The Portable Voltaire (Portable Library)

by Francois Voltaire

  He has written prose for him now, as he once wrote verses for d’Amaud—for the pleasure of doing it: and for another motive less worthy of a philosopher—to annoy me. A true author, you seel

  But all this is but the most insignificant part of what has happened. I too am unfortunately an author, and in the opposite camp. I have no scepter, but I have a pen: and I have used it26—I really do not know how—to turn Plato—with his stipendiaries, his predictions, his dissections, and his insolent quarrel with Koenig—into ridicule. My raillery is quite innocent, but I did not know when I wrote it I was laughing at the pastimes of the King. The affair is unlucky. I have to deal with conceit and with despotic power—two very dangerous things. I also have reason to believe that my affair with the Duke of Würtemberg has given offense. It was discovered: and I have been’ made to feel it was discovered....

  I am at the moment very wretched and very ill: and, to crown all, I have to sup with the King. Truly, a feast of Damocles! I need to be as philosophical as was the real Plato in the house of Dionysius.

  TO MME. DENIS

  Berlin, December 18, 1752.

  I enclose, my dear, the two contracts from the Duke of Würtemberg: they secure you a little fortune for life. I also enclose my will. Not that your prophecy that the King of Prussia would worry me to death is going to be fulfilled. I have no mind to come to such a foolish end: nature afflicts me much more than he can, and it is only prudent that I should always have my valise packed and my foot in the stirrup, ready to start for that world where, happen what may, kings will be of small account.

  As I do not possess here below a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, I cannot pretend to make war. My only plan is to desert honorably, to take care of my health, to see you again, and forget this three years’ nightmare. I am very well aware that “the orange has been squeezed”: now we must consider how to save the peel. I am compiling, for my instruction, a little Dictionary for the Use of Kings.

  “My friend” means “my slave.”

  “My dear friend” means “you are absolutely nothing to me.”

  By “I will make you happy” understand “I will bear you as long as I have need of you.”

  “Sup with me tonight” means “I shall make game of you this evening.”

  The dictionary might be long: quite an article for the Encyclopedia.

  Seriously, all this weighs on my heart. Can what I have seen be true? To take pleasure in making bad blood between those who live together with him! To say to a man’s face the kindest things—and then to write brochures upon him—and what brochures! To drag a man away from his own country by the most sacred promises, and then to ill-treat him with the blackest malicel What contradictions! And this is he who wrote so philosophically: whom I believed to be a philosopher! And whom I called the “Solomon of the North!”

  You remember that fine letter which never succeeded in reassuring you? “You are a philosopher,” said he, “and so am I.” On my soul, sir, neither the one nor the other of us!

  My dear child, I shall certainly never believe myself to be a philosopher until I am with you and my household gods. The difficulty is to get away from here. You will remember what I told you in my letter of November 1st. I can only ask leave on the plea of my health. It is not possible to say “I am going to Plombieres” 27 in December.

  There is a man named Pérrard here: a sort of minister of the Gospel and born, like myself, in France: he asked permission to go to Paris on business: the King answered that he knew his affairs better than he did himself, and that there was no need at all for him to go to Paris.

  My dear child, when I think over the details of all that is going on here, I come to the conclusion that it cannot be true, that it is impossible, that I must be mistaken—that such a thing must have happened at Syracuse three thousand years ago. What is true is that I sincerely love you and that you are my only consolation.

  TO MME. DU DEFFAND

  Colmar, April 23, 1754.

  I feel very guilty, dear madam, at not having answered your last letter. I do not make my bad health an excuse: for, although I cannot write with my own hand, I could at least have dictated the most melancholy things, which, to those who, like you, know all the misfortunes of life and are no longer deceived by its illusions, are not unacceptable.

  I remember that I advised you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. As far as I am concerned, it is the only pleasure I have left. When I feel an attack of indigestion coming on, I picture two or three princes as gainers by my death, take courage out of spite, and conspire against them with rhubarb and temperance.

  Still, notwithstanding my desire to do them a bad turn by living on, I have been very ill. Add to that, these cursed Annals of the Empire, which put an extinguisher on all imagination and take up all my time, and you have the reasons for my idleness. I have been working It these stupid things for a Princess of Saxony—who deserves something livelier from me. She is a most agreeable royalty, and has things much better done than the Duchesse du Maine, while her court allows one much more liberty than did Sceaux, but, unfortunately, the climate is horrible: and just now I care for nothing but the sun. You cannot see it, madam, in the present state of your eyes: but it is good at least to feel warm. The horrible winter we have had makes one wretched: and the news that reaches us does not improve matters.

  I wish I could send you some trifles to amuse you, but the works I am now engaged on are far from amusing.

  In London I was an Englishman: and in Germany a German: with you my chameleon coat would soon take on brighter colors—your lively imagination would fire my drooping wits.

  I have been reading the Memoirs of Lord Bolingbroke. It seems to me that he talks better than he writes. I declare I find his style as difficult of comprehension as his conduct. He draws a frightful portrait of Lord Oxford —without adducing any proofs. This is the Oxford whom Pope calls:

  “A Soul supreme, in each hard instance try‘d,

  Above all Pain, all Passion, and all Pride,

  The rage of Pow’r, the blast of public breath,

  The Lust of Lucre, and the dread of Death.”

  Bolingbroke would have employed his leisure better if he had written good memoirs on the War of the Succession, the Peace of Utrecht, the character of Queen Anne, the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, Louis XIV, the Duke of Orleans, and the French and English ministers. If he had been skillful enough to blend his Apologia with these great subjects, he would have made it immortal: instead of which it is completely lost in the abbreviated and confused little book he has left us.

  I cannot understand how a man, who appeared to take such wide views, should condescend to such trivialities. His translator is quite mistaken in saying I try to proscribe the study of facts. The reproach I bring against Lord Bolingbroke is that he has given us too few, and that the few he records he smothers in trivialities. However, I think his Memoirs will have given you a certain amount of pleasure, and as you read them you must very often have found yourself on familiar ground.

  Good-by, madam; let us try to bear our earthly afflictions patiently. Courage is of some use: it flatters self-love, it lessens misfortune: but it does not give one back one’s sight. I always most sincerely pity you: your fate touches me deeply.

  TO MME. DU DEFFAND

  Colmar, May 19, 1754.

  Do you know Latin, madam? No; that is why you ask me if I prefer Pope to Virgil. All modem languages are dry, poor, and unmusical in comparison with those of our first masters, the Greeks and Romans. We are but the fiddles of a village band. Besides, how can I compare Epistles to an Epic poem, to the loves of Dido, the burning of Troy, to Aeneas’ descent into Hades?

  I think Pope’s Essay on Man the finest of didactic and philosophic poems: but nothing is comparable to VirgiL You know him through translations: but it is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music? I regret, madam, that you, with your enlightened taste and feeling, cannot read
VirgiL I pity you even more if you are reading the Annals, short though they are. Germany, even reduced to a miniature, is not likely to please a French imagination such as yours.

  As you like epic poems, I would much rather you had the Pucelle. It is a little longer than the Henriacte and the subject is livelier. Imagination has more play—in serious books in France it is generally much too circumscribed. My regard for historical truth and religious prejudice clipped my wings in the Henriade: they have grown again in the Pucelle. Her annals are much more amusing than those of the Empire.

  If M. de Formont is still with you, pray remember me to him: if he has left, remember me to him when you write. I am going to Plombières, not in hopes of recovering my health—those I have quite given up—but because my friends are going there too. I have been six months at Colmar without moving out of my room: and I believe I shall do just the same at Paris unless you are there.

  I perceive that, in the long run, there is really nothing worth the trouble of leaving the house for. Illness has great advantages: it spares one society. It is different for you, madam: society is as necessary to you as a violin to Guignon—who is the King of the violin.

  M. d’Alembert is worthy of you: and much too good for his generation. He has repeatedly honored me far above my deserts, and he can be sure, if I regard him as the first of our philosophers with wit, it is not out of gratitude.

  I do not often write to you, madam, although the next best thing to having a letter from you is answering one: but I am overwhelmed with hard work, and divide my time between it and the colic. I have no leisure—I am always either ill or working. That makes life a full one, though not a perfectly happy one: but where is happi ness to be found? I have not the slightest idea: it is a very nice problem to solve.

  TO J. J. ROUSSEAU

  Les Délicea. August 30, 1755.

  I have received, sir, your new book against the human species, and I thank you for it. You will please people by your manner of telling them the truth about themselves, but you will not alter them. The horrors of that human society—from which in our feebleness and ig norance we expect so many consolations—have never been painted in more striking colors: no one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes: to read your book makes one long to go on all fours. Since, however, it is now some sixty years since I gave up the practice, I feel that it is unfortunately impossible for me to resume it: I leave this natural habit to those more fit for it than are you and I. Nor can I set sail to discover the aborigines of Canada, in the first place because my ill-health ties me to the side of the greatest doctor in Europe,28 and I should not find the same professional assistance among the Missouris: and secondly because war is going on in that country, and the example of the civilized nations has made the barbarians almost as wicked as we are ourselves. I must confine myself to being a peaceful savage in the retreat I have chosen—close to your country, where you yourself should be.

  I agree with you that science and literature have sometimes done a great deal of harm. Tasso’s enemies made his lite a long series of misfortunes: Galileo’s enemies kept him languishing in prison, at seventy years of age, for the crime of understanding the revolution of the earth: and, what is still more shameful, obliged him to forswear his discovery. Since your friends began the Encyclopedia, their rivals attack them as deists, atheists —even Jansenists.

  If I might venture to include myself among those whose works have brought them persecution as their sole recompense, I could tell you of men set on ruining me from the day I produced my tragedy Oedipe: of a perfect library of absurd calumnies which have been written against me: of an ex-Jesuit29 priest whom I saved from utter disgrace rewarding me by defamatory libels: of a man yet more contemptible30 printing my Century of Louis XIV with Notes in which crass ignorance gave birth to the most abominable falsehoods: of yet another, who sold to a publisher some chapters of a Universal History supposed to be by me: of the publisher avaricious enough to print this shapeless mass of blunders, wrong dates, mutilated facts and names: and, finally, of men sufficiently base and craven to assign the production of this farago to me. I could show you all society poisoned by this class of person—a class unknown to the ancients—who, not being able to find any honest occupation—be it manual labor or service—and unluckily knowing how to read and write, become the brokers of literature, live on our works, steal our manuscripts, falsify them, and sell them. I could tell of some loose sheets of a gay trifle31 which I wrote thirty years ago (on the same subject that Chapelain was stupid enough to treat seriously) which are in circulation now through the breach of faith and the cupidity of those who added their own grossness to my badinage and filled in the gaps with a dullness only equaled by their malice; and who, finally, after twenty years, are selling everywhere a manuscript which, in very truth, is theirs and worthy of them only.

  I may add, last of all, that someone has stolen part of the material I amassed in the public archives to use in my History of the War of 1741 when I was historiographer of France; that he sold that result of my labors to a bookseller in Paris; and is as set on getting hold of my property as if I were dead and he could turn it into money by putting it up to auction. I could show you ingratitude, imposture, and rapine pursuing me for forty years to the foot of the Alps and the brink of the.grave. But what conclusion ought I to draw from all these misfortunes ? This only: that I have no right to complain: Pope, Descartes, Bayle, Camoens—a hundred others—have been subjected to the same, or greater, injustice: and my destiny is that of nearly everyone who has loved letters too well.

  Confess, sir, that all these things are, after all, but little personal pinpricks, which society scarcely notices. What matter to humankind that a few drones steal the honey of a few bees? Literary men make a great fuss of their petty quarrels: the rest of the world ignores them, or laughs at them.

  They are, perhaps, the least serious of all the ills attendant on human life. The thorns inseparable from literature and a modest degree of fame are flowers in comparison with the other evils which from all time have flooded the world. Neither Cicero, Varron, Lucretius, Virgil, or Horace had any part in the proscriptions of Marius, Scylla, that profligate Antony, or that fool Lepidus ; while as for that cowardly tyrant, Octavius Caesar —servilely entitled Augustus—he only became an assassin when he was deprived of the society of men of letters.

  Confess that Italy owed none of her troubles to Petrarch or to Boccaccio: that Marot’s jests were not responsible for the massacre of St. Bartholomew: or the tragedy of the Cid for the wars of the Fronde. Great crimes are always committed by great ignoramuses. What makes, and will always make, this world a vale of tears is the insatiable greediness and the indomitable pride of men, from Thomas Koulikan, who did not know how to read, to a customhouse officer who can just count. Letters support, refine, and comfort the soul: they are serving you, sir, at the very moment you decry them: you are like Achilles declaiming against fame, and Father Malebranche using his brilliant imagination to belittle imagination.

  If anyone has a right to complain of letters, I am that person, for in all times and in all places they have led to my being persecuted: still, we must needs love them in spite of the way they are abused—as we cling to society, though the wicked spoil its pleasantness: as we must love our country, though it treats us unjustly: and as we must love and serve the Supreme Being, despite the superstition and fanaticism which too often dishonor His service.

  M. Chappus tells me your health is very unsatisfactory: you must come and recover here in your native place, enjoy its freedom, drink (with me) the milk of its cows, and browse on its grass.

  I am yours most philosophically and with sincere esteem.

  TO M. TRONCHIN OF LYONS

  Les Délices, November 24, 1755.

  This is indeed a cruel piece of natural philosophy! 32 We shall find it difficult to discover how the laws of movement operate in such fearful disasters in the best of all possible worlds—where a hundred
thousand ants, our neighbors, are crushed in a second on our antheaps, half, dying undoubtedly in inexpressible agonies, beneath débris from which it was impossible to extricate them, families all over Europe reduced to beggary, and the fortunes of a hundred merchants—Swiss, like yourself—swallowed up in the ruins of Lisbon. What a game of chance human life is ! What will the preachers say—especially if the Palace of the Inquisition is left standing ? I flatter myself that those reverend fathers, the Inquisitors, will have been crushed just like other people. That ought to teach men not to persecute men: for, while a few sanctimonious humbugs are burning a few fanatics, the earth opens and swallows up all alike. I believe it is our mountains which save us from earthquakes.

  TO MLLE.—

  Les Délices, June 20,1756.

  I am only an old invalid, mademoiselle, and my not having answered your letter before, and now replying only in prose to your charming verses, prove that my condition is a serious one.

  You ask me for advice: your own good taste will afford you all you need. Your study of Italian should further improve that taste which was born in you, and which nobody can give you. Tasso and Ariosto will do much more for you than I can, and reading our best poets is better than all lessons; but, since you are so good as to consult me from so far away, my advice to you is—read only such books as have long been sealed with the universal approval of the public and whose reputation is established. They are few: but you will gain much more from reading those few than from all the feeble little works with which we are inundated. Good writers are only witty in the right place, they never strive after smartness: they think sensibly, and express themselves clearly. Now, people appear to write exclusively in enigmas. Everything is aSected—nothing simple: nature is ignored, and everyone tries to improve on the masterpieces of our language.