Читать книгу The life of Voltaire - Evelyn Beatrice Hall - Страница 12

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In the middle of March, 1729, there was a man calling himself M. Sansons, living over a wigmaker’s at St. Germain-en-Laye. At the end of the month M. Sansons came to Paris, and lived for a while at the house of one of his father’s old clerks. Being so advised by his friends he applied for a warrant, annulling his order of exile. He obtained it; and lo! M. de Voltaire, after an absence of nearly three years, is returned from his English travels, and once more at work on his profession in the capital.

He had no thought at present of bringing out those “English Letters.” The time was not yet ripe; and discretion here, certainly, was the better part of valour. He applied himself instead to his “Charles XII.” He spoke of it himself as his favourite work, and “the one for which I have the bowels of a father.” Its breathless race of incident swept him along, and he had hardly time even to be sociable. Refusing one of Theriot’s invitations to dinner on May 15th, he said that he would drop in at the end of the entertainment “along with that fool of a Charles XII.” The subject engrossed him, as the subject he had in hand always engrossed him. Then, since he was no more an exile, he set to work with Theriot to get his pensions restored—and, succeeded.

One night when he was out at supper he heard talk of a lottery formed by Desforts, the controller-general. One of the guests observed that anyone who took all the tickets in the lottery would be greatly the gainer. Voltaire was as swift to act as swift to see. He formed a company who bought up all the tickets: and found himself the winner of a large sum. To be sure he had offended Desforts, who was thus written down an ass. So off went the poet to Plombières with Richelieu in August for a visit. When he returned to Paris the squall had blown over, and M. de Voltaire had made an uncommonly successful speculation.

He made others, too, about this period, and never again was in need of money.

In this December of 1729 Voltaire invited the actors of the Comédie Française to dinner and read them his new play, “Brutus.” It was accepted, rehearsed, and then suddenly and mysteriously withdrawn. Voltaire said there was a plot against it—a cabal of Rohan and his kind, and of Crébillon—famous rival playwright and gloomy tragic poet. But worse than any plot was the feebleness of the play itself and its fatal absence of love interest. The actors themselves thought it unworthy of a Voltaire and his public. Voltaire knew it to be so himself, and at once set about revising and rewriting it.

On March 20, 1730, there died after four days’ acute anguish, aged only thirty-eight, the great actress, Adrienne Lecouvreur. Her death was the supreme event of this period of Voltaire’s life. Perhaps it was one of the supreme events of his whole life. He had been, he said, “her admirer, her friend, her lover.” If the last word is to be taken literally, that relationship had long ceased. But he had for ever a passionate admiration for her talents. The last piece she played in was “Œdipe,” and she was taken ill upon the stage. Voltaire with his quick instinct of a passionate pity, hastened to her bedside, and she died in his arms in agonies for which there could be found no remedy. She was an actress, so she could have neither priest nor absolution, and dying thus, was refused Christian burial, and taken without the city at night and “thrown in the kennel,” like a dead dog.

What wonder if Paris was stirred to its soul? And if Paris was stirred, what must a Voltaire have been? Adrienne, it has been well said, had “all the virtues but virtue.” She was generous and disinterested to a high degree. She was a woman of supreme talent and achievements. She was at least morally no worse, as she was intellectually far greater, than those kings’ mistresses over whose graves prelates had thought it no shame to lift their voices in eulogies and orations, and who had been buried with royal honours and splendour.

In Voltaire’s mind England and Mrs. Oldfield’s burial were still fresh impressions. Injustice had begun to play the part with him that the lighted torch plays to the fagot. His soul was ablaze at once.

It is not fashionable to look upon him as a man of feeling. In the popular idea he is the scoffer who jeered at everything. Read the “Poem on the Death of Adrienne Lecouvreur” written, not on the passionate impulse of the moment, but many months later, and see in it a soul stirred to its profoundest depths—the ebullition of a feeling as deep as it is rare.

“Shall I for ever see … the light-minded French sleeping under the rule of superstition? What! is it only in England that mortals dare to think?”

