Cornell University Library PQ 2099.G25 1883 Voltaire in exile : 3 1924 027 425 804 Cornell University Library The original of tliis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027425804 CENTENARY OF VOLTAIRE. VOLTAIRE m EXILE: HIS LIFE AND WORKS IN FRANCE AND ABROAD (ENGLAND, HOLLAND, BELGIUM, PEUSSIA, SWITZERLAND), "WITH UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OP VOLTAIRE AND MME. DU CHATELET. BT BEI^JATtlllV OASTIKEAV. Translated with the author's approval by Messrs. P. Yogeli and Edmond Dubourg. D. M. BENNETT, LIBERAL AND SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHIlSra HOUSE, 141 Eighth St., New Yoek. /] CjLl uj TABLE OF CONTENTS. Teanslatoes' Peepace, . , , . ia Centenaby ofToltaike, . . , . 3 Intboduction, ..... 9 ■Chap. I.— Voltaiee's Youth, . , . , 17 Chap. II. — yoLiAiRE in Exile, . ^ . 28 Chap. III. — EetubS to Paris, . . , 35 Chap. IV.— Voltaiee in Britssels, . . 42 Chap. V.— Yoltaiee and J. J. Kousseatt, . . ^^^&-- Chap. VL— Voltaiee and the Abbe Peevost, . 53 Chap. VII.— Voltaiee and Fbeberick the Geeat, 60 Chap. VIII.— Voltaiee and Pope Benedict XIV., 66 Chap. IX. — Voltaiee in Bbelin, . . .74 Chap. X.— Third Ketukn to Paris. ^ . . 80 Chap. XI.— Leaves Again eoe Berlin, . . 85 Chap. XII.— Coolness Between Him and -Feed- eeicx, ...... 90 Chap. XIII.— Life in Switzerland, , , 97 Chap. XIV.— Voltaiee at Peeney, . . . 115 Chap. XV.— Improves a Town, Builds a Church, AND Fights the Jesuits, . . .122 Chap. XVL— Defends the Victims of Beligious Hateed and Peesecution, . Chap. XVII.— Voltaiee and Cathaeine II., Chap. X VIII.— Triumphant Return to Paris, Chap. XIX.— The Work of Voltaiee, Chap. XX.— Voltaire's Peopagandism, Chap. XXI.— Philosophical System, Chap. XXIL— The Enemies of Voltaiee, Chap. XXIII.— Voltaiee as a Poet and Dramatic Author, . . . . , . 209 Appendix.— Unpublished Letters, . . 224 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. A desire on the occasion of the centenary of Vol- taire to pay a tribute to his memory, and a genuine admiration for that master mind of the eighteenth century, have prompted the author of Voltaire in Exile to the writing of these pages. The loyal feel- ings of the biographer, so often apt in imparting a bias to his appreciation and sketching of traits, have not been permitted in this case, however, so to tint the lineaments of the philosopher's character that, the defects which stamped him as a man being passed or glossed over, his glowing qualities, unimpeded, might make him appear the greater hero. That Vol- taire possessed faults cannot be denied. Yet it re- dounds to his praise that his faults were rather those of the age than of the man. As miich could not be said of many men of less genius ani of other ages. Aside from the unpardonable sin of blasphemy and the use of every conceivable means to foil his enemies and cover them with well-merited ridicule, there stands against Voltaire but one accusation of weight. With regard to his alleged use of unscrupulous means in the increase of his wealth, the simple facts, as given in the course of this work, are sufficient to show how absurd were the attacks of that lilliputian church rabble so ready, nevertheless, to fawn ugon every monopolist or stock speculator who will but donate a tithe of his ill-gotten gains to the " houses VI rEEKicir. ©f Gad." But there remains against tlie great icoir- oclast tbe charge of holding broad nations concern- ing the relation* of the sexes and transgressing the social laws wbi«h govern them. This book is meant to- be a faithful history of Vol- taire, a picture as unbiased and perfect as it could be- photographedi so to speak, by the hand of an admiring- but conscientious artist. The pha8€S and evolutions- of the great man's character are- left to- be- observed through the eantinuous panorama of his eventful and active life. We are first introduced to a young maa in -whom genius -vrith- all its concomitant temptations is already revealing itself to- a nature which, with its- inborn- Epicurean tastes> was easily led through the influence of the surrounding, and general Christian, licentiousness into a participation in its dissolute ways. In his day "-the 1-over,^ Vami' intime," to use the words of a writer in the Argosy, " was an indis- pensable part of every fine lady's hausohold. It is-- true that both- the fair dames and their cavaliers were frequently seen at mass and all sorts of relig- ious ceremonies, but they went back to the salon ta- fiirt and make love quite a& briskly as ever." Vol- taire simply lived as men of the world in his time lived. Therein li«8 his only weakness,- that, high as he towered in heart and intellect above the Chris- tian herd among which he lived, he did not rise above them in social morality. But, if having admitted and regretting this (for an apostle of the truth shauld be above reproaolv even .from those who,, in every respect, are beneath him),, we now turn to- the work af the philosopher, we are seized with such admiration that the weaknesses of the man are foi'gotteiL aud entirely swallowed up ia PREFACE. Vii his brilliancy, greatness, and philanthropy. When ■we behold him the equal of kings and protector of the weak, armed with the sword of philouophy and truth opposing, almost single-handed, the combined and exasperated forces of superstition, cant, ecclesiastical falsehood, and priestly despot- ism ; lacerating them with his terrible sarcasm, and scattering them in every direction; then view the humanitarian, ever watchful and ready to step for- ward and champion the cause of the oppressed, giving them his time, his genius, his money, his hospitality; and, lastly, see the public benefactor at Ferney, where the practical bearings and results of his life-long principles are illustrated in his becom- ing the author of the prosperity and happiness of a hitherto stagnant community, we grant him not admiration alone, but also the profound venera- tion which true goodness, allied to genius, must ever command. We can then look down with tranquil contempt upon the tartufBan crowd that would blot his fame to stifle his ideas, and cover him with the slime of their calumny and abuse to prevent his genius from lighting up the philosophical world. Therefore let faithful biographies of Voltaire multiply without fearing to reproduce every feature of his wonderful character. This greatest of the champions of Freethought, whom his enemies have belied to the point of stamping with the universal reputation of an Atheist the man who, right or wrong, persistently declared his belief in a sv.preme being, needs but to become known, such as he really was, to also become endeared, in spite of his faults, to all who, whatever their philosophical creed, have a love for truth, justice, and liberty. VOLTAIRE'S CENTENARY. I regretfully leave Voltaire, after having passed three months with him. I had long been an admirer of the great philoso- pher who was the leader of Preethought in the eighteenth century. By living in his intimacy, by scrutinizing his life and work, I have become his friend; and, if they are not already so, I am con- vinced my readers will become his friends as I have, after perusing this work, where I have endeavored to seize upon his encyclopedic genius, his mobile and multiple physiognomy. How can we but become the liegemen, the intel- lectual associates of Voltaire, when we see him con- secrate all his life to the cause of civilization, of truth, of the liberty of conscience and thought; when we behold his struggle in France against political despotism and religious obscurantism; when we ac- company him to his retreats in exile where he cour- ageously takes up again his interrupted work and freely publishes his productions ? It is with an inexpressible joy that we follow the steps of this scout of the human army, of this pio- neer making deep gaps in the forest of prejudices, bringing new light at each one of his stages, and that we behold the victory of the mind upor- human errors and folly. 4 VOLTAIKE S CENTENARY. Voltaire will be the great figure, eternally be- ^witching and attractive, of the eighteenth century. He fought the good fight, and carried the victory. He established tolerance, liberated conscience from its oppressions, affranchised thought from its chains, wrote the preface of the Civil Code and of the Rev- olution of '89, destroyed the barbarous legislations, superannuated customs, old traditions, prejudices, all the obstacles, all the impediments which hindered the march of civilization. He has been the martial champion of the mind, the hero of free humanity. His country emhastilled him, persecuted him, threw his books to the flames, exiled him nearly all his life. Voltaire burst into laughter in the face of that race of arlequins anthropophages, as he called the proscribers of Louis XV.; he made sport of censure and lettre de cachet. He pursued his crusade of Freethought in all his places of retreat; in England, Hollan'd, Belgium, Prussia, Switzerland; where, con- nected with the eminent minds of those lands, he founded the public opinion of Europe, which, through his propaganda, became an irresistible power against all public iniquities, against all infractions of the rights and liberty of man. Voltaire sums up in himself all the eighteenth century, with its genius sparkling like champagne in its bowl, its absolute separation from a shameful and retrograde past, its vigorous flight towards progress, towards a new state of civilization disen- ^^aged from all that is base, servile, and obscure. By this resplendent light .projected by the age of Voltaire, how deformed and shrunken appears the ancient slave trembling before priest and master! But wait until the philosophers have restored to the TPKOLOGUE. S mutilated being of the Middle Ages his mind, his soul, his will, his intellectual and moral power — until they have delivered him frora the jail of the seventeenth century; and you will see the poor man renewed and transformed by the Promethei of the Encyclopedi-a; you shall see him walk erect and firm in his strength and liberty. Ah, masters! you throw Voltaire in the Bastille, and you proscribe him. His vengeance shall be exemplary. He will bring out with him from his dungeon the enchained genera- tions, and he will return, in spite of you, triumphant to those lands from which you had believed him for- ■ever banished. There is not in the world a more marvelous, more attractive spectacle, one better demonstrating the power of a luminous and sagacious mind, than the polemic of Voltaire against the birds of prey and the men of darkness of his time. What a vivacious and high intelligence, what ardor of conviction, what good sense, what acumen in critique, one of his creationsl What lucidity of conception and ex- pression! What a pliant and fine blade! "His prose is a sword," says Nisard; "it sparkles, it whizzes, it thrusts forward, it slays!" A knight armed from head to foot, brilliant and sprightly combatant, how well he strikes at the fault