Читать книгу The life of Voltaire - Evelyn Beatrice Hall - Страница 8
ОглавлениеOur priests are not what a foolish people think them!
Our credulity makes all their knowledge.
But “when fanaticism has once gangrened a brain, the malady is incurable,” said Voltaire; and neither he nor any other could alter an Armand. A certain Maréchale de Villars—galante, coquette, with all the easy ton learnt in Courts, and all the French woman’s aplomb and grace to make five-and-thirty more dangerous than five-and-twenty—leant curiously out of her box presently to watch a young buffoon of an actor who was doing his best to ruin M. de Voltaire’s play. The high priest, in a scene essentially grave and tragic, has as train-bearer a lean-faced, narrow-shouldered, boyish-looking youth who must needs take his part as comic, and make a fool not of himself only but of his high priest also. Who is the ridiculous boy? M. de Voltaire. It appears deliciously piquant to the Maréchale that an author should run the risk of damning his own work for a jest. What a refreshing person to have to stay when one is a little bored! Madame receives him in her box—he knows quite well how to behave and how to be as affable, daring, and amusing as could be wished—and they begin a friendship, not without result.
There were some allusions to the Regent and Madame du Berri in “Œdipe,” very vociferously applauded, which must have made Maître Arouet groan in spirit and think that after all his Armand, his rigid “fool in prose” at home, was safer to deal with than this “fool in verse” on the boards, who would not be warned and must come to the gallows. But the Regent, like a wise man, hearing of that astounding first night and the allusions, presented the author with a gold medal and a thousand crowns; talked with him publicly at the next Opera ball, and made a point of coming to the performance to show that the arrows could not have been really intended for him after all.
As for the Duchesse du Berri, she came five nights in succession to the piece. And of course all the little, witty, disaffected Court of Maine were there too, enjoying those allusions and looking hard at their enemies, the Regent and his daughter.
The curtain went down on perhaps the most successful début that ever playwright had made. “Œdipe” ran for forty-five nights. Clever Philip commanded it to Court to be performed before the little Louis XV. The enterprising and energetic young author asked, and obtained, permission to dedicate it, in book form, to downright old Charlotte Elizabeth, the Regent’s mother. He sent a copy, with a flaming sonnet, to George I. of England; and yet another copy to the Regent’s sister, the Duchess of Lorraine, with a letter wherein is to be found his first signature of his new name, Arouet de Voltaire. When the Prince de Conti, his old Temple companion, complimented “Œdipe” and its author in a poem of his own, “Sir,” said Voltaire airily, “you will be a great poet; I must get the King to give you a pension.”
The young playwright gained from “Œdipe”—not including the Regent’s present—about four thousand francs, besides a fine capital of fame. He was the old notary’s son to some purpose after all, and began to invest money. As to the fame, he took that very modestly. When the women declared his “Œdipe” to be a thousand times better than his old hero Corneille’s play on the same subject, the young man made the happiest quotation from Corneille himself, disclaiming superiority.
He attended every one of the forty-five performances—a learner of his own art and of the actors’.
He must have gone back gay and well pleased enough on those evenings to his furnished room in the Rue de Calandre.
In the spring of 1719 the faithless and charming Mademoiselle de Livri insisted on his using his influence to get her a good part in his play. Perhaps she, Voltaire, and “little de Génonville” enjoyed themselves about Paris together as before. “Que nous nous aimions tous trois! … que nous étions heureux!” the forsaken lover wrote ten years later in his graceful poem to the memory of de Génonville.
Mademoiselle was no actress, though she wished to be one. Her very accent was provincial. She was laughed off the stage when “Œdipe” was revived after Lent, and Voltaire very nearly came to blows with one of the laughers, Poisson, who was one of the actors too. He had Poisson thrown into prison, and then himself obtained his release. Poisson and the public were right after all, and Voltaire soon knew it.
Mademoiselle retired from the boards, and married.
