Voltaire

break for something like twenty years. His estate was a feudal seigniory in the district of Gex,

nd-daughter of the uncle of Corneille. A soldier ought to succour the niece of his general, he said. He took the liveliest interest in the little maid's education, though she appears to have been a sulky pupil, and eventually he married her with due dower to one Dupuits. The bustle and expense of his establishment became greater than ever, and in the spring of 1768 Paris was as much electrified by news of a revolution at Ferney, as she has been since by some revolutions in her own streets. Madame Denis and the two Dupuits had suddenly made their way to Paris, and for a year and a half Voltaire was left in peace, part of which he employed sensibly in having his house cleaned from cellar to garret,-a bit of news which is handed down to our times, since, according to Grimm, the domestic arrangements of the manor-house at Ferney interested at that moment more or less every court in Europe.269 In the autumn of 1769 Madame Denis returned, and with her the old stir and extravagance were resumed, for Voltaire was one of the best-humoured of men to his family and friends, and could deny his niece

ices: it is Naples in summer, Lapland in winter.273 One year he marks with word of bitterness snow falling thick in the middle of May. Four feet of snow in the courtyard constituted a normal winter state. He commemorates with enthusiasm how one day, thr

ow amid so many distractions the master of the house contrived to write so many scores of pieces, large and small, and so many hundreds of letters, grave and gay. Of these letters nearly seven thousand are already in print, and M. Beuchot, most carefully informed of all Voltaire's editors, thinks there are likely to be quite as many more still in undiscovered existence. Ferney was the centre of the most universal and varied correspondence that any one man has ever carried on. Frederick the Great was not the only crowned head with whom Voltaire interchanged royal communication. Catharine II. of Russia, of Anhalt-Zerbst by birth, was the helpful patroness of Diderot and D'Alembert, and was always eager to hear some word from the pa

It was always the same with him. No young author ever solicited advice in vain, and he was never sparing either of trouble or praise. The Marquis of Chastellux sent him a copy of his Félicité Publique, and was raised to the seventh heaven by a letter of thanks, in which Voltaire tells him: 'I covered the m

and, 'whom I do not know, wrote to me a little while since, to ask me in confidence whether there is a God or not; whether, in case there be one, he

He corresponded with cardinals, marshals of France, and bishops, and he corresponded with Helvétius and with Diderot, w

able as to the propriety of using some bit of old French,

umour was from the truth, and in fact he did get an answer to his own letter; but it can hardly have been very much more satisfactory than silence would have been, for Voltaire, while profuse in praise of the fidelity and spirit of the translation, unfortunately did not detect that it was meant for anything more ambitious than simple prose with enthusiasm in it.279 As Turgot especially valued in the patriarch his 'superb ear,' the blow was as sharp as it well could be. He was little concerned or surprised on learning the fallacious reasoning of the poet in political eco

