Volume VI Part 14 (1/2)

”Let us see in what countries M. de Voltaire has not had some squabble or made himself many enemies,” said a letter to Madame Denis from the great Scotch lord, when he had entered Frederick's service: ”every country where the Inquisition prevails must be mistrusted by him; he would put his foot in it sooner or later. The Mussulmans must be as little pleased with his Mahomet as good Christians were. He is too old to go to China and turn mandarin; in a word, if he is wise, there is no place but France for him. He has friends there, and you will have him with you for the rest of his days; do not let him shut himself out from the pleasure of returning thither, for you are quite aware that, if he were to indulge in speech and epigrams offensive to the king my master, a word which the latter might order me to speak to the court of France would suffice to prevent M. de Voltaire from returning, and he would be sorry for it when it was too late.”

Voltaire was already in France, but he dared not venture to Paris.

Mutilated, clumsy, or treacherous issues of the _Abrege de l'Histoire Universelle_ had already stirred the bile of the clergy; there were to be seen in circulation copies of _La Pucelle,_ a disgusting poem which the author had been keeping back and bringing out alternately for several years past. Voltaire fled from Colmar, where the Jesuits held sway, to Lyons, where he found Marshal Richelieu, but lately his protector and always his friend, who was repairing to his government of Languedoc.

Cardinal Tencin refused to receive the poet, who regarded this sudden severity as a sign of the feelings of the court towards him. ”The king told Madame de Pompadour that he did not want me to go to Paris; I am of his Majesty's opinion, I don't want to go to Paris,” wrote Voltaire to the Marquis of Paulmy. He took fright and sought refuge in Switzerland, where he soon settled on the Lake of Geneva, pending his purchase of the estate of Ferney in the district of Gex and that of Tourney in Burgundy.

He was henceforth fixed, free to pa.s.s from France to Switzerland and from Switzerland to France. ”I lean my left on Mount Jura,” he used to say, ”my right on the Alps, and I have the beautiful Lake of Geneva in front of my camp, a beautiful castle on the borders of France, the hermitage of Delices in the territory of Geneva, a good house at Lausanne; crawling thus from one burrow to another, I escape from kings. Philosophers should always have two or three holes under ground against the hounds that run them down.”

The perturbation of Voltaire's soul and mind was never stilled; the anxious and undignified perturbation of his outer life at last subsided; he left off trembling, and, in the comparative security which he thought he possessed, he gave scope to all his free-thinking, which had but lately been often cloaked according to circ.u.mstances. He had taken the communion at Colmar, to soften down the Jesuits; he had conformed to the rules of the convent of Senones, when he took refuge with Dom Calmet; at Delices he worked at the _Encyclopcedia,_ which was then being commenced by D'Alembert and Diderot, taking upon himself in preference the religious articles, and not sparing the creed of his neighbors, the pastors of Geneva, any more than that of the Catholic church. ”I a.s.sure you that my friends and I will lead them a fine dance; they shall drink the cup to the very lees,” wrote Voltaire to D'Alembert. In the great campaign against Christianity undertaken by the philosophers, Voltaire, so long, a wavering ally, will henceforth fight in the foremost ranks; it is he who shouts to Diderot, ”Squelch the thing (_Ecrasez l'infame_)!”

The masks are off, and the fight is barefaced; the encyclopaedists march out to the conquest of the world in the name of reason, humanity, and free-thinking; even when he has ceased to work at the Encyclopaedia, Voltaire marches with them.

