LEKAINFrom an Engraving after a Painting by S. B. Le Noir
LEKAINFrom an Engraving after a Painting by S. B. Le Noir
LEKAIN
From an Engraving after a Painting by S. B. Le Noir
manuscript, intrusted to Frederick, he had written other manuscripts wherein he had not only modified but actually changed his first ideas. This time at least, when he followed his old plan of loudly disavowing the work, he had much justification. The “pretended Universal History,” as he called it,washis “Essay,” but so mauled and disfigured he may be forgiven for refusing to acknowledge it.
But far stronger than any merely literary reasons for denying such a paternity was the bold, free-spoken character of this son of his genius. Voltaire knew that no work he had ever written would so bar his way back to his country as this one. Every line glowed with some truth hateful to Boyers and to tyranny. There was never any mistaking a Voltaire’s meaning. Now, more than ever, he had written in luminous words which, like sunbeams, being much condensed, greatly burnt. His principles were as lucid as daylight. There was hardly a phrase which would not draw upon him “the implacable wrath of the clergy.” How could he forget in it such remarks as the following—“Rome has always decided for the opinion which most degraded the human mind and most completely annihilated human reason”?
“Whoso thinks makes others think.”
How could he help remembering that he had taken the Protestant Reformation as a new tyranny—not an emancipation; that he had degraded war “from the highest to the lowest place in the historian’s regard”; and had declared that “Tyrants sacrifice the human race to an individual”—a dangerous sentence in itself, and which that abominable pirate publisher had rendered a thousand times more dangerous by misquoting as “Kings sacrifice the human race to a caprice”? He had offended every powerful class, and every cherished prejudice. But action was now, not less than ever, hisforte. If it could not save him from his enemies, it could save him from himself—from that worst combination, idleness with misery.
On December 28, 1753, he wrote to Néaulme, and told M. Jean his candid opinion about that edition. He also wrote not a little piteously, a very few days after, to his old friendMadame de Pompadour—the publication of that “Essay” forcing him to prove, he said, his innocence to his master the King—of France.
But it was in vain he reminded Louis XV., through her, that he had spent years of his life in writing the history of Louis’s predecessor; “and alone of the Academicians had had his panegyric translated into five languages.” That surly Bourbon, with that intuition which saved his degraded race a hundred times from earlier and completer ruin, saw in the genius of Voltaire the fuse which was to set ablaze the gunpowder of sedition and misery with which his France was undermined. He turned to Madame de Pompadour and said that he “did not wish” Voltaire to return to Paris. It is not difficult to imagine the exile’s state of mind. “I have no comfort but in work and solitude,” he wrote; and to Cideville, on January 28th of this new year 1754: “My dear Cideville, at our age one must mock at everything and live for self. This world is a great shipwreck.Sauve qui peut!but I am far from the shore.”
On what shore would he be allowed to land if he could gain one?
Colmar, he soon discovered, was “a town of Hottentots governed by German Jesuits.” On February 17th, he wrote a very meek, artful letter to one of those Jesuits, Father Menou (whom he had known at the Court of Stanislas and of whom he speaks in his “Memoirs” as “the boldest and most intriguing priest I ever knew”), pleading his cause with him. He pleaded it, too, with the Archbishop of Paris through M. de Malesherbes. But it was all in vain. The Church was as offended as the King.
On February 2Oth, pushed to extremity, and neither able to leave nor to stay in this wretched Colmar without the sanction of his French Majesty, the unhappy man asked d’Argenson to “sound the King’s indulgence”—to know if he might travel.
On February 22d, he called in two notaries, who compared the correct manuscript of his “Essay” with the two incorrect volumes published at The Hague; and drew up a formal declaration in which they affirmed that the Dutch edition was“surreptitious, full of errors, and worthy of all contempt,” and that the real “Essay” was at least eight times longer than the false one. But that also was useless. Neither Court nor Catholic meant to be convinced.
Then, as if her uncle’s cup of misfortune were not brimming over already, niece Denis’s bad management and extravagance with his money in Paris forced him to appoint an agent to look after her affairs; and she, living on his bounty, turned and accused him of avarice. No public wrongs are so cruel as private ones. Beside Madame Denis’s ingratitude, excommunication, said Voltaire, would have been a light penalty. He had given her an ample fortune—a larger one than old Maître Arouet had left his Voltaire. Her reproaches were the unkindest cut of all.
That they were singularly ill-timed may be gathered from the fact that sixty thousand francs of Voltaire’s income were derived from annuities or bonds of the City of Paris, of which at any moment angry Louis might deprive him, by a line of writing and the royal signature, for ever. Two kings were now his enemies. Jesuitical Colmar hated him. Prussia and France were barred to him. Denis had turned upon him. The Pompadour was helpless. The “Essay,” filled with blunders and pregnant with daring and danger, was all over Europe. Such was Voltaire’s position in the month of March, 1754.
Receivingno answer to his request to be allowed to travel, Voltaire prudently resolved to consider that silence gave consent. But he was still not a little nervous that if he took refuge in a foreign country Louis XV. might consider himself justified in seizing the pensions of his truant subject.