When a few years later, Voltaire went to call on her in her fine house when she was the Marquise de Gouvernet, and her huge Swiss porter, not knowing him, refused him admission, he sent her “Les Vous et Les Tu,” one of the most charmingly graceful and bantering of all his poems. In his old age at Ferney, when the first rose of the year appeared he would pluck it and kiss it to the memory of Mademoiselle de Livri. Perhaps it was of her he thought when he wrote one of the few tender lines to be found in his works, and one of the tenderest in any poetry:
C’est moi qui te dois tout, puisque c’est moi qui t’aime.
On his last great visit to Paris, when he was nearly eighty-four and she not much younger, the two met for the last time—ghosts out of shadowland—in a strange new world.
In this same spring of 1719 there appeared in Paris another satire on the Regent, called the “Philippics.” M. de Voltaire had not written it, to be sure. But it was clever, and sounded as if he had. Besides, he was known to be the friend of the Duchesse du Maine, at the present moment shut up, with her Court, in the Bastille; of the gorgeous Duke of Richelieu and of the Spanish ambassador who were accomplices in a conspiracy against Orleans. So in May the authorities requested M. de Voltaire to spend the summer in the country; and he spent it at Villars.
If the Maréchale had been charming in Paris, she was a thousand times more so here. If she had flattered a brilliant young author in her box at the theatre, she flattered and petted him a thousand times better now she had him to herself, an interesting young exile. Such a clever boy! so witty! so cynical! so amusing! He certainly ought to have been clever enough to guess that this woman of the world was only playing with him. But he was vain too—and did not guess it. “Friendship is a thousand times better worth having than love,” he wrote disconsolately in a letter after a while. “There is something in me which makes it ridiculous for me to love. … It is all over. I renounce it for life.” The renunciation was not so easy as he expected. He was, at least for a time, out of gear, restless, discontented. The husband, Louis XIV.’s famous marshal, had a thousand anecdotes of the Sun King to relate. And the future author of the “Century of Louis XIV.” was almost too distrait to listen to them. He forgot Paris and his career. He forgot the dazzling success of “Œdipe.” He would not indeed have been Voltaire, but some lesser man, if he had let this or any other passion ride over him rough-shod. He had the “Henriade” and a new play with him. He turned to his work—worked like a fury—until he had worked the folly out of him. But, not the less, “he never spoke of it afterwards but with a feeling of regret, almost of remorse.”
By June 25, 1719, he was at Sully, where he wrote most of his new play, “Artémire,” and spent the autumn and part of the winter. Paris had gone mad over the financial schemes of John Law, and it was well that a young man of five-and-twenty, with a taste for speculation and money in his pocket for the first time, should be out of the way of temptation. From Sully he went back to Villars, and from Villars to the Duke of Richelieu’s. “I go from château to château,” he wrote. He liked the life well, no doubt. It was gay, easy, witty. For anyone else it would have been idle too; but not for a Voltaire.
He had already complained that his passion for his Maréchale de Villars had lost him a good deal of his time. But, all the same, by February, 1720, “Artémire” was finished, and its author was back in Paris superintending its rehearsals.
Its first appearance took place on February 13, 1720. It is not too much to say that it was a most dismal failure.
Adrienne Lecouvreur, the great tragic actress, had hoped everything from it. At a private reading a certain Abbé de Bussi had shed so many tears at its pathos that he had caught cold from them. The public was not so soft-hearted. It was in no mood for plays. Law had just ruined half Paris. When the crash came—“Paper,” said Voltaire, with his usual neat incisiveness, “is now reduced to its intrinsic value.” Someone says that this mot was the funeral oration of Law’s system. Law’s system was the funeral oration of “Artémire.” It was a dull, feeble play. Not all its author’s rewritings and correctings and embellishments—and it was his custom to rewrite, correct, and embellish all his works until labour and genius could do no more for them—could ever make it good enough for him to publish as a whole. But when the public took it exactly at his own valuation, he was not a little hurt. It was a later Voltaire who said that he envied the beasts because of their ignorance of evil to come and of what people said of them. He was not less sensitive now than then. The last performance of the rewritten “Artémire” took place on March 8, 1720. When, soon after, the “Henriade” was criticised at a private reading, he threw it disgustedly into the fire; and President Hénault saved it at the price of a pair of lace ruffles. Perhaps the fire was not very bright, or the author had a very shrewd idea that one of his friends would not let a masterpiece be lost to posterity.
