 
 and it is quite right that I should offer my works to one who em- 
 bellishes them. I thought to die last night, and am in a wretched 
 state this morning ; but for which I should be at your feet to thank 
 you for the honor you are doing me. The piece is unworthy of 
 you ; but, rely upon it, you are going to win great *glory in invest- 
 ing my role of Tullie with your own charms Do not be 
 
 discouraged. Think how marvelously well you played at the re- 
 hearsals, and that nothing was wanting to you yesterday but con- 
 fidence. Your timidity even did you honor. To-morrow you must 
 
 take your revenge In God's name, be tranquil ! Though 
 
 you should not make a decided hit, what does it matter ? You are 
 but fifteen, and people could only say that you are not yet what you 
 will be one day. For my part, I have nothing but thanks for you. 
 .... Begin by having some friendly regard for me, who love you 
 like a father, and you will play my role in an interesting manner." 
 
 He was too sick to go to the theatre on the second night, 
 but toward the close of the evening his valet brought him 
 the good news that Tullie had "played like an angel ! " 
 
 In distributing the new edition of "La Henriade," he 
 
 t Duvernet, chapter vii. 
 VOL. I. 17
 
 258 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 sent a copy also to his ancient master, Father Porde, of 
 the College Louis-le-Grand, asking him to receive it with 
 some indulgence, and to think of him as a son who came, 
 after the lapse of many years, to present to his father the 
 fruit of his labors in an art which that father had origi- 
 nally taught him. He asked him also to point out any places 
 in the poem where he had not spoken of religion as he 
 ought, that he might correct them in the next edition. 
 " I desire your esteem, not only as author, but also as a 
 Christian." 
 
 About the middle of March, 1731, giving out on all sides 
 that he was about to return to England, he disappeared from 
 Paris, and took up his abode in obscure lodgings at the ancient 
 city of Rouen, in the character of an English lord exiled for 
 political offenses and obliged to live in strict seclusion. A 
 valet, hired for the occasion at twenty sous per diem, added 
 to the usual duties of a valet that of conveying proof-sheets 
 between author and printer ; M. Jore, also, was ever attentive 
 to the pleasure of milord. In the summer, he removed to 
 a farm-house near by, and then a servant-girl was his mes- 
 seno-er, going to the printing-house three times a week. In 
 the intervals of proof-reading, he worked, with even more 
 than his usual assiduity, upon his tragedy of " Julius Caesar," 
 upon " Eriphyle," a tragedy sketched before leaving Paris, 
 and upon the closing part of "Charles XII." He could write 
 in June to Thieriot that, in spite of a slow fever that kept him 
 miserable for some weeks, he had written two tragedies and 
 finished " Charles XII." in three months. "In Paris, I could 
 not have done that in three years. But you know well what 
 H prodigious difference there is between a mind in the calm 
 of solitude and one dissipated in the world." After a residence 
 in and near Rouen of six months or more, he returned to 
 Paris, without having yet seen a copy of his history. Great 
 bundles of copies, however, soon arrived. We find him writ- 
 ing to a Rouen friend in October : " If it will cost only sixty 
 livres by land, send the packages by the carrier to the address 
 of the Duke of Richelieu, at Versailles, and I, being informed 
 of day and hour of arrival, will not fail to send a man in the 
 Richelieu livery, who will deliver the whole safely. If the 
 land carriage is too expensive, I pray you to forward them by
 
 PURSUIT OF LITERATURE UNDER DIFFICULTIES. 259 
 
 :1 
 
 water to St. Cloud, whither I will send a wagon for them." 
 These ballots, probably, contained copies for the queen and 
 court. 
 
 " Charles XII." was received with heartiest welcome in all 
 countries which contained an educated class. Translations and 
 new editions followed one another quickly, until it reached 
 the whole reading public of Europe and America. When a 
 writer takes all the trouble and leaves the reader nothing 
 but pleasure, it is usual for critics to surmise that the author 
 invented romantic or convenient circumstances. This work, 
 written during the lifetime of thousands of men who had 
 taken part in the events described, was subjected to severe 
 and repeated scrutiny. The author, sedulous to profit by this, 
 incorporated new facts from time to time, and corrected errorsy 
 until it was, perhaps, as true a narrative as written language 
 could present of a career involving so many extraordinary and 
 distant scenes. It remains to this day the only work of the 
 author which has universal and unimpeded currency, being 
 used as a school-book in all countries where French is a part ' '^ ^'' 
 of polite education. At the time it gave him a perceptible 
 increase of reputation, as well as a certain weight with the 
 public which he had not before possessed. It widened his 
 celebrity, since there are ten persons who can enjoy an 
 easy, limpid narrative in prose, for one who finds pleasure in 
 classic poetry. 
 
 The English Letters were not yet seen in France. The 
 author was still modifying the audacities, and veiling the 
 heresies, and cutting away the inadmissibles, ever hoping to 
 render the work such as a not ungenial cardinal might tacitly 
 allow to circulate. It surprises us that he could have indulged 
 such an expectation ; but we perceive from his familiar corre- 
 spondence with comrades that he did so. 

 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 THE CONVULSIONIST MIRACLES. 
 
 On the return of Voltaire to Paris, late in the summer of 
 1731, he found his fellow-citizens again agitated by the ancient 
 Jansenist and Molinist controversy. From being the sport 
 of theologians, it had now come to be the scoff of the polite 
 world and the scourge of the people. At that time France 
 may have contained a population of twenty millions, of 
 whom, perhaps, two millions could read, and half a million 
 may have had mental culture enough to follow with pleasure 
 an easy narrative like Voltaire's " Charles XII." When Tal- 
 leyrand visited Yale College, as late as 1794, he told the pres- 
 ident that he thought eighteen millions of the French people 
 could neither read nor write. 
 
 An ignorant people take instinctively to the severer modes 
 of religion, as they do to the severer schools of law and 
 physic. They like their medicine, whether for mind or body, 
 exceedingly nauseous and painful. They love the terrors of 
 the law. Jansenism, too, had the advantage, which Voltaire 
 enjoyed, of being constantly denounced and prosecuted by the 
 government, — the most effective mode of advertising then 
 invented. Hence the " philosophers " and the Jansenists 
 shared the sovereignty over the French mind between them: 
 the philosophers swaying the few thousands who partook of 
 the intellectual life of the age, and the Jansenists controlling 
 many hundreds of thousands who sought welfare through re- 
 ligion. As late as 1731, Voltaire could still say, with an ap- 
 proach to truth, that all France was Jansenist, except the 
 Jesuits, the bishops, and the court. 
 
 It may have been on the very day of his reappearance in 
 Paris, in 1731, that he witnessed the solemn and elaborate 
 burning (August 29th) of a small Jansenist book by the pub- 
 lic executioner. The book was the "Life of Deacon Paris," or,
 
 THE CONVULSIONIST MIRACLES. 261 
 
 as the Jansenists loved to style him, Saint Paris ; a name of 
 renown at tliat day among millions of Frenchmen who lived 
 and died in ignorance of the name of Voltaire. The college 
 of cardinals and the chiefs of the inquisition united in de- 
 nouncing this little book, in menacing with "the excommuni- 
 cation major " all who should even read it, and in condemn- 
 ing it to be publicly burned. In the open space, opposite 
 the convent of Minerva, a very large platform was built, and 
 in front of it, at a distance of thirty paces, a stake was set 
 up, as though Deacon Paris himself was to be burned. The 
 cardinals ascended the platform, to the eldest of whom the 
 clerk of their court presented the unhappy Book, with thin 
 chains twisted about it and fastened with care. The car- 
 dinal in chief handed the book thus bound to the grand in- 
 quisitor, who gave it back to the clerk. That officer then 
 handed it to the provost, who gave it to a bailiff, who passed 
 it on to a watchman, who placed it in the hands of the execu- 
 tioner, who raised it high above his head, slowly and gravely 
 turning round to the four points of the compass. He then 
 took off the chains from the book, tore out the leaves, one at a 
 time, dipped each leaf in boiling pitch, and, finally, the whole 
 mass of leaves being placed at the stake, he set fire to it, and 
 regaled the people with a fine blaze. ^ 
 
 Why this childish scene ? And who was Deacon Paris ? 
 The reader who would understand Voltaire and his time 
 must know what that thing was which called itself " religion " 
 in his day, and how it presented itself to his eyes, I will 
 therefore briefly answer these questions, reminding the reader, 
 once more, that of these two brothers Arouet, one looked 
 upon the scenes about to be described with contemptuous pity, 
 and the other with rapturous approval. 
 
 Francis Paris, born 1G90, son of an eminent and wealthy 
 Paris lawyer, imbibed the notion in childhood from his Jan- 
 senist teachers that the great interest of man is to propitiate 
 an almost implacable deity by self-inflicted torture. He 
 abandoned the profession of the law, to which his father des- 
 tined him, refused the rank and inheritance of eldest son, and 
 accepted from his father's large estate only a small pension, 
 one fourth of his legal right. His father's death setting him 
 1 Histoire du Parlement de Paris, par Voltaire, chapter Ixiv.
 
 262 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 free from restraint, liis first care was to disengage himself 
 from all worldly affairs and ties. Part of his inheritance was 
 a mass of silver plate, weighing two hundred pounds. This 
 he sold, and divided the proceeds among the poor. He in- 
 herited also a quantity of linen and other household stuffs, 
 which his mother, according to the provident custom of the 
 age, had accumulated. The linen he gave to a number of 
 poor priests for surplices, and the other fabrics he divided 
 among the poor families of his parish. Some barrels of salt 
 had come to him, salt being then a very expensive article ; 
 this he distributed among the poor. Having thus disposed of 
 his superfluous effects, and having remained at home long 
 enough to see his younger brother married and settled, he 
 went forth to begin his long-desired life of entire consecration 
 to propitiatory religion. 
 
 He retired to a village near Chartres, hired secluded apart- 
 ments, and gave himself up to prayers, study, fasting, and 
 self-torture. All day he remained alone in his room, studying 
 Hebrew, reading theology, and praying. He wore a hair shirt 
 next his skin, and fasted on all the appointed days most rigor- 
 ously, not eating a morsel of food till sunset. On Sundays 
 he performed, at the request of the parish priest, the duty of 
 catechizing the children. In winter he would have no fire in 
 his room, and when the cold was too severe to be borne he 
 merely covered his feet with a hair cloth. 
 
 He often changed his place of abode, but never his habits, 
 except that he constantly increased the severity of his self-in- 
 flicted torments. Being intrusted by his parish priest with 
 the charge of the young candidates for the priesthood, he 
 led them to practice such extreme self-denial that he was 
 complained of to the archbishop, who was thus made ac- 
 quainted with his character. Instead of his reproving his ex- 
 cessive and ill-directed zeal, the archbishop desired to reward 
 it by bestowing upon him the dignity of deacon, and held out 
 to him the promise of still further advancement. The zealot 
 deemed himself unworthy of the honor, and long refused it. 
 His scruples being at length overcome, he was ordained, and 
 thus acquired the title by which he is now known. Other 
 ecclesiastical honors, though they were often pressed upon 
 him, he declined.
 
 THE CONVULSIONIST MIRACLES. 263 
 
 As he advanced in life his austerities still increased, and he 
 resolved, at last, to retire wholly from the haunts of men. 
 First he traveled on foot over France, seeking some monas- 
 tery congenial to him. From this journey he ingeniously ex- 
 tracted all the misery it could be made to yield, pursuing his 
 weary way through all kinds of weather, ill clad, half starved, 
 and lodging in the stables of the poorest inns. But in all his 
 wanderings he found no retreat that promised sufficient sever- 
 ity, and he returned to Paris to contrive one for himself. 
 There he withdrew to a mean and secluded abode, and set 
 about the work of torturing himself to death with renewed 
 vigor. 
 
 It was his habit now to fast during the whole forty days 
 of Lent as rigorously as he had been used to fast on single 
 days, never eating until sunset, and then only bread and water, 
 nor much of them. Toward the close of the forty days he 
 really suffered as much as his heart could wish. He would 
 sometimes fall into convulsions, and endured awful pangs 
 and spasms, which he attributed to the efforts of the devil to 
 shake his purpose. He slept upon a straw mattress, except 
 in seasons of penitence, when he preferred the floor. He had 
 in his little room a table, one chair, no fire-place, and he ate 
 nothing but bread, water-cress, and other raw herbs, with the 
 occasional luxury of a hard-boiled egg or a plate of thin soup 
 sent in to Uim by his landlord, a poor lace-maker. To still 
 further mortify himself, he bought a stocking-frame, and 
 earned his livelihood by making stockings, concealing from his 
 fellow-lodgers that he possessed an independent income. His 
 landlord, for a considerable time, thought he was a poor stock- 
 ing-weaver, and it was in compassion for his supposed poverty 
 that he sent him in the soup. 
 
 Having exhausted, at length, all the usual modes of self-sac- 
 rifice, he hit u.pon a new one : he resolved to deny himself the 
 consQlatio7is of religion itself! For two years he abstained 
 from taking the communion, alleging that he was unworthy ; 
 and it was only at the express command of his ecclesiastical 
 superiors that he again partook of it. Frustrated thus in this 
 design of tormenting his soul, he aggravated the tortures of 
 his body, saying that, as every part of his body within and 
 without was sinful, it was necessary that every part of it
 
 264 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 should suffer, and suffer severely. Now it was that he added 
 to his shirt of coarsest hair a girdle of iron, and to that a 
 breastplate of iron wire in the form of a heart, with points 
 of wire on the side next his flesh ; so that when, in his pen- 
 itential frenzies, he beat his breast with his hands the blood 
 flowed. 
 
 The poor misguided man persevered in this suicidal course 
 till he brought himself to death's door. When he lay help- 
 less upon his straw his friends gathered round him and strove 
 to alleviate his condition. He steadfastly refused their offers, 
 and turned a deaf ear to all remonstrance, blaming himself 
 only for not having concealed his sufferings, and saying that 
 if he recovered his health he must "serve God" more 
 faithfully than he had done before. He died aged thirty- 
 seven, and was buried in a cemetery of his native city. He 
 died of self-mortification at about the age when many young 
 men (Byron and Burns, for example) die of self-indulgence, 
 — a meaner and madder kind of suicide than his. 
 
 It was not till after his death that the events occurred 
 which have caused this poor man to be so long remembered. 
 The more ignorant Jansenists of Paris, hearing of the man- 
 ner of his life and death, regarded him as a saint, and looked 
 upon his burial-place as holy ground. 
 
 I once asked a distinguished judge of New York what he 
 had learned by sitting thirty years upon the bench. He an- 
 swered promptly, " The difficulty of arriving at truth through 
 human testimony.'" 
 
 A catalogue of the miracles wrought at the tomb of Deacon 
 Paris, in three volumes folio, was published by a respectable 
 priest, each miracle being supported by sworn testimony, taken 
 before notaries, and certified in proper form. This testimony, 
 upon many of the cases, is of such a nature and is so abundant 
 in quantity that it would command a verdict, as the learned 
 judge himself would charge. To illustrate the fallibility of 
 human evidence, I will give a few examples drawn from this 
 ponderous work. 
 
 Deacon Paris died on the 1st of May, 1727. A woman, aged 
 sixty-two, had met and exchanged civilities with the holy man. 
 For many years she had had a withered arm, which was so 
 useless that she was accustomed to hang it in a sling, while
 
 THE CONVULSIONIST MIRACLES. 265 
 
 she exercised her vocation of silk-winder. Hearing of the 
 death of the venerated deacon, she determined to attend his 
 funeral, and to pray at his grave for the restoration of her 
 arm. Entering the apartment where lay the emaciated body 
 prepared for the tomb, she fell upon her knees, lifted the cloth 
 which covered the feet, and kissed them, saying, " Blessed 
 saint, pray the Lord to cure me, if it is his will that I re- 
 main upon earth. Your prayers will be heard ; mine are 
 not." When the body was placed upon the bier, she leaned 
 forward, and rubbed her arm with the pall. Having seen the 
 corpse deposited in the tomb, she returned to her house and 
 resumed her usual employment. What was her astonishment 
 to discover that she had no longer any need of her sling, and 
 could use one arm witli the same facility as the other. The 
 withered member had regained its former roundness and 
 vigor, and she could lift with it as much as ever she could ; 
 nor had she ever after any return of the malady. The narra- 
 tive of her cure, which she made on oath before a notary, is 
 full and particular. 
 
 The fame of this miracle being spread abroad, other 
 afflicted persons resorted to the tomb to avail themselves of 
 its mysterious virtues. A Spanish nobleman, member of the 
 Royal Council of Spain, had sent his son to Paris to complete 
 his education. This young man, by a succession of accidents, 
 lost the use of one of his eyes, and finally the eye itself oozed 
 away. The doctors having abandoned his case in despair, he 
 repaired to the tomb of Deacon Paris, and there prayed most 
 fervently for the restoration of his eye. His cure, though not 
 sudden, was complete. He placed upon his eye a small piece 
 of the shirt in which the deacon had died, and instantly felt 
 some relief. That evening, upon going to sleep, he again 
 placed the relic over his eye. " In the silence and secrecy of 
 the night," says our chronicler, " the cure began, and when 
 the young man woke, at three in the morning, his eye was 
 perfectly restored, for he could see through the window of 
 liis room the houses on the opposite side of the street ! " He 
 rose joyful from his bed, threw off his bandages, and hastened 
 to the tomb to return thanks. 
 
 Not only is this miraculous cure supported by an abun- 
 dance of sworn testimony, but I have before me a letter, writ-
 
 266 LIFE OF VOLTAIHE. 
 
 ten by Charles Rollin, the celebrated historian, in which he 
 expresses his entire belief in the miracle. Dr. Rollin says : 
 " I saw the sad condition to which Don Alpbonse was reduced 
 by the loss of one eye and the malady of the other, and I was 
 agreeably surprised to see the sudden and perfect change which 
 occurred in it, when every one despaired of its cure. This 
 testimony I render with joy to the singular grace which God 
 has shown to a young man whom I loved the more tenderly 
 because Providence himself seemed to have consigned him to 
 my care." 
 
 Several volumes could be filled with similar narratives, some 
 of which are more wonderful and incredible even than this. 
 There was, for example, an old lady of sixty-nine, swollen to a 
 monstrous size by dropsy, covered with ulcers, an object of 
 horror to every beholder. There are one hundred pages of 
 testimony, much of it given by surgeons of reputation, to the 
 effect that this woman was instantly and completely cured by 
 praying uj)on the tomb of Deacon Paris. Many persons, born 
 humpbacked and otherwise distorted, left the tomb walking 
 erect, and with vivacity more than usual. 
 
 As the celebrity of the tomb increased, the concourse of the 
 sick, the lame, the halt, the blind, and the dumb became such 
 as to incommode the neighborhood. The whole cemetery and 
 the neighboring streets wei*e crowded with women and men of 
 all ages, afHicted with all maladies. Here were seen men writh- 
 ing upon the ground in epileptic fits ; there were others in a 
 kind of convulsive ecstasy, swallowing pebbles, earth, pieces 
 of glass, and even burning coals ! Yonder were women beside 
 themselves, standing upon their heads, while other women, 
 prostrate upon the earth, called upon the by-standers to relieve 
 their agony by striking them heavy blows upon the body. 
 Some women danced, others leaped into the air, others twisted 
 their bodies in a thousand extravagant ways, others assumed 
 postures designed to represent scenes of the Passion. Some 
 of them sang ; others groaned, grunted, barked, mewed, hissed, 
 declaimed, prophesied. The dancing, conducted by a priest, 
 was the favorite exercise, and many of the lame, it is said, 
 who had not stood upon their feet for years, found themselves 
 able to join in it with great activity. 
 
 Scenes of this nature were daily exhibited in the cemetery
 
 THE CONVULSIONIST MIKACLES. 267 
 
 for the space of five years. At the end of that period the 
 extravagance had risen to such a height that both the church 
 and the kingdom were scandalized by it. The king then in- 
 terfered, and published an edict, which ordered the cemetery 
 to be closed, and forbade assemblages of people in the neigh- 
 borhood. The morning after this edict appeared, one of the 
 wits of Paris wrote upon the gate of the cemetery the well- 
 known epigram, " By order of the king : God is forbidden 
 to perform miracles in this place." 
 
 But the madness continued. The earth of the cemetery 
 and the water of a well near by were conveyed to private 
 apartments, and there the miracles were renewed. In all the 
 history of human folly there is nothing so extravagant as the 
 scenes which now occurred. It became the mode for the sick 
 to fall into the most violent convulsions, during which they 
 were subjected to treatment still more violent. One or two 
 examples out of a thousand will sufiice. A young girl of sev- 
 enteen, afflicted with a chronic disease, was laid upon the floor. 
 Twenty-three grown persons placed one of their feet upon her 
 body, and pressed with all their force upon it, — an operation 
 which, as she said, gave her the most exquisite delight, and 
 effected a total cure. Other women, stretched upon the floor 
 in convulsions, were beaten with an oaken club on every part 
 of the body, and with aU the force of a strong man, to their 
 great joy and lasting relief. A witness swears that he saw 
 one poor woman receive, without harm, two thousand blows, 
 any one of which would have felled an ox. Other witnesses 
 testify that five strong men endeavored to thrust a sword into 
 the body of one of the convulsed, but could not. Sometimes 
 swords were thrust into the body, but the wound immediately 
 healed without leaving a scar. One woman received, in one 
 night, thirty thousand blows of the fist from relays of strong 
 men ; another was beaten for fifty-five minutes with a huge 
 oaken club, at the rate of thirty blows a minute, without in- 
 curring the slightest harm. All of which is supported by a 
 superabundance of sworn, positive, and detailed testimony from 
 persons of repute. 
 
 The climax of this impious and wonderful folly was reached 
 when they began to parody the crucifixion. The following ac- 
 count of one of these scenes rests upon an amount of evidence
 
 268 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 which would convict a man of murder before any of our courts. 
 If the jury believed one half of the witnesses, they would be 
 compelled to convict. A woman called Sister Frances, aged 
 fifty-five, who had been subject to convulsions for twenty-seven 
 years, was crucified three times. On the last occasion, the 
 ceremony began at seven o'clock in the morning by stretching 
 her upon a cross in the ordinary form, laid upon the floor. A 
 priest drove a nail through the palm of her left hand into the 
 wood of the cross, and then let her alone for two minutes. 
 Then, pouring a little water upon the right hand, he nailed 
 that to the cross. The woman, who was in a convulsion, 
 appeared to suffer severely, though she neither sighed nor 
 groaned ; her flushed face alone indicating anguish. Thus she 
 remained for twenty-eight minutes (these chroniclers are very 
 exact), at the end of which time they nailed her two feet to a 
 shelf upon the cross. The nails, we are informed, were square 
 in shape, and six inches long. No blood flowed from any of 
 these wounds, excej^t a very little from one of her feet. 
 
 Having thus completed the nailing, they let her remain fif- 
 teen minutes longer, and then gradually raised one end of the 
 cross, supporting it first upon a chair, and finally leaning it 
 against the wall. Here it was allowed to remain for half an 
 hour, during which tbey read a chapter from the Gospel of St. 
 John, which the woman appeared to understand and enjoy. 
 Next they placed upon her head a crown of sharp iron wires, 
 to represent the crown of thorns. She was nailed to the cross 
 for three houis, and then the nails were gradually drawn out, 
 which appeared to cause much suffering. " One of the nails," 
 saj's the narrator, '•'' I put in my "pockety and I have it now.'''' 
 The hands of the woman bled profusely, but when tbey had 
 been washed with a little water, she rose, warmly embraced 
 one of her friends, and appeared to have undergone little in- 
 jury. The wounds were rubbed with a small cross, which had 
 been sanctified at the tomb of Deacon Paris, and they imme- 
 diately closed. This story is related at such length, and is 
 supported by such a number of affidavits, that it occupies 
 nearly one hundred folio pages. ^ 
 r Both the brothers Arouet, I repeat, witnessed these events. 
 
 ^ Histoire des Miracules et des Convulsionaires de Saint-Mcdard, par P. F. Ma- 
 thieu. Paris, 1864. 
 
 J
 
 THE CONVULSIONIST MIRACLES. 269 
 
 The impression they made upon the mind bf Voltaire is re- 
 vealed to us in several of his works. He burlesques them in 
 " La Pucelle ; " he gravely describes them in his histories ; he 
 alludes to them in his letters ; and in all he regards them with 
 as much respect as we do the hideous and fantastic tricks by 
 which the Indian and the African medicine men impose upon 
 the credulity of their tribes. Armand, on the contrary, beheld 
 them with abject faith. I He compiled a collection of the mira- 
 cles, which his brother inherited and kept all his life, and 
 which is said still to exist at Petersburg, Avith the rest of 
 the Voltaire manuscripts bought by Catherine II. He de- 
 lighted to attest the miracles both as notar}' and as man. 
 Among the great number of affidavits appended to the case of 
 Madeleine Durand, a young girl miraculously cured of a 
 "frightful cancer in the mouth," is one by Armand Arouet. 
 This dreadful cancer, we are assured by the historian of the 
 miracles, Carre de Montgeron, only began in the mouth, and 
 gradually infected all the blood, wasted the body to a skele- 
 ton, distorted the face out of all knowledge, and corrupted the 
 air to a distance of ten paces. Armand Arouet swore to the 
 effect following : — 
 
 " I have seen her often fall iu convulsions ; and then she seemed to 
 be quite out of her senses, conscious of nothing that passed in her 
 presence. Possessed by various sentiments that sprung up in her 
 mind, she gave expression to them in short and most fervent prayers. 
 In those same convulsions I have seen her throw herself down, and 
 strike the floor again and again with her cancer very Jiard, and rub it 
 against the tiles with all her might. Sometimes she begged one of the 
 persons present to put his hands upon her left cheek and lean upon it 
 with all his weight, the cancer being in contact with the floor. I have 
 seen her cut off a piece of her cancer with a pair of scissors. Her 
 blood then flowed abundantly, but as soon as she poured some water 
 from the well near the tomb of M. Paris upon the wound, at that very 
 instant the blood was stanched. I saw that but once, but I know that 
 a great number of persons will render the same testimony, who have 
 also seen it. Having learned that the most skillful surgeons of Or- 
 leans, where tliis convulsionist was born, had pronounced her malady 
 incurable, and as tlieir opinion was confirmed by that of the most cele- 
 brated surgeons of Paris, I ceased to visit her assiduously, and awaited 
 the event. At the beginning of 1735 I saw her perfectly cured, and 
 have seen her several times since ; to-day, also (this June 8, 1736), she
 
 270 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 has been presented to me. The convulsions following immediately 
 upon the invocation of the Blessed One \_le Blenheureux, meaning 
 Paris], as I have myself vpitnessed ; her cancer having disappeared 
 totally, without leaving upon her cheek, inside or outside, any mark 
 of iron or fire ; the perfect health which she now enjoys, — all con- 
 vinces me that we can assign a cure so miraculous to no other agent 
 than God." 
 
 Thus Armand Arouet, brother of Voltaire ! 
 
 The brothers probably conversed together upon the con- 
 vulsionist miracles ; and perhaps Voltaire had Armand in his 
 mind when he wrote, many years after, in the " Philosoph- 
 ical Dictionary," article " Fanaticism : " " When once fanati- 
 cism has gangrened a brain, the malady is almost incurable. 
 I have seen convulsionists who, in speaking of the miracles 
 of Saint Paris, grew warm by degrees ; their eyes flashed 
 fire ; their whole body trembled ; their fury distorted their 
 countenances ; and they would have killed any one who had 
 contradicted them. Yes ; I have seen those convulsionists. 
 I have seen them twist their limbs and foam at the mouth. 
 They cried, ' We must have blood I ' "
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 THE TENDER " ZAiRE." 
 
 It was from a mansion near the Palais-Royal that Voltaire 
 surveyed life at this period. Not his own mansion, of com-se. 
 Since his return from England, in March, 1729, until near 
 the close of 1731, he had had no fixed abode ; but soon after 
 coming from his hiding-place near Rouen he found luxurious 
 quarters in the hotel of the Countess de Fontaine-Martel, a 
 merry old widow, with a well appointed house, forty thousand 
 francs a year, and the easy morals of a Ninon de Lenclos. 
 Being at this time " past love, through age and erysipelas," 
 she gave a nightly supper to the amusing people of the day, 
 among whom, if we may judge of the specimens of her talk 
 reported by Voltaire, she surpassed Ninon herself in the license 
 which she allowed her tongue. It would be hard to decide 
 which were farther from the right way, — this witty and auda- 
 cious old countess, or the serious women who groveled at the 
 tomb of Deacon Paris. 
 
 From being a frequent guest at her suppers, Voltaire at 
 length yielded to her desire that he should occupy rooms in 
 her house ; and there, during the brief remainder of her life, 
 he lived and reigned, as though he had been the natural lord 
 of the mansion. As he himself remarked, it was precisely as 
 if he had been the master of a magnificent hotel and forty thou- 
 sand francs a year. He presided at her suppers ; he conducted 
 her private theatricals ; he tried his plays upon her stage ; he 
 enjoyed her box at the opera ; he used her coach ; he rode 
 upon her horses, — and paid for all by an epistle or two in 
 verse, which fill two or three pages of a volume, and preserve 
 her name. A lucky old reprobate she was to have such an 
 inmate. From one of these epistles posterity learns that 
 " Martel " was the exact opposite of a saint of the kind then in 
 vogue ; since she preferred long, merry, and tranquil suppers
 
 272 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE, 
 
 to pious vigils, and chose Voltaire for the director of her con- 
 science instead of a Jansenist priest. " In her abode reigned 
 Liberty, decent, tolerant, and serene, conjointly with her sis- 
 ter Gayety, never bitter in her satire, neither prudish nor 
 dissolute." 
 
 The epistle does not quite accord with prosaic accounts of the 
 lady's character or manners. In a letter written in 1767, 
 Voltaire himself gives a taste of her : " No more tragedies from 
 me I console myself in forming young people. Ma- 
 dame de Fontaine-Martel used to say that when one had the 
 misfortune to be no longer .... it was necessary to be 
 procuress." The lady, however, used the simpler language of 
 the tap-room. 
 
 In her hotel was first performed his new tragedy of " Eri- 
 phile," where it received the applause bestowed upon drawing- 
 room theatricals. Fourteen years had now elapsed since the pro- 
 duction of " Q^dipe," and never since had the author tasted 
 the sweet delirium of an unequivocal dramatic triumph. Total 
 failures had alternated with successes of esteem, which tanta- 
 lize, not satisfy; and the growing popularity of "Charles 
 XII." seems but to have pi'ovoked his desire to prove him- 
 self equal to works more difficult. Unfriendly critics, too, 
 began to taunt and disparage ; the modern reviewer was 
 developing ; literary periodicals were acquiring vogue and 
 power ; and this author began now to experience the bondage 
 of a great and dazzling celebrity. What could be esteemed 
 literary glory in Paris compared with dramatic success ? A 
 truly excellent acting-play will perhaps forever remain the 
 supreme product of human genius, as it is also the one 
 which gives the greatest rapture to the greatest number. 
 In France, a genuine dramatic success was then very much 
 what it now is ; and our susceptible poet evidently felt that 
 his other glories only made this supreme glory the more 
 necessai'y to him. His letters show how ardenth' he strove to 
 perfect his " Eriphile, Queen of Ai-gos;" correcting, chang- 
 ing, rewriting, reading it to friends, and, finally, trying it 
 upon a private stage. The play slightly resembles " Hamlet " 
 in its plot, and he ventured to introduce the ghost of a mur- 
 dered king upon the stage, who appears in a temple, and there 
 calls solemnly upon his son to avenge his death. The queen,
 
 THE TENDER "ZAIRE." 273 
 
 too, was a party consenting to the murder, and in a few 
 other particulars we are reminded of " Hamlet." Voltaire had 
 high Lopes of his ghost, remembering, doubtless, the thrill 
 and awful hush which the appearance of Hamlet's ghost never 
 failed to cause in London, even when not well played. He 
 dared not attempt a long scene of the kind, but showed his 
 ghost only for a few moments, in the fourth act, just as the 
 guilty pair were about to enter the temple to be married. The 
 temple opens ; the ghost is revealed in a menacing posture. 
 The guilty mother, her paramour, and the innocent son stand 
 appalled. 
 
 Ghost. — " Hold, wretch ! " 
 
 Queen. — " My husband's self ! Where am I ? " 
 
 Sox. — " Dread spirit, what god causes thee to leave the infernal 
 shades? What is the blood that flows from thee.'' And what art 
 thou ? " 
 
 Ghost. — " Thy king ! If thou aspirest to reign, stop, obey me." 
 
 Son. — "I will. My arm is readj^ What must 1 do? " 
 
 Ghost. — " Avenge me upon my tomb." 
 
 Son. — " Upon whom ? " 
 
 Ghost. — " Upon thy mother." 
 
 Son. — "My mother? AVhat dost thou say ? O uncertain oracle ! 
 But hell withdraws him from my distracted gaze. The gods shut their 
 temple." 
 
 The edifice then closes, and the ghost is no more seen. 
 
 " Eriphile " was not successful. The poor ghost had to be 
 exhibited upon a stage half filled with Paris dandies, and 
 could not succeed in appalling either them or the more distant 
 spectators. The piece was not absolutely damned, but it did 
 not interest, and it was soon withdrawn. The author rewrote 
 three acts, and prefixed a very taking prologue. The prologue 
 was a hit, but the play still going heavily he withdrew it 
 from the theatre and, finally, even from the printer ; and, years 
 after, as his manner was, used some of the material and some 
 of the verses in his tragedy of " Semiramis." 
 
 Friends interposed their advice on this occasion. The baf- 
 fled author in old age used to speak of a certain supper at 
 Madame de Tencin's, where Fontenelle and other persons of 
 note in literature joined in friendly remonstrance against hia 
 persisting further in a career for which he was evidently not 
 
 VOL. I. 18
 
 N 
 
 274 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 made. One success, two failures, two escapes ! Thus the ac- 
 count stood so far ; and who could say how mucli of the brill- 
 iant success of " ffidipe " was due to Sophocles, how much to 
 accident, how much to Voltaire ? La Harpe once asked him 
 what reply he made to the remarks of his friends at Ma- 
 dame de Tencin's. " None," said he ; " but I brought out 
 ' Zaire.' " i 
 
 " Zaire " was a new arid captivating subject, suggested per- 
 haps by Shakespeare's " Othello," as " Eriphile " seems a faint 
 reminiscence of " Hamlet." He dashed at it with amazing im- 
 petuosity, as if inspired by failure. During his late residence 
 at Rouen he had renewed his school-boy intimacy with Cide- 
 ville and Formont, who retained in maturity the love of liter- 
 ature which they had imbibed at the College Louis-le-Grand. 
 He made them now his literary confidants, and they in return 
 gave him plenty of advice, and sometimes came from Rouen 
 to Paris to witness the performance of his plays. He wrote 
 tumultuous letters to these sympathizing friends this summer ; 
 sometimes to one, sometimes to both at once. It is in such 
 letters as these that we see both the mode and the motive of 
 his labors. Here is the history of the new tragedy in a few 
 sentences from them : — 
 
 [To Cideville, May 29th.] "I have corrected in ' i^riphile' all the 
 faults which we remarked. Scarcely was this task finished, when, in 
 order to be able to review my work with less self-love, and to give 
 myself time to forget it, I began another, and I have taken a firm 
 resolution not to cast my eyes upon ' firiphile ' until the new tragedy 
 is done. This play will be made for the heart, as much as ' Eriphile ' 
 was for the imagination. The scene is to be laid in a very singular 
 place, and the action will pass between Turks and Christians. I shall 
 depict their manners to the utmost of my ability, and I shall try to 
 throw into the work all that the Christian religion has of most pa- 
 thetic and most interesting, and all that love knows of most tender 
 and cruel. Here is work for six months." 
 
 [To Formont, on the same day.] " Every one here reproaches me 
 that I do not put more love into my pieces. There shall he love 
 enough this time I swear to you, and not gallantry either. My de- 
 sire is that there may be nothing so Turkish, so Christian, so amorous, 
 so tender, so infuriate, as that which I am now putting into verse for 
 the pleasure of the public. I have the honor already to have done an 
 
 1 9 Cours de Litterature, 139. 
 
 1
 
 THE TENDER "ZAIRE." 275 
 
 act of it. Either I am much deceived, or this will be the most pe- 
 culiar piece we have upon our stage. The names of Montmorenci, of 
 Saint Louis, of Saladin, of Jesus, of Mahomet, will be in it. There 
 will be mention of the Seine and of Jordan, of Paris and of Jerusa- 
 lem. We shall love, we shall baptize, we shall kill, and I will send 
 
 you the outline as soon as it is done Don't ask me for news of 
 
 the parliament. I know, and wish to know, only les belles-lettres." 
 
 [To Formont, June 2oth.] " Hearty thanks, mv dear friend, for the 
 good advice you give me upon the plan of a tragedy ; but it came too 
 late. The tragedy was done. It c ost me but twenty-two days. 
 Never have I worked with such_swiftness. The subject drew me on, 
 
 and the piece made itself At present I am having it copied ; 
 
 as soon as I have a copy ready, it shall start for Rouen, and go to 
 Messieurs de Formont and Cideville. Scarcely had I written the last 
 verse of my Turco-Christian j^iece than I took up ' Eriphile ' again." 
 
 [To Cideville, June 27th.] " A man just finishing a new tragedy has 
 not time to write long letters, my amiable Cideville ; but every scene 
 of the piece was a letter which I wrote to you, and I said to myself 
 continually, ' Will my tender and susceptible friend Cideville approve 
 this situation or this sentiment ? Shall I make him shed tears ? ' At 
 length, after having rajiidiy written my work, in order the sooner to 
 send it to you, I read it to the actors." 
 
 [August 25th. To both.] " My dear and amiable critics, I wish that 
 you could be witnesses of the success of ' Zaire ; ' you would see that 
 your advice was not useless, and that there was very little of it which 
 I did not profit by. Permit me, my dear Cideville, to express to you 
 freely the pleasure I enjoy in seeing the success of a work which you 
 approved. My satisfaction augments in communicating it to you. 
 Never piece was so well played as ' Zaire ' at the fourth representation. 
 I wished you there ; you would have seen that the public did not hate 
 your friend. I appeared in a box, and the whole pit clapped me. I 
 blushed, I hid myself ; but I should be a hypocrite if I did not con- 
 fess to you that I was sensibly touched. It is sweet not to be without 
 honor in one's own country : I am sure you will love me the more for 
 the avowal. But, messieurs, send me back ' Eriphile,' which I can- 
 not do without, and which is going to be played at Fontainebleau. 
 Moil Dieu ! what a thing it is to choose an interesting subject ! ' Eri- 
 phile ' is far better written than ' Zaire ; ' but all the ornaments, all 
 the spirit and all the force of poetry are not worth (so people say) 
 one touch of sentiment." 
 
 /^ The new tragedy had indeed all the success wliich a play 
 can have with the play-going public. On the first night,
 
 276 LIFE OF VOLTAIKE. 
 
 August 13, 1732, the pit, it is true, was a little refractory at 
 times : now tittering at a hasty verse ; now half inclined to 
 rebel against innovation ; now almost laughing at an effect 
 that missed fire. Colley Gibber records an anecdote of this 
 stormy first night, related to him by an English barrister Avho 
 was present. During the delivery of a soliloquy by Mademoi- 
 selle Gaussin, the Englishman was seized with such a violent fit 
 of coughing as to compel the lady to pause for several seconds, 
 which drew upon him the eyes of the whole audience. A 
 French gentleman, sitting near, leaned over and asked him 
 if Mademoiselle Gaussin had given him any particular of- 
 fense, since he took so public an occasion to resent it. The 
 cougher protested that he admired the actress too much to 
 disoblige her in any way, and would rather leave the theatre 
 than disturb her again. ^ 
 I Audiences then, according to Gibber, were inclined to be 
 / despotic, and were most prompt to resent the slightest de- 
 ' parture from usage, whether before or behind the foot-lights. 
 He says that he saw a play at the Theatre Francais inter- 
 rupted for several minutes by the audience crying Place a 
 la dame ! to a gentleman in the second tier, who was sitting in 
 front of the box, so as to obscure the view of a lady behind 
 him. 
 
 For a short time the fate of the tender " Zaire " was in doubt 
 before that turbulent and tyrannical tribunal, the parto-re. 
 But the pathos of the chief scenes subdued all hearts at 
 length. The author on the following days removed the 
 more obvious blemishes, and "Zaire " took its place as a public 
 favorite, which it retains to this day. After a first run of 
 nine nights, the summer season closed ; but, being resumed 
 in the autumn, it had twenty-one representations, and con- 
 tinued to be reproduced from time to time. It was j^erformed 
 before the king and queen at Fontainebleau ; it was trans- 
 lated into English, and given wdth applause in London ; and, 
 finally, being published " with privilege," was spread abroad 
 over Europe. He dedicated the printed edition to his English 
 friend, Falkener, thus : " To M. Falkener, English merchant ; 
 since ambassador at Gonstantinople." He added, as was his 
 wont, a dedicatory epistle, in mingled prose and verse, in 
 1 Gibber's Apology, London, 1740, page 482.
 
 "THE TENDER ZAIRE." 277 
 
 which he said various things that he wished his own country- 
 men to consider : — 
 
 " You are an Englishman, my dear friend, and I was born in 
 France ; but those who love the arts are all fellow-citizens. Honest 
 people who think have very much the same principles, and compose 
 
 but one republic I offer, then, this tragedy to you as my 
 
 countryman in literature and as my intimate friend. At the same 
 time, I take pleasure in being able to say to my own nation in what 
 estimation merchants are held among you ; how much respect is felt 
 for a profession which makes the greatness of the state, and with what 
 superiority some of you represent their country in parliament. I 
 know well that this profession is despised by our petits-maitres ; but 
 you know also that our petits-mailres and yours are the most ridicu- 
 lous species that creep with pride upon the surface of the earth." 
 
 He extols again, above all things else, the happy liberty of 
 thought enjoyed in England, which, he says, communicated 
 itself to his own mind whenever he associated with English- 
 men. " My ideas are bolder when I am with you." 
 
 This was truly the case, as was shown by the two plays, 
 *'Eriphile" and "Zaire," both of which were written with a 
 certain new audacity and spirit, derived, in part, from Shake- 
 speare. Zaire was a Christian captive in Jerusalem, reared 
 in ignorance of her faith and country, and beloved by the 
 Soudan, the Mahometan ruler of the region. She warmly 
 returned his passion ; and the play opens near the hour fixed 
 for their union. But on that fatal day she discovers her 
 origin, meets her aged father just released from long im- 
 prisonment, meets her brother coming to ransom Christian 
 captives, and thus finds herself in the clutch of passions as 
 irreconcilable as tigers in presence of one stray white lamb. 
 On one side, religion, loyalty, natural affection, and pride of 
 race ; on the other, a deep and tender love at the hour of 
 fruition, and a lover all fire and jealousy. The tender lamb, 
 of course, is torn in pieces. The Soudan, mistaking the 
 brother for a lover, and a baptismal rendezvous for a rendez- 
 vous of love, kills her ; and then, discovering his error, kills 
 himself. 
 
 Forget " Othello ; " come to " Zaire " by the road of the an- 
 cient classic drama of France, and you find it a powerful and 
 affecting work, with many a passage of genuine force and
 
 278 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 beauty ; the whole performance announcing the deliverance of 
 the French stage from the bondage of its ancient rules and 
 unities. The subject was a happy one for an author born to 
 exhibit tlie nothingness of those theological differences which 
 made men willing to tear out one another's vitals. " On the 
 banks of the Ganges," says the innocent, bewildered Zaire, "I 
 had been a devotee of false gods ; in Paris, a Christian ; here, 
 a Mahometan. Instructiun does all ; the hand of our fathers 
 engraves upon our feeble hearts those first characters which 
 time and example retrace." And again, speaking of her lover: 
 "Can God hate a heart so magnanimous? Generous, benefi- 
 cent, just, full of excellent cjualities, if he had been born a 
 Christian, what would he have been more ? " The Mahom- 
 etan chief speaks, in his turn, of the wonder and indignation 
 he had felt on finding himself equaled in virtue by a Chris- 
 tian ! 
 
 Tragedy, comedy, farce, poem, history, romance, — what- 
 ever might be the name and plumage of the pigeon which 
 Voltaire loosed in his autho-r's life of sixty years, the message 
 under its wings was sure to be such as these words convey. 
 
 But, in " Zaire," he was fortunate, as an author competing 
 for public favor, in having opportunities to give eloquent ex- 
 pression also to the feeling which inspired the crusades ; and 
 thus he gave pleasure in the same plaj^ and sometimes in 
 the same passage, to the philosophers and to the Christians. 
 " Great by his valor, greater by his faith,^' is a sentiment 
 which a French girls' boarding-school would, perhaps, still ap- 
 plaud. There is also a magnificent burst of religious feeling 
 in the second act, where the aged father of Zaire appeals to 
 the sacred objects and places near Jerusalem, to rouse in his 
 daughter the dormant Christian sentiment. " Thy God whom 
 thou betray est, thy God whom thou blasphemest, died for 
 thee, died for the universe, amid these scenes. Turn thine 
 eyes ; his tomb is near this palace. Here is the JNIount 
 whereon, to wash away our sins, he was willing to die under 
 the wounds of impious men. Yonder is the place where he 
 returned to life from the gx-ave. In this august region thou 
 canst not take one step without finding thy God ! " 
 
 The success of " Zaire " gave its impetuous author no rest, 
 no pause ; for it was his habit not only to correct ceaselessly
 
 THE TENDER "ZAIRE." 279 
 
 his past works, but to have several new ones in pnngress at the 
 same time. In the interval of the summer holidays we see 
 him " reworking * Zaire ' as though it had been a failui'-e," re- 
 casting " Julius Csesar " and " Eriphile," correcting " Charles 
 XII." for a new Holland edition, replying at much lengt,h to si 
 pamphlet calling in question some of its statements, adding im- 
 poitant things to his English Letters, meditating a new play, 
 accumulating material for his " Histoi-y of Louis XIV.," and 
 Avriting long letters, Avith sprightly and graceful verses in- 
 terspersed. "How much toil and trouble," he writes to For- 
 mont in September, 1732, " for this smoke of vainglory ! 
 Nevertheless, what should w^e do without that chimera ? It 
 is as necessary to the soul as food is to the body. I have 
 made ' Eriphile ' and ' Csesar ' all over again ; and all for that 
 smoke." 
 
 In October he was at Fontainebleau, where he spent six 
 weeks, superintending the performance before the court of old 
 plays and new, — " Zaire " and " Mariamne " among them, — 
 and in rewriting his chapter upon Newton and Gravitation for 
 the English Letters, getting important aid from his friend 
 and mathematician, Maupertuis. In the midst of his court life 
 we discover him corresponding with Maupertuis upon the New- 
 tonian philosophy ; which was so little known in France, and 
 so lightly regarded, that he began to doubt whether it could 
 be all that the English claimed for it. " A frightful scruple 
 comes to me," he writes, "and all my faith is shaken." But 
 Maupertuis completely reassured him. " Burn my ridiculous 
 objections," Voltaire rejoins ; and he goes on with his New- 
 tonian chapter without fear. Who that saw him about the 
 palace at this time could have suspected such a correspond- 
 ence ! " The whole court," he writes to a young lady, while 
 he w^as puzzling over Newton, "has been in combustion for 
 three or four days with regard to a bad comedy which I kept 
 from being played Two parties were formed : one, in- 
 cluding the queen and her ladies ; the other, the princesses 
 and their adherents. The queen was victorious, and I made 
 peace with the princesses. This important affair cost me but a 
 few trifling, mediocre verses, which, however, were deemed 
 very good by those to whom they were addressed ; for there is 
 no goddess whose nose the odor of incense does not regale."
 
 280 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 We have a glimpse of him during this residence at court 
 from a s:''cirical letter of Alexis Piron, who was also a courtier 
 for the moment. Piron had not yet recovered from the delu- 
 sion wliicli comic writers, as well as comic actors, frequently 
 r.berish, that nature meant him for the tragic drama. One of 
 his tragedies, entitled " Gnstave," he had offered to the actors, 
 and may have had it with him at Fontainebleau. He could 
 not, in early life, contemplate Volt;iire's tragic triumphs with 
 unalloyed satisfaction. This too brief description of court 
 scenes is in his good comedy vein : — 
 
 " I should be much bored at court [he writes to the Abbe Legen- 
 dre], but for a window corner in the gallery, where, opera-glass in 
 hand, I post myself for some hours ; and God knows the pleasure I 
 have in seeing the goers and comers. Ah, the masks ! If you should 
 see what an edifying aspect people of your garb have ! what an im- 
 portant air the courtiers ! how the rest are changed by fear and hope ! 
 and, especially, how false those airs, for the most part, are to discern- 
 ing eyes ! It is a marvel. I see nothing genuine here but the faces 
 of the Swiss guards, the only philosophers of the court. With their 
 halberds upon their shoulders, their big mustaches, and their tranquil 
 air, one would say that they regarded all these hungry fortune-hunters 
 as people who are running after what they, poor Swiss as they are, 
 obtained long ago. Speaking of that, it was with a sufficiently Swiss 
 expression that I watched, very much at my ease, yesterday, Voltaire, 
 bustling about like a little green pea among the crowds of foolish peo- 
 ple who amused me. When he saw me, — 
 
 " ' Ah, good day, my dear Piron. What are you at court for ? I 
 have been here these three weeks. They played my " Mariamne " the 
 other day, and they are going to play " Zaire." When " Gustave " ? 
 How are you ? Ah, Monsieur Duke, one word. I was looking for 
 you.' 
 
 " He said that all in a breath ; I was unable to get in a word. So, 
 this morning, having met him again, I said at once, — 
 
 " * Very well, thank you, sir.' 
 
 *' He did not know what I meant until I told him he had left me 
 the evening before asking me how I was, and I had not been able to 
 answer him sooner." 
 
 The sage Piron does not tell us how Voltaire extricated him- 
 self on this occasion. Late in the year the author of " Zaire " 
 returned to Paris, and spent the winter at the hotel of his aged 
 countess, in that tumult of work and pleasure, of literature
 
 THE TENDER "ZAIRE." 281 
 
 and speculation, which made up his life at the capital. Early 
 in January, 1733, there was a memorable evening at Madame 
 de Fontaine-Martel's, when " Zaire " was performed in the 
 salon, the author himself playing the part of Lusignan, the 
 aged and dying father of the heroine. " I drew tears from 
 beautiful eyes," he wrote to Formont. Almost every day 
 there was a festival of some kind at this hotel, — a festival, 
 too, tlie chief design of which was to amuse Voltaire. There 
 were charades, games, forfeits, feats of rhyming, cards, music, 
 comedy, tragedy, divei'tusement, — all the gayeties in vogue. 
 High play, too, sometimes ; for this thriving poet mentions 
 losing there twelve thousand francs in one evening. 
 
 Suddenly, in January, 1733, the gay, distracting life came to 
 an end. Death knocked at the door. The aged countess fell 
 dangerously sick, suffered a few days, and died. Her death, it 
 must be confessed, was not " edifying," and Voltaire's account 
 of it not more so. " What o'clock is it ? " asked the dying 
 woman. Without waiting to be told, she added, " Blessed be 
 God, whatever the hour may be, there is somewhere a ren- 
 dezvous ! " 1 
 
 He gave other particulars, not less astounding, in a letter to 
 Formont, just after the funeral : — 
 
 " I owe an answer to your charming epistle [in prose aijd verse], 
 but the illness of our baroness suspended all our double rhymes. I 
 did not believe, eight days ago, that the first verses I should have 
 to compose for her would be her epitaph. I cannot conceive how 
 I bore all the burdens that have overwhelmed me these fifteen days 
 past. On the one hand, they seized an edition of ' Zaire ; ' on the 
 other, the baroness was dying. I had to go and solicit the Keeper 
 of the Seals, and, at the same time, to seek the viatica. At night 
 I was in attendance upon the patient, and all day I was occupied 
 with the details of the house. Imagine it : it was I who announced 
 to the poor woman that she had to set out \_partir'\. She was 
 unwilling to hear the last ceremonies spoken of ; but I was obliged 
 in honor to make her die in the rules. I brought her a priest, half 
 Jansenist, half politician, who made believe confess her, and after- 
 wards gave her the rest. When this comedian of St. ICustache asked 
 her aloud if she was not firmly persuaded th-at her God, her Creator, 
 was in the Eucharist, she answered. Ah, yes ! in a tone that would 
 have made me burst out laughing, in circumstances less doleful." 
 
 1 Voltaire to Richelieu, July 19, 1769.
 
 282 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 And this countess had a daughter who was a Jansenist, 
 and doubtless believed in the miracles of the blessed Paris ! 
 Such was the dislocation of society then ! Voltaire speaks of 
 writing madame's epitaph. He did so, with perfect sincerity, 
 in the first sentence of a letter to Cideville, written on the 
 same day : " I have lost, as perhaps you know, Madame de 
 Fontaine-Martel. That is to say, I have lost a good house 
 of which I was the master, and forty thousand francs of 
 revenue which was spent in diverting me." 
 
 It was necessary to dislodge, though he lingered three 
 months longer in the " good house " of the departed. His 
 next abode was a change of scene such as we see in a pan- 
 tomime. From the airy and brilliant neighborhood of the 
 Palais-Royal, he went to live, in May, 1733, at the house of his 
 man of business, Demoulin, in a dingy and obscure lane, called 
 then Rue de Longpont, now Rue Jacques-de-Brosse. Opposite 
 the house was the fine portico of the church of St. Gervail, 
 the bells of which, it appears, disturbed his repose. He told 
 his friend Cideville that his new home was in the ugliest 
 house of the ugliest quarter of Paris, and that he was more 
 deafened in it by the noise of the bells than a sexton. 
 "But," he added, " I shall make so much noise with my lyre 
 that the sound of the bells will be nothing for me." Madame 
 Demoulin served as housekeeper to all the inmates, and the 
 merchant-poet was attended by a valet and an amanuensis. 
 
 He usually had with him a fledgeling poet or two, whose 
 talents he encouraged, — with the usual result of total disap- 
 pointment. The talents that move the world are apt to be 
 discouraged, until they no longer need encouragement. Two 
 poets, Lefevre and Linant, were with him at this period. 
 Lefevre died in the flower of his days ; but Linant, who pos- 
 sessed, as Voltaire remarks, all the virtues becoming a man of 
 fortune, but not those that help a man to win fortune, clung 
 to him long, and plagued him much by his unconquerable 
 indolence. By the middle of May, 1733, Voltaire was settled 
 in his new quarters, with his retainers, his proteges^ and his 
 projects, literary and commercial. " I come here," he wrote 
 to Cideville, while he was moving, " to lead a philosophic life, 
 the plan of which I have long had in my head, and never car- 
 ried out."
 
 THE TENDER "ZAIRE." 283 
 
 He and his man of business Avere deeper than ever in com- 
 merce now, importing grain from Mediterranean ports, and 
 bringing into France the rich products of Spain and Portu- 
 gal. He was greatly interested, in 1733, in a project for 
 making straw paper, an invention reserved for a later day. 
 Many of liis letters on this subject exist in manuscript, not 
 yet accessible. 1 A more profitable enterprise than any of 
 these was looming up this spring. The war to replace Stan- 
 islas upon the throne of Poland began this year, and Paris- 
 Duverney returned with his brothers to their old trade of feed- 
 ing the troops. He invited and advised Voltaire to take 
 a share in the contract ; and who could do the work better 
 than one accustomed to import grain from the chief sources 
 of supply ? The contractors agreed to place provisions wher- 
 ever needed at a fixed sum per ration (say, sixty sous) ; and 
 hence, in an easy, languid, political war like this, an inordi- 
 nate profit might be realized. In the course of two or three 
 mild campaigns, Voltaire's share of the proceeds of the con- 
 tract amounted to six hundred thousand francs ;2 and this 
 without interrupting his career, and while he seemed wholly 
 the man of letters. 
 
 It is not often that the same hand supplies an army with 
 biscuit and with laurel. Among the minor poems of our con- 
 tractor is one, in the poet-laureate style, celebrating the Ital- 
 ian campaign of 1734, for which campaign he assisted to 
 furnish supplies. If the biscuit and the beef which he sent 
 to the army of Italy were no better than the poem with 
 which he regaled it, his soldiers would have given the con- 
 tractor a sorry welcome if he had ventured into camp. Yet 
 he put his own name to his sham poem, while using that of 
 Demoulin for his honest business. 
 
 1 Jeunesse de Voltaire, page 480. 
 
 2 Memoires, par S. G. Lougchamp, article 34.
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 THE ENGLISH LETTERS PUBLISHED. 
 
 But lie could not live in Paris. He never could, long at a 
 time. One would have thought that now his position was 
 something more than merely secure in his native city ; since, 
 to a great and growing celebrity, he had taken the precaution 
 to add a great and growing fortune. 
 
 He was forty years of age ; fifteen years had passed since 
 the production of " CEdipe," and he had a widening circle of 
 " admirers," as well among the few who seek knowledge from 
 the books they read as among the many who seek pleasure. 
 The Marquise du Chatelet speaks of having known " La Hen- 
 riade " by heart before she saw the author's face in 1733. In 
 distant lands, men open to liberal ideas were reading his works 
 with that silent gratitude with which we have hailed the suc- 
 cession of free spirits who have made our own generation mem- 
 orable. We have been blessed with many such ; but, in 1733 
 and later, Voltaire was the only conspicuous author on the Con- 
 tinent who wi'ote in the new spirit. Frederic, Prince Royal of 
 Prussia, who came of age in 1733, was, we may be sure, not 
 the only young man in Germany who scanned the horizon for 
 the first sign of something new from Voltaire, and counted 
 the days till he received his copy. In England he was, at 
 least, a bookseller's favorite, for there was " money in him." 
 Rival editions of " Charles XII.," a Henriade in English verse, 
 two in French verse, three thousand copies of the English Let- 
 ters printed for the first edition, a "Za'ire" in French for 
 readers, a " Za'ire " in English on the stage, and all these run- 
 ning in 1732 and 1733, attest tlie commercial value of his 
 reputation in England. Amsterdam had given Europe two 
 editions of his collected works : one, a small duodecimo, in 
 1728 ; another, in two volumes octavo, in 1732.^ 
 
 ^ Bibliographic Voltairienne, page 92.
 
 THE ENGLISH LETTERS PUBLISHED. 285 
 
 But he could not live in Paris, notwithstanding. 
 There was a vacancy in the French Academy, in December, 
 1731, by the death of Lamotte, one of the Forty ; that Acad- 
 emy v/hich, as Voltaire himself tells us, was — as it now is — 
 the darling object of desire to men of letters in France. The 
 great Richelieu, who founded the Academy, would have given 
 the vacant chair to the author of " Charles XII.," " Q^dipe," 
 " Zaire," and " La Henriade." Voltaire may have been of 
 that opinion, and appears to have had a momentary expecta- 
 tion of receiving the king's nomination. But, early in 1732, 
 by some unknown chance or treachery was published that 
 deistical poem, the " Epistle to Uranie," written by him ten 
 years before for Madame de Rupelmonde, his traveling com- 
 panion on the journey to Holland. It was published, too, 
 with the name of the author. " What do you think of it ? " 
 asked the austere chancellor of France, D'Aguesseau, of his 
 secretary, Langlois. "• Monseigneiir," replied the secretary, 
 " Voltaire ought to be shut up in a place where he could have 
 neither pen, ink, nor paper. That man, by the bent of his 
 mind, can destroy a stale." ^ The Archbishop of Paris com- 
 plained formally to the lieutenant of police, Herault, so often 
 obliged to concern himself with a troublesome poet. The lieu- 
 tenant summoned the culprit to his cabinet. Voltaire parried 
 this grave danger by the expedient employed by Sir Walter 
 Scott, whenever he was cornered touching the authorship of 
 " Waverley." Pie plumi)ly denied having written it. It was 
 the w^ork, he added, of the late Abbe de Chaulieu ; he had 
 heard the abbd recite it ; and, indeed, in the volume of Chau- 
 lieu's works, collected by Thieriot, there are several poems ex- 
 pressing similar sentiments. The lieutenant, who may have 
 seen " Zaire " the evening before, was polite enough to pre- 
 tend to believe this, and the poet retained his liberty. Dur- 
 ing Lent several orthodox poets tried their skill in replying to 
 the obnoxious epistle in the " Mercure," but without eliciting 
 response from the abb^. 
 
 The tender " Zaire " was the innocent occasion of a more 
 noisy and lasting, if less perilous commotion. J. B. Rousseau, 
 still in unjust, dependent exile at sixty-three, had lost much of 
 
 1 Paroles Memorables, par G. Brottier, page 303. Quoted in Jeunesse de Vol- 
 taire, page 459.
 
 286 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 his poetic power, without gaining in good temper. He heard 
 of Voltaire's successes with the jealousy of a narrow mind 
 soured b}^ age aud misfortune. He had written of Voltaire, 
 in 1731, in a letter designed to be handed about Paris, in a 
 style of affected contempt, as " a young man who imposed 
 upon others by his effrontery, but produced nothing that pos- 
 terity would take as true metal," — a too obvious reminiscence 
 of Voltaire's jest upon Rousseau's " Ode to Posterity." He 
 spoke contemptuously of his plays as a string of fragments 
 devoid of connection and of sense, improbable and unnatural, 
 with here and there a few verses not wanting in spirit, but 
 very irregular and inharmonious. " Add to that," wrote Rous- 
 seau, " a proud ignorance which disdains to be informed, a 
 vanity that revolts, and an audacity in setting up rules intol- 
 erable in an author who neither recognizes nor knows any 
 rule." All of which was ill-natured and unjust; but there 
 was no savor of the Bastille in it, and no scent of the fagot. 
 " Zaire " was produced, and gave Voltaire rank as the tragic 
 poet of the time. Rousseau received from his correspondent 
 in Paris a copy of the tragedy, and with it some rumor of a 
 composition by Voltaire called the " Temple du Gout," — a 
 piece of fun then in manuscript, in which Rousseau, among 
 other poets, was burlesqued. The exile wrote in reply a long 
 letter, which also was meant to circulate where it could do 
 most harm : — 
 
 " The piece [Zaire] which you sent me has arrived at last. Those 
 who told me, four montlis ago, that the subtle design of the work 
 was to prove Saracens better people than Christians gave me an er- 
 roneous idea of it ; for it does not appear that the author had tliat de- 
 sign in view. The sentiment which reigns in it tends simply to 
 show that all the efforts of Grace have no power over the passions. 
 This impious dogma, not less hostile to good sense than to religion, 
 
 is the sole basis of his plot He must have a bad opinion 
 
 of his auditory to suppose that the picture of frenzied concupiscence 
 in a Christian piece, wherein a crucified God is spoken of, and the 
 ineffable mysteries of the faitli, would appear more touching than 
 the miraculous effects of divine mercy." 
 
 He continues to denounce the play at inordinate length, 
 styling it "an odious melange of piety and libertinage," a 
 "monstrous tragedy," "trivial and flat," which would revolt
 
 THE ENGLISH LETTERS PUBLISHED. 287 
 
 all honest readers^ He contrasts with "Za'ire" the pious trage- 
 dies of Racine and Corneille, so much admired at boarding- 
 school exhibitions and convent festivals. He concludes his 
 letter thus : — 
 
 " As to what you tell me of Voltaire's recriminations, I foresaw that 
 your complaisance in permitting a copy to be taken of what I wrote 
 to you upon this little author would call out something of the kind 
 from him. But it gives me very little concern. He is a man of no 
 consequence, who can build all the Temples he pleases without fear 
 of my taking the hammer to work at their demolition. I esteem his 
 architecture no more than I do his poetry. Nevertheless, although 
 I have no desire to measure myself with such an adversary, I am 
 not sorry that the public is informed of the reasons for his attacking 
 me ; and to that end the extracts can serve which you allowed to 
 be taken of what I wrote to you on this subject." 
 
 Voltaire was transported with fury by this unprovoked and 
 perilous attack. A man of his constitution, worn always by 
 intense mental toil, and regulating his system more by medi- 
 cine than by regimen, may become irritable to an inconceiv- 
 able degree. But there were two peculiarities in his case : 
 he could retain his anger a long time ; and, the moment he 
 took pen in hand, he could perfectly control it. Poor Rous- 
 seau exhibited his malevolence in every line ; but Voltaire 
 never seems more light of heart, more at peace with all the 
 world, more free from everything like rancor, than in this 
 ''Temple of Taste," written chiefly, perhaps, to "get even 
 with " J. B. Rousseau. No cat was ever more playful while 
 a mouse was fluttering away its little life between her velvet 
 paws. It was a piece of twenty-five or thirty printed pages, 
 of verse and prose intermingled : chatty, critical, satirical, eu- 
 logistic, — everything by turns, and nothing long. It was 
 such free and easy discourse upon men, things, and books, liv- 
 ing and dead, ancient and recent, as might be supposed to fall 
 from the poet's lips after supper, while surrounded only by 
 friends. Fancy such talk printed in the life-time of three 
 fourths of the people mentioned by name ! Fancy it so 
 spirited, so elegant, so witty, so brief, and, worst of all, so 
 true^ that all the reading world must possess it, must re-read 
 it, must send it to their friends in the country, with fierce 
 censure or chuckling eulogiura ! Sainte-Beuve truly remarks
 
 288 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 that posterity lias ratified its judgments ; but there was the 
 sting of it. 
 
 In a few verses of that graceful, complimentary, audacious 
 badinage of which Voltaire is the sole master, he informs the 
 reader that the Cardinal de Fleury had asked to go with him 
 to the Temple of Taste. They set out together; and this 
 piece is the record of their journey. Every folly of the hour 
 is gayly and good-humoredly hit : " the cloud of commenta- 
 tors who restore passages, and compile big volumes apropos 
 of a word they don't understand;" thoughtless expositors of 
 thought ; " connoisseurs of pictures who go into raptures at 
 God the Father in his eternal glory, genteelly painted in the 
 taste of Watteau ; " the rage for Italian music ; the excessive 
 tasteless ornamentation of the new edifices ; editors and re- 
 viewers who, " like insects, are only perceived when they 
 sting ; " old authors overrated and living authors miscon- 
 ceived. The cardinal and the poet, in the course of their 
 joui-ney, arrive near the entrance of the Temple, where, of 
 course, they meet a throng of candidates for admission ; among 
 others, the austere and orthodox Rousseau. 
 
 " Another versifier arrives, supported by two little satyrs, and 
 crowned with laurels and with thistles. ' I come,' says he, ' to laugh 
 and have a good time, and to go it like the devil ; and I won't go 
 home till morning ! ' ' Why, what 's this I hear ? ' asks la Critique. 
 ' It is I,' said the rhymer. ' I come from Germany to see you. I 
 have taken the spring-time for it, since the young Zejihyrs with 
 their warm breath have melted the hark of the waters ' [parody of a 
 Rousseau couplet]. The more he spoke this language, the less the 
 door opened. ' What do they take me for, then ?' said he. * For a 
 frog that goes about singing, from the bottom of his little throat, 
 Brekeke, kake, koax, koax, koax ? ' ' Ah, hon Dieu I what horrible 
 jargon ! ' cried la Critique. She could not at first recognize him who 
 expressed himself in this manner. She was informed that it was 
 Rousseau, whose voice the Muses had changed to that of a frog, as 
 a punishment for his spiteful tricks. She opened the door, however, 
 in consideration of his early verses, saying, ' Poets, compose your 
 verses at Paris, and don't go to Germany.' Then, approaching me, 
 she said in a low tone, ' You know him ; he was your enemy ; and 
 you do him justice. You see his Muse, between the altar and the 
 fagot, handle indifferently the harp of David and the flageolet of 
 Marot. Don't imitate his weakness in rhyming too long. The fruits
 
 THE ENGLISH LETTERS PUBLISHED. 289 
 
 of tlie Permessus are produced only in the spring. Cold and mel- 
 ancholy old age is only made for good sense.' " 
 
 Admitted to the Temple, Rousseau turns pale with wrath 
 at meeting there Fontenelle, against whom he had launched so 
 many epigrams. He goes aside to make another epigram, 
 while the aged and beloved Fontenelle " looks upon him with 
 that philosophic compassion which a broad and enlightened 
 spirit cannot help feeling for a man who only knows how to 
 rhyme ; and lie goes away tranquilly to take his place between 
 Lucretius and Leibnitz." 
 
 Among other applicants for admission to the Temple is a 
 black monk, who announces himself thus : " I am the Rever- 
 end Father Albertus Garassus. I preach better than Bourda- 
 loue [court preacher to Louis XIV.], for Bourdaloue never 
 caused any books to be burned ; whereas I declaimed with 
 such eloquence against Pierre Bayle, in a little province over- 
 flowing with intellect, I so touched my hearers, that six of 
 tliem burned their Bayles. Never before did eloquence obtain 
 so beautiful a triumph." To whom la Critique replies, " Be- 
 gone, Brother Garassus ! Begone, barbarian ! Out of the 
 Temple of Taste ! Out of my sight, modern Visigoth, who 
 hast traduced the man of myself inspired ! " 
 
 The " Temple du Gout " being ready for publication, the 
 author read it to the Keeper of the Seals, who thought it might 
 receive, not merely a tacit permission, but even a royal privi- 
 lege, since he found nothing in it hostile to the state, to relig- 
 ion, or to morals. But while it was in the hands of the ap- 
 pointed censor, M. Crebillon, lo, it appeared from the press ! 
 Such accidents could happen at a time when it was so usual to 
 take copies of poems circulating in drawing-rooms. Once in 
 print, it ran like a prairie fire, and raised a buzzing and sting- 
 ing storm about the author's ears of unexampled fury. On 
 this occasion he was probably astonished to discover what a 
 terrible weapon he wielded when he used his pen in his ban- 
 tering manner, of which no translation can give an adequate 
 idea. He had the art of cutting several ways at once, making 
 sentences that had in them various currents of allusion, all ex- 
 asperating to the victims, all diverting to the reader. It was 
 like fighting with one of those hundred-bladed knives that boys 
 admire in the shop-windows. At a moment when he had just 
 
 VOL. I. 19
 
 290 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 finished a new tragedy, " Adelaide," and was full of zeal in 
 collecting material for his opus magnum., his " Louis XIV. ; " 
 at a time when, as he wrote to Thieriot, he was " exhaust- 
 ing and killing himself in order to amuse his fool of a coun- 
 try," he was in the midst of enemies, persecutions, and mis- 
 fortunes. 
 
 Those whom he had not praised enough and those whom 
 he had not praised at all were equally envenomed again&t him. 
 " Join to that the crime of having printed this bagatelle with- 
 out a permit sealed with yellow wax, and the wrath of the min- 
 istry against such treason ; add to that the outcries of the 
 court and the threat of a lettre de cachet., and you will have 
 only a faint idea of the pleasant situation I am in, and of the 
 protection given here to the belles-lettres.^^ 
 
 There was danger in the air. He knew the insecurity of 
 his position, and that his only safety was in getting upon his 
 side a certain public opinion, — a public pride, — which would 
 make the government ashamed to molest an ornament of the 
 country. Hence his rage at such letters as those of Rousseau, 
 which gave countenance and courage to the natural enemies of 
 the human mind, — those who appealed to the dungeon and 
 the fire when their interpretation of the universe was called in 
 question. He was one against a host ; he could depend on no 
 effective support except his own tact and talent. 
 
 Among his minor writings, published during the last year or 
 two of his attempt to continue his career in Paris, were three 
 pieces in prose which attest his forethought and skill in this 
 unequal combat. One of these was a long letter to the editors 
 of the " Nouvelliste du Parnasse," politely remonstrating with 
 them upon their harshness in dealing with the authors noticed 
 by them. He said that, for his own part, he never permitted 
 himself the liberty of saying or writing plain Fontenelle or 
 Ciiaulieu, but always M. de Fontenelle and M. I'Abb^ de 
 Chaulieu, and he had corrected several persons of the habit of 
 using such indecent familiarity towards men who shed lustre 
 upon France. He might say " the great Corneille," since that 
 poet was one of the ancients ; but he always said M. Racine 
 and M. Boileau, as those great men had been almost his con- 
 temporaries. The purport of tlie piece was that, because a 
 man had failed to write a perfect work, he had not thereby
 
 THE ENGLISH LETTERS PUBLISIffiD. 291 
 
 forfeited Lis claim to decent civility, and that men who as- 
 sumed to criticise others should set an example, not only of 
 just thinking, but of good breeding also. 
 
 Another of these pieces was in the form of a letter to his 
 secretary and nascent poet, Lefevre, upon the " Inconven- 
 iences attached to Literature." He tells this young man 
 what he might expect if he should ever be so unfortunate as 
 to write a good book in France: first, a year of suspense and 
 solicitation while the censor held the manuscript ; next, to be 
 torn to pieces by the gazettes, which sell in proportion as they 
 are malignant and abusive. It would be worse if he wrote for 
 the stage : the actors, justly indignant at the abasement to 
 which the law condemns them, lavish upon an author all the 
 contempt with which they are covered ; and the piece being 
 at last performed, one bad joke from the pit gives it its quie- 
 tus. You succeed ? Then you are burlesqued at the minor 
 theatres, twenty pamphlets prove that you ought not to have 
 succeeded, and the learned affect to despise you because you 
 write in French. Trembling, you carry your work to a lady 
 of the court : she gives it to her maid to make into curl-pa- 
 pers ; and the laced lackey who wears the livery of luxury 
 derides your coat, which is the livery of indigence. After 
 forty years of toil, you intrigue a place in the Academy, and 
 go to pronounce with broken voice an oration which will be 
 forgotten the next day forever. " One regrets to see the de- 
 vice of immortality at the head of so many declamations, which 
 announce nothing of eternal except the oblivion to which they 
 are condemned." All this in the lightest manner, sown thick 
 with those happy touches and allusions which make a piece 
 readable. * 
 
 The third of these defensive, propitiatory pieces was in the 
 guise of a " Letter to a Chief Clerk," a personage to whom a 
 minister might be supposed to consign a new book for exam- 
 ination, and who therefore had a certain power over literature. 
 He asks this imaginary clerk to remember, when he is exam- 
 ining a work, that if there had been a literary inquisition at 
 Rome we should not possess Horace or Juvenal, nor the philo- 
 sophical works of Cicero ; and if in England, not Milton, Dry- 
 den, Pope, or Locke. " Repress libels, repress obscene tales, 
 but let honest thought be free ; let not Bayle be contraband."
 
 292 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 He called attention to the commercial aspects of the case : 
 "The thonglits of men have become an important article of 
 commerce ; Dutch booksellers gain a million a year because 
 Frenchmen have had intellect. The genius of Moliere, Cor- 
 neille, Racine, and the dramatists formed by them lure to 
 Paris great numbers of people from remote provinces and 
 states, who come to enjoy pleasures nobler than those of sense. 
 Foreigners who hate France bow in grateful homage to French 
 genius. A magistrate who presumes to think that, because 
 he has bought a seat on the bench, it is beneath his dignity to 
 see ' Cinna ' performed shows much gravity and little taste." 
 The Romans built prodigies of architecture in which to wit- 
 ness the combats of beasts, and Paris had not one passable 
 theatre for the presentation of the masterpieces of the human 
 mind. " What man in Paris is animated by a regard for the 
 public welfare ? We gamble, we sup, we slander, we make 
 bad songs, and go to sleep in stupidity, only to begin again on 
 the morrow our round of lightness and indifference. Try, 
 monsieur, to rouse us from this barbarous lethargy, and, if you 
 can, do something for letters, which do so much for France! " ^ 
 
 Thus he strove to make a party in France for the rights of 
 the human mind. Shakespeare, during the dismalest period 
 of Puritanism, found a public in London capable of draw- 
 ing from him, and generously rewarding, the sublimest of his 
 tragedies, the most exquisite of his comedies. But Shake- 
 speare confined himself to his vocation, and did not write 
 " Temples of Taste." As dramatist, Voltaire, too, could have 
 lived at the capital of his country ; but the drama, much as he 
 loved it, was really, at times, little more than the price he was 
 willing to pay for the opportunity to act directly upon the in- 
 tellect of France. It was a custom with him, all his life, when- 
 ever the storm howled menacingly about him, to divert public 
 attention and disarm prejudiced authority by producing a new 
 play. Twice lately he had declared his firm resolve never to 
 write another play : once in the preface to " Zaire," and again 
 in the " Temple du Gout." He laughed when the revised 
 " Temple du Gout " was brought to him on the day of publi- 
 cation, for he was just beginning a new tragedy. 
 
 That ingenious composition proved to be more than the sen- 
 1 62 CEuvres de Voltaire, 26 to 51,
 
 THE ENGLISH LETTERS PUBLISHED. 293 
 
 sation of a week. "It is detested and read by all the world," 
 wrote the author in 1733. It was burlesqued at the Marion- 
 nettes. Sick Punchinello applies to a doctor, who advises 
 blows with a stick, to make the patient sweat. " I have al- 
 ready tried that remedy," says Punchinello, " and it did me 
 no good." Another doctor advises purgation and lavements^ 
 our poet's well-known remedies ; and so he finally reaches the 
 Temple du Gout, where he is enthroned upon a chaise pereee. 
 This exhibition was stopped by the police. In July, 1733, a 
 dramatic burlesque of the piece was given at one of the minor 
 theatres, wherein Voltaire himself was personated, dressed as 
 a Frenchman, but in an English fabric of large pattern. He 
 was made to talk, as an indignant spectator records, " like a 
 fool, a perfect ninny, full of himself, who pokes his nose into 
 everything, devoid of taste and judgment, finding nothing good 
 except his own works." The burlesque was vehemently ap- 
 plauded, and ran many nights. " For my part," says the spec- 
 tator just quoted, " my heart is pierced ; I cannot bear to see 
 one of the brightest spirits of France treated so." ^ 
 
 The ministry, he adds, were besought to suppress this play 
 also, but refused, " being not unwilling to mortify a too bold 
 spirit, and to punish him for certain truths scattered here and 
 there in his works." Jordan may refer here to the new edi- 
 tion of his " works " published in Holland, which excited in 
 the author's own mind lively apprehensions. The editors, he 
 remarked to Cideville, have taken care, whenever there were 
 two readings of a passage, " to print the most dangerous and 
 the most hurnahle. I shall keep it out of France." 
 
 The tide still running strongly against him, he tried his de- 
 vice of bringing out the new play, that " Ad^ilaide du Gaes- 
 clin," in which once more he used a romantic French subject 
 of the Middle Ages, and introduced French historic names. 
 The very first act did not escape hissing. During the second, 
 when a Duke de Nemours came upon the stage wounded, his 
 arm in a sling, the audacity of such an approach to natural- 
 ness called down a storm of disapproval. In the last act, 
 when the Duke de Vendome said to the Sire de Couci, " Are 
 you content, Couci ? " a person in the pit cried out, Couci- 
 Couci! which is a French familiar equivalent of omt So-So. 
 1 Voyage Litteraire, par C. E. Jordan, page 64.
 
 294 LITE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 The joke gave a convenient opportunity to an audience that 
 was ah-eady in a very damning humor. The theatre resounded 
 with Couci- Couci ; the curtain went down to the hissing thun- 
 der of Couci- Couci ; and the piece, after one more perform- 
 ance, was shelved for thirty-one years. In 1765 the actors 
 revived it from the self-same copy, and it had a success only 
 less pronounced than that of " Za'ire." For the present, how- 
 ever, this attempt to present the France of 1387 in a romantic 
 light to the France of 1734 only weakened the hold of the 
 author upon his best protector, the public of Paris. 
 
 He was in frequent alarm during the rest of the year, for 
 he had now gone so far with his English Letters that at any 
 moment a copy might escape. The little book was published 
 in London, and was printing at Rouen. His letters to Thieriot, 
 Cideville, Jore, and Formont teem with warnings not to let 
 loose a sheet of the work until he gave the signal. There 
 were times, he explained to them, when almost anything could 
 be published with impunity, and there were times when the 
 censorship scented heresy in every doubtful word. Such a 
 time, he said, was then passing over them. " Tell Jore," he 
 kept writing to his Rouen friends, " that if one copy gets out 
 he will find himself in the Bastille, his Kcense forfeited, his 
 family ruined." Several copies, however, reached Paris early 
 in 1734 ; sent, perhaps, as " feelers." The author wrote to 
 Formont in x4pril, "The Letters philosophical, political, poet- 
 ical, critical, heretical, and diabolical are going off in London, 
 in English, with great success. But, then, the English are 
 Pope-scorners, cursed of God. The Galilean church, I fear, 
 will be a little harder to please. Jore has promised me a 
 fidelity proof against every temptation. I do not yet know 
 if there has not been some little breach in his virtue. He is 
 strongly suspected in Paris of having sold some copies. He 
 has had upon that subject a little conversation with M. He- 
 rault, lieutenant of police, and, by a miracle greater than all 
 those of Saint Paris and the Apostles, he is not in the Bas- 
 tille. He must, however, make up his mind to go thither some 
 day. It appears to me that he has a fixed vocation for that 
 pleasant retreat. I shall ti-y not to have the honor of accom- 
 panying him." 
 
 For the time the danger seemed averted, and the author 
 
 4
 
 THE ENGLISH LETTERS PLT3LISHED. 295 
 
 was balked of his purpose to exhibit to France the spectacle 
 of a country governed by law. The marriage of the Duke de 
 Richelieu to the Princess de Guise was about to be celebrated 
 at Monjeu, near Autun, a hundred and fifty miles to the south- 
 east of Paris. This was a marriage of Voltaire's own mak- 
 ing, as he tells Cideville. " I conducted the affair like an in- 
 trigue of comedy." He also drew up the contract, notary's 
 son as he was, and traveled fifty leagues " to see the happy 
 pair put to bed," in the style of the period. With him went 
 the Marquise du Chatelet, a near relation of the bridegroom, 
 and, probably, other persons invited to the wedding. 
 
 This lady, who shared the poet's anxieties with regard to 
 the dreadful book, having even seen some of the proof sheets 
 at the author's abode in the Rue de Longpont, left a servant 
 in Paris with orders to mount at the first rumor of danger, 
 and ride with all speed to give him warning. Friends likely 
 to get earlier news were notified and put on the alert, particu- 
 larly D'Argental, for fifty years the poet's " guardian angel." 
 "I have a mortal aversion to a prison," wrote Voltaire to him 
 this spring. " I am sick, and close air would kill me." 
 
 In May, 1734, while the author was still at Monjeu, the 
 storm burst. All at once, no one knew whence, copies of 
 the book began to circulate everywhere in Paris, — a pirated 
 edition, with the full name of the author on the title-page ! 
 Voltaire had sent three copies to be bound, some time before, 
 and at the binder's shop the work was read by a printer, who 
 perceived its salable nature. Penmen sat up all night ; the 
 whole book was copied; and, during the Richelieu honey- 
 moon, a large edition was printed. Appended to the work, 
 and designed to be bound with it, the pirate printer found a 
 hundred pages or more of another composition, entitled "Re- 
 marks upon the Thoughts of Pascal." The two works had 
 little in common, but they now appeared in the same volume, 
 a mass of heresy and good sense, of solid truth and amusing 
 satire. Pascal was a fascinating subject to Voltaire ; as, 
 indeed, he must ever be to susceptible readers, whether they 
 agi-ee or disagree with him. He was an example of a noble 
 nature perverted and prostrated by panic fear. _ As our 
 Pascal, Jonathan Edwards, was terrified into Calvinism by a 
 fever that caused him to be shaken over the pit of hell, so
 
 296 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 this brilliant and lovely Blaise Pascal, the Edwards of France, 
 was made a craven Jansenist by a narrow escape from de- 
 struction. As he was i-iding, one day, in Paris, in a carriage 
 drawn by four horses, the leaders took fright, and, dashing 
 upon a bridge without railings, plunged into the water, and 
 drew the vehicle to the very edge of the bridge. The traces 
 broke, and no one was injured. Pascal, worn by excessive 
 study, nervous and weak, was paralyzed by terror, and, for 
 months after, he fancied that he saw an abyss yawning at 
 his side. Finally, all other fear was merged into one supreme 
 affright : Another inch^ and his soul had been eternally 
 damned ! No more geometry, nor Greek, nor natural science, 
 nor anything else profitable or pleasant. Hair shirt instead ; 
 an iron breastplate, with points to pierce his flesh ; cruel 
 fasting; abject, incessant prayers. At thirty-nine this gifted 
 man, a noble mind in ruins, had completed his slow suicide, 
 and left behind him those Thoughts of his, to assist in 
 giving another lease of life to the most pernicious theory of 
 man's duty that has ever saddened and demoralized human 
 nature. 
 
 Voltaire's comments were moderate and respectful in tone. 
 With his usual adroitness he calls his readers' attention to 
 the difficulties arising from accepting legends as history, rhap- 
 sody as prophecy, self-annihilation as virtue. Pascal says, for 
 example, that since there is a God we should love only Aiw, 
 not his creatures. Voltaire replies, " We must love his creat- 
 ures, and very tenderly, too, — country, wife, father, children ; 
 we must love them so well that God will make them love us, 
 whether we wish it or not." Pascal exalts the Christian re- 
 ligion as holy beyond comjoarison, and true beyond question. 
 " Think," says Voltaire, " that it was on the way to mass 
 that men committed the massacres of Ireland and St. Barthol- 
 omew ; and that it was after mass and on account of the mass 
 that so many innocent people, so many mothers, so many 
 children, were murdered in the crusade against the heretics 
 of the south of France. O Pascal ! Such are the results 
 of the endless quarrels upon the dogmas, upon the mysteries 
 that could have no results except quarrels. There is not an 
 article of faith which has not given birth to a civil war ! " 
 
 The volume containing the English Letters and the Re-
 
 THE ENGLISH LETTERS PUBLISHED. 297 
 
 marks upon Pascal was denounced early in May, 1734. Every 
 copy that could be found was seized. Jore was arrested and 
 consigned to the Bastille ; his edition was confiscated. A 
 lettre de cachet was launched against Voltaire. The parlia- 
 ment of Paris condemned the book to be publicly burned by 
 the executioner; which was performed in Paris, June 10, 
 1734, in the manner before described. The residence of the 
 author was searched, its contents were thrown into confusion, 
 and some money was stolen from it. 
 
 May 11th, M. de la Briffe, charged with the duty of arrest- 
 ing the author of the offensive volume, arrived at Monjeu. 
 He was informed that the Duke de Richelieu was gone to the 
 army to join his regiment, — the regiment Richelieu, of which 
 the duke was colonel. As to M. de Voltaire, he had left the 
 chateau on Thursday last, five days before. He was gone to 
 Lorraine, so the officer was told, to drink the waters ; and 
 Lorraine was not yet part of the dominions of the King of 
 France. It is extremely probable that this easy opportunity 
 to get out of the way was intentionally afforded him. M. 
 de la Briffe, it is thought, was neither surprised nor sorry to 
 find the bird flown.
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 MADAME DU ChItELET AND HER CHATEAU. 
 
 An amusing page of the St. Simon Memoirs presents to 
 us the Baron de Breteuil, reader to Louis XIV., and after- 
 wards " introducer of ambassadors." This baron, though not 
 wanting in intellect nor in scholarship, was very much the 
 courtier and man of fashion ; ill informed on subjects out of 
 the range of the antechamber, but not the less positive on 
 that account in expressing his opinions. In our rough way we 
 should call him a conceited old bore. The Duke de St. Simon 
 more politely says that he was " endured and laughed at." 
 At the table of the minister, M. de Pontchartrain, the baron 
 was discoursing one day in his most fluent and confident man- 
 ner before a numerous company, when Madame de Pontchar- 
 train said to him, " With all your knowledge, I '11 bet you 
 don't know who composed the Lord's Prayer." The baron 
 laughed, and tried hard to pooh-pooh the question as too tri- 
 fling to be answered. Madame perceived his embarrassment, 
 and mercilessly pushed her advantage. He contrived to parry 
 her attacks until the company rose to return to the drawing- 
 room. On the way, M. de Caumartin, his relation, whispered 
 in his ear, " Moses ! " The baron at once recovered his self- 
 confidence, and, when the guests were seated, renewed the 
 topic, again insisting that he was ashamed to answer a ques- 
 tion so trivial. IMadame still defying him to name the author, 
 he said 9,t length, " There is no one who does not know that 
 Moses wrote the Lord's Prayer." A roar of laughter followed, 
 and the poor baron, as St. Simon remarks, "could no longer 
 find a door to get out b}^" ^ It was long before he could for- 
 give Caumartin, and longer before the story ceased to be one 
 of the standard jests of the court. 
 
 This Baron de Breteuil was the father of Madame du Chite- 
 
 1 2 Memoires de St. Simon, 145. Paris, 1873. 
 
 i
 
 MADAME DU CHATELET AND HER CHATEAU. 209 
 
 let, wliom Voltaire accompanied to the wedding at Monjeu. 
 He had seen her when she was a child ; perhaps at the house 
 of M. de Caumartin, when he was a young fugitive from 
 Maitre Alain's dusty solicitor's office. She had forgotten 
 him, for they did not meet again until 1733, when she was a 
 married woman, twenty-seven years of age, the mother of 
 three children, namely, Pauline, seven years old, Louis, five, 
 and Victor, an infant, born in April of that very year, 1733.^ 
 
 This lady concerned herself with the paternoster as little 
 as her father, and she was probably neither less fluent nor less 
 positive than the hero of St. Simon's anecdote. At fifteen she 
 began to write a translation of Virgil's " ^neid " in verse, some 
 jDortions of which Voltaire afterwards read, and often extolled. 
 From childhood she was a student and a reader. It is not- 
 necessary to deduct too much from the eulogium of Voltaire, 
 who was her lover for many years and her friend always. Her 
 writings show that she was a woman of some ability, and we 
 know from several well-authenticated anecdotes that her math- 
 ematical talent was extraordinary. Born in a better time and 
 reared amid better influences, she might have won the respect 
 of Europe by such work as Mrs. Somerville, Miss Herschel, 
 and Miss INIitchell have since performed, and left a reputation 
 as cheering as theirs. 
 
 Her discourse on the " Existence of God " is as good an 
 argument as we can ever expect from a lady who does not 
 perceive the graver and newer difficulties of the question. 
 Her opening remark has been frequently used by theologians 
 since her day, to the effect that God is, if possible, more neces- 
 sary to physical science than to moral, and ought to be the 
 foundation and conclusion of all scientific research. From this 
 she proceeds in the usual way : " Something exists, since I ex- 
 ist ; and since something exists, something must always have 
 existed." In treating the question of the origin of evil she 
 uses the metaphysical phrases of the century very neatly, and 
 the composition is one that would do credit to a New England 
 preceptress of a later day. 
 
 Not so madame's " Reflections upon Happiness." In order 
 to be happy, she tells us, we must be free from prejudices, 
 virtuous, in good health, capable of illusions, and have tastes 
 1 Lettres de la Marquise du ChStelet, Paris, 1878, pag< 8.
 
 300 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 and passions. Rational self-indulgence is her idea of happi- 
 ness, which is not that of a New England preceptress. In this 
 treatise she breaks occasionally into autobiograj^hy : "I have 
 a very good constitution, but I am not robust. There are cer- 
 tain things which surely destroy my health, such as wine, for 
 example, and all sorts of liquors ; and so from my earliest 
 youth I have refrained from them. I have a temperament of 
 fire ; hence I pass the morning in drowning myself with liq- 
 uids. Finally, I often give myself up to the pleasures of the 
 table, which God has given me a capacity for ; but I make up 
 for those excesses by a severe regimen, which I begin the mo- 
 ment I feel any inconvenience, and thus I always avoid dis- 
 ease." 
 
 Beautiful she was not, nor well-formed. She was tall, rather 
 bony, with flat chest and large limbs ; but, on the other hand, 
 she had fine eyes and a spacious, noble forehead, abundant fine 
 black hair, and a pleasing cast of countenance. At twenty- 
 seven, when Voltaire renewed his acquaintance with her, she 
 was far from wanting personal charms. So Maupertuis re- 
 cords, who was giving her lessons in geometry at the time ; so 
 testifies Madame Denis, Voltaire's niece ; and so Latour, the 
 painter of her portrait, which still exists. They all record, 
 too, and the marquise herself mentions the fact, that she was 
 disposed to heighten the effect of her good points by all the 
 means which art and nature have placed within woman's reach. 
 She was fond of dress and decoration, fond of gaming, addicted 
 to all the pleasures of her time and sphere. She played very 
 well on the spinet, and could converse on all the topics, from 
 bricabrac to Newton's " Principia." 
 
 At nineteen she was married to the Marquis du Chatelet, 
 an officer of ancient house and dilapidated fortune, a tractable 
 young man, without conversation, with not the least tincture 
 of literature, and extremely complaisant to his wife. The gos- 
 sip of the day assigned her various lovers, the Duke de Riche- 
 lieu among the rest ; and we have many letters of hers to the 
 duke, written in her later life, and they certainly read like the 
 letters of a woman to a former lover. Neither husband nor 
 wife had any scruples of principle or feeling with regard to 
 miscellaneous amours. Like the society around them, they 
 had resumed the morals of primitive man.
 
 MADAME DU CHATELET AND HER CHATEAU. 801 
 
 It was early in the summer of 1733, not later than June, 
 that Voltaire and Madame du Chatelet met in Paris : she, a 
 woman of fashion studying mathematics under Maupertuis | 
 and he immersed as usual in poetry and business. They soon 
 became warmly attached to one another. In July he ad- 
 dressed to her a poetical epistle upon Calumny, styling her 
 in the first line respectable Emilie. Then we see the lady and 
 her friend, the Duchess de Saint Pierre, surprising the poet 
 in his "hole," as he liked to call his lodgings in the Rue de 
 Longpont. He did his best to entertain them, extemporized 
 a repast of fricasseed chickens, and sent them a poetical invi- 
 tation to supper. She was Emilie to him henceforth as long 
 as she lived. " Who is Emilie ? " asks Cideville, on reading 
 the epistle upon Calumny. Voltaire replies, " You are Emilie 
 in the form of man, and she is Cideville in that of woman." 
 In November she was taking lessons in English. " She learned 
 it," wrote Voltaire, " in fifteen days. Already she translates 
 at sight ; she has had but five lessons of an Irish teacher. In- 
 deed, Madame du Chatelet is a prodigy." He began to think 
 that women could do whatever, men could do, and that the 
 only difference between them was that women were more ami- 
 able. "My little system," he styled this novel opinion. 
 
 What of the Marquis du Chatelet? Nothing at all. He 
 viewed this enthusiastic friendship with an equanimity that 
 was never disturbed. During their liaison of sixteen years, 
 this docile and tolerant soldier frequented his abode quite as 
 usual, and remained on the most cordial terms with a poet 
 who lent him money, and drew the fire of a wife perhaps op- 
 pressively superior. All this, I repeat, being simply incon- 
 ceivable to persons of our race, it were useless to expend words 
 upon it. These people had amended one of the ancient com- 
 mandments by striking out the word not, and adding, " but 
 thou shalt commit no indecorum." Voltaire obeyed this lat- 
 ter amendment with ingenious consistency as long as he lived. 
 
 It is a wonder how children were brought up under this 
 new dispensation. Many of them were reared by good and 
 faithful servants who adhered to the old dispensation. Some 
 had the ill luck of Talleyrand, whose mother scarcely saw him 
 during his infancy, and who came back to her from his nurse 
 lamed for life. Not a few, doubtless, had the fat^ which be-
 
 802 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 fell the infant of tlie Marquise da Cliatelet. We have a note 
 of hers, written on a Sunday evening in January, 1734, to 
 Maupertuis, her professor of mathematics, which explains what 
 that fate was : " My son died to-night, monsieur. I avow to 
 you that I am extremely afflicted at it, and I shall not go out, 
 as you may well believe. If you wish to come to console me, 
 YOU will find me alone. I refuse to admit company, but I feel 
 that there is no time when it will not give me extreme pleas- 
 ure to see you." 
 
 In April, 1734, as we have seen, she accompanied Voltaire 
 to the Chateau de Saint-Blaise, near Autun, the abode of 
 the Prince de Guise, where she witnessed the marriage of a 
 princess of the house to the Duke de Richelieu. It was a 
 honeymoon to two pairs of lovers, those weeks spent at the 
 magnificent chateau of the Guises. She wrote to Maupertuis 
 that, between Voltaire and the amiable Duchess de Richelieu, 
 she was passing blissful da3S, and that nothing was wanting 
 to her happiness but her daily lesson in geometry. The sol- 
 diers departed at length for the army, leaving to the ladies 
 the full enjoyment of their poet. Dread rumors from Paris 
 arrived to trouble the peace of this Arcadia, and soon a hint 
 came direct from the cabinet of a minister that the author of 
 the English Letters would do well to leave the Chateau de 
 Saint-Blaise, and " absent himself." He acted upon this hint, 
 and left two ladies inconsolable. The marquise and himself 
 had intended to return to Paris in three weeks, and now, in a 
 moment, they were separated, perhaps never again to meet in 
 France. For some days she thought that probably the lattre 
 de cachet had overtaken him, and that he was actually con- 
 fined in the fortress of Auxonne, to which it consigned him. 
 "If he was in England," she wrote to a friend, May 12th, "I 
 should be less to be pitied. I love my friends with some dis- 
 interestedness. His companionship would make the happi- 
 ness of my life ; his safety would make its tranquillity. But 
 to know that he, with such health and imagination as he has, 
 is in a prison, I assure you, I do not find in myself constancy 
 enough to support the idea. Madame de Richelieu is my |j 
 only consolation, — a charming woman, with a heart capable 
 of friendship and gratitude. She is, if possible, more afflicted 
 than I am ; for she owes to him her marriage, the happiness 
 of her life."
 
 MADAME DU CHATELET AND HER CHATEAU. 303 
 
 News from the fugitive reassured her ; at least he was not 
 in a fortress. But the minister was adamant ; the parliament 
 of Paris was burning the terrible little book ; there was small 
 hope of the author ever being permitted to live again in 
 France. " I shall retire at once to my chateau," wrote the 
 marquise. " Men have become insupportable ; so false are 
 they, so unjust, so full of prejudices, so tyrannical." 
 
 Meanwhile she used her knowledge of court and cabinet in 
 his behalf. Born and reared at court, she knew what woman 
 governed each powerful man, what man controlled each influ- 
 ential woman, and how all these were to be reached. She 
 brought to bear her connection, the Duchess d'Aiguillon, upon 
 the Princess de Conti, who had great weight with an adaman- 
 tine Keeper of the Seals ; and, in consequence, better news 
 came from Paris. Hope revived. If Voltaire would disavow 
 the offensive book, the lettre de cachet might be canceled, and 
 the storm blow over. It never cost Voltaire the most mo- 
 mentary scruple to disavow anything that had a savor of the 
 Bastille in it. His disavowals never deceived one human be- 
 ing, least of all the ministry that demanded them. They were 
 not intended nor expected to deceive. On this occasion he 
 disavowed, as Madame du Chatelet remarked, " with affecting 
 docility." If she refers to his letter of May, 1734, to the 
 interceding Duchess d'Aiguillon, she uses undescriptive lan- 
 guage. 
 
 " They say I must retract," he wrote to the amiable duchess. 
 " Very willingly. I will declare that Pascal is always right ; 
 that if St. Luke and St. Mark contradict one another it is a 
 proof of the truth of religion to those who know well how to 
 take things ; that another lovely proof of religion is that it is 
 unintelligible. I will avow that all priests are gentle and dis- 
 interested ; that Jesuits are honest people ; that monks are 
 neither proud, nor given to intrigue, nor stinking; that the 
 holy inquisition is the triumph of humanity and tolerance. 
 In a word, I will say all that may be desired of me, provided 
 they will leave me in repose, and not indulge the mania to 
 persecute a man who has never done harm to any one, who 
 lives in retirement, and who knows no other ambition but that 
 of paying court to you. It is certain, besides, that the edition 
 was published in spite of me, that many things lave been
 
 304 LIFE OF VOLTAIEE. 
 
 added to it, and that I have done all that was humanly possi- 
 ble to discover the publisher. Permit me, madame, to renew 
 my thanks and prayers. The favor I ask of the minister is 
 that he will not deprive me of the honor of seeing you. It is 
 a favor for which I should not know how to importune him too 
 much." 
 
 Other friends joined their efforts. Madame du Deffand 
 wrought upon M. de Maurepas. The Princess de Conti, the 
 Duchess du Maine, the Duchess de Villars, the Duchess de 
 Richelieu, and other ladies plied their arts and employed 
 their influence, the poet himself ever writing as he flew. The 
 pursuit was relaxed, and Madame du Chatelet was so far re- 
 assured as to be able to resume her geometry. She told her 
 Maupertuis that he would find her just where he had left 
 her, having forgotten nothing and learned nothing, but cher- 
 ishing the same desire to make a progress in geometry worthy 
 of such a master. She had taken up a treatise by Guisnee 
 upon the application of algebra to geometry, but could make 
 nothing of it, and was impatient for his assistance. " You 
 sow flowers upon a road where others find only ruts. Your 
 imagination knows how to embellish the driest subjects with- 
 out taking from them their accuracy and precision. I feel 
 how much I should lose if I did not profit by your goodness 
 in condescending to my weakness, and in teaching me truths 
 so sublime almost in jesting. I feel that I shall always have 
 over you the advantage of having studied under the most 
 amiable and, at the same time, the most profound mathema- 
 tician in the world."' In many letters of this period she pours 
 forth the warmest expressions of gratitude and affection for 
 her instructor ; scolding him also, now and then, for not 
 Avriting to her oftener than once a week, and failing some- 
 times to comiC to her suppers in Paris. In June, she went to 
 Versailles to continue her efforts on behalf of the wanderer, 
 and passed the summer near the court. She was one of the 
 ladies whose rank gave them the right of tambour with the 
 queen ; that is, the right of sitting on a stool in the queen's 
 presence, a tremendous privilege, to get which women schemed 
 for a life-time, and " jumped the life to come." 
 
 The fugitive, where was he ? The nobility of a French 
 province were a family party, inhabiting various chateaux, but
 
 MADAME DU ChItELET AND HER CHATEAU. 305 
 
 connected by all the ties of blood, usage, and interest. During 
 the pleasant weeks of May and June, the poet moved about 
 from chateau to chateau once more, always near the border, 
 constantly advised of possible danger by madame la marquise, 
 and obeying her injunctions with " affecting docility." He 
 spent some days at Cirey, in Champagne, where the Du 
 Chatelets had an old chateau ; and while there he heard news 
 that drew his attention from his own affairs, and changed the 
 direction of his thoughts. The Duke de Richelieu, on re- 
 joining his regiment before Philipsburgh (now Udenheim) 
 in Baden, met some of his new relatives of the house of 
 Guise, two of whom, the Prince de Lixin and the Prince de 
 Pons, had refused to sign the marriage contract. They ob- 
 jected to a marriage negotiated by a poet as he would have 
 arranged a marriage in the last act of a comedy. An alter- 
 cation occurred, ending in a duel between the bridegroom and 
 M. de Lixin. The rumor reached Voltaire that the Prince 
 de Lixin had died upon the field, and that the Duke de Riche- 
 lieu was severely wounded, perhaps mortally. He hastened 
 to the camp, appalled at such a tragic ending of his comedy. 
 He found both combatants in \evy good condition ; at least, 
 not seriously damaged, and able to bear the hardships of wiar. 
 Colonel the Duke de Richelieu was" making war in the true 
 Xerxes manner, with a personal train of seventy mules, thirty 
 horses, and a proportionate number of servants. Other great 
 lords were similarly equipped. The author, proscribed at 
 Paris, was received with enthusiasm at the camp, where he 
 was feted by princes and marshals, and where, perhaps, he 
 tasted the provisions supplied by Duverney and Voltaire, 
 contractors. The ministry, supposing that his visit to the 
 army was of the nature of a bravado, hardened towards him 
 again, and Madame du Ch^telet advised him to cut his visit 
 short. The siege, moreover, was becoming more active than 
 was convenient to visitors. 
 
 " The troops show great ardor [he wrote to a lady of Cirey, July 
 1st]. It is astonishing. We swear we will beat the Prince Eugene ; 
 we are not afraid of him ; but, notwithstanding, we intrench to the 
 teeth ; we have lines, a ditch, pits, and another ditch in advance, — 
 a new invention, which looks very pretty and very well contrived to 
 break the necks of people who come to attack our lines. All the 
 
 VOL. I. 20 , ■''
 
 306 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 indications are that the Prince Eugene is going to attempt the pas- 
 sage of the pits and the ditches about four in the morning, to-morrow, 
 Friday, the day of the Virgin. He is said to be much devoted to 
 Mary, and she is likely to side with him against our general, who is 
 a Jansenist. You are aware, madame, that you Jansenists are sus- 
 pected not to be sufficiently devoted to the Virgin ; you ridicule the 
 society of Jesuits, and Paradise opened to Philagie hy one hundred 
 and one Devotions to the Mother of God. We shall see to-morrow 
 for whom victory will declare itself. Meanwhile, we cannonade one 
 another powerfully. The lines of our camp are fringed by eighty 
 pieces of cannon, which are beginning to play. Yesterday we finished 
 carrying a certain horn-work, half of which M. de Belle-Isle had 
 already taken. Twelve officers of the guards were wounded at that 
 cursed work. Behold, madame, human folly in all its glory and all 
 its horror ! I intend to leave forthwith the sojourn of bombs and 
 bullets." 
 
 Toward the end of July, after a merry visit of two or three 
 weeks, he left the camp, and returned to his " hiding-place ;" 
 for so he called the dilapidated old castle belonging to the 
 Marquis du Chatelet, in Champagne, — " my chateau," to which 
 madame la marquise threatened to retire from contact with 
 prejudiced, proud, and tyrannical men. The lady had rarely, 
 if ever, lived in this sequestered relic of the thirteenth cent- 
 ury. It "was, indeed, scarcely inhabitable without extensive 
 repairs, which the family could not afford. The marquis had 
 IK) great income for his rank ; and he had a wife fond of play 
 and pleasure ; he had two children ; he had a lawsuit of eighty 
 years' standing ; he belonged to an army of which a colonel 
 could take to the field a retinue of one hundred animals and 
 thirty servants. At the best, the chateau of Cirey would not 
 naturally have been an inviting abode to a lady accustomed 
 from infancy to the magnificences of Versailles and the charms 
 of Fontainebleau. Suddenly, however, the old castle near the 
 border (and because it was near the border) became an object 
 of extreme interest to madame, to her poet, and to a complai- 
 sant husband. 
 
 A dream of a place in the country, a lodge in some accessi- 
 ble, well-kept, pleasant wilderness, where glorious things could 
 be composed in peace and love, far from the distractions 
 of the world, floats ever before the minds of the toil-worn 
 votaries of literature. " I have a passion for retirement,"
 
 MADAME DU CHItELET AND HER CHiXEAU. 307 
 
 Voltaire repeats many times. " I am a fawn, out of place 
 except in sylvan scenes," he writes more than once. He truly 
 loved the country, as actors love it, as many other men love it 
 whose occupations are extremely remote from country'- things 
 and ways. The idea now occurred to convert this ancient 
 abode of the Du Chatelets into such a retreat as he had loncred 
 for, to which all of them could remove, the marquis, madame, 
 the children, and the poet, making it their chief abode ; where 
 a persecuted author could write immortal works, and a lady 
 of great intellect could study mathematics and compose trea- 
 tises on the Existence of a Supreme Being. So thought, so 
 done. Voltaire had the honor of lending the marquis forty 
 thousand francs for repairs, at an interest of five per cent., 
 not paid, and the work of reparation was begun at once.^ 
 
 Cirey-sur-Blaise (there are six Cireys in France) is a hard 
 place to find, whether you look for it on the map or in the 
 department of Haute-Marne, as that part of the old province 
 of Champagne is now called. A part of the old chateau still 
 stands, and belongs to the estate of a descendant of the Du 
 Chatelets, the late Marquis de Damas. In 1863, the historian, 
 George Grote, gave up the project of a pilgrimage to it. 
 " We next," records Mrs. Grote, " made a detour for the ex- 
 press purpose of visiting the Chateau de Cirey, dear to us 
 both as the residence, a century ago, of Voltaire and Madame 
 du Chatelet. But in this pious pilgrimage we were defeated 
 by the difficulty of obtaining any manner of conveyance to 
 Cirey. We got within sixteen English miles of it at Joinville ; 
 from which pleasant village we could find neither cart nor 
 carriage for love or money during our stay." ^ They should 
 have gone to Chaumont-sur-Marne, the chief town of the de- 
 partment, a city of seven thousand inhabitants, the centre of 
 the iron trade and of the iron manufacture of that iron- 
 yielding region. The landlord of the " Ecu de France " would 
 probably have been only too happy to provide a vehicle for 
 illustrious English travelers. 
 
 It Avas already a land of forges and iron mines when Voltaire 
 went into hiding there in the summer of 1734, the famous 
 wine country lying a little to the north of it, and showing such 
 
 1 Voltaire to Comtesse de Montrcvel, November 15, 1749. 72 (Euvres, 92. 
 
 2 Personal Life of George Grote, by Mrs. Grote, page 270.
 
 308 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 names as Sillery, Epernay, Verzenay, and others that now 
 figure on the labels of wine bottles. Around Cirey the coun- 
 try is generally hard and uninteresting, as beseems a region 
 that supplies France with iron, charcoal, marble, grindstones, 
 glass, building stone, and a thousand articles of cutlery and 
 iron ware. The chi,teau had only its great antiquity, its 
 romantic aspect, and its great size to recommend it; an 
 extensive edifice, with a chapel and all the other appurte- 
 nances of a feudal residence of the time of the Crusades, but 
 with scarcely a window or door capable of keeping out wind 
 and rain. A few thousand francs, expended by a man who 
 knows how to get a franc's worth for every franc, will make 
 some corners of an old chateau inhabitable, and this was done 
 at Cirey. He began the work in August, 1734, while Ma- 
 dame du Chatelet was still at court ameliorating ministers. 
 
 In the absence of the lord and lady of the chateau he was 
 very much the grand seigneur ; at least, he played the part 
 with grace and effect. " I take the liberty of sending you 
 a boar's head," he writes to a neighbor, the Countess de 
 la Neuville, " This monsieur has just been assassinated, in 
 order to give me an opportunity of paying my court to you." 
 I sent for a buck, but none could be found. This boar was 
 destined to give you his head. I swear to you that I think 
 very little of the head of a wild pig, and I believe it is only 
 eaten from vanity. If I had taken nothing but a lark, I 
 should have offered it to you, all the same." In return, the 
 countess sends the lord ^:)ro tern, a basket of peaches. He is 
 occupied, meanwhile, with leads for the roof, with fire-places, 
 carriage-ways, chimney-pots, surrounded by masons and heaps 
 of old plaster. New workmen arrive. " I write their names 
 every day in a large account-book ; I cannot leave the chateau 
 until some one comes to relieve me." But he could write 
 verses for the ladies and retouch his opera of " Samson" for 
 Rameau in the midst of chaos. If the warning comes from 
 Paris, he can skip over the border. He did so in October, 
 and went as far as Brussels, returning, after a few weeks' 
 absence, to welcome Madame du Chatelet, who was coming to 
 join him. 
 
 Chaos itself was now confused. On a certain day in Novem- 
 ber arrived from Paris " two hundred packages," harbingers
 
 MADAME DU CH^TELET AND HER ChItEAU. 309 
 
 of the lady of the chateau. Next came a letter from her, 
 saying that she had been detained, and could not come as 
 soon as she had appointed. Lastly, at the close of the day, 
 in the midst of all this litter, madame herself arrived, "in a 
 kind of two-horse cart," bruised, shaken, tired, but very well. 
 She found that, if much had been done, more remained to do : 
 beds without curtains, rooms without windows, closets full of 
 old china, but no easy-chairs, beautiful vehicles and no horses 
 to draw them, an abundance of ancient tapestry hanging in 
 tatters. She entered upon the work of restoration with zest, 
 and speedily undid much that her poet had done. " She has 
 windows put," he wrote to Madame de la Neuville, " where I 
 had made doors. She changes stairs into chimneys, and 
 chimneys into stairs. She has lindens planted where I had 
 proposed elms, and if I had laid out a vegetable garden she 
 turns it into flower beds. Besides this, she does fairy work 
 in her house. She converts rags into tapestry, and finds the 
 secret of furnishing Cirey out of nothing." Several weeks 
 were spent in work of this kind, and gradually portions of 
 " the most dilapidated chateau on earth," as Voltaire called it, 
 became inhabitable and presentable. He had bought a valua- 
 ble picture, now and then, of late years as opportunity offered, 
 and thus he was able to hang a considerable number of fine 
 works upon these ancient walls. Horses were procured ; and 
 soon madame had, among other carriages, " a little phaeton as 
 light as a feather, drawn by horses as big as elephants." 
 
 At Christmas she was at Paris again, attending " the mid- 
 night mass " with Maupertuis, and taking him home with her 
 to supper, after that festivity. She was there to be near 
 Madame de Richelieu in her confinement, and to effect the 
 canceling of the lettre de cachet. She passed the first weeks 
 of 1735 between the bedside of the duchess and the cabinet 
 of M. de Maurepas, with happy results both to the lady and 
 the poet. March 2, 1735, the lieutenant of police wrote to 
 "Voltaire a letter worthy of a " paternal government " : — 
 
 " His Eminence and Monsieur the Keeper of the Seals have 
 charged me, monsieur, to inform you that you are at liberty 
 to return to Paris whenever you think proper. This permis- 
 sion is given on condition that you will occupy yourself here 
 with objects which shall afford no grounds of complaint against
 
 310 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 you, like those of the past. The more talent you have, mon- 
 sieur, the more you ought to feel that you have enemies and 
 jealous competitors. Shut their mouths, then, forever, by a 
 course of conduct worthy of a wise man and of a man who 
 has now reached a certain age." 
 