And then, where was he to go? It seems most likely that if it had not been for that unromantic disorder calledmal de merhe would have ended his days in Pennsylvania. He had still hisbizarreliking for the Quakers; and America was the country of the free. To be suremal du payswas a worse and a longer lived disorder with him than the other: and if he had tried Pennsylvania on one impulse, he would quickly have left it on another.
He looked back lovingly, too, on bold little England, “where one thinks as a free man.” And on March 19, 1754, he asked M. Polier de Bottens, who had been a Calvinist minister at Lausanne, if he could assure him of as much freedom in Lausanne as in Britain. Meanwhile, there was no reason why, in the near future, that long-deferred and greatly discussed Plombières visit should not take place.
And, for the time, he was in Colmar. On January 12th of this year he had sent his Duchess of Saxe-Gotha twelve advance copies of those “Annals of the Empire” written at her request, and just printed under Voltaire’s own eye at Colmar by Schoepflin. In return, Madame had done her gracious best to reconcile him with Frederick. He was anxious to be reconciled. Frederick could influence France to receive back her prodigal, as could no one else. “Brother Voltaire,” as hesigned himself in his letters to her, also pleaded his cause once more with the Margravine of Bayreuth; and then sent Frederick himself a copy of those “Annals” as a tentative olive branch. Frederick accepted the book, and declined the peace overtures in a letter, dated March 16, 1754, which contained bitter allusion to the Maupertuis affair and showed that the kingly heart was still sore and that the kingly soul still angrily admired the great gifts of his Voltaire.
The famous suppers “went to the devil” without him. But if the King missed his wit much, he dreaded it more; and if Voltaire wanted the King’s powerful friendship—he did not want the King’s society. They were better apart. And, for the first time, both were wise enough to know it.
To this spring belongs a very active correspondence between Voltaire, the most voluble correspondent who ever put pen to paper, and Madame du Deffand. Blind, bored, and brilliant, the friend of Horace Walpole, a courtier at Sceaux, and the head of one of the most famous salons in Paris, Madame du Deffand had long been a friend of Voltaire’s, and had visited him in the Bastille in 1726, just before his exile in England.
If she thought, as Frederick the Great wrote to Darget on April 1st of this same year 1754, that Voltaire was “good to read and bad to know,” her cynic old soul loved his wit if she feared it. Perhaps she even loved him—though mistrustingly. Blindness had just fallen upon her. And “the hermit of Colmar”—neither now nor ever onlyméchant—wrote to her with the finest sympathy and tact, cheering, amusing, rallying her. “My eyes were a little wet when I read what had happened to yours.... If you are an annuitant, Madame, take care of yourself, eat little, go to bed early, and live to be a hundred, if only to enrage those who pay your annuities. For my part, it is the only pleasure I have left. I reflect, when I feel an indigestion coming on, that two or three princes will gain by my death: and I take courage out of pure malice and conspire against them with rhubarb and sobriety.”
As Voltaire could have had nothing to gain by continually writing to amuse this blind oldmondaine, it may be conceded that he did it out of kindness; and that if he loved her cleverness, he also pitied her misfortune. The eighteenth century, which failed so dismally in all other domestic relationships, perfectly understood the art of friendship.
On the Easter Day of this 1754, Voltaire, having first confessed to a Capuchin monk, received the Sacrament.Faire ses Pâquesdeclares the laxest Catholic to be still a son of the Church. What Voltaire’s motives were in this action, it is not easy to see. It is said that his anxious friends in Paris recommended the action as an answer to the charges of unbelief brought against him. But a Voltaire must have known well enough that such an answer as that would impose on no one. Besides, it was not like him to be governed by the advice of fools—even if they happened to be his friends. The reasons he himself gave for the action were that at Rome one must do as Rome does. “When men are surrounded by barbarians ... one must imitate their contortions.... Some people are afraid to touch spiders, others swallow them.” “If I had a hundred thousand men, I know exactly what I should do: but I have not, so I shall communicate at Easter, and you can call me a hypocrite as much as you like.”
The hypocrisy was but ill acted. Voltaire received the Sacrament with an irreverence painful to believers and harmful to his own reputation. To him the thing was a jest—“the contortions of barbarians.” He was quite mocking and gay. When he got home, he sent to the Capuchin convent a dozen of good wine and a loin of veal. I despise you too much to be ill-natured to you! If you believe in this mummery, you are fools! If you connive at it, unbelieving, you are knaves! Knaves or fools, I can laugh at you quite good-humouredly. If ever present conveyed a message, this was the message conveyed by the dozen of wine and the loin of veal.
To justify Voltaire for this act is not possible. It was at best améchanceté. It was the mocking, jesting nature of the man getting the upper hand alike of his prudence and of his consideration for others. He was himself a Deist, and a firmly convinced Deist. To him the religion of Rome was not merely a folly but the stronghold of tyranny and of darkness. The fact that millions of faithful souls had found in her bosomconsolation for the sorrows, and a key to the mysteries of life and of death, did not soften him.
In Voltaire was lacking now and ever that “crown of man’s moral manhood,” reverence. To find in “the last restraint of the powerful and the last hope of the wretched” only subject for a laugh was the greatest of his faults. If he had been a nobler nature, he would have seen the beauty and the virtue which lie even in the most degrading theologies: and respecting them, would have stayed his hand from the smashing blow, and for the sake of the virtue which sweetens corruption, have let corruption alone.
