Volume VI Part 12 (2/2)

The intense labor, the immense courses of reading, to which Montesquieu had devoted himself, had exhausted his strength. ”I am overcome with weariness,” he wrote in 1747; ”I propose to rest myself for the remainder of my days.” ”I have done,” he said to M. Suard; ”I have burned all my powder, all my candles have gone out.” ”I had conceived the design of giving greater breadth and depth to certain parts of my _Esprit;_ I have become incapable of it; my reading has weakened my eyes, and it seems to me that what light I have left is but the dawn of the day when they will close forever.”

Montesquieu was at Paris, ill and sad at heart, in spite of his habitual serenity; notwithstanding the scoffs he had admitted into his _Lettres persanes,_ he had always preserved some respect for religion; he considered it a necessary item in the order of societies; in his soul and on his own private account he hoped and desired rather than believed.

”Though the immortality of the soul were an error,” he had said, ”I should be sorry not to believe it; I confess that I am not so humble as the atheists. I know not what they think, but as for me I would not truck the notion of my immortality for that of an ephemeral happiness.

There is for me a charm in believing myself to be immortal like G.o.d himself. Independently of revealed ideas, metaphysical ideas give me, as regards my eternal happiness, strong hopes which I should not like to give up.” As he approached the tomb, his views of religion appeared to become clearer. ”What a wonderful thing!” he would say, ”the Christian religion, which seems to have no object but felicity in the next world, yet forms our happiness in this.” He had never looked to life for any very keen delights; his spirits were as even as his mind was powerful.

”Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against the disagreeables of life,” he wrote, ”never having had any sorrow that an hour's reading did not dispel. I awake in the morning with a secret joy at beholding the light; I gaze upon the light with a sort of enchantment, and all the rest of the day I am content. I pa.s.s the night without awaking, and in the evening, when I go to bed, a sort of entrancement prevents me from giving way to reflections.”

Montesquieu died as he had lived, without retracting any of his ideas or of his writings. The priest of his parish brought him the sacraments, and, ”Sir,” said he, ”you know how great G.o.d is!” ”Yes,” replied the dying man, ”and how little men are!” He expired almost immediately on the 10th of February, 1755, at the age of sixty-six. He died at the beginning of the reign of the philosophers, whose way he had prepared before them without having ever belonged to their number. Diderot alone followed his bier. Fontenelle, nearly a hundred years old, was soon to follow him to the tomb.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fontenelle----274]

Born at Rouen in February, 1657, and nephew of Corneille on the mother's side, Fontenelle had not received from nature any of the unequal and sublime endowments which have fixed the dramatic crown forever upon the forehead of Corneille; but he had inherited the wit, and indeed the brilliant wit (_bel esprit_), which the great tragedian hid beneath the splendors of his genius. He began with those writings, superfine (_precieux_), dainty, tricked out in the fas.h.i.+on of the court and the drawing-room, which suggested La Bruyere's piquant portrait.

”Ascanius is a statuary, Hegio a metal-founder, AEschines a fuller, and Cydias a brilliant wit. That is his trade; he has a sign, a workshop, articles made to order, and apprentices who work under him. Prose, verse, what d'ye lack? He is equally successful in both. Give him an order for letters of consolation, or on an absence; he will undertake them. Take them ready made, if you like, and enter his shop; there is a choice a.s.sortment. He has a friend whose only duty on earth is to puff him for a long while in certain society, and then present him at their houses as a rare bird and a man of exquisite conversation, and thereupon, just as the musical man sings and the player on the lute touches his lute before the persons to whom he has been puffed, Cydias, after coughing, pulling up his wristband, extending his hand and opening his fingers, gravely spouts his quintessentiated ideas and his sophisticated arguments.”