 This epistle, which found him still immersed in the details 
 of reparation, had no effect upon the scheme of retirement. 
 He showed himself in Paris for a few weeks in the spring, to 
 notify friends and enemies that he was free to come and go 
 like other men. He knew that Paris could not then be a safe 
 place of I'esidence for him ; and even during this short stay 
 rumors reached him of the currency of portions of his " Pu- 
 celle.'" There were lines in that burlesque which, under De 
 Fleury and Maurepas, might have doomed the author to one 
 of the wet dungeons of the Bastille. He withdrew in haste, 
 and, after spending some time in Lorraine, returned to Cirey 
 to continue the battle with chaos. He did not enjoy it. " I 
 am worried with details. So afraid am I of making bad bar- 
 gains, and so tired of urging on the workmen, that I have 
 asked for a man to help me." But no day passed without its 
 verse. In December, 1734, he could tell Cideville that, during 
 the eight months of his " retreat," he had written " three or 
 four thousand verses," and he sent to D'Argental a portion of 
 the same in the form of a new traged}-, " Alzire." 
 
 Cirey was his home henceforth as long as Madame du Cha- 
 telet lived. He often fled from it at the rumor of danger. He 
 sometimes remained for considerable periods at Paris and else- 
 where ; but Cirey was his home, to which he removed the 
 works of art and curiosity, the books and memoranda, that he 
 had accumulated in a life of forty years. He lived there, as far 
 as visitors could usually discern, very much as an uncle might, 
 — one of those good uncles who, having missed a happiness of 
 their own, share by enhancing that of a brother or a sister; an 
 uncle who has plenty of money, and gives watches to his neph- 
 ews and nieces on their sixteenth birthday, and suddenly ap- 
 pears on the lawn, of a May morning, leading rapture in the 
 guise of a pony. In the absence of visitors, the marquise 
 and himself spent laborious days in study and composition, 
 each remaining alone for seven and eight hours of the day, and 
 meeting in the evening at the French sacrament of supper.
 
 MADAME DU CHATELET AND HER CHATEAU. 811 
 
 When a poet settled in the country, he was expected to dig- 
 nify his abode with inscriptions, and he usually fulfilled this 
 expectation. Voltaire's first attempt — a Latin couplet, as 
 written in a letter to a friend — contained errors that have 
 since given much consolation to clerical critics. It was de- 
 signed for a small addition to the chateau which he had caused 
 to be built, and which in this couplet he called casa^ making 
 both its syllables long. In the ancient republic of letters this 
 was a capital offense. If Mr. Grote had pushed on to Cirey, 
 he might have discovered that, before having the inscription 
 engraved, Voltaire corrected the error. It reads thus upon 
 one of the doors of the old chateau : — 
 
 " H«c ingens incoepta domus fit parva ; sed sevum 
 Degitur hie felix et bene, magna sat est."i 
 
 Two other inscriptions, one in Latin and one in French, 
 were until recently to be seen upon the door of a gallery which 
 he built for philosophical apparatus. The Latin inscription, 
 witty in itself, is also amusing for its observance of the estab- 
 lished decorum of the chateau. The masculine gender is as- 
 signed to the " lover of virtue, the despiser of the vulgar and 
 the court, the cultivator of friendship, who, withdrawn to his 
 estate, was hiding a poet." The world was invited to take 
 note that it was a marquis who hid the poet, not Madame la 
 Marquise. 
 
 " Hic virtutis amans, vulgi contemptor et aulse, 
 Cultor amicitice vates liitet abditus aaro." 
 
 A French inscription was placed under this, and may have 
 been engraved there a little later : — 
 
 "Asile des beaux-arts, solitude ou mon coeur 
 Est toujours occiipe daus une paix profonde, 
 C'est vous qui donnez le bonheur 
 Que promettiait en vain le monde."^ 
 
 He had an unequaled facility in the trifles of poetry, many 
 of which are so happy that, even in a prose translation, they 
 are not devoid of interest. During the first year or two of 
 his settlement at Cirey he composed a great number of inscrip- 
 
 ^ 1 This house, begun on a vast scale, becomes small ; but time passes here hap- 
 pily and well ; it is large enough. 
 
 2 Asylum of the fine arts, solitude in which my heart is always occupied in 
 profound peace, it is you that give the happiness which the world would promise 
 in vain. f
 
 312 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 tions, impromptus, epigrams, snatches of verse in letters, com- 
 pliments to ladies at table, satirical couplets, and rhymed invi- 
 tations. I select two or three, not usually accessible except 
 to inhabitants of cities. He winds up an invitation thus : — 
 
 " Certain vin frais, dont la mousse pressee 
 De la bouteille avec force elancee, 
 Avec eclat fait Yoler le bouchon ; 
 II part, on rit, il frappe le plafond. 
 De ce nectar I'e'cume petillante 
 De nos Fran9ais est I'image briilante." ^ 
 
 The following is upon the chateau of Cirey : — 
 
 " Un voyageur, qui ne mentit jamais, 
 Passe a Cirei, I'admire, le contemple ; 
 II croit d'abord que ce n'est qu'un palais ; 
 Mais il voit Emilie. Ah ! dit-il, c'est un temple." ^ 
 
 This was addressed to Madame du Chatelet upon his seeing 
 her deep in algebra : — 
 
 " Sans doute voiis serez celebre 
 Par les grands calculs de I'algebre 
 Oil votre esprit est absorbe : 
 J'oserais m'y livrer moi-merae : 
 Mais, helas ! A + D — B 
 N'est pas == a je vous aime." ^ 
 
 One addressed to an officer who had some of his hair cut off 
 by a cannon ball at a siege, and was not promoted for it, was 
 much celebrated at the time : — 
 
 " Des boulets allemands la pesante tempete 
 
 A, dit-on, coupe' vos cheveux : 
 
 Les gens d'esprit sont fort heureux 
 
 Qu'elle ait respecte votre tete. 
 On pretend que Cesar, le phenix des guerriers, 
 N'ayant plus de cheveux, se coiffa de lauriers : 
 Cet ornement est beau, mais n'est plus de ce monde. 
 
 Si Cesar nous etait rendu, 
 Et qu'en servant Louis il eut ete tondu, 
 II n'y gagnerait rien qu'une perruque blonde." * 
 
 1 A certain cool wine, the confined froth of which shot from the bottle with 
 force, makes the cork fly ; it starts, we laugh, it hits the ceiling. The sparkling 
 foam of this nectar is the brilliant image of our Frenchmen. 
 
 2 A traveler, who never lies, passes by Cirey, admires it, contemplates it. At 
 first he believes it is only a palace ; but he sees Emilie. " Ah," he says, " it is a 
 temple." 
 
 8 Doubtless you will become famous through the grand calculations of algebra 
 in which your mind is absorbed. I should dare to devote myself to them ; but, 
 alas ! A plus D minus B is not equal to / love you. 
 
 * The weighty tempest of German bullets has, they say, cut your hair. Men 
 of letters are very glad it respected your head. It is said that Caesar, the phoenix
 
 MADAME DU CIiItELET AND HER ChItEAU. 313 
 
 It were easy to fill ten pages of this volume from the light 
 and sparkling verses of this period, if not from those addressed 
 to Madame du Chatelet alone. I yield to the temptation of 
 copying one more, upon Idleness, which was written to rouse 
 the idle Linant to exertion, but written in vain : — 
 
 " Connaissez mieux I'oisivete : 
 
 EUe est ou folie ou sagesse ; 
 
 Elle est vertu dans la richcsse, 
 
 Et vice dans la pauvrete. 
 On peut jouir en paix, dans I'hiver de sa yie, 
 De ces fruits qu'au printemps sema notre Industrie : 
 Courtisans de la gloire, e'crivains ou guerriers, 
 Le sommeil est permis, mais c'est sur des lauriers." i 
 
 of warriors, having lost his hair, covered his head with laurels. That ornament 
 is beautiful, but no longer in fashion. If Caasar were restored to us, and if, while 
 serving Louis, he had been shorn, he would gain nothing by it but a blonde 
 peruke. 
 
 1 Understand idleness better. It is either folly or wisdom; it is virtue in 
 wealth and vice in poverty. In the winter of our life, we can enjoy in peace the 
 fruits which in its spring our industry planted. Courtiers of glory, writers or 
 warriors, slumber is permitted you, but only upon laurels.
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 MAN OF BUSINESS. 
 
 To almost any man of letters it would have been a disad- 
 vantage to live a hundred and forty miles from the capital. 
 With such roads and vehicles as they had then in France, it 
 was usually a journey of three or four days from Cirey to 
 Paris, and might be one of five or six. The chateau was lit- 
 erally " twelve miles from a lemon ; " but a coach from Paris 
 appears to have passed near it two or three times a week, and 
 there were villages four or five miles distant. Chaumont and 
 Joinville, either of which might have sometimes furnished a 
 lemon, were from twelve to sixteen miles away. Another dif- 
 ficulty was that all letters intrusted to the mail were liable to 
 be opened, and the letters of Voltaire were sure to be. He 
 was more than an author: he was importer, merchant, con- 
 tractor, speculator, capitalist, money-lender ; and he was now 
 buried alive in the depths of Champagne, reputed to be the 
 most provincial province of France ! " Ninety -nine sheep and 
 one Champagne man make a hundred beasts," says the old 
 French proverb. 
 
 To his other labors were to be added those of a student and 
 experimenter in science, a fashion then in Europe, and he 
 cultivated this new field with his own ardor and tenacity. 
 Every week he wanted something from Paris ; every day some 
 interest of his required intelligent attention. The literary 
 news was necessary to him. Frequently he needed informa- 
 tion from brother chemists and philosophers upon some point 
 not yet elucidated in books. Often he wanted books hard to 
 find, materials little known, apparatus not kept for sale. All 
 this business he managed with that ease, tact, and success 
 which usually marked his direction of mundane things. 
 
 Among his acquaintances at the capital there was a certain 
 Abbd Moussinot, a kind of clerical notary, who conducted the
 
 MAN OF BUSINESS. 315 
 
 business affairs of his chapter, who knew how to "place" and 
 how to collect money, and who speculated a little on his own 
 account in pictures and rare objects. For eight years or more 
 Voltaire had had dealings with him, had bought pictures of 
 him, had employed him in transactions and negotiations, and 
 had found him intelligent, prompt, faithful, secret. It was 
 through this shrewd, obliging, and silent abb^ that he kept 
 open lines of communication with his base of supplies dur- 
 ing the first years of his residence at Cirey. There is nothing 
 in the vast range of his correspondence more characteristic than 
 his familiar letters to the Abbe Moussinot, of which we possess 
 about one hundred and fifty. Before entering upon his intel- 
 lectual life in Champagne, his most brilliant, fertile, and effect- 
 ive period, I will seize the opportunity of presenting him to 
 the reader as man of business. The most agreeable way of 
 doing this will be simply to translate a few of these letters, 
 and leave the reader to make his own comments and deduc- 
 tions. It is only necessary to bear in mind that, while he was 
 writing these letters and managing an estate of sixty thou- 
 sand francs a year, he was the most diligent and absorbed lit- 
 erary man in Europe, the dramatist of his age, the most pro- 
 ductive of living authors, who was making wide and peculiar 
 researches in history, ancient and modern, and was full of the 
 new zeal for scientific experiment. He was also a correspond- 
 ent punctual and profuse; and when a visitor arrived at the 
 chateau he could appear wholly the man of pleasure, and ar- 
 range a series of entertainments that made life pass like a 
 dream of festivity. 
 
 LETTERS FROM VOLTAIRE TO THE ABBiE MOUSSINOT. 
 
 [March 21, 1736.] " My dear Abbe, — I love your strong-box a 
 thousand times better than that of a notary ; there is no one in the 
 world whom I trust as I do you ; you are as intehigent as you are 
 virtuous. You were made to be the soHcitor-general of the order of 
 the Jansenists, for you know that they call their union the Order ; it 
 is their cant; every community, every society, has its cant. Consider, 
 then, if you are willing to take charge of the funds of a man who is 
 not devout, and to do from friendship for that undevout man what 
 you do for your chapter as a duty. You will be able in this way to 
 make some good bargains in buying pictures ; yon will borrow from 
 me some of the money in your strong-box. My affairs, as you know,
 
 316 LITE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 are very easy and very simple ; you will be my superintendent wher- 
 ever I may be myself; you will speak for me, and in your own name, 
 to the Villars, to the Richelieus, to the D'Estaings, to the Guises, to 
 the Guebriants, to the D'Auneuils, to the Lezeaux, and to other illus- 
 trious debtors of your friend. When a man speaks for his friend he 
 asks justice ; when it is I who solicit that justice, I have the air of 
 asking a favor, and it is this that I wish to avoid. This is not all : 
 you will act as my plenipotentiary, whether for my pensions payable 
 by M. Paris-Duverney, by INI. Tannevot, first clerk of the finances, 
 or for the interest due me from the H6tel-de-Ville, from Arouet, my 
 brother, as well as for the bonds and money which I have at differ- 
 ent notaries. You will have, my dear abbe, carte-hlanche for all that 
 which concerns me, and everything will be conducted in the greatest 
 secrecy. Write me word if this charge is agreeable to you. Mean- 
 while, I pray you to send your frotteur to find a young man named 
 Baculard d' Arnaud : ^ he is a student in philosophy at the College 
 of Harcourt ; he lives in the Rue Mouffetard. Give him, I beg you, 
 this little manuscript [the "Epistle upon Calumny"], and make him 
 from me a little present of twelve francs. I entreat you not to neg- 
 lect this small favor which I ask you ; this manuscript will be sold 
 for his advantage. I embrace you with all my heart ; love me al- 
 ways, and, especially, let us bind the bonds of our friendship closer 
 by mutual confidence and reciprocal services." 
 
 [May 22, 1736.] " To punish you, my dear friend, for not having 
 sent to find the young Baculard d' Arnaud, student in philosophy at 
 the College of Harcourt, and living with M. Delacroix, Rue Mouffe- 
 tard, — to punish you, I say, for not having given him the ' Epistle 
 upon Calumny ' and twelve francs, I condemn you to give him a louis 
 d'or, and to exhort him from me to learn to write, which will con- 
 tribute to his fortune. This is a little work of charity which, whether 
 
 Christian or mundane, must not be neglected I expect news 
 
 from you with impatience, and I embrace you with all my heart. I 
 write to this young D' Arnaud. Instead of twenty-four francs, give 
 him thirty livres when he comes to see you. I am going to seal my 
 letter quick for fear that I augment the sum. Received thirty livres. 
 Signed, Bacidard d" Arnaud." ^ 
 
 [September, 1736.] " Thirty-five thousand francs for tapestries of 
 the ' Henriade ' ! That is much, my dear treasurer. It would be 
 necessary, before all, to know how much the tapestry of Don Quixote 
 sold for ; it would be necessary, especially before commencing, that 
 M. de Richelieu should pay me my fifty thousand francs. Let us sus- 
 
 1 Voltaire's literary correspondent at Paris. 
 
 2 Lettres de Voltaire a I'Abbe JMoussinot. Paris, 1875, page 6.
 
 IMAN OF BUSINESS. 317 
 
 pend, then, every project of tapestry, and let M. Oudri do nothing 
 without more ample information. Buy for me, my dear abbe, a little 
 table which may serve at once as screen and writing-desk, and send it 
 in my name to the house of Madame de Winterfield,^ Rue Platriere. 
 Still another pleasure. There is a Chevalier de Mouhi, who lives at 
 the Hotel Dauphin, Rue des Orties ; this chevalier wishes to borrow 
 of me a hundred pistoles, and I am very willing to lend them to him. 
 Whether he comes to your house, or whether you go to his, I pray 
 you to say to him that I take pleasure in obliging literary men when I 
 can, but that I am actually very much embarrassed in my affairs ; that 
 nevertheless you will do all you can to find this money, and that you 
 hope the reimbursement will be secured in such a way that there will 
 be nothing to risk ; after which you will have the goodness to inform 
 me who this chevalier is, as well as the result of these preliminaries. 
 Eifrhteen francs to the little D'Arnaud. Tell him I am sick and can- 
 not write. Pardon all these trifles. I am a very tedious dabbler, but 
 I love you with all my heart." , 
 
 [July 30, 1736.] "The little table with a screen, which I asked 
 you to buy for Madame de Winterfield, Rue Platriere, near Saint- 
 Jacques, is a trifle. It must be very simple and a very good bar- 
 gain." 
 
 [Summer, 1736.] " Oudri, my dear abbe, appears to me expen- 
 sive ; but if he makes two sets of hangings, can we not have them a 
 little cheaper ? I might be able even to have three of them made. 
 If M. de Richelieu pays me, it will be well for me to invest my money 
 in that way. The countenance of Henry IV. and that of Gabrielle 
 d'Estrees in tapestry will succeed very well. Good Frenchmen will 
 wish to have some Gabrielles and Henrys, especially if the good 
 Frenchmen are rich. "VVe are not very rich ourselves, just now ; but 
 the holy time of Christmas will give us, I hope, some consolation. 
 Cannot Chevalier come to Cirey to execute under my own eyes de- 
 signs from the ' Henriade ' ? Does he know enough of his art for 
 that ? They speak well of him, but he has not yet sufficient reputa- 
 tion to be unteachable. It is said there is at Paris a man who draws 
 portraits to be worn in rings in a perfect manner. I have seen a face 
 of Louis XV. of his doing, which was an excellent likeness. Have 
 the goodness, my dear abbe, to disinter this man. You will find it 
 impertinent that the same hand should paint the king and poor me; 
 but friendship wishes it, and I obey friendship.^ The Chevalier de 
 
 1 This was Oliinpe Duiioycr, the young lady with whom Voltaire was in love 
 during his first residence in Holland, in 1713. 
 
 2 The artist in question was Barrier, an engraver of precious stones, who made 
 a ring portrait of Voltaire for Madame du Chatelet soon/'^ter the date of this 
 letter.
 
 318 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Mouhi, then, will send twice a week to Cirey the gossip of Paris. En- 
 join it upon him to be infinitely secret ; give him a hundred crowns, 
 and promise him a payment once a month, or every three months, as 
 he prefers. I treat you, my dear friend, as I beg you will treat me. 
 I should be glad to be so happy as to receive some orders from you." 
 
 [October 27, 1736.] " I could wish, my dear and faithful treasurer, 
 to have, under the greatest secrecy, some ready money deposited with 
 a discreet and faithful notary, which he could place at interest for a 
 time, and which, if necessary, I could get back without delay. The 
 sum would be fifty thousand francs, and perhaps more. Are you not 
 acquainted with a notary in whom you could confide ? The whole 
 would be in your name. I am very much discontented with M. Fer- 
 ret ; he has two excellent qualities for a public man, he is brutal and 
 
 indiscreet Have the goodness to give another louis d'or to 
 
 D'Arnaud. Tell him then to have himself called simply D'Arnaud ; 
 that is a fine Jansenist name ; Baculard is ridiculous." 
 
 [February, 1737.] " I find myself, my dear treasurer, in the situa- 
 tion of always having before me a large sum of money to dispose 
 of. Your letters will be henceforth addressed to Madame d'Azilli, at 
 Cirey. Put nothing in them too clearly which might reveal that it is 
 I to whom you write. I find my obscurity convenient. I wish to 
 have no correspondence with any one ; I pretend to be ignored of all 
 the world except you, whom I love with all my heart, and whom I 
 beg very earnestly to find me a literary correspondent who will give 
 me news with exactness, and whom you will leave in ignorance of my 
 retreat." 
 
 [March 18, 1737.] " The principal of the debt of M. de Riche- 
 lieu is 46,417 livres ; date. May 5, 1735."^ 
 
 [March, 1737.] " I am very glad, my dear correspondent, that 
 M. Berger thinks I am in England. I am there for all the world ex- 
 cept you. Send, I pray you, a hundred louis d'or to M. the Marquis 
 du Chatelet, who will bring them to me. Now, my dear abbe, are 
 you willing that I should speak to you frankly ? It is necessary for 
 you to do me the favor of accepting every year a little honorarium, 
 merely as a mark of my friendship. Let us not beat about the bush. 
 You have a small salary from your canons ; treat me as a chapter ; 
 take twice as much every year from your friend, the poet-philosopher, 
 as your cloister gives you ; this without prejudice to the gratitude 
 which I shall always cherish. Arrange this and love me." 
 
 [April, 1737.] "I repeat to you, my tender friend, my urgent 
 request not to speak of my affairs to any one, and especially to say 
 that I am in England. I have the very strongest reasons for that. 
 1 Lettres de Voltaire a I'Abbd Moussinot. Paris, 1775, page 26.
 
 MAN OF BUSINESS. 319 
 
 In the present critical situation of my affairs, it would be very im- 
 prudent for me to embark in the commerce with Piiiega a large sum, 
 which would be too long in yielding returns. Therefore, let us not 
 invest in that commerce more than four or five thousand francs for 
 our amusement ; a like sum in pictures, which will amuse you still 
 more. The paper of the farmers-general brings in six per cent, a 
 year ; it is the surest investment of money. Amuse yourself again 
 in that. Buy some bonds. That merchandise will fall in a short 
 time ; at least, I think so ; that is another honest recreation for a 
 canon ; and I leave to your intelligence everything that relates to 
 those amusements. Besides, let us put into the hands of M. Michel, 
 whose probity and fortune you know, one half of our ready money at 
 five per cent., and not more ; were it only for six months, that would 
 produce something. In the matter of interest nothing must be neg- 
 lected, and in investing our money we must always conform to the 
 law of the prince. Let all that, like my other affairs, be a profound 
 secret. Still eighteen francs to D'Arnaud, and two ' Henriades.' 
 I see that I give you more trouble than all your chapter, but I shall 
 not be so ungrateful." 
 
 [April 14, 1737.] " M. the Abbe de Breteuil has come here. He 
 is in quest of some engravings for his rooms ; if I have still half a 
 dozen pretty enough, you will do me, my dear friend, the favor to 
 send them. You will have the goodness to send with them a word 
 or two, in the way of a note, to the effect that, having recommended 
 that the engravings of mine which are left should be presented to him, 
 you have but these, and he is requested to accept them. Besides the 
 two thousand four hundred francs which you are to give to the Mar- 
 quis du Chatelet, it is necessary to give him fifty livres. It is nec- 
 essary also, my dear abbe, to find a man who will give us at Cirey 
 twice a week a letter of news. I ask a thousand pardons, my gener- 
 ous correspondent, for the tiresome details of my commissions, but 
 you must have pity upon country people, by whom you are tenderly 
 loved." 
 
 [May, 1737.] "You are going, then, to Rouen, my dear treasurer? 
 See, I pray you, the Marquis de Lezeau. Speak to him of the pov- 
 erty of our cash-box. I am confident that you will induce him to 
 pay ; you have the gift of persuasion. It is, my dear abbe, of abso- 
 lute necessity that I should know how it is that I have forgotten 
 having given a receipt to M. the President d'Auneuil. It must be 
 some one else who has given this receipt, and who has received the 
 money for me ; it is from the mouth of Demoulin that y ni can know 
 whether this money has been received or not. Mesnil, the notary, 
 delivered it; Demoulin ought to have received it. This man, who
 
 320 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 robbed me of twenty thousand francs, and who is an ingrate, could 
 he have pilfered also that half year's payment ? It is necessary to 
 address ourselves to those two individuals in order to know the truth ; 
 and if neither of them remember the facts it will be well that M. 
 d'Auneuil should be informed that I know no more of the matter than 
 the}-. In matters of interest and money we cannot be too careful 
 and exact ; we should foresee everything and guard against every- 
 thing. M. de Richelieu owes only for one year ; it is not proper 
 to demand that year's interest at a time when he is paying me 
 forty-three thousand two hundred francs. I would not hinder him, 
 however, from giving me some ready money, if he wishes to do so ; 
 but I shall be very content with a good assignment, as well for the 
 two thousand nine hundred livres of arrears which I am still to receive 
 from him as for the annuity of four thousand francs which he pays 
 me every year. In that case he would be importuned no more, and 
 our affairs would be more according to rule and easier to manage. 
 You can, my dear abbe, send by the coach, in perfect safety, three 
 hundred louis well packed, without saying what they are and without 
 expense, provided the box be well and duly registered as containing 
 valuables ; that will suffice. Besides these three hundred louis, I must 
 have a draft for two thousand four hundred francs ; the receiver- 
 general of Champagne will give you this draft for your money. Any 
 banker will tell you the name and residence of the receiver-general. 
 I am ashamed of all the trouble I give you, and I am obliged to avow, 
 my dear friend, that you were made to manage greater affairs than the 
 treasury of a chapter of Saint Merri and the revenue of a philoso- 
 pher who embraces you with all his heart. In this world one is rarely 
 what he ought to be." 
 
 [May, 1737.] "The man who has the secret of spinning brass is 
 not the only one ; but I believe that only a little of it can be spun, 
 and that it easily breaks. Sound this man of brass ; we might be 
 able to have him here, and give him a chamber, a laboratory, his 
 board, and a salary of a hundred crowns. It would be in his power 
 to make some experiments, and to try and make steel, which as- 
 suredly is much easier than to make gold. If he has the misfortune 
 to seek the philosopher's stone, I am not surprised that from six thou- 
 sand francs a year he is reduced to nothing. A philosopher who has 
 six thousand francs a year has the philosopher's stone. That stone 
 brings us, very naturally, to speak of affairs of interest. Here is the 
 certificate which you ask for. I repeat to you my prayers that M. 
 de Guise, INI. de Lezeau, and others may be written to without delay ; 
 that you see M. Paris-Duverney, and let him know that he will 
 give me great pleasure if he permits me to enjoy the pension from 
 
 { I 
 
 ■,{i
 
 MAN OF BUSINESS. 321 
 
 the queen and from the royal treasury, of which I am in very great 
 need, and for which I shall be much obliged. Be willing also, my 
 dear abbe, to arrange, in some amiable way, my annuity, my capital 
 overdue, and the arrears, with the steward of M. de Richelieu ; the 
 whole without betraying an unbecoming distrust. That ought to 
 have been done more than a month ago. An assurance of regular 
 payment would spare the duke disagreeable details, would deliver 
 his steward from great embarrassment, would spare you, my dear 
 friend, many useless steps, many fatiguing and unfruitful labors. 
 We shall say more of this another time, for I am afraid of forgetting 
 to ask you for a very good air-pump, which is hard to find ; a good 
 reflecting telescope, which is at least as rare ; the volumes of pieces 
 which have been crowned at the Academy. Such are the learned 
 things which my little learned mind has very urgent need of. I 
 have, my dear abbe, neither the time nor the strength to continue, 
 nor even to thank you for the chemist whom you sent me. As yet, 
 I have scarcely seen him, except at mass ; he loves solitude ; he 
 ought to be content. I shall not be able to work with him in chem- 
 ical matters until an apartment which I am building is finished ; till 
 then, we must each of us study apart, and you must love me always." 
 
 [May, 1737.] " It is necessary, my dear friend, to ask, to ask again, 
 to press, to see, to importune, and not jjersecute my debtors for my 
 annuities and arrears. A letter costs nothing; two are only a very 
 trifling embarrassment, and serve the purpose that a debtor cannot 
 complain if I am obliged to avail myself of legal means of redress. 
 After two letters to the farmers at an interval of a mouth, and a little 
 word of excuse to the masters, it will be necessary to issue formal 
 demands to the farmers of the lands upon which my annuities are se- 
 cured. I will send you the list of them. For the rest of my life it 
 will be with the farmers that I shall have to do. That will be a much 
 better plan. Pinga says everywhere that he is selling my effects, and 
 that has a much worse effect than all I sell. I flatter myself, my dear 
 friend, that you will keep much better the secret of all my affairs. 
 You have, God be thanked, all the good qualities." 
 
 [May, 1737.] "Great thanks, my dear abbe, for the present given 
 to La Mare, and the more because it is the last whicli my affairs per- 
 mit me to accord him. If ever he comes to importune you, do not let 
 him take up your time. Reply that you have nothing to do with my 
 business ; that cuts the matter short. Ascertain if it is *rue that this 
 little gentleman, whom I have overwhelmed with benefits, rails also 
 against me. Speak to Demoulin gently. He ought indeed to blush 
 at his conduct towards me ; he has deprived me of twenty thousand 
 francs, and wishes to dishonor me. In losing twenty thousand francs 
 
 VOL. I, 21
 
 822 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 I need not acquire an enemy. Another request, my dear ahh^. A 
 friend, who asks of me an inviolable secrecy, charges me to ascertain 
 what is the subject of the prize essay announced this year by the 
 Academy of Sciences. I know no man more secret than you : it will 
 be you, then, my dear friend, who will render us this service. If I 
 were to write to some member of the Academy, he would think, per- 
 haps, that I wished to compete for the prize ; that would suit neither 
 my age nor my defective knowledge." 
 
 [June, 1737.] "Arm yourself with courage, my dear and amiable 
 agent, for to-day I am going to be exceedingly troublesome. Here is 
 a learned negotiation, in which it is necessary, if you please, that you 
 succeed, and that I be not found out. A visit to, M. de Fontenelle, 
 and a long explanation upon what is understood by the propagation of 
 fire. Disputants, among whom I sometimes take a fancy to thrust 
 myself, discuss the question whether fire has or has not weight. M. 
 Lemeri, whose ' Chemistry ' you sent me, asserts (chapter v.) that, 
 after having calcined twenty pounds of lead, he found it increased in 
 weight five pounds ; he does not say whether he weighed the earthen 
 vessel in which the calcination was made, to ascertain if any carbon 
 had joined itself to the lead ; he supposes simply, or rather boldly, 
 that the lead has absorbed some particles of fire, which have augmented 
 its weight. Five pounds of fire ! Five pounds of light ! That is 
 admirable, and so admirable that I do not believe it. Other scientific 
 men have made experiments with a view to ascertain the weight of 
 fire. They have put filings of copper and filings of tin into glass re- 
 torts hermetically sealed ; they have calcined these filings, and they 
 have found them increased in weight : an ounce of copper has acquired 
 forty-nine grains, and an ounce of tin four grains. Antimony calcined 
 by the rays of the sun, by means of the burning glass, has also in- 
 creased in weight in the hands of the chemist, Romberg. I wish that 
 all those statements may be true ; I wish that the matter in which the 
 metals were held during calcination may not have contributed to in- 
 crease the weight of those metals ; but I who speak to you have 
 weighed more than a thousand pounds of red-hot iron, and I have 
 afterwards weighed it cold. I have not found a grain of difference. 
 Now it would be very curious that twenty pounds of lead, calcined, 
 should gain five pounds in weight, and that a thousand pounds of red- 
 hot iron should not weigh one grain the heavier. Such, my dear abbe, 
 are the difiiculties which for a month past have wearied the head of 
 your friend, little accustomed to physical investigations, and rendered 
 him uncertain in chemistry, just as other difficulties of a different order 
 render him shaky upon some points little important of scholastic the- 
 ology. In every science we seek the truth in good faith, and, when 
 
 31
 
 MAN OF BUSINESS. 323 
 
 we think we have found it, we are often embracing only an error. 
 Now for the favor which I ask of you. Go to your neighbor, M. 
 GeofFroy, apothecary to the Academy of Sciences ; get into conversa- 
 tion with him by means of half a pound of quinquina, which you will 
 buy and send to me. Ask him respecting the experiments of Lemeri, 
 of Homberg, and mine. You are a very skillful negotiator ; you will 
 easily find out what M. Geoffroy thinks of all that, and you will tell 
 me what he says, — the whole without committing me. I am, as you 
 see, my dear friend, much occupied with physical matters ; but I do 
 not forget that superfluity which they name the necessary.-^ I hope 
 that Hebert will not delay to finish it, and that he will spare nothing 
 in rendering it elegant and magnificent." 
 
 [June 29, 1737.] " Are you willing, my dear friend, to pay a visit, 
 long or short as you like, to M. Boulduc, a learned chemist ? I am 
 informed that he has made some experiments which tend to prove that 
 fire does not augment the weight of bodies ! The point is to have 
 upon that subject a conversation with him. There is also a M. 
 Grosse, who lives in the same building. He is also a chemist, very 
 intelligent and very laborious. I pray you to ask both of these gen- 
 tlemen what they think of the experiments of the lead calcined by or- 
 dinary fire, and of the metals calcined by the rays of the sun concen- 
 trated through the burning glass. They will feel it a pleasure to 
 speak to you, to instruct you, and you will send me a statement of 
 their philosophic instructions. This, my dear correspondent, is a com- 
 mission much more amusing than to arrange a composition with the 
 creditors of the Prince de Guise. That prince has always concealed 
 from me the appointment of a commission for the liquidation of his 
 debts. A life annuity ought to be sacred ; he owes me three years' 
 income. A commission established by the king is not established for 
 the purpose of frustrating the creditors. Life annuities ought cer- 
 tainly to be excepted from the operation of the laws most favorable 
 to debtors of dishonest intentions. Speak of this, I pray you, to M. 
 de Machault ; and after having represented to him my right and the 
 injury which I suffer, you will act as he will direct. It is essential 
 for us to avail ourselves of legal methods, and it is proper to do so 
 with all the consideration possible. Do not trust the positive promise 
 of the Prince de Guise. The positive promises of princes are trifles, 
 and his are worse." 
 
 [June 30, 1737.] "Another little visit, my dear friend, to M. 
 
 Geoffroy. Send him back, by means of some ounces of quinquina, or 
 
 of senna, or of manna, or of anything else which you may be pleased 
 
 to buy for your own health or for mine, — send him back, I tell you, to 
 
 ^ An allusion to Voltaire's poem, the Mondain, verse 22.
 
 324 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 the chapter of lead and the regukis of antimony increased in weight 
 by calcination. He has told yon, and it is true, that those substances 
 lose the increase of weight after becoming cold again ; but that is not 
 enough. It is necessary to know if that weight is lost when the cal- 
 cined body becomes simply cold again, or if it is lost when the calcined 
 body has been afterwards melted. Lemeri, who reports that twenty 
 pounds of calcined lead weigh twenty-five pounds, adds that this lead 
 remelted only weighs nineteen pounds. MM. Duclos and Romberg 
 report that the regulus of iron and that of antimony calcined by the 
 burning glass increased in weight ; but that upon being melted after- 
 wards by the same glass they lost both the weight which they had ac- 
 quired and a little of their own. It is then not after having become 
 cold that these bodies lose the weight added to their substance by the 
 action of the fire. It would be necessary also to know if M. Geoffrey 
 thinks that the igneous matter alone has caused this increase of 
 weight ; if the iron ladle with which they stirred during the operation, 
 or if the vessel which contained the metal, did not increase the weight 
 of that metal by transfusing into it some of its own substance. Ascer- 
 tain, my dear friend, the opinion of the apothecary upon all these 
 points, and send it to me quick. You are very capable of making tliis 
 chemist talk, and all the chemists of the Academy, and of understand- 
 ing them well. I count upon your friendship and discretion." 
 
 [July 6, 1737.] ''It is a pleasure, my dear friend, to give you 
 learned commissions, so well do you acquit yourself of them. No 
 one could render service better or more promptly. I have just per- 
 formed the experiment upon iron which the learned charcoal-burner, 
 M. Grosse, advises. I weighed a piece of two pounds, which I made 
 red-hot upon a tile in the open air. I weighed it red, I weighed it 
 cold ; it always weighed the same. I have been weighing every day 
 lately iron and melted iron, flaming hot : I have weighed from two 
 pounds to a thousand. So far from finding the weight of red-hot iron 
 greater, I have found it much smaller, which I attribute to the fur- 
 nace, prodigiously hot, which consumed some particles of iron. It is 
 this which I pray you to communicate to M. Grosse when you see 
 him ; visit, then, promptly this gnome, and, with your usual precaution, 
 consult him anew. He is a man well informed upon these subjects. 
 Ascertain, then, 1st, if he believes that fire has weight ; 2d, if the ex- 
 periments made by M. Homberg and others ought to prevail over that 
 of the iron red and iron cooled, which always weigh the same. We 
 are surrounded, my dear abbe, with uncertainties of all possible kinds. 
 The least truth gives us infinite pains to discover. 3d. Ask him if the 
 burning glass of the Palais-Royal has the same effect upon matter ex- 
 posed to the air as in the vacuum of the air-pumj). Upon this point
 
 MAN OF BUSINESS. 325 
 
 you must make him talk a long time. Ask him the effects of the rays 
 of the sun in that vacuum upon gunpowder, upon iron, upon liquors, 
 upon metals, and make a little note of all the answers of this learned 
 man. 4th. Ask him if the phosphorus of Boyle, the burning phos- 
 phorus, takes fire in a vacuum. Finally, ask if he has seen any good 
 Persian naphtha, and if it is true that this naphtha burns in water. 
 There you are, my dear abbe, a finished natural philosopher. I pester 
 you terribly, for I still add that I am in a hurry for this informatiini. 
 I abuse your complaisance excessively, but in atonement I love you 
 excessively." 
 
 [August, 1737.] " Every day, my dear friend, brings you, then, 
 new importunity from me. Tell me, will it not be abusing your pa- 
 tience to pray you to see M. Grosse again, and to have with that cel- 
 ebrated chemist a new scientific conversation ? See him, then, and 
 have the goodness to ask that learned charcoal-burner if he has ever 
 performed the experiment of plunging his thermometer in spirits of 
 wine, in spirits of nitre, to see if the mercury rises in those liquors. 
 I am, my dear abbe, always ashamed of my importunities ; but spare 
 neither cariiages nor messengers, and always transact the affairs of 
 your friend entirely at your ease." 
 
 [October, 1737.] " Ts M. de Breze quite solid? What do you 
 think of it, my prudent friend ? This article of interest having been 
 maturely examined, take twenty thousand francs from M. Michel and 
 give them to M. Breze, at ten per cent. This investment will be the 
 more agreeable, as we shall be paid easily and regularly upon the pro- 
 ceeds of his houses in Paris. Arrange this affair for the best ; and, 
 once arranged, if the estate of Spoix can be bought for fifty thousand 
 francs, we shall find the money towards the month of April. We 
 shall sell some bonds. We shall borrow at five per cent., which will 
 not be difficult either to you or to me. Life is short ; Solomon tells 
 us we must enjoy it ; I think to enjoy, and for that reason I feel 
 within me a grand vocation to be gardener, plowman, and vine- 
 dresser. Perhaps even I shall succeed better in planting trees, in dig- 
 ging the earth, and in making it fruitful than in composing tragedies, 
 experimenting in chemistry, writing epic poems, and othc_ sublime fol- 
 lies which make implacable foes. Give ' L'Enfant Prodigue'^ to 
 Prault for fifty louis d'or, — six hundred francs down, and a note for 
 the other six hundred francs, payable when this unhappy Enfant shall 
 see the light. This money will be employed in some good work. I 
 do not rebel against my destiny, which is to have a little glory and 
 some hisses." 
 
 [November, 1737.] "Your patience, my dear abbe, is going to 
 
 1 Comedy by Voltaire.
 
 326 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 be put to a severe proof ; I tremble lest you may be unable to sustain 
 it. I hope everything from your friendship. Affairs temporal, affairs 
 spiritual, these are the two great subjects of the long babble with 
 which I am about to trouble you. M. de Lezeau owes me three 
 years ; it is necessary to press him without too much importunity. 
 A letter to the Prince de Guise ; that costs nothing, and advances 
 matters. The Villars and the D'Auneuils owe two years ; it is neces- 
 sary politely and nicely to remonstrate with those gentlemen touch- 
 ing their duties to their creditors. It is necessary also to finish with 
 M. de Richelieu, and to consent to what he wishes. I should have 
 some great objections to make upon what he proposes ; but 1 love better 
 a conclusion than an objection. Conclude, then, my dear friend; I 
 trust myself blindly to your discretion, which is always very useful 
 to me. Prault ought to give fifty francs to monsieur your brother. 
 I wish him to do so. It is a trifling bonus, a bagatelle, which is 
 part of my bargain ; and when that bagatelle shall be paid, monsieur 
 your brother will scold for me the negligent Prault, who in the 
 parcels of books which I order always makes delays that try my 
 patience cruelly ; nothing that he sends me arrives at the time 
 appointed. Monsieur your brother will then inquire of that book- 
 seller, or of any other that he wishes, for a Puffendorf; for the 
 chemistry of Boerhaave, the most complete edition ; for a * Letter 
 upon the Divisibility of Matter,' published by Jomvert ; for the ' In- 
 dex of the Thirty-First Volume of the History of the Academy of 
 Sciences ; ' for Marriotte upon the ' Nature of the Air ; ' the same 
 author upon ' Cold and Heat ; ' for Boyle ' De Ratione inter Ignem 
 et Flammam,' difficult to find : that is the affair of monsieur your 
 brother. Other commissions : two reams of foolscap, the same of 
 letter paper, — the whole of Holland ; twelve sticks of Spanish sealing- 
 wax for spirits of wine ; a Copernican sphere ; a burning glass of 
 the largest size ; my engravings of the Luxembourg ; two globes 
 mounted ; two thermometers ; two barometers (the longest are the 
 best) ; two scales, well graduated ; some crucibles ; some retorts. In 
 making purchases, my friend, always prefer the handsome and excel- 
 lent, if a little dear, to a common article less costly. 
 
 " So much for the literary man who seeks to instruct himself 
 after the Fontenelles, the Boyles, the Boerhaaves, and other learned 
 men. What follows is for the material man, who digests very ill ; 
 who has need to take, as they tell him, plenty of exercise ; and who, 
 beside this need, of necessity has also some other needs of society. I 
 pray you, in consequence, to buy for him a good fowling-piece ; a 
 pretty game-bag with appurtenances ; a gun-hammer ; a draw-charge; 
 large diamond shoe-buckles ; other diamond garter-buckles ; twenty 
 
 I
 
 MA2? OF BUSINESS. 327 
 
 pounds of hair powder ; ten pounds of smelling powder ; a bottle of 
 essence of jasmin ; two enormous pots of orange pomatum ; two 
 powder puffs ; a very good knife ; three fine sponges ; three dusters ; 
 four bundles of quills* two pairs of toilet pincers, very nice ; a pair 
 of very good pocket scissors ; two floor brushes ; finally, three pairs 
 of slippers, well furred ; and, besides — I remember nothing more. 
 Of all these make a parcel ; two, if necessary ; three, even, if neces- 
 sary : your packer is excellent. Send the whole by way of Joinville ; 
 not to my address, for I am in England (I beg you to remember 
 that), but to the address of Madame de Champbouin. All that costs 
 money, you will tell me ; and where to get the money ? Where you 
 wish, my dear abbe. We have some bonds ; we can convert them. 
 We ought never to neglect anything for our pleasure, since life is 
 short. I shall be entirely yours during that short life." 
 
 [December, 1737.] " Instead of money which Prault owes me, my 
 dear abbe, I have ordered some books of him. You tell me he is 
 dissatisfied ; I am surprised at it ; he ought to know that an author 
 never deprives himself of the right of foreign editions. As soon 
 as a book is printed at Paris with privilege, the publishers of Hol- 
 land seize it, and the first who prints it has the exclusive privilege 
 in that country ; and to have this right of printing it first it suffices 
 to announce the work in the gazettes. It is an established usage, 
 which holds the place of law. Now, when I wish to favor a pub- 
 lisher in Holland, I advertise him of the work which I am printing in 
 France, and I endeavor to let him have the first copy, in order that 
 he may get beforehand with the trade. I have then promised a 
 Holland publisher that I will immediately send him a copy of the 
 work in question, and I have promised him this little favor to in- 
 demnify him for the delay in finishing the elements of the philos- 
 ophy of Newton, which he began to print nearly a year ago. The 
 point is to hurry on Prault, in order at the same time to hasten the 
 little advantage which will indemnify the Holland publisher, for 
 whom I have an affection, and who is a very honest man. M. Prault 
 knows very well that this is the point. His privilege is for France, 
 and not for Holland. He has never done business except upon this 
 footing, and on condition that the work should be printed at Paris 
 and at Amsterdam simultaneously. To prevent all difficulty, send him 
 this note, and let him put in it his reply. These are the facts, and 
 I ask your pardon for this verbiage. Prault still owes fifty francs 
 to monsieur your brother ; I wish him to pay them. This is a new 
 bonus which I beg your brother to accept. I pray him also to send 
 me the old tragedy of ' Cresphonte,' and all the old books which I 
 have noted upon the catalogue which he sent me."
 
 328 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 [Cambridge, December, 1737.] "I am very glad, my dear natural 
 philosopher, that M. de Foutenelle has explained himself touching the 
 propagation of fire. As the light of the sun is the most powerful fire 
 which we know, it was natural to have some ideas a little clear upon 
 that elementary fire. It was the affair of a philosopher; the rest is a 
 blacksmith's business. I am in the midst of forges, and the subject 
 suits me well enough. I hope that Bronod will explain himself as 
 clearly respecting the fifty louis of which you speak as M. de Foute- 
 nelle upon light. If Bronod does not pay this money, I believe it will 
 be necessary to sell a bond. I see no great harm in that; one never 
 loses his dividend. It is true that the price varies towards the time of 
 their payment, that is to say, every six mouths; but that amounts to 
 little ; and, besides, it is better to sacrifice some pistoles that give you 
 the trouble of calling again upon M. Bronod. The three louis which 
 you gave finally to M. Robert were doubtless for the advances he has 
 made. I cannot imagine that a solicitor has taken it into his head to 
 incur expense for me, since I have had no law business, unless I have 
 had a suit without knowing it. M. Michel wishes, then, to keep my 
 money until the first of March ? Be it so. Let him have it ; it will 
 be always two months' interest gained. Let us not disdain such pick- 
 ings. Make, I pray you, if you think it necessary, a little present to 
 the steward of M. de Richelieu ; but before doing so we must have 
 good security for my arrears, and security that henceforth I receive 
 regularly four thousand francs a year. A louis d'or to D'Arnaud, 
 without telling him either where I am or what I am doing ; neither 
 him nor any one else. I am at Cirey for you alone, and in Cochin 
 China for all the Parisians; or, which wiU be more probable, confined 
 in some province of England." 
 
 [December, 1737.] "The picture of myself drawn in jiastel, my 
 dear abbe, is horrible and wretched, whatever the engraver thinks ; 
 little do I care. I shall not take the part of my countenance, which I 
 do not know too well ; but, my dear friend, can they not make me less 
 ugly ? I leave that to your care ; especially, do not speak of it to 
 Madame du Chatelet. Let us come to the affair of this lady. See, as 
 soon as possible, Hebert, and recommend to him the greatest diligence. 
 You have given him fifty louis ; give him fifty more if he demands 
 them, and assure him that at the instant of delivery the whole shall be 
 exactly paid. If, in accordance with my last letter, you have sold a 
 bond, you have done well ; if you have not sold one, still you have 
 done well. I approve you in everything, because all that you do is 
 always well doue, and you deserve that I thank you and that I em- 
 brace you heartily." 
 
 [July 12, 1740.] " I received your letter of the 9th, in which you
 
 MAN OF BUSINESS. 329 
 
 inform me ol the general bankruptcy of the receiver-general named 
 Michel. A sufficiently large portion of my property is involved 
 (40,000 francs). The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; blessed 
 be the name of the Lord. To suffer my ills in patience has been my 
 lot for forty years ; and one can submit to Providence without being 
 a devotee. I confess that I did not expect this failure, and I do not 
 understand how a receiver-general of the finances of his Most Chris- 
 tian Majesty, a very rich man, too, could fail so awkwardly, unless it 
 is because he wished to be richer. In that case, M. IVIichel is doubly 
 wrong. I could find it in my heart to cry, — 
 
 Michel, au nora de I'Eternel, 
 Met jadis le diable en de'route ; 
 Mais apres cette banqueroute. 
 Que le diable emporte Michel. ^ 
 
 " But this would be a poor jest, and I do not wish to make light 
 either of M. Michel's losses or of my own. Nevertheless, my dear 
 abbd, you will find the result to be that M. Michel's children will re- 
 main very rich, very well placed Have the goodness to speak 
 
 to Michel's cashier ; endeavor to get from him how we should pro- 
 ceed so as not to lose all Good-night ; I embrace you with 
 
 all my soul. Console yourself for the rout of Michel ; your friend- 
 ship consoles me for my loss." ^ 
 
 [December, 1737.] "You speak to me, my dear abbe, of a good- 
 man chemist, and I hear you with pleasure. Then you propose that 
 I should take him into my service ; I ask nothing better. He will 
 enjoy here complete liberty, be not ill lodged, be well nourished, have 
 great convenience for cultivating at his ease his talent as a chemist; 
 but it is indispensable that he should know how to say mass on Sun- 
 days and festivals in the chapel of the chateau. This mass is a con- 
 dition without which I could not engage him. I will give him a hun- 
 dred crowns \_ecus] a year, but I can do nothing more. He must also 
 be informed that we take our meals very rarely with the Marquise 
 du Chatelet, whose meal-times are not very regular ; but there is a 
 table for the Count du Chatelet, her son, and his tuto>', a man of 
 understanding, served regularly at noon and at eight in the evening. 
 M. du Chatelet, the elder, often eats at that table, and occasionally 
 we all sup together. Besides, we enjoy here perfect liberty. For 
 the present we can only give him a chamber with an ante-chamber. 
 If he accepts my propositions, he can come and bring all his appa- 
 ratus with him. If he is in need of money you can advance him 
 
 1 Michael, in the name of the Eternal, formerly put the devil to rout; but, 
 after this bankruptcy, may the devil fly away with Michael 1 
 
 2 Lettres de Voltaire a I'Abbe Moussiuot, page 213.
 
 330 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 a quarter, on conditiou that he starts at once. If he delays his de- 
 parture, do not delay, my dear treasurer, to send me some money 
 by the coach. Instead of two hundred and fifty louis, send boldly 
 three hundred of them, with the books and the bagatelles I have 
 asked for. For the rest, my dear friend, I take it for granted that 
 your chemist is a man of sense, since you propose him. Tell me his 
 name, for, really, I must know how he calls himself. If he makes 
 Fahrenheit thermometers, he will make some here, and render service 
 to natural philosophy. Are those thermometers of the same scale as 
 Reaumur's ? These instruments do not accord unless they sound the 
 same octave." 
 
 [May, 1738.] '* I would like, my dear abbe, a pretty little watch, 
 good or bad, simple, of silver merely, with a cord of silk and gold. 
 Three louis ought to pay for that. You will send it to me suMto,^ 
 subito, by the coach. It is a little present which I wish to make to 
 the son of M. the Marquis du Chatelet, a child ten years old. He 
 will break it, but he wishes one, and I am afraid of being anticipated. 
 I embrace you." 
 
 [June, 1738.] " The watch was just the thing. It was received 
 with transport, and I thank you, my dear abbe, for taking so much 
 pains." 
 
 1 Quickly.
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 LITERARY WORK AT CIREY. 
 
 And now for the realization of the dream of peaceful, glo- 
 rious toil, far from the distractions of the world, solaced every 
 hour by love. 
 
 His first labors at Cirey, which were begun and continued 
 amid crowds of workmen and heaps of litter, were of an ab- 
 stract and thoughtful nature, inspired by Pope's " Essay on 
 Man," then in the splendor of its first celebrity. Voltaire 
 had received the early cantos in 1732, in time to insert a pas- 
 sage concerning them in his English Letters, and in 1734 
 came the completed work, in a quarto volume, with dedication 
 to Lord Bolingbroke. It so moved and roused him that, while 
 he had a princely wedding on his hands and a new love in his 
 heart, while a lettre de cachet was on his track, while he was 
 finishing a tragedy and writing a comedy, while he was restor- 
 ing and furnishing a chateau, while he was in hiding at Brus- 
 sels, his graver thoughts revolved the mighty themes touched 
 in Pope's Essay. His seven " Discourses on Man," in verse, 
 and his " Treatise on Metaphysics," in prose, contain the sub- 
 stance of those thoughts. Three of the Discourses were writ- 
 ten in 1734, and the others in the three years following, as 
 mood and opportunity favored. 
 
 The first of the Discourses turns upon the equality of hu- 
 man conditions : " Mortals are equal ; their mask differs ; " 
 wealth has its drawbacks, and poverty its compensations. The 
 second, upon Liberty, maintains that man mak.3s or mars his 
 own happiness. " Love truth, but pardon error. The mortal 
 who goes astray is still a man and thy brother. Be wise for 
 thyself alone, compassionate for him. Achieve thine own wel- 
 fare by blessing others." The third Discourse declares that 
 the chief obstacle to human happiness is envy. " Take re- 
 venge upon a rival by surpassing him." The fourth inculcates
 
 332 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 the truth that excess is fatal to enjoyment, and moderation one 
 of the inflexible conditions of happiness. " To desii'e all is 
 the mark of a fool ; excess is his portion. Moderation is the 
 treasure of the mse ; he knows how to control his tastes, his 
 labors, his pleasures." " Work is often the father of pleas- 
 ure ; I pity the man overwhelmed with the weight of his 
 own leisure. Happiness is a good that nature sells us." The 
 fifth Discourse is upon the Nature of Pleasure, and shows that 
 pleasure is the lure that God uses to make us execute his 
 purposes, and is therefore not to be placed under the ban of 
 religion. "Calvin, — that fool, sombre and severe." "It is 
 necessary to be a man before being a Christian." "Without 
 tlie attraction of pleasure, who would submit to the laws of 
 Hymen ? " The sixth Discourse, upon the Nature of Man, is 
 a confession that man knows very little of his nature, but must 
 make the best of it, and bear in mind that perfect felicity can 
 never be the lot of mortal. " One day some mice said to one 
 another, ' How charming is this world ! What an empire is 
 ours ! This palace so superb was built for us ; from all eter- 
 nity God made for us these large holes. Do you see those fat 
 hams under that dim ceiling ? They were created there for us 
 by Nature's hands ; those mountains of lard, eternal aliment, 
 will be oui'S to the end of time. Yes, we are, great God, if our 
 sages tell us the truth, the masterpiece, the end, the aim, of all 
 thy works. Cats are dangerous and prompt to devour, but it 
 is to instruct and correct us.' " The seventh and last of these 
 Discourses is upon True Virtue. " The miracles are good ; 
 but to relieve a brother, to draw a friend from the depths 
 of misery, to pardon the virtues of our enemies, — these are 
 greater miracles." " The true virtue, then, is ' beneficence ; ' 
 a new word in the French language, but the whole universe 
 ought to cherish the idea." 
 
 The seven poems — fluent, light, witty, brief, often wise and 
 salutary — are surcharged with the Voltairean essence ; not 
 anti-Christian, but anti-Pascal. They are such as Horace 
 micrht have written if he had had seventeen Christian centu- 
 ries behind him, instead of before him. Their airy liglitness 
 and grace made them universally read, and they will doubt- 
 less retain their power when Voltaire and Pascal at last meet 
 in a religion that will include and honor both. 

 
 LITERARY WORK AT CIREY. 333 
 
 A line of the Discourse upon the Nature of Man gives us 
 one of Voltaire's maxims of the art of writing : " The secret 
 of wearying your reader is to tell him all." 
 
 During the first years of his residence at the chateau, the 
 reading of one of these Discourses was frequently part of the 
 evening entertainment provided for a guest, followed, perhaps, 
 by a new canto of the " Pucelle ; " and nothing is more cer- 
 tain than that, in polite circles, the two readings were consid- 
 ered equally legitimate and proper. Such were the chateau 
 manners of the time. 
 
 A graver and longer work, in prose, the " Treatise upon 
 Metaphysics," was also written amid the confusion of settling 
 at Cirey. This Treatise is a simple and clear statement of the 
 author's convictions concerning man, God, immortality, the 
 freedom of the will, the nature of the soul, man's duty, and 
 the sources of his welfare. When Madame de Rupelmonde, 
 many years before, asked him what she ought to think on 
 such subjects, he replied by a sprightly deistical poem. Prob- 
 ably the Marquise du Chatelet had asked him a similar ques- 
 tion, and this seventy-five-page pamphlet was such a reply 
 as he would have made to a lady fond of mathematics and ac- 
 customed to read Locke. There is only one dull or repellent 
 word in the piece, and that is its title, which has doubtless 
 kept many persons from looking farther. In his own chatty, 
 irresistible manner, he draws the idlest reader on, while he 
 gives his reasons for thinking that men cannot be descended 
 from a single pair, and must have been created by a God. 
 The watch proves the tvatchnaker was his constant argument 
 for the existence of God, at every period of his life, and he de- 
 veloped it in this Treatise some years before Paley was born. 
 While admitting God, he denies providence. The universe is 
 governed by laws which nothing can change, — laws as invaria- 
 ble as those of mathematics. Revelation, other tl^an that of sci- 
 ence, he rejects with his usual gayety and scorn, —a revelation 
 that " tells the Jews how they shall go to the garde-robe, but is 
 silent upon the soul and immortality ! " "I do not assert," he 
 says, " that I have demonstrations against the spirituality and 
 immortality of the soul ; but all the probabilities are against 
 those doctrines." In treating of the nature of virtue, he lays 
 down this simple proposition : Virtue is conduct which benefits 
 the community ; vice is conduct which injures the community.
 
 334 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Lying, for example, is generally a vice, because it is of the 
 greatest importance that men should be able to believe and 
 trust one another. " But how often does lying become an 
 heroic virtue?" To shrink from a lie when it would save a 
 friend from deadly peril would be, he says, shameful dereliction. 
 As to religion, he plainly reveals his conviction that, as then 
 established in Europe, it was a system of spoliation and oppres- 
 sion, the despot's main support and defense. Every desolater 
 of the earth began his work of massacre and ruin by solemn 
 acts of religion, and, while the ground still smoked with car- 
 nage, hastened to the temple to i-epeat those solemn acts. Nor 
 was religion necessary as an ally of virtue, since men conspic- 
 uous for unbelief, like Bayle, Locke, Spinoza, Shaftesbury, Col- 
 lins, and others, were men of rigid virtue. " Much to be pitied 
 are they who need the help of religion to be honest men." 
 
 Such was the famous " Treatise upon Metaphysics." Its 
 chief merit was its tone of candor, moderation, and modesty. 
 He stated, and evidently felt, tlie difficulties attending every 
 solution of the vast enigma, and how inadequate were the fac- 
 ulties of man to penetrate the mysteries of life, growth, and 
 death. He wrote it in 1734, when science was not yet grop- 
 ing toward the central secret, and when few men could offer a 
 conjectural, or state an hereditary, solution without some mixt- 
 ure of passion or bias fatal to the development of truth. He 
 uttered his real thoughts. He wrote without cant, without 
 arrogance, without passion, and without fear. 
 
 It is interesting to notice how he returned in this work to 
 the point where the Roman poet, Lucretius, left off, about the 
 year 50 B. C. As Lucretius surveyed the Roman Empire and 
 interpreted human life in it, so did Voltaire survey and in- 
 terpret the Roman Catholic empire, of which he was a part. 
 Lucretius spoke of " the life of man lying abject and foully 
 groveling, crushed beneath the weight of a Religion that low- 
 ered over mortals with terrible aspect, until Epicurus rose to 
 make a stand against her." " Him neither tales of gods, nor 
 thunder-bolts, nor heaven itself with its threatening roar, re- 
 pressed, but roused all the more the active energy of his soul, 
 so that he should desire to be the first to break the close bars 
 of nature's portals." ^ 
 
 ^ Lucretius on the Nature of Things. Rome, about 50 B. c. Bohn's edition. 
 Loudon, 1872. Book I., page 6.
 
 LITERARY WORK AT CIREY. 335 
 
 Voltaire's Treatise could not, of course, be published just 
 then. The manuscript lay among his papers at this period, 
 with other perilous material, to keep Madame du Chatelet in 
 alarm. We are too familiar with such opinions now to be 
 able to feel how frightfully explosive the little book was. We 
 have learned, and Europe is learning, that the most prodig- 
 ious bombshell can explode harmlessly out-of-doors, with red 
 flags duly placed. We have learned that publicity, like the 
 winds of heaven, is a perfect disinfectant, as well as a good 
 seed-sower. But in 1735 there was terror in a manuscript 
 like this, as in a loaded shell on a centre-table, or a bottle of 
 phosphorus in a medicine chest. 
 
 While occupied thus with works and thoughts traceable in 
 some degree to his residence in England, he was delighted to 
 learn that his hospitable friend Falkener, now Sir Everard 
 Falkener, had been appointed English ambassador to Constan- 
 tinople. He wrote to congratulate him, using such English as 
 he had left after seven years of disuse : — 
 
 [September 18, 1735.] " My dear Friend ! Your new title will 
 change neither my sentiments, nor my expressions. My dear Falk- 
 ener ! friendship is full of talk, but it must be discreet. In the hurry 
 of business you are in, remember only I talk'd to you, about seven 
 years ago, of that very same ambassy. Remember I am the first man 
 who did foretell the honour you enjoy. Believe then no man is more 
 pleased with it than I am. I have my share in your happiness. If 
 you pass through France in your way to Constantinople, I advise you 
 I am but twenty leagues from Calais, almost in the road to Paris. 
 The castle is called Cirey, four miles from Vassy en Champagne 
 on Saint-Dizier's road, and eight miles from Saint-Dizier. The post 
 goes thither. There lives a young lady called the marquise Du Chate- 
 let, whom I have taught english to, and who longs to see you. You 
 will lie here, if you remember your friend." ^ 
 
 The ambassador went to Constantinople by s^n, and so 
 missed the delights of Cirey. Soon after he was settled at 
 Constantinople, Voltaire wrote to him again, and in better 
 English : — 
 
 [February 22, 1736.] " Now the honest, the good and plain phi- 
 losopher of Wandsworth, represents his king and country, and is equal 
 
 1 1 Lettres Inedites de Voltaire, 75 and 84.
 
 336 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 to the Grand-Seignior. Certainly England is the only country where 
 
 commerce and virtue are to be rewarded with such an honour. If 
 
 any grief [concern] rests still upon my mind, my dear friend (for 
 
 friend you are, tho' a minister), it is that I am unable to be a witness 
 
 of your new sort of glory and felicity. Had I not regulated my life 
 
 after a way which makes me a kind of solitaire, I would fly to that 
 
 nation of savage slaves, whom I hate, to see the man I love. What 
 
 would my entertainment be ! and how full the overflowings of my 
 
 heart, in contemplating my dear Falkener, amidst so many Infidels of 
 
 all hues, smiling with his humane philosophy at the superstitious 
 
 follies that reign on the one side at Stamboul, and on the other at 
 
 Galata ! I would not admire, as mylady Mary Worthley Montagu 
 
 says, 
 
 The vizir prond, distinguished from the rest ; 
 Six slaves in gay attire, his bridle hold, 
 His bridle rich with gems, his stirrups gold ! 
 
 " For, how the devil ! should I admire a slave upon a horse ? My 
 friend Falkener I should admire ! 
 
 " But I must bid adieu ! to the great town of Constantin, and stay 
 in my little corner of the world, in that very same castle where you 
 were invited to come in your way to Paris, in case you should have 
 taken the road of Calais to Marseille. Your taking an other way, 
 was certainly a sad disappointment for me, and especially to that lady 
 who makes use of your Locke and of more of your other books. 
 Upon my word ! a French lady who reads Newton, Locke, Addison, 
 and Pope, and who retires from the bubbles and the stunning noise 
 of Paris, to cultivate in the country the great and amiable genius she 
 is born with, is more valuable than your Constantinople and all the 
 Turkish empire ! 
 
 " You may confidently write to me, by the way of Marseille, chez 
 madame la marquise Du Chdtelet, a Girey, en Champagne. Be sure 
 I shall not stir from that spot of ground, before the favour of your 
 letter comes to me. .... What I long to be informed of is, whether 
 you are as happy as you seem to be. Have you got a little private 
 seraglio ? or, are you to be married ? Are you over-stoked with busi- 
 ness ? Does your indolence or laziness comply with your affairs ? Do 
 you drink much of that good Cyprus wine ? For my part, I am here 
 too happy, though my health is ever very weak : 
 
 Excepto quod non simul esses, csetera Isetus. 
 
 " Addio ! mio carissimo ambasciadore ! Addio ! le baccio umilmente 
 le maui ! L'amo, e la reversico ! " ^ 
 
 1 Adieu, my dearest ambassador ; adieu, I kiss very humbly the handa of your 
 lordship. I love and honor you.
 
 LITERAIIY WORK AT CIREY. 337 
 
 He continued to correspond with the ambassador, always 
 in the same tone. 
 
 Another dramatic success, and one of great splendor, fell 
 to his lot in January, 1736, while he was absent from the 
 scene. " Alzire, or the Americans," was the name of the new 
 tragedy, the scene of which was laid in that land so exceed- 
 ingly remote then from the knowledge of Europeans, — Peru, 
 The attention of Europe had been just drawn to that country 
 by the expedition sent thither by the French Academy of Sci- 
 ences to measure an arc of the meridian, with a view to as- 
 certain the precise form of the earth. Voltaire's old friend, 
 Condamine, v/as one of the party. " Alzire," moreover, was 
 similar to " Zaire " in contrasting two civilizations and two 
 religions, and in affording opportunity for striking costume 
 and barbaric magnificence. During the turbulent period, when 
 the poet was battling with ministers at Paris and masons at 
 Cirey, Thieriot, as it seems, talked of the new play in an 
 exulting strain, in the hearing of Le Franc, a young author, 
 who had recently made a dramatic success of much promise 
 with his tragedy of " Didon." Le Franc at once wrote a Pe- 
 ruvian tragedy, and read it to the actors, who accepted it 
 with joy. Voltaire was not the person to allow poaching on 
 any manor of his. He wrote a witheringly polite, ingenious 
 letter to the comedians, stating his case, and modestly claiming 
 to have his play, such as it was, produced first, since he had 
 originated the subject, and since no play of his could have the 
 least chance of success if performed after that of M. Le Franc» 
 who was in all the vigor and brilliancy of youth. 
 
 M. Le Franc was obliged to stand aside and wait. " Al- 
 zire " was performed January 27, 1736,- with perfect success, 
 the first of a long line of Peruvian plays. For twenty suc- 
 cessive nights — a great run then — it was repeated to houses 
 averaging 2682 francs ; it was performed twice at court ; it 
 remained a popular piece during the rest of the century, and, 
 indeed, until the later development of the French drama ren- 
 dered that mode of dramatic presentation obsolete. It need 
 not be said that this play teemed with the Voltairean mes- 
 sage from end to end. That message was repeated in notes, 
 in prefaces, and in the elaborate dedication to Madame du 
 Chatelet. "- The religion of a barbarian," says the Discourse 
 VOL. I. 22
 
 338 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Preliminary, " consists in offering to his gods the blood of his 
 enemies. An ill-instructed Christian is often little more rea- 
 sonable. To be faithful to some useless observances, and un- 
 faithful to the true duties of man; to offer certain prayers, 
 and retain bis vices ; to fast, but hate ; to cabal, to persecute, 
 — such is his relis^ion. That of the true Christian is to re- 
 gard all men as his brothers ; to do them good, and pardon 
 their ill-doing." 
 
 It is noticeable that, in his public dedication of the work, 
 he makes no secret that it was written in ]\Iadame du Chate- 
 let's house, and that he hopes to live there, " near her, for 
 the rest of his life," in the cultivation of literature and the 
 search for truth, " to which she has sacrificed in her youth 
 the false biit enchanting pleasures of the world." 
 
 " Alzire " was still fresh in the recollection of play-goers 
 when an event occurred at the Th^atre-Francais that kept 
 all the cafds talking for a week, and has made a good cafd 
 and green-room tradition ever since. It was the 10th of Oc- 
 tober, 1736. The play advertised for that evening was Ra- 
 cine's " Britannicus." The audience was assembled, and the 
 time for beginning had come. A member of the company 
 appeared before the curtain, and addressed the audience. An 
 actress, he said, who was cast in a leading part of "Britanni- 
 cus " had become suddenly indisposed, and the play could not 
 be presented. But, most fortunately^ a new five-act comedy, 
 in verse, by an anonymous author, was in readiness, though 
 not yet announced ; and, if the audience pleased, it would be 
 given instead of the traged5\ The comedy was called " The 
 Prodigal Son" (L'Enfant Prodigue). What audience could 
 object to such unexpected good fortune? The piece was 
 played. It was received with the warmest applause, an- 
 nounced for repetition, continued to be given, with an inter- 
 ruption, for thirty nights, and thus thrust upon the cafes of 
 Paris an agitating problem. Who could have written it ? 
 Not Piron, surely. Perhaps Destouches. Probably Gresset. 
 Gresset, no doubt, was the rumor for some days. Voltaire ? 
 Out of the question ! 
 
 The astute reader knows, of course, that the author was 
 managing this comedy within a comedy from the castle of 
 Cirey, in "St. Dizier's road," in Champagne. When that
 
 LITERARY WORK AT CIREY- 339 
 
 author was showing himself in Paris, in the spring of 1735, 
 he supped one evening with Mademoiselle Quinault, a leading 
 actress of the Theatre-Franc^ais. She chanced to mention 
 that she had seen lately a dramatic sketch at a Fair theatre, 
 which, coarse and crude as it was, had in it the germ of a 
 good comedy, and that she was going to suggest it as a subject 
 to Destouches. She gave an account of the plot : Two sons : 
 one of them merry and wild, but noble, the other a steady- 
 going, miserly dastard ; both attracted to the same lovely 
 gh-1, one by true love, the other by her large dowry ; at the 
 end, the true lover winning the prize. Voltaire listened in 
 silence, thinking, perhaps, that he knew two such brothers 
 in Paris. The next morning, early, he was at Mademoiselle 
 Quinault's door. " Have you spoken to Destouches of ' The 
 Prodigal Son ' ? " She had not. He drew from his pocket 
 the plan of a comedy upon the subject, which she approved, 
 and urged him to complete. Mindful, it may be, of his Pe- 
 ruvian adventure, he imposed absolute secrecy as to the au- 
 thorship, and afterwards devised the little scheme of substi- 
 tuting the comedy for the tragedy. 
 
 We see by his letters of this time that he was more intent 
 upon the success of his scheme of concealment than he was 
 upon the success of the play. Two passages from these let- 
 ters have been frequently quoted against him, and they are 
 in truth characteristic, and could not be fairly omitted. To 
 one intimate friend, M. Berger, who was in the secret, he 
 wrote thus : " You can assure MM. La Roque and Prevost 
 [editors] that I am not the author of the play. Get them 
 to publish a statement to this effect in their periodicals, in 
 
 case it should be necessary If by chance the secret 
 
 of ' The Prodigal Son ' escapes, swear always that I am not 
 the author. To lie for a friend is friendship's first duty." 
 Three days after he wrote thus to Thieriot : " Lying is a 
 vice only when it does harm ; it is a very great virtue when 
 it does good. Be, then, more virtuous than ever. It is nec- 
 essary to lie like a devil ; not timidly, not for a time, but 
 boldly and always. What does it matter that this censorious 
 public should know whom to punish for having put upon 
 the stage a Croupillac ? Let it hiss her if she has no merit, 
 but let the author remain unknown, I conjure you, in the
 
 340 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 name of the tender friendship which has united us for twenty 
 years." This we might accept, if he had only hiid down an 
 infallible rule, adapted to average human capacity, for distin- 
 guishing between lies that do good and lies that do hai'm. 
 
 These plays, these poems, these treatises upon the problems 
 of life and destiny, were not all the literary work done by 
 him in these years. His favorite scheme was still the history 
 of the reign of Louis XlV., which he meant to write on a 
 system unattempted yet in prose or verse : that of dwelling 
 upon things of j-eal and lasting importance, and passing as 
 lightly as possible over wars, quarrels, controversies, and con- 
 quests. His letters on this subject show him in a different 
 light from that cast by those just quoted. Here he is the 
 faithful servant of truth. To the same Thieriot, as to many 
 others, he writes thus on the plan and spirit of this long-pro- 
 jected work : — 
 
 " When I asked you for anecdotes upon the age of Louis 
 XIV., it was less upon the king himself than the arts which 
 flourished in his reign. I should prefer details relating to Ra- 
 cine and Boileau, to Quinault, Sully, Moliere, Lebrun, Bos- 
 suet, Poussin, Descartes, and others, than to the battle of 
 Steinkerque. Nothing but a name remains of those who com- 
 manded battalions and fleets ; nothing results to the human race 
 from a hundred battles gained; but the great men of whom 
 I have spoken prepared pure and durable delights for genera- 
 tions unborn. A canal that connects two seas, a picture by 
 Poussin, a beautiful tragedy, a discovered truth, are things 
 a thousand times more precious than all the annals of the 
 court, than all the narratives of war. You know that with 
 me great men rank first ; heroes last. I call great men all 
 those who have excelled in the useful or the agreeable. The 
 ravagers of provinces are mere heroes." 
 
 The true Voltaire speaks in these lines ; it was so that he 
 felt all the days of his life. 
 
 Two of the forty arm-chairs of the French Academy fell 
 vacant this year. The author of " Alzire " was not thought 
 of as a candidate for either of them. He did not even regard 
 himself as an available candidate ; and the reason was plain 
 enough to the literary caf^s of the capital. The same cafes 
 soon knew why the author of " The Prodigal Son " had so
 
 LITERARY WORK AT CIREY. 341 
 
 sedulously concealed himself ; or, as Madame du Chatelet 
 expressed it, why that Prodigal was an orplian. In March, 
 1736, he received a letter from Jore, bookseller of Rouen, 
 bastilled and ruined by the English Letters, telling him that 
 the ministry was disposed to relent toward, him and restore 
 his license, provided he would state the whole truth respecting 
 that publication. He asked for particulars, which Voltaire 
 gave with simplicity and truth ; going over the whole history 
 of the work, from Thieriot's taking it to England to the 
 pirated Paris edition, published daring the author's absence, 
 which caused the arrest and ruin of Jore and his own flight 
 from France. This letter, in which he frankly owned himself 
 the author of the book, placed him m the power of Jore, who 
 answered it by demanding to be paid the cost of the confis- 
 cated edition, fourteen hundred francs. The author, indignant, 
 but alarmed, hastened to Paris, saw the bookseller, and denied 
 the justice of his claim, but offered half the sum demanded. 
 Jore refused ; brought suit ; threw himself into the arms of 
 Desfontaines, editor of a literary journal hostile to Voltaire; 
 and published a factum^ probably written by Desfontaines, 
 in which he gave a history of his connection with the poet, 
 related with highly effective perversity. The scandal was 
 immense. Injudicious friends advised compromise at any 
 cost ; and, finally, the lieutenant of police, with the approval 
 of the ministry, decided the matter thus : Jore's claim not 
 allowed ; Voltaire to give him five hundred francs as charity 
 (aumones). "It is to sign my shame," said Voltaire; "1 
 would rather go on with the suit than pay." But he signed 
 and paid, nevertheless. A year or two after, Jore confessed 
 that he had been used and misled by others ; he made profuse 
 apologies, and drew a small pension from Voltaire as long as 
 he lived. " The malice of your enemies," said he, " has only 
 served to make me know the goodness of your character." ^ 
 
 The effect upon the public of this scandalous affair was 
 exceedingly bad. The author labored under peculiar disad- 
 vantages, since he had formally disavowed the work, and the 
 decree against him of the parliament of Paris was still in 
 force. He held his freedom on sufferance. He was in a 
 corner where effective battle was impossible, and a thought- 
 1 Jore to Voltaire, December 20, 1738. 1 CEuvres, 262.
 
 842 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 less public, imperfectly informed, saw nothing in the matter 
 except a paltry squabble between a very rich and a very poor 
 man about a sum of money, of no importance to the one, 
 and of great importance to the other. The history of this 
 single case suffices to refute the light passage upon lying given 
 above. It is not in mortal ken to discern what falsehood is 
 harmless and what falsehood is destructive. 
 
 After wasting ten weeks in Paris upon this sorry business, 
 he returned, in July, 1736, to Cirey, not in the best spirits, 
 and well aware that it would be unwise in him to give his 
 " Prodigal Son " a father of so dubious a reputation as his 
 own. He saw the two chairs of the Academy assigned to his 
 inferiors, and he was all too conscious that the Rousseaus 
 and the Desfontaines, the Jansenists and the bigots of his 
 world, did not repine at the national slight put upon him. 
 
 i
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 FREDERIC, PRINCE ROYAL OF PRUSSIA. 
 
 Consolation brief but keenly felt awaited liim at Cirey. 
 In August, 1736, soon after his return from Paris, a long let- 
 ter reached the chateau, addressed to himself, and signed, 
 Frederic, Prince Royal of Prussia. A year or two before, 
 when he was settling at Cirey, he had received from the Duke 
 ofJHolstein, heir presumptive of the throne of Russia, husband 
 of Catherine II., an invitation to reside at the Russian capital 
 upon a revenue of ten thousand francs a year. He had just 
 then come under the spell of Madame du Chatelet. " Per- 
 secuted as I was," he wrote to Thieriot, " I would not have 
 left Cirey for the throne of Russia itself." He politely de- 
 clined the offer ; hoping, as he said, that " the Keeper of the 
 Seals would less persecute a man who refused such establish- 
 ments in foreign countries." Doubtless, he found means to 
 convey both the information and the hint to that minister. 
 
 The letter of Frederic was the warm outpouring of a young 
 and generous heart toward the poet who had given it its 
 noblest pleasures, toward the instructor who had nourished 
 its best aspirations. The prince, then twenty-four, had lived 
 through his storm and stress period. The miseries and shames 
 brought upon his sister and himself by the collision between 
 their willful, obstinate mother and their father's arbitrary 
 disposition, j)redisposed to frenzy by alcohol and tobacco, 
 were at an end. The Prince Royal was then a married man, 
 living in peace and dignity at a spacious and suitable house in 
 the country, where he exercised his regiment, played the flute, 
 worked his air-pump, read Voltaire, and tried — how hard he 
 tried ! — to write such French verses as Voltaire wrote. He 
 was in the habit of sending letters to the French authors, to 
 whom he had owed much of the alleviation of his hard lot ; 
 and now he wrote to Voltaire, to whom he felt that he owed
 
 344 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 most. Here is the first of his letters, entire, — the first of a 
 correspondence that inckides about five hundred letters, and 
 lasted, with occasional interruptions, for forty-two years, even 
 to the last weeks of Voltaire's life : — 
 
 [August 8, 1736.] " Monsieur, although I have not the satisfaction 
 of knowing you personally, you are not the less known to me by your 
 works. They are treasures of the mind, if one may so express him- 
 self, composed of pieces wrought with so much taste, delicacy, and 
 art that their beauties appear new every time they are read. I be- 
 lieve I have discerned in them the character of their gifted author, 
 who does honor to our age and to the human intellect. Great mod- 
 erns will one day owe it to you, and to you alone, in case the dispute 
 whether the preference is due to them or the ancients is ever renewed, 
 that the balance will incline to their side. 
 
 " You add to the quality of excellent poet an infinitude of other 
 kinds of knowledge, which, in truth, have some affinity with poetry, 
 but which have not been treated poetically, except by your pen. 
 Never did poet before set to music metaphysical thoughts ; the honor 
 of having done so first was reserved for you. It is the taste you 
 show in your writings for philosophy that induces me to seud you 
 the translation I have made of the indictment and defense of J. M. 
 Wolf, the most celebrated philosopher of our day, who, for having 
 carried the light into the darkest places cf metaphysics, and for hav- 
 ing treated those difficult matters in a style as lofty as it is precise 
 and clear, is cruelly accused of irreligion and atheism. Such is the 
 destiny of great men ; their superior genius always exposes them to 
 the envenomed darts of calumny and euvy. 
 
 " I am at present having translated the ' Treatise upon God, the 
 Soul, and the World,' from the same author. I shall send the work 
 to you, monsieur, as soon as it is finished ; and I am sure that the 
 force of the reasoning will strike you in all his propositions, which 
 follow one another geometrically, and are joined like the links of a 
 chain. 
 
 " The kindness and support you bestow upon all who devote them- 
 selves to the arts and sciences make me hope that you will not ex- 
 clude me from the number of those whom you find worthy of your 
 instruction ; for thus I name your correspondence, which cannot but 
 be profitable to every thinking being. I dare even to go so far as to 
 say, without derogating from the merits of others, that in the entire 
 universe there are no individuals of whom you could not be the in- 
 structor. Without lavishing upon you incense unworthy to be offered 
 you, I can say that I find beauties without number in your works.
 
 FREDEEIC, PRINCE ROYAL OF PRUSSIA. 345 
 
 Your ' Henriade ' charms me, and triumphs happily over the ill-judo-ed 
 criticism wliich has been made upon it. The tragedy of ' Caesar' ex- 
 hibits to us characters well sustained ; the sentiments of the play are 
 all magnificent and grand ; and we feel that Brutus is either Roman 
 or English. ' Alzire' adds to the charm of novelty a happy contrast 
 between the manners of savages and Europeans. You show by the 
 character of Gasman that Christianity, ill understood and guided by 
 false zeal, renders men more barbarous and more cruel than paganism 
 itself. 
 
 " Corneille, the great Corneille, he who drew to himself the ad- 
 miration of his whole period, if he were to return to life in our 
 days, would see with astonishment, and perhaps with envy, that the 
 tragic Muse lavishes upon you the favors of which she was miserly 
 towards him. What may we not expect from the author of so many 
 masterpieces ! What new marvels may not come from the pen 
 wliich once delineated, with so much spirit and elegance, the ' Tem- 
 ple of Taste ' ! 
 
 " This it is which makes me desire so ardently to possess all your 
 works. I pray you, monsieur, to send them to me, and to communi- 
 cate them without reserve. If among your manuscripts there is one 
 which, from necessary prudence, you deem it best to conceal from the 
 eyes of the public, I promise to keep it inviolably secret, and to be 
 content with applauding it myself. I know, unhappily, that the faith 
 of princes is a thing little respectable in our time ; but I hope, nev- 
 ertheless, that you will not allow yourself to be possessed by a gen- 
 eral prejudice, and that you will make an exception in my favor. 
 
 " I shall believe myself richer in having your works than in the 
 possession of all the transient and contemptible gifts of fortune, which 
 the same chance gives and takes away. One can render your works 
 his own by the aid of memory, and they will last as long as memory 
 itself. Knowing the imperfection of mine, I hesitate long before 
 making choice of the things which I judge worthy to place in it. 
 
 " If ijoetry were still upon its old footing, — that is to say, if poets 
 knew only how to trill tedious idyls, eclogues cast in the same moulds, 
 insipid stanzas, or, at their highest flight, to chant an elegy, I should 
 renounce it forever ; but you ennoble that art ; you show us new 
 paths and routes unknown to the Lefrancs and the Rousseaus. 
 
 " Your poems have qualities which render them respectable, and 
 worthy the admiration and study of honest people. They form a 
 course of morals wherein one can learn to think and to act. Virtue 
 is painted therein in the most beautiful colors. The idea of true 
 glory is clearly defined in them ; and you insiimate a taste for the 
 sciences in a manner so fine and so delicate that whoever has read
 
 346 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 your works cherishes the ambition to follow your footsteps. How 
 many times have I not said to myself, ' Unhappy man, lay down a 
 burden the weight of which is beyond your strength ; no one can 
 imitate Voltaire unless it be Voltaire himself ' ! 
 
 " At such moments I have felt that the advantages of birth, and 
 the halo of grandeur so flattering to our vanity, are things of very 
 small account, or, in truth, of no account at all. They are distinc- 
 tions foreign to ourselves, which adorn only the exterior. How far 
 preferable to them are mental gifts ! What do we not owe to per- 
 sons whom Nature herself has distinguished by merely making them 
 what they are ! She pleases herself in forming some men whom she 
 endows with all the capacity necessary for carrying forward the arts 
 and sciences ; and it is for princes to recompense their toils. Ah, 
 would that it might fall to my lot to crown your triumphs with the 
 glory they merit ! I should only fear that this country, not fertile in 
 laurel, would not furnish as much as your works deserve. 
 
 " If my destiny does not favor me so far as to enable me to pos- 
 sess you, I can at least hope some day to see one whom I have ad- 
 mired so long and from so great a distance, and to assure you with 
 the living voice that I am, with all the esteem and the considera- 
 tion due to those who, following the torch of truth, consecrate their 
 labors to the public weal, monsieur, your affectionate friend, 
 
 " Frederic, Prince Royal of Prussia." 
 
 The arrival of this letter was well timed to enhance its ef- 
 fect. Eulogium of this kind had been familiar to him from 
 his youth, and even eulogium from princes ; but this prince 
 was about to reign ! He was to reign over a country in close 
 proximity to France, and no Keeper of the Seals could choose 
 to disregard him. His " ogre of a father," as Madame du 
 Chatelet was pleased to style the Prussian king, was not a 
 " good life," with his deep drinking, his tobacco parliament, 
 and his explosions of drunken fury. The time was obviously 
 not distant when the guard of four thousand giants would be 
 disbanded, and a prince ascend the throne who would at once 
 begin a millennium in Prussia that might spread over Europe. 
 So thought Voltaire, in the enthusiasm of the hour. What 
 princes he had seen in his own country ! How insensible to 
 the true glory of rulers ! A regent of France had shut him up 
 in the Bastille for eleven months upon a groundless charge ; a 
 Duke of Bourbon had seen him imprisoned and exiled for a 
 happy and just repartee ; the present king had not recognized
 
 FREDEEIC, PRINCE ROYAL OF PRUSSLA.. 347 
 
 his existence, and allowed his best works to be put under ban. 
 At the very moment when this letter was placed in his hands 
 he was not, as we shall see in a moment, safe in his bed, and 
 he owed his late impunity, not to any merit of his own, but, 
 as a minister had recently said, "to the respect felt by the ad- 
 ministration for " the family that gave him an asylum^ Vol- 
 taire re]3lied thus to the Prince Royal : — 
 
 [August 26, 1736.] " Monseigneur, I should be wanting in sensi- 
 bility not to be infinitely touched by the letter with which your Royal 
 Highness has deigned to honor me. My self-love was too much flat- 
 tered by it ; but my love for the human race, whicli I have always 
 had at heart, and which I venture to say makes my character, gave 
 me a pleasure a thousand times purer when I discovered that there is 
 in the world a prince who thinks like a man, a prince philosopher, 
 who will render men happy. 
 
 " Permit me to say to you that there is not a man on earth who 
 does not owe you grateful homage for the care you take to cultivate 
 by sound philosophy a soul born to command. Be sure that there 
 have been no truly good kings except those who have begun, like you, 
 by instructing themseh^es, by knowing men, by loving the truth, by 
 detesting persecution and superstition. There is no prince who, being 
 thus formed, could not bring back the age of gold to his states. Why 
 do so few kings seek this advantage ? You know, Monseigneur : it is 
 because almost all of them think more of royalty than of humanity. 
 You do precisely the contrary. Rely upon it, if one day the tumult 
 of business and the wickedness of men do not alter so divine a charac- 
 ter, you will be adored by your jieople and beloved by the whole 
 world. Philosophers worthy of the name will fly to your dominions ; 
 and, as celebrated artisans go in crowds to the country where their art 
 is most esteemed, men who think will go to gather about your 
 throne. 
 
 "The illustrious Queen Christina left her kingdom to go in quest of 
 the arts ; reign, Monseigneur, and the arts will go in quest of you. 
 
 " May you never be disgusted with the sciences by the quarrels of 
 the learned ! You see, Monseigneur, by the very things you deign to 
 send me, that they are men, for the most part, like courtiers them- 
 selves. They are sometimes as selfish, as intriguing, as false, as cruel ; 
 and all the difference between the pests of the court and the pests of 
 the schools is that the latter are the more ridiculous. 
 
 " It is very sad for humanity that those who claim to declare the 
 commands of Heaven, to be the interpreters of the Divinity, — in one 
 word, the theologians, — are sometimes the most dangerous of all ; that
 
 348 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 there should be some among them who are as pernicious to society as 
 they are obscure in their ideas ; and that their souls should be swollen 
 with bitterness and pride in proportion as they are empty of truth. 
 They would be willing to disturb the peace of the earth for a sophism, 
 and would interest all kings to avenge by sword and fire the honor of 
 an argument in ferio or in barbara. 
 
 " Every thinking being who is not of their opinion is an atheist ; 
 and every king who does not favor them will be damned. You know, 
 Monseigneur, that the best course one can take is to abandon to them- 
 selves those pretended preceptors and real enemies of the human race. 
 Their words, when they are disregarded, are lost in the air like the 
 wind ; but if the weight of authority is enlisted in their support, that 
 wind acquires a force which sometimes overturns the throne. 
 
 " I see, Monseigneur, with the natural joy of a heart filled with love 
 for the public good, the immense distance which you put between men 
 who peacefully seek the truth and those who wish to go to war for 
 words which they do not understand. I see that the Newtons, the 
 Leibnitz, the Bayles, the Lockes, souls so elevated, so enlightened, 
 and so gentle, are those who nourish your spirit, and that you reject 
 other sham aliment which you find poisoned or without substance. 
 
 " I do not know how to thank your Eoyal Highness enough for 
 your goodness in sending me the little book concerning M. Wolf. I 
 regard his metaphysical ideas as doing honor to the human intellect. 
 They are flashes in the midst of profound night, which, I believe, is 
 all we can hope from metaphysics. There is no appearance that the 
 first principles of things will ever be well understood. The mice 
 which inhabit some little holes of an immense building know not if 
 that building is eternal, nor who was its architect, nor why that ar- 
 chitect built. They try to preserve their lives, to people their holes, 
 and to escape the destructive animals that pursue them. We are 
 mice, and the divine architect who has built this universe has not yet, 
 as far as I know, told his secret to any of us. If any one might pre- 
 tend to divine the truth, it is M. Wolf. He may be combated, but 
 he must be esteemed. His philosophy is very far from being perni- 
 cious ; there is nothing in it more beautiful or more true than his re- 
 mark that men ought to be just, though even they should have the mis- 
 fortune to be atheists. 
 
 " The protection which, it seems, you give, Monseigneur, to that 
 learned man is a proof at once of your justice and your humanity. 
 
 " You have the goodness, Monseigneur, to promise to send me the 
 ' Treatise upon God, the Soul, and the World.' What a present, 
 Monseigneur, and what a transaction ! The heir of a monarchy deigns, 
 from the recesses of his palace, to send instruction to a hermit I
 
 FREDERIC, PRINCE ROYAL OF PRUSSIA. 849 
 
 Deign to make me this present, Mouseigneur ; my extreme love for the 
 truth is the only thing which renders me worthy of it. Most princes 
 dread to hear the truth, and you will teach it. 
 
 " With regard to the verses of which you speak to me, you think 
 upon that art as sensibly as upon all the rest. Verses which do not 
 teach men new and affecting truths little deserve to be read. You 
 feel that there would be nothing more contemptible than to pass one's 
 life in putting into rhyme stale commonplaces which do not merit the 
 name of thoughts. If there is anything lower than that, it is to be 
 nothing but a satirical poet, and write only to decry others. Such 
 poets are to Parnassus what those doctors are to the schools who are 
 acquainted only with words, and cabal against men who write things. 
 
 " If the ' Henriade ' has not displeased your Royal Highness, I 
 ought to thank for it the love of truth my poem inspires, and the 
 horror for the factious, for persecutors, for the superstitious, for ty- 
 rants, and for rebels. It is the work of an honest man ; it ought to 
 find favor with a prince philosopher. 
 
 " You order me to send you my other works. I shall obey you, 
 Monseigneiir ; you shall be my judge, and you shall stand to me in 
 lieu of the public. I shall submit to you what I have hazarded in 
 philosophy ; your luminous comments will be my recompense; it is a 
 reward that few sovereigns can give. I am sure of your secrecy ; 
 your virtue, I do not doubt, equals your knowledge. 
 
 " I should regard it as a very great good fortune to be able to pay 
 my court to your Royal Highness. We go to Rome to see churches, 
 pictures, ruins, and bas-reliefs. A prince like you deserves a journey 
 much better ; it is a rarity more marvelous. But friendship, which 
 retains me in the retreat where I am, does not permit me to leave it. 
 You think, without doubt, like Julian, that great man so calumniated, 
 who said that friends ought always to be preferred to kings. 
 
 " In whatever corner of the world I finish my life, be sure, Mon- 
 seigneur, that I shall continue to make vows for you ; that is to say, 
 for the happiness of a whole people. My heart will be ranked among 
 your subjects ; your glory always will be dear to me. Bly wish will 
 be that you may always resemble yourself, and that the other kings 
 may resemble you. I am, with profound respect, of your Royal High- 
 ness, the very humble Voltaire." 
 
 The prince replied with a promptitude and at a length that 
 might have alarmed a less busy man than Voltaire. This sec- 
 ond letter would fill about ten of these pages. Voltaire re- 
 sponded by dedicating to Frederic a poem on the " Use of 
 Science by Princes," of which he sent him a copy. The
 
 350 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Prince Royal, in return, gave his beloved poet a cane, the head 
 of which was a golden bust of Socrates, and, ere the year was 
 out, plucked up courage to send a specimen of his French 
 verse, addressed to Voltaire ; receiving in return manuscripts 
 of great pith and moment, one a " Dissertation on the Soul," 
 afterwards amplified for the " Philosophical Dictionary." The 
 correspondents grew ever fonder. Voltaire " sheds tears of 
 joy " on receiving the long letter mentioned above. Frederic, 
 on his part, is thrown into such an agitation by the arrival of 
 a letter from Cirey that hours pass before he is calm enough 
 to gather its full meaning. 
 
 " Towards the hour [he wrote in 1737] when the post usu- 
 ally arrives, all my servants are out on the road to bring me 
 my packet. Impatience immediately seizes me, also ; I run to 
 the window, and then, tired of seeing nothing come, I return 
 to my usual occupations. If I hear a noise in the antecham- 
 ber, I am there ! ' Ah, what is it ? Give me my letters ! No 
 neivs?^ My imagination far outstrips the courier. At last, 
 after such proceedings have continued some hours, behold, my 
 letters arrive ! I break the seals. I look for your writing 
 (often in yain), and, when I perceive it, my agitation hinders 
 me from breaking the seal. I read, but so fast that I am 
 obliged sometimes to read the letter three times over before 
 my mind is calm enough to understand what I have read ; and 
 it happens, even, that I do not succeed until the next day." 
 
 He might well make the last statement, for one of Voltaire's 
 letters, to which the above was a reply, fills twenty-seven large 
 printed pages, and contained a metaphysical discourse upon 
 the question of Liberty and Necessity. Soon there was an in- 
 terchange of civilities and letters between Madame du Chate- 
 let and the prince, which continued as long as she lived. Soon 
 Thieriot was appointed to write for the prince an occasional 
 letter of literary news from Paris, a duty ill performed by that 
 idle and luxurious parasite. During 1737 the prince's letters 
 came pretty regularly to the chateau once a month ; in 1738 
 he wrote seventeen times ; in 1740, the year of his accession, 
 twenty-seven times. 
 
 Such a correspondence could not remain a secret. Thieriot 
 was before long enabled to show to the illustrious suppei'-tables 
 of Paris a copy of " a very curious letter " which the Prince
 
 TREDEEIC, PRINCE ROYAL OF PRUSSIA. 851 
 
 Royal of Prussia (the prince, you know, who came near hav- 
 ing his head cut off by his ogre of a father, a few years since) 
 had lately written to Voltaire. All Europe soon heard of it. 
 The gazettes, even, presumed to mention it. A Holland paper 
 stated that the golden head of the cane sent to the poet was 
 " a portrait of the prince." " Was it, indeed ? " asks Vol- 
 taire. "No," replied Frederic; " my portrait is neither good- 
 looking enough nor rare enough for me to give you. It is of 
 Socrates, who was to Greece less than you are to Fi-ance." 
 
 Voltaire, we must own, meant to get from this correspond- 
 ence all the sup^^ort it could furnish against the powers that 
 kept the key of the Bastille and could drive him from his 
 home and country without a moment's warning. At the same 
 time, he fulfilled, to the very best of his ability and light, 
 the duty, the opportunity, which had fallen in his way, of 
 influencing a mind destined to rule a country. He spared 
 no toil to give this young man the best he had. Both were 
 under ilkision. Frederic had seen beautiful works in a gal- 
 lery, and seen them with the adoring rapture of ingenuous 
 youth ; but the artist — with a smudge of clay upon his nose, 
 with his indigestions, irritabilities, servilities, vanities, and all 
 the cat;ilogue of his human foibles and frailties — he had not 
 seen. Nor did Voltaire yet know how much more a kingdom 
 governs a king than a king governs a kingdom. Hence both 
 were destined to some disenchantment. 
 
 Voltaire was beginning to have his corps of young disciples, 
 — known to him and unknown, — who were, by and by, to ex- 
 tend liis influence. Many young men in Europe, and, here 
 and there, one or two in Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, 
 and Pennsylvania, felt towards him very much as Frederic of 
 Prussia felt. Never was there such an untiring and dexterous 
 sower of seed ; and now the seed was sprouting in many parts 
 of the field. He berated his young friends soundly when he 
 thought they deserved it, especially the idle and neglectful. 
 His patience with such was amazing in so impatient a man ; 
 and even when he had exhausted every means of rousing 
 them to exertion he could not cast them off ; or, if he did, 
 was swift to welcome them again on the least sign of im- 
 provement. Note these few sentences from his letters of this 
 period : —
 
 852 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 [To Thieriot.] " Yes ; I will scold you till I have cured you of 
 your indolence. You live as if man had been created only to sup ; 
 and you exist only between ten p. M. and two a. m. When you are 
 old and abandoned, will it be a consolation to you to say, ' Formerly 
 I drank champagne in good company ' ? " 
 
 [To Cideville.] " Tell Linant to be modest, humble, and service- 
 able. Your applause and friendship have been a sweet poison that 
 has turned his head. Me he hates, because I have spoken frankly to 
 him. Deserve his hatred in your turn, or he is lost." 
 
 [To Helvetius, young author.] " It costs you nothing to think, but 
 it costs infinitely to write. I therefore preach to you eternally that 
 art of writing which Boileau has so well known and so well taught: 
 that respect for the language, that connection and sequence of ideas, 
 that air of ease with which he conducts his readers, tliat naturalness 
 which is the fruit of art, and that appearance of facility which is 
 due to toil alone. A word out of place spoils the most beautiful 
 thought." 
 
 [To Helvetius.] " Do you wish an infallible little rule for verse ? 
 Here it is : See if your thought, as you have written it in verse, is 
 beautiful in prose also." 
 
 [To a young poet without fortune.] " Think first to improve your 
 .circumstances. First live ; then compose." 
 
 [To Thieriot.] " I envy the beasts two things, — their ignorance 
 of evil to come, and their ignorance of what is said of them." 
 
 [To Frederic] " Learned men there will always be at Berlin ; but 
 men of genius, men who in communicating their soul render others 
 wise, these elder sons of Prometheus who go about distributing the 
 celestial fire among ill-organized masses, — of these there will always 
 be very few in any country." 
 
 [To Helvetius.] " The body of an athlete and the soul of a sage, 
 — these are what we require to be happy." 
 
 [To Maupertuis, invited to Prussia.] " It is a beautiful age, this, 
 when men of letters hesitate to repair to the courts of kings ; but if 
 they do not hesitate, the age will be much more beautiful." 
 
 [To Frederic] '' Those who say that the fiames of religious wars 
 are extinguished, pay, it seems to me, too much honor to human nat- 
 ure. The same poison still subsists, though less developed ; the plague 
 that seems stifled reproduces from time to time germs capable of in- 
 fecting the earth."
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 FLIGHT INTO HOLLAND. 
 
 The pleasant excitement caused by the prince's letter had 
 subsided, and life at Cirey was going its usual course. The 
 marquise was still restoring parts of the old chateau ; Vol- 
 taire was building an annex for his apparatus ; and they were 
 rivals for the possession of the workmen. " Madame has 
 taken all my men," he complains sometimes, impatient to get 
 his laboratory in working order. There were periods of such 
 peaceful, happy, and honorable labor during the early years of 
 their settlement at Cirey that it seemed as if their dream was 
 realized, and, unlike Faust, they could say to the gliding hour, 
 " Stay, thou art fair ! " 
 
 The children were occupied with their tutor, — good children, 
 Voltaire assures us; the boy, afterwards that Duke du Chate- 
 let who lost his head imder the reign of the guillotine, was 
 now a little scholar learning Latin fables, enraptured to receive 
 on his birthday a silver watch, good or bad, that had cost three 
 louis d'or. The marquis, his father, when not with his regi- 
 ment, was hunting, or visiting his foundries and iron mines, 
 or riding to the neighboring chateaux ; coming home with an 
 excellent appetite to eat, and, as soon as he had eaten, bestow- 
 ing upon an intellectual company the favor of his friendly 
 departure. He is " the worthiest gentleman I ever knew," 
 says his wife in her correspondence. She invariably speaks 
 of him with respect, often with warm eulogiuni ; and he, as 
 we are assured, was gratified at his wife's celebrity. 
 
 Madame was almost as studious as her friend, when there 
 were no guests to entertain ; for, besides her geometry, she 
 was now^ learning English and Italian. She was translating 
 Mandeville's " Fable of the Bees ; " and she, too, as well as 
 Voltaire, was grappling with Pope's " Essay on Man." One 
 verse she remarks, delighted her very much : " An honest 
 
 VOL. I. 23
 
 354 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 man 's the noblest worck of God." This she thought exceed- 
 ingly fine ; but there was a couplet in the same book which, 
 she says, shocked Voltaire : — 
 
 " All reason's pleasure, all the joys of sense, 
 Lie in three words, — health, peace, and competence." 
 
 These lines omitted love. " Pope is to be pitied," says Vol- 
 taire, in an epigram suggested by the passage ; " he is neither 
 happy nor wise." Madame was all enthusiasm for England 
 and the English. She intended to visit that home of freedom 
 as soon as she had devised a pretext ; for, as she remarks, the 
 marquis, one of the best of men, would not understand her 
 real reason for going, which was simply to instruct herself. 
 " You have seen the ' Julius Csesar ' of Shakespeare," she 
 writes to Algarotti, in England ; " you are going to see ' On- 
 fort ' and ' Blenkeim ; ' and, what is still better, you see men 
 worthy to associate with you." She quotes with approbation 
 two lines of Hervey : — 
 
 " freedom, benefactress fair, 
 How happy who thy blessings share ! " 
 
 For a year or more she was blessed in being able to render 
 Voltaire important aid in a work near his heart. In the au- 
 tumn of 1735, Algarotti, a young Italian who employed the 
 leisure that wealth gives in patriotic and intellectual labors, 
 spent six weeks at Cirey, where he talked frequently with its 
 inmates upon an amiable project he had partly executed of 
 putting Newton's " Principia " into a series of Italian dia- 
 logues for ladies. He read some of the dialogues at Cirey, 
 and Voltaire applauded the scheme, which was completed, 
 with happy results to Italy and to other countries ; for Alga- 
 rotti's work was translated into several languages. Its best 
 result was in suggesting to Voltaire the idea of doing for 
 France what his young friend was doing for Italy. In his 
 English Letters he had given Newton the place of honor, 
 and this at a time when Newton's philosophy was unknown 
 to the many and despised by the few. Out of England there 
 were not in the world, probably, thirty Newtonians when 
 Voltaire wrote upon Newton in his English Letters. He 
 determined, in 1735, to write a volume, giving in a clear, 
 exact, but popular form, the substance of Newton's work, 
 which, being in Latin, and algebra, was, is, and will always
 
 FLIGHT INTO HOLLAm). 355 
 
 remain inaccessible except to the learned. It was a project 
 worthy of a patriot and a scholar thus to place the best intel- 
 lectual treasure of a foreign land within easy reach of the 
 whole educated class of his own ; and it was peculiarly Ms 
 work who felt that knowledge is the antidote to superstition, 
 and that superstition was poisoning the life of France. 
 
 From the middle of 1735 to the end of 1736, Newton was 
 his principal task. " Thalia, Thalia," he wrote from the 
 midst of it to Mademoiselle Quinault, who was playing in his 
 " Prodigal Son," " if I were at Paris, I would work only for 
 you. You would make me an amphibious animal, comic six 
 months of the year, and tragic the other six ; but there is in 
 the world a devil of a Newton, who has found out how much 
 the sun weighs, and of what color the rays are which compose 
 light. This strange man has turned my head." And to his 
 ancient professor, Abb6 d'Olivet, in October, 1736: "At pres- 
 ent I am occupied in learning how much the «un weighs ; 
 one folly the more. ' What does it matter,' you will ask, 
 ' how much it weighs, provided we enjoy it ? ' Oh, it matters 
 much to us deep thinkers, for it relates to the grand principle 
 of gravitation. My dear friend, my dear master, Newton is 
 the greatest man that ever lived, — the greatest, I mean, as 
 the giants of old are compared with children who play with 
 cherry-stones. Nevertheless, let us not be discouraged ; let 
 us gather some flowers in this world which he measured, which 
 he weighed, which he alone knew. Let us sport under the 
 arms of this Atlas who carries the sky ; let us compose dramas, 
 odes, rubbish. Love me; console me for being so small. 
 Adieu, my dear friend, my dear master." In this light, fa- 
 miliar way he spoke of a piece of work that evidently tasked 
 the united powers of Madame du Chatelet and himself, and 
 which filled months with arduous, fascinating toil. 
 
 Thus they were employed at the beginning of Christmas 
 week in 1736. The long and honorable labor was substantially 
 done ; only the last two chapters being incomplete. The 
 weather was cold ; and Voltaire, a chilly mortal, from his 
 unceasing, inordinate industry, stirred seldom from the warmth 
 of the fire. He loved a fire. He was a rare heaper-on of 
 fuel, and visitors wondered at the number of cords of wood 
 daily consumed in the vain attempt to warm the old chateau.
 
 356 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 But the poet's corner was warm and snug enough, and he 
 clung to it ; for the earth was covered with snow, and the air 
 was thick with wintry storm. 
 
 It was Saturday, December 21st, the longest night of the 
 year. A letter arrives from the " guardian angel " of the 
 house, D'Argental, — a letter of warning ! The peace of this 
 abode rested upon a promise which the Keeper of the Seals 
 had given again and again to the Duchess de Richelieu, that 
 he would begin no proceeding against Voltaire without giv- 
 ing her notice. Notice had been given ! D'Argental for- 
 warded it swiftly to Cirey. The pretext of the threatened 
 prosecution seems to have astounded the inmates of the chi,- 
 teau even more than the threat itself. It was a merry poem 
 of a hundred and twenty lines, called "The Worldling" (Le 
 Mondain), suggested by the " Fable of the Bees," and written 
 in the gay hours following the success of " Alzire," a few 
 months before. The poem was a jovial explosion of anti- 
 Pasealism ; harmless if taken as a joke, nor likely to be taken 
 otherwise except by a Tartuffe. 
 
 " Eegret who will the good old time, 
 And the age of gold, and Astrea's reign. 
 And the beautiful days of Saturn and of Rhea, 
 And the garden of our first parents." 
 
 " For my part," continued the poet, " I love luxury and 
 even softness [wo??essg], all the pleasures, all the arts, cleanli- 
 ness, taste, decoration ; and so does every honest man." One 
 of the lines of this poem has remained current coin in France 
 ever since : "Le superflu, chose tres necessaire."^ 
 
 The offense of this poem was supposed to lie in a few 
 lines referring to the legend of Adam and Eve : " My dear 
 Adam, my gourmand, my good father, what did you do in the 
 garden of Eden ? Did you toil for this stupid human race of 
 ours? Did you caress Madame Eve, my mother ? Confess to 
 me that both of you had long nails, a little black and dirty, 
 your hair slightly out of order, j^our complexion dark, your 
 skin brown and tanned. Without decency, the most fortunate 
 love is love no more ; it is a shameful need. Immediately 
 tired of one another, they sup genteelly under an oak upon 
 water, millet, and acorns ; then sleep upon the ground. Such 
 
 1 The superfluous, a thing very necessary.
 
 FLIGHT INTO HOLLAND. 357 
 
 is the condition of man in a state of pure nature." To this 
 he contrasts the daily life of a rich Frenchman of that period, 
 to whom all the arts ministered, and who enjoyed the re- 
 fined delights of mind, taste, and sense. The poem concludes 
 with a few lines which utter the feelings of millions of school- 
 boys, whose souls have wearied of Telemachus and never- 
 ending preach : ♦' Now, Monsieur Telemachus, vaunt as you 
 may your little Ithaca, where your Cretans, dismally vir- 
 tuous, poor in goods, rich in abstinence, go without every- 
 thing in order to have abundance, I consent willingly to be 
 whipped within your walls if ever I go to seek there my hap- 
 piness." 
 
 At the instigation of Boyer, preceptor of the dauphin, a 
 priest whose name comes down to us laden with Voltaire's con- 
 temptuous ridicule, the aged Cardinal de Fleury consented to 
 the prosecution of the author of the " Mondain." D'Aro-en- 
 tal's warning Avas emphatic and urgent. " But for the respect 
 felt for your Flouse," he said, " M. de Voltaire would long ago 
 have been arrested, and it is. now in contemplation to write to 
 M. du Clnitelet, requesting that he no longer give him an asy- 
 lum." It was this last menace that threw the lady into such 
 extreme apprehension, since it threatened to put an end to 
 their scheme of life. The marquis, true child of his period, 
 had no scruples with regard to the morality of the situation, 
 but he would have died for its decorums. Madame lauohed 
 at the idea of such extreme respect felt for their House, when 
 the chateau of a Prince de Guise had not sufficed to protect 
 her poet ; but all the more was she alarmed at a danger of 
 which she knew not the extent, nor the real cause. 
 
 At length, after agonizing conflicts of feeling, she consented 
 to his temporary departure. He should at least cross the 
 frontier, and await the development of events. If the storm 
 blew over, he could return. If not, he must seek an abode in 
 some country — England, Holland, Prussia — wliere a poet 
 and philosopher could not be turned out of his liome into the 
 snow by a dull theologian ambitious to wear a red hat. It was 
 nine in the evening when she was brought to consent to this 
 project, and they determined to leave that very night; she to 
 go with him as far as Vassy, four miles off, the nearest village 
 where he could get post-horses. We have the letter which he
 
 358 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 wrote to D' Argental at Vassy early on Sunday morning, while, 
 perhaps, the horses were harnessmg : — 
 
 " Your friend cannot endure that I should remain longer in a coun- 
 try where I am treated so inhumanly. We have left Cirey ; at four 
 o'clock in the piorning we are at Vassy, where I am to take post- 
 horses. But, my true, my tender and honored friend, now that the 
 moment arrives when I must separate myself forever from one who has 
 done all for me, — who for me left Paris, left all her friends, and all the 
 agreeable things of life, — one whom I adore and ought to adore, you 
 know what I feel ; the situation is horrible. I should set out with joy 
 inexpressible ; I w^ould go to see the Prince of Prussia, who often in- 
 vites me ; I would put between envy and me a space so wide that I 
 should be troubled by it no more ; I would live in foreign countries 
 like a Frenchman who will always respect his own country ; I should 
 be free, and should not abuse my liberty ; I should be the happiest 
 man in the world ; but your friend is before me in a flood of tears. 
 My heart is pierced. Will it be necessary to let her return alone to a 
 chateau which she has rebuilt only for me, and deprive myself of the 
 charm of my life, because I have enemies at Paris ? It is, assuredly, 
 to unite the absurdity of the age of gold and the barbarity of the age 
 of iron to menace me for such a work. If you deem the storm too 
 violent, send us word to the usual address, and I shall continue my 
 journey ; if you believe it calmed, I shall come to a halt. But what 
 a frightful life ! I would rather die than be eternally tormented by 
 the dread of losing my liberty upon the most trifling complaint, with- 
 out form of law. I submit all to you ; see what I ought to do." 
 
 They separated at Vassy on Sunday morning ; he taking the 
 road to Lorraine, she returning to the void and desolate chS,- 
 teau at Cirey. She heard notliing of him until the Friday fol- 
 lowing, when good news came. He had reached the frontier 
 in safety, and had gone on toward Brussels, a hundred and 
 fifty miles distant, where he was to be addressed as Monsieur 
 Renol, merchant. Best of all, his health had not suffered. 
 "His unfortunate health," wrote the marquise to D'Argental, 
 " always supports journeys better than we should dare hope, 
 because then he works less. Still, when I look out upon the 
 earth covered with snow, and the weather so dismal and thick ; 
 when I think of the climate to which he is going, and his ex- 
 treme sensitiveness to cold, I am ready to die of grief. I would 
 endure his absence if I could be assured of his health." 
 
 Her long and almost daily letters to their guardian angel,
 
 FLIGHT INTO HOLLAND. 859 
 
 D'Argental, show how her heart was torn with apprehension 
 and anxiety during the next two months. She brooded over 
 the situation. She imagined new explanations. She feared 
 a collision between Voltaire and Rousseau at Brussels. She 
 dreaded lest her poet should go to the Prince Royal of Prussia, 
 and never return to Cirey. That prince might be amiable, 
 but he was not king, and he had an ogre of a father, who might 
 even arrest a French poet and send him packing home to a 
 Keeper of the Seals. The ogre would have liked nothing bet- 
 ter. That metaphysical treatise, too, that thirty-page letter 
 to the prince upon Liberty and Necessity, — what insanity to 
 trust such a dreadful package of explosive matter out of their 
 own hands ! " A Treatise," wrote madame, " reasonable enough 
 to bring its author to the stake ; a book a thousand times more 
 dangerous, and, assuredly, more punishable, than the ' Pu- 
 celle.' " And the prince to have in his custody such a work as 
 that ! How likely it was to fall into the hands of the Prus- 
 sian ministry, and so reach his father, and thus the French 
 ambassador, and finally the French ministry ! To confide 
 such a work to a prince of twenty-four years, unformed, whom 
 a fit of sickness might render religious ! To make the happi- 
 ness of her life depend upon the discretion and fidelity of the 
 Prince Royal, merely to gratify a foolish vanity of showing the 
 work to a young man who could not appreciate it. Thus 
 she tormented herself with apprehensions of evil, shut up in 
 the dead of winter in an old country chateau, which only his 
 presence could for a day have made endurable. For some 
 time she indulged the fancy that one of her own relations had 
 taken this method of gratifying an enmity against her. So 
 she was wretched in the belief that she had been the cause of 
 his unhappiness. But she had one comfort : " Happily, I am 
 sure of M. du Chatelet. He is the most honorable and the 
 most estimable man I know, and I should be the basest of 
 creatures if I did not think so." Again, " It is a happiness 
 unique to live with a man so worthy." 
 