It has been done many times. “No man can achieve great things for his country without some loss of the private virtues.” A reverent Voltaire—what a contradiction in terms!—to spare some goodness, must have spared much vice. To arouse eighteenth-century France, steeped to her painted lips in superstition, and the slavery which had debased her till she came to love it, the shrieks and the blasphemies of a Voltaire and a Rousseau were necessary. No calmer voice would have waked her from her narcotic sleep. “Without Voltaire and Rousseau there would have been no Revolution.” No honest student of eighteenth-century France can doubt that that Revolution, though it crushed the innocent with the guilty and left behind it some of the worst fruits of anarchy, left behind it too a France which, with all its faults, is a thousand times better than the France it found.
By the middle of April the Plombières arrangements were well advanced. The d’Argental household was to be there; and Madame Denis, more or less penitent and more or less forgiven, had asked to join the party. The waters would be good for a health—ruined, said her temperate uncle, by “remedies and gourmandising.” Voltaire would come, with a couple of servants at the most. He was anticipating the change with pleasure when at the very last minute Madame Denis wrote to tell him that Maupertuis was at Plombières too. It was certainly not big enough to hold both him and his enemy. The events of the last months had taught even Voltaire some kind of caution. He was absolutelyen partantwhen Madame Denis’s letter came; but on June 8th, though he left Colmar, it was to stop halfway between it and Plombières, at the Abbey of Senones, as the guest of Dom Calmet, who had himself been a visitor at Cirey. Calmet had a splendid library. His visitor, who was condemned, as he said, to work at a correct edition of that “General History, printed for my misfortune,” made good use of it, during his three weeks’ visit. Absurd reports were noised abroad—which the Dom did not contradict—that he had converted “the most pronounced Deist in Europe.” But, as the Deist himself said, his business was with the library—not with matins and vespers. Directly Maupertuis left Plombières, Voltaire took leave of Calmet and his monks, and on some day not earlier than July 2d left for Plombières, where he found not only his dear d’Argentals and Madame Denis, but her sister, Madame de Fontaine, as well.
The little party passed here an agreeable fortnight or so. About July 22d, Voltaire returned to Colmar with Madame Denis, who from this time forth managed, or mismanaged, his house for him till his death. The “Universal History” greatly occupied him after his holiday. But there was another subject which was even more engrossing.
It was the idea of living in Switzerland. Since March the plan of seeking “an agreeable tomb in the neighbourhood of Geneva,” or possibly near Lausanne, had been growing—growing. There were many reasons why the little republic was a suitable home for Voltaire. In the first place, itwasa republic. It was quite close to France, though not in it; and though France might not like to have such a firebrand as Voltaire burning in her midst, she would not object to be lit by his light if it were burning near.
Then Switzerland was Protestant—and in Voltaire’s English experience of Protestantism he had found that faith singularly tolerant and easy-going—in practice, that is, not in principle. By August he was negotiating actively with M. de Brenles, a lawyer of Lausanne, about “a rather pretty property” on the lake of Geneva. It was called Allamans; and Voltaire was not a little disappointed when his negotiations for buying it fellthrough. In October he was inquiring if a Papist could not possess and bequeath land in the territory of Lausanne. He urged secrecy on de Brenles; and entered fully into money matters. If he bought land, it was to be in the name of his niece, Madame Denis. There was a danger throughout these months of that bomb the “Pucelle” bursting—into print—“and killing me.” That fear made the Swiss arrangements go forward with a will.
On October 23d, Voltaire went to supper at a poor tavern of Colmar, called the “Black Mountain,” with no less a personage than his friend Wilhelmina of Bayreuth. She overwhelmed him with kindness and attention; asked him to stay with her; begged she might see Madame Denis, and made a thousand excuses for the bad behaviour of brother Frederick; so that impulsive Voltaire jumped once more to that favourite conclusion of his that “women are worth more than men.” To be sure, if he had seen an account of the interview his clever Princess wrote to her brother, he might have thought something less highly of her and her sex. But he did not see it; nor Frederick’s bitter reply. If he had, neither flattery nor opprobrium would have moved him now from one fixed resolve—to shelter in Switzerland.
On November 11th, Voltaire, Collini, Madame Denis, a lady’s maid, and a servant left Colmar to visit the Duke of Richelieu at Lyons. Voltaire had lived at Colmar on and off for thirteen months—among Jesuits who five years earlier had publicly burnt the works of Bayle, the prophet of tolerance. He could not have left with regret. Just as they were starting off, Collini declares that his master, finding the travelling carriage overladen with luggage, gave orders that everything should be taken out except his own trunk and Madame Denis’s; and that he told Collini to sellhisportmanteau and its contents. The hot-tempered young Italian refused to do so, and gave notice on the spot. On his own showing, his impetuous master made at once the handsomest apologies for his little burst of temper; gave the secretary generous presents of money as a peace-offering; and made him re-pack his portmanteau and put it back in the carriage. The storm blew over; butCollini, like almost all Voltaire’s servants, was beginning to take advantage of his master’s indulgence, and to trespass on a kindness which Voltaire made doubly kind to compensate for his irritability.