“Men deprive of burial her to whom Greece would have raised altars.” “The Lecouvreur in London would have had a tomb among genius, kings, and heroes.” “Ye gods! Why is my country no longer the fatherland of glory and talent?”

Such words were enough to endanger its author’s safety.

It was well that when Theriot was showing them about the salons of Paris in June, 1731, Voltaire was living incognito in Rouen, and was supposed to be in England.

Paris forgot; but not Voltaire. For sixty years he never ceased to try and improve the condition of actors. Thirty years after Adrienne’s death he wrote as if it had happened yesterday: “Actors are paid by the King and excommunicated by the Church; they are commanded by the King to play every evening, and by the Church forbidden to do so at all. If they do not play, they are put into prison; if they do, they are spurned into the kennel. We delight to live with them, and object to be buried with them; we admit them to our tables and exclude them from our cemeteries. It must be allowed we are a very reasonable and consistent nation.” In his old age, his one dread was not the mysterious Hereafter, but that he too, dying unabsolved, might be “thrown into the gutter like poor Lecouvreur.”

By the spring of 1730, “Charles XII.” was almost ready for the press. The censor—its satire of current superstition was so very delicate the good man had not noticed it—passed the book.

The author was delighted, and was more than busy in preparing a large edition of the first volume for the press.

By the autumn of 1730, when he had two thousand six hundred copies on the eve of publication, the whole edition was suddenly seized by the paternal government. The censor had passed it? True. But a change in the political outlook made France uncommonly nervous of displeasing Augustus, the usurping King of Poland, of whom Voltaire, forsooth, had spoken disrespectfully. “It seems to me,” he wrote very reasonably, “that in this country Stanislas [the Queen’s father and ex-King] ought to be considered rather than Augustus.”

It is easy to fancy what a maddening irritation such a prohibition, and the delays, worries, and waste of time it caused, must have had on such an impatient and energetic temperament as Voltaire’s.

But he never gave up hope, as he never gave up work.

On December 11th of this year 1730 the rewritten “Brutus” was performed: very favourably received on the first night—by an audience composed entirely of the author’s friends—and damned with faint praise on the second. The author had quite enough vanity to be bitterly mortified. But, not the less, he wrote the kindest and most considerate of letters to the terrified ingénue of fifteen who had played one of the chief parts hopelessly badly. “Ce coquin-là,” one of his bitterest enemies said of him, “has one vice worse than all the rest; he has sometimes virtues.”

The last performance of “Brutus” took place on January 17, 1731. There had been but fifteen in all. In the Revolution it was revived, and received with tumultuous applause. Its motif, that of a father sacrificing his sons for the common good, appealed to those stirring times of reckless deeds, but not to the cultivated and sentimental dolce far niente of 1731.

By February, Voltaire was writing to Cideville at Rouen that the new edition of the “Henriade” was tacitly permitted in Paris by the authorities. While they had been busy suppressing it, those authorities had also been busy reading and admiring it themselves. Henceforth, it was allowed in France.

In March, M. de Voltaire announced his intention of returning to his dear England, and insinuated that he was going to print “Charles XII.” at “Cantorbéry.” In truth, Cideville had found his friend “a little hole” in Rouen—a very dirty and uncomfortable little hole as it turned out—where he could live incognito and superintend the secret printing and publishing there. He removed from the first little hole to the house of Jore, his printer and publisher, with whom he was to have only too many dealings in the future. He passed as an English gentleman. He had the society of Cideville to console him. He was five months in Rouen altogether, from March of 1731 until August. One of these months he spent in bed. Part of his time he was in the country. The whole time he was correcting the proof-sheets of the first part of “Charles XII.” and writing the latter, and composing two tragedies—“The Death of Cæsar” and “Ériphyle.”

He returned to Paris in August, 1731. On September 13th died the noble young Maisons, aged only thirty-one, of the smallpox which had spared him before. “He died in my arms,” said Voltaire, “not through the ignorance but through the neglect of the doctors.”

In October the secretly printed “Charles XII.” was introduced surreptitiously into Paris, as the “Henriade” had been. Like the “Henriade,” it became the mode and was read by all the educated classes; and soon, in translations, by the educated of other countries as well.

