Indeed, he might well have borrowed a phrase from Pope—with whom he shared so many characteristics: wit, vanity, and venom among others—and spoken of “that long disease, my life.” Yet one may suspect that, artist as he was in almost everything else, he was also something of an artist in complaint; that, wretched as his health really was, it amused him to depict it as being even more wretched. On one occasion, at least, we find him candidly confessing: “I am always complaining, in accordance with my custom, but by and large, 1 am quite comfortable.”
The man who lived so long with death ended by look. ing rather like the conventional image of death itself, and even during youth and middle years his skin was stretched tight over bones that were nearly fleshless. But within this emaciated tenement the fire of life burned brightly, even dangerously, as everyone whose eyes ever met Voltaire’s own eyes was forced to see at a glance. A police report, which describes him as he was in his twenties, says that he looked like a satyr. Baron Grimm, having mentioned his fleshless face, speaks of his witty, caustic expression, his sparkling, mischievous eyes, and declares that his behavior exhibits all the fire of his writings; that the brilliant play of his personality is dazzling in its intensity. And Grimm concludes: “A man so constituted could not help being a valetudinarian; the sword wears out the scabbard.” Dr. John Moore, an Englishman, tells us that “an air of irony never entirely foresakes his face, but may always be observed lurking in his features, whether he frowns or smiles.” And another physician, Dr. John Morgan of Philadelphia, who visited Femey in 1764, reports that Voltaire “has a very sagacious but at the same time a comical look. Something satirical and very lively in his action ...’
Witness after witness could be called, but the fiftieth would only confirm what the first few tell us: that Voltaire was a brilliant, fascinating creature, as lively and mischievous as a monkey; but with the difference that his liveliness and mischief were directed by one of the most agile brains ever housed in a human skull.
We know, with a knowledge abundantly and noisily documented, that he was even Whistler’s superior in the gentle art of making enemies; but it is just as certain that his charm was irresistible when he wished it to be, and we may assume that this charm showed itself at a very tender age. Otherwise, the sprightly Abbé de Chateauneuf would hardly have bothered to act as little François’s godfather, and amuse himself by teaching the child of three or four years to recite a string of irreverent verses from a poem called the Moïsade. Nor, if the budding charm had not flowered, would Châteauneuf have sponsored his precocious charge in the free-thinking society of the Temple, the house of the Grand Prior of Vendôme, where the Abbé de Chaulieu presided over an aristocratic circle of deists and libertines, whose boldness of speculation, and of wit, often threatened to spill over deistical frontiers into the bleak region of pure atheism. It was in this society that young Arouet’s charm and other talents met their first important test; an encounter in which they scored a dashing triumph. Their possessor breathed deep of a heady atmosphere, and found it very pleasant indeed. It was nice, the notary’s son discovered, to be able to look round a supper-table and declare, with easy assurance: “Here we are all either princes or poets.” But this brings us to the first of those five famous Voltairean periods: Youth. And of this period, as of the others, certain features must be considered; even in an introduction that does not pretend to biographical adequacy.
At the outset, then, it is important to note that, health apart, François Marie Arouet got off to an excellent start in life, as the younger son of a rising family of the middle class; a class whose successful members were beginning to enjoy certain social, as well as merely financial, rewards; the class which, with the passing of a century, was destined to become dominant in France. On his father’s side, the boy’s ancestors were tradesmen, artisans, and farmers; on his mother’s, they were much the same sort of folk, with a few small men of law in the immediate background; and, on both sides, the genealogical tree was deeply rooted in the soil of Poitou. But the residence of Arouet père—ancien notaire au Châtelet de Paris, prosperous official of the exchequer, whose friendly clients included such great noblemen as the dukes of Sully and Richelieu, and so glamorous a lady as Ninon de Lenclos-was not frequented by farmers and tradesmen. The society that met there was lively and often distinguished; the family’s Jansenism, which seems to have been taken to heart only by the elder son, Armand, cast no pall over the household. Had it done so, Châteauneuf would not have made himself at home there; and, if the father had been as grave a Jansenist as some biographers would make him out, he would hardly have welcomed Châteauneuf, with his lessons from the Moïsade, or even Ninon’s other dear friend, the exJesuit, Abbé Nicholas Gédoyn. It is highly probable that the gay and attractive Mme. Arouet—dead at forty, when her younger son was seven—was the family’s social magnet. In any case, the child who was nicknamed Zozo was familiar with polite company and conversation from the first moment that his ears could make sense of the sounds uttered by the huge creatures who surrounded him.