By November 15th, the party were installed in a very bad inn, called the “Palais Royal,” at Lyons. Voltaire complained that it was “a little too much of a joke for a sick man to come a hundredlieuesto talk to the Maréchal de Richelieu.” But he and Richelieu were not only very old friends but, in spite of little disagreements such as that affair of the “Panegyric of Louis XV.” at Court in 1749, very faithful friends. The brilliant author and the brilliant soldier had still for each other the attraction which had been potent twenty years earlier in those June days at Montjeu, when Voltaire had negotiated the marriage between Mademoiselle de Guise and the gallant Duke. The charming wife had died young; and her husband and Voltaire had met little of late. But Voltaire received Richelieu in the bad inn, and clever Richelieu made the five days he stayed at Lyons so infinitely soothing and agreeable for his much tried and harassed friend, that when Richelieu left, Voltaire said he felt like Ariadne in Naxos after the desertion of Theseus.
While he was at Lyons the enterprising traveller also went to call on Cardinal de Tencin, head of the Church there, uncle of d’Argental, and brother of that famous Madame de Tencin who had played Thisbe to Voltaire’s Pyramus when Voltaire was in the Bastille in 1726. The wary Lord Cardinal stated to M. de Voltaire that he could not ask a person in such ill-favour with his Majesty of France to dine with him. Voltaire replied that he never dined out, and knew how to take his own part against kings and cardinals; and, so saying, turned his back on his Eminence and went out of the room. As he and Collini were returning from that brief visit, the visitor observed absently that this country was not made for him. The officer in command of the troops in Lyons received him in much the same way. All the authorities were cold, in fact, to propitiate that Highest Authority at the Court of France, who was colder still. However, their disapproval was not very afflicting. The town of Lyons saw Voltaire with bolder eyes. It acted his plays at the theatre; and when he appeared in his box there, loudly applauded him. On November 26th, he formally took his seat in the Lyons Academy, of which he had long been an honorary member. Then, too, Wilhelmina was in Lyons; and Wilhelmina used her shrewd influence with de Tencin, and at a second interview, behold! the Church and Deism on quite friendly terms.
As a whole, the Lyons visit was a success; or would have been but for Voltaire’s ill-health and “mortal anxieties” about “that cursed ‘Pucelle.’”He was afraid that it was in the possession of Mademoiselle du Thil, once companion to Madame du Châtelet, who had found it among Émilie’s effects. The ill-health, too, which took the form of gouty rheumatism this time, was so painful and annoying that many of his friends had strongly recommended him to try for it the waters of Aix-in-Savoy. In the meantime he had been lent “a charming house halfway.” On December 10, 1754, he, Madame Denis, and Collini left Lyons for ninety-three miles distant Geneva, which they reached on December 13th and found gaily celebrating a victory gained in 1602 over the Duke of Savoy. The gates of the city were shut for the night when they arrived. But the great M. de Voltaire was expected: and they were flung open for him. He supped that night in Geneva with a man who was to be till his death one of the best and wisest friends he ever had, the famous Dr. Tronchin.
No account of Voltaire’s life in Switzerland could be complete without mention of that honourable and celebrated family, who in the eighteenth century nobly filled many important posts in the Swiss republic and whose descendants are well known in it to the present day. One Tronchin, the Swiss jurisconsult, is celebrated as having provoked, by certain “Letters from the Country,” the famous “Letters from the Mountain” of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Another, the Councillor François Tronchin, the most delightful and hospitable of men, was at once the constant correspondent, the legal adviser—in brief, the factotum of Voltaire.
But the most famous of the family, as well as the one mostintimately associated with Voltaire, was Theodore Tronchin, the doctor. Handsome face, noble mind, fearless spirit, with the stern uprightness of the Puritan, and an infinite benevolence and compassion all his own—if greatness meant only goodness, friend Theodore was a greater man than his great patient, Voltaire.
Yet, though no spark of the Voltairian genius was in him, he was the most enlightened doctor of his age. It is not only as the intimate of that “old baby” as he called him, the Patriarch of Ferney, that Tronchin may well interest the present day: but as the earliest discoverer—after eighteen centuries of stuffiness—of the value of fresh air; as the first of his class who preached the Gospel of Nature; recommended temperance, exercise, cleanliness in lieu of the drugs of the Pharmacopœia; and, after years of labour, taught the woman of his age to be very nearly as good a mother to her children as is the lioness to her cubs. Tronchin deserves to be famous.
It was he who discountenanced the idea of Voltaire trying the waters of Aix. Tronchin’s diagnosis always went through the body to the soul. No doubt he saw that thisvif, irritable, nervous patient—torn to pieces with the quarrels and the excitement of the last five years—wanted, not the waters of Aix, but of Lethe: peace, quiet, monotony, and a home.