 The traveler was by no meaus so unhappy as she. At Brus- 
 sels he did not fall foul of Rousseau, and the actors there cele- 
 brated the arrival of M. Renol, merchant, by performing the 
 tragedy of " Alzire," written by M. de Voltaire, poet. The 
 same coincidence marked the arrival of M. Renol at Anvers,
 
 860 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 the next large city of Flanders. The gazettes informed the 
 public that M. de Voltaire was on his way to visit the Prince 
 Royal of Prussia ; and that prince, on learning the true cause 
 of his leaving Cirey, sent a messenger to offer him the use 
 of the Prussian ambassador's house in London. The prince 
 overwhelmed him with sympathy and attention. Voltaire 
 received four letters from him at the same time, besides a 
 copy of Wolf's " Metaphysics " and a cargo of French verses. 
 Continuing his journey, he reached Amsterdam, still as M. 
 Renol, merchant ; but there the transparent disguise was 
 laid aside. He had a world of business at the Dutch capital, 
 where a complete and authorized edition of his works was in 
 course of publication, and where he intended to have an edi- 
 tion of his "Elements of Newton" published simultaneously 
 with one at Paris. At Leyden, where he spent several days, 
 he improved the opportunity to submit knotty points in 
 Newton to the learned professors of the university, partic- 
 ularly^ to Professor s' Gravesande, a staunch Newtonian. 
 Twenty English gentlemen of the suite of George II. called 
 upon him at Leyden, and he received them, busy as he was. 
 His mind seemed absorbed in Newton during most of his stay 
 in Holland. 
 
 "I live here," he wrote to D'Argental, "quite like a phi- 
 losojaher. I study much ; I see little company ; I try to under- 
 stand Newton, and I try to make him understood. I console 
 myself by study for the absence of my friends. It is not pos- 
 sible at present for me to recast the ' Prodigal Son.' I could 
 well enough labor at a tragedy in the morning and at a comedy 
 in the evening; but to pass in the same day from Newton to 
 Thalia, I do not feel the force for it. Wait till the spring, 
 gentlemen ; la poesie will serve her quarter ; but just now it 
 is the turn of science. If I do not succeed with Newton, I 
 shall console myself very quii'kly with you." 
 
 The agonizing letters of Madame du Chatelet imploring his 
 return soon prevailed ; and in March, 1737, after an absence 
 of nearly three months, he gave out on all sides that he was 
 going to England, and slipped quietly back to Cirey. " Be 
 sure and not forget that I am in England," he writes to Abb^ 
 Moussinot. 
 
 No act of arbitrary power of which he was himself the 
 
 1
 
 FLIGHT INTO HOLLAND. 361 
 
 victim ever stirred within him so lasting indignation as this 
 proscription of " Le Mondain." He spoke of it twenty years 
 after with bitterness, and it was, perhaps, the chief motive 
 of his attempt to establish himself, at a later day, in another 
 country. He felt it the more acutely because the abhorred 
 Rousseau was the witness and harbinger of his discredit. 
 To Rousseau he attributed scandalous paragraphs which ap- 
 peared in the gazettes, informing Europe that the author of 
 the English Letters had been driven (^chasse') from France, 
 never to return, and had gone to Leyden for the purpose of de- 
 fending: atheism against Professor s' Gravesande. These re- 
 ports reached Paris, reached the government, and he asked the 
 professor to " write two words to the Cardinal de Fleury," to 
 set him right with that minister; for, said he, "all my prop, 
 erty is in France, and I am under a necessity of destroying an 
 imposture which in your country I should content myself with 
 despising, as you would." 
 
 Madame du Chatelet, and she alone, brought him back to 
 France. " A man of letters," he wrote to D'Argental, soon 
 after his return to Cirey, " ought to live in a free country, or 
 make up his mind to lead the life of a timorous slave, whom 
 other slaves, jealous of him, continually accuse to the master. 
 In France I have nothing to expect but such persecutions ; 
 they will be my only recompense. I feel that I shall always 
 be the victim of the first calumniator. In vain I hide in ob- 
 scurity ; in vain I write to no one ; it will be known where I 
 am, and my obstinate concealment will perhaps render my 
 retreat culpable. Thus, I live in continual alarm without 
 knowing how I can parry the blows dealt me every day. 
 There is no likelihood of my ever returning to Paris, to expose 
 myself again to the furies of superstition and envy. I shall live 
 at Cirey or in a free land. / have always said to you that 
 {/" ^y father^ my brother^ or my son ivere prime minister of 
 a despotic state, I would leave it to-morrou> ! Judge what 
 must be my repugnance on finding myself in such a state 
 to-day! But, after all, Madame du Chatelet is to me more 
 than a father, a brother, or a son." 
 
 He wrote, nevertheless, a conciliatory letter to one of the 
 mmisters, M. de Maurepas ; to whom, also, madame sent a 
 propitiatory present of two bucks, much fearing that they
 
 362 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 would reach him the worse for their journey, — pourris, as she 
 plainly expressed it. 
 
 Was he going to be a good boy, then, and write no more 
 Mondains and essays upon Liberty and Necessity? That 
 was Madame du Chatelet's desire. She implored him to be 
 " prudent " (sage) ; she strove, as she said, to " save him from 
 himself ; " she begged him to leave out of his new edition the 
 passages that were most " burnable." That, however, was 
 not Voltaire's interpretation of the case. As soon as he was 
 well settled at Cirey again, in the spring of 1737, he amused 
 himself by writing a " Defense of the Mondain," a poem a 
 little longer than the " Mondain " itself, and, if possible, more 
 audacious, more comic, more gracefully effective and mur- 
 derous. " At table 3'esterday, by a sad chance, I found my- 
 self seated by a master hypocrite." The poem consists of 
 the conversation between tlie poet and the priest ; and this 
 device gave him an opportunity, which he made the most of, 
 to show that, whatever abstinence priests might preach, they 
 did not deny themselves mundane luxuries. His description 
 of this luxurious churchman guzzling perfumed and amber 
 colored canary, after consigning the author of " the Mondain 
 to perdition, is extremely diverting. Nor does he omit to 
 adduce the example of Solomon, held up as the wisest of 
 men ; who, however, carried luxurious indulgence to a point 
 which the Mondain would not presume to attempt. "A thou- 
 sand beauties ? That is much for a sage ! Give me one. 
 One is enough for me, who have not the honor to be either sage 
 or king." 
 
 He wrote yet another poem, entitled " The Use of Life : A 
 Reply to Criticism upon the Mondain," in which he inculcated 
 moderation and temperance. " The secret of happiness is to 
 moderate your desires." " To enjoy the pleasures, you must 
 know how to leave them." Prosperity, adversity, — these 
 are but names ; " our happiness is in ourselves alone." 
 
 )'
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 
 VOLTAIRE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 For about four years — 1735 to 1739 — science was the 
 chief pursuit of the inmates of the chateau of Cirey. The 
 new impulse toward science, originating in the Royal Society, 
 and stimulated by Sir Isaac Newton's sublime career, reached 
 France soon after Voltaire's return from England, and kept 
 on its way round the world. It set printer Franklin and his 
 leather- aproned junto rubbing electrical tubes in Philadel- 
 phia. It made farmer Bartram of Pennsylvania a botanist, 
 and Jefferson in Virginia a natural philosopher. It captivated 
 Voltaire in 1735, and held him long enthralled. Among his 
 friends and instructors at Leyden, the Leyden jar was soon 
 to be invented. As in all progressive times, so in that won- 
 derful century of seed-sowing, the boundaries of human knowl- 
 edge were greatly enlarged ; and it was inevitable that so sym- 
 pathetic a spirit as Voltaire should endeavor to lend a helping 
 hand. 
 
 He believed, too, in a varied culture. He was prone to un- 
 dervalue the man of one talent; the nature with only one cul- 
 tivated field ; the poet, like J. B. Rousseau, who could do 
 nothing but poetry ; the man of business who was only a busi- 
 ness man ; the philosopher who always and only philosophized. 
 He said, more than once, that he should have venerated New- 
 ton the more if Newton had written some vaudevilles for the 
 London stage. Friends remonstrated with him upon his ab- 
 sorption in pursuits that seemed to them foreign to his nature. 
 He had been a punctual and profuse correspondent until sci- 
 ence possessed him : then he often forgot or delayed to an- 
 swer his letters. " What shall you gain," asked Cideville, 
 " by knowing the pathway of light and the gravitation of 
 Saturn ? " 
 
 " We must give our souls," he replied, " all the forms possi-
 
 364 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 ble to them. It is a fire -which God has confided to us ; we 
 ought to nourish it with whatever we find that is most precious. 
 We must have all imaginable modes of intellectual life, open 
 all the doors of our souls to all the sciences and all the senti- 
 ments ; and. provided that they do not enter pell-mell, there 
 is room within us for eveiy one of them." 
 
 And so for four or five years he was a natural philosopher. 
 He filled his gallery with costly apparatus, — air-pumps, ther- 
 mometers, furnaces, crucibles, retorts, telescopes, microscopes, 
 prisms, scales, and compasses. Failing to get a competent 
 chemist who could say mass on Sundays in the chapel of the 
 chateau, he endeavored to form and train a young man for the 
 work of the laboratory alone, which answered better. For a 
 year or two he had a chemical assistant at Cirey ; and, indeed, 
 many of his experiments must have required the aid of several 
 men, — Aveighing a ton of red-hot iron, for example. We per- 
 ceive that Prince Frederic caught the new taste, and followed 
 his example. The prince sowed radish-seed in an exhausted 
 receiver to see if seed would germinate without air. He 
 worked his air-pump diligently. It was "the mode" with the 
 intelligent portion of the public not to be content with their 
 ignorance of natural laws. 
 
 The chief results of Voltaire's studies and experiments in 
 science occupy two volumes of his works, and strengthen every 
 other volume produced in the latter half of his life. One of 
 these volumes is devoted to his " Elements of Newton's Phi- 
 losoph)''," — a work of great celebrity in its day, obsolete now 
 only because Newton's philosophy is part and parcel of human 
 thought in every civilized land. 
 
 It is interesting to notice throughout the wide range of Vol- 
 taire's works how Newton had fascinated him. In London, both 
 Franklin and Voltaire, almost at the same time, appear to us 
 as if haunting Newton's neighborhood; longing for a sight of 
 the aged discoverer, and longing in vain ; happy to converse 
 with those who had known him. When he was in England, 
 Voltaire tells us, he was denied the consolation of seeing the 
 great philosopher, who was then sinking to the tomb ; but he 
 frequently met Dr. Samuel Clarke, Newton's friend and disci- 
 ple, who continued the controversy with Leibnitz after the 
 master's death. From conversations with Dr. Clarke he de-
 
 VOLTAIRE AND SCIENCE. 365 
 
 rived that impulse towards metaphysics which influenced him 
 for some years. But, he tells us, he soon perceived the insuf- 
 ficiency of the metaphysical systems then in vogue. " One 
 day, full of those grand subjects which charm the mind by 
 their immensity, I said to a very enlightened member of the 
 company, ' Mr. Clarke is a much greater metaphysician than 
 Mr. Newton.' ' That may be,' was the cool reply. ' It is as 
 if you should say that one of them plays •with, balloons better 
 than the other.' This reply made me reenter into myself. 
 Since that time I have dared to pierce some of those balloons 
 of metaphysics, and have found that nothing came out of them 
 except wind. So, when I said to M. s' Gravesande, ' Vanity 
 of vanities, and metaphysics are vanity,' he replied, 'I am very 
 sorry that you are right.' " 
 
 Another English anecdote of Dr. Clarke he called to mind 
 on beginning to write his "Elements of Newton, ".and he 
 introduced it very happily, as if to disarm the prejudices of 
 those who regarded the philosophy of Descartes as part of 
 their orthodoxy. These are the opening sentences of his work 
 upon the " Principia : " — 
 
 " Newton was intimately persuaded of the existence of a God, and 
 he understood by that word not only an infinite being, all-powerful, 
 eternal and the Creator, but a Master who has established a relation 
 between himself and his creatures ; for, without that relation, the 
 knowledge of a God is only a sterile idea, which, by the hope of im- 
 punity, would seem to invite to crime every reasoner of perverse dis- 
 position. Thus that great philosopher makes a singular remark at 
 the end of his ' Principia.' It is that we do not say, My Eternal, my 
 Infinite, because those attributes have no relation to our nature ; but 
 we say, and ought to say, My God, by which we must understand 
 the Master and the Preserver of our lives and the object of our 
 thoughts. I remember that, in several conversations which I had in 
 1726 with Dr. Clarke, that pliilosopher never pronounced the name 
 of God except with an air of seriousness and respect very noticeable. 
 I mentioned to him the impression which that made upon me. He 
 told me it was from Newton that he had insensibly taken the habit, 
 — which, indeed, ought to be that of all men. The whole philosophy 
 of Newton conducts necessarily to the knowledge of the Supreme 
 Being, who has created everything, and arranged everything accord- 
 ing to his will." 
 
 With this prelude, so just to Newton, he enters upon the
 
 366 LITE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 first part of his task, which is to give an account of the con- 
 troversy between Newton and Leibnitz upon the metaphysics 
 of his theme. Newton's opinion was that God, infinitely free, 
 as infinitely powerful, had done all things without any other 
 reason than his own wnll ; the planets, for example, moving 
 from west to east, rather than from east to west, simply and 
 solely because such was God's will. Leibnitz, on the con- 
 trary, held that God's will was determined by reasons ade- 
 quate to control it. Then, said Newton, God is not free. 
 Then, replied Leibnitz, God is capricious. Newton and Leib- 
 nitz were also at variance upon the nature of the connection 
 between the soul and the body, and upon many other ques- 
 tions not then ripe even for serious consideration. " If any 
 one," says Voltaire, " wishes to know what Newton thought 
 upon the soul, and upon the manner in which it operates, I 
 shall reply that he followed none of the cnrrent opinions of 
 his time. Do you ask what that man knew upon this subject, 
 who had submitted the infinite to calculation, and had discov- 
 ered the laws of gravity ? He knew how to doubt." 
 
 The second part of Voltaire's work contains the exposition 
 of Newton's researches in optics. Here he was by no means 
 either a translator or a compiler. He tried all the experiments 
 described by Newton. He had in his gallery at Cirey a dark 
 chamber, arranged accord'ng to Newton's description, in which 
 he performed the experiments with prisms of various sizes 
 and kinds which are now so familiar. Every intelligent vis- 
 itor to the chateau was sure to be taken to this dark room to 
 see him break a ray c^f light into Sir Isaac's brilliant rainbow. 
 He invented some experiments of his own, and brought the 
 air-pump into requisition to see the effect of a vacuum upon 
 the prismatic colors. He was exceedingly pleased with his 
 prisms and his dark chamber; he reflected much upon the 
 Newtonian theory of light, but, like most other philosophers, 
 he left the subject where Newton left it in his last edition of 
 
 1726. 
 
 The difficult part of Voltaire's task was in explaining the 
 principle of gravitation. Sir Isaac himself gives a list of the 
 works necessary to be understood by a student before attempt- 
 mo- bis " Principia," — a somewhat formidable catalogue. 
 INIost mathematicians, however, recommend a much more ex-
 
 VOLTAIRE AND SCIENCE. 367 
 
 tensive preparation. Whatever was necessary for the clear 
 vmderstanding of this part of Newton's work, Voltaire ac- 
 quired. He wrestled mightily with his task ; for at college 
 he had had no mathematical training. With the assistance 
 of Maupertuis, of Madame du Chatelet, of the learned pro- 
 fessors of Leyden University, and his own unconquerable reso- 
 lution, he mastered the work, and gave an account of -it wliich 
 any educated person of good intelligence can follow and enjoy. 
 His essay is free from those sallies of wit and satire, those 
 side-blows at the various objects of his antipathy, which mark 
 almost every other production of his pen. Descartes, whose 
 philosophy Newton's displaced, and Leibnitz, Newton's chief 
 opponent, he treats with the respect due to their great quali- 
 ties, while dissenting with perfect candor from their positions. 
 
 Before dispatching the last chapters to his printers in Am- 
 sterdam, he sent a copy of the whole work to the Chancellor 
 of France, asking for a royal privilege to publish it. He ex- 
 pected to receive the privilege. " The most imbecile fanatic, 
 the most envenomed hypocrite," he wrote to a friend, " can 
 find nothing in it to object to." Six months passed away, 
 and he had received no answer to his application. By way 
 of showing, as he says, " a docility without reserve," he sus- 
 pended the publication in Holland ; and, to make the suspen- 
 sion sure, he withheld the manuscript of the last two chap- 
 ters. Other months passed, and no news from the censorship. 
 The Dutch printers, impatient, engaged a local mathematician 
 to complete the work ; which they jDublished, swarming with 
 errors, with a telittling title-page of their own concocting, 
 and the last pages added by another hand. Finally, to com- 
 plete the series of misfortunes, the Chancellor of France, M. 
 d'Aguesseau, refused the privilege of publication, and left the 
 author to struggle as he might with this complication of em- 
 barrassments. 
 
 The most bigoted reader would look through the work in 
 vain to find either cause or pretext for the ministerial ban. 
 The reason was the freedom with which he had handled the 
 theories of Descartes, who supposed that the earth and the 
 moon were whirled along from west to east by a vast number 
 of minute particles rushing eternally in the same direction. 
 Descartes ruled in science and in literature. Polite society
 
 368 LIFE OF VOLTAIRK 
 
 was Cartesi:in. As M. Saigey remarks, " it savored of good 
 breeding " to profess a belief in the Cartesian whirlwinds. 
 Grandes dames, and the young ladies who composed their 
 courts, had upon their toilet-tables Fontenelle's " Conversa- 
 tions upon the Plurality of Worlds," in which the astronomy 
 of Descartes was adorned Avith all the gi-aces of his style. 
 Descartes was defended against Newton in the most elegant 
 circles. The Duchess du Maine and her court were Carte- 
 sian, and nearly all institutions of learning in France, which 
 took notice of astronomy at all, illustrated the wisdom and the 
 power of the Creator by describing the Cartesian whirlwinds 
 with whatever eloquence they possessed. 
 
 This was precisely the condition of things which a compe- 
 tent author would desire, if he were sure he had the truth on 
 his side. Voltaire's work, impatiently expected, and long de- 
 layed by the perversity of things and men, struggled into life 
 at last, and made a genuine sensation. The errors of the first 
 Holland edition published without his knowledge, the novelty 
 of a poet appearing in the character of a man of science, the 
 author's prompt, vehement explanations and remonstrances, 
 the publication at length of a correct and authorized version, 
 the opposition of the polite world, the flaming zeal of the few 
 Newtonians, all contributed to enhance the celebrity and in- 
 fluence of the book. The " Dutch corsairs," as he styled the 
 impatient printers of Amsterdam, had taken the liberty to 
 entitle the work " The Elements of the Philosophy of New- 
 ton Adapted to Every Capacity " (^mis a la portee de tout le 
 monde). The malign Desfontaines remarked, in his notice, 
 that there was one error of the Dutch edition which the au- 
 thor had not corrected. For portee, said he, read joo?-tg/ since 
 it was only at everybody's door that the new work was put. 
 The work made its way through a vast number of doors, and 
 in ten years there were scarcely ten Cartesians in France. 
 
 Before Newton was off his hands, he was immersed in origi- 
 nal researches. The Academy of Sciences proposed as the 
 subject for the prize essay of 1738 " The Nature of Fire and 
 its Propagation." Voltaire, who was living in a land of fire, 
 near forges and foundries vomiting flame by night and day, 
 resolved to compete for the prize, and entered upon a course 
 of laborious experiment. We have seen him, on previous
 
 VOLTAIRE AND SCIENCE. 369 
 
 pages, setting the Abb(5 Moussinot at work among the chem- 
 ists of Paris. At Chaumont he frequently visited a foundry, 
 where he had scales prepared for weighing huge masses of 
 iron, cold and hot, as well as great pots for weighing melted 
 iron. He weighed from two pounds to two thousand pounds, 
 first cold, and then hot. He worked thoroughly and deliber- 
 ately, beginning by having iron chains put to the scales in- 
 stead of ropes, and taking the precaution to be surrounded by 
 " ten ocular witnesses," of whom one, doubtless, was Madame 
 du Chatelet. What an unwonted scene in a Chaumont foun- 
 dry ! He had three cast-iron pots, very thick, hung upon 
 scales near the furnace, into one of which he caused a hun- 
 dred pounds of liquid iron to be poured ; into another, thiity- 
 five pounds ; into the third, twenty-five. After six hours' 
 cooling, he found that his hundred-pound mass weighed one 
 hundred and four pounds, and that the others had increased 
 in proportion. This experiment he repeated many times, al- 
 ways with the same results. Then he tried it with pots of 
 gray ore, " less metallic " than the cast-iron, and there was 
 neither increase nor diminution of weight in the contents of 
 the pots. Yet he was long in doubt whether heat possessed 
 the property of weight, because the results of his experiments 
 were not uniform, and he could not always determine whether 
 the occasional increase of weight was due to heat or to the 
 absorption of matter from the atmosphere or the vessel. 
 
 He performed a series of experiments with hot and cold 
 liquids, heating various liquids separately, mixing them hot, 
 mixing them cold, pouring a pint of boiling liquid upon a pint 
 of cold, and blending them in all conceivable ways; which led 
 him to the discovery that the temperature resulting from mix- 
 ing two liquids of different temperatures is not always the 
 mean temperature. " I have prepared," he says in his essay, 
 " some experiments upon the heat which liquids communicate 
 to liquids and solids to solids, and I will give a table of the 
 same, if the gentlemen of the Academy are of opinion that it 
 could be of any utility." 
 
 He experimented laboriously upon the second part of his 
 subject, the Propagation of Fire. He tried one experiment 
 which would not have been safe in the drier atmosphere of 
 America, where a spark from a cigar on a still day can set a 
 
 VOL. I. 24
 
 370 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 mountain or a plain on fire. He had a piece of forest, eighty- 
 feet by twenty, partly cleared, but strewn with fallen trees 
 and cut wood ; to one end of which he applied fire by means 
 of straw. The day being serene and dry, the fire advanced 
 twenty feet in an hour, and then went out. But the next day 
 there was a high wind, and the whole eighty feet was burnt 
 over in an hour. 
 
 The science of one century is the ignorance of the next. It 
 was impossible that an essay upon Fire, written in 1737, should 
 have final scientific value, except to mark how far the subject 
 had then been developed ; as Pliny, in his " Natural His- 
 tory," gives us an imperishable and priceless cyclopaedia of 
 human ignorance in the first century. Voltaire's essay is all 
 acuteness and tact ; but it is not free from a little half-con- 
 scious attitudinizing. The doctors recommended him, about 
 this time, to take more exercise in the open air ; hunting, for 
 example. Why not hunt, in a hunting country ? Whereupon 
 he requests the Abbe Moussinot to send him from Paris the 
 complete apparatus and costume of a hunter. He wore it 
 once or twice, but he soon discovered that killing animals and 
 birds for pleasure was not very congenial. He adhered longer 
 to science than to shooting; but we catch glimpses of the trap- 
 pings of the investigator ; we observe a polite company gath- 
 ered round the iron pots of liquid iron, with a poet in the 
 midst of them amiably demonstrating that it is possible for a 
 poet to know something besides verse-making. 
 
 His essay was nearly done, and he was preparing to send it 
 to the Academy, the authorship being duly concealed accord- 
 ing to the rule. Madame du Chatelet, who had dissented from 
 some of his conclusions, suddenly resolved to send in a com- 
 peting essay. " I wished [as she explained to Maupertuis] to 
 try my powers under the shelter of the incognito ; for I ex- 
 pected never to be known. M. du Chatelet was the only one 
 in my confidence, and he kept the secret so well that he said 
 nothing of it even to you at Paris. I could perform no experi- 
 ment, because my project was unknown to M. de Voltaire, 
 and I could not have concealed experiments from him. I 
 made up my mind to compete only a month before the expira- 
 tion of the time set by the Academy for sending in the essays. 
 I could only work in the night, and I was all new in these sub-
 
 VOLTAIRE AND SCIENCE. 371 
 
 jects. M. de Voltaire's work, wliich was almost finished when 
 I began mine, suggested some ideas, as well as the desire to 
 compete. I set to work without knowing whether I should 
 ever see my essay again, and I said nothing about it to M. de 
 Voltaire, because I did not wish to blush before him for an 
 undertaking which I feared might displease him. Besides, I 
 combated almost all his ideas." 
 
 For eight successive nights she toiled at her essay, only 
 sleeping " an hour " each night ; and when nearly overcome 
 by sleep she would plunge her hands into ice-water, walk 
 rapidly up and down the room, and throw her arms about. 
 Thirty essays were received from the different countries of 
 Europe, of which five were pronounced worthy to compete. 
 Two of these select five were written at Cirey ; but the prize 
 was divided among the other three contestants : Professor Eu- 
 ler, of St. Petersburg, Father Lozeraude de Fiesc, of the Jes- 
 uits, and the Count de Crequi-Canai^les, a French nobleman. 
 The essay of the eminent mathematician, Euler, contained 
 some valuable and even memorable points ; it was the work of 
 a man of science. Those of his two associates in glory owed 
 their laurels, as French historians of science tell us, solely to 
 the fact that they adhered to the philosophy of Descartes, 
 which, in 1738, was clinging to life with the tenacity of death. 
 " It savored of good breeding to be Cartesian," — the last re- 
 source of error, that has received its death-wound. Condorcet 
 says boldly that Voltaire's essay deserved the prize, an opinion 
 from which M. Emile Saigey does not dissent.^ " Voltaire's 
 essay [says M. Saigey] is in advance of the science of that 
 age, and we find in it many passages the value of which could 
 not then have been appreciated." 
 
 When the news of the awards reached Cirey, the lady of 
 the chateau told her secret. " I felt [she says] that a rejec- 
 tion shared by him was an honor to me." He took the little 
 comedy in good part ; read her essay, extolled it warmly, pro- 
 cured its honorable publication by the Academy, and wrote an 
 anonymous review of it for the press, which carried the name 
 of the authoress to the ends of Europe. She was gratified by 
 the celebrity he gave her. He dedicated to her almost every- 
 thing he published at this period, and we perceive from her 
 1 La Physique de Voltaire, page 53. '
 
 872 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 letters that she did not enjoy the omission of his compli- 
 mentary e^Mstles in some of tlie foreign editions of his works. 
 In tlie records of the Academy both essays were printed, pre- 
 ceded by a notice : " The authors of the two following pieces 
 having made known their desire that they should be printed, 
 we consent thereto with pleasure, although we cannot approve 
 the idea advanced in either of them of the nature of fire. 
 Both essays give evidence of great reading, great knowledge 
 of the best works upon science, and they are filled with facts 
 and views. Besides, the name alone of the authors can inter- 
 est the public curiosity. No. 6 is by a lady of high rank, 
 Madame du Chatelet, and the piece No. 7 is by one of our best 
 poets." 
 
 At the head of his essay Voltaire placed two Latin verses, 
 which have since done good service in similar ways : — 
 
 " Ignis ubique latet, nnturam amplectitur omnem, 
 Cuncta parit, renovat, dividit, unit, alit." ^ 
 
 D'Alembert asked him who was the author of these lines. 
 *' My dear philosopher [he replied], those two verses are mine. 
 I am like the Bishop of Noyon, who used to say in his sermons, 
 ' My brethren, I took none of these truths which I have just 
 uttered either from the Scripture or from the Fathers ; all 
 came out of the head of your bishop.' " 
 
 Continuing their scientific labors, niadame published, in 
 1740, a work entitled " Institutions Physiques," in which she 
 championed Leibnitz, as Voltaire had championed Newton. 
 He wrote an extensive review of it, in which he mingled gal- 
 lantry and criticism with his usual art, — not unwilling to let 
 his readers see under what a miserable bondage religion itself 
 struggled, when such giants as Leibnitz and Newton could 
 gravely accept the theologian's chronology, and their pupils 
 angrily discuss such frivolous questions as why God did not 
 create the world six thousand years sooner than he did, and 
 whether he could have done so if he had wished it. 
 
 In 1741, he sent to the Academy of Sciences an essay upon 
 the " Computation and Nature of Moving Forces," which shows 
 that, by dint of several years' study of science, mathematically 
 treated, he had become a respectable mathematician. He em- 
 
 ^ Fire is hidden everywhere : fills all nature ; produces, renews, divides, unites, 
 nourishes, all things.
 
 VOLTAIRE AND SCIENCE. 373 
 
 ploys the language of mathematics in this essay with a readi- 
 ness and ease which prove familiar knowledge. He appears 
 to have had some intention of seeking admission to the Acad- 
 emy of Sciences, as " a bulwark " against the hostility of those 
 who were interested in keeping the human mind in bondage 
 to tradition. 
 
 A few years later he wrote scientific essays on subjects more 
 within the range of unlearned readers. The Academy of Bo- 
 logna having elected him a member of their body, he acknowl- 
 edged the compliment by composing an essay for them in the 
 Italian language, upon the Changes which have occurred in 
 our Globe. This essay shows us in an interesting manner 
 what man did not know in geology about the middle of the 
 last century. The spirit that pervades it, and which it incul- 
 cates, is the spirit to which we owe our better knowledge, — 
 the spirit of doubt. It is in this essay that his zeal to relieve 
 infant science from the incubus of sacred legend laid him 
 open to retort. It is said that, even at the present day, there 
 are provincials who believe in a literal deluge of the whole 
 earth ; but in 1746 all theologians assumed it ; and that one 
 legend, universally accepted as sacred history, would have 
 sufficed to clioke science in its cradle. In his zeal, I say, to 
 deliver the human mind from the ignominious bondage of the 
 deluge legend, he made light of the discovery of shells and 
 fossils which had been found upon mountains. Geology had 
 not then explained their presence a mile above the sea, and 
 theologians marked them for their own. 
 
 " A stone," said he, " was discovered in the mountains of 
 Hesse which appeared to bear the impression of a turbot, and 
 upon the Alps a petrified pike ; from which the inference has 
 been drawn that the sea and the rivers have flowed by turns 
 over the mountains. It were more natural to suppose that 
 these fish, carried by a traveler and becoming spoiled, were 
 thrown away, and, in the course of time, were petrified. But 
 that idea was too simple and too little systematic. An an- 
 chor, they say, was found upon a mountain of Switzerland ; 
 people do not reflect that heavy burdens, particularly cannon, 
 have often been transported in men's arms, and that an anchor 
 may have served to hang those burdens to a cleft in the 
 rocks. It is very probable that this anchor was taken from
 
 374 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 one of the little ports of Lake Geneva. Finally, the story of 
 the anchor may be fabulous ; and men like better to declare 
 that it was the anchor of a vessel which was moored in Swit- 
 zerland before the deluge." 
 
 He discourses amusingly upon the question how a universal 
 flood was brought about which covered the highest mountains, 
 and required a quantity of water equal to twenty-four oceans. 
 " Science," he says, "has nothing in common with miracles. 
 Religion commands us to believe them, and reason forbids us 
 to explain them." Dr. Burnet, he adds, conjectured that the 
 ocean was swollen to that prodigious height by boiling ; but 
 no, that could not be; for water in boiling does not increase 
 more than a quarter in bulk. " To what a point we are 
 reduced when we attempt to fathom what we ought only to 
 respect ! " Twenty years later, when a great number of 
 marine deposits had been found far above the level of the 
 sea, he still demands proof that they were marine deposits. 
 Might they not be snail shells ? he asks. To such a point is 
 an author reduced who discusses a geological question before 
 geology exists ! 
 
 During the rest of his life, though he gradually discontinued 
 his more laborious investigations in science, he was an atten- 
 tive student of nature. His essay of 1768, on " Some Singu- 
 larities of Nature," shows that the habit of his mind was to 
 observe and reflect upon the natural facts within his view. 
 If he had lived in our day, he would have subscribed to the 
 scientific periodicals, and kept them well supplied with the 
 shoi't articles their conductors love to receive, such as relate 
 something new about bees, coral, snails, toads, or oysters, or 
 give new conjectures concerning the formation of mountains, 
 seas, lakes, stone, and shells. His interest in nature was gen- 
 uine and lasting. When there were no visitors at the chateau, 
 natural science appears to have furnished Madame du ChS,telet 
 and himself wdth their most familiar topics of conversation, 
 and, particularly, the influence of natural causes upon the 
 character and history of nations. He had much of what we 
 may call the spirit of " Buckle's History of Civilization " in 
 him. We catch them star-gazing, also, in the memoirs of their 
 visitors and secretaries, who were frequently invited to survey 
 the heavens through the telescope. If any strange creature
 
 VOLTAIRE AND SCIENCE. 375 
 
 was exhibited in Paris during their visits to the city, they 
 were of the people who were likely to examine it. He went 
 to see an albino once, of whom he has left us a minute and 
 careful description. He calls it a " white Moor," and speaks of 
 it as belonging to "a race inhabiting the middle of Africa, near 
 the kingdom of Loango." After descanting, as usual, upon the 
 blind credulity and obstinate incredulity of men, he proceeds to 
 give a great number of particulars of the habits and character 
 of this non-existent race. He was credulous himself on this 
 occasion, because it lay near his heart to remove from pro- 
 gressive science the stumbling-block of the Adara-and-Eve 
 legend, and he was eager to seize every chance of showing 
 that our race could not have sprung from a single pair. 
 
 On another occasion his incredulity proved useful. A 
 German chemist of Alsace believed he had found the secret of 
 making saltpetre at one twentieth the ordinary price of the 
 article, and produced some gunpowder made of his saltpetre, 
 which proved to be excellent. He offered to sell the secret 
 for seventeen hundred thousand francs, and one fourth of 
 the profits of the manufacture for twenty years. The con- 
 tract was signed. The head of the powder company and a 
 chemist of repute came to Alsace, and the experiment was 
 performed before them with some appearance of success. 
 The gentlemen from Paris visited Voltaire, and explained 
 their errand. He said to the chief of the powder company, 
 " If you do not pay the seventeen hundred thousand francs 
 until after you have made saltpetre, you will keep your money 
 always." The chemist declared that saltpetre had been actu- 
 ally made. " I do not believe it," said Voltaire. " Why 
 not?" " Men " [was his reply] " make nothing. They unite 
 and disunite ; but it belongs only to nature to make." The 
 German tried for three months to produce saltpetre, without 
 success. He had found in the ruins of some ancient stables 
 and cellars a small quantity of saltpetre, which had misled 
 him into the belief that he could get any required quantity 
 from the earth of that region.^ 
 
 1 Des Singalarites de la Nature, par Voltaire. Chapter xxii.
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 VISITORS AT CIREY. 
 
 No other man m Europe was so attentive to what passed at 
 Cirey as the Prince Ro^'al of Prussia, whose passion for Vol- 
 taire did not diminish. In the spring of 1737 he announced 
 his purpose of sending as " ambassador " to Cirey his merry 
 and voluble young companion, Kaiserling, who would, as he 
 hoped, bring back to him a treasure of unpublished writings, 
 peihaps even some cantos of " La Pucelle." " In taking leave 
 of my little friend," wrote the prince, July 6, 1737, " I said 
 to him, ' Think that you are going to the terrestrial paradise, 
 
 — to a place a thousand times more delicious than the island 
 of Calypso ; that the goddess of those haunts yields in no de- 
 gree to the beaut}^ of the enchantress of Telemachus ; that you 
 will find in her all the charms of the mind, so preferable to 
 those of the person ; that this marvel occupies her leisure in 
 the search after truth. There it is that you will see the hu- 
 man spirit in its last degree of perfection, — wisdom without 
 austerity, enlivened by love and laughter. There you will 
 see on the one hand the sublime Voltaire, and on the other 
 the amiable author of " Le Mondain ; " him who now soars 
 above Newton, and now without abasement sings of Phyllis. 
 How, my dear Cesarion, shall we be able to tear j'ou away 
 from a retreat so full of charms? Against such attractions 
 bow weak will be the bonds of an old friendship ! ' " 
 
 He arrived at the chateau, bearing a portrait of the prince 
 for Voltaire, an elegant writing-desk of amber for madame, 
 an installment of M. Wolf's " Metaphysics " for both, a 
 glowing letter of twenty pages, a packet of verses, and some 
 German books. He had the warmest welcome, and such en- 
 tertainment as no palace in Europe could then have afforded, 
 
 — tragedies, comedies, burlesques, puppets, the magic-lantern, 
 music, fetes, the society of a woman skilled in the agree-
 
 VISITORS AT CIREY. 377 
 
 able arts, and the conversation of the most amusing man 
 alive. " Madame," as Voltaire wrote to Thieriot, " received 
 him so well, gave him such agreeable fetes^ with such an easy- 
 grace, with so little of the fuss and fatigue of 2^ fete, forced him 
 to accept extremely pretty presents in a manner so noble and 
 so adroit, that he returned enchanted with everything he had 
 seen, heard, and received." He did, indeed. He told his 
 prince that when Madame du Chatelet talked he loved her 
 mind, and when she was silent he was enamored of her per- 
 son. Cesarion, too, made an agreeable impression, a fluent, 
 vivacious young man, who " spoke all languages, and some- 
 times spoke them all at once." 
 
 Prussians then looked to Frederic with longing and enthusi- 
 asm, weary of the arbitrary drunkard, his father ; and Cesa- 
 rion was of course full of the prince's praises, not unmindful 
 of his hope one day to " possess " Voltaire. " Our prince 
 [said he] at present is not rich, and he is unwilling to borrow, 
 because, as he says, he is mortal, and he is not sure that his 
 father would pay his debts." But nothing was more cer- 
 tain than that he would recompense with striking liberality 
 any one who should be in his service without being his sub- 
 ject. Upon hearing this, Voltaire extolled his friend Thie- 
 riot in terms which, it is to be feared, were not justified by 
 events. 
 
 Kaiserling took home with him a huge and rare bundle of 
 manuscript, — parts of "Louis XIV.," many short poems, 
 some tracts and treatises upon philosophy, besides new editions 
 of former works; but not a canto, not a line, of "La Pu- 
 celle " ! Madame la Marquise put down her foot; she would 
 not risk her poet again, so soon after the mishap of "Le 
 Mondain," for the best prince in Christendom ! She had the 
 poem in custody, locked in her desk, and she would not sur- 
 render it. " The friendship with which she honors me [wrote 
 Voltaire to Frederic] does not permit me to hazard a thing 
 which might separate me from her forever. She has re- 
 nounced all to live with me in the bosom of retreat and 
 
 study She knows that M. de Kaiserling was watched 
 
 at Strasbourg, that he will be again on his return, that spies 
 are after him, that he may be searched ; and, above all, she 
 knows that you would not willingly risk the happiness of
 
 378 LIFE OF VOLTAIKE. 
 
 your true subjects at Cirey for a pleasantry in verse." After 
 an intoxicating visit of something less than a month, the 
 Baron de Kaiserling returned to Remusburg to inflame anew 
 his prince's admiration for the inhabitants of the enchanted 
 castle. 
 
 It was not every visitor who saw the interior of that abode 
 in so rosy a light. 
 
 M. Mignot, husband of Voltaire's sister, died in 1737, leav- 
 ing two marriageable daughters with insufficient portions. 
 Voltaire played the part of a good French uncle on this oc- 
 casion, and set Thieriot at work arranging for their honorable 
 marriage, undertaking to provide for the elder both husband 
 and dot. The husband whom Voltaire proposed for her was 
 a son of Madame Champbonin, a jovial dame who lived near 
 Cirey, and much enlivened the society of the neighborhood, — 
 a great favorite everywhere, and extremely beloved by him. 
 " God forbid [he wrote to Thieriot] that I should in the least 
 constrain her inclinations. To aim at the liberty of a fellow 
 creature appears to me a crime against humanity ; it is the 
 sin against nature." The young lady, a true child of Paris, 
 pupil of the composer Rameau, accustomed to the gayeties of 
 the metropolis, was not disposed to "bury herself " in a coun- 
 try chateau. He was disappointed, but yielded with the 
 better grace because he had taken the precaution to sound his 
 niece before taking any other step. " After all [he wrote to 
 Thieriot], I have really no family but them, and I should be 
 very glad to attach them to me. It is necessary to bear in 
 mind that we become old, infirm, and that then it is sweet 
 to find relatives attached to us by gratitude. If they marry 
 bourgeois of Paris, I am their very humble servant, but they 
 are lost to me. It is a sorry thing to be an old maid. The 
 princesses of the blood find it very troublesome to endure a 
 condition contrary to nature. We are born to have children. 
 It is only certain fools of philosophers, like ourselves, who can 
 decently avoid the general rule." 
 
 The result of much negotiation was that Mademoiselle 
 Mignot, aged twenty-seven, married, February 25, 1738, the 
 man of her choice, M. Denis, formerly a captain in a French 
 regiment, then holding an office in the commissariat. Uncle 
 Voltaire gave the pair his blessing, an invitation to pass the
 
 VISITORS AT CIREY. 379 
 
 honeymoon at Cirey, and thirty thousand francs, all of which 
 they accepted. The younger lady, four months after, married 
 Nicholas-Joseph de Dompierre, seigneur of Fontaine-Hornoy, 
 chief of the finance bureau at Amiens. They were called sim- 
 ply M. and jNIadame de Fontaine, and the uncle of the bride 
 gave her twenty-five thousand francs. 
 
 These young ladies had another uncle, Voltaire's " Jansen- 
 ist of a brother," now styled by his friends tlie Abbe Arouet. 
 He, too, behaved liberally to them. Besides attending both 
 weddings, he gave the elder niece so handsome a present 
 (amount unknown) that Madame du Chatelet wished that all 
 her uncles and aunts had &iven her as much on her wedding-- 
 day. Armand Arouet was still an assiduous convulsionist, 
 unmarried, wholly estranged from the author of the " Mon- 
 dain," who suspected his austere brother of a secret marriage, 
 and mentions that he chose his mistresses from amonor the 
 prettiest convulsionists. Voltaire could not be tempted to at- 
 tend either of the weddings, where, as he said, there would be 
 " crowds of relations, quibbling puns, flat jests, broad stories 
 to make the bride blush and the prudes purse their lips, a 
 great noise, all talking together, giggling without merriment, 
 heavy kisses heavily given, and little girls looking at every- 
 thing out of the corner of their eyes." No such wedding could 
 draw liim from an enchanted castle in the country to the street 
 of the Two Balls at Paris. 
 
 But Madame Denis and her husband visited a rich and lib- 
 eral uncle at Cirey, in March, 1738. The bride saw in the 
 chateau an enchanted castle indeed, but enchanted only as the 
 oak-tree was enchanted that held Ariel in its gnarled and 
 knotted embrace. The future mistress of Ferney was aghast 
 at her uncle's bondage. 
 
 "I am in despair [she wrote to match-maker Tliieriot]. I be- 
 lieve him lost to all his friends. He is bound in such a way that it 
 appears to me impossible that he can break his chains. They are in 
 a solitude that is frightful for humanity. Cirey is four leagues from 
 a habitation, in a region of mountains and wastes ; and they are aban- 
 doned by all their friends, having almost no one from Paris. Such is 
 the life led by the greatest genius of our age ; with a woman, it is 
 true, of much intellect, very pretty, who employs all the art imagina- 
 ble to beguile him. There is no kind of personal decoration which
 
 380 LIFE OF VOLTAIKE. 
 
 she does not arrange, nor passages of the best philosophers which she 
 does not cite, to please him. To that end nothing is spared. He ap- 
 pears more enchanted with her than ever. He is building a handsome 
 addition to the chateau, in which there will be a dark room for experi- 
 ments in natural philosophy. The theatre is very pretty, but they do 
 not use it for want of actors. All the actors of the country for ten 
 miles round are under orders to come to the chateau. They did all 
 that was possible to have them there during our stay ; but they could 
 only exhibit to us some puppets, which were very good. We were 
 received in perfect style. My uncle tenderly loves M. Denis ; which 
 does not astonish me, for he is very amiable." ^ 
 
 Madame Denis was not so far wrong. There was a flaw in 
 the bond between these two gifted and brilliant persons which 
 of necessity vitiated their union, making each a kind of slave 
 to the other. She was always in dread of his breaking away ; 
 and he was prevented from doing so by compassion and the 
 instinct of fidelity. He should have lived in bis own chateau, 
 and the family inhabiting that chateau should have been his 
 family, not another man's. 
 
 Another visitor of the year 1738 makes this plainer. Ma- 
 dame de Grafigny was a lady whom Voltaire and Madame du 
 Chatelet had met at the little court of King Stanislas in Lor- 
 raine, where she was an object of sj'^mpathy on account of the 
 violence and brutality of her husband, chamberlain to the 
 Duke of Lorraine. After years of misery she was divorced 
 from the chamberlain, who ended his days in prison. The in- 
 mates of Cirey offered her an asylum for a time, and in De- 
 cember, 1738, she came. She was then forty-three years of 
 age, unknown to fame ; for it was not till she was fifty-two 
 that the publication of her romance, " Lettres d'une P^ru- 
 vienne," gave her celebrity. Her portrait shows us a hand- 
 some, full-formed woman, " fair, fat, and forty," and her writ- 
 ings are, as Sainte-Beuve styles them, cailletage (gossip). 
 During her residence at Cirey she wrote quires of cailletage to 
 a gentleman at Luneville, where the fallen majesty of Poland 
 spent his French allowance. A volume of these letters was 
 published in 1820, in which we can see the routine of life at 
 the chateau almost as plainly as if we had been femme de 
 chambre to the writer ; since, in accordance with the custom 
 
 1 Voltaire, Pieces Inedites. Paris, 1820, page 289. 
 
 I
 
 VISITORS AT CIREY. 381 
 
 of that age and land, she wrote as freely to a man as she could 
 have gossiped with a woman.^ 
 
 Like Kaiserling, she was under the spell long before she 
 reached the enchanted abode. Besides the singular favor in 
 which the poet was held at the Polish court, the most extrav- 
 agant accounts had been brought thither of the splendors of 
 the chateau, the mysterious life led in it, the wizard appara- 
 tus, the dark chamber, the magician-like habits of the poet, 
 and the unearthly fascinations of the lady of the castle. A 
 burlesque in this taste had been published in Paris, and the 
 chateau was a theme at the burlesque theatres. Kaiserling 
 came enchanted, stayed three weeks, and went away en- 
 chanted. Madame de Grafigny came enchanted, stayed three 
 months, and left disenchanted. 
 
 She relates her arrival at Cirey to her corresj)ondent, who 
 was also under the spell : — 
 
 " Upon seeing the address of this letter, you leap with joy, and 
 you say : Ah ! Mon Dieu, she is at Cireij ! I started before day- 
 light ; I was present at the toilet of the sun. I had admirable 
 weather and roads as far as Joinville, just as in summer, even to the 
 dust, which one could do very well without. I reached Joinville 
 in a little chaise of Madame Royale [Duchess de Lorraine] but 
 there the coachman told me that it was impossible they could go 
 further. What was I to do ? I took a post-chaise. I arrived at 
 Cirey two hours after dark, dying of fright from the state of the 
 roads, which the devil had made horrible, expecting every moment to 
 be overturned ; paddling in the mud sometimes, for the postilions 
 told me that if I did not alight I should be overturned. Judjre of 
 my condition ! However, I arrived. The nymph received me very 
 well. I remained a moment in her chamber, then went up to my 
 own to rest. A moment after arrived, who ? Your idol, holding a 
 little candlestick in his hand, like a monk. He caressed me a thou- 
 sand times ; he appeared so glad to see me that his demonstrations 
 went even to transport ; he kissed my hands ten times, and questioned 
 me about myself with a very touching air of interest. At last he 
 went away in order to give me an opportunity to write to you 
 
 " I left my letter to dress, for fear the supper-bell should ring. I 
 hear nothing of it, and so I am going to add a word or two. You are 
 astonished, perhaps, that I say, simply, the nymph received me very 
 
 1 Vie Prive'e de Voltaire et Madame du Chatelct pendant un Sdjour de six 
 Mois a Cirey. Paris, 1820.
 
 882 LITE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 well ; it is all I have to tell you. No ; I forgot that she spoke to me 
 at once of her lawsuit, without any ceremony. Her clack [_cnquet] 
 is wonderful ; she speaks extremely fast, and just as I do when I play 
 the Frenchwoman. She talks like an angel ; so much I perceived. 
 She had on a robe of chintz and a large apron of black taffeta ; her 
 black hair is very long, and it is gathered up behind to the top of her 
 head, and curled like that of little children, which is very becoming 
 to her. As I have seen nothing yet except her dress, I can speak to 
 you of nothing but her dress. With regard to your idol, I know not 
 if he powdered himself for my sake, but all I can tell you is that he 
 was dressed as he would have beeu at Paris. The goudman [M. 
 du Chatelet] leaves to-morrow for Brussels, when we three shall be 
 alone ; and no one will shed any tears on account of it : that is a 
 secret which we have already imparted to one another." 
 
 The summons to supper here interrupted the epistle. To 
 understand the account she gives of the conversation at the 
 table, the reader needs to be informed that Voltaire's feud 
 ■with the poet J. B. Rousseau was assuming more importance, 
 and was both complicated and embittered by a quarrel with 
 the journalist Desfontaines, editor of the " Observations," re- 
 ferred to in the course of the repast. As we shall be obliged 
 very soon to return to this affair, and show how authors and 
 critics loved one another a hundred and forty years ago, it is 
 only necessary here to say that Voltaire at this time was gun- 
 powder to any spark of allusion to Rousseau or Desfontaines. 
 Madame de Grafigny describes her first meal at the cha- 
 teau : — 
 
 " I was conducted to a suite of apartments which I recognized at 
 once to be Voltaire's. He came to receive me. No one else had 
 arrived, and yet I had not the time to cast a glance around the room. 
 The company placed themselves at the table, and well content was 
 I ; and all the more when I compared this supper with my evening 
 adventure on the road. What a thing is life ! said I to myself. A 
 little while asro in darkness and mire ; now in an enchanted place. 
 What is there that we did not speak of? Poetry, science, art; all m 
 the tone of badinage and good breeding. I should like to be able to 
 report to you that charming conversation, that enchanting conversa- 
 tion ; but it is not in me to do so. The supper was not abundant, but 
 it was rare, elegant, and delicate ; served, also, with a profusion of 
 silver plate. Opposite me I had five globes and all the philosophical 
 apparatus ; for it was in the little hall that we enjoyed this unique
 
 VISITORS AT CIREY. 38 
 
 o 
 
 repast. Voltaire by my side, as polite, as attentive, as he is amiable 
 and learned ; the lord of the castle on the other side. This is to be 
 my place every evening : thus my left ear will be sweetly charmed, 
 while the other is very slightly bored ; for the marquis says little, 
 and goes away as soon as we leave the table. At the dessert comes 
 the perfume ; conversation as instructive as agreeable. They spoke 
 of books, as you may well believe, and J. B. Rousseau was a topic. 
 Oh, by our Lady ! then the man remained, and the hero vanished. He 
 would scarcely pardon any one who should praise Rousseau. At last 
 the conversation turned upon the various kinds of poetry. ' For my 
 part,' said the lady, ' odes [Rousseau wrote many] I cannot endure.' 
 'Ah, indeed!' said, your idol; 'what is an ode? It is the most 
 trifling merit to compose one. Fustian, rhapsodies, in the style of 
 Hudibras ; it is the most execrable thing in the world. I do not com- 
 prehend how honest people read such things.' 
 
 " Is not there the man ? I know not how he came to speak of the 
 ' Observations ' of Desfontaines. I asked him if he had sent for them. 
 * Yes,' said he ; and all at once he launched invectives against the 
 author and against the work. He gave me a pamphlet to read, en- 
 titled ' A Preservative against the Observations ' (Voltaire's own), 
 which he pretends was written by one of his friends. I believe that 
 he could not speak of Rousseau and Desfontaines without a fermenta- 
 tion of the blood equivalent to fever. But as it seized him we retired 
 in order to let him go to bed. 
 
 " I have read that ' Preservative,' for it was very necessary that I 
 should be able to say that I had read it. In sending to ask how I was, 
 Voltaire j^resented to me a beautiful Newton, bound in morocco. As 
 I do not dine to-day, I began to read Newton, instead of writing to 
 you. Yes, my friend, instead of writing to yon, although I was dying 
 of desire to write ; but you will feel how necessary it is that I should 
 show a little eagerness in recognizing the polite and honorable atten- 
 tion of your idol, and to be able to speak to him of the work in the 
 evening." 
 
 Tlie next day Madame de Grafigny liad the pleasure of in- 
 specting Voltaire's rooms, and penned a glowing account of 
 them to her friend : — 
 
 " Voltaire made me a little visit. I drove him out, because my room 
 is very chilly, and he had a very bad cold. To diive out Voltaire ! 
 Ah, Dieu! you find that a very strong expression, and so it is ; but it 
 is thus that we become familiar with great men when we live with them. 
 Then came in the lord of the castle (not yet gone to Brussels), who 
 bored me pitilessly for two hours and a half. At last, Voltaire, haK
 
 884 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 an hour before supper, got me away by sending me a message that, 
 since I was unwilling he should remain in my chamber, I should take 
 the trouble of soingf down to his. I did not hold out asrainst this in- 
 vitation, and I descended at once. I had only seen his rooms in pass- 
 ing, but now he made me admire them, and I will give you a descrip- 
 tion of them. 
 
 " His little wing: is so close to the chateau that the door of it is 
 at the bottom of the grand staircase. There is, first, a small ante- 
 chamber, as large as your hand ; then comes his bedroom, which is 
 small, low, and hung with crimson velvet, with an alcove (for the bed) 
 of the same, set off with gold fringe. That is the furniture for winter. 
 There is little tapestry in his rooms, but a great deal of wainscoting, 
 in which are framed some charming pictures. There are mirrors, 
 brackets of admirable enamel, porcelains, a clock sustained by gro- 
 tesque figures ; a world of things of that nature, costly, rare, and, above 
 all, so spotlessly clean that you could kiss the floor. There is an open 
 case containing a service of silver ; there is everything which the su- 
 perjlu, chose si necessm're, has been able to devise. And what silver ! 
 .what workmanship ! There is a casket containing twelve rings of cut 
 stone, besides two of diamonds. From this room we pass into the lit- 
 tle hall, which is not more than thirty or forty feet in length. Be- 
 tween the windows are two extremely beautiful statuettes upon pedes- 
 tals of Indian lacquer : one is the Venus Farnese, the other Hercules. 
 The other side of the windows is occupied by two cases : one for books, 
 and one for the apparatus. Between the two cases there is a stove 
 in the wall, which renders the air like that of spring. In front of I 
 the stove is a large pedestal, upon which there is a Cupid of some 
 magnitude who is discharging an arrow, — an unfinished work, for they ; 
 
 are making a sculjotured niche for that Cupid which will conceal the 
 stove entirely. The following is the inscription below this Cupid : — |. 
 
 ' Whoe'er thou art, thy master he, U 
 
 He is, or was, or ought to be.' 
 
 " The gallery is wainscoted and varnished light yellow. Clocks, 
 tables, bureaus, — I need not say that nothing of that kind is want- 
 ing. Beyond is the dark chamber, which is not yet finished ; nor is 
 the one completed where he intends to put his apparatus ; and this is 
 the reason why it is all now in the hall. There is but a single sofa, 
 and no commodious arm-chairs ; I mean that the few which are there 
 are good, but there are no stuffed arm-chairs, — bodily ease not being 
 his luxury, as it seems. The panels of the wainscot are of India paper, 
 extremely beautiful ; the screens are of the same. There are writing- 
 tables, porcelains, and all in a taste extremely elegant. There is one 
 door which opens into the garden, and outside of the door is a very
 
 VISITORS AT CIREY. 385 
 
 pretty grotto. You will be very glad, I think, to have an idea of the 
 temple of your idol, since you cannot see it." 
 
 On the following day the guest had an opportunity to ex- 
 amine the rooms of Madame du Chatelet, which astonished 
 her exceedingly. 
 
 " To-day I came down at eleven o'clock for coffee, which is taken 
 in the new hall. Voltaire was in his dressing-gown, but he has a very 
 bad cold. We did not go to mass, for it is not a fete day here. They 
 spoke of the eternal lawsuit during the whole breakfast, which lasted 
 an hour and a half. Voltaire began to write, and we — the lady of the 
 castle and myself — went into her part of the chateau to see it, because 
 I had not yet examined it. Voltaire's rooms are nothing in compari- 
 son with hers. Her bedroom is wainscoted in light yellow, and var- 
 nished with light blue mouldings ; an alcove for the bed of the same, 
 lined with charming paper of India. The bed is of watered blue silk, 
 and the whole is so assorted that, even to the basket for her dog, all is 
 yellow and blue ; the wood of the arm-chairs, also, the desk, bureau, and 
 brackets. The mirrors and their silver frames are of an admirable 
 brilliancy. A great door of plate-glass opens into the library, which is 
 not yet finished. The carving is as fine as that of a snuff-box ; nothing 
 can be prettier than the whole effect. There are to be mirrors in this 
 room, and pictures by Paul Veronese and others. On one side of the 
 alcove for the bed is a little boudoir, so exquisite that, on entering 
 it, one is ready to fall upon one's knees. The walls of this boudoir 
 are blue, and the ceiling was painted and varnished by a pupil of Mar- 
 tin, who has been here three years. All the small panels are filled 
 with pictures by Watteau : the Five. Senses, the Two Tales of La Fon- 
 taine, tlie Kiss Taken and Returned, of which I have the two engrav- 
 ings, and Brother Philip's Geese. Ah, what pictures ! The frames are 
 gilt and filigree. I saw there also the Three Graces, as beautiful and 
 lovely as the mother of the tender Cupids. There is a fire-place with 
 brackets by Martin, with some pretty things upon them, among others 
 an amber writing-desk, wliich the Prince of Prussia sent her with some 
 verses. The only furniture is a large arm-chair stuffed in white taffeta, 
 and two stools to match ; for, thanks be to God, I have not seen one 
 couch in all the house. This divine boudoir has a single window, 
 which looks out upon a charming terrace and an admirable view. On 
 the other side of the alcove is a garde robe, divine, paved with marble, 
 wainscoted in linen-gray, with the prettiest engravings. Indeed, the 
 very muslin curtains of the windows are bordered with exquisite taste. 
 No ; there is nothing in the world so pretty ! 
 
 " After having examined the rooms we remained in her chamber. 
 
 VOL. I. 25
 
 386 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 She then related to me the history of that lawsuit of hers, from its 
 origin, about eighty years ago, down to the present day. This little 
 conversation lasted more than an hour and a half, and, strange to say, 
 it did not fatigue me. That, however, was natural enough ; she talks 
 80 well that ennui has not time to get a hearing. She also showed me 
 her jewel-case, which is more beautiful than that of Madame de Riche- 
 lieu. I do not cease wondering at it, for when she was at Craon she 
 had only one shell snuff-box ; now she has fifteen or twenty of gold and 
 precious stones, as well as some of enamel and enameled gold, a new 
 mode, whicli must be of very high price ; as many navetles of the same 
 kind, each more magnificent than the rest ; watches of jasper adorned 
 with diamonds; some elegant boxes, immense things. She has also 
 rings of rare stones, and trinkets without end and of all kinds. In 
 fact, I still wonder at it, for her family has never been rich." 
 
 Madame de Grafigny's own room was in dismal contrast to 
 these splendors : — 
 
 " But you must know what sort of a chamber I have. In height 
 and size it is a hall, where all the winds disport, entering by a thou- 
 sand crevices around the window, which I will have stopped if God 
 gives me life. This immense room has but a single window, cut into 
 three, according to the ancient fashion, having no protection except six 
 shutters. The wainscoting, which is whitish, lessens a little the gloom 
 of the apartment, dim from the little light that enters it, and the nar- 
 rowness of the view ; for an arid mountain, which I could almost 
 touch with my hand, masks it completely. At the foot of this mount- 
 ain is a little meadow, perhaps fifty feet wide, upon which a little 
 stream is seen creeping with a thousand turns. The tapestry is of 
 grand personages unknown to me, and ugly enough. There is an al- 
 cove hung with very rich cloths, but unpleasing to the sight through 
 their ill-assorted colors. As to the fire-place, there is nothing to say 
 of it ; it is of such dimensions that all the snbat could be within range 
 at the same moment. We burn in it about half a cord of wood every 
 day, without in the least mollifying the air of the room In- 
 deed, except the apartments of the lady and Voltaire, the chateau is 
 dirty enough to disgust one. From the window, the gardens appear 
 to be beautiful." 
 
 The guest had not been long at Cirey before she witnessed 
 a tiff between the lovers : — 
 
 " About four in the afternoon, as I was reading, I was sent for to 
 come down-stairs. I found the lady, who was going to bed, as she 
 was not quite well. She said to me that, as she could not work. Vol-
 
 VISITORS AT CIREY. 387 
 
 taire was going to read us his tragedy of ' M^rope.' Voltaire arrives. 
 The hidy takes a fancy to make hina put ou another coat. The one 
 he had on, it is true, was not very nice, but it was well powdered, arfd 
 had upon it fine lace. He gave her many good reasons for not chang- 
 ing it, as, that it would give him a chill, and that he would catch 
 cold for nothing. At last, he was obliging enough to send for his 
 valet de chambre, that he might get him another coat. The valet, at 
 the moment, could not be found, and Voltaire believed that the subject 
 would be dropped. Not at all ; the persecution recommenced. Vi- 
 vacity seizes Voltaire ; he speaks to her warmly in English, and leaves 
 the room. Madame sends, a moment after, to call him back. He 
 replies that he has the colic, and behold ' Merope ' at the devil. I 
 was furious. The lady begged me to read aloud the dialogues of 
 M. Algarotti. I read and laughed, as in the morning. At length, a 
 gentleman of the neighborhood came in, whereupon I rose, saying 
 that 1 was going to see Voltaire. The lady told me to try and bring 
 him back. I found him with the lady who is staying here [Madame 
 Champbonin], who, I may remark, seems to me to be in his confi- 
 dence. He was in the best humor, having forgotten that he had the 
 colic. We had already talked a little while, when the lady of the 
 chateau sent to call us. At length he went back to her ; and this man, 
 who had just been laughing with us, resumed his ill-humor on reen- 
 tering her chamber, under the pretext of the colic. He put himself 
 into a corner, and said not a woi'd. Some time after, the neighbor 
 went out, upon which the pouters spoke to one another in English, 
 and, a minute after, ' Merope ' appeared upon the scene. This is the 
 first sign of love that I have observed ; for they behave with an admi- 
 rable decency. But she renders his life a little hard \_uii peic dure'].^ 
 
 " I send you this long detail in order that you may understand how 
 they are together. At last, he read two acts of 'Merope.' I shed 
 
 tears at the first After the reading we discussed the piece — 
 
 the lady and I — until supper-time. She does not like it, and turns it 
 into ridicule as much as she can ; which little pleases poor Voltaire, 
 
 who was like a patient, not daring to join in our discussion 
 
 The author was so afraid of another quarrel that the little which he 
 said was against me. The supper was like a supper of Luneville ; we 
 beat our sides for something to say, and no one said a word. After 
 supper we looked at the globe, — Voltaire, the fat lady, and myself; 
 for the lovely nymph spoke not, pretending to be asleep. 
 
 "Voltaire is always charming, and also always occupied with my 
 amusement. His attention is unwearying, and it is evident that he is 
 fearful of my becoming bored. He is nmch mistaken. To be bored 
 ^ All the italics in these extracts are those of Madame de Grafigny.
 
 388 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 near Voltaire ! Ah, Dieu! that is not possible ; I have not even the 
 leisure to think that there is such a thing as ennui in the world. I 
 have the health of a fish-woman, and wake as easily as a mouse. Is 
 it because I eat less, or because my mind is so vividly and agreeably 
 acted upon ? .... It is a pleasure for me to laugh inwardly at their 
 fanaticism for Newton, and to hear people of the best understanding 
 utter imbecilities [^des hetises] dictated by prejudice. I do not dispute, 
 as you may believe, but I get my profit from it in a knowledge of the 
 human mind." 
 
 Madame continued daily to record incidents and traits. I 
 add a few paragraphs : — 
 
 " After breakfast, the goddess of these haunts took it into her head 
 to have a ride in her caliche. I cared little to go, on account of her 
 horses, which are like ill-governed children. At length, I was so 
 much pressed that I consented to go. But, ma fox! when I saw the 
 gambols of those messieurs I could not muster the courage to get into 
 the carriage. Nevertheless, I should have been obliged to get in but 
 for the humane Voltaire, who said that it was ridiculous to force oblig- 
 ing people to take pleasures which for them were pains. Adorable 
 words, were they not ? So I remained at home with our lady guest, 
 who is as idle as I. We had a walk together, and then she took me 
 to see the bath-rooms. Ah, what an enchanting place ! The ante- 
 chamber is of the size of your bed ; the bath-room itself is entirely 
 lined with porcelain tiles, except the pavement, which is marble. Then 
 there is a dressing-room of the same size, the wainscoting of which is 
 enameled with a clear, brilliant sea-green, gay, divine, admirably carved 
 and gilt ; furniture to match, — a little sofa, charming little arm-chairs 
 in the same style, all carved and gilt ; brackets, porcelains, engravings, 
 pictures, and a toilet-table ; the ceiling painted ; the chamber rich, and 
 equal to the cabinet in all respects, with mirrors, and amusing books 
 upon enameled tables. Everything seemed to be made for the people 
 of Lillii^ut. No ; there is nothing there so pretty, so delicious, and so 
 enchanting as this place. If I had a suite of apartments like that, I 
 would have myself roused in the middle of the night to see it. The 
 fire-place is not larger than an ordinary arm-chair, but it is a jewel to 
 
 put in your pocket After supper Voltaire gave us the magic 
 
 lantern, accompanying the exhibition with words to make you die of 
 laughter. He exhibited all the circle of the Duke de Richelieu, the 
 history of the Abbe Desfontaines, and all sorts of tales, always in the 
 manner of a Savoyard. No ; there was never anything so funny ! " 
 
 "• Yesterday at supper Voltaire was of a charming gayety. He told 
 us some stories which are not good except from his mouth. He told 
 
 •I
 
 VISITORS AT CIREY. 389 
 
 me some anecdotes of Boileau that are not in print. There were 
 some impromptu verses, also, which I will send you if he will dictate 
 them to me. I leave you to imagine the pleasure there is in living 
 with such people. But wait ; I still have something to say to you. 
 This morning the lady of the house read us a geometrical calcula- 
 tion of an English dreamer, who pretends to demonstrate that the in- 
 habitants of Jupiter are of the same height as King G., (sic) of whom 
 the Scripture speaks. The book was in Latin, and she read it to us 
 in French. She hesitated a moment at each period, and I supposed 
 that it was to understand the calculations, which are given at length 
 in the book. Ijut no ; she translated easily the mathematical terms ; 
 the numbers, the extravagances, nothing stopped her. Is not that 
 really astonishing.'' " 
 
 The Abbe de Breteuil, a brother of Madame du Chatelet, 
 passed nine days at the chateau, and during his stay there were 
 gay doings. This gentleman was a genuine abbe of the period, 
 having nothing of the ecclesiastic except his title and revenue. 
 Gay were the suppers now, for the abbd had a true churchman's 
 stock of stories of the untranslatable kind, which drew from 
 Voltaire his ample quota ; and, between them, they made Ma- 
 dame de Grafigny laugh "to split her spleen," as she remarked. 
 She gives some specimens of these comic tales, wliich serve to 
 show that neither sex, nor profession, nor rank, was a restraint 
 upon the license of the tongue in those good old times of the rS- 
 gime. They were such stories as a party of young fellows might 
 be supposed to tell in the last hour of a convivial party, in- 
 nocent enough, but not repeatable. Now, too, " La Pucelle " 
 was brought out from Madame du Chatelet's desk, and the 
 author read a canto or two ahnost every night to the abbe and 
 the ladies, much to the delight of Madame de Grafigny, who 
 wrote an outline of each canto for the amusement of her corre- 
 spondent ; and he, in his turn, was infinitely entertained by 
 them. " The canto of Jeanne [he wrote, in one of his replies] 
 is charming." Madame de Grafigny gives the routine of a day 
 during the abbe's stay at the chateau : — 
 
 "Between half past ten and half past one, they summon every 
 one to coffee, which is taken in Voltaire's hall. The meal usually 
 lasts an hour, more or less. Precisely at noon, the people who are 
 called here the coachmen go to dinner. These coachmen are the lord 
 of the castle, the fat lady, and her son ; the latter never appearing
 
 390 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 except when there is something to be copied. After coffee, we — 
 that is to say, Voltaire, madame, and myself — remain half an hour. 
 Then he makes us a low bow, and tells us to go away ; upon which 
 we return to our rooms. Toward four o'clock, sometimes, we take 
 a slight repast. At nine we sup, and remain together till midnight. 
 Bien ! what suppers ! They are always the suppers of Damocles. All 
 the pleasures are in attendance ; but, alas, how short is the time ! 
 Oh, vion Dieu! Nothing is wanting to them, not even the Dam- 
 ocles sword, which is represented by the swift flight of time. The 
 lord of the castle takes his place at the table, does not eat, falls 
 asleep, consequently says not a word, and goes out with the tray. 
 .... Yesterday, after supper, there was a charming scene. Vol- 
 taire had the pouts on account of a glass of Rhine wine which ma- 
 dame prevented his drinking ; he would not read Jeanne, as he had 
 promised, being in an extremely bad humor. The brother and my- 
 self, by force of pleasantries, succeeded at last in restoring him. The 
 lady, who was also pouting, was unable to keep it up. All this made 
 a scene of delicious jests, which lasted a long time, finishing with a 
 canto of Jeanne, which was no better than that scene." 
 
 More serious readings were given sometimes, such as Vol- 
 taire's " Epistles upon Man ; " but, as these poems contained 
 passages reflecting more or less openly upon Rousseau and Des- 
 fontaines, they were occasionally accompanied by explosions of 
 what the French politely call " vivacity." Madame du Chatelet 
 remarked, one morning at breakfast, that, in the Epistle upon 
 Envy, which the poet had just read, there was too much about 
 Rousseau. "If he \vere dead [said Voltaire], I would have 
 him dug up to hang him." Madame de Grafigny deplored his 
 " fanaticism " with regard to these two men. " I have just 
 come [she writes] from a terrible conversation upon them, in 
 which we tried to persuade him to despise them. Oh, human 
 weakness ! He has neither rhyme nor reason when he speaks 
 of them. It is he who has the engravings (caricatures of 
 them) made, and he who composes the verses underneath. 
 What weakness ! And what ridicule it will bring upon him I 
 Really my heart bleeds at it, for I love him ; yes, I love him ; 
 he has so many good qualities that it is a pity to see in him 
 
 such miserable foibles He never hears a good action 
 
 spoken of -without emotion." 
 
 Indeed, madame praises warmly the amiable qualities of 
 Voltaire, particularly his singular patience in sickness, his
 
 VISITORS AT CIRET. 391 
 
 gratitude for attentions paid him when he was sick, his tender 
 sympathy with her when she told him the terrible details of 
 her miserable marriage, his frequent generosities, his thought- 
 ful and laborious care for the guests of the house. To enter- 
 tain the abbd the theatre was reopened, and such was Vol- 
 taire's zeal that in one day and night he made his company 
 of volunteers rehearse and perform thirty-three acts of tragedy, 
 opera, and comedy. The housekeeping was on a very liberal 
 scale ; thirty-six fires blazed in the chateau, requiring six cords 
 of wood every day. Madame de Grafigny relates a kitchen 
 anecdote : — 
 
 " Eight days ago, a female servant broke an earthen pot over the 
 head of a lackey of Voltaire, which kept him in bed till yesterday. 
 They dismissed the girl, and kept back a crown from her wages, which 
 they gave to the lackey. At breakfast, yesterday, your idol's valet 
 mentioned that the lackey had given back the crown to the servant. 
 ' Bring him here,' said Voltaire. ' Why did you give back the 
 crown?' ' Eh-eh-eh, monsieur' (for he is a booby), 'it was be- 
 cause I am almost well, and the girl is sorry for having hurt me.' 
 * Cer'an (that is the valet's name), give a crown to this queer fellow 
 for the one he gave back ; and another one to teach him what good 
 actions deserve. Go, go, my lad ; you are very fortunate in knowing 
 how to behave. Always behave well.' " 
 
 After the departure of the abb^, the gayeties came to an 
 end, and the two personages of the chateau settled to their 
 work once more, laboring with ceaseless impetuosity; Voltaire 
 growing ever more restive under the envenomed attacks of his 
 enemies in Paris. 
 
 "Madame spends almost every night in work, even until five and 
 seven in the morning. She makes the stout lady's son, who is a good 
 Israelite, stay in her room copying her works, of which he does not 
 understand a word. You think, perhaps, that she must sleep until 
 three in the afternoon. Not at all ; she gets up at nine or ten in the 
 morning; and even rises at six when she goes to bed at four, which 
 she calls going to bed at cock-crow. In short, she sleeps but two 
 hours a day, and, in the course of the twenty-four hours, only leaves 
 ^er desk for breakfast, which lasts an hour, and for supper, and an 
 hour after. Sometimes she cats a morsel at five o'clock in the after- 
 noon, but at her desk, and very rarely. On the other hand, when 
 Voltaire takes a fancy to leave his work for half a quarter of an hour, 
 to pay a visit to me and the stout lady, he does not sit down, and
 
 892 LITE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 says, ' It is frightful, the time we lose in talking ; we ought not to 
 lose a minute ; the greatest waste we can make is that of time.' This 
 is his daily remark. We come to supper while he is still at his desk ; 
 we have half done supper when he leaves it ; and we have to use force 
 to keep him from going back as soon as he leaves the table. He 
 beats his sides [z7 se bat les Jlancs] to tell us some stoiies during the 
 repast ; and we perceive that it is from pure politeness, for his spirit is 
 
 far away Voltaire is the unhappiest man in the world. He 
 
 knows his value, and approbation is almost indifferent to him ; but for 
 that very reason one word of his adversaries reduces him to what we 
 call despair. It is the only thing that occupies him, and it drowns 
 him in bitterness. I cannot give you an idea of this folly, except in 
 telling you that it is more powerful and more wretched than his mind 
 
 is great and broad He drugs himself without ceasing. He has 
 
 got it into his head that he must not eat. Judge of the happiness of 
 these people whom we supposed to have attained supreme felicity ! I 
 should like to be able to tell you all that I think of it, but between 
 the tree and the bark one must not put a finger." 
 
 Unhappily, Madame cle Grafigny, prudent as she meant to 
 be, did get her finger between the tree and the bark. In the 
 innocence of her heart, overflowing with admiration for the 
 genius of Voltaire, she was accustomed to copy portions of his 
 " Louis XIV." and give outlines of cantos of " La Pucelle," in 
 her letters to her friend, evidently thinking only to gratify a 
 warm lover of the author. Madame du Chatelet, following the 
 example of her king, opened the letters that came to and left 
 the chateau. Madame de Grafigny, discovering this, became 
 cautious as to what she said, and used feigned names for the 
 persons mentioned in her letters. But, one day, the lady of 
 the chateau read in a letter from Lundville to her guest the 
 fatal words given above, " The canto of Jeanne is charming.''^ 
 She jumped to the conclusion that Madame de Grafigny had 
 copied a canto and sent it to her friend. Terrified and indig- 
 nant, slie flew to Voltaire, who was sick, sore, and exasperated 
 from his warfare with enemies in Paris. Awful scenes fol- 
 lowed. The tempest broke upon the poor lady after one of 
 those suppers which had usually been so merry and delicious. 
 
 " The 29th of December, on the arrival of the post, they told me 
 there were no letters for me. Supper passed as usual, without much 
 conversation, and without my observing anything which could give 
 me warning of the storm they were preparing for me. Supper over,
 
 VISITORS AT CIREY. 393 
 
 I withdrew quietly to my room to seal a letter which I had written 
 to you. Half an hour after, I saw coming in you will easily guess 
 whom. I was extremely surprised, for he never came into my apart- 
 ment ; but much more astonished was I when he said to me : ' T 
 am lost ! My life is in your hands ! ' ' Oh, mon Dieu ! How is 
 that ? ' said I. ' How is that ? ' he cried. ' It is that a hundred copies 
 are in circulation of the canto of Jeanne. This instant I fly ! I seek 
 refuge in Holland, at the end of the world, — I don't know where. 
 M. du Chatelet starts for Luneville. You must write at once to Pan- 
 pan [M. Deveaux, her friend] to secure his assistance in getting back all 
 those copies. Is he honest man enough to do it ? ' I assured him, with 
 the utmost sincerity, that you would render all the services in your 
 power. ' Very well, then,' said he, ' write quick, and earnestly.' ' I 
 will do so I ' I exclaimed. ' I am delighted to seize this opportunity to 
 show you all my zeal.' Nevertheless, I told him how much it afflicted 
 me that such a thing should happen while I was here. 
 
 " At this he rose, furious, and said to me : ' No prevarication, ma- 
 dame ! It is you who sent the copy.' At these words I fell from the 
 clouds. I assured him that I had never read nor written a single verse 
 of it. He insisted, nevertheless, that it was you who distributed the 
 copies, and that you had said I had sent the canto to you. Upon 
 hearing this, I saw, like a flash, that some one of the hundred thou- 
 sand persons to whom he has shown this poem had kept a canto, and 
 that it was circulating, while I was here without my being able to clear 
 myself of suspicion. Alas ! a circumstance so distressing drove me to 
 despair. I repeated, with the accent of truth, but always with a 
 deafening vivacity, that it was not I. He declared, in his turn, that 
 you had read the canto to Desmarets, at a lady's house ; that you were 
 giving copies of it to everybody ; and that Madame du Chatelet had the 
 proof of it in her pocket. 
 
 • " What could I say ? Oh, my friend, I was in utter consternation. 
 You will perceive that I understood nothing of all this, and that it was 
 impossible I should ; but not the less frightened was I on that account. 
 At last, he said to me, ' Come, come, write and tell him to send you 
 back the original and the copies.' I began to write ; and as I could 
 not ask you to return what I had not sent you, I begged you to 
 inform yourself of what had happened, and to communicate to me 
 whatever you might learn. He read my letter, and, throwing it back 
 to me, he exclaimed, ' Oh, fie, madame ! You should be sincere when 
 the very life of a poor unfortunate like me is in danger.' 
 
 " The more I talked, the less I convinced him. I was silent. This 
 frightful scene lasted at least an hour ; but it was nothing to what 
 was coming ; it was reserved for the lady to put the climax to it. She
 
 394 LIFE OF VOLTAIEE. 
 
 came into my room like a fury, screaming with passion and repeating 
 almost the same things, while I still kept silence. Then she drew a 
 letter from her pocket, and, almost thrusting it into my face, cried 
 out, ' See, see the proof of your infamy! You are the most unworthy 
 of creatures ! You are a monster, whom I took into my house, not 
 from friendship, for I had none for you, but because you knew not 
 where else to go ; and you have had the infamy to betray me, to as- 
 sassinate me, to steal from my desk a work for the purpose of copy- 
 ing it ! ' 
 
 " Ah, my poor friend, where were you ? The thunder-bolt which 
 falls at the feet of the solitary traveler overwhelms him less than 
 these words overwhelmed me. This is all I can recollect of the tor- 
 rent of insults which she uttered ; for I was so distracted that I soon 
 ceased to hear and understand her. But she said much more, and un- 
 less Voltaire had restrained her she would have boxed my ears. To 
 all that she said I only replied, ' Oh, be silent, madame ; I am too un- 
 happy for you to treat me so unworthily ! ' 
 
 " At these words Voltaire«seized her round the waist, and snatched 
 her away from me ; for she said all this right in my teeth, and with 
 such violent gestures that at every moment I expected she would 
 strike me. When she had been removed,' she strode up and down the 
 room, uttering loud exclamations upon my infamy. Observe, all this 
 was uttered in so loud a voice that Dubois [maid of Madame Gra- 
 figny], who was two rooms off, heard every word. For my part, I 
 was long without the power to pronounce a syllable ; I was neither 
 dead nor alive. 
 
 " At last, I asked to see the letter. She told me I should not have 
 it. ' At least,' said I, ' show me what there is in it so decisive against 
 me.' She did so, and I saw this unfortunate phrase : ' T7ie canto of 
 Jeanne is charming.' Instantly that gave me the secret of this scene, 
 which I had not before thought of. I at once gave them the ex- 
 planation, and told them what I had written to you of the impres- 
 sion which the canto had made upon me when I had heard it read. 
 To his credit I say it, Voltaire believed me at once, and immediately 
 asked my forgiveness. 
 
 " The affair was tlien explained to me as it had appeared to them. 
 He told me that you had read my letter to Desmarets in the hearing 
 of a man who had written an account of it to M. du Chatelet ; and 
 that, upon reading that letter, they had opened yours to me, which 
 had confirmed them in their error. This scene lasted until five o'clock 
 in the morning. 
 
 " Megara [madame] was slow to give in. Poor Voltaire talked to 
 her a long time in English without making any impression upon her ; 
 
 t 
 
 II
 
 VISITORS AT CIREY. 395 
 
 then he teased her to make her say that she believed my story, and 
 that she was sorry for what she had said to me. They made me write 
 and ask you to send me back my letter, in order that I might justify 
 myself entirely. I wrote with extreme pain ; I gave them my letter, 
 and they went away ; but I did not cease to tremble until they had 
 been gone for a long time. 
 
 *' In the midst of the uproar, the stout lady (Madame de Champ- 
 boniii) entered, but immediately went out, and I did not see her attain, 
 until they had been gone an hour. She found me vomiting, and in 
 a frightful state ; for reflection only redoubled my grief. She went 
 down-stairs again, and, a moment after, brought me back the letter I 
 had written, saying tliat they believed me upon my word alone, and 
 that it was useless to write. Dieu! in what a condition I was ! Un- 
 til noon I was in perfect despair, and you will not be surprised at it if 
 you realize the situation in which I was, — without a home, without 
 money, and insulted in a house which I could not leave. Madame de 
 was at Commercy, and I had not a single sou to pay my ex- 
 penses to the next village, where I should have slept better upon 
 straw than in a chamber which I could not look upon again without 
 horror. What was to become of me, O my Panpan? The good 
 stout lady was the only one who had shown me any humanity ; but, 
 as she believed still that I had copied that cursed canto, and as she is 
 strongly attached to the family, she gave me but cold consolation. 
 
 "At last, about noon, the good Voltaire came in. He was moved 
 even to tears at my condition. He made me the most emphatic ex- 
 cuses. Many times he asked my forgiveness, and I had an opportu- 
 nity to see all the tenderness of his heart. He made me give him my 
 word of honor that I would not ask the return of the fatal letter, and 
 I gave it to him. 
 
 " At five o'clock in the evening M. du Chatelet came in with a con- 
 trite air, and said to me, gently, that he advised me to send for my 
 letter ; not that they did not believe my word, but just to confound 
 them. I objected that I had given my word not to do it, and that I 
 was afraid, since I did not doubt that my letters were opened, that 
 they would take it ill if I broke my promise. Nevertheless he in- 
 sisted so strongly, and so well persuaded me that my letter should not 
 be opened, that at last I promised him I would write. It required a 
 whole hour of reflection for me to see through the trick ; for I had no 
 more the faculty of thinking. I passed three days and three nights 
 in tears. 
 
 " Ah ! I forgot to say that the same evening, about eight o'clock, 
 Megara came with all her train, and, after a formal courtesy, said, in 
 a very dry tone, ' Madame, I am sorry for what passed last night.'
 
 396 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 And then she spoke of other things with the fat lady and her hus- 
 band, as tranquilly as people speak when they rise in the morning." 
 
 For three weeks Madame de Grafigny was prostrate, or, as 
 she expressed it, " in hell," always sick, and not leaving her 
 room till nine in the evening. At length the letter arrived in 
 which she had described the canto, which made her innocence 
 manifest. Even then Madame du Chatelet was cold and for- 
 mal, not being able to forgive herself for her violence. Vol- 
 taire was all contrition and assiduity. 
 
 " More than once he shed tears on seeing me so ill, never 
 entering my chamber without making me the most humble 
 and pathetic excuses, and redoubling his care that I should 
 want nothing. Often he went so far as to say that madame 
 was a terrible woman, who had no flexibility in her heart, 
 although she had a good heart." 
 
 Gradually, life at the chateau resumed its usual train ; even 
 Megara relented, and there was an approach to the former 
 gayety and ease. The guest appears to have remained at 
 Cirey about three months, not six, as the title-page of her 
 letters imports. She contrived in the spring of 1739 to get 
 away to Paris, where she lived the rest of her life upon a 
 small pension from the Austrian court, increased at a later 
 day by the profits of her works. Voltaire remained to the 
 end of her life her affectionate friend and correspondent, con- 
 gratulating her upon her literary successes, and giving her the 
 aid which an established author can give to one beginning a 
 career.
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 THE ABB6 DESFONTAINES. 
 
 Nothing that Madame de Grafigny observed at Cirey sur- 
 prised her so much as Voltaire's sensitiveness to the attacks of 
 a hostile press. The mere mention of the editor Desfontaines 
 or of the poet J. B. Rousseau was enough sometimes to put 
 him in a passion. One evening in February, 1739, as she re- 
 cords, they were going to play a comedy at the chateau ; the 
 guests were assembled and the actors were ready, when the 
 mail arrived, bringing him some disagreeable letters. " He 
 uttered frightful cries, and fell into a kind of convulsions. 
 Madame du Chatelet at length came into my room, with tears 
 in her eyes as big as her fist, and begged me not to perform. 
 The curtain did not rise. Yesterday he had some good inter- 
 vals, and we played. Man Dieu! what a donkey [hete] he 
 is, — he who has so mucli intellect ! " 
 
 Madame de Grafigny, like many other guests, did not pene- 
 trate the secret of the house she inhabited. She was very far 
 from knowing what was the matter with the inmates of the 
 chateau, and naturally surmised it to be some new offense 
 committed against a too susceptible author of weak digestion 
 by a robust, unscrupulous critic. This may well have seemed 
 to her a trifling cause of effects so dire ; for of all the ills we 
 see others suffer, there are few which we bear with more com- 
 posure than their abuse by the press. We are amazed that 
 they should take it seriously. Nevertheless, when it is our 
 turn to roast, we do not find the process agreeable ; and no 
 people feel so acutely the anguish inflicted by the pen as 
 those whose profession it is to use that instrument of torture. 
 
 Voltaire had particular reasons for resenting the Abb^ 
 Desfontaines's faint praise and covert satire. It was not his 
 clerical garb and title ; for he had resigned a small country 
 benefice in order to devote himself to literature, and was now
 
 398 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 only an abb^ m title. Piron, probably, had tbe true reason 
 in mind when he made his well-known retort. Desfontaines, 
 seeing Piron enter the Caf^ Procope, veiy handsomely dressed, 
 said to him, " M. Piron, does such a coat as this become a 
 poet?" To which Piron replied, "Does such a man as this 
 become such a coat ? " 
 
 In 1724, when Desfontaines was a writer for such literary 
 journals as there were then in Paris, he was introduced by 
 Thieriot to Voltaire, who was polite to him, and alluded to 
 him in a friendly tone in his letters. A few weeks after this 
 introduction, the abbe was arrested on an unnamable charge ; a 
 bo}^ chimney-sweep the alleged victim. The crime, in tbe 
 severe code of that age, was punishable by burning alive ; and 
 as several cases had lately been reported, it was thought that 
 an example was needed. The officers of the law were preparing 
 the indictment, when the abbd wrote to Voltaire informing 
 him of his dangei*. It was at the time of the poet's brief 
 favor with Madame de Prie, mistress of the Duke de Bourbon, 
 prime minister. He flew to Fontainebleau, and, using all that 
 zeal and tact which he was wont to use when a friend needed 
 his aid, he procured an order for the discharge of the prisoner 
 on the simple condition of his leaving Paris. The abbe left 
 Paris, and Voltaire ;ig;vin interposed in his behalf, endeavoring 
 to get permission for his return. He spoke to M. de Fleury 
 on the subject, found him prejudiced against the accused, but 
 succeeded, after farther efforts, in obtaining the remission of 
 his exile, and the abbd resumed his vocation in Paris. 
 
 The letter in which he poured forth his gratitude to Vol- 
 taire has been pr(^served. " I shall never forget, monsieur," 
 it began, "the infinite obligations I am under to you. Your 
 good heart is far above even your genius ; and you are tlie 
 truest friend that ever existed. The zeal with which you have 
 served me does me, in some sort, more honor than the malice 
 and depravity of my enemies have given me of affront." ^ 
 
 Whether Desfontaines was guilty or innocent of the of- 
 fense charged cannot be known, because his case was never 
 tried. Nor does his avoiding a trial imply guilt. Men who 
 could bring such an accusation against a writer in revenge for 
 satirical or abusive paragraphs would not stick at making or 
 
 1 I CEuvres de Voltaire, 255.
 
 THE ABBE DESFONTAINES. 399 
 
 buying testimony, and the most innocent person in that age 
 and country might shrink from a trial involving such painful 
 possibilities. He told Voltaire, in the letter just quoted, that 
 he had a plan of a defense in his mind which he thought would 
 be " beautiful and curious," and which he was going to work 
 out in the country ; for it would not become him to be silent 
 " under so execrable an affront." This defense, however, never 
 appeared. One thing only is certain : Voltaire rendered Des- 
 fontaines a very great service. 
 
 Time passed. Voltaire spent his three years in England, 
 returned, and continued his brilliant career. Desfontaines, 
 after working upon and conducting various journals, estab- 
 lished, in 1735, a literary weekly, which he called " Observa- 
 tions sur tons les Ouvrages Nouveaux," in which he displayed 
 no more than the usual perversity of ancient critics. At 
 present a book sent to the critical periodicals for review is 
 usually assigned to reviewers specially qualified ; but in that 
 period the conductor was man-of-all-work, and felt himself 
 obliged to assume an editorial superiority on every subject 
 and in every kind of literature. Thus, Desfontaines, when 
 Newton became a topic of general interest in France, know- 
 ing nothing of Newton but what he had read in Voltaire's 
 English Letters, treated the new philosophy with contemptu- 
 ous freedom. " Newtonisra," said he, " is bad science, repro- 
 bated by all the good philosophers of Europe Newton 
 
 was no philosopher ; only a geometer, an observer, a calcu- 
 lator. Such terms as vacuum, absolute gravitation, attraction 
 of gravitation, are the contemptible jargon of peripateticism, 
 — a jargon long ago despised and proscribed in all the schools 
 of Europe." ^ 
 
 Although this was the fashionable tone in France, in 1735, 
 upon the Newtonian philosophy, the sentences quoted were 
 doubtless aimed at the man who had plucked the writer of 
 them as a brand from the burning in 1724. 
 
 Desfontaines, in fact, soon forgot his obligations to his de- 
 liverer. He took offense, as it seems, from a trifling cause. 
 Having published a French translation of Voltaire's English 
 Essay upon Epic Poetry, the author of that work found it so 
 swarming with errors that he translated it anew himself, and 
 1 2 L'Esprit de I'Abbe Desfontaiues, 62.
 
 400 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 published it, as it were, in opposition to Desfontaines's transla- 
 tion. One mistake of the abbe's made a good deal of sport 
 at the time. The English word cakes bafHed him, and he con- 
 cluded it to be an English form of Cacus, the Latin name of 
 Vulcan's robber son. Voltaire, it seems, wrote, " the cakes 
 eaten by the Trojans," which the learned abb^ translated, la 
 faim devorante de Cacus. Desfontaines, from this time, we 
 are told, held his obligations to Voltaire annulled, and treated 
 him in his journals with no particular consideration. He com- 
 mended some of his tragedies, damned his " Charles XII." with 
 the faintest praise and sly insinuation, criticised "La Henri- 
 ade " with freedom, and, in general, wrote of his works with- 
 out favor but with no very noticeable severity. Voltaire did 
 not enjoy the perusal of the " Observations." He thought 
 them arrogant, ignorant, and tasteless. He laughed when Des- 
 fontaines, who still plumed himself upon his English, styled 
 Bishop Berkeley's " Alciphron " a defense of atheism. " I re- 
 pent," he wrote to Cideville in 1735, " having saved Desfon- 
 taines. After all, it is better to burn a priest than to bore the 
 public. If I had left him to cook, I should have spared the 
 public many imbecilities." 
 
 Personal ill-will grew between them. Voltaire, with some 
 reason, suspected Desfontaines of writing bookseller .lore's 
 attack, — a piece done evidently by a practiced hand. He 
 thought, too, that the abbe was in league with detested Rous- 
 seau, traitor to the freedom of utterance, with whom Vol- 
 taire was at open war. Desfontaines knew no moderation 
 when Rousseau was to be extolled, and he praised him in 
 terms that seemed designed to meet Voltaire's censure. Vol- 
 taire, for example, liked to remind the public that Rousseau 
 was a mere poet, and a poet who excelled only in one or two 
 kinds. Desfontaines began an eulogium by remarking that 
 Rousseau was " a great master in all the kinds and in all 
 the styles ; " as admirable in his theory of the poetic art as 
 in the poems by which he illustrated it. Voltaire reflected 
 upon Rousseau's family, his father having been an excellent 
 shoemaker and a good citizen. Desfontaines wrote, "Every 
 man of letters who becomes distinguished, every celebrated au- 
 thor, is a nobleman." Rousseau, he added, was of illustrious ori- 
 gin, — a descendant of Homer, Virgil, Pindar, and Horace: 
 nay, a son of Apollo and Calliope.
 
 THE abb6 desfontaines. 401 
 
 This was a good and fair retort. His notice of Voltaire's 
 Newton was extremely exasperating, and was obviously meant 
 to be so. 
 
 '* To have [said he] a sovereign contempt for the scientific system 
 that has dazzled M. de Voltaire, it is only necessary to recall one's 
 mind to the great principles of clear ideas \^aux grands principes des 
 idees claires.'] Happily, there are in liis book many other things 
 not connected with that bad system, to which we cannot refuse our 
 esteem, such as the observations of Newton and other scientific men 
 and astronomers upon light and color. These, however, were long ago 
 known and adopted in France, and they are taught in the scliools. 
 M. de Voltaire has, nevertheless, the glory of having compiled them 
 with care, and of having published them in French. If he has fallen 
 into some mistakes, persons who are versed in those elevated subjects 
 easily perceive his errors." 
 
 Every sentence of this was barbed and poisoned for a sus- 
 ceptible author living a hundred and fifty miles off, and la- 
 boring under the conviction that this perverse and ignorant 
 editor was " the oracle of the provinces," and whose journal 
 actually had a large circulation. Worse offenses increased 
 the ill-feeling between them. Desfontaines published a pri- 
 vate letter addressed to him by Voltaire, asking him to state, 
 " in two lines," that the edition of his " Julius Caesar," just 
 out, was not published with the author's consent, and 
 abounded in errors and alterations Desfontaines, who had 
 already written his review of the play, simply added to it this 
 letter, much to the writer's disgust. There was a partial rec- 
 onciliation between them, Voltaire being morbidly and exces- 
 sively desirous to propitiate a man who, as it seemed to him, 
 was lessening his hold upon the public, and giving courage 
 to the powers who issued lettres de cachet. The favor of the 
 public was his only safety. The most sensualized noble, the 
 narrowest ecclesiastic, the meanest informer, had some feel- 
 ing of the dangerous ridicule of molesting a man who was 
 "shedding glory upon the king's reign ; " for, under every form 
 of government, in every degree and kind of civilization, the 
 power that finally rules and sways, the king of kings and lord 
 of lords, is Public Opinion. Voltaire was fighting for freedom 
 of thought and utterance in Europe. He was fighting Rous- 
 seau's battle and Desfontaines's battle. His detestation of 
 
 VOL. I. 26
 
 402 LIFE OF VOLTAIEE. 
 
 those men was therefore a blending of all the ingredients of 
 animosity, public and private, noble and personal. 
 
 The truce was broken by a foul blow on the part of the 
 editor. The young and generous Count Algarotti, before 
 starting upon his expedition to the polar seas, had spent a few 
 days at Cirey, where Voltaire had addressed to him, on his 
 departure, some pretty verses, which were, for many reasons, 
 unfit for publication. 
 
 " Go," said the poet, " and return bringing to the French 
 people news of the pole observed and measured. I, mean- 
 while, will await your coming under my meridian, in the fields 
 of Cirey, observing henceforth only the star of Emlly. 
 Warmed by the fire of her powerful genius, .... I call to 
 witness the heavens measured by your hands that I would 
 not abandon her divine charms for the equator and the arctic 
 pole." 
 
 This poem of a dozen lines having, by some chance, fallen 
 into the hands of Desfontaines, he wrote to the author, asking 
 permission to insert it in his journal ! We can imagine the 
 consternation of the inmates of the chateau at the thought of 
 such an indecorous promulgation of a secret known to Europe. 
 All three of the persons interested — Voltaire, the Marquis du 
 Chatelet, and madame — united in an earnest protest against 
 its publication. Nevertheless, he published it. 
 
 The reader cannot desire to follow this quarrel through all 
 its stages. Voltaire's minor poems of this period contain 
 bitter satire of " the hireling scribe " who sold his wrath and 
 adulation to the first comer ; and the " Observations " teem 
 with evidences of the editor's anger against his adversary. 
 It is one of the calamitous limitations of literature that a 
 battle, nay, a skirmish of outposts, that only lasts twenty 
 minutes, demands, for its complete elucidation, more space 
 than could usually be afforded to the most brilliant, the most 
 important, the most enduring, triumph of peaceful exertion. 
 About Waterloo there is a library ; but no historian, I think, 
 bestows two lines upon the publication, in 1624, of Lord 
 Herbert's " De Veritate," which began deism in Europe. I 
 have before me several hundred printed pages upon this qmir- 
 rel between Voltaire and Desfontaines. Let us come at once 
 to the crisis of the strife.
 
 THE ABBfi DESFONTAINES. 403 
 
 In an evil hour for his own peace and dignity, Voltaire hit 
 upon the expedient of applying to his reviewer the reviewer's 
 most effective trick, that of gleaning the errors from a thou- 
 sand pages, and grouping them in one page. No work can 
 stand this treatment, if it is skillfully managed. Go carefully 
 over a book containing ten thousand things ; find some typo- 
 graphical errors, some lapses in style, some omissions, inten- 
 tional and unintentional, several unimportant and two or 
 three important mistakes, a few sentences which, severed from 
 their connection, can easily be made to seem absurd ; group 
 all that with the tact of " an old hand," and vou can make a 
 review of a very good book that will cause provincial readers 
 to pity the author, and wonder it should be considered safe to 
 let him go loose. Voltaire took two hundred numbers of Des- 
 fontaines's weeklj^, subjected them to this familiar process, and 
 published the result in a pamphlet, entitled " The Preserva- 
 tive " (Le Pr^servatif), a copy of which, as we have seen, he 
 handed to Madame de Grafigny to read. This pamphlet of 
 forty small pages bore the name in the title-page of the Cheva- 
 lier de Mouhi, one of several poor fellows who hung about the 
 office of the Abbe Moussinot to get an occasional louis d'or 
 from Voltaire's charity. 
 
 It was not a difficult task to compose an effective pamphlet 
 of this kind, for Desfontaines's ignorance of science was that 
 of a French abb^ of 1735, and, in literary matters, he made 
 frequent slips, as all men must who write continually and on 
 every topic. Thus, he wrote that Brutus was more a Quaker 
 than a Stoic. " It is," remarked Voltaire, " as if he had said 
 Brutus was more a Capuchin than a Stoic." A wonderful 
 statement of the editor was that Seneca was a more verbose 
 writer than Cicero. He had made, too, some ludicrous mis- 
 translations from Latin, Italian, and English ; he had dis- 
 played a singular and inveterate ignorance of Newton when- 
 ever he mentioned or alluded to him. Voltaire selected about 
 fifty of his mistakes and misconceptions, appending to each a 
 sentence or two of quiet satire ; all tending to show '' how 
 amusing it was that such a man should take it into his head to 
 sit in judgment upon others." 
 
 But this was not the sting of " Le Pr^servatif." Toward 
 the close of his pamphlet, Voltaire made his Chevalier de 
 Mouhi proceed thus : —
 
 404 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 " Having read in these ' Observations ' several attacks upon M. de 
 Voltaire, as well as a letter which the editor boasted he had received 
 from M. de Voltaire, I took the liberty to write myself to M. de Vol- 
 taire, though not acquainted with him. Here is his reply : — 
 
 " ' I only know the Abbe Guyot Desfontaiues from M. Thieriot's 
 bringing him to my house in 1724 as a man who had formerly been 
 a Jesuit, and hence a student. I received him with friendship, as 
 I do all who cultivate literature. I was astonished at the end of 
 fifteen days to receive a letter fi'om him, written at Bicetre [prison 
 for criminals, near Paris], to which he had just been committed. I 
 learned that he had been put into the Chatelet [prison in Paris] three 
 months before for the same crime of which he was then accused, and 
 that they were preparing to try him. At that time I was so fortu- 
 nate as to have some very powerful friends, of whom death has since 
 deprived me. Sick as I was, I hurried to Fontainebleau to throw 
 myself at their feet. I pressed, I solicited, on all sides ; and, at last, 
 obtained his release, and the discontinuance of a trial that involved a 
 question of life or death. I also procured for him permission to re- 
 tire to the country house of M. le President de Bernieres, my friend, 
 and he went thither with M. Thieriot. Do you know what he did 
 there ? He wrote a libel against me. He even showed it to M. 
 Thieriot, who made him throw it into the fire. He asked my pardon, 
 saying that the libel was written a little before the time of his com- 
 mittal to Bicetre. I had the weakness to forgive him, and that weak- 
 ness has cost me a mortal enemy, who has written me anonymous let- 
 ters, and who has sent twenty libels to Holland against me. Such, 
 sir, are some of the things I can say concerning him.' " 
 
 This was a cutting stroke ; but, as the reader observes, there 
 is no indication in the letter of the nature of the offense for 
 which the abb^ was committed to prison. As if to supply the 
 deficiency, the author of " Le Preservatif," while that pam- 
 phlet was passing through the press, set flying about Paris an 
 epigram, in which the attacks of Desfontaines upon Newton 
 were coupled with the offense of which he was accused : " He 
 has taken everything a rehours, and his errors are always sins 
 asainst nature.'' Still worse, he caused a caricature to be 
 engraved and published, representing the abbe on his knees 
 receiving ignominious punishment for his alleged crime. Un- 
 der the picture was another epigram by Voltaire, not de- 
 scribable, ending with an assurance that " God recompenses 
 merit."
 
 THE ABBfe DESFONTAINES. 405 
 
 When the matadore strikes between the horns with his slen- 
 der and glitterhig blade, he must kill his bull on the instant, 
 or look out for his horns. The bull will not refrain from ven- 
 p-eance because he is not skilled in the use of the matadore's 
 brilliant weapon; he employs the means of offense that nature 
 has given him, and the matadore expects nothing else. Des- 
 fontaines replied promptly to " Le Preservatif " in a pamphlet 
 which he entitled " The Voltaire Mania [La Voltairomanie], 
 or the Letter of a Young Advocate, in the Form of a Memo- 
 rial." It was the attack of a bull blinded by rage, and Vol- 
 taire was justly punished by it for stooping either to concili- 
 ate or to assail such an adversary. The young advocate began 
 by assuming that, in assaulting Voltaire, he was avenging out- 
 raged man. 
 
 " He has spared no one, and, like a mad dog, he has thrown 
 himself upon all the most distinguished authors. Theologians, 
 philosophers, poets, all the learned, have been the objects of 
 his contempt, raillery, and banter. He has turned into ridi- 
 cule religions, nations, and governments. There is no one 
 who does not know this ; and why should I not unmask the 
 persecutor of the human race, this enemy of the living and 
 the dead, and tear from him that assumption of infallibility 
 in litei-ature with which he arrogantly decorates himself? " 
 
 The " young adyocate " was also the defender of an outraged 
 individual. The Abbe Desfontaines, he remarks, is of an age 
 and character that cause him to forgive injuries too easily, 
 and therefore he, the young advocate, his friend, has imder- 
 taken to punish a man who has been accustomed to be paid 
 for his follies hi another way. 
 
 " Supposing, even, that the Abbe Desfontaines is such a person as 
 he is depicted in ' Le Preservatif;' does it follow that Voltaire is an 
 honest man and a orreat writer? Will all connoisseurs be the less 
 convinced that he is absolutely ignorant of the dramatic art, and that 
 he owes all the applause he has ever received at the theatre to the 
 empty harmony of his pompous tirades, and to his satiric or irreligious 
 audacity ? His ' Heuriade,' will it be the less a dazzling chaos, a bad 
 tissue of fictions, stale or out of place, in which there is as much jirose 
 as verse, and more verbal faults than pages ? Will not his ' Charles 
 XII.' always pass for the work of an ignorant fool, written in the 
 jocular taste of a common gossip retailing anecdotes ? Ilis Letters
 
 406 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 (English), wherein he dares to carry his extravagances even to the 
 altar, will they the less oblige him to keep out of Paris all his life ? 
 The ' Elements of Newton,' will they ever be anything else than the 
 exercise of a school-boy who stumbles at every step, a work simply 
 ridiculous ? In a word, will Voltaire be the less a man dishonored 
 in civilized society for his low impostures, his rascalities, his shameful 
 basenesses, his thefts, public and private, and his presuming imperti- 
 nence, which have drawn upon him hitherto such withering disgraces?" 
 
 Of these withering disgraces the young advocate appends a 
 descriptive catalogue : " (1.) The deserved chastisement which 
 he received at Sevres during the regency, — a chastisement 
 for which he deemed himself well recompensed by the thou- 
 sand crowns which his avarice accepted to console his honor. 
 (2.) The celebrated treatment at the door of the Hotel de 
 Sully, in consequence of which he was driven from France for 
 the follies which that noble basting caused him to commit. 
 (3.) Basting again at London from the hand of an English 
 bookseller, — a grievous mishap, which made him earnestly so- 
 licit, and obtain, the favor of returning to France. Thus the 
 same scourge that caused him to leave France made him come 
 back, to experience several other affronts of another kind. 
 When will he be satiated with ignominy ? " 
 
 Then he came to the aifair of the abba's committal to Bi- 
 cetre : — 
 
 " Will it be believed that he who to-day brings against the 
 Abb^ Desfontaines so shameful a reproach is the self-same 
 man who, thirteen or fourteen years ago, defended him against 
 it, and who proved in a short memorial, drawn up by himself, 
 the falsity and absurdity of the accusation ? He did this at 
 the solicitation of the late President de Bernieres, who good- 
 naturedly lodged him in his house, and whom Voltaire pre- 
 sumed to call his friend! The President de Bernieres the 
 friend of Voltaire, grandson of a peasant ! The profession of 
 man of letters is advantageous indeed. This friend drove 
 him out of his house in 1726, after his insolent speech in 
 Madame Lecouvreur's box." 
 
 He repeats that the service rendered him by Voltaire in 
 1724 was done in mere deference to the wishes of " a ben- 
 efactor upon whom Voltaire depended," who " lodged and 
 fed him," and who was an " ally of the Abb^ Desfontaines."
 
 THE abb6 desfontaines. 407 
 
 He added, in a parenthesis, '' A scoundrel, by his airs of pro- 
 tection, compels us to speak of this circumstance." He asks 
 whether a man standing in such a relation to the President de 
 Bernieres could have avoided doing as Voltaire had done. 
 
 This was the more audacious from the circumstance that 
 Madame de Bernieres was still alive. But Desfontaines's 
 masterpiece of effrontery was in his meeting the chai'ge of 
 having written a libel against his deliverer just after leaving 
 Bicetre, which libel Thieriot had seen and had made him 
 suppress. He attempted here to make a breach between the 
 accuser and the witness. 
 
 " M. Thieriot," continued the young advocate, " is a man as 
 much esteemed by worthy people as Voltaire is detested by 
 them. As if in spite of himself, he draws after him the dis- 
 graceful residue of an old tie which he has not yet had the 
 resolution to break entirely. Now M. Thieriot, who is cited 
 as a witness in this affair, has been asked if the statement was 
 true, and M. Thieriot has been obliged to say that he had no 
 knowledge of it. Here we defy Voltaire to the proof. The 
 sojourn at the country house of the late President de Bernieres 
 occurred in the vacation of 1725. If a libel printed in that 
 year exists, let it be produced. If it is replied that the abbd 
 threw it into the fire, let Voltaire name the witnesses ; for 
 assuredly he ought not to be believed upon his word. He 
 says that M. Thieriot obliged the abb^ to throw it into the 
 fire ; and here is M. Thieriot, who declares the falsity of the 
 statement. Voltaire, then, is the most audacious, the most 
 insensate, of liars." 
 
 The pamphlet concluded by a kind of apology for its vio- 
 lence : " I believe the Voltaire mania sufficiently demonstrated 
 by what I have said. Would to God that he was only a mad- 
 man ! Worse than that, he is false, impudent, slanderous. 
 Let him henceforth write what he pleases, whether prose or 
 verse, he has been deprived, or, rather, he has deprived him- 
 self, of the least credit in the world. For the rest, however 
 he may seem to have been maltreated here, we have been 
 
 but too indulgent And what is more likely to abase 
 
 that monstrous pride of his, the radical cause of all his vices 
 and all his infamy, than the contents of this salutary letter, 
 which your charity will not fail to communicate to him? "
 
 408 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Having completed his pamphlet, the abbe was so well con- 
 tent with it that he read it, as an after-dinner treat, to a 
 company of literary men at the house of the Marquis de Loc- 
 Maria. The hearers pronounced it " a very gross libel ; " upon 
 which the author roared out " in the brutal tone that nature 
 had given him, and which education had not corrected," " Vol- 
 taire has no other part to take than to go and hang himself." ^ 
 
 The pamphlet was published December 14, 1738, and it 
 had the swift currency which savage assaults upon conspicuous 
 individuals usually have. Its sale was rapid and large. An 
 edition of two thousand copies, printed in Holland, was sold in 
 fifteen days, and the affair was soon the talk of Europe. Life, 
 meanwhile, at the chateau of Cirey was going its usual train : 
 Voltaire hard at work upon his new tragedy of " Mei'ope," of 
 which he had the highest hopes ; madame absorbed by turns 
 in her lawsuit and her studies ; the marquis, anticipating a 
 successful result of the suit, in treaty for a new hQtel in Paris, 
 price two hundred thousand francs. From various causes, 
 Thieriot had been much in their thoucrhts of late. He had 
 spent two or three weeks at the chateau in October of this 
 year, and while he was there, Desfontaines being a topic at the 
 dinner table, one day, he had told the Bicetre anecdote, — 
 how the abbe, fresh from prison, had written a libel against his 
 benefactor. jSIadame was a little jealous of this comrade of 
 Voltaire's youth, but she gave him a cordial reception and 
 hospitable entertainment. On his departure, Voltaire, under 
 pretense of assisting him to pack his valise, had slipped into it 
 a rouleau of fifty golden louis, which Thieriot did not discover 
 until he had reached Paris. 
 
 Madame du Chatelet received a copy of " La Voltairomanie " 
 on Christmas Day, and read it with such feelings as we can 
 imagine. " I have just read that frightful libel," she wrote 
 to their "guardian angel," D'Argental. "I am in despair. I 
 am more afraid of the sensitiveness of vour friend than of the 
 public ; for I am persuaded that the cries of that mad dog can 
 do no harm. I have kept it from him ; his fever having only 
 left him to-day. He fainted yesterday twice ; he is extremely 
 debilitated, and I should fear tlie worst if, in his present con- 
 dition, his feelings should experience a violent shock. Upon 
 1 Letter quoted in Voltaire au Chateau de Cirey, par Desnoircsterres, page 175.
 
 THE ABBfi DESFONTAINES. 409 
 
 such matters his sensitiveness is extreme. His Holland book- 
 sellers, the return of Rousseau to Paris, and this libel are 
 enouo;h to kill him. There is no fraud which I do not invent 
 to conceal from him news so afflicting." She continued to in- 
 vent her amiable frauds during the whole holiday week ; and, 
 thinking that some reply to the pamphlet was necessary, she 
 wrote one herself, which has been published among her works 
 in recent times. 
 
 But Voltaire had had the pamphlet all the time, and had 
 employed similar frauds to hide it from her. She appeal's to 
 have made this discovery on New Year's Day ; when, to her 
 great relief, he took the affair with perfect coolness, seeming 
 only to be concerned for its effect upon her mind. He told 
 her there was no occasion to make any formal reply to an at- 
 tack so absurdly violent. Their proper course, he thought, 
 was to treat it merely as a criminal libel, prepare refuting tes- 
 timony, and apply to the law for redress. He had already 
 begun proceedings ; had already sent to the Abbe Moussinot 
 to buy a copy of the pamphlet in the presence of two wit- 
 nesses, and to file the preliminary papers. Madame de Berni- 
 eres promptly gave her testimony that he had paid rent for 
 his rooms at her house ; and, fortunately, he was a man who 
 "never cast receipts away," and even his contract with the 
 late president was on file at his brother's office in Paris. As 
 to the evidence of Thieriot, that could not fail to be forthcom- 
 ing with equal promptitude. All the knowledge he had ever 
 possessed of the Bicetre libel was obtained from Thieriot's 
 spontaneous communications, and he could not doubt the lo}''- 
 alty of an old comrade, who owed all his importance in the 
 world to his connection with himself. 
 
 But Thieriot was silent! The " Voltairomanie " had been 
 circulating ten days, and still no word from Thieriot ! All the 
 inmates of the chateau were amazed and confounded. Voltaire 
 was cut to the heart. He was aware that Desfontaines had 
 felt his ground with Thieriot before publishing the pamphlet, 
 for Tiiieriot himself had told him so, and Voltaire had ad- 
 vised him to make no terms with the abbe. " You are trying," 
 he wrote, " to conciliate a monster whom you detest and fear. 
 I have less prudence. I hate him ; I despise him ; I am not 
 afraid of him ; and I shall lose no opportunity to punish him. I
 
 410 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 know how to hate, because I know how to love. His base in- 
 gratitude, the greatest of all the vices, has rendered me irrec- 
 oncilable." 
 