The Jesuits took care of his formal education, at the famous College of Louis-le-Grand, from his ninth to his seventeenth year; while his worldly education, as we have seen, was taken in hand by the entirely competent Châteauneuf. Some writers have made much of Voltaire’s association with the Temple, and his participation in the legendary orgies of the Regency; but it is obvious that he had no more taste than physical fitness for the career of a debauchee. What he had a taste for was the business of rising in the world. He used the society of the Temple for his own purposes. At school he made fast friends with aristocrats who were destined for places of power, and in the circle of Chaulieu and the Grand Prior of Vendôme he acquired other valuable friends, while skillfully exploiting an audience whose approval could assure the fortune of a promising young poet. “A great man’s friendship is the gift of heaven,” declared Philoctetes in Voltaire’s first play. It was a truth that he never forgot, a precept by which he continually profited. Frederick of Prussia was only the most exalted of his conquests. The Marquis de Saint-Ange, Sully, Richelieu, the Duchesse du Maine, Bolingbroke, the Maréchal and Maréchale de Villars, Madame de Pompadour—these, and many more, he cultivated and used along his way, expertly and with assiduity. But we must remember that it was no fault to cultivate the great in a society constituted as was the society of France and England in the eighteenth century; if, indeed, it is ever a fault. And we must remember, too, that in most cases Voltaire gave far more than he received; that in many instances, while accepting ephemeral favors, he bestowed a kind of secondary immortality upon those whose names he linked with his own.
The youth’s father, who had little use for literature as a profession, most naturally wished his son to follow in his successful footsteps; and the son made some languid efforts to interest himself in the study of the law. But his clever, darting, curious, brilliant mind refused to be interested in that particular subject. Such dullness was not to be endured, when one could be a poet and sup with princes. The father exerted his authority by sending the poet to Caen for a few months, far from his princes: but the rebel returned from banishment with no greater liking for the law. And when young Arouet was sent to The Hague, in the suite of the Marquis de Châteauneuf, this corrective effort ended in his having to be called home because of a fiery, futile, and diplomatically embarrassing love affair with a Protestant young lady who endures in history under the nickname of Pimpette. Arouet père did not know it, of course, but he might as well have asked the moon to stand still, or the Pleiades to dance a quadrille, as ask his son to forgo the career towards which his powers inevitably urged him.
He aspired to be a great tragic poet, but he began by being a witty versifier, with a wit that was no respecter of persons. He composed lampoons against the Regent, which delighted the Duchesse du Maine’s little court at Sceaux, and he was suspected of composing others; so it was natural, as things went in his day, that among the first rewards of his wit sh
ould be brief, monitory exiles from Paris, and a comfortable stay of some eleven months in the Bastille. He came out of prison with a finished draft of Oedipe, with much of the Henriade written, and with a new name; a name that was destined by its maker to serve as a patent of the nobility which birth had unkindly denied him. Monsieur Arouet de Voltaire. It sounded well, and it looked well. The young man assumed his new nobiliary particle, and his new surname, without fuss or fanfare; a few signatures to a few letters, a few words to friends, and the thing was done.
That anyone should have ever wondered why this change was made is rather puzzling. The principal’s own explanation to J. B. Rousseau, that he had been unhappy under the name of Arouet, is unacceptable; he remained Arouet, but with a delightful addition. Nor is there any sense in-Saint-Simon’s suggestion that the poet sought a disguise. Cardinal Dubois, the apothecary’s son and favorite of the Duc d’Orleans, who knew all about the art of rising in the world, put his coarse thumb on the obvious truth when he accused Voltaire of wishing, quite simply, to ennoble himself in the eyes of society. There is no need to seek any other reason.