of the cuirass, the leviathans, the mastodons of the old regime! He harasses them ceaselessly with his barbed arrows; he smites oppression in all its forms, s. snatching away the mask of religious hypocrisy,-' stigmatizing superstition, lifting up man bent under . secular servitudes, extricating his mind from the silly errors, from the chimeras, that dwarf him, by I saying to him: v/ c 6 voltaiee's centeitaet. "Cultivate thy garden and thy brain; cleanse them from the old sediments, from the calcareous deposits and the detritus of the past. Burn the brambles and parasite herbs; destroy the noxious insects; let the mattock pass everywhere. Thou art king, lord, and master at home. Draw straight and see clearly. Do not fall in the rut of Utopia; do not lose thyself in the abyss of dreams. No power has the right to weigh down upon thee, to violate thy intellectual property and material good. Throw to the garret all the worm-eaten cabalistic books, the old Bibles and old cod,es, and find thy evangel in thy reason; thy law and rule in thy conscience." The universality, the prodigious intellectual activ- ity of Voltaire allowed him to span all problems; his quick and sensitive genius, his straightforward sense, carry him wherever there is a truth useful to bring forth, an error to confound, an injustice to disgrace. He is the support, the spur, of that valiant crew of encyclopedists who forged the conception of the new society; he encourages them, animates them with his noble ardor, with his hatred against the Catholic denomination, by preaching through exam- ple and ceaselessly exclaiming, "Crush the wretch!" We find the generous and beneficent hand of Vol- taire in the salient facts of the eighteenth century. He touches everything; nothing for him lacks inter- est. He was not only a profound thinker, philoso- pher, historian, man of letters, poet, dramatic author, popularizer of science, but he was, besides, "the hero and the man of action of right," as a Belgian deputy, M. Beige, has said in a lecture. Possessing ^o a supreme degree the love of humanity, he con- PEOLOGUE. 7 aiders all wrong done to others as if it were personal to him. He leaps with indignation on witnessing a public iniquity. He constitutes himself the juris- consult, the high judge of his time. The victims of fanaticism, persecution, and judiciary errors come to him. He welcomes them, he throws wide open to them the doors of his house at Ferney, takes in hand their grievances, becomes their eloquent de- fender, and succeeds in snatching them away from the fury of the Catholic tribunals. The obscurantist and Jesuitic pack threw itself, howling and furious, upon this knight of Free- thought; but, smiling in the thick of the melee, Vol- taire marked with his eagle claw the enemies of rea- son, and devoted the spirits of darkness and the Tartuffes to the immortality of ridicule. After fifty years in the philosophical arena, fifty years of conflicts constantly renewed without ex- hausting the athlete, Voltaire remains at last master of the field. He triumphs over the retrograde ele- ments of the old society. All the despotisms, tem- poral and spiritual, have Voltairian shot in their wing. They have lost their assurance, their audaci- ty; they drag themselves and gasp, mortally wound- ed by the skillful hunter. Is it to be wondered at that, a hundred years after the Iliad, after the great battle of the eighteenth century, "the deceiving spirits, teaching lies and hypocrisy," to borrow from de Sainte-Aldegonde, "the 'black band,' Jesuitic and despotic, shudders at the very name of Voltaire, of that Satan of the mind, as he is qualified by one of the greatest cori- phsei of the Church, Joseph de Maistre, who ex- pressed the wish to see a statue raised tr> liim b^^ the 8 Voltaire's centenary. > baud of the executioner^ and who, in an avowal de- void of artifice, exclaimed, "Ah! what harm Vol- taire has done us!" The labors of Hercules are but child's play by the side of Voltaire's. His encyclopedic mind has shone upon all the branches of human knowledge. Philosophy, politics, legislation, morals — ^there is not one social element which he has not touched, shed light upon, and re- formed. . Let the Revolution come; it will only have to bind up in sheaves the grain of the Voltairian har- vest, to countersign and decree the ideas of Vol- taire. And in '89 Condorcet will be able to say with truth, " Voltaire a fait tout ce que nous voy- ons!" ("Voltaire is the author of all that we see!") All the sons of Freethought unite to-day in the glorification of Voltaire, in his centenary, honoring in him the luminous genius that has more and better than any other honored and served humanity, the highest expression and the most illustrious represent- ative of European civilization. INTRODUCTION. Voltaire, that Wandering Jew of intelligence and Freethought in the eighteenth century, does not belong only to France, from which he was forced to flee nearly all his life, but to all the lands where he Sought refuge to save himself from the chronic in- tolerance of his fellow-countrymen — to the Nether- lands, to England, to Prussia, and to Switzerland. , At these hearths he found established, radiant and powerful, the political and religious liberties which he strove to take back and to make triumph in his native land. Voltaire forged his genius upon the hard anvil and at the rough school of exile. To this he owed his fame. Had he remained at the French court he would have been but a mere witling, a rare bird in the golden cage of Versailles. In London, in Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Ge- neva, Voltaire found the lever of Archimedes, the fulcrum that was necessary to him in lifting the world and enlightening it. It was abroad that he was able to^fight openly, to write freely, to publish his works, to propagate his ideas, without risking, as it had happened to him in France, to be bastinadoed, emhastiUed, and to see his books burnt by the hand of the executioner. The funeral march of the Wandering Jews of Freethought begins with the revocation of the edict of Nantes and the dragonnades of the Cevenncs, 10 voltaiee's centenaey. under King Louis XIV, in his second childhood, that nee pluribus impar which terminated his existence by the fistula and Madame de Maintenon. The Hu- guenots deserted en masse from Catholic France, carrying away with them their gold, their art, their science, their industry, to take them to the Protest- ant nations, by whom they were received with open arms. After the religionists of the seventeenth come the Freethinkers of the eighteenth, lastly the politicians of the nineteenth century. It is the great and painful pilgrimage of Liberty in mourning. Belgium, Holland, England, Switzerland, Ger- many, behold coming to them legions of fugitives, seeking a new hearth, a new fatherland. In the seventeenth century the Huguenots leaving France merely passed through Catholic Belgium. The United Provinces received no less than 55,000 French Protestant refugees; England received 100,- 000 of them, who endowed her with all the precious industries of France. Migrations, whether voluntary or- forced, have two consequences: impoverishment of the countries they abandon, increase of vitality and riches for the regions where they land and which they fructify, as the periodical overflows of the Nile fecundate the lands they water. Emigration alone has created the formidable power of the United States. The emigration of the Old World has brought forth and enriched the New. But refugees do not only carry material benefits to the countries that receive them ; they carry to INTRODUCTION. 11 them, besides, the precious tributes of their science, of their art, of their intelligence. In return they receive a strength, a development, an increase of light, as is proven by Voltaire, exiled in the Nether- lands, in England, and in Switzerland. Before reaching Voltaire, it will be useful to say something of the French exiles who preceded him in his first places of refuge, Belgium and Holland. In the seventeenth century we see in Belgium an illustrious refugee, Antoine Arnauld, the Hercules of Jansenism, the director of the nuns and pension- naires of Port Royal. Denounced by the Jesuits, accused of conspiracy and intrigue against the State, Arnauld crossed the frontier. It was natural for him to seek refuge in the country where Jansenius had been bishop and professor of Holy Scriptures. After having resided at Mons, Arnauld settled permanently at Brussels, for he died there in the course of the year 1694. He was interred under the flagstones of Catherine Church, and his heart was taken to Port Royal des Champs. Bayle, the illustrious author of the Dictionaire Historique et Critique, who, in his professor's chair at Sedan and in his writings, had courageously fought the religious intolerance of Louis XIV, was also com- pelled to take the road of exile. Before reaching Amsterdam, there to edit his Nouvelles de la Re- imhlique des Lettres, he stopped in Brussels, but he left there no appreciable trace of his abode. The famous comic poet, Regnard, also remained a short while in Brussels in the course of 1681, and there found time to grasp the subject of the best comedy in his repertory. Here are the facts: 12 voltaikh's cbntenaet. At Rome, with the general of the Jesuits, sudden- ly died an old gentleman of Franehe Comte, the lord d' Ancier. That abrupt and unlucky decease had completely upset the plans of the good Jesuit fathers, who had lodged and fondled our Franehe Comte gentleman thus well only to have him make his will in favor of their order and to inherit all his goods, according to their custom. But such a small affair did not per- plex our Jesuits ; they concealed the nobleman's death and sought a Sosia who could make the will in his room and stead. One of the members of the company had known in Franehe Comte a farmer of M. d' Ancier, Denis Euvrard by name, who had the same looks and the same tone of voice as his lord. He was despatched to that tenant, and, through promises of money, succeeded in bringing him to Rome. There he was told that his former lord had just died ab intestat, but not, however, before having had time to dtclare to the Jesuits that he had bequeathed an important farm to Denis Euvrard, and the remainder of his property to the reverend fathers. The general- of the order urged Denis in the name of heaven to carry out the desire of his defunct mas- ter by playing the part of the lord of Ancier on his bed of agony, by bringing him to life again for a few hours. And so there was Denis Euvrard, our pseudo dying man, stretched upon his bed, with a nightcap down over his eyes, dictating his will — the will of the lord of Ancier — before witnesses and attorneys; but Denis, like the roguish countryman he was, in- stead of simply allotting to himself a farm, m ii, )iaii lITTEODUCTIOir. 