Fontenelle was not destined to stop here in his intellectual developments; when, at forty years of age, he became perpetual secretary to the Academy of Sciences, he had already written his book on the _Pluralite des Mondes,_ the first attempt at that popularization of science which has spread so since then. ”I believe more and more,” he said, ”that there is a certain genius which has never yet been out of our Europe, or, at least, has not gone far out of it.” This genius, clear, correct, precise, the genius of method and a.n.a.lysis, the genius of Descartes, which was at a later period that of Buffon and of Cuvier, was admirably expounded and developed by Fontenelle for the use of the ignorant. He wrote for society, and not for scholars, of whose labors and discoveries he gave an account to society. His extracts from the labors of the Academy of Science and his eulogies of the Academicians are models of lucidness under an ingenious and subtle form, rendered simple and strong by dint of wit. ”There is only truth that persuades,” he used to say, ”and even without requiring to appear with all its proofs. It makes its way so naturally into the mind, that, when it is heard for the first time, it seems as if one were merely remembering.”

Equitable and moderate in mind, prudent and cold in temperament, Fontenelle pa.s.sed his life in discussion without ever stumbling into disputes. ”I am no theologian, or philosopher, or man of any denomination, of any sort whatever; consequently I am not at all bound to be right, and I can with honor confess that I was mistaken, whenever I am made to see it.” ”How did you manage to keep so many friends without making one enemy?” he was asked in his old age. ”By means of two maxims,” he answered: ”Everything is possible; everybody may be right”

(_tout le monde a raison_). The friends of Fontenelle were moderate like himself; impressed with his fine qualities, they pardoned his lack of warmth in his affections. ”He never laughed,” says Madame Geoffrin, his most intimate friend. ”I said to him one day, 'Did you ever laugh, M. de Fontenelle?' 'No,' he answered; 'I never went ha! ha! ha!' That was his idea of laughing; he just smiled at smart things, but he was a stranger to any strong feeling. He had never shed tears, he had never been in a rage, he had never run, and, as he never did anything from sentiment, he did not catch impressions from others. He had never interrupted anybody, he listened to the end without losing anything; he was in no hurry to speak, and, if you had been accusing against him, he would have listened all day without saying a syllable.”

The very courage and trustiness of Fontenelle bore this stamp of discreet moderation. When Abbe St. Pierre was excluded from the French Academy under Louis XV. for having dared to criticise the government of Louis XIV., one single ball in the urn protested against the unjust pressure exercised by Cardinal Fleury upon the society. They all asked one another who the rebel was; each defended himself against having voted against the minister's order; Fontenelle alone kept silent; when everybody had exculpated himself, ”It must be myself, then,” said Fontenelle half aloud.

So much cool serenity and so much taste for n.o.ble intellectual works prolonged the existence of Fontenelle beyond the ordinary limits; he was ninety-nine and not yet weary of life. ”If I might but reach the strawberry-season once more!” he had said. He died at Paris on the 9th of January, 1759; with him disappeared what remained of the spirit and traditions of Louis XIV.'s reign. Montesquieu and Fontenelle were the last links which united the seventeenth century to the new era. In a degree as different as the scope of their minds, they both felt respect for the past, to which they were bound by numerous ties, and the boldness of their thoughts was frequently tempered by prudence. Though naturally moderate and prudent, Voltaire was about to be hurried along by the ardor of strife, by the weaknesses of his character, by his vanity and his ambition, far beyond his first intentions and his natural instincts. The flood of free-thinking had spared Montesquieu and Fontenelle; it was about to carry away Voltaire almost as far as Diderot.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Voltaire----277]

Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire was born at Paris on the 21st of November, 1694. ”My dear father,” said a letter from a relative to his family in Poitou, ”our cousins have another son, born three days ago; Madame Arouet will give me some of the christening sugar-plums for you.

She has been very ill, but it is hoped that she is going on better; the infant is not much to look at, having suffered from a fall which his mother had.” M. Arouet, the father, of a good middle-cla.s.s family, had been a notary at the Chatelet, and in 1701 became paymaster of fees (_payeur d'epices_) to the court of exchequer, an honorable and a lucrative post, which added to the easy circ.u.mstances of the family.

Madame Arouet was dead when her youngest son was sent to the college of Louis-le-Grand, which at that time belonged to the Jesuits. As early as then little Arouet, who was weak and in delicate health, but withal of a very lively intelligence, displayed a freedom of thought and a tendency of irreverence which already disquieted and angered his masters. Father Lejay jumped from his chair and took the boy by the collar, exclaiming, ”Wretch, thou wilt one of these days raise the standard of Deism in France!” Father Pallou, his confessor, accustomed to read the heart, said, as he shook his head, ”This, child is devoured with a thirst for celebrity.”