But whence came the name Voltaire? Here is a mystery that might well arouse curiosity, and it has done so to an extent that is probably disproportionate to the importance of the truth behind the mystery, whatever it may be. One popular explanation is that the name is an imperfect anagram of Arouet, le jeune; but there are cogent arguments against this theory. Another suggestion is that the name came from a family estate; but different writers favor different estates, on both the paternal and maternal sides, and careful research has been unable to transfer any one of these properties from the realm of imagination to that of reality. One writer derives the name from the phrase, “Je vole ma terre.” A second traces it back to Volterra, in Italy, birthplace of Persius, whose satires young Arouet read at Louis-le-Grand. A third would associate it with the schoolboy’s nickname: le volontaire. But a recent and zealous student of the subject2 rejects all these and other explanations, while presenting a novel solution of his own, which he supports learnedly and persuasively. According to this theory, Voltaire took his name from the town of Airvault, a place in which the Arouet clan did considerable business, and close to Saint-Loup, their place of origin. The poet merely transposed the syllables of Airvault, changed some letters without altering the basic pronunciation of his product, and the trick was done.
Wherever the name came from, its bearer remained sensitive to any questions regarding it, even decades after he had made it glorious. Only once, however, did his assumed nobility involve Voltaire in serious trouble —some seven years arter the assumption—and then the upshot of the incident proved fortunate. The Chevalier de Rohan chose to pick up Voltaire’s name as an instrument of insult; Voltaire replied in kind; the Chevalier had the impudent upstart beaten by lackeys; the bourgeois poet challenged the great aristocrat to a duel; the aristocrat had the bourgeois sent to the Bastille; after a fortnight, the prisoner was released on the condition that he go straight into exile in England; and the three years which Voltaire spent in England proved one of the important and fruitful experiences of his life.
Just how important it was is still the subject of controversy. One extreme view is that England was chiefly responsible for all that Voltaire became as a liberal thinker, as a foeman of fanaticism and intolerance, and as a defender of the rights of individual man; that in England he learned both to reason and to feel correctly; that, in Morley’s famous phrase, he arrived a poet and returned home a philosopher. Excessive claims on one side of the Channel have evoked exaggerated counter-arguments from the other side. It is as foolish to say that Voltaire owed England practically nothing as it is to say that be owed England practically everything. The scholar3 who argues that Voltaire did not have to cross the water in order to become a deist is on firm ground. The child was already lisping deism when he recited the Moisade. Châteauneuf was a deist; the Temple was alive with deism; all through France deistical currents were running strongly, often underground; and, above all, Pierre Bayle had been a deist. Was not the influence of Bayle dominant in Voltaire’s thinking? Was not the pupil pleased to refer to his master as his spiritual father ? And what was the Henriade, published more than a year before the fracas with Rohan, but a powerful deistical poem which violently attacked all organized religion, with a particular concentration of fire-power on that which stems from Rome?
So far so good. When the same scholar relegates Bolingbroke to a secondary position of influence, his argument still rests on fairly solid foundations. We may safely agree with him when he contends that it is always more or less the same Voltaire whom we meet in most of his works; that he was, even, very nearly “complete” in Oedipe. But when he refuses to credit Locke with as much influence as Voltaire himself attributed to the Englishman, he walks more shakily; and the danger is that, in his conscientious effort to arrive at the exact importance of the English sojourn, he may be encouraging readers to believe that it was less significant than it really was.
