The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  I abandon a great monarch who cultivates and honors an art which I idolize, and I go to join a person who reads nothing but the metaphysics of Christian Wolff [the expositor of Leibniz]. I tear myself from the most amiable court in Europe for a lawsuit. I did not leave your adorable court to sigh like an idiot at a woman’s knees. But, Sire, that woman abandoned for me everything for which other women abandon their friends. There is no sort of obligation which I am not under to her.… Love is often ridiculous, but pure friendship has rights more binding than a king’s commands.56

  He was reunited with Émilie at Brussels, which, because of her prolonged lawsuit, became their second home. In May, 1741, they attended the première of Mahomet at Lille, and received an ovation. They returned to Brussels elated, but sombered by a growing consciousness that their idyl was over. Her love was still strong, even if possession was its soul, but Voltaire’s fire was escaping through his pen. In July, 1741, he apologized to her for his failing ardor:

  Si vous voulez que j’aime encore,

  Rendez-moi l’âge des amours;

  Au crépuscule de mes jours

  Réjoignez, s’il se peut, l’aurore.

  On meurt deux fois, je le vois bien:

  Cesser d’aimer et d’être aimable

  C’est une mort insupportable;

  Cesser de vivre, ce n’est rien.57 II

  In August, 1742, they went to Paris to assist at the presentation of Mahomet at the Théâtre-Français. Voltaire sought from Cardinal Fleury an official permit for the performance; the Cardinal consented. The Paris première (August 19) was the literary event of the year; magistrates, priests, and poets were numerous in the packed audience. All seemed satisfied except some of the clergy, who claimed that the play was “a bloody satire against the Christian religion.” Fréron, Desfontaines, and others joined in the complaint; and though the Cardinal felt that these critics were injuring their own cause, he sent private advice to Voltaire to withdraw the play. This was done after the fourth performance before a full house. Voltaire and Émilie returned in angry frustration to Brussels.

  Was Mahomet anti-Christian? Not quite. It was against fanaticism and bigotry, but it portrayed the Prophet in a hostile light that should have pleased all Christians innocent of history. Voltaire pictured Mahomet as a conscious deceiver who foists his new religion upon a credulous people, uses their faith as a spur to war, and conquers Mecca by ordering his fanatical devotee, Séide, to assassinate the resisting sheik Zopir. When Séide hesitates, Mahomet reproves him in terms that seemed to some auditors a reflection on the Christian priesthood:

  And dost thou pause? Presumptuous youth, ’tis impious

  But to deliberate. Far from Mahomet

  Be all who for themselves shall dare to judge … .

  Those who reason are not oft

  Prone to believe. Thy part is to obey.

  Have I not told thee what the will of Heaven

  Determines? …

  Knowest thou holy Abram here

  Was born, that here his sacred ashes rest-

  He who, obedient to the voice of God,

  Stifled the cries of nature, and gave up

  His darling child? The same all-powerful Being

  Requires of thee a sacrifice; to thee

  He calls for blood; and darest thou hesitate

  When God commands? …

  Strike, then, and by the blood

  Of Zopir merit life eternal.58

  Séide kills the old man, who, dying, recognizes him as his own son. This, of course, was an attack upon the use of religion to sanction murder and foment war. Voltaire meant it so, and in a letter to Frederick he gave, as examples of pious crimes, the assassination of William of Orange and of Henry III and Henry IV of France. But he denied that the play was an attack upon religion; it was a plea to make Christianity Christian.

  Cardinal Fleury consoled him by commissioning him (September, 1742) to try his hand at turning the policy of Frederick to friendship with France. Voltaire, proud to be a diplomat, visited the King at Aachen; Frederick saw through his purposes, and answered his politics with poetry. Voltaire returned to Paris, Émilie, and the drama. On February 20, 1743, his greataest play, Mérope, was produced by the Comédie-Française with a success that for a while silenced his enemies.