He went to stay again with Richelieu after his “Artémire” disappointment; and from there wrote to Theriot telling him to copy out, in his very best handwriting, cantos of the “Henriade” which were to be propitiatingly presented to the Regent. From Richelieu Voltaire went to Sully, and from Sully to La Source, the home of the great St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, and his French wife.
In the June of 1721, he went back to Villars again. He could trust himself to see his Maréchale now. They had “white nights” here as at Sceaux and at Sully. They gaily astronomised through opera glasses in the long, warm, starlit summer nights in the garden—with the assistance of that fashionable “Plurality of Worlds” by M. de Fontenelle. “We mistake Venus for Mercury,” Voltaire wrote to him gaily in verse, “And break up the order of the Heavens.”
From that modish courtly life the man who had been François Marie Arouet was summoned home in the December of 1721 to the death-bed of his old father. A strange group gathered round it—Catherine, Madame Mignot, a middle-aged married woman; Armand, the austere and surly Jansenist of eight-and-thirty; and the most brilliant man in France. Good old Maître Arouet went the way of all flesh, trusting greatly neither in his “fool in prose” nor his “fool in verse,” but leaving Prose a post in the Chamber of Accounts which brought in thirteen thousand francs yearly, and Verse a sum which afforded him four thousand odd francs per annum. He had appointed a trustee and guardian, with whom Verse, who was always what his valets thereafter charitably called vif, immediately quarrelled.
The guardian was indeed such a dilatory old person that it took him four years to divide the estate among Maître Arouet’s children; and two years after his father’s death Voltaire was writing lugubriously to Theriot, “I shall be obliged to work to live, after having lived to work.”
Things were not quite so bad as that, however. When he left the Bastille the Regent had given him a pension of twelve hundred francs. And now, a few days after his father’s death, in January, 1722, the boy King, Louis XV., made him a further pension of two thousand francs. From this moment Voltaire never spent his whole income.
In no other concern of his life has he been so much misrepresented as in his dealings with money matters.
It is hard to see why for all other men independence should be considered honourable and a freedom of the spirit, and grinding poverty an inspiration and liberty only to the man of letters. But the peculiarly foolish idea that genius cannot be genius if it understands its bank-book, and that great truths can only come from a garret and an ill-fed brain, is not yet extinct. Many of Voltaire’s biographers feel that they have to apologise for him paying his bills regularly, hunting out his creditors, and investing his money with shrewdness and caution. It would have been so much more romantic to have flung it about royally—and then borrowed someone else’s!
But Voltaire knew that “poverty enervates the courage.” He never uttered a truer word. If it was his mission to whip the world’s apathy into action with unpalatable truths, he could not depend on that world for the bread he put into his mouth and the coat he put on his back. “Ask nothing of anyone; need no one.” “My vocation is to say what I think fari quæ sentiam.” If Voltaire had been insolvent the Voltairian message could never have been uttered.
In this May of 1722, he further sought to improve his monetary position by running to earth, for Cardinal Dubois—the first, greatest, and vilest of the Regent’s Prime Ministers—a spy, one Salamon Levi. Voltaire does not appear to have thought the occupation a derogatory one. Nor did it hurt his cynic and elastic conscience to flatter “Iscariot” Dubois to the top of his bent both in verse and prose, and declare that he (Voltaire) would be eternally grateful if Dubois would employ him somehow, in something.