It is indeed a bold and vigorous story. Plenty of anecdote and action—a vivid drama wherein the characters play their parts with extraordinary spirit and energy. In the heat of so many battles the author has no time for reflections. But throughout, not the less, he shows very plainly his contempt for his hero, and his love for all those strange things—peace, liberty, enlightenment—which that hero had done so much to crush.

Many of his facts he had obtained first-hand from the Duchess of Marlborough, who remembered her husband’s dealings with Charles; and from Baron Goertz, who had been Charles’s favourite minister and then Voltaire’s personal friend.

Voltaire, as has been seen, loved his “Charles XII.” himself; and as usual had spared nothing to make it as good as he could.

“My great difficulty,” he wrote, “has not been to find memoirs, but to sift out the good ones. There is another inconvenience inseparable from writing contemporary history. Every captain of infantry who has served in the armies of Charles XII. and lost his knapsack on a march, thinks I ought to mention it. If the subalterns complain of my silence, the generals and ministers complain of my outspokenness. Whoso writes the history of his own time must expect to be blamed for everything he has said and everything he has not said; but these little drawbacks should not discourage a man who loves truth and liberty, expects nothing, fears nothing, asks nothing, and who limits his ambition to the cultivation of letters.”

By December of this year 1731 Voltaire was staying with a certain gay old Comtesse de Fontaine Martel who had a house in the Palais Royal, to which she made her visitor free, as to her carriage, her opera-box, and her fine company.

His friendship with the Bernières had cooled by this time. To be sure, he was no small acquisition to this corrupt old Countess, whose one aim in existence was to be amused if she could. “To be bored near Voltaire! Ah, Dieu! that is not possible!” said an enthusiastic lady admirer thereafter. He sonneted his hostess now, as only he knew how—delicate, graceful, French, delightful. “Ériphyle” was performed at her house very early in 1732. The guests were much too polite not to sob at its pathos and applaud it to the echo.

On March 7, 1732, it was played to a public who received it with a very tepid warmth; until the fifth act, of which they unmistakably disapproved. “One forgives the dessert when the other courses have been passable,” Voltaire wrote cheerily to Cideville. But one of his critics was not far from the truth when he said that if it had not been for its hits at the great, at princes, and at superstition, it would have had nothing of Voltaire in it at all.

It was dull; and Voltaire knew it. He employed the Easter holidays in writing a very good prologue to it. But if a bad dessert cannot spoil a good dinner, a good hors d’œuvre will not save a bad one. On May 13th Voltaire wrote to Theriot that he was resolved not even to print it, and it was withdrawn from Jore’s hands at the last moment. Some of its material was used in “Semiramis.”

The author of “Œdipe,” of the “Henriade,” and of “Charles XII.” had already not unnaturally turned his thoughts to that mistress who was the object of all literary men’s hopes, vows, and adorations—the French Academy. By December, 1731, there was a vacant chair there. Who had a right to it if not he? He was almost forty years old. He had already done great things; he was ripe to do greater. Even the authorities could not be blind to his deserts and to his powers. Richelieu was his friend, and used all his influence to help him. The thing was as good as done, when by secret malice, or very ill fortune, there appeared in print in the spring of 1732 that luckless “Epistle to Uranie,” written ten years earlier to that fair travelling companion, Madame de Rupelmonde.

There is nothing in that poem but its grace, cleverness, and sincerity which would excite comment if it appeared in a magazine to-day. Voltaire had called it “Le Pour et le Contre,” but it was certainly much more against revealed religion than for it. Yet it is in no sense offensively anti-Christian. It is not the poem of a scoffer, but of one who seeks truth diligently and “gropes through darkness up to God.”

The fact did not soften the authorities in the least.

“What do you think of it?” said the Chancellor of France to his secretary.

“Voltaire ought to be deprived of pen, ink, and paper,” was the answer. “That man has a mind which could destroy a state.”