The truth would seem to be that Voltaire drank deep from two springs: from English freethinkers and scientific investigators, and from French sources that were similarly congenial to his intellect and temperament. An authority already drawn upon sees Voltaire’s third period of development—what is known as the Cirey period, spent in the company of Madame du Châtelet-as one which he employed in harmonizing “the influences of the two preceding periods—in his assimilating writers interested in the same subjects, such as Pope and Fontenelle, Bolingbroke and Bayle, Woolston and Meslier. This assimilation is not exclusively characteristic of Voltaire, it is typical of the whole French movement in ideas from 1730 to 1750 ... the French intellectual atmosphere of 1730-50 was subject to two influences—a strong traditional current and an equally strong English current. Voltaire merely breathed the same air which all intellectual Frenchmen were breathing.” 4
One estimate of the value of the English sojourn, which combines brevity with reasonable accuracy, is Lanson’s: “England aroused, armed, and matured Voltaire : it did not make him.” He came to England at the age of thirty-one—in the last year of George the First’s reign—established as a brilliantly successful poet-play-wright, destined to be a worthy successor to Comeilie and Racine. Bolingbroke made him free of the highest Tory circles, while the ambassador of the government which had jailed him to oblige a Rohan was his sponsor with the Whigs. He was quickly acquainted with the leading writers and thinkers of the island, and soon friendly with a. number of them. While enjoying the society of Pope and Swift, Gay, Young, and Thomson, he discovered the writings of Bacon, Locke, and Newton. He learned to read and write and think in English, and was presented at Court. He revised the Henriade, dedicated it to the Queen, and is said to have made two thousand or more pounds from the sale of subscriptions. He began his play Brutus, worked on his History of Charles XII, and soaked up the impressions and information which were to form the substance of the English Letters (Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais)—in which he contrasted English political liberty, religious tolerance, and commercial enterprise with the prevailing spirit and actions of France, surveyed English poetry, and sketched the progress of English thought from Bacon to Newton.
The degree of religious tolerance prevailing in England could not fail to impress an author who was forced, at home, to write and print with cautious eyes fixed on powerful, fanatical churchmen. The degree of individual freedom was wonderful to a middle-class poet who had found himself at the mercy of an aristocracy which could use the Bastille as a kind of private jail. Wherever Voltaire looked in England, high or low, he found reasons for admiration. At the bottom of the scale there was the peasant, whose feet were not bruised by wooden shoes, who ate white bread, and whose clothes were not rags; while at the top of the scale, there was the philosopher, who was free to pursue his speculations, openly, as far as he had the wit to travel. On one side of the Channel, Voltaire thought that he saw the sunshine of day; on the other side, the da
rkness of night. When he returned home in 1729—with his skepticism and his deism strongly nourished by his English contacts, with a matured realization of his own intellectual position and a clear view of his direction—he was determined to uphold the torch of liberal thinking in France, and there make it blaze so that all Europe might learn to read by its light.
During the five years which elapsed between the end of the English exile and the beginning of the long liaison with Madame du Châtelet, Voltaire began to write the Pucelle, his notorious, bawdy, mock-heroic poem on the life of Joan of Arc; prepared Charles XII for a surrepti. tious printing, and had it smuggled into Paris; saw his Brutus, Ériphyle, and Zaïre acted with varying degrees of success, published his Temple of Taste, in which he sharpened his critical knives on several famous victims; and was forced to flee Paris in consequence of an unauthorized edition of the English Letters. For a while, during these years, he enjoyed the generous hospitality of a worldly, witty, and possibly wicked old lady, the Comtesse de Fontaine-Martel, in whose house he lived, whose horses he rode behind, and whose ample income he enjoyed having spent for his entertainment. When she died, he moved—but not too quickly-to the house of a wealthy corn merchant, named Demoulin, where he made himself at home. After the Comtesse’s, this setting was comparatively mean, but it seems to have suited his convenience, and it is likely that he was engaged with Demoulin in an occupation to which he was quite as devoted as he was to literature: the business of making money. Any account of Voltaire’s career and character would be sadly incomplete if it failed to take note of his financial talents; so let us take such note, at least briefly, at this point, even if it means that we must keep a most remarkable woman waiting for a moment or two.
The Portable Voltaire (Portable Library) Page 2