By September, then, he had these two estates in view—“Tourney for the title, and Ferney for the land: Ferney for a perpetuity, and Tourney only for life.” There was not much trouble with M. de Boisy over Ferney. It was bought for 24,000 écus in the name of Madame Denis, who was to inherit it after her uncle’s death. The contract for the purchase was not actually signed until February 9, 1759; but in the middle of September, 1758, Voltaire had made a kind of state entrance into the parish, accompanied by Madame Denis. Madame Denis was in her very best clothes, with all the diamonds theménageVoltaire could produce. As for Uncle Voltaire himself, he, in spite of the fact that the weather was still very warm, enjoyed himself vastly in crimson velvet trimmed with ermine. The pair drove in the smartest carriage, and attended High Mass—“droned out—false”—at the parish church, during which the enthusiastic future tenants of the proprietor of Ferney thumped on tin boxes to represent a welcome of cannon! That little, lively, black-eyed French-woman, Madame d’Épinay, has left a vivacious record of the day. If she saw it as comic, Voltaire did not. Once more he justified Tronchin’s appellation for him, “an old baby,” and enjoyed himself like a schoolboy.
But if the Ferney negotiations had been simple, not so the Tourney.
Président de Brosses and Voltaire were soon engaged in a vast correspondence. A whole book has been written on their relations with each other. There is no doubt that over Tourney Voltaire showed a great deal of that spirit which people call business capacity in themselves and meanness in others.
On September 9th, he made an offer to de Brosses for the life lease of the little estate. De Brosses said the offer was insufficient. After a good deal of trouble and haggling over small items on both sides, Voltaire finally bought the life leaseof Tourney (with all seigneurial rights and that delightful title included) for 35,600 livres. He undertook to make certain alterations and repairs. A herd of cattle was included in his purchase. Although he was not to enter into his life tenancy until February 22, 1759, the agreement is dated December 11, 1758; and on December 24th he made his state entrance into Tourney, as three months before he had into Ferney.
The second occasion was much the more magnificent of the two. Madame de Fontaine was with him this time, as well as Madame Denis. Both were in diamonds. Here, too, was their brother Mignot, the abbé; alsotout paré. The village girls handed the ladies baskets of flowers and oranges. The artillery had come from Geneva, so there was no need to thump upon tin boxes. There were drums, fifes, cannon: all the music of flattery. The spectators were not only peasants, as they had been at Ferney, but all the polite persons of the neighbourhood. There was a splendid banquet, given by the outgoing tenant of Tourney, and served by the innkeeper of a neighbouring village. The curé made M. de Voltaire a beautiful address. M. de Voltaire was wholly delighted—“very gay and content.” He answered quiteen grand seigneur, and as was expected of him, “Ask anything you like for the good of your parish and I will give it you.” Lord and Count of Tourney! This most impressionable of men lived up to the part immediately. He wrote an enthusiastic account of the proceedings to de Brosses on the very same day, when he was back again at Délices. “I made my entrance like Sancho Panza into his island. Only his paunch was wanting to me.” “My subjects frightened my horses with musketry and torpedoes.” The banquet (served by the native innkeeper) “was a magnificent repast in the style of those of Horace and Boileau.” In short, the Lord of Tourney saw his new estates allcouleur de rose, or almost all. It is infinitely characteristic that in this very letter he went on to plead for the restitution of certain tithes to the poor of Ferney, which they had enjoyed for a century, and of which Ancian, the curé of the neighbouring parish of Moens, “the most abominable pettifogger in the district,” had deprived them, further “putting them tofifteen hundred francs of law expenses before they knew it.” Voltaire had also appealed passionately to the Bishop of Annecy; and did at last obtain his suit, but only after he had paid a very large sum out of his own pocket.
He wrote also to Theriot that evening—tired, no doubt, but too charmed to remember it. “You are mistaken, my old friend; I have four paws instead of two. One paw in Lausanne, in a very pretty house for the winter; one paw at Délices, near Geneva, where good company comes to see me—those are the front paws. The back are at Ferney, and in the county”—a county, if you please, and not merely an estate—“of Tourney.”
He went on to point out the advantages of Ferney—how there was plenty of land and wood for the rebuilding operations he already had in hand; how he could get marble by the lake; how the extensive estates would really not be so costly after all. For himself, he would like to live on them quite simply. But my niece, you know—that victim of Frankfort—shemerits luxury and indulgences. He had already set the peasants to work to mend the neglected roads about Ferney; so that in a month or two he was able to say truthfully that they had earned more in that time than formerly they had been able to do in a year. He had already chartered more than a hundred workmen, that his rebuilding and gardening operations might be put in hand at once.
The year closed full of the happiest expectations. Despite gala entrances to new estates, Madame Denis, indeed, complained that the winter of 1758-59 was dull. It was all spent at Délices: as being more out of the way of the troubling of Grassets and Hallers, than Monrion. True, plenty of visitors came from Lausanne; but there were not many who came to sleep and stay. True, too, the Délices troupe had privately acted (“the only pleasure I have in this country,” Madame Denis wrote dismally) “Aménaïde,” which was to have its name changed to “Tancred” later; and as “Tancred” become immortal. But Madame Denis apparently was suffering from an indigestion which Tronchin could not cure, for she spoke slightingly of that good physician, and discontentedlyof life in general. Uncle Voltaire was so absurdly busy! Trying to do a hundred things at once, and invincibly obstinate. “It is the only sign of old age he has.” “If I were not so sensitive I should be very happy.” When a lady complains she is sensitive, she always means that she is cross and offended. Uncle Voltaire had shown his invincible obstinacy by persisting in going on with that Saurin controversy when his niece thought he had very much better leave it alone.
Then, too, he was getting more and more engrossed every day with pulling down and putting up, with barns, farms, oxen, sheep, horses; and “adored the country even in winter,” while Louise, as he said himself, was “very difficult to reduce to therôleof Ceres, of Pomona, and of Flora, and would much rather have been Thalia in Paris.” But when her uncle found Tourney and Ferney, he found a better life than he had ever known; and the dearest and crossest of nieces would not make him relinquish it. The year 1759 was still new-born when he was writing, not once but many times, that he was wonderfully well and happy, stronger and better than he had ever been; that he had only really lived since the day he chose his retreat; that he was so infinitely content “that if I dare I should think myself wise.”
“Such is my life, Madame, tranquil and occupied, full and philosophic.” “I love to plant, I love to build, and so satisfy the only tastes which gratify old age.”
“This kind of life makes one want to live.” “Property in paper depends upon fortune; property in land depends only upon God.”
“To have found the secret of being independent in France is more than to have written the ‘Henriade.’”
Ferney, as has been said, stood on the north shore of Lake Leman, in the district of Gex, three and a half miles from Geneva and almost joining Délices. The village to which it belonged, also called Ferney, was really nothing but a mean hamlet with forty or fifty miserable inhabitants, “devoured by poverty, scurvy, and tax-gatherers.” A very ugly little church stood much too near the house.