The _Essai sur l'Histoire generale et les Moeurs_ was one of the first broadsides of this new anti-religious crusade. ”Voltaire will never write a good history,” Montesquieu used to say: ”he is like the monks, who do not write for the subject of which they treat, but for the glory of their order: Voltaire writes for his convent.” The same intention betrayed itself in every sort of work that issued at that time from the hermitage of Delices, the poem on _Le Tremblement de Terre de Lisbonne,_ the drama of _Socrate,_ the satire of the _Pauvre Diable,_ the sad story of _Candide,_ led the way to a series of publications every day more and more violent against the Christian faith. The tragedy of _L' Orphelin de la Chine_ and that of _Tancrede,_ the quarrels with Freron, with Lefranc de Pompignan, and lastly with Jean Jacques Rousseau, did not satiate the devouring activity of the Patriarch, as he was called by the knot of philosophers. Definitively installed at Ferney, Voltaire took to building, planting, farming. He established round his castle a small industrial colony, for whose produce he strove to get a market everywhere. ”Our design,” he used to say, ”is to ruin the trade of Geneva in a pious spirit.” Ferney, moreover, held grand and numerously attended receptions; Madame Denis played her uncle's pieces on a stage which the latter had ordered to be built, and which caused as much disquietude to the austere Genevese as to Jean Jacques Rousseau. It was on account of Voltaire's theatrical representations that Rousseau wrote his _Lettre centre les Spectacles_. ”I love you not, sir,” wrote Rousseau to Voltaire: ”you have done me such wrongs as were calculated to touch me most deeply. You have ruined Geneva in requital of the asylum you have found there.” Geneva was about to banish Rousseau before long, and Voltaire had his own share of responsibility in this act of severity so opposed to his general and avowed principles. Voltaire was angry with Rousseau, whom he accused of having betrayed the cause of philosophy; he was, as usual, hurried away by the pa.s.sion of the moment, when he wrote, speaking of the exile, ”I give you my word that if this blackguard (_polisson_) of a Jean Jacques should dream of coming (to Geneva), he would run great risk of mounting a ladder which would not be that of Fortune.” At the very same time Rousseau was saying, ”What have I done to bring upon myself the persecution of M. de Voltaire? And what worse have I to fear from him? Would M. de Buffon have me soften this tiger thirsting for my blood? He knows very well that nothing ever appeases or softens the fury of tigers; if I were to crawl upon the ground before Voltaire, he would triumph thereat, no doubt, but he would rend me none the less. Basenesses would dishonor me, but would not save me. Sir, I can suffer, I hope to learn how to die, and he who knows how to do that has never need to be a dastard.”

Rousseau was high-flown and tragic; Voltaire was cruel in his contemptuous levity; but the contrast between the two philosophers was even greater in the depths of them than on. the surface. Rousseau took his own words seriously, even when he was mad, and his conduct was sure to belie them before long. He was the precursor of an impa.s.sioned and serious age, going to extremes in idea and placing deeds after words.

In spite of occasional reticence dictated by sound sense, Voltaire had abandoned himself entirely in his old age to that school of philosophy, young, ardent, full of hope and illusions, which would fain pull down everything before it knew what it could set up, and the actions of which were not always in accordance with principles. ”The men were inferior to their ideas.” President De Brosses was justified in writing to Voltaire, ”I only wish you had in your heart a half-quarter of the morality and philosophy contained in your works.” Deprived of the counterpoise of political liberty, the emanc.i.p.ation of thought in the reign of Louis XV.

had become at one and the same time a danger and a source of profound illusions; people thought that they did what they said, and that they meant what they wrote, but the time of actions and consequences had not yet come; Voltaire applauded the severities against Rousseau, and still he was quite ready to offer him an asylum at Ferney; he wrote to D'Alembert, ”I am engaged in sending a priest to the galleys,” at the very moment when he was bringing eternal honor to his name by the generous zeal which led him to protect the memory and the family of the unfortunate people named Calas.