The pension from the King—very irregularly paid at first, and soon not paid at all—was not taken by him as the authorities must have hoped it would be, and neither shut his mouth nor quenched his spirit. It was nominally a tribute to a talented young playwriter. He took it virtually as such. His old talent for getting into mischief was as lively as ever; and spies at this period seem to have had an unlucky fascination for him. One night in July, 1722, at the house of the Minister of War he met Beauregard, the spy who had been the instrument of putting him into the Bastille. “I knew spies were paid,” he said, “but I did not know that it was by eating at the minister’s table.” Beauregard bided his time, and fell on the poet one night on the Bridge of Sèvres as he was crossing it in his sedan chair, beating him severely. To give blows with a cane was thereafter translated “Voltairiser” in the mouth of Voltaire’s enemies. He had many of them. He had made so many mots! They denied him his proper share of physical courage. D’Argenson, his friend, though he said he had in his soul a strength worthy of Turenne, of Moses, and of Gustavus Adolphus, yet added that he feared the least dangers for his body and was “a proven coward.” He was certainly, now and ever, a most nervously organised creature. When he was at fever heat he could be plucky
J. B. ROUSSEAU
From an Engraving after a Picture by J. Aved
enough. But there is as little doubt that he dearly loved his safety as that he spent his whole life in endangering it.
He pursued Beauregard with a most nimble, passionate, vivid intensity. He must have had an extraordinary persistence to get that unwieldy mass of muddle and jobbery which called itself French law to administer any kind of justice; but he did it. It took him more than fifteen months to compass his revenge, and cost him immense sums of money as well as immense labour. The game was not worth the candle. But Voltaire was never the person to think of that. To him the game was everything while he pursued it. It was to this characteristic he owed some of his success in life.
The affair of the Bridge of Sèvres was, not the less, one of the most unfortunate incidents of his experience. To the day of his death it was a whip in the hands of his enemies which they used without mercy and without ceasing.
He must have been tired of fighting and failure, and in need of quiet and change when one of his philosophic marquises—a certain Madame de Rupelmonde—“young, rich, agreeable,” took him with her in July, 1722, as her guest, on a trip to Holland. Her witty companion of eight-and-twenty was in no sense her lover. The few convenances there were left in those days quite permitted such an association. The two had for each other merely a gallant friendship. Madame was a widow, of easy virtue, and fashionable enough to have religious doubts—to wish to be taught to think. As they jolted leisurely in her post-chaise over the rough roads of old France they had plenty of time to discuss fate, free will, life, death, and the theologies. Voltaire found time, too, during the trip, to answer Madame’s questions by an “Epistle to Uranie”—in which he gave, in a few graceful pages, and with the admirable terseness and lucidity which were to be the hall-mark of all his writings, the most powerful objections to Christianity. It was his first open avowal of Deism. How long he had cherished that belief and outgrown all others, cannot be told. The whole temper of his mind was rationalistic. Christianity had come to him through the muddy channel of French Roman Catholicism in the eighteenth century. He began by disbelieving the shameless superstitions with which the Churchmen darkened and debased the understanding of the people. He ended by disbelieving everything which his reason could not follow. The process is easy and not uncommon.
The philosophic pair were much fêted en route. “Œdipe” was performed when they were at Cambrai, as a delicate compliment. There was a Congress going on there too; and Voltaire wrote gaily therefrom to Cardinal Dubois (who was archbishop of the place but had never even seen it) one of those audacious, easy letters which were his forte, and which Dubois and Theriot between them passed round the salons of Paris. Voltaire and Madame were at Cambrai for some five or six weeks, and then went on to Brussels. Here lived now J. B. Rousseau, fifty-two years old, who from wit and licence had passed to dulness and orthodoxy. Of course the poets met. Voltaire had not seen Rousseau since he was a schoolboy, and Rousseau had been shown him as a prodigy for imitation. To the gay, unsparing logic of the younger poet the old one did not appear at all in the light of a prodigy now. “He despises me because I neglect rhyme, and I despise him because he can do nothing but rhyme,” said Voltaire carelessly.