That house, when Voltaire bought it, was very old, tumbledown, and totally inadequate to his requirements. The entrance was through two towers connected by a drawbridge. If it was picturesque, it was certainly not comfortable. When Voltaire had rebuilt it, it was certainly comfortable, and decidedly unpicturesque.
He had begun that rebuilding three months before the deed of purchase was signed. By December 6, 1758, he had twenty masons at work. By the 24th, what he might well have cynically called hisoptimismled him to think it “a pretty house enough.” By June, 1759, it was “a charming château in the Italian style.”
By July it was “of the Doric order. It will last a thousand years.”
By November it was “a piece of architecture which would have admirers even in Italy.” While by the March of 1761 it had grown—at any rate in its master’s fancy—into “a superb château.”
There have not been wanting to Voltaire enemies to argue persistently and vociferously that Ferney was not at all what he represented it; and that all his geese were swans. Theywere. Ferney at its best and completest was never anything but a plain, sensible, commodious country house. It had neither wings nor decoration; not any architectural merit, except that its ugliness was simple and not elaborate. Voltaire was his own architect; and owned quite frankly that he knew nothing at all about architecture. The man who had travelled through Holland, Belgium, and Prussia without once stepping out of his post-chaise to look at a famous picture, or an immortal sculpture, or the “frozen music” of a grand cathedral, had as little feeling for art as for Nature.
He thought Ferney a superb château because it washischâteau. Just as he was devoted to flowers and gardens, when they werehisflowers andhisgardens.
It is certainly not the best way of loving art or Nature, but it is the only way of many persons besides Voltaire. And, after all, that comfortable feeling of landed proprietorship, that honest pride in his cows and his sheep, his bees and his silkworms, sits pleasantly enough on this withered cynic of sixty-five; and makes him at once more human, more sympathetic—the same flesh and blood as the simple and ordinary.
He had, as he said, plenty of wood and stone for his building operations on the premises—“oak enough to be useful to our navy, if we had one”; and stone, which the architect thought very good, and which turned out to be very bad. He said gaily that when the house was finished he should write on the wall “Voltaire fecit”; and that posterity would take him for a famous architect. As for that marble of which he had talked largely as being brought up by the lake, the man who declared that he preferred a good English book to a hundred thousand pillars of it, did not trouble to obtain much or to make an elaborate use of what he did obtain. He wanted the house “agreeable and useful,” and he had it. There was a fine view from it; though not so fine as it might have been, for it faced the high road. Still, as its happy master said, it was situated in the most smiling country in Europe; at its feet the lake gleamed and sparkled; and beyond the warm and gorgeous luxuriance of its perfect gardens could be seen, in dazzling contrast, the eternal snows of Mont Blanc.
When the rebuilding was finished the house was, looked at without prejudice, the well-appointed home of a well-to-dobourgeois gentilhomme—with an unusual love for literature. There was an ordinary hall with a stone staircase on the left which led up to the fourteen guest-rooms, all comfortably furnished, said one of those guests, who was an Englishman and had been used to solid English comfort at home. Here and there were some good pictures—or copies of good pictures—copies, most likely, since Voltaire, hardly knowing the difference, would be apt to reflect that a copy would do as well as an original, and be much cheaper. A Venus after Paul Veronese and a Flora after Guido Reni, some of the visitors declared genuine; and some as hotly pronounced spurious. Wagnière, that Genevan boy who lived to write memoirs like the other secretaries, stated that his master had about twenty valuable pictures in all; and some good busts. There were various family portraits about the house: one of Madame Denis; one of Voltaire’s young mother; and, soon, a likeness of Madame de Pompadour painted by herself, and by herself given to Voltaire. In Madame Denis’s room presently there was a portrait of Catherine, Empress of Russia, embroidered in silk; and a marble statue of Voltaire. There was a copy of this statue, or his bust in plaster, in almost every room in the house.
The library was simple, and, for Voltaire, small. Dr. Burney, the father of Fanny, who saw it in 1770, describes it as “not very large but well filled,” and says it contained “a whole-length figure in marble” of its master “recumbent, in one of the windows.” At Voltaire’s death it contained only 6,210 volumes. But almost every one had on its margin copious notes in that fine, neat little handwriting. Six thousand volumes annotated by a Voltaire! His sarcasm should have made the dullest ones amusing; and his relentless logic the obscurest ones clear. There were a great many volumes of history and theology; dictionaries in every language; all the Italian poets; and all the English philosophers. The Comte de Maistre, who saw this library after Voltaire’s death when it had been bought by Catherine the Great, wondered at the “extreme mediocrity” of the books. Bythis he explained himself to mean that there were no rare old editions and no sumptuous bindings, which the Count took as a sign that Voltaire was “a stranger to all profound literature.” It was a sign that Voltaire read to act; that books were his tools, not his ornaments; that he loved literature, not as a sensuous delight, but as the lever that was to turn the world. “A few books, very much marked.” That library was infinitely characteristic of the man who was doer, not dreamer; of the mind to which every poet, every philosopher, every scientist acted as a spur to new practical effort; of the man who was to go down the ages not as playwright, or verse-maker, but as he who “conquered the intellect of France, for the Revolution.”
Thesalle à mangerwas distinguished only by a most extraordinary and very bad allegorical picture, called “The Temple of Memory,” in which a Glory, with her hair dressed muchà la mode, was presenting Voltaire (who was surrounded with a halo like a saint) to the God of Poetry who was getting out of his chariot with a crown in his hand. On one side of the picture appeared busts of Euripides, Sophocles, Racine, Corneille, and other great men; on the opposite side were caricatures of Fréron and Desfontaines, who were being most satisfactorily kicked by Furies. Voltaire laughed at, and enjoyed immensely, this part of the picture while he was at meals. The artist was Alix, a native of Ferney, and soon anhabituéat the château. It was fortunate for him that Voltaire was so much better a friend than he was a judge of art.
His bedroom and salon were both small rooms. The salon, entered by folding doors, contained the master’s bust above the stove, six or seven pictures, “more or less good,” a portrait of Madame du Châtelet, and casts of Newton and Locke. One of the pictures, after Boucher, represented a hunting scene. There were ten tapestry armchairs, and a table of very common varnished marble. French windows and a glass door led into the garden.
Voltaire’s bedroom was principally distinguished by a neatness, cleanness, and simplicity natural to him, but very unusual in his day. The roughly carved deal bedstead one visitorregretfully regarded as “almost mean.” It was the fashion then to spend the night in what looked like a large heavily curtained coffin. Voltaire—to the melancholy vexation of the fashionable—seems to have dispensed with most of the curtains, but could not escape a huge baldachino over his head. Inside it, hung a very bad pastel portrait of Lekain; and a candelabra containing three wax candles, so that he could see to read. On either side of the bed hung portraits of Frederick the Great, of Voltaire himself, and of Madame du Châtelet. Placed between the door and the only window were five or six other engraved portraits, all in very simple black frames. The bed hangings and the four armchairs were upholstered alike in pale blue damask.