“Uncertain Uranie” had before this solved her doubts by going into a convent. Her mentor saw but one course open to him. It was a very characteristic course—and used by him afterwards very freely. He denied the authorship of the ill-omened little work in toto; and, true to his principles of doing everything thoroughly, declared that the Abbé Chaulieu was the writer thereof, and that he (Voltaire) had heard him recite it at the Temple.

Nobody believed the story, it appears. At any rate, the Academy doors remained closed to him.

Many worldly-wise old friends of Voltaire’s—Fontenelle and Madame de Tencin among others—took the opportunity of the failure of “Ériphyle” to beg him about this time to give up that dramatic career for which he was evidently unsuited.

“What answer did you make?” someone said to him.

“None; I brought out ‘Zaire.’”

“Zaire” was written in twenty-two days.

“The subject carried me away with it; the piece wrote itself.” It is a tragedy full of love and pathos, which still in some degree keeps its popularity. It has been ably criticised as being not the best of Voltaire’s tragedies, but the most inspired. It reads as if its author were a lover of five-and-twenty—quick with the emotions he describes. “Whoso paints the passions has felt them,” he said himself. What an unknown Voltaire “the tender Zaire” must have revealed to his friends! It was his first real dramatic success since “Œdipe.” It was a greater success than “Œdipe” had been. At the first performance, indeed, on August 6, 1732, the pit was somewhat noisy, and vociferously called attention to defects arising from hasty writing. But, after all, the play moved the heart. At the fourth performance the author was called from his box to receive the unanimous plaudits of the house. He himself wrote a notice of the play in the “Mercure”—the first time such a thing had ever been done. On October 14th it was played before the King and Queen at Fontainebleau. It brought its author much of what he called “that smoke of vainglory” for which he had written ‘Ériphyle’ and ‘Brutus’ all over again, and in vain. He himself superintended the performance. He was at Court six weeks. “Mariamne” was also performed; and the “Gustave” of that rival playwright, Alexis Piron, was not. Voltaire met Piron at Court one day. “Ah! my dear Piron, what are you doing here? I have been here three weeks. The other night they played my ‘Mariamne’; they are going to play ‘Zaire.’ How about ‘Gustave’?” Bitter Piron himself tells the story. It does not sound like truth. An enemy’s ill-luck nearly always killed the Voltairian spite at a blow. But if it be true, it is easy to understand that this cool, witty Arouet, the son of the notary, was not precisely popular. While at Court he rewrote his “English Letters” on “Newton” and “Gravitation”; read aloud to Cardinal Fleury, with a few judicious omissions, that one on the Quakers, and corresponded with a man who was now his scientific teacher and, to be, his admired friend and his bitter enemy. His name was Maupertuis.

When Voltaire had returned to his comfortable quarters at the Palais Royal, “Zaire” was acted there by amateurs in January, 1733. Voltaire himself took the part of Lusignan, the heroine’s father, in spite of his health, which was so bad that “I dread being reduced to idleness, which to me would be a terrible disgrace.”

In that very same month of January the Comtesse de Fontaine Martel died very suddenly. She had her card parties and her salon to the last. She was quite old, wicked, godless, charming and generous, a perfect type of her class and her age. Voltaire was at her bedside when she died. “What time is it?” she asked with her last breath. Before she could be answered—“Thank God!” said she, “whatever time it is, there is somewhere a rendezvous.”

Voltaire said that he lost, by her death, a good house of which he was the master, and an income of forty thousand francs which was spent in amusing him.

He stayed on in her house for some time. He was there when there swept over him one of the noisiest hurricanes of all his stormy existence.

In 1731, that envious old exiled J. B. Rousseau had circulated in Paris a very venomous letter on the subject of Voltaire. The brilliant success of ‘Zaire’ was the signal for him to attack it with fury. The criticism was so manifestly unjust and so manifestly dictated by jealousy, that Voltaire might have been well content to leave it alone. But almost the only thing he could not do was to do nothing. So he wrote “The Temple of Taste.”

“The Temple of Taste” is a brilliant burlesque, half prose, half verse. Pope’s “Dunciad” is the only English poem with which it can be compared. Its story is that Cardinal Fleury and the poet go together to the “Temple of Taste” criticising every foible of the age on their way there. Near the entrance they meet the candidates for admission to the “Temple,” great among whom is J. B. Rousseau.