After four days’ stay in Geneva, Voltaire and suite reached the “charming house” which had been lent him, and which was ten miles from Geneva and called the Château of Prangins. It stood on very high ground, overlooking the lake from thirteen immense windows. There was too much house and too little garden. The house was only half furnished, and beaten by every wind that blew. And it was mid-winter in Switzerland. Was it really so charming? Madame Denis was volubly discontented. Italian Collini, who felt he had been cheated out of going to Paris, was extremely cross and cold. His master and mistress were always calling him to make up the fires, shut the windows, and bring them their furs. The draughts were really abominable. And what was one to do here? “Be bored; in a worse temper than usual; and write a great deal of history; be as bad a philosopher as in the town;and have not the slightest idea what is to become of us.” This was discontented Collini’s account of Prangins. He was pluming his wings for flight, and not at all in the mood to make the best of things.
It was Voltaire who did that. Between the grumbling niece and secretary, acutely sensitive himself to physical discomfort, not a little worried by the memory of that “abortion of a Universal History,” compelled to wait for a package of absolutely necessary books that ought to have come from Paris and had not, so ill that by January 3, 1755, he could not even hold a pen, he was still, in spite of angry Collini’s insinuations, the same true philosopher who had astronomised with Madame du Châtelet sitting by the roadside on a January evening on the cushions of their broken-down carriage. He was still busy and cheerful. “Theyhave need of courage,” he wrote of his companions, very justly. As for himself, he worked and forgot the cold. It was in these early days of his life in Switzerland that he arranged with the Brothers Cramer, the famous publishers of Geneva, to bring out the first complete edition of his writings. Then he heard from d’Argental that the public of Paris resented his exile. What warmth and comfort in that! “Nanine” was played there with success; and a play of Crébillon’s was a failure. That would have made one glow with satisfaction in any climate. And if Prangins was cold, two at least of the influential persons in the neighbourhood had written warmly to assure the famous newcomer of their good offices.
And better than all, better a thousand times, through this chill, discontented January, Voltaire was eagerly looking for a house and property of his own, in this free little Switzerland, where he might settle down at last and be in peace. On January 31, 1755, he was in active negotiation about two houses. On February 1st there appeared in the Registers of the Council of State of Geneva a special permission to M. de Voltaire—who alleged the state of his health and the necessity for living near his doctor, Tronchin, as a reason for wishing to settle in Switzerland—to inhabit the territory of the republic under the good pleasure of the Seigneury.
On February 8th or 9th the Councillor Tronchin bought a property quite close to Geneva, called Saint-Jean, which he let on a life lease to Voltaire, and which, in a characteristic enthusiasm and before he had had any practical experience of it, Voltaire rechristened “Les Délices.” Thus he was enabled to evade the law of the republic, and, Papist though he nominally was, to live and hold property under the Genevan republic.
A few days later he acquired a second house, called Monrion, on the way from Lausanne to Ouchy.
He was now sixty-one years old. Strong in his heart all his life had been his love of a home. For a while Cirey had seemed like one. But it had never belonged to him. It was, too, in France; and there had been often the painful necessity of leaving it as quickly as possible, and without any surety of being allowed to come back again. The man’s whole life had been a buffeting from pillar to post.
But the fretted youth in Paris, the restless middle age at Lunéville, Brussels, Cirey, and the angry hurry of Prussia were over for ever.
When he settled in Switzerland Voltaire took a new lease of his life. He entered upon its last, greatest, noblest, and calmest epoch.
In1755, the little republic of Geneva contained twenty thousand of some of the most simple, honest, frugal, and industrious persons in the world. Calvin had been dead two centuries. But his influence yet lived in laws which regulated not only the worship but the food and the drink of his followers; which bade them rise at five in summer and at six in winter, under penalty of a fine; allowed but two dishes at their tables; and made more than one fire in a house appear unjustifiable extravagance. In many respects the Genevan Calvinists of the time of Voltaire were not unlike a certain section of Scottish society. Austere in morals, and shrewd in mind, narrow, laborious, economical, equally exempt from degrading poverty and degrading luxury, content with stern pleasures, and a brief and rigid creed—the Calvinist was but a severer Presbyterian after all. By the middle of the eighteenth century, indeed, one party of the Genevans had been influenced not a little, on the side of their intellect, by the new science, the new literature, the new philosophy, which were remoulding Europe; and beneath the Calvinistic gloom still felt the gay heart-beats of the Frenchman. But the other and larger party were Puritan to the marrow—who believed, with all the morbid intensity of their founder, that enjoyment was sinful, musical instruments had been invented by the devil, and play-acting was the abomination of desolation.
It was among such a people that this cynic Voltaire, whose motto was “Rire et fais rire,” whose darling amusement was the drama, and whose incorrigible indulgence was the “Pucelle,” had elected to live.
On the very day, February 9, 1755, when he completed his negotiations for buying the lease of Délices, a certain Pastor Vernet wrote to him, begging him to respect religion, and saying that the serious persons of the neighbourhood were not without their apprehensions on that count. But when it came to writing, Voltaire was more than a match for any pastor who ever lived. He responded by a letter brilliantly ambiguous; to which Vernet could take no exception, but in which he must have found much food for thought.