authority would not even allow freedom enough to plead for tolerance, much less to utter uncertified opinion. 'Time,' said D'Alembert, apologising for some whiff of orthodoxy which Voltaire scented in one or two articles in the Encyclopaedia, 'will make people distinguish what we thought from what we said.'282 Condorcet, as we know, deliberately defended these deceptions, which did not deceive, while they did protect. He contended that if you rob a man of his natural right of publishing his opinions, then you lose your own right to hear the truth from the man's lips.283 Undoubtedly all laws admit that duress introduces new conditions into the determination of what is right and wrong in action, or at least that it mitigates pains and penalties, and the position of every claimant for free speech was in those days emphatically a position of duress. The choice lay between disavowal on the one hand, and on the other abstention from proclaiming truths by which only society could gain the freedom it so much needed; between strict anonymity and leaving the darkness unbroken. And we must remember that disingenuous tricks to conceal authorship were not assuredly so unpardonable, when resorted to as protectives against imprisonment, confiscation, and possible peril of life, as they are now among ourselves, when they serve no more defensible purpose than sheltering men who have not the courage of their opinions, against one or two paltry social deprivations. The monstrous proceedings against La Barre, and the ease with which in this and numerous other cases the jurisprudence of the tribunals lent itself to the cruelty of fanatics, no doubt excited in Voltaire a very genuine alarm for his own safety, and probably with good reason. We know that he could not venture to visit Italy, in consequence of his just fear lest the Inquisition should throw their redoubtable foe into prison, and the parliaments of Toulouse and Abbeville had perpetrated juridical murders as iniquitous as any of the proceedings of the Holy Office. And though it is easy and right for the young, who live in a time when you are not imprisoned or hung or decapitated for holding unpopular opinions, to call out for manliness to the uttermost in these things, one must make allowance for an occasional fit of timorousness in a man of eighty, whom nature had never cut out for a martyr. Yet, more than once, these fits committed Voltaire to acts which were as great a scandal to the devout as to the atheists. That he should rebuild the ruinous little chapel of his estate was not much more remarked, than it would be for a Protestant landlord to subscribe to repair the Catholic church on an Irish property containing only Catholic tenants. The gorgeous ceremony with which in his quality of lord he commemorated its opening, made everybody laugh, not excepting the chief performer, for he actually took the opportunity of lifting up his voice in the new temple and preaching a sermon against theft. The bishop of Annecy in Savoy, his diocesan, was furious at this mockery, and urged the minister at Paris to banish Voltaire from France. In order to avert the blow, Voltaire tried to make a nominal peace with the church by confessing, and participating in the solemnity of an Easter communion (1768). The bishop wrote him a long letter of unctuous impertinences, to which Voltaire replied by asking very tartly why the discharge of so ordinary a duty called for this insolent congratulation. The philosophers of Paris were bitterly scandalised, and some of them wrote to the patriarch of the sect to remonstrate. Even D'Alembert, his own familiar friend, could not refrain from pr

harassing his enemy, the bishop of Annecy. Thirdly, it amused that whimsical element of farce and mischief which was always so irrepressible in him, from the early days when he is said to have nearly damned his own play by appearing on the stage as the high-priest's train-bearer, and burlesquing that august person's solemn gait. Voltaire filled his letters with infinite pleasantries about the new Capucin, and seemed as much pleased at the idea of wearing the cord of Saint Francis, as he had been with the gold key of a Prussian chamberlain.288 One of his first enjoyments was to write letters to his episcopal foe, signed with a cross and his name: '? Voltaire, Capucin

aire wrote escaped, him, and that the Philosophical Letters, that is the Letters on the English, though assuredly not the writer's best work, were what first attracted him to study, and implanted a taste which never afterwards became extinct. The correspondence between Voltaire and the prince of Prussia, afterwards the great Frederick, inspired Rousseau with a passionate desire to learn how to compose with elegance, and to imitate the colouring of so fine an author.291 Thus Voltaire, who was eighteen years his elder, gave this extraordinary genius his first productive impulse. But a sensibility of temperament, to which perhaps there is no parallel in the list of prominent men, impelled Rousseau to think, or rather to feel, about the concrete wrongs and miseries of men

shelter, and so did Voltaire; but each of them disliked his work as warmly as the other. They did not understand one who, if he wrote with an eloquence that touched all hearts, repulsed friends and provoked enemies like a madman or a savage. The very language of Rousseau was to Voltaire as an unknown tongue, for it was the language of reason clothing the births of passionate sensation. Emile only wearied him, though there were perhaps fifty pages of it which he would have had bound in morocco.293 It is a stale romance, he cries, while the Social Contract is only remarkable for some insults rudely thrown at kings by a citizen of Geneva, and for four insipid pages against the Christian religion, which are simply plagiarised from Bayle's centos.294 The author is a monster of ingratitude and insolence, the arch-scoundrel and chief of charlatans, the lineal descendant of the dog of Diogenes the cynic, and other evil things not readily to be named in