The glorious and b.l.o.o.d.y annals of the French Reformation had pa.s.sed through various phases; liberty, always precarious, even under Henry IV., and whilst the Edict of Nantes was in force, and legally destroyed by its revocation, had been succeeded by periods of a.s.suagement and comparative repose; in the latter part of Louis XV.'s reign, about 1760, fresh severities had come to overwhelm the Protestants. Modestly going about their business, silent and timid, as inviolably attached to the king as to their hereditary creed, several of them had undergone capital punishment. John Calas, accused of murdering his son, had been broken on the wheel at Toulouse; the reformers had been accustomed to these sombre dramas, but the spirit of the times had marched onward; ideas of justice, humanity, and liberty, sown broadcast by the philosophers, more imbued than they were themselves aware of with the holy influences of Christianity, had slowly and secretly acted upon men's minds; executions which had been so frequent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries caused trouble and dismay in the eighteenth: in vain did the fanatical pa.s.sions of the populace of Toulouse find an echo in the magistracy of that city: it was no longer considered a matter of course that Protestants should be guilty of every crime, and that those who were accused should not be at liberty to clear themselves. The philosophers had at first hesitated. Voltaire wrote to Cardinal Bernis, ”Might I venture to entreat your eminence to be kind enough to tell me what I am to think about the frightful case of this Calas, broken on the wheel at Toulouse, on a charge of having hanged his own son? The fact is, they maintain here that he is quite innocent, and that he called G.o.d to witness it. . . . This case touches me to the heart; it saddens my pleasures, it taints them. Either the Parliament of Toulouse or the Protestants must be regarded with eyes of horror.” Being soon convinced that the Parliament deserved all his indignation, Voltaire did not grudge time, efforts, or influence in order to be of service to the unfortunate remnant of the Calas family. ”I ought to look upon myself as in some sort a witness,” he writes: ”several months ago Peter Calas, who is accused of having a.s.sisted his father and mother in a murder, was in my neighborhood with another of his brothers. I have wavered a long while as to the innocence of this family; I could not believe that any judges would have condemned to a fearful death an innocent father of a family.

There is nothing I have not done to enlighten myself as to the truth. I dare to say that I am as sure of the innocence of this family as I am of my own existence.”

For three years, with a constancy which he often managed to conceal beneath an appearance of levity, Voltaire prosecuted the work of clearing the Calas. ”It is Voltaire who is writing on behalf of this unfortunate family,” said Diderot to Mdlle. Voland: ”O, my friend, what a n.o.ble work for genius! This man must needs have soul and sensibility; injustice must revolt him; he must feel the attraction of virtue. Why, what are the Calas to him? What can awaken his interest in them? What reason has he to suspend the labors he loves in order to take up their defence?”

From the borders of the Lake of Geneva, from his solitude at Genthod, Charles Bonnet, far from favorable generally to Voltaire, writes to Haller, ”Voltaire has done a work on tolerance which is said to be good; he will not publish it until after the affair of the unfortunate Calas has been decided by the king's council. Voltaire's zeal for these unfortunates might cover a mult.i.tude of sins; that zeal does not relax, and, if they obtain satisfaction, it will be princ.i.p.ally to his champions.h.i.+p that they will owe it. He receives much commendation for this business, and he deserves it fully.”

The sentence of the council cleared the accused and the memory of John Calas, ordering that their names should be erased and effaced from the registers, and the judgment transcribed upon the margin of the charge-sheet. The king at the same time granted Madame Calas and her children a gratuity of thirty-six thousand livres, a tacit and inadequate compensation for the expenses and losses caused them by the fanatical injustice of the Parliament of Toulouse. Madame Calas asked no more.

”To prosecute the judges and the ringleaders,” said a letter to Voltaire from the generous advocate of the Calas, Elias de Beaumont, ”requires the permission of the council, and there is great reason to fear that these petty plebeian kings appear powerful enough to cause the permission, through a weakness honored by the name of policy, to be refused.”

Voltaire, however, was triumphant. ”You were at Paris,” he writes to M. de Cideville, ”when the last act of the tragedy finished so happily.