1 3 been agreed with the Jesuits, added thereto appur- tenances — item a mill, itein a meadow, item a wood- patch, item, some cattle, item, rents. At every item of Denis' the Jesuits, seeing them- selves fooled, grew pale and foamed with rage. They were caught like foxes in their own trap. At last the mock dying lord deigned to leave a part of the heritage to the reverend fathers, who were furious at thus seeing themselves defrauded of the best portion of the cake, yet were obliged to hold their peace in order to save the rest. On the day after that sacrilegious farce the true d' Ancier was buried, and Denis Euvrard returned to his hearth, rich, in good health, and delighted at having thus hoodwinked the reverend Jesuit fathers. Years passed away, and the mimic of death, play- ing seriously this time the part of a dying man, acknowledged bis fraud and revealed the source of his fortune to his confessor. This priest, who was gallican, divulged the will scene concocted by the Jesuits. The natural heirs of M, d' Ancier then attacked the testament. They gained their cause twice, at Besangon and Dole; but the Jesuits, hav- ing carried the suit to the Supreme Court of Brus- sels (Franche Comte, subdued by Spain, depended at that time upon the Flemish government), this tri- bunal maintained the Jesuits in their right of mort- main upon what property of d' Ancier wafe held by them. This suit had not been ended very long before Regnard was in Brussels. It was yet talked and laughed about. Thus it was that the reverend iatbers f ui-nished Eegnard the idea of his excellent 14: voi-taiee's centenaet. comedy of the Ltgataire Universel. We seo the Jesuits are yet of some use, since they have so hap • pily inspired Moliere in Tartuffc, Beaumarchais in the Marriage de Figaro, and Kegnard in the IJcga- taire. "We are in the eighteenth century, so justly called the age of Voltaire. At last the dazzling dawn of Freethought has arrived. It arises, shedding a tor- rent of light upon its obscure blasphemers, according to the expression of Lefranc de Pompignan. What an age ! And how aptly has Hegel named it the age of intelligence. Such intellectual radia- tion; such philosophical magnetism; such buoyancy, and fc'ach salons ! All the literary minds participate in the great work of the emancipation of the human mind. The most brilliant names of the aristocracy and of the rising bourgeois, of the nobility and the finance, actively cooperate in the work of renovation, for the eighteenth century was a new manner of viewing all things, an intellectual and moral revolu- tion. Lastly, the most noble women and the women the most noble — Mesdames du Chatelet, du Deffant, d' Tencin, de L'Espinasse, d' Houdetot, Geoffrin, Ilel- vetius, d'Epinay, de Choiseul, de Grammout, de Lux- embourg — I forget many more — these duchesses, these marchionesses, these countesses, do not disdain to be the Amazons of Freethought. At their houses are held the philosophical assizes. Their parlors are opened to the encyclopedists, to the philosophers, discussing with them the great problems of human destiny, bringing, as their part of the collaboration, their graces and sparkling wit. How precious that collaboration ! and how much it is to be regretted that the bourgeois of the nine- IXTEODUCTIOK. 15 teenth century have not seen fit to follow the examiile of their nohle predecessors! In the midst of that brilliant pleiad of encycloped- ists and philosophical great ladies, vindicating the rights of Freethought, appears, like a knight in full^ armor, Voltaire, who exercised a prodigious influ- ence upon his time, upon his age, of which he was the leader, as well as the highest intellectual expression. Voltaire represented the tendencies of the minds \ of his period ; he stands for free conscience and typifies the virile ideas of that great eighteenth century, which Mr. Blaze de Bury has happily char- acterized as follows: "In science, a spirit of free research; in literature, the free expansion of the true, of the human beauti- ful;" and we will add to that definition of M. Blaze. In the sphere of the philosophical, absolute reaction against Christianity, entire separation, antithesis of the Christian idea that makes human destiny to de- pend upon divine grace and intervention, whilst the philosophy of the eighteenth century — man is de- pendent only upon himself — upon the laws of his conscience and reason. Christianity, as indeed do all religions, establishes the rights of God. The eighteenth century estab- lishes the rights of man, so clearly formulated by the laws of the French Revolution, which was the product and the crowning of its philosophy. The eighteenth century is the legislator of the inevitable law of progress upon which we live to-day, and which vivifies us as our very blood. Through the influence of Voltaire and of the en-' cyclopedists, the period of Louis XV. was a com- plete revolution in thought, literature, and art. x iC VOLT aire's cbntenary. On this point David Frederick Strauss has said,'in one of his remarkable lectures upon Voltaire : " The great work of the sixteenth century, the Reformation, is essentially the deed of the Germans; during the period of transition marked by the seven- teenth century, whilst Germany was torn by civil istruggle, Holland and England were establishing the foundations of modern politics and thought. In the eighteenth. Englishmen scattered in France, like Bolingbroke, Frenchmen visiting England, as Voltaire and Montesquieu, brought the spark of the new light which, thanks to the efforts of Vol- taire, was to spring from France to beam upon the entire world, as the light of the age of vulgarization. If the French, and above all the Parisians, were the people elected to this intellectual priesthood, Vol- - taire was its high-priest ; and w« say with equal truth, In France alone the eighteenth century could, find its literary representative; or in the eighteenth century alone could France produce the writer capa- ble of reflecting within himself all her national qual- ities. VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. HIS LIFE AND WORK IN FRANCE AND IN FOREIGN LANDS. Voltaire had a very stormy youth — ordinary par- turition of great men. A student in the college Louis-le-Grand, directed 'ky the Jesuits, to whom he was destined to give such rude blows, he filled his teachers with admira- tion. A celebrated Aspasia, who loved science, intelli- gence, and liberty as much as love, Ninon de L'Enclos, was so much charmed with the keen intellect of the young collegian that she desired to be his intellectual godmother. She bequeathed him in her will two thousand pistoles " for the purchase of books." His classical studies were hardly terminated when Voltaire abandoned himself to his poetical inspira- tion. Quatrains and epigrams already circulated around him. His father, M. Arouet, payer of fees in the Chamber of Accounts, absolutely desiring to cauterize the poetical mania of his son, and to pre- vent him from sacrificing to the muses, in order to make him like himself a model notary, imagined nothing better than to banish him to Holland, near the Embassador of France, the Marquess of Cha- teauneuf. 18 VOLTAIEE IN EXILE, At Hague, in sp;,te of the rigid supervision of tlie Marquess, tlie young Arouet lighted up the foggy sky of Holland with the sun of his youth. He began an amorous intrigue with Olympiii Dunoyer, whom he surnamed Pimpette. The young girl was to that degree enamored with Arouet that she would come to see him in masculine disguise. This affair did not suit the mother, Theresa Du- noyer, an intriguing woman, who aspired to wed Pimpette to some high personage. It seems that Cavalier, the hero of the Cevennes, was among the pretenders to the hand of Olympia. To avoid a scandal, and being interested in man- aging Pimpette's mother, then director of the Quint- essence, a magazine of clippings, of piquant anec- dotes and ilippant gossips, the Embassador interrupt- ed the relations of the lovers by sending Voltaire back to his father, to whom he described him as incorrigible, incapable of being held in check, and a precocious rascal. He represented his amorous prank in the blackest colors in his missive, which he began thus: " I have no more hope for your son. He is twice cracked: in love and a poet." He called those things follies, the old diplomat ! Paraphrasing him, the good man Arouet dolefully paid: "I have for my sons two fools: the one in verse, the other in prose." The " fool in prose " was the elder brother of Voltaire, who had become a Jansenist. Voltaire returned to France by the way of Gand, whence he wrote to his Pimpette. In 1716 he was banished to SuUy-sur-Loire for HIS LIFS AND WORK. 19 having lampooned the doings of the Regent and his girls. He enlivened that retreat by agreeable rela- tions with Mademoiselle de Corsanibleu, who had a taste for the stage, and who, four years later, made her debilt in a production of Voltaire, Ariemire. The production and the debutante fell, the one upon the other. In the course of the year 1717, Voltaire, once more in Paris, was accused, wrongly this time, of being the author of a satire entitled J'ai Yu (I Have Seen), which ended thus: " I have seen, 'tis enough, the Jesuit adored." The supposed author of the J'ai Vu was thrown into the Bastille. There he composed the cantos of his Menriade, and came out only in April, 1718. The Marquess of Noce, designing to save Voltaire from exile, which was customary and of right after an incarceration in the Bastille, sought to reconcile him with the Regent, and conducted him to a recep- tion at tlie Palais Royal. A storm burst out over- head. Voltaire, looking at the sky, cried out in the midst of the courtiers: " If a Regent governed up there, things could not go on any worse !" The Marquess of Noce, when presenting Voltaire to Philip of Orleans, said to Mm: " My lord, this is the young Arouet whom you have just taken out of the Bastille and whom you are going to send there again;" and he related the sally about the storm. The Regent, who was as witty as licentious, phi- losopher in his own good hjours, burst out with 2 a VOLTAlEE IN EXILE'. laughter, and spoke of giving a pension to Voltaire-, vrho thus replied to him: " I thank your Royal Highness for your bounty in taking charge of my dinner-table, but I pray you never more to provide my lodging," However, Voltaire found it necessary to seek the country air and to go to Chatenay, where his father had engaged to have him watched over by one of his relatives. After passing some time in that forced retreat, he returned to the capital, and brought out at the Theatre Fran gais his tragedy of (Edipe, which was applauded, and of which the two- following famous lines soon passed from mouth tO" mouth; " Our priests are not, in treth, what a vain people see ; Their craft is only born of our credulity." Somewhat making light of Ms own production,, the author appeared upon the stage, carrying the train of the high priest. As soon as the work was printed, Voltaire sent a copy of it to Jean Baptiste Rousseau, who answered him from