in the generation just closing. But Voltaire's theory, so far as he ever put it into its most general form, was that the temporal order was safe and firm, and that it would endure until criticism had transformed thought and prepared the way for a régime of enlightenment and humanity. Rousseau, on the contrary, directed all the engines of passion against the whole temporal fabric, and was so little careful of freedom of thought, so little confident in the plenary efficacy of rational persuasion, as to insist upon the extermination of atheists by law. The position of each was at once irrefragable and impossible. It was impossible to effect a stable reconstitution of the social order until men had been

r to return, in spite of the transient appearances to the contrary. The church was swept away also, but only for a year or two; and so little effectual was the Revolution, which was in fact Rousseau's Revolution, in permanently modifying its position, that those Frenchmen at the present day who most soberly judge the future of their country and look deepest into its state, clearly perceive that the battle to be fought in the order of ideas is a battle between the new moral and social ideas of the workmen, and the old moral and social ideas which Catholicism has implanted in the breasts of the peasants, and on which the middle class privately and unconsciously lean for the support of their own consciences, though they may have put away Catholic dogma. We may see here, once more, the help which Protestantism gave to the dissolution of the old society, by the increased room it gave, apart from the specific influence of a more democratic dogma, for that gradual intellectual expansion throughout a community, w

d wear away their lives in unbroken toil without hope or aim, in order that the few may live selfish and vacuous days. Rousseau presented this sentiment in a shape which made it the 'negation of society;' but it was much to induce thinkers to ask themselves, and the bondsmen of society to ask their masters, whether the last word of social philosophy had been uttered, and the last experiment in the relations of men to one another decisively tried and irrevocably accepted. Second, by his fervid eloquence and the burning conviction which he kindled in the breasts of great numbers of men, he inspired energy enough in France to awaken her from the torpor as of death which was stealing so rapidly over her. Nobody was more keenly aware of the presence of this breath of decay in the air than Voltaire was. It had seized such hold of the vital parts of the old order, that, but for the fiery spirit and unquenchable ardour of the men who read Rousseau as men of old had read the gospel, but for the spirit and ardour which

sp and breadth of positive knowledge. Whoever will take the trouble to turn over some of the thirty-five volumes of the Encyclop?dia, may easily see how that gigantic undertaking (1751-1765), in which Voltaire always took the most ardent and practical interest,297 assisted the movement that Voltaire had commenced. It seemed to gather up into a single great reservoir all that men knew, and this fact of mere mechanical collocation was a sort of substitute for a philosophic synthesis. As Comte says, it furnished a provisional rallying-point for efforts the most divergent, without requiring the sacrifice of any points of essential independence, in such a way as to secure for a body of incoherent speculation an external look of system.298 This enterprise, the history of which is a microcosm of the whole battle between the two sides in France, enabled the various opponents of theological absolutism, the Voltaireans, Rousseauites, atheists, a

with me; but if I say that she has never yet produced, and is never likely to produce again, a man so extraordinary, only his enemies will contradict me.'299 This panegyric was specially disinterested, because Voltaire's last years had been not least remarkable for his bitter antipathy to the dogmatic atheism and dogmatic materialism of that school, with which Did

erful ministers, fine ladies, lawyers, men of letters, were all constrained by his importunate solicitations to lend an ear to the cause of reason and tolerance, and to lift up an arm in its vindication. The same tremendous enginery was again brought into play in the case of Sirven. In the case of La Barre and his comrade D'Etallonde, his tenacity was still more amazing and heroic. For twelve years he persevered in the attempt to have the memory of La Barre rehabilitated. One of the judicial authorities concerned in that atrocious exploit, struck with horror at the thought of being held up to the execration of Europe by that terrible avenger, conveyed some menace to Voltaire of what might befall him. Voltaire replied to him by a Chinese anecdote. 'I forbid you,' said a tyrannical emperor to the chief of the tribunal of history, 'to speak a word more of me.' The mandarin began to write. 'What are you doing now?' asked the emperor. 'I am writing down the order that your majesty has just given me.'301 There was a something inexorable as doom about Voltaire's unrelenting perseverance in getting wrong definitely stamped and transfixed. If he did not succeed in obtaining justic

