The road to Potsdam was open. Voltaire, at first crushed by grief, hating Lunéville and Cirey, ill at ease in Paris, was ready for a new way of life; ready to burn his French bridges behind him, even if it meant gravely displeasing his own lawful monarch. Within nine months of Madame du Châtelet’s death, Frederick the Great of Prussia was ecstatically preparing to welcome his famous guest. “You will be received,” wrote the king, “as the Virgil of this age; and the gentleman m ordinary to Louis XV will give place, if you please, to the great poet. Good-bye; may the rapid coursers of Achilles bring you, hilly roads flatten themselves before you! May the German inns change into palaces to receive you! May the winds of Aeolus be imprisoned in the vessels of Ulysses, may rainy Orion disappear, and our vegetable-garden Nymphs be changed into goddesses, so that your journey and your reception may be worthy of the author of the Henriade:”
It all sounded wonderful; and perhaps it might have been, if only .. But, no, there was not a chance. Disaster was inevitable when Voltaire’s character and Frederick’s power came together under the same roof, when they met daily at the same supper-table. The king was determined to be only a friend, but he could not help speaking and acting like a sovereign when his pet poet and philosopher provoked him; and perhaps on some other occasions as well. The poet took Frederick’s money, food, and lodging, along with official and unofficial honors, but he was temperamentally incapable of being a good pensioner. He could not help getting into mischief himself, nor stirring up trouble for others. That a shady speculation might be intensely distasteful to the man on whose largesse he was living did not for an instant restrain him from fishing in dirty waters. That a witty pamphlet, designed to heap ridicule on the president of Frederick’s precious Academy, might be hotly resented by Frederick himself did not keep Voltaire from writing it, or from continuing its circulation after he had assured his royal patron of its destruction. Voltaire equivocated, lied, cheated. Frederick became cold, harsh, contemptuous; and played the king. Grave differences were aggravated, without being dignified, by petty, despicable tricks and maneuvers on both sides. Both men felt sorry for themselves, saw themselves as the victims of cruel disillusionment. What had been intended to be an ideal, philosophical union of prince and poet; what had been meant to serve as model and lesson to an admiring world, was instead, quite simply, a sorry mess from beginning to end.
The story of this mess has been written many times. It is a mixture of low comedy, high comedy, and farce. It began with Voltaire’s involvement with a Berlin usurer, reached its climax in the quarrel with Maupertuis, against whom Voltaire directed his deadly satire in the famous Dr. Akakia pamphlet which so outraged Frederick and so amused Europe, and ended with the arrest and release of Voltaire and his niece by the zealous Frankfort police. It all makes amusing reading for those who enjoy, as most of us do, the spectacle of great men making fools of themselves. But it need not be told again here. The Prussian sojourn of almost three years was a comparatively barren period of Voltaire’s intellectual and literary life. During his stay with Frederick, he finally published his Century of Louis XIV, and made notes for the miscellany which was to be known as the Philosophical Dictionary; but the first had long been on the stocks, while the second, in one form or another, was to occupy him off and on for the rest of his life.
It is probably just as well that the Prussian episode was over and done with as quickly as it was. When it was finished, Voltaire was his own man again—perhaps really and completely his own man for the first time—and that is what he was fit to be. No verdict need be given on a quarrel in which both parties were culpable. If Frederick was goaded into playing the part of a royal boor, he was goaded by a malicious expert in the management of pic and banderilla. Even Voltaire’s most uncritical admirers must agree that the great king was justified when he wrote to his difficult friend, some years after their parting: “Would that Heaven, which gave you so much wit, had given you judgment proportionately!”