The room contained five desks. On each were notes for the various subjects on which the author was working: this desk had notes for a play; this, for a treatise on philosophy; a third for abrochureon science; and so on. All were exquisitely neat and orderly; every paper in its right place. The writing chair was of cane, with a cover on it to match the bed curtains. Later on, Voltaire had a second writing-chair made, which he used much in the last few years of his life: one of its arms formed a desk, and the other a little table with drawers; and both were revolving.
Just below the master’s bedroom was Wagnière’s, so that if Voltaire knocked on the floor during the night the servant could hear him. That he did so knock, pretty often, rests on the rueful testimony of Wagnière himself.
Quite close to the house stood a little marble bathroom with hot and cold water laid on. It was a very unusual luxury in those times, and considered a highly unnecessary one. It is pleasant to a century much more particular in such matters than the eighteenth to reflect that Voltaire was always personally cleanly and tidy to an extent which his contemporaries considered ridiculous. That fine and dirty age could hardly forgive his insisting on his ancient perukes and queer old gardening clothes being kept as trim and well brushed as if they were new and grand. His passion for soap and water was one of the complaints his enemies in Prussia had broughtagainst him. Wagnière records that his master was “scrupulously clean” and also his love of washing his eyes in pure cold water. Doubtless the habit preserved them, in spite of the inordinate amount of work they had to do. To the day of his death they never needed spectacles.
Most of the visitors comment on the well-kept appearance of the house; though one, Lady Craven, Margravine of Anspach, said thesalle à mangerwas generally dirty and the servants’ liveries soiled. It was at Ferney as it had been at Cirey. The master was particular, but the mistress was not. If Madame du Châtelet had been engrossed with science, Madame Denis was engrossed with amusement. Her extravagance and bad household management in that respect were often the cause of disagreements between her uncle and herself. And, that “fat pig, who says it is too hot to write a letter,” as Voltaire once described his niece to Madame d’Épinay, was the sort of person who thought no trouble too great for pleasure, but any trouble too great for duty.
It is significant that when she went to Paris in 1768 her uncle seized the opportunity of having Ferney thoroughly cleaned from top to bottom.
It is said that when he caught sight of cobwebs by the pillars and porticoes of the house, which the servants had neglected to remove, he used to vigorously flick a whip, crying out, “À la chasse! à la chasse!” and the whole household, including the guests, had to join in the spider hunt.
He had in his daily employ sixty or seventy persons, and sometimes more. Five servants usually waited at table, of whom three were in livery. Martin Sherlock, the Englishman, says that the dinner consisted of two courses and was eaten off silver plates with the host’s coat of arms on them; while at the dessert the spoons, forks, and blades of the knives were of silver-gilt; and adds that no strange servant was ever allowed to officiate at meals. Wagnière records how two of the household having robbed their master, the police got wind of the matter; and Voltaire bade him go and warn the delinquents to fly immediately, “for if they are arrested I shall not be able to save them from hanging.” He also sent them somemoney for the journey. It is pleasant to learn that the hearts of the culprits were touched by this generous kindness, and that, having escaped, they lived honest lives.
It was a rule at Ferney that all peasants who came to the house should have a good dinner and twenty-four sous given them before they pursued their way.
“Good to all about him,” was the Prince de Ligne’s description of Voltaire. It was not an extravagant one.
If the house at Ferney was simple and comfortable rather than magnificent, the grounds were on a far more elaborate scale. There was enough land to grow wheat, hay, and straw. There were poultry yards and sheepfolds; an orchard watered by a stream; meadows, storehouses, and an immense barn which stabled fifty cows with their calves and served as a granary, and of which its master was intensely proud.
Then, too, there were farms which Voltaire managed himself, and so made lucrative. He was pleased to say, with a twinkle in his eye, that he also did everything in the garden—the gardener was “si bête.” That he had a field which was always called Voltaire’s field, because he cultivated it entirely with his own hands, is certainly true. Before long he had four or five hundred beehives; turkeys and silkworms; and a breeding stable for horses, transferred from the Délices. He was not a little delighted when, in this May of 1759, the Marquis de Voyer, steward of King Louis’s stables, made him a present of a fine stallion. As if he had not hobbies enough, he soon became an enthusiastic tree-planter—begging all his friends to follow his example—and sending waggons all the way to Lyons for loads of young trees for his park.
After a while that park stretched in three miles of circuit round the house, and included a splendid avenue of oaks, lindens, and poplars. In the garden were sunny walls for peaches; vines, lawns, and flowers. It was laid out with a charmingimprévuand irregularity, most unfashionable in that formal day. Voltaire had always a “tender recollection of the banks of the Thames,” and made his garden as English as he could. It is indeed melancholy to note that artificial water and prim terraces were soon introduced to spoil—thoughtheir master thought they improved—its luxuriant irregularity; and that objects like lightning conductors, and fountains presided over by plaster nymphs, were not considered the least out of keeping with Nature by their lord and master. Near his silkworm house a thick linden-tree with overhanging branches formed what was called Voltaire’s study, and there he wrote verses “for recreation.” Nature certainly never inspired any ofthem. Now and again there came, it is true, even to this most typical son of the most artificial of all centuries, as he cultivated his field, or pruned and weeded in his garden, such reflections as might have fallen from the lips of his great opposite, Rousseau: “I have only done one sensible thing in my life—to cultivate the ground. He who clears a field renders a better service to humankind than all the scribblers in Europe.”
“You have done a great work for posterity” a friend said to him one day.
“Yes, Madame. I have planted four thousand feet of trees in my park.”
No more incongruous picture could be painted than that of this “withering cynic,” this world-famous hewer, hacker, and uprooter in his old grey shoes and stockings, a long vest to his knees, little black velvet cap and great drooping peruke, tranquilly directing, cultivating, sowing, “planting walnut and chestnut trees upon which I shall never see walnuts or chestnuts,” consoling himself for the toads in his garden by the reflection that “they do not prevent the nightingales from singing”: and prophesying that his destiny would be “to end between a seedlip, cows, and Genevans.”
For the time this country life was his element not the less. He wrote that it was, to Madame du Deffand, a dozen times. True, he had taken to it late. But perhaps always, deep down in him, undeveloped, stifled by Paris and by the burning needs of humanity, had been the peaceful primæval tastes. Cirey had roused them. Délices had nourished them: and Ferney and Tourney confirmed them.
Tourney had given its master a title, but at first it gave him nothing else. It was a countypour rire, “the land ina bad state,” “a garden where there was nothing but snails and moles, vines without grapes, fields without corn, and sheds without cows,” and “a house in ruins.” Still, the land could be made fertile; and the house, if itwasin ruins, boasted an admirable view, and was but “a quarter of a league” from Geneva.
