Volume VI Part 13 (1/2)
It was there that the poet acquired that knowledge of business which was useful to him during the whole course of his long life; he, however, did not remain there long: a satire upon the French Academy which had refused him the prize for poetry, and, later on, some verses as biting as they were disrespectful against the Duke of Orleans, twice obliged their author to quit Paris. Sent into banishment at Sully-sur-Loire, he there found partisans and admirers; the merry life that was led at the Chevalier Sully's mitigated the hards.h.i.+ps of absence from Paris. ”Don't you go publis.h.i.+ng abroad, I beg,” wrote Arouet, nevertheless, to one of his friends, ”the happiness of which I tell you in confidence: for they might perhaps leave me here long enough for me to become unhappy; I know my own capacity; I am not made to live long in the same place.”
A beautiful letter addressed to the Regent and disavowing all the satirical writings which had been attributed to him, brought Arouet back to Paris at the commencement of the year 1717; he had been enjoying it for barely a few months when a new satire, ent.i.tled _J'ai vu_ (I have seen), and bitterly criticising the late reign, engaged the attention of society, and displeased the Regent afresh. Arouet defended himself with just cause and with all his might against the charge of having written it. The Duke of Orleans one day met him in the garden of the Palais-Royal. ”Monsieur Arouet,” said he, ”I bet that I will make you see a thing you have never seen.” ”What, pray, monseigneur?” ”The Bastille.” ”Ah! monseigneur, I will consider it seen.” Two days later, young Arouet was shut up in the Bastille.
I needs must go; I jog along in style, With close-shut carriage, to the royal pile Built in our fathers' days, hard by St. Paul, By Charles the Fifth. 0 brethren, good men all, In no such quarters may your lot be cast!
Up to my room I find my way at last A certain rascal with a smirking face Exalts the beauties of my new retreat, So comfortable, so compact, so neat.
Says he, ”While Phoebus runs his daily race, He never casts one ray within this place.
Look at the walls, some ten feet thick or so; You'll find it all the cooler here, you know.”
Then, bidding me admire the way they close The triple doors and triple locks on those, With gratings, bolts and bars on every side, ”It's all for your security,” he cried.
At stroke of noon some skilly is brought in; Such fare is not so delicate as thin.
I am not tempted by this splendid food, But what they tell me is, ”'Twill do you good So eat in peace; no one will hurry you.”
Here in this doleful den I make ado, Bastilled, imprisoned, cabined, cribbed, confined, Nor sleeping, drinking, eating-to my mind; Betrayed by every one, my mistress too!
O Marc Rene! [M. d'Argenson] whom Censor Cato's ghost Might well have chosen for his vacant post, O Marc Rene! through whom 'tis brought about That so much people murmur here below, To your kind word my durance vile I owe; May the good G.o.d some fine day pay you out!
Young Arouet pa.s.sed eleven months in the Bastille; he there wrote the first part of the poem called _La Henriade,_ under the t.i.tle of _La Ligue;_ when he at last obtained his release in April, 1718, he at the same time received orders to reside at Chatenay, where his father had a country house. It was on coming out of the Bastille that the poet took, from a small family-estate, that name of Voltaire which he was to render so famous. ”I have been too unfortunate under my former name,” he wrote to Mdlle. du Noy er; ”I mean to see whether this will suit me better.”
The players were at that time rehearsing the tragedy of _OEdipe,_ which was played on the 18th of November, 1718, with great success. The daring flights of philosophy introduced by the poet into this profoundly and terribly religious subject excited the enthusiasm of the roues; Voltaire was well received by the Regent, who granted him an honorarium.
”Monseigneur,” said Voltaire, ”I should consider it very kind if his Majesty would be pleased to provide henceforth for my board, but I beseech your Highness to provide no more for my lodging.” Voltaire's acts of imprudence were destined more than once to force him into leaving Paris; he all his life preserved such a horror of prison, that it made him commit more than one plat.i.tude. ”I have a mortal aversion for prison,” he wrote in 1734; once more, however, he was to be an inmate of the Bastille.
Launched upon the most brilliant society, everywhere courted and flattered, Voltaire was constantly at work, displaying the marvellous suppleness of his mind by s.h.i.+fting from the tragedies of _Artemise_ and _Marianne,_ which failed, to the comedy of _L'Indiscret,_ to numerous charming epistles, and lastly to the poem of _La Henriade,_ which he went on carefully revising, reading fragments of it as he changed his quarters from castle to castle. One day, however, some criticisms to which he was not accustomed angered him so much, that he threw into the fire the ma.n.u.script he held in his hand. ”It is only worth burning, then,” he exclaimed in a rage. President Henault dashed at the papers. ”I ran up and drew it out of the flames, saying that I had done more than they who did not burn the AEneid as Virgil had recommended; I had drawn out of the fire _La Henriade,_ which Voltaire was going to burn with his own hands.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Rescue of ”La Henriade.”----283]
If I liked, I might enn.o.ble this action by calling to mind that picture of Raphael's at the Vatican which represents Augustus preventing Virgil from burning the AEneid; but I am not Augustus, and Raphael is no more.”
Wholly indulgent and indifferent as might be the government of the Regent and of Dubois, it was a little scared at the liberties taken by Voltaire with the Catholic church. He was required to make excisions in order to get permission to print the poem; the author was here, there, and everywhere, in a great flutter and preoccupied with his literary, financial, and fas.h.i.+onable affairs. In receipt of a pension from the queen, and received as a visitor at La Source, near Orleans, by Lord Bolingbroke in his exile, every day becoming more brilliant and more courted, he was augmenting his fortune by profitable speculations, and appeared on the point of finding himself well off, when an incident, which betrayed the remnant still remaining of barbarous manners, occurred to envenom for a long while the poet's existence. He had a quarrel at the Opera with Chevalier Rohan-Chabot, a court libertine, of little repute; the scene took place in the presence of Mdlle. Adrienne Lecouvreur; the great actress fainted they were separated. Two days afterwards, when Voltaire was dining at the Duke of Sully's, a servant came to tell him that he was wanted at the door of the hotel; the poet went out without any suspicion, though he had already been the victim of several ambuscades. A coach was standing in the street, and he was requested to get in; at that instant two men, throwing themselves upon him and holding him back by his clothes, showered upon him a hailstorm of blows with their sticks. The Chevalier de Rohan, prudently ensconced in a second vehicle, and superintending the--execution of his cowardly vengeance, shouted to his servants, ”Don't hit him on the head; something good may come out of it.” When Voltaire at last succeeded in escaping from these miscreants to take refuge in Sully's house, he was half dead.
Blows with a stick were not at that time an unheard-of procedure in social relations. ”Whatever would become of us if poets had no shoulders!” was the brutal remark of the Bishop of Blois, M. de Caumartin. But the customs of society did not admit a poet to the honor of obtaining satisfaction from whoever insulted him. The great lords, friends of Voltaire, who had accustomed him to attention and flattery, abandoned him pitilessly in his quarrel with Chevalier de Rohan. ”Those blows were well gotten and ill given,” said the Prince of Conti. That was all the satisfaction Voltaire obtained. ”The poor victim shows himself as much as possible at court, in the city,” says the Marais news, ”but n.o.body pities him, and those whom he considered his friends have turned their backs upon him.”
Voltaire was not of an heroic nature, but excess of rage and indignation had given him courage; he had scarcely ever had a sword in his hand; he rushed to the fencers' and practised from morning till night, in order to be in a position to demand satisfaction. So much ardor disquieted Chevalier de Rohan and his family; his uncle, the cardinal, took precautions. The lieutenant of police wrote to the officer of the watch, ”Sir, his Highness is informed that Chevalier de Rohan is going away to-day, and, as he might have some fresh affair with Sieur de Voltaire, or the latter might do something rash, his desire is for you to see that nothing comes of it.”
Voltaire antic.i.p.ated the intentions of the lieutenant of police he succeeded in sending a challenge to Chevalier de Rohan; the latter accepted it for the next day; he even chose his ground: but before the hour fixed, Voltaire was arrested and taken to the Bastille; he remained there a month. Public opinion was beginning to pity him. Marshal Villars writes in his memoirs,--
”The chevalier was very much inconvenienced by a fall which did not admit of his handling a sword. He took the course of having a caning administered in broad day to Voltaire, who, instead of adopting legal proceedings, thought vengeance by arms more n.o.ble. It is a.s.serted that he sought it diligently, but too indiscreetly. Cardinal Rohan asked M.
le Duc to have him put in the Bastille: orders to that effect were given and executed, and the poor poet, after being beaten, was imprisoned into the bargain. The public, whose inclination is to blame everybody and everything, justly considered, in this case, that everybody was in the wrong; Voltaire, for having offended Chevalier de Rohan; the latter, for having dared to commit a crime worthy of death in causing a citizen to be beaten; the government, for not having punished a notorious misdeed, and for having put the beatee in the Bastille to tranquillize the beater.”
Voltaire left the Bastille on the 3d of May, 1726, and was accompanied by an exon to Calais, having asked as a favor to be sent to England; but scarcely had he set foot on English territory, scarcely had he felt himself free, when the recurring sense of outraged honor made him take the road back to France. ”I confess to you, my dear Theriot,” he wrote to one of his friends, ”that I made a little trip to Paris a short time ago. As I did not call upon you, you will easily conclude that I did not call upon anybody. I was in search of one man only, whom his dastardly instinct kept concealed from me, as if he guessed that I was on his track. At last the fear of being discovered made me depart more precipitately than I had come. That is the fact, my dear Theriot. There is every appearance of my never seeing you again. I have but two things to do with my life: to hazard it with honor, as soon as I can, and to end it in the obscurity of a retreat which suits my way of thinking, my misfortunes, and the knowledge I have of men.”