  Several plays had already been written on the theme; Euripides had used it in a drama of which only fragments remain. In a preliminary letter Voltaire acknowledged his special indebtedness to Marchese Francesco Scipione di Maffei of Verona, who had produced a Merope in 1713. It was a distinction of these plays that their interest turned on parental rather than sexual love. At the final curtain, we are told, most of the audience was in tears. For the first time in the history of the French theater there were calls for the author to show himself on the stage. According to the accepted account he complied, creating a precedent which Lessing deplored; according to other sources Voltaire refused to go on the stage, though urged to do so by the two duchesses in whose box he sat; he merely stood up for a moment and acknowledged the applause.59 Frederick gave it as his judgment that Mérope was “one of the finest tragedies ever written.”60 Gibbon thought the final act equal to anything in Racine.61

  The success of Mérope was alloyed for Voltaire by the failure, soon afterward, of his candidacy for a seat in the Academy. He campaigned for it eagerly, even to proclaiming himself “a true Catholic” and the author of “many pages sanctified by religion.”62 Louis XV at first favored him, but was deterred by his new minister Maurepas, who protested that it would be unseemly to let so profane a spirit succeed to the seat vacated by the death of Cardinal Fleury. The seat was given to the bishop of Mirepoix. Frederick urged Voltaire to abandon a country that so little honored its geniuses, and come and live with him in Potsdam. Mme. du Châtelet objected. The French government advised him to accept the invitation for a time, and to serve as its secret agent in Berlin. Longing to play politics, Voltaire agreed, and undertook again the racking ride across France, Belgium, and Germany. He spent six weeks (August 30 to October 12, 1743) in the enterprise. Frederick again laughed at his politics and praised his poetry. Voltaire returned to Émilie at Brussels. In April, 1744, they resumed their residence at Cirey, and tried to revive their dying love.

  In her Traité de la bonheur the Marquise thought that “of all the passions the desire for knowledge is the one which contributes most to happiness, for it is the one which makes us least dependent upon each other.” Nevertheless she called love

  the greatest of the good things that are within our grasp, the only one to which even the pleasure of study should be sacrificed. The ideal would be two individuals who would be so attracted to each other that their passions would never cool or become surfeited. But one cannot hope for such harmony of two persons; it would be too perfect. A heart which would be capable of such love, a soul which would be so steadfast and so affectionate, is perhaps born once in a century.63

  In a touching letter she summed up her surrender of this hope:

  I was happy for ten years in the love of the one who had conquered my soul, and those ten years I spent in perfect communion with him.… When age and illness had reduced his affection, a long time passed before I noticed it; I loved for two; I spent my whole life with him, and my trusting heart enjoyed the ecstasy of love, and the illusion of believing itself to be loved.… I have lost this happy state.64

  What was it that had turned Voltaire from love to a kind of intermittent fidelity? He seems to have been sincere in pleading the decline of his physical powers; yet we shall find him, within a year, “sighing like an idiot at a woman’s knees.” The truth was that he had exhausted one phase of his life and interest—Mme. de Châtelet and science. The isolation of Cirey would have palled much sooner on an average mind; it was a blessing only when the police pursued him and science called. But now he had tasted again the pleasures of Paris and premières; he was even playing a part in national politics. If only from a distance he felt the glamo
ur of the court. His friend the Marquis d’Argenson had become chief minister, his friend and debtor the Duc de Richelieu was first chamberlain to the King, and Louis himself had relented. In 1745 the Dauphin was to marry the Infanta Maria Teresa Rafaela; a lordly festival must be prepared; Richelieu commissioned Voltaire to write a play for the occasion. But Rameau was to write the music; poet and composer had to work together; Voltaire must come to Paris. In September, 1744, the lovers bade goodbye to Cirey and moved to the capital.

  IV. THE COURTIER: 1745–48

  He was now fifty years old. He had for a long time been dying annually; “It is most certain,” he wrote to Thieriot in 1735, “that I have but a few years to live.”65 He had then lived forty-one years; he was to live forty-three more. How did he manage this? When he fell seriously ill at Châlonssur-Marne in 1748, and a physician prescribed some drugs, Voltaire “told me,” his secretary reported, “that he would follow none of these directions, for he knew how to manage himself as well in sickness as in health, and he would continue to be his own doctor, as he had always been.” In such crises he fasted for a while, then ate a little broth, toast, weak tea, barley and water. Secretary Longchamp adds:

  Thus it was that M. de Voltaire cured himself of a malady which probably would have had grave consequences if he had delivered himself up to the Aesculapius of Châlons. His principle was that our health depends upon ourselves; that its three pivots are sobriety, temperance in all things, and moderate exercise; that in almost all diseases which are not the result of serious accidents, or of radical vitiation of the internal organs, it suffices to aid nature, which is endeavoring to restore us; that it is necessary to confine ourselves to a diet more or less strict and prolonged, suitable liquid nourishment, and other simple means. In this manner I always saw him regulate his conduct as long as I lived with him.66

  He was as skilled as a banker in the management and investment of his funds. He was an importer, a poet, a contractor, a dramatist, a capitalist, a philosopher, a moneylender, pensioner, and heir. His friend d’Argenson helped him to make a fortune in military supplies.67 He had inherited part of his father’s wealth; in 1745 the death of his brother Armand left to him the income of the remainder. He made large loans to the Duc de Richelieu, the Duc de Villars, the Prince de Guise, and others. He had much trouble recapturing the principal, but he compensated himself with interest.68 In 1735 Richelieu owed him 46,417 livres, on which the Duke paid four thousand livres per year.69 In the case of the unreliable M. de Brézé, Voltaire asked ten per cent. Much of his money he invested in bonds of the city of Paris at five or six per cent. He had often to instruct his agent to dun his debtors: “It is necessary, my friend, to ask, to ask again, to press, to see, to importune—but not to persecute—my debtors for my annuities and arrears.”70 His secretary calculated in 1749 that Voltaire’s income was eighty thousand livres per year.71 He was not a moneygrubber or a miser. He repeatedly gave money or other assistance to young students, and lent a helping hand or voice to Vauvenargues, Marmontel, La Harpe; we have seen him surrendering to the actors the proceeds of his plays. When he lost forty thousand livres through the bankruptcy of a farmer general to whom he had lent that sum, he took it calmly, using the wise words taught him in his youth: “The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

  If he had had less money to take care of, and more flesh on his bones, he might have been less sensitive, nervous, and irritable. He was generous and considerate, usually cheerful, good-humored, vivacious; he was capable of warm and steadfast friendship, and quick to forgive an injury that did not hurt his pride; but he could not with patience bear criticism or hostility (“I envy the beasts two things,” he said: “their ignorance of evils to come, and their ignorance of what is said of them”72). His sharp wit aroused many enemies. Fréron, Piron, Desfontaines attacked him or his ideas with a violence far greater than came from the clergy; we shall listen to them by and by. Voltaire returned blow for blow, despite Mme. du Châtelet’s counsel to be silent. He called them hot names, marshaled his friends to war against them; the Marquise was hard put to it to keep him from rushing to Paris to whip or challenge Desfontaines; he even thought of invoking the censorship to suppress the more virulent of his foes. He had all the defects of his qualities, and a few more.

  He found in Rameau a man as proud and irritable as himself; their cooperation was a trial for both; but at last the libretto and the music were complete, the players and musicians were rehearsed; La Princesse de Navarre went off well (February 23, 1745). A month later Voltaire was given a room in the palace, near what he described in his very private correspondence as “the most stinking merde-hole in Versailles.” The Marquise du Châtelet resumed at court the place that she had sacrificed for Voltaire; she had now the dizzy privilege of sitting in the presence of the Queen. The rise of Mme. de Pompadour favored Voltaire; he had known her when she was Mme. d’Étioles, had visited her home, had written trivia in her praise. At her urging the King appointed him (April 1) royal historiographer, with a salary of two thousand livres per year.

  He was soon required to earn his fee. On May 11, 1745, the French defeated the English at Fontenoy; d’Argenson asked for a commemorative ode; Voltaire in three days turned out 350 lines; they went through five editions in two weeks; for a moment the King liked Voltaire, and Voltaire was a poet of war. To further celebrate the victory Voltaire and Rameau were commissioned to compose a festival opera. Le Temple de la gloire, performed before the court in December, showed Trajan (i.e., Louis XV) returning in triumph from battle. Voltaire was given a seat at the King’s table that evening, and ate ambrosia; but he asked Richelieu, too eagerly, “Trajan est-il content?” (Is Trajan content?); Louis overheard him, thought him a bit forward, spoke no word to him.