At first, however, all went well. Voltaire read his “master” as he called him, a part of the “Henriade.” Rousseau praised it, only criticising such passages as would be likely to give offence to the Church. Then came a meeting, when the poets read to each other some of their minor poems; and Madame de Rupelmonde was a gracious and sympathetic listener. Rousseau read his satire, the “Judgment of Pluto”; which was nothing but an account of the wrongs which had exiled him. And Voltaire said the “Judgment” was unworthy of the Great and Good Rousseau. Then Rousseau must needs read out his “Ode to Posterity,” on the same subject. “That is a letter, master,” says Voltaire, “which will never reach its address.” Then Voltaire takes his “Epistle to Uranie” and reads that. “Stop, stop!” cries old Rousseau, still smarting under the audacious boy’s criticisms. “What horrible profanity!” And Voltaire asks since when the author of the “Moïsade” has become devout.
There was the making of a very pretty quarrel here. The one sun was rising, the other setting. Both men were not a little vain, sensitive, and jealous. Henceforth, it was war to the knife. They parted; and if Voltaire forgave at the last, Rousseau never did.
Rousseau recorded afterwards how Voltaire attended Mass on the first day of his arrival at Brussels and shocked the congregation by his profanity. The story was true, though it was written by an enemy. Voltaire was born irreverent. When he left Brussels he did not even revere that hero of his youth, Rousseau.
By October, 1722, he and Madame had gone on to The Hague and Amsterdam.
The young man was always out dining and playing tennis there, reading aloud his works, keen, active, enjoying himself. His health, of which he was exceedingly fond of talking and complaining was better than it had ever been; but that did not prevent him from drinking up one day as a kind of medical experiment—“from greediness,” said Madame de Rupelmonde—a bottle of medicine from her bedside which she was going to have taken, from necessity.
Perhaps in the midst of gaiety and enjoyment Voltaire recalled the last time he was here, Pimpette, and that wild episode of his youth. But this was the man who was always agog for the future; never a dreamer of the past—a doer, an actor, the most energetic spirit in history.
When he was at The Hague he was busy arranging for the publication of his “Henriade” there, in that freer country, and continually reading and reciting extracts from it to his friends. After a few weeks’ visit he started on his journey home. Madame de Rupelmonde had a house at The Hague, and as there was no other agreeable marquise with a travelling carriage returning to France just then, M. de Voltaire did the journey on horseback alone, and as economically as he could.
He was at Cambrai again on October 31, 1722, announcing the forthcoming publication of his epic. At the beginning of the new year, 1723, he was once more staying at La Source, near Orleans, with that exiled Lord Bolingbroke who had, said his guest, “all the learning of his own country and all the politeness of ours.” The guest read aloud that dear epic. He called it “The League or Henry IV.” now, or “The League,” or “Henry IV.” only. He advertised it industriously at every château he stayed at. In Paris Theriot was trying to get subscriptions for it, and to propitiate the censor. From La Source Voltaire went to stay with other friends at Ussé, who were also friends of a charming early friend of his own, Madame de Mimeure.
By February 23, 1723, he was back again in Paris seeing a new play by Alexis Piron, called “Harlequin Deucalion,” wherein the failure of “Artémire” was piquantly satirised. “Deucalion” is remarkable as having obeyed a prohibition of the censor, designed to stop comic opera in Paris, that not more than one person should appear on the stage at a time, and as having succeeded in spite of that obedience.
Then the active Voltaire was off to Rouen, where lived his old friend Cideville. Then he went on to Rivière Bourdet, near Rouen, the country home of the Bernières, a married couple, also very much his friends. All the time he was planning, scheming, working, for the production of his “Henriade.” Almost all his letters of the year 1723 are to Theriot or Madame de Bernières, and almost all on this topic. In May he was staying at the Bernières town house, on what is now the Quai Voltaire and was then the Quai des Théatins, opposite the gardens of the Tuileries. The “Henriade” was finished at last. The subscription lists had not gone well; their ill-success had been burlesqued in the play which succeeded “Deucalion.” That was mortifying. Still, it was but the chagrin of a moment. The “Henriade” was about to appear. It must and should succeed! Had not its wary author read parts to the Regent, and changed phrases which might have offended Dubois? The only thing he would not do was to alter its principles to suit the blindest and most autocratic powers that ever brought a country to ruin.
It must take its chance! It took it, and was prohibited by the censor immediately.