For a time it seemed that he had really burned his bridges behind him. Barred from Paris, he spent half a year flitting from Mayence to Strasbourg to Colmar, where he began to write for the great Encyclopedia and corrected his Annals of the Empire, while his niece worked to open the doors that were shut against him. But his cause was rendered more hopeless than ever when his Essay on Manners was published in a mangled form at The Hague. This history, full of free-thinking that was hateful at once to throne and church, could hardly endear him to the authorities he was seeking to propitiate. “Rome,” it declared, “has always decided in favor of the opinion which most degraded the human mind, and most completely annihilated human reason.” Exile stretched before him. But it was an exile which led to Geneva, to the house which he called Les Délices; and this was but one step from Ferney.
He had reached the last, long period of his long life; a period that was to be filled with ceaseless activity. During it he was to write Candide, that perfect thing, which will be read as long as men can read, even if some day every other line of its author’s is utterly forgotten. He was to bombard l’infâme with deadly pamphlets, and wage tireless, tedious, expensive battles in behalf of its unfortunate victims: three years to win a declaration of innocence for Calas, brutally executed on charges of having murdered a son because he wished to turn Catholic; nine years to obtain the exculpation of the Sirvens, accused of murdering a daughter for a similar reason; twelve years to vindicate the Chevalier de la Barre, most horribly put to death for an offense against religion of which he had not been proved guilty! These are the famous cases which have forever linked Voltaire’s name with the word, and concept, justice. But there were other cases only less notable, a series of them which began with his unsuccessful intervention in behalf of Admiral Byng, the unfortunate British officer who, as Voltaire ironically remarks in Candide, was shot “in order to encourage the others.” The man of words, during what are the quiet and slippered years of most lives, was vigorously translating words into deeds.
He was busily engaged with other matters as well. That much-whispered-about delight of decades—La Pucelle-was pirated in 1755, and finally authorized seven years later. Work for the Encyclopedia continued. The Philosophical Dictionary began to make its appearance, charged with the essence of its author. Natural Law was published, and promptly burned at Paris. The influential Treatise on Tolerance made its way into the world, where it found one of its approving readers in Benjamin Franklin. There were numberless letters to be written, including those to Catherine of Russia, who acknowledged their worth by declaring that their writer had formed her mind; a responsibility, one may remark, of no mean proportions. There was a daughter to be adopted, furnished with a dowry, and properly married off. There were tales to be written that would be only a little less perfect than Candide. There was amusement to be found in a running battle with the Calvinistic fathers of Geneva; and what could be more stimulating to an aged invalid than an endless round of lively quarrels and controversies, notably one with Jean Jacques Rousseau, that child of nature who wished men to go on all fours? There was a biography of Peter the Great to be turned out on order. And, of course, one could not stop writing plays, producing plays, and acting in plays. A life from. which the theater was excluded would have been no life at all to the man whose first love it had been and whose last love it would be.
At Ferney and the nearby estate of Tourney, the Lord and Count of Tourney—possessed at last of a legitimate if purchased title—cultivated his garden on a heroic scale and a diversified pattern. First of all, his chateau had to be practically torn down and rebuilt; marshes had to be drained, parks laid out, guest houses provided, a Catholic church solemnly erected by the most powerful anti-Christian in Europe (Deo erexit Voltaire), and trees planted—avenues of trees, miles and miles of trees. After that came the horse-breeding, the silkworm culture, the bee-keeping, the lace-making, the manufacture of silk and silk stockings, the watchmaking, and the care of one’s workmen and peasants; a care which moved the patriarc
h of Ferney to fight for the mitigation of feudal rights and the decrease of taxes.
Then there were the guests, always the guests, scores and hundreds of them, of all nationalities, many famous and others obscure, some who came for an hour, some who made themselves comfortable for months on end; a steady tide that flowed in and out of Ferney, while the master dispensed a hospitality that entitled him to call himself the hotel keeper for all Europe. But he was less free with his time than with anything else that belonged to him. Ferney and Tourney might be filled to overflowing with visitors, and almost always were, but Voltaire remained inaccessible most of the day, working as uninterruptedly as if he were the tenant of a lonely ower.
So life went at Ferney, with a sanitative diminution of guests during the final years, from the time that Voltaire was sixty-five until the time that he was eighty-three. As he grew older, the Lord and Count of Tourney lay longer and longer in bed, clung more closely to his dressing-gown and nightcap, and drank less and less coffee; but he had the trick of working in bed as well as anywhere else, and he learned to work without his cherished stimulant. He had reason to be well pleased with the Burgundian retreat that he had found and made for himself on the shore of Lake Leman, less than four miles from Geneva; an ideal haven for an author who might suddenly have urgent reasons for wishing to be in France one hour and in Switzerland the next. Everything had turned out very well, indeed, in what was after all, despite Leibnitz and Pope, not quite the best of all possible worlds. He might not live to finish his final deistical study, La Bible enfin expliquée, although there was really no reason why he should not, since he had lived so long already. But he could publish it tentatively, in an incomplete form. And, afterwards, he could get on with his play Irène. That he would finish, despite all the nonexistent devils in a nonexistent hell.
He was still correcting it, as he went into his eighty-fourth year, even after the tragedy had been read and accepted for production by the Comédie Française. Production in Paris. Eh? Well, why not? He would go to Paris himself, to the city which he had scarcely seen for twenty-eight years, along with his play. He would rehearse Irène as it should be rehearsed, and he would sit in triumph at its first night. Louis XV was dead: killed by smallpox almost four years ago. Of course, his successor would not welcome an author whom he feared as a dangerous and subversive force; but, through the long years of an exile which had never been formally decreed, Voltaire had acquired a prestige so formidable that a stronger king than Louis XVI might well have been willing to avoid an open clash with him. The mentor of Frederick of Prussia, Catherine of Russia, Gustavus of Sweden, Christian of Denmark, Joseph of Austria, and Stanislaus of Poland, was a king in his own right; one who knew his strength. It was almost certain that he could go to Paris, and return to Ferney, as he willed.
It all worked out very nearly as he had planned, excepting that he did not go back to Ferney.
Much eloquence has been spent on Voltaire’s triumphant, magnificent, glorious, unparalleled return to the city of his birth, and the eloquence has been well spent. John Morley has called this last visit, this final blaze of a setting sun, one of the historic events of the eighteenth century. By the historical standards of which Voltaire himself was one of the first exponents, this description is just. The visit, which lasted for three and a half months, crowned one of the eighteenth century’s most significant careers; the life of a man who had grown inextricably with the life of his age—a man who was at once an avid inbreather and a mighty trumpet of the Zeitgeist.
In the streets of Paris, Voltaire scored triumphs of a kind that are now known only to film stars. Receiving hundreds of callers in his apartment at the Marquis de Villette’s, his audiences were regal. The Academy did homage to its greatest member, who had been barred for so long from the company that liked to think itself immortal. Voltaire did not sit in triumph at the first night of Irène, for on that night he was close to death; but, save for himself and the King, all Paris was present to applaud the poet who had left the Bastille with his first play ready for production some sixty years before. Cheating death for a little longer, and tasting immortality while he lived, Voltaire was on hand for the sixth performance, on the same day that he had been uniquely honored by the Academy. Submitting to an ovation that was literally overwhelming, and poetically and pertinaciously crowned with laurel—not once but twice—the incredible invalid cried out that they were killing him with glory. And he was right.