 In this passage we have the simple explanation of Thieriot's 
 silence. Like many better men than himself, and like many- 
 men worse than himself, he was afraid of the editorial pen ; he 
 dared not face the weekly abuse of a widely-circulated journal. 
 It was this conduct of his old friend, and not Desfontaines's 
 crude and lumbering abuse, that threw Voltaire into those con- 
 vulsions of which Madame de Grafigny was a witness, in the 
 early days of 1739. He wrote to Thieriot the most eloquent 
 and affectionate letters, remonstrating, pleading, arguing. Ma- 
 dame du Chatelet wrote to him. The marquis, who was no 
 letter writer, dispatched a long epistle to the cowai'dly parasite, 
 urging him to do his duty; " The extreme friendship," he 
 wrote, " which I have for M. de Voltaire, and the knowledge 
 which I possess of his friendship for you, and the essential proofs 
 of it which he has given you, induce me to write to persuade you 
 to do what you owe to friendship and to truth." The Prince 
 Royal of Prussia was enlisted in the cause, Thieriot being his 
 literary correspondent and Paris express agent. 
 
 Thieriot struggled hard to escape this dilemma. He wi'ote 
 thus to Madame du Chatelet with regard to the Bicetre libel : 
 " I have been much questioned concerning the truth of that 
 statement, and this has been my answer : that I simply remem- 
 bered the fact, but that, with regard to the circumstances, they 
 had so little remained in my memory that I could render no 
 account of them ; and that is not extraordinary, after so many 
 years. All the information, then, madame, which I can give 
 you is that, in those times, at M. de Bernieres's country-house, 
 there was conversation concerning a piece against M. de Vol- 
 taire, which, to the best of my recollection, filled a copy-book 
 of forty to fifty pages. The Abb^ Desfontaines showed it to 
 me, and I engaged him to suppress it. As to the date and title 
 of that writing (circumstances very important in this case), I 
 protest, on my honor, that I remember nothing of them." 
 
 This was terrible, and may well have throAvn a too suscepti- 
 ble friend into something like convulsions. Voltaire searched 
 among his letters of that time, and found three or four of 
 Thieriot's in which he had written of the libel. August 16,
 
 THE ABBf: DESFONTAINES. 411 
 
 1726, he had written thus : " Desfontaines in the time of his 
 imprisonment [dans le temjJS de Bicetre] wrote against you a 
 satirical work, which I made him throw into the fire." In 
 conversation he had mentioned the title of the piece, " Apolo- 
 gie du Sieur de Voltaire," which was not thrown into the fire, 
 for it has since been printed, and is now accessible. Never 
 was such pressure brought to bear upon a reluctant witness as 
 upon Thieriot during the first weeks of the year 1739. The 
 "stout lady," Madame de Champbonin, made a journey to 
 Paris to add the weight of her personal influence. He made 
 some concessions, at length, and joined the friends and family 
 of Voltaire in demanding justice against the libeler. 
 
 It was customary then, it appears, for the friends and rela- 
 tions of a man bringing a libel suit to go in a body before the 
 magistrate when the complaint was presented. The reader 
 need scarcely be informed that Voltaire neglected no means 
 to enforce his demand. 
 
 " Fly, my dear friend," he writes to Moussinot; "give the 
 
 inclosed letter to my nephew I entreat him to stir up 
 
 some of my relations. Join yourself to them and to Madamfe 
 de Champbonin. Do your part : move the Procopes, the An- 
 dris, and even the indolent Pitaval, the Abb^ Seran de La 
 Tours, the Du Perrons de Castera ; make them sign a new req- 
 uisition. Offer them carriages, and, with your ordinary ad- 
 dress and tact, pay all the expenses. Add De Monhi to the 
 crowd ; promise him some money, but do not give him any. 
 You must, my dear friend, call yourself my relation, as ]Ma- 
 dame de Champbonin does. All of you go in a body to the 
 audience with the chancellor. Nothing produces so great an 
 effect upon the mind of a judge well disposed as the attendance 
 of a numerous family Spare neither money nor prom- 
 ises ; it is necessary to rouse men, to excite them powerfully, in 
 order to make them do right. I think it essential that my 
 
 friend Thieriot should join my relations and defenders 
 
 Let us neglect nothing ; let us push the scoundrel by all the 
 
 means in our power Justice is like the kingdom of 
 
 heaven, and the violent take it by force." 
 
 Nor did he neglect to circulate in Paris satirical reflections 
 upon his antagonist and the odious offense charged against him, 
 which no Frenchman of that day, nor Frenchwoman either,
 
 412 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 could resist. One anonymous letter, written at Cirey, des- 
 canted upon Desfontaines's memorial in a strain like this : " He 
 calls himself a man of qualit}^ because he has a brother who 
 is auditor of accounts at Rouen. He entitles himself a man of 
 good morals, because he has been only a few days at the Cha- 
 telet and Bicetre. He says that he goes always with a lackey; 
 but he does not specify whether this bold lackey goes before or 
 behind ; and this is not a case to pretend that it is no matter 
 which. Finally, he pushes his effrontery so far as to say that 
 he has some friends. This is to attack cruelly the human race." 
 There were several pages of this letter, in mingled prose and 
 verse, each sentence a distinct and cutting epigram. 
 
 The friends of Voltaire rallied in great force, and displayed 
 extraordinary zeal. Besides Madame de Champbonin, the 
 Marquis du Chatelet came to Paris on this business, and lent 
 the weight of his ancient name to the support of the person 
 who occupied his place at home. The Prince Royal of Prus- 
 sia wrote to the French ambassador at .his father's court, ask- 
 ing him to make known to the Cardinal de Fleury his warm 
 interest in Voltaire's cause. ^ Desfontaines discovered, before 
 the spring months were over, that his antagonist had struck 
 down too many roots in his native soil to be overthrown by 
 one rude, unskillful blow. Voltaire tired out friend and foe, 
 masistrates and ministers. His letters of these three or four 
 months are wonderful for their number, length, intensity, 
 acuteness, and fertility of suggestion. It must have seemed to 
 all the parties and to the public that never again could there 
 be peace in Europe until that indefatigable and indomitable 
 spirit at the chateau of Cirey was appeased. Desfontaines 
 was finally notified that he had only the choice to retract or go 
 to prison again. Voltaire had always disavowed " Le Preser- 
 vatif ; " he must disavow " La Voltairomanie." The Marquis 
 d'Argenson, on the part of the administration of justice, pre- 
 pared the draft of such a disavowal and retraction as was re- 
 quired, which the a,hh6 copied and signed : — 
 
 " I declare that I am not the author of a printed libel en- 
 titled " La Voltairomanie," and that I disavow it in its en- 
 tirety, regarding as calumnious all the charges bi'ought against 
 M. de Voltaire in that libel ; and that I should have cousid- 
 
 1 Frederic to Voltaire, 1739.
 
 THE ABBE DESFONTAINES. 413 
 
 ered myself dishonored if I had had the least share in that 
 writing, having for him all the sentiments of esteem due to 
 his talents, and which the public so justly accords him. Done 
 at Paris, this 4th April, 1739." 
 
 Voltaire was not satisfied, but gradually yielded to the en- 
 treaties of his friends to molest the abb^ no more. Three 
 weeks after, he wrote to his faithful Moussinot: " Let us speak 
 no more of Desfontaines ; I am ill avenged, but I am avenged. 
 Give two hundred francs to Madame de Champbonin, and that 
 with the best grace in the world ; another hundred to De 
 Mouhi, telling him you have no more." With surprising fa- 
 cility, he half forgave Thieriot, repeating one of his favorite 
 maxims : " When two old friends separate, it is discreditable 
 to both." He knew his man, and, perhaps, also suspected that 
 the date of the Bicetre libel was such as Desfontaines claimed ; 
 that is, before Voltaire had rendered him the service. What 
 is most surprising in this affair is the little regard for truth 
 shown by every individual involved in it. They all lied, like 
 ill-taught children, — not only the antagonists, but all their 
 friends ; and the final disavowal was known to be a falsehood 
 by the honorable magistrate who drew it, as well as by the 
 odious individual who signed it. 
 
 Desfontaines continued his editorial career, and occasionally 
 had a safe opportunity to indulge his rancor against Voltaire. 
 The Essays upon Fire, written at Cirey, were soon after pub- 
 lished. He criticised Voltaire's with severity, and extolled 
 Madame du Chatelet's to the skies. Her dissertation, he said, 
 was " full of spirit and erudition, of things curious and pleas- 
 ing." She was "' a phenomenon of literature, knowledge, and 
 grace ; " and " if any one was capable of giving France a com- 
 plete course of natural philosophy, it was the illustrious lady 
 whose genius and learning the Academy of Sciences had es- 
 teemed." 1 
 
 1 2 L'Esprit de I'Abbe Desfontaines, 201.
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI. 
 
 FREDERIC BECOMES KING OF PRUSSIA. 
 
 Voltaire came out of this contest a victor, but sorely 
 wounded in body and mind; "his health," as Madame du 
 Chatelet wrote in April, 1739, was " in a state so deplorable 
 that I have no longer any hope of restoring it except through 
 the bustle of a journey and a change of air. It is sad to be 
 reduced to such a condition by a Desfontaines." An occasion 
 for a long journey occurred that spring. Through the death 
 of the aged Marquis de Trichateau, cousin of M. du Chatelet, 
 there was not only an increase of the family estate, but an ad- 
 ditional hold upon that lawsuit of eighty years' standing, 
 which was so frequent a topic at the chateau. The new ac- 
 quisitions of land lay in Flanders, a few miles from Brussels, 
 and the suit had to be tried in the courts of " the empire," to 
 which Flanders then belonged. The Prince Royal of Prussia, 
 too, while warning madame of the interminable delays of the 
 Austrian judges, had promised to do what he could to acceler- 
 ate her cause. " They say," he wrote in January, 1739, " that 
 if the imperial court owes a box on the ear to some one it is 
 necessary to solicit three years before getting payment." But 
 Frederic knew intimately the Prince of Orange and the Prince 
 d'Aremberg, all powerful in the Low Countries, and through 
 them he hoped to quicken the pace of the cause through the 
 courts. 
 
 On the 8th of ]\Iay, 1739, the Marquis du Chatelet, Ma- 
 dame la Marquise, Koenig, her new tutor in mathematics, 
 Voltaire, and a numerous retinue of servants left the chateau 
 at Cirey for a very leisurely journey to Brussels, a hundred 
 and fifty miles distant, which they accomplislied in twenty 
 days. Voltaire had lived thi-ee successive years at Cirey. A 
 long period was to elapse before he again remained three years 
 under one roof ; for his connection with this family, so far from
 
 PEEDERIC BECOMES KING OF PRUSSIA. 415 
 
 affording him the peace and quiet he needed, only added their 
 perplexities and excitements to his own, which were numerous 
 enough without that large addition. He was an appendage 
 who should have been chief. This lawsuit was his lawsuit, 
 as his affair with Desfontaines had been theirs also. Upon 
 reaching Brussels, they rode out together to see the new es- 
 tate. Returning soon, madame, head of the family, hired a 
 large furnished house in a secluded quarter of Brussels, and 
 the whole party settled to their several occupations : she to 
 law papers, German, and mathematics, rising at six to study, 
 dreading to disgust Professor Koenig with her inaptitude ; the 
 marquis, who was soon to depart, to the calm digestion of his 
 daily rations ; Voltaire to his new tragedies and his " Louis 
 XIV.," not declining his share of the law business. Madame 
 was resolved to win her suit. She studied every document, 
 law precedent, and usage bearing upon it, and had that entire 
 confidence in the justice of her cause which is the aggravating 
 privilege of clients. 
 
 But these were not people to give themselves wholly up to 
 labor. Brussels had been for many years the abode of J. B. 
 Rousseau ; the Duke d'Aremberg having given the exiled poet 
 honorable asylum, for which the duke is now chiefly remem- 
 bered. Later, he withdrew his favor from Rousseau, and the 
 poet lived in obscurity in a city where the arts were held in 
 little esteem. Voltaire, still burning with wrath against him, 
 desired to show the people of Brussels that he was still a per- 
 sonage, in spite of the devout libels of Rousseau and the lum- 
 bering assaults of Desfontaines. He was willing, also, to let 
 them know that a French poet was not of necessity dependent 
 on a prince's bounty. He gave a fete, in the style of a " gar- 
 den party," to Madame du Chatelet, the Princess of Chimai, 
 and the Duke d'Aremberg, to which he invited the society of 
 Brussels. The invitations were given in the name of the 
 " Envoy from Utopia," though he confesses he had never read 
 Sir Thomas More's work upon that island, and discovered that 
 not one person in all Brussels had ever heard of it, or knew 
 what the word Utopia meant. The party was perfectly suc- 
 cessful, and made the house a social centre to the world of 
 Brussels. A deplorable incident, however, rendered the occa- 
 sion one of misery to himself. In the morning, as he was su-
 
 416 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 perintending the preparations for the fireworks, two of his car- 
 penters fell from the height of the third story at his feet, and 
 covered him with their blood. He almost lost consciousness, 
 and was some days in recovering from the shock. 
 
 The Duke d'Aremberg invited the strangers, in return, to 
 his castle at Enghien twenty miles away, where Rousseau had 
 lived. There Madame du Chatelet and himself spent a week 
 or two, joining in the noble game of killing time, the chief 
 employment then of princes. " I play a good deal at brelan,^' 
 he wrote to Helvetius, " but our dear studies lose nothing by 
 it. It is necessary to ally labor and pleasure." He found Flan- 
 ders very much what Charlotte Bronte found it a hundred years 
 later : " It is not the land of belles-lettres I am in a cha- 
 teau wherein there were never any books except those brought 
 by Madame du Chatelet and myself ; but, by way of compen- 
 sation, there are gardens more beautiful than those of Chan- 
 tilly, and we lead here that luxurious and easy life which 
 makes the country so agreeable. The possessor of this beau- 
 tiful retreat is of more value than many books ; " particularly, 
 he might have added, to an anthor gathering historic material ; 
 for the Duke d'Aremberg had been wounded at Malplaquet, 
 had served under Prince Eugene, had been part of all the mil- 
 itary history of his time. These superb gardens exist at the 
 present day, and the chateau itself has been demolished only 
 a few years. Visitors are shown a Mount Parnassus there, 
 upon which Voltaire and Rousseau may have stood, as well as 
 some walks shaded by ancient, interlaced shrubbery, under 
 which they must often have walked, though not together. 
 After a round of splendid festivity at Enghien, to which the 
 visitors added the intellectual element of comedy, they re- 
 turned to Brussels. 
 
 But there was no resting-place there for a poet. The busi- 
 ness of the suit obliged madame, six weeks later, to go and 
 pass a month in Paris, where also Voltaire had business, two 
 tragedies at once being ready for submission to the actors. In 
 September they were in the metropolis. Paris was in festival, 
 for the king's eldest daughter was just mai-ried to the Prince 
 Royal of Spain, and the king was lavishing millions in tasteless 
 magnificences, which, Voltaire thought, would have been bet- 
 ter employed in permanent improvements. 
 
 I
 
 FREDERIC BECOMES KING OF PRUSSIA. 417 
 
 " Paris [as he wrote to " the stout lady " of Cirey, Madame de 
 Champbonin, — "big tom-cat," as he loved to call her] is an abyss, 
 wherein we lose our repose and serenity of mind, without which life is 
 a weaiisome tumult. I do not live ; I am carried, drawn far from my- 
 self in whirlwinds. I go, I come ; I sup at the end of the city, to sup 
 the next day at the other end. From a society of three or four inti- 
 mate friends, I must fiy to the opera, to the theatre, to see some curi- 
 osities as a stranger, to embiace a hundred persons in a day, to make 
 and receive a hundred protestations ; not a moment to myself ; no 
 time to write, think, or sleep. I am like that personage of old who 
 
 died smothered under the flowers that were thrown to him 
 
 Such is our life, my dear gros chat ; and you, tranquil on your roof, 
 laugh at our escapades ; and, for myself, I regret those moments so full 
 of delight which we enjoyed at Cirey, with our friends and one an- 
 other. What is, then, that bundle of books which has reached Cirey ? 
 Is it a packet of works against me ? I will mention to you, in pass- 
 ing, that there is no more question here of the Desfontaines horrors than 
 if he and his monsters of children had never existed. That wretch can 
 no more thrust himself into good company at Paris than Rousseau can 
 at Brussels. They are spiders, which are not found in well-kept houses. 
 My dear gros chat, I kiss a thousand times your velvet paws." 
 
 This mode of existence, which did not prevent Madame du 
 Chatelet from continuing her studies, was fatal to the produc- 
 tion of dramatic poetry, which required, as Voltaire wrote to 
 Mademoiselle Quinault, " the whole soul of the poet, a serenity 
 the most profound, an enthusiasm the most intense, a patience 
 the most docile." In November, without having seen either 
 of his new plays in rehearsal, he set out with madame on his 
 return, taking Cirey on their way, and before Christmas they 
 were settled once more in Brussels, immersed in law, mathe- 
 matics, and literature. 
 
 The new year, 1740, was one of the most interesting of Vol- 
 taire's life. The King of Prussia was fast failing, and the 
 Prince Royal, his heir, was giving to Voltaire and to Europe 
 the most engaging promise of a reign peaceful and noble be- 
 yond example. Never before had their correspondence been 
 so frequent, so tender, so enthusiastic. The prince had set his 
 heart upon editing and publishing the most superb edition 
 of " La Henriade " that art and expense could produce. He 
 meant to have the poem printed from engraved plates, as 
 
 music was then printed, and he was in correspondence on the 
 VOL. I. 27
 
 418 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 subject with persons in England, where the work was to be 
 done. Finding unexpected difficulties in the way, he imported 
 from England a font of silvei'-faced type, and set all the artists 
 and engravers of Berlin at work executing vignettes and other 
 illustrations. " Whatever the cost," he wrote to the author, 
 " we shall produce a masterpiece worthy of the poem which it 
 will present to the public." Frederic composed an elaborate 
 introduction, in which he extolled the poem in a manner so 
 extravagant that the poet begged him to moderate his eulo- 
 gium. The prince denied him this favor, and the introduc- 
 tion, as we now have it in the roval edition of Frederic's 
 works, ranks " La Henriade " above the " -iiEneid," above the 
 " Iliad," and, indeed, above all that man had produced of ex- 
 cellent and finished in epic poetry.^ 
 
 Aside from this excess of praise, the preface was well cal- 
 culated to strengthen Voltaire's position in France. Fred- 
 eric, writing while the affair of Desfontaines was fresh in the 
 public mind, hurls anathemas at those " half-learned men, 
 those creatures amphibious of erudition and ignorance, those 
 wretches, themselves without talent, who persistently perse- 
 cute men whose brilliant genius throws them into eclipse ; " 
 and he endeavors to show France how unworthy it was of her 
 to menace and maltreat a man who was the wonder and glory 
 of his age and country. The prince quotes but three lines 
 from the poem, — the apostrophe to Friendship in the eighth 
 canto, in which kings are spoken of as " illustrious ingrates, 
 who are so unhappy as not to know friendship." Frederic 
 did not " stand by his order." 
 
 Voltaire, never weary of correcting his works, sent the 
 prince a number of. passages for insertion in the new edition, 
 one or two of which had in them so much of the Bastille flavor 
 that Frederic advised him not to print them in any. French 
 edition of the poem: " My dear Voltaire, avoid giving a pre- 
 text to the race of bigots, and fear your persecutors. There 
 is nothing more cruel than to be suspected of irreligion. In 
 vain one makes all imaginable efforts to escape the odium of 
 it ; the accusation lasts always. I speak from experience ; 
 and I perceive that extreme circumspection is necessary upon 
 a matter of which dotards [so^s] make a principal point. 
 1 8 CEuvres de Frederic le Grand, 49, 51. Berlin, 1847.
 
 FREDEKIC BECOMES KING OF PRUSSIA. 419 
 
 Voltaire, in the course of his life, was favored with many 
 reams of advice of this kind. Frederic often joined Madame 
 du Chatelet in the well-meant endeavor to " save him from 
 himself," — which would have been to annihilate himself. 
 The passage which the prince had in his mind when he wrote 
 thus remains in the poem (canto vii. line 56) : " Soft Hy- 
 pocrisy, with eyes full of sweetness, — heaven in her eyes, hell 
 in her heart," — ending with the lines in which the church 
 is represented as having inspired and hallowed assassination 
 in the religious wars : " In Paris, cruel priests dared to soil 
 the holy altars with the portrait of Valois's assassin. The 
 League invoked him ; Rome extolled him ; here in torments 
 hell disavows him." Such a passage, the prince added, was 
 fit to be published only in a country like England, where " it 
 is permitted to a man not to be stupid, and to utter all his 
 thought." 
 
 The zeal of the prince in producing this sumptuous edition 
 was indefatigable. He had a world of trouble with it, as 
 men usually have who meddle with other trades than their 
 own ; but he was sustained by a heart-felt conviction that the 
 delineation given in the poem of the religious wars — " the 
 baleful work of wicked priests and false zeal " — was a lesson 
 to kings and people of unspeakable value, which could not 
 be too often repeated nor too strongly emphasized. " An idle 
 prince, in my opinion," he wrote, " is an animal of little use 
 to the world. At least it is my desire to serve my age in all 
 that depends upon me. I wish to contribute to the immor- 
 tality of a work useful to the universe ; I wish to spread 
 abroad a poem in which the author teaches the duty of nobles 
 and the duty of peoples, a mode of reigning little known 
 among princes, and a way of thinking that would have enno- 
 bled the gods of Homer." 
 
 Under the inspiration of Voltaire, he even determined to 
 become himself an author. At this time, the last year of his 
 liberty and leisure, he wrote his " Anti-Machiavelli," or crit- 
 ical examination of Machiavelli's " Prince," a work which he 
 regarded as one of the most mischievous that had ever ap- 
 peared. He told Voltaire that he meant his treatise as " a 
 sequel to ' La Henriade.' " " Upon the grand sentiments of 
 Henry IV. I forge the thunder-bolts that will crush Caesar
 
 420 L[FE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Borgia," he wrote in his first enthusiasm ; and the work con- 
 tinued for many months to be a leading topic in their cor- 
 respondence. The " Anti-Machiavelli " is a dissertation in 
 twenty-six chapters, wherein the maxims by which Machi- 
 avelli inculcates the art of despotism are demolished in the 
 best manner of a young man whose virtue has not yet been 
 brought to " the fatal touch-stone " of opportunity. Voltaire 
 might well anticipate, as he read the chapters sent him by 
 the prince, that Europe was about to see a powerful and ris- 
 ing state governed on Arcadian principles. How eloquently 
 did the prince descant upon the barbarous kings who pre- 
 ferred " the fatal glory of conquerors to that won by kindness, 
 justice, clemency, and all the virtues ! " He wondered — he 
 who was to invade and annex Silesia within the year — "what 
 could induce a man to aggrandize himself through the misery 
 and destruction of other men." " How monstrous, how ab- 
 surd, the attempt to render one's self ilkistrious through mak- 
 ing others miserable ! " " The new conquests of a sovereign 
 do not render the states more opulent which he already pos- 
 sesses ; his subjects gain nothing ; and he deludes himself if 
 he imagines he will be more happy." Again : " It is not the 
 magnitude of the country a prince governs which constitutes 
 his glory." ^ Twenty-six chapters of such virtue-in-words, 
 so easy, so delusive, make up the "Anti-Machiavelli " of Fred- 
 eric of Prussia. Those words were evidently sincere. They 
 were as sincere as the eloquent composition of a student upon 
 temperance, which he delivers to admiration at eleven A. M., 
 and who is led home at eleven P. M. of the same day, some- 
 thing the worse for his supper. 
 
 It is given to Frenchmen, as to ladies, to shed tears easily. 
 These noble sentiments, uttered by a young man who was 
 about to ascend a throne and command an army of a hundred 
 thousand men, brought rapturous tears to Voltaire's eyes, and 
 he delighted to call the prince the modern Marcus Aurelius 
 and the Solomon of the North. He did more. He pointed out 
 the faults and defects of the work with considerable frankness, 
 wrote a preface for it, and undertook the charge of getting it 
 printed and published. 
 
 There is nothing in the lives of these two kings so amiable 
 
 1 9 CEuvres Frederic le Grand, 69, 70.
 
 FKEDERIC BECOMES KING OF PRUSSIA. 421 
 
 and pleasing as this early romantic phase of their long friend- 
 ship, before either had seen anything of the other but his most 
 real self — the man as he would have been if his streuffth had 
 been equal to his disposition, or if he had been born in a much 
 less difficult world than the one he actually inhabited. The 
 prince's daily thought was to gratify and glorify a beloved 
 Master, who gave his pupil an ample return of such wit and 
 wisdom as he possessed. Frederic consulted his own physician 
 upon Voltaire's case ; sent him medicines and receipts ; sent 
 him casks of Hungarian wine, then much valued for weak 
 stomachs ; and gave him a ring that he was never, never^ to 
 take from his finger. He also supplied Madame du Chatelet 
 with an abundance of amber articles, addressed to her a long 
 poem, wrote her many letters, and claimed a place in the 
 poet's heart next to hers. 
 
 He made known to Voltaire some of his royal dreams of 
 good for Prussia : " Every chief of society," he wrote, a few 
 months before his accession, " ought, it seems to me, to think 
 seriously of rendering his people contented, if he cannot make 
 them rich ; for contentment can very well subsist without 
 being sustained by wealth." To this end, he thought, kings 
 should provide agreeable and cheering entertainments for their 
 people ; enjoying which, they could for a short time forget the 
 unhappinesses of their lot. He told Voltaire that if the affairs 
 of the world were really governed by an all-wise Providence, 
 as people imagined, the kings of Europe would not be the 
 extremely dull men many of them were. " The Newtons, 
 the Wolfs, the Lockes, the Voltaires, would be the masters of 
 this world." He described the tower he had built at his cha- 
 teau, in imitation of Voltaire's hall at Cirey : the first story 
 a grotto; the second a room for philosophical apparatus; the 
 third a printing-office ; the roof an observatory. A colon- 
 nade connected this structure with the wing of the castle in 
 which his library was placed ; and, thus bountifully provided, 
 he passed his days in study, experiment, music, and compo- 
 sition ; punctual at the daily parade of his regiment, not other- 
 wise taking part in public business. 
 
 He was, as heirs-apparent generally were, the darling of his 
 country ; his portrait in every house, his name a household 
 word. The few old heads who supposed they had Europe
 
 422 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 in charge, at that period of personal government, regarded 
 this young prince with some attention and little respect. His 
 air-pumps, his tower, his verses, his flute, his raving enthu- 
 siasm for a French author, even his aversion to debauchery, 
 all conspired to give them the impression that he and Prussia 
 would be an easy prey. Plis regiment, however, was a model 
 to the whole army ; even his martinet of a father commended 
 it. 
 
 In February, 1740, the king was supposed to be dying, and 
 the Prince Royal was of necessity near his bedside. Frederic- 
 William was only fifty-two years of age, and he had inherited 
 a constitution that should have lasted eighty-five. Wine, to- 
 bacco, arbitrary power, and the infuriate temper resulting from 
 their inordinate use had burned him out at this early period, 
 and he was one mass of incurable disease. It is an evidence 
 of the essential soundness of the prince's character, as well as 
 of his discernment, that in all his correspondence and conver- 
 sation he was loyal to this dull, defective parent, whom a 
 physical cause maddened and destroyed. He gave Voltaire a 
 glowing narrative of the great things his father had done in 
 peopling a province devastated by the plague, and he never 
 dropped an allusion to the terrible scenes in the palace and the 
 prison which had embittered his own early years, and the 
 whole life of his sister of Baireuth. 
 
 The king lingered nearly half a year, during which his son 
 was severed from all that had made life interesting to him, 
 and he was prevented by etiquette from engaging in new em- 
 ployments. He could merely wait, and stay at home, and 
 look serious. In such circumstances, the only vent to his pent- 
 up vivacity was in composing French verses ; and this was his 
 usual resource all his life, even in the crisis of a campaign, or 
 while he was waiting for the development of a manceuvre. 
 •' As I cannot drink," he wrote once from the field to his 
 sister Amelia, "nothing relieves me but writing verses, and 
 while the distraction lasts I do not feel my griefs." So, now, 
 at Berlin, waiting till his father's death should call him 
 to new duties, he relieved his mind by writing long letters 
 to Voltaire, in nimgled verse and prose. Thus, February 26, 
 1740 : — 
 
 " My dear Voltaire, I can reply only in two words to the
 
 FREDEKIC BECOxMES KING OF PRUSSIA. 423 
 
 letter, the most spirituelle in the world, which you wrote to 
 me. The situation in which I find myself holds the mind so 
 strongly that I almost lose the faculty of thinking. 
 
 " Oui, j'apprends, en dcvenant maitre, 
 Le f'ragilitc de mou etre ; 
 Recevant les grandeurs, j'en vois la vanite'." ^ 
 
 There were twenty-nine lines of this poem, in some of 
 which he came as near poetry as he ever did in his life. He 
 said, in plain prose, that, in whatever situation destiny might 
 place him, Voltaire should see no other change in him than 
 something more efficacious added to the esteem and friend- 
 ship which he felt for him, and always should feel. " I 
 tliink," he added, " a thousand times of the place in ' La 
 Henriade ' where the courtiers of Valois are spoken of. '•His 
 courtiers in tears about him ranged.'' " 
 
 Many long letters in this manner followed, the prince often 
 deploring his coming elevation, as well he might, and declaring 
 that nothing consoled him but " the thought of serving his 
 fellow-citizens [coticitot/ens'], and being useful to his country." 
 He hoped, too, to possess Voltaire. " Can I hope to see you, 
 or do you wish cruelly to deprive me of that satisfaction? 
 .... If I change my condition, you will be informed of it 
 among the first. Pity me, for I assure you I am to be pitied." 
 
 Frederic- William died May 31, 1740. For a week the young 
 king was immersed in business that could not be deferred. A 
 monarch was to be buried ; Prussia was to be delivered from 
 the ridicule of his four thousand rickety giants ; and tan- 
 gled skeins of negotiation were to be unraveled. At the end 
 of his first week of royalty he found time to write to Vol- 
 taire a shurt letter, which showed how little even an absolute 
 monarch is master of his time and destiny. Frederic had 
 thought to be king of Prussia, but was already discovering that 
 Prussia was going to be king of Frederic. 
 
 " My dear friend [lie wrote June 6, 1740], my destiny is changed, 
 and T have witnessed the lust moments of a kinij, his death-strusfle, 
 and his death. In coming to royalty, I certainly had no need of this 
 lesson to be disgusted with the vanity of human grandeurs. I had 
 projected a little work of a metaphysical nature ; it is changed into 
 
 1 Yes, 1 appreluMid on becoming master the frailty of my being; receiving 
 grandeurs, I see the vanity of ilium.
 
 424 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 a work of politics. I thought to joust with the amiable Voltaire, and 
 am obliged to fence with the old mitred Macliiavelli.^ In a word, my 
 dear Voltaire, we are not masters of our destiny. The tornado of 
 events draws us along, and we have to let ourselves be drawn. See 
 in me, T pray you, only a zealous citizen, a somewhat skeptical philos- 
 opher, but a truly faithful friend. For God's sake, write to me only 
 as man to man, and despise with me titles, names, and all external 
 show. I have scarcely yet had time to recognize myself ; my occu{)a- 
 tions are infinite, and still I give myself more of them ; but, despite 
 all this labor, there always remains to me time to admire your works, 
 and draw from them instruction and recreation. Assure the mar- 
 chioness of my esteem. I admire her as much as her vast informa- 
 tion and rare capacity merit. Adieu, my dear Voltaire. If I live, I 
 shall see you, and even this very year. Love me always, and be 
 always sincere with your friend." 
 
 Three letters the young king wrote to Voltaire in the first 
 month of his reign, in verse and prose, although, as he said, 
 he had to work with both hands, — with one at army busi- 
 ness, with the other at civil affairs and the fine arts ; having 
 twenty occupations at once, and finding every day twenty- 
 four hours too short. Voltaire was not backward in respond- 
 ing. 
 
 " Sire," he wrote in his first letter to the king, " if your 
 destiny has changed, your noble soul has not. I was a little 
 inclined to misanthropy, and the injustice of men afflicted me 
 too much. At present I abandon myself, with all the world, 
 to joy." Then he told the king what delight his accession 
 
 had given in France. " The French are all Prussians 
 
 The minister who governs the country where I am (Count de 
 Daun, of Brussels) said to me, ' We shall see if he will dis- 
 band all at once the useless giants who have caused so much 
 outcry.' My reply was, ' He will do nothing precipitately ; 
 he will not betray any marked design to condemn the errors 
 which his predecessor may have made ; he will content him- 
 self with repairing them gradually. Deign, then, to avow, 
 great king, that I have divined well. Your majesty orders 
 me, when writing to you, to think less of the monarch than 
 of the 7nan. It is an order much in accord with my own 
 heart. I do not know how to demean myself with a king ; 
 
 1 Cardinal de Fleury.
 
 FKEDERIC BECOMES KING OF PRUSSIA. 425 
 
 but I am quite at my ease with a true man, — one who has in 
 his heart and his head the love of the human race. There is 
 one thing which I should never dare ask the king, but which 
 I should dare take the liberty of asking the man. It is, if 
 the late king, before his death, came to know and love all the 
 merit of my adorable prince." 
 
 He banters the king upon the question whether he would 
 submit to the ceremony of coronation and anointing; asks him 
 for the routine of his day ; warns him to put a festive supper 
 between the day's work and sleep ; declares that he is enrap- 
 tured, at the thought of seeing him so soon ; and protests that 
 the sight of him will be a beatific vision. " I am not the only 
 one who sighs for that happiness. The Queen of Sheba would 
 like to take measures for seeing Solomon in his glory." 
 
 Solomon wrote a long reply, touching upon many points, 
 but did not offer the least encouragement to the project of the 
 Queen of Sheba. It was not his iptention to invite a Queen 
 of Sheba, from whom he hoped to lure an illustrious vassal. 
 He informed Voltaire that his father had died in perfect 
 friendship with him. 
 
 " Here, then, is the Berhn Gazette, such as you ask it of 
 me : I reached Potsdam Friday evening, and found the kino- 
 in so sad a condition that I augured at once that his end was 
 near. He showed me a thousand marks of his regard ; he 
 talked to me more than a full hour upon public business, both 
 home and foreign, with all the justness and good sense imagi- 
 nable. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday he spoke in the same 
 way, appearing very tranquil, very resigned, and bearing his 
 pains with much firmness. He resigned the regency into my 
 hands Tuesday morning at five o'clock ; took leave tenderly of 
 my brothers, of all the officers of mark, and of me." 
 
 Frederic continued at much length to answer Voltaire's 
 questions. One piece of intelligence must have struck with 
 surprise a man who was reading the proofs of Frederic's 
 " Anti-Machiavelli : " "I began by augmenting the forces of 
 the state by sixteen battalions, five companies of hussars, and 
 one of body guards." But then he immediately added that 
 he had founded a new Academy, had made the acquisition of 
 Maupertuis, Wolf, and Algarotti, had invited to his service 
 Euler, S'Gravesend, and Vaucanson, had established a new col-
 
 426 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 lege for commerce and manufactures, had engaged painters 
 and sculptors, and was not going to be either crowned or 
 anointed. He spoke of those ceremonies as "frivolous and 
 useless, which ignorance and superstition had established." 
 He was working, too, with wonderful assiduity : up at four ; 
 medical treatment till eight; at his desk till ten; parade till 
 noon ; at desk again till five ; in the evening, music, supper, 
 and society. 
 
 Voltaire was moved, amazed, and puzzled. " What do you 
 think of it ? " he asked his old friend Cideville. " Is not your 
 heart moved ? Are we not happy to be born in an age which 
 has produced a man so singular ? For all that, I remain in 
 Brussels, and the best king in the world, with all his merits 
 and favors, shall not take me away a moment from Emilie. 
 Kings, even this one, must ever yield the precedence to 
 friends." 
 
 Emilie, indeed, had a tight clutch upon him. Her obliging 
 husband had now gone to the army, and never lived long un- 
 der the same roof with her again. There was a period of five 
 years, from 1740 to 1745, during which they scarcely met, 
 though they were always on terms of friendship, and cordially 
 cooperated for objects of common concern. Voltaire was hus- 
 band, companion, lawyer, and illustrious friend to her, all in 
 one ; and she held him fast by making him believe that his 
 presence was infinitely necessary to her. He had, moreover, 
 vowed eternal fidelity, and he was a man to be faithful to such 
 a vow. Planting herself upon this vow, as some women do 
 upon their marriage certificate, she kept him in pitiful bond- 
 age through his sympathies, and of course dared not trust him 
 out of her sight. The vigilant instinct with which women 
 falsely allied to men are apt to be endowed causes them to 
 scent danger from afar, and thus Madame du Chatelet, from 
 the first, dreaded in the Prince Royal of Prussia a rival that 
 could rob her of her poet. For the next ten years it was in- 
 deed always a question which should possess him; and be- 
 tween the two contestants Voltaire seemed sometimes in dan- 
 ger of being torn to pieces. 
 
 The struggle began in the first month of Frederic's reign. 
 The refutation of Machiavelli was in the hands of a printer in 
 Holland at the moment of Frederic's accession to the throne;
 
 FREDERIC BECOMES KING OF PRUSSIA. 427 
 
 and Voltaire, the editor of the work, so informed the king. 
 But Prussia was now lord of Frederic. Surveying his ami- 
 able treatise from the height of a throne, he perceived several 
 things in it that were proper enough for a prince to write, but 
 not politic for a king to publish. " For God's sake," he wrote 
 to Voltaire, " buy up the whole edition of the ' Anti-Machia- 
 velli' ! " ^ Here was a coil. The publisher lived at the Hague 
 a hundred miles away, and he was a publisher who knew how 
 much the commercial value of the work confided to him by 
 Voltaire had increased by its author's accession to a throne. 
 It was evidently necessary for the editor to go to the Hague. 
 He went. Experienced men will know what he meant when 
 he told the king that he " had had much trouble in getting 
 leave of abseuQe." 
 
 Rare scenes occurred at the Hague between editor and 
 publisher, which could have been amplified into an amusing 
 farce. Voltaire had sent a man in advance, post-haste, to try 
 and get possession, on some plausible pretext, of a few pages 
 of the manuscript not yet in type, so that he could enter upon 
 the negotiation at an advantage. Not a page could be be- 
 guiled from the astute possessor of the prize. Upon hearing 
 this report, Voltaii'e himself entered upon the scene. 
 
 " I sent for the rascal ; I sounded him ; I presented the thing in 
 every light. He gave me to understand that, being in possession of 
 the manuscript, he would not for any consideration whatever give it 
 up ; and that, having begun to print, he should finish. When I saw 
 that I had dealings with a Dutchman who abused the liberty of his 
 country, and with a publisher who pushed to excess his right of per- 
 secuting authors, not being able here to confide my secret to any one, 
 nor to implore the aid of authority, I remembered that your majesty 
 says, in one of the chapters of the ' Anti-Machiavelli,' that in nego- 
 tiation it is allowable to use a little honest finesse. I said then to 
 Jean Van Duren that I only came to correct some pages of the manu- 
 script. ' Very willingly, sir,' said he. ' If you will come to my house, 
 I will confide it to you generously, leaf by leaf ; you shall correct 
 whatever you please, shut up in my room, in the presence of my fam- 
 ily and my workmen.' I accepted his cordial offer ; I went to his 
 house ; and, in truth, I corrected some leaves, which he took from 
 me as I did them, and read them over to see if I was not deceiving 
 him. Having thus inspired in him a little less distrust, I returned 
 1 22 CEuvres de Frederic le Graud, 14.
 
 428 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 to-day to the same prison, where he shut me up as before ; and having 
 obtained six chapters at once, in order to compare them together, I 
 scratched them in such a way, and interlined such horrible cock-and- 
 bull nonsense, that they no longer had the least resemblance to a 
 work. That is what may be called blowing up your ship in order 
 not to be taken by the enemy. I was in despair at sacrificing so fine 
 a work ; but I was obeying a king whom I idolize, and I assure you 
 I did it with hearty good-will. Who is now astonished and con- 
 founded ? My scoundrel. To-morrow I hope to make with him a 
 fair bargain, and to force him to give up all to me, both print and 
 manuscript." 
 
 But Jean was obdurate. Voltaire sought legal advice, and 
 found that, by Dutch law, a bargain was a bargain. He tried 
 all arts and devices, and still Van Duren's press continued to 
 strike off the printed sheets. Then he advised the king to 
 kill Van Duren's edition by issuing an authorized version, 
 which he, Voltaire, would superintend, and hurry into print. 
 The king replied, " Erase, alter, correct, and replace all the 
 passages you like. I submit the whole to your discernment." 
 Voltaire recast the work in a few days, and, in a few weeks, 
 had editions for London, Paris, and Holland ready for distri- 
 bution ; and thus, although he did not prevent Van Duren 
 from issuing his mutilated version, he prevented him from 
 gaining much by it. In the late Berlin edition of Frederic's 
 works, two versions of the " Anti-Machiavelli " are given, — 
 the one edited by Voltaire, and the one as originally written 
 in the king's own hand. Voltaire used his privilege of editor 
 with great freedom, and made many g;illant cuts in the man- 
 uscript, erasing in all thirty-two printed pages. When the 
 king saw his diminished bantling, his paternal pride was so 
 aggrieved that he resolved to disavow both editions and spend 
 the leisure of the following winter in preparing a third, which 
 should be printed at Berlin under his own eyes, and, perhaps, 
 publislied with his name in the title-page. Before the next 
 winter had reached its second month, the King of Prussia, as it 
 seemed to his assiduous editor, was refuting, sword in hand, not 
 Machiavelli's " Prince," but the prince's " Anti-Machiavelli." 
 For the present, the king was sorry he had written the book, 
 because " it had robbed the world of fifteen days of Voltaire's 
 time." Late in August, 1740, Voltaire returned to Brussels 
 and resumed his usual routine of labor and recreation.
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII. 
 
 FIRST MEETING OF VOLTAIRE AND FREDERIC. 
 
 KiXG and author, after four years of correspondence, were 
 now to put their enthusiastic friendship to the test of personal 
 converse. The king, in making the tour of his states to re- 
 ceive homage, was to approach, in September, 1740, the bor- 
 ders of Flanders. He was on fire to meet Voltaire. Rather 
 than not see him, he would receive Madame du Chatelet also, 
 tliougb with great reluctance ; and he wrote to her, at Vol- 
 taire's request, to say that he hoped soon to meet them both. 
 He evidently had for her the repugnance of a rival. " To 
 speak frankly to you," he wrote to Voltaire, "it is you, it is 
 my friend, whom I desire to see ; and the divine Emilie, with 
 all her divinity, is only the accessory of the Newtonized 
 Apollo." Writing the next day, the king added, " If Emilie 
 viust accompany Apollo, I consent ; but if I can see you alone, 
 I should prefer it. I should be too much dazzled ; I could not 
 bear so much brilliancy at once. I should need the veil of 
 Moses to temper the blended rays of your divinities." 
 
 But, king as he was, he was obliged promptly to change 
 his note ; and he announced his intention, a few days after, of 
 visiting them, incognito, at Brussels. They were to meet 
 him at Anvers, a day's ride from their abode, and they would 
 all go to Brussels together, — Voltaire and madame, the king 
 and his three companions, Kaiserling, Maupertuis, and Alga- 
 rotti. Nothing could be more agreeable to Madame du Chate- 
 let ; for Algarotti and Maupertuis were among her most cher- 
 ished friends. Kaiserling had been her guest, and she was 
 not insensible to the social Sclat of entertaining a king. She 
 had had a brief estrangement from the difficult Maupertuis, 
 but Voltaire had healed the breach, telling the irritable phi- 
 losopher that " a man is always in the right when he makes 
 the first advance to an offended woman." Maupertuis, as it
 
 430 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 seems, acted upon this maxim, and all was well between them. 
 A most congenial party would have surrounded the king at 
 her house in Brussels, where madarae had extemporized am- 
 ple preparation. 
 
 But there was, after all, a doubt whether the king could 
 come. He was afflicted with the four-days ague, for which he 
 was under treatment ; and the next day, as he wrote to Vol- 
 taire, would decide whether that treatment had been effectual. 
 If the next Hay passed without a fit of the ague, then he would 
 go on from Wessel to An vers, and meet them, and enjoy the 
 most exquisite experience of his life. 
 
 But the ague returned the next day, and the king could 
 only write a letter, not undertake a long journey. Could 
 Voltaire alone meet him at Cleves, eighty miles from Brus- 
 sels ? " Let us cheat the fever, my dear Voltaire, and let me 
 at least have the pleasure of embracing you. Make my ex- 
 cuses to the marchioness for my not having the satisfaction of 
 seeing her at Brussels. All who come near me know what 
 my intention was, and that it was the fever only that could 
 have made me change it. On Sunday I shall be at a little 
 place near Cleves, where I shall be able to possess you truly 
 at my ease. If the sight of you does not cure me, I shall con- 
 fess myself at once." 
 
 No French lady of that period could believe that this was 
 not contrived ; and we may also be perfectly sure that Ma- 
 dame du Chatelet did not allow royal letters to come into her 
 house which she did not take the precaution of reading. We 
 ought not to be surprised, therefore, to read in one of her 
 letters of December, 1740, " I defy the King of Prussia to 
 hate me more than I have hated him these two months past! " 
 Nevertheless, Voltaire managed to break away, and take the 
 road to Cleves in time for the rendezvous, carrying with him 
 a letter from madame to the king, in which she declared she 
 did not know which afflicted her most, — to know that he was 
 sick, or to miss the expected opportunity of paying him lier 
 court. She also hoped his majesty would not keep long the 
 person with whom she expected to pass her life, and whom 
 she had " only lent him for a very few days." 
 
 On a chilly Sunday evening, September 11, 1740, Voltaire 
 reached the castle of Moyland, six miles from Cleves, where
 
 FIRST MEETING OF VOLTAIRE AND FREDERIC. 431 
 
 the King of Prussia lodged. At the gate of the court he 
 found one soldier on guard, and descried within the court 
 Privy Councilor Rambouet walking up and down, blowing 
 his fincrers. The visitor was conducted to the rooms of the 
 chateau occupied by the king, which were unfurnished ; and 
 he perceived by the light of one candle, in a small side-room, 
 a cot two feet and a half wide, upon which there was a little 
 man all muffled up in a dressing-gown of thick blue cloth, 
 and shaking with a violent fit of the ague. Voltaire, after 
 making his bow, went to the bedside of the shivering mon- 
 arch, and, as he tells us, " began their acquaintance by feeling 
 his pulse, as if he had been the king's first physician." The 
 fit passed, and the king was well enough to dress and join 
 his friends at supper. With Voltaire, Maupertuis, Algarotti, 
 Kaiserling, and one or two official persons at the table, Fred- 
 eric forgot his ague, and led the conversation to deep and 
 high matters. " We discussed to the bottom," Voltaire re- 
 corded long after, " the immortality of the soul, free-will, and 
 the men-Avomen of Plato." Doubtless it was a supper to be 
 remembered. 
 
 The three days' visit was all too short for the discussion of 
 the king's fondly cherished pi'ojects for the elevation of his 
 country and the entertainment of its capital. Frederic availed 
 himself of the pen of his guest in drawing up a manifesto, be- 
 sides advising with him in affairs dramatic, philosophical, ar- 
 tistic, and literar}^ The king anticipated some years of peace, 
 and with good reason. His whole soul seemed set upon em- 
 ploying those years in making Berlin a German Paris, with 
 academy, library, theatre, opera, galleries, society, all in the 
 ti'ue Parisian manner. What man so comj)etent to aid him as 
 Voltaire, who had lived but to promote and strengthen that 
 which made Paris illustrious in Frederic's eyes ? Three days 
 of familiar, earnest, delicious conversation, three suppers of the 
 gods, and the friends separated ; but soon, as they hoped, to 
 meet again, in circumstances more favorable, — perhaps at that 
 chateau of Remusburg, where Frederic had lived as Prince 
 Royal, and where he had built a tower and had gathered all 
 the means of self-improvement. Voltaire, on leaving the cha- 
 teau of Moyland, took the road to Holland, to complete the 
 publication of the " Anti-Machievelli " and to superintend its
 
 432 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 distribution. Thus, the King of Prussia did not send back in 
 a few days the poet whom Madame du Chatelet had been so 
 obb'ging as to lend him. 
 
 The visit did not, in the least, disenchant either the king 
 or Voltaire. They were, if possible, more in love with each 
 other than before. 
 
 " I have seen that Voltaire whom I was so curious to know," 
 wrote the king, September 24th, to his familiar Jordan; "but I 
 saw him with my ague upon me, and my mind as unstrung as 
 
 my body was weak He has the eloquence of Cicero, 
 
 the sweetness of Pliny, and the wisdom of Agrippa ; in a word, 
 Ke unites in himself the virtues and talents of the three greatest 
 men of antiquity. His mind works without ceasing ; every drop 
 of ink is a gleam of wit dai'ted from his pen. He declaimed 
 " Mahomet 1." to us, an admirable tragedy of his own, and he 
 transported us out of ourselves ; I could only admire and be 
 silent. The Du Chatelet is fortunate indeed to have him ; for 
 out of the good things he utters at random a person who had 
 no gift but memory might make a brilliant book." 
 
 Voltaire was not less satisfied with the king. He described 
 him soon after, in letters to Cideville, Maupertuis, H^nault, 
 andD'Argens, in glowing terms. 
 
 [To Cideville.] " I saw one of the most amiable men in the world, — 
 a man who would be the charm of society, sought everywhere, if he had 
 not been a king ; a philosopher without austerity, all goodness, com- 
 pliance, and accomplishments; forgetting that he is a king the mo- 
 ment he is among his friends, and so completely forgetting it that he 
 made me forget it also, so that I had to make an effort of memory to 
 recollect that 1 saw seated upon the foot of my bed a sovereign who 
 had an army of a hundred thousand men." 
 
 [To D'Argens.] " Why do you go to Switzerland ? "What! there 
 is a King of Prussia in the world ! "What! the most amiable of men 
 is upon a throne ! The Algarottis, the Wolfs, the Maupertuis, all the 
 arts, are running thither in a throng, and you would go to Switzer- 
 land 1 No, no ; take my advice : establish yourself at Berlin. Reason, 
 wit, virtue, are to be recreated there. It is the country for every man 
 
 who thinks To-day [at the Hague], I have seen a gentleman 
 
 of fifty thousand francs a year, who said to me, ' I shall have no 
 other country than Berlin. I renounce my own.' I know, too, a 
 very great lord of the empire who desires to leave his sacred majesty 
 for the Humanity of the King of Prussia. Go, my dear friend, into 
 
 1
 
 FIRST MEETING OF VOLTAIRE AND FREDERIC. 433 
 
 that temple which he is elevating to the arts. Alas, that I cannot 
 follow you thither ! A sacred duty draws me elsewhere." 
 
 [To President Henault.] " It is a miracle of nature that the son of 
 a crowned ogre, reared with beasts, should have divined in his des- 
 erts that refinement and all those natural graces which, even at Paris, 
 are the possession of a very small number of persons, who neverthe- 
 less make the reputation of Paris. His ruling passions are to be 
 
 just and to please. He is formed for society as for the throne 
 
 As much as I detest the low and infamous superstition which dis-" 
 graces so many states, so much do I adore true virtue ; and I believe 
 I have found it in this prince and in his book. If he should ever be- 
 tray such grand professions, if he is not worthy of himself, if he is 
 not always a Marcus Aurelius, a Trojan, and a Titus, I shall lament 
 it, and love him no more." 
 
 [To Maupertuis.] " When we set out from Cleves, and you took to 
 the right and I to the left, I believed we had come to the last judg- 
 ment, and the good Lord was separating his elect from the damned. 
 The divine Frederic said to you, ' Sit at my right hand iu the para- 
 dise of Berlin ; and to me, ' Go, accursed one, into Holland.' I am, 
 then, in that phlegmatic hell, far from the divine fire that animates the 
 Frederics, the Maupertuis, the Algarottis." 
 
 He was detained several weeks at tlie Hague, during which 
 he lived, by the king's invitation, at an old palace belonging 
 to the crown of Prussia, and inhabited by the Prussian envoy. 
 He gave the king a poetical description of the dilapidated 
 condition of this palace : its magnificent rooms with rotten 
 floors and leaky roofs ; its garret full of the shields, armor, 
 and weapons of the king's heroic ancestors ; their rusty sa- 
 bres ranged along the walls, and the worm-eaten wood of their 
 lances couched upon the ground, — dust like the heroes who 
 had borne them. " There are also some books, which the rats 
 alone have read during the last fifty years, and whicli are 
 covered with the largest cobwebs in Europe, for fear the pro- 
 fane should approach them." In this musty old palace he 
 lived two months. Madame du Chatelet embraced the oppor- 
 tunity of his absence to visit Fontainebleau, where she busied 
 herself in preparing the way for his safe return to Paris. 
 She had bouglit a very large and handsome house at the 
 capital, which she hoped long to inhabit with her friend, when 
 she had gained her suit in Brussels. Finding the Cardinal 
 de Fleury not too well disposed toward him, she asked the 
 
 VOL. I. 28
 
 434 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Kins: of Prussia to use his influence with the cardinal on Vol- 
 taire's behalf. 
 
 " There is nothing positive against him," she wrote to 
 Frederic, October 16, 1740; "but an infinitude of trifling 
 grievances can all together do as much harm as real wrongs. 
 It will depend upon your majesty alone to dissipate all those 
 clouds, and it would sufiice if only M. Camas [Prussian am- 
 bassador] would not conceal the favor with which your maj- 
 esty honors him and the interest which you deign to take in 
 him. I am very certain that would be enough to secure M. 
 de Voltaire a repose which he has a right to enjoy, and of 
 which his health has need." ^ 
 
 The king did not neglect to comply with this request. He 
 had already more than once conveyed to the cardinal intima- 
 tions of his warm regard for Voltaire, and Voltaire himself had 
 taken pains to keep the French court advised of the same. 
 Usually, he was careless about the address and date of his 
 letters ; but now, at the head of all his letters for Paris, he 
 was careful to write, " At the Hague, at the Palace of the 
 King of Prussia." Nor did he fail to communicate to his cor- 
 respondents at court the more striking proofs of the king's 
 favor towards him. Thus, on the very day, June 18th, upon 
 which he answered the first letter written to him by King 
 Frederic, he wrote to the Marquis d'Argenson, telling him 
 what a tender and affectionate letter the young king had writ- 
 ten him, and how the king had enjoined it upon him to write 
 to him only as man to man. As soon as he had copies of the 
 " Anti-Machiavelli " ready, he sent one to Madame du Chsi- 
 telet for presentation to the Cardinal de Fleury, leaving the 
 cardinal to guess the secret of its authorship, which was known 
 to Europe. Thus the way was prepared for a closer connec- 
 tion with " the mitred Machiavelli " than either of them could 
 have anticipated. 
 
 1 Lettrea de la Marquise du Chatelet, page 396. Paris, 1878.
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII. 
 
 VOLTAIRE AS AMATEUR DIPLOMATIST. 
 
 In the early autumn of 1740, the system of personal gov- 
 ernment, as then established in Europe, presented itself in its 
 fairest aspect. There was peace among the nations, and each 
 of the individuals upon whom its continuance most depended 
 had a personal reason of the most powerful nature to pre- 
 serve it. Frederic, as we know, was ardent to carry out his 
 project of engrafting French civilization. George II., of Eng- 
 land, was never so sure of his native, hereditary Hanover as 
 when Europe was at peace. The Emperor Charles VI. was a 
 bankrupt, struggling to restore his finances. The Cardinal 
 de Fleury, always devoted to a pacific policy, always more a 
 priest than a minister, was then eighty-seven years of age. 
 
 Science, art, literature, the amelioration of the common lot, 
 — all the dearest interests of man, that languish in war and 
 revive in peace, — seemed more than ever the objects sought 
 by governments, societies, and individuals. Three kings at 
 once invited Maupertuis in 1740. An advocate of the system 
 by which the interests and rights of two hundred millions of 
 human beings were annexed, bj'^ the accident of birth, to the 
 caprice of the dozen worst educated of them all might have 
 been pardoned if, on the 15th of October, 1740, he had pointed 
 to the condition of public affairs as an evidence that personal 
 government, however absurd in theory, was still well suited to 
 the imperfect development of man. 
 
 A trifling incident changed all. One day an elderly gentle- 
 man in Vienna, called Charles VI., Emperor of Germany, ate 
 too many mushrooms ! He died, and Maria Theresa, his 
 daughter, reigned in his stead. A young lady of twenty-three, 
 married to an ordinary man, was to hold together an exten- 
 sive, incoherent empire, parts of which were hers by titles 
 that could be called in question. All the powers were bound
 
 436 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 by treaty to recognize her as the heir to the whole of her 
 father's dominions. But that father was gone from the scene, 
 — dead before his time, — a victim to his love of an expensive 
 vegetable. A spell was broken ! The political system of 
 Europe was at an end. Each power sat wondering what the 
 others would do, watching for the outthrust of an arm toward 
 the chestnuts left suddenly without protection. Thirteen years 
 of war and tribulation followed, involving Europe and Amer- 
 ica; causing more damage than arithmetic can compute, and 
 more misery than language can utter ; ending in salutary rec- 
 tifications of the maps of both hemispheres, — ending in the 
 United States of to-day and the Prussia of to-day. 
 
 Voltaire was still inhabiting the King of Prussia's palace at 
 the Hague when those historic mushrooms did their fatal work. 
 Besides his proof-reading and his copy-distributing, he was ne- 
 gotiating, on Frederic's behalf, with a troupe of Paris actors, 
 whom the king desired to engage permanently for the royal 
 theatre at Berlin, — a troupe complete in all the kinds : trag- 
 edy, comedy, opera, and ballet. He was writing, also, to his 
 literary and philosophic friends in France, as we have seen, 
 urging them to repair to Berlin, the new seat of the Muses, 
 the new home of philosophy and toleration. He was soon 
 himself to visit the king at his old abode at Remusburg, to dis- 
 cuss further all those fine schemes for making Berlin a more 
 solid and tolerant Paris. In the midst of this joyous and 
 hopeful activity occurred the disaster of the imperial indiges- 
 tion. 
 
 " My dear Voltaire," wrote Frederic, October 26, 1740, " an 
 event the least expected hinders me this time from opening 
 my soul to yours as usual, and gossiping with you as I should 
 like. The emperor is dead. This death disarranges all my 
 pacific ideas ; and my opinion is that, in the month of June 
 next, we shall be occupied with gunpowder, soldiers, and earth- 
 works, rather than with actresses, ballets, and theatres ; so 
 that I find myself obliged to suspend the contract we were 
 making [with the comedians]. My affair at Liege is all fin- 
 ished; but those of the present moment are of the greatest 
 consequence for Europe. This is the moment of the total 
 change of the ancient system of policy ; it is that detached 
 rock which rolled upon the image of four metals which Nebu-
 
 VOLTAIRE AS AMATEUR DIPLOMATIST. 437 
 
 chadnezer saw, and which destroyed them all. I am a thou- 
 sand times obliged to you for the printing of the Alachiavelli. 
 I could not work upon it at present ; I am overwhelmed with 
 business." 
 
 But Voltaire was to visit the king, all the same ; and he un- 
 derstood the political situation sufficiently well to see that, at 
 such a moment, he might be of use to an aged, apprehensive 
 French minister. What did this young enthusiast of a king 
 mean to do ? That was a question upon which, perhaps, he 
 could get some precious information during his stay at Remus- 
 burg. He wrote to the cardinal, acknowledging the favorable 
 disposition towards himself which Madame du Chatelet had 
 made known to him, and denying that he had anything but 
 respect for true religion. " Formerly," he wrote, "the Cai-di- 
 na,l de Fleury loved me, when I used to see him at the chateau 
 of Madame de Villars." Two days after, he announced to the 
 cardinal his intention to visit Remusburg and pay his court to 
 " a monarch who took the Cardinal de Fleury's way of think- 
 ing as his model." He also reminded his Eminence that he 
 had lately sent him a copy of a certain " Anti-Machiavelli,"' a 
 work in which his Eminence's own sentiments were expressed, 
 and which had been inspired by his Eminence's own motive, a 
 desire to promote the happiness of mankind. " Whoever may 
 be the author of this work, if your Eminence will deign to in- 
 dicate to me that you approve it, I am sure that the author, 
 who is already full of esteem for you personally, will add his 
 friendship also, and cherish still more the nation of which you 
 make the felicity." 
 
 The aged minister, disturbed already by unexplained move- 
 ments of Prussian troops, poured forth two long, affectionate 
 letters to Voltaire on the same day, November 14, 1740. His 
 ancient love, such as it was, experienced a surprising revival. 
 He became a father to Frederic's friend, a wise, indulgent 
 sire, who knew how to allow for the vagaries of genius and 
 the escapades of youth. 
 
 " You did me wrong [he wrote] if you thought that I have ever 
 wished you the least ill ; and I have been sorry for that only which 
 you have done to yourself. I think I know you perfectly. You are 
 a good and honest man. That first quality certainly will not harm 
 you, and you are aware that Cicero gave it the first rank in the char-
 
 438 LIFE OF VOLTAIEE. 
 
 acter of great orators. But you have been young ; and perhaps you 
 were young a little too long. You passed your youth in the company 
 which the thoughtless world regards as the best, because it is com- 
 posed of great lords. They applauded you, and with reason ; but they 
 yielded to you in everything, and they went too far. Very soon 
 they spoiled you ; and, at your age, that was natural. I trust that 
 you feel it yourself ; and that which gives me the most pleasure, in 
 your letter of the 2d of this month, is the passage in which you 
 speak of your respect for religion. It is a grand word, and let me, I 
 pray you, give to what you say all the extent which my friendship 
 for you makes me desire for it. Among the great number of duties 
 which an honest man is bound to fulfill, can that one be excepted which 
 regards our sovereign Master and our Creator ? Even the pagans do 
 not think so. Return, then, to your country with these sentiments, or, 
 at least, with a willingness to yield yourself to them. You do your 
 country honor by your talents ; give it also the consolation to see 
 those talents employed for the public good, the only end of genuine 
 and solid glory. I have always esteemed you and loved you : I can- 
 not give you a better proof of it than in speaking to you with the free- 
 dom that I now do." 
 
 Then, with regard to the King of Prussia, nothing, he 
 thought, could be more becoming in Voltaire than to pay his 
 homage to so glorious a prince. 
 
 " I was not aware [continued the cardinal] that the precious gift 
 which Madame la Marquise du Chatelet made me of the ' Anti- 
 Machiavelli ' came from you. It is all the more dear to me as your 
 gift, and I thank you for it with all my heart. As I have but few mo- 
 ments to bestow upon my pleasure, I have only been able to read 
 about forty pages or so, and I shall try to finish it in what I call, very 
 improperly, my retreat ; for it is, unhappily, too much disturbed for re- 
 pose. Whoever may be the author of this work, if he is not a prince, 
 he deserves to be one ; and the little which I have read of it is so wise, 
 so reasonable, and expresses principles so admirable, that the author 
 would be worthy to command other men, provided he has the courage 
 to put them in practice. If he was born a prince, he contracts a very 
 solemn engagement with the public ; and the Emperor Antoninus 
 would not have acquired the immortal glory which he retains, age 
 after age, if he had not sustained by the justice of his government the 
 exquisite morality of which he had given such instructive lessons to 
 
 all sovereigns I should be infinitely touched if his Prussian 
 
 majesty could find in my conduct some conformity with his principles ; 
 but I can at least assure you that 1 regard his as the outline of the
 
 VOLTAIRE AS AJIATEUR DIPLOMATIST. 439 
 
 most perfect and most glorious government. Corruption is so gen- 
 eral and good faith so indecently banished from all liearts in this un- 
 happy age that, if we do not hold very firmly to the superior mo- 
 tives which oblige us not to depart from right principles, we shall 
 sometimes be tempted to lay them aside on certain occasions ; but the 
 king, my master, makes it plainly evident that he does not claim the 
 right to use reprisals of this kind, and, at the first moment of the 
 news of the emperor's death, he assured the Prince de Lichtenstein 
 that he would faithfully keep all his engagements. I fall without 
 thinking of it into political reflections, and I conclude by assuring you 
 that I shall endeavor not to render myself unworthy of the good opin- 
 ion which his Prussian majesty deigns to have of me." 
 
 The King of France, then, meant to keep the peace, — 
 meant to respect the claims of Maria Theresa. Could the 
 author of the " Anti-Machiavelli" do less? 
 
 Early in November, the season no longer favorable for trav- 
 eling, Voltaire set out from the Hague on his journey to Re- 
 musburg, distant not less by the usual road than three hun- 
 dred miles. At the moment of his departure, who should ar- 
 rive but a young man, Dumolard by name, recommended by 
 Thieriot for the service of the King of Prussia as librarian. 
 That monarch had ceased to want librarians ; but, neverthe- 
 less, he took him into his carriage, and thus' had a traveling 
 companion. The king, moreover, had been remiss in paying 
 Thieriot's salary and expenditures as Paris agent and news- 
 writer, and it occurred to Voltaire that the arrival of Dumo- 
 lard would furnish an occasion for him to jog the memory of 
 a king overwhelmed with business. " Send me at once," he 
 wrote to Thieriot, " the amount of your disbursements ; do not 
 doubt that his majesty will act generously." Thieriot, in fact, 
 was getting tired of writing letters and making purchases, 
 even for a king, without receiving an occasional remittance. 
 
 The usual breakdown of their carriage occurred soon after 
 they had entered the dominions of Frederic. One of their 
 servants, as Voltaire told the king, asked help of some na- 
 tives, who, not acquainted with the French language, supposed 
 he wanted something to drink. Another servant ran off with- 
 out knowing where. " Dumolard proved a man of resources, 
 as if he had not been a scholar." Voltaire, accoutred as he was 
 in velvet breeches, silk stockings, and low shoes, mounted one
 
 440 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 of the carriage horses, restive and sharp-backed, and thus ap- 
 proached the walled town of Herford. " Who goes there ? " 
 cried the sentinel. " Don Quixote," answered Voltaire ; and 
 under that name he entered the city. 
 
 Two weeks of laborious travel brought him to the ch^ 
 teau of Remusburg, where he found a numerous and gay com- 
 pany of the king's friends, including his sister of Bayreuth. 
 The quinine which Voltaire had recommended — a new rem- 
 edy then — had broken the king's ague, and he was able to 
 meet his guests in the evening. To all appearance nothing 
 had changed, if not that the king was more bent on pleasure 
 than usual ; every evening a concert, at which he played two 
 or three concertos on the flute ; a merry supper afterward, 
 with verses, play, dancing, and " eating to burst." Voltaire, 
 who was always improved in health by a journey, was in 
 his brightest mood, and pleased the king better than be- 
 fore. When opportunity served, the great topic of the day, 
 the death, of the emperor and its possible consequences, was 
 spoken of between them. The flattering letter of the car- 
 dinal upon the " Anti-Machiavelli " was brought into play; 
 or, as Voltaire wrote to the cardinal, " I have obeyed the 
 orders which your Eminence did not give me, and have shown 
 your letter to the King of Prussia." It was a bad move. 
 He would not have recalled that embarrassing publication if 
 he had known what was passing in the king's mind, and 
 whither those regiments were tending which were on the 
 march in various parts of the Prussian dominions. 
 
 But he did not know. Frederic II. had two kingly traits, 
 — decision and secrecy, — without which no man is king. 
 He knew pi-ecisely what he meant to do, and he confided his 
 intention only to the three individuals who must of necessity 
 know it. This excessive gayety, these rollicking verses, this 
 musical assiduity, these feasts and balls, were merely his mode 
 of concealing himself during the weeks that had to elapse 
 before he was ready to begin his invasion of Silesia. Voltaire, 
 therefore, after his six days' stay at Remusburg, went away 
 without having discovered or guessed Frederic's purpose. 
 He mentions in his "History of the Reign of Louis XV." 
 that he was with the King of Prussia at this critical time, and 
 could assert positively that Cardinal de Fleury had not the 
 
 i
 
 VOLTAIRE AS AMATEUR DIPLOMATIST. 441 
 
 least idea what kind of a prince lie had to do with. He did 
 not conceal his disappointment. Before leaving he gave the 
 king this epigram : — 
 
 " No, despite your virtues, no, despite your charms, my soul 
 is not satisfied; no, you are only a coquette who subjugates 
 hearts, but does not give one." 
 
 To this the king made a happy reply : " My soul feels the 
 value of your divine charms, but does not presume to be satis- 
 fied. Traitor, you leave me to follow a coquette, — me, who 
 would not leave you." 
 
 The amateur diplomatist went to Berlin to pay his re- 
 spects to the queen and the queen dowager ; to Potsdam 
 also ; then returned to Berlin, where asrain he saw the kino% 
 and joined the French ambassador in vain attempts to divine 
 impending events. To both of them, on the subject of his 
 intentions, the king was still evasive or dumb. Early in De- 
 cember the visitor set out on his return to the Hao;ue, leaving 
 Berlin excited and expectant, waiting anxiously for a develop- 
 ment of the king's designs. The royal manifesto which briefly 
 announced them was published about a week after Voltaire's 
 departure, and while he was still struggling along on miry 
 German roads. 
 
 We perceive from their familiar letters that, during this 
 visit, each of these gushing lovers discovered that the other 
 was human. The king asked for an account of Voltaire's ex- 
 penditures in his service, — moneys spent in journeys between 
 Brussels and Holland, printer's charges, copyist's wages, and 
 other items. In reckoning with the king, Voltaire added the 
 expenses of the present journey, which was undertaken at 
 Frederic's urgent request, as well as for his pleasui^e and pur- 
 poses, — its diplomatic character being an incident and an 
 after-thought. The total was thirteen hundred crowns [«?cms]. 
 And most of it was for the " Anti-Machiavelli," so absurdly 
 embarrassing at that moment ! This king, moreover, had 
 another royal trait, without which no man is long a king, 
 namely, a fixed principle and habit of ruling his expenses with 
 exactness. He was no lavish semblance of a monarch, like 
 a Louis XIV., but the veritable ruler of his country, and in 
 some degree aware of his responsibility to his " fellow-citi- 
 zens," whose hard-earned monev he administered, not owned.
 
 442 LIFE OF VOLTATRE. 
 
 But Voltaire also possessed this trait of the victor. He, too, 
 knew the value of money, and hence presented his large sum 
 total, only omitting from the account five months of his own 
 time, so precious in Frederic's eyes. The king paid the 
 bill with a wry face. He even exhibited the wry face to 
 Jordan. 
 
 " Your miser," wrote the king, November 28tii, to that 
 most familiar of all his familiars, " will drink the dregs of his 
 insatiable desire to enrich himself ; he will have thirteen hun- 
 dred crowns. His six days' visit will cost me five hundred 
 and fi^fty crowns a day. This is paying a fool [fou] well. 
 Never did the buffoon of a great lord have such wages." 
 
 This might have been deemed the irritation of a moment, if 
 the king had not added, two days after, " The brain of the poet 
 is as light as the style of his works, and I flatter myself that 
 the attractiveness of Berlin will have power enough to make 
 him return thither immediately, and the more since the purse 
 of the marchioness is not always as well furnished as mine. 
 You will deliver to this man, extraordinary in everything, the 
 letter inclosed, with a little compliment in the style of a know- 
 ing procuress." Again, a day or two after, " I can assure 
 you that Voltaire has made a subtle collection of the ridicu- 
 lous people of Berlin for reproduction at the proper time and 
 place, and that the Secretary of the Impromptus [Jordan] will 
 have his place among them, as I mine. I have lost those 
 verses which he wrote upon some tablets. Send them to me 
 again." 
 
 It is a bad habit in a king to allow himself such license as 
 this ; for the time comes, at last, when the contrast between 
 the language addressed to a favorite and the language em- 
 ployed in speaking of him comes to the favorite's knowledge. 
 There were, in fact, two men in this Frederic II. of Prussia, 
 as in an engrafted tree there are two trees. His stock was 
 that of a strong, coarse, hard, ambitious, upright and down- 
 right Prussian soldier, — very much what his father would have 
 been if he had had a good French tutor in his boyhood, and 
 avoided excess in wine and tobacco. Inheriting something less 
 of animal vigor than that of the paternal " ogre," Frederic had 
 had an intelligent and gifted French teacher, who engrafted 
 upon him that culture which made him, for half a century,
 
 VOLTAIRE AS AMATEUE DIPLOMATIST. 443 
 
 turn to Voltaire with longing and admiration, even from the 
 field of battle, — even from the midst of carnage, disaster, de- 
 feat, and despair. But he never was a Frenchman ; with all 
 his merits he was an imperfectly civilized being. 
 
 In France, in Rome, in England, in New England, in all 
 advanced civilizations, women are at once the price and prize 
 of the social system ; its risk and its reward. They do not 
 rule; they reign. They ai'e not formed to rule, but to give 
 lustre, charm, interest, and dignity to social life. Now, this 
 Prussian Fredei'ic, with such a termagant of a mother as he 
 had, and a mild, submissive princess forced upon him as a wife, 
 came to hold the whole sex in a certain aversion, and never 
 admitted one of them to his familiar court. He tried to be 
 happy without paying the price. He tried to enjoy the play 
 without buying a ticket. His correspondence with his wife is 
 one of the curiosities of epistolary literature, — brief, punctual, 
 polite, and, as the poor queen herself remarked, icy, rjlaciale. 
 The whole forty-seven years of it occupies no more space than 
 his correspondence with Voltaire during single months. He 
 would announce to her the gain or loss of a battle in three 
 lines, in two lines, in one line, while writing to him four pages. 
 In communicating to her the news of the battle of Soor, he 
 extended himself to three lines, half a line of which read thus : 
 " They say that Prince Louis is wounded." Prince Louis was 
 the queen's brother. On another occasion he announced to 
 her the death of a brother in battle, and added, " I pity you, 
 madame, for the pain which it is natural you should feel at 
 the death of your relations, but these are events for which there 
 is no remedy." 
 
 The queen was not insensible to this treatment. "I am 
 accustomed to his manners," she wrote on this occasion to one 
 of her brothers, " but not on that account the less wounded 
 by them, especially at such a time, when one of my brothers 
 has lost his life in his service. It is too cruel for him to have 
 such manners." ^ 
 
 It was not " manners ; " the man was dead on that side. It 
 was not possible for him to feel with a woman's heart, or see 
 with a woman's eyes, or have the least intimation of the com- 
 plex reasons, for example, why Voltaire could not break the 
 1 26 (Euvrea de Frederic le Grand, 23.
 
 444 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 irksome bond that bound him to an exacting and exasperating 
 marchioness. He endeavored to supply the void in his life, 
 — which women alone can fill in men's lives and hearts — by 
 surrounding himself with the most gifted spirits in Europe. It 
 is consoling to know that this attempt was not successful. 
 
 Voltaire, meanwhile, was hastening homeward, dreading to 
 meet his tyrant at Brussels. He had originally timed his 
 flight into Prussia so as to get back before she had returned 
 from Fontainebleau. The king had begged him for two more 
 days ; but away he sped to the Hague ; whence, pursuing his 
 journey by water, he was caught in the ice, and detained mo- 
 tionless tw^elve days. He employed the time, in the cabin of 
 the vessel, in working upon his tragedy of " Mahomet " and 
 writing long letters to his friends. He might well be afraid to 
 meet Madame du Chatelet. She looked upon this diplomatic 
 adventure with the indignation and alarm of a woman who 
 had detected her lover going to a rendezvous. He was a whole 
 month in getting from Berlin to Brussels, a journey now of ten 
 hours, so that he was two months absent ! She poured out her 
 sorrows to the Count d'Argental: — 
 
 " I have been cruelly repaid for all that I did for him at Fontaine- 
 bleau, where I put in good train for him an affair the most difficult 
 that can be imagined. I procure for M. de Voltaire an honorable 
 return to his country ; I restore to him the good-will of the ministry ; 
 I open to him the road to the Academies ; in a word, I give him back 
 in three weeks all that he had taken pains to lose in six years. Do 
 you know how he recompenses so much zeal and attachment ? When 
 he sets out for Berlin he dryly sends me the news of his departure, well 
 knowing that it would pierce my heart ; and he abandons me to a grief 
 without example, of which others have not the idea, and which your 
 heart alone can comprehend. I heated my blood so much by sitting 
 up at night, and my chest was in so bad a condition, that a fever has 
 
 seized me, and I hope soon to end my Hfe Would you believe 
 
 that the idea which occupies me most in these fatal moments is the 
 frightful grief which will be the lot of M. de Voltaire when the in- 
 toxication wherein he now is of the court of Prussia is diminished ? I 
 cannot sustain the thought that the recollection of me will one day be 
 his torment. All those who have loved me must refrain from re- 
 proaching him." 
 
 These words were written at the time when Voltaire was us- 
 ing all his force to tear himself from that intoxicating court,
 
 VOLTAIRE AS AMATEUE DIPLOMATIST. 445 
 
 only that he might rejoin her. Nevertheless, the unhappy 
 ■woman was not altogether mistaken. The tie which bound 
 him to her was beginning to be extremely inconvenient, and 
 he sometimes said as much to his intimate friends. From the 
 cabin of his yacht he wrote to the King of Prussia some lines 
 which Madame du Chatelet might have read with advantage 
 to both : — 
 
 " I abandon a great monarch who cultivates and honors an art which 
 I idolize, and I go to join a person who reads nothing but the meta- 
 physics of Christianus Volfius. I tear myself from the most amiable 
 court in Europe for a lawsuit. I did not leave your adorable court to 
 sigh like an idiot at a woman's knees. But, sire, that woman aban- 
 doned for me everything for which other women abandon their friends. 
 There is no sort of obligation which I am not under to her. The 
 coiffure and the petticoat which she wears do not render the duties of 
 gratitude less sacred. Love is often ridiculous ; but pure friendship 
 has rights more binding than a king's commands. My little fortune 
 mingled with hers places no obstacle to the extreme desire which I 
 have to pass my days near your majesty." 
 
 The news of the invasion of Silesia in December smoothed 
 the way for the happy return of the baffled diplomatist ; for 
 he could assign to his departure a motive more dignified than 
 lovers can usually offer for their late return. Peace was soon 
 restored between them, and Voltaire could write to their guard- 
 ian angel, D'Argental, that they were more lovers than ever, 
 and that he would not go to Prussia if the king should make 
 him a free gift of Silesia. 
 
 The invasion of that province astonished no man in Europe 
 more than it did Voltaire ; and he was obliged to agree with 
 Madame du Chatelet that there could not be a more glaring 
 contradiction between word and deed than the seizure of the 
 province presented to various passages of the " Anti-Machia- 
 velli," which the editor had modified, but not erased. Ma- 
 dame was not ill pleased to see the idol step down from his 
 pedestal. " He may take as many provinces as he likes," said 
 she, " if he does not take from me that which makes the hap- 
 piness of my life." Voltaire was something more than aston- 
 ished, so warmly had he certified to the young monarch's pa- 
 cific and magnanimous character. He did not know what to 
 think. He wrote to the Countess d'Argental, March 13, 1741 :
 
 446 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 " I do not yet know if the King of Prussia deserves the in- 
 terest which we take in him. He is a king ; that makes one 
 tremble. Time will tell." On the same day to Cideville : 
 " The cat of La Fontaine, metamorphosed into a woman, runs 
 after the mice as soon as she catches sight of them, and the 
 prince throws off his philosopher's mantle and takes the sword 
 as soon as he sees a province at his mercy." Again to Cide- 
 ville, a little later: "After all, he is only a king." The 
 strangest thing of all was that Frederic, from the midst of his 
 rapid campaign, found time to write his usual chatty, poetical 
 epistles to Voltaire, and wrote with all his former careless 
 gayety. 
 
 Nor did Voltaire neglect to call the king's attention, with 
 his usual adroitness, to the apparent inconsistency of his pro- 
 ceedings in Silesia. On recovering from an indisposition in 
 April, 1741, he wrote thus to the young conqueror: "I put 
 only one foot upon the border of the Styx ; but I was very 
 sorry, sire, at the number of poor wretches that I saw passing 
 over. Some arrived from Scharding, others from Prague or 
 from Iglau. Will you not cease — you and the kings, your 
 colleagues — to ravage this earth, which you have, you say, so 
 much desire to render happy ? " To which the king replied 
 in a tone as far removed from that of the " Anti-Machiavelli " 
 as even Madame du Chatelet could have desired, in her worst 
 humor. " You ask me," said he, " how long messieurs my 
 brother kings have given themselves the word to devastate 
 the earth. My reply is that I know nothing about it ; only 
 it is the fashion at present to make war, and there is reason to 
 believe that it will last a long time. The Abbd de Saint- 
 Pierre, who sufficiently distinguislies me to honor me with his 
 correspondence, has sent me a beautiful work upon a mode of 
 restoring peace to Europe, and of preserving it forever. The 
 thing is very practicable. Nothing is wanting to make it suc- 
 ceed except the consent of Europe, and some other bagatelles 
 of that kind." 
 
 Voltaire, however, returned to the charge both in prose and 
 in verse. He told the king how much he wondered and la- 
 mented that the Solomon of the North should have become its 
 Alexander, the affright of the world, after having been the 
 object of its love. " I hate heroes ; they make too much dis-
 
 VOLTAIRE AS AMATEUR DIPLOMATIST. 447 
 
 turbance. I hate those conquerors who find their supreme 
 happiness in the horrors of the fight." Even the victories of 
 the king wrung from him only a qualified congratulation. " I 
 think of humanity, sire, before thinking of yourself ; but after 
 having, like the Abbe de Saint-Pierre, wept for the human 
 race, of which you have become the terror, I deliver myself to 
 all the joy which your glory gives me. That glory will be 
 complete if your majesty forces the Queen of Hungary to ac- 
 cept peace and to make the Germans happy Go on, 
 
 sire ; but make at least as many people happy in this world as 
 you have taken out of it." 
 
 To this the king promptly replied : " Do not believe me 
 cruel ; but think rather that I am reasonable enough to choose 
 an evil when it is necessary to avoid a worse. Every man who 
 makes up his mind to have a tooth out when it is decayed 
 would give battle when he wished to terminate a war. To 
 shed blood in such a conjuncture is truly to spare it ; it is a 
 blood-letting which we give an enemy in delirium, and which 
 restores him to his senses." Voltaire again pressing the king 
 hard, and reminding him that it was he who began the war, 
 Frederic rejoined, with what was intended to be a home thrust, 
 " You declaim at your ease against those who sustain their 
 rights and their claims by force of arms ; but I remember a 
 time when, if you had had an army, it would, no doubt, have 
 marched against the Desfontaines, the Rousseaus, the Van 
 Durens, and others. Until the platonic arbitration of the 
 Abb^ Saint-Pierre is established, there will remain no other 
 resource to kings to terminate their differences." 
 
 In this strange correspondence they touched all their usual 
 topics, even religion ; the king again remonstrating with Vol- 
 taire for troubling himself with a subject at once so trivial 
 and so perilous. " There are so many things," he wrote once 
 from camp, " to be said against religion that I wonder they 
 do not occur to everybody. But men are not made for the 
 truth. I regard them as a herd of deer in the park of a great 
 lord, which have no function but to people and occupy the 
 inclosure." 
 
 Voltaire remonstrated : " I fear that you are coming to de- 
 spise men too much. The millions of animals without feath- 
 ers, with two feet, who people the earth, are at an immense
 
 448 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 distance from your person, as well in their souls as in their 
 condition. There is a beautiful verse of Milton : — 
 
 ' Amongst unequals no society.' " ' 
 
 Lib. viii., V. 387. 
 
 He hoped, however, that the king would not take too 
 severe a view of human nature, nor think a king could not be 
 loved for his own sake. And so each of these sovereigns of 
 Europe pursued his career, and exchanged their thoughts ; 
 neither quite sincere with the other ; and each having for the 
 other a considerable, even a warm, but no longer an unquali- 
 fied regard. 
 
 1 " Amongst unequals what society 
 
 Can sort, what harmony or true delight 1 " 
 Paradise Lost, Book VIII. 
 
 I
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX. 
 
 " MAHOMET " AND " MEROPE." 
 
 The first week of the new year, 1741, found him again set- 
 tled at Brussels, much improved in health by his two months' 
 contention with the elements. Madame du Chatelet and 
 himself were at once absorbed in labors, literary and legal, 
 scientific and metaphysical, dramatic and historical. An im- 
 portant point was gained, this spring, in the interminable 
 lawsuit, after two years of exertion ; and it was gained, as 
 Voltaire observes, by the courage, the intelligence, and the 
 fatigues of Madame du Chatelet. This advantage, he thought, 
 would abridge the suit by two years, and made final success 
 probable. 
 
 The reader may imagine that such a disturbed, tumultuous 
 life, so far from books and conveniences, must have been 
 detrimental to an author's proper work. It would have been 
 to that of most men ; but Vollaire was, as the King of 
 Prussia remarked, extraordinary in everything. These inter- 
 ruptions may have saved him. He possessed, moreover, the 
 power of snatching his work from the social tumult, the domes- 
 tic broil, the mire, the waves, the ice. He could work in his 
 carriage ; he could elaborate a play in the cabin of an ice-bound 
 vessel ; he could dictate in bed ; and when he was so sick 
 that he could not do that, he could always, as Madame du 
 Chatelet mentions, correct his poems, and even compose verses 
 for a tragedy. He never worked more successfully than dur- 
 ing this Brussels lawsuit period, from 1739 to 1745 ; and so 
 he thought himself. "I have never," he wrote to Cideville 
 in January, 1740, when he was in the full tide of his " Ma- 
 homet," "been so inspired by my gods, or so possessed by my 
 demons. I know not if the last efforts I have made are those 
 of a fire about to be extinguished." 
 
 That famous tragedy, one of the most vigorously tem- 
 
 VOL. I. 29
 
 450 LITE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 pered of all his plays, was now ready for the stage. The mo- 
 ment cliosen for the action of this drama is indicated by two 
 of its celebrated lines : — 
 
 " Aujourd'hui c'est un prince ; il triomphe, il domine ; 
 Imposteur a la Mecque, et prophete a Medine." 
 
 Revered as a prophet, as the prophet, at Medina, his na- 
 tive Mecca is still restrained to the old ways by an aged, 
 powerful sheik, the venerable and beloved Zopire. Mahomet 
 and a few of his chiefs are allowed to enter Mecca, where, 
 first, they seek to gain over Zopire and his party by argument 
 and persuasion. This gives occasion to some scenes of com- 
 manding interest, in which Voltaire rises to a degree of 
 dramatic force and fire which we can enjoy even without for- 
 getting Shakespeare*; and this the more as he did not him- 
 self forget Shakespeare. Tliere are reminiscences of Brutus 
 and Cassius in some of these fierce dialogues of " Mahomet ; " 
 the most important of which are between the aged Zopire 
 and the chief of the new religion. But the spirit of those 
 dialogues was the new wine which was to break the old bot- 
 ties of the European system to pieces, and intoxicate the 
 human soul. The old sheik taunts Omar, a trusted lieuten- 
 ant of Mahomet, with the low birth of his prophet. " Mortals 
 are equal," replies Omar; "not birth, but worth alone, makes 
 the difference between them. Mahomet is one of those spir- 
 its, heaven-endowed, who are what they are of themselves, 
 and owe to their ancestors nothing." 
 
 The great lesson of the play is that the founders of false 
 religions at once despise and practice upon the docile credu- 
 lity of men. When I remember that this powerful exhibition 
 of executive force triumphing over credulity and weakness 
 was vividly stamped upon the susceptible brain of Frederic by 
 Voltaire's impassioned declamation, at the very time when he 
 was revolving his Silesian project, I am inclined to the con- 
 jecture that it may have been the deciding influence upon 
 the king's mind. All the utterances of Mahomet and Omar 
 breathe the same impious contempt of human kind which the 
 King of Prussia so often expressed at this period of his life. 
 " The people, blind and feeble, are born for the great, — are 
 born to admire, to believe, and obey us." ZoplRE. — " Who 
 made him king ? Who crowned him ? Omar. — " Victory ! "
 
 "MAHOMET" AND "M^ROPE." 451 
 
 ZoPiRE. — " What right have you received to teach, to fore- 
 tell, to carry the censer, to affect the empire ? " Mahomet. — 
 " The right tvhich a spirit^ vast mid firm in its designs, has 
 over the dull soids of common men.'''' 
 
 In the earlier scenes of the play the interest is chiefly 
 intellectual ; it is the conflict between the virtuous adherents 
 of an ancient faith and the ruthless founder of a new one. 
 Later, the interest arises from the struggle of opposing pas- 
 sions. It is' necessary to Mahomet's purposes that the aged 
 Zopire should be destroyed, and he selects as the assassin a 
 young zealot, weak enough, as Omar intimates, to believe 
 the new religion, without thought or question. But it re- 
 quires the utmost exertion of Mahomet's fascinating and com- 
 manding personality to work the brave youth up to the point 
 of slaying a defenseless old man. When he recoils, Mahomet 
 addresses him thus : — 
 
 " Rash man, to deliberate is sacrilege. Far from me be 
 mortals bold enough to judge for themselves, and see with their 
 own eyes. Whoever dares to think is not born to be my 
 disciple. Your sole glory is to obey in silence. Know you 
 who I am ? Know you the place wherein my voice charged 
 you with the commands of heaven ? If Mecca is a sacred 
 spot, do you know the reason ? Abraham was born here, 
 and here his dust reposes, — Abraham, whose arm, submis- 
 sive to the Eternal, drew his only son to the steps of the altar, 
 stifling for his God the cries of nature. And when that God 
 by you desires to avenge his wrong, you hesitate ! Go, base 
 idolater ; fly, serve, crawl, under my proud enemies ! " 
 
 The young fanatic yields ; the murder is done ; and Ma- 
 homet rules in Mecca. A complicated love story intensifies 
 the later scenes, and renders the play effective upon the 
 French stage. The obvious perils which such a subject of- 
 fered to such a poet were avoided with much art, and the 
 weight of the satire was carefully confined to false religion. 
 
 Among the English visitors to Brussels who frequented the 
 house of Madame du Chatelet was Lord Chesterfield, and to 
 him Voltaire read portions of the play.' Chesterfield deemed 
 it a covert attack upon the Christian religion. He thought 
 that where the author wrote Mahomet he meant Jesus Christ. 
 But, assuredly, in the play as we now have it, there is not a
 
 452 LIFE OP VOLTAIRE. 
 
 phrase that gives the slightest countenance to such an idea. 
 If tliere are in it any alhisions to Christian history' or French 
 fanatic assassinations, they are completely veiled from foreign 
 eyes. 
 
 And now, in the spring of 1741, the tragedy was ready for 
 presentation. The retirement of two or three leading actors 
 from the Th(iatre-Francais induced the author to defer its 
 production there, when an opportunity occurred to exhibit it 
 upon a provincial stage near at hand. It was those fatal 
 mushrooms of the German emperor that gave him this un- 
 expected chance. The company of French comedians with 
 whom he had been negotiating on behalf of the King of Prus- 
 sia were then established at the large industrial city of Lille, 
 fifty miles west of Brussels, where also his niece, Madame 
 Denis, lived with her husband. The manager was indignant 
 upon learning that the treaty was to be broken off. He was 
 of opinion that the king had gone too far to retreat without 
 dishonor. He was even tempted to expose the proceeding to 
 the public, and to select a moment for the purpose when the 
 eyes of Europe were fixed upon the King of Prussia. Voltaire 
 hastened to appease him, and as one means to that end con- 
 sented to the first production of his " Mahomet " at Lille. 
 
 The play was given in May, 1741 ; the author present, ac- 
 companied by Madame du Chatelet and Madame Denis ; the 
 theatre filled with an expectant and excited auditory, flattered 
 by a distinction accorded to a stage two hundred miles from 
 Paris. The first acts passed off extremely well. While the 
 poet was sitting in his box waiting for the third act to begin, 
 a dispatch was handed to him from the King of Prussia, an- 
 nouncing the victory of Molwitz, the first of his long series 
 of triumphs in the field. The dispatch of two lines, written 
 two days after the battle, was penned by a flying victor, by a 
 commanding general who ran away from his own victorious 
 army : — 
 
 " It is said the Austrians are in retreat, and I believe it is 
 true. Frederic." ^ 
 
 The people of Lille, who had been besieged by Austrian 
 troops within living raemoiw, could be nothing less than en- 
 thusiastic partisans of a young monarch warring against Aus- 
 1 Voltaire to D'Argental, May 5, 1741.
 
 "MAHOMET" AND " M^ROPE." 453 
 
 tria at the head of his own battalions. The author of the 
 play, prompt to seize an advantage, rose in his box and read 
 the dispatch to the audience, who received it with the due 
 thunders of applause. The play itself seemed to share the 
 triumph of the king, and it was played to the end with a suc- 
 cess the most unequivocal. It was repeated the next evening 
 with equal applause, and was demanded for the third time. 
 " T^e came near," writes Madame du Chatelet, "exciting a 
 riot in the pit, because we hesitated to accord the third repre- 
 sentation." There was even a fourth presentation of the play, 
 at the house of one of the magistrates, for the convenience of 
 the clergy, who, as the poet remarked, " wished absolutely to 
 see a founder of religion." This, also, received the unani- 
 mous approval of the spectators, who were of opinion that the 
 author had avoided the rocks and quicksands which the sub- 
 ject presented. The performance of the play also justified the 
 author's high recommendation of the company to the king. 
 " The manager," he wrote, " with the face of a monkey, 
 played Mahomet better than Dufresne, and Baron made the 
 whole audience cry, as when one bleeds from the nose." 
 
 These performances of the tragedy upon a provincial stage 
 the author regarded only as dress rehearsals, and he sub- 
 jected it to many a severe revision. One thing was reas- 
 suring : the clergy of Lille saw no offense in it. And, in 
 very truth, even from a Jansenist point of view, there was no 
 offense ; not a line, not a phrase, to which the most sensitive 
 Catholic could plausibly object. Various circumstances re- 
 tarded its representation in Paris. A Turkish envoy, with a 
 numerous suite, w^as a conspicuous figure in the great houses 
 of Paris during the next winter, and the poet thought " it 
 would not be decent to blacken the Prophet while entertaining 
 his ambassador." The Turk departed at length, when a far 
 more alarming obstacle arose. At a moment, in the summer 
 of 1742, when Frederic of Prussia seemed about to enter 
 upon that course of polities which was to make him an enemy 
 of France, and when, in consequence, he was an unpopular 
 person in Paris, one of Voltaire's comic versified letters to 
 the king appeared in the gazettes. A post-office clerk at 
 Brussels, following the example of his superiors, had broken 
 the seal, copied the letter, and put it on its way to publicity.
 
 454 LIFE OF VOLTAIEE. 
 
 " Here I am, sire," it began, " in Paris ; your capital, I be- 
 lieve, for all the fools and all the wits, clergy, lawyers, dan- 
 dies, pedants, speak of you without pause. As soon as I 
 come in sight, crowds surround me and block my way, saying, 
 Have you seen him f " Forty lines of these airy nothings, 
 ending with a sentence or two in prose : " But, sire, will you 
 be always taking cities, and shall I always be at the tail of 
 a lawsuit ? Will there not be this summer some happy hours, 
 when I can pay my court to your majesty? " 
 
 This to a king whom the people and the ministry were 
 beginning to regard as a public enemy ! It cost him a world 
 of trouble and multitudinous denials to parry the stroke. He 
 protested that the letter had not been correctly copied ; he 
 wrote eloquently to the king's mistress, declaring that he was 
 a Frenchman and a patriot ; he set in motion all the means 
 of influence within his command. Luckily, the Cardinal de 
 Fleury, in his extreme anxiety during the crisis, again thought 
 of Voltaire as a possible conciliator of the King of Prussia ; 
 and so the storm blew over, leaving the public in some ill- 
 humor with the author of a play announced for speedy rep- 
 resentation under the title of " Fanaticism, or, Mahomet the 
 Prophet." 
 
 The garrulous advocate, Barbier, probably gave the current 
 gossip of the caf^s when he made his entry of August 8, 1742: 
 " Voltaire is generally decried. People are convinced that the 
 letter to the King of Prussia, which he has disavowed, is cer- 
 tainly his Madame du Chatelet is severely reflected 
 
 upon ; it is thought singular that a woman of quality should 
 lead by the hand a man who has rendered himself the object 
 
 of general contempt No quarter is now given her upon 
 
 her gallantries. Her son's tutor, they say, was selected only 
 because he valued himself upon having no religion. Nothing 
 good is said of Voltaire's new piece, which, it is thought, will 
 have a bad success [rnauvais swcees]." 
 
 Imagine plenty of such talk as this in the more sedate 
 coffee-houses frequented by wig and gown. August 19, 1742, 
 the tragedy Avas performed at the Thdatre-Fran^ais. Every 
 precaution had been taken against every possible danger. 
 The author had submitted the play, in form, to the censor- 
 ship; he had given the manuscript to the Cardinal de Fleury, 
 
 II
 
 "MAHOMET" AND " M^ROPE." 455 
 
 who approved it, and made some suggestions on points purely- 
 literary, which the author adopted. The theatre was crowded 
 with an audience the most distinguished that Paris could fur- 
 nish : many of the ministry were present ; one great box was 
 filled with magistrates ; a number of the clergy were there ; 
 D'Alembert and the literary men were out in force ; Voltaire 
 himself conspicuous in the middle of the pit. Some murmurs 
 of disapprobation were occasionally heard ; but these were 
 overwhelmed with the general applause, and the play gained, 
 as it seemed, an unquestionable success. A second and third 
 performance appeared only to confirm and establish the verdict 
 of the opening night. 
 
 But those few murmurers had their way, notwithstanding. 
 Thieriot used to recount that a professor of theology who was in 
 the theatre the first night rushed out at the close of the play, 
 and went home to the Sorbonne, declaring that the new trag- 
 edy was " a bloody satire against the Christian religion," and 
 gave as one reason for the assertion, that the name of j\Ia- 
 homet had three syllables, " the same number as that of the 
 adorable name of Jesus Christ " ! The next day the solicitor- 
 general, Joly de Fleuri, an important magistrate, heard of the 
 play in a chamber of the parliament of Paris, and wrote of the 
 same to the lieutenant of police : " I hear a comedy spoken of, 
 which some of these gentlemen have witnessed, and which, 
 they say, contams enormous things against religion." The 
 lieutenant sent a copy of the drama to the solicitor-general, 
 who, without reading it, wrote again to the lieutenant : — 
 
 " I need not tell you [said this enlightened personage], that I 
 have not read a word of the play ; but, judging from what I hear, I 
 believe it is necessary to forbid its performance. Three persons of 
 my knowledge saw it yesterday, and this is what they say of it" It is 
 the acme of infamies, wickedness, irreligion, and impiety ; and such is 
 the judgment also of men who have no religion. One said, during the 
 performance, ' I wonder the audience does not rise and stop the piece.' 
 Another said, 'Here are fine instructions for a Ravaillac' Another 
 said, ' The author should be put in Bicetre for the rest of his days.' 
 One man, on leaving the theatre, met his friend, who was also going 
 out, and asked him what he thought of the play. The reply was, ' I 
 have seen it three times.' To this he responded, ' Never will I see 
 you again. To have had the hardihood three times to see such hor- 
 rors ! ' Everybody says that to have written such a piece a man must
 
 456 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 be a reprobate fit to burn. This is all I have heard ; it is a universal 
 revolt." 
 
 The lieutenant of police, awai'e that the tragedy had re- 
 ceived the privilege, despatched a courier extraordinary to 
 Versailles, to convey this appalling letter to the minister, 
 Maurepas, who, in turn, passed it on to the Cardinal de 
 Fleury. The courier was not kept waiting many minutes for 
 his return packet, which contained the following from M. de 
 Maurepas to the lieutenant of police : — 
 
 " I took your letter, monsieur, to my lord the cardinal, and read 
 it to him, as well as that of the solicitor-general which was joined 
 thereto. Although his Eminence agrees substantially with you, he is 
 nevertheless of opinion that you ought not to risk a scene for such a 
 cause, and he approves that you suggest to the actors to assign the 
 sickness of one of their number as a pretext for not playing the piece 
 on Friday ; also, that you advise Voltaire to withdraw the play from 
 their hands, to avoid commotion. I even believe that you had better 
 begin by the expedient last named, and that he will himself assist you 
 to cover your proceedings. The communication to him of the epithets 
 given his play by the solicitor-general, joined to a certain decree of 
 the parliament, by virtue of which it is in the power of that officer to 
 arraign the author of the Philosophic Letters [upon England], will 
 render your argument persuasive ; and by this means you will not be 
 committed with any one. I hasten to send back your express, so that 
 you may be able, before the end of the play, to speak to him, or to 
 Madame du Chatelet." 
 
 The argument was persuasive, and the piece was withdrawn 
 after the fourth representation. The reader remarks, doubt- 
 less, that the connection between the author of the tragedy 
 and Madame du Chatelet was recognized and accepted by the 
 ministry. 
 
 This abrupt, needless frustration of so many hopes and so 
 much generous toil cannot be realized except by those who 
 have borne something of the kind. There was, too, a witty 
 Piron in the caf(5s to celebrate the mishap by couplets and 
 epigrams ; also, a malign Desf ontaines to go about pretending 
 it was he who had compelled the withdrawal. 
 
 The Kinsf of Prussia was not so absorbed in correcting the 
 map of Europe as not to be attentive to what passed at the 
 Theatre- Fran 9ais. He asked Voltaire to send him the tragedy
 
 "MAHOMET" AND " MIEROPE." 457 
 
 as it had been performed in Paris. The author had it copied, 
 and sent it, Avith an apology for his countrymen. '* It is the 
 story of Tartuffe over again," he wrote, August 19, 1742. 
 " Hypocrites persecuted Moliere, and fanatics rose against me. 
 I yielded to the torrent without a word. If Socrates had done 
 as much, he would not have drunk the hemlock. I avow that 
 I know nothing which more dishonors my country than this 
 infamous superstition, made to degrade human nature. I 
 ought to have the King of Prussia for a master, and the peo- 
 ple of England for fellow-citizens. Our Frenchmen, in gen- 
 eral, are only great childven ; but, also, as I alwaj^s insist, the 
 small number of thinking beings among us are excellent, and 
 claim pardon for the rest." 
 
 The king took him at his word, and urged him to pay him 
 a visit at Aix-la-Chapelle. Voltaire spent a few days with 
 him there in September, when Frederic, who had just signed 
 a treaty of peace, renewed his endeavors to lure him away from 
 his marchioness. He offered him a handsome house in Berlin, 
 a pretty estate in the country, an income ample for both, and 
 the free enjoyment of his time ; in return, asking only the 
 pleasure of his society, the honor of his presence, and his ad- 
 vice in matters relating to literature and art. No more perse- 
 cution ! No more Bastille ! No more rude suppressions of 
 immortal dramas ! No more flights over the border for a few 
 gay and harmless verses! No Desfontaines ! Nq Jansenists ! 
 No convulsionists ! Instead of these, life-long basking in the 
 sunshine of royal favor, and the rank in Prussia of a man 
 whom the king delighted to honor. But he remained true to 
 his word. " I courageously resisted all his fine propositions," 
 he wrote to Cideville. " I prefer a second story in the house 
 of Madame du Chatelet ; and I hasten to Paris, to my slavery 
 and persecution, like a little Athenian who had refused the 
 bounties of the King of Persia." 
 
 Meanwhile, the sudden withdrawal of a successful play by a 
 celebrated author was having the natural effect of making it 
 a European topic. Pamphlets were published upon it. An 
 actor of Lille wrote one in the form of a letter. " The Senti- 
 ments of a Spectator " was the title of another. An unau- 
 thorized edition of the play was published in Paris at once ; 
 another at Brussels within a month ; another at Amsterdam,
 
 458 LEFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 during the following winter, — all, as the author insisted, more 
 or less incorrect. The poet's own edition was deferred for 
 a while ; but it appeared, at length, with unparalleled eclat^ 
 as we shall see in a moment. 
 
 A dramatic author, of all others, needs to have a spare shaft 
 in his quiver ; for the fate of a play is something which the as- 
 tutest dramatist has never learned to foresee. For two years 
 Voltaire had been elaborating a tragedy upon the ancient 
 legend of Mdrope, Queen of Messina, a story of the classic 
 sort, like those treated by the elder dramatists. In " Merope " 
 he ventured to dispense with the passion of love, and to de- 
 pend for the interest of the drama upon maternal affection. 
 He felt all the difficulty of his scheme. ' It was his opinion 
 that a reciprocated passion does not move the spectator of a 
 play, and that therefore the love of mother and son cannot be 
 as effective upon the stage as in the written story. " iTvery 
 scene of a tragedy," he wrote once to Father Porde, " must be 
 a combat^ and the great rock of the arts is what is called com- 
 monplace." Nevertheless, he had ventured upon this theme, 
 and he had now the play in his portfolio complete, and ready 
 for the theatre. No sooner was " Mahomet " shelved than he 
 drew forth this hidden treasure, and read it to the comedians. 
 It was accepted and put in rehearsal, the author himself super- 
 intending. 
 
 The anecdote was current at the time that he had much dif- 
 ficulty in getting Mademoiselle Duniesnil, who played Merope, 
 to rise to the height of the terrific scene in the fourth act, 
 where the distracted mother reveals her son to the usurper of 
 his throne, — a scene associated since with the glor}^ of the suc- 
 cessive queens of the tragic stage of Paris, from Dumesnil to 
 Rachel. Throwing herself between Egisthe and the guards 
 about to lead him to execution, she cries, " Barhare ! il est 
 mon fils ! " 
 
 The young tragedienne could not satisfy the author, and he 
 gave the passage himself as he thought it ought to be de- 
 livered. "Why," said she, "I should have to have the devil 
 in me to reach the tone you wish !" " Exactly so, mademoi- 
 selle ! " cried the author. " It is the devil you must have in you, 
 to excel in any of the arts." 
 
 The play was represented February 20, 1743. Various cir-
 
 "MAHOMET" AND " MEROPE." 459 
 
 cumstances had inflamed public curiosity respecting it : among 
 others, the new attempt of the author to get admission to the 
 French Academy. The death of Cardinal de Fleury, January 
 29, 1743, had created a vacancy, and there was a ferment at 
 the very idea of a Voltaire succeeding a cardinal. The harsh 
 treatment of the author and the public in the affair of " Ma- 
 homet," six months before, must have conciliated many minds. 
 The theatre, accordingly, was filled to repletion wdth specta- 
 tors, most of whom seem to have been well disposed toward 
 an author to whom they owed so vast a fund of innocent 
 pleasure. 
 
 " Mdrope," the most finished and evenly excellent of all 
 Voltaire's tragedies, made also the most thrilling and triumph- 
 ant first-night of his whole experience as a dramatic author. 
 Its success with the audience was everything that the most 
 sanguine and exacting writer could have anticipated, — a suc- 
 cess without previous parallel. 
 
 Readers familiar with the old French drama are aware that ' 
 the simple test formerly applied to tragedy and tragic acting 
 was the quantity of tears they drew from the spectators. 
 " M^rope " drowned the theatre in tears, filled as it was with 
 the fashionable world of Paris, who might be thought hard- 
 ened against theatrical suffusion. During all the last three 
 acts, we are told, the audience was sobbing. Nor was the play 
 quite wanting in those Voltairean strokes, so much in harmony 
 with the " sentiment " of the period : " He who serves his 
 country well has no need of ancestors ! " This, also : " The 
 right to command is no longer an advantage transmitted by 
 nature, like an inheritance." Usually, however, the senti- 
 ments were those of the ancient time delineated, and the ef- 
 fects legitimate. Hence prejudice was dissolved, and the tri- 
 umph was not marred by audible dissent. Advocate Barbier, 
 a dull and narrow chronicler, who was so well pleased to re- 
 cord the forced withdrawal of " Mahomet," assures us that the 
 success of " Mdrope " was the most striking ever known in 
 Paris. " The pit," he says, " not only applauded fit to break 
 everything, but asked, a thousand times, that Voltaire should 
 appear upon the stage, that the people might testify to him 
 their joy and satisfaction. Mesdames de Boutflers and de Lux- 
 embourg did everything they could to induce the poet to com-
 
 460 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 ply with the public desire ; but he vpitlidrew from their box 
 with a submissive air, after having kissed the hand of the 
 Duchess de Luxembourg." The same Barbier records that 
 two of the poet's enemies, Roy and Cahuzac, came near faint- 
 ing away, if one could judge from the mortal pallor which 
 overspread their visages. 
 
 Voltaire himself adds an incident of his triumph. After es- 
 caping from the box of the two duchesses, who were his warm 
 partisans, he hid himself somewhere in front of the house. 
 Friends sought him out, and he drew back into the box of his 
 old friend, the Duchess de Villars. " The pit was mad," wrote 
 the poet to one of his friends. " They cried to the duchess to 
 kiss me, and they made so much noise that she was obliged at 
 last to do it, by the order of her mother-in-law. I have been 
 kissed publicly, like Alain Chartier by the Princess Mar- 
 guerite of Scotland ; but he ^vas asleep, and I was awake." 
 
 This was the first time, as French writers inform us, that 
 ' an author was called for by an audience. 
 
 The actor Lekain adds an anecdote of the run of this trag- 
 edy. During the third or fourth representation, Voltaire was 
 struck with a defect in one of the dialogues. That very even- 
 ing, as soon as he had reached home, he made the alterations, 
 and told his servant to carry the packet at once to the house 
 of the actor who played the part of the usurper, Polyphonte, 
 and who was to speak most of the new lines. The valet ob- 
 served that it was past midnight, and that it was impossible 
 to wake the actor at that hour. " Go, go," said the author ; 
 " tyrants never sleep ! " 
 
 But this fine tragedy did not open to its author the doors of 
 the French Academy. The death of Cardinal de Fleury, in 
 January, 1743, made a chair vacant, and there was a strong 
 movement to secure it for the man whose absence from the 
 Academy was beginning to cast a certain ridicule upon it. He 
 desired the chair as a protection against his enemies. " The 
 tranquillity of my life," he wrote, " depends upon my getting 
 it." He desired it not less, perhaps, because his election would 
 be a victory over his enemies, whom he believed to be the en- 
 emies of man and truth. As the king had a veto upon the 
 election, it was necessary to gain, besides the vote of the Acad- 
 emy itself, the concurrence of three individuals : the king's
 
 "MAHOMET" AND "M^ROPE." 461 
 
 mistress, the king's chief minister, and the king. It is Vol- 
 taire himself who informs us of his endeavor to secure this 
 concurrence, and what came of it. 
 
 " Several Academicians [lie says] wished that I should have the 
 cardinal's jDlace in the French Academy. At the king's supper table, 
 the question was asked who was to pronounce the funeral oration of 
 the cardinal at the Academy. The king replied that it was to be me. 
 His mistress, the Duchess de Chateauroux, desired it ; but the Count 
 de Maurepas, secretary of state, did not. He had the mania to em- 
 broil himself with all the king's mistresses, and he did not find it ad- 
 vantageous. 
 
 " An old imbecile, tutor to the Dauphin, formerly a monk, and then 
 Bishop of Mirepoix, Boyer by name, undertook, for reasons of con- 
 science, to second the caprice of M. de Maurepas. This Boyer had 
 the bestowal of the church benefices ; to him the king abandoned all 
 the affairs of the clergy ; and he treated this matter as a point of ec- 
 clesiastical discipline. He argued that for a profane person like my- 
 self to succeed a cardinal would be to offend God. Knowing that M. 
 de Maurepas was urging him to act in this way, I called upon the 
 minister, and said to him, ' A place in the Academy is not a very im- 
 portant dignity ; but, after one has been named for it, it is painful to 
 be excluded. You are on ill terms with Madame de Chateauroux, 
 whom the king loves, and with the Duke de Richelieu, who governs 
 her ; what, I pray you, has a poor place in the French Academy to 
 do with your differences ? I conjure you to answer me frankly. In 
 case Madame de Chateauroux carries the day over the Bishop de Mire- 
 poix, will you oppose her?" He reflected a moment, and said to me, 
 ' Yes ; and I will crush you ! ' 
 
 *' The priest, in fact, triumphed over the mistress ; and I did not get 
 the place, for which I cared little." 
 
 For which he cared too much ! We have a long letter of 
 his, written in the heat of the canvass, to the "old imbecile " 
 Boyer, Bishop of Mirepoix, which takes unjustifiable liberties 
 with the truth. He seems to have thought it right to fight fire 
 with fire, solemn humbug with solemn humbug. He begins 
 by saying that he had long been persecuted by calumny, which 
 he had long been in the habit of pardoning ; and, from Socra- 
 tes to Descartes, it had been a habit with envious rivals, where 
 they could not assail an author's works or morals, to attack his 
 religion. 
 
 " Thanks to Heaven," he proceeds, " my religion teaches
 
 462 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 me that it is necessary to know how to suffer. The God who 
 founded it, as soon as he deigned to become man, was of all 
 men the most persecuted. After such an example, it is al- 
 most a crime to complain ; let us correct oar faults, and sub- 
 rait to tribulation as to death ! An honest man can, in truth, 
 defend himself ; he even ought to do so, not for the vain sat- 
 isfaction of imposing silence, but in order to render glory to 
 the truth. 1 can say, then, before God who hears me, that I 
 am a good citizen and a true Catholic ; and this I say because 
 I have always been such at heart. I have not written one 
 page that does not breathe humanity, and I have written many 
 pages sanctified by religion." 
 
 A true Catholic he might claim to be ; it was a harmless 
 play upon words ; but when he descended to use such an ex- 
 pression as "the God who founded it deigning to become 
 man," he stepped over the line that divides what may from 
 what may not be said by such as he. True, he deceived no 
 one. He neither expected nor designed to deceive. He 
 meant merely to deprive the hierarchy of a weapon against 
 himself and his order. But he went too far. 
 