The piece is according to the rules; it is, to my thinking, the finest fifth act there is on the stage.” Henceforth he finds himself transformed into the defender of the oppressed. The Protestant Chaumont, at the galleys, owed to him his liberation; he rushed to Ferney to thank Voltaire. The pastor, who had to introduce him, thus described the interview to Paul Rabaut: ”I told him that I had brought him a little fellow who had come to throw himself at his feet to thank him for having, by his intercession, delivered him from the galleys; that it was Chaumont whom I had left in his antechamber, and whom I begged him to permit me to bring in. At the name of Chaumont M. de Voltaire showed a transport of joy, and rang at once to have him brought in. Never did any scene appear to me more amusing and refres.h.i.+ng. 'What,' said he, 'my poor, little, good fellow, they sent you to the galleys! What did they mean to do with you? What a conscience they must have to put in fetters and chain to the oar a man who had committed no crime beyond praying to G.o.d in bad French!' He turned several times to me, denouncing persecution. He summoned into his room some persons who were staying with him, that they might share the joy he felt at seeing poor little Chaumont, who, though perfectly well attired for his condition, was quite astonished to find himself so well received. There was n.o.body, down to an ex-Jesuit, Father Adam, who did not come forward to congratulate him.”

Innate love of justice and horror of fanaticism had inspired Voltaire with his zeal on behalf of persecuted Protestants; a more personal feeling, a more profound sympathy, caused his grief and his dread when Chevalier de la Barre, accused of having mutilated a crucifix, was condemned, in 1766, to capital punishment; the scepticism of the eighteenth century had sudden and terrible reactions towards fanatical violence, as a protest and a pitiable struggle against the doubt which was invading it on all sides; the chevalier was executed; he was not twenty years old. He was an infidel and a libertine, like the majority of the young men of his day and of his age; the crime he expiated so cruelly was attributed to reading bad books, which had corrupted him.

”I am told,” writes Voltaire to D'Alembert, ”that they said at their examination that they had been led on to the act of madness they committed by the works of the _Encyclopaedists_. I can scarcely believe it; these madmen don't read; and certainly no philosopher would have counselled profanation. The matter is important; try to get to the bottom of so odious and dangerous a report.” And, at another time, to Abbe Morellet, ”You know that Councillor Pasquier said in full Parliament that the young men of Abbeville who were put to death had imbibed their impiety in the school and the works of the modern philosophers. . . .

They were mentioned by name; it is a formal denunciation. . . . Wise men, under such terrible circ.u.mstances, should keep quiet and wait.”

Whilst keeping quiet, Voltaire soon grew frightened; he fancied himself arrested even on the foreign soil on which he had sought refuge. ”My heart is withered,” he exclaims, ”I am prostrated, I am tempted to go and die in some land where men are less unjust.” He wrote to the Great Frederick, with whom he had resumed active correspondence, asking him for an asylum in the town of Cleves, where he might find refuge together with the persecuted philosophers. His imagination was going wild. ”I went to him,” says the celebrated physician, Tronchin, an old friend of his; ”after I had pointed out to him the absurdity of his fearing that, for a mere piece of imprudence, France would come and seize an old man on foreign soil to shut him up in the Bastille, I ended by expressing my astonishment that a head like his should be deranged to the extent I saw it was. Covering his eyes with his clinched hands and bursting into tears, 'Yes, yes, my friend, I am mad!' was all he answered. A few days afterwards, when reflection had driven away fear, he would have defied all the powers of malevolence.”

Voltaire did not find his brethren in philosophy so frightened and disquieted by ecclesiastical persecution as to fly to Cleves, far from the ”home of society,” as he had himself called Paris. In vain he wrote to Diderot, ”A man like you cannot look save with horror upon the country in which you have the misfortune to live; you really ought to come away into a country where you would have entire liberty not only to express what you pleased, but to preach openly against superst.i.tions as disgraceful as they are sanguinary. You would not be solitary there; you would have companions and disciples; you might establish a chair there, the chair of truth. Your library might go by water, and there would not be four leagues' journey by land. In fine, you would leave slavery for freedom.”