Les Délices stood on the top of a hill on the Lyons road and quite near to the town of Geneva. It was therefore in that republic, while it was ten minutes’ walk from the Sardinian province of Savoy, half an hour’s ride into France, and an hour’s ride into Vaud. Altogether, a most prudent situation for a Voltaire. Lake Leman lapped the foot of its terraces. It was surrounded by gardens, whose beauty was only marred by high walls which shut out the lovely surrounding country. His signature on the lease was still wet when this enthusiastic Voltaire began pulling down those walls that he might look uninterruptedly upon one of the most beautiful views in Switzerland—across the city of Geneva, the junction of the rivers Arne and Rhone, to the Jura and the Alps. He called the place the Délices, he said, because “there is nothing more delightful than to be free and independent.” Certainly, the Delights were his torments in some respects. He complained that the architect of Prangins had forgotten to make a garden, and the architect of Délices had forgotten to make a house. Its builder had built for himself; and the guest-rooms were inadequate and uncomfortable. But such defects could be remedied. The last occupant of Délices was the son of that Duchess of Saxe-Gotha who had inspired the “Annals.”Thatseemed like a good omen.
Monrion, the second purchase, was on the way from Lausanne to Ouchy—at the other end of the lake from Délices. “Les Délices will be for the summer, Monrion for the winter, and you for all seasons,” Voltaire wrote to Lawyer de Brenles, the very day he acquired Délices. “I wanted only one tomb. I shall have two.” Monrion was comfortable and “shelteredfrom the cruel north wind”—“my little cabin,” “my winter palace”—a “clean, simple house” such as its master loved. After his time it was inhabited by Tissot—a celebrated doctor, only second in reputation to Tronchin.
It is pleasant to see the keen youthful enjoyment and ardour with which Voltaire turned to the improvement of his new homes. The first letter he wrote from Délices is dated March 5, 1755, but, as has been noted, even before that date he was enthusiastically pulling down walls in the garden and planning new rooms for the house. By March 24th, he and Madame Denis were actually in the midst of building the “accommodation for our friends and our chickens—planting oranges and onions, tulips and carrots. One must found Carthage.” The new fascination—the safest and best he had ever known—the fascination of home and garden, of country life, of pride in simple things—took possession of the most susceptible of men. He said with his cynic smile that he “was born faun and sylvan.” He was at least strangely free from love of the pavement for a man who had spent on it all the most pliable years of his life. He wrote in this March that his whole conversation was of “masons, carpenters, and gardeners.” Even Madame Denis, whose “natural aversion to a country life” her poor uncle was to have bitter cause to lament, liked the hurry and bustle of moving, and was for a while content.
There was much to be done, too, within doors. For himself, Voltaire’s own tastes were always quite frugal and simple. He wanted neither fine furniture nor many servants. And as for rich eating and drink, from those, if he had ever desired them—which he had not—his health would have precluded him. His sternly frugal fare and love of simplicity about him should have pleased his Calvinistic neighbours. But he was a friend before all things. And Délices and Monrion were to be open to all his friends—who must be received with every hospitality and with every generous comfort of which their host could think. For them he would live like a rich man. For them he began spending that comfortable fortune he had acquired with so much sagacity, and very often with so muchself-denial. He bought half a dozen horses and four carriages. He kept a couple of lackeys, a valet called Boisse, a French cook, and a cook’s boy; maidservants, coachmen, a postilion, and gardeners; beside Collini, whose duties were only less universal than Longchamp’s had been. That French cook soon had to provide a great many dinners for a great many diners; and generous suppers after evening theatricals. The carriages had to be sent to bring the economical, quiet-going neighbours to and from the dinner parties. The carriage Voltaire kept for his own use was of antique build, with a blue ground speckled with gold stars; but it was his fancy always to drive this remarkable equipage into Geneva with four horses to it—to the great excitement and astonishment of the grave little republic. On one occasion the people so crowded round him to see him alight from this extraordinary conveyance, that he called out, “What do you want to see, boobies? A skeleton? Well, here is one,” and he threw off his cloak. The establishment of Délices was further completed by a tame bear and a monkey. The monkey, who bit the hand that caressed him, was called Luc. So in his letters of the time Voltaire soon began to allude to a certain royal friend as Luc too.
Voltaire had been established at Délices about a month, when in April his first visitor, Lekain the actor, came to stay with him. Lekain, who in 1750 had been nobody at all but a clever young dependent on the bounty of the famous M. de Voltaire, was himself famous now, as one of the best tragedians in Paris. Of course the amateur dramatic talents of Délices took advantage of the professional genius of Lekain. “Zaire” was rehearsed; and then read aloud in one of the large rooms of the house. Denis and Lekain were in the principal parts. Voltaire took his favouriterôleof Lusignan, and declared gaily that no company in Europe had a better old fool in it than himself. The frigid Calvinists and the Tronchins, who formed the audience, were in tears. Lekain had more sentiment than voice, said Voltaire; and was so moved sometimes as to be inaudible. But then he moved his audience too. That was the great thing. He and his amateurs also read some part of the new play, “The Orphan of China”; and whenLekain left he carried away most of it in his box with the view of producing it in Paris.
But even at Délices the man who had written the “Pucelle” could not long expect to find only the pleasures of play-acting and the agreeable troubles of an estate. Since he began it, in 1730, the thing had been copied, and miscopied, read, re-read, quoted, and travestied a thousand times. It had been imitated by King Frederick in the “Palladium”; and read aloud to the Prussian princesses and the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha. It had been transcribedforPrince Henry, andbyLongchamp. It was everybody’s secret; but still itwasa secret. There was one indecorum it had not yet committed—that of print.