 He did not get the chair, however. The Bishop of Mire- 
 poix, as if he really did regard the forty chairs of the Academy 
 as forty benefices, caused the vacant one to be given to a 
 bishop of very slight claim to literary rank. " For a prelate 
 to succeed a prelate," said Voltaire, " is according to the can- 
 ons of the church." He added that, as he had not the honor 
 to be a priest, he believed it became him to renounce the 
 Academy. 
 
 Four chairs, as it chanced, became vacant during this year, 
 1743, all of which except one were given to persons of little 
 account in the world of intellect. Maupertuis was the excep- 
 tion, and his distinction was not literary. One of the seats 
 was given to Bignon, aged thirty-one years, whose sole con- 
 nection with literature was this : he had inherited from his 
 uncle the place of king's librarian. " I believe," wrote the 
 King of Prussia, touching one of these exploits of JMirepoix, 
 " that France is now the only country in Europe where asses 
 and idiots can make their fortune." The king sent comic 
 verses also upon the " forty learned paroquets, who sat upon 
 the French Parnassus, and dreaded to let in Voltaire, lest his
 
 "MAHOMET" AND " M^ROPE." 463 
 
 flashing brilliancy should dim the trivial beauty of their twi- 
 light." 
 
 It remained, however, that Voltaire was not of the Academy ; 
 while the old imbecile Boyer, about the time of the election, 
 added to his other fat things a benefice of eighty thousand 
 francs a year, to which the queen appended a suite of apart- 
 ments in her palace, all the world expecting his good luck to 
 be crowned soon by a cardinal's hat.
 
 CHAPTER XL. 
 
 VOLTAIEE AND MADAME STUDY HISTORY TOGETHER. 
 
 When they first went to live at Cirey, madame was de- 
 voted to mathematics and he was collecting material for a 
 history of the reign of Louis XIV. This was bis serious work, 
 poems and dramas being his delight, his glory, his defense. 
 She objected to his employing time upon history. " This 
 vixen \_be(/ueule^,'^ wrote Madame de Grafigny in 1738, "does 
 not wish him to finish his ' History of Louis XIV.' She 
 keeps it under lock and key. He was obliged to beg hard 
 before she would promise to let me have it. I will bafile her 
 little game." ^ She did baffle it so far as to get a reading of 
 the manuscript, from which she used to copy long passages 
 for the entertainment of her correspondent. 
 
 Voltaire confirms this anecdote, but he tells it as a lover 
 tells the fault of a mistress. Far from styling her a begueule, 
 he speaks of her as "a person rare in her time and in all 
 times," who had conceived a disgust for history from the man- 
 ner in which it was usually written. " What matters it," she 
 would say, " to me, a Frenchwoman, living here upon my 
 estate, that in Sweden Egil succeeded King Haquin, and that 
 Ottoman was the son of Ortogul ? I have read with pleasure 
 the history of the Greeks and Romans. They present to my 
 mind grand pictures which hold my attention. But I have 
 not been able to finish any extended history of our modern 
 nations, in which I see little but confusion ; a crowd of trifling 
 events, without connection and without result ; a thousand bat- 
 tles which decided nothing, and from which I only learn what 
 weapons men used to destroy one another with. I have re- 
 nounced a study equally tedious and immense, which over- 
 whelms the mind without enlightening it." ^ 
 
 1 Voltaire and Madame du Chatelet, par Madame de Grafigny, page 27. ^Hi 
 
 2 Essai sur les Moeurs. Pre'face. 19 CEuvres de Voltaire, 3. 

 
 VOLTAIRE AND MADAME STUDY HISTORY. 465 
 
 She often spoke in this strain when something in their 
 studies brought the subject into conversation. Sharing the 
 general ignorance respecting the history of France, she laid 
 the blame upon such chroniclers as the* Jesuit Father Daniel, 
 whose three ponderous folios of 1713 seemed to both of them 
 to have been ' written on the principle of excluding every- 
 thing of interest to thoughtful readers, and everything that 
 could warn or enlighten patriotic statesmen. " I desired," 
 she would say, "to read the history of France, Germany, 
 Spain, Italy, and found a mere chaos; a heap of useless facts, 
 for the most part false and ill digested ; barbarous actions 
 under barbarous names ; insipid romances ; no knowledge of 
 manners, governments, laws, opinions, — not very extraordi- 
 nary in a time when there were no opinions except monks' 
 legends, and no laws but those of brigandage. The Middle 
 Ages ! Nothing remains of those miserable times but con- 
 vents founded by the superstitious, who thought to ransom 
 their crimes by endowing idleness. I cannot endure in Daniel 
 those continual tales of battles, while I look for light upon 
 the states-general, parliaments, municipal laws, chivalry, all 
 our usages, and, above all, the progress of communities once 
 savage and to-day civilized. I seek in Daniel the history of 
 the great Henry the Fourth, and I find in it that of the Jesuit 
 Coton." 
 
 Much more to the same effect he attributes to her, which 
 was probably only his generous and brilliant interpretation of 
 her impatient disgust. 
 
 He tells us how he met her objections. "But," he Avould 
 say to her, " if among so much material, rude and unformed, 
 you should choose wherewith to construct an edifice for your 
 own use ; if, while leaving out all the details of warfare, as 
 wearisome as they are untrue, all the petty negotiations 
 which have been only useless knavery, all the particular ad- 
 ventures which conceal the great events ; if, while preserving 
 these details which paint manners, you should form out of 
 that chaos a general and well-defined picture ; if you should 
 seek to discover in events THE HISTORY OF the HUMAN ]\IEND, 
 "would you believe you had lost your time ? " 
 
 This idea, he says, determined her to enter with him upon 
 a course of historical studies ; and it was upon this general 
 
 VOL. I. 30
 
 466 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 scheme of tracing the progress of civilization and the devel- 
 opment of human intelligence that they proceeded. At first, 
 he was surprised at the little light throvrn upon his subject 
 by the multitude of . books consulted. " I remember," he 
 adds, " that when we began to read Puffendorf, who wrote in 
 Stockholm, and to whom the archives of the state were open, 
 we were confident of learning from him what was the strength 
 of that country ; how many inhabitants it nourished ; how the 
 people of the province of Gothland were related to those who 
 ravaged the Roman Empire ; how in the course of time the 
 arts were introduced into Sweden ; what were its principal 
 laws, its wealth, or rather its poverty. Not one word of what 
 we looked for did we find. When we wished to inform our- 
 selves concerning the claims of the emperors upon Rome, and 
 those of the Popes against the emperors, we found only confu- 
 sion and obscurity ; so that upon all that I wrote I put in the 
 margin, ' See, INQUIRE, DOUBT.' These words, in large 
 letters, are still to be seen in a hundred places of my old 
 manuscript of the year 1740. The only thing which sus- 
 tained me in researches so ungrateful was what we met now 
 and then relating to the arts and sciences. This became our 
 principal object. It was easy to perceive that, in our ages of 
 barbarity and ignorance, which followed the decline and 
 division of the Roman Empire, we received almost everything 
 from the Arabs, — astronomy, chemistry, medicine, algebra, 
 arithmetic, geography." 
 
 For a quarter of a centurj^, — 1730 to 1755, — with intervals, 
 history was his chief pursuit, and the result of his labors fills 
 fifteen of the ninety-seven volumes of his works. The " His- 
 tory of Charles XII." was already European, though he still 
 labored to correct and improve it. The " History of the Reign 
 of Louis XIV." he intended should follow that, until these 
 conversations with Madame du Chatelet widened his view 
 and enlarged his scheme. For some years now he had 
 been gathering knowledge for that general 'history of hur"^" 
 progress which, beginning to appear in print in 1742, 
 finally given to the world many years later, under the titL 
 " Essay upon the Manners and Spirit of Nations, and u 
 the principal Facts of History from Charlemagne to L( 
 XIII." The work as we now have it, in six volumes, is
 
 VOLTAIRE AND MADAME STUDY HISTORY. 467 
 
 most voluminous of the productions of the author, and it is, 
 perhaps, the one which has most influenced human thought in 
 later times. One of its pregnant little sentences is, " Quicon- 
 que pense fait penser " (whoever thinks makes think). I know 
 not if there is any other work published in the last two cent- 
 uries that has suggested so much to the men who suggest. 
 If it is now obsolete, it is so for the same reason that Adam 
 Smith's " Wealth of Nations " is obsolete, — because it has ac- 
 complished its purposes. But it remains an enduring record 
 of the development the human mind had reached when the 
 author wrote finis on the last page of his last edition in 1775. 
 It belongs now to the same class of pi'oductions as Pliny's 
 " Natural History," — that wondrous and fascinating cyclo- 
 pgedia of ancient ignorance. On both works could be in- 
 scribed: This is what men then Tcnew and thought of them- 
 selves and their ivo7'ld. 
 
 But tliere is one vital difference between the ancient and 
 the modern investigator. Aristotle told his readers that 
 women had more teeth than men, but never thought of 
 counting to see if the statement was correct, and never ad- 
 vised his disciples to do so. He wrote upon anatomy, but, 
 as Mr. Lewes shows, could never have looked into a human 
 body. Pliny recounts ten thousand prodigies without ques- 
 tion, satisfied to preface them with " They sayy Voltaire 
 doubts, inquires, denies, ridicules, burlesques. His Essay, be- 
 sides pointing out mistakes, is a contribution toward the nat- 
 ural history of mistake. He pauses often, after burlesquing 
 falsehood, to dwell upon the laws governing the generation, 
 promulgation, duration, and extinction of falsehood ; and 
 therefore, while falling very frequentl}^ into gross error, he ed- 
 ucated his period to surpass and supersede himself. Gibbon, 
 Niebuhr, Bentham, Colenso, Renan, Franklin, Jefferson, Dar- 
 win, Buckle, Motley, Knight, Carlyle, and others follow out 
 lines of investigation which he suggested, or carry on inves- 
 tigation in a spirit and method which he made easy. Even 
 Carlyle's Dryasdust was pierced by Voltaire's airy shaft, be- 
 fore the autlior of " Sartor Resartus " finished him with his 
 heavy mace, and rolled him in his own element of dust. 
 
 Take Niebuhr for another example. Voltaire found Chris- 
 tendom still believing the legends of Romulus and Remus, the
 
 468 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Horatii and Curatii, and all the other Roman marvels, just 
 as thoughtlessly as they believed the biblical prodigies. Be- 
 sides laughing at this credulity, he showed, by amusing exam- 
 ples, the folly of believing a story because an ancient monu- 
 ment attestecL it. " What ! because young Bacchus issuing 
 from Jupiter's thigh was celebrated in a temple at Rome, 
 did Jupiter actually carry Bacchus in his thigh? " After sev- 
 eral questions of this kind we have the remark, " An idiot 
 princess built a chapel to the Eleven Thousand Virgins ; the 
 incumbent of that chapel does not doubt that the eleven 
 thousand virgins existed, and causes the sage who does doubt it 
 to be stoned." 
 
 In Grote, also, the Greek legends are subjected to the same 
 process ; and Mr. Grote, improving upon the Voltairean method, 
 relates the beautiful legends as legends, and through them 
 gropes his way to the point where it is possible to begin his- 
 tory. Dr. Arnold pursues the same method in his " History of 
 Rome." 
 
 Gibbon is another instance. Both for the method and the 
 spirit of the " Decline and Fall " Gibbon was much indebted 
 to this Essay ; but especially for the spirit. Solid Gibbon 
 could not catch "Voltaire's lightness and brilliancy, or he, too, 
 would have described Julian as a man " who had the misfortune 
 to abandon the Christian religion, but did much honor to the 
 rehgion of nature, — Julian, the scandal of our church and the 
 glory of the Roman Empire." Gibbon's fifteenth and sixteenth 
 chapters are wholly in the spirit of this Essay, though weight- 
 ier in manner, and the result of wider investigation. 
 
 Bishop Colenso's arithmetical test applied to the Hebrew 
 narratives was very freely used by Voltaire in the Essay, as 
 well as in other works, accompanying the same with a profusion 
 of exquisite mockery. The line of investigation pursued by 
 M. Renan is in harmony with the spirit of the work, and was 
 made possible by it. 
 
 The author most indebted to Voltaire was Henry Thomas 
 Buckle, who died in attempting, with all the modern accumula- 
 tions of knowledge, to do what Voltaire essayed with the 
 scanty materials accessible in his day. Buckle's " History of 
 Civilization," if the gifted and devoted author had lived to 
 complete it, could have been little more than an amplification
 
 VOLTAIRE AND MADAME STUDY HISTORY. 469 
 
 and rectification of Voltaire's Essay. Even in the form, Buckle 
 followed his model ; for Voltaire too has an " Introduction " 
 of extraordinary length, — nearly a volume. We are reminded 
 of the English author in a hundred places of Voltaire's " Intro- 
 duction : " as when we read, for example, of the controlling in- 
 fluence of climate in developing civilization ; that civilization 
 began with leisure, and cannot thrive without it ; tliat the im- 
 mensities of nature limited the population of America ; that 
 religion retards and knowledge promotes development; that 
 the " aspects of nature," when they are terrible, make men 
 more superstitious, and when they are benign make them less 
 so ; that such works as the pyramids prove the builders to have 
 been poor and servile ; that ignorance and fear are the allied 
 causes of all that is most deplorable in the history of man ; and 
 that the beginning of all progress is the increase of knowledge. 
 
 He anticipates, also, those investigators who trace the grad- 
 ual development of such doctrines as the real presence and 
 miraculous inspiration, as well as the gradual construction of 
 such modes of worship as the Catholic mass. On this line, he 
 displays all his knowledge, acuteness, humor, and audacity. 
 The infinite absurdities of the early church history, such as 
 tracing the papacy to St. Peter, who never saw Rome, give 
 him matter for many entertaining and effective pages. The 
 awful power wielded for so many ages by the Ring of small- 
 brained, greedy Italians who governed the church from Rome, 
 and debauched both the mind and morals of Europe, received 
 due recognition at his hands. He sums it all up in one sen- 
 tence of terrible truth: — 
 
 " You will observe," he says, as if addressing Madame du 
 Chatelet, " that in all the disputes which have inflamed Chris- 
 tians against one another since the birth of the church, Rome 
 has always decided for the opinion that most degraded the 
 human mind and most completely annihilated human reason." 
 
 Having made this powerful statement, he appends a jest : 
 " I speak here only of history ; leaving out of view the inspi- 
 ration of the church and its infallibility, with which history 
 has nothing to do." It was this mingling of weighty truth 
 with amusing mockery that rendered the Essay the only his- 
 torical work in six volumes which readers for pleasure were 
 likely to read through.
 
 r 
 
 470 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 If the merits of this work are immense, so also are the de- 
 ductions \A'hich modei'n readers are obliged to make from former 
 estimates. Its defects are due in part to the impossibility of 
 procuring at that time the requisite knowledge, and in part to 
 the narrow limits of the human mind, and to the dominating 
 antipathies of Voltaire. Instead of expanding upon these de- 
 fects, I will quote one passage which exhibits them, — a pas- 
 sage which American readers can judge better than othei's. 
 In his last volume, he comes to speak of the colonies in North 
 America, and he selects Pennsylvania and New England, 
 among others, for particular remark. The reader will observe 
 the extreme, even ludicrous, incorrectness of his information, 
 as well as the influence of his early liking for the Quakers and 
 his life-long aversion to Calvinism : — 
 
 " Pennsylvania [he says] was long without soldiers, and it is only 
 of late that England sent some troops to defend them, when they were 
 at war with France. Take away that name of Quaker, cure them of 
 their revolting and barbarous habit of trembling when they speak in 
 their religious meetings, abolish some other^ridiculous customs, and we 
 must agree that those primitive people are of all men worthiest of re- 
 spect. Their colony is as flourishing as their morals have been pure. 
 Philadelphia, or the City of the Brothers, their capital, is one of the 
 most beautiful cities in the universe ; and they reckon that, in 1740, 
 there were a hundred and eighty thousand men in Pennsylvania. These 
 new citizens are not all primitives or Quakers ; half of them are Ger- 
 mans, Swedes, and people of other cotin tries, who form seventeen re- 
 ligions. The primitives, who govern, regard all those strangers as 
 their brothers. 
 
 " Beyond that province, the only one upon earth to which peace has 
 fled, banished as it is from every other region, you come to New Eng- 
 land, of which Boston, the richest city of all that coast, is the capital. 
 
 "It was inhabited and first governed by Puritans, persecuted in 
 England hj Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, who afterwards paid for 
 his persecutions with his head, and whose scaffold served to raise that 
 of the king, Charles I. Those Puritans, a species of Calvinists, fled, 
 about the year 1620, into that country, since named New England. 
 If the Episcopalians pursued them in the Old World, it was a war of 
 tigers against bears. They carried to America their sombre and fero- 
 cious humor, and vexed in every way the peaceful Pennsylvanians, as 
 soon as those new-comers had established themselves. But, in 1692, 
 the Puritans were self-punished by the strangest epidemic that ever 
 attacked the human mind.
 
 VOLTAIRE AND MADAME STUDY HISTORY. 471 
 
 " While Europe was beginning to escape from the abyss of horrible 
 superstitions wherein ignorance had plunged it for so many ages, and 
 while sorcery and possession were, in England and other polite na- 
 tions, only regarded as ancient follies, at which they blushed, the Pu- 
 ritans gave them new life in America. A girl had convulsions in 
 1692; a preacher accused an old female servant; they forced the old 
 woman to confess that she was a witch. Half the inhabitants believed 
 they were possessed ; the other half were accused of sorcery ; and the 
 people in fury threatened all the judges with hanging if they did not 
 hang the accused. For two years nothing was seen but sorcerers, 
 possessed, and gibbets ; and it was the countrymen of Locke and 
 Newton who abandoned themselves to that abominable delusion. At 
 last the malady ceased ; the citizens of New England recovered their 
 reason, and were astonished at their own madness. They devoted 
 themselves to commerce and agriculture. The colony very soon be- 
 came the most flourishing of them all. They reckoned there, in 1750, 
 about three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, which is ten times 
 more than the estimated population of the French establishments. ___- ■ ' 
 
 " From New England you pass to New York ; to Acadia, which 
 has become so great a cause of discord ; to New Land, where is carried 
 on the great cod fishery."^ 
 
 This is highly diverting, and shows h'ow difficult it is for 
 a human mind to get to the limpid water at the bottom of 
 the well where Truth resides. Defective information and a 
 biased mind, — these are the reasons why each generation has j/ 
 to re-write for itself the history of the world. He attributes 
 the Reformation to a squabble of two rival orders of monks, 
 as to which of them should have the German agency for tlie 
 sale of indulgences. Calvin, of course, he cordially and justly 
 detests. To Luther he is more lenient. He approves Luther's 
 marriage, commends his good-humor, and signalizes the fact 
 that, ecclesiastic and controversialist as he was, he never com- 
 mitted a cruel action, — not even burnt a Unitarian. "De- 
 spite the theologic fury that reigns in his works, he was a 
 good man at home, frank in character and peaceful in social 
 intercourse. His hatred of the sacramentarians limited itself 
 to expelling them from the universities and the ministry ; a 
 very moderate thing for the age in which he lived." On the 
 other hand, he did not perceive, living in a Catholic countr}^ 
 that the Reformation was a step toward the emancipation of 
 
 1 6 Essai sur les Moeurs, 124.
 
 472 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 the mind from the bondage of the letter. He saw that the 
 writings of the reformers were silly and savage ; he knew that 
 their demeanor was austere and forbidding ; and he supposed 
 that, in removing the heavy yoke of the old chm'ch, they had 
 imposed one more crushing still. 
 
 " If," he remarks, " the reformers condemned celibacy, if 
 they opened the doors of the convents, it was to change human 
 society itself into convents. Sports and plays were forbidden 
 among them. Geneva, for a hundred years, did not allow a 
 musical instrument within its borders. They proscribed au- 
 ricular confession, but they wished public penitence ; and so 
 it was established in Switzerland, Scotland, Geneva. We suc- 
 ceed little with men when we propose something easy and sim- 
 ple. The strictest school-master is the one most run after." 
 
 In relating the horrors of religion in every age, he still 
 blends pathos an4 fun ; lamenting the woes unutterable that 
 zealots have inflicted for religion's sake, and j^et never allow- 
 ing his readers to forget the trivial and ridiculous nature of 
 the usages and doctrines for which they slew and tortured. 
 He sometimes makes the mistake that we are all apt to make 
 in commenting upon those scenes of blood and devastation, in 
 Spain, in Holland, in Florida, in France, attributing them too 
 much to individuals, and too little to man. People were dis- 
 mal in Geneva and cruel in Spain, not because Calvin was dys- 
 peptic and Philip II. ambitious, but because man was still 
 weak, ignorant, and timorous. He, too, felt this when, after 
 relating the appalling massacres that followed the surrender 
 of Haarlem, he adds only, " The pen drops from the hands 
 when we see how men are wont to deal with men." He felt 
 it, also, and gave it memorable expression, when he wrote, 
 "It is characteristic of bai'barians to believe the divinity ma- 
 levolent. Men make God in their own image." 
 
 Such were the studies that occupied him during these years 
 of wandering and disturbance ; cheered occasionally by the 
 warm commendations of the King of Prussia, to whom he sent 
 the portions as they were completed. Frederic praised this 
 work without reserve. He pronounced it the ornament of the 
 age, sufficient of itself to show how much superior modern 
 genius was to ancient. For a wonder, he did not object to its 
 audacities. " Cicero," said the king, " could not conceive how 
 
 II
 
 VOLTAIRE AND MADAME STUDY HISTORY. 473 
 
 the augurs could look one another in the face without laugh- 
 ing ; you do more : you expose the absurdities and furies of 
 the clergy to the view of all the world.'' Again, on reading 
 Voltaire's account of the crusades, the king broke into poetry, 
 congratulating himself upon being Voltaire's contemporary, 
 to be instructed by him, instead of being a crusader, to be 
 pierced by his satire. "Go on with this excellent work," he 
 added ; " go on with it for the love of truth ; go on for the 
 happiness of men. It is a king who exhorts you to write the 
 follies of kings." Frederic was, indeed, so roused by it that 
 he resumed his own literary labors, wrote a poem and a com- 
 edy, and began to compose those Memoirs of his house and 
 time which occupy six of the thirty volumes of his works. 
 
 The " History of the Age of Louis XIV." was not neg- 
 lected, meanwhile. The author's familiar intercourse with the 
 men and women whose parents and connections had lived at 
 the old court supplied him with documents and memoirs. To 
 the polite society of his time no other work of his could have 
 been so fascinating as this melange of anecdote, epigram, and 
 history. He " stands by his order^" Half his first volume 
 consists of a catalogue, with brief explanations, of the princi- 
 pal writers of the time of the late king, among wdiom, wdth 
 his usual tenacious loyalty, he includes " Chatelefc (Gabrielle- 
 Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du) " who was nine 
 years of age when Louis XIV. died. She was dead herself 
 when he added that, " of all the women who had illustrated 
 France, she was the one who had possessed most of genuine 
 esprit^ and had least affected the hel-esprity The History 
 is so much occupied with matters appertaining to the mind 
 and the taste that it reminds us of the amiable Philadelphian 
 who proposed the " History of the United States with the 
 Wars omitted." 
 
 He could not, for many reasons, speak of the late king with 
 perfect candor. He w^as himself somewhat under the influ- 
 ence of the general illusion with regard to Louis XIV. ; and 
 the more because the redeeming glory of his reign was the 
 encouragement given to art and literature. Nor liad the co- 
 lossal egotism of the monarch been clearly revealed to the 
 world, though it had brought France close to the verge of 
 ruin, and left to his successor the chaos of 1715. The Mem- 
 oirs of Saint Simon, of Madame de Maintenon, and many
 
 474 LIFE or VOLTAIRE. 
 
 others enable us to know that court better than any individ- 
 ual could have known it who spent a life in attendance. Vol- 
 taire knew more than he could tell, and he " manages " the 
 dangerous points of his theme with all his own audacious pru- 
 dence. The anecdotes are a valuable part of his work, and 
 these will make it always a source of information. " Anec- 
 dotes," he says, " are an inclosed field in which one gleans 
 after the vast harvest of history." Most of those which he has 
 recorded have become part of the common stock of entertain- 
 ment and illustration, used by each generation as it passes, 
 and left intact for the next. The spirit of the work is Vol- 
 tairean enough. In other words, it is a solicitation, in three 
 agreeable volumes, to the world of readers, to think with their 
 own minds, to believe only what is in harmony with tlie 
 known nature of things, and, having done this themselves, to 
 concede the same right to all men without reserve. The Rev- 
 ocation of the Edict of Nantes he adduced as a case in point. 
 How often during his long life he returned to this theme! He 
 reminded his countrymen, on every convenient opportunity, 
 that the priests who ruled the ignorant mind of Louis XIV. 
 drove from the kingdom eight hundred thousand people, moral, 
 skillful, frugal, loyal, who carried away with them a thousand 
 millions of francs, and planted in Holland, England, Germany, 
 America, several branches of manufacture of which till then 
 France had enjoyed a monopoly. He told his countrymen 
 of the ffreat colonies of Frenchmen that he had himself seen 
 in Berlin, London, Switzerland, Holland, — the descendants of 
 those good people who had followed their pastors into exile, 
 rather than renounce their right to believe. On this point he 
 was called in question, and met his opponent with accounts of 
 these foreign settlements as visited and inspected by himself. 
 
 He concluded the Histor}^ with a narrative of the persistent 
 endeavor on the part of the Jesuits, under Louis XIV., to 
 convert the Chinese. The missionaries sent home a pious lie 
 to inflame the zeal and swell the offerings of the people of 
 France. Four crosses had appeared, they said, on the clouds 
 near the horizon, as if to sanction the sublime enterprise. Vol- 
 taire ended his History thus : " But if God had wished that 
 China should become Christian, would he have contented him- 
 self with putting some crosses in the air ? Would he not have 
 put them in the heart of the Chinese ? "
 
 CHAPTER XLI. 
 
 AMATEUR DIPLOMATIST AGAIN. 
 
 These elevated studies were never so frequently or so long 
 interrupted as during the next two or three years, — a period of 
 his life to which he always looked back with regret. When he 
 "was an old man, the Ahh6 Duvernet asked him if it was true 
 that he had once been a courtier. He replied that it was all 
 too true. "In 1744 and 1745," he added, " I was one ; I cor- 
 rected myself in 1746 ; and I repented in 1747." He under- 
 stated the misfortune. From 1743 to 1753 he passed a great 
 part of his time at or near the courts of his three kings, Louis, 
 Frederic, and Stanislas, snatching his own proper work from 
 tumultuous distraction. " It was not the period of my glory," 
 said he, " if I ever had any." ^ 
 
 There was a grand wedding at Paris, in the family of the 
 Du Chatelets, in the spring of 1743. Madame du Chatelet 
 gave her daughter to a Neapolitan, the Duke de Montenei'o- 
 Caraff. It appears to have been a veritable marriage of the 
 good old time : the bride a plump damsel of seventeen, fresh 
 from the convent ; the bridegroom much older, a foreigner, 
 as Voltaire notes, " with a big nose, a meagre visage, and a 
 hollow chest." But the King of France signed the contract; 
 the King of Prussia was formally notified ; and all was done in 
 the rules. The mother had had other wishes for this daugh- 
 ter ; at least, she said so in her letter announcing the marriage 
 to the King of Prussia. " If 77it/ vows had been heard," she 
 wrote, "it had been at your court that she had passed her 
 life ; and that would have been a happiness of which I should 
 have been jealous." Could the young Baron de Kaiserling 
 have aspired ? The young lady had been brought home from 
 her convent to take part in a comedy performed for his amuse- 
 ment at Cirey. 
 
 1 Voltaire to Duvernet, February, 1776.
 
 476 LT^E OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Weio-htier matters called Voltaire from his books in June, 
 1743, and detained him long. Europe was still embroiled. 
 Frederic, who had broken the peace in 1740, had withdrawn 
 from the strife, with Silesia his own. He was at peace ; but 
 France was waging disastrous, discreditable war against Aus- 
 tria and Hanover, a war without well-defined object, and wo- 
 fully ill conducted. Again all eyes were fixed in hope or dread 
 upon Prussia, whose alliance could turn the scale and give to 
 either belligerent decisive preponderance. It was Frederic 
 himself who seemed to invite Voltaire to try once more his 
 skill in the diplomatic art. " I now ask you," wrote Frederic, 
 " for a new explanation ; for, behold, the cardinal is dead and 
 affairs are going a different way. It were good to know what 
 are the channels which it is necessary to employ." 
 
 The Duke de Richelieu was then "first gentleman of the 
 king's bed-chamber," an office which he fulfilled by supplying 
 that sumptuous apartment with occupants agreeable to the 
 king, and useful to himself. The Duchess de Chateauroux was 
 one of them. Petticoat II. she was styled by a King of Prus- 
 sia, indifferent to women. Richelieu conceived the scheme of 
 sendingr Voltaire to Berlin on a secret mission to sound the 
 King of Prussia, to warn him of the danger to himself of allow- 
 ing Maria Theresa to recover power and prestige through the 
 aid of the King of Hanover, who was also King of England, 
 and to win him over to an alliance with France ; or, as Vol- 
 taire expressed it, " to ask him if he would be so good as to 
 lend us a hundred thousand men, for the nonce, in order the 
 better to assure his Silesia." The mistress seconded, the min- 
 istry adopted, the king sanctioned the project, and he prepared 
 to depart. 
 
 A pretext being necessary to account for his presence at 
 Berlin, he suggested his recent public quarrel with the ancient 
 Bishop of Mirepoix, which also the king approved. The new 
 envoy wrote to Frederic that he was about to seek refuge at 
 his court from the persecutions of " that bigoted old monk." 
 Boyer was accustomed to sign himself, officially, the " anc. 
 Bishop of Mirepoix." The abbreviation ajic. in the bad hand- 
 writing of the bishop bore a resemblance to the French word 
 ane, which means ass. Voltaire and Frederic styled him 
 habitually Vane de Mirepoix, and made merry at his ex- 
 
 I
 
 AMATEUR DIPLOMATIST AGAIN. 477 
 
 pense. Voltaire took care that the bishop should see some of 
 the king's letters in which liberties of this kind were taken 
 with his name and character. Boyer complained to the King 
 of France that Voltaire was giving him out in foreign courts 
 as a fool. Louis replied, as Voltaire reports, that " it was a 
 thing agreed upon, and that he need not concern himself about 
 it." Thus, he adds, he had the pleasure, at once, of aveng- 
 ing the indignity of his exclusion from the Academy, of tak- 
 ing an agreeable journey, and of having an opportunity to 
 serve his king ; all, too, at the king's expense, for he was 
 authorized to spend as much money as he wished. 
 
 But how was he to get away from Madame du Chatelet, 
 ■who would make " a horrible outcry " at this appearance of 
 desertion? It was agreed that she should be let into the 
 secret, and that the letters between Voltaire and the ministry 
 should pass through her hands. She made the outcry, not- 
 withstanding; but she made it with discretion and with his- 
 trionic effects. Voltaire took leave of her about June 15, 1743, 
 to be gone six weeks ; and she performed her part so well that 
 the gossiping Barbier was deceived by it. July 1st, he made 
 this entry in his diary : " Madame du Chatelet is going im- 
 mediately to join Voltaire at Brussels. It is remarked that 
 the government ought to conciliate this poet, or else assure it- 
 self of him. He is extremely dissatisfied, extremely angry, and 
 in great favor with the King of Prussia. That woman passed 
 a part of Saturday last in crying, because she had not received 
 on Friday any letters from that Adonis." ^ From this we may 
 infer that the purpose of the journey was not suspected. 
 
 Before leaving Paris he procured from his old school-fellow, 
 the Marquis d'Argenson, minister of war, a contract for his 
 relations, Marchand and son, for making ten thousand army 
 coats. " All they ask," said he, " is to clothe and feed the 
 defenders of France." Marchand lived to be a farmer-cren- 
 eral. For another nephew, badly wounded in a recent action, 
 he solicited " that cross of St. Louis, for which men have 
 their arms and legs broken." For Madame du Chatelet, also, 
 he obtained something, not stated, from the same minister. 
 " Permit me, Monseigneur," he writes to D'Argenson from 
 the Hague, " to thank you tenderly for the favor accorded to 
 
 ^ 8 Journal de Barbier, 309.
 
 478 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Madame du Cliatelet, and for the manner of it." He was in 
 great vogue ; for the first news he had to remark upon in his 
 letters to the minister was of the famous victory won over the 
 French at Dettingen by George II. 's English and Hanoverian 
 troops, — that army of Uncle Toby's which swore so terribly 
 in Flanders. Nothing was too good for the envoy who might 
 win for France at such a crisis so powerful an ally as Frederic 
 II., King of Pj-ussia. The envoy improved his hour of sun- 
 shine. 
 
 From the light tone in which he wrote of his mission, years 
 after, we might suppose that it was all a jest at the expense 
 of Vane de Mirepoix. His letters of the time, however, show 
 that he was a vigilant, laborious, and able amateur in the dip- 
 lomatic art, with the usual fault of the amateur, excess of 
 zeal. He sent home an abundance of documents, maps, plans, 
 and information, supplied by and through Frederic's agents 
 and ministers. He dispatched couriers ; he sent unsigned let- 
 ters ; he wound himself up in impenetrable secrecy, and be- 
 haved, in all respects, in the approved diplomatic style. But 
 he did more than this. Living for six weeks in Prussia, in the 
 royal palaces, in daily and nightly intimacy with the king, he 
 had with him long and serious conversations, in the course of 
 which Frederic spoke with apparent candor and fullness of his 
 intentions and desires. Voltaire reports one of these conver- 
 sations to M. Amelot, French minister for foreign affairs. It 
 occurred September 3, 1743, in Voltaire's own room, after a 
 dinner given by the king to M. de Valori, the French ambas- 
 sador at Berlin. The gayety and ease of a Paris table marked 
 this repast, and, when it was over, the king came to Voltaire's 
 apartment, and they talked alone together until the evening 
 concert was announced. 
 
 The King. — "I was very glad yesterday to invite the envoy of 
 France alone of all the ministers, not only to give him marks of con- 
 sideration, but to disquiet those who would be displeased at the pref- 
 erence." 
 
 Voltaire. — " The envoy of France would be much more content 
 if your majesty should send some troops to Wesel or to Magdeburg." 
 
 The King. — " But what do you wish me to do ? Will the King 
 of France ever forgive my having made a separate peace ? " 
 
 Voltaire. — " Sire, great kings know not vengeance ; all yields to
 
 AMATEUE DIPLOMATIST AGAIN. 479 
 
 the interest of the state. You know if the interest of your majesty 
 and that of France is not to be forever united." 
 
 The King. — " How can I believe that it is the intention of France 
 to bind herself firmly to me ? I know that your envoy at Mayence 
 makes insinuations against my interests, and that a peace is proposed 
 with the Queen of Hungary, involving the reestablishment of the em- 
 peror and an indemnification at my expense." 
 
 Voltaire. — "1 dare believe that this accusation is an artifice of 
 the Austrians, a practice too common with them. Did they not calum- 
 niate you in the same manner last May ? Did they not publish in 
 Holland that you had made an offer to the Queen of Hungary to join 
 her against France ? " 
 
 The King (lowering his eyes). — " I swear to you that nothing is 
 more false. What could I gain by it ? Such a falsehood destroys 
 itself." 
 
 Voltaire. — " Very well, sire ; why, then, not openly unite with 
 France and the emperor against the common enemy, who hates you 
 and calumniates you both equally ? What ally can you have but 
 France?" 
 
 Thk King. — "You are right. You know, also, that I am endeav- 
 oring to serve France ; you are aware of what I am doing in Holland. 
 But I cannot act openly until I am sure of being seconded by the em- 
 pire, to which end I am now laboring ; and this is the real object of 
 the journey I shall make to Bayreuth in eight or ten days. I wish to 
 be assured that some, at least, of the princes of the empire — such as 
 Palatine, Hesse, Wurtemberg, Cologne, and Stettin — would furnish a 
 contingent to the emperor." 
 
 Voltaire. — " Sire, ask their signature only, and begin by making 
 your brave Prussians take the field." 
 
 The King. — "I do not wish to recommence the war ; but I con- 
 fess I should be flattered to be the pacificator of the empire, and to 
 humiliate a little the King of England, who wishes to give law to 
 Germany." 
 
 Voltaire. — " You can do it. Only this glory is wanting to you, 
 and I hope that France will owe peace to her own arms and your ne- 
 gotiations. The vigor she will show will doubtless increase your good- 
 will. Allow me to ask what you would do if the King of France 
 should demand succor from you by virtue of your treaty with him ? " 
 
 The King. — "I should be obliged to excuse myself, and to reply 
 that the treaty was annulled by what I have since done with regard to 
 the Queen of Hungary. At present I can serve the emperor and the 
 King of France only by negotiating." 
 
 Voltaire. — " Negotiate, then, sire, as fortunately as you have
 
 480 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 fought ; and suffer me to say to you, what all the earth says, that the 
 Queen of Hungary only awaits the favorable moment to attack Si- 
 lesia." 
 
 The King. — " My four fortresses will be finished before Austria 
 can send against me two regiments. I have a hundred and fifty thou- 
 sand combatants ; I shall have then two hundred thousand. I flatter 
 myself that my system of military discipline, which I consider the best 
 in Europe, will always triumph over the Hungarian troops. If the 
 Queen of Hungary attempts to recover Silesia, she will force me to 
 take Bohemia from her. I fear nothing from Russia ; the Czarina is 
 forever devoted to me since the last conspiracy fomented by Botta 
 [envoy of Maria Theresa] and by the English. I advise her to send 
 the young Ivan and his mother to Siberia, as well as my brotlier-in- 
 law, with whom I have always been dissatisfied, and who has always 
 been governed by the Austrians." ^ 
 
 At this point the king was notified that the musicians 
 were ready to begin the concert. Voltaire followed him to 
 the music-room, and the conversation ended ; to be renewed, 
 however, on several succeeding days. The king could scarcely 
 have been more explicit or more frank ; and, probably, an ex- 
 perienced diplomatist would not have pressed him farther. 
 But Voltaire had private as well as public reasons for making 
 of this embassy an unquestionable and striking success. He 
 desired something in the king's handwriting to take home 
 with him ; and, to this end, he wrote the well-known series 
 of questions, leaving a wide margin on the paper for the king's 
 written comments. Frederic, obliged to disappoint the per- 
 tinacious envoy, appended ridiculous or evasive answers. " Is 
 it not clear," asked Voltaire, " that France displays vigor and 
 wisdom ? " The king wrote in the margin, " I admire the 
 wisdom of France, but God keep me from ever imitating 
 it." Voltaire alluded to the burning desire of the Austrians 
 to attack Silesia. Frederic wrote, " They will be received, 
 birihi, in the style of Barbary, mon ami ! " The king would 
 not commit himself upon paper. In conversation he contin- 
 ued to discuss the situation in a manner which his subsequent 
 conduct showed to be sincere. Their final conversation 
 turned upon King George II. of England, whom Frederic did 
 not love. The king's last word was this: — 
 
 1 Voltaire to Amelot, September 3, 1743.
 
 AMATEUR DIPLOMATIST AGAIN. 481 
 
 " George is Frederic's uncle ; but George is not King of 
 Prussia. Let France declare war against England, and I 
 march ! " ^ 
 
 To oblige the envoy, the king wrote him a long letter to 
 shou\ eulogizing France, complimenting her king, and com- 
 mending Voltaire as a loyal subject and admirable citizen, 
 Frederic still longed to possess him ; and it is evident from 
 scattered intimations that the envoy endeavored to turn this 
 passionate desire to account. I think he said in substance to 
 the King of Prussia, " Let me be the means of bringing suc- 
 cor to France, make ray mission brilliantly successful, and 
 what can I not ask of the king, mo7i maitre ? Say, for ex- 
 ample, that I should wish the obliging Marquis du Chatelet 
 appointed ambassador at your majesty's court, with one Vol- 
 taire as guest of the family, resident at Berlin for many 
 years, and perhaps always ! " Frederic, on his part, re- 
 newed all his former offers. " France," he wrote, a few days 
 before Voltaire's departure, " has passed hitherto for the asy- 
 lum of unfortunate kings ; I wish my capital to become the 
 temple of great men. Come, my dear Voltaire, and dictate 
 all that can be agreeable to you. I wish to give you pleasure ; 
 and to oblige a man it is necessary to enter into his way 
 of thinking. Choose a suite of apartments or a house ; rule 
 whatever is necessary to you for the agreeableness and the 
 luxury of life; make your condition such as your happiness 
 requires ; it shall be mine to provide for the rest. You shall 
 be always free and entirely master of your destiny." 
 
 In his mania to have him, the king descended to a trick 
 which, doubtless, he regarded as a kind of harmless practical 
 joke, but which few readers will be able to see in that light. Vol- 
 taire, as we have observed, caused some of Frederic's letters to 
 fall into the hands of the Bishop of Mirepoix. Before leaving 
 Prussia, he discovered that the king was taking precisely the 
 same liberty with certain letters of his, in which the " mitred 
 donkey of Mirepoix " was spoken of with infinite contempt. 
 " Here," wrote Frederic, August 17, 1743, to his favorite, 
 Count de Rottembourg, then visiting Paris, — " you have a 
 morsel of a letter of Voltaire's, which I beg you will get de- 
 livered to the Bishop of Mirepoix in some roundabout way, 
 
 1 Memoires. 2 CEuvres dc Voltaire, 56. 
 VOL. I. 31
 
 482 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 without either you or me appearing in the business. My in- 
 tention is to embroil Voltaire so thoroughly in France that 
 there will remain no part for him to take but to come to 
 me." ^ The morsel inclosed read thus : — 
 
 " This ugly Mirepoix is as hard, as fanatical, as imperious, 
 as the Cardinal de Fleury was suave, accommodating, polite. 
 Oh, how he will make that good man regretted ! " 
 
 Ten days later, the king sent to Count de Rottembourg 
 some verses of Voltaire's upon Mirepoix, and charged him to 
 get them secretly delivered to the bishop ; for, added the king, 
 " I wish to embroil Voltaire forever with Fi-ance ; it would 
 be the means of having him at Berlin." These verses, be- 
 sides heaping contempt upon Mirepoix, contained a line that 
 seemed to speak of Louis XV. as " the most stupid of kings." 
 This was going far, even for a monarch. Voltaire, who had 
 partisans or friends everywhere, was promptly informed of 
 this procedure, and did not approve it. He was extremely 
 indignant. If he had amused himself a little by putting 
 some jocular paragraphs of Frederic where the bishop could 
 see them, he did not consider the game equal between a king 
 with two hundred thousand men at his command and a poet 
 who was obliged always to serve and charm his country at 
 the risk of a dungeon. Strange to relate, Frederic was as- 
 tonished that he should take the flattering treason amiss. 
 " Voltaire," he wrote to Rottembourg, " has unearthed, I 
 know not how, the little treason we have played him. He 
 is strangely piqued at it. He will get over it, I hope." 
 
 He pouted for a while, it appears, and then forgave the little 
 treason. Luckily, it had been a thing agreed upon that Mire- 
 poix was to be " written down an ass ; " and thus he was 
 able to make it up with his own court. Nor was he ill pleased 
 to let the French ministry know how intensely he was desired 
 at the Prussian court. " Not being able," he wrote to M. Am- 
 elot, " to gain me otherwise, the king thought to acquire me by 
 destroying me in France ; but I swear to you that I would 
 rather live in a town of Switzerland than enjoy at this price 
 the perilous favor of a man capable of putting treason into 
 friendship itself." 
 
 But he was not quite so angry then as these words imply. 
 
 1 25 CEuvres de Frederic le Grand, 523, 525, 527, 528. 
 
 II
 
 AMATEUR DIPLOMATIST AGAIN. 483 
 
 He brought his Prussian journey to a happ}^ close by accom- 
 panying the king to the court of his sister, the Margravine of 
 Bayreuth, where he passed fourteen days of sumptuous and 
 elegant festivity. Operas, comedies, concerts, hunts, suppers, 
 filled up the hours. The king's sisters, Ulrique and Amelia, 
 as well as Wilhelmiiia, were there, all sharing their brother's 
 enthusiasm for the guest, all owing part of their mental devel- 
 opment to him. Voltaire had never been so feted and caressed. 
 He left behind him at Bayreuth, as a memorial of those en- 
 chanting days, three little poems, unequaled in their kind in 
 all the literature of the drawling-room. These trifles are so 
 exquisite that the plainest prose of them leaves a pleasing im- 
 pression upon the mind : — 
 
 " To the Princess Ulrique : Often a little truth mingles with 
 the grossest falsehood. Last night, iti the error of a dream, to 
 the rank of kings I was mounted. I loved you, princess, and 
 dared tell you so. The gods, at my waking, did not take all 
 from me. I have lost only my empire." 
 
 "To the Princesses Ulrique and Amelia: If Paris should 
 come upon the earth to judge between your beautiful eyes, he 
 would cut the apple in two, and not cause any war." 
 
 " To the Princesses Ulrique, Amelia, and Wilhelmina : Par- 
 don, charming Ulrique ! pardon, beautiful Amelia ! I had 
 thought to love only you for the rest of my life, and to serve 
 only under your laws ; but, at length, I hear and I see that 
 adorable sister upon whose steps Love follows. Ah, it is not 
 wronging the Three Graces to love all three of them ! " 
 
 The Princess Ulrique ventured to send him a reply in verse 
 and prose. She, too, had had a dream : " Apollo, with majes- 
 tic port, gentle and gracious, accompanied by his Nine Sisters," 
 appeared before her, to rebuke her for replying to such verses 
 only in dull prose. The god dictated ; she wrote : Eis dream 
 had been a mere delusion ; it was Emilie who had appeared to 
 him, not Ulrique ; and so he would discover as soon as he had 
 returned to Brussels. What a difference between Ulrique and 
 them ! They had placed themselves on the heights of Helicon ; 
 they had made themselves famous ; but she owed all to her an- 
 cestors. Tn this tone Voltaire and the princess continued to 
 correspond until she went away to be Queen of Sweden. 
 
 After four months' absence, he set his face toward home,
 
 484 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 bearing with him many evidences of the favor in which he was 
 held ; among others, a gold box from the king, in which were 
 several medals in gold, representing Frederic giving peace to 
 his subjects. Long as he had been absent, still he lingered 
 several days at the court of the Duke of Brunswick, writing 
 few letters and short to that Emilie of his, who was chafing 
 and anxious at Brussels. She wrote to D'Argental that she 
 no longer knew the man upon whom her happiness depended. 
 His letters and his behavior were equally strange to her. " He 
 is absolutely drunk ; he spends twelve days in going from 
 Berlin to the Hague ; he is mad for Germany and courts ; he 
 stayed fifteen days at Baja-euth ; he has passed fifteen days 
 without writing to me ; and for two months past I have learned 
 his designs from ambassadors and gazettes. Such conduct 
 would, perhaps, detach any one but me." But the truant re- 
 turned at length, and all was forgiven. He had had a painful 
 journey, he said, but his return overwhelmed him with happi- 
 ness ; he had never found his Emilie so amiable and so far 
 above the King of Prussia. 
 
 Soon they went to Paris together ; he to give details of his 
 mission, and to receive, perhaps, the glory and reward which 
 kings bestow upon subjects returning from hard and not un- 
 successful service. But he did not receive either glory or re- 
 ward. The Duchess de Chateauroux was offended because the 
 negotiation had not passed through her hands ; she had taken 
 a dislike to the person of M. Amelot, minister for foreign af- 
 fairs, because he stammered ; she detested him, also, because 
 he was controlled by M. de Maurepas, her mortal foe ; and, 
 when Voltaire reached Paris, she was in full intrigue to expel 
 the odious stammerer. A few weeks later, M. Amelot was 
 dismissed, and Voltaire was " enveloped in his disfavor." 
 
 After a month's stay at Paris, madame and himself returned 
 to Brussels, where they resumed their lawsuit and their stud- 
 ies, aftei'seven months' interruption. On the opening of spring 
 they were at Cirey, its new gardens all blooming with the 
 beauty which their taste had imagined. Few visitors enlivened 
 this retreat, it is true, but they thought, perhaps, that they 
 were now settled for a long period of generous toil and elegant 
 pleasure. President Henault looked in upon them again in 
 the spring of 1744, and found them immersed in intellectual
 
 AMATEUR DIPLOMATIST AGAIN. 485 
 
 employments, with madame's new tutor in mathematics their 
 only companion. "If," wrote H(^nault, in his Memoirs, "one 
 should make a fancy picture of a delicious retreat, an asylum 
 of peace, of union, of calm of soul, of amenity, of talents, of 
 mutual esteem, of the attractions of philosophy joined to the 
 charms of poetry, he would have painted Cirey : a building 
 simple and elegant from the ground-floor up ; cabinets filled 
 with the apparatus of mechanics and chemistry ; Voltaire in 
 bed, beginning, continuing, finishing works of all kinds."
 
 CHAPTER XLII. 
 
 VOLTAIEE AT THE COURT OF FRANCE. 
 
 After this interesting experience of court life in a foreign 
 country, where the king was king, he was to become a court- 
 ier at Versailles, where the man who governed the king's mis- 
 tress was king. 
 
 Again it was the Duke de Richelieu, First Gentleman of 
 the Chamber, who broke in upon the elevated pursuits of 
 Cirey, and called him to lower tasks and less congenial scenes. 
 The royal children were coming of age. The marriage of the 
 Dauphin to the Infanta of Spain, long ago agreed upon, was 
 soon to be celebrated, the prince having passed his sixteenth 
 year, and it devolved upon the First Gentleman to arrange the 
 marriage festival. This was no light task ; for Louis XIV. 
 had accustomed France to the most elaborate and magnificent 
 fetes. Not content with such splendors as mere wealth can 
 everywhere procure, that gorgeous monarch loved to enlist all 
 the arts and all the talents, exhibiting to his guests divertise- 
 ments written by Moliere, performed with original music, 
 and with scenery painted by artists. Several of his festivals 
 have to this day a certain celebrity in France, and have left 
 traces still noticeable. There is a public ground in Paris, 
 opposite the Tuileries, which is called the Place of the Carou- 
 sal. It was so named because it was the scene of one of this 
 king's fetes, in which five bodies of horsemen, or quadrilles, 
 as they were called, took part. One of these bodies were 
 dressed and equipped as Roman knights, and they were led by 
 the king in person. His brother, the Duke of Orleans, com- 
 manded a body of Persian cavalry ; the Prince of Conde, a 
 splendid band of Turks ; the Duke of Guise, a company of 
 Peruvian horse ; and a son of Cond^ shone at the head of 
 East Indian horsemen in gorgeous array. Imagine these five 
 bodies of horse galloping and manoeuvring, entering and de- 
 
 I
 
 VOLTAIRE AT THE COUET OF FRAl^CE. 487 
 
 parting, charging and retreating, like circus riders in an ex- 
 tremely large and splendid tent ; and in the midst, on a lofty 
 platform, three queens in splendid robes, the mother of Louis, 
 the wife of Louis, and the widow of Charles L, who lived and 
 died the guest of the King of France. There were grand 
 doings at this festival. There were tournaments, games of 
 skill and daring, stately processions, concerts, plays, and buf- 
 fooneries, with a ball at the close. 
 
 That pageant, splendid as it was, was " effaced," as the 
 French say, by one which the king gave only two years after 
 at Versailles, probably the most sumptuous thing of the kind 
 ever seen. On the 5th of May, the most beautiful month of 
 the year in France, the king rode out to Versailles with all 
 his court, which then included six hundred persons, each at- 
 tended by retainers and servants, the whole numbering more 
 than two thousand individuals and as many horses. The fes- 
 tival was to last seven days, and the king defrayed the ex- 
 penses of every one of his guests. In the park and gardens 
 of Versailles miracles had been wrought. Theatres, amphi- 
 theatres, porticoes, pavilions, seemed to have sprung into being 
 at the waving of an enchanter's wand. On the first day there 
 was a kind of review, or march-past, of all who were to take 
 part in the games and tourneys. Under a triumphal arch the 
 three queens appeai'cd again, resplendent, each attended by 
 one hundred ladies, who were attired in the brilliant manner 
 of the period ; past these marched heralds pages, squires, car- 
 rying the devices and shields of the knights, as well as ban- 
 ners upon which verses were written in letters of gold. The 
 knights followed, in burnished armor and bright plumes, the 
 king at their head in the character of Roger, a famous knight 
 of old. All the crown diamonds glittered upon his coat and 
 the trappings of his horse. Both he and the animal sparkled 
 and blazed in the May sun ; and we can well imagine that a 
 handsome young man, riding with perfect grace the most 
 beautiful of horses, mus't have been a very pretty spectacle, 
 despite so much glitter. When this procession of squires and 
 knights had passed and made their obeisance to the queens, 
 a huge car followed, eighteen feet high, fifteen wide, and 
 twenty-four long, representing the Car of the Sun, — an im- 
 mense vehicle, all gilding and splendor. Behind this car
 
 488 .LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 came groups exhibiting the Four Ages, of Gold, of Silver, of 
 Brass, and of Iron ; and these were followed by representa- 
 tions of the celestiiil signs, the seasons, and the hours. All 
 this, the spectators inform us, was admirably performed to the 
 sound of beautiful music ; and, now and then, persons would 
 step from the procession, and the music would cease, while they 
 recited poems, written for the occasion, before the queens. 
 Imagine shepherds, blacksmiths, farmers, harvesters, vine-dress- 
 ers, fawns, dryads. Pans, Dianas, Apollos, marching by, and 
 representing the various scenes of life and industry ! 
 
 The procession ends at last. Night falls. With wondrous 
 rapidity four thousand great torches are lighted in an inclos- 
 ure fitted up as a banqueting place. Two hundred of the per- 
 sons who had figured in the procession now bring in various 
 articles of food ; the seasons, the vine-dressers, the shepherds, 
 the harvesters, each bear the food appropriate to them ; while 
 Pan and Diana advance upon a moving mountain, and alight 
 to superintend the distribution of the exquisite food which had 
 been brought in. Behind the tables was an orchestra of mu- 
 sicians, and when the feast was done the pleasures of the day 
 ended with a ball. For a whole week the festival continued, 
 the sports varied eYery day. There were tourneys, pageants, 
 hunts, shooting at a mark, and spearing the ring. Four times 
 the king gained the prize, and offered it to be competed for 
 again. There were a great number of court fools at this fes- 
 tival, as we still find clowns at a circus. Indeed, when we 
 attend a liberally appointed circus we are looking upon a show 
 resembling in many particulars the grand doings in the park 
 of Versailles when Louis XIV. entertained his court and fig- 
 ured as chief of the riders. 
 
 Most of the performances could have been procured by 
 money lavishly spent ; and, in order to reproduce them, the 
 Duke de Richelieu needed little assistance from the arts. But 
 there were items of the programme which redeemed the char- 
 acter of. this festival, and caused it to be remembered by the 
 susceptible people of France with pride. Moliere composed 
 for it a kind of show play, called the '' Princesse d"Elide," a 
 vehicle for music, ballet, and costume, with here and there a 
 spice of his comic talent. A farce of his, the " Forced Mar- 
 riage," was also played ; and the first three acts of his " Tar- 
 
 II
 
 VOLTAIRE AT THE COURT OF FRANCE. 489 
 
 tuffe," the greatest effort of French dramatic genius in that 
 age, if not in any age, were performed for the first time. 
 There was only one man in France who could help a " First 
 Gentleman " to features of the coming fete at all resembling 
 these ; and to him that First Gentleman applied. Voltaire 
 entered into the scheme with zeal. In April, 1744, Cirey all 
 blooming with flowers and verdure, he began to write his fes- 
 tive divertisement, the " Frincesse de Navarre," the hero of 
 which was a kind of Spanish Duke de Richelieu. " I am mak- 
 ing," he wrote, " a divertisement for a Dauphin and Dauphiu- 
 ess whom I shall not divert ; but I wish to produce some- 
 thing pretty, gay, tender, worthy of the Duke de Richelieu, 
 director of the fete.''' It was his chief summer work, and he 
 labored at it with an assiduity that would have sufficed to pro- 
 duce three new tragedies. He very happily laid the scene of 
 his play in an ancient chateau close to the borders of the 
 Spanish province of Navarre, — an expedient which enabled 
 him to group upon the stage both Frenchmen and Spaniards, 
 with their effective contrasts of costume, and to present to the 
 Spanish bride and her court pleasing traits of their own coun- 
 trymen. The poet and the First Gentleman arranged the 
 processions, tlie ballets, the tableaux, the fete within a fete ; 
 exchanging many long letters, and pondering many devices. 
 There is good comic writing in this piece ; and there are two 
 characters, a rustic Spanish baron and his extremely simple- 
 minded daughter, that are worthy of a better kind of play and 
 occasion. 
 
 This was the year in which the King of France first braved 
 the hardships of the field, accompanied by his mistress, the 
 Duchess de Chateauroux, and attended by that surprising ret- 
 inue of courtiers and comedians, often described. I need not 
 pause to relate how, after being present at warlike operations, 
 he fell dangerously sick of a fever ; how the mistress and the 
 First Gentleman took possession of the king's quarters, and 
 barred the door against priests and princes ; how, as the king 
 grew worse, the alarmed mistress tried to come to a compro- 
 mise with the royal confessor, the keeper of the king's con- 
 science, saying to him, in substance, " Let me go away without 
 scandal, that is, without being sent away, and I will quietly 
 let yoa into the king's chamber ; " how the cautious Jesuit
 
 490 LIFE OF VOLTAIEE. 
 
 contrived to get through a long interview without saying either 
 yes or no to this proposal ; how, at length, when the king 
 seemed near his end, she was terrified into yielding, and the 
 king, fearing to lose his absolution and join some of the bad 
 kings in the other world, sent her a positive command to de- 
 part, as if she had been, what the priest officially styled her, a 
 concubine ; how the king, having recovered, humbly courted 
 her return, calling upon her in person at her house ; and how, 
 while she affected to hesitate, and dictated terms of direst ven- 
 geance, even the exile of every priest, courtier, and minister 
 who had taken the least part in her disgrace, she died of min- 
 gled rage, mortification, and triumph, leaving both the king 
 and the First Gentleman perfectly consolable. Upon all that 
 we need not here dilate ; it is related with modesty and force 
 by the brothers De Goncourt in their work upon the " Mis- 
 tresses of Louis XV.," a precious series of illustrations of the 
 system of personal government. 
 
 The impressive fact is that none of these things impaired 
 the spell of the king's divinity. During the crisis of his fever 
 all France seemed panic-stricken ; and when he recovered, the 
 manifestations of joy were such as to astonish the king him- 
 self, inured as he was to every form and degree of adulation 
 from his childhood. " What have I done," cried the poor 
 man, " to be loved so ? " It was at this time that he received 
 his name of Louis the Well-Beloved, by which it was pre- 
 sumed that he would go to posterity, along with Louis the 
 Fat and Philip the Long, titles so helpful to childish memory. 
 On his return to Paris in September, 1744, " crowned with 
 victory" and recovered from the borders of the tomb, the 
 fetes were of such magnitude and splendor that Madame du 
 Chatelet came to Paris to witness them, with her poet in her 
 train. He brought his " Princesse de Navarre " with him, 
 however, and was soon in daily consultation with composer, 
 ministers. First Gentleman, and friends as to the resources of 
 an extemporized theatre. 
 
 A curious street adventure befell madarae and himself on 
 the night of the grand fire-works, which they rode in from a 
 chateau near the city to witness. They found all the world 
 in the streets. Voltaire gave an account of their night's ex- 
 ploits to the President Renault, whose visit to Cirey they now
 
 VOLTAIRE AT THE COURT OF FRANCE. 491 
 
 returned in an unusual manner : " There were two thousand 
 backing carriages in three files ; there were the outcries of two 
 or three hundred thousand men, scattered amono; those car- 
 riages ; there were drunkards, fights with fists, streams of wine 
 and tallow flowing upon the people, a mounted police to aug- 
 ment the embroglio ; and, by way of climax to our delights, 
 his Royal Highness [Duke de Chartres] was returning peace- 
 fully to the Palais-Royal with his great carriages, his guards, 
 his pages ; and all this unable either to go back or advance 
 until three in the morning. I was with Madame du Chatelet. 
 Her coachman, who had never before been in Paris, was about 
 boldly to break her upon the wheel. Covered as she was with 
 diamonds, she alighted, calling upon me to follow, got through 
 the crowd without being either plundered or hustled, entered 
 your house [Rue St. Honore], sent for some roast chicken at 
 the corner restaurant, and drank your health very pleasantly 
 in that house to which every one wishes to see you return." 
 
 It was a busy time with him during the next six months, 
 arranging the details of the fete, with Rameau the composer, 
 with scene-painters, with the Duke de Richelieu, and the Mar- 
 quis d'Argenson. We see him cutting down eight verses to 
 four, and swelling four verses to eight, to meet the exigencies 
 of the music. We see him deep in converse with Richelieu 
 upon the complicated scenes of his play, — suggesting, alter- 
 ing, abandoning, curtailing numberless devices of the stage- 
 
 manager. 
 
 On this occasion, also, as before going to Prussia, he took 
 care to secure some compensation in advance. It was not his 
 intention to play courtier for nothing. He was resolved to 
 improve this opportunity, and to endeavor so to strengthen 
 himself at court that henceforth he could sleep in peace at his 
 abode, in Paris, or in the country, fearless of the Ane of Mire- 
 poix. To get the dull, shy, sensualized king on his side was a 
 material point with him. He wrote a poem on the " Events 
 of the Year" (1744), in which the exploits of the king upon 
 the tented field and his joyful recovery from sickness were 
 celebrated in the true laureate style. He also took measures 
 to have this poem shown to the king by the Cardinal de Ten- 
 cin, "in a moment of good-humor." He made known to two 
 of his friends in the ministry, M. Orry and the Marquis d'Ar-
 
 492 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 genson, precisely what he wanted. He wanted an office which 
 would protect him against confessors, bishops, and Desfon- 
 taines, — say, for example, gentleman-iu-ordinary of the king's 
 chamber, a chai-ge of trifling emolument, less duty, and great 
 distinction. He would then be a member of the king's house- 
 hold, not to be molested on slight pretext by a Mirepoix, nor 
 to be calumniated with impunity by a journalist. But since 
 such offices were seldom vacant he asked to be appointed at 
 once writer of history (Jdstoriographe) to the king, at a nomi- 
 nal salary of four hundred francs a year. M. Orry thought 
 this very modest and suitable ; the Marquis d'Argenson was 
 of the same opinion ; and both engaged to aid in accomplish- 
 ing his wishes. If he could add to these posts an armchair 
 in the French Academy, which in good time he also meant 
 to try for, he thought he might pursue his natural vocation 
 in his native land without serious and constant apprehen- 
 sion. 
 
 But, first, the fete ! That must succeed as a preliminary. 
 In January, 1745, he took up his abode at Versailles to super- 
 intend the rehearsals, conscious of the incongruity of his em- 
 ployment. " I am here," he wrote to Thieriot, " braving For- 
 tune in her own temple ; at Versailles I play a part similar 
 to that of an atheist in a church." To Cideville, also : " Do 
 you not pity a poor devil who at fifty is a king's buffoon, and 
 who is more embarrassed with musicians, decorators, actors, 
 singers, and dancers than the eight or nine electors will soon 
 be in making a German Caesar ? I rush from Paris to Ver- 
 sailles ; I compose verses in the post-chaise ; I have to praise 
 the king highly, Madame the Dauphiness delicately, the royal 
 family sweetly. I must satisfy the court, and not displease the 
 city." 
 
 In the very crisis of the long preparation, February 18, 
 1745, seven days before the festival, Voltaire's Jansenist of a 
 brother, the " Abbd Arouet," Receiver-of-Fees to the Chamber 
 of Accounts, died at Paris, aged two months less than sixty 
 years. The brothers, as we know, had been long ago es- 
 tranged, and had rarely met of late years. The parish regis- 
 ter, still accessible, attests that the funeral was attended, Feb- 
 ruary 19th, by " Frangois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, bowgeois 
 of Paris;" not yet gentleman-in-ordinary. The receiver-of-
 
 VOLTAIRE AT THE COURT OF FRANCE. 493 
 
 fees died, as he had lived, in what was called the odor of sanc- 
 tity ; presenting to the view of young and old that painful 
 caricature of goodness which has for some centuries, in more 
 than one country, made virtue more difficult than it naturally 
 is. From his will, which also exists, we learn that, if he did not 
 disinherit his brother, he came as near it as a French brother 
 could without doing violence to the sentiment and custom of 
 his country. After giving legacies to cousins, friends, and serv- 
 ants, he leaves one half the bulk of his estate to his nephew 
 and nieces, and the other half to his brother ; but with a dif- 
 ference. Voltaire was to enjoy his half " in usufruct only," 
 the capital to fall finally " to his nephew and nieces aforesaid." 
 He look care, also, to prevent his brother from gaining any- 
 thing by the decease of any of the heirs. As the receiver-of- 
 fees, besides bequeathing his valuable office to a relative, died 
 worth, as French investigators compute, about two hundred 
 thousand francs, Voltaire received an increase to his income of 
 perhaps six thousand francs a year.^ 
 
 From his brother's grave, without waiting to learn these 
 particulai-s, he was obliged to go post-haste to Versailles, to- 
 wards which all eyes were now directed. The marriage festi- 
 val, a tumult of all the splendors, began February 23, 1745. 
 The " Princess of Navarre " succeeded to admiration. A vast 
 and beautiful edifice had risen, at the command of Richelieu, in 
 the horse-training ground near the palace of Versailles, so con- 
 structed that it could serve as a theatre on one evening and a 
 ball-room on the next, both equally magnificent and complete. 
 The stage was fifty-six feet in depth ; and, as the boxes were 
 so arranged as to exhibit the audience to itself in the most ef- 
 fective and brilliant manner, the words spoken on the stage 
 could not be always perfectly heard. But this was not so im- 
 portant, since the play was chiefly designed as a vehicle for 
 music, dancing, costume, and picture. At six in the evening 
 the king entered and took the seat prepared for him in the 
 middle of the theatre, followed, in due order, by his family and 
 court, arrayed in the gorgeous fashion of the time. These 
 placed themselves around him, a splendid group, in the midst 
 of a great theatre filled with the nobility of the kingdom, all 
 sumptuous and glittering. The author of the play about to 
 1 Voltaire a Cirey, page 438. Menage et Finances de Voltaire, page 44.
 
 494 LITE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 be performed was himself thrilled by the picturesque magnifi- 
 cence of the spectacle which the audience jDresented, and he 
 regretted that a greater number of the people of France could 
 not have been present to behold the superb array of princes 
 and princesses, noble lords and ladies, adorned by master- 
 pieces of decorative art, which the beauty of the ladies " ef- 
 faced." He wished that more people could observe the noble 
 and becoming joy that filled every heart and beamed in all 
 those lovely eyes. 
 
 But, since nothing can be perfect, not even in France, this 
 most superb audience was so much elated with itself that it 
 could not stop talking. There was a buzz and hum of conver- 
 sation, reminding the anxious author of a hive of bees hum- 
 ming and buzzing around the queen. The curtain rose ; but 
 still they talked. The play, however, being a melange of 
 poetry, song, music, ballet, and dialogue, everything was en- 
 joyed except the good verses, here and there, which could 
 scarcely be caught by distant ears. Every talent in such a 
 piece meets its due of approval except that of the poet, who 
 imagines the whole before any part of it exists. At half past 
 nine the curtain fell upon the closing scene ; when the audi- 
 ence, retiring to the grounds without, found the entire facade 
 of the palace and adjacent structures illuminated. All were 
 enchanted. The king himself, the hardest man in Europe to 
 amuse, was so well pleased that he ordered the play to be re- 
 peated on another evening of the festival. " The king is 
 grateful to me," wrote Voltaire to his guardian angel, D'Ar- 
 gental. " The Mirepoix cannot harm me. What more do I 
 need?" 
 
 He was exhausted with the long strain upon his nervous 
 system. " So tired am I," he wrote to Thieriot, " that I have 
 neither hands, feet, nor head, and write to you by the hand 
 of another." But he soon had the consolation of receiving 
 the king's promise of the next vacancy among the gentlemen- 
 in-ordinary, and his immediate appointment as writer of his- 
 tory at an annual salary of two thousand francs. Thus the 
 year consumed in these courtly toils, he thought, was not with- 
 out its compensations. Nor did he relax his vigilance, nor 
 give ministers peace, until these ofiices were securely his by 
 letters patent and the king's signature. His brevet of histo- 
 
 J
 
 VOLTAIRE AT THE COURT OF FRANCE. 495 
 
 riographe was signed b}^ the king April 1st, and tlie salary- 
 began January 1, 1745. The document ran thus : — 
 
 "To-day, April 1, 1745. The king being at Versailles, taking into 
 consideration that tlie recompenses which his majesty accords to those 
 who devote themselves to the study of letters contribute to their 
 progress by the emulation which they excite, no one has appeared to 
 his majesty more worthy to receive marks of his benevolence and to be 
 distinguished by an lionorable title than the Sieur Arouet de Voltaire, 
 who, by the superiority of his talents and his steady application, has 
 made the most rapid progress in all the sciences that he has cultivated, 
 and of which his works, received with just applause, are the fruit. 
 To this effect his majesty has retained and retains the said Sieur de 
 Voltaire in quality of historiographer of France, permits him to take 
 the title and quality of the same in all documents and papers whatso- 
 ever, desiring him to enjoy all the honors and prerogatives which per- 
 sons hitherto invested with such titles have enjoyed and had a right 
 to enjoy, together with the sum of two thousand francs of emolument, 
 payable annually during his life, beginning with the 1st of January 
 last, according to the conditions and ordinances which will be drawn 
 up by virtue of the present brevet, as well as to certify its validity. 
 
 " Signed, " Louis." ^ 
 
 When he accepted this office he was far from anticipating 
 an increase of labor through it. But, in truth, no poet laure- 
 ate ever won his annual pipe of sack by labors so arduous as 
 those by which Voltaire earned this salary of two thousand 
 francs. Several volumes of history attest his diligence. Dur- 
 ing the first two or three years of his holding the place, he 
 was historiographer, laureate, writer of royal letters and min- 
 isterial dispatches, complimenter of the royal mistress, and 
 occasionally court dramatist and master of the revels. 
 
 The marriage festivities at Versailles drew to a close, and 
 all that brilliant crowd dispersed. From the splendors of the 
 court he was suddenly called away to attend the son of Ma- 
 dame du Chatelet through the small-pox. He assisted to save 
 the future Duke du Chatelet for the guillotine, applying to 
 his case his own experience of the two hundred pints of lem- 
 onade. That duty done and his forty days of quarantine ful- 
 filled, he returned to court, wdiere the minister for foreign 
 affairs had a piece of work for his pen. Elizabeth, Empress 
 of Russia, had offered her mediation to the King of France, 
 
 1 Voltaire k Cirey, page 445.
 
 496 LITE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 and the task of writing the king's reply, accepting tlie offer, 
 was assigned to Voltaire, who performed it in the loftiest style 
 of sentimental politics. If Louis XV. took the trouble to 
 glance over this composition he must have been pleased to find 
 himself saying that " kings can aspire to no other glory than 
 that of promoting the happiness of their subjects," and swear- 
 ing that he " had never taken up arms except with a view to 
 promote the interests of peace." It was an amiable, effusive 
 letter, in the taste of the period, being written by the man 
 who made the taste of the period. Later in the summer he 
 drafted a longer dispatch to the government of Holland, re- 
 monstrating against its purpose of sending aid to the King of 
 England against the Pretender. It was he also who wrote 
 the manifesto to be published in Great Britain on the landing 
 of the French expedition under the Duke de Richelieu, in aid 
 of the Pretender. Whenever, indeed, during 1745, 1746, and 
 1747, the ministry had occasion for a skillful pen, Voltaire was 
 employed. We perceive in this part of his correspondence 
 the mingled horror and contempt that war excited in his 
 mind. " Give us peace, Monseigneur," is the burden of his cry 
 to the Marquis d'Argenson in confidential notes ; and we see 
 him, with his usual easy assurance, suggesting such marriages 
 for the royal children as would " render France happy by a 
 beautiful peace, and your name immortal despite the fools." 
 
 Whatever philosophers may think of war, few citizens can 
 resist the contagious delirium of victory after national defeat 
 and humiliation. The King of France again, in 1745, was 
 posed by his advisers in the part of conqueror. From a hill, he 
 and the Dauphin looked on while Marshal Saxe won the de- 
 cisive and fruitful victory of Fontenoy over the English Duke 
 of Cumberland and the forces of the allies, with a loss of eight 
 thousand men on each side. Voltaire received the news at 
 Paris, late in the evening, direct from D'Argenson, who was 
 with the king in the field. He dashed upon paper a congrat- 
 ulatory note to the minister: "Ah! the lovely task for your 
 historian! In three hundred years the kings of France have 
 done nothing so glorious. I am mad with joy ! Good-night, 
 Monseigneur ! " 
 
 In a few days came that letter from D'Argenson in reply to 
 " Monsieur the Historian " which has long been justly re-
 
 VOLTAIRE AT THE COUKT OF FRANCE. 497 
 
 garded as one of the curiosities of the regime. It affords mat- 
 ter both for the hiughing and the crying philosopher. 
 
 " It was a glorious sight [wrote M. d'Argenson to Voltaire] to see 
 the king and the Dauphin writing upon a drum, surrounded by the 
 conquerors and the conquered, the prisoners, the dying and the dead. 
 I had the honor to meet the king on Sunday near the field of battle. 
 When I arrived at the camp from Paris I was told that the king was 
 gone an airing. I immediately procured a horse, and came up to his 
 majesty near a place which was in view of the enemy's camp I then 
 learned, for the first time, what his majesty's intentions were, and I 
 never saw a man so cheerful as he was upon the occasion. Our con- 
 versation turned precisely on a point of history that you have discussed 
 in four lines, — Which of our kings gained the last royal battle? — 
 and I assure you that his majesty's Courage did not wrong his judgment, 
 nor his judgment his memory. 
 
 " We then went to lie down upon the straw. Never was there a ball 
 night more gay, or so many hon-mots. We reposed between the inter- 
 ruptions of couriers and aids-de-camp. The king sang a very di'oll song 
 of several verses. As for the Dauphin, he went to the battle as to a 
 hare-hunting, saying, ' What is all this ? ' A cannon-ball struck in the 
 clay, and bespattered a man near the king. Our masters laughed 
 very heartily at the man who was bespattered. One of my brother's 
 grooms, who was behind, received a wound in the head with a musket 
 ball. 
 
 " It is certainly true, and without flattery, that the king gained the 
 battle by his own steadiness and resolution. You will see different 
 accounts and details of this affair. You will be told of a terrible mo- 
 ment, in which we beheld a second edition of Dettingen, where the 
 French were prostrated before the English. Their rolling fire, which 
 resembled the flames of hell, did, I confess, stupefy the most uncon- 
 cerned spectators, and we began to despair for the state. 
 
 " Some of our generals, who have more heart and courage than abil- 
 ities, gave very prudent advice. They dispatched orders all the way 
 to Lisle ; they doubled the king's guard ; they had everything packed 
 up. The king laughed at all this, and, going from the left to the cen- 
 tre, asked for the corps-de-reserve and the brave Lowendahl : but there 
 was no occasion. A charge was made by a sham corps-de-reserve, con- 
 sisting of the same cavalry which had already made an unsuccessful 
 attack, the king's household, the carbineers, those of the French guards 
 who had not advanced, and the Irish brigade, who are excellent troops, 
 especially when they march against the English and Hanoverians. 
 
 " Your friend, M. de Eichelieu, is another Bayard ; it was he who 
 
 VOL. I. 32
 
 498 XIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 gave and put into execution the advice to attack the infantry like 
 hunters or foragers, pell-mell, the hand lowered, the arm shortened, 
 masters, servants, officers, cavalry, infantry, all together. Nothing 
 can withstand this French vivacity, which is so much spoken of; and 
 in ten minutes the battle was gained by this unexpected stroke. The 
 heavy English battalions turned their backs upon us; and, in short, 
 there were fourteen thousand of them killed.-' 
 
 " The heavy artillery had indisputably the honor of this terrible 
 slaughter ; there never were so many or such large cannon fired in 
 one battle as at the battle of Fontenoy ; there were no less than a 
 hundred. It would seem, sir, as if the poor enemy had willingly per- 
 mitted everything to reach the army that could be destructive to them, 
 the cannon from Douay, the gens (Tarmes, and the musketeers. 
 
 "There is one anecdote of the last attack I mentioned, which I 
 hope will not be forgotten. The Dauphin, from a natural impulse, 
 drew his sword in the most graceful manner, and insisted upon charg- 
 ing ; but he was requested to desist. After all, to mention the bad 
 and the good, I observed a habit, too easily acquired, of looking with 
 tranquillity on the dying and the dead, and on the reeking wounds 
 which were to be seen on every part of the field of battle. I own that 
 my heart failed, and that I stood in need of a cordial. I attentively 
 observed our young heroes, who seemed too indifferent upon this oc- 
 casion. I am fearful that this inhuman carnage may harden their dis- 
 positions through the course of their lives. 
 
 " The triumph was the finest thing in the world : God save the king ; 
 hats in the air and upon bayonets ; the compliments of the sovereign 
 to his troops ; visiting the entrenchments, villages, and redoubts ; joy, 
 glory, and tenderness ! But the ground of the picture was human 
 blood and fragments of human flesh ! 
 
 •' At the end of the triumph the king honored me with a conversa- 
 tion on the subject of peace, and I have dispatched some couriers. 
 
 " The king was much entertained yesterday in the trenches ; they 
 fired a great deal at him, but he remained there three hours. I was 
 employed in my closet, which is my trench ; for I confess to you that 
 I have been much retarded in business by all these dissipations. I 
 trembled at every shot I heard fired. I went the day before yesterday 
 to see the trenches, but I cannot say there is anything curious in them 
 in the day-time. We shall h^ve the Te Deum sung to-day under a tent, 
 and there will be a general feu-de-joie of the whole army, which the 
 king will go to see from Mont Trinity. It will be very fine. 
 
 " Adieu ! Present my humble respects to Madame du Chatelet." 
 
 1 There were indeed fourteen thousand men missing at the muster, but about 
 six thousand returned the same day.
 
 VOLTAIRE AT THE COURT OF FRANCE. 499 
 
 Voltaire read this epistle with the delight becoming a court- 
 ier of the period, and set to work instantly to turn it into 
 heroic verse. His poem, "Fontenoy," of three hundred lines or 
 more, was scattered over the delirious city damp from the 
 press, and in a few days was declaimed in every town of the 
 kingdom. Edition after edition was sold. " Five editions in 
 ten days ! " The author, as his custom was, added, erased, 
 altered, corrected; offending some by omitting their names, 
 offending others by inserting names odious to them ; working 
 all one night to make the poem a less imperfect expression of 
 the national joy ; not forgetting to dedicate it to the king, and 
 to get a copy placed in his hands. " The king deigns to be 
 content with it," he wrote. Thousands of copies were sold in 
 the first month, and there were two burlesques of the poem 
 in the second. 
 
 In the very ecstasy of the general enthusiasm, he still re- 
 peats, in a private note to D'Argenson, " Peace, Monseigneur, 
 peace, and you are a great man, even among the fools ! " 
 
 He was now in high favor, even with the king, who had 
 said to Marshal Saxe that the " Princesse de Navarre " was above 
 criticism. The marshal himself gave Madame du Chatelet 
 this agreeable information. " After that," said the author, 
 "I must regard the king as the greatest connoisseur in his 
 kingdom." He renewed his intimacy with his earl 3' patron, 
 the Duchess du Maine, who still held court at the chateau of 
 Sceaux, near by. By great good luck, too, as doubtless he 
 regarded it at the time, he was acquainted with the new mis- 
 tress, Pompadour, before she was Pompadour. He knew her 
 when she was only the most bewitching young wife in France, 
 cold to her rich and amorous young husband, and striving by 
 every art that such women know to catch the king's eye as 
 he hunted in the royal forest near her abode. Already, even 
 while the king was sleeping on histrionic straw on the field 
 near Fontenoy, it was settled that the dream of her life was 
 to be realized. She was to be Petticoat HI. 
 
 This summer, during the king's absence at the seat of war, 
 Voltaii-e was frequently at her house, and had become estab- 
 lished in her favor. She was a gifted, brilliant, ambitious 
 woman, of cold temperament, who courted this infamy as men 
 seek honorable posts which make them conspicuous, powerful,
 
 500 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 and envied. In well-ordered nations, accomplished men win 
 such places by thirty years' well-directed toil in the public ser- 
 vice. She won her place, and kept it nineteen years, by amus- 
 ing the least amusable of men, and gratifying a sensuality witli 
 which she had no sympathy whatever. She paid a high price. 
 In return, she governed France, enriched her family, promoted 
 her friends, exiled her enemies, owned half a dozen chateaux, 
 and left an estate of thirty-six millions of francs. ^ 
 
 With such and so many auxiliaries supporting his new 
 position, the historiographer of France, if he had been a 
 younger man, might have felt safe. But he knew his ground. 
 Under personal government nations usually have two masters, 
 the king and the priest, between whom there is an alliance, 
 offensive and defensive. He had gained some favor with the 
 king, the king's ministers, and the king's mistress. But the 
 priest remained hostile. The king being a coward, a fit of 
 the colic might frighten him into turning out the mistress 
 and letting in the confessor ; and, suppose the colic success- 
 ful, instantly a pious and bigoted Dauphin became king, with 
 a Mirepoix as chief priest ! Moreover, to depend upon the 
 favor of either king or mistress is worse than basing the pros- 
 perity of an industrial community upon a changeable fraction 
 in a tariff bill. 
 
 Revolving such thoughts in an anxious mind, Voltaire con- 
 ceived a notable scheme for going behind the Mirepoix, and 
 silencing him forever by capturing the favor of the Pope. 
 Benedict XIV. was a scholar, a gentleman of excellent tem- 
 per, and no bigot. He owed his election to his agreeable 
 qualities. When the cardinals were exhausted by days and 
 nights of fruitless balloting, he said, with his usual gayety and 
 good humor, "Why waste so much time in vain debates and 
 researches ? Do you want a saint ? Elect Gotti. A politi- 
 cian ? Aldovrandi. A good fellow ? Take me." And they 
 took him. 
 
 It was soon after the close of the fete at Versailles that Vol- 
 taire consulted the Marquis d'Argenson, minister for foreign 
 affairs, upon his project of getting, as he expressed it, " some 
 mark of papal benevolence that could do him honor both in 
 this world and the next." The minister shook his head. He 
 1 2 Les Maitresses de Louis XV., 98. 
 
 I
 
 VOLTAIRE AT THE COURT OF FRANCE. 501 
 
 said it was scarcely possible to mingle in that way things ce- 
 lestial and political. Like a true courtier of the period, the 
 poet betook himself to a lady, Mademoiselle du Thil, a con- 
 nection of Madame du Chatelet, and extremely well disposed 
 toward himself. She had a friend in the Pope's household, 
 the Abbe de Tolignan, whom she easily engaged in the cause. 
 D'Argenson, also, bore the scheme in mind when he wrote 
 to the French envoy at Rome. Voltaire, meanwhile, read the 
 works of his Holiness, of which there are still accessible fif- 
 teen volumes, and in various ways "coquetted" with him, 
 causing him to know that the celebrated Voltaire was one of 
 his readers. The good-natured Pope was prompt to respond. 
 The Abb^ de Tolignan having asked for some mark of papal 
 favor for Voltaire, the Pope gave two of his large medals to 
 be forwarded to the French poet, the medals bearing the 
 Pope's own portrait. His Holiness also caused a polite letter 
 to be written to him by his secretary, asking his acceptance of 
 the medals. Then the French envoy, ignorant of these pro- 
 ceedings, also applied to the Pope on behalf of Voltaire, re- 
 questing for him one of his large medals. The Pope, ignorant 
 of the envoy's ignorance, replied, " To St. Peter's itself I 
 should not give any larger ones ! " The envoy was mystified, 
 and Voltaire, on receiving a report of the affair, begged the 
 minister for foreign affairs to write to the envoy in explana- 
 tion. 
 
 The two large medals reached the poet in due time. He 
 thought Benedict XIV. the most plump-cheeked holy father 
 the church had enjoyed for a long time, and one who " had 
 the air of knowing very well tvhat all that was worth.'" He 
 wrote two Latin verses as a legend for the Pope's portrait, to 
 the effect that Lambertinus, officially styled Benedict XIV., 
 was the ornament of Rome and the father of the world, who 
 by his works instructed the earth, and adorned it by his vir- 
 tues. Emboldened by success, he ventured upon an audacity 
 still more exquisite, and one which would not be concealed in 
 the archives of the foreign office. All Europe should know 
 the favor in which this son of the church was held at the pa- 
 pal court. He resolved to dedicate to the Pope that tragedy 
 of " Mahomet," which the late Cardinal de Fleury had ad- 
 mired and suppressed. He sent a copy of the drama to the 
 Pope, with the following letter : —
 
 602 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 [Paris, August 17, 1745.] "Very Holy Father, — Your Holi- 
 ness will be pleased to pardon the liberty which one of the humblest, 
 but one of the warmest, admirers of virtue takes in consecrating to 
 the chief of the true religion a production against the founder of a 
 religion false and barbarous. To whom could I more properly ad- 
 dress a satire upon the cruelty and the errors of a false prophet than 
 to the vicar and imitator of a God of peace and truth ? Will your 
 Holiness deign to permit that I place at your feet both the book and 
 its author ? I dare ask your protection for the one, and your bene- 
 diction for the other. It is with these sentiments of profound venera- 
 tion that I prostrate myself and kiss your sacred feet." 
 
 The Pope delayed not to accept the homage. He answered 
 the letter in the tone of a scholar and man of the world : — 
 
 " Benedict XIV., Pope, to his dear son, salutation and Apostolic 
 Benediction. Some weeks ago there was presented to me on your 
 behalf your admirable tragedy of ' Mahomet,' which I have read with 
 very great pleasure. Cardinal Passionei gave me afterwards, in your 
 name, the beautiful poem of ' Fontenoy.' M. Leprotti has communi- 
 cated to me your distich for my portrait ; ^ and Cardinal Valenti yes- 
 terday sent me your letter of August 17th. Each of these marks of 
 your goodness merited a particular expression of my gratitude ; but 
 permit me to unite these different attentions in order to render you 
 my thanks for all of them at once. You ought not to doubt the sin- 
 gular esteem with which merit so acknowledged as yours inspires me. 
 When your distich was published in Rome, we were told that a man 
 of letters, a Frenchman, being in a company when it was sjjoken of, 
 discovered in the first verse a false quantity. He pretended that the 
 word hie, which you employ as short, ought always to be long. We 
 replied that he was in error; that that syllable was short or long in 
 the poets indifferently, Virgil having made the word short in this 
 
 verse, — 
 
 ' Solus hie inflexit sensus, animumque labantem/ 
 
 and long in this, — 
 
 ' Hie finis Priami fatorum, hie exitus ilium.' 
 
 "This answer was, perhaps, pretty well for a man who has not read 
 Yirgil in fifty years. Although you are the interested party in this 
 difference, we have so high an idea of your candor and integrity, that 
 we do not hesitate to make you the judge between your critic and 
 ourselves. Nothing remains but for us to grant you our Ajiostolic 
 Benediction. 
 
 1 The distich was as follows : — 
 
 " Lambertinus hie est, Romse decus, et pater orbis, 
 Qui munduin scriptis doeuit, virtutibus oniat.''
 
 VOLTAIRE AT THE COURT OF FRANCE. 503 
 
 " Given at Rome, on the clay of Holy Mary the greater, Septem- 
 ber 19, 1745, the sixth year of our pontificate." 
 
 To this letter Voltaire replied with curious happiness. He 
 contrived to flatter the Pope very agreeably, while surpassing 
 him on his own ground : — 
 
 [Voltaire to Pope Benedict XIV.] " The lineaments of your Holi- 
 ness are not better expressed in the medals with which you have had 
 the particular goodness to gratify me, than are those of your mind 
 and character in the letter with which you have deigned to honor me. 
 I place at your feet my very humble and heart-felt thanks. I am 
 obliged to recognize the infallibility of your Holiness in your literary 
 decisions, as in other things more important. Your Holiness has a 
 better acquaintance with the Latin tongue than the French fault-finder 
 whose mistake you deigned to correct. I admire the aptness of your 
 citation from Virail, Amonsf the monarchs who have been amateurs 
 in literature, the sovereign pontiffs have always distinguished them- 
 selves ; but none have adorned like your Holiness the most profound 
 erudition with the richest ornaments of polite literature. 
 
 'Agnoscoi rerum dominos, gentemque togatam.' 
 
 " If the Frenchman who censured with so little justice the syllable 
 hie had had his Virgil as present to his memory as your Holiness, 
 he would have been able to cite, very apropos, a verse in which this 
 word is both short and long. That beautiful verse seemed to me 
 to contain the presage of the favors with which your generous good- 
 ness has overwhelmed me. It is this : — 
 
 * Hie vir, hie est, tibi quern promitti ssepius audis.' ^ 
 
 " Rome ought to resound with this verse, to the exaltation of 
 Benedict XIV. It is with sentiments of the most profound vener- 
 ation and of the most lively gratitude that I kiss your sacred feet." * 
 
 Soon an edition of the tragedy of " IVIahomet " appeared, 
 preceded by this correspondence, in Italian and in French, 
 and thus the world was informed, in the most interesting man- 
 ner, that the author stood well with the head of the* church. 
 
 He continued to labor for the amusement of the court. He 
 wrote his opera of the " Temple of Glory," set to music 
 by Rameau, for the grand fete to be given at Fontainebleau 
 
 1 For Romanes. 1 ^neid, 281. 
 
 2 Tliis is the man, this is he [Augustus Caesarl whom thou hast often beard 
 promised to tliee. 6 ^neid, 791. 
 
 * 5 (Euvres de Voltaire, 352.
 
 504 LITE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 in honor of tne late successes of the French in the field. He 
 also set about preparing a more durable memorial of the 
 two campaigns in which the king had figured, — a history of 
 the same, compiled from the lips of eye-witnesses. He flew 
 at this patriotic task, as he says, "with passion," and con- 
 tinued it until his work became a considerable history of the 
 reicrn of Louis XV. 
 
 An incident which occurred at the beginning of this task 
 amused him very much, and added one mure supper story 
 to his ample stock. Having heard that the secretary of the 
 Duke of Cumberland, during the recent operations, bore the 
 name of his old English friend Falkener, ambassador at Con- 
 stantinople, he wrote to the secretary, asking for information 
 relating to those operations. He wrote in English : — 
 
 " You bear a name that I love and respect. I have, these twenty 
 years since, the honor to be friend to Sir Everard Falkeuer. I hope 
 it is a recommendation towards you. A better one is my love for 
 truth. I am bound to speak it. My duty is to write the history 
 of the late campaigns, and my king and my country will approve me 
 the more, the greater justice I'll render to the english nation. Though 
 our nations are ennemies at present, yet they ought for ever to enter- 
 tain a mutual esteem for one another : my intention is to relate what 
 the duke of Cumberland has done worthy of himself and his name, and 
 to enregister the most particular and noble actions of your chiefs and 
 officers, which deserve to be recorded, and what passed most worthy 
 of praise at Dettingen and Fontenoy, particularities, if there is any, 
 about general sir James Campbel's death, in short, all that deserves 
 to be transmitted to posterity. I dare or presume to apply to you, 
 sir, on that purpose ; if you are so kind as to send me some mem- 
 oirs, I'll make use of them. If not, I'll content myself with relat- 
 inof what has been acted noble and glorious on our side ; and I will 
 mourn to leave in silence many great actions done by your nation, 
 which it would have been glorious to relate." 
 
 We can imagine his delight on receiving in reply a cor- 
 dial letter from Sir Everard himself. It was Sir Everard 
 Falkener who was serving under the Duke of Cumberland. 
 
 " How could I guess, my dear and honorable friend [wrote Vol- 
 taire] that your Mussulman person had shifted Galata for Flanders ? 
 and had passed from the seraglio to the closet of the duke of Cum- 
 berland ? But now I conceive it is more pleasant to live with such 
 a prince, than to speak in state to a grand-visir by the help of au
 
 VOLTAIRE AT THE COURT OF FRANCE. 505 
 
 interpreter. Had I thought it was my dear sir Everard who was 
 secretary to the great prince, I had certainly taken a journey to 
 Flanders. My duty is to visit the place where your nation gave such 
 noble proofs of her steady courage. An historian ought to look on 
 and view the theatre in order to dispose the scenery of his work." 
 
 Sir Evenird supplied him with abundant documents, and 
 continued to serve him in various ways, as well in the field as 
 at home. One short English letter of the next campaign 
 from Voltaire to Falkener may find place here : — 
 
 [Paris, June 13, 174G.] "My dearest and most respected 
 Friend, — Although I am a popish dog, much addicted to his Holiness, 
 and like to be saved by his power, yet I retain for my life something of 
 the english in me ; and I cannot but pay you my compliment upon the 
 brave conduct of your illustrious duke. You have made a rude, rough 
 camfDaign in a climate pretty different from that of Turky. You have 
 got amongst your prisoners of war a French nobleman called the mar- 
 quis d'Eguilles, brother to that noble and ingenious madman who has 
 wrote the Lettres juives. The marquis is possessed of as much wit as 
 his brother, but is a little wiser. I think nobody deserves more your 
 obliging attention, I dare say kindness. I recommend him to you 
 from my heart. My dear Falkener is renowned in France for many 
 virtues and dear to me for many benefits ; let him do me this new 
 favour, I will be attached to him for all my life. Farewell, my dear 
 friend ; let all men be friends, let peace reign over all Europe ! " 
 
 Voltaire suggested to the minister for foreign affairs that 
 he be sent on a secret mission to the quarters of the Duke of 
 Cumberland, in the interest of peace, concealing his object 
 under a pretext of visiting his old friend, the duke's secretary. 
 The scheme, however, was not carried out. 
 
 Early in December, 1745, the victories of the French army 
 were duly celebrated at Fontainebleau, when the Duke de 
 Richelieu again called into being a hall like that which had 
 served for the marriage festival, and again Voltaire slione as 
 author of the divertisement performed in it. He presented to 
 the splendid auditory gathered on the occasion three kinds of 
 royal glory. In the first act, Belus figures, a conqueror pure 
 and simple, barbarous and bloody, — a mere despoiler and des- 
 olater. Him the Muses disdain and the gods drive from the 
 Temple of Glory. Next appears Bacchus-Alexander, con- 
 queror of India, himself conquered by his appetites, roaming 
 the earth with his bacchanalian crew. To him also a place is
 
 606 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 denied in the Temple of Glory. Last comes benign, majestic 
 Trajan, aiming only at the glory of Rome and the welfare of 
 the world ; valiant in war, but loving peace ; deaf to calumny, 
 but ever solicitous to seek out and reward modest worth, — 
 such a king, in short, as intoxicated France longed to be able 
 to think that Louis XV. was. To him, of course, the Temple 
 of Glory flung open wide its gates, and Louis-Trajan entered, 
 amid the rapturous effusion of the spectators. But he entered 
 not alone. Plotine, a new and tender conquest, appears at his 
 side, and goes with him into the Temple, while the chorus 
 sings, — 
 
 " Toi qne la Victoire 
 Couronne en ce jour, 
 Ta plus belle gloire 
 Vient du tendre amour." ^ 
 
 Who could fail to recognize Louis and Pompadour in Trajan 
 and Plotine ? No true courtier. This opera, aided by music, 
 dance, song, and spectacle, all in great perfection, was highly 
 successful. At the close of the performance, the author, much 
 elated, went to the door of the royal box, and said to the Duke 
 de Richelieu, who was near the king, and said it loud enough 
 for the king to hear, " Is Trajan content ? " The king had 
 the grace to be disconcerted by this enormous compliment, and 
 made no remark upon it. He ordered the divertisement to be 
 repeated on a subsequent evening ; and it served on similar 
 occasions during the long favor of Richelieu.^ 
 
 During this fete^ Madame du ChS,telet was conspicuous 
 among the grand ladies of the court, and enjoyed once more 
 her hereditary right of sitting in the queen's presence on a 
 stool without a back, and of losing her money at the queen's 
 play. 
 
 It is more agreeable to observe that Voltaire used this gleam 
 of court favor for the benefit of others, as well as himself. To 
 this period belongs the pleasing story of his inviting Marmon- 
 tel to Paris, and starting him upon the perilous career of liter- 
 ature. With us a poor and ambitious student works his way 
 through college by teaching, by mechanical labor, by harvest- 
 ing, by serving as waiter at summer hotels ; in France, he 
 
 ^ Thou whom Victory crowns to-day, thy most beautiful glory comes of tender 
 love. 
 2 Voltaire a la Cour, par Desnoiresterres, page 32.
 
 VOLTAIEEAT THE COURT OF FRANCE. 607 
 
 often competes for the liberal prizes offered every year by the 
 "Academies" of the larger towns for the best poems and es- 
 says. Marmontel, destined to a long and illustrious litei'ary life, 
 was at twenty an extremely poor student at a college of Tou- 
 louse. For the prize of poetry, while as yet he knew not one 
 rule or usage of prosody, he selected as his subject the Inven- 
 tion of Gunpowder, and launched boldly into the sublime, 
 
 " Kneaded by some infernal Fury's bloody hands." 
 
 The ambitious competitor has related, in his own interest- 
 ing manner, the results of this venture, — 
 
 " I could not [he says in his Memoirs] recover from my astonish- 
 ment at having written so fine an ode. I recited it with all the intox- 
 ication of enthusiasm and self-love ; and when I sent it to the Academy 
 I had no doubt of its bearing away the prize. It did not succeed ; it 
 did not even olitain for me the consolation of honorable mention. I 
 was enraged, and, in my indignation, I wrote to Voltaire, sent him my 
 poem, and cried to him for vengeance. Every one knows with what 
 kindness he received all young men who announced any talent for 
 poetry ; the French Parnassus was an empire whose sceptre he would 
 have yielded to no one on earth, but whose subjects he delighted to 
 see multiply. He sent me one of those answers that he could turn 
 with so much grace, and of which he was so liberal. The praises he 
 bestowed on my poem amply consoled me for what I called the injus- 
 tice of the Academy, whose judgment, as I said, did not weigh one 
 single grain in the balance against such a suffrage as his. But what 
 flattered me still more than his letter was the present he sent me of a 
 copy of his works, corrected by his own hand. I was mad with pride 
 and joy, and ran about the town and the colleges with his present in 
 my hands. Thus began my correspondence with that illustrious man, 
 and that intimate friendship which lasted, without any change, for five 
 and thirty years, dissolved only by his death. 
 
 " I sent ray mother the handsome present he made me of his works. 
 She read them, and (on her death-bed) was reading them again. ' If 
 you see him,' said she, ' thank him for the sweet moments he has 
 made your mother pass ; tell him that she knew by heart the second 
 act of " Zaire," that she wept over " Merope," and that the verses in 
 the " Henriade " upon Hope have never left her memory or her 
 heart.' " 
 
 The young man, compelled at length to decide between the 
 church, the law, and literature, consulted the chief of litera-
 
 508 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 ture, wlio advised him to remove at once to Paris and try the 
 career of letters. Marmontel replied that his poverty forbade 
 so doubtful and costly an experiment. During the December 
 fete at Fontainebleau, Voltaire was so happy as to get from 
 the Count d'Orry, comptroller-general of the finances, the prom- 
 ise of a place in the public service for the young poet. Let 
 Marmontel relate what followed : — 
 
 "Toward the end of this year [1745], a little note from Voltaire 
 came, and determined me to set off for Paris. ' Come,' said he, ' and 
 come without inquietude. M. Orry, whom I have spoken to, under- 
 takes to provide for you.' Who was M. Orry ? I knew not. I went 
 to ask my good friends at Toulouse, and showed them my note. ' M. 
 Orry ! ' exclaimed they. ' Why, it is the comptroller-general of finance ! 
 My dear friend, your fortune is made : you will be a farmer-general. 
 Remember us in your glory. Protected by the minister, it will be 
 easy for you to gain his esteem and confidence. You will be at the 
 source of favor. Dear Marmontel, make some of its rivulets flow 
 down to us. A. little streamlet of Pactolus will content our ambi- 
 tion.' One would be receiver-general ; another would be satisfied with 
 an humbler place in the finances, or with some other employment of 
 two or three hundred a year ; and this depended on me ! " 
 
 With six louis d'or in his pocket, and a translation into 
 French of Pope's " Rape of the Lock," he set out for Paris, a 
 journey of three hundred miles, and reached at length, with 
 palpitating heart and " a kind of religious fear," the abode of 
 Voltaire. 
 
 " Persuaded [he continues] that I should have to speak first, I had 
 turned in twenty ways the phrase with which I should address him, 
 and was satisfied with none. He relieved me from this difiiculty. On 
 hearing my name, he came to me, and extending his arms, ' My good 
 friend,' said he, ' I am very glad to see you. Yet I have bad news to 
 tell you. M. Orry had undertaken to provide for you ; M. Orry is 
 no lonjier in favor.' 
 
 " I could scarcely have received a more severe, more sudden, or 
 more unexpected blow ; but I was not stunned by it. I have always 
 been astonished at the courage I have felt on great occasions, for my 
 heart is naturally feeble. ' Well, sir,' said I, ' then I must contend 
 with adversity ; I have long known and long struggled with it.' ' I 
 am glad,' said he, ' to find you have confidence in your own powers. 
 Yes, my good friend, the true and most worthy resource of a man of 
 letters is in himself and in liis genius. But, till yours shall have pro-
 
 VOLTAIRE AT THE COURT OF FRANCE. 509 
 
 cured you something upon which to subsist, — I speak to you candidly, 
 as a friend, — I must provide for you. I have not invited you hither 
 to abandon you. If, even at this moment, you are in want of money, 
 tell me so : I will not suffer you to have any other creditor than Vol- 
 taire.' I returned him thanks for his kindness, assuring him that, for 
 some time at least, I should not need to profit by it, and that, when I 
 should, I would confidently have recourse to him. ' You promise me,' 
 said he, ' and I depend on you. In the mean time, let 's hear what 
 you think of applying to.' ' I really don't know ; you must decide 
 for me.' ' The stage, my friend, the stage is the most enchanting of 
 all careers ; it is there that in one day you may obtain glory and for- 
 tune. One successful piece renders a man at the same time rich and 
 celebrated ; and if you take pains you will succeed.' ' I do not want 
 ardor,' replied I ; ' but what should I do for the stage ? ' ' Write a 
 good comedy,' said he, in a firm tone. ' Alas, sir, how should I draw 
 jDortraits ? I do not know faces.' He smiled at this answer. ' Well, 
 then, write a tragedy.' I answered that I was not quite so ignorant 
 of the passions and the heart, and that I would willingly make the 
 attempt. Thus passed my first interview with this illustrious man." 
 
 INIarmontel began at once to study the art of play-writing, 
 and an old actor soon set him upon the true path by telling 
 him that the art of writing plays that act well can be learned 
 only at the theatre. " He is right," said Voltaire ; " the thea- 
 tre is the school for us all. It must be open to you, and I ought 
 to have thought of it sooner." He procured free admission 
 for the young poet, and, erelong, Marraontel produced his 
 " Dionysius " with a success that fixed his desthiy. Voltaire 
 himself witnessed his second tragedy, " Aristomcne." 
 
 " He had expressed [says Marmontel] an inclination to see my 
 piece before it was completed, and I had read to him four acts, with 
 which he was pleased. But the act I had still to write gave him some 
 inquietude, and not without reason. In the four acts that he had 
 heard, the action appeared complete and uninterrupted. ' What ! ' 
 said he, after the reading, ' do you pretend, in your second tragedy, to 
 supersede a general rule ? When I wrote " The Death of Cassar," in 
 three acts, it was for a boys' school, and my excuse was the constraint I 
 was under to introduce only men. But you, on the great theatre, and 
 on a subject where nothing could confine you, give a mutilated piece in 
 four acts ; for which unsightly form you have no example ! This, at 
 your age, is an unfortunate license that I cannot excuse.' * And, in- 
 deed,' said I, ' this is a license I have no intention of taking. In my 
 own imagination, my tragedy is in five acts, which I hope to complete.'
 
 610 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 ' And how ? ' inquired he. ' I have just heard the last act ; all is per- 
 fectly coherent ; and you surely do not think of beginning the action 
 earlier ? ' * No,' answered I, ' jthe action will begin and finish as you 
 have seen ; the rest is my secret. What I meditate is, perhaps, folly. 
 But, however perilous the step may be, I must take it ; and if you 
 damp my courage all my labor will be lost.' ' Cheerily, then, my 
 good friend, go on ; risk, venture ; it is always a good sign. In our 
 profession, as in war, there are fortunate temerities ; and the greatest 
 beauties frequently burst forth under the most desperate difficulties.' 
 
 " At the first representation he insisted on placing himself behind me 
 in my box ; and I owe him this testimony, that he was almost as agi- 
 tated and tremulous as myself. ' Now,' said he, 'before the curtain 
 is drawn up, tell me from what incident you have drawn the act that 
 was wantino-.' I made him recollect that at the end of the second act 
 it was said that the wife and son of Aristomene were going to be tried, 
 and that at the commencement of the third it appeared that they had 
 been condemned. ' Well,' said I, ' this trial that was then supposed 
 to take place between the acts I have introduced on the stage.' 
 ' What ! a criminal court on the stage ? ' exclaimed he. ' You make 
 me tremble.' ' Yes,' said I, 'it is a dangerous sand, but it was in- 
 evitable ; it is Clairon that must save me.' 
 
 "'Aristomene,' had no less success than 'Dionysius.' Voltaire at 
 every burst of applause pressed me in his arms. But what astonished 
 him, and made him leap for joy, was the effect of the third act. When 
 he beheld Leonide, loaded with irons, like a criminal, appear before her 
 judges, command them by her dignity and magnanimity, get full pos- 
 session of the stage and of the souls of the spectators, turn her defense 
 into accusation, and, distinguishing among the senators the virtuous 
 friends of Aristomene from his faithless enemies, attack, overwhelm, 
 and convict them of perfidy, amid the applauses she received, ' Brava, 
 Clairon ! ' cried Voltaire, ' Made animo, generose puer ! 
 
 The coming of Marmontel to Paris added one more to the 
 ever-increasing number of young writers whom Voltaire had 
 assisted to form. The new men of talent were his own, and 
 they were preparing to aid him in future contests with hostile 
 powers. The Marquis de Vauvenargues, the young soldier 
 who was compelled by ill healtli to abandon the career of arms, 
 in which he was already distinguished, and now aspired to 
 serve his country in the intellectual life, had been for some 
 time one of Voltaire's most beloved friends. His first, his only 
 work, "Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind," 
 was just appearing from the press, heralded by Voltaire's zeal- 
 
 I
 
 VOLTAIRE AT THE COURT OF FRANCE. 611 
 
 0U8 commendation. " My dear Master," the young disciple 
 loved to begin Lis letters ; and Voltaire, in writing to him, used 
 all those endearing expressions which often make a French 
 letter one long and fond caress. He sank into the grave in 
 1747, but his name and his work survive. It is evident from 
 his correspondence that he was of a lofty and generous nature, 
 capable of the true public spirit, — the religion of the new 
 period. 
 
 Marmontel reached Paris in time to witness a day of tri- 
 umph for Voltaire, which had been long deferred. There was 
 a vacancy at the French Academy early in 1746. Mirepoix's 
 voice was not heard on this occasion, and Voltaire, without se- 
 rious trouble, succeeded in obtaining a unanimous election to 
 the chair. This event could not have been at that time any 
 increase of honor to an author of his rank. He valued an aca- 
 demic chair for himself and for his colleagues, such as Mar- 
 montel, D'Alembert, and others, as an additional protection 
 against the Mirepoix. Members of the Academy had certain 
 privileges in common with the officers of the king's household, 
 Tliey could not be compelled to defend a suit out of Paris ; 
 they were accountable to the king directly, and could not be 
 molested except by the king's command. Above all, they stood 
 in the sunshine of the king's effulgent majesty; they shared in 
 the mystic spell of ranh, which no American citizen can ever 
 quite understand, and of which even Europeans of to-day begin 
 to lose the sense. He was £t little safer now against all the 
 abuses of the royal power, usually covered by lettres de cachet. 
 
 May 9, 1746, was the day of his public reception at the 
 Academy, when, according to usage, it devolved upon him to 
 deliver a set eulogium upon his departed predecessor. The 
 new member signalized the occasion by making his address 
 much more than that. His eulogy was brief, but sufficient, 
 and, when he had performed that pious duty, he struck into an 
 agreeable and very ingenious discourse upon the charms, the 
 limits, the defects, and the wide-spread triumphs of the French 
 language. With that matchless art of his, he contrived in 
 kingly style to compliment all his "great friends and allies," 
 while adhering to his subject with perfect fidelity. Was it not 
 one of the glories of the French language that a Frederic should 
 adopt it as the language of his court and of his friendships, and
 
 512 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 that Italian cardinals and pontiffs should speak it like natives? 
 His dear Princess Ulrique, too, — then Queen of Sweden, — was 
 not French her native tongue ? There were some wise remarks 
 in this address ; as, for example, where he says that eminent 
 talents become of necessity rarer as the whole nation ad- 
 vances : " In a well-grown forest, no single tree lifts its head 
 very high above the rest." He concluded with the "necessary- 
 burst of eloquence " respecting the late warlike exploits of the 
 king ; in which, however, he gave such prominence to the 
 services in the field of the Duke de Richelieu, a member of 
 the Academy, that the First Gentleman almost eclipsed the 
 monarch. 
 
 He was now at the highest point of his court favor. An 
 epigram of his, written at this period, conveys to us his sense 
 of the situation, and renders other comment superfluous : — 
 
 " Mon ' Heuri Quatre ' et ma ' Zaire ' 
 
 Et mon Americaine ' Alzire ' 
 Ne m'ont valu jamais un seul regard du roi ; 
 J'eus beaucoup d'euncmis avec tres-peii de gloire ; 
 Les honneurs et les bicus pleuvent enfin sur moi 
 
 Pour une farce de la foire." ^ 
 
 1 My "Henry IV." and my "Zaire" and my American "Alzire" were never 
 worth to me one look of the king. I had many enemies and very little glory. 
 At length honors and benefits rain upon me for a farce of the fair. 
 
 I
 
 CHAPTER XLIir. 
 
 OUT OF FAVOR AT COURT. 
 
 His court favor was no protection to him against his ill- 
 wishers, either within or without the palace. Least of all 
 could it protect him against himself. 
 
 His young friend, Vauvenargues, told him truly, just after 
 his election to the French Academy, that his enemies had 
 never been " so unchained against him " as then, and notified 
 him that no effort would be spared to damn his new tragedy, 
 " Semiramis," which he had written for the approaching /e^g 
 of the Dauphiness, and at her request. The generous Vauve- 
 nargues was so shocked at the mania that seemed to prevail 
 among some men of letters to degrade their chief that he said 
 he was disgusted, not only with them, but with literature itself. 
 " I conjure you, my dear master," he wrote, " to finish your 
 tragedy so thoroughly that there will remain no pretext for an 
 attack upon it, even to envy's self." The lamentable death 
 of the princess in the second year of her married life delayed 
 the production of " Semiramis," but did not stay the torrent 
 of abuse that assailed the author. 
 
 Everything he did was burlesqued or lampooned, — his 
 " Princesse de Navarre," his " Temple de Gloire," his speech 
 at the Academy. The poet Roy, an old man now, and 
 sharper tempered than ever, had been doubly disappointed 
 by Voltaire's success at court. He had composed a divertise- 
 ment for the wedding fete, which had been rejected ; and he 
 had been for many years a candidate for an academic chair, 
 with no chance of success. One member, perhaps, remem- 
 bered his ancient epigram upon the election of the Duke de 
 Clermont, to the effect that 39 -fO does not equal 40. The 
 acidulated poet revived this year a scurrilous poem of his, writ- 
 ten in 17oG, entitled "The Poetic Triumph," in which the 
 various mishaps of Voltaire's life, real and imaginary, were 
 
 VOL. I. 33
 
 614 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 related in the manner of a burlesque Odyssey. Of course the 
 " bastonades " figured conspicuously in this work, as well as 
 the controversy with Desfontaines ; and, in the new edition of 
 1746, all the recent adventures and misfortunes of Voltaire 
 which admitted of burlesque treatment were introduced. Roy 
 had a particular skill in defamation, as men of small talent 
 are apt to have, and he produced on this occasion some effect- 
 ive couplets. Besides this burlesque, be composed a parody 
 of Voltaire's " Fontenoy," and a burlesque of his academic 
 discourse, and, in general, " unchained himself " against the 
 historiographer of France. 
 
 It is a pity Voltaire could not have been philosopher enough 
 to laugh at all this, and straightway forget it, and so say we 
 all, until some small, malign Roy selects us for a target. 
 Then we feel as Voltaire felt, and many of us would do as he 
 did, if we could. Among other things, he casually let loose 
 in Paris drawing-rooms an epigram of the following pur- 
 port : — 
 
 " Know you a certain rhymer, obscure, dry and pompous, 
 often cold, always hard, having the rage and not the art to 
 slander, who cannot please, still less can injure ; for his mis- 
 deeds in a jail once caged, and after at St. Lazarus confined ; 
 banished, beaten, detested for his crimes, disgraced, laughed 
 at, spit upon for his rhymes, — contented cuckold, speaking 
 always of himself ? Every one cries, Ah I it is the poet 
 Roy!'' 
 