The “Temple” is one of the most graceful and easy of the works of an author who always possessed those two qualities in an extraordinary degree. It shows, as no other writing of Voltaire’s had yet shown, his delicate and perfect critical judgment. He expresses his damning opinion—so gaily, so charmingly, so innocently—on many other over-rated celebrities besides Rousseau. The piquancy of the thing lies in the fact that three fourths of those celebrities were then living. It hits off every passing craze. Every line contains a deadly allusion. Every other word is a mot almost. No translation can give any idea of the full and deadly effect of that easy, trifling, bantering style. “The Temple of Taste” is a flame which still leaps and shines, though it burns no more.

By February “the Temple,” wrote its builder, “had become a Cathedral.” In April it was in the hands of the censor. Voltaire quite expected to be given a privilege for it. The censor did not seem to see anything objectionable in it.

It is easy to fancy what a success a work so gay, witty, and daring would meet with, when it dropped red-hot from the press, while it was still in the hands of the authorities awaiting the coveted yellow seal. If it was a cathedral, it was one which afforded the author no sanctuary. The old dangers and the old outcries, to which he should have been getting wearily used by now, met him as usual. There was a threatened lettre de cachet. “Here is little villain of a writer who ought to be sent over the sea again,” said Marais.

All Paris was up in arms in fact. “This ‘Temple of Taste’ has roused those whom I have not praised enough for their liking,” Voltaire wrote to Theriot on May 1st, “and still more those whom I have not praised at all … add to that the crime of having printed this bagatelle without a permission, and the anger of the minister against such an outrage; add to that the howlings of the Court and the menace of a lettre de cachet, and, with all, you will have but a feeble idea of the pleasantness of my position and of the protection afforded to literature.”

“I must then rebuild a second Temple,” he added cheerfully; and he positively set to work to do it, missing out some of the stones of offence in the first.

On May 15th he left the late Comtesse de Martel’s comfortable house and went to live at the mean lodging of his man of business—“in the worst quarter of Paris in the worst house”—opposite the Church of St. Gervais. “The place is more deafened with the sound of bells than a sacristan,” said he, “but I shall make so much noise with my lyre the bells will be nothing to me.”

One hardly knows whether to admire more the man’s admirable indifference to things material, or that genius for hard work which stood him in as good stead in a garret as in a palace.

He was not long alone in these rooms. He soon had with him two literary protégés whom he fed, lodged, and entertained “like my own children.” One of them, Lefèvre, died young. For the other, Linant, Voltaire had done his very best to get the good offices of Madame de Fontaine Martel. But that worldly-wise old person, who had already been much tried by friend Theriot, declined to accommodate Linant in her house. Then Voltaire besought Madame du Deffand for him.

The protégés were always going to do great things and never did them. Voltaire believed in them exactly as devout and simple persons will long believe in the reclamation of the irreclaimable. “I am persuaded,” he had said in that “Temple of Taste,” “that if a man does not cultivate a talent it is because he does not possess it; there is no one who does not write poetry if he is a poet; or music, if he is a musician.”

MADAME DU CHÂTELET

From an Engraving after Marianne Loir

But his heart was softer than his judgment. Now, as later, he believed in the capacity as in the generosity of his fellows, with an enthusiasm which outlasted experience, and wholly contradicts the gay cynicism of his utterances.

On July 3, 1733, there is a little innocent, ominous sentence in a letter of Voltaire’s to Cideville. “Yesterday I began an epistle in verse on Calumny, dedicated to a very amiable and much calumniated woman.” That nameless lady, who had Voltaire’s Richelieu for a lover, had already written to Richelieu highly praising Voltaire’s new play, “Adélaïde du Guesclin.” In this July she, a certain Comte de Forcalquier and a gay young duchess, paid a surprise visit to Voltaire in his dingy lodging, which occasioned the poet to break into charming verse and to compare his guests to the three angels who visited Abraham. The summer also saw him busy buying pictures, writing an opera, “Samson,” to music by Rameau, and rewriting his “Adélaïde.” It was to have been performed in the April of this 1733, but the illness of the chief actress delayed its appearance, and gave the author more time to correct and improve it.