Duke to allow him to forward a letter he had, stating Richelieu's conviction of his defeated enemy's bravery and good judgment. Voltaire insists that this letter turned four votes on the court-martial.304 He informs a correspondent, moreover, of the fact that Byng had instructed his executor to express his deep obligation both to Voltaire and Richelieu.305 Humanity is erroneously counted among commonplace virtues. If it des

red Frederick not to leave to Catherine alone the burden of so glorious a task. Superstition had had seven crusades; was it not a noble thing to undertake one crusade to drive the barbarous Turks from the land of Socrates and Plato, Sophocles and Euripides? Frederick replied very sensibly that Dantzic was more to him than the Pir?us, and that he is a litt

d devised the scheme, for he found it full of genius, and to all seeming he discerned none of the execration which the event he had just witnessed was destined to raise in his own country in years to come. His friendship with two of the chief actors may have biassed his judgment; but Voltaire seldom allowed, indeed by the conditions of his temperament he was unable to allow, personal considerations of this kind to obscure his penetrating sight. He may well have thought the partition of Poland desirable, for the reasons which a stat

eat and virtuous man's most sanguine lieutenants. He declared that a new heaven and a new earth had opened to him.309 His sallies against the economists were forgotten, and he now entered into the famous controversy

la brill

e enfin les

monde est p

ra?t pour

guste phi

long temps

s triomph

*

s: 'Ange

répandent ce

n seul h

er (May 1776), Voltaire sunk into a despair for his country, from which he never arose. 'I am as one dashed to the ground. Never can we console ourselves for having seen the golden age dawn and peris

ars. His reception has been described over and over again. It is one of the historic events of the century. No great captain returning from a prolonged campaign of difficulty and hazard crowned by the most glorious victory, ever received a more splendid and far-resounding greeting. It

ing broadcast of the seed of a revolution, which must inevitably come one day, but which I shall not have the pleasure of witnessing. The French always come late to things, but they do come at last. Light extends so from neighbour to neighbour, that there will be a splendid outburst on the first occasion, and then there will be a rare commotion. The young are very happy; they will see fine things.'313 A less sanguine tone marks the close of the apologue in which Reason and Truth, her daughter, take a triumphant journey in France and elsewhere, about the time of the accession of Turgo

TNO

s, xxxv

Philosophic Po

found in Les Economistes Financiers du XVII

ble que le clergé catholique de France au moment où la Révolution l'a surpris, plus éclairé, plus national, moins retranché dans les seules vertus pr

ées de M. Pascal. ?

Organu

ore warmly of Voltaire than the words in the text imply: 'Toutefois, l'indispensable nécessité mentale et sociale d'une telle élaboration provisoire laissera toujours, dans l'ensemble de l'histoire humaine, une place importante à ses principaux coopérateurs, et surtout à leur type le plus éminent, auquel la postérité la plus lointaine assurera une position vraiment unique; parceque jamais un pareil office n'avait pu jusqu'alors échoir, et pourra désormais encore moins appartenir à un esprit de cette nature, chez lequ

ousseau's

s, lxii

ilosophique,s.v. ?

res, i

lxii. pp.

lxii.

.E.T., L(e

a title given by courtesy to the

res, i

ncien Gouvernement

t. of Civilisat

euve, Cause

pe, iv

b. i

, ou Ep?tre à Uranie. ?

ie de Voltaire.

ie de Voltaire.

e, 1725. ?uvres,

. ?uvres, xxxv. p. 114. Cf. al

Hist. of England,

s Anglais, ix. ?u

ce, 1732. ?uvre

t. de France, v

ewton, Pt. i. c. i.

Anglais, xv. ?uvres

n, Pt. i. c. ix. (?

'Ale

sophique, s.v. Locke.