And in this January of 1755 had come that unpleasant news that a manuscriptwasin the possession of Mademoiselle du Thil; and then, like a clap of thunder, the announcement that the thing “was printed and being sold for a louis in Paris.”
The publication of such a work would have been disastrous for Voltaire at any moment; but it was doubly disastrous now. Here he was just settling down upon his estate as a sober, respectable country gentleman, very much minded to stand well with his strait-laced neighbours, very fond of his new home, not at all inclined to leave it, and having nowhere to go if he did leave it—yet holding his land and his right to live on it only at the “good pleasure” of a very strict Seigneury. To make matters worse, the printed “Pucelle” was (of course) full of errors; and while it was much less witty than the original, was not at all less indecent. At first there seemed to be nothing to be done but to follow the old, old plan. The thing is not mine at all! Here, for instance, is a passage abusing Richelieu—and Richelieu is my friend! And then, to make assurance doubly sure, Voltaire tried another very artful and most characteristicruse. He employed hundreds of copyists in Paris to copy it as incorrectly as possible. Then all his friends, as well as himself, denied loudly and vehemently that he was the author thereof. A Voltaire write such bad verse—sofade, soplat, so prosy! Impossible! At the same time, Voltaire sent copies of such a “Pucelle”—or such parts ofthe“Pucelle”—as he wished to avow, to all his acquaintance andall persons in authority. It was a very good idea. It cost a great deal of money, and a great deal of trouble; and might have been of some use if M. de Voltaire’s character and writings had not been known and feared these forty years.
On July 26th, Grasset, a publisher of Lausanne, appeared at the Délices and kindly offered to sell M. de Voltaire the incorrect copy of his own “Pucelle” for fifty louis. Voltaire had already written to Grasset to tell him in no mild terms that those “rags of manuscript” were not his “Pucelle” at all, but the work of some person who had neither “poetic art, good sense, nor good morals”; and that of such a thing Grasset would not sell a hundred copies. His rage, therefore, may be imagined. He denounced Grasset to the Genevan authorities; and had the satisfaction of seeing that misguided person made fast in prison—for a time. On July 27th, factotum Collini was sent up to Paris to see if he could not better matters there. But Paris burnt the “Pucelle.” The Pope prohibited it; and it sold lustily. It is not a little curious that Voltaire himself never in all his life suffered anything worse from it than frights: though of those he had enough and to spare. In 1757, a Parisian printer was sentenced to nine years at the galleys for printing an edition. Geneva—pretending to believe, and trying to believe, that M. de Voltaire was not its author—burnt the accursed thing as Paris had done; knowing that M. de Voltaire could only be glad to see the destruction of such a wicked travesty of his respectable poem. With what a wry smile he must have watched that bonfire!
The republic, however, for the moment, ostensibly gave him the benefit of the doubt. And then in this very July, just when he ought to have been most cautious and circumspect, if this imprudent, mischievous person does not begin making a stage of inverted wine-barrels, painting scenery, getting together theatrical costumes, flashing sham lightning in a dust-pan, preparing sham thunder by means of the rims of two cartwheels—and, worse than all, a thousand times worse—recruiting a theatrical company from among the young people of Geneva! The young people were only too willing. The Council of State had swallowed—in disapproving silence—thatreading of “Zaire” when Lekain had reduced “Tronchins and syndics” to tears. But this was a little too much. So on July 31st the Council met, and, as the result of a solemn confabulation, reminded M. de Voltaire that the drama, played publicly or privately, was contrary to their regulations, and that no Calvinists were allowed to take part in, or to witness, the same. Voltaire replied with a suspicious meekness that his only desire was to obey the “wise laws” of the government. He further wrote to Councillor Tronchin in terms quite abject. “No man who owes to your honourable body the privilege of living in this air ought to displease anyone who breathes it.”
In brief, there was a different and quite as good an air in Lausanne, where the “wise laws” of Geneva had no sway. Lausanne loved play-acting; and M. de Voltaire had a house at Monrion.
In Paris, too, on August 20th, “The Orphan of China” was performed with brilliant success. Here was excellent consolation for the solemn resolutions of Genevan Councils. They might take offence at “Zaire,” but Paris applauded “my Chinese baboons” to the echo. Poor Marie Leczinska, indeed, who not unnaturally saw evil in everything this sceptic, this Pompadour’s favourite, did, saw it here too. But even her objections, that the piece contained lines hostile to religion and to the King, were too obviously unjust to harm it. The censor had passed it. Its first performance declared it Voltaire’s greatest success since “Mérope.” If Lekaindidfall into his old fault and speak dreadfully indistinctly, Mademoiselle Clarion made the most charming of heroines, and the play was “all full of love”—tender, graceful, picturesque. It was played twelve or thirteen times in Paris; and when it was moved to Fontainebleau the Court delighted in it as much as the capital had done. In the annals of the French stage it is still remembered as the first play in which the actresses consented to forego theirpaniers.