But paramount in his mind to any opera and tragedy, aye, to any amiable and calumniated woman of fashion too, was his haunting fear, which never left him all through this year, that the “English Letters,” which were being printed at Rouen privately and under his own supervision, should slip out and become public property before he gave the signal at what he took to be the psychological moment. By July they were already published in England—free England who received them with delight. “The Letters philosophical, political, critical, poetical, heretical, and diabolical are selling in English in London with great success.” But here?

The outcries against “The Temple of Taste” were still loud and vehement. Voltaire’s terror lest “our incorrect Jore” should play him false with regard to this far more dangerous work, vibrates passionately in every letter of the period he wrote. “These cursed Letters,” he called them. They were damned on their reputation alone in Paris, before anyone had seen them. It is almost impossible now to believe that any government should have thought it dangerous to the state and its citizens to understand the theory of gravitation or the principles of light. But, after all, those authorities were not such fools as they looked. Once allow the people to reason, and the Bourbon dynasty would fall like a pack of cards.

The author had already toned down some of his freer utterances. But he could never tone the free soul which breathed in them.

He had “a mortal aversion to prison,” he wrote. He had a reason, a stronger reason than he had ever had in his life, for wishing to remain quietly in France. But speak his message to the world he must. “The more liberty one has, the more one wants.” He had tasted of that deep nectar of the gods, and his countrymen must drink of it with him. He feared his gay manner of conveying grave truth would offend. “If I had not lightened matter, nobody would have been scandalised; but then nobody would have read me.”

The vif and anxious author paid Jore and worried him freely enough. And then he tried to propitiate the fickle French public, as he had propitiated it before, by a play. On January 18, 1734, was performed the long-delayed “Adélaïde du Guesclin.” The first act was received with hisses, which redoubled in the second. In the fifth, the ruin was completed by one of those mots at which a Parisian parterre is only too apt. On the second evening Voltaire spoke of himself as attending Adélaïde’s funeral. One critic, indeed, and no mean critic, had found the play “tender, noble, and touching.” But then that critic already looked on Voltaire with eyes more than friendly. “Adélaïde,” far from smoothing the way for the “Letters,” was but another stumbling stone in it.

Then the versatile Voltaire, at once a friend and a notary’s son, must needs arrange personally for the marriage of his friend Richelieu to Mademoiselle de Guise.

To be sure, Richelieu was amant volage if ever man was; but he took Mademoiselle without a dot, and the manners of the time were such that neither husband nor wife would in any case have expected fidelity of the other. Voltaire left for Montjeu, near Autun, the residence of the bride’s parents, on April 7th. “I have drawn up the contract, so I shall not write any verses,” said he. But he did his duty all the same a few days after, and composed an “Epithalamium.” The bridegroom left shortly to join his regiment. Among the wedding guests was that old love of Richelieu’s, the tender critic of “Adélaïde,” “the most amiable and calumniated of women,” Émilie de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet. Between composing love verses for the newly married pair, and perhaps some on his own account, Voltaire enjoyed a brief holiday, idle and content. Then the storm burst in such a clap of thunder as had never shaken even his world before.

By April 24, 1734, the “English Letters” had appeared without the slightest warning to the author and with his name on the title-page, and were running through Paris like a firebrand. Appended was his Letter on the “Thoughts of Pascal,” in which he had dared to doubt the omniscience and infallibility of that thinker, and which he had done his best to suppress altogether. Jore was thrown into the Bastille. The book was denounced. On June 10th it was publicly burnt in Paris by the hangman as “scandalous, contrary to religion, to morals, and respect for authority.” Voltaire’s lodging in the capital was searched. When the officer arrived to arrest him at Montjeu on May 11th he was told that he had gone five days earlier, that is, on May 6, 1734, to drink the waters of Lorraine, not yet a French possession.

But in reality Voltaire was making his way quietly to the Château of Cirey-sur-Blaise, in Champagne, a country home of the Marquis and the Marquise du Châtelet.