Brussels by a letter, of which we give the conclusion ; " I would say a great many things concerning the excellent work you have sent me. . . . But I hope that we will meet in Brussels, and there have the pleasure of discoursing upon many things M'hich would be too tedious to write." In May, 1719, another harsh measure fell upon Voltaire, to whom was attributed the Sophomoric poem flung at the Regent, the Philippics. Voltaire was once more banished from Paris. He led a wan- dering life, now at Sully, with the duke, now with HIS LIFE AND WORK. 21 tliu Marec/ade de ViUars, with whom bo fell in love, now in Touraine, at la Source, with Lord Bol- ingbroke, a man of learning and a Freethinker, ban- ished from his country through the intrigues of the Jacobites, and who had married a French woman, Madame' de Villette. Thus went Voltaire, from castle to castle, convers- ing, devising, sowing wit upon his way, and ever working wherever he happened to be. The following year his ban was raised, and he hurried back to Paris. But soon after another mis- fortune befell him. Veltaire, meeting at Versailles, at a ministerial dinner, the officer Beauregard, whose denunciations had caused his first embastiUeme/U, he exclaimed : "I was well aware that spies were paid, but I did not know yet that their reward was to eat at the table of the minister." Having resolved to take revenge for this cruel affront, Beauregard watched for the passage of Vol- taire at the bridge of Sevres, took him unawares, riddled him with blows and wounded him in the face. Voltaire asked for justice. The officer-spy had rejoined his regiment, and moreover he was pro- tected by the minister. From a letter sent by Voltaire to Cardinal Dubois, dated at Cambrai, July, 1722, we learn that he was the companion, the attendant of the Marchioness Julie de Rupelmonde during a pleasure tour in Belgium and Holland : A beauty named Rupelmonde, With -whom the sly Cupid and I Do roam of late pa/r tout le monde, 22 VOLTATEE IN EXILE. Atitl who does o'er lis lord it high, Commands that imtanter 1 write. . . . This marchioness, daughter of Marshal d'Aligro and widow of a rich lord of Flanders, to whom she had been married in 1705, w.is in full maturity, blonde, and sprightly. Voltaire had cured her from -bigotry and from the zealots who love to console young widows, by converting her to philosophy. But to that she had added gallantry. To her it is that Voltaire had addressed the celebrated Ode to JJranie, which was at first the Ode to Julia, and some lines of which are subjoined: 'Tis then thy -will, fair Uraaie, That now, at thy behest, a nevT Luciilius boru, By my undaunted hand, for thee The Uands of superstition may be torn; That I expose to view j;he sad and dangerous sight Of all the holy lies that fill the earth with blight, And that, imbued with my philosophy. The horrors of the tomb thou mHveat Iparn to scorn. And all the foolish dread of the life yet unborn. The fair widow and the witty philosopher, happy wandering couple, had a great struggle in te.iring themselves away from the Cambrai fites, where a congress had assembled. But, however regretfully, they had to take their leave and cross the Bel- gian border. In Brussels, Voltaire repaired, au debotte, to the house of his friend, Jean Baptiste Rous- seau, whom he thought he would find a Freethinker as in Paris, but quantum mutatus ah illol Rousseau was a skilful rhymer, of incontestable talent, but he did not possess the elevation of char- acter and the nobility of soul of the true poet. lie had returned to the bosom of the church, probably touched by Catholic grace during exile at Brussels^ HIS LIFE AND WOEK. 23 exile which he had brought to himself by his Moside (Mo'isade), by his scurrillous pamphlets and licen- tious epigrams, leveled in Paris at everybody's head. After the first expressions of friendship and the warm demonstrations of the two friends so rancli charmed once more to see each other, Voltaire proposed a pi-omenade outside the city, and they mounted the carriage. o It is impossible for two poets to remain long to- gether without speaking of their works and confiding their labors to each other. Voltaire read to Rous- seau his " Ode to Julia,." Hardly had he listened to the first strophe ere Jean Baptiste chose to become indignant with the " impious ideas " scattered in the piece, and threatened to leave the carriage in order to hear no more. Voltaire derided the bigoted sentiments of which Rousseau made such a show before him, and ex- claimed : "Let us go to the play — ^but I regret that the author of the Moisade did not inform the public that he had turned bigot." It seems that during an interlude of the comedy, Rousseau read to Voltaire his " Ode to Posterity," yet unpublished, and consulted him concerning its value. " Do you know, my master," ironically replied Voltaire, when he had ended, " that I do not be- lieve that ode will ever reach its destination?" Rousseau said not a word, and remained under the blow of that cutting epigram. He was wound- ed to the very core. The two poets parted in anger — sworn enemies. Oemts irritabile vatum! 24 VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. In the volaminous correspondence of Voltaire are found letters from Belgium dated in 1722, 1734, 1737, 1739, 1740, 1741, 1742, and 1744. The correspondence of Voltaire (Edit. Beuchot)- mentions only one letter addressed to Thierot, and dated September 11, 1722, in which he says to his friend that he will be again in Paris from Brussels within fifteen days, and that he will go to see Sully to have " the rascal snapped." The rascal in question was the French officer, Beauregard. Voltaire remained two weeks in Brussels, where, he writes, he was every day enf&te, at which they did him the honors in an exquisite manner. After this he visited several cities of Belgium with Madame de Rupelmonde. * In Holland he met some publishers, and busied himself with the publication of the first cantos of his Henriade. He had been unable to find a publisher in France. In the seventeenth ani eighteenth centuries, Hol- land was one of the principal retreats of Free- thought. There it is that Locke and Shaftesbury, victims of the Jacobites and of the Catholic govern- ment of James II., came. Shaftesbury died there. It was at Amsterdam that Basnage, Bayle, Leclerc, I'Abbe Prevost, RoufpSeau, and many others, also sought a refuge. From the printing-presses of that free city of the United Provinces issued pamphlets, papers, and philosophi 3al works, which afterwards spread over all Europ >, making the Revolution in minds before its translation into facts. His voyage d^agr&men.t in company with his amiable marchioness beirg terminated, Voltaire turned toward Paris. lie threw himself with EIS IIPE AND WOEK. 25 feverish ardor into the noble studios, not without shooting his epigrams right and left and paying his «ourt to the beautiful Duchesse de Villars, whom he still vei'y much admired. The Duchess was quite willing to discourse of ten- •der things with the poet, but, like a gr«at coquette, she held his passion at a distance in the Platonic spheres. Voltaire, who had defined love as ^' the stuff of nature embroidered by the Imagination," was on that- chapter a little of tlie school of the Regency, more sensual than sentimental, if we except, how- ever, his relations with Madame du Chatelet. From the too ethereal heights of the Duchesse ■de Villars he descended into Cythera with a very- poor aad very charming young .girl. Mademoi- selle Suzanne Livry. It was a veritable romance •of youth. Suzanne became for him a new Pimpette. She wished to consecrate tierself to the theatre. Voltaire told her that comedy was synonymous with iove and passion, and asked her if she had loved. Upon her answering in the negative, the poet taught her the play and comedy of loTe. Some months elapsed. Suzanne took a part in the comedy of Voltaire. Then she committed sev- eral infidelities against the author, and left with a company of comedians for London. But the enter- prise failed. Suzanne fell into poverty — and into the arms of the rich and original Marquess of d-ouvernet, who met her in an obscure London tavern and wedded her. Voltaire has made that in- cident the subject of his Ecossaise. STear the end of his life Voltaire had the whim of going to visit, m iier botel at Paris, the Marchioness 20 VOLTAIBE lU- EXILE. of Goavernot. But she did not receive him. He was stopped at the door by a large and solemn lackey. Voltaire sent her the charming and satirical poem ol the Vous and the Tu, contrasting the measured coldness of the Marchioness with the abandon and carelessness of the ex-comidienne of the ruby lips: "Ah, Phyllis! where is now the time When in a eab we rode about; No footmen, no' adornments thine. Beyond thine own, all charms without; With a bad supper, blithe and free, Which thou for me ambrosian made; Thou gavest thyself all to me, A happy dupe, ah, fickle maidl With all my life enwrapped in thee? "For treasures all, as well as rank. The Fates alone thou hadst to thank. For beauty common to thy age, A tender heart, not very sage, A marble breast and beauteous eyes — With all these charms, a precious prize; Alast who roguish would not be ? Thou wert, ah, graceful wicked nymph! Yet (may Cupid forgive it me,) I loved thee but the more, thou imp." For her only answer,' the Marchioness sent the poet's portrait painted in his youth. " Oh, my friends !" exclaimed Voltaire, reporting his visit; "I have just passed from one shore of the Cocytus to the other." Voltaire's relations with Adrienne Lecouvereur lasted a little longer than the ones he had carried on with the fickle Suzanne Livry. It was in the pres- ence of that famous comedienne, at her house or in her HIS LIFE AND WORK. 27 box at the opera, that ho had an altercation with a pretentious sot called the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot. Having acted impertinently toward the poet, he was nailed to the wall by one of those cutting replies which were habitual with Voltaire. " AYho might be that young man who speaks in such a high key ?" the Chevalier is reported to have asked. " He is," replied Voltaire, " a man wko is estab- lishing his name while you are finishing yours." Two days after, Voltaire, dining with the Duke of Sully, was called outside, drawn into an ambush, and bastinadoed by the lackeys of the Chevalier de Ro- han, who was present at the execution of his orders, and ended by saying to his rabble: " It is enough ! " Voltaire, mad with rage, vainly demended repara- tion for that shameful outrage from the miserable knight, from God and devil. "Justice has been done ! " was the reply everywhere. Knowing that Voltaire was practicing fencing, and wished to force him to accept a duel, the Chevalier de Rohan induced the minister to have his mor- tal enemy shut up in the Bastille. That second incarceration lasted a year. Voltaire came out of prison in August, 1Y26, to be embarked at Calais, by order of the lieutenant of police, and to sail for England. It was during that year, 17 2 6, that he is supposed to have renounced the name of Arouet and to have taken, from some estate, the one he has rendered illustrious. 