6. ?uvres, l

Petersbourg, 6ième

1737; lxi

8. Cf. also

Anglais, xiv. ?uvre

, vol. xl

b. p

, vol. xl

7. ?uvres, l

Anglais, xiii. ?u

tc. x. ?uvres

cien Régime, liv. ii.

es, xxx

the 'homme comme moi,' and his ill lu

s Anglais, xi. ?u

xxi.; xxxv.

les Anglais,

ng. vi.; x

Ang. vii.

ng. ii.; x

s, xxxv.

Epique. ?uvres, xiii.

s, xxxv.

s, xxxv.

?uvres, lxiii

xxxv. pp.

130, 164, etc.), and for the other two, see Le Ph

. xliv

itate was pub

1728 in Leland's View of the

, lvii. p

?uv. lxiii. p. 60,

de Milord Bolingbroc

schichte des Englis

s. Works, i.

, s.v. Voltaire, p. 736. De Maistre audaciously denies th

e, Soirées de St. Petersbourg, vi. p. 424. On the other hand, see Lan

esnoiresterres, Voltaire au

resterres

eful and dignified letter in this kind is th

spondance Litté

. lxv.

sai sur la Poésie Epique, c

es, lxv

t, 1737, and afterwards. ?uvres

52. ?uvres,

e Voltai

resterres

e Voltaire avec De Brosses

Desnoireste

resterres

ise du Chatelet, sur la Ca

Hist. Induc. Sc

esterres,

Institutions Physiques. ?

, xlii. p

7. ?uvres, l

, Vie de Vol

37. ?uvres,

. s.v. ?uvres

. s.v. ?uvres

58. ?uvres,

Go?t. ?uvre

3. ?uvres, l

e Vauvenargu

Go?t. ?uvres

y effective. 'Trop d'artifice,' says Ste. Beuve, 'trop d'art nuit auprès des esprits neufs; trop de simplicité nui

u Go?t. ?uvr

32. ?uvres,

e, 1718; Brutus, 1730; Za?re, 1732; Mort de César, 1735; Alzire,

: Literaturgeschichte des

re, act

n Hum. Und.

Bolingbrocke. ?uvres, ii. p. 337. See

res, ii

Anglais, xix. ?u

4. See also Du Théatre Anglais (1761). Ib. x. p

rauss; p. 74. The same idea is found in a

criticism, see his Mémoires et ?uvr. Inédites, i. 234 (1

and Fall, c.

s, vols.

iresterre

res, ix

es, 4ième

res, v.

rauss,

es, xvii

lished surreptitiously in 1755; pu

e Voltair

astity, of Condorcet's Works, vi. p. 264, and pp. 523

Poésie Epique. ?u

res, ii

Life of David

iade, x.

es, lxxv

de Volta

ss's Histoire Philosophique d

hique de l'Academie d

50. ?uvres,

Jabl

es, lxxv

50. ?uvres,

tory of Frederick

Voltaire, lx

b. p.

b. p.

ressed remonstrance, see Corr. O

Hist, de Fran

lxxv. p. 207

Go

holmess,

artholmes

Voltaire, lx

51. ?uvres,

51. ?uvres,

Hist. Ind, Sci. bk

es, lxiv

e's Phil. Po

nch physician, who changed his real name of Sans-Malice into Akakia, and left descendants

52. ?uvres,

oirester

t Fréderic, cc. 9 and 10. Carly

-153, including a facsimile of the fraudulently altere

Frederick, b

lxxiii. p.

, lxxiii.

ouin edition, as Mémoires pour ser

58. ?uvres,

Ib.

v. p. 23. Cf

r. lxv.

list of the oppressions practised on writers in this reign

c de Brasses, etc., p. 318. Also Corr

es, Ixxv

es, i. ch.

Mdlle. de Voland: Mémoires, Corre

rivant à sa terre

1757. ?uv.

Ib.