  Drunk with a mixture of fame and royalty, Voltaire began another campaign for admission to the Academy. He left no stone unturned. On August 17, 1745, he sent a copy of Mahomet to Benedict XIV, asking might he dedicate it to him. The amiable Pope replied (September 19):

  This day sevennight I was favored with your excellent tragedy of Mahomet, which I have read with great pleasure.… I have the highest esteem for your merit, which is so universally acknowledged.… I have the highest opinion of your honor and sincerity.

  I … here give you my apostolical benediction.73

  Voltaire was so delighted with this accolade that he wrote to the Pope a letter of fervent appreciation, ending: “With the utmost respect and gratitude I kiss your sacred feet.”74 He proclaimed to Paris his attachment to the Catholic faith and his admiration for the Jesuits. He multiplied his praises of Pompadour and the King. Pompadour pleaded for him, the King consented, and at last, May 9, 1746, the Academy admitted the leading poet and dramatist of the age. To make his cup run over, he was appointed (December 22) gentilhomme ordinaire de la chambre—“ gentleman in ordinary of the chamber,” privileged to wait upon the King.

  Probably it was in these days of success and satisfaction that he composed his tale Babouc, ou le Monde comme il va. Babouc, a gentleman of Scythia, sets out to see the world, and especially how things are in Persia (i.e., France). He is shocked by the wars, the political corruption, the purchase of offices, the farming of taxes, and the wealth of the “Magi” (the clergy). But he is entertained by a lady (Pompadour) whose beauty, culture, and courtesy reconcile him to “civilization.” He notes here and there actions of generosity, instances of honesty. He visits the Prime Minister (a memory of Fleury) and finds him laboring earnestly to save Persia from chaos and defeat. He concludes that matters are as good as they can be in the current condition of human nature and education, and that “the world as it goes” does not yet deserve destruction; reform is better than revolution. As for himself, however, he will imitate the “truly wise,” who “live among themselves in retirement and tranquillity.”75 Was Voltaire already lonesome for Cirey?

  In any case he was not fashioned for a courtier. With incredible tactlessness he cel
ebrated the success of the French at Bergen op Zoom with a poem in which he spoke of Louis as flying from the victory to the arms of Pompadour, and charged both of them to keep what they had conquered. The Queen was outraged; so were her children; half the court denounced the poet’s impudence. Meanwhile Mme. du Châtelet had relapsed into gambling; in one evening she lost 84,000 francs. Voltaire, on her shoulder, warned her in English that she was playing with cheats; some of the players understood and protested. News of this scandalous candor ran through the court, leaving the poet scarcely a friend in Versailles or Fontainebleau. Voltaire and Émilie fled to Sceaux (1747) and the still surviving Duchesse du Maine. There he remained for two months in a remote apartment hidden from public view. And there he tried to forget his plight by writing some of those delightful contes or romans which helped to make him the most popular author in all the literature of France. Apparently he read them, of an evening, to the intimate guests who constituted the Duchess’s private court. Hence their brevity, their gay satire and bubbling wit.

  The longest of these stories written in the years 1746–50 was Zadig, or The Mystery of Fate. Zadig is an amiable, rich, well-educated young Babylonian, “as wise as it is possible for a man to be.… Instructed in the sciences of the ancient Chaldeans, he understood the principles of natural philosophy, … and knew as much of metaphysics as has ever been known in any age, that is, little or nothing at all.”76 He is about to marry the lovely Semina when he is attacked by brigands, and suffers a wound that develops into an abscess in the left eye. The famous physician Hermes is brought in from Memphis: he examines the wound, and announces that Zadig will lose the eye. “Had it been the right eye, I could easily have cured it, but the wounds of the left eye are incurable.” Semina, declaring that she has an unconquerable aversion to one-eyed men, abandons Zadig and marries his rival. In two days the abscess breaks of its own accord; soon the eye is completely cured; Hermes writes a book to prove that this is impossible. Zadig pleases King Moabdar with his wise counsels, and Queen Astarte with his good looks; she falls in love with him; he flees to a distant city. On the way he sees a man beating a woman; he responds bravely to her cries for help; he interferes, is murderously assailed, and slays the man; the woman rails at him for having killed her lover. Zadig proceeds, and is sold into slavery.… Zadig “then imagined men as in fact they are, insects devouring one another on a drop of mud.”