 Such verses do not appease anger. The booksellers' shops 
 of Paris were not the less littered with burlesques of the au- 
 thor, in verse and prose, sportive and rancorous. From the 
 catalogue which French compilers give of these, we might 
 conclude that they were the chief literary product of the sum- 
 mer of 1746. Voltaire, enraged, unable to reach the well- 
 known, anonymous authors, rose against the sellers of this 
 defamatory trash. Armed with ministerial authority, and 
 conscious of a king's mistress behind him, he caused the shops 
 to be searched by the police, the offensive publications to be 
 seized, and at least five persons to be arrested. Two inci- 
 dents of these proceedings were exceedingly unfortunate. In 
 one of the houses searched, an elderly man, a zealous col- 
 lector of the burlesques, was lymg sick of a mortal disease, of
 
 OUT OF FAVOR AT COURT. 515 
 
 which he died soon after. In another instance the wrong man 
 was accidentally cast into prison. One Travenol, a violinist 
 at the opera, had distinguished himself above all others by his 
 industry in spreading abroad everything he could find adverse 
 to Voltaire ; induced thereto by some offense the poet had 
 given his mistress in the distribution of the roles of the opera 
 of " Samson." Travenol being in the country on leave, the 
 police committed the terrible error of arresting his father, an 
 old dancing-master, aged eighty years, who kneAV nothing of 
 the matter. On learning the mistake, Voltaire procured from 
 the ministry an order for his release; but, unhappily, the re- 
 spectable old man had been six days in prison, of which three 
 had been passed in solitary confinement, before he was re- 
 stored to his home. His aged wife, too, and the wife of his 
 absent son were alarmed and distressed beyond measure. 
 
 The true culprit was found at length, and against him the 
 exasperated author brought a suit for damages. For a mo- 
 ment, through the good offices of the Abb^ d'Olivet, he was 
 disposed to forgive ; but, mistaking some proceeding of Tra- 
 venol, he conceived the idea that he was played upon, and 
 therefore resumed the prosecution with redoubled zeah For 
 sixteen months this affair was in the courts ; the Travenols 
 bringing a counter suit for false imprisonment. After the 
 usual delays, the cause was first tried in December, 1746, 
 when a decision was pronounced which satisfied no one. For 
 the imprisonment of the elder Travenol, Voltaire was con- 
 dejnned to pay five hundred francs damages, with costs, and 
 ordered, in the manner of the ancient courts, not to do so 
 again. Travenol, the younger, was required to pay three 
 hundred francs, with costs and interest, for having " occasioned 
 and circulated defamatory libels " against Voltaire, and he was 
 expressly forbidden to repeat those offenses. Two of the pieces 
 circulated by Travenol, namely, Roy's " Poetic Triumph " 
 and a burlesque by the same author of Voltaire's speech at 
 the Academy, were ordered to be brought to the bar of the 
 court, and there publicly " suppressed and lacerated " by the 
 clerk of the court. 
 
 Voltaire appealed to a higher tribunal. Another year passed. 
 After a new trial, which occupied five sessions, the decree of 
 the lower court was confirmed. Again all parties issued from
 
 616 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 the contest disappointed. The plaintiff had demanded a par 
 ticular retraction, and the infliction of a penalty which would 
 deter his libelers from repeating their offenses. He deemed 
 the penalty imposed a mere mockery of justice. " Ought not 
 the scoundrels to be hanged," he wrote to Richelieu, " who 
 infect the public with these poisons ? But the poet Roy will 
 have some pension, if he does not die of leprosy, by which his 
 soul is more attacked than his body." Both the court and 
 the public, we are assured, disapproved this prosecution, and 
 censured all the parties to it. The collusion between the 
 old satirist and the young violinist, for the purpose of wreak- 
 ing their spite upon Voltaire, was sufficiently shown in the 
 course of these trials. Nevertheless, the prosecution of a poor 
 musician for selling burlesques, which gave but slight pain 
 to any one but the object of them, did not present the plain- 
 tiff to the public in a pleasing light. Then, as now, a rich 
 and powerful man seeking justice. In a court of justice, against 
 a poor and insignificant man, had small chance of success. 
 The sympathies of the court and the public go with the poor 
 man. Ere long, the poet Roy was pensioned ; Travenol con- 
 tinued to play the violin at the opera ; and the libels were not 
 extinguished. 
 
 The favor of the reigning mistress could not avail in protect- 
 ing the historiographer against the consequences of his own im- 
 prudence. The rage among ladies of the highest rank in Europe 
 to possess cantos of " La Pucelle " was such that the author 
 of the poem did not always I'esist their importunities. The 
 Duchess of Wurtemberg had a portion of it. Frederick II. of 
 Prussia had with him two cantos, and Voltaire could not but 
 remember that once the king's campaign carriage had been 
 captured by Austrian hussars, and manuscripts of his own 
 carried off, no one knew where. That monarch had a peculiar 
 fondness for the " Pucelle." He disapproved the poet's new 
 vocation of historiographer to such warriors as Louis XV. and 
 Richelieu, which delayed the completion of that precious work. 
 *' Believe me," wrote the king, in December, 1746; '-finish 
 * La Pucelle.' Better worth while is it to smooth the wrinkles 
 from the foreheads of worthy people than to compose gazettes 
 for blackguards [poZ/ssons]." He reproached the poet for not 
 trusting him with more of a poem which he had confided to a
 
 OUT OF FAVOE AT COURT. 517 
 
 lady. <' You have lent your ' Pucelle ' to the Duchess of 
 Wurtemberg. Know that slie has had it copied during the 
 night. Such are the people whom you trust ; while the only 
 persons who deserve your confidence, or, rather, to whom you 
 ought to abandon yourself entirely, are the only ones whom 
 you distrust." Voltaire swore that the duchess possessed no 
 more of the poem than the king, "She has perhaps copied a 
 page or two of the part which you have ; but it is impossible 
 that she has that which you have not." Besides, he might 
 have added, duchesses do not take the field in a travelins: car- 
 riage full of contraband writings. The king's mistress could 
 not at that day protect the known author of " La Pucelle," 
 even though she might read it nightly to the king in her bou- 
 doir. 
 
 Meanwhile, he seemed to be drawing nearer to the court. 
 In December, 1746, according to Duvernet, he made his first 
 appearance at the table assigned in all the palaces of the king 
 to the Gentlemen of the Chamber. The tradition is that some 
 of these high-born functionaries eyed the bourgeois gentleman 
 askance, until he had uttered one of those pleasantries which 
 no true son of Gaul can resist. They were speaking of the 
 rumored marriage of a young lord with the daughter of a far- 
 mer-general, and the question arose as to where the ceremony 
 should be performed. " At the tax-office," suggested one. 
 " There is no chapel there," said others. Voltaire, hitherto 
 silent, joined in the conversation. " Pardon me, gentlemen," 
 said he, " there is the chapel of the Impenitent Thief." Farm- 
 er-general, under the old regime, was synonymous in the pub- 
 lic estimation with plunderer. The company laughed, and 
 relented toward their new associate.^ It is not improbable 
 that the bourgeois gentleman-in-ordinary was an unwelcome 
 addition to a corps that valued itself upon its unquestionable 
 nobility. M. Desnoiresterres publishes a curiously illiterate 
 letter of the time from a young gentleman to his uncle in La 
 Vendee, in which he reflects upon the king for appointing to 
 so exalted a post " a certain Arouet of Saint-Lou, son of one 
 Domar, who has made himself known under the name of Vol- 
 taire." The king, he adds, will not put upon the nobility 
 " the affront " of dispensing this person (ce cuidani) from his 
 
 ^ Duvernet, chapter xii.
 
 518 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 proofs (of nobility) ; but in order to procure those proofs, lie 
 will be obliged to seek them among the relations of his mother, 
 which will be " a dishonor to gentlemen of name and arms, 
 noble from time immemorial." Duvernet's anecdote, there- 
 fore, may have had a basis of truth ; and it may have been for 
 this reason that the king permitted him, soon after, to sell the 
 keenly-coveted post, and retain its title, rights, exemptions, 
 and privileges. He sold it for thirty thousand francs, and 
 never again bestowed his society uj^on his colleagues. 
 
 Other enemies he had at court, more powerful and more 
 respectable than a second-table of court dandies. In the royal 
 palaces of France and of other countries in that century, there 
 were two courts, the dull-virtuous and the brilliant-wicked ; 
 one presided over by the neglected queen, the other by the 
 reigning mistress. The Queen of France, with her children 
 and court, all under the influence of the austere and orthodox 
 Mirepoix, could protest against the life led in the other wing 
 of the palace only by the practice of piety carried to a forbid- 
 ding excess. They sought and found alleviation in strict com- 
 pliance with the religious routine prescribed by the church. 
 They lived with some frugality and decency. If their con- 
 ception of duty and self-control was narrow, erroneous, obso- 
 lete, they at least kept alive in France the sense that there 
 were such things as duty and self-control. They felt, also, in 
 some degree, that duty and self-control, though binding on all, 
 are most binding upon the powerful and conspicuous classes, 
 who may disregard them for a time with apparent impunity. 
 Nor did they neglect the elegant life. The princesses at- 
 tempted every art and played upon every instrument, even the 
 trombone, and the queen sustained her wearisome part with 
 sufficient dignity. It was necessary, no doubt, that their mode 
 of virtue, so cramping to the intelligence, so debilitating to the 
 conscience, should pass away, and be supplanted by a mode 
 that will at length give the intellect and taste free play. But, 
 take them just as they were, the life led at the queen's end of 
 Versailles was less remote from virtue than that lived in Pom- 
 padour's splendid rooms. 
 
 The queen's circle was not so destitute of influence as it 
 seemed. The king was not devoid of natural affection, and 
 he was liable to fits of religious fear. His family, it appears,
 
 OUT OF FAVOR AT COURT. 619 
 
 had influence enough to keep Voltaire from gaining a firm 
 foothold at court. 
 
 This was the period when private theatricals were the reign- 
 ing amusement of the idle classes in Europe. In 1748 there 
 were, as we are told, sixteen noted companies of amateur actors 
 in Paris among the nobility, without reckoning those of the 
 bourgeois, one of which was about to give Lekain to the public 
 stage. Madame de Pompadour conceived the project of amus- 
 ing the king by a company of amateurs composed of the elect 
 courtiers, herself being manager and chief actress. She pos- 
 sessed all the agreeable accomplishments : she could act, sing, 
 play, and dance, to admiration. She could draw and paint 
 pretty well, and even engrave with some skill. Her company, 
 which chiefly consisted of princes, dukes, and duchesses, was 
 capable of giving comedy, opera, and ballet. Admission to its 
 lowest grade, even to the rank of silent supernumeraries, was 
 regarded in the palace as the most exquisite distinction which 
 a mortal could hope to attain in this sublunary scene. Ma- 
 dame de Pompadour's femme de chamhre obtained a commis- 
 sion in the army for one of her relations by procuring for a 
 duke the illustrious privilege of playing a policeman's part of 
 a few lines in " Tartuffe." 
 
 Voltaire had formed madame's literary taste ; he had kno\vn 
 her from childhood ; he was a member of her circle when the 
 king first cast his eyes upon her bewitching beauty ; she had 
 made him the confidant of what she called her "love;" she 
 used to give him some of that medicinal Tokay, recommended 
 by the King of Prussia, which he declared was better than that 
 which the king himself had sent to Cirey. Moreover, she was 
 naturally and necessarily on the side of " the philosophers,'' 
 who alone could imagine a scheme of morals that would not 
 condemn her position in the home of the Queen of France. 
 Cardinals, bishops, and priests courted her, flattei'ed her, 
 cringed to her, during all her long reign of nineteen years, 
 and stood ready to give the king instant absolution, on the 
 easy con.dition of her brief i-esidence at one of her numerous 
 chateaux. Nevertheless, she knew very well what the lan- 
 guage was in which their profession compelled tiiem to de- 
 scribe hers. In a word, she desired to oblige Voltaire, and 
 she selected his comedy of " The Prodigal Son " as the play
 
 520 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 to be first performed in the palace before the king. It had a 
 striking success. At this theatre the etiquette was suspended 
 which forbade applause in the king's presence, and the hall 
 resounded Avith acclamations. The comedy was even played 
 a second time, which gave the author the right to witness the 
 performance, and admission to the royal theatre ever after. 
 Naturally desirous of testifying his gratitude, he circulated a 
 little poem which he had written for Madame de Pompadour 
 while the king was at the seat of war, in 1745 : — 
 
 " So then you reunite all the arts, all the tastes, all the tal- 
 ents of j)leasing. Pompadour, you embellish Court, Parnassus, 
 and Cythera. Charm of all hearts, treasure of a single mor- 
 tal, may a lot so blest be eternal ! May your precious days be 
 marked hj fetes ; may peace to our land return with Louis! 
 Be both of you without enemies, and may both of you keep 
 your conquests'"' 
 
 In this poem he now made a slight alteration. Instead of 
 wishing peace to return w4th Louis, he said, " May new suc- 
 cesses mark the fetes of Louis," which gave it the appearance 
 of a more recent composition. There was a swift copying of 
 these verses in the palace ; and she was the fortunate lady 
 who could first exhibit the true version. The queen and her 
 daughters soon read them, and read them only to be the more 
 incensed against the author. According to Pierre Laujon, a 
 dramatist who contributed several pieces to Madame de Pom- 
 padour's theatre, and knew all the gossip of both ends of the 
 palace, the entire coterie of the queen and Dauphin wei'e boil- 
 ing with indignation at the last line of this poem : " May both 
 of you keep your conquests ! " Those soured, dull, virtuous 
 people thought this pretty jest " the climax of rashness and 
 audacity." "The very idea," says Laujon, "of putting upon 
 a level the glorious conquests of the king in Flanders and his 
 conquest of the ' heart ' of a mistress was an unpardonable 
 crime." All the enemies of Voltaire were summoned to a con- 
 ference in the apartment where the queen usually passed the 
 evening, and there this new audacity of his was amply dis- 
 cussed. 
 
 The next day, the king's daughters, who always retained 
 some hold upon his affections, visited him at their usual hour, 
 and embraced him with more than their usual tenderness.
 
 OUT OF FAVOR AT COURT. 521 
 
 They repeated their caresses again and again, and when his 
 heart was softened toward them they introduced the subject 
 of the verses, and dwelt upon the insolence of a poet who 
 could speak in that light tone of the king's immortal exploits. 
 " Before Madame de Pompadour could be informed of it," says 
 Laujon, "the exile of Voltaire was signed ; " and the mistress, 
 powerful as she was, dared not risk a struggle to get the 
 decree annulled. She dissembled her mortification and was 
 silent. 
 
 Voltaire dined that evening in Paris with a gay company of 
 literary men, one of whom was his brother dramatist, Pierre 
 Laujon, who reports the scene. Voltaire came late to the 
 foftst, no one but himself being aware of what had occurred at 
 Versailles. " Quick ! " said the host ; " bring some dinner for 
 M. de Voltaire." But the new-comer took nothing except 
 seven or eight cups of coffee without milk and two little rolls. 
 That, however, did not prevent him from " paying his score 
 by a number of piquant sallies." " I remember," says the 
 narrator, " that when the guests began to speak of the new 
 tax upon playing cards, he very strongly approved it, and men- 
 tioned many other articles of luxury that invited taxation ; 
 thus indicating an ardent and fruitful mind, to which no sub- 
 ject of politics or administration was foreign. After leaving 
 the table, he was surrounded by the guests, who plied him well 
 with questions." 1 
 
 This exile of which Laujon speaks was probably a moment- 
 ary concession to the ladies, and did not involve the immedi- 
 ate departure of the poet from Paris. From about this time, 
 however, in 17-17, we perceive, from his letters and other indi- 
 cations, that his court favor was of little force ; and in the 
 course of that year an event occurred which caused him to 
 leave the royal abode with precipitation. He was out of place 
 at court. No palace is large enough to contain two monarchs. 
 All deference and courtesy as he Avas to princes and their mis- 
 tresses, he was not under the illusion which concealed from 
 many eyes the precise stature of those personages. He knew 
 too well, as he remarked of the jovial Pope Benedict, " what 
 all that was worth." 
 
 ^ CEuvrcs Choisies de P. Laujon, page 90.
 
 CHAPTER XLIV. 
 
 PRECIPITATE FLIGHT FROM COURT. 
 
 During bis long life of literary labor, Voltaire usually bad 
 an amanuensis or secretary domesticated witb bim. Tbree of 
 his secretaries recorded tbeir recollections, from wbicb we get 
 close and interesting views of tbe man, botb in bis ordinary 
 routine and at some crises of bis existence. One of tbem, S. 
 G. Longcbamp, entered bis service during tbis turbulent period 
 of court and ministerial favor, and remained witb bim about 
 seven years. Voltaire evidently bad mucb confidence in bim ; 
 he trusted bim to collect, bold, and pay considerable sums of 
 money, and even left bim in charge of important affairs during 
 his own absences from Paris. Some doubt has been cast upon 
 tbe trustwortbiness of Longcbamp's extraordinary anecdotes 
 from tbe incorrectness of some statements wbicb be must have 
 derived from others. Tbe Travenol affair, for example, he 
 misunderstood, and blends witb it otber matters having no 
 connection witb it. When be related what he personally saw 
 and heard, he appears to have usually done his best to tell tbe 
 truth ; and, indeed, we may well ask what mortal could have 
 invented those of bis tales wbicb task our credulity most. I 
 shall tberefore translate a few passages from his narrative, 
 leaving to the reader tbe mucb more difficult task of reading 
 tbem by tbe light of otber days and climes. 
 
 I need only add that Longcbamp owed his introduction into 
 tbe house of Madame du Cbatelet to tbe recommendation of bis 
 sister, who was madame's femme de chamhre. He was first 
 engaged as her steward, or maitre d'hStel, and took charge of 
 her establishment in Paris. 
 
 LONGCBAMP ENTERS THE SERVICE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 " I remained five or six months sufficiently at my ease in the house 
 of Madame du Chatelet, having scarcely anything to do except attend-
 
 PRECIPITATE FLIGHT FROM COURT. 623 
 
 ing to purchases and commissions. She had but a single meal a day, 
 which was supper, and she took that almost always away from home. 
 In the morning her breakfast consisted of a roll and a cup of coffee 
 with cream, so that her steward and cook had very little occupation. 
 During that period I do not believe she gave more than ten or twelve 
 suppers, and when that happened there were but few guests, with few 
 dishes and still less wine, ller cellar was not well furnished ; her wine- 
 merchant sent her two dozen bottles at once, half being red, which 
 he called burgundy, but which really was of Paris vintage ; and the 
 other half white, called champagne, and no more correctly styled than 
 the other. When that supply was exhausted it was renewed. My 
 principal business was to lay in the other provisions of the house, — 
 wood, candles, food, etc. Madame did not board her servants, but 
 gave them instead a compensation in money. It was I who was 
 charged to pay them every fifteen days : her coachman, her two lack- 
 eys, and her female cook at the rate of twenty sous per day; her 
 footman, her femme de chamhre, and myself at thirty sous per day. I 
 received also the dessert from the table, which I shared with my sister. 
 It was not long before I wearied of the monotonous life which I led 
 at Madame du Chatelet's, where, during a great part of the day, I was 
 without employment. I sought some resource to dissipate my eniiui, 
 and I found one which suited me very well. M. de Voltaire lodged 
 in the house, as well as his secretary, and with the latter I contracted 
 a firm friendship. When the work of the house was done, and there 
 remained nothing more for me to do, I mounted to this secretary's 
 room. He gave me the works of M. de Voltaire to read, and even, 
 seeing that I wrote pretty well, begged me sometimes to help him 
 copy the manuscripts of that author, who often overcharged him with 
 work. That amused me much, and when madame was from home, 
 which happened often, I passed almost whole days in this occupation. 
 M. de Voltaire found me there one day, and, knowing me to be at- 
 tached to Madame du Chatelet and an inmate of the house, he made 
 no objections. He examined my writing, and I perceived that he 
 found it to his mind. From that time I did not fail, whenever there 
 was nothing for me to do, to go to his secretary's room, where I was 
 entertained and instructed, and took pains to improve my handwrit- 
 ing. 
 
 " Nevertheless, at the end of some months, I had to renounce this 
 occupation, as well as the house of Madame du Chatelet. I left that 
 lady, perhaps too lightly, piqued at an injustice she had done my sis- 
 ter, whom I obliged also to leave. Some weeks after, there was in 
 her house a more considerable defection. It was the season of the 
 royal residence at Fontainebleau, when all the court was there ; ma-
 
 524 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 dame, also, as usual, having tabouret with the queen, and being of her 
 play. At the moment when she was making her preparations to go 
 to Fontainebleau, all her servants left her, under pretext that living 
 was dearer in that city than at Paris ; complaining, too, of her econ- 
 omy and the smallness of their wnges, and saying that they could 
 easily find better pay elsewhere. There remained to her only a femme 
 de c/mmbre, whom she had taken but a few days before. She had had 
 all M. de Voltaire's servants put upon the same footing as her own, 
 because she governed him ; and they left, also, according to an under- 
 standing among themselves. As a climax of misfortune, his secretary 
 was taken from him by a violent inflammatory disease. This circum- 
 stance, doubtless, made him remember me in the midst of the incon- 
 venient desertion, and, having informed himself of my abode, he sent 
 for me to come and speak to him. He asked me if I was willing to 
 go with him to Fontainebleau, and serve him as secretary during the 
 time of his residence there. Being satisfied with the terms he offered, 
 and charmed also to see the court, which I had not seen since my 
 coming to Paris, I acquiesced willingly in his request. Thus it was 
 that I entered the service of M. de Voltaire. I expected to remain in 
 it only during the stay at Fontainebleau ; but various circumstances, 
 unforeseen, deranged my projects, and made me take the resolution to 
 stay with him as long as he wished. I did not leave him until long 
 after, during his residence at the court of the King of Prussia, as I 
 shall relate by and by. I can but applaud myself for having entered 
 his service. I was overwhelmed with his bounties and honored with 
 his entire confidence, as I had previously been with that of Madame 
 du Chatelet." 
 
 LONGCHAMP'S FIRST DAy's WORK FOR VOLTAIRE. 
 
 " M. de Voltaire and Madame du Chatelet were lodged at Fontaine- 
 bleau at the house of the Duke de Richelieu. All their servants had 
 left them the evening before their departure, giving as pretext the in- 
 sufficiency of their wages. Madame, in haste to set out, took at once 
 and without inquiry the first servants who presented themselves. M. 
 de Voltaire had none. I arrived the third day after them at Fon- 
 tainebleau, at two o'clock in the morning. All was perfectly quiet in 
 the mansion. After sleeping some hours, I went into the chamber of 
 M. de Voltaire, who was just waking. He had been unable to find any 
 servant. Delighted to see me, he begged me to light his fire, the 
 cold being somewhat severe that day. That done, being still in bed, 
 he told me, to bring him a portfolio, which I did not immediately 
 perceive. As I delayed satisfying him, not knowing where he had 
 put that portfolio, he threw oS. his bed-clothes, got half out of bed,
 
 PRECIPITATE FLIGHT FROM COURT. 625 
 
 and, pointing with his finger to a chair in a dark corner of the room, 
 he cried out with force and emphasis, ' There it is ! Don't you see it ? ' 
 A little confused by the tone of his exclamation, I seized the portfolio, 
 and placed it in his hands. He took from it a copy-book which con- 
 tained the beginning of his * Essay upon the Manners and Arts of 
 Nations,' and said to me that, after I had looked about for a lackey? 
 I could employ the rest of the day in copying its contents upon some 
 fine Dutch paper which he had brought for the purpose. He then 
 asked me if I knew how to dress his wig. I answered, Yes. Then 
 he got up, put on his shoes and stockings, and shaved. Meanwhile, 
 I took his wig, dressed it as well as I could, and powdered it with 
 white powder. When he came to put it on it was not dressed to 
 his mind ; he laughed at his new wig dresser, took the wig, shook out 
 the powder with violence, and told me to give him a comb. Having 
 given him the one I had in my hand, which was small, although it 
 had two blades, he threw it upon the floor, saying it was a large 
 comb that he wanted. Upon my telling him that I had no other for 
 the moment, he told me to pick it up. I did so, and gave it to him 
 again. He passed it several times through his wig, and, after having 
 put it thoroughly out of order, he tossed it upon his head. I helped 
 him on with his coat, and he went to breakfast with Madame du 
 Chatelet. 
 
 " This debut into the service of M. de Voltaire did not appear to 
 me to promise well for the future, and I applauded my good sense in 
 having engaged only for their stay at Fontainebleau. His abruptness 
 displeased me, and I took it at first for brutality ; but I soon perceived 
 that it was in him only an extreme vivacity of character, which burst 
 forth upon slight occasion, and was almost instantly calm again. I 
 saw more and more, as time went on, that, while his vivacities were 
 transient and, so to speak, superficial, his indulgence and goodness 
 were qualities solid and durable. 
 
 "A moment after, I went out of the house in search of a servant for 
 him. I went all over the city without being able to find one that 
 would suit him. After having dined, I returned, and set myself to 
 copying the manuscript he had left me." 
 
 SUDDEN DEPARTURE FROM FONTAINEBLEAU. 
 
 " Neither madame nor he came home during the day. I sat up for 
 them until half past one in the morning, not doubting that they were 
 at the queen's play, which was prolonged sometimes far into the niglit. 
 At that hour I saw them returning together, both looking sad and 
 troubled. On arriving, madame told me to find her servants, and 
 tell her coachman to put the horses at once to the carriage, as she
 
 626 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 wished to leave immediately. At that hour, in the middle of the 
 night, it was difficult to get together her people, who were lodged in 
 various parts of the city. There were only in the house her femme 
 de chambre and myself. I went at once in search of the servants. 
 The coachman, wTiom I awoke first, made haste to harness the horses 
 to the carriage. When all was ready, they got into it with the femme 
 de chamhre, who had only time to pack two or three parcels, which she 
 took with her. They left Fontainebleau before the break of day. 
 
 " This order of Madame du ChPitelet surjarised me much ; I could 
 not guess the true cause of so precipitate a departure. I only learned 
 it at Paris, when I had returned to her house there. That night the 
 play at the queen's table had been very stormy, and Madame du Chatelet 
 had been particularly unfortunate. Before setting out for Fontaine- 
 bleau, she had got together as much money as she could. The strong- 
 box of her agent was but slenderly furnished, and she had been able 
 to draw from it only four hundred and odd louis. M. de Voltaire, 
 who did not play, had two hundred in his purse. The first day of 
 their arrival, madame lost her four hundred louis. On returning to 
 her lodging, she dispatched a lackey as a courier with letters to her 
 agent and some friends, in order to get a supjjly. Meanwhile, M. de 
 Voltaire gave the marquise the two hundred louis which he had 
 brought with him. At the second session these took the same road 
 as the others with great velocity, but not without some remonstrances 
 on the part of the lender. The lackey returned the next day, bring- 
 ing two hundred louis, which her agent, M. de la Croix, had borrowed 
 at high interest, and a hundred and eighty more, which her friend, 
 Mademoiselle du Thil, had joined to them. With this sum madame 
 returned to the queen's play. Alas! her louis d'or only appeai'ed upon 
 the table to disappear. Piqued by such constant ill luck, and believing 
 it must cease at last, she determined to make good her losses, and con- 
 tinued to play very high, going in debt for the sums lost. She lost 
 eighty-four thousand francs with inconceivable intrepidity. The play 
 over, M. de Voltaire, who was at her side, alarmed at so considerable 
 a loss, said to her in English that her absorption in the game had pre- 
 vented her from perceiving that she was playing with cheats. These 
 words, though pronounced in a low tone, were overheard by some 
 one, and repeated. Madame remarked it, and told M. de Voltaire, 
 for whom that could have some disagreeable consequences. They with- 
 drew quietly, and, having taken the resolution to return at once to 
 Paris, they set out from Fontainebleau the same night. 
 
 " I remained behind alone to gather and pack their effects, and con- 
 vey them to Valvin, where I wis to take the water-coach \le coche 
 d'eau'] and bring the whole to Paris. Madame's carriage took the
 
 PRECIPITATE FLIGHT FROM COURT. 527 
 
 high-road. On arrriving near Essonne, a wheel of the carriage was 
 broken, and luckily it was almost opposite the house of a wheelwright, 
 who repaired the accident by substituting another wheel. The work 
 finished, it was necessary to pay this wheelwright, but it so happened 
 that neither the masters nor their servants had a single sou. The 
 man, not knowing them, refused to let tliem go before he was paid. 
 At that moment, by another happy accident, an acquaintance passed, 
 coming from Paris in a post-chaise. Madame du Chatelet, having gone 
 up to the chaise, saw in it with great joy an old friend of her house. 
 She informed him of her embarrassment, which he ended at once by 
 handing to madame the wherewithal to pay the debt and the expenses. 
 of the journey." 
 
 TWO MONTHS TS HIDING AT SCEAUX. 
 
 " When they were near Paris, M. de Voltaire alighted, and went to 
 a village a little way from the high-road. There he wrote a letter to 
 the Duchess du Maine, and had it carried by a peasant, who was 
 to wait for an answer. In this letter, M. de Voltaire informed the 
 princess of his adventure, and prayed her to give him at Sceaux, where 
 she then was, an asylum in which he could be concealed from his ene- 
 mies. Madame du Maine took his request in good j^art. A messen- 
 ger was sent him with a note, informing him tluit, on his arrival, he 
 would find at the gate of the chateau M. du Plessis, a confidential olii- 
 cer, who would conduct him to private rooms, which would be made 
 ready to receive him in the manner he desired. He waited until after 
 dark before going to Sceaux, and there he found M. du Plessis, who 
 conducted him, by a secret staircase, to a remote suite of rooms, which 
 was precisely what he wanted. It was from the depths of this retreat 
 that he went down every night to the chamber of the Duchess du 
 Maine, after she was in bed and her servants had retired. A single 
 footman, who was in her confidence, then set a little table by her 
 bedside, and brought M. de Voltaire's supper. The princess took 
 great pleasure in seeing him and talking with him. He amused her 
 by the gayety of his conversation, and she instructed him by telling 
 him many old court anecdotes which he did not know. Sometimes, 
 after the repast, he read to her a tale or a little romance which he had 
 written during the day on purpose to divert her. Thus were com- 
 posed 'Bahouc,' 'Memnon,' ' Scarmentado,' ' Micromegas,' ' Zadig,' of 
 which he wrote every day some chapters. 
 
 " On her part, Madame du Chatelet was shut up at home for nearly 
 six weeks, occupied in making arrangements for the payment of her 
 
 gambling debts Two months passed before M. de Voltaire 
 
 dared show himself or leave his rooms in the day-time. At last, Ma-
 
 628 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 dame du Cliatelet succeeded in appeasing the players wlio liad com- 
 plained of the words of M. de Voltaire Madame du Chatelet 
 
 hastened herself to carry this news to Sceaux, where Madame du 
 Maine retained her. M. de Voltaire then went out of his mysterious 
 asylum, and appeared at the court of the princess, where a number of 
 amiable and accomplished persons were always to be found. From 
 that moment the company were occupied in arranging festivals and 
 divertisements of all kinds for Madame la Duchesse in which every 
 one took part." 
 
 LONGCHAMP JOINS HIS MASTER AT SCEAUX. 
 
 " After the departure, so precipitate, of INIadame du Chatelet and M. 
 de Voltaire, I hastened to execute their ordei's. The packages were 
 immediately made. I hired a wagon to transport them to Valvin, 
 where I had them placed upon the water-coach, which did not arrive 
 at Paris until pretty late in the evening. Upon reaching the mansion, 
 I found Madame du Chatelet, and was surprised not to see M. de Vol- 
 taire. Madame told me that he was not in Paris, which redoubled my 
 surprise. She then explained to me the late proceedings, and the res- 
 olution which M. de Voltaire had taken not to show himself for some 
 time, and mentioned the retreat which he had chosen. The next day I 
 received a note from him, in which he told me to go to him at Sceaux, 
 and to bring with me in a hackney-coach the little traveling bureau 
 in which he usually kept his unfinished manuscripts, and which was 
 then in his parlor. He warned me not to arrive before eleven o'clock 
 in the evening, because at that hour I should find some one at the gate 
 of the chateau who would guide me to his apartments, and who 
 would cause to be carried in the little article of furniture of which he 
 was in need. I executed his orders to the letter, and was conducted 
 to a suite in the second story of the chateau, looking out upon the gar- 
 dens and a court-yard. In order to conceal who inhabited those roonas, 
 the shutters remained closed even in the day-time. 
 
 " Here I passed nearly two months with M. de Voltaire, without 
 seeing the sun, unless by stealth, or when I escaped on the sly to do 
 some errand in the village. During the first days of my confinement 
 in this new kind of prison, where I had scarcely anything to do, I 
 slept a great part of the day ; for idleness was to me a punishment. 
 It was necessary that we should not be seen. I kept close all day, 
 and did not go down until eleven in the evening to sup with one of the 
 footmen of tlie chateau, to whom I had been recommended. I usually 
 prolonged this repast until one or two o'clock in the morning, as it 
 was the only one I took in the twenty-four hours. M. de Voltaire did 
 not descend to the room of Madame la Duchesse until every one else
 
 PRECIPITATE FLIGHT FROM COURT. 529 
 
 had gone to bed, and did not return to liis own until a little before 
 daylight. 
 
 " This indefatigable man, to whom an idle life was still more insup- 
 portable than to me, laid in an ample supply of candles, by the aid of 
 which he wrote all the time when he was not asleep ; and he slept not 
 more than five or six hours, at most. He made me copy the tales 
 with which he was to regale Madame du Maine every evening. From 
 time to time he gave me some commissions for Paris. la that case, I 
 both went out and came back by night, and he remained alone during 
 the day. To remedy this inconvenience, he told me one day to bring 
 him from Paris a little Italian boy, whom he would employ to do his 
 errands, so that I could remain always with him, and said that he 
 would give him a place to sleep in a closet next to the room I occupied, 
 where there was a camp-bed. I easily found such a boy as he wanted, 
 a child of ten or eleven years, sufficiently intelligent, full of candor, 
 and M. de Voltaire was well satisfied with him. 
 
 " Here is a proof of his ingenuous character. One day I brought 
 some money from Paris for IM. de Voltaire, — a purse containing two 
 hundred louis d'or. Upon receiving it he put a part of the gold into 
 a purse which he had in his pocket, closed the other again, and placed 
 it in a little cupboard at the side of his chamber. In the same cup- 
 board was a pair of new shoes, which M. de Voltaire had brought, 
 but not yet worn, because they were too narrow. Some days after, 
 when I was gone out upon an errand, he took a fancy to wear those 
 shoes. He called Antoine, told him to take them from the cupboard 
 and carry them to a shoemaker in the village to be stretched upon a 
 last. The boy took the shoes, put them under his arm, and started. 
 He crossed the park, which was covered with a foot of snow, slipped, 
 plunged in, fell down, putting the pair of shoes now under one arm, 
 now under the other. He reached the village at last, and entered the 
 shop of a shoemaker, who, late as it was, was still at work. The man 
 took his last and tried to get it into one of the shoes, which he thought 
 at first was hobnailed, since it seemed so heavy. Unable to get in 
 the last, he shook the shoe over a table, when there fell from it a 
 purse full of louis d'or. Antoine, no less surprised than himself, had 
 nevertheless the presence of mind to take the purse, and said, cry- 
 ing, that it was all a trick to prove his honesty. The man comforted 
 him as best he could, and, the work being done, the little fellow paid 
 him and returned. On seeing me, Antoine said, with the tears in his 
 eyes, that he was an honest boy, incapable of doing wrong, and that 
 it was unfair to test him in tliat manner, and a great piece of good 
 luck for him that the money had not fallen out on the way. I con- 
 soled him, praised his honesty, and told liim that it was only an eflfect 
 VOL. I. 34
 
 530 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 of the distraction of M. de Voltaire, who had thrown this money into 
 the cupboard without looking, and had not thought of it again. 
 
 " I took the purse to M. de Voltaire, and related Antoine's advent- 
 ure, which confirmed the good opinion he had of him. He put the 
 purse upon his table, and told me we could both go to supper. For 
 his part, he seldom went down to Madame du Maine until between 
 one and two in the morning, and sometimes I returned before he did, 
 each of us having a key to the rooms. This time I came back from 
 supper later than usual. While I was at supper, M. de Voltaire, 
 wishing to know if the money was right, spread it out upon that bu- 
 reau of his which was covered with a green cloth ; after which he 
 went away, forgetting to lock it up, and leaving two lighted candles 
 upon the table, two others upon the mantel-piece, and a door open. 
 While going up-stairs I was astonished to see light in the corridor, and 
 still more astonished to find all the doors open, the gold spread out, 
 and M. de Voltaire absent. It frightened me, and a little after the 
 idea occurred to me to count the sum, in order to ascertain if it was 
 all there. Upon his return I remonstrated upon his imprudence, add- 
 ing that, for my own satisfaction, I had counted the coins upon the 
 table, and there were one hundred and sixty-five louis. ' That is my 
 count,' said he. I asked him if he had actual need of the money. 
 He said, ' No.' ' Very well, then,' said I, ' permit me to be the guard- 
 ian of this sum, that at least I may be sure of its not having a third 
 adventure before the day is over.' He laughed and consented. 
 
 " Meanwhile, we began to be tired of our retreat. M. de Voltaire 
 took no exercise, slept little, employed all his time in writing, not by 
 the feeble light of a lamp, but by that of wax candles, no less heating 
 to the blood. His health was visibly impaired. For nearly two 
 months we led this solitary life at Sceaux, when, one fine day, Ma- 
 dame du Chatelet arrived, and informed Madame du Maine thai, there 
 was no longer any reason why M. de Voltaire should not show him- 
 self in public. Madame du Maine urged them to remain at Sceaux 
 and join the brilliant company already assembled. The divertise- 
 ments were varied every day : comedy, opera, balls, concerts. Among 
 other comedies they played ' The Prude ; ' and before the repre- 
 sentation M. de Voltaire came upon the stage and pronounced a 
 new prologue appropriate to the occasion. Madame du Chatelet, who 
 was as good a musician as actress, acquitted herself to perfection in 
 the role of Isse. She played still better, if possible, the part of Fan- 
 chon, in the ' Originals,' — a comedy by M. de Voltaire, written and 
 played previously at Cirey. This character seemed to be made ex- 
 pressly for her ; her vivacity, her cheerfulness, her gayety, were dis- 
 played after Nature's own self. Ballets, also, were executed by the 
 first dancers of the opera.
 
 PRECIPITATE FLIGHT FROM COURT. 531 
 
 " Among so many varied pleasures must be mentioned the reading 
 of several novelties, in verse and in prose, which were given in the 
 drawing-room when the company assembled before dinner, Madame 
 du Maine had made known to M. de Voltaire her desire that he should 
 communicate to her little court those tales and romances which had 
 so much amused her every evening. M. de Voltaire obeyed her. 
 He knew as well how to read as to compose. Those little works 
 were found delightful, and every one pressed him not to deprive the 
 public of them. He objected that those ti'ifles of society would not 
 bear the light of publicity, and did not deserve to appear in it. He 
 was obliged at length to promise that, on his return to Paris, he would 
 think of having them printed. 
 
 " These amusements continued more than three weeks, which seemed 
 to pass as quickly as a fairy dream. IMadame du Chatelet then took 
 leave of Madame du Maine, thanked her for all she had done for them, 
 and returned to Paris." 
 
 VOLTAIRE CIRCUMVENTS A PUBLISHER. 
 
 " On reaching home, after three months' absence, M. de Voltaire, 
 unwilling to fail in keeping the promise he had given at Sceaux, re- 
 solved to publish some of the little works which had been asked for 
 there. He first made choice of the romance of ' Zadig,' one of the 
 most striking, and his intention was not to let the public have it be- 
 fore Madame du Maine and her society had enjoyed the first reading, 
 nor before he had sent copies to all his friends, — a thing not devoid 
 of difficulty, even if he had it printed on his own account. Plis 
 experience instructed him on this point. He wished, on the present 
 occasion, not to be the dupe of publishers, and, to attain that end, this 
 is what he contrived. He sent for M. Prault, who had previously 
 
 published pretty editions of several of his works He asked M. 
 
 Prault how much he would charge for an edition of a thousand copies 
 of the little romance of ' Zadig.' The price not suiting M. de Vol- 
 taire, he said the printing would be put off to another time. M. Prault, 
 intending to print extra copies for his own advantage, returned the 
 next day, and was not ashamed to reduce his price more than a third, 
 pretending that he could economize a little both in the workmanship 
 and in the paper. M. de Voltaire said that he wished his work printed 
 in the best manner and upon fine paper, a sample of which he showed, 
 at the same time designating the form and type. He said that he 
 would himself revise the last proof, and he requested that the sheets 
 should be sent to him as soon as they came from the press. M. Prault 
 consenting, M. de Voltaire gave him one half of the romance of ' Za- 
 dig,' and told him that while that part was in the press he would
 
 532 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 revise the other half with care, and perhaps add something to it. The 
 bargain was carried out. M. de Voltaire, having received the first 
 printed sheet, easily calculated that the last chapter of tlie part which 
 M. Prault was printing would end with a certain page. 
 
 " The next day he sent for one Machuel, a Rouen printer, whom he 
 knew to be in Paris, and proposed to liim also to print the romance on 
 the author's account. This printer took the job at a lower price than 
 M. Prault. M. de Voltaire, alleging that he wished to make some 
 changes in the first part of the work, gave him the second half, and 
 told him the number of his first printed page. When all was finished, 
 and the sheets of both halves had been brought in, he saw with pleas- 
 ure that the two parts agreed perfectly in type and paper. The two 
 publishers having no more eopy, and calling to get the remainder of 
 the work, he put them off for some days on various pretexts. Mean- 
 while, he charged me to seek out some women to fold and sew the 
 sheets, and to buy some elegantly colored paper with which to cover 
 the volumes. I at once found in the quarter Saint-Jacques all that he 
 wanted, and brought back with me two women, who in less than three 
 days folded, sewed, and covered all the copies. He ordered me to 
 make forthwith a package of two hundred copies for Madame du 
 Maine, and to put in envelopes an infinite number of others. He 
 dictated to me the addresses, which I wrote upon the envelopes ; being 
 those of all his friends and even his acquaintances, as well those liv- 
 ing in Paris as in the provinces. That done, all were sent ofE the 
 same day by express, by mail, and by the coaches. The next day 
 ' Zadig' was a subject of conversation in all Paris. 
 
 " The two booksellers, astounded, ran to the .house of M. de Vol- 
 taire, where they poured forth complaints and reproaches, and asked 
 payment of the sum agreed upon. He told them that, having heard a 
 rumor of their printing more than the prescribed number of sheets, 
 and fearing lest copies might be circulated among the public before 
 his friends had seen the work, which would have frustrated his design, 
 he had been able to think of no better means of preventing it than the 
 little stratagem he had employed. He paid them for the work they 
 had done, and even added something as a mark of his satisfaction with 
 the excellent style in which the printing was executed. He added, by 
 way of completing their consolation, that they could increase their 
 profits by each printing his half and exchanging sheets with the other, 
 so as to make complete copies; or, if they preferred it, each might set 
 in type the other half, and publish an edition of his own. They put a 
 good face upon the matter, begged him to continue his favor toward 
 them, and, I believe, acted upon his advice ; for new editions of ' Za- 
 dig ' immediately appeared both in France and in foreign countries." 

 
 PRECIPITATE FLIGHT FROM COURT. 533 
 
 A WINTER JOURNEY FROM PARIS TO CIREr. 
 
 " On her return from Sceaux, Madame du Chatelet, either to forget 
 her losses or merely to economize, took the resolution to go with M. 
 de Voltaire and pass the rest of the winter at her estate of Cirey in 
 Champagne. She preferred to travel by night. It was the month of 
 January ; the earth was covered with snow, and it was freezing very 
 hard. JMadanie had caused to be made ready all the traps which us- 
 ually accompanied her in her travels. Her old carriage was loaded 
 like a coach, and it was drawn by post-horses. Alter Madame du 
 Chatelet and M. de Voltaire were well wedged in side by side in the 
 cariiage, they placed the femme de chamhre on the front seat, with the 
 bandboxes and the various effects of her mistress. Two lackeys were 
 posted behind, and we got upon the road towards nine o'clock in the 
 evening. 
 
 "I rode on before as postilion, that they might find horses ready 
 for them, and not have to wait for relays. They were to make one 
 stop for rest at La Chapelle, a chateau thi-ee leagues beyond Nangis, 
 belonging to M. de Chauvelin, where I was to arrive before them, to 
 have a supper prepai-ed and to light a fire in their rooms. I did not wait 
 for them at the post-houses, but kept on in advance, according to their 
 orders. It was an hour after midnight when I reached the post-house 
 of Nangis. It was the festival of the place, and the postilions, not ex- 
 pecting any one at that hour and in such weather, had gone to divert 
 themselves at a ball at the other end of the town. It was in vain, 
 tlierefore, that I cracked my whip and shouted for tlie door to open. 
 No one responded. I dismounted, and knocked with all my strength 
 with the heel of my boot. At last, roused by this noise, a neighbor, 
 putting his head out of the window, told me that there was no one at 
 home, and that all the postilions were gone to the ball. I asked him 
 if I could not hire some one to run thither and get the postilions at 
 once. He offered to go himself, and in less than a quarter of an hour 
 he returned with two postilions, which was the number re(piired for 
 the carriages. The time thus lost seemed to me sutRcient to allow for 
 the arrival of the carriage, and I was a little uneasy at the delay. I 
 hesitated a moment whether to go on or return to find them ; but reflect- 
 ing that our travelers would be very much dissatisfied if, on arriving 
 at La Chapelle, they should not find their orders exactly executed, I 
 determined to continue my journey ; and so much the more as there re- 
 mained three long leagues to go, by a cross-road with which I was not 
 acquainted. 
 
 *' Unable to procure a guide, I had the road explained to me several 
 times. I was told that, in going out of this town, I had only to follow
 
 534 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 the high-road to the first left-hand turning. From that point the white 
 horse they gave me, which knew that road perfectly, would serve me 
 as a guide, and with the bridle upon his neck would take me straio-lit 
 to La Chapelle. I followed these directions, and after an hour and a 
 half found myself opposite to the gate of a chateau, where the horse 
 stopped of his own accord. The concierge, who expected no one, was 
 gone to bed in the interior of the chateau, which was separated from the 
 gate-way by a vast court-yard. In vain, therefore, I called and shouted ; 
 uo one replied. Then, leading my horse by the bridle, I endeavored 
 to go round the chateau, to see if I could make myself heard better at 
 some other place. I came at last to a little door where there was 
 a bell, which I rang several times. I saw with pleasure that I was 
 heard ; a gardener came and asked me who I was and what I wanted. 
 I having answered him, he went to wake the concierge, who soon came 
 and let me in. He immediately roused the servants, lighted a great 
 fire in the kitchen and fires in the chambers. Some pigeons were 
 brought and a chicken, which were immediately prepared and put down 
 to roast. They added everything which they could find suitable to 
 satisfy travelers, whose appetite ought to be well diposed. Neverthe- 
 less, despite all the time thus employed, they did not arrive. The day 
 was about to dawn, and, my uneasiness increasing at every moment, I 
 decided to return to Nangis, in order to discover what could have hap- 
 pened to them. I mounted, and set out from the chateau toward eight 
 o'clock in the morning. I had gone some hundreds of paces when I 
 perceived a carriage coming towards me very slowly, which I soon rec- 
 ognized to be that of Madame du Chatelet. When I had ridden up, 
 they soon told me the cause of their delay ; and the story was related 
 afterwards to me in detail by ihefemme de chambre, and confirmed by 
 M. de Voltaire himself. 
 
 " About half-way to the village of Nangis, the hinder spi'ing of the 
 carriage broke and let the carriage down upon the road, upon the side 
 where M. Voltaire was seated. Madame and hev femme fell upon him, 
 with all their bundles and bandboxes, which were loosely piled on 
 the front seat on each side of the woman, and which, following natural 
 laws, were precipitated toward the corner where M. de Voltaire was 
 compressed. Half stifled under such a load, he uttered piercing cries, 
 but it was impossible to change his position. He had to remain as he 
 was until the two lackeys, one of whom was hurt by his tumble, came 
 up with the postilions to unload the carriage. First, they drew out 
 all the bundles, then the women, then M. de Voltaire. They could 
 get them out only by the door of the carriage which was uppermost ; 
 and hence, one of the lackeys and a postilion, having climbed upon the 
 body of the carriage, drew them out as from a well, seizing them by 
 
 .
 
 PRECIPITATE FLIGHT FROM COURT. 535 
 
 the first members which presented themselves, arms or legs, and passed 
 them into the hands of their comrades below, who put them on the 
 ground ; for there was neither step nor stool by which they could be 
 assisted to descend. It was then the question how to raise the car- 
 riage and see what had caused its overturn. These four men were not 
 strong enough to do it, so overloaded was the roof with baggage, and 
 it was necessary to dispatch a postilion on horseback for help in the 
 next village, a mile and a half distant. 
 
 " While he was gone, M. de Voltaire and madame were seated side by 
 side upon the cushions of the carriage, which had been drawn out and 
 placed upon the road, that was covered with snow ; and there, almost 
 benumbed with cold notwithstanding their furs, they admired the 
 beauty of the heavens. It is true, the sky was perfectly clear, the stars 
 shone with the utmost brilliancy, the whole horizon was in view ; no 
 house, no tree, concealing from them the least part of it. It is known 
 that astronomy was always one of the favorite studies of our two phi- 
 losophers. Ravished by the magnificent spectacle displayed above 
 and around them, they discoursed, shivering, upon the nature and the 
 movements of the stars and upon the destination of so many immense 
 globes scattered in space. They wanted nothing but telescopes to be 
 perfectly hap{)y. Their minds being thus lost in the depths of the 
 skies, they were no longer conscious of their disagreeable position on 
 the eartli, or rather upon the snow, and in the midst of fragments of ice. 
 
 " Their learned contemplation and discourse were interrupted only 
 by the return of the postilion, who brought with him four men, fur- 
 nished with cord, tools, and a false spring. The carriage being set 
 upright, the real cause of the accident was perceived, and they mended 
 it as well as they could with the materials they had brouglit with them. 
 Twelve francs were given them when their work was done ; and 
 they returned toward their village, little content with this sum, and 
 grumbling at it. 
 
 "The carriage went on again, but had scarcely gone fifty paces 
 when the cords, not being strong enough, became loose and partly 
 broken, and the vehicle came down a second time, but without over- 
 turning, which rendered this new break-down much less disagreeable 
 to our travelers. 
 
 " Some one ran quickly after the workmen who had just left. They, 
 however, did not wish to return. They were brought back by force of 
 promises that they should be better paid. With the assistance of the 
 postilions, they raised the body of the coach with levers, and mended it 
 more strongly, without deranging the interior of the vehicle. For 
 greater safety, they proposed to these workmen to go with tliem as far 
 as Nangis, which they did, and the carriage arrived there without other
 
 536 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 accident. This time the men were liberally paid, and they went home 
 well satisfied. The spring was solidly repaired by a blacksmith of 
 that town, but the body of the vehicle was so badly damaged that the 
 blacksmith advised them to go no faster than a walk, if they wished 
 to prevent accidents ; and it was so that they went nine miles before 
 arriving at a good harbor. 
 
 *' Having reached the chateau, they warmed themselves thoroughly 
 before a large fire, which was not less necessary to them than nourish- 
 ment. After having supped, or, to speak more correctly, breakfasted, 
 for it was daylight, they withdrew to their rooms, where good beds had 
 been prej^ared for them, and they slept very well till late in the 
 afternoon. M. de Voltaire, having got up, ordered me- to get workmen 
 to repair the body of the carriage, v/hich proved to be in such bad 
 order that it took two whole days to put it in tolerable condition. On 
 the third day we left La Chapelle, and arrived at lengtli, without new 
 delay or accident, at Cirey, the estate of Madame du Chatelet." 
 
 MADAME PROJECTS A PRIVATE EDITION OF " LA PUCELLE." 
 
 " Madame da Chatelet had long had a copy of ' La Pucelle,' 
 written with her own hand. Her friends, both men and women, often 
 importuned her to read portions of it to them. This trouble, from 
 which she wished to be freed, suggested to her an odd idea, which 
 was to print the poem secretly at her chateau of Cirey during her 
 sojourn there in the following year, 1749. Her design was to have 
 but a very small number of copies printed, to be distributed among 
 those of her friends whom she knew to be discreei. Counting in 
 advance upon the acquiescence of M. de Voltaire, fhe began, even 
 in the winter, to prepare quietly for the execution of her project. 
 In order to confine the secret to fewer persons, she resolved to take 
 part in the work herself, with two faithful workmen, one of whom 
 was to instruct her in making up the pages. This was an adroit 
 and intelligent printer named Lambert, who for a number of years 
 enjoyed the confidence of Madame du Chatelet and of M. de Voltaire. 
 He performed well the commissions which they gave him, and he be- 
 came their usual purveyor of forbidden books. Madame charged him 
 to select a comrade for the following spring, and the conditions were 
 arranged to their satisfaction. 
 
 " Lambert bought two fonts of new type, well assorted, from a 
 type-founder of his acquaintance, who gave him pretty long credit and 
 took notes in payment. He procured also some forms and a press, 
 and the other necessary articles. The whole was packed and depos- 
 ited with a commissioner of transportation, who, upon the first advice, 
 was to send it to Bar-sur-Aube, whence the servants of Madame
 
 PRECIPITATE FLIGHT FROM COURT. 537 
 
 du ChAtelet would have conveyed it to Cirey. According to the pro- 
 ject, Madame la Marquise was to preside at the case, that is to say, 
 at the type-setting, with the aid of Lambert, who, with the assistance 
 of his companion, was to work the press. They counted upon M. de 
 Voltaire as proof-reader. 
 
 " All being thus ver}^ well arranged, there remained only one tri- 
 fling difficulty, whicli madame flattered herself to be able to overcome 
 easily : it was merely to get the author's consent. He ought to have 
 been told of it the first, but he was told the last. She ended where 
 she ought to have begun ; for madame must have known that the 
 operation could not go on in the chateau without M. de Voltaire's 
 knowing it. She cherislied the idea that to oblige her he would con 
 sent to a thing which would remain secret between them and a very 
 small number of sure friends. 
 
 " She was deceived. Scarcely had she spoken a word of it, when he 
 rejected the idea. At first he thought it was only a jest, but when 
 he saw that the scheme was serious, and that preparations were already 
 made, he was much excited, and dwelt with energy upon the conse- 
 quences of such an enterprise ; among others, the danger of seeing 
 the book fall into the hands of strangers, whether by indiscretion or 
 by accident, and so reach the public, which would expose both of them 
 to serious inconveniences and bitter relets. She could not resist the 
 force of those reasons. It was no longer a question of printing ' La 
 Pucelle.' She explained the matter afterwards to Lambert; the 
 materials, which were still at Paris, were given back to the dealers, 
 who consented to receive them, on being indemnified for their trouble. 
 Lambert was recompensed for his pains, and took upon himself to 
 satisfy the comrade whom he had engaged." 
 
 MADAME LA MARQUISE WILL NOT BE IMPOSED UPOX. 
 
 " Madame la Marquise du Chatelet, who had much enjoyed her last 
 visit to the court of the King of Poland, and had promised that prince 
 to return the next summer, was well disposed to keep her word, and 
 took, with M. de Voltaire, the resolution to go thither without stop- 
 ping on the road, and the carriage was therefore furnished with some 
 provisions. But on reaching Clullons-sur-Marne, madame felt herself 
 slightly indisposed, and made the postilion stop opposite the Bell Inn. 
 There, while they changed horses, she had a fancy to take a bowl of 
 broth. The landlady, having ascertained who it was she had the 
 honor to serve, came to the carriage door, having a napkin under her 
 arm, a porcelain plate in her hand upon a silver tray, and a porringer 
 of silver containing the broth. While madame was taking it the 
 horses were already put to, and ready to start. I hastened to carry
 
 538 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 back the plate and the other articles to the landlady, and asked her 
 how much we had to pay. ' One louis,' said she. I was almost pros- 
 trated at this word ; then, recovering from my astonishment, I cried 
 out upon the enormity of the price, and said to her that I would have 
 thouf^ht a crown, or even four francs, too much. She declared she 
 could not abate one sou. Upon this I went to explain the matter to 
 madame, who was of my opinion. The landlady, who had followed 
 me, then approached the carriage door, and upon madame represent- 
 ino- to her how excessive her demand was she replied that she was 
 not accustomed to have her charges disputed, and that it was her fixed 
 price. I took the liberty to remark that with a crown's worth of 
 meat I could make several bowls of broth, and the meat would still 
 remain over and above. Consequently I believed I should be paying 
 her well in offering her that crown. She persisted, declaring that all 
 the persons who did her the honor to alight at her house, whether 
 they took only a fresh egg, a bowl of broth, or a dinner, invariably 
 paid the same price. ' Very well,' replied I, ' we have not alighted ; 
 Madame la Marquise has not left the carriage, and has not set foot 
 upon the threshold of your door.' 
 
 "M. de Voltaire, joining in the colloquy, said to the landlady, 
 ' Your method, madame, seems to me as new as it is strange, and I 
 believe it very little advantageous to your house ; for, in fact, all trav- 
 elers are not in a condition to give twenty-four francs for a bowl of 
 broth, and for one or two customers who fall, without knowing it, into 
 your i\et you are likely to lose a hundred others." Thereupon the 
 woman began to be augry and to dispute with a loud voice, and at 
 the noise she made one, two, three, four neighbors and more left 
 their shops and came to hear what was going on. Soon a numerous 
 populace ran from all directions and grouped themselves around the 
 carriage, clamoring and wishing to know what was the matter. All 
 asked and answered at the same time ; it seemed as if a sedition was 
 going to burst forth in the town. All that we could discern amid 
 so many squeaking voices was that the landlady was in the right. 
 M. de Voltaire saw plainly that there was no means of gaining the 
 suit against so powerful a i)arty. He was of opinion that it was nec- 
 essary to give it up, and to get out of the scrape like Harlequin, that 
 is, by paying. This I did, and we set out, not without exciting the 
 laughter of all that crowd. Madame du Chatelet swore well that, no 
 matter how exhausted she might be in traveling from Paris to Lor- 
 raine, she would never stop in that cursed town, and the broth of 
 Chulons-sur-Marne was not rubbed out of her tablets."
 
 PRECIPITATE FLIGHT FROM COURT. 539 
 
 VOLTAIRE AND LONGCHAMP MAKE A JOURNEY TO PARIS. 
 
 " Fifteen days after their arrival at Luneville they learned by a 
 letter from M. d'Argental that the French actors were preparing 
 to give immediately the first representation of ' Semiramis.' They 
 vrould have both liked to be present; bnt madame, fearing to dis- 
 please the King of Poland, consented to remain at Luneville and to 
 let M. de Voltaire set out alone for Paris. He took only me with him, 
 and placed me on the front seat of the post-chaise. As he had time 
 to spare, he resolved to visit on the way some persons of his acquaint- 
 ance, and particularly to go through Reims, to see M. de Pouilli, his 
 old college friend, who had invited him many a time. We started, and 
 our first bait was at the country-house of the Bishop of Chrilons-sur- 
 Marne, a colleague of M. de Voltaire at the French Academy, and his 
 friend. He was very well received, and passed three days there ; and 
 even on the fourth that prelate consented to his leaving with reluc- 
 tance, because the weather was threatening. In fact, at the end of 
 some hours the sky was covered with very black and frightful clouds ; 
 whirlwinds of dust almost hid the road from view ; we were dazzled 
 and deafened by the lightning and thunder. Half-way between Cha- 
 lons and Reims this storm ended by a rain so abundant that the foot- 
 path and ditches on each side of the road were both overflowed. M. 
 de Voltaire, fearing to be overturned and drowned, made the chaise 
 stop in the middle of the road, which, with the adjoining fields, was 
 one sheet of water. He attentively considered this spectacle, and 
 suffered much to see the postilion and his horses drenched while we 
 were sheltered. At length, the weather improving and the waters 
 having subsided, we could continue our journey, and at night-fall 
 reached Reims. M. de Voltaire was expected, as he had sent a note 
 from Chfdons to M. de Pouilli, asking hospitality. 
 
 " A grand repast was prepared, to which had been invited several 
 friends of M. de Voltaire ; and they made it a festival to meet that 
 celebrated man. The beginning of the supper was noisy enough, 
 every one talking at once. The guests interrupted one another, and 
 M. de Voltaire kept on eating and said not a word. At last, the de- 
 sire to hear him speak induced a moment of silence. M. de Pouilli, 
 then alluding to the dangers which M. de Voltaire had run upon the 
 road, asked liim some questions on tlie subject. Replying, he entered 
 into details, and described the storm he had encountered in a man- 
 ner so pathetic that the whole company listened with the greatest in- 
 terest, scarcely daring to breathe for fear of interrupting him, or to 
 lose a word of what he was saying. His narrative, however, was 
 quite natural, without emphasis and without gesture. The truth of
 
 540 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 the images, the simplicity of his words, their variety and suitableness, 
 sufficed to excite the highest degree of emotion. Even I, who had 
 been witness of the event, and who heard him relate it with the same 
 attention as the guests, believed for the moment that I was again 
 upon the high-road and in the midst of the inundation. After supper, 
 when the company was gone, M. de Voltaire, before going to bed, 
 talked again a quarter of an hour with M. de, Pouilli, who felicitated 
 himself upon having spoken of the storm. ' For my part,' he added, 
 ' I was in no degree astonished at the impression which you made 
 upon them ; for I assure you that never did the description of a tem- 
 pest give me more affright and at the same time more pleasure.' 
 
 " The next morning we took the road to Paris, where we arrived 
 in the evening." 
 
 THE PLOT AGAINST THE NEW TRAGEDT. 
 
 " The actors had already had one rehearsal of the tragedy of ' Se- 
 miramis.' They rehearsed it several times in the presence of the au- 
 thor, who gave them some useful hints, from which they profited. Al- 
 though he was well enough satisfied with their ability, and could count 
 upon their zeal, and had elaborated his tragedy with much care, he 
 was far from daring to depend upon its success. He was not ignorant 
 that Piron, who thought himself much superior to him, and was jeal- 
 ous of his successes, had fomented a powerful cabal against ' Semira- 
 mis,' and that to this band were rallying the soldiers of Corbulon, as 
 he used to call the partisans of Crubillon, in allusion to a passage in 
 one of his pieces. The latter were in truth much less sincere admirers 
 of their hero than jealous enemies of Voltaire ; and as M. de Crebillon 
 had also written a ' Semiramis,' they assumed that no other author 
 should dare to make a better one. 
 
 "To counterbalance this league, M. de Voltaire had recourse to a 
 measure little worthy of him, indeed, but which he believed necessary, 
 and which, in fact, was not without effect. He bought a number of 
 pit tickets, which he gave to his friends and acquaintances, who in 
 turn distributed them among their friends. Thieriot, Lambert, the 
 Abbe de La Mare, and others, whose devotion he knew, acquitted 
 themselves very well of this commission. I had also my share of tick- 
 ets to <:ive away, and I placed them in good hands ; by which I mean 
 hands capable of clapping well and at the proper places. The day of 
 the first representation arrivea (August 29, 1748). The champions 
 on both sides did not fail to be present on the field of battle, armed 
 cap-a-pie, among whom I held firmly my rank of foot-soldier. Each 
 party was confident of victory, and the struggle was tlierefore hard 
 and painful. Even during the first scene there was excitement in the 
 
 I,
 
 PEECIPITATE FLIGHT FROM COURT. 541 
 
 pit; some bravos, some murmurs, were heard, aud even some faint 
 hisses. But from the start the applause at least balanced the signs of 
 discontent, and finished by stifling them. The piece held its own, 
 ended very well, aud its success seemed not equivocal The an- 
 tagonists of M. de Voltaire renewed their attempts on the following 
 nights, but they served only the better to assure his triumph. Piron, 
 to console himself for the defeat of his party, employed iiis usual re- 
 source, and assailed ' Semiramis ' with spiteful epigrams which did it 
 harm." 
 
 THE AUTHOR OF " SEMIRAMIS " GOES IN DISGUISE TO HEAR THE 
 VERDICT OF THE CAFE DE PROCOPE. 
 
 "M. de Voltaire, who loved always to correct and improve his 
 works, desired to know more particularly and with his own ears what 
 was said for and against his tragedy, and he thought he could do this 
 nowhere better than at the Cafe de Procope, which was called also the 
 Cave of Procope, because it was very dark, even in broad daylight, 
 and by no means well lighted in the evening, and because poets were 
 often seen there, gaunt and pallid, who looked like ghosts. In this 
 cafe, which is opposite the theatre, had been held for more than sixty 
 years the tribunal of the self-styled Aristarques, who imagined them- 
 selves judges in the last resort of pieces, authors, and actors. M. de 
 Voltaire wished to appear there disguised and entirely incognito. It 
 was at the end of the play that the judges used to begin wliat they 
 called their grand sessions. 
 
 " On the day of the second representation of ' Semiramis,' he bor- 
 rowed the garb of an ecclesiastic. He put on a cassock, with a long 
 cloak, black stockings, a girdle, bands, and, that notliing might be 
 wanting, a breviary. Upon his head he wore an ample wig without 
 powder, ill dressed, which covered more than half his cheeks, and left 
 visible scarcely anytiiing of his face except the end of a long nose. 
 This was surmounted by a large three-cornered hat, much dilapidated. 
 It was in this costume that the author of ' Semiramis ' went on foot to 
 the Cafe de Procope, where he established himself in a corner, and, 
 while waiting for the end of the performance, called for a cup of tea, a 
 roll, and a newspaper. He had not long to wait before the frequenters 
 of the parterre and of the cafe arrived. There were present persons 
 of both the parties, and they entered at once into the discussion of the 
 new tragedy. His partisans and his adversaries pleaded with warmth, 
 and gave reasons for their judgment. Some impartial persons of- 
 fered their opinion, and repeated beautiful verses of the piece. 
 
 "All this time M. de Voltaire, with spectacles upon his nose, his 
 head bent over the newspaper which he pretended to read, listened to
 
 542 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 the debates, profited by the reasonable remarks, and suffered much 
 from hearing absurd observations witliout being able to repl}', which 
 put him into bad humor. In this way, during an hour and a half, 
 he had the courage and patience to hear people reason and gossip upon 
 ' Semiramis ' without uttering one word. At length, all these pretended 
 arbiters of the renown of authors having retired without converting 
 one another, M. de Voltaire left also, took a cab in the Rue Mazarine, 
 and reached home at eleven o'clock. Although I knew his disguise, 
 I confess that I was again struck and almost frightened on seeing him 
 accoutred as he was. I took him for a spectre of Ninus who was ap- 
 pearing to me, or, at least, for one of those Hiberian arguers arrived 
 at the end of their career, after having exhausted themselves in syllo- 
 gisms in the schools. I helped him shed all these traps, which I took 
 back the next day to their true owner. After having made some cor- 
 rections in several of the parts, and given them to the actors, M. de 
 Voltaire did not wish to remain in Paris, and no longer doubting the 
 success of his piece he set out satisfied, and eager to rejoin Madame 
 du Chutelet at Luneville." 
 
 VOLTAIRE RESCUES HIMSELF FROM DEATH AND A COUNTRY DOCTOR. 
 
 " M. de Voltaire, when he arrived at Paris (in August, 1748), did 
 not enjoy very good health. A slow fever wore upon him severely. 
 Rest and his usual regimen could have calmed and even cured him, 
 but it was impossible to think of rest in Paris, where he was always in 
 agitation : by day, visits and continual running about; at night, writ- 
 ing, kept up almost until morning. He scarcely reserved some hours 
 for sleep. His fever increased. Although extremely fatigued and 
 suffering much, he persisted not less in setting out for Luneville. 
 
 " At Chrdons, where we stopped at the post-house, it was necessary 
 to rest, for it was impossible for M. de Voltaire to go further. He 
 had no longer the strength to stand or talk, and I was obliged to carry 
 him from his carriage to a bed. Fearing that this was the beginning 
 of a dangerous disease, 1 thought it my duty to notify the Bishop and 
 the Intendant of Chrdons, who had always testified much regard for 
 him. Both came to see him the same day, and ^iressed him to let him- 
 self be carried to one of tlieir houses, that he might be the better cared 
 for. M. de Voltaire excused himself from accepting their offer, assur- 
 ing them that he already felt himself better since he had taken some 
 repose in bed. The magistrate insisted upon sending him his own 
 doctor, who, in fact, came to see him in the evening, examined him, 
 and prescribed bleeding and various medicaments. M. de Voltaire 
 listened to him with much patience, and replied to his questions as 
 laconically as possible ; but when the doctor was gone, he told me
 
 PRECIPITATE FLIGHT FROM COURT. 543 
 
 that he should follow none of his directions, for he knew how to man- 
 age himself as well in sickness as in health, and he should continue to 
 be his own doctor, as he had always been. The bishop and the mag- 
 istrate then urged that, at least, some of their servants should come 
 and take care of him. This oifer he also declined, saying that a woman 
 was already engaged to watch with him and make his broth, and that 
 I should serve as her assistant and do his errands out-of-doors. 
 
 " M. de Voltaire had eaten nothing since we left Paris. As night 
 was coming on, I proposed to him to take some broth, to which he con- 
 sented ; but scarcely had it touched his lips, when he pushed it away 
 and shook his head, intimating that he did not wish any. Then, with 
 a voice scarcely audible, he entreated me not to abandon him, and to 
 remain near him in order to cast a little earth upon his body when he 
 had breathed his last. I was surprised and still more alarmed at these 
 words, and indeed not without reason, for that night was one of his 
 worst. He had a burning fever accompanied by delirium, and when 
 the fit was passed there was scarcely any life left in him. Next morn- 
 ing he was again visited by the bishop, the intendant, and the doctor. 
 Those gentlemen could scarcely get a word from him, and they saw 
 him steadily refuse all the drugs the doctor tried to make him swallow. 
 On leaving him they did not conceal their apprehension of seeing him 
 perish, and hasten his end by his obstinacy in refusing to take what 
 they recommended for his relief. 
 
 " When they were gone he made me come near his bed, and putting 
 into my hand a purse full of gold, which had been in the drawer of 
 his night-table, he said to me that if he yielded to his malady his in- 
 tention was that I should keep that sum, which was all the good he 
 could do me at the moment ; but if, on the contrary, he escaped the 
 danger which threatened him, I was to give him back the purse, on ac- 
 count of the immediate use he should then have for it, and he would 
 supply its place by a recompense with which I should be better satis- 
 fied. He prayed me not to abandon him in his present situation, and 
 to remain with him to the last in order to close his eyes. I replied 
 with tears that I would never leave him, that his orders were sacred to 
 me, that I hojjed still to see him restored to health, and that that was 
 all I desired. I assured him he could count upon the sincerity of my 
 words, for I loved him, and was truly attached to him. 
 
 "■ On our arrival at Chrdons I had, unknown to him, written a few 
 lines to Madame Denis and to Madame du Chatelet, to inform them 
 of his sickness and of the place where he was. Nevertheless, as soon 
 as he had come to himself, I asked him if he did not think I had bet- 
 ter send for madarae his niece to come and bear him company. He 
 was then on ill terms with her, and had not seen her for some time.
 
 544 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 He absolutely forbade me to write to her. However, I received every 
 day letters from Madame Denis, and I gave her an account of her 
 uncle's health by every courier who left for Paris, as also Madame 
 du Chatelet by the couriers who went to Strasbourg by way of Lune- 
 ville. 
 
 '• As he continued to be unwilling to take any solid food whatever, 
 confining himself to certain drinks, such as weak tea, toast and water, 
 and a veiy refreshing kind of barley water, slightly aperient, he be- 
 came so weak that he could scarcely move any of his limbs. At 
 length, in the evening of the sixth day after our arrival at Chalons, 
 he astounded me by telling me to prepare everything for his depart- 
 ure, to pay what he owed, pack his trunk, and make arrangements 
 for leaving Chalons very early in the morning, since he did not wish 
 to die there. He added that if at the break of day he was still alive, 
 whatever his condition might be, I had only to carry him to his post- 
 chaise, and convey him to Luneville. He dictated to me some lines 
 to inform the bishop and the intendant of his sudden resolution, and 
 to thank them for their attentions. The landlord was charijed to for- 
 ward those notes to them after our departure. Then he rested, and I 
 occupied myself with the execution of his orders. 
 
 "The next day, all being ready and the horses harnessed, I carried 
 him out to his post-chaise, wrapped in his dressing-gown, and a coun- 
 terpane over it. I seated myself in front of him, so as not to lose him 
 from my sight, and to hold him up if he should fall forward ; to which 
 precaution I added that of tying together the hand-straps at the sides, 
 which formed a kind of barrier to keep him in place. It was in this 
 way that I brought him from Chalons to Saint-Dizier [about thirty 
 miles], without his uttering a single word. He was so weak, so pale, 
 that I dreaded not to be able to get him to Luneville alive. While 
 we were changing horses at Saint-Dizier, he seemed as if to wake 
 from a sleep all of a sudden, and asked me where we were and what 
 o'clock it was. Having answered these questions, I asked him some 
 questions in my turn, but he made no answer, and appeared to relapse 
 into unconsciousness. We resumed our journey. 
 
 " Between Saint-Dizier and Bar-le-Duc we met a lackey, whom Ma- 
 dame la Marquise du Chatelet had sent on a post-horse to. Chalons, to 
 ascertain more particularly the condition of the sick man, and to see 
 if he could bear transportation to Luneville. I mentioned this to M. 
 de Voltaire. It appeared to give him pleasure and restored him a lit- 
 tle. The lackey returned, and served us as a courier to have horses 
 got ready upon the road, so that we arrived at Nancy in the evening 
 before the closing of the gates. We alighted at the post-house, where 
 the lackey of madame waited upon us again, to know if there were
 
 PRECIPITATE FLIGHT FROM COURT. 545 
 
 any orders for liim. M. cle Voltaire charged me to tell him to push on 
 to Luneville, so that madame should get news of him the sooner. As 
 to himself, he could go no further without much risk. Exhausted 
 with fatigue and inanition, I put him into a good bed on arriving, 
 and had some broth brouijht to him. He drank the whole of it 
 with relish. Having myself no less need of nourishment, for I had 
 scarcely broken my fast all day, I had my supper brought into his 
 chamber, where also I had a camp-bed put for myself ; for I re- 
 mained with him night and day. Seeing the avidity with which I 
 devoured what they brought me, he said, ' How happy you are to have 
 a stomach and a digestion ! ' He had seen disappear half a leg of 
 mutton and a side-dish. They brought me, besides, two roast thrushes 
 and a dozen red-throats, which latter are the ortolans of the country, 
 and they were then in season. I asked him if he was not tempted to 
 suck one of those little birds. ' Yes,' said he, ' I would like to try 
 one.' I picked out two of the fattest, and carried them with a morsel 
 of the crumb of bread to his bed, where, half reclining, he ate a good 
 part of them with pleasure. Then he asked for a glass of wine mixed 
 with a third of water, which also he swallowed briskly enough. After 
 that he told me he felt some inclination to sleep, and that after I had 
 finished my supper I had only to go to bed. The next morning, as 
 soon as he awoke, we were to start for Luneville. 
 
 " Then, putting his head upon the pillow, he soon fell asleep. For 
 my part, I slept very well until five in the morning. By six all the 
 arrangements for our departure were made, and I only waited for M. 
 de Voltaire to wake. I saw him in a sleep so profound that nothing 
 could have induced me to interrupt it. I went from time to time to 
 look at him, thoroughly resolved to let him wake of his own accord. 
 I was far from expecting that that moment would not arrive until 
 three o'clock in the afternoon. At that hour he drew aside his cur- 
 tains, saying that he had slept well. He had slept better and longer 
 than he supposed. I helped him get up and dress. That sleep had 
 refreshed him, and I found him improved. After he had taken some 
 broth with bread in it, we set out at five in the afternoon for Lune- 
 ville [ten miles distant], where we arrived easily the same evening. 
 There M. de Voltaire found himself much better, and the presence of 
 Madame du Chatelet completed his recovery. In a few days she 
 made him resume all his usual gayety, and forget the tribulations he 
 had experienced on his journey from Paris. 
 
 "Thus it was that M. de Voltaire cured himself of a malady which 
 probably would have had graver consequences if he had delivered him- 
 self up to the -^sculapius of Chalons. His principle was that our 
 health often depends upon ourselves ; that its three pivots are sobriety, 
 
 VOL. I. 35
 
 546 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 temperance in all things, and moderate exercise ; that in almost all the 
 diseases, which are not the result of very serious accidents, or of rad- 
 ical vitiation of the internal organs, it suffices to aid nature, which is 
 endeavoring to restore us ; that it is necessary to confine ourselves to 
 a diet more or less severe and prolonged, suitable liquid nourishment, 
 and other simple means. In this manner I always saw him regulate 
 his conduct as long as I lived with him." 
 
 The events related in these passages from the graphic Long- 
 champ occurred between January, 1746, and September, 1748, 
 when Voltaire rejonied madame at the mimic court of Stan- 
 islas, at Luneville. One of his " anecdotes," which he tells 
 circumstantially, and with a great number of names of persons 
 concerned, has a particular interest for Americans, because it 
 relates to the Count d'Estaing, who commanded a French fleet 
 in American waters during the Revolutionary War, and after- 
 wards died upon the guillotine in the French Revolution. 
 This nobleman, still a young man when Longchamp left the 
 service of Voltaire, had run so deeply into debt that there ap- 
 peared no resource left to him but to sell his paternal estates, 
 and reduce himself to abs-olute penury. Voltaire, one of the 
 largest creditors, undertook to save the lands and put the 
 young man's debts in a train of liquidation. He bought 
 enough of the debts, at a serious reduction, to constitute him 
 the chief creditor, and thus secured the legal right to control 
 the affair. Other debts he arranged to pay at various periods, 
 and converted others into annuities. By these and other de- 
 vices he saved the estate entire, and enabled the count, while 
 still enjoying a sufficient revenue, to relieve it from incum- 
 brance within a reasonable time. " Often," adds Longchamp, 
 " I have seen M. d'Estaing at the house of M. de Voltaire, 
 whom he regarded as his best friend, and he said openly to 
 those who talked to him of his affairs that if there remained 
 to him something of his ancient fortune he was indebted for 
 it to M. de Voltaire alone." ^ 
 
 1 2 Memoires sur Voltaire et sur ses CEuvres, par Longchamp et Wagni^re, ses 
 Secretaires, 115 to 223. Paris, 1826.
 
 CHAPTER XLV. 
 
 DEATH OF MADAME DU CHATELET. 
 
 Perhaps it is fortunate for civilization that so many of the 
 most conspicuous men of that century managed their relations 
 with women so badly as they did. Their intense and shame- 
 ful sufferings instruct the student of the art of living. We 
 see them expecting to enjoy the good of women without pay- 
 ing the just price of that good. We see them shunning the 
 salutary restraints of marriage, and enduring inconveniences 
 ten times greater. The illustrious Goethe, a rover and a lib- 
 ertine from his youth, after shrinking from marriage with a 
 kind of horror, found himself, in his declining years, mated to 
 his inferior, a bloated drunkard, who transmitted her despotic 
 appetite to their son ; and that son, in his turn, became its 
 abject slave, and died miserably in the prime of his life. 
 Voltaire we have seen figuring for sixteen years as part of the 
 baggage of a wild marchioness, enduring more than the cost 
 and worry of married life, while enjoying very little of its 
 peace, happiness, and dignity, and nothing at all of its great- 
 est charm. 
 
 His long bondage was now to end in a catastrophe com- 
 pounded of the farcical and the tragic. Nature cannot be 
 cheated. Of all the multitudes of men who have attempted 
 to steal a good, not one has ever succeeded ; perpetual motion 
 is not more impossible. In the affairs of sex, nature, so far 
 as we can discern, has but one object, the production and due 
 custody of superior offspring. Slie seems to regard nothing 
 else as of the slightest importance ; and since the production 
 and due custody of even one child demands the affectionate 
 cooperation of both parents for an average life-time, every 
 healthy sexual instinct tends to life-long marriage. Nature 
 will not be cheated in a matter of supreme importance. She 
 bore much from this ill-regulated Du Chatelet, but turned 
 upon her at last to wreak a sudden and horrible vengeance.
 
 548 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Madame du Chatelet recorded the decline of Voltaire's affec- 
 tion for her with great candor. She introduces the topic into 
 her *' Reflections upon Happiness." 
 
 " I received from God [she tells us] one of those tender and im- 
 movable souls that know not how either to disguise or moderate their 
 passions ; whose love knows neither decline nor disgust, and the tenac- 
 ity of which is such as to resist everything, even the certainty of 
 being loved no more. Yet I was happy for ten years through the 
 love of him who had subjugated my soul, and those ten years I passed 
 at his side without any moment of disgust or languor. When age, 
 maladies, possibly also the satiety of enjoyment, had lessened liis 
 fondness, it was long before I perceived it. I loved for two ; I passed 
 my entire life with him ; and my heart, free from suspicion, enjoyed 
 the pleasure of loving and the illusion of believing myself loved. It 
 is true that I lost that happy condition, and not without it costing me 
 many tears. Terrible shocks are necessary to break such chains ; the 
 wound at my heart bled a long time. I had reason to complain, and 
 I forgave all. I was even just enough to feel that, perhaps, in the 
 whole world there was only my heart which had that immutability 
 that annihilates the power of time. I thought, too, that if age and 
 sickness had not entirely extinguished his desires they would still have 
 been for me, and his love would have returned to me ; and, finally, 
 that his heart, though incapable of love, chei-ished for me the most 
 tender friendship, and would have consecrated to me his life. The 
 absolute impossibility of the return of his taste and of his' passion, 
 which I well knew was not in the nature of things, led my heart in- 
 sensibly to the gentle sentiment of friendship ; and that sentiment, 
 joined to my passion for study, rendered me sufficiently happy." ^ 
 
 Which means that she had found another lover. At the 
 distance of a day's ride eastward from Cirey was Luneville, 
 the principal seat of Stanislas, "King of Poland," father-in-law 
 to the King of France, and Duke of Lorraine. He was an 
 indolent, good-natured old gentleman, now a little past sev- 
 enty, who amused himself by maintaining a court in the style 
 then accepted in Europe as the true royal mode. That is to 
 say, he kept a confessor and a mistress ; he went to mass 
 every morning ; he was scrupulously polite to his wife ; he 
 corresponded with authors, wrote books, founded an Academy, 
 gave prizes for poems, loved the drama, and doted upon Vol- 
 taire. His court, too, was a centre of intrigues, which were 
 1 Lefctres luedites de Madame la Marquise du Chatelet. Paris, 1806. Page 369.
 
 DEATH OF MADAME DU CHATELET. 549 
 
 as active and virulent as those of courts wliere a hundred 
 times as much of the public money was wasted. Voltaire had 
 been an occasional visitor at LumSville for many years ; but it 
 was one of those petty court intrigues that drew him thither 
 as a more established inmate. 
 
 • The king, as Voltaire has recorded, " shared his soul be- 
 tween his mistress, the Marquise de Boufflers, and a Jesuit 
 named Menou, the most intriguing and audacious priest I have 
 ever known. This man had beguiled from King Stanislas, 
 through the importunities of his wife, whom he governed, about 
 a million francs, part of which he employed in building a mag- 
 nificent house for himself and some Jesuits in the town of 
 Nancy. This house was endowed with a revenue of twenty- 
 four thousand francs, of which twelve thousand were for Me- 
 nou's table, and twelve thousand were at his disposal. The 
 mistress was far from being so well treated. She drew from the 
 King of Poland scarcely money enough to buy her petticoats, 
 and yet the Jesuit coveted her portion, and was furiously jeal- 
 ous of the marquise. They were openly embroiled. Every day 
 the king had much trouble, on going out from the mass, to 
 reconcile his mistress and his confessor. At length, our Jesuit, 
 having heard Madame du Chatelet spoken of as a woman well 
 formed and still handsome enough, conceived the project of 
 putting her in Madame de Boufflers's place. Stanislas occa- 
 sionally composed some sufficiently bad little works, and Menou 
 believed that a woman who was an author would succeed better 
 with him than another. It was he who came to Cirey to begin 
 this game. He cajoled Madame du Chatelet, and told us that 
 Kinfj Stanislas would be enchanted to see us. He returned to 
 say to the king that we burned with desire to pay our court to 
 im. 
 And, indeed, as Longchamp has already informed us, ma- 
 dame, from 1747, found herself very much at home at the little 
 court, where all her talents were agreeably exercised. She 
 acted, sang, danced, played, conversed, and translated Newton. 
 But it was Voltaire who captivated the benevolent old king. 
 " We attached ourselves," he says, " to Madame de Boufflers, 
 and the Jesuit had two women to combat." The king's let- 
 ters to Voltaire, of which several have been preserved, are 
 warmly eulogistic, and he praises some of his writings of this
 
 650 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 period in a manner which casts doubts upon his orthodoxy. 
 Stanishis published, in 1749, his Uttle work entitled " The 
 Christian .Philosopher," which was held by good Catholics to 
 savor of heresy. His daughter, the Queen of France, read it 
 with emphatic disapproval, and laid the blame of it at the door 
 of her father's favored guests. They had perverted the good 
 old man, she thought, and she did not love Voltaire the better 
 for it. She wrote to her father that his book was the work of 
 an atheist, and she entertained the opinion that Voltaire and 
 Madame du Chatelet had first lured him from the path of vir- 
 tue throuo-li Madame de Boufflers, and then stifled his remorse 
 with irreligion.i 
 
 Voltaire soon felt this renewal of antipathy. After reach- 
 ing Lundville in September, 1748, he heard that a low bur- 
 lesque of his " S^mirainis " was about to be performed at Fon- 
 tainebleau. He begged the King of Poland to come to his 
 bedside, and entreated him to forward to the queen, his daugh- 
 ter, a remonstrance against the sacrilege. The queen coldly 
 replied that everything was parodied, even Virgil ; parodies 
 were in fashion ; why should he complain ? He then appealed 
 to Madame de Pompadour, and she contrived to prevent the 
 performance. Parodies, be it observed, were not then in fash- 
 ion ; they had been forbidden five years before, and the edict 
 was still in force. Stanislas heaped favors upon the guests 
 who amused him with such an enchanting variety of enter- 
 tainments. He bestowed a solid boon upon Madame du Cha- 
 telet in 1748 by appointing her husband grand marshal of his 
 household, at a salary of two thousand crowns per annum. 
 He interested himself also in procuring for her son his first 
 military commission, which was obtained about the time of 
 this visit. 
 
 One of the officers of King Stanislas's little court was the 
 Marquis de Saint-Lambert, afterwards celebrated as a poet, au- 
 thor of " Les Saisons," once rated by Frenchmen above " The 
 Seasons "of 'Thomson. He was a native of Lorraine, a scion 
 of an ancient house, though possessed of little fortune. He 
 served for a while as an officer of Stanislas's guards, but after- 
 wards accepted the post of grand master of the royal ward- 
 robe. In 1747, when Madame du Chatelet first became inti- 
 1 Voltaire to Eichelieu, Au<;ust, 1750.
 
 DEATH OF MADAME DU CHATELET. 551 
 
 mate with him, he was thirty-one years of age, a well-formed, 
 attractive young man, not less agreeable than when, in later 
 years, he was a favorite in the circles of Paris. She was then 
 forty-one. They were thrown much together at Lun^ville, 
 at Commercy, another abode of the King of Poland, and at 
 Nancy, Saint-Lambert's native place. It was not long before 
 she became furiously in love with him. As early as the spring 
 of 1748, she wrote him a tumultuous letter, in which she ex- 
 pressed her passion without the least reserve. It is evident 
 from this burning epistle and other hot notes of the same 
 month of May, 1748, that she was the wooer of the young 
 man, and that he yielded to her solicitations. She assures 
 him tWfit her love is without bounds, and tells him that her 
 only fear is lest he should be unable to return her passion with 
 the entire devotion she craves. 
 
 " Come to Cirey," she wrote, " to prove to me that I am 
 wrong." 
 
 He came. He was with her at Luneville, while Voltaire was 
 sick on the road to Paris, and this was probably the reason 
 why, in answer to Longchamp's letters, she only sent a lackey 
 to inquire how he was. She was urgent in her love. " Come 
 to me as soon as you are dressed," she writes in one flaming 
 note ; " afterwards you may ride on horseback if you wish." 
 In another, " I shall fly to you as soon as I have supped. 
 Madame de Boufflers is gone to bed." For several months 
 tliis amour was in full tide without awakening the least sus- 
 picion on the part of Voltaire, who was doubtless relieved 
 by it from some of the constraint in which he had lived. He 
 probably owed to it his happy escape to Paris with Long- 
 thamp, and his gay meeting with old friends, untrarameled by 
 madame's bandboxes. But the time came when he discov- 
 ered it. We owe to the curious Longchamp some wondrous 
 scenes that followed the discovery, which occurred at the 
 chateau of the King of Poland at Commercy, twenty miles from 
 Cirey : — 
 
 " One evening, M. de Voltaire, having come down-stairs before be- 
 ing called to supper, entered Madame du Chatelet's rooms without 
 having been announced, there being no servant in the ante-chamber. 
 He traversed the whole suite without meeting any one, and reached 
 at length a small room at the end, half lighted by one candle.
 
 552 LIFE OF VOLTxMRE. 
 
 There he saw, or thought he saw, Madame du Chatelet and M. de 
 Sakit-Lambert .... conversing upon something besides verses and 
 philosophy. Struck with astonishment and indignation, unable to 
 control his feelings, he broke out into violent reproaches. M. de 
 Saint-Lambert, without being disconcerted, observed that it seemed 
 to him very singular that any one should give himself airs to censure 
 his conduct ; if that conduct displeased any one, the jjerson offended 
 had but to leave the chateau, and he would follow, in order to ex- 
 plain himself in a suitable place. M. de Voltaire went out furious, 
 ascended to his room, and ordered me to go at once to find a post- 
 chaise that could be hired or bought, his own having been left at 
 Paris ; adding that, after having found it, I should get post-horses 
 put to it, and bring it to the gate of the chateau. He said he was 
 resolved to return to Paris that very night. 
 
 " Amazed at a departure so precipitate, of which I had not heard 
 a word the evening before, and unable to divine the cause, I went 
 in search of Madame du Chatelet, to inform her of the order I had 
 just received, and try to learn from her what was the motive of it. 
 She told me that M. de Voltaire was a flighty man [^un visionnaire], 
 who had burst into a passion because he had found M. de Saint- 
 Lambert in her room. It was necessary, she added, to prevent his 
 leaving and making an outcry, and that I must evade executing the 
 commission which he had given me in a moment of fury. She 
 would know how to appease him ; it was necessary to let him dis- 
 charge his first fire, and try only to keep him in his room the next 
 day. 
 
 '• I did not return to his room until toward two o'clock in the 
 morning, when I told him that in all Commercy I had not been able 
 to find a carriage, either for hire or sale. His- servants lodo^ed in 
 the city ; I slejit alone in a small room near his chamber. Before 
 going to bed, he drew from a secretary a small bag of money, which 
 he gave me, saying that, after having rested, I was to go, at the 
 dawn of day, hire a post-horse and ride to Nancy, whence I should 
 bring him a carriage suited to his purpose. Seeing that he was still 
 in the same resolution, I wished to give notice of it to Madame du 
 Chatelet. Before retiring, I descended secretly to her room, where 
 she was still occupied in writing. On seeing me, she first asked if 
 M. de Voltaire was a little more tranquil. I replied that he appeared 
 to be still irritated ; that he had just gone to bed ; but that probably 
 he would sleep little during the night. Thereupon she dismissed me, 
 saying that she was going up to speak to him. 
 
 " I returned softly to my little room. A few minutes after some 
 one knocked, and I ran, with a candle, to open the door for madame, 
 
 t
 
 DEATH OF MADAME DU CHATELET. 553 
 
 and to announce her to M. de Voltaire. Seeing me half undressed, he 
 did not suspect that I had been forewarned of this visit. She entered 
 the chamber almost at the same time as myself, and took a seat upon 
 the foot of his bed. After having lighted two candles I withdrew ; 
 but I could hear part of their conversation through the very thin wall 
 which separated me from the chamber ; and, since the death of Ma- 
 dame du Chatelet, I have heard some details from Mademoiselle du 
 Thil, her intimate confidante. While I was still with them, madame 
 first addressed him in English, repeating a pet name in that language 
 which she ordinarily called him by. After I was gone she spoke 
 in French, and did what she could to soften him and excuse her- 
 self. 
 
 " 'What,' said he, ' you wish me to believe you after what I have 
 seen ! I have exhausted my health, my fortune ; I have sacrificed all 
 for you ; and you deceive me ! ' 
 
 " ' No,' she replied, ' I love you always ; but for a long time you 
 have complained that you are sick, that your strength abandons you ; 
 I am extremely afflicted at it; I am very far from wishing your death ; 
 your health is very dear to me ; no one in the world takes more in- 
 terest in it than I do. On your part, you have always shown much 
 interest in mine ; you have known and approved the regimen which 
 suits it ; you have even favored and shared it as long as it was in your 
 power to do so. Since you agree that you could not continue to take 
 care of it except to your great damage, ought you to be offended that 
 it is one of your friends who supplies your place ? ' 
 
 "' Ah, madame,' said he, 'you are always right; but since things 
 must be as they are, at least let them not pass before my eyes.' 
 
 " After half an hour's conversation, madame, seeing that he was a 
 little more calm, bade him adieu with an embrace, and urged him to 
 give himself up to repose. She then retired. 
 
 " She had already taken much trouble to appease M. de Saint-Lam- 
 bert, who still wished to have satisfaction for the insult which he pre- 
 tended to have received from M. de Voltaire. She succeeded in molli- 
 fying him, and she determined him even to take measures for the res- 
 toration of good-will between them, persuading him that this was his 
 dyty, were it only from deference to the age of M. de Voltaire. The 
 latter, after the interview with madame, slept for some hours, and did 
 not leave his rooms that day. Toward evening, M. de Saint-Lambert 
 called, alleging that he was anxious concerning the healtli of M. de 
 Voltaire. Astonished to see him, I went to announce him to M. de 
 Voltaire, who permitted him to enter. The young man, approaching 
 with a modest air, began by apologizing for the words, a little ani- 
 mated, which had escaped him in a moment of trouble and agitation.
 
 554 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Scarcely was his sentence finished, when M. de Voltaire seized him 
 with" both hands, embraced him, and said, — 
 
 " 'My child, I have forgotten all, and it was I who was in the wrong. 
 You are in the happy age of love and delight. Enjoy those moments, 
 too brief. An old man, an invalid, like me is not made for the pleas- 
 ures.' 
 
 " The next day all three supped together as usual. A few days 
 after this adventure, M. de Voltaire began to compose a comedy in 
 one act and in verse, wherein all that had happened was delineated 
 under a veil of allegory. The characters, the passions, were depicted 
 in it with as much energy as truth. The author judged it proper to 
 suppress the manuscript of this piece, some verses of which are to be 
 found in ' Nanine,' another comedy, which was also written at Com- 
 mercy some time after." 
 
 The autumn of 1748 rolled away. Voltaire, having recov- 
 ered his health and composure, designed to spend part of the 
 winter at Paris, where he hoped to see " Serairamis " revived, 
 to present to the public a new tragedy, and submit to the King 
 of France some chapters of his history of the late campaigns. 
 Madame was to leave her young lover for a while, and accom- 
 pany her old " friend " to the capital ; not to share his ex- 
 pected triumphs at the theatre and the court, but to finish at 
 Paris her version of Newton's "Principia," with the aid of 
 M. Clairaut, her instructor in mathematics. 
 
 " Before going to Paris [continues Longchamp] she desired to ar- 
 range a matter of business with one of her farmers near Chalons ; 
 whence she proposed to go on to Cirey, in order to audit the accounts 
 of the men who had the management of her foundries and forests. 
 Both having taken leave of the King of Poland, they set out from 
 Luneville toward the middle of December, 1748. On approaching 
 Chillons at eight o'clock in the morning, Madame la Marquise was 
 very far from stopping to take a bowl of broth at the inn. She was 
 driven to the country-house of the bishop, whom she knew to be at 
 home. He received our travelers with pleasure, and caused a good 
 breakfast to be served to them. Madame's farmer, notified by one of 
 the postilions, came to meet her there, and the regulation of his ac- 
 count was neither long nor difficult. At the same time the other pos- 
 tilion had been charged to bring a change of horses by half past nine 
 at the very latest. 
 
 " The farmer having gone, madame took a fancy, while waiting for 
 the horses, to propose to some gentlemen who were at the bishop's
 
 DEATH OF MADAME DU CHATELET. 555 
 
 house to play a game of comet or cavagnole, games then in fashion. 
 They yielded to her desire, and play began. It was much prolonged. 
 Meanwhile the horses were at the door, and the postilions, tired .of 
 waiting, sent in to say that if the travelers were not going to start 
 they Avould take the horses back to the stable. They received orders 
 in reply to do so, since the travelers would not set out till after din- 
 ner, and to bring the horses back at two o'clock. The postilions 
 executed punctually these orders ; but, dinner over, madame and her 
 friends began again to play at comet. The game was long. It was 
 raining. The postilions, chilled to the bone in the rain, did not cease 
 to crack their whips in the most furious manner. That game over, 
 Madame du Chatelet, who was on the losing side, asked her revenge. 
 Another game was begun. Then the postilions, losing all patience, 
 swore like mired cartmen ; and if they had been their own masters 
 they would have abandoned their horses. To quiet them they were 
 told to put the horses into the stables of the chateau, and were as- 
 sured that the time lost would be amply paid for. At length, the day 
 was entirely spent. It was eight o'clock in the evening. Then M. 
 de Voltaire, to whom this delay was not agreeable, and Madame du 
 Chatelet, who cared nothing about it, thanked and took leave of the 
 very obliging prelate, and resumed their journey. 
 
 " It had rained all day ; the weather was still bad and the night 
 very dark. Mounted upon a large white horse, I rode on before to 
 have the relays ready for them. It was not possible for me to see 
 two paces ahead, and unfortunately, while directing my horse by 
 chance, I got out of the middle of the road, and went headlong into 
 the ditch. Losing my seat, I was precipitated over the head of the 
 animal, and found myself stretched at length at the bottom of the 
 
 ditch, with a part of the horse resting upon me The postilion 
 
 who was sent to find me, having heard my cries, ran up to me and as- 
 sisted me to reach the carriage. Tiiey had me placed beside the 
 femme de chamhre, for I was bruised and could no longer ride on 
 horseback. I reached Cirey, suffering much pain and in a miserable 
 condition ; but rest and the care lavished upon me restored me, and 
 prevented the serious results which the accident might have had, some 
 of the consequences of which I felt for several years. 
 
 " Two or three days sufficed for madame to transact the business 
 which brought her to Cirey before going to Paris, where she expected 
 to pass the winter. When not studying she was always lively, active, 
 and good-humored. In the midst of her preparations for departure 
 she appeared all at once abstracted,' melancholy, restless. She had 
 discovered, from various symptoms, that she was in a way to become a 
 mother again, at the age of forty-four years. She was terrified at the
 
 556 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 prospect. How to conceal her condition and its consequences, and 
 especially from M. du Chatelet ? 
 
 " M. de Voltaire, struck with a change in her demeanor, so sudden 
 and so extraordinary, asked her with concern what was the reason of 
 it. She gave it without hesitation. He was not very much aston- 
 ished. The information could not give him pleasure; but, on learning 
 it, he thought only of tranquillizing Madame du Chatelet, and pre- 
 venting its affecting her to the point of making her sick. He told 
 her that there was no occasion for despair, and nothing in her case at 
 all supernatural. It became them, he said, to consider the matter 
 coolly, with good sense and prudence, and decide what was the best 
 course to take in the circumstances. His advice was, first of all, to 
 send for M. de Saint-Lambert, that they might all three take part in 
 the deliberation. Informed by M. de Voltaire of the business in hand, 
 M. de Saint-Lambert was at Cirey the day after he received the noti- 
 fication. 
 
 " A council was immediately held. A mischance which seemed to 
 be of a nature to displease equally each of the three personages, as 
 parties in interest, and to separate them forever, served, on the con- 
 trary', only to unite them the more. The event, serious as it was, was 
 even turned into jest. Nevertheless, they considered first if there 
 was any way of concealing from the public, and, above all, from M. 
 du Chatelet, the condition of madame and its natural consequence. 
 It was decided that both her character and propriety forbade the long 
 and indispensable precautions which such a scheme would involve ; 
 and even were she capable of submitting to them the least indiscre- 
 tion, the merest accident, might cause the plan to fail. The questions 
 then arose how the pregnancy should be announced, and to what fa- 
 ther the child should be assigned ; which latter seemed very embar- 
 rassing: to M. de Saint-Lambert and to Madame du Chatelet. 
 
 " ' As to that,' said M. de Voltaire, ' we will put it among the mis- 
 cellaneous works [^oeuvres melees^ of Madame du Chatelet.' 
 
 " On discussing the thing more gravely, it was agreed not to falsify 
 the legal axiom, that he is the father whom the nuptial relation indi- 
 cates, and that the child belonged of right to j\L du Chatelet. To 
 him, then, it was resolved to give the child ; but the difficulty was to 
 make him accept it. All being well weighed and deliberated, they 
 agreed that madame should write at once to her husband, who was 
 then at Dijon (one hundred and twenty miles distant), and invite him 
 to come immediately to Cirey to arrange some family business, so as 
 to avoid a lawsuit with which she was threatened. She pressed him 
 to come also for the purpose of receiving the money she had collected 
 at Cirey for the expenses of the next campaign, adding that, if the
 
 DEATH OF MADAME DU CHATELET. 557 
 
 war continued, he was to have a higher grade, which she had assisted 
 to obtain for him by her influence. 
 
 " The marquis flew to Cirey, where he was received with lively 
 demonstrations of tenderness and regard on the part of his wife, as 
 well as of respect and joy on that of his vassals. He was rejoiced to 
 find there M. de Voltaire and M. de Saint-Lambert, who neglected 
 nothing that could render his visit to his estate agreeable, despite 
 the season. He was flattered with so much cordiality, seemed ex- 
 tremely cheerful, and responded by unequivocal marks of friendship. 
 Madame invited several noblemen of the neigliborhood to spend some 
 days at the chateau to augment the satisfaction of her husband. They 
 gave him Ihtla fetes, and even theatricals. During the first days she 
 employed a great part of the morning with him arranging the affairs 
 of the house, while the guests were hunting. At dinner great cheer 
 was made. The marquis performed well his part at table, having 
 previously gained a good appetite in going to see his farmers and 
 inspecting his forges and his woods. After dinner they had cards and 
 other amusements ; but nothing surpassed supper in agreeableness and 
 gayety. All the guests were in the best humor, and testified their 
 delight in seeing M. du Chatelet again. Every one talked with the 
 greatest freedom of whatever interested him, and M. le Marquis du 
 Chatelet related some stories of the last campaign in Flanders. They 
 seemed to listen to him with great interest, and he was much flattei-ed 
 by it. They let him talk and drink as much as he liked. When 
 he ceased, others told pleasant tales, said good things, and gave some 
 curious anecdotes. M. de Voltaire went beyond all the rest, and 
 heightened the general gayety by the drollest and most diverting 
 stories. 
 
 " Madame du Chatelet, who on that day was dressed with extreme 
 elegance, sat next her husband, and said some agreeable and happy 
 things to him, paid him, without affectation, pretty little attentions, 
 which he took in good part, and to which he responded by addressing 
 flattering compliments to his wife. M. de Voltaire and M. de Saint- 
 Lambert exchanged glances, and secretly rejoiced to see that all was 
 going so well. Indeed, during dessert the marquis was in a beautiful 
 humor, and became entirely gallant. His wife appeared in his eyes 
 such as he had beheld her at twenty. He felt himself transported 
 
 back to the same age, and played the young man During this 
 
 little conjugal colloquy the other guests, animated by champagne, 
 talked loudly of hunting, fishing, horses, and dogs. But M. de Vol- 
 taire and M. de Saint-Lambert, interested in another matter, I'ead 
 with great pleasure in the face of M. du Chatelet, and still better in 
 the eyes of his wife, that their project would be accomplished accord-
 
 558 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 ing to their intention. In fact, from that night the pair occupied the 
 same suite of rooms. Nothing was neglected to sustain the illusion 
 during the following days. They kept the marquis in play. Pleas- 
 ure followed pleasure, and his lovely humor was maintained in the 
 midst of the gayety by which he was surrounded. Three weeks and 
 more passed in a kind of enchantment, and then madame declared to 
 her husband that, from certain signs, she had reason to believe herself 
 enceinte. 
 
 " At this news M. du Chatelet thought he should faint with joy. 
 He sprang to the neck of his wife, embraced her, and went to commu- 
 nicate what he had heard to all his friends who were in the chateau. 
 Every one congratulated him, and called upon madame to testify the 
 interest they took in their mutual satisfaction. The news was imme- 
 diately spread into the neighboring villages. Gentlemen, lawyers, 
 large farmers, came to compliment M. du Chatelet. He received 
 them all to admiration. Perhaps he was secretly flattered to prove 
 to them that he could still be of service elsewhere than in the field. 
 This gave occasion to new rejoicings at Cirey. At length the time 
 arrived for M. du Chatelet to return to his post, and he took his de- 
 parture. M. de Saint-Lambert went back to Luneville. Madame 
 la Marquise and M. de Voltaire renewed preparations for their jour- 
 ney to Paris. All four set out from Cirey, well content with what 
 had passed there." 
 
 Thus, Longchamp. On reading his unique narrative we 
 naturally turn to the correspondence of the characters who 
 fisfure in it, to see if it harmonizes with his statements. We 
 find that it does. December 1, 1748, Voltaire wrote at Lune- 
 ville to the D'Argentals at Paris, " Divine angels, I shall be 
 under your wings at Christmas." This accords with Long- 
 champ's information that they left Luneville for Paris toward 
 the middle of December, intending to make but a brief stay 
 at Cirey for business only. Something not expected detained 
 them there until the end of January, 1749. January 21st, Vol- 
 taire wrote to D'Argental from Cirey, " Madame du Chatelet 
 has just finished a preface to her Newton, which is a chef 
 d'oeuvre.'" January 2Gth, he wrote from Cirey a long letter to 
 the King of Prussia, and did not begin to send letters from 
 Paris until February. Thus, ample time was afforded (six 
 weeks) for the performance of the amazing comedy described 
 by a secretary of inquiring mind. 
 
 More than this, Voltaire's presence in Paris, during all that
 
 DEATH OF MADAME DU CHATELET. 559 
 
 long period of detention in the country, was veliemently de- 
 sired by his friends, and particularly by his guardian angels, 
 the D'Argentals, ever watchful for his interest. The actors 
 and the public were waiting for his coming with impatience 
 that " S^miramis " might be revived, with the author's last 
 corrections and improvements. Never before had the clique 
 hostile to him been more active, more resolute, more hopeful ; 
 and a tragedy was his favorite means both of offense and de- 
 fense. D'Argental wrote urgently for his coming. Madame du 
 Chatelet, as we have observed, was one of those ladies who can 
 look out from the warm shelter of an elegant room, and bear, 
 with perfect equanimity for many hours, the inconveniences 
 suffered by postilions in the piercing rain of a French Decem- 
 ber. She was hard j)ut to it on the present occasion to account 
 for this unforeseen delay in a manner that would satisfy the 
 Count d'Argental. January 13th, she wrote to him, " If I 
 thought that the presence of M. de Voltaire was necessary at 
 Paris, I would leave everything to bring him thither ; but, in 
 truth, I think it is best to teep the public fasting with regard 
 to ' Sdmiramis,' so that they may long for it as it merits. I am 
 sure of M. de Richelieu, and know that the parody upon 'Senii- 
 ramis ' will not be played. These are my principal reasons for 
 not abandoning the very essential and tedious business which 
 I am transacting at Cirey. A forge-master who is leaving, 
 another who takes possession, some woods to examine, some 
 disputes to reconcile, — all that, without losing a moment, 
 cannot be accomplished before the end of the month." ^ 
 
 All of which confirms the narrative of Longchamp. 
 
 They were established, then, at the Du Chatelet mansion in 
 Paris early in February, 1749. Each of them was at once ab- 
 sorbed in intellectual labor, madame being passionately intent 
 upon completing her Newton before returning to the country 
 on a less agreeable errand. Were they really on as cordial 
 terms as before? They were always liable to tiffs' and scenes; 
 and if age had cooled Voltaire's temperament it does not ap- 
 pear to have quieted his nerves. Let Longchamp relate two 
 scenes between them at Paris, which occurred while the lady 
 was closeted daily and nightly with her professor of mathemat- 
 ics, reading proofs and verifying algebra : — 
 
 ^ Lettres, page 481.
 
 660 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 FIRST SCENE. 
 
 ""Upon their return to Paris, madame plunged again into the sci- 
 ences, and invited M. Clairaut, of the Academy of Sciences, to come 
 and examine her work upon Newton and go over the calculations. 
 M. Clairaut came every day, and went with her to a room in the second 
 story, where they shut themselves up in order not to be interrupted. 
 There they passed a great part of the day, and in the evening they 
 usually supped with M. de Voltaire, who then kept house, and occupied 
 rooms on the first floor. For some days he had not been well, and 
 complained that his digestion was out of order. When that was the 
 case, his usual remedy was to confine himself to a strict diet, and drink 
 abundantly of very weak tea. 
 
 " One day, when his affairs had obliged him to take several walks 
 in Paris, finding in the evening that he had gained a little appetite, he 
 asked to have supper somewhat earlier than usual, and told me to go 
 and call the two learned persons, Madame du Chatelet and M. Clai- 
 raut. Madame, who was deep in a calculation which she wished to 
 finish, asked a respite of a quarter of an hour. M. de Voltaire con- 
 sents, and waits patiently. Half an hour passes, and no one comes. 
 He makes me go up-stairs again. I knock, and they cry out to me, 
 ' We are just coming down ! ' Upon receiving this answer, M. de Vol- 
 taire has the soup brought in, and takes his seat at the table, expecting 
 the company immediately. But they come not, and the plates are 
 getting cold. Then he gets up, furious, rushes up the stairs, and, find- 
 ing their door locked, he gives it a tremendous kick. At this noise, 
 being obliged to leave their work, the two geometers rise and follow 
 him with some confusion. As they were going down-stairs he said to 
 them, ' You are then in a conspiracy to kill me ? ' Usually their sup- 
 per was cheerful and very long, but that night it was very short; 
 scarcely anything was eaten ; each of them, with eyes fixed upon his 
 plate, said not a word. M. Clairaut left early, and it was some time 
 before he came to the house again." 
 
 SECOND SCENE. 
 
 " M. de Voltaire went to bed, but could not sleep all night, so 
 much was he excited by the events of the evening. The next morn- 
 ing, madame sent some one to his room to ask how he was, and to 
 know if he desired her to come and breakfast with him. He answered 
 that if she wished to come she should be well received. A moment 
 after, madame came down, holding in her hand a superb cup and sau- 
 cer of Saxony porcelain, which he had given her, and which she loved 
 to use. They were very large, all gilt inside, and the outside adorned 
 with a landscape containing a great number of figures very well painted, 
 
 I
 
 DEATH OF MADAME DU CHATELET. 561 
 
 which formed some charming pictures, as well from the elegance of the 
 design as from the brilliancy of the coloring. M. de Voltaire told me 
 to pour into it some coffee and cream, which having done I withdrew. 
 Madame, while sipping her coffee, began to speak to him of what had 
 passed the evening before, reproaching him for his quickness of temper 
 and excusing herself for keeping him waiting. She was standing with 
 her cup in her hand, and, while sipping and talking, she had come very 
 near the fauteuil on which he was seated. Suddenly he rose, as if to 
 make room for her to sit beside him, and, in rising, he struck madame 
 with his left shoulder, which caused the cup and saucer to fall from 
 her hands and break into a thousand pieces. Roused by this noise, I 
 reentered. Madame, much attached to this little article, and having 
 quite as quick a temper as M. de Voltaire, said to him in English 
 some words which I did not understand, and, without waiting for his 
 reply, went up to her room, extremely irritated, as it seemed to me. 
 
 " As soon as she was gone out, M. de Voltaire called me, told me 
 to pick up the pieces and put them upon the table. He chooses one 
 of the largest pieces, and tells me to go at once to the shop of M. la 
 Frenaye, jeweler, to buy a cup and saucer exactly like the fragment, 
 if he has one such. At the same time he gives me a little bag of 
 money to pay him. But among all the porcelains which adorned the 
 shop, I found not one cup of the pattern I wished. Having chosen 
 one of those which seemed most like it, I asked the price. Ten louis. 
 The bag was two or three louis short of this sum, and I asked M. la 
 Frenaye to send one of his men with three or four of his most beauti- 
 ful breakfast cups, that M. de Voltaire might choose the one he liked 
 best. The man brought six. Having selected the most elegant, and at 
 the same time the most expensive, M. de Voltaire haggled much about 
 the price ; but gained nothing by it, the man protesting that ten louis 
 was the cost price, and that it was impossible to abate anything. M. 
 de Voltaire finished by counting out to the man the ten louis, not with- 
 out regretting the expense, and saying between his teeth that madame 
 ought to have taken her coffee in her own room before coming down 
 to his. Nevertheless, he sent me to make his excuses for his ill-tem- 
 per, and to carry her this new coffee-cup, which she received with a 
 smile. Their reconciliation was prompt, and this little disturbance had 
 no after-effects." 
 
 The weeks flew by, as only time can fly which is spent in 
 mental labor. Madame might well be excused for keeping her 
 companion waiting for his supper. She spared herself no more 
 than she considered him. She was under a terrible pressure. 
 She worked upon her Newton as ambitious or procrastinating 
 
 VOL. I. 36
 
 562 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 students ■work during the ten days before their final examina- 
 tion. She wrote, at the same time, burning letters to her ab- 
 sent lover, lamenting her long detention, and explaining its 
 cause. 
 