Even at school and among the Jesuits, that pa.s.sion for getting talked about, which was one of the weaknesses of Voltaire's character, as well as one of the sources of his influence, was already to a certain extent gratified. The boy was so ready in making verses, that his masters themselves found amus.e.m.e.nt in practising upon his youthful talent.

Little Arouet's snuff box had been confiscated because he had pa.s.sed it along from hand to, hand in cla.s.s; when he asked for it back from Father Poree, who was always indulgent towards him, the rector required an application in verse. A quarter of an hour later the boy returned with his treasure in his possession, having paid its ransom thus:

”Adieu, adieu, poor snuff-box mine; Adieu; we ne'er shall meet again: Nor pains, nor tears, nor prayers divine Will win thee back; my efforts are in vain!

Adieu, adieu, poor box of mine; Adieu, my sweet crowns'-worth of bane; Could I with money buy thee back once more, The treasury of Plutus I would drain.

But ah! not he the G.o.d I must implore; To have thee back, I need Apollo's vein. . .

'Twixt thee and me how hard a barrier-line, To ask for verse! Ah! this is all my strain!

Adieu, adieu, poor box of mine; Adieu; we ne'er shall meet again!”

Arouet was still a child when a friend of his family took him to see Mdlle. Ninon de l'Enclos, as celebrated for her wit as for the irregularity of her life. ”Abbe Chateauneuf took me to see her in my very tender youth,” says Voltaire; ”I had done some verses, which were worth nothing, but which seemed very good for my age. She was then eighty-five. She was pleased to put me down in her will; she left me two thousand francs to buy books; her death followed close upon my visit and her will.”

Young Arouet was finis.h.i.+ng brilliantly his last year of rhetoric, when John Baptist Rousseau, already famous, saw him at the distribution of prizes at the college. ”Later on,” wrote Rousseau, in the thick of his quarrels with Voltaire, ”some ladies of my acquaintance had taken me to see a tragedy at the Jesuits in August, 1710; at the distribution of prizes which usually took place after those representations, I observed that the same scholar was called up twice. I asked Father Tarteron, who did the honors of the room in which we were, who the young man was that was so distinguished amongst his comrades. He told me that it was a little lad who had a surprising turn for poetry, and proposed to introduce him to me; to which I consented. He went to fetch him to me, and I saw him returning a moment afterwards with a young scholar who appeared to me to be about sixteen or seventeen, with an ill-favored countenance, but with a bright and lively expression, and who came and shook hands with me with very good grace.”

Scarcely had Francois Arouet left college when he was called upon to choose a career. ”I do not care for any but that of a literary man,”

exclaimed the young fellow. ”That,” said his father, ”is the condition of a man who means to be useless to society, to be a charge to his family, and to die of starvation.” The study of the law, to which he was obliged to devote himself, completely disgusted the poet, already courted by a few great lords who were amused at his satirical vein; he led an indolent and disorderly life, which drove his father distracted; the latter wanted to get him a place. ”Tell my father,” was the young man's reply to the relative commissioned to make the proposal, ”that I do not care for a position which can be bought; I shall find a way of getting myself one that costs nothing.” ”Having but little property when I began life,” he wrote to M. d'Argenson, his sometime fellow-pupil, ”I had the insolence to think that I should have got a place as well as another, if it were to be obtained by hard work and good will. I threw myself into the ranks of the fine arts, which always carry with them a certain air of vilification, seeing that they do not make a man king's counsellor in his councils. You may become a master of requests with money; but you can't make a poem with money, and I made one.”

This independent behavior and the poem on the _Construction du Choeur de Notre-Dame de Paris,_ the subject submitted for compet.i.tion by the French Academy, did not prevent young Arouet from being sent by his father to Holland in the train of the Marquis of Chateauneuf, then French amba.s.sador to the States General; he committed so many follies that on his return to France, M. Arouet forced him to enter a solicitor's office.

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