By February, 1759, fifty workmen were putting it to rights; and by November the Count of Tourney could say that he had planted hundreds of trees in the garden, and used more powder (in rock-blasting) than at the siege of a town. Everything needed repairing, he added—fields, roads granaries, wine-presses—and everything was being repaired.
As at Ferney and Délices, the master personally supervised every detail; and so made his farms, his nurseries, his bees, his silkworms, all pay.
In the house at Tourney he quickly made a theatre-room. If some of the guests were disposed to laugh at a stage which held nine persons in a semicircle with difficulty, and to think the green and gold decorations tawdry, Voltaire adored that “theatre of Punchinello” as a child adores a new toy. “A little green and gold theatre,” “the prettiest and smallest possible”—he alludes to it in his letters a hundred times. From the September of 1760 he was anxious to transfer it to Ferney. But meanwhile he loved it where and as it was. Tourney also was useful to provide accommodation for the servants of the innumerable guests who came to stay at Ferney.
No idea of Voltaire’s life there could be given without mention of that incessant stream of visitors of all nations and languages which flowed through it, almost without pause for twenty years. Half the genius—and but too many of the fools—of Europe came to worship at the shrine of the prophet of this literary Mecca.
As prim Geneva shut its gates at nightfall, every one who came to sup with M. de Voltaire had to stay all night in his house. Ferney had no inn. After fourteen years of his life there, Voltaire might well say that he had been the hotel-keeper of Europe. He told Madame du Deffand, as early as1763, that he had entertained four hundred English people, of whom not one ever after gave him a thought.
Too many of his guests, indeed, were not merely self-invited: but remained at Ferney with such persistency that their unhappy host would sometimes retire to bed and say he was dying, to get rid of them. One caller, who had received a message to this effect, returned the next day. “Tell him I am dying again. And if he comes any more, say I am dead and buried.”
Another visitor, when told Voltaire was ill, shrewdly replied that he was a doctor and should like to feel his pulse. When Voltaire sent down a message to say he was dead, the visitor replied, “Then I will bury him. In my profession I am used to burying people.” His humour appealed to Voltaire’s. He was admitted. “You seem to take me for some curious animal,” said Voltaire.
“Yes, Monsieur, for the Phœnix.”
“Very well: the charge to see me is twelve sous.”
“Here are twenty-four,” said the visitor. “I will come again to-morrow.”
He did, and on many to-morrows: and was received as a friend.
But all the importunate were not so clever, and their fulsome flattery was odious to the man who loved it daintily dressed.
“Sir, when I see you, I see the great candle that lights the world.”
“Quick, Madame Denis,” cried Voltaire. “A pair of snuffers!”
One persistent woman tried to effect an entry by saying that she was the niece of Terrai, the last, and not the least corrupt, of Louis XV.’s finance ministers.
Voltaire sent out a message. “Tell her I have only one tooth left, and I am keeping that for her uncle.”
The Abbé Coyer, on his arrival, calmly announced that he was going to stay six weeks.
“In what respect, my dear Abbé, are you unlike ‘Don Quixote’? He took the inns for châteaux, and you take the châteaux for inns.”
Coyer left early the next day.
Still, in spite of such rebuffs, the visitors were incessant.
One said that he could not recollect there beingmorethan sixty to eighty people at supper after theatricals. Voltaire himself said there were constantly fifty to a hundred.
Many visitors stayed for weeks; many for months; some for years.
Madame de Fontaine, with her loveren train, could come when she chose—and she often chose. Mignot came whenheliked. Great-nephew d’Hornoy was a constant visitor.
At different times there were two adopted daughters and two Jesuit priests living in the house. One relative, as will be seen, was at Ferney for a decade—completely paralysed. And hanging about the house were generally a trio or a quartette of gentlemen ne’er-do-weels, who sometimes copied their host’s manuscripts, and sometimes stole them.
In the midst of such a household Voltaire pursued his way and his life’s work, wonderfully methodically and equably. It was his custom to stay in bed till eleven o’clock, or later. There he read or wrote; or dictated to his secretaries with a distressing rapidity. Sometimes he was reading to himself at the same time. About eleven, a few of his guests would come up and pay him a brief visit.
The rest of the morning he spent in the gardens and farms, superintending and giving orders. In earlier years, he dined with his house party—in an undress, for which he always apologised and which he never changed. Later on, he always dined alone. After dinner he would go into the salon and talk for a little with his guests. The whole of the rest of the afternoon and evening until supper-time he spent in study: in which he never allowed himself to be interrupted. One at least of his guests complained that his only fault was to be “fort renfermé.”
At supper he appeared in as lively spirits as a schoolboy set free from school. It was the time for recreation: and a well earned recreation too. He led his guests to talk on such subjects as pleased them. When a discussion grew serious, he would listen without saying a word, with his head bent forward. Then, when his friends had adduced their arguments,he advanced his own, in perfect order and clearness, and yet with an extraordinary force and vehemence. He was seldom his best before a large company, especially of the kind that had come, as he said, “to see the rhinoceros.” But with a few kindred spirits he was as brilliant as he had been twenty years before over the supper-table at Cirey. At Ferney he must have missed indeed that woman who, having flung off her mantle of science and erudition, became socially what socially all women should be—an inspirer, a sympathiser, a magnet to draw out men’s wit—a sorceress who talked so well that she made her companions feel not how clever she was, but how clever they were.
Niece Denis was certainly the most good-natured of hostesses—if she wasgaupe, as Madame du Deffand said—and was grateful to her uncle’s guests for mitigating the ennui of a country life. She was useful too. When Voltaire was tired or bored, he could retire directly after supper to that invariable refuge, bed; and leave his niece to act with his visitors. When he was not bored and there were no theatricals, he sometimes read aloud a canto of the “Pucelle” as in old times; or quoted poetry—any but his own—which he never could recollect; or talked theatres or played chess. It was the only game in which he indulged, and he was a little ashamed of it. Games are so idle!
When he went to bed he started work afresh. It was his only intemperance. If he kept an abundant table for his guests he was still infinitely frugal himself. Hisdéjeunerconsisted only of coffee, with cream; his supper, of eggs, although there was always a chicken ready for him in case he fancied it. He drank a little burgundy, and owned to a weakness for lentils. Of coffee, in which he had indulged freely in youth, he now took only a few cups a day. He had a habit of ignoring meals altogether when he was busy—a little idiosyncrasy somewhat trying to his secretaries. Wagnière also complained that his master was too sparing in sleep; and called him up from that room below, several times in the night, to assist him in his literary work. When he had a play on hand he was “in a fever.”