 [May 18, 1749.] " No ; it is not possible for my heart to express 
 to you how it adores you. Do not reproach me for my Newton ; I am 
 sufficiently punished for it. Never have I made a greater sacrifice 
 to reason than in remaining here to finish it ; it is a frightful labor, — 
 
 one that demands a head and health of iron Mon Dieu ! how 
 
 amiable INI. du Chatelet is to have offered to take you with him [to 
 Cirey] ! " 
 
 [May 20th.] " My departure hence does not depend absolutely 
 upon me, but upon Clairaut and the difficulty of my work. I sacrifice 
 everything to it, even my shape, and I beg you to remember it if you 
 find me changed. Do you kuow the life I have led since the depart- 
 ure of the king ? I get up at nine, sometimes at eight ; I work till 
 three ; then I take my coffee ; I resume work at four ; at ten I 
 stop to eat a morsel alone ; I talk till midnight with M. de Voltaire, 
 who comes to supper with me, and at midnight I go to work again, 
 
 and keep on till five in the morning I must do this, or else I 
 
 must either renounce the idea of lying in at Luneville, or lose the fruit 
 
 of my labors if I should die in child-bed With regard to the 
 
 fear you have of being alone with M. du Chatelet, it does not depend 
 entirely upon me to secure you against it ; and if you prefer seeing me 
 ten or twelve days later to risking that accident I have nothing to 
 
 say I can love nothing but what I share with you ; for, at 
 
 least, I do not love Newton. I finish it from reason and honor ; hut 
 I love only you." ^ 
 
 This work upon Newton, published in 1756 by her distin- 
 guished teacher, Alexis Clairaut, in two quarto volumes, in- 
 volved vei'y severe and long- continued toil. She attempted in 
 it to do for Newton's " Principia " what Mrs. Somerville aft- 
 erwards accomplished for the Astronomy of Laplace. She 
 translated the Latin into French, and amplified the demon- 
 sti'ations so as to bring the work within the grasp of advanced 
 French students of mathematics. The title finally given it by 
 M. Clairaut was " The Mathematical Principles of Natural 
 Philosophy." How much of the work was done by the teacher 
 and how much by the puj^il will never be known. At the 
 end of May she saw her last of Paris, and went to pass the 
 1 Lettres. Paris. 1878. Page 487.
 
 DEATH OF MADAME DU CHATELET. 563 
 
 lovely clays of June at beautiful Cirey, lier work still incom- 
 plete. 
 
 They spent most of the summer at Lun^ville, where ma- 
 dame chose that her child should be born, because there its 
 father could be near her at the critical time. Both Voltaire 
 and herself continued to labor with an intensity which was ex- 
 traordinary even for them. At Luneville, being separated 
 from his books and papers, and kept long waiting for the ex- 
 pected child, he had no resource but in original composition. 
 The Duchess du Maine had suggested to him a subject for a 
 new tragedy, the Conspiracy of Catiline, recently treated by 
 the aged Crdbillon. He thought of it during these summer 
 weeks of tedious waiting. Kindled by the project of his Paris 
 enemies to exalt above him the veteran dramatist just men- 
 tioned, whose " Catiline," despite all their efforts, had signally 
 failed, he now had one of his frenzies of inspiration, and wrote 
 in eight days and nights his tragedy of " Rome Saved." It 
 was a wonderful feat. Every other day, he says, madame 
 looked up from her Newton to be astounded by his bringing 
 in two new acts. But here is one of his own accounts of the 
 mad fit, written August 12, 1749, at Luneville, to D'Argen- 
 tal: — 
 
 " Read, only read, what I send you ! You are going to be aston- 
 ished ; I am, myself. On the 3d of the present mouth the devil, 
 saving your grace, took possession of me, and said, Avenge Cicero and 
 France ; wash away your country's shame ! He enlightened me ; he 
 made me imagine the wife of Catiline, etc. This devil is a good devil, 
 my angels ; yourselves would not do better. He made me work day 
 and niglit. I thought I should die of it; but what does that matter? 
 In eight days, — yes, in eight days, and not in nine, — Catiline has been 
 done ; and the first scenes, very nearly as first written, I send you. 
 It is all done in the rough, and I am quite exhausted. I shall send it 
 to you, as you may well believe, as soon as I have put the last hand 
 to it. You will see in it no amorous Tullia, no go-between Cicero ; 
 but you will see a terrible picture of Rome. I shudder at it still. Ful- 
 via will rend your heart. You will adore Cicero. How you will love 
 Caesar ! How you will say, This is Cato's self ! And Lucullus, Cras- 
 sus, what shall we say of them ? Oh, my dear angels, ' Merope ' is 
 scarcely a tragedy in comparison. But let us employ eight weeks in 
 correcting what we have done in eight days. Believe me, beUeve me, 
 this is the true tragedy ! "
 
 564 • LITE or VOLTAIRE. 
 
 [Again, August 16th.] "This post ought to convey to my divine 
 angels a cargo of the first two acts of Catiline. But why entitle the 
 work Catiline ? Cicero is the real hero of it : he it is whose glory I 
 wished to avenge ; it was he who inspired me, he whom I tried to im- 
 itate, and who occupies all the fifth act. I pray you, let us call the 
 piece Cicero and Catiline." 
 
 The heat of creation having subsided, he labored more 
 peacefully at correcting his work, kpeping an eye ever upon 
 Paris, and beginning already to make partisans for the new 
 play by giving early accounts of its progress. The Duchess du 
 Maine was of course promptly notified. The President Re- 
 nault, a French Horace Walpole, rich, critical, and friendly, 
 was amply advised. The zealous Marmontel was not over- 
 looked. The author, meanwhile, on surveying his work more 
 at leisure, found abundant faults in it, and did, in fact, spend 
 much more than eight weeks in correcting the composition of 
 eight days. 
 
 August drew towards its close, and still madame kept them 
 waiting. The ofiicers and servants of the King of Poland 
 did not all appreciate the merits of guests who stayed so long, 
 increased their labors, and, perhaps, in some instances, cur- 
 tailed their perquisites. One M. Alliot, aulic councilor, ad- 
 ministrator of the king's household, did not approve the system 
 of M. de Voltaire in confining himself so much to his own 
 rooms, instead of taking sustenance in the usual place. He 
 was slack in supplying a frenzied tragic poet with such homely 
 necessaries as " bread, wine, and candles." But he found 
 that the tragic poet was a person who knew his rights as a 
 king's guest. Voltaire wrote an exquisitely polite letter to 
 M. Alliot, informing him that at the court of his majesty of 
 Prussia he was not obliged " to importune every day for bread, 
 wine, and candles." " Permit me to say to you," he added, 
 " that it belongs to the dignity of the King of Poland and the 
 honor of your administration not to refuse these trifling at- 
 tentions to an officer of the court of the King of France, who 
 has the honor to pay his respects to the King of Poland.'" 
 
 This note was ostentatiously dated "August 29th, at a quar- 
 ter past nine in the morning." He waited just half an hour. 
 Receiving no answer, he wrote to the king himself, dating his 
 letter " August 29th, at a quarter to ten in the morning."
 
 DEATH OF MADAJME DU CIIATELET. 565 
 
 "Sire, when we are in Paradise, it is necessary for us to address 
 ourselves to God. Your majesty has permitted me to pay you my 
 court until the end of autumn, when I shall not be able to avoid 
 taking leave of your majesty. Your majesty is aware that I am very 
 sick, and that unceasing labors, not less than my continual sufferings, 
 retain me in my own rooms. I am compelled to beseech your majesty 
 to give orders that the director of your majesty's household shall con- 
 descend to pay me those attentions, necessary and suitable to the 
 dignity of your abode, with which your majesty honors foreigners who 
 come to your court. Kings, from the time of Alexander, have had 
 it in charge to nourish men of letters ; and when Virgil was in the 
 house of Augustus Alliotus, aulic councilor to Augustus, caused Virgil 
 to be supplied with bread, wine, and candles. I am sick to-day, and 
 have neither bread nor wine for dinner. I have the honor to be, with 
 profound respect, sire, of your majesty, the very humble servant." 
 
 The wine, the bread, and the candles were not again with- 
 held by an aulic councilor, the king having given orders to 
 that effect. Madame Alliot, we are informed, was extremely 
 sotte and superstitious, and did not enjoy this irruption of 
 French pagans into a quiet chateau with a chapel and a daily 
 mass. One day she chanced to be in the same room with 
 Voltaire while a frightful thunder-storm was passing over 
 Lun^ville, and she did not conceal her apprehension that his 
 presence much enhanced the danger the chateau was in from 
 a vengeful bolt. " Madame," said he, pointing to the sky, 
 " I have thought and written more good of him whom you are 
 so much afraid of than you will be able ,to say of him in the 
 whole of your life." ^ 
 
 So passed these summer months. September came in. 
 Madame du Chatelet still labored assiduously at her Newton, 
 not neglecting her part in amusing the good-natured old king. 
 Gay as she seemed, she was not, as Longehamp assures us, 
 without occasional fears. She sent to Paris for her old friend, 
 Mademoiselle du Thil, who obeyed her summons. She arranged 
 her papers, and had them divided into parcels, which she caused 
 to be sealed and directed. She made Longehamp promise to 
 deliver them to their addresses if she should not survive. 
 September 4th her child was born. All went as favorably as 
 possible, and Voltaire wrote three merry notes to convey the 
 news to anxious friends in Paris. 
 
 1 73 (Euvrea de Voltaire, 46. Note by another hand.
 
 566 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 , " This evening [he wrote to the Abbe de Voisenon] Madame du 
 Chatelet, being at her desk, according to her laudable custom, said, 
 * But I feel something ! ' That something was a little girl, who came 
 into the world forthwith. It was placed upon a volume of geometry 
 which happened to be lying near, and the mother has gone to bed. 
 As for me, not knowing what to do during the last part of her preg- 
 nancy, I set myself to make a child all alone, and in eight days was 
 delivered of ' Catiline.' It was a jest of nature to wish that I should 
 accomplish in a week what Crebillon took thirty years to do. I am 
 astonished at the accouchement of Madame du Chatelet, and terrified 
 at my own. I know not if madame will imitate me and be pregnant 
 again ; but as soon as I was delivered of ' Catiline ' I had a new preg- 
 nancy, and produced upon the spot an ' Electre ' " [another subject of 
 Crebillon's]. 
 
 In the same light tone he wrote to other friends that night, 
 while, as he said, mother and child " slept like dormice." 
 " I am a hundred times more fatigued than she is," he wrote 
 to D'Argental. 
 
 For four days she continued to do well. The child was 
 christened in the chapel, and given out to nurse, after the 
 French custom. The fourth day was very warm, and the 
 mother, being slightly feverish, felt the heat extremely. She 
 told her femme de chambre to bring her some iced orgeat, a 
 favorite summer drink of the time, made of almond paste, 
 sugar, and water. Persons near her bed remonstrated ur- 
 gently. She insisted, and drank of the ice-cold liquid a large 
 tumblerful. Alarming symptoms immediately declared them- 
 selves. Doctors were summoned ; her husband was sent for. 
 Powerful remedies having relieved her, again every one hoped 
 for her speedy restoration. Two days passed. September 
 10th, late in the evening, Voltaire, the Marquis du Chatelet, 
 and other friends were seated at the supper-table of Madame de 
 Boufflers, in another part of the chateau. Saint-Lambert and 
 Longchamp watched in the sick-room. All of them were relieved 
 and cheerful. Suddenly, ominous sounds were heard from the 
 bed, — a rattling, hiccoughs, a struggle for breath. They rushed 
 to her side. She seemed to have fainted. They raised her, 
 gave her the vinaigrette, rubbed her feet, struck her hands, 
 and employed all the usual remedies. She never breathed 
 again. She was dead when they reached her bedside. 
 
 From the merriment of the supper-table Voltaire, the bus-
 
 DEATH OF MADA^IE DU CHATELET. 567 
 
 band, and all the guests, upon hearing the awful and unexpected 
 tidings, ran to the chamber. The consternation was such as 
 we should imagine. To sobs and exclamations of grief and hor- 
 ror a mournful silence succeeded. M. du Chatelet was led out ; 
 the other guests went away ; and, finally, the two men who 
 had most reason for emotion remained alone by the side of the 
 bed, speechless and overwhelmed. Voltaire staggered out of 
 the room like a man stunned and bewildered, and made his 
 way, he knew not how, to the great door of the chtiteau, at 
 the head of the outside steps. At the bottom of those steps 
 he fell headlong, close to a sentry-box, and remained on the 
 ground insensible. His servant, who had followed him, seeing 
 him fall, ran down the steps, and attempted to lift him up. 
 Saint-Lambert came, also, and assisted to get him on his feet. 
 He recognized Saint-Lambert, and said to him, sobbing, as 
 Longchamp reports, " Ah, my friend, it is you who have 
 killed her for me." Then, suddenly coming to himself, as if 
 from a deep sleep, he cried, in a tone of mingled despair and 
 reproach, " Oh, my God, sir, what could have induced you 
 to get her into that condition ? " Saint-Lambert said nothing, 
 and Voltaire was led away to his room. 
 
 Among the crowd of distracted persons who had rushed 
 into the chamber on the first alarm was Madame de Boufflers. 
 As she was going out, half an hour later, she took Longchamp 
 aside, and told him to see if the deceased had upon her fin- 
 ger a cornelian locket-ring ; and if she had, to take it off and 
 keep it until further orders. He obeyed, and the next day 
 gave the ring to Madame de Boufflers, who picked out of the 
 locket, with a pin, a portrait of Saint-Lambert, and then gave 
 back the ring to Longchamp, to place it among the other ef- 
 fects, for the Marquis du Chatelet. Two or three days after, 
 Voltaire, being a little calmer, asked Longchamp for the same 
 ring, which, he said, contained his own portrait. The secre- 
 tary informed him that his portrait was not in the ring at the 
 time of madame's death. " Ah ! " exclaimed Voltaire, " how 
 do you know that ? " Longchamp related what had passed. 
 " Oh, heavens ! " cried Voltaire, rising to his feet and clasp- 
 ing his hands. " Such are women ! I took Richelieu out of 
 the ring. Saint-Lambert expelled me. That is in the order 
 of nature ; one nail drives out another. So go the things of 
 this world ! "
 
 568 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Longchamp, obeying the orders which madame had given 
 him, distributed the papers she had left sealed and directed. 
 Last of all he delivered those addressed to her husband. One 
 of the parcels was a large case, locked, and sealed in several 
 places, with the key in a sealed packet tied to one of the han- 
 dles. Upon the cover of the case madame had written with 
 her own hand : — 
 
 '■'■ I pray M. du Chdtelet to he so good as to hum all these 
 papers tvithout looking at them. They can he of no use to him., 
 and have no relation to his affairs^ 
 
 The husband, upon opening the case, was disposed to disre- 
 gard this request ; but his wiser brother, the Count de Lomont, 
 who was present, told him that he ought to respect the last 
 wishes of his wife, and not abuse the mark of confidence which 
 she had shown him. The marquis, however, persisted in read- 
 ing a few of the uppermost letters, which, says the observant 
 Longchamp, caused him to make a wry face and shake his 
 ears. His brother, saying that he was well paid for his curi- 
 osity, ordered a lighted candle, emptied the case into the fire- 
 place, and set fire to the papers. There were several thick 
 and solid packets of manuscript among the mass, which burned 
 slowly. Longchamp, kneeling down before the fire-place to 
 quicken the blaze, contrived to rescue, on the sly, Voltaire's 
 " Treatise upon Metaphysics " and several letters. Even those 
 letters were afterwards destroyed ; so that of the hundreds of 
 letters which must have passed between Voltaire and Madame 
 du Chatelet only one trifling, jocular note of his is known to 
 
 exist. 
 
 She went beyond her right in consigning some of these 
 papers to the fire ; for among the mass were important memo- 
 randa and documents, collected by Voltaire for his historical 
 works, of which she disapproved, as well as some compositions 
 similar to the metaphysical treatise, which she deemed unsafe 
 for him to possess. He lamented deeply this irreparable loss, 
 and mentions it in the preface to his " Essai sur les Moeurs," 
 with an expression of respect for her memory, which he never 
 omitted on any fair occasion as long as he lived. From him 
 the public never learned anything but good of the woman he 
 had loved. 
 
 Madame du Chatelet was buried at Lun^ville, with the
 
 DEATH OF MADAME DU CHATELET. 569 
 
 pomp and ceremonial then customary. Her child lived but for 
 a short time, and passed away lamented by no one, — the mere 
 incidental supernumerary of a drama in which nature meant 
 her to be the chief personage^ And these wonderful events, 
 known to many persons immediately, brought no reproach 
 upon any of the actors. Saint-Lambert, in the drawing-rooms 
 of Paris, was regarded as a sort of hero of romance. " It 
 made him the fashion,'^ says the " Nouvelle Biographic," and 
 led the way to other "conquests," and to a long career of so- 
 cial as well as literary distinction in the metropolis of his 
 country. Voltaire remained on friendly, even cordial, terms 
 with him as long as he lived, as both did with the family of 
 the Du Chatelets. Frederic of Prussia was duly advised of 
 what had occurred by his French correspondents. We find 
 among his poetical writings of 1749 an epitaph upon Madame 
 du Chatelet, to this effect : — 
 
 " Here lies one who lost her life from the double accouche- 
 ment of a ' Treatise of Philosophy ' and of an unfortunate in- 
 fant. It is not known precisely which of the two took her 
 from us. Upon this lamentable event what opinion ought we 
 to follow ? Saint-Lambert assigns it to the book ; Voltaire 
 says it was the child." ^ 
 
 1 14 CEuvrea de Frederic le Grand, 169.
 
 CHAPTER XLVI. 
 
 THE WIDOWER. 
 
 In some very bad marriages, Mr. Emerson wisely remarks, 
 tliere is a fraction of true marriage. In Voltaire's connection 
 with Madame du Cbatelet, tliere was, on his side, a large in- 
 gredient of true marriage. To the vow which sealed their 
 union he was faithful against the solicitations of the most se- 
 ductive king in Europe. He was faithful to it when it became 
 oppressive. He was faithful when she was faithless ; and, after 
 having been faithful to her person while she lived, he was sin- 
 gularly so to her name and honor after she was dead. He had 
 loved this woman, and he lived, with her in that kindly illusion 
 which in happy marriages casts a pleasing veil over ugly faults, 
 and sets good qualities in bright relief. Parents habitually 
 think of their children as they appear to them in their best 
 moments and moods. So he thought of her. There had been, 
 moreover, a genuine communion of spirit between them, and 
 they had often been true companions to each other. Long- 
 champ has told us how they sat together on the carriage cush- 
 ions, in the wintry night, lost in the contemplation of the starry 
 heavens which spoke to them of Newton's immortal glory. 
 As that incident gave dignity to a situation otherwise ridicu- 
 lous, so such communion of soul, though but occasional and 
 brief, redeemed the quality of their connection. 
 
 He was heart-broken at her loss. "Ah, my dear friend," 
 he wrote to D'Argental on that fatal night, " I have only you 
 left upon the earth ! " It distressed him that he had written 
 of the birth of her child in so light a tone. " Alas, madame," 
 he wrote to the Marquise du Deffand, " we had turned that 
 event into a jest ; and it was in that unfortunate tone that I 
 wrote, by her order, to her friends. If anything could augment 
 the horror of my condition, it would be to have taken with 
 gayety an adventure the result of which poisons the remainder
 
 THE WIDOWER. 571 
 
 of my miserable life." In a similar strain lie wrote to other 
 friends during the first hours of his bereavement. Longchamp 
 testifies that the death of his Emilie overwhelmed him. He 
 avoided all company, and remained alone in his chamber, ab- 
 sorbed, sad, suffering, a prey to the most doleful thoughts. 
 His life was shattered, and he knew not how to begin to re- 
 construct it, so accustomed was he to depend upon her for 
 direction, as well as companionship. His first thought was to 
 retire to the Abbey of Senones, of which Dom Calmet was 
 the chief, a laborious writer upon theology and history, whose 
 extensive collection of books Voltaire had frequently drawn 
 upon during his long visits to the court of the King of Poland. 
 The Abbey of S^nones was near the chateau of that king 
 at Commercy, in Lorraine. Soon abandoning this idea, he 
 thought of seeking ah asylum with Lord Bolingbroke in Eng- 
 land, and actually wrote a letter, as Longchamp asserts, to 
 Bolingbroke, announcing his loss, and saying that he was dis- 
 posed to seek consolation at his abode. The letter does not 
 appear in his works, and seems to have had no consequences. 
 
 The inevitable duties of the crisis called him from his soli- 
 tude, and after the funeral he went to Cirey with Longchamp, 
 where he was joined soon by the Marquis du Chatelet and his 
 brother. Here he was in some degree consoled by sympathiz- 
 ing letters from his guardian angels in Paris, the truest and 
 fondest friends of his long life. 
 
 " You make my consolation, my dear angels [he wrote] ; you make 
 
 me love the unhappy remainder of my life I will confess to 
 
 you that a house which she inhabited, though overwhelming me with 
 grief, is not disagreeable to me. I am not afraid of my affliction ; I 
 do not fly that which speaks to me of her. I love Cirey ; I could not 
 support Luneville, where I lost her in a manner more awful than you 
 think ; but the places which she embellished are dear to me. I have 
 not lost a mistress ; I have lost the half of myself, a soul for whom 
 mine was made, a friend of twenty years, whom I knew in infancy. 
 The most tender father loves not otherwise his only daughter. I love 
 to find again everywhere tlie idea of her ; I love to talk witli her hus- 
 band, with her son I have been reading once more the im- 
 mense materials relating to metaphysics which she had gathered with 
 a patience and a sagacity which used to frighten me. With all that, 
 how was it possible for her to cry over our tragedies ? She had the
 
 572 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 genius of Leibnitz, with sensibility. Ah, my dear friend, we do not 
 know what a loss we have suffered ! " 
 
 Longchamp, meanwhile, was packing for transportation to 
 Paris his books, marbles, bronzes, pictures, telescopes, air- 
 pumps, and his other apparatus, much of which was placed 
 in large barrels, and all was sent to his old abode in Paris. 
 He had a settlement of accounts with M. du Chatelet, much 
 to the advantage of that incomprehensible husband. He had 
 essentially promoted the fortune of the bereaved family, and 
 continued to be of service to it. He had, as before men- 
 tioned, lent the marquis forty thousand francs for the restora- 
 tion of the old chateau at Cirey, receiving, by way of interest, 
 an annuity of two thousand francs. For several years he had 
 been in the habit of making a present to the marquis of a re- 
 ceipt for the amount of the annual sum. • When the Brussels 
 lawsuit had reached a favorable stage, it was Voltaire who 
 negotiated and affected a compromise, by which the Du Ch^te- 
 lets surrendered their claim for the sum of two hundred thou- 
 sand francs in ready money. He then proposed to the marquis 
 to terminate their pecuniary relations at once and forever by 
 selling him back his annuity for the sum of fifteen thousand 
 francs. Du Chatelet gratefully accepted this proposal, and 
 contrived to pay ten thousand francs of the sum agreed upon, 
 leaving five thousand unpaid at the time of his wife's death. 
 This debt Voltaire now formally relinquished, asking only in 
 return a few mementos which he had himself given her, such 
 as his own miniature set in diamonds, and some articles of 
 furniture which he had bought for her at a sale.^ 
 
 It is interesting to observe how scrupulously he used the 
 forms of respect demanded by the rank of this husband, to 
 whom he was so strangely related. In giving an account of 
 these transactions to that husband's elder sister, he says, " The 
 marquis deigned to accept from an old servant this arrange- 
 ment, which he would not have accepted from a man less at- 
 tached to him I value his friendship above five thou- 
 sand francs." 
 
 After a stay of fifteen days at Cirey, Longchamp packing, 
 himself working a little upon his " Rome Sauvde," he returned 
 
 1 "Voltaire to the Countess de Montrevel (sister of the Marquis du Chatelet), 
 November 15, 1749.
 
 THE WIDOWER. 573 
 
 by easy stages to Paris, and took up his abode in his old quar- 
 ters, Rue Traversiere, now hired by him from the Marquis du 
 Chatelet. The house was a roomy old mansion in the Fau- 
 bourg St. Antoine, not very far from the Bastille. The mar- 
 quis, who cared little for Paris or the court, but loved his gun 
 and doars, retained the first and second floors, and let all the 
 rest to Voltaire. The rooms would scarcely contain the multi- 
 tude of things brought from Cirey, which were heaped up pell- 
 mell, as Longchamp records, a chaos of splendid and interest- 
 ing objects, which could neither be enjoyed nor seen. The 
 owner wandered about among them, sick, sorrowful, inconsol- 
 able, sleepless, admitting only his guardian angels, the D'Ar- 
 gentals, and Richelieu, and them not often. He never went 
 out. 
 
 " During the nights [says Longchamp] he would get up, all agita- 
 tion, and, fancying he saw Madame du Chatelet, he would call to her, 
 and drag himself with difficulty from room to room, as if in search of 
 her. It was the end of October, and the cold was already somewhat 
 severe. In the middle of a certain night when he could not sleep, 
 he got up out of bed, and after groping a few steps about the room 
 he felt so weak that he leaned against a table to keep from falling. 
 He remained standing there a long time, shivering with cold, and yet 
 reluctant to wake me. At length he forced himself to go into the 
 next room, where almost all his books were heaped upon the floor. 
 But he was far from remembering this, and, his head always filled 
 with the same object, he was endeavoring to traverse the room, when, 
 running against a pile of folios, he stumbled and fell. Unable to rise, 
 he called me several times ; but so feeble was his voice that at first 
 I did not hear him, although I slept near by. "Waking, at last, I 
 heard him groan and faintly repeat my name. I sprang up, and ran 
 toward him. Having no light, and going very fast, my feet became 
 entangled with his, and I fell upon him. Upon getting up, I found 
 him speechless and almost frozen. I made haste to lift him to his 
 bed, and, having struck a light and made a great fire, I endeavored to 
 warm him by wrapping his body and limbs in very hot cloths. That 
 produced a good effect. Gradually I saw him coming to himself ; he 
 opened his eyes, and, recognizing me, he said that he felt very tired 
 and had need of rest. Having covered him well and closed his cur- 
 tains, I remained in his room the rest of the night. He soon fell 
 asleep, and did not wake until near eleven in the morning." 
 
 Longchamp claims to have assisted his recovery by means
 
 574 LIFE OF VOLTAIKE. 
 
 still more effectual. Among the letters which he had saved 
 from the conflagration of madame's papers there were some 
 in which she had spoken of Voltaire with great freedom. We 
 know that she did this in conversation. With several of these 
 letters within easy reach, Longchamp ventured to say to his 
 " dear master," whom he saw perishing daily, that he was very 
 much in the wrong to mourn so deeply the death of a lady 
 who had not loved him. " What ! " he cried. " Mordieu ! 
 She did not love me ? " " No," said Longchamp ; " I have the 
 proof in my hand, and here it is." He gave him the letters, 
 which he read, and remained silent a long time. " She de- 
 ceived me ! " he said at length, with a sigh ; " who would 
 have believed it ? " From that hour, according to the secre- 
 tary, he began to recover his cheerfulness, and never again 
 left his bed in the night pronouncing the name of Emilie. 
 
 Something of this kind may have occurred ; for, no doubt, 
 a person so little accustomed to restrain her tongue had fre- 
 quently given full play to her pen. The Abbe de Voisenon, 
 a warm friend of the marquise for many years, has a brief 
 passage on this point : " Madame du Chatelet cQncealed noth- 
 ing from me ; I remained often alone with her until five in the 
 
 morninfj She said to me sometimes that she was en- 
 
 tirely detached from Voltaire. I made no reply. I took one 
 of the eight volumes [of manuscript letters from Voltaire to 
 the marquise, which she had had bound in eight beautiful 
 quartos], and I read some of the letters. I observed her eyes 
 moisten with tears. I promptly shut the book, saying, ' You 
 are not cured ! ' The last year of her life, I put her to the 
 same test. She criticised them ; I was convinced that the 
 cure was accomplished. She confided to me that Saint-Lam- 
 bert had been the doctor." ^ 
 
 Voltaire's letters of this melancholy time harmonize with 
 his secretary's narrative. The letters of October are in the 
 tone of despair. In those of November much interest is 
 shown in his usual pursuits, and he renews his labors to com- 
 plete and perfect his new plays. He wrote often to the Duch- 
 ess du Maine, " ma frotectrice^'' arranging with her the de- 
 tails of a first performance on her private stage at Sceaux 
 of " Rome Sauvee," in which the author himself was to play 
 1 Quoted by Desuoiresterres in Voltaire a la Cour, page 180.
 
 THE WIDOWER. 575 
 
 the part of Cicero. The drama, always his consolation when 
 other sources of enjojmient failed, was his chief means of res- 
 toration now, as it doubtless will be, finally and forever, the 
 most constant solace of toil-worn mortals. By Christmas, 
 too, he had put his house in order. He took the whole of the 
 large house from the Marquis du Chatelet, and so found room 
 for his furniture and objects of art. He invited his niece, 
 Madame Denis, to live with him and do the honors of his 
 abode. She was abundantly willing, and about Christmas 
 took possession of the keys and governed his house. His other 
 relations frequently visited him, and assisted to cheer his exist- 
 ence in the most natural manner. Madame Denis, whatever 
 her faults, was at least a woman of the world, a true Parisi- 
 enne, interested in art and society, ambitious to shine. She 
 had herself written a comedy, was somewhat proficient in 
 music, and could take a part in a play Avith some credit. " I 
 have returned to Paris," wrote Voltaire to Frederic, November 
 10, 1749. " I have gathered my family about me ; I have 
 taken a house, and I find myself the father of a family, with- 
 out having any children. Thus, in my grief, I have formed 
 an honorable and quiet establishment, and I shall spend the 
 ■winter in completing these arrangements." 
 
 It seemed, then, that he had won at last, at the age of fifty- 
 six, a suitable and becoming home in his native city. The 
 Hotel de Richelieu was close at hand. The D'Argentals were 
 not far from him. Several of the friends of his early days 
 were still living, — the Abb^ d'Olivet, D'Argenson, Thieriot, 
 and others. He was rich beyond the most sanguine dreams of 
 his youth. Longchamp gives us the catalogue of his revenues 
 for this very year, 1749, amounting to seventy-four thousand 
 francs. He informs us, also, that this catalogue was incom- 
 plete, and that the actual income was probably eighty tliou- 
 sand francs, a sum equal in purchasing power to perhaps fifty 
 thousand dollars of our present currency. It was a laro-e in- 
 come for the time, one that placed every reasonable gratifica- 
 tion within his reach. It was an income, too, of which the 
 fiat of no man could deprive him. He did not yet own a foot 
 of land. He drew his revenue from the bonds of the city of 
 Paris, from mortgages, from annuities upon the estates of 
 great lords. He had twenty sources of supply, which could
 
 576 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE, 
 
 not all fail him, let him be compelled to fly to the ends of the 
 earth. He kept his resources in light marching order. 
 
 France had been at peace since 1748. Why should he not 
 henceforth remain at home, cultivate his art, amuse Paris, en- 
 joy his celebrity, and glide tranquilly into the veteran ? Be- 
 cause he was Voltaire ; because France was France ; because 
 he had scarcely yet begun the work which makes him a per- 
 sonage in the history of man ; and because, until a man's 
 work is substantially done, it is in vain that he seeks the re- 
 pose of the chimney corner.
 
 CHAPTER XLVII. 
 
 HOUSEHOLDER IN PARIS. 
 
 It is evident from his letters of this time that he considered 
 himself settled for life. His intention was, after spending the 
 winter in Paris, to visit the King of Prussia, and then gratify 
 a long-cherished desire of making the tour of Italy. He 
 wished to see Rome, and the two buried cities in which the 
 past had been preserved for the inspection of modern eyes. 
 This desire appeased, he meant to return to his home in Paris, 
 and resume there his life of toil and pleasure. 
 
 He did not know as well as we now do how completely 
 he had lost his court favor. Neither Richelieu nor Pompa- 
 dour could hold their own, in such a cause, against Boyer, the 
 queen, the dauphin, the princesses, and the antipathy of the 
 king. Nevertheless, on one condition, he could have lived in 
 peace in his house the rest of his days : he must have discon- 
 tinued the important part of his career ; he must have let the 
 Boyers remain in unmolested possession of the intellect of 
 France. But this was impossible to him. He might as well 
 have tried to live without breathing. 
 
 Longchamp has already told us the story of the publication 
 of '' Zadig," one of a series of satirical tales, which he com- 
 posed from 1746 to 1750. How could an author expect court 
 favor while publishing burlesques so effective as these of every 
 court abuse, and even of court personages, transparently dis- 
 guised ? There was one little tale of his, called " The World 
 as it Goes, or the Vision of Babouc," which had been circu- 
 lating two or three years under an equally transparent veil of 
 the anonymous. Babouc was commissioned by the j)residing 
 genius of Asia to visit the city of Persepolis, to see if it was 
 deserving of destruction or only of chastisement. Babouc 
 was Voltaire, and Persepolis was Paris. Every fault of the 
 regime was touched lightly, but in a way that made it ridic- 
 
 VOL. I. 37
 
 678 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 ulcus forever. Tlie Heedlessness of the war then wastinor 
 France, promotion by intrigue of mistresses, the " good old 
 times " superstition, the burial of the dead under churches, the 
 sale of offices, the persecution of philosophers, all the topics, 
 important and unimportant, were treated with his own grace, 
 brevity, and point. 
 
 Babouc enters a sombre and vast inclosure filled with the 
 old and ill-favored, where some people paid money to others 
 for the privilege of seating themselves. He thought it must 
 be a market for the sale of rush-bottomed chairs. " But im- 
 mediately, seeing several women going down upon their knees, 
 pretending to look straight before them, and eying men fur- 
 tively, Babouc perceived that he was in a temple." A young 
 man who had bought a judgeship consults an old lawyer as to 
 the decision he ought to give in a cause. " But," asks Ba- 
 bouc, " why is not the old man on the bench ? " Babouc 
 visits the great college of mages, or priests, the chief of whom 
 confessed that he had a revenue of a hundred thousand crowns 
 a year for having taken the vow of poverty. Babouc admires 
 "the magnificence of that house of penitence." 
 
 Another of these tales was called " Memnon, or Human 
 Wisdom," a burlesque of those luxurious theologians of the 
 century whose fundamental maxim was that partial evil is the 
 general good. It was Pope's all-is-as-well-as-possible theory 
 of the universe. It was the theory of comfortable, solid men, 
 who have little sympatliy and less imagination. A burlesque 
 of a system of philosophy would have been harmless enough 
 from any other pen. But Voltaire must needs bring his bat- 
 tered enthusiast to court, " with a plaster on his eye and a 
 petition in his hand," to get redress for outrageous wrongs. 
 There he meets several ladies wearing hoops twentj'-four feet 
 in circumference, one of whom, eying him askance, said, 
 " Oh, horror ! " Another, who knew him a little, said to him, 
 " Good evening, Monsieur Memnon ; indeed. Monsieur Mem- 
 non, I am very glad to see you. Apropos, Monsieur Memnon, 
 how came you to lose an eye ? " And she passed on without 
 waiting for an answer. Finally, he throws himself at the 
 king's feet, and presents his petition. The king receives it 
 very graciously, and hands it to a satrap for examination and 
 report. The satrap draws Memnon aside, and says to him,
 
 HOUSEHOLDER IN PARIS. 579 
 
 with a haughty air and a bitter sneer, " I find you a pleasant 
 style of one-eyed man to address yourself to the king rather 
 than to me, and still more pleasant to dare ask justice agamst 
 an honest bankrupt, whom I honor with my protection, and 
 who is the nephew of a femme de chambre of my mistress. 
 Abandon this affair, my friend, if you wish to keep your other 
 eye ! " 
 
 After many adventures of this kind, poor Memnon, who be- 
 gan life with sanguine hopes of attaining perfect happiness by 
 the exercise of perfect virtue, comes to the conclusion that this 
 little terraqueous globe of ours is the mad-house of the uni- 
 verse. All of which was very amusing except to parties bur- 
 lesqued, who owned France and kept the key of the Bastille. 
 
 Another of these airy tales was called "History of the Trav- 
 els of Scarmentado, by Himself," a burlesque of religious in- 
 tolerance, that compels the reader to laugh and shudder at the 
 same moment. Scarmentado visited Rome under Leo X. to 
 find it a scene of debauchery and rapine ; France, desolate by 
 sixty years of religious wars ; England, where he was shown 
 the place on which the blessed Queen Mary, daughter of 
 Henry VIII., had burned five hundred of her subjects ; Hol- 
 land, where he saw the bald head of the prime minister, Bar- 
 neveldt, cut off, because he believed men were saved by good 
 works as well as by faith. At Seville, on a lovely spring day, 
 when all breathed abundance and joy, Scarmentado witnessed 
 a glorious festival. The king, the queen, and their children, 
 little girls as well as boys, were seated on a magnificent plat- 
 form in a public square. " Some very beautiful prayers were 
 chanted ; the forty guilty ones were burned by a slow fire ; at 
 which all the royal family appeared to be extremely edified." 
 Scarmentado found a Spanish bishop boasting that they had 
 drowned, burned, or put to the sword ten millions of infidels 
 in America, in order to convert the Americans. He gravely 
 remarks thereupon, " I believe that this bishop exaggerated ; 
 but if we should reduce those sacrifices to five millions, it 
 would still be admirable." 
 
 The traveler continues his journey round the world, and 
 everywhere finds men waging cruel war against men for opin- 
 ions and usages, monstrous or trivial. On reaching Ispahan, 
 for example, he was assailed by a terrible question : " Are you
 
 580 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 for the black slieep or tlie white sheep ? " He replied, " It is 
 indifferent to me, provided the mutton is tender." Both sects 
 set upon him as a vile scoffer, and he had to fly for his life. 
 
 Then came " Zadig," the story he had read piecemeal to the 
 Duchess da Maine in the small hours of the morning. This 
 was the longest of the series, but it could be read in an even- 
 ing, and it was full of offense. To Madame du Maine, every 
 scene was a satire of the life she daily witnessed ; nearly every 
 name was the pseudonym of a person she was familiar with. 
 The story begins tlius : " In the time of King Moabdar, there 
 was at Babylon a young man named Zadig." She took it oth- 
 erwise : " In the time of Louis XV., there was in Paris a young 
 man named Voltaire." That is to say, it was the mind of 
 Voltaire before which now passed in rapid review the state of 
 things existing in her world. In this work he attacked Boyer 
 under so obvious an anagram that no one failed to recognize 
 the ancient Bishop of Mirepoix. He called him " Yebor, the 
 most stupid of the Chaldeans, and therefore the most fanat- 
 ical." A controversy raged in Babylon as to whether there 
 was such an animal as a griffin. " Why," said one party, 
 " should Zoroaster forbid the eating of griffins, if there are no 
 griffins ? " Zadig sought to reconcile the embittered sects by 
 saying, " If there are griffins, let us not eat them ; if there are 
 none, we shall still less eat them ; and, in either case, we shall 
 obey Zoroaster." This was flat heresy. A learned person, 
 who had written thirteen volumes on the properties of the 
 griffin, hastened to accuse Zadig before the fanatical Yebor, 
 who would gladly have impaled him for the greater glory of 
 the sun, and recited the breviary of Zoroaster on the occasion, 
 with the most satisfied tone. A friend took up the young her- 
 etic's defense. " Bewai'e of punishing Zadig ! " he cried ; " he 
 is a saint. He has some griffins in his poultry-yard, and yet 
 does not eat them. His accuser is a heretic, who dares main- 
 tain that rabbits have cloven feet, and are not unclean." 
 " Very well," said Yebor, shaking his bald head, " it is neces- 
 sary to impale Zadig for having thought ill of griffins, and the 
 other for having spoken amiss of rabbits." The friend ar- 
 ranged the matter through his mistress, "a maid of honor," 
 and no one was impaled. 
 
 The trivial nature of the theological controversies of the
 
 HOUSEHOLDER IN PARIS. 581 
 
 day was variously burlesqued in this story. " For fifteen hun- 
 dred years Babylon had been divided into two irreconcilable 
 sects : one maintaining that to enter the Temple of Mithra 
 except with the right foot first was an abomination, and the 
 other denouncing all who presumed to enter except with the 
 left. The bold Zadig jumped into the temple with both feet, 
 and proved in an eloquent discourse that God was no respecter 
 of persons, and cared no more for one foot than the other. 
 The tale alluded also to the malign whisperers of the ante- 
 chamber, who every day uttered some new charge against a 
 loyal servant of the king. " The first accusation is repelled ; 
 the second grazes ; the third wounds ; the fourth kills." 
 
 Besides these fictions, there was a piece of similar tone 
 which assailed superstition in a more direct manner, called 
 " The Voice of the Sage and of the People." It was a series 
 of short paragraphs, tending to show that it is religious enthu- 
 siasms that waste the wealth of nations and menace the tran- 
 quillity of kings. " Here is a convent with two hundred thou- 
 sand francs of annual revenue. Reason says. Divide that estate 
 among a hundred officers, who would marry and rear citi- 
 zens for their country." It was superstition that assassinated 
 Henry III., Henry IV., and the Prince of Orange, besides 
 causing to flow rivers of common blood. But no philosopher 
 had ever raised a parricidal hand against his king, or advised 
 disobedience to the laws. Reason perfected would destroy 
 the very germ of religious wars, which the philosophic spirit 
 had already banished from the world. 
 
 It was not, however, such passages as these that made the 
 "Voice of the Sage" so offensive to the Bishop of Mirepoix 
 and his colleagues. The question of taxing the vast property 
 of the church was assuming importance, and this pamphlet 
 presented the question in such a way that it seemed to admit 
 of only one answer. He went to the root of the matter : — 
 
 " There ought not to be two authorities in a state. 
 
 " The distinction between spiritual authority and temporal 
 authority is a relic of Vandal barbarism, as if, in a house, two 
 masters should be recognized : I, who am the father of the 
 family ; and, besides me, the tutor of my children, to whom I 
 pay wages. 
 
 " I desire that very great respect be paid my children's in-
 
 582 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 structor, but I am very far from wishing him to have the least 
 authority in my house. 
 
 " In France, where reason becomes more developed every 
 day, reason teaches us that the church ought to contribute to 
 the expenses of the nation in proportion to its revenues, and 
 that the body set apart to teach justice ought to begin by giv- 
 ing an example of it. 
 
 " That government would be worthy of the Hottentots in 
 which it should be permitted to a certain number of men to 
 say, ' Let those pay taxes who work ; we ought not to pay any- 
 thing, because we are idle.' 
 
 " That government would outrage God and men in which 
 citizens should be able to say, ' The nation has given us all we 
 have, and we owe nothing to it except prayers.' " 
 
 This "Voice of the People," a short essay, which the reader 
 might not observe in the multitudinous writings of the author, 
 was the sensation of the year in ecclesiastical circles. It was 
 a Voice that awoke many echoes. Replies, refutations, and 
 parodies appeared in such numbers that as many as fifteen 
 are known and catalogued at this day. There was the " Voice 
 of the Priest," the " Voice of the Bishop," the " Voice of the 
 Pope," the "Voice of the Fool," the "Voice of the Women," 
 the " Voice of the Poor Man," the " Voice of the Rich Man," 
 the " Voice of the Poet," the " Voice Crying in the Wilder- 
 ness," the "Voice of the Christian," and, finally, a volume con- 
 taining all these Voices. A little pamphlet has seldom raised 
 such a storm. 
 
 These brief notices of his lighter labor's during the last years 
 of Madame du Chatelet's life will suffice to explain the loss of 
 any little favor he may have won at court by two years of toil 
 for its amusement. These tales arid essays were easy to read, 
 short, full of that satirical gayety which Frenchmen are quick- 
 est to appreciate, and not wanting in weighty truth most need- 
 ful for citizens to know. The king himself probably had men- 
 tal force enough to read works so adroitly adapted to the inert 
 intellect. The queen, too, and her dull little court may have 
 been equal to some of them ; and there are always people close 
 at hand to minister to the passions of those who control the 
 expenditure of a nation's revenue. A notable scheme was con- 
 ceived in 1748, as Marmontel records, to assail Voltaire in the
 
 HOUSEHOLDER IN PARIS. 583 
 
 very citadel of liis power. His dramatic celebrity, as we have 
 before seen, he habitually used as a means of self-protection. 
 When a storm lowered, when he felt a lettre de cachet in the 
 air, he seems always to have gone to his portfolios and rum- 
 maged for a new tragedy ; for even the most servile minister 
 hesitated to launch a bolt at a man who had just given Paris 
 a new pleasure and the king's reign a new glory. But now 
 the hostile faction disinterred a rival to Voltaire in the drama 
 itself. 
 
 Crdbillon, the dramatist of a former generation, was still liv- 
 ing, seventy-four years of age, in obscurity, most of his great 
 successes of other days forgotten. He had written effective 
 tragedies, chiefly remarkable for their power to excite terror. 
 Being questioned, after the successful production of one of his 
 terrific plays, " L'Atree," as to his reason for choosing that 
 line, he answered, " Corneille has appropriated heaven, and 
 Racine the earth. Nothing remained for me but hell, and I 
 threw myself into it headlong." Marmontel, who was now an 
 established man of letters, a favorite of the reigning mistress, 
 was an eye-witness of the attempt made to resuscitate the 
 aged poet, and restore to him the first place in the drama of 
 France. 
 
 " Crebillon [be tells us], old and poor, was living in the vilest part 
 of the Marais, laboring by starts at that ' Catiliua ' which he had an- 
 nounced for ten years, and of which he read here and there some bits 
 of scenes that were thought admirable. His age, his former success, 
 his somewhat rough manners, his soldier-like character, his truly trag- 
 ical face, the air, the imposing though simple tone in which he recited 
 his harsh and inharmonious verses, the vigor, the energy, he gave to 
 his expression, all concurred to strike the mind with a sort of enthusi- 
 asm. 
 
 " The name of Crdbillon was the rallying cry for the enemies of 
 Voltaire. ' Electre ' and ' Rhadamiste,' which were sometimes still 
 played, drew but thin houses. All the rest of Crebillon's tragedies 
 were forgotten ; while those of Voltaire, ' Qidipe,' ' Alzire,' ' Mahomet,' 
 ' Zaire,' and ' Merope,' were often performed in all the splendor of full 
 success. The partisans of old Crebillon were few, but noisy. They 
 did not cease to call him the Sophocles of our age ; and, even among 
 men of letters, Marivaux used to say that all the fine wit of Voltaire 
 must bow before the genius of Crebillon. 
 
 " It was mentioned before Madame de Pompadour that this great,
 
 584 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 neglected man was suffered to grow old without support, because he 
 was witliout art and intrigue. This was touching her in a tender 
 part. * What say you ? ' cried she. ' Crebillon poor and forsaken ! ' 
 She instantly obtained for him a pension of two thousand francs from 
 the privy purse. 
 
 " Crebillon was eager to thank his benefactress. A slight indispo- 
 sition kept her in bed when he was announced. She desired he might 
 come in. The sight of this fine old man touched her ; she received 
 him with an affecting grace. He was moved by it ; and, as he leaned 
 over her bed to kiss her hand, the king appeared. ' Ah, madame,' 
 cried Crebillon, ' the king has surprised us ! I am lost.' This sally 
 from an old man of (nearly) eighty pleased the king. The fortune of 
 Crebillon was decided. All the little courtiers launched into praises of 
 his genius and manners. ' He had dignity,' said they, ' but no pride, 
 and still less vainglory. His poverty was the proof of his disinterest- 
 edness. He was a venerable character, and the man whose genius 
 truly honored the reign of the king.' ' Catilina ' was mentioned as 
 the wonder of the age. Madame de Pompadour wished to hear it. A 
 day was fixed for the reading ; the king, present, but invisible, heard 
 it also. It had complete success ; and, on its first performance, Ma- 
 dame de Pompadour, accompanied by a crowd of courtiers, attended 
 with the most lively interest. A little time afterward Crebillon ob- 
 tained the favor of an edition of his works at the press of the Louvre, 
 the expense defrayed by the royal treasury. From that time Voltaire 
 was coldly received, and he left off going to court." 
 
 The reader does not need to be informed that Voltaire was 
 not the person to submit to an intrigue of this nature. His 
 way of meeting it was one possible only to himself. He se- 
 lected for the theme of his next tragedy the story of S^mira- 
 mis, Queen of Babylon, a subject which had once been treated 
 by Crebillon. The success of this powerful play was not as 
 decided as Longchamp imagined. All depended upon the ghost 
 scene, which the author again attempted, still remembering 
 the effect of the ghost in Hamlet on the London stage. But 
 the crowd of dandies on the stage left, as Voltaire remarked, 
 " scarcely more than a space of ten feet wide for the actors," 
 and thus the awful power of the ghost scene in the third 
 act, so necessary to the effect of the later scenes, was fatally 
 marred. On the succeeding nights, more room was retained 
 for the actors ; and unprejudiced spectators agreed in assign- 
 ing this tragedy a rank among the masterpieces of the French
 
 HOUSEHOLDER IN PARIS. 585 
 
 drama. It has retained its place on the stage to this day. 
 But, for the moment, it failed of the effect the author, at the 
 moment, desired. The forced success of Crebillon's "■ Cati- 
 lina " followed. Voltaire, as we have seen, was roused by it 
 to write a tragedy upon the same subject, and, almost before 
 the ink was dry, threw himself upon another of Crciibillon's 
 subjects, — " Electre," — and produced a tragedy which he en- 
 titled " Oreste." These two pieces — "Rome Sauvc^e" and 
 " Oreste " — were in the author's portfolio, though still under 
 revision, when he returned to Paris after the death of Madame 
 du Chatelet in October, 1749. 
 
 The very actors had caught the infection of his ill-favor at 
 court. They had been restive under his exactions for the due 
 presentation of " Semiramis," the short run of which had not 
 tended to make them more submissive. He would have four 
 men in the wings to extinguish the candles, and another man 
 to lower the foot-lights, in order to " execute the night," on 
 the appearance of the ghost. He was himself a good actor, and 
 he had, as all good actors have, the stage-manager's instinct 
 sensitively alive. He insisted on having his dramatic concep- 
 tions conveyed to his audiences as vividly as the art permitted. 
 One result of the imperfect success of " Semiramis " and the 
 ostentatious " protection " bestowed upon Cr^billon " was an 
 ill-feeling between himself and the company of actors attached 
 to the Theatre-Fran cais. " Sarrasin," he wrote to D'Argental, 
 "spoke to me with much more than indecency when I begged 
 him, on behalf of the public, to put into his plajang more soul 
 and more dignity. There are four or five of the actors who 
 refuse me the salute, because I made them appear upon the 
 stage as silent spectators. La None has declaimed against the 
 piece much more loftily than he declaimed his part. In a 
 word, I have experienced from them nothing but ingratitude 
 and insolence." 
 
 Established now in a spacious house of his own, his melan- 
 choly in some degree dispelled, his friends and family about 
 him, he resolved to dispense with these ungrateful actors, Avith- 
 out de^oriving himself of the pleasure their art had afforded 
 him. He had a great room in his second stoiy arranged as a 
 little theatre, capable of seating a hundred persons and of con- 
 taining a hundred and twenty. Longchamp had brought him
 
 686 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 a good account of a company of young amateurs, who were in 
 the habit of playing for their own amusement twice a week in 
 a hall hired by themselves, and Voltaire sent them a polite in- 
 vitation to visit him. One of these amateurs was a goldsmith's 
 son, named Lekain, then just of age, who was destined to a 
 long and splendid career upon the Paris stage. It was the 
 ever assiduous Longchamp who bore Voltaire's invitation to 
 the company. 
 
 " My message [he says] was received by all of them with as much 
 joy as surprise. They promised to call upon M. de Voltaire, and it 
 was agreed that they should come at ten o'clock in the morning. On 
 the day fixed, the entire troupe, including even the candle-snuffer, 
 arrived punctually at the rendezvous. No one on that day had 
 neglected his toilet, and all those young people were extremely well 
 dressed. I conducted them to the drawing-room. A moment after, 
 M. de Voltaire appeared. He began by thanking them for their 
 good-will and for complying with his desire so promptly. Address- 
 ing each in turn, he ascertained their line of parts and the pieces 
 in which they played with most success. He questioned Lekain 
 much, whom I had described as the best performer of the company. 
 Then he invited the five or six principal actors to declaim some pas- 
 sage taken indifferently from one of their parts. In general, he ap- 
 peared tolerably satisfied ; he encouraged them, and promised them some 
 instruction from which their talent could profit if they were willing 
 to receive it with docility. At length, in order to judge them better, 
 he engaged them to come the next day, towards six o'clock in the 
 evening, to play upon his stage the tragedy they knew best. They 
 acquiesced at once in this request, and several voices said that the 
 tragedy which they played most willingly and successfully was ' Ma- 
 homet, the Prophet.' A desire to pay court to the author of tliat 
 piece may have had some influence in determining their choice. 
 
 " However that may be, the thing was so arranged, and the next 
 day they played the tragedy of ' Mahomet ' in the hall he had pre- 
 pared, the only spectators being M. de Voltaire, Madame Denis, M. 
 and Madame d'Argental, the Duke de Richelieu, and M. de Pont- 
 de-Veyle, a brother of M. d'Argental. I also was present at this 
 representation, according to the injunction of M. de Voltaire. Two 
 or three persons attached to the house may also have been there. 
 Lekain played with force and intelligence, and, ahove all, with much 
 earnestness, the part of Mahomet, which he has since performed in a 
 manner so superior upon the public stage. The other parts were 
 played sufficiently well. M. de Voltaire saw with pleasure the union
 
 HOUSEHOLDER IN PARIS. 587 
 
 of those young people, their zeal, their correctness, and the unity 
 which they knew how to give to the execution of his piece, though 
 they were occasionally interrupted. This performance was, to speak 
 precisely, only a general rehearsal. The author stop{)ed the actors 
 from time to time, and made them begin a scene again, showing to 
 each the gesture and tone suitable to his part and to the situation. 
 
 " Upon the whole, he was well enough content with this first per- 
 formance, lie invited both actors and spectators to remain to sup- 
 per, and, at the end of the repast, he brought the parts of his 
 ' Rome Sauvee,' and distributed them to those young people, request- 
 ing them to learn their parts as soon as they could He en- 
 gaged Lekain, in whom he discovered the germ of a superior talent, 
 to come and live with him, a proposal which was accepted with ardor 
 by that young man. 
 
 " When the roles of ' Rome Sauvee' were well learned, it was re- 
 hearsed several times, M. de Voltaire giving himself much trouble 
 to direct and form the aotors. At length, all being arranged to his 
 mind, he wished to have the piece played before a company of con- 
 noisseurs, to get their judgment upon it. To complete the illusion, 
 he desired that all the accessories should be in accord with the sub- 
 ject of the play. For that purpose, a considerable number of new 
 costumes in the Roman style were necessary, which could not be made 
 without much time and expense. He conceived the plan of borrow- 
 ing for the purpose the superb dresses and magnificent properties pro- 
 vided by the court for the ' Catilina ' of Crebillon, played some time 
 before with great pomp, both at court and in the city. All those effects 
 were preserved with care at the Theatre-Fran^ais, where they were 
 again to be used before long for the same play, though it had already 
 had thirty or forty representations. This run was in consequence of 
 the high protection accorded then to Crebillon, — a protection prepared 
 and obtained by the intrigues of a cabal envenomed against M. de 
 Voltaire, whom they thought to abase and annihilate by exalting Cre- 
 billon M. de Voltaire asked M. de Richelieu to grant him for 
 
 a single day the costumes which had been made for ' Catilina.' The 
 First Gentleman of the Chamber consenting without difficulty, all was 
 sent to tlie Rue Traversiere, and nothing now delayed the representa- 
 tion of ' Rome Sauvee.' 
 
 " On the day appointed, the hall was filled at an early hour. Only 
 a very few ladies were present, the audience consisting principally of 
 men of letters ; among others, MM. D'Alembert, Diderot, Marmontel, 
 the President Henault, the Abbes de Voisenou and Raynal, and sev- 
 eral Academicians, such as the Abbe d'Olivet and others. The Dukes 
 de Richelieu and de la Valliere attended, and some other intimate
 
 588 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 friends of the author, whom I had invited on his part. Among them 
 were particularly remarked Father de la Tour, principal of the Col- 
 lege of the Jesuits [Louis-le-Grand], and his companion. These fa- 
 thers never attended any plays except those which were given by 
 their scholars in college ; but M. de Voltaire, who had read his tragedy 
 to Father de la Tour, and had received from him strong compliments 
 thereupon, so pressed him to come and see it played that he consented. 
 The actors, kindled by the presence of so many enlightened judges, 
 put into the performance of their parts all the fire of which they were 
 capable. The audience, in general, seemed very well satisfied with 
 them, but were still more so with the piece. They admired the beauty 
 of the poetry, the force and truth of the characters ; and connois- 
 seurs agreed that, in these respects, ' Rome Sauvee ' was equal to the 
 best of M. de Voltaire's plays. 
 
 " The Abbe d'Olivet was especially enchanted, and he openly testi- 
 fied his joy and his gratitude to the author for having at last avenged 
 his dear Cicero for the flat and ridiculous part which old Crebillon 
 had made him play in his ' Catiliua.' After the performance, M. de 
 Voltaire could not doubt the general satisfaction. Every one was 
 eager to testify it to him, and urged him not to deprive the public of 
 so beautiful a work. 
 
 " The fame of the little theatre of the Rue Traversiere rapidly 
 spread over all Paris. Though established first by M. de Voltaire 
 only for the purpose of trying his new pieces, it became in a short 
 time almost a public theatre. His friends, whom he had at first ad- 
 mitted, solicited the same favor for others. Persons of consideration, 
 foreigners of note, who knew him only by reputation, sought admis- 
 sion, and he had not the force to refuse. I have seen more than one 
 minister and more than one ambassador present. It was necessary, 
 at last, to have tickets, the bearers of which alone should be admit- 
 ted. By means of some steps along the sides of the room, which 
 M. de Voltaire called his boxes, about a hundred persons could find 
 seats, while at least twenty others, standing in a kind of vestibule, could 
 also enjoy the play. 
 
 " The fame of the tragedy of ' Rome Sauvee ' gave many people 
 a desire to see it. A second representation was given, which was 
 more remarkable than the first, and produced a more lively sensation. 
 "Without notifying any of the spectators except three or four, M. de 
 Voltaire himself played the part of Cicero, as he had done once be- 
 fore at the chateau of Madame la Duchesse du Maine at Sceaux some 
 weeks previously. He excited the same enthusiasm at Paris. Some 
 persons whom I saw thirty years after that representation, and who 
 had been witnesses of it with me, spoke to me of it with as much in- 
 
 I 
 
 I
 
 HOUSEHOLDER IN PARIS. 589 
 
 terest as if it had taken place the evening before. Some time after, 
 M. de Voltaire tried his tragedy of the ' Due de Foix.' I saw played, 
 also, by the little troupe of amateurs, ' Zulime,' — a piece formerly 
 represented, but little more known than the play last named. Two 
 nieces of the author appeared in it together : Madame Denis in the 
 part of Zulime, and Madame de Fontaine in that of Ative. They 
 played tolerably well, and must have been flattered by the reception 
 which the audience gave them. 
 
 " The company of the Thea,tre-Fran9ais could not be unaware of 
 the celebrity of the theatre in the Rue Traversiere. Some of them, 
 against whom M. de Voltaire had no complaint, ventured to come to 
 him and ask the favor of being admitted to his theatre. They were 
 not ill received ; for, before they left, M. de Voltaire called me, and 
 told me to give them two tickets for each of the next four represen- 
 tations. The actors thus obliged gave an account to their comrades 
 of the new pieces which they saw performed. The company felt that 
 those pieces would have been very useful to their theatre, which lan- 
 guished for want of interesting novelties. They began to realize their 
 past imprudence, and to feel how wrong they had been in giving 
 M. de Voltaire cause to be dissatisfied. They no longer concealed 
 their desire to atone for their fault. This being the posture of affairs, 
 M. d'Argental and M. de Pont-de-Veyle, his brother, coming to a 
 knowledge of the actors' disposition, undertook to reconcile M. de 
 Voltaire to them, and thus promote the enjoyment of the public, who 
 eagerly desired to see those pieces played, of which they had heard so 
 much. These were the two brothers whom he called sometimes his 
 guardian angels, and sometimes Castor and Pollux, alluding to the 
 tutelary divinities who restored hope and courage to sailors beaten 
 by a tempest. Their friendship, beginning in childhood, was always 
 extremely precious and useful to M. de Voltaire in all the circum- 
 stances of his life, and deserved the names which he took pleasure in 
 giving them. 
 
 " On the present occasion, those gentlemen spoke to the most in- 
 fluential actors, and made them feel the propriety of sending him a 
 dejiutation to ask him to open for them his portfolio. The deputa- 
 tion arrived, having at its head as orator M. Grandval. His address, 
 the object of which was to calm M. de Voltaire, asked the oblivion of 
 all past wrongs, and promised that the recollection of those wrongs 
 should be entirely effaced from his mind by their future conformity to 
 all his desires. Grandval ended his speech by entreating the poet, 
 the adthor of so many masterpieces, to take the company again into 
 favor, and restore to them his works. M. de Voltaire never knew 
 how to keep rancor when any one returned to him in good faith ;
 
 590 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 and, in fact, I have in other circumstances seen him pardon and forget 
 graver injuries when confession was made and repentance shown. He 
 was not insensible to this proceeding of the actors, gave a good recep- 
 tion to the deputation, and promised compliance with its request. The 
 difference between them was so terminated." 
 
 We possess, also, Lekain's recollection of his interviews and 
 residence with Voltaire during this important year, -which 
 fixed his destiny. He, too, mentions his surprise and delight 
 upon being invited to visit the author, who was the first of liv- 
 ing men in his regard. 
 
 " The pleasure [he tells us] which this invitation gave me was still 
 greater than my surprise. But what I cannot describe is my feeling 
 at the sight of that man, whose eyes sparkled with the fire of imagi- 
 nation and of genius. On addressing him I felt myself penetrated 
 with respect, enthusiasm, admiration, and fear. All these sensations 
 at once I experienced, when M. de Voltaire had the goodness to put 
 an end to my embarrassment by folding me in his arms, and thanking 
 God for having created a being who had kindled and moved him by 
 the delivery of verses that were not too good. 
 
 " He questioned me upon my condition, upon that of my father, 
 upon the manner in which I had been brought up, upon my ideas of 
 fortune. After having satisfied him upon all these points, and after 
 having taken my share of a dozen cups of chocolate, mixed with cof- 
 fee, his only nourishment from five in the morning until three in the 
 afternoon, I replied to him with intrepid firmness that I knew no 
 other happiness in life than to play upon the stage ; that, a cruel and 
 melancholy chance having left me my own master, and possessing a 
 little patrimony of about seven hundred and fifty francs per annum, 
 I had reason to hope that in abandoning the trade and skill of my fa- 
 ther I should not sustain any loss, if I could one day be admitted into 
 the king's troupe of actors. 
 
 " 'Ah, my friend,' cried M. de Voltaire, ' never do that ! Take my 
 advice : act for your pleasure, but never make acting your business. 
 It is the most beautiful, the most rare, the most difficult, of talents ; 
 but it is abased by barbarians and proscribed by hypocrites. One day 
 France will value your art aright ; but then there will be no more 
 Barons, no more Lecouvreurs, no more D'Angevilles. If you are 
 willing to renounce your project, I will lend you ten thousand francs 
 to go into business for yourself, and you shall pay me back when you 
 can. Go, my friend ; come and see me toward the end of the week ; 
 consider the subject well, and give me a positive answer.' 
 
 " Stunned, confused, and penetrated even to tears by the obligmg 
 
 1 
 
 m
 
 HOUSEHOLDER IN PARIS. 691 
 
 and generous offers of that great man, who was called avaricious, 
 hard, and jiitiless, I wished to pour out my thanks. Finally I adopted 
 the plan of making my bow while stammering a few words, and I 
 was going to take my leave, when he called me back to ask me to re- 
 peat some fragments of the parts I had already played. Without 
 consideration, I proposed to him, with little enough tact, the grand 
 passage from the second act of Piron's ' Gustave.' ' No Piron, no 
 Piron,' said he, with a voice thundering and tei*rible : ' I do not like 
 bad verses. Speak all you know of Racine.' 
 
 " Fortunately, I remembered that, while at the College Mazarin, I 
 had learned the whole tragedy of ' Athalie ' from having heard it often 
 rehearsed by the scholars who were going to play it. I began at the 
 first scene, playing alternately Abner and Joab. But I had not yet 
 entirely completed my task, when M. de Voltaire cried out with a di- 
 vine enthusiasm, — 
 
 " ' Oh ! mon Dieu ! the lovely verses ! And the wonder is that all 
 the piece is written with the same warmth, the same purity, from the 
 first scene to the last. Everywhere in it the poetry is inimitable. 
 Good-by, my dear child,* embracing me. ' I predict that you will 
 one day rend the heart, but be the delight, of Paris. But never go 
 upon the public stage.' 
 
 " Such is an exact account of my first interview with M. de Vol- 
 taire. The second was more decisive, since he consented, after the 
 most urgent entreaties on my part, to receive me into his house, and 
 let me play with his nieces and all my company in his little thea- 
 tre 
 
 " The expense which this temporary establishment caused him and 
 the disinterested offer which he made me some days before proved to 
 me in a very touching manner that he was as generous and noble in 
 his proceedings as his enemies were unjust in ascribing to him the vice 
 of sordid economy. These are facts of which I have been a witness. 
 I owe still another avowal to the truth ; not only did M. de Voltaire 
 aid me by his counsels for more than six months, but he paid my ex- 
 penses during that time ; and since I have belonged to the stage I can 
 prove that he has given me more than two thousand crowns. He calls 
 me to-day his gi-eat actor, his Garrick, his dear child. These titles I 
 owe only to his goodness ; but the title which I adopt at the bottom 
 of my heart is that of a pupil, respectful and penetrated with grati- 
 tude." 
 
 Lekain adds an anecdote of the dramatist's mode of drilling 
 the troupe : — 
 
 " A very young and pretty girl, daughter of a solicitor to the par-
 
 592 LIFE OF VOLTAII^E. 
 
 liament, played with me the part of Palmiie in ' Mahomet,' in the 
 theatre of M. de Voltaire. This amiable child, only fifteen, was far 
 from being able to deliver with force and energy the imprecations 
 against her tyrant. She was merely young, pretty, and interesting. 
 He therefore treated her with a great deal of tenderness, and, to show 
 her how far she was from being up to her part, he said to her, — 
 
 '• 'Mademoiselle, imagine that Mahomet is an impostor, a cheat, a 
 scoundrel, who has had your father stabbed, has just poisoned your 
 brother, and who, to crown his good works, absolutely wishes to pos- 
 sess you. If all these trifles give you a certain pleasure, ah ! then you 
 are right in treating him so gently as you do ; but if his behavior gives 
 you rather some repugnance, why, then, mademoiselle, this is how you 
 ought to address him.' 
 
 " Then, repeating the imprecation, he gave to that poor innocent 
 child, red with shame and trembling with fear, a lesson so much the 
 more precious since he joined example to precept. She became in 
 time a very agreeable actress." 
 
 Thus it was that he found consolation in the art of which he 
 was a votary for sixty years, — an art which was the ambition 
 of his youth, the occupation of his happiest hours, the solace of 
 his old age, his first triumph and his last. His peace was 
 now made with the actors of the national theatre, and he could 
 resume at any moment his career as national dramatist. Ho 
 put the docility of the company at once to a severe test. Hav- 
 ing invited them, with the D'Argentals and a few other devo- 
 tees of the drama, to the reading of a new tragedy, he read to 
 them, not " Rome Sauv^e," which they expected and desired, 
 but his new " Electre," which he now called " Oreste," a 
 piece after Sophocles, in the severe and simple taste of the 
 Greek master. Crebillon had once treated the subject with 
 some success, though his " Electre " had ceased to be per- 
 formed. Voltaire adhered closely to the Greek system, dis- 
 carding love, and presenting the awful story in the austere, un- 
 compromising manner of the Greeks. The actors looked blank 
 when he began the session by reading the list of characters. 
 
 " You expected," said the author, " that I was to give you 
 a reading of 'Catilina.' Not at all, gentlemen. This year I 
 give you ' Oreste,' and I shall not have ' Catilina ' played 
 until next year. Now for the distribution of the rdles. I ask 
 the most profound secrecy." 
 
 The explanation of this change was very simple, if he had 
 
 m.
 
 HOUSEHOLDER IN PARIS. 593 
 
 chosen to give it. The exigencies of the theatre obliged the 
 actors to produce something new within a few days, and the 
 author would not entrust the presentation of his beloved Cic- 
 ero, and the complicated drama of which he had made Cicero 
 the central figure, until it could be thoroughly rehearsed. The 
 company submitted with a good grace; the parts were dis- 
 tributed, and the rehearsals were begun. At this distance of 
 time, in a country where the arts exist, as it were, by suffer- 
 ance, and the drama is burdened with odium and disadvantage, 
 we can with difficulty conceive the interest taken by the pub- 
 lic in this stiuggle between Voltaire and the court on the stage 
 of the Thdatre-Fran^ais. The polite world of Paris was agi- 
 tated. When the " Catilina " of Cr^billon was performed in 
 1748, not only did the king pay the whole cost of the costumes 
 and appointments, but the court seconded the attempt to cast 
 Voltaire into the shade. Barbier tells us that for the three 
 opening nights all the boxes were taken a month in advance. 
 The princes and princesses of the royal blood made a point of 
 attending. Servile critics vied with one another in extolling 
 the piece, and by these arts a play insufferably tedious achieved 
 twenty representations. 
 
 And now again Paris was astir at the announcement of Vol- 
 taire's " Oreste." Piron, if we may believe tradition, took the 
 lead of the cabal against the new piece, and Voltaire, I need 
 not say, omitted no expedient to give it a fair chance of suc- 
 cess. The dread night arrived, January 12, 1750. Both par- 
 ties mustered in prodigious numbers. So zealous were the oppo- 
 nents of the piece that, according to Duverney, some of them 
 hissed in the street, and they kept up a vigorous hissing in the 
 theatre, long before the play began. The author had taken 
 the precaution to write a short address to the public, to disarm 
 those who pretended that this was an ungracious struggle on 
 his part against a veteran. One of the actors came forward 
 and spoke as follows : — 
 
 " Gentlemen, — The author of the tragedy which we are about to 
 have the honor of presenting to you has not the rash vanity to wish 
 to contend against the play of ' Electre,' justly honored by your ap- 
 plause, still less against a fellow artist, whom he has often called Mas- 
 ter, and who has inspired in him only a noble emulation, equally re- 
 mote from discouragement and from envy, — an emulation compatible 
 
 VOL. I. 38
 
 594 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 with friendship, and such as men of letters ought to cherish. He has 
 only wished, gentlemen, to hazard before you a picture of antiquity. 
 When you shall have judged this feeble sketch of a masterpiece of 
 past ages, you will return to the delineations more brilliant and varied 
 of celebrated moderns. The Athenians, who invented this great art, 
 which the French alone upon the earth cultivate with success, en- 
 couraged three of their citizens to labor upon the same subject. You, 
 gentlemen, in whom to-day we see live again that people, as famous 
 for their genius as their courage, — you, who possess their taste, will 
 have their justice also. The author who presents to you an imitation 
 of the antique is much more sure to find in you Athenians than he 
 flatters himself to have rendered Sophocles. You know that Greece, 
 in all its masterpieces, in all the kinds of poetry and eloquence, de- 
 sired that beauties should be simple. You will find that simplicity in 
 this piece, and you will discern the beauties of the original despite 
 the faults of the copy ; you will deign, above all, to accommodate 
 yourselves to some usages of the ancient Greeks, for in the arts they 
 are your veritable ancestors. France, which follows in their footsteps, 
 Avill not censure their customs ; you are to consider that already your 
 taste, especially in dramatic works, serves as a model to other nations. 
 It will suffice one day to be approved elsewhere that it should be 
 said. Such was the taste of the French ; it was so that illustrious 
 nation spoke ! We ask your indulgence for the manners of antiquity 
 for the same reason that Europe, in the ages to come, will render 
 justice to yours." 
 
 This ingenious oration sufficed not to conciliate the enemy. 
 The performance began. During the first four acts, as Du- 
 verney records, it was a contest of applause and hisses, which 
 was amusing, at length, even to the author. There were mo- 
 ments when the stern and awful trails caught from Sophocles 
 silenced opponents and carried the audience away. There was 
 one such moment at the beginning of the fifth act, when the 
 applause seemed unanimous and enthusiastic. But even then 
 the author perceived that it was only his friends who approved. 
 He rose, and, leaning over his box, cried out, " Courage ! 
 Brave Athenians, applaud ! That is pure Sophocles ! " The 
 conclusion of the play, however, gave the enemy another op- 
 portunity, and the author discerned that he had carried the 
 Greek severity a little too far. Considering all the circum- 
 stances, and, especially, the weight and power of the opposing 
 influences, the evening was regarded as a triumph for the 
 
 I
 
 HOUSEHOLDER IN PARIS. 695 
 
 author. He at once revised the fifth act^ and strove, with all 
 his might and tact, to prolong and heighten his success. 
 
 We can scarcely wonder that the actors should have been 
 sometimes rebellious under his demands. His letters to Made- 
 moiselle Clairon, during the run of this piece, leave us in 
 doubt whether an actress ought to be envied or pitied for hav- 
 ing such an exacting master. After giving her an entirely new 
 fifth act and a considerable list of changes in the other acts, 
 all to be learned and rehearsed in two or three days, he still 
 sends her other trifling changes, as well as mmute instructions 
 as to the delivery of striking passages. But, then, how hum- 
 bly and gracefully he apologizes ! " He asks her pardon, upon 
 his knees, for the insolences wdth which he has loaded her part. 
 He is himself so docile as to flatter himself that talents su- 
 perior to his own will not disdain, m their turn, the observa- 
 tions which his admiration for Mademoiselle Clairon has ex- 
 torted from him." Again, a day or two after, upon sending 
 her another change : " It is only by a continual and severe ex- 
 amination of myself, it is only by an extreme docility to wise 
 counsels, that I am able each day to render the piece less un- 
 worthy of the charms which you lend to it. If you had a 
 quarter of the docility in which I glory, you would add some 
 unique perfections to those with which you now adorn your 
 part." Then, after a series of hints, he adds, " By observing 
 these little artifices of art, by speaking sometimes without de- 
 claiming, by thus shading the beautiful colors which yeu throw 
 over the pei-sonality of Electre, you would actually reach that 
 perfection which you now nearly approach, and which ought 
 to be the object of a noble and feeling soul. Mine feels itself 
 made to admire and advise you ; but if you wish to be perfect, 
 think that no one has ever been perfect without listening to 
 advice, and that one ought to be teachable in proportion to the 
 greatness of his talents." 
 
 At the second representation of the piece, if we may be- 
 lieve the enemies of the author, the theatre was half filled 
 with his hired partisans, who earned their wages so faithfully 
 that opposition was almost silenced. Every night, as one of 
 the hostile critics has recorded, Voltaire was in the breach, 
 animating his friends, distributing seats, placing his paid ap- 
 plauders, clapping passages himself, and crying to those around
 
 596 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 him, " Clap, my dear friends ! Applaud, my dear Atheni- 
 ans ! " Nevertheless, with all his efforts, the piece at this time 
 had but ten representations. This was a respectable success 
 for the period, and the play called forth the usual fire of paro- 
 dies, burlesques, and epigrams. 
 
 What an incredible activity of mind was his ! To these 
 months belongs a pamphlet by him upon the "Embellishment 
 of Paris," in which he recommended that liberality of expendi- 
 ture in the beautifying of the city which has since made it the 
 most agreeable place of residence in Europe. He dwelt upon 
 the wise economy of such an expenditure. He foretold, what 
 we have seen come to pass, that the influx of strangers in 
 quest of pleasure would cause an ample return from the money 
 invested in noble structures and beautiful public grounds. 
 Paris was then dark and heavy with ecclesiastical edifices ; its 
 streets were narrow, unclean, and ill-paved. He desired Louis 
 XV. to do for Paris what Louis XIV. had done for Versailles, 
 and not wait for a great fire to clear the way. " When Lon- 
 don was consumed, Europe said, ' London will not be rebuilt 
 in twenty years, and even then it will show the traces of its 
 disaster.' It was rebuilt in two years, and rebuilt with mag- 
 nificence. What ! will it be only at the last extremity that 
 we shall do something as grand ? Such an enterprise would 
 encourage all the arts, attract foreigners from the extremities 
 of Europe, enrich the kingdom, far from impoverishing it, and 
 inure to labor a thousand wretched idlers."
 
 CHAPTER XLVIII. 
 
 SETTLING IN PRUSSIA. 
 
 The King of Prussia had been courting Voltaire for four- 
 teen years, and the long courtship, as is usual, had destroyed 
 some illusions. If Frederic still loved the poet, he had per- 
 mitted himself to apply to the man the word fou, as a lover, 
 in a moment of irritation, calls his sweetheart a little fool. 
 But he desired to possess him not the less. He longed for 
 him. He said to him once that he would have given him a 
 province rather than not had him. Death, in 1749, had re- 
 moved the king's only rival, and taken away Voltaire's con- 
 stant excuse for not going to him. He renewed and intensi- 
 fied his solicitations, but saw the bereaved poet arrange himself 
 for an independent existence in Paris. 
 
 Why did this German king want this Frencli author ? It 
 is Voltaire himself, I think, who suggests the controlling rea- 
 son. Lord Lyttleton, in his " dialogues of the Dead," as- 
 signs to Pope these words : " When the King of Prussia drew 
 Voltaire from Paris to Berlin, he had a whole Academy of 
 belles-lettres in him alone." That was true, but probably not 
 the true reason. Voltaire was the most agreeable of living 
 men to men of intellectual tastes ; and a king who is not 
 enough man to enjoy the society of women must solace him- 
 self as best he can with amusing men. But this frugal and 
 able monarch would not have given a province even for the 
 best story-teller in Europe. Frederic, then enjoying peace, 
 leisure, and " glory," had again become an industrious author, 
 as the thirty volumes of his works attest. He was writing 
 in prose the history of his house and of his own campaigns, 
 and he was adding frequently to his stock of French verses, 
 of which the authorized edition of his writings contains about 
 forty thousand. 
 
 "He was very sure," wrote Voltaire in 1759, " that botb his
 
 598 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 verses and his prose were much above my prose and my verses, 
 as to the substance ; but he believed that, as to the form, I could, 
 in my quality of Academician, give a certain turn to his writ- 
 mgs. 
 
 These words were not written with benevolent intention ; 
 but perhaps they suggest the truth. This great general did 
 not appear to value himself upon his victories ; but, keenly 
 coveting the glory of the poet, he may have indulged the hope 
 of one day enjoying it. And, indeed, the wonder is that a 
 man who wrote so many pretty good pieces and some very 
 good lines should not have occasionally risen to the degree of 
 excellence which the world accepts. He wrote a fable or two, 
 which appear to need only a touch from the hand of a Lafon- 
 taine to be good French fables. He wrote a few epigrams, 
 odes, and epistles, which seem to want nothing but a certain 
 tournure from the pen of Voltaire, to be all that the author 
 ■wished them to be. 
 
 Frederic had just given a new proof of the excessive value 
 which he put upon the verse-making talent. Among the great 
 number of young men whose dawning promise Voltaire had 
 nourished and encouraged was Baculard d'Arnaud, who had 
 written three tragedies (one upon the massacre of St. Barthol- 
 omew), neither of which was ever produced, and only one was 
 printed. For many years he had been a needy hanger-on of 
 literature. Several of Voltaire's letters to his man of busi- 
 ness, the Abb^ -Moussinot, end with a request in his favor: 
 " One more louis d'or to Baculard d'Arnaud ; " "• Instead of 
 twenty-four francs, give D'Arnaud thirty livres, when he 
 comes." Voltaire, at length, procured him the appointment 
 of Paris letter-writer to the King of Prussia, which raised him 
 from a condition approaching beggary to one of tolerable ease, 
 the salary being a thousand francs a year. D'Arnaud, in the 
 •fashion of the time, mingled verse with his items of literary 
 and philosophical news. He, too, could compose very pretty 
 and graceful verses, which gave the king, as they had once 
 given Voltaire, an exaggerated estimate of his abilities. In 
 1750, Frederic, as if despairing of Voltaire, invited D'Arnaud 
 to Berlin, and settled upon him a pension of five thousand 
 francs per annum. He completed the bewilderment of the 
 young man by addressing him a poetical epistle, in which Vol-
 
 SETTLING IN PRUSSIA. £99 
 
 taire was spoken of as the setting sun of French literature, and 
 Baculard d'Arnaud as the rising kiminary of the same. 
 
 " Deja I'Apollon de la France 
 S'achemine a sa decadence ; 
 Venez briller a votre tour, 
 Elevez-vous s'il baisse encore ; 
 Ainsi le couchant d'un beau jour 
 Promet une plus belle aurore." 
 
 D'Arnaud, in the spring of 1750, took up his abode in Ber- 
 lin, where, from being a Paris nobody, he found himself in a 
 position to show these verses in the most distinguished draw- 
 ing-rooms of the kingdom, with his own verses in reply, mod- 
 estly declining the royal compliment. An edition of his poems 
 at once appeared, dedicated to the king, and preceded by an 
 epistle to Voltaire, in which the young poet spoke of him as 
 
 " Mon maitre, men ami, mon pere dans les arts." 
 
 The suddenness and splendor of his fortune were, it must be 
 confessed, a severe trial of the good sense of a gazetteer of 
 Paris, thirty-two years of age. 
 
 Frederic, meanwhile, held Voltaire to his engagement, which 
 was to pass part of the summer of 1750 at Potsdam and Ber- 
 lin, on his way to Italy. Voltaire meant to concede no more, 
 and hesitated to concede even so much. His better instinct 
 warned him not to venture again within the personal influence 
 of a king who, as he often said, could caress with one hand 
 and scratch with the other. But he had made too many prom- 
 ises to be able to refuse without giving just offense to the most 
 sliining personage of the time, whose protection both himself 
 and his philosophic allies might one day need. He had already 
 been attacked in the citadel of his position by the resuscita- 
 tion of Cr{;billon. The rasping, satirical Fr^ron, whom Vol- 
 taire sweetly named " a worm from Desfontaines's carcass," 
 had begun his editorial career of defaming the good and ex- 
 alting the bad. For many a year to come, he was to earn the 
 good-will of the Boyer faction by assailing, with equal tact 
 and pertinacity, Voltaire, Marmontel, Diderot, and their 
 friends. The Boyers, full of blind confidence, were just be- 
 ginning that last, long, besotted struggle to crush the intellect 
 of France, which only ended with the explosion that scattered 
 them to the ends of Europe. They had begun to refuse the
 
 600 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 sacraments to dying Jansenists who could not show a billet de 
 confession, a certificate declaring that they had accepted the 
 Bull Unigenitus. Diderot had already been in prison, and 
 all things in F'rance wore an ill aspect for the little band of 
 audacious, half-enlightened spirits who were to begin to save 
 her. 
 
 The King of Prussia continued his importunities. " You 
 are like bad Christians," he wrote : " you put off your conver- 
 sion from one day to another." Again : " Come, at least, to 
 correct my eulogium of our officers killed in the last w-ar, a 
 poem full of faults, in which I take more interest than in all 
 my other works." D'Arnaud, too, wrote to " my dear Apollo," 
 informing him that he was expected with the greatest impa- 
 tience in Prussia, and that the king would make a festival 
 of his coming. Apollo may have deemed the letter of the 
 lucky Baculard a little familiar, but he replied to it with his 
 usual gayety. 
 
 According to Marmontel, it was this Baculard d'Arnaud 
 who was the occasion of Voltaire's suddenly conquering his 
 reluctance to set out. The vivacious Marmontel, writing forty 
 years after the eveut, may have unconsciously heightened the 
 comic effects of the scenes which he relates, as he certainly 
 misunderstood some of his facts. He tells us that Voltaire, 
 unwilling to travel without Madame Denis, asked the king to 
 give him twenty thousand francs to defray the additional ex- 
 pense. The king, according to Marmontel, refused this mod- 
 est demand, which transported Voltaire with fury. " Look," 
 said he to me, " at this meanness in a king ! He has barrels 
 of gold, and he won't give a poor twenty thousand francs for 
 the pleasure of seeing Madame Denis at Berlin ! But he shall 
 give them, or I myself will not go." The celebrated scenes in 
 Marmontel's Memoirs which follow this anecdote are a curi- 
 ous example of the manner in which falsehood inevitably gath- 
 ers about a famous name. Marmontel continues : — 
 
 "A comical incirleut happened, which ended this dispute. Oue 
 morning, as I was going to see him, I found his friend, Thieriot, in 
 the garden of the Palais-Royal, and, as I was always on the watch for 
 literary news, I asked him if he had heard any- ' Yes,' said he, ' some 
 that is very curious ; you are going to M. de Voltaire's, and there you 
 shall hear it ; for I shall go there as soon as I have taken my coffee.'
 
 SETTLING IN PRUSSIA. 601 
 
 " Voltaire was writing in his bed when I went in. In his turn, he 
 asked me, ' What 's the news ? ' 
 
 "'I know none,' said I ; ' but Thieriot, whom I met in the Palais- 
 Royal, says he has something very interesting to tell you. He is 
 coming.' 
 
 " ' Well, Thieriot,' said he, ' you have some curious news ? ' 
 
 " ' Oh ! very curious ; and news that will please you in particular,' 
 answered Thieriot, with his sardonic laugh, and the nasal twang of a 
 Capuchin. 
 
 "' Let 's hear ; what have you to tell ?' 
 
 " ' I have to tell you that Baculard d'Arnaud has arrived at Pots- 
 dam, and that the King of Prussia has received him with open arms.' 
 
 " ' With open arms ! ' 
 
 " < And Arnaud has presented him with an epistle.' 
 
 " ' Very bombastical and very insipid ? ' 
 
 " ' Not at all ; very fine, — so fine that the king has answered it by 
 another epistle.' 
 
 " * The King of Prussia, an epistle to Arnaud ! No, no, Thieriot ; 
 they have been poking fun at you.' 
 
 " ' I don't know what you call fun ; but I have the two epistles in 
 my pocket.' 
 
 " ' Let 's see, quick. Let me read these masterpieces of poetry. 
 What insipidity ! what meanness ! how egregiously stupid ! ' said he, 
 in reading the epistle of D'Arnaud. Then, passing to that of the king, 
 he read a moment in silence and with an air of pity. But when he 
 came to these verses, — 
 
 ' Voltaire 's a setting sun, 
 But you are in your dawn,' 
 
 he started up, and jumped from his bed, bounding with rage: 'Vol- 
 taire a setting sun, and Baculard in his dawn ! And it is a king who 
 writes this enormous folly ! Let him think only of reigning ! ' 
 
 " It was with difficulty that Thieriot and I could prevent ourselves 
 from bursting into laughter to see Voltaire in his shirt, dancing with 
 passion, and addressing himself to the King of Prussia. ' I 'II go,' said 
 he ; ' yes, I '11 go, and teach him to distinguish between men ; ' and 
 from that moment the journey was decided upon. 
 
 " I have suspected that the King of Prussia intentionally gave him 
 this spur, and without that I doubt whether he would have gone, so 
 angry was he at the refusal of the twenty thousand francs ; not at all 
 from avarice, but from indignation at not having obtained what he 
 asked. 
 
 " Obstinate to excess by character and by system, he had, even in 
 little things, an incredible repugnance to yield, and to renounce what 
 he had resolved on."
 
 602 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 It seems a pity to spoil so amusing a story, and one which 
 has passed current so long. But we perceive from the letters 
 of Voltaire, D'Arnaud, and the king that Marmontel's forty 
 years had deceived him. Voltaii'e was cognizant of all the 
 movements of the young poet ; congratulated him on his good 
 fortune at eveiy stage of it ; congratulated the king upon get- 
 ting him ; busied himself with procuring for the king another 
 Paris correspondent ; and alluded, in exquisite verse, to the 
 king's sorry comparison of the rising and the setting sun. He 
 certainly did feel all the indecency of that comparison, and 
 doubtless showed that he did in Marmontel's presence. It 
 did not diminish his sense of its unworthiness when he found 
 the verses circulating everywhere in Paris : — 
 
 " Je touche a mes soixante hiversj 
 Mais si tant de lauriers divers 
 Ombragent votve jeime tete, 
 Grand homme, est-il done bien honnete 
 De depouiller mes cheveux blancs 
 De quelques feuilles negligees, 
 Que deja I'Envie et le Temps 
 Ont, de lenrs detestables dents, 
 Sur ma tete a demi ronge'es? "^ 
 
 Falling into a lighter strain, he says to Frederic, " What a 
 devil of a Marcus Antoninus you are, to scratch so with one 
 hand, while you protect with the other! " 
 
 With regard to Madame Denis and the twenty thousand 
 francs, Marmontel's memory deceived him completely. That 
 lady was to remain at Paris in charge of her uncle's house, 
 assisted in out-of-door business and otherwise by Longchamp. 
 There was never the least suggestion of her going to Berlin 
 until after Voltaire's arrival there, when the king, out of tiie 
 abundance of his barrels of gold, offered her a pension for life 
 of four thousand francs a year, if she would come to Berlin 
 and keep her uncle's house. There was, it is true, a moment- 
 ary difficulty with regard to money. May 8, 1750, Voltaire, 
 writing to the king upon the obstacles to his leaving and the 
 little pleasure he felt able to bestow on his arrival, proceeded 
 thus : — 
 
 ^ I approach my sixtieth winter; but if so many kinds of laurel shade your 
 young head, great man, is it then quite worthy of you to despoil ray white hairs of 
 some neglected leaves, which already Envy and Time have, with their detestable 
 teeth, half gnawed upon my head ? 
 
 1
 
 SETTLING m PRUSSIA. 603 
 
 " There is still one other difficulty. I am going now to speak, not 
 at all to the king, but to the man who enters into the detail of human 
 miseries. I am rich, and even very rich, for a man of letters. I 
 have, as they say in Paris, ' mounted a house,' where I live like a phi- 
 losopher, with my family and my friends. Such is my situation. Yet 
 it is impossible for me to incur at present an extraordijiary expendi- 
 ture ; first, because it has cost me a great deal to set up my little es- 
 tablishment : in the second place, the affairs of Madame du Chatelet, 
 mixed with my own, have cost me still more. I pray you, according 
 to your philosophic custom, put majesty aside, and allow me to say 
 that I am not willing to be an expense to you. I cannot have a good 
 traveling carriage, and set out with the help necessary to a sick man, 
 and provide for the expenses of my house during my absence, with 
 less than four thousand German crowns. If Mettra, one of the ex- 
 change dealers of Berlin, is willing to advance me that sum, I will 
 secure him upon that part of my property which is the most unques- 
 tionable." 
 
 The king replied to tins letter in forty of his sprightliest 
 verses ; but added to his merry lines a few sentences in prose : 
 "As the Sieur Mettra might object to a letter of exchange in 
 verse, I cause to be sent to you one in proper form by his cor- 
 respondent, which will be of more value than my jingle." 
 
 The letter of exchange, which was for sixteen thousand 
 francs, arrived in due time. There was never any question 
 between them with regard to money. The king, generally so 
 frugal and exact in business, as able men are, was profuse to- 
 wards him, and pressed money upon him. 
 
 Another of Marmontel's anecdotes of this period is equally 
 entertaining, and may be accepted us founded upon fact. It 
 belongs to the class of stories which, being often told, gain a 
 little in point, and lose a little in truth, every year ; until, 
 after the lapse of forty years, they must be taken with liberal 
 allowance : — 
 
 " I again saw a singular instance of this obstinacy of Voltaire's, 
 just before his departure to Prussia. He had taken a fancy to carry 
 a cutlass with him on his journey, and, one morning, when I was at 
 his house, a bundle of them was brought, that he might choose one. 
 But the cutler wanted twenty francs for the one that pleased him, and 
 Voltaire took it into his head that he would give but fifteen. He 
 then begins to calculate in detail what it may be worth. He adds 
 that the cutler bears in his face the character of an honest man, and
 
 604 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 that, with such ffood faith written on his forehead, he cannot but con- 
 fess that the instrument will be well paid for at fifteen francs. The 
 cutler accepts the eulogy on his face, but answers that, as an honest 
 man, he has but one word ; that he asks no more than the thing is 
 worth ; and that, were he to sell it at a lower price, he should wrong 
 his children. 
 
 " ' What ! you have children, have you ? ' asked Voltaire. 
 
 " ' Yes, sir, I have five, three boys and two girls, the youngest of 
 whom is just twelve.' 
 
 " ' Well, we '11 think about placing your boys and marrying your 
 girls. I have friends in the treasury ; I have some credit in the pub- 
 lic offices. But let 's finish this little affair : here are your fifteen 
 francs ; say no more about it.' 
 
 " The good cutler was confused in thanking Voltaire for the protec- 
 tion with which he was pleased to honor him ; but he still kept to his 
 first word about the price of the cutlass, and did not abate one sou. I 
 abridge this scene, which lasted a quarter of an hour, by the turns of 
 eloquence and seduction that Voltaire employed in vain, not to save 
 five francs, — that he would have given to a beggar, — but to prevail 
 by the power of persuasion. He was obliged to yield, and, with a 
 troubled, indignant, embarrassed air, threw upon the table the five- 
 franc piece that he relinquished so unwillingly. The cutler, when he 
 had got his money, returned him thanks for his favors, and went 
 away. 
 
 " ' I am very glad,' said I, in a low voice, as I saw him go out. 
 
 " ' Of what ? ' asked Voltaire angrily. ' What are you glad of?' 
 
 " ' That this honest man's family is no longer to be pitied. His 
 sons will soon be placed; his daughtei-s married ; and he, in the mean 
 time, has sold his cutlass for what he wanted, and you have paid it, in 
 spite of all your eloquence.' 
 
 " ' And this is what you are glad of, you obstinate Liraosin ? ' 
 
 " ' Oh, yes ; I am quite pleased ; if he had yielded to you, I be- 
 lieve I should have beaten him.' 
 
 " ' Do you know,' said he, laughing in his sleeve, after a moment's 
 silence, ' that if Moliere had been witness to such a scene he would 
 have turned it to some profit ? ' 
 
 " ' Indeed,' said I, ' it would have been the counterpart to that of 
 M. Dimanche.' 
 
 " It was thus that with me his anger, or rather his petulance, al- 
 ways terminated in gentleness and friendship." 
 
 Only one formality remained to be complied with. " I have 
 the honor," Voltaire would sometimes say, when his conven-
 
 SETTLING IN PRUSSIA. 605 
 
 ience required it, " to be a domestique du roi.^^ A gentlemaii- 
 in-ordin;iry of the cliamber, who was also the king's histori- 
 ographer, could not leave the kingdom without the king's per- 
 mission, and he resolved to ask it in person. On two occasions 
 he had been charged with public business of high importance, 
 on leavinfr France for a visit to the Prussian court. He went 
 to Compiegne, where the King of France was, and, seeking an 
 audience, asked the required permission and the king's orders. 
 The tiadition is that he was coldly received. Longchamp re- 
 lates that the king merely said, " You can set out when you 
 wish," and turned his back. Madame de Pompadour was 
 more gracious. "When I took leave of Madame de Pompa- 
 dour," he wrote to his niece, " she charged me to present her 
 respects to the King of Prussia. A commission could not be 
 given more agreeably or with more grace. She put into it all 
 her modesty, saying, If I dared, and, I asic pardon of the King 
 of Prussia for talcing this liberty.'''' 
 
 Returning to Paris, he gave his last orders to Longchamp, 
 who was to receive part of his revenues during his absence, 
 and furnish Madame Denis with one hundred louis a month 
 for household expenses. If that allowance should be found 
 insufficient, Longchamp was to inform him of the fact, when 
 he would authorize him to provide "a reasonable addition." 
 He expected to be absent three or four months at most. To 
 the last hour he seems to have had misgivings ; he implored 
 the D'Argentals to pardon his journey, however severely they 
 might judge his new tragedies, which he was still correcting. 
 This visit to the King of Prussia, he said to his friends, had 
 become a duty which, after two years of promises, he could no 
 longer honorably postpone. 
 
 He left to the Boyers of France last proofs of his affection 
 in the form of two little tracts of amusing satire : one called 
 " Sincere Thanksgiving to a Charitable JNIan," in which he 
 reviewed a priestly reviler of Montesquieu, Pope, and Locke. 
 The zealous priest had laboriously attempted to prove that 
 " the partisans of natural religion " are all enemies of the Chris- 
 tian religion. Voltaire congratulated him upon his success in 
 proving that the men in every age and land who had shown 
 the most love of truth and the greatest diligence in its inves- 
 tigation had been hostile to the claims of ecclesiastics.
 
 606 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 " NotliinsT could be said more sensible or more useful to 
 Christianity." The other pat at parting was a leaf entitled 
 " Extract from a Decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rome 
 upon a Libel called Letters upon the Twentieth." This 
 was a broad burlesque of the claim of the clergy to be exempt 
 from taxation. He little thought that he was exiling himself 
 from his native haunts for twenty-eight years by these merry 
 effusions. 
 
 " As it is clear that the world is about to come to an end, and that 
 Anti-Christ has come already, the said Anti-Christ having sent sev- 
 eral circular letters to some of the bishops of France, in which he 
 has had the audacity to treat them as Frenchmen and as subjects of 
 the king, Satan has joined himself to the Man of Iniquity, in order 
 to put the abomination of desolation into the holy place ; which Satan 
 has, to that end, composed a book worthy of him, — a book heretical, 
 savoring of heresy, rash, and unseemly. He strives to prove in the 
 said book that ecclesiastics form part of the body of the nation, in- 
 stead of maintaining that they are substantially its masters, as they 
 formerly taught. He advances that those who enjoy one third of 
 the revenues of the state should contribute at least one third to the 
 state's support; not remembering that our brethren were created to 
 possess all and give nothing. The said book, moreover, is notoriously 
 filled with impious maxims drawn from natural law, the rights of 
 the people, the fundamental laws of the kingdom, and other perni- 
 cious prejudices, tending wickedly to strengthen the royal authority, to 
 cause more money to circulate in the kingdom of France, to relieve 
 p^or ecclesiastics now holily oppressed by rich ones. 
 
 " For these reasons, it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to 
 us to cause the said book to be burned, in anticipation of doing the 
 same to the author of it, who served in this matter as the secretary of 
 Satan. "We demand, moreover, and command that our first-fruits be 
 punctually paid. We condemn Satan to drink holy water at supper 
 every Friday, and we enjoin it upon him to enter into the body of all 
 those who have read his book. Done at Rome, in Sainte-Marie sans 
 Minerve, at twenty-five o'clock. May 20, 1750. 
 
 " Signed, Coglione-Coglionaccio, Cardinal-President, and, lower, 
 Cazzo-Culo, Secretary of the Holy Office." 
 
 This was his parting word to the keeper of the Dauphin's 
 conscience and the bestower of the church's fat things. It 
 was not forgotten. 
 
 Berlin is now twenty hours from Paris. Voltaire, who had
 
 SETTLING IN PRUSSIA. 607 
 
 a kino" to order relays of horses for liis convenience, accom- 
 plished the journey in twenty-five days ; but then he lost sev- 
 eral days through a mistake. That precious time, he wrote, 
 which ought to have been employed in rendering " Rome Sau- 
 v^e " less unworthy of the theatre, he wasted in giving himself 
 a series of indigestions. He left Paris June 15, 1750. July 
 10th he reached Sans-Souci, near Potsdam, the country palace 
 of the King of Prussia, seventeen miles southwest of Berlin. 
 
 What a reception was his ! From a king who told him he 
 was welcome to go, he had come to a king who practiced every 
 seductive art to make him willing to remain. The suite of 
 rooms assigned him in the palace was the one formerly oc- 
 cupied by Marshal Saxe. He was left at absolute liberty. 
 If he wished to dine alone, he had but to indicate the wish. 
 If he desired to entertain company, the king's kitchen and 
 store-room were at his command. The king's horses, carriages, 
 grooms, coachmen, all were at his orders, to use, to send, to 
 lend. If he was disposed to labor, no one interrupted him ; 
 if he strolled abroad, his privacy was respected. The whole 
 court smiles upon the king's favorite. The queen, the queen- 
 mother, the princesses, the princes, the ambassadors, the 
 nobles, all the king's circle of officers and friends, paid assid- 
 uous court to him ; and the people of Berlin, who looked 
 towai'ds the court from a great imaginary distance, regarded 
 him with intense curiosity. 
 
 At the moment of his arrival preparations were going for- 
 ward for a grand carousal in the style of Louis XIV., to 
 which the nobility of the kingdom were invited. This mag- 
 nificent festival, which took place at Berlin, in August, 1750, 
 was an assemblage of everything Prussia could boast of the 
 splendid and the entertaining. Balls, fire-works, concerts, op- 
 eras, plays, succeeded one another. The court-yard of the 
 royal palace was turned into an amphitheatre, surrounded by 
 ranges of seats, one above another, with decorated boxes in the 
 rear for the king and chosen guests, and, in the midst, an ex- 
 tensive, oblong arena for the exercises. Three thousand 
 troops lined this arena, and guarded the avenues leading to it. 
 Thousands of spectators were present. When all was in read- 
 iness, and every eye was directed toward the royal box to 
 catch the first glimpse of the king, a buzz and murmur were
 
 608 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 heard in all parts of the inclosure: " Voltaire! Voltaire! Vol- 
 taire! " He was seen crossing the arena, attended by a num- 
 ber of lords, and walking toward one of the boxes. Soon the 
 king and his family entered, and the performance began. 
 Four quadrilles, or, as Voltaire styled them, " four little ar- 
 mies," entered, of mounted knights, Roman, Carthaginian, 
 Greek, Persian, all superbly costumed and armed, with a 
 prince of the royal house at the head of each. One of these 
 quadrilles came in at each corner of the amphitheatre ; in a 
 moment, the great arena was one glitter of prancing horses 
 and gorgeous chevaliers, marching and counter-marchmg, 
 wheeling and manoeuvring, to the sound of the best martial 
 music then attainable. The usual exercises of the tourney fol- 
 lowed. 
 
 Voltaire could not resist the fascination of the spectacle. 
 "Not the least confusion," he wrote home to D'Argental ; " no 
 noise ; all the assembly seated at ease, and silently attentive." 
 . . . . The Princess Amelia gave the prizes to the victors. "It 
 was Venus awarding the apple. The Prince Royal won the 
 first prize. He had the air of a hero of Amadis. You can form 
 no just idea of the beauty, the singularity, of the spectacle ; the 
 whole terminated by a supper of ten tables and a ball. This 
 is fairy-land." It was, at once, a carousal of Louis XIV. and 
 a Chinese feast of lanterns ; for the amphitheatre and its ap- 
 proaches were illuminated by forty-six thousand small lanterns 
 of glass. 
 
 The Princess Amelia was not ill-pleased to receive an " im- 
 promptu " from the poet, penciled, as she could presume, at 
 the moment of her bestowal of the prize : — 
 
 "Jamais dans Athene et dans Rome, 
 On n'eut de plus beaux jours, ui de plus digne prix. 
 J'ai vu le fils de Mars sous les traits de Paris, 
 Et Venus qui donnait la pomme." . 
 
 The master and creator of all this magnificence redoubled 
 his solicitations. He was a little rough on one occasion, which 
 might have warned a Frenchman that he was in a country 
 that could buy French polish, but could never be France. Im- 
 agine this colloquy on Voltaire's arrival at Potsdam: — 
 
 Voltaire. — " Madame de Pompadour did me the honor to 
 charge me with her respects to your majesty."
 
 SETTLING IN PRUSSIA. 609 
 
 Frederic. — "I don't know her." 
 
 It was blunt. Voltaire did not report the response to the 
 lady. He was polite for two. In a few pretty verses, he con- 
 trived, without falsehood, to inform her that her compliments 
 had reached the person for whom they were intended. Her 
 myrtles, he added, were now blended with his laurels. 
 Then, — 
 
 " J'ai I'honneur, de la part d'Achille, 
 De rendre graces a Venus." ^ 
 
 If all Frederic's familiars had been as politic, Prussia might 
 have had one enemy the less in the Seven Years' War. 
 
 Voltaire did not yield to the king's solicitations without a 
 struggle. He consulted his niece, Madame Denis, upon the 
 change of residence proposed for them both. August 14th, he 
 wrote to her thus : — 
 
 " The Kinir of Prussia makes me his chamberlain, gives me one of 
 his orders, twenty thousand francs a year, and to you four thousand a 
 year for life, if you are willing to come and keep house for me at 
 Berlin, as you do at Paris. You lived well at Landau with your hus- 
 band. I swear to you that Berlin is a better place than Landau, and 
 that there are better operas here. Reflect ; consult your heart. You 
 will tell me that the King of Prussia must be very fond of verses. He 
 is, indeed, a French author born at Berlin. He has come to the con- 
 clusion that, all things considered, I should be more useful to him than 
 D'Arnaud. I have forgiven the trifling polite verses which his Prus- 
 sian majesty addressed to my young pupil, in which he spoke of him 
 as the rising sun, very brilliant, and of me as the setting sun, dim enough. 
 He scratches still, sometimes, with one hand, while he caresses with the 
 other ; but we must not mind that so much. If you consent, he will 
 have near him both the rising and the setting sun, and, for his own 
 part, he will be in his meridian, writing prose and verse as much as h(3 
 pleases, since he has no more battles to give. I have little time to live. 
 Perhaps it is pleasanter to die in his fashion at Potsdam than in the 
 manner of an inhabitant of a parish at Paris. After my death you will 
 return thither, with your four thousand livres of dowry. If these prop- 
 ositions suit you, you will pack up your effects in the spring ; and, for 
 me, I shall go, toward the end of this autumn, on pilgrimage to Italy, 
 to see St. Peter's of Rome, the Pope, the Venus de Medicis, and the 
 subterranean city. I have always mourned at the thought of dying 
 without seeing Italy. We should meet in the month of May next. I 
 
 1 I have the honor, on the part of Achilles, to return thanks to Venus. 
 VOL. I. 39
 
 610 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 have four verses from the King of Prussia for his Holiness. It would 
 be pleasant to carry to the Pope four French verses from a German 
 and heretical monarch, and to bring back to Potsdam some indul- 
 gences. You see that he treats Popes better than he treats ladies. He 
 will compose no verses for you ; but you will find good company here ; 
 you will have a good house. The king our master must first consent 
 to this. That will be, I think, very indifferent to him. It matters 
 little to a King of France in what place the most useless of his twenty- 
 two or twenty-three millions of subjects passes his life ; but it would be 
 frightful to live without you." 
 
 Madame Denis, a true child of Paris, was proof against these 
 arguments. She wrote a reply, earnestly dissuading him. The 
 mere rank of the king, ^he thought, made friendship impossi- 
 ble between them. Kings, too, changed their minds and their 
 favorites. If he gave himself to a king, he would bitterly re- 
 pent it; his life as the servant of a foreign potentate could only 
 be slavery disguised. This letter he sent to the king's cabi- 
 net ; whence soon he received an answer, in which Frederic le 
 Grand, as Voltaire now habitually called him, condescended to 
 refute Madame Denis's reasoning. 
 
 [Berlin, August 23, 1750.] "I have seen the letter which your 
 niece writes you from Paris. The affection which she has for you 
 wins my esteem. If I were Madame Denis, I should think as she 
 does ; but, being what I am, I think otherwise. I should be in despair 
 to be the cause of my enemy's unhappiness ; and how could I wish the 
 misfortune of a man whom I esteem, whom I love, and who sacrifices 
 to me his country and all that is dearest to humanity ? No, my dear 
 Voltaire, if I could foresee that your removal hither could turn the 
 least in the world to your disadvantage, I should be the first to dis- 
 suade you from it. Yes, I should prefer your happiness to my ex- 
 treme pleasure in possessing you. But you are a philosopher; I am 
 one also. What is there more natural, more simple, more according to 
 the order of things, than that philosophers, made to live together, united 
 by the same studies, by the same tastes, and by a similar way of think- 
 ing, should give one another that satisfaction ? I respect you as my 
 master in composition and in knowledge ; I love you as a virtuous friend. 
 What slavery, what unhappiness, what change, what inconstancy of 
 fortune, is there to fear in a country where you are esteemed as much 
 as in your own, and in the house of a friend who has a grateful heart ? 
 I have not the foolish presumption to believe that Berlin equals Paris. 
 If wealth, grandeur, and magnificence make a city agreeable, we yield
 
 SETTLING IN PRUSSIA. 611 
 
 to Paris. If good taste, perhaps more generally diffused, exists any 
 where in the world, I know and I agree that it is at Paris. But do 
 you not carry that taste with you wherever you are? "We have some 
 organs which give us sufficient means of applauding you, and in point 
 of sentiments we do not yield to any country in the world. I respected 
 the friendship which bound you to Madame du Chatelet; but, after 
 her, I was one of your oldest friends. What ! because you retire to 
 my house, it will be said that that house becomes a prison for you ? 
 What ! because I am your friend, I shall be your tyrant ? I confess 
 to you that I do not understand such logic as that, and I am firmly 
 persuaded that you will be very happy here ; that you will be regarded 
 as the father of letters and of people of taste ; and that you will find 
 in me all the consolations which a man of your merit can expect from 
 one who esteems him. Good-night." ^ 
 
 In conversation he was even more affectionate and more ur- 
 gent. In such circumstances, the poet who deliberates is lost. 
 It is himself who tells us how he yielded to the royal seducer : 
 " The large blue eyes of the king, his sweet smile, and his 
 siren voice, his five battles, his extreme love of retirement and 
 of occupation, of verses and of prose, as well as attentions to 
 turn one's head, delicious conversation, liberty, bis rank for- 
 gotten in our intercourse, a thousand marks of regard, which 
 even from a private individual would be seducing, — all that 
 bewildered my brain. I gave myself to him with passion, 
 bhndly, and without reflection." ^ It was hard indeed for such 
 a man to say No to such a suppliant. " He took my hand," as 
 he afterwards recorded, " to kiss it. I kissed his, and made 
 myself his slave.'" 
 
 As usual in such cases, repentance followed quick. No 
 sooner had he given his word than his heart yearned toward 
 his friends in Paris : he knew not what to say to them ; he 
 knew not how to explain this inconstancy of the most con- 
 stant of men. Writing to the D'Argentals, August 28th, he 
 begins without a beginning : — 
 
 " Judge, my dearest angels, if I am not in some degree excusable. 
 Judge by the letter which the king wrote to me from his quarters to 
 mine, — a letter which replies to the very wise, very elegant, very pow- 
 erful reasons that my niece adduces upon a mere presentimc-nt. I 
 send her that letter ; let her show it to you, I beg, and you will think 
 
 1 22 CEuvres de Frederic le Grand, 255. 
 
 2 Vohaire to Richelieu. August 31, 1751.
 
 612 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 you are reading a letter of Trajan or Marcus Aurelius. Not the less 
 is my heart torn. I yield to my destiny, and I throw myself, head 
 foremost [Za tete la premiere], into the abyss of the fatality which 
 conducts us. Ah, my dear angels, have pity upon the struggles that 
 pass within me, and the mortal anguish with which I tear myself 
 from you ! I have almost always lived apart from you ; but formerly 
 it was persecution the most unjust, the most cruel, the most unrelent- 
 ing, that separated us. To-day it is the first man in the universe, 
 it is a crowned philosopher, who takes me from you. How do you 
 suppose I could resist ? How forget the barbarous manner in which 
 I have been treated in my country ? Do you bear in mind that they 
 took as a pretext the ' Mondain ' ? That is to say, the most innocent 
 badinage, which I would read at Rome to the Pope. Do you remem- 
 bei-, I say, that base enemies and infamous bigots used that pretext to 
 have me exiled? You will tell me that fifteen years have passed 
 since that was done. No, my angels, only one day ; for those atro- 
 cious wrongs are always recent wounds." 
 
 Madame Denis could hardly come to Prussia after having 
 expressed herself so freely with regard to the Prussian king. 
 She remained at Paris, mistress of her uncle's house there, 
 which he still maintained at an expense of thirty thousand 
 francs a year, as if to preserve for himself a retreat in case his 
 niece proved a true prophet. Frederic himself undertook to 
 procure the consent of the King of France, which was given 
 without delay. The French king took from him his office of 
 historiographer, but allowed him to retain his title of gentle- 
 man-in-ordinary of the chamber and his pension of two thou- 
 sand francs a year. Madame du Hausset, the/emwie de chamhre 
 of Madame de Pompadour, has been so good as to inform us 
 what Louis XV. thought of Voltaire's abandonment of his 
 country. That monarch was accustomed to express himself 
 with considerable freedom in Pompadour's boudoir, witli a 
 few of his familiars around him, and the femme de chamhre 
 within hearing distance. He greatly admired his grandfather, 
 Louis XIV., and all his lavish, magnificent ways; and he 
 loved to imitate him, even in the modest pensions bestowed 
 by Louis XIV. upon Racine, Boileau, Moliere, Corneille, and 
 others, who give him all the " glory " that remains to his 
 name. Louis XV., Madame du Hausset assures us, was proud 
 of the celebrity of Voltaire, but " feared him, and did not 
 <isteem him." One evening, the conversation turned upon his
 
 SETTLING IN PRUSSIA. 613 
 
 removal to Berlin. The king and Madame de Pompadour 
 may both have heard the substance of a very long letter writ- 
 ten in August, 1750, by Voltaire to Richelieu, in which the 
 author recounted some of the outrages to which he had been 
 subjected through the machinations and misrepresentations of 
 the mitred dne of Mirepoix. The king defended himself : — 
 
 " ' I have treated Voltaire,' said he, ' as well as Louis XIV. treated 
 Kacine and Boileau. I gave him, as Louis XIV. gave Racine, the 
 post of gentleman-in-ordiiiary, and some pensions. It is not my fault 
 if he has committed folHes, and if he aspires to be a chamberlahi, to 
 have a cross, and to sup with a king. That is not the fashion in 
 France ; and, as there are more men of genius and more great lords 
 here than in Prussia, I should be obliged to have a very large table 
 to hold them all ' (counting upon his fingers) : ' Maupertuis, Fonte- 
 nelle, Lamotte, Voltaire, Piron, Destouches, Montesquieu, the Cardinal 
 de Polignac' 
 
 " ' Your majesty forgets,' said some one, ' D'Alembert and Clai- 
 rault.' 
 