28 VOLTAIEE IN EXILE, n. Voltaire, banished from France, chose for his resi- dence London, where existed neither Bastille nor bastinadoes for philosophers, nor Jesuits to prevent their speech-, and where, to use his own expression, " reason knew no restraint." England was then full of Freethinkers and Whigs. An ancestor, a father of free thought, Shaftes- bury, was dead, as well as the celebrated philosopher Locke, the author of the " Essay on the Understand- ing," the apostle of political and religious liberty. But Toland, Collins, Wollaston, and Tindal were yet living when Voltaire landed in London. Boling- broke, pardoned, had returned from France. Wol- laston had just published his " Discourse Against the Miracles of Jesus Christ," the journalist, Richard Steele, colleague of Addison in the Spectator, his ringing pamphlets, and Bolingbroke, his learned crit- icisms on Christianity. Politics, philosophy, science, letters, all flourished, all were fruitful, ripened by the sun of liberty, by the rays of that great Revolution of 1688, which had put an end to absolute power and given wing to English genius. Thus thinkers, writers, publicists now saw all roads opened before them. Far from being persecuted, gagged, and castigated, as in France, they could aspire to the highest charges. The electrifying effect produced by emancipated England upon our fugitive from the Bastille, upon HIS LIFE AND WORK. 29 fhe man just out of the French trap, will be easily imagined. What dazzling brightness, what feast of thoaght for Voltaire entering the modern Athens ! From the darkness he was emerging into the light, from th« midst of courtiers and slaves he found him- self suddenly transported into a land of free men, organizing their activities in all independence. The English, with their self-government under George I., their freedom of meetings, of association, of the press, of political and religious propaganda, presented a perfect contrast to the French bent un- der the royal boniylaisvr and the Jesuitic arbitrary will. The frank, "bold, impetuous character of tho Englishman captivated Voltaire. lie drank with avidity from the British tankard the nectar which strengthesaed his powerful faculties and gave a solid basis to his mind. He devoured everything, books, pamphlets, journals, speeches, sermons. He attended meetings, gatherings, circles. His laborious and studious life was at that period, he has said, the life of a Rosicrucian, " ever hidden, ever on the march." Carlyle informs us, in his " History of Frederick the Great," that upon his arrival in London, Voltaire lived for some time in an old house, inhabited to this day, in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. He was very cordially received at Wandsworth, in the cottage of an opulent merchant of London, a friend of letters and well read himself, Mr. Fawkener. The houses of the great were not slow to open themselves for the French exile. He was received with the utmost cordiality at Pall-Mali, in the sump- tuous mansion of Bolingbroke, and in his residence at Dawley. 30 VOLTAIEE IN EXILE, Voltaire remained three weeks witli- Lord Peters- borough. He also very assiduously frequented the house of Pope, the illustrious author of the " Essay on Man," and whom he estimated " the most elegant, correct, and harmonious poet of England." At the "homes of Lord Bolingbroke, Lord Peters- borough, and Pope, Voltaire found himself in rela- tions with nearly all the British celebrities — with Clarke, Gay, Congreve, Thomson, Young, Swift, whom he called the English Rabelais. In that circle of brilliant minds philosophical discussions some- times became very lively. According to his wont, Voltaire put a slight curb upon -the expression of his thoughts. At one of Pope's great dinners, if we must believe an English chronicler, he treated Chris- tianity in such a cavalier way that Pope's mother, a good Catholic, rose from the table and withdrew. Admitting the authenticity of this incident, it did not interrupt his good relations with Pope. Lastly, Voltaire dwelt in Beletery Square with a certain Cavalier. It is not probable, however, that it was the hero of the Cevennes, who, in Holland, had been his rival in his love affair with Pimpette. It would appear that Lady Laura Harley had much inclination and admiration for Voltaire. But this cosmopolitan English woman had for appendix a very jealous husband — a true Othello, who very quickly put an end to the romance. Voltaire placed himself in relations with all the personages of mark and originality; political and literary men, poets and philosophers. He did not even omit to see and frequent the Quakers. Among other visits of Voltaire, his commentators speak, in their memoirs, of bis interviews wirJa tha HIS LIFB AND WOEK. 31 famous comic author, Congreve, the German Fab- rice, Lady Sundon, and the Princess Caroline. He charmed every one, and gained his city right by the vivacity and the brightness of his wit, his tact, his ton of man of the world, and also, it must be said, by amiable flatteries, which he dropped upon his way, as formerly Buckingham threw pearls at the feet of adnairing belles. Voltaire knew, in London, the celebrated Duchess of Marlborough, then occupied with the editing of her " Memoirs." But he failed to see the greatest scientific genius of the eighteenth century — the legislator of the heavens, he who had subdued the world to the great law of universal attraction — Isaac Newton, already sick at the time of his arrival. On the 25th of March, 1'72'i', he assisted at his sump- tuous obsequies with all England, pondeiing, per- haps, that in France Moliere had been denied a sep- ulture. Upon landing, the first care of the exile was to perfect- himself in the study of the English tongue; and well it was, for had he been ignorant of it, the London population, who hated the French, would have treated him badly. One day he was followed by a group of furious workingmen, who aimed at nothing less than stoning the Frenchtnan. Voltaire, in close quarters, did not lack presence of mind. He mounted a stone, and harangued his pursuers: "Worthy Englishmen," said he, " is it not misfortune enough not to have been born among you ?" . . . At the end of his allocution, the populace, flattered, passed from wrath to enthusiasm. But Voltaire, 32 VOLTAIEE ISr EXILE. knowing the versatility of the mob, prudently escaped. Some time after, he was the victim of a much more serious accident. /Entering the office of the Jew d'Acosta to cash a cheque of 20,000 francs drawn upon him, and which he wrongly had neglected to present, the son of Abraham informed him that he had declared bankruptcy the day preceding, f Hap- pily, King George hearing of this misadventure of Voltaire, spontaneously sent him 100 guineas, which put him out of difficulty. At the same time, his poem, " La Henriade," was made ready for publica- tion by subscription. Heading the list were the names of the royal family and all the court. Bol- ingbroke having declined the honor of the dedication, the " Henriade " was dedicated to the queen. It had such a success that three editions were taken up at once. The author realized important sums, which, later in France, he placed in fruitful commercial operations. Among other services, the English Positivists developed in hini the genius of business. But it is rather curious that the publication of an epic poem was the beginning of Voltaire's fortune. During his three years' sojourn in London Vol- taire profoundly studied the institutions, the cus- toms, and the manners of England. He became initiated into the philosophy of Locke, which brought ;all human knowledge back to the sole source of sub- jective and objective experience. He studied the works and the system of Newton, who had scattered the famous and fantastic world-mists of Descartes. He was strongly impressed by reading Shakspere in the original. It is true that he did not appreciate the true value of his genius, and that he qualified as HIS LIFE AND %VORK. 33 barbarous the fiery klans of the English dramatist, which disturbed the classic convenu of the eight- eenth century. It was Voltaire, nevertheless, who revealed Shakspere to Europe, which was ignorant of him, and the meditation of his works must cer- tainly have benefited the author of "Brutus," " Zaire," and " Mahomet." M. Villemain, in his " Tableau de la Litterature au XVIIIe Siecle," estimates as follows English in- fluence upon Voltaire and the French thinkers: "Bolingbroke was pardoned in 1726, and returned to London. Voltaire, emerging from the Bastille, joined him there. This was the time when the young president of Montesquieu made the same voy- age, in the company of Lord Chesterfield. England, from 1V23 to 1730, was thus the school of the two first master-minds of that century. Later, Buffon began hie great researches of nature through the study and translation of English discoveries. The most active mind after Voltaire, Diderot, borrowed of England his first studies and his first "Essai d'Encyclopedie." Jean Jacques Rousseau drew from the works of Locke a great part of his ideas upon politics and education. Condillac owes to them all his philosophy." Formed, fashioned, kneaded, as it were, by Eng- lish science, literature, philosophy, and legislation, Voltaire returned to France very different from what he was when he had left it. The three years of his exile in that great and free country had opened for him new and large horizons, had given him an intellectual vigor, a tempered mind, a moral force, which became apparent when he was at last permit- ted to return to his fatherJand,' 34 VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. The French minister, favorably considering a de- mand of Voltaire, based upon the imperious neces- sity of regulating matters of interest, had signed, on the 29th of July, 1721, the following authorization : " Permission to the sieur de Voltaire to come to Paris to attend to his affairs during three months, to begin with the day of his arrival ; and said time being elapsed, it is to him enjoined by his majesty to return to the place of his exile, under penalty of disobedience. (Dated at Versailles, and signed) " Philtpeaux." As he himself tells us, without giving his motives, Voltaire did not utilize that permit of sojourn in Paris, since he remained in London until the spring of 1129, at which time the new minister, De Maure- pas, no longer opposed his return. HIS LIFE AND WOEK. 35 ni. New trials awaited Voltaire 'in France. The 11th of September, 1730, he put upon tjie stage his "Bru- tus," written in London and dedicated to Lord Bol- ingbroke. The piece had some success, although it was found too republican. Voltaire did not cease to criticise the abuses and the moral and material servitudes of his country, by exalting English liberties. His enthusiasm for Great Britain eloquently betrayed itself in his "Ode a Lecouvreur" (October, I'i'Sl), which avenged the memory of the famous comedienne clandestinely in- terred at La Grenouillere, after a refusal of sepulture from the clergy. We publish in extenso that admi- rable ode, in which Voltaire praises England as warmly as the great tragic actress of the eighteenth century. Plere let us note a remarkable particular : This piece was set to music by the Prince Royal of Prus- sia, Frederick, who was a maestro of the first order, and played the flute to a charm. ODB TO ADEIBNNB LECOUVKBUB. What do I see? Great GoJ ! Those lips soft as the lyre, O God ! these heavenly eyes, the source of living fire, Of death are made to know the livid horrors now. O muses, graces, loves of whom she was the type, My gods and hers, O help! for death can she be ripe? But what is this? 