?uv. lxx

was that Locke, after having so profoundly traced the development of the human understanding, cou

ate and Liberty of Writing, prefixed to

768. ?uv. l

them in M. Lanfrey's L'Eglise et les Ph

(Euv. lx

istoire du Parlement de Paris. ?uv. xxxiv. Or in Mart

uis xv. c. 36. ?

?uv. lxx

?uvres, lx

Morellet, ch

ist. de France

r de la Barre, 1766; Le Cri du Sang

16, 1766. ?uv

?uv. Ixx

b. p.

Corr. Lit

774. ?m. lx

1. p.

14ième le?on, p. 405. Cf. also De Tocq

?uv. lxvi. pp. 92,

lxvii. p. 174;

ee ante

hant i.

et du Peuple (1750).

oirtées de St. Pé

es, xxxv

73. ?uvres,

il. s.v. Eglise.

ommes, c. xiv. ?u

v. Resurrection. ?

Tylor's Primitive Cultu

etc. This active spite prevented the acces

s. v. Dieu. ?u

ommes, c. iii. ?u

v. Polythéisme. ?

61. ?uvres,

58. ?uvres,

t. of Religi

b. se

St. Pétersbou

te, ch

f Latin Christianity, bk

61. ?uvres,

er the Romans (B.C. 146

sastre de Lisbonne.

?uv. xli. p. 46. See

r la Philosophic de Newton

Fanatisme. ?uvr

es, xv.

r wit, as ?βρι? πεπαιδευμ?νη marks one of V

res, xv

65. ?uvres,

g. xiv. ?uvres

36. ?uvres,

s. v. Locke. ?vr

in Sainte-Beuve's No

s La Révolu

. ?uvres, xx. p. 344. See also

ur les M?ur

sur les M?

of History, Let

Décadence des

52 (a portion of it in 1739); Annales de l'Empire, 1753-54; Essai sur les M?urs, 1757 (surreptitiously in 1754); Histoi

oire, cc. xii. xiii. ?uvres,

?uvres, Ix

57. ?uvres,

761. ?uv. l

res, xx

is XIV., c. i. ?u

. ?uvres, Ixii

xxxvi. pp. 4

v. Guerre. ?uvres,

t des Loi

res, lv

?uvres, lx

ng of Prussia in Voltaire'

ii. ?uvres

full title is Essai sur les M?urs et l'Esprit des Nations, et sur les

?uvres, x

?uvres, x

t Finlay's Greece under the Romans

arold, iii.

?uvres, x

?uvres, xxi.

Hardiesses, etc. ?u

. ?uvres, x

sastre de Lisbonne.

ost humane and otherwise excellent pieces, L'H

c, 1577. Esprit

. lxvii

de France (Paris, 1826), Part II. The chateau is still standing, and the prospect from the terrace r

l find what he seeks in a singular monument of painstaking spleen, en

761. ?uv. l

t. vi. p. 27

Corr. Lit

761. ?uv. l

st husband 1744; married on

770. ?uv. l

72. ?uv. lxxiv.

in existence, along with the rest of Voltaire's books, at St. P

1. CEuvres, I

, Ixxv. pp.

70. (Euvres,

e Turgot, ii

b. p.

es, lxxv

es, lxxv

cet, iv. pp. 33, 34,

68. ?uvres,

. (Euvres, Ixx

pp. 434, 435; lxxv. p. 452. G

, Vie de Volt

es, Ixxi. pp.

Corr. Lit.

Corr. Lit.

, pt. i. liv. v

es, lxxv

62. ?uvres,

es, lxvi

dorcet,

ne's Girond

res, lxxv.) until 1760, the date of D'Alembert'

l. Pos.

Claude et Néron, vol. vi. pp.

66. ?uvres,

dorcet,

st. de France,

57. ?uvres,

es, lxv. p. 568; lxv

es, lxvi

72. ?uvres,

. p. 9

let, i. pp. 1

es, lxxv

et le Présent (1775).

omme (1776). ?uvr

vres, lxxii. pp. 4

764. ?uvres, l

Raison (or Voyage de la R

E

R. CLARK, Edin