During these months in which Voltaire held court in Paris, an incident occurred which is of particular interest to Americans. It has been recounted often: how Benjamin Franklin called at the Hotel Villette with his young grandson, how the two great men spoke English together until they were reminded that the rest of the company could not understand their conversation, how the American asked the Frenchman to give the boy his blessing, and how the old deist responded by placing his hands on the lad’s head, while accompanying his gesture with three English words—“God and Liberty.” But there was another meeting of the two philosophers, the first in public, of which we have an amusing account that should be better known than it is. The scene was the Academy of Sciences; the reporter was John Adams, writing in his Diary. When the two famous men were introduced, they merely bowed politely to each other, but this did not satisfy the assembled audience. So, going a step further, they clasped each other by the hand. But it was still not enough. Finally, they understood that they were expected to embrace à la Française. This they graciously consented to do, whereupon, writes Adams, “the cry immediately spread through the whole kingdom, and I suppose, all over Europe, ‘Qu’il etait charmant de voir embrasser Solon et Sophoclel’ ” (“How delightful to see Solon and Sophocles embracel”)10
Yes, they were killing him with glory. Having rallied from a collapse which he had thought must prove fatal —during which he had tried to take out insurance against a dog’s burial by signing a declaration that he was dying in the Catholic faith in which he was born —he sank again under the weight of his age and his exertions, still full of plans which included work on an Academy Dictionary of the French language, and the purchase of a Parisian residence. The end came on May 30, 1778, after two weeks of final struggle. The priests arrived to make sure of their old enemy, whose confession of faith they now held in their hands; but Voltaire had done all he proposed to do along that line—he had refused absolution and the last sacrament at the time of his recantation—or he was too weak and weary to play his part in what, at best, could have been only a farce. In any case, he waved the priests away, saying: “Let me die in peace.”
That was how he died, at peace with the god of his watchmaker’s universe, but in a state of sin so far as the Archbishop of Paris and all other strict ecclesiastics were concerned. The dog’s ditch threatened, after all. However, thanks to his nephew, the Abbé Mignot, Voltaire’s body was smuggled out of the city by night, and buried with proper rites in the chapel of the monastery at Scellieres, in Champagne. Not until the Revolution was in spate were his bones to come back to Paris, to the Panthéon, but when they did come they were borne on the crest of a triumph which topped even the glory he had known alive.
We are sure that he was a great man—but what was the nature of his greatness? The superlatives of a Goethe or a Nodier are hardly helpful when it comes to answering this question. We must try to distinguish, define, and evaluate.
He was, obviously, not a great creative writer on the level of a Dante, a Milton, or a Shakespeare. Nor, in his prose, was he one on the level of a Tolstoy, a Balzac, a Dostoevski, a Dickens, or a Proust. He created no characters, he filled no scenes with bustling life, he explored no depths of human nature, he exposed and manipulated no psychological subtleties. In other words, he was not a great modem novelist, for the good and sufficient reason that in his day the modem novel had not yet been born; and he was no originator, no pioneer in literature. Candide is, indeed, a masterpiece, the origins and elements of which have been traced to The Thousand and One
Nights, Gulliver’s Travels, The Persian Letters, Gil Blas, and Le Sopha. It is a tale which, as Gustave Lanson has said, gathers and filters the traditions and formulas of all sorts of tales—philosophical, social, satirical, allegorical, fairy, and oriental. It is, in short, the tale at its highest level. But, even at its highest, this form is not one which is capable of bearing burdens that other literary forms can bear; not one in which the experience of life can find its fullest, most profound; and most affecting expression.
Voltaire was great neither as a lyric nor as a didactic poet. He was an admirable, witty, even brilliant play-wright, who knew perfectly how to play the game in accordance with fashionable rules; but he was not a great dramatist, because his plays were never capable of crossing national and linguistic frontiers, and are hardly alive in France today. He was not a philosopher in the sense that Locke and Descartes were philosophers. He left no great history behind him, as did one of his visitors to Lausanne-Edward Gibbon by name —the first volume of whose majestic work was published two years before Voltaire’s death. He was less successful than Benjamin Franklin in scientific experimentation, and he was much less of a naturalist than his colleague, d’Alembert. His Biblical studies, on which he lavished so much time, and which afforded him so much amusement, were soon superseded by the unremitting labors of gentlemen living on the other side of the Rhine. What, then, are we left with in the way of greatness?
The Portable Voltaire (Portable Library) Page 4