'Tis donel Alas I thou art laid low- Yes, dead ! and all have learnt thou art beyond relief. All hearts wi'.h mine are moved, are filled with mortal grief. 3e VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. I hear on every side the arts thy fate deplore And cry, with tearful eyes, "Melpomene Is no morel" What will you say, O future race. When you the insult know, which naugbt can e'er efface. Now offered by vile men to these arts sad distressed? They have refused a resting-place To one for whom of old her altars Greece had dressed. Before she left the world they all for her would sigh; Thfcir bondage I beheld, on her I saw them fawn. Did then her crime begin when cruel death came nigh? Is it far charming you she's punished, now she's gone? N'J more for us shall be this an unholy glade. For therein lies thy form, and this, thy sad, last home, E'er honored by our strains, and hallowed by thy shade, A holy temple wi?l become. Here is my St. Denys; 'tis here that I adore Tliy talent and thy wit, thy charms, thy winning grace. I loved them when thou wert, I shall honor them more In spite of death's most foul embrace — In spite of error, or ingrates Who could alone thy wrong to share with thee deplore. Oh ! must I ever see my nation, weak and vain, Uncertain in its vows, disgrace what we admire; Our deeds upon our laws e'er stand as a satire; And fickle sons of France beneath the dark empire Of superstition lain? Is it upon the English strand Alone that thought can dare be free? O Athens' rival, thou, O Loudon, happy land! Just as thy tyrants fled, thou hast compelled to flee The shameful herd that warr'd against free thought and thee. 'Tis there men know all things to say and to reward; No art is there despised; all skill commands regard; The hero of Tallard, of victory favored son, And Dryden the sublime, and Addison the wise, Ophils with charms replete, the immortal Newton, To Memory's shrine together rise. In England, Lecouvreur would have been laid to rest Among her heroes, kings, her greatest and her best. niS LIFE AND -rVOEK. 37 For talent there insures a place 'neath fame's high dome, And freedom, with resources hived, Has, after centuries, on Albion's shore revived The soul of Greece and Rome. What! shall we never more upon our fields, grown tame, Apollo's laurel leaf upspringing hope to see? Immortal gods! why has my country ceased to be The home of worth and fame? The sharp critique made by the poet upon clerical intolerance, on the score of their refusal of inhuma- tion for Lecouvreur, answered perfectly to the pub- lic feeling. But it was not without danger when all-powerful priests governed the State and the woman Louis XV. It is at this period that happened the scandalous ease of the Jesuit Girard. The confessor of a young and hindsome Tolosian, Catherine Cadifere, the rev- erend father had seduced her by means of a gross mysticism — by persuading her that sister-souls could unite and mingle their bodies; that God had com- manded him to blow in her mouth and administer the discipline upon her naked body. The pretty penitent was made to enter a convent, where the relations were continued. La Cadifere was soon in an interesting way, gave birth to a precocious monk, and Father Girard was forced to render account of his mystic operations before the parliament. After his ode to Lecouvreur, Voltaire had pru- dently sought refuge for a few months in Normandy. In the month of October, 1732, the first represen- tation of Zaire — that enchanting drama, has said a critic — proved a sparkling triumph, and consecrated Ms fame as a dramatic author. But the laurels of Voltaire were ever interwoven with thorns. The 38 VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. publication of his letter to Uranie, written ten years earlier, raised the indignation of the godly party. The archbishop of Paris, M. de Vintemille, addressed a complaint to the lieutenant of police upon the scan- dal of the Voltairian epistle. Chancellor d'Agues- seau consulted on this subject his secretary, Lan- glois, who answered him: " My lord, Voltaire should be shut up in a place where he could never have either pen, ink, or paper. By the turn of his mind that man can ruin a State." Voltaire called at the ministeriaJ. bar, having found an escape-flue. He repudiated the paternity of the ode, which he attributed to the late Abbe de Chau- lieu. Without taking him at his word, they rested content with the excuse. But, some time later, more ado. Not a production of Voltaire's could appear without creating a tempest. His " Temple du Gotit," a witty and amusing poem, half verse, half prose, alienated against him all the lettered and courtier tribe. It was a vigorous satire upon false taste and the absurd infatuations of the period, filled with allusions, waggery, and keen darts launched at his enemies, upon the ephemeral idols of the public, and a few popular authors, who, ren- dered furious, answered him by insulting letters, epigrams, pamphlets, and parodies. The author of the "Temple du Golt" enjoyed all this frenzy, attesting that he had struck at the very defect in the cuirass, and meanwhile was completing his " Lettres sur les Anglais," commenced in Lon- don — a perfect revelation of political, philosophical, scientific, and literary England^ hitherto unknown in France. He extolled Newton's system, Locke's phi- losophy, the liberties, the religious tolerance, of HIS LIFE AND WOEK. 39 \putre Manche. With the privileges, the despotism, and tiie abuses of the French system he contrasted the free institutions and customs of England. He thrashed the French priests upon the backs of the Anglican clergy by writing: " The Anglican clergy has retained many Catholic ceVemonies, and especially that of collecting the tithes with the most attentive scrupulousness. The Anglicans have also the pious desire of being mas- ters ; for what vicar does not wish to be pope ?" In his "Frederick the Great," ('arlyle declares very correct Voltaire's appreciation of the English and of England in the eighteenth century. Several manuscript copies of Voltaire's work had circulated with impunity. But the editor, Jore fils, having published the " Lettres sur les Anglais," un- der the name of " Lettres Philosophiques," he was thrown into the Bastille. Referred to parliament, the book was condemned as "scandalous, contrary to religion, to good morals, to the respect due to the powers," and publicly burned by the hand of the executioner. A writ of arrest was issued against its author, but he was not found at his lodgings. At that moment he was in Monjeu, assisting at the cel- ebration of the marriage of the Duke of Richelieu with Mademoiselle de Guise. A lettre de cachet com- manded the author of the " Lettres Philosophiques " to constitute himself prisoner in the Chateau d'Aux- onne, near Dijon. " I have a mortal aversion against the jail," wrote Voltaire. " I am sick ; confined air would have killed me. They would perhaps have stuck me in a cell. . . . What makes me believe the orders were severe is that the Marshalsea was astir." 40 VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. Voltaire avoided that extremity by leaving Paris and hiding in an unknown place. But he suddenly emerged from his retreat to join the army, when he learned that the Duke of Richelieu had been wound- ed in a duel with the Prince of Liscin, who had been stretched on the ground. Arrived at the camp of Philipsbourg, he found Richelieu, slightly wounded, who feasted him, in company with the Prince of Conti and of the Counts of Charolois and of Cler- mont. They passed from the festal board to the battle-field. Voltaire braved musket-balls and can- non-shot. But, being taken for a spy, he came near being executed. Recognizing the dangers of his presence at the camp, he took refuge in the castle of Cirey, in Champagne, in the retreat offered him by the Marchioness Emilie du Chatelet. Voltaire, who called her a very amiable and calumniated woman, had gained her friendship by dedicating to her his " Epitre Contre la Calomnie." At that time Mme. du Chatelet was in Paris, seek- ing to put to work influences in favor of Voltaire ani to calm the tempest. She wrote : " I am entirely convinced that the minister has a well-formed design to ruin him. They speak of ban- ishment. For me, I know that in his place I should have been in London or at Hague long ago." Whether he did not believe himself safe, or was weary of living alone in that desert of Cirey, sur- rounded by mountains and uncultivated land, accord- ing to the portraiture of Madame Denis, Voltaire sought refuge in Belgium. He remained there one month. From Brussels he wrote two letters to the Count of Argeutal, dated in the month of November, 1734, in which he shows his impatience to learn the HIS LIFE AlTD -WOEK. 41 issue of the interview which Madame de Richelieu was to have concerning him with the lord-keeper of the great seal, and also of the attempt in the same direction made by Madame du Chatelet. " For my part," he ends with, " I admit to you that I shall have to possess great philosophic resignation in order to forget the unworthy manner in which I have been treated by my country," Feeling more secure, he returns to Cirey, where he finds the chatelaine Emilie and several distinguished visitors. Voltaire soon becomes the god of that cir- cle. He throws down wit and mirth by handfuls. In the evenings he makes the guests of Cirey swell with laughter by showing them the magic lantern, by causing these Chinese profiles to play all the in- trigues of the times, by running dialogues in the most comic Savoyard accent. Dramas were also represented at Cirey. Amateur comedy was, as every one knows, one of the passions of the eight- eenth century. Madame du Chatelet appeared on the stage, and played her part royally well; which did not prevent her from studying the exact sciences, to Newtonize, whilst Voltaire elaborated his works. 