Voltaire pa.s.sed three years in England, engaged in learning English and finis.h.i.+ng _La Henriade,_ which he published by subscription in 1727.
Touched by the favor shown by English society to the author and the poem, he dedicated to the Queen of England his new work, which was entirely consecrated to the glory of France; three successive editions were disposed of in less than three weeks. Lord Bolingbroke, having returned to England and been restored to favor, did potent service to his old friend, who lived in the midst of that literary society in which Pope and Swift held sway, without, however, relaxing his reserve with its impress of melancholy. ”I live the life of a Bosicrucian,” he wrote to his friends, ”always on the move and always in hiding.” When, in the month of March, 1729, Voltaire at last obtained permission to revisit France, he had worked much without bringing out anything. The riches he had thus ama.s.sed appeared ere long: before the end of the year 1731 he put _Brutus_ on the stage, and began his publication of the _Histoire de Charles XII.;_ he was at the same time giving the finis.h.i.+ng touch to _Eriphyle_ and _La Mort de Caesar_. _Zaire,_ written in a few weeks, was played for the first time on the 13th of August, 1732; he had dedicated it to Mr. Falkner, an English merchant who had overwhelmed him with attentions during his exile. ”My satisfaction grows as I write to tell you of it,” he writes to his friend Cideville in the fulness of joy: ”never was a piece so well played as _Zaire_ at the fourth appearance.
I very much wished you had been there; you would have seen that the public does not hate your friend. I appeared in a box, and the whole pit clapped their hands at me. I blushed, I hid myself; but I should be a humbug if I did not confess to you that I was sensibly affected. It is pleasant not to be dishonored in one's own country.”
Voltaire had just inaugurated the great national tragedy of his country, as he had likewise given it the only national epopee attempted in France since the _Chansons de Geste;_ by one of those equally sudden and imprudent reactions to which he was always subject, it was not long before he himself damaged his own success by the publication of his _Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais_.
The light and mocking tone of these letters, the constant comparison between the two peoples, with many a gibe at the English, but always turning to their advantage, the preference given to the philosophical system of Newton over that of Descartes, lastly the attacks upon religion concealed beneath the cloak of banter--all this was more than enough to ruffle the tranquillity of Cardinal Fleury. The book was brought before Parliament; Voltaire was disquieted. ”There is but one letter about Mr.
Locke,” he wrote to M. de Cideville; ”the only philosophical matter I have treated of in it is the little trifle of the immortality of the soul, but the thing is of too much consequence to be treated seriously.
It had to be mangled so as not to come into direct conflict with our lords the theologians, gentry who so clearly see the spirituality of the soul that, if they could, they would consign to the flames the bodies of those who have a doubt about it.” The theologians confined themselves to burning the book; the decree of Parliament delivered on the 10th of June, 1734, ordered at the same time the arrest of the author; the bookseller was already in the Bastille. Voltaire was in the country, attending the Duke of Richelieu's second marriage; hearing of the danger that threatened him, he took fright and ran for refuge to Bale. He soon left it to return to the castle of Cirey, to the Marchioness du Chatelet's, a woman as learned as she was impa.s.sioned, devoted to literature, physics, and mathematics, and tenderly attached to Voltaire, whom she enticed along with her into the paths of science. For fifteen years Madame du Chatelet and Cirey ruled supreme over the poet's life. There began a course of metaphysics, tales, tragedies; _Alzire, Merope, Mahomet,_ were composed at Cirey and played with ever increasing success. Pope Benedict XIV. had accepted the dedication of Mahomet, which Voltaire had addressed to him in order to cover the freedoms of his piece. Every now and then, terrified in consequence of some bit of anti-religious rashness, he took flight, going into hiding at one time to the court of Lorraine beneath the wing of King Stanislaus, at another time in Holland, at a palace belonging to the King of Prussia, the Great Frederick.
Madame du Chatelet, as unbelieving as he at bottom, but more reserved in expression, often scolded him for his imprudence. ”He requires every moment to be saved from himself,” she would say. ”I employ more policy in managing him than the whole Vatican employs to keep all Christendom in its fetters.” On the appearance of danger, Voltaire ate his words without scruple; his irreligious writings were usually launched under cover of the anonymous. At every step, however, he was advancing farther and farther into the lists, and at the very moment when he wrote to Father La Tour, ”If ever anybody has printed in my name a single page which could scandalize even the parish beadle, I am ready to tear it up before his eyes,” all Europe regarded him as the leader of the open or secret attacks which were beginning to burst not only upon the Catholic church, but upon the fundamental verities common to all Christians.