 " ' And Crebillon,' continued the king, ' and La Chaussee.' 
 
 '"And Crebillon junior,' added some one else; 'he ought to be 
 more amiable than his father. And there is still the Abbe Prevost 
 and the Abbe d'OIivet.' 
 
 " ' Very well,' rejoined the king, 'during the last twenty-five years, 
 all that would have dined or supped with me.' " ^ 
 
 The King of France being thus disposed towards him, Ma- 
 dame de Pompadour could not wish him to return to Paris. 
 She could exile or appoint a minister more easily than 
 she could then protect " a philosopher," and Voltaire had no 
 other hope of a safe return. He had written a long letter 
 to Richelieu, apologizing both to her and to him for his, 
 apparent " desertion." He recalled old grievances and related 
 new ones. He said that the Bishop of Mirepoix had so poi- 
 soned against him the minds of the Dauphin and the queen 
 that he had no prospect in France but an old age of sad ob- 
 scurity or constant apprehension. 
 
 " The old Bishop of Mirepoix [said he] has just burst out against 
 me on the subject of a little piece, imputed to me, entitled ' The Voice 
 of the People and the Sage,' a production which has called forth so 
 many others, such as the ' Voice of the Pope,' the ' Voice of the 
 
 ^ Memoires de Madame du Hausset.
 
 614 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Priest,' the ' Voice of the Layman,' the ' Voice of the Capuchin,' 
 
 etc Could you not have the goodness to represent to Madame 
 
 de Pompadour that I have precisely the same enemies as herself ? 
 If she is jjiqued at my desertion, and if she regards me as a fugitive, 
 I must remain where I am ; but if she believes that 1 can be reckoned 
 among those who, in literature, can be of some use, if she wishes 
 me to return, could you not say to her that you know my attach- 
 ment to her, that she alone could make me leave the King of Prus- 
 sia, and that I left France only because I was persecuted there by 
 those who hate her ? " 
 
 But she made no sign. For the present, therefore, he had 
 no choice but to remain where he was. 
 
 Madame du Hausset adds a trifling fact. Her companion 
 in office (jna camarade^ returned to the palace, one day, in- 
 dignant at a " profanation " she had witnessed in the streets 
 of Paris. She had heard a peddler of pictures crying, — 
 
 " Here is Voltaire, that famous Prussian ! Do you see him, 
 with his big bear-skin cap on to keep out the cold ? Only six 
 sous for the famous Prussian ! "
 
 APPENDIX I. 
 
 LIST OF PUBLICATIONS 
 
 Relating to Voltaire and to his works, arranged according to the dates 
 of publication so far as known, and with their titles translated into 
 English. 
 
 [Collectors may find the original titles of the following works, down to the year 1842, 
 in the " Bibliographie Voltairienne " of J. M. Querard, Paris, 1842. The rest are to be 
 found in publishers' catalogues issued since January, 1842.] 
 
 A Critical Letter upon the New Tragedy 
 of CEdipe. By Father Folard, Jesuit. 
 Paris. 1719. 
 
 A Criticism of the Tragedy of (Edipe. By 
 the Comedian, Le Grande. 36 pages, 
 Svo. Paris. 1719. 
 
 A Letter to Madame , containing a 
 
 Criticism of the CEdipe of M. de Vol- 
 taire. By M. Van Effen. Paris. 1719. 
 
 A Letter from an Abb6 to a Country Gen- 
 tleman, containing Observations upon 
 the Style and Thoughts of the Tragedy 
 of (Edipe, and Reflections upon the last 
 Letter of M. de Voltaire. Paris. 1719. 
 
 A Letter to M. de Voltaire upon the New 
 Tragedy of CEdipe. By De Longpierre. 
 Paris. 1719. 
 
 Defense of Sophocles, or Remarks upon 
 the Tliird Critical Letter of M. de Vol- 
 taire. By the Abb6 Capperonier. Paris. 
 1719. 
 
 Apology of Sophocles, or Remarks upon 
 the Third Critical Letter of M. de Vol- 
 taire. By C Capperonier. Svo. Paris. 
 1719. 
 
 A Letter from a Swedish Gentleman to M. 
 , Professor of the French Lan- 
 guage, upon the Tragedy of CEdipe. 
 Paris. 1719. 
 
 A Refutation of the Letter from a Swedish 
 Gentleman upon the Tragedy of CEdipe. 
 By M. D. . Paris. 1719. 
 
 Defense of the New Tragedy of CEdipe of 
 
 Voltaire. By L. Mannory, Advocate to 
 the Parliament. Paris. 1719. 
 
 A Reply to the Defense of the New CEdipe. 
 By M. M. . Paris. 1719. 
 
 A Letter from the Marquis of M to 
 
 a Gentleman, his Friend, containing a 
 Criticism of the Critics of M. de Voltaire's 
 (Edipe. Paris. 1719. 
 
 New Remarks upon the CEdipe of M. de 
 Voltaire, and upon his Critical Letters, 
 wherein Corneille is justified, etc. By 
 the Abb6 G(5rard. Paris. 1719. 
 
 The Satirical Journal Intercepted, or a 
 Defense of M. Ai-ouet de Voltaire and JL 
 de La Motte. By the Sieur Bourguig»on. 
 48 pages, Svo. Paris. 1719. 
 
 A Critical Letter, or Comparison of the 
 three ancient epic Poems, the Iliad and 
 Odyssey of Homer, and the yEneid of 
 Virgil, with the League, or Henry the 
 Great, of M. de Voltaire. By De Belle- 
 chaume. 15 pages, Svo. Paris. 1724. 
 
 A Second Letter upon the same subject, 
 and by the same Author. 44 pages, Svo. 
 Paris." 1724. 
 
 Literary Verities upon tlie Tragedy of 
 Herod and Mariamne. By Messieurs the 
 Abb{5 Dcsfontaines and Granet. 12mo. 
 Paris. 1725. 
 
 Three Letters to M. de containing 
 
 some Observations upon the Tragedy of 
 Mariamne of M. de Voltaire. By J. J. 
 Bel. 1 vol. 12mo. Paris. 1725.
 
 616 
 
 LITE OF VOLTAIEE. 
 
 Apology for M. do Voltaire. By the Abb^ 
 Pellegrin. 12mo. Paris. 1725. 
 
 Critical Observations upon the Tragedy of 
 Herod and Mariamne of M. de Voltaire. 
 By the Abbe Nadal. 12mo. Paris. 1725. 
 
 A Criticism of the Henriade. The Hague. 
 1728. 
 
 Critical Letters upon the Henriade of M. 
 de Voltaire. By Saint-Hyacinthe. 50 
 pages, 8vo. London. 1728. 
 
 Thoughts upon the Henriade. 23 pages, 
 8vo. London. Without date. 
 
 Remarks upon M. Voltaire's Essay on the 
 Epic Poetry of European Nations, etc. 
 By Paul Rolli. London. 1728. 
 
 A Defense of some Passages in Paradise 
 Lost from the Hyper-Criticism of M. de 
 Voltaire. By William Duncombe. Lon- 
 don. 1728. 
 
 Examination of the Essay upon Epic Po- 
 etry of M. de Voltaire. Translated from 
 the English of Paul Rolli. By the Abbe 
 Autonini. Paris. 1728. 
 
 To the Author of the Epistle to Uranie, 
 preceded by a Letter to M. Bignon. By 
 Travenol. Paris. 1732. 
 
 Reflections upon Jealousy, to serve as Com- 
 mentary upon the last works of Voltaire. 
 By Le Roy. 29 pages. Amsterdam. 
 1732. 
 
 Remarks Historical and Critical upon the 
 History of Charles XH. By M. de la 
 Motraye. 12mo. Paris. 1732. 
 
 Religion Defended, a Poem against the 
 Epistle to Uranie. By F. M. C. Des- 
 champs. Pamphlet, 46 pages. Paris. 
 1733. 
 
 Vindication of the Authors censured in the 
 Temple of Taste of M. de Voltaire. Crit- 
 ical Observations upon the Temple of 
 Taste. By the Abbt5 Roy. 32 pages, 
 Svo. Paris. 1733. 
 
 A Letter from M. to a Friend on the 
 
 Subject of the Temple of Taste of Vol- 
 taire. By the Abbe Goujet. Paris. 
 1733. 
 
 Reply to, or Criticism upon, the Philosoph- 
 ical Letters of M. de Voltaire. By Le 
 Coq. de Villeray. 1 vol. 12mo. Reims. 
 1735. 
 
 Letters in Replj- to M. de Voltaire's Philo- 
 sophical Letters upon the English. By 
 the Abb^ Molinier. Paris. 1735. 
 
 Letter of M. de Bonneval upon the Criti- 
 
 (ism of M. de Voltaire's Philosophical 
 Letters by the Abb6 Molinier. Paris. 
 1735. 
 
 Translation of a Letter of M. A. Cocchi to 
 M. Rinuccini, Secretary of State at Flor- 
 ence, upon the Henriade. Paris. 1737. 
 
 Upon the Thoughts of Pascal (by Vol- 
 taire). Paris and the Hague. 1735. 
 
 Criticism of Voltaire's Comments upon the 
 Thoughts of Pascal. By De Villeray. 
 Basle. 1735. 
 
 Letter of a Physicist upon the Philosophy 
 of Newton, as popularized bvM. de Vol- 
 taire. By Father Regnault. 46 pages, 
 12mo. Paris. 1738. 
 
 Reflections upon the Philosophy of New- 
 ton. 82 pages, 12mo. Paris. 1738. 
 
 Remarks upon the History of Charles XIL 
 of Voltaire. By Neitz. Svo. Frank- 
 fort. 1738. 
 
 The Voltairomanie, or Letter from a Young 
 Advocate in Reply to the Libel of the 
 Sieur de Voltaire entitled The Preserva- 
 tive, etc. By the Abb6 Desfoutaines. 
 Paris. 1738. 
 
 The Mediator between Voltaire and the Au- 
 thor of the Voltairomanie, a Letter to M. 
 
 le Marquis de . By J. B. D. 12mo, 
 
 24 pages. Toulouse. 1739. 
 
 Letter of M. concerning a Pamphlet 
 
 entitled Life of Moliere. (By Voltaire.) 
 Pamphlet, 24 pages. Paris. 1739. 
 
 Disinterested Judgment concerning the Dif- 
 ference between M. de Voltaire and the 
 Abb6 Desfontaines. Pamphlet, 12mo. 
 Paris. 1739. 
 
 Examination and Refutation of the Ele- 
 ments of Newton's Philosophj' by M. de 
 Voltaire, with a Dissertation upon the 
 Reflection and Refraction of Light. By 
 J. Barrieres. Paris. 1739. 
 
 A Letter to M. de Voltaire upon his 
 Work entitled Replies to the Objections 
 brought against the Philosophy of New- 
 ton. 30 pages, Svo. Paris. 1739. 
 
 Examination and Refutation of the Ele- 
 ments of the Philosophy of Newton. By 
 M. Jean Barrieres. Paris. 1739. 
 
 Examination and Refutation of some Opin- 
 ions upon the Causes of the Reflection 
 and Refraction of Light in the Work of 
 M. Bagnieres. By L. Le Ratz. 50 pages, 
 Svo. Paris. 1740. 
 
 Remarks, Historical, Political, Mytholog-
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 617 
 
 ical, and Critical, upon the llenriade. By 
 LeBrun. The Hague. 1741. 
 
 Remarks of a Polish Lord (Count Ponia- 
 towski) upon the History of Charles Xll. 
 of Voltaire. 12rno. The Hague. 1741. 
 
 Letters upon the True Principles of Relig- 
 ion, wherein are examined the^ Work 
 upon Religion Essential to Man, by 
 Mademoiselle Hcbrut ; with the Defense 
 of the Thoughts of Pascal against the 
 Criticism of Voltaire, and three letters 
 relative to the Philosophy of that poet. 
 By D. R. Bouiller. 2 vols. 12mo. Am- 
 sterdam. 1741. 
 
 Letter from an Actor of Lille upon the 
 Tragedy of Mahomet. By M. de Vol- 
 taire. Pamphlet, 8vo. Paris. 1742. 
 
 Sentiments of a Spectator of the Tragedy 
 of Mahomet. By the Abbe Cahague. 
 Paris. 1742. 
 
 Defense of tlie Thoughts of Pascal. By 
 D. R. Bouiller. Paris. 1742. 
 
 Letter from a Quaker to Francois de Vol- 
 taire, occasioned by his Remarks upon 
 the English. (By Josias Martin.) 1vol. 
 8vo. London. 1743. 
 
 Discourse delivered at the Door of the 
 French Academy by the Director to M. 
 .(Attributed to Roy.) Paris. 1743. 
 
 Letter to the Marquis de upon the 
 
 Merope of M. de Voltaire, a Tragedy. 
 By Aubert de la Chesmaye des Bois. 
 Pamphlet, 8vo. Paris. 1743. 
 
 A Criticism of Merope. Pamphlet, 8vo. 
 Paris. 1743. 
 
 A Comparison of the two M(5ropes, Trage- 
 dies, by ]\Iaffei and by Voltaire. Pam- 
 phlet, 12mo. Paris. 1744. 
 
 A Letter upon the Tragedy of Merope, upon 
 the Comedy of the School of Manners, 
 and upon the Freemasons. Pamphlet, 
 12mo. Brussels. 1744. 
 
 Pteply of the Marquis Scipio de Maffei, au- 
 thor of the Italian Merope, to M. de Vol- 
 taire, author of the French Merope. Pam- 
 phlet, 12mo. Paris. 1744. 
 
 The Birth of Tinsel and of her daughter, 
 Merope, a tale allegorical and critical. 
 Pamphlet, 12mo. Paris. 1744. 
 
 The only True Religion demonstrated 
 
 against the Atheists, the Deists, and aU 
 
 the Sectarians. By Father Lefevre, 
 
 Jesuit. 1 vol. 12mo. Paris. 1744. 
 
 Examination of a Book entitled The Met- 
 
 aphysics of Newton. Translated from 
 the German of L. M. Kahle. By G- de 
 Saint-Blancard. Paris. 1744. 
 
 Sincere Counsels to M. de Voltaire on the 
 Subject of the Sixth Edition of his Poem 
 upon the Victory of Fontenoy. Paris. 
 1745. 
 
 Retlections upon a Printed Piece entitled 
 The Battle of Fontenoy, a Poem. Dedi- 
 cated to M. de Voltaire. (By Drom- 
 gold.) Paris. 1745. 
 
 Boileau to A'oltaire, a Satire. By Clement 
 of Dijon. Paris. 1745. 
 
 Collection of all the Pieces concerning the 
 Suit between M. de Voltaire and the 
 Sieur Traveuol, violinist of the opera. 
 Quarto. Paris. 1746. 
 
 Letter from an Academician of Villefranche 
 to M. de Voltaire upon his Reception 
 Speech at the French Academy. Pam- 
 phlet, 4to. Paris. 174G. 
 
 Discourse pronounced at the Academy by 
 M. de Voltaire. (A burlesque.) Paris. 
 1746. 
 
 Parallel between the Henriade and the Lu- 
 rin. By the Abbe Batteux. Paris. 
 1746. 
 
 Memoir in behalf of Louis Travenol against 
 the Sieur Voltaire. By J. A. R. de Ju- 
 vigny. Pamphlet. Paris. 1746. 
 
 The same, with the Poetical Triumph. 
 (Published by L. Travenol, Jun., violin- 
 ist of the Royal Academy of Music.) 
 Paris. 1746. 
 
 Eevealed Religion, a Poem in Reply to that 
 upon Natural Religion. By M. de Sau- 
 vigny. 8vo, 64 pages. Geneva and 
 Paris. 1748. 
 
 A Melancholy Epistle of the Chevalier 
 Pompon to La Babiole against good Taste, 
 or an Apology for Sc'-miramis, a Tragedy 
 of M. de Voltaire. Pamphlet in verse, 
 12mo. By Travenol. Paris. 1748. 
 
 The Poet Reformed, or an Apology for the 
 Si^miramis of V. By Favicr. Pampiilet 
 8vo. Amsterdam. 1748. 
 
 An Epistle to Philou upon the Tragedy of 
 St^miramis. In verse. Panijjhlet, 12mo. 
 By M. VAhU P. Paris. 1748. 
 
 Comparison of the Semiramis of M. de Vol- 
 taire and that of M. Crebillon. By Du- 
 puy-Dempoi-tes. 46 pages, 8vo. Paris. 
 1748. ■ 
 
 A Criticism, Scene by Scene, of Semiramis,
 
 618 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 a Tragedy by M. de Voltaire. Pamphlet, 
 8vo. Paris. 1748. 
 
 A Critical Letter upon the Tragedy of 
 St^miramis. By Desforges. Pamphlet, 
 12mo. Paris. 1748. 
 
 Letter to M. de Voltaire upon his Tragedy 
 of Catilina. By Dupuy-Demportes. Pam- 
 phlet, 8vo. Paris. 1748. 
 
 A Letter from Madame S^miramis to Mon- 
 sieur Catilina, arranged as a vaudeville. 
 By a Songster of Paris. Pamphlet, Svo. 
 Paris. 1748. 
 
 Observations upon Catilina (by Cr^billon) 
 and of Rome Sauvee (by Voltaire). Pam- 
 phlet, 12mo. Paris. i749. 
 
 Observations upon the S^miramis of Vol- 
 taire, and upon the first Criticism of that 
 Tragedy. By L. Mannory. 77 pages, 
 8vo. Paris. 1749. 
 
 Natalica, an Indian Tale, or a Criticism of 
 Catilina. By Desforges. Pamphlet, 12 
 mo. Paris. 1749. 
 
 A Letter to the Author of Nanine. By 
 Guiard de Servign(5, advocate of Reunes. 
 Pamphlet, 12mo. Paris. 1749. 
 
 Nanin and Nanine, a fragment of a tale 
 translated from the Arabic. By L. D. 
 V. Pamphlet, Svo. Paris. 1749. 
 
 Critical Reflections upon the Comedy of 
 Nanine. By M. G. Pamphlet, Svo. 
 Nancy. 1749. 
 
 Reflections upon the Tearful Comic (as ex- 
 emplified in Voltaire's comedy of Na- 
 nine). By M. de C, of the Academy of 
 Rochelle. 74 pages, 12mo. Paris. 1749. 
 
 The printed Lies of M. Arouet de Voltaire. 
 Svo. Holland. 1750. 
 
 Historical Dissertation upon the Works of 
 M. de Voltaire. By Baculard d'Arnaud, 
 of the Academy of Berlin. Pamphlet, 
 24 pages. 1750. 
 
 A Comparison of the four Electras, of 
 Sophocles, of Euripides, of M. de Cr^bil- 
 lou, and of M. de Voltaire. By Gaillard. 
 124 pages, 12mo. The Hague. 1750. 
 
 Letter to Madame the Countess of 
 
 upon the Tragedy of Oreste by M. de 
 Voltaire, and upon the Comedy upon the 
 Force of Nature, by M. N. Destouches. 
 By L. de Sepmanville. Pamphlet, 12 
 mo. Paris. 1750. 
 
 The Voice of the Bigarrure, to the Authors 
 of the Letters for and against the Im- 
 munities of the Clergy. Paris. 1750. 
 
 The Voice of the Capuchins. By the Abb^ 
 Herv6. 8 pages, Svo. Paris. 1750. 
 
 The Voice of the Poet, and that of the Le- 
 vite. 22 pages, 12mo. Paris. 1750. 
 
 The Voice of the Poor Man. By Joseph 
 Languet de Gergy, Archbishop of Tou- 
 louse. Paris. 1750. 
 
 A Voice crying in the Wilderness. Paris. 
 1750. 
 
 The Voice of the Rich Man. Paris. 1750. 
 
 Memoir in Aid of a History of the Immu- 
 nities of the Church, or the Ecclesiastical 
 
 Conferences of Madame de , or, if 
 
 preferred, the Voice of the Woman. 23 
 pages, 12mo. Paris. 1750. 
 
 The Voice of the Priest : very Humble and 
 very Respectful Remonstrances, of the 
 Clergy of the Second Order, to the King, 
 on the Subject of the Twentieth. Paris. 
 1750. (Suppressed.) 
 
 The Voice of the Christian and the Bishop. 
 12 pages, 12mo. Paris. 1750. 
 
 Collection of the Voices for and against 
 the Immunities of the Clergy. 126 pages, 
 12mo. Paris. 1750. 
 
 It must Needs be that Offenses Come. 30 
 pages, 12mo. Paris. 1750. (Suppressed.) 
 
 Voltaire, Ass, formerly Poet (containing 
 satirical letters, parodies, and epigrams). 
 39 pages, Svo. Paris. 1750. 
 
 A Dissertation upon the Principal Trage- 
 dies, ancient and modern, which have 
 appeared upon the subject of Electra, and, 
 in particular, upon that of Sophocles. 
 Bj' M. Dumolard, member of several 
 Academies. Pamphlet, Svo. London. 
 1750. 
 
 Abstract of the Electras. Pamphlet, 16 
 pages. Paris. 1750. 
 
 Reflections upon the Tragedy of Oreste, in 
 which is naturally placed the Compari- 
 son of that Piece with the Electra of M. 
 de Crt'billon. By De la Morlifere. 47 
 pages, 12mo. Paris. 1750. 
 Electra Avenged, or a Letter upon the 
 Tragedy of Oreste and Electra. By M. 
 le N. de C Pamphlet, 12mo. Paris. 
 1750. 
 Critical Response to the Voice of the Sage. 
 
 12mo, 88 pages. Paris. 1751. 
 Tlie Voice of the Pope, or Brief of our 'J 
 Holy Father, Pope Benedict XIV., con- 
 veying the condemnation of the Letters, 
 Ke repugnate, etc., and of the Libel en-
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 619 
 
 titled The Voice of the Sage, of Voltaire. 
 In Latin and in French. 7 pages, 12mo. 
 Paris. 1751. 
 Refutations of a Libel entitled. The Voice 
 of tlie Sage and of the People. 12ino, 
 35 pages. Paris. 1751. 
 Dialogue between the Age of Louis XIV. 
 and the Age of Louis XV. By Carac- 
 cioli. 12nio. The Hague. 1751. 
 Thoughts Anti-Philosophical. By Alla- 
 mand of Lausanne. 1 vol. 12mo. The 
 Hague. 1751. 
 Remarks Historical and Political upon the 
 Anti-Machiavelli of Frederic II., as given 
 by Voltaire. By L. H. de Hesse. Wis- 
 mar. 1751. 
 Refutation of a Falsehood, printed in the 
 Age of Louis XIV. By F. L. C. Rival. 
 4to. Paris. 1752. 
 Observations upon the Tragedy of the Due 
 de Foix of M. de Voltaire. By De la 
 Morliere. Paris. 1752. 
 Flemish Letters, or History of the Varia- 
 tions and Contradictions (if the Pretended 
 Natural Religion. By the 'Abb(5 Duha- 
 mel. 1 vol. 12mo. Lille. 1752. 
 The Eight Philosophic Adventurers, or an 
 unexpected meeting of Messieurs de Vol- 
 taire, d'Argens, Maupertuis, Pr^vot, 
 Crebillon, Mouhi, and de Mainvillers, 
 in the Tavern of Jladame Tripaudiere. 
 A comedy in prose. The Hague. 1752. 
 
 Letter from M. de La Beaumelle to M. 
 
 upon what passed between him and Vol- 
 taire. Frankfort. 1753. 
 The Political Age of Louis XIV., or Let- 
 ters of the Viscount Bolingbroke upon 
 ^ that subject, together with the pieces 
 which formed the History of the Age of 
 M. de Voltaire, and of his quarrels with 
 Messrs. de Maupertuis and de La Beau- 
 melle; followed bj' the Disgrace of that 
 famous poet. 12mo, 495 pages. Sie- 
 clopolis. (Frankfort.) 1753. 
 , Remarks upon the Age of Louis XIV. By 
 ^^ La Beaumelle. Frankfort. 1753. 
 Critical Letters upon the Philosophical Let- 
 ters of Voltaire. By D. R. Boullier, 
 Protestant minister. Paris. 1753. 
 A Dissertation upon the Italian Poetry, in 
 which are interspersed some remarks on 
 M. Voltaire's Essay on the Epic Poets. 
 By Jos. Baretty. London. 1753. 
 Response to the Supplement (by Voltaire) 
 
 of the Age of Louis XIV. By !M. de la 
 Beaumelle. 12mo. 1G6 pages. Colmar. 
 1754. 
 
 Narrative of the Quarrel of M. de la Beau- 
 melle with M. de Voltaire. By M. 
 Roques. Svo. Hanover. 1755. 
 
 Memoir of M. de Voltaire, annotated byM. 
 de la Beaumelle, preceded by a Letter to 
 Madame Denis. Frankfort. 1755. 
 
 Reflections upon the Untrustworthiness of 
 the Documents which M. de Voltaire has 
 followed in treating (in his Abridgment 
 of Universal History to our Days) the 
 fragment entitled Affaire of Genoa and 
 Provence in 1746 and 1747. By M. de 
 la Porte. Svo, 15 pages. Paris. 1755. 
 
 Letter of M. de Bury to M. de Voltaire on 
 the sul)ject of his Abridgment of Univer- 
 sal History. Svo. London. 1755. 
 
 Criticism of the Universal History of M. de 
 Voltaire upon the subject of Mohammed 
 and Mohammedanism. 12mo, 43 pages. 
 Paris. 1755. 
 
 A Letter from Poinsinet Junior to a man 
 of the olden time upon the Orphan of 
 China, a tragedy by M. de Voltaire, 
 represented for the first time August 20, 
 1755. Pamphlet, Svo. Paris- 1755. 
 
 Analysis of the Tragedy of the Orphan of 
 China. By De la Morliere. 42 pages, 
 12mo. Paris. 1755. 
 
 A Letter from Father Grisbourdon to M. 
 de Voltaire upon the Poem of the Pucelle. 
 B}- De Junquieres. 11 pages, 12mo. 
 Paris. 1756. 
 
 Introduction to the Ilenriade, by Frederic 
 II., King of Prussia. (Written in 1736.) 
 Geneva. 1756. 
 
 Letter to M. de Voltaire concerning his 
 poem upon the Destruction of Lisbon. 
 By J. J. Rousseau. Paris. 1756. 
 
 The Anti-Naturalist, or Ci'itical Examina- 
 tion of the Poem upon Natural Religion. 
 Svo, 21 pages. Berlin. 1756. 
 
 Reflections, Historical and Literary, con- 
 cerning the Poem upon Natural Religion 
 by Voltaire. By Thomas. Paris. 1756. 
 Anecdotic Parody of 31. de Voltaire's poem 
 upon Natural Religion. Svo, 52 pages. 
 The Hague. 1757. 
 Remarks upon Natural Religion, a Poem 
 by M. de Voltaire, followed by an addi- 
 tion from Geneva to the same poem. Svo, 
 72 pages. Louvain. 1757.
 
 620 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Religion Avenged, or Refutation of the Im- 
 pious Authors. By a Society of Men of 
 Letters (Soret, Father Haver, and oth- 
 ers). 21 vols. 12mo. Paris. 1757. 
 
 Epistle from a disinterested Man to M. de 
 Voltaire concerning his poem upon Nat- 
 ural Religion : being an Examination of 
 Voltaireanism in prose and in verse. 
 Paris. 1757. 
 
 A Letter written from Geneva to M. de 
 Voltaire. By Prof. Jacob Vernet. Pam- 
 phlet, 12mo. Geneva. 1757. 
 
 Letter to M. Formey, in which are exam- 
 ined two Chapters of M. de Voltaire in 
 the Essay upon Universal History, con- 
 cerning Calvin. By Professor Jacob 
 Verney. Frankfort. 1758. 
 
 The Quarrel between Messieurs de Vol- 
 taire and de Maupertuis. 8vo. Paris. 
 1758. 
 
 The Literary War, or some Select Pieces 
 of M. de. v., with the replies, to serve as 
 Sequel and Commentary to his works. 
 12mo, 294 pages. Lausanne. 1759. 
 
 The Oracle of the new Philosophers, to 
 serve as Supplement and Commentary 
 to the Works of M. de Voltaire. By 
 the Abbe C. M. Guyon. 12mo. Berne. 
 1759. 
 
 An Epistle from the Devil to M. de Vol- 
 taire. By the Marquis D . Pam- 
 phlet. 16 pages. Avignon, 1760, and 
 Paris, 182-3. 
 
 Ode and Letters to M. de Voltaire in favor 
 of the Family of the Great Corneille. 
 By M. Lebrun. With the reply of M. 
 de Voltaire. 12mo. Paris. 1760. 
 
 Sequel to the Oracle of the New Philoso- 
 phers, to ser\'e as Supplement and Com- 
 mentary to the Works of M. de Voltaire. 
 By the AhU C. M. Guyon. 1 vol. 8vo. 
 Berne. 1760. 
 
 The King of Prussia's Criticism on the 
 Henriade of M. Voltaire. Translated 
 from the original ; with a preface con- 
 taining a short account of the Disgrace 
 and Retreat of that favorite. London. 
 1760. 
 
 Letter from M. de Voltaire to M. Palissot, 
 with the Reply, on the occasion of the 
 Comedy of the Philosophers. Paris. 
 1760. 
 
 Epistle to a Friend in his Retreat upon the 
 occasion of the Philosophers, and L'Ecos- 
 
 saise, a burlesque in verse. Pamphlet, 
 12mo. Paris. 1760. 
 
 Discourse upon the Satire (by Palissot) 
 against the Philosophers represented by 
 a Troupe supported by a poet Philoso- 
 pher, and approved by an Academician 
 who has Philosophers for Colleagues. By 
 the Abb6 Coyer. Pamphlet, 12mo. 
 Paris. 1760. 
 
 Opinion of an Unknown Person upon the 
 Oracle of the New Philosopher, to serve 
 as Commentary and Errata to that work. 
 Dedicated to M. de Voltaire. By Chau- 
 meix. 1 vol. 12mo. Paris. 1760. 
 
 A Letter from Beelzebub to the Author of 
 the Pucelle. 8 pages, 8vo. Paris. 1760. 
 
 Verses upon the Poem of the Pucelle to M. 
 
 M. , who had sent a veiy incorrect 
 
 copy of it. 4 pages, 8vo. Paris. 1760. 
 
 An Essay upon the Pucelle of Voltaire con- 
 sidered as an Epic Poem. By M. Eusebe 
 Salverte. Paris. 1760. 
 
 Replies to the Whens, to the Ifs, and to 
 the Whys. Pamphlet, 12mo. Paris. 1760. 
 
 The Whys,' a Reply to the ridiculous 
 Whens of the Count de Tornet. Pam- 
 phlet, 8vo. Paris. 1760. 
 
 The Whens, after the manner of the Eight 
 of M. de v., or. Letter from an Appren- 
 tice Bel-Esprit, who is not wanting in 
 Common Sense, to his Father in the 
 Country, in order to give him a good 
 Opinion of his Son. Pamphlet, 12mo. 
 Paris. 1760. 
 
 Parallel between M. de Voltaire and M. 
 Crf^vier as Historians. By De Passe. 
 Pamphlet. Paris. 1761. 
 
 Letter from the Czar Peter to M. de Vol- 
 taire upon his History of Russia. Pam- 
 phlet, 39 pages. By La Beaumelle. 
 Toulouse. 1761. 
 
 A Fugitive Examination of the Fugitive 
 Pieces of Messrs. de Voltaire, Desmahis, 
 and other authors, etc. 80 pages, 12mo. 
 Plaisance. 1761. 
 
 Anti-Sans-Souci, or the Folly of the new 
 Philosophers. 2 vols. 12mo. Bouillon. 
 1761. 
 
 Remarks upon the new Discoveries of M. 
 de Voltaire in Natural Historj'. Lon- 
 don. 1761. 
 
 Reflections upon the System of the new 
 Philosophers. By Le Pr6vot d'Exmes. 
 12mo. Frankfort. 1761.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 621 
 
 Narrative of the Sickness, Confossinn, and 
 End of M. de Voltaire, and of what f d- 
 lowed. By me, Joseph Dubois. Pam- 
 phlet. Geneva. 1761. 
 A Letter to M. de Voltaire, with Compara- 
 tory Descants on the extraordinary Com- 
 position and Incidents of a Dramatic 
 Poem, called The Desert Island ; also, 
 Remarks on the Tragedy of the Siege of 
 Aquilei. By a gentleman. Pamphlet. 
 London. 17G1. 
 A Codicil of Voltaire, found among his 
 papers after his death. Pamphlet. Paris. 
 1762. 
 Challenge to the Philosophers on four 
 Paws, or Immaterialism opposed to Ma- 
 terialism. By the Abb(5 Pichon. 8vo. 
 Brussels. 1763. 
 Apology for the Jewish Nation, or Critical 
 Reflections upon the first chapter of the 
 seventh volume of the works of M. de 
 Voltaire upon the Jews. By the author 
 of The Essay upon Luxury (Isaac Pinto, 
 a Portuguese Jew). 12mo. Amsterdam. 
 1762. (See article upon the Jews in the 
 Philosophical Dictionarj'', for the chapter 
 criticised in this work.) 
 Illusions of the Treatise upon Tolerance. 
 
 24 pages, ^vo. Paris. 1763. 
 Anti-Uranie, or Deism compared with 
 Christianity, Epistles to M. de Voltaire; 
 followed by Critical Reflections upon 
 several Works of that celebrated Author. 
 By Father Bonhomme, Cordelier. 8vo, 
 127 pages. Paris. 1763. 
 Letter to a Friend in the Country upon the 
 Gu^bres and the Scythians, Tragedies 
 by M. de Voltaire. Pamphlet. Paris. 
 1763. 
 Examination of the Scythians (a tragedy 
 of M. de Voltaire). Pamphlet, 8vo. 
 Paris. 1763. 
 Voltaire, a Poem in Free Verses. 8vo. 
 By M. Leclerc de Montmercy, advocate. 
 8vo. Paris. 1764. 
 Examination of the Catechism of the Hon- 
 est Man (l\v Voltaire), or a Dialogue be- 
 tween a MonJt and a Man of Worth. By 
 the Abb6 L. le Francois. Paris. 1764. 
 Historical Examination of the Four Beau- 
 tiful Ages of M. de Voltaire (in the 
 first chapter of the Age of Louis XIV.). 
 By A. J. Roustan, Protestant minister. 
 Amsterdam. 1764. 
 
 Letter to the Author of the Catechism of 
 the Honest Man. 12mo, 12 pages. The 
 Hague. 176.5. 
 
 A Reply to M. de Voltaire, or a defense of 
 the axiom. All is Well. 8vo, 16 pages. 
 Paris. 1765. 
 
 Epistle to the Author of Anti-Uranie. By 
 J. C. Courtalon-Delaistre. Troyes. 1765. 
 
 Remarks upon a Book entitled Portable 
 Philosophic Dictionary. By a member 
 of the Society for the Propagation of 
 Christian Doctrine. Lausanne. 1765. 
 
 Letter to a Countrj' Friend, containing 
 some observations upon Adelaide du 
 Guesclin, a Tragedy of M. de Voltaire. 
 38 pages, 12mo. Amsterdam. 1765. 
 
 Memoir to the First Sj-ndic of Geneva, 
 xipon a Libel of Voltaire. By Professor 
 J. J. Vernet. Pamphlet. Geneva. 1760. 
 
 Supplement to the Philosophy of History 
 of the late Abbd Bazin (Voltaire.) By 
 P. H. Larcher. Svo. Amsterdam. 1767. 
 
 Anti-Philosophical Dictionary, designed as 
 commentary and corrective of the Philo- 
 sophical Dictionary, and of the other 
 books which have appeared in our days 
 against Christianity. By the Abb^ L. M. 
 Chaudon. 2 vols. Svo. Avignon. 1767. 
 
 Certainty of the Proofs of Christianity, or 
 the Examination of the Apologists for 
 the Christian Religion refuted. By the 
 Abb6 N. S. Bergier. 2 parts, i2mo. 
 Paris. 1767. 
 
 The Pick-Lock, or Voltaire's Hue and Cry 
 after a celebrated Wit-Stealer, and dra- 
 matic Smuggler. London. 1767. 
 
 A Defense of Mr. Rousseau against the 
 Aspersions of Mr. Hume, Mr. Voltaire, 
 and their Associates. Pamphlet. Lon- 
 don. 1767- 
 
 Observations to Messieurs of the French 
 Academy upon a Letter from M. de Vol- 
 taire, read in that Academy, at the So- 
 lemnity of Saint Louis, August 25, 1776. 
 By the Chevalier de Rutlidgc. Pamphlet, 
 8vo. Paris. 1767. 
 
 The Friend of Truth, or impartial Letters 
 mingled with curious Anecdol-os upon the 
 Plays of Voltaire. By G. Dourxign^. 
 12mo. Amsterdam. 1767. 
 
 Response to the Philosophy of History (of 
 Voltaire). By L. Viret, Cordelier. 12mo. 
 Paris. 1767. 
 
 Response to the Defense of my Uncle, jHre-
 
 622 
 
 LITE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 ceded by the Narrative of the Death of 
 the Abb6 Bazin. By P. H. Larcher. 
 8vo. Amsterdam. 1767. 
 
 Ferney, an Epistle to M. Voltaire; in 
 which is introduced a fine Eulogium on 
 Shakespeare. By George Keate. 4to. 
 London. 17G8, 
 
 The Abb^ Bazin (Voltaire). Philosophy of 
 History. By J. G. Herder. 8vo. Eiga. 
 1768. 
 
 Defense of the Books of the Old Testa- 
 ment against the Essay of Voltaire en- 
 titled The Philosophy of Historj'. By 
 the Abb^ J. G. Clemence. 8vo. Eouen 
 and Paris. 1768. 
 
 Reply of a Countrj'man of Pierrefort to 
 the Philosopher of Saint-Flour, Capu- 
 chin and Cook, upon Shells and many 
 other things. Paris. 1768. 
 
 Refutation of Belisaire and bis Oracles (J. 
 J. Rousseau, A^oltaire, etc. ). By Aubert, 
 Canon of Saint-Antoine. 12mo. Paris. 
 1768. 
 
 The Quakers to their Brother Voltaire, 
 Letters more Philosophical than those of 
 
 upon his Religion and his Works. 
 
 By the Comte d'Autrey. 8vo. London 
 and Paris. 1768. 
 
 Great Men Avenged, or Examination of the 
 Judgments rendered by M. de Voltaire, 
 and by some other philosophers, upon 
 several celebrated Men, in alphabetical 
 order, with a great number of critical 
 Remarks and literary Judgments. 2 vols. 
 8vo. Amsterdam and Lyons. 1769. 
 
 Letters upon some Works of M. de Vol- 
 taire. By R. de Bury. 8vo. Amster- 
 dam and Paris. 1769. 
 
 Commentary upon the Henriade. By L. 
 A. de la Beaumelle, revised and correct- 
 ed (and preceded by the life of the au- 
 thor). By M. Fr(5ron. Paris. 1769. 
 
 A Letter to M. de Voltaire upon the Operas 
 Philosophico-Comie, in -which is found 
 the Criticism upon Lucile, a comedy in 
 one act and in verse with songs. By La 
 Tonraille. Amsterdam. 1769. 
 
 Reply to the Reasonable Counsels (of Vol- 
 taire), designed as a Supplement to the 
 Certainty of the Proofs of Christianity. 
 Ry the Abbd N. S. Bergier. Paris. 
 1769. 
 
 Letters of some Jews, Portuguese, German, 
 and Polish, to M. de Voltaire ; followed 
 
 by a little Commentary extracted from 
 a larger one. By the Abbe A. Guenee. 
 1 vol. 8vo. Lisbon and Paris. 1769. 
 
 The Bad Dinner, or Letters upon the Din- 
 ner of the Count de Boulainvilliors (by 
 Voltaire). By the Rev. Father Viret. 
 8vo, 282 pages. Paris. 1770. 
 
 Exposition of the Song of Songs, against 
 the Commentary by Voltaire. By D'An- 
 sart. Paris. 1770. 
 
 Vindication of the Sacred Books and of Jo- 
 sephus from various Misrepresentations 
 and Cavils of Voltaire. By Robert Find- 
 lay, D. D., Divinity Professor in Glas- 
 gow. 8vo. Glasgow. 1770. 
 
 Letters from India to the Author of the 
 Age of Louis XV. By De la Flotte. 
 Svo. Amsterdam and Paris. 1770. 
 
 A new Commentary upon the Ecclesiast, 
 with reference to some passages ab- 
 stracted by M. de Voltaire; with notes 
 upon the Commentary of that Poet. 8vo, 
 19 pages. Paris. 1770. 
 
 Thoughts Anti-Philosophical. By the Abbe 
 Camuset. Svo. Paris. 1770. 
 
 Portable Dictionary Philosopho-Theologic- 
 al. By the Abb6 Paulian. Paris. 1770. 
 
 Observations upon the Philosophy of His- 
 tory, and upon the Philosophical Dic- 
 tionary; with soine Replies to several 
 Difficulties. By the Abb6 L. le Fran- 
 cois. 2 vols. Svo. Paris. 1770. 
 
 Response to Voltaire's Reasonable Coun- 
 sels, to serve as Supplement to the Cer- 
 tainty of the Proofs of Christianity. By 
 M. Bergier. 12mo. Paris. 1771. 
 
 Philosophic Picture of the Mind of Vol- 
 taire, to serve as Supplement to his 
 Works. By the Abb(5 Sabatior. Svo. 
 Geneva and Paris. 177L 
 
 A Philosophic Delineation of the Mind of 
 M. de Voltaire, to serve as a Sequel to his 
 Works, and as Jlemoirs for the History' 
 of his Life. By De Castres. Svo. Ge- 
 neva and Paris. 1771. 
 
 Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shake- 
 speare compared with the Greek and 
 French Dramatic Poets; with Remarks 
 upon the Misrepresentations of !M. de 
 Voltaire. By Mrs. Elizabeth Montague. 
 1 vol. Svo. London. 1772. 
 
 Letter to M. de Voltaire by one of his 
 friends, upon the Work entitled the Gos- 
 pel for the Day. Svo. Paris 1772.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 623 
 
 Let Him Answer; or Letters of Doctor 
 Chl^vales to M. de Voltaire on sending 
 him the Manuscript Copy of another 
 Letter, to which it does not appear that 
 he has replied. By the Abbe de Cavei- 
 rac. 8vo. Geneva and Paris. 1772. 
 (Eeply to Voltaire upon the Massacres 
 of St. Bartholomew.) 
 
 Philosophic Dictionary of Religion, whei-e- 
 in are established all the Points of Doc- 
 trine attacked by the Unbelievers, and 
 all Objections replied to. By the Author 
 of the Errors of Voltaire (the Abbe C. 
 F. Nonnotte). 4 vols. 12mo. Avignon. 
 1772. 
 
 A Discourse upon Shakespeare and upon 
 M. de Voltaire. Pamphlet. By Jos. 
 Baretti. Paris. 1772. 
 
 Letters to M. de Voltaire by one of his 
 Friends upon the work entitled The Gos- 
 pel of the Day. By Ducrane de Blangy. 
 8vo. Paris. 1773. 
 
 Instructions from the Father-Guardian of the 
 Capuchins of Gex to a brother mendicant 
 setting out for the chateau of Feme}'. 
 Translated from the Italian by the Rev. 
 Father Adam. Amsterdam. 1772. 
 
 The Tale of Ferney. A Divertisement. 
 By the Abb6 de Launay. Paris. 1773. 
 
 Reflections, critical and political, upon the 
 Tragedy of the Laws of iNIinos of Vol- 
 taire, addressed to M. Thomas, of the 
 French Academy. By the Abb^ T. J. 
 Duvernct. 51 pages, 8vo. Amsterdam 
 and Paris. 1773. 
 
 Letters (nine) to M. de Voltaire, or Conver- 
 sations upon several Works of that Poet. 
 By Clement of Dijon. Paris. 1773. 
 
 Proofs Positive in the Case of the V(?ron 
 Heirs against the Count of Morangies, 
 with confirmatory Documents on behalf 
 of the Sieur Li(^gard du Jonquay, Grand- 
 son of Madame Veron, Doctor of Laws, 
 to serve as a reply to the New Probabil- 
 ities of M. de Voltaire. 126 pages, 8vo. 
 Paris. 1773. 
 
 The Fiftieth Dramatic Anniversary of M. 
 de Voltaire, followed by the Inaugura- 
 tion of his Statue. A Medley in one act 
 and in prose, with songs and dances. 
 By Du Coudray. Paris. 1774 
 
 M. de Voltaire painted by himself, or 
 Letters of that Writer, in which are seen 
 the History of his Life, of his Works, of 
 
 his Quarrels, of his Correspondence, and 
 of the principal Traits of his Character, 
 with a great Number of Anecdotes, Re- 
 marks, etc. 12mo. Lausanne. 1766, 
 and 1775. 
 
 Voltaire Appreciated, a Comedy in one act 
 and in verse. By Etienne Billard. 
 Paris. 1775. 
 
 Epistle to La Beaumelle at the Champs- 
 Elysees, on the Subject of his Commen- 
 tary upon the Heuriade. By Curieres- 
 Palmezcaux. Paris. 1776. 
 
 Voltaire in the Shades. 1 vol. 12mo. 
 Geneva and Paris. 1776. 
 
 Letter from a Friend of Men, or a Reply 
 to the Diatribe of M. de Voltaire against 
 the Clergy of France. By the author of 
 the Preservative (Father C. L. Richard, 
 Dominican). Bvo. Deux-Ponts. 177G. 
 
 Historical Memoirs of the Author of the 
 Henriade. With some original Pieces. 
 To which are added genuine Letters of 
 Mr. de Voltaire. Taken from his own 
 Minutes. Translated from the French. 
 1 vol. 12mo. London. 1777. 
 
 Philosophical Catechism, or a Collection of 
 Observations, with which to defend the 
 Christian Religion against its Enemies. 
 By Flexier de RevaL Svo. Paris. 1777. 
 (Many editions.) 
 
 Voltaire on his Return from the Shades, 
 and upon the Point of going back thither, 
 to return no more; addressed to all those 
 whom he has deceived. By Father C. 
 L. Richard. 1 vol. Svo. Brussels and 
 Paris. 1776. London. 1777. 
 
 Letter upon the Origin of the Sciences, and 
 upon that of the Peoples of Asia; ad- 
 dressed to M. de Voltaire. By J. S. 
 Baill}'. Svo. London and Paris. 1777. 
 
 Apology for Shakespeare, translated from 
 the English of Milady Montague. By F. 
 Letourucur, Translator of Shakespeare. 
 1 vol. Svo. Paris. 1777. 
 
 Discourse upon Shakespeare and M. de 
 Voltaire. By Joseph Baretti, corre- 
 sponding secretary of the British Royal 
 Academy. 1 vol. Svo. London. 1777. 
 
 Eulogy of Voltaire, read to the Academy of \^ 
 Berlin, November 26, 1778. By Frederic -^"^ 
 n., King of Prussia. Svo. Berlin. 1778. 
 
 Eulogy of Voltaire, followed by various 
 poems. Svo. By Curiferes-Palmezeaux. 
 Paris. 1778.
 
 624 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Eulogy of M. de Voltaire. Bj- Charles 
 Palissot. 8vo. London and Paris. 1778. 
 
 Eulogy of M. de Voltaire. By the Marquis 
 de Luchet. Svo. Cassel. 1778. 
 
 Verses upon Voltaire, and upon his Apo- 
 theosis on Parnassus. By G. de Chaba- 
 non. Pamphlet. 16 pages. Paris. 1778 
 
 Eulogy of Voltaire. By Gazon Dourxign^. 
 8vo. Paris. 1779. 
 
 Eulogy of Voltaire, pronounced at the pub- 
 lic session of the French Academy, May 
 4, 1779. By D'Alembert. 8vo. Paris. 
 1779. 
 
 Epistle to Voltaire, a Piece which ob- 
 tained the second prize from the French 
 Academy in 1779. By M. de Murville. 
 8vo. Paris. 1779. 
 
 Lyrical Eulogy of M. de Voltaire, recited 
 at the close of the Rival Muses by the 
 actors of the Theatre of Lyons. By 
 Benech. 8vo. Lyons. 1779. 
 
 Eulogy of Voltaire, a Poem which com- 
 peted for the prize of the French Acad- 
 emy in 1779. By P. J. B. Xougaret. 
 Geneva, Paris, and Philadelphia. 1779. 
 
 Eulogy of Voltaire, pronounced in the Ma- 
 sonic Lodge of the Nine Sisters. By De 
 la Dixmerie. 8vo, 128 pages. Geneva 
 and Paris. 1779. 
 
 Eulogy of Voltaire, a Piece which competed 
 for the prize in 1779. By the Marquis 
 de Pastoret. Svo. Paris. 1779. 
 
 Voltaire, an Ode, a piece which competed 
 for the prize of the French Academy in 
 1779. By J. Geofiroy. Svo, 12 pages. 
 Paris. 1779. 
 
 To the Manes of Voltaire, a Poem which 
 received the prize from the French Acad- 
 emy. By J. F. de La Harpe. Pamphlet. 
 Paris. 1779. 
 
 Impartial Reflections upon the Eulogies of 
 Voltaire, which competed for the prize of 
 the French Academj'. By L. de Boissy- 
 8vo. Paris. 1779. 
 
 The Shade of Voltaire at the Champs-Ely- 
 sdes, a comedy-ballet in prose and verse, 
 dedicated to the Manes of that great 
 Man. By M. Moline. Paris. 1779. 
 
 Letter from A. S. de Castres to the Abb6 
 Fontenai, editor of the Annonces et Af- 
 fiches pour la Province, upon the late M. 
 de Voltaire. Pamphlet, 16 pages. Paris. 
 1779. 
 
 The Rival Muses, or the Apotheosis of Vol- 
 
 taire, a Comedy in one act and in free 
 verses. By J. F. de La Harpe. Paris. 
 1779. 
 
 Racine, Crdbillon, and Voltaire, with 
 grammatical Remarks upon some Verses 
 of the Tragedies of Cr^billon. By 
 D'Acarq. Pamphlet. Paris. 1779. 
 
 Supplement to the EiTors of Voltaire, or 
 complete Refutation of his Treatise upon 
 Tolerance. By an ix;clesia.«tic of the 
 Diocese of Reims (the Abbe Loisson, 
 cure of Vrisy). Liege and Paris. 1779. 
 
 Voltairimeros, or the first Day of M. de 
 Voltaire in the Other World. By the 
 Ahhi Baston. 2 vols. 12mo. Brusseb. 
 1779. 
 
 Voltaire, a Poem read at the Academic 
 Festival of the Lodge of the Nine Sisters. 
 By F. des Oliviers. Ferney and Paris. 
 1779. 
 
 Memoirs and Anecdotes to serve for the 
 History of Voltaire. 16mo. Li^e. 
 1780. 
 
 The Death of Voltaire, an Ode, followed by 
 his Eulogy, with the Tragedy of Eriphile 
 and other pieces, to serve as a sequel to 
 the Memoirs aud Anecdotes of that il- 
 lustrious man. 12mo. Paris. 1780. 
 
 Voltaire and other Poems. By P. L. A. 
 Veau de Launay. Paris. 1780. 
 
 Letters upon Revealed Religion, against 
 Voltaire. By the Baron de Haller. 
 Translated from the German into French. 
 2 vols. 8vo. Berne. 1780. 
 
 Voltaire, a Collection of Curious Particu- 
 lars of his Life and Death. By Father 
 Elie Ilarel. 8vo, 148 pages. Porentruy. 
 1780. 
 
 Reflections upon the Eulogy upon M. de 
 Voltaire, by D'Alembert, pronounced by 
 himself May 4, 1779, in the presence of 
 the whole Academy. By J. de S. Val- 
 lier. 8vo. Frankfort. 1780. 
 
 A Letter to M. Mercier, Abbe of St. L^ger, 
 upon the Contention between Voltaire 
 and Saint-Hyacinthe, in which will be 
 found some literary Anecdotes and Let- 
 ters of Voltaire and Saint-Hyaciathe. 
 By J. L. de Burigny. Pamphlet. Lon- 
 don and Paris. 1780. 
 
 Remarks upon Voltaire's Commentary upon 
 Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. By 
 C. I. Pallzow. Berlin. 1780. 
 
 The Henriade Avenged, with the Reply of
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 625 
 
 M. B. (J. Bidault) to each of the Objec- 
 tions in La Beaumelle's Commentary ; 
 the Preface of Frederic the Great, King 
 of Prussia ; the Essay upon Epic Poetry, 
 translated from the English by the Abbd 
 Desfontaines ; a Supplement to that Es- 
 say ; an Article upon the subject of He- 
 -p siod; another concerning Ariosto; the 
 Judgments of Contemporaries upon the 
 Poem; a Relation of the Honors which 
 were paid to Voltaire at Paris in 1778; 
 and several other Fragments relating to 
 Voltaire. Collected and edited by M. de 
 Chateaulion. 12mo. Berlin and Paris. 
 1780. 
 The Veritable Muses, a Medley in six 
 
 scenes. Paris. 1781. 
 The Vengeance of Pluto, or a Sequel to the 
 Rival Muses, a Comedy in one act and in 
 prose, followed by detached pieces. By 
 Cubieres. 8vo, 62 pages. Paris. 1781. 
 Eulogy of M. de Voltaire, an Ode which 
 competed for the prize at the French 
 Academy. By L. de la Vicomterie ; fol- 
 lowed by a Letter from the King of Prus- 
 sia to the Author. Pamphlet. Ham- 
 burg. 1782. 
 Voltaire and the Serf of Mount Jura, a 
 Discourse in Easy Verses, crowned by 
 the French Academy in 1782. By the 
 Chevalier de Florian. Pamphlet, 14 
 pages. Paris. 1782. 
 The Authenticity of the Books both of the 
 New and the Old Testament, and their 
 Truth defended; or Refutation of the 
 "Bible at Length Explained"' of Vol- 
 taire. By the Abbe J. G. Clemence, 
 Canon of Rouen. 1 vol. 8vo. Paris. 
 1782. 
 A Discourse in Verse in praise of M. de 
 Voltaire, followed by some other Poems 
 by the JIarquis de Ximente, and pre- 
 ceded by a Letter from M. de Voltaire to 
 the Author. Pamphlet. Paris. 1784. 
 Tragedy, a Sequel to the Nine Letters to 
 Voltaire by Clement of Dijon. Paris. 
 1784. 
 Voltaire Triumphant, or the Priests Fallen, 
 a Tragi-Comed\' in one act and in prose. 
 Attributed to Anacharsis Clootz. Pam- 
 phlet, 30 pages. Paris. 1784. 
 Private Life of the King of Prussia, or 
 Memoirs to serve for the history of Vol- 
 taire. 12mo. Amsterdam. 1785. 
 VOL. I. 40 
 
 Memoirs to serve for the History of Vol- 
 taire, in which will be found various ■■ — 
 Writings by him little known. 12mo. 
 Amsterdam. 1785. 
 Historical and Critical Memoirs of the Life 
 and Writings of M. de Voltaire. 2 vols. 
 8vo. By Dom Chaudon. Paris. 1785. 
 Dialogue between Voltaire and Fontenelle. 
 
 By Rivarol. 8vo. Paris. 1785. 
 Defense of Voltaire (against La Harpe). 
 By J. E. I'HospitaL Pamphlet. Lon- 
 don. 1786. 
 The Life of Voltaire. By the Abb6 Du- 
 
 vemet. Geneva. 1786. 
 Life of Voltaire. By the Marquis de Lu- 
 
 chet. 12nio. Geneva. 1786. 
 Decline of Letters and Manners since the 
 Greeks and Romans (attributed chiefly 
 to Voltaire and to the excessive Develop- 
 ment of light Literature). By J. A. R. de 
 Juvigny. 12mo. Paris. 1787. 
 Eulogy of Marie-Frangois de Voltaire, fol- 
 lowed by Notes, instructive and edifying. 
 By M. M. Ecrlinf. 80 pages, Svo. 
 Paris. 1788. 
 Tantalus at Law, a Comedy in one act. 
 and in prose (upon Voltaire versus 
 Ilirsch and Son, of Berlin). Attributed 
 to Frederic H. of Prussia. Berlin. 1788. 
 Eulogy of Voltaire, which competed for 
 the prize offered by the French Acad- 
 emj'. By Mademoiselle de Gaudin. Svo. 
 Paris. 1789. 
 Analyses and Criticisms of the Works of 
 Voltaire, with several Anecdotes, inter- 
 esting and little known, concerning him, 
 from 1762 to his death. Svo. Kehl. 
 1789. 
 Frederic H., J. J. Rousseau, D'Alembert, 
 and the Academy of Berlin defended 
 from the Secretary of that Academy. 
 By J. C. Laveaux. Svo. Paris. 1789. 
 Voltaire to the French upon their Con- 
 stitution. By M. Lava. Pamphlet. Paris, 
 1789. 
 Life of Voltaire. By M. de Condorcct. 
 Followed by the Memoirs of Voltaire, ^ 
 written by himself. 2 vtrts. 16mo. Ge- -- 
 neva, 1787, and Berlin, 1791. 
 Anti-Voltaire, or Remarks upon Religion. 
 
 2 vols. Svo. Berne. 1791. 
 The Response of a Friend of Great Men to 
 those who are envious of Voltaire's 
 Glory. Pamphlet, 15 pages. Paris. 1791.
 
 626 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 The Widow Calas at Paris, or the Tri- 
 umph of Voltaire. A drama in one act 
 and in prose. By J. B. Pujoulx. Paris. 
 1791. 
 The Beneficence of Voltaire, a drama in one 
 act and in verse. By W. d'Abancourt. 
 Represented for the first time at the The- 
 atre of the Nation, May 30, 1791. Paris. 
 1791. 
 A True Eulogy of M. de Voltaire, one of 
 the great men of the nation who repose 
 in the Temple of Memory. 55 pages, 
 8vo. Paris. 1791. 
 The Apotheosis of Voltaire and that of the 
 Great Men of France proposed on the same 
 day, by placing their busts by the side of 
 their ashes. Pamphlet. Paris. 1791. 
 An Exact and Circumstantial Detail of all 
 the Mattei-s relating to the Festival of 
 Voltaire, extracted from the Chronique 
 de Paris. Pamphlet. Paris. 1791. 
 The Translation of Voltaire to Paris, and 
 Details of the Ceremony which is to take 
 place oji the Fourth of July. Pamphlet. 
 Paris. 1791. 
 Literary History of Voltaire, containing 
 his literary and private Life, Anecdotes, 
 and Successes of each of his works, with 
 Details of the Honors which he obtained 
 during his life, and those which were 
 decreed to him at the Temple of great 
 Men. By the Marquis de Luchet. 6 
 vols. 8vo. Paris. 1792. 
 Doubts upon the Revealed Religions, 
 addressed to Voltaire. By Emilie du 
 Chatelet. A posthumous work. 8vo, 
 72 pages. Paris. 1792. 
 Voltaire in the Shades, or Dialogues on 
 the Deistical Controversy. Poems and 
 a Tragedy. By W. J. Mickle. 1 vol. 
 4to. London. 1794. 
 Life of M. de Voltaire. By the Abbe. T. 
 J. Duvernet. Svo. Geneva, 1786, and 
 Paris, 1798. 
 The Spirit of Voltaire as shown by his 
 writings. By the Abb6 C. F. Nonnotte. 
 12rao. Paris. 1799. 
 New Lights on Jacobinism, abstracted 
 from Robinson's History of Freema- 
 sonry; with an Appendix containing an 
 Account of Voltaire's Behavior on his 
 death-bed, and a Letter from J. H. 
 Stone (who was tried for sedition) to his 
 friend Dr. Priestley, disclosing the prin- 
 
 ciples of Jacobinism. 1 vol. Svo. Lon- 
 don. 1799. 
 
 Voltaire, or a Day at Ferney. A Vaude- 
 ville in two acts. Paris. 1802. 
 
 Errors of Voltaire in Metaphysics. Svo. 
 By Father J. B. Aubry. Commercy. 
 1802. 
 
 Evenings at Ferney, or Confidences of 
 Voltaire, gathered by a Friend of that 
 great Man (S. Desprf^'aux). 8vo. Paris. 
 1802. 
 
 An Evening with two Prisoners, or Vol- 
 taire and Richelieu. A Vaudeville. By 
 D. and Z. Paris. 1803. 
 
 Report made to the Society of Science and 
 Literature of Montpellier upon the Inau- 
 guration of the Statue of Voltaire in the 
 Museum of the same City. By Mar- 
 tin Choisy. Pamphlet. Montpellier. 
 1803. 
 
 Refutations of some False Assertions of 
 Voltaire and other Philosophers of the 
 Eighteenth Century concerning the Holy 
 
 Scriptures. By the Abb6 , Svo. 
 
 Paris. 1804. 
 
 On the Philosophy of the Henriade. By 
 M. Tabaraud, former priest of the Ora- 
 tory. Paris. 1805. 
 
 Voltairiana, in four volumes. Selected and 
 translated from the French by Mary 
 Julia Young. 16mo. London. 1805. 
 
 Unpublished Letters of La Marquise du 
 Chatelet and the Comte d'Argental. 1 
 vol. Svo. Paris. 1806. 
 
 The Genius of Voltaire appreciated in all 
 his works. By Charles Palissot. 12mo. 
 Paris. 1806. 
 
 Voltaire at the House of Ninon, a Vaude- 
 ville in one act and in prose. By Mo- 
 reau and La Fortelle. Paris. 1806. 
 
 Response of Voltaire to M. J. Ch^nier. 
 By A. d'Aldequier. Paris. 1806. 
 
 Boniface Carr^, or the Coat of Voltaire. 
 A Vaudeville in one act. Paris. 1806. 
 
 My Residence with Voltaire, and Unpub- 
 lished Letters written to me by that 
 celebrated Man do-\vn to the last year 
 of his life. 1 vol. 12mo. By Come 
 Alexander Collini. Paris. 1807. 
 
 The Infidel and Christian Philosophers, or 
 the Last Hours of Voltaire and Addison 
 contrasted. A poem. 4to. London. 
 1807. 
 
 Voltaire, or the Triumph of Modem Phi-
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 627 
 
 losophy. A Poem in eight cantos, with 
 an Epilogue ; followed by various Pieces 
 in verse and in prose. By J. Berchoux. 
 1 vol. 8vo. Lyons. 1814. 
 
 Commentary upon the Drama of Voltaire. 
 By La Harpe. Printed after the auto- 
 graph manuscript of that celebrated critic. 
 Collected and published by M. Decroix. 
 1 vol. 8vo. Paris. 1814. 
 
 The Voltairiade, or Adventures of Voltaire 
 in the other World, occasioned by an 
 event which happened in this. By M. 
 J. Grambert. 8vo. 96 pages. Paris. 
 1815 and 1825. 
 
 Parallel between the Literary Life of J. J. 
 Rousseau and Voltaire. By A. Val- 
 secchi. Pamphlet. Venice. 1816. 
 
 The Philosophy of the Eighteenth Century 
 unveiled by itself, a Work addressed to 
 Fathers of Families, and to Christian In- 
 structors, followed by observations upon 
 the Notes with which Voltaire and Con- 
 dorcet have accompanied the Thoughts 
 of Pascal. By Gourjui. 2 vols. 8vo. 
 Paris. 1816. 
 
 Voltaire judged by the Facts. Anony- 
 mous. 8vo. 76 pages. Paris. 1817. 
 
 The Political, Literary, and Moral Life of 
 Voltaire, in which are refuted Condorcet 
 and his other historians, by citing and 
 comparing a great number of unknown 
 and very curious facts. By Lapan. 
 8vo. Paris. 1817, 1819, and 18.38. 
 
 Voltaire's Cane and Rousseau's Writ- 
 ing-Desk. A dialogue in verse. By 
 Dc Montburn. Pamphlet, 16 pages. 
 Paris. 1817. 
 
 Voltaire and his Genius, his Arrival and 
 his Triumph in the other World, a 
 Drama in three acts and in prose. A 
 posthumous work of the late M. Bros, 
 formerly honorary Canon of Meaux. 
 Published by M. Crussaire, his testa- 
 meutar_v executor. Paris. 1817. 
 
 Philosophic Judgment upon Voltaire and 
 J. J. Rousseau. By H. Azais. 8vo, 
 82 pages. Paris. 1817. 
 
 Justification of the Works of Voltaire and 
 the Forgiveness of his errors accorded 
 by Alpha and Omega, a foreign Prince 
 more just than his Enemies newly ar- 
 rived here. Pamphlet, 8 pages. Paris. 
 1817. 
 Uandate of Messieurs the Vicars-General 
 
 of the Diocese of Paris for the Lent of 
 1817 (against a new edition of the works 
 of Voltaire and of Rousseau). 8vo. 
 Paris. 1817. 
 
 Letter from the Editor of the Complete 
 Works of Voltaire to Messieurs the 
 Vicars-General of the Metropolitan Chap- 
 ter of Paris on the subject of their last 
 mandate. Pamphlet, 25 pages. Paris. 
 1817. 
 
 Important Questions upon the New Edition 
 of the Complete Works of Voltaire and 
 J. J. Rousseau. B3' the Abbe C. de 
 Montals. Pamphlet, 48 pages. Paris. 
 1817. 
 
 Still some Words upon Voltaire, a little 
 Letter upon a great Subject. Pamphlet, 
 14 pages. Paris. 1817. 
 
 Voltaire and Rousseau, or the Trial of the 
 Day. By R. Bazin. Pamphlet. Paris. 
 1817. 
 
 Voltaire, J. J. Rousseau, and Montesquieu. 
 Pamphlet. Paris. 1817. 
 
 A Philosophic Judgment concerning Jean 
 Baptiste Rousseau and Voltaire. By H. 
 Azais. 82 pages, 8vo. Paris. 1817. 
 
 An Epistle from Voltaire to M. Beuchot, 
 one of his editors. Pamphlet, 8 pages. 
 Paris. 1817. 
 
 Reflections upon the Two Editions of the 
 Complete Works of Voltaire. 8vo. 64 
 pages. Paris. 1817. 
 
 Two Words to the Constitutionnel and one 
 Word to the Mercury on the Subject of 
 the new Editions of the Complete Works 
 of Voltaire, and with regard to Philoso- 
 phy and the Philosophers. By M. G. J. 
 M. Pamphlet, 40 pages. Paris. 1817. 
 
 Researches concerning the Works of Vol- 
 taire, containing: (1) general reflections 
 upon his writings; (2) a notice with ex- 
 planations of the different editions of his 
 works, select or complete, from 1732 to 
 this day; (3) the detail of the judicial 
 condenmations which most of those 
 writings have incurred; and (4) ac- 
 counts of the principal works in which 
 his dangerous principles have been com- 
 bated. Bv J. J. E. G., advocate. Pam- 
 phlet, 78 pages. Dijon. 1817. 
 
 Literary and Philosophical History of Vol- 
 taire. 12mo. By R. J. Durdent. Paris. 
 1818. 
 An Epistle from Voltaire to the numerous
 
 628 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Editors of his Complete Works, with 
 Notes aud Documents. Pamphlet, 20 
 pages. Paris. 1818. 
 
 A Letter Philosophical, Political, and Lit- 
 erary, from Voltaire to the French. 
 Published by E. B. D. M. Bvo. 56 
 pages. Paris. 1818. 
 
 The Sirven Family, or Voltaire at Castres. 
 A Melodrama in three acts. By F. Du- 
 petit-Mer6 and J.' B. Dubois. Paris. 
 1820. 
 
 Philosophical Observations upon the Phil- 
 osophical Dictionary of Voltaire. By 
 G. Feydel. Part I. 12mo, 48 pages. 
 Paris. 1820. 
 
 Private Life of Voltaire and Madame du 
 Chatelet, during a Sojourn of six Months 
 at Cirey. By the Author of the Peru- 
 vian Letters (Madame de Grafigny), fol- 
 lowed by Fifty Unpublished Letters in 
 verse and in prose of Voltaire. 1 vol. 
 Bvo. Paris. 1820. 
 
 The Pastoral Address of Monseigneur the 
 Bishop of Troves, upon the Printing of 
 bad Books, and particularly upon the 
 Complete Works of Voltaire and Rous- 
 seau. Pamphlet, 76 pages. Paris, Ly- 
 ons, and Toulouse. 1821. 
 
 Letter from M. Touquet to his grandeur 
 Monseigneur the Bishop of Troyes, Arch- 
 bishop elect of Vienna, in reph^ to his 
 Pastoral Address against the editions of 
 the Complete Works of Voltaire and 
 J. J. Rousseau. Pamphlet, 48 pages. 
 Paris. 1821. 
 
 Letters to Madame Perronneau and com- 
 pany, relative to the edition of the Com- 
 plete Works of Voltaire. By M. Beu- 
 chot. Eleren letters. Paris. 1821. 
 
 The Involuntary Apologists, or the Chris- 
 tian Religion proved by the wi-itings of 
 the Philosophers. By Father M. M^- 
 rault. 1 vol. Bvo. Paris. 1806 and 
 1821. 
 
 Letter from M. Beuchot, addressed to sev- 
 eral journals relative to the Complete 
 Works of Voltaire in 50 vols. 12mo. 
 Paris. 1821. 
 
 Life of Voltaire. By M. F. A. J. M^ 
 zure, Inspector-General of Studies. Bvo. 
 Paris. 1821. 
 
 The Life of Voltaire, with interesting Par- 
 ticulars concerning his Death, and An- 
 ecdotes and Characters of his Contempo- 
 
 raries. By Frank Hall Standish, Esq. 
 1 vol. 12mo. London. 1821. 
 
 Unpublished Letters of Voltaire, Madame 
 Denis, and Collini. 1 vol. 12mo. Paris. 
 1821. 
 
 The Faithful Catholics to the Bishops and 
 all the Pastors of the Church of France, 
 on the subject of the new editions of the 
 works of Voltaire and Rousseau. Pam- 
 phlet, 52 pages. Paris. 1821. 
 
 Historical Notice upon the Henriade, for 
 an edition of that poem, with a Com- 
 mentary'. By Fontanier. 16 pages, Bvo. 
 Rouen. 1822. 
 
 The Shoemaker of Voltaire, or the Flight 
 from Berlin. A Comedy played at the 
 Varietes. Paris. 1822. 
 
 Impiety, or the Philosophists. A poetical 
 essay in eight cantos. By Clemcnce. 
 Paris, 1821, and Lyons, 1823. 
 
 The Errors of Voltaire. By the Abb6 C 
 F. Nonnotte. 2 vols. 12mo. Avignon. 
 1762. Seventh edition of the same. 3 
 vols. 12mo. Paris. 1822. 
 
 The Purification of Voltaire, or Voltaire 
 neutralized by Religion and Morality. 
 Dedicated to the august shade of the 
 martyr-king, Louis XVI. By A. Hus. 
 Bvo, 4 pages. Paris. 1823. 
 
 Full Presentation of the Voltaire Tonquet, 
 a Collection of the Treatises, Sentences, 
 Transactions, Judgments, Decrees, and 
 various Acts relative to that Operation 
 (a suit between publishers). Quarto, 
 104 pages. Paris. 1823. 
 
 History of the Life and Works of Voltaire, 
 with Estimates of that celebrated man 
 by various esteemed authors. By L. Pail- 
 let de Warcy. 2 vols. Bvo. Paris. 1824. 
 
 The Bible Avenged from the Attacks of 
 Incredulity, and justified from every 
 Reproach of its Inconsistency with Rea- 
 son, Historical Monuments, Natural 
 Science, Geology, Astronomy. By the 
 Abb^ J. F. Duclot. 6 vols. Bvo. Lyons 
 and Paris. 1824. 
 
 Compile, or the Pupil of Voltaire. A com- 
 edy in one act and in verse : new prey 
 of the theatrical censorship. By T. 
 Princeteau. Lyons. 1825. 
 
 Voltaire as an Apologist of the Christian 
 Religion. By the author of the Invol- 
 untary Apologists (the Abb(5 Merault). 
 1 vol. 8vo. Paris. 1826.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 629 
 
 An Epistle to Voltaire in verse. By M. 
 J. Chenier. Paris. 1806 and 1820. 
 
 Voltaire and a Jesuit. A Dialogue in 
 verse. By C!onstant Taillard. 32mo, 
 32 pages. Paris. 1826. 
 
 Memoirs relating to Voltaire and his 
 Works. By Longchamp and Wagnifere, 
 his Secretaries. Followed by various un- 
 published Writings of the Marquise du 
 Chatelet, Renault, Piron, D'Arnaud, 
 Thieriot, and others, all relating to Vol- 
 taire. 2 vols. 12mo. Paris. 1820. 
 
 Examination of the Works of Voltaire 
 considered as Poet, as Prose Writer, as 
 Philosopher. By Linquet. Svo. Paris. 
 1827. 
 
 An Epistle to Voltaire upon the Present 
 Government. By Horace . Pam- 
 phlet, 16 pages. Paris. 1828. 
 
 Voltaire among the Capuchins. A Com- 
 edy in one Act and in Prose, with Songs. 
 By Dumersan and Dupin. Paris. 18J0. 
 
 An Epistle to Voltaire in Verse. By La- 
 croix. Pamphlet, 4 pages. Bordeaux. 
 1831. 
 
 Voltaire at Frankfort. An Anecdotical 
 Comedy in one Act and in Prose, with 
 Songs. By Ourry and Brazier. Paris. 
 1831. 
 
 Madame du Chatelet, or No To-JIorrow. 
 
 ■ A Comedy in one Act and in Prose, with 
 Songs intermingled. By Ancelot and 
 Gustave. Paris. 1832. 
 
 A Breakfast at Ferney in 1765, or the 
 Widow Galas at the Home of Voltaire. 
 A Dramatic Sketch in one Act and in 
 Verse. By Alexandre Duvoisin-Calas. 
 Gustave. Paris. 1832. 
 
 Voltaire and Madame de Pompadour. A 
 Comedy in tliree Acts. Bj* J. B. P. La- 
 fitte and C. Desnoyer. Paris. 1833. 
 
 The Youth of Voltaire, or the First Prize. 
 An Historical Comedy in one Act, with 
 Couplets intermixed. By Saint-Hilaire. 
 18mo, 72 pages. Paris. 1833. 
 
 The S!ipper of Voltaire. A Vaudeville in 
 two Acts. By J. B. Simonnin. Paris. 
 1836. 
 
 Voltaire on a Holiday. A Vaudeville in 
 two Acts. By De Villeneuve and De 
 Livry. Paris. 1836. 
 
 A Fugitive at the House of Voltaire. A 
 Vaudeville in one Act. By Saint-Hilaire 
 and Simonnin. Paris. 1836. 
 
 The Secretary of Voltaire. A Tale. Ge- 
 neva. 1838. 
 
 Voltaire and the French Revolution. By 
 C. Nagel. 8vo, 176 pages. 1839. 
 
 The Housekeeping and Finance of Vol- 
 taire, with an Introduction upon Court 
 and Drawing-Room Manners in the 
 Eighteenth Century. By Louis Nico- 
 lardot. 1 vol. Svo. Paris. 1854. 
 
 The Enemies of Voltaire. By Charles Ni- 
 sard. 1 vol. 12mo. Paris. 1853. 
 
 The Friends of Voltaire. By H. Julia. 1 
 vol. 12mo. Paris. 1854. 
 
 Unpublished Letters of Voltaire, collected 
 by M. de Cayrol, annotated by Alphonse 
 Fran9ois, with a Preface by Saint-Marc 
 Girardin. 2 vols. Svo. Paris. 1857. 
 
 Voltaire and the People of Geneva. By 
 J. Gaberel, former pastor. 1 vol. 12mo. 
 Paris. 1857. 
 
 Voltaire and the President de Brosses, Un- 
 published Correspondence. By Th. Fois- 
 set. 1 vol. 12mo. Paris. 1858. 
 
 The Philosophy of Voltaire. By Ernest 
 Bersot. 1 vol. 12mo. Paris. 1858. 
 
 Jean Calas and his Family. An Historic 
 Study from Original Documents. By 
 Athanase Coquerel, Juu., Pastor of the 
 Reformed Church. 1 vol. 12rao. Paris. 
 1858. 
 
 Voltairian Catalogue. A List of Works by 
 and relating to Voltaire. Svo. 184 pages. 
 By J. M. Querard. Paris. 1800. 
 
 Voltaire at Ferney. His Correspondence 
 with the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha. Col- 
 lected and edited by M5L Evariste, Ba- 
 voux, and A. F. 1 vol. Svo. Paris. 
 1860. 
 
 Voltaire and his School-Masters. An Epi- 
 sode of Classical Learning in France. 
 By Alexis Pierron. 1vol. 12mo. Paris. 
 1806. 
 
 Voltaire, his Life and his Works. By the 
 Abb^ Maj-nard. 2 vols. Svo. Paris. 
 1867. 
 
 The' True Voltaire, the Man and the 
 Thinker. By Edouard de Pompery. A 
 Biography. 1 vol. Svo. Paris. 1867. 
 
 Voltaire. 1 vol. 12mo. By David Fred- 
 erick Strauss. 1870. 
 
 Voltaire. By John Morley. 1 vol. 12mo. 
 London. 1872. 
 
 The True Letters of Voltaire to the Abb4 
 Moussinot, published for the first time
 
 630 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 from the autographs in the National Li- 
 brary. By Courtat. 1 vol. 12mo. Paris. 
 1875. 
 Life and Times of Francois-Marie Arouet, 
 calling himself Voltaire. By Francis 
 Espinasse. Vol. 1st. 8vo. London. 1876. 
 Voltaire and French Society in the Eight- 
 eenth Century. A Biography in eight 
 volumes. 8vo. By Gustave Desnoires- 
 terres. Paris. 1876. 
 Voltaire and Rousseau, and the Philosophy 
 of the Eighteenth Century. 1 vol. 12mo. 
 By Henri Martin. Paris. 1878. 
 Voltaire, his Life, his Works, and the In- 
 fluence of his Ideas upon Society. 1 vol. 
 12mo. Paris. 1878. 
 Voltaire in Exile. His Life and his Work 
 in France and in Foreign Lands, Bel- 
 gium, Holland, Prussia, England, Switz- 
 erland. With Unpublished Letters of 
 Voltaire and Madame du Chatelet. By 
 B. Gastineau. 1 vol. 12mo. Paris. 1878. 
 A German Tourist at Ferney in 1775. By 
 P. Ristelhubor. 1 vol. 16mo. Paris. 1878. 
 Voltaire and Rousseau. By Eugene Noel. 
 
 1 vol. 12mo. Paris. 1878. 
 Frederic II. and Voltaire. Dedicated to 
 the Centenary Commission. 1 vol. 12mo. 
 Paris. 1878. 
 Prayers, Sermons, and Religious Thoughts. 
 Translated from the French of Voltaire, 
 by J. E. Johnson, Rector of St. John 
 the Evangelist Church, Philadelphia 
 1 vol. 16mo. Philadelphia. 1878. 
 Letters of Madame du Chatelet. Edited 
 by Eugene Asse. 1 vol. 12mo. Paris. 
 1878. 
 Voltairian Iconography. The History and 
 Description of what was published upon 
 Voltaire by Contemporary Art. By Gus- 
 tave Desnoiresterres. 4 parts, 8vo. Paris. 
 1878. 
 Voltaire and the Church. By the Abb^ 
 Moussinot. 1 vol. 12mo. Paris. 1878. 
 One Hundred and One Anecdotes of Vol- 
 taire. 1 vol. 12mo. By Gaston de 
 Genonville. Paris. 1878. 
 The Good and the Evil which has been 
 said of Voltaire. By Maxime de Cide- 
 ville. 1 vol. 12rao. Paris. 1878. 
 To Voltaire, a Sonetto (in Italian), with 
 the Translation of the same in French. 
 By Maron Antonio Canini. 8vo, 7 pages. 
 Paris. 1878. 
 
 Voltaire at Paris. By Edouard Damila- 
 
 ville. 1 vol. 12mo. Paris. 1878. 
 The Centenary of Voltaire as celebrated 
 by the Freemasons in Rome. 8vo, 34 
 pages. Rome. 1878. 
 Homage to Voltaire. Poem by Ch. More. 
 
 8vo, 1 page. Paris. 1878. 
 Voltaire in Prussia. By Albert Thieriot. 
 
 1 vol. 12mo. Paris. 1878. 
 The Centenary of Voltaire, May 30, 1878. 
 Oratorical Festival, President, Victor 
 Hugo. The Discourses of MM. E. Spul- 
 ler, Emile Deschanel, and Victor Hugo. 
 32mo, 96 pages. Paris. 1878. 
 The Centenary of Voltaire. By B. Gasti- 
 neau. 12mo, 36 pages. Brussels. 1878. 
 To Voltaire ! A poem on the Occasion of 
 the Centenary of Voltaire. By Ernest 
 Calonne. 8vo, 7 pages. Paris. 1878. 
 Voltaire, Choice works. Edition for the 
 Centenary, May 30, 1878. 12mo, 1000 
 pages. Paris. 1878. 
 Vive Voltaire ! Vive Rousseau ! May 30, 
 1878. Poem by Attale du Cournan. 
 16mo, 8 pages. Paris. 1878. 
 The Centenary of Voltaire. Poem. By 
 A. Baumann. Svo, 3 pages. Lyons. 
 1878. 
 The Discourse for the Centenary of Vol- 
 taire, and the Letter to the Bishop of 
 Orleans. By Victor Hugo. 8vo, 24 
 pages. Paris. 1878. 
 The Centenary of Voltaire. Festival of 
 May 30, 1878. 32mo, 4 pages. Paris. 
 1878. 
 The Centenary of Voltaire. Poem. Svo 
 
 2 pages. Boulogne. 1878. 
 Stanzas to Voltaire, recited at the Tht^atre- 
 Fran9ais of Bordeaux on the Occasion of 
 the Centenary. By A. D. Svo. Bor- 
 deaux. 1878. 
 The Centenary of Voltaire. An Appeal to 
 the good Sense, to the Honor, and to the 
 Patriotism of Men of all Parties. 4to, 
 4 pages. Nismes. 1878. 
 The Centenary of Voltaire. By Gf^neral 
 Ambert. 4to, 3 pages. Paris. 1878. 
 Voltaire and Dupanioup. Poem. By M»- 
 rius Lombard. 4to, 2 pages. Digne. 
 1878. 
 The Centenary of Voltaire. Poem. By 
 Felix Dubourg. Svo, 15 pages. Roche- 
 fort. 1878. 
 The Ceutenarv of Voltaire. By members
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 631 
 
 of the United "Workmen of St. Etienne. 
 16mo, 8 pages. St. Etienne. 1878. 
 
 The Centenary of Voltaire, followed by 
 the Soul of France. By A. Marquery. 
 A song. 16mo, 4 pages. Paris. 1878. 
 
 The Centenaiy of Voltaire. 4to, 2 pages. 
 Marseilles. 1878. 
 
 The Centenar}' of Voltaire in France. 
 32mo. Paris. 1878. 
 
 Historic Gallery of the Actors in the Com- 
 pany of Voltaire. With portraits on 
 steel. 8vo, 2d edition. Kecast and aug- 
 mented. By E. de Maune. Lyons. 1878. 
 
 The Head of Voltaire. A comedy in one 
 act. By Vibert and Tochi5. Produced 
 at the Theatre de Nouveaut^a. Paris. 
 1879. 
 
 Voltaire ■with Houdon. A comedy in one 
 act and in verse. By Georges Duval. 
 Paris. 1880. 
 
 The Folly-Book (Sottisier) of Voltaire. 
 From the manuscripts in his Library 
 at Petersburg. 1 vol. 8vo. Paris. 
 1880. 
 
 Life of Voltaire. 2 vols. 8vo. By Jamea 
 Partoa. Boston. 1881.
 
 APPENDIX II. 
 
 A LIST OF THE WORKS OF VOLTAIRE, 
 
 IN THE ORDER, SO FAR AS KNOWN, OF THEIR PUBLICATION, WITH THE TITLES TRANS- 
 LATED INTO ENGLISH. 
 
 1706. Aged 12. Epistle to the Dau- 
 phin, the only son of Louis XIV., ou 
 behalf of an invalid soldier. In verse. 
 20 lines. Written at school. 
 
 1709. Aged 15. Tkanslation of an 
 Ode in Latin, by Father Lejay, 
 UPON St. Genevieve. 5 pages. Writ- 
 ten at school, where Lejay was professor 
 of rhetoric. 
 
 1712. Aged 18. Ode upon the Vow of 
 Louis XIII. to rebuild the Choik of 
 Notre Dame. 104 lines. Written for 
 a prize offered by the French Academy 
 for the best poem upon The Piety and 
 Magnificence of the King [Louis XIV.] 
 in the Decoration of the Choir of the 
 Church of Notre Dame, for the Accom- 
 plishment of the Vow of Louis XIII. 
 
 1713. Aged 19. Epistle to the Count- 
 ess de Fontaines, upon her romance 
 of the Countess of Savoy. A compli- 
 ment in verse. 34 lines. 
 
 1714. Aged 20. The Anti-Giton. A 
 compliment in verse to Madame Lecouv- 
 reur. 74 lines. 
 
 1716. Aged 22. The Padlock. A 
 comic tale in verse. 83 lines. 
 
 Epistle to the Duke of Orleans, Re- 
 gent OF France. Eulogy, written in 
 exile to mollify the ruler of France. 106 
 lines. 
 
 1717. Aged 23. The Bastille. A poem 
 relating his arrest and his arrival at the 
 Bastille. 88 lines. 
 
 1718. Aged 24. (Edipe. A tragedy in 
 five acts and in verse. 
 
 1719. Aged 25. Letters to M. de 
 Genonville. Seven letters upon the 
 
 ffidipes of Sophocles, Comeille, and 
 Voltaire. 61 pages. 
 1720. Aged 26. Art^mire. A tragedy 
 in five acts and in verse. 
 
 1722. Aged 28. For and Against, or 
 an Epistle to Uranie. A poem written 
 in answer to Madame de Rupelmonde's 
 question, what she ought to think con- 
 cerning religion. 133 lines. 
 
 1723. Aged 29. La Henriade, or the 
 Poem of the League. Epic in ten cantos. 
 
 1724. Aged 30. Mariamne. A tragedy 
 in five acts and in verse. 
 
 1725. Aged 31. The Festival of Bel^- 
 BAT. A dramatic divertisement in one 
 act and in verse. 495 lines. 
 
 The Babbler. A comedy in one act and 
 in verse. 
 
 1727. Aged 33. Essay upon Epic Po- 
 etry. Written in English ; afterwards 
 translated into French by the author, 
 with corrections and additions. 104 
 pages. 
 
 Brutus. A' tragedy in five acts and in 
 verse; published first in London, repub- 
 lished and performed in Paris. 
 
 1730. Aged 36. The Death of Ma- 
 demoiselle Lecouvreur. a poem re- 
 monstrating against the French law re- 
 fusing burial in consecrated ground to 
 actors. 56 lines. 
 
 1731. Aged 37. History of Charles i 
 XII., King of Sweden. Two volumes, 
 octavo. 
 
 The Death* of Caesar. A tragedy in 
 three acts and in verse. 
 
 1732. Aged 38. jfenYPHiLE. A tragedy 
 in five acts and in verse. 
 
 I
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 633 
 
 Zaire. A tragedy in five acts and in 
 verse. 
 
 Samson. An opera in five acts and in 
 verse. 
 
 The Temple of Fuiexdshif. A satir- 
 ical poem. 119 lines. 
 
 1733. Aged 39. Philosophic Letteus. 
 A series of twenty-four letters describ- 
 ing men and things in England, pub- 
 lished both in France and in Eng- 
 land. 
 
 The Temple of the Taste. A satirical 
 poem in the spirit of Pope's Dunciad, 
 reflecting upon the authors of the day 
 hostile to Voltaire. 32 pages of mingled 
 prose and verse. 
 
 1734. Aged 40. Adelaide Duguescun. 
 A tragedy in five acts and in verse. 
 
 Discouhses upon Man, in verse: (1.) 
 Upon Equality of Conditions. (2.) Lib- 
 erty. (3.) Envy. About 140 lines 
 each. 
 
 The Campaign in Italy in 1734. A 
 poem of 64 lines, after the manner of a 
 poet-laureate of that day. 
 
 Treatise upon Metaphysics. A chatty 
 discourse upon man, his origin, destiny, 
 and duty, such as one man of the world 
 might give to another. 75 pages. 
 
 1735. Aged 41. Tamis and Zi5lide, or 
 THE Shepheko Kings. An opera in 
 five acts and in verse. 
 
 1736. Aged 42. Alzire, or the Amer- 
 icans. A tragedy in five acts and in 
 verse. 
 
 The PiiODiGAL Son. A comedy in five 
 
 acts and in verse. 
 The Worldling {Mondain). A satire in 
 
 verse. 130 lines. 
 
 1737. Aged 43. Discourses upon Man, 
 in verse: (1.) Upon Moderation. (2.) 
 The Nature of Pleasure. (3.) The Nat- 
 ure of Man. (4.) True Virtue. About 
 150 lines each. 
 
 Advice to a Journalist. A pamphlet 
 of 50 pages, giving advice to a person 
 about to establisli a literary periodical. 
 
 [1738. Aged 44. Elements of the Phi- 
 losophy OF Newton. A volume of 400 
 pages, giving a popular account of the 
 Truths demonstrated in Newton's Prin- 
 cipia, a work in which Voltaire was as- 
 sisted by Madame du Chatclet. 
 Essay upon the Nature of Fire and 
 
 its Pro vacation. A Prize Essay of 
 80 pages. 
 
 Notice of a Work upon Natural 
 Philosophy, by Madasie du Chate- 
 let. An extensive Review of her In- 
 stitutions Physiques. 
 
 Observations upon J. Law, Melon,. 
 AND DuTOT, etc. A pamphlet of 30 
 pages upon some errors of political econ- 
 omists. 
 
 The Preservative. A pamphlet of 25 
 pages, against the journalist Desfon- 
 taines. 
 
 Remarks upon Pascal's Thoughts. 
 A work of 116 pages, among the most 
 characteristic of all Voltaire's writings in 
 prose. 
 
 Advice to M. Helvetius. Twelve rules 
 for the guidance of a young author, both 
 as to the choice of a subject and its treat- 
 ment. 
 
 1739. Aged 45. Discourse irpoN the 
 History of Charles XIL Now 
 printed as a preface to that work. 
 
 Defense of Newtonism. A pamphlet 
 of 30 pages in reply to objections. 
 
 Memoir upon Satire. A pamphlet of 30 
 pages upon the quarrels of authors and 
 his own. 
 
 Life of Moli^re. For an edition of the 
 works of Moli^re. 70 pages of biog- 
 raphy and criticism. 
 
 1740. Aged 4G. Zulime. A tragedy in 
 five acts and in verse. 
 
 Pandore. An opera in five acts and in 
 verse. 
 
 Preface and Extract from the An- 
 ti-Machiavelli of Frederic II. of 
 Prussia. Sent to the gazettes by Vol- 
 taire to promote the circulation of Fred- 
 eric's work. 15 pages. 
 
 Short Answer to the long Discourses 
 OF a German Doctor. A defense of 
 Newton against an adherent of Leibnitz. 
 
 1741. Aged 47. Doubts concerning 
 THE Measurement of Moving 
 Forces. An essay presented to the 
 Academy' of Sciences. 
 
 A Useful Examination of the last 
 Three Epistles of J. B. Rousseau. 
 Adverse criticism, 7 pages. 
 
 1742. Aged 48. Fanaticism, or Ma- 
 homet the Prophet. A tragedy in 
 five acts and iu verse.
 
 634 
 
 LITE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 Advice to M. Racine. Criticism of La 
 Religion, a poem by the son of Racine. 
 
 1743. Aged 49. M^rope. A tragedy in 
 five acts and in verse. 
 
 The Police under Louis XIV. A poem 
 of 128 lines on the duty of kings. 
 
 1744. Aged 50. Narrative touching 
 A White Moor. Description of au 
 albino exhibited at Paris. 
 
 The Events of the Year 1744. A lau- 
 reate poem in praise of Louis XV. 
 94 lines. 
 
 Cosi Sancta. a tale written to oblige the 
 Duchess du Maine, who had to produce 
 a tale for a forfeit. 10 pages. 
 
 1745. Aged 51. The Princess of Na- 
 varre. A spectacular comedy in three 
 acts and in verse. 
 
 The Temple OF Glory. An opera in five 
 
 acts and in verse. 
 The Poem of Fontenoi. Written to 
 
 celebrate the victory at Fontenoy. 324 
 
 lines. 
 
 1746. Aged 52. A Dissertation upon 
 the Changes which have occurred 
 IN OUR Globe. Written originally in 
 Italian. 20 pages. 
 
 Discourse at his Reception into the 
 
 French Academy. 
 The World as it goes, or the Vision 
 
 of Babouc. a burlesque romance. 
 
 25 pages. 
 Manifesto of the King of France in 
 
 favor of Prince Charles Edward. 
 
 For publication in Scotland. 
 History of the War of 1741. After- 
 wards incorporated with The Age of 
 
 Louis XV. Two volumes. 
 
 1747. Aged 53. The Prude. A comedy 
 in five acts and in verse. 
 
 Memnon, or Human Wisdom. A bur- 
 lesque romance. 10 pages. 
 
 History of the Travels of Scar- 
 mentado. a burlesque romance. 14 
 pages. 
 
 1748. Aged 54. SiSmieamis. A tragedy 
 in five acts and in verse. 
 
 Panegyric upon Louis XV. A laureate 
 eulogy in prose. 25 pages. 
 
 Eulogium upon the Officers killed 
 IN THE War of 174L Prose. 25 
 pages. 
 
 Zadig, or Destiny. A burlesque ro- 
 mance. 110 pages. 
 
 1749. Aged 55. Nanine. A comedy in 
 three acts and in verse. 
 
 The Woman in the Right. A comedy 
 
 in three acts and in verse. 
 The Embellishments of Paris. An 
 
 ingenious plea for improving the city. 
 
 14 pages. 
 
 Beauties and Faults of Poetry and 
 Eloquence in the French Lan- 
 guage. A treatise upon rhetoric, with 
 numerous examples. 170 pages. 
 
 Panegyric upon St. Louis. Prose. 
 22 pages. 
 
 1750. Aged 56. Oreste. A tragedy in 
 five acts and in verse. 
 
 The Duke of Alencon, or the Hos- 
 tile Brothers. A tragedy in three 
 acts and in verse. 
 
 The Voice of the Sage and of 
 the People. Against the union of 
 church and state. Pamphlet. 8 pages. 
 
 A Sincere Thank -Offering to a 
 Charitable Man. A defense of Mon- 
 tesquieu against a religious newspaper. 
 7 pages. 
 
 A Journey to Berlin. Comic nar- 
 rative in mingled prose and verse. 7 
 pages. 
 
 1752. Aged 58. The Duke of Foix. 
 A tragedy in five acts and in verse. 
 
 Rome Saved. A tragedy in five acts 
 and in verse. 
 
 The Age of Louis XIV. A history in 
 three volumes. '^ 
 
 Defense of Lord Bolingbroke. A 
 pamphlet defending Bolingbroke against 
 Leland and others. 12 pages. 
 
 The Diatribe of Doctor Akakia. Bur- 
 lesque of Maupertuis. Pamplilet. 50 
 pages. 
 
 MiCROM^GAS. A burlesque romance. 
 25 pages. 
 
 Fragment of Instructions for the 
 
 Prince Royal of . Satire of 
 
 the abuses in the French government. 
 
 15 pages. 
 
 The Tomb of the Sorbonne. A de- 
 fense of Abb6 de Prades. 20 pages. 
 
 1753. Aged 59. Doubts upon some 
 points in the History of the Em- 
 pire. 7 pages. 
 
 Thoughts upon the Public Adminis- 
 tration. Detached paragraphs upon 
 I government. 16 pages.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 635 
 
 V 1754. Aged 60. The Annals of the 
 
 Empire. A history in two volumes. 
 Historic Eulogy op Madame du Cha- 
 
 TELET. Printed as a preface to her 
 
 translation of Newton's Principia. 14 
 
 pages. 
 1755. Aged 61. The Maid (ZaPucc/^e). 
 
 A burles(iue poem upon Jeanne Dare, in 
 
 21 cantos. 
 The Okphan of China. A tragedy in 
 
 five acts and in verse. 
 ^^1756. Aged 62. Essay upon the JIan- 
 
 /^NEHS AND THE SpIKIT OF THE NATIONS, 
 FROM THE TIME OF CHARLEMAGNE. 
 
 A work upon the philosophy of history, 
 in five volumes. 
 
 The Lisbon Earthquake. A poem. 2.34 
 lines. 
 
 Natural Law. A poem upon natural re- 
 ligion in four parts. 
 
 Request to all the Magistrates of 
 the Kingdom. Against compulsory fes- 
 tivals and fasts. 11 pages. 
 
 1757. Aged 63. Articles for the En- 
 CYCLOP/EDiA. Now printed in the 
 Philosophical Dictionary. 
 
 1758. Aged 04. Refutation of a piece 
 AGAINST JL Saurin. A Warm defense 
 of bis old tutor. 7 pages. 
 
 Candide, or Optimism. A burlesque ro- 
 mance. 46 pages. 
 
 The Poor Devil. A satirical poem, 420 
 lines, against the enemies of the Ency- 
 clopaedia. 
 
 1759. Aged 65. Socrates. A drama in 
 three acts and in prose. 
 
 The Ecci.esiast. A translation, with 
 
 comments. 
 The Song of Songs. Translation, with 
 
 comments. 
 Narrative of the Death of the 
 
 Jesuit Berthier. A burlesque. 20 
 
 pages. 
 History of Russia under Peter I. 
 
 First part, one volume. 
 Memoranda for the Biography of 
 
 the Author, written by Himself. 
 
 A semi-burlesque narrative of his con- 
 nection with Frederic of Prussia. 110 
 
 pages. 
 1760. Aged 66. Tancr^ide. A tragedy 
 
 in five acts and in verse. 
 The Scotch Maiden. A comedy in five 
 
 acts and in prose. 
 
 \ 
 
 The Plea of Ramponkau, and a volume 
 
 of short facetious pieces of a similar 
 
 kind. 
 The Russian at Paris. A satirical poem. 
 
 188 lines. 
 Vanity. A satirical poem, 86 lines, 
 
 against Pompignan. 
 
 1761. Aged 67. Mandate of the Em- 
 peror OF China. Burlesque of J. J. 
 Rousseau. 5 pages. 
 
 Conversation between the Abb:^ 
 Gkizel and the Superintendent 
 OF THE Royal Pleasures. A defense 
 of the drama. 20 pages. 
 
 Sermon of Rabbi Akib. Against perse- 
 cution. 14 pages. 
 
 On THE VARIOUS CHANGES IN THE DRA- 
 MATIC Art. 16 pages. 
 
 The English Dra3ia. Against Shake- 
 speare and Otway. 
 
 Horace, Boileau, and Pope. A par- 
 allel. 10 pages. 
 
 A Letter from Charles Gouju to hi3 
 Brothers. Burlesque of intolerance. 
 7 pages. 
 
 1762. Aged 68. The Right of the 
 Seigneur. A comedy in three acts and 
 in verse. 
 
 Sermon of the Fifty. Strong plea for 
 
 deism. 30 pages. 
 Eulogy upon M. de Cr^billon. A rival 
 
 dramatist. 30 pages. 
 Republican Ideas. Detached reflections 
 
 upon government. 25 pages. 
 
 1763. Aged 69. Treatise upon Toler- 
 ance. 180 pages. 
 
 Remarks upon Ge.xeral History. Sup- ^ 
 
 plemcnts to the Essai sur les Mocurs. 
 
 130 pages. 
 Saul. A burlesque drama in five acts and 
 
 in prose. 
 The Catechism of an Honest Man. A 
 
 dialogue upon religion between a monk 
 
 and a man of the world. 31 pages. 
 Letters of a Quaker to John George. 
 
 Burlesque of Pompignan. 24 pages. 
 History of Russia. Part Second, one 
 
 volume. 
 
 1764. Aged 70. Olympie. A tragedy 
 in five acts and in verse. 
 
 The Triumvirate. A tragedy in five 
 
 acts and in verse. 
 The Tales of William Vad^. Fifteen 
 
 short comic tales in verse.
 
 636 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 ^ 
 
 Commentary upon Corneili.e. Three 
 volumes of notes upon Corneille's works, 
 published for the benefit of his grand- 
 daughter. 
 
 DiscouwsE TO THE WELCHES. A bur- 
 lesque oration upon French vanity. 30 
 pages. 
 
 The Philosophical Dictionary. Eight 
 volumes. 
 
 Doubts Concerning the Will of Car- 
 dinal DE Richelieu. 140 pages. 
 
 The AVhite and the Black. A bur- 
 lesque romance. 20 pages. 
 
 Pot-Poukki. A burlesque of existing su- 
 perstitions. 26 pages. 
 
 Translation of Shakespeare's Julius 
 C^SAR. In three acts and in verse. 
 
 Translation of Calderon's Hera- 
 CLius. In three acts and in prose. 
 
 Twenty-Thkee Articles of Literary 
 Criticism. Contributed to the Liter- 
 ary Gazette of Paris, from 1764 to 
 1766. 
 
 1765. Aged 71. The Ideas of La Mothe- 
 le-Vayer. Against superstition. De- 
 tached sentences. 5 pages. 
 
 The Decree of Alexis, Archbishop 
 OF Novogorod-la-Grand. Burlesque 
 of clerical authority. 10 pages. 
 
 Questions concerning the Miracles. 
 A series of burlesque letters. 170 pages. 
 
 The Two Tubs. A comic opera in three 
 acts and in verse. 
 
 The Philosophy of History. After- 
 wards placed as an introduction to the 
 author's Essay upon the Manners and 
 the Spirit of the Nations. 
 
 The Baron of Otranto. Burlesque 
 opera in three acts and in verse. 
 
 1766. Aged 72. An Essay upon Pro- 
 scriptions, OR Conspiracies against 
 Pkoples. a catalogue of the atrocities 
 of intolerance. 25 pages. 
 
 Essay upon the Dissensions of the 
 Churches in Poland. 30 pages. 
 
 Narrative of the Death of the 
 Chevalier de la Barre. 23 pages. 
 
 Information to the Public concern- 
 ing the Parricides imputed to the 
 Calas family and the Sirvens. 134 
 pages. 
 
 Commentary upon the Book of Crimes 
 and Penalties. A plea for humaner 
 punishment of crime. 100 pages. 
 
 The Ignorant Philosopher. A famil- 
 iar review of the various ways of inter- 
 preting the universe and its origin. 86 
 pages. 
 
 A Little Commentary upon M. 
 Thomas's Eulogy of the Dauphin. 
 Against persecution for opinion's sake. 
 7 pages. 
 
 Anecdotes concerning Belisarius. 
 Amusing satire of clerical pretensions. 
 15 pages. 
 
 1767. Aged 73. The Scythians. A 
 tragedy in five acts and in verse. 
 
 Charlot, or the Countess de Givrt. 
 A comedy in three acts and in verse. 
 
 Extensive Examination of Lord Boi/- 
 ingbroke. a summary of Bolingbroke's 
 works. 187 pages. 
 
 Questions of Zapata. The supposed 
 questions of a puzzled and doubting stu- 
 dent of theology. 30 pages. 
 
 The Defense of my Uncle. Reply 
 to critics of his Universal History, as 
 if by a nephew of the author. 120 
 pages. 
 
 Letters to the Prince of Brunswick 
 UPON Rabelais and Others. A de- 
 fense of deistical authors. 101 pages. 
 
 The Man with Forty Crowns. A bur- 
 lesque romance. 
 
 Literary Courtesies. Satire of the en- 
 emies of philosophy. 100 pages. 
 
 The Dinner of Count de Boulainvil- 
 LiERS. Three table-talks upon deism 
 and the evils of superstition. 60 pages. 
 
 Canonization of St. Cucufin. Bur- 
 lesque of sainthood and monkery. 30 
 pages. 
 
 Concerning Panegyrics. An ingen- 
 ious defense of Catherine II. 14 pages. 
 
 The Ingenuous Young Man. A bur- 
 lesque romance. 107 pages. 
 
 1768. Aged 74. The Age of Louis • 
 
 XV. Two volumes. 
 The Pyrrhonism of History. Upon 
 applying to tradition the test of proba- 
 bility. 110 pages. 
 The Civil War of Geneva. A bur- 
 lesque poem in five cantos. 
 The Princess of Babylon. A bur- 
 lesque romance. 110 pages. 
 The Rights of Men and the Usurpa- 
 tions OF THE Popes. Historical re- 
 view of papal claims. 32 pagea. 
 
 yj
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 637 
 
 The Theists' Profession op Faith. 
 Rather a catalogue of the crimes com- 
 mitted in the name of religion. 34 
 pages. 
 The Banishment of the Jesuits from 
 China. Conversations between the Em- 
 peror of China and a priest upon the 
 claims of the Christian priesthood. 50 
 pages. 
 Dialogues between A., B., and C. 
 Seventeen convei-sations upon religion 
 and politics, between persons designat- 
 ed by those letters. 160 pages. 
 A Sermon preached at Bale. In 
 favor of the brotherhood of men. 18 
 pages. 
 A Homily of Pastor Bourn. Extol- 
 ling the moral teaching of Jesus, and 
 rejecting the prodigies related of him. 
 12 pages. 
 The Snails of the Reverend Father 
 l'Escarbotier. Satire of spontaneous 
 generation. 24 pages. 
 Some Singularities of Nature. Upon 
 natural history. Familiar comments 
 upon ancient errors. 110 pages. 
 The Man of Marseilles and the 
 
 Lion. A satire in verse. 100 lines. 
 The Three Emperors in the Sok- 
 bonne. a satire in verse, 11.5 lines, 
 of those who censured Marmontel's Bel- 
 isarius. 
 Instructions to Brother Pedicu- 
 ix)S0. Upon what he is to see in Pales- 
 tine. Broad burlesque of ancient le- 
 gends. 10 pages. 
 1769. Aged (75. Perpetual Peace. 
 Intolerant reltgion the cause of wars. 
 46 pages. 
 ; All in God. A Commentary upon Male- 
 1 branche, maintaining that God works by 
 general laws, not b}- perpetual interfer- 
 ence. 20 pages. 
 The Gukbres, or Tolerance. A trag- 
 edy in five acts and in verse. 
 The History of Jenni, or the Athe- 
 ist AND the Sage. A romance. 120 
 pages. 
 Letters of Amabed. A tale of the 
 Portuguese Inquisitors in India, by one 
 of their victims. 77 pages. 
 Homilies preached in London in 176.5. 
 Five sermons upon religious disputes. 
 86 pages. 
 
 An Epistle to Boileau. In verse. 138 
 
 lines. 
 History of the Parliament of Paris, u 
 
 One volume. 
 The Cry of the Nations. Against 
 
 papal domination. 10 pages. 
 God and Men. Historical review of re- /, 
 
 ligions. 217 pages. 
 Supplement to the Age of Louis ^ 
 
 XIV. 270 pages. 
 Remonstrances of the Body of Pas- 
 tors of the G^vaudan to a. a. J. 
 
 Rustau, Snviss Pastor in London. 
 
 Satirical reply to an attack upon the 
 
 deists. 15 pages. 
 The Adorers, or the Praises of God. 
 
 Conversation between two fervent and 
 
 enlightened deists. 31 pages. 
 
 1770. Aged 76. Sophonisbe. A tragedy 
 in five acts and in verse. 
 
 Refutation of the System of Nat- 
 ure. An essay afterward joined to 
 the Philosophical Dictionary. Reply to 
 Holbach. 13 pages. 
 
 Translation of the Poem op Jean 
 Plokof. a plea for the deliverance of 
 Greece from the Turks. Prose. 5 
 pages. 
 
 Epistle to the King of China. Sa- 
 tirical poem, 154 lines, in the familiar 
 manner of Horace. 
 
 Writings on behalf of the Inhab- 
 itants OF Mount Jura and the 
 County of Ge.x. Many petitions, 
 etc., on behalf of his neighbors. 142 
 pages. 
 
 Reasonable Counsels to M. Bergier. 
 Reply to a defender of superstition. 
 31 pages. 
 
 The Lawsuit of Claustre. Narrative 
 of priestly villainy. 24 pages. 
 
 1771. Aged 77. The Mistake op Ar- 
 ras. Narrative of the case of the Mont- 
 baillis. 20 pages. 
 
 The Discourse of Anne du Bourg to 
 HIS Judges. Imaginary speech on 
 the scaffold, against persecution. 5 
 pages. 
 
 The Letters of Mejimius to Cicero. 
 Twenty-two imaginarj- letters, present- 
 ing the Voltairean philosophy in classic 
 guise. 44 pages. 
 
 Epistle to the Romans. Burlesque of 
 the papacy. 41 pages.
 
 638 
 
 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. 
 
 The Tocsin of Kings. A protest against 
 the Turk, written for Catherine II. 7 
 pages. 
 
 Concerning a New Epistle of Boi- 
 LEAU TO M. DE VoLTAiRE. Showing 
 that the epistle could not be of Boileau. 
 10 pages. 
 
 1772. Aged 78. The Prude. A Moral 
 Tale. In verse. 228 lines. 
 
 Cabals. A Satire in verse. 180 lines. 
 
 Systems. A Satire in verse. 118 lines. 
 
 Essay upon Probabilities, with ref- 
 erence TO the Administration of 
 Justice. 54 pages. 
 
 Philosophical Keflections upon the 
 CASE OF Mademoiselle Camp. To 
 show the imperfections of the French 
 legal procedure. 9 pages. 
 
 Some Trifling Audacities of M. 
 Clair on the Occasion of a Pane- 
 gyric OF St. Louis. A defense of the 
 present against unjust comparisons with 
 the past. 13 pages. 
 
 The Pelopides. A tragedy in five acts 
 and in verse. 
 
 The Trustee (Depositaire). A comedy 
 in five acts and in verse. 
 
 1773. Aged 79. The Laws of Minos. 
 A tragedy in five acts and in verse. 
 
 A Discourse of Advocate Belleg- 
 
 NIER. A defense of the freethinkers, 
 
 past and present. 15 pages. 
 Historical Fragments upon India. 
 
 Exhibition of the case of Count de Lally. 
 
 226 pages. 
 Tactics {la Tactique). A Satire of war, 
 
 in verse. 146 lines. Compare with this 
 
 powerful poem M. Hugo's centenary 
 
 oration upon Voltaire. 
 
 1774. Aged 80. A Funereal Eulogy 
 of Louis XV. Ingenious censure under 
 the guise of eulogy. 13 pages. 
 
 To the Reverend Father in God, 
 Messire Jean de Beauvais. Satir- 
 ical comments on the bishop's funeral 
 oration upon Louis XV. 6 pages. 
 
 Dialogue between Pegasus and the 
 Old Man. The old man being the poet 
 himself. Satirical poem upon his own 
 career. 178 lines. 
 
 It is Necessary to take a Part, or 
 THE Principle of Action. Humor- 
 ous conversation upon deism and athe- 
 ism. 104 pages. 
 
 The White Bull. A burlesque romance. 
 
 56 pages. 
 The Journey of Reason. A review of 
 
 the triumphs of reason in the various 
 
 countries of the world. 15 pages. 
 Concerning the Soul, by Soranus. 
 
 An inquiry into the nature of the soul, 
 
 as if by Trajan's physician. 22 
 
 pages. 
 Plato's Dream. Concerning the creation 
 
 of the world. 5 pages. 
 Barabec and thk Fakirs. A satire 
 
 of the East Indian self-tormentors. 5 
 
 pages. 
 
 1775. Aged 81. Don Pedro. A trage- 
 dy in five acts and in verse. 
 
 The Cry of Innocent Blood. An ap- 
 peal to Louis XVI. on behalf of Etal- 
 londe. 25 pages. 
 
 Diatribe to the Author of the Eph:^- 
 bi:^ride9. Against the spoliations to 
 which French farmers were subjected. 
 20 pages. 
 
 The Ears of Lord Chesterfield. A 
 burlesque tale. 30 pages. 
 
 Observations upon the Book enti- 
 tled Of Man, by J. P. Marat. A 
 satirical review. 9 pages. 
 
 1776. Agfd 82. Chinese, Indian, and 
 Tartar Letters to M. Paw. A re- 
 view of the beliefs, traditions, and relig- 
 ious usages of Asia, as if by a Bene- 
 dictine monk. 85 pages. 
 
 The Host and Hostess. Sketch of a 
 divertisement in one act, prose and 
 verse 
 
 The Bible Commented upon and Ex- 
 plained, by several Almoners op 
 the King of Poland. Two volumes. 
 
 A Letter to the French Academy 
 upon Shakespeare. 
 
 A Christian against Six Jews. Satir- 
 ical commentary upon the Jewish le- 
 gends. 200 pages. 
 
 Historic Commentary upon the 
 Works of the Author of La Hen- 
 EiADE. A sketch of his own career. 
 114 pages. 
 
 Sunday, or the Daughters of Minj^e. 
 A comic tale in verse upon the origin of 
 Sunday. 293 lines. 
 
 1777. Aged 83. History of the Es- ■ 
 
 TABLI3HMENT OF CHRISTIANITY. 135 
 
 pages.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 639 
 
 Commentary upon Montesquieu's Es- 
 prit DES Lois. 108 pages. 
 
 Dialogues of Evhemerus. Twelve dia- 
 logues, as if between two philosophers of 
 the age of Alexander, upon all the high 
 themes. 120 pages. 
 
 The Prize of Justice and Humanity. 
 Suggestions for a reform of the crimi- 
 nal law. 102 pages. 
 
 Upon the Work entitled The Life 
 and Opinions of Tristp.am Shan- 
 dy. A slight, not appreciative ^e^^ew. 
 5 pages. 
 
 1778. Aged 83. IrJink. A tragedy in 
 five acts and in verse. 
 
 Agathocle. a tragedy in five acts and 
 in verse, performed in 1779 on the anni- 
 versary of the author's death.
 
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