42 VOLTAIBB IN EXILE. IV. Ever reappearing on the Parisian arena, and cease- lessly taking up again his warp of Penelope, Voltaire put on the stage, in 1136, "Alzire" and " I'Enfant Prodigies." Emboldened, Voltaire solicit- ed a second time a chair at the Academy; but his enemies leagued against him, and caused him once more to fail. He felt very sensitive over this check. At the end of the year 1V36, two reasons forced Voltaire to disappear temporarily from France — a moral reason and a political reason. The swelling and pullulating pack of the Jesuits and bigots ac- cused him of sacrilege and barked at his heels for having said in his publication of the Mondain that Adam had finger-nails of the length of those of an ape, and having made our mother Eve the object of keen pleasantries. On the other hand, the relatives of Madame du Chatelet had found scandalous his presence at the castle of Cirey and his intimacy with the chatelaine, in the absence of her husband, the Marquess of Chatelet, who was with the army. For these reasons, and especially because he felt weary of hiding and being tracked about, tired of living with the invariable prospective of the Bastille and of a writ, Voltaire was pushed to seek a tempo- rary security in Belgium and Holland. The Prince Royal of Prussia had, indeed, offered him a refuge, but Madame du Chatelet dissuaded him from accept- ing it. She put under key bis manuscript of the HIS LIFE AND WOEK. 43 "Pucelle," which Voltaire intended to take with him to have it printed in Holland. " It is necessary at every turn to save him from himself," she wrote, " and I use more diplomacy to guide him than all the Vatican employs to keep the Christian world in bonds." Madame du Chatelet was really too prudent con- cerning Voltaire, and, with her precautions, she would have extinguished his genius, had it been extinguishable. The very day of his passage to Brussels, the 16 th of January, 1131, one of his pieces, "Alzire," was being played. "His laurels follow him everywhere," observed the Marchioness of Chatelet to the Count d'Argental. " But what does so much glory profit him ? Obscure happiness would be much preferable. O vana /lom- inum mantes! Opectora cceca!" Madame du Chatelet understands here, by "ob- scure happiness," the happy days which Voltau-e spent with her at the Chateau de Cirey; which he charmed with his witty conversation, as Madame de Graffigny said, adding t1»at being deprived of Voltaire's small-talk was a real punishment. Voltaire, arrived in Brussels, remained there but a short while. M. Desnoireterres, the learned author of " Voltaire and French Society in the Eighteenth Century," attributes his short residence to the un- pleasantness which, it is said, he experienced at meeting there his declared enemy, the poet Jean Baptiste Rousseau. Their quarrel had, indeed, be- come very much envenomed since the year 1722, and had taken the character of a mortal fray. Rousseau had narrated according to his point of 44 VOLTAIRE Ilf EXILE. view their altercations of 1122. He pretendeS. t&ai it was the impiety of Voltaire, his attacks upon Christianity, which had revolted him. But in reality it was his slaying epigram upon the " Ode a la Pos- terity." He reproached him with being a follower of the Marchioness de Rnpelmonde, and with not having had with her Platonic relations alone. He added that he had introduced Voltaire into several great families of Brussels, and that his manners there had been improper. In the church of the Sablons, he would have it appear, Voltaire had troubled the service and listened very undevoiit- ly to the mass. He charged Voltaire, furthermore, with having blattered against him at Marimont, and with having at Mons so much incensed the tabie d'hdte by his words that he came near being throwu out of the window. Rousseau, besides, had attributed to Voltaire the odious project of going to preach Atheism in the Netherlands, bringing forward to support his cal- umnies the learned Sr. Gravesand and the Duke of Aremberg; both of whom opposed him with an ex- press denial. Lastly, a violent pamphlet from Rousseau had appeared in a Paris magazine. Voltaire, however, was not at all behind his char- itable confrere. He had riddled him with epigrams, notably in his " Temple du GoUt." To his pamphlet he had replied by his deoppilating "Crepinade." To understand the piquant allusion in this title, it must be known that Rousseau was the son of a shoemaker of Paris, and that, the honest man having come to the foyer to congratulate him after his first repre- sentation of the " Flatteur " at the Theater Frtin- UIS LIFE AND WOEK. 45 jais, Rousseau, swollen with pride, had refused to recognize him. He did not want to be known as the son of an artisan. Here is the biased alRpreciation of the difference between Voltaire and Rousseau, made by a Catholic writer, M. Capefigue: " Rousseau, the poet so long exiled for his impie- ties and sarcasms, was now growing old. What a change had been operated in him! Proscribed on account of an abominable book attributed to him, the 'Moisade,' Rousseau had taken refuge in Bel- gium, and he was expiating in Brussels, by sacred odes and some sublime strophies, the wanderings oi his youth. Voltaire had visited him a moment in Belgium; they had been again drawn together by a mutual correspondence, soon suddenly interrupted. They agreed no longer. Voltaire was commencing his career of impiety, Rousseau was ending his." In the eyes of M. Capefigue, as in the minds of all his co-religionists, it is impiety to defend liberty of thought. Voltaire had gone from Brussels to Anvers, in Holland, where he had embarked upon the canals. He took the name of R^vol, and had his correspond- ence addressed to the care of MM. Ferney and d'Arty, merchants of Amsterdam. But he lived with Ledet, who printed an edition of his works, comprising the "Elements de la Philosophic de Newton," uncompleted. Voltaire went to Leycjen, where he chose his domicile with a banker named Rollen. In Berlin he saw the celebrated physician Boerhaave. During this time, Madame du Chatelet imparts her mortal inquietudes to the Count of Argental, whom y 46 VOLTAIKB IN EXILE. Voltaire called his good angel, and who was, indeed, all his life the type of the devoted and disinterested friend. In her letters dated from Cirey she entreats him to use all his influence upon his friend to dis- suade him from incorporating the " Mondain" in the edition of his works, and to divert him from visiting Prussia. " His sojourn in Prussia would harm him," says she. "The climate is horribly cold. The Prince Royal is not king. When he shall be king, we shall go to see him together. But until he is, there is no security there. His father knows no other merit than that of being ten feet high; . . . he is sus- picious and cruel ; he hates and persecutes his son ; he keeps him under a yoke of iron." The Chatelaine de Cirey has such a fear of Vol- taire going to Prussia that she does not leave him time to complete the " Elements de la Philosophic de Newton " at Amsterdam. She sends him letter after letter to recall him to Cirey, to the effect that Voltaire believes himself in duty bound to defer to her wishes. This recall to the gardens of Armida was not of long duration. Mare-Antoine du Chatelet, Marquess of Tricha- teau, had just died, bequeathing to his cousin his properties situated in Flanders. This succession gave rise to serious litigation between the houses of Chatelet and of Iloensbroeck. In order to sustain a suit and to defend her endangered interests, the Marchioness du Chatelet unhesitatingly left Cirey, niS LIFE AND WORK. 47 with her inseparable Voltaire, who was not sort-y to breathe more freely abroad than in France, where he was ever disturbed, threatened, and forced to concealment. Leaving Cirey on the 8th of May, 1739, the two travelers arrived at Brussels on the 28th, after hav- ing stopped four or five days at Valenciennes. Vol- taire and the Marchioness scarcely touched land at Brussels. They went at once, passing by Louvain, to Bevinghen, whence Madame du Chatelet wrote to the Count d'Argental: " Here we are in Flanders, my dear friend. I was visited and feasted in Brussels when I merely passed. Rousseau is no more spoken of there than if he were dead. All were eager to feast M. de Voltaire. I am actually within ten leagues of Brussels, on an estate of M. du Chatelet." Then Voltaire sought the most quiet quarter in Brussels, and installed himself, with Madame du Chatelet, in the Rue de la Grosse Tour (Great Tower Street).* She was a precious companion for a philosopher, * To-day the Rue du Grand Cerf (Great Deer street). A tavern exists yet today, bearing tiie sign: "A la Grosse Tour." In 1743 and 1743 Voltaire lived in Brussels, Place de Louvain, as is attested by the letter he wrote, in a pleai- ant Oriental style, to the Abbe Aumillon, in October, 1743, and ending thus: " Written in my pigmy closet. Place de Louvain, tfflicted with an enormous colic, the Sth of the moon cf the 9th month, the year of the hegira 1122." On the other hand, Madame du ChStelet was writing from Lille to the Count d'Argental, the. 10th of October, 1743: " I am going to Brussels as soon as a slight fever I have is over. Write me at Brussels, Place de Louvain." 43 TOLTAIEE IN EXILE. this young and admirable woman, impassioned with science, possessing upon the ends of her fingers all the Greek and Latin authors, and translating into French the works of Newton. She had Koenig, her professor of mathematics, to follow her to Brussels. Notwithstanding his resolution to isolate himself in order to be fully consecrated to his cherished studies and noble labors, Voltaire did not long re- main secluded in Brussels. Rousseau had, the very first thing, let out his presence in the capital of Bra- bant. He went clamoring everywhere against the illustrious writer, repeating that he preached Athe- ism. Jealous of Voltaire's fame, Rousseau had vainly sought to divert the Duke d'Aremburg from the soci- ety of the author of " Zaire," whom he cavalierly styled a rimeur de deus jours, or " a forty-eight hour rhymer." Voltaire, to whom r&partee was an easy thing, retorted by comparing Rousseau's poetry to the croaking of frogs. All that Rousseau gained by his calumnies and hostilities against Voltaire was the loss of the pen- sion generously given him by the Duke d'Aremberg, and expulsion from his house. To conclude with Rousseau, let us say that, struck with apoplexy on his return from Hague in the month of October, 1740, he died in Brussels on the I'Zth of March, 1'741, at the respectable age of sev- enty-one, and that his piety brought him the honor of being interred in the church of the Bare-footed Carmelites. Piron, who had the mania of epitaphs to such a degree that he composed his own — SIS LIFE A.NI) WORK. 49 *' Here lies Pirou, who naught could be. Not evea Academician be " — also wrote Rousseau's epitaph. It Las remained famous. We subjoin it : " Here lies th« illustrious, unfortunate Rousseau; lu Paris he was born, and in Brabant laid low. His life is in this epitaph Summed up: It was too long by half. For thirty years of envy worthy, For thirty more he was to pity." TJie Judgment of Pirou may be accepted as imjjar- tial, for the author of the " Metromanie " was the iutimate friend of Jean Baptiste Rousseau, from whom he did not separate during his sojourn in Brussels in 1788 and 1740. In these two years Pirou •did not see Voltaire. He was secretly jealous of him, and, blinded by his immense vanity, pretende i to be his superior. " Voltaire works in marquetry," «aid he, " and I oast in bronze." But let us retrace our steps and return to the year 1739. Jean Baptiste Rouseeau had vainly used all his venom-teeth against the finely-tempered file of Vol- taire, whom the most distinguished personages of Brussels knew well how to appreciate, as well as to find his peaceful retreat in the Rue de la Grosse Tour ; among others, the Prince of Chimai, the Duke of Aremberg, who became his friends, and the grandson of the illustrious pensionary De Witt, who put at his disposition his library — the richest in Europe. Desirous of requiting these courteous vis- its, Voltaire gave a feast, to which he invited the representatives of several great Brussels families. They responded with eagerness to his appeal. 