All these inducements having failed of effect, Voltaire gave up the foundation of a colony at Cleves, to devote all his energy to that at Ferney. There he exercised signorial rights with an active and restless guardians.h.i.+p which left him no illusions and but little sympathy in respect of that people whose sacred rights he had so often proclaimed.

”The people will always be sottish and barbarous,” he wrote to M. Bordes; ”they are oxen needing a yoke, a goad, and a bit of hay.” That was the sum and substance of what he thought; he was a stern judge of the French character, the genuine and deep-lying resources of which he sounded imperfectly, but the infinite varieties of which he recognized. ”I always find it difficult to conceive,” he wrote to M. de Constant, ”how so agreeable a nation can at the same time be so ferocious, how it can so easily pa.s.s from the opera to the St. Bartholomew, be at one time made up of dancing apes and at another of howling bears, be so ingenious and so idiotic both together, at one time so brave and at another so dastardly.”

Voltaire fancied himself at a comedy still; the hour of tragedy was at hand. He and his friends were day by day weakening the foundations of the edifice; for eighty years past the greatest minds and the n.o.blest souls have been toiling to restore it on new and strong bases; the work is not finished, revolution is still agitating the depths of French society, which has not yet recovered the only proper foundation-stones for greatness and order amongst a free people.

Henceforth Voltaire reigned peacefully over his little empire at Ferney, courted from afar by all the sovereigns of Europe who made any profession of philosophy. ”I have a sequence of four kings” (_brelan de roi quatrieme_), he would say with a laugh when he counted his letters from royal personages. The Empress of Russia, Catherine II., had dethroned, in his mind, the Great Frederick. Voltaire had not lived in her dominions and at her court; he had no grievance against her; his vanity was flattered by the eagerness and the magnificent attentions of the Semiramis of the North, as he called her. He even forgave her the most odious features of resemblance to the a.s.syrian princess. ”I am her knight in the sight and in the teeth of everybody,” he wrote to Madame du Deffand; ”I am quite aware that people bring up against her a few trifles on the score of her husband; but these are family matters with which I do not meddle, and besides it is not a bad thing to have a fault to repair.

It is an inducement to make great efforts in order to force the public to esteem and admiration, and certainly her knave of a husband would never have done any one of the great things my Catherine does every day.” The portrait of the empress, worked in embroidery by herself, hung in Voltaire's bedroom. In vain had he but lately said to Pastor Bertrand, ”My dear philosopher, I have, thank G.o.d, cut all connection with kings;”

instinct and natural inclination were constantly re-a.s.serting themselves.

Banished from the court of Versailles by the disfavor of Louis XV., he turned in despite towards the foreign sovereigns who courted him.

”Europe is enough for me,” he writes; ”I do not trouble myself much about the Paris clique, seeing that that clique is frequently guided by envy, cabal, bad taste, and a thousand petty interests which are always opposed to the public interest.”

Voltaire, however, returned to that Paris in which he was born, in which he had lived but little since his early days, to which he belonged by the merits as well as the defects of his mind, and in which he was destined to die. In spite of his protests about his being a rustic and a republican, he had never allowed himself to slacken the ties which united him to his Parisian friends; the letters of the patriarch of Ferney circulated amongst the philosophical fraternity; they were repeated in the correspondence of Grimm and Diderot with foreign princes; from his splendid retreat at Ferney he cheered and excited the literary zeal and often the anti-religious ardor of the _Encyclopaedists_. He had, however, ceased all working connection with that great work since it had been suspended and afterwards resumed at the orders and with the permission of government. The more and more avowed materialistic theories revolted his shrewd and sensible mind; without caring to go to the bottom of his thought and contemplate its consequences, he clung to the notion of Providence as to a waif in the great s.h.i.+pwreck of positive creeds; he could not imagine