Collini was present on the opening night. Even his grumbling pen allows that his master had made a very palpable hit. The pleasure-loving secretary had spent six weeks in Paris,almost entirely engaged in enjoying himself, before Voltaire recalled him in the friendliest of terms.
On August 30, 1755, Voltaire wrote from Délices one of his most famous letters; perhaps one of the most famous letters in the world. It was to Jean Jacques Rousseau, and thanked him for the “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men,” which Rousseau had written as a prize essay at the Academy of Dijon, and now sent for the approval of the great master. The “Discourse” was nothing but an elaboration of Rousseau’s famous theory—the advantage of savage over civilised life. Years before, at the French Court in 1745, Voltaire and Rousseau had had dealings with each other. They now renewed that acquaintance. Voltaire’s letter began, “I have received, Sir, your new book against the human race.... No one has ever employed so much wit in trying to make us beasts: one longs to go on four paws when one reads your book, but, personally, it is sixty years since I lost the habit, and I feel it is impossible for me to resume it.” He went on to agree with Jean Jacques that literature and science brought many troubles to their votaries; and instanced his own case with as quick a feeling as if all his wrongs were of yesterday. But, “literature nourishes, rectifies, and consoles the soul ... one must love it, in spite of the way it is abused, as one must love society, though the wicked corrupt its sweetness: as one must love one’s country, though one suffers injustice from it; and one’s God, though superstition and fanaticism degrade His service.”
On September 10th, Rousseau replied from Paris in warm terms of friendship, and agreeing with the superior wisdom of his master’s argument. As yet, each could see the other’s genius—and reverence it. They could disagree and be friends.
The autumn at Délices was further marked by the visit of Patu, a poet, who was a friend of David Garrick’s and wrote him an ecstatic account of his boyishly energetic host; and by afracaswith Madame Denis.
The facts that that foolish person was fat, short, forty-five years old, and squinted, did not, it has been said, make her lessfond of admiration from the opposite sex, or less prone to make a fool of herself in a flirtation when opportunity offered.
In the present case Uncle Voltaire suspected her of being a party to a theft her old admirer, the Marquis de Ximenès, had made of some manuscript notes for Voltaire’s “Campaigns of the King.” Ximenès had sold the notes to a publisher. Madame Denis’s voluble denials would certainly prove nothing. Voltaire was already quite aware of what Madame d’Épinay discovered after a very short acquaintance with her, that his niece was constitutionally a liar.
And then, on November 24th, came news which staggered Voltaire’s soul; and beside which all petty trouble seemed shameful. On November 1, 1755, Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake. It was All Saints’ Day, and the churches were full. In six minutes, fifteen thousand persons were dead; and fifteen thousand more were dying.
In these days, when every morning has its “crisis” and every evening its “appalling disaster,” it is difficult to realise the effect of the earthquake at Lisbon upon the eighteenth century. The less news there is, the more is that news felt. In the eighteenth century, too, all thoughtful persons saw signs in the heavens and the earth of some great change; and felt in the social order throes, which might be the death pangs of the old world, or the birth pains of a new. Further, men had begun to think and to reason for themselves: to ask why? from whence? to what end? and to brush aside the answers of the old theologies to those ancient questions as trite, unproven, and inadequate.
And if this was the temper of mind of most thoughtful persons, how much more of a Voltaire!
The news took nearly a month to reach him. For many months after he received it, there is hardly one of his letters which does not allude to it in terms of a passionate horror or a passionate inquiry. “The best of all possible worlds!” “If Pope had been there would he have said ‘Whatever is, is right’?” “All is well seems to me absurd, when evil is on land and sea.” “I no longer dare to complain of my ailments: none must dare to think of himself in a disaster so general.” “Beaumont, who has escaped, says there is not a house left in Lisbon—this isoptimism.” Over and over again he reverts to the comfortable dogmas of Mr. Pope’s “Essay on Man”—conceived sitting safe and easy in a Twickenham villa. The stories of the earthquake reached Voltaire exaggerated. But the bald truth was enough. “Voltaire,” said Joubert, “is sometimes sad; he is moved; but he is never serious.” He was serious once—over the Earthquake of Lisbon.
When the horrors were still fresh in his mind, when the burning questions to which they gave rise were still loudly demanding an answer, he wrote the most passionate and touching of all his compositions; one of the most vigorous and inspired works of any author of the age.
The “Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon” is only two hundred and fifty lines long; but it contains a statement of almost all those searching problems which every thinking man, of whatever belief or unbelief he be, has to face at last.
What am I? Whence am I? Whither go I? What is the origin of evil? What end is accomplished by the suffering and sorrow I see around me? “Why is Lisbon engulfed while Paris, no less wicked, dances?” Your “whatever is, is right” may be an easy doctrine for the happy, the rich, the healthy; but a hard saying for the poor, the sick, and the wretched. I will none of it! All Nature gives it the lie. The lips that utter it in prosperity to-day will deny it in misery to-morrow. At the end, the note of consolation is struck in the story of the caliph who, dying, worshipped God in the prayer “‘I bring to Thee all that which Thou hast not in Thy immensity—faults, regrets, evils, ignorance.’ He might have added also Hope.”
The philosophy of “The Disaster of Lisbon” is the philosophy of “In Memoriam.”