Many of the visitors who stayed at Ferney have left an account of their life there. Though the accounts always graphically portray the character of the writers, they sketch much less vividly the portrait of Voltaire. But from such accounts—all taken together, and corrected by each other from Voltaire’s own descriptions, from Wagnière’s and from Madame Denis’s—Ferney, and the life there, were as nearly as possible what has been depicted. Changes in habits are inevitable in twenty years. Differing accounts may all be true—at different times. Feverishly busy for Voltaire, idle and sociable for Madame Denis; she carried along by that unceasing stream of guests, and he watching it, half amused and half bored, from his own firm mooring of a great life’s work—that was Ferney for its master and mistress from 1758 until 1778. They did not regularly take up their abode there until 1760. They did not give up Délices altogether until 1765. But from the autumn of 1758 Ferney was their real home, the home of Voltaire’s heart; inextricably associated with him by his friends and his enemies; the subject of a thousand scandals, and of most beautiful imaginative descriptions. Nearly all great men have had one place dedicated to them—Florence to Dante; Corsica to Napoleon; Stratford to Shakespeare; Weimar to Goethe; and Ferney to Voltaire.
OnFebruary 10, 1759, Voltaire’s “Natural Law,” Helvétius’s book “On the Mind,” and six others were publicly burnt in Paris by the hangman.
In March the “Encyclopædia” was suspended.
“Natural Law,” it will be remembered, was nothing but a seeking for an answer to that everlasting question “What is truth?”
“On the Mind” was the naïve expression of the materialism of the wittiest freethinker in Paris, Helvétius,maître d’hôtelto the Queen and Farmer-General. But the Dauphin showed it to his mother, and it received the compliment of burning. “What a fuss about an omelette!” said Voltaire contemptuously. The destruction of his own “Natural Law” disturbed him as little. “Burn a good book, and the cinders will spring up and strike your face” was one of his own axioms. From the flames of its funeral pyre, the thing would rise a phœnix gifted with immortal life and fame.
But the suspension of the “Encyclopædia” hit him hard.
Since the attempted assassination of the King by Damiens the laws against the freedom of the press had been growing daily more severe. True, the poor creature had had a Bible in his pocket, but the churchmen argued somehow that it was the New Learning which had guided the dagger. Then France had had reverses in war. Suppose these misfortunes all came from these cursed philosophers and their “Encyclopædia”! As, later, whole nations attributed the rot in the crops and the ague in the bones of their children to the withering influence of that great little Corporal, hundreds of miles awayfrom them, so in the eighteenth century in France a great party in the State attributed to the extension of learning every disaster which their own folly or foolhardiness brought upon them.
They turned, and brought all their power, influence, and money against the Encyclopædists. D’Alembert was no fighter. Student, recluse, and gentle friend—he was not one of those who could write with a pen in one hand and a sword in the other. “I do not know if the ‘Encyclopædia’ will be continued,” he wrote to Voltaire as early as the January of 1758, “but I am sure it will not be continued by me”; and though the pugnacious little warrior of Délices wrote and passionately urged his peaceful friend not to do what his absurd enemies wished—not to let them enjoy “that insolent victory”—still, d’Alembert withdrew. On February 9, 1759, Voltaire wrote that he seemed to see the Inquisition condemning Galileo.
But it was as he said. The cinders from the burning sprang up and burnt the burners. They could mutilate the “Encyclopædia,” but they could not kill it. Its very mutilations attracted interest, and “Natural Law” and “On the Mind” continued to be sold—in open secrecy—a hundred times more than ever.
It will not have been forgotten that with “Natural Law” had originally been published “The Disaster of Lisbon”; and that the doctrines of “Lisbon” had been refuted, by the request of the Genevans, in a long, wild, rambling letter by Jean Jacques Rousseau, wherein that absurd person had pointed out that if we lived in deserts, not towns, the houses would not fall upon us, because there would not be houses to fall.
Answer a fool according to his folly! A few gay bantering lines were all Voltaire’s reply at the moment. To strike quickly—or wait long—this man could do both. He loved best to strike at once; but if he could have patience and wait to gather his weapons, to barb his arrows, to poison his darts, why, he was of nature the more deadly. This time he had waited long. The bantering note was but a sop thrown to his impatience. Rousseau’s Letter on Optimism bears the date
VOLTAIREFrom the Bust by Houdon
VOLTAIREFrom the Bust by Houdon
VOLTAIRE
From the Bust by Houdon
of August, 1756. It was not till the early part of 1759 that there crept out stealthily, secretly, quietly, the gayest little volatile laughing romance called “Candide.”
Written in some keen moment of inspiration—perhaps at the Elector Palatine’s, perhaps at Délices, where, it matters not—in that brief masterpiece of literature Voltaire brought out all his batteries at once and confronted the foe with that ghoulish mockery, that bantering jest, and that deadly levity which few could face and live.
If the optimists had talked down the passionate reasonings of the “Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon” with that reiterated “All is well,” “All chance, direction which thou canst not see—all partial evil, universal good,” “Candide’s” laugh drowned those affirmations—so loudly and so often affirmed that the affirmers had come to mistake them for argument. In this novel of two hundred pages Voltaire withered by a grin the cheap, current, convenient optimism of the leisured classes of his day, and confounded Pope as well as Rousseau. This time he did not argue with their theories. He only exposed them. In that searching light, in that burning sunshine, the comfortable dogmas of the neat couplets of the “Essay on Man” blackened and died, and Rousseau was shown forth the laughing-stock of the nations.
One of the few literary classics which is not only still talked about but still sometimes read, is “Candide.” Nothing grows old-fashioned sooner than humour. The jests which amuse one age bore and depress the next. But it is part of Voltaire’s genius in general, and of “Candide” in particular, that its wit is almost as witty to-day as when it was written. It still trips and dances on feet which never age or tire. Nothing is more astounding in it than what one critic has called its “fresh and unflagging spontaneity”—its “surpassing invention.” Its vigour is such as no time can touch. It reads like the work of a superabundant youth. Yet Voltaire was actually sixty-four when he wrote it; and if indeed “we live in deeds, not years: in thought, not breaths: in feelings, not in figures on a dial,” he was a thousand.
The story is, briefly, that of a young man brought up inimplicit belief in the everything-for-the-best doctrine, who goes out into a world where he meets with a hundred adventures which give it the lie. Life is a bad bargain, but one can make the best of it. That is the moral of “Candide.” “What I know,” says Candide, “is that we must cultivate our garden.” “Let us work without reasoning: that is the only way to render life supportable.”
As children read the “Gulliver’s Travels” of that past master of irony, Jonathan Swift, as the most innocent and amusing of fairy tales, so can “Candide” be read as a rollicking farce and as nothing else in the world.
Who knows, indeed, when he puts down that marvellous novelette, whether to laugh at those inimitable traits of the immortal Dr. Pangloss—“noses have been made to carry spectacles, therefore we have spectacles; legs have been made for stockings, therefore we have stockings; pigs were made to be eaten, and therefore we have pork all the year round”—or to weep over the wretchedness of a humanity which perforce consoles itself with lies, and, too miserable to face its misery, pretends that all is well?
One woman, with her heart wrung by that cruel mockery, speaks of “Candide’s” “diabolical gaiety.” “It seems to be written by a being of another nature than our own, indifferent to our fate, pleased with our sufferings, and laughing like a demon or a monkey at the miseries of that humankind with which he has nothing in common.” Some have found in it the blasphemies of a devil against the tender and ennobling Christianity which has been the faith and the hope of sorrowing millions; and others discover in it only one of the most potent of arguments for embracing that Christianity—the confession that no other system so consolatory can be found. To one reader it is the supreme expression of a genius who, wherever he stands, stands alone—“as high as mere wit can go”; to another, shorn of its indecency, it is, like “Gulliver,” but abizarreabsurdity for youth; while a third finds it “most useful as a philosophical work, because it is read by people who would never read philosophy.”
Perhaps the genius of “Candide” lies partly in the fact thatit is both serious and frivolous, ghoulish and gay, tragedy and comedy; and equally perfect as the one or the other.
Voltaire assigned “this little sort of romance” to that convenient person, the Chevalier de Mouhy, on whom, in 1738, had been fathered the “Préservatif.” The real author declared that the thing was much too frivolous for him to have written. He had read it, to be sure. “The more it makes me laugh the more sorry I am it is assigned to me.” Almost every letter of this spring of 1759 contains a mocking allusion tooptimism. “Candide” was much to the fore in its writer’s mind.
On March 2d, the Council of Geneva condemned the book to be burnt; and once more, as in the case of the “Pucelle,” Voltaire watched a bonfire with a very twisted smile. He revenged himself by flooding Geneva with anonymous irreligious pamphlets with such religious names—“Christian Dialogues” and “The Gospel of the Day”—as to deceive the very elect.
But it was not only his suspected paternity in the case of “Candide,” but a suspected paternity of an even more dangerous child, that prevented Voltaire in this spring giving up his whole soul peacefully to rebuilding Ferney and laying out gardens. Frederick was in the midst of a disastrous campaign; but, unfortunately, no disaster stopped him writing to Voltaire or composing verses. Wilhelmina’s death had only healed the old wounds for a while. They broke out afresh. In March this strange Damon and Pythias were again squabbling over that ancient bone of contention, Maupertuis; and then, as inconsistently as if they had been a couple of schoolgirls, passionately regretting their old amity. “I shall soon die without having seen you,” wrote Voltaire on March 25th. “You do not care, and I shall try not to care either.... I can live neither with you nor without you. I do not speak to the King or the hero: that is the affair of sovereigns. I speak to him who has fascinated me, whom I have loved, and with whom I am always angry.” Then they remembered Frankfort and Freytag, and began snarling and growling again.
And then—then—a book of Frederick’s poems which abusedLouis XV. and Madame de Pompadour was opened in the post on its way from Frederick to Voltaire. And in a trice Voltaire is quaking lest he should be thought to have inspired, or positively written, verse so dangerous and disrespectful.
No emergency had ever yet robbed him of his cleverness. He took the packet to the French envoy at Geneva and showed him the broken seal; and then, by the envoy’s advice, sent the whole thing to Choiseul, the head of the French Ministry. Choiseul was himself a verse-maker; he wrote a virulent versified satire upon Frederick and sent it to Voltaire. “Tell your King, if he publishes his poems I shall publish mine.”
Voltaire says that if he had wished to amuse himself he might have seen the Kings of France and Prussia engaged in a war of verses. But he was the friend of peace as well as the friend of Frederick. He begged Frederick not to shut every door of reconciliation with the King of France by publishing that ode; and added, that in mortal fear of its being attributed to Uncle Voltaire, Niece Denis had burnt it. Frederick would not have been human had he not immediately felt convinced that those ashes contained the finest lines he had ever written. But theywereashes. The episode closed.
On July 27, 1759, Maupertuis died at Bâle, “of a repletion of pride,” said Voltaire. Akakia, busy with his history of “Peter the Great,” and with touching up “Tancred,” or his “Chevaliers” as he called it sometimes, must needs push them aside and shoot an arrow or two of his barbed wit at that poor enemy’s dead body. “Enjoy your hermitage,” Frederick wrote back to him gravely. “Do not trouble the ashes of those who are at peace in the grave.... Sacrifice your vengeance on the shrine of your own reputation ... and let the greatest genius in France be also the most generous of his nation.” The counsel was just and noble. Alas! it was even more needed than Frederick guessed. At this very time Voltaire was writing his secret “Memoirs for the life of M. de Voltaire.” They were not published till after his death. They were never meant to be published at all. They contain what Morley has well called “a prose lampoon” on the King’s private life, “which is one of the bitterest libels that malice ever prompted.”
Its incomprehensible author was still actually compiling it when, for the third time, he took up hisrôleof peacemaker between France and Frederick.
This time, Tencin and Richelieu having been tried in vain, the medium was to be Choiseul, Choiseul being approached by Voltaire’s angel, d’Argental. The moment was favourable. The campaign of 1759 was wholly disastrous to Frederick: and on August 12th he was beaten by the united armies at Kunersdorf. Chased from his States, “surrounded by enemies, beaten by the Russians, unable to replenish an exhausted treasury,” “Luc,” as Voltaire phrased it, “was still Luc.” He still kept his head above the foaming waters that would have engulfed any other swimmer. “Very embarrassed, and not less embarrassing to other people; astonishing and impoverishing Europe, and writing verses,” Frederick as if to give himself time—as if, though he never meant to yield to such advances, he yet did not dare to openly refuse them—coquetted with the peace offers of M. de Choiseul, sent through that “Bureau d’adresse,” Voltaire. It is not a little wonderful that Voltaire, with his itching fingers for action, could suffer himself to be a “Bureau d’adresse,” a passive medium, even for a while. But he did. An immense correspondence passed between himself and Frederick—for the benefit of Choiseul. Frederick was alluded to as Mademoiselle Pestris or Pertris: and very coy was Mademoiselle over the matter. Shall it be peace? shall it not? It was a delicate negotiation, said that “Bureau d’adresse,” very truly. It was like the play of two cats—each with velvet paws to hide its claws.
It came to nothing. Though, perhaps, when in December there appeared in Paris a book entitled “The Works of the Philosopher of Sans-Souci,” containing those freethinking effusions a Most Christian King had written under the rose, and which he would not at all wish to see daylight, Choiseul’s claw had been active in the matter. Fortunately Voltaire could not be suspected. Had not Freytag taken from him at Frankfort that “Œuvre de Poëshie du Roi Mon Maître,” which was none other than the “Works of the Philosopher of Sans-Souci” under a different name? Still, the year 1760 opened as 1759 had done, with Damon and Pythias still sparring at each other. “You have embroiled me for ever with the King of France, you have lost me my posts and pensions, you have ill-treated me at Frankfort, me and an innocent woman,” writes Voltaire to Frederick from peaceful Tourney in April, 1760.
And in May Frederick wrote back. “If you were not dealing with a fool in love with your genius,” what might I not do and say? As it is—“Once for all, let me hear no more of that niece who bores me, and has nothing but her uncle to cover her defects.”
The niece who bored Frederick must have been very nearly as bored herself throughout the remainder of this year 1759 as she confessed to have been at the beginning. Uncle Voltaire was always so engrossed with writing, or with those stupid farms and gardens. “The more you work on your land, the more you will love it,” he had written to Madame de Fontaine in the summer. “The corn one has sown oneself is worth far more than what one gets from other people’s granaries.” And then, there were so few visitors.
Valette, a needy, clever, unsatisfactory acquaintance of d’Alembert’s, was at Délices in December; and during the year a man named d’Aumard had arrived on a visit. But that was all.
D’Aumard was a young soldier cousin of Voltaire’s mother. Of very ordinary abilities, and morals rather below the very low average of his day, that distant cousinship was the only claim he had upon Voltaire’s notice. But it was more than sufficient. Voltaire had already sent him presents of money through Madame Denis, and made him a promise of a pension for life. Directly he arrived at Délices he was attacked by what was at first taken to be rheumatism. Tronchin was called in. Voltaire sent d’Aumard to Aix for the waters. But neither the first physician nor the most fashionable cure in Europe was of any avail. D’Aumard became a helpless and hopeless cripple. In 1761, Voltaire said that it required fourpersons to move him from one bed to another. In this condition he lived in Voltaire’s house for at least ten years, and finally died there. His host engaged in a long correspondence about his case with the surgeon of the Royal Footguards, and entered into every detail with infinite pains and minuteness. To a busy and active Voltaire the fate of this young man, shut out of all work and interest—hearing, as he lay on the bed from which he was never to rise, the stir and movement of a life in which he could never join—seemed peculiarly pitiable. He makes a hundred sympathetic allusions to him. That his own conduct was infinitely generous he seems to have wholly lost sight of in the fact that d’Aumard’s fate was infinitely sad. Yet Voltaire had a reward if he wanted one. To Madame du Deffand’s question if life were worth living he could reply, “Yes. I know a man completely paralysed who loves it, to folly.” The man was d’Aumard.
In this year Voltaire obtained, after the exercise of even more than his usual persistence, and after working himself and his friends to death to attain his aim, the grant of two letters-patent for his lands of Tourney and Ferney. He set great value on these letters as declaring him a French subject.
Also in this year he heard of the loss of that very old English friend of his, Falkener. In 1774, Falkener’s two sons came to stay with him at Ferney.
He still kept himself wellau courantof English affairs and English literature.
It was in 1759 he wrote to Madame du Deffand that there was nothing passable in “Tom Jones” but the character of the barber; and of “A Tale of a Tub” as “a treasure-house of wit.” He also read—and yawned over—“Clarissa Harlowe” and “Pamela”; and in 1760 he was criticising “Tristram Shandy.” No other great Frenchman of his day got into the heart of English literature and English character as Voltaire did. “An Englishman who knows France well and a Frenchman who knows England well are both the better for it,” is one of the shrewdest of his sayings, and he said many shrewd things, on the two races. “The English know how to think; the French know how to please.” “We are thewhipped cream of Europe. There are not twenty Frenchmen who understand Newton.”
But there was another foreign country besides England which was engaging his attention now—Russia.
In this 1759 he produced the first volume of that “History of Peter the Great,” which he had undertaken to write two years earlier, in 1757, at the request of Peter’s daughter, Elizabeth.
In the spring of 1717, when Arouet was an imprudent young Paris wit of three-and-twenty, awaiting his first introduction to the Bastille, he had seen the great Peter in the flesh, being shown the shops of the capital, the lion of its season—“neither of us thinking then that I should become his historian.”
But directly Elizabeth made the suggestion, a Voltaire of sixty-three had embraced it with an enthusiasm which would not have been astonishing in an Arouet of twenty-three, and set to work at once.
The subject bristled with difficulties. First it involved an enormous correspondence with Schouvaloff, the Russian minister. Schouvaloff was ready and eager to shower maps, medals, and documents upon the historian. But the medals, as the historian pointed out, were not of the slightest use; the maps were inadequate; and the documents had too often been tampered with.
Then, too, there was an immeasurable difficulty, for a writer who wanted to tell the truth, in the fact that his hero’s own daughter was not only living, but had commissioned him to write the work. When Frederick wanted to know what in the world made Voltaire think of writing the history of the wolves and bears of Siberia, he represented the point of view from which most people then regarded Russia. A cold, ugly, barbarous, uninteresting place—what in the world can you have to say about it? The veil of tragedy and romance which now hangs before that great canvas did not give it the potent charm of mystery in the eighteenth century. Only Voltaire would then have dared to write “Russia under Peter the Great,” and only Voltaire could have made it readable.
He took a flying leap into that sea of difficulties, and came up to the top safely as usual. He gave Schouvaloff a plan ofthe work in advance. First, there are to be no unnecessary details of battles; secondly, the thing will be called not “The History of Peter the Great,” but “Russia under Peter I.,” as giving me greater liberty, and explaining to my readers in advance the real aim of the book; thirdly, Peter’s little weaknesses are not to be concealed when necessary to expose them.
The rough sketch was bold, and so was the finished picture. But to its boldness were united that grace and charm by which Voltaire could make disagreeable truths sound like compliments. If to the world generally Peter was, and should be, but the “wisest and greatest of savages,” “only a king,” and a badly brought up one at that—to Russia he was, and ought to be, a great man and a hero; and, Peter apart altogether—and there is a good deal of the work from which Peterisentirely apart—the book “revealed Russia to Europe and herself,” and brought that great country to the knowledge and the interest of other nations.
The style sometimes bears trace of the difficulties its author had to overcome—the fact that the subject was chosen for him, notbyhim. “I doubt,” he wrote to Madame du Deffand, “if it will be as amusing as the ‘Life of Charles XII.,’ for Peter was only extraordinarily wise, while Charles was extraordinarily foolish.” All the time he was writing it, “Tancred,” Ferney, “Candide,” Frederick, were calling his attention away from it.
Not the less, the History was a very successfully executed order, with which the orderer was so pleased that in 1761 she sent the author her portrait set in diamonds.
To the end of 1759 also belongs a very different work of Voltaire’s—one of those spontaneous, impulsive, rollicking, daring things which must have been no little relief to hisméchancetéto turn to from those grave ploddings through Schouvaloff’s documents. Encouraged by that burning of “Natural Law” and its companion volumes, and by the suppression of the “Encyclopædia” in the early part of the year, in November a weekly Jesuit organ called the “Journal de Trévoux,” edited by one Berthier, furiously assailed not only “Natural Law,” which fires could not destroy, but the “Encyclopædia,” which prohibitions could not suppress, and all the works of enlightenment in France. Voltaire had always an inconsistenttendressefor the Jesuits. They had been good to him in his school days: and among them he still numbered some of his friends. But this thing was too monstrous! Voltaire attacked it with sharpest ridicule, and wrote anonymously that scathing pamphlet called “The Narrative of the Sickness, Confession, Death, and Re-appearance of the Jesuit Berthier.” This he followed by another pamphlet, “The Narrative of Brother Grasse.” Both were but burlesques. True, there was a hit in every line; and then, if not now, every arrow went home. But the real significance of the pamphlets is in the fact that they were a declaration of war. Gardens and architecture, farms and beehives—in these things is to be found happiness perhaps. But there has been no great man in the world who ever thought happiness enough. That hatred of intolerance, that passion for freedom which had been the motive power of a young and struggling Arouet, was still the motive power of this affluent, comfortable Voltaire of sixty-five. To be sure, it is easier to feel sympathy with the oppressed and the needy when one is oneself downtrodden and poor: and something more difficult when one is oneself prosperous and independent. It must be accounted to Voltaire for righteousness that when he no longer suffered himself, the sufferings of others appealed to him only with a double force. It was in those smiling days of Délices and Ferney that he framed his battle-cry and formulated the creed of all the philosophers, and the aim and the conviction of his own life, into one brief phrase—Écrasez l’infâme.
Friend and foe still remember him by that motto. The one has idly forgotten, and the other carefully misunderstands, what it means and meant. To many Christians, “Écrasez l’infâme” is but the blasphemous outcry against the dearest and most sacred mysteries of their religion; andl’infâmemeans Christ.
But to Voltaire, if it meant Christianity at all, it meant that which was taught in Rome in the eighteenth century, and notby the Sea of Galilee in the first. If itwasChristianity at all, it was not the Christianity of Christ.L’infâme didmean religion, but it meant the religion which lit the fires of Smithfield and prompted the tortures of the Inquisition; which terrified feeble brains to madness with the burning flames of a material hell, and flung to the barren uselessness of the cloister hundreds of unwilling victims, quick and meet for the life for which they had been created.
L’infâmewas the religion which enforced its doctrines by the sword, the fire, and the prison; which massacred on the Night of St. Bartholomew; and, glossing lightly over royal sins, refused its last consolations to dying Jansenists who would not accept the Bull Unigenitus. It was the religion which thrust itself between wife and husband in the person of the confessor—himself condemned to an unnatural life which not one in a thousand can live honestly and aright; it was the religion of Indulgences, and the rich: for those who could pay for the remission of their sins and for large impunity to sin afresh; it was the religion which served as a cloak for tyranny and oppression, ground down the face of the poor, and kept wretchedness wretched for ever.
And above all,l’infâmewas that spirit which was the natural enemy of all learning and advancement; which loved darkness and hated light because its deeds were evil; which found the better knowledge of His works, treason to God; and an exercise of the reason and the judgment He had given, an insult to the Giver.
If there was ever a chance for the foolish to become learned,l’infâmedeprived them of it. If the light fought its way through the gross darkness of superstition,l’infâmequenched it. It prohibited Newton; burnt Bayle; and cursed the “Encyclopædia.” If men were once enlightened,l’infâmewould be cast down from the high places where it sat—as Pope or as King, as Calvinist or as Cardinal; but always as the enemy of that Justice which drives out oppression, as the sun drives out the night.
L’infâmecannot be translated by any single word. But if it must be, the best rendering of it is Intolerance.
No one can have any knowledge of the career or of the character of Voltaire without seeing that this Thing, to which in the year 1759 was first given the name ofInfâme, was his one, great, lifelong enemy. Loathing of it coursed in hisbourgeoisblood and was bred in his bones. The boy who had seen France starve to pay for the Sun King’s wars, and Paris persecuted to please his mistress and his confessor, had felt surge in him the first waves of that tireless indignation which was to turn a courtier into a reformer, and make a light soul, deep. By the time he himself became the Voice crying in the wilderness of men’s sorrows, the utterer of hard truths,l’infâmehad imprisoned, persecuted, and exiled him. And who is there who does not better hate wrong-doing when he has himself been wronged? He had revealed God to sages through Newton; and the hangman burnt the “English Letters.” He had studied history, especially the history of the religious wars, and he knew whatl’infâmehad done in the past as well as in the present. He declared, with that extraordinary mixture of levity and passion which is his alone, that he always had an access of fever on St. Bartholomew’s Day. He had seen the works of Boyer—fanatic and tyrant—the product of a shameful system, and not the less harmful in fact because he was honest in intention. He had seenl’infâmeprompt Damiens’s knife; and then, in its besotted inconsequence, avenge the crime of its own scholar by prohibiting all the works of enlightenment in France.
In 1757, in writing to d’Alembert, Voltaire had first givenl’infâmea name—the Phantom. A few days later he called it the Colossus. Under any name a d’Alembert would recognise it. On May 18, 1759, Frederick the Great spoke of it by that title it was to bear for ever, in one of those bitter yearning letters he wrote to his old friend. “You will still caressl’infâmewith one hand and scratch it with the other; you will treat it as you have treated me and all the world.” And in June Voltaire replied: “Your Majesty reproaches me with sometimes caressingl’infâme. My God, no! I only work to extirpate it.” And the next year—June 3, 1760—“I want you to crushl’infâme; that is the great point. It must bereduced to the same condition as it is in England. You can do it if you will. It is the greatest service one can render to humankind.”
Henceforward, his allusions to it in his letters became more and more frequent. Sometimes, he abbreviated it toÉcr. l’Inf.Sometimes he wrote in one corner“É. l’I.” “The first of duties is to annihilatel’inf.; confoundl’inf.as much as you can.”
“This Mr.Écrlinfdoes not write badly, said these worthy people.” One of his theories was that truths cannot be too often insisted on. “Rub it in! rub it in!” he would cry. He rubbed in hisinfâme. Now in passionate earnest, now in jest, now cynically, now bitterly, he alluded to it at all times and seasons and to all kinds of persons. To Damilaville, who was to take Theriot’s place as his correspondent and who himself loathedl’infâmewith a deadly intensity, Voltaire hardly wrote a letter without that “Crush the monster!” It was a catchword at last. “I end all my letters by sayingÉcr. l’inf., as Cato always said, That is my opinion and Carthage must be destroyed.” By it, he heated the zeal of his fellow-workers in the cause; quickened the “phlegmatic perseverance” of d’Alembert; and rallied to new effort Helvétius, Marmontel, Holbach, and a dozen lesser men.
It has been seen that he had loathed the Thing, a nameless monster, for fifty years. The insults of the “Journal de Trévoux” were the final spur to action. If Berthier had not pushed him to extremities, no doubt some other of “those serpents called Jesuits” would have done it equally effectually. The time was ripe; and Voltaire was ripe for the time. He flung down the glove at last and declared uponl’infâmean open war, which was to be war to the knife till he had no longer breath in his body, and the sword—his pen—fell from a dead hand.