50 VOI/TAIEE IN EXILE. " This is the country of uniformity," writes Vol- taire to M. Berger, at the date of the 28th of June, 1739. " Brussels has so little activity that the great- est news of the day is a very small feast which I give to Madame da Chatelet, to Madame the Princess of Chimai, and to M. le Due d'Aremberg. Rousseau, I believe, will have no share in it. It is assuredly the first feast given by a poet at his own expense, and where there was no poetry. I had promised a very gallant device for the fireworks, but I have had made some great and very luminous letters that say: ' I am for the jeu va tout /' That will not cure our ladies, who love the gleek a little too well. Yet I did it only to cure them." This letter, by which we learn that the ladies of Brussels of the last century loved and played with frenzy the hrclan, the jsm va tout, is followed, two days later, by another missive to Thi^rot, in which Voltaire relates the tragic accident which had come to sadden the feast : " I write yon from a house from which Rous- seau has been driven forever — a just punishment of his calumnies. I would say a good many things to you, but I am really sick from a shock which made me nearly faint when I saw fall at my feet, from the third story, two carpenters whom I had at work. Imagine what it is to see two poor artisans fall in this way and to be covered with their blood. I see that it is not for me to give entertainments. That sad spectacle corrupted all pleasure of the most agreeable journey in the world." To chase away the impression of the terrible acci- dent which had disturbed the sensibility of Voltaire, ms LTFE AND WORK. 51 the DiiVe d'Aremberg had taken him, with Emilia, to his residence, d'Enghien. If we believe Voltaire, the signification of the word Utopia was absolutely unknown in Brussels during the last century. Ignorant of the word, they of course were ignorant of the thing. ,And truly, they have never been very Utopian in Belgium. Here follows what Voltaire wrote to Helvetius on this subject : " I admit to you with shame that I have never read the ' Utopia ' of Thomas More. However^ I took it in my head some days ago to give a merry- making in Brussels, under the name of the Envoy of Utopia. The feast was in honor of Madame du Chatelet, as a matter of course. But would you be- lieve that nobody could be found in the town who knew the meaning of Utopia, It is not the home of belles-lettres." One of the first thoughts of Voltaire in Belgium had been for Frederick, the Prince Royal of Prussia, to whom he had written a short letter as early as the 30th of May, from Louvain, during his excursion to Beringhen. In the first part of June, 1739, he ad- dressed him a long missive, from which we extract what follows: " Madame du Chatelet will do nothing here but plead. She will find very few persons to whom she can speak of philosophy. - The arts do not dwell in Brussels any more than pleasures. A retired and quiet life is here ^the lot of nearly all individuals. But this quiet life simulates ennui so nearly that one can very easily mistake it." The same critical idea of Brussels atd Efc'gium ia reproduced in several letters of Volcairu, Aoiong 52 TOLTAIEE IN EXILE. Others is an epistle addressed, at a later period, to M. -de Farmont, and of- which we give a stanza : " For the sorry town whence I write thee, Of ignorance 'tis the home, And, besides, of dallness and ennui/ Stupidity here reigns alone. 'Tis a land of true servility, With no wit, and sainily to the core; But then Emilie is here with me, And she is alone worth France and more." In a letter to Madame de Champbonin is found this passage : " There are, as you know, many princes in Brus- sels, and few men. One hears at every moment, ' Your Ilighness,' ' Your Excellency.' " HIS LIFE AND WORK. 53 VI, With Ilia rapid glance and his habitual vivacity, Voltaire contents himself with exposing the penury of arts and letters in the Belgium of the eighteenth century; but to have been absolutely just he should have indicated the causes which had made of that intelligent and expressive race a nation of mutes, and had temporarily weaned them from their native qualities. Political and religious despotism is the grave-digger of nations, and liberty is their emanci- pator, their creator, as was so well proven at that period by the jDrosperity of the United Provinces, toward which all that Flanders had of vivaciousness and intelligence had been directing its course for a century. Voltaire, then, should have recalled and placed by the side of his strictures upon the moral and intel- lectual state of Belgium in his time the vital explo- sion, the magnificent efflorescence, of the Flemish communes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centu- ries. Led by Artevelde, who at that period con- ceived the idea of the federal communes of Europe, they heroically resisted the oppression of the counts of Flanders, backed by the French monarchy, and succumbed only under the weight of overwhelming numbers, at Roesbeck, in 1382. Voltaire should have recalled the dark silhouettes of Philip II. and the Duke of Alva, swaying the ax over the head of all intelligence, over the heads which arose above 54 VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. the level of servitude — principally over the members of the Chambers of Rhetoric, which were a nursery of poets and authors. The Prince Royal of Prussia joined the chorus with Voltaire against Brussels. It is true he did not spare Germany any more. " Brussels, and nearly all Germany," he wrote to Voltaire on the 17th of July, 1739, "still feel the effects of their ancient barbarism. They honor the arts very little, and therefore cultivate them but little. The nobility bear arms, or, after superficial studies, enter the bar, which they look upon as a pleasant thing. The well-to-do gentry live in the country or in the woods, which makes them as wild as the animals they pursue. . . . You must be much more sensitive than any one else to the differ- ence in the life of Paris and Brussels — you who breathe only in the centers of art, who have brought together in Cirey all that is most voluptuous, most piquant in intellectual pleasures." A letter of Voltaire to the Marquess of Argeus, dated July 18, 1739, relates the case of the Jesuit Janssens, which at that time was making a groat noise : i^ "My compliments, dear friend, to the reverend father Janssens, Jesuit, of Brussels, who persuaded the poor dame Viana that her husband had died a heretic, that consequently she could not in good conscience keep any money in her possession, and that she should place it all in the hands of her con- fessor. The good lady Viana, full of compunction, trusted all her money to him. The coachman who helped the reverend father to carry the sack gives legal evidence against the reverend father. The niS LIFE AND WORK. 55 good man says he does not know what it moan", and prays God for them. The people, however, want to stone the saint. The case is going to be tried. He must be hung or canonized, and haply he will be the one and the other. Adieu, and let us be neither the one nor the other." Voltaire and the Marchioness had left the shades of Enghien to return to their Rue de la Grosse-Tour. But they did not remain there long. Madame du Chatelet was called to Paris, and she took her phi- losopher with her, as well as her mathematician, Koenig, who followed her everywhere. In tlie month of September of that year, 1V39, the Parisian editor Prault published a collection of fugi- tive pieces, at the head of which figured an unpub- lished fragment of the " Histoire du Sieole de Louis XIY.," by Voltaire. The book was seized at the publishing office and the publisher condemned to pay a fine of five hundred livres and to shut up his house. Voltaire, fearing to be included in the pur- suit, retired in all haste to the Chateau de Cirey. Madame du Chatelet, seeking to attract Voltaire into the field of scientific studies, of exact sciences, sought to divert him from his love of poetry and his purely literary occupations. " When M. Vol- taire is sick," she wrote, " he writes poetry." Bat Voltaire did not abandon himself to the wishes of his too learned friend. At that time he wrote : "I love all the nine (the Muses). One should seek, as much as possible, to derive enjoyment from so many fair ones." Voltaire has also painted Madame du Chatelet in her metamorphosis from the worldly into the scien- tific woman : 56 VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. " But as the evening shades come on, Adown from her aphelion Our astronomic Emilie, Her hands with ink black as can be, And apron on, returns to me. To compasses she bids adieu. To reckonings, telescope; Her cliarms she now takes up anew : Those flowers beneath her steps that ope, Up to her toilet take with speed. And play for her upon thy reed Those melodies to love so dear. And which poor Newton did not hear." In the month of December, 1739, we find him again, with the marchioness, in Brussels. The 10th of January, 1740, the Prince Royal had written him a letter made up of prose and verse, characterizing the Cardinal de Flcury as an old ungrateful priest, and which begins thus : " For making France illustrious A thankless old priest banishes Thee from thy home, O princely bard 1 Old age makes him ridiculous; It is the way one punishes. But not that men reward," Voltaire, very sensitive to the disagreeable results of Prault's publication, writes from Brussels to the Count d'Argental in February, 1740 : " I intend to remain a long time in this country. I love the French, but hate persecution. I am indig- nant at being treated as I am." *" And to the Marquess of Argenson, the 2l8t of May: " The suit of Madame du Chatelet does not pro- gress much. I must prepare myself to remain here HI-3 LIