by Will Durant
Before and after becoming a millionaire he cultivated the socially or politically powerful with a flattery that sometimes came close to sycophancy. In an Épître au Cardinal Dubois he called that vessel of vices a greater man than Cardinal Richelieu.100 When he was seeking admission to the French Academy and needed ecclesiastical support, he assured the influential Père de La Tour that he wished to live and die in the Holy Catholic Church.101 His printed lies would make a book; many were not printed, some were unprintable. He held this procedure justifiable in war; he felt that the Seven Years’ War was merely the sport of kings compared with his thirty years’ war against the Church; and a government that could jail a man for telling the truth could not justly complain if he lied. On September 19, 1764, at the top of his war, he wrote to d’Alembert: “As soon as the slightest danger comes up, kindly notify me, so that I may disown my writings in the public press with my habitual candor and innocence.” He denied almost all his works except the Henriade and the poem on the battle of Fontenoy. “One must show the truth to posterity with boldness, and to his contemporaries with circumspection. It is very hard to reconcile these two duties.”102
It goes without saying that he was vain: vanity is the spur of development, and the secret of authorship. Usually Voltaire kept his vanity under control; he frequently revised his writings according to suggestions and criticism offered in good spirit. He was generous in praise of authors who did not compete with him—Marmontel, Laharpe, Beaumarchais. But he could be childishly jealous of competitors, as in his slyly critical Éloge de Crébillon [père]; Diderot thought he had “a grudge against every pedestal.”103 His jealousy led him to scurrilous abuse of Rousseau: he called him “the clockmaker’s boy,” “a Judas who betrayed philosophy,” “a mad dog who bites everybody,” “a madman born of a chance mating of Diogenes’ dog with that of Erasistratus.”104 He thought the first half of Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse had been composed in a brothel, and the second in a madhouse. He predicted that Émile would be forgotten after a month’s time.105 He felt that Rousseau had turned his back upon that French civilization which, with all its sins and crimes, was precious to Voltaire as the very wine of history.
Being nerves and bones with little flesh, Voltaire was even more sensitive than Rousseau. And as we must feel our pains more keenly than our pleasures, so he took commendation in his stride but was “reduced to despair” by an adverse critique.106 He was seldom wise enough to restrain his pen; he answered every opponent, however small. Hume described him as one “who never forgives [? ], and never thinks an enemy beneath his notice.”107 Against persistent foes like Desfontaines and Fréron he fought without restraint or truce; he used every device of satire, ridicule, and vituperation, even crafty distortion of the truth.108 His rancor shocked old friends and made new enemies. “I know how to hate,” he said, “because I know how to love.”109 “By my stars [I am] a bit inclined to malice”;110 so he successfully moved all his cohorts to defeat de Brosses’ candidacy for the Academy (1770). He summed up the matter in a mixture of d’Artagnan and Rabelais:
As for my puny self, I make war up to the last moment—Jansenists, Molinists, Frérons, Pompignans to the right and to the left, and preachers, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I receive a hundred thrusts and give back two hundred, and I laugh. … God be praised! I look upon the whole world as a farce which sometimes becomes tragic. All is the same at the end of the day, and all is still the same at the end of days.111
In his anti-Semitism he turned upon an entire people the resentment generated by his encounters with a few individuals. From the standpoint of those memories Voltaire interpreted the history of the Jews, noting their faults meticulously, and seldom giving them the benefit of a doubt. He could not forgive the Jews for having begotten Christianity. “When I see Christians cursing Jews methinks I see children beating their fathers.”112 He saw in the Old Testament hardly anything but a record of murder, lechery, and wholesale assassination. The Book of Proverbs seemed to him “a collection of trivial, sordid, incoherent maxims, without taste, without selection, and without design”; and the Song of Songs was to him “an inept rhapsody.”113 However, he praised the Jews for their ancient disbelief in immortality, for refraining from proselytism, and for relative tolerance; the Sadducees denied the existence of angels, but suffered no persecution for heresy.
Did his virtues outweigh his vices? Yes, and even if we do not place in the scale his intellectual with his moral qualities. Against his parsimony we must place his generosity, against his love of money his cheerful acceptance of losses and his readiness to share his gains. Hear Collini, who as his secretary for many years must have known his faults:
Nothing is more baseless than the reproach of avarice made against him. … Stinginess never had a place in his home. I have never known a man whom his domestics could more easily rob. He was a miser only of his time. … He had, with regard to money, the same principles as for time: it was necessary, he said, to economize in order to be liberal.114
His letters reveal some of the many gifts he distributed, usually without revealing his name, and not only to friends and acquaintances, but even to persons whom he had never seen.115 He allowed the booksellers to keep the profit from his books. We have seen him helping Mlle. Corneille; we shall see him helping Mlle. Varicourt. We have seen him helping Vauvenargues and Marmontel; he did the same to Laharpe, who failed as a dramatist before developing into the most influential critic in France; Voltaire asked that half of his own governmental pension of two thousand francs be given to Laharpe, without letting him know who was the donor.116 “Everyone knows,” wrote Marmontel, “with what kindness he received all young men who showed any talent for poetry.”117
If Voltaire, conscious of his puny size, had little physical courage (allowing himself to be caned by Captain Beauregard in 1722118), he had astonishing moral courage (attacking the most powerful institution in history, the Roman Catholic Church). If he was bitter in controversy, he was quick to forgive opponents who sought reconciliation; “his fury vanished with the first appeal.”119 He lavished affection upon all who asked for it, and was loyal to his friends. When, after twenty-four years of association, he parted from Wagnière, “he cried like a child.”120 As to his sexual morality, it was above the level of his time with Mme. du Châtelet, below that level with his niece. He was tolerant of sexual irregularity, but rose in fine fury against injustice, fanaticism, persecution, hypocrisy, and the cruelties of the penal law. He defined morality as “doing good to mankind”; for the rest he laughed at prohibitions, and enjoyed wine, woman, and song in philosophical moderation. In a little story called “Bababec” he disposed of asceticism with characteristic pungency. Omni asks the Brahmin if there is any chance of his eventually reaching the nineteenth heaven.
“It depends,” replied the Brahmin, “on what kind of life you lead.”
“I try to be a good citizen, a good husband, a good father, a good friend. I sometimes lend money without interest to the rich; I give to the poor; I preserve peace among my neighbors.”
“But,” asked the Brahmin, “do you occasionally stick nails into your behind?”
“Never, reverend father.”
“I am sorry,” the Brahmin replied; “you will certainly never attain to the nineteenth heaven.”121
Voltaire’s crowning and redeeming virtue was his humanity. He stirred the conscience of Europe with his campaigns for the Calas and the Sirvens. He denounced war as “the great illusion”: “The victorious nation never profits from the spoils of the conquered; it pays for everything; it suffers as much when its armies are successful as when they are defeated”;122 whoever wins, humanity loses. He pleaded with men of diverse needs and states to remember that they were brothers; and that plea was heard with gratitude in the depths of Africa.123 Nor was he subject to Rousseau’s charge that those who preached love of mankind spread their love so widely that they had little left for their neighbor; all who knew him remembered his kindness and court
esy to the lowliest persons around him. He respected every ego, knowing its sensitivity from knowing his own.124 His hospitality survived the excessive calls upon it. “How moved I was,” wrote Mme. de Graffigny, “to find you always as perfectly good as you are great, and to see you doing all about you the good that you would have liked to do to all humanity.”125 He could be irascible and break out in a temper, but “you could never imagine,” wrote another visitor, “how lovable this man is in his heart.”126
As the fame of his help to persecuted persons spread through Europe, and reports circulated through France of his private charities and beneficence, a new image of Voltaire took form in the public mind. He was no longer Antichrist, no longer the warrior against a faith beloved by the poor; he was the savior of the Calas, the good seigneur of Ferney, the defender of a hundred victims of intolerant creeds and unjust laws. Genevan clergymen expressed their wonder whether, at the Last Judgment, their faith would balance the works of this impious man.127 Educated men and women forgave his impiety, his quarrels, his vanity, even his malice; they saw him grow out of hostility into benevolence; and they thought of him now as the venerable patriarch of French letters, the glory of France before the literate world. This was the man whom even the populace would acclaim when he came to Paris to die.
CHAPTER VI
Rousseau Romantic
1756-62
I. IN THE HERMITAGE: 1756-57
ROUSSEAU had moved into Mme. d’Épinay’s cottage on April 9, 1756, along with his common-law wife Thérèse Levasseur and her mother. For a while he was happy, loving the song and chatter of the birds, the rustling and fragrance of the trees, the peace of solitary walks in the woods. On his walks he carried pencil and notebook to catch ideas in their flight.
But he was not made for peace. His sensitivity doubled every trouble, and invented more. Thérèse was a faithful housewife, but she could not be a companion for his mind. “The man who thinks,” he wrote in Émile, “should not ally himself with a wife who cannot share his thoughts.”1 Poor Thérèse had small use for ideas, and little for written words. She gave him her body and soul; she bore with his tantrums, and probably replied in kind; she allowed him to skirt the edge of adultery with Mme. d’Houdetot, and was herself, so far as we know, humbly faithful except for an episode vouched for only by Boswell. But how could this simple woman respond to the range and wild diversity of a mind that was to unsettle half the Continent? Hear Rousseau’s own explanation:
What will the reader think when I tell him … that from the first moment in which I saw her, until that wherein I write, I have never felt the least love for her, that I never desired to possess her, … and that the physical wants which were satisfied with her person were to me solely those of the sex, and by no means proceeded from the individual? … The first of my wants, the greatest, strongest, and most insatiable, was wholly in my heart: the want of an intimate [spiritual] connection, as intimate as it could possibly be. This singular want was such that the closest corporal union was not sufficient; two souls would have been necessary.2
Thérèse might have made countercomplaints, for Rousseau had by this time ceased to perform his conjugal duties. In 1754 he had stated to a Geneva physician: “I have been subject for a long time to the crudest sufferings, owing to the incurable disorder of retention of the urine, caused by a congestion in the urethra, which blocks the canal to such an extent that even the catheters of the famed Dr. Daran cannot be introduced there.”3 He claimed to have ceased all sexual intercourse with Thérèse after 1755.4 “Until then,” he added, “I had been good; from that moment I became virtuous, or at least infatuated with virtue.”
The presence of his mother-in-law made the triangle painfully acute. He maintained her and his wife as well as he could with the income from his copying of music and the sale of his writings. However, Mme. Levasseur had other daughters, who required marriage portions, and were always in need. Grimm, Diderot, and d’Holbach made up, for the two women, an annuity of four hundred livres, pledging them to hide this from Rousseau lest his pride be hurt. The mother (according to Rousseau5) kept most of the money for herself and her other daughters, and contracted debts in Thérèse’s name. Thérèse paid these debts, and long concealed the annuity; finally Rousseau found it out, and flared into anger at his friends for so humiliating him. They fed his wrath by urging him to move from the Hermitage before the winter set in; the cottage (they argued) was not adapted for cold weather; and even if his wife could bear it, would the mother survive? Diderot, in his play Le Fils naturel,6 had written: “The good man lives in society; only the bad man lives alone.” Rousseau took this as applying to himself; now began a long quarrel in which reconciliations were only armistices. Rousseau felt that Grimm and Diderot, envious of the peace he had found in the woods, were trying to lure him back to a corrupt city. In a letter to his benefactress, Mme. d’Épinay (then in Paris), he revealed his character with candor and insight:
I want my friends to be my friends and not my masters; to advise me but not to try to rule me; to have every claim upon my heart but none upon my liberty. I consider it extraordinary the way people interfere, in friendship’s name, in my affairs, without telling me of theirs. … Their great eagerness to do me a thousand services wearies me; there is a touch of patronage about it that wearies me; besides, anyone else could do as much. . . .
As a recluse, I am more sensitive than other men. Suppose I fall out with one who lives amid the throng; he thinks of the matter for a moment, then a hundred and one distractions will make him forget it for the rest of the day. But nothing takes my thoughts off it. Sleepless, I think of it all night long; walking by myself, I think of it from sunrise to sunset. My heart has not an instant’s respite, and a friend’s unkindness will cause me to suffer, in a single day, years of grief. As an invalid I have a right to the indulgence due from his fellow men to the little weaknesses and temper of a sick man.... I am poor, and my poverty (or so it seems to me) entitles me to some consideration. ...
So do not be surprised if I hate Paris yet more and more. Nothing for me, from Paris, except your letters. Never shall I be seen there again. If you care to state your views on this subject, and as vigorously as you like, you have a right to do so. They will be taken in good part, and will be—useless.7
She answered him vigorously enough: “Oh, leave these petty complaints to the empty-hearted and empty-headed!”8 Meanwhile she made frequent inquiries about his health and comfort, shopped for him, and sent him small gifts.
One day, when it froze to an extreme degree, in opening a packet of several things I had asked her to buy for me, I found a little under-petticoat of English flannel, which she told me she had worn, and desired I should make of it an under-waistcoat. This more than friendly care appeared to me so tender—as if she had stripped herself to clothe me—that in my emotion I repeatedly kissed both the note and the petticoat, while shedding tears. Thérèse thought me mad.9
During his first year at the Hermitage he compiled a Dictionnaire de musique, and summarized in his own language the twenty-three volumes of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre on war and peace, education, and political reform. In the summer of 1756 he received from the author a copy of Voltaire’s poem on the earthquake that had killed fifteen thousand persons, and wounded fifteen thousand more, at Lisbon on All Saints’ Day, November 1, 1755. Voltaire, like half the world, wondered why a presumably beneficent Providence had chosen for this indiscriminate slaughter the capital of a country completely Catholic, and an hour—9:40 A.M.—when all pious people were worshiping in church. In a mood of utter pessimism Voltaire painted a picture of life and nature as being heartlessly neutral between evil and good. A passage in the Confessions gives us Rousseau’s reaction to this powerful poem.
Struck by seeing this poor man, overwhelmed (if I may so speak) with prosperity and honor, bitterly exclaiming against the miseries of this life, and finding everything to be wrong, I formed the mad project of making him turn his attention to himse
lf, and of proving to him that everything was right. Voltaire, while he appeared to believe in God, never really believed in anything but the Devil, since his pretended deity is a malicious being who, according to him, has no pleasure but in evil. The glaring absurdity of this doctrine is particularly disgusting from a man enjoying the greatest prosperity, who, from the bosom of happiness, endeavors, by the frightful and cruel image of all the calamities from which he is exempt, to reduce his fellow creatures to despair. I, who had a better right than he to calculate and weigh all the evils of human life, impartially examined them, and proved to him that of all possible evils there was not one to be attributed to Providence, and which had [not] its source rather in the abusive use man made of his faculties than in nature.10
So, on August 18, 1756, Rousseau sent to Voltaire a twenty-five-page “Lettre sur la Providence.” It began with a handsome acknowledgment:
Your latest poems, monsieur, have come to me in my solitude; and though all my friends know the love I have for your writings, I do not know who could have sent me this book unless it be yourself. I have found in it both pleasure and instruction, and have recognized the hand of the master; … I am bound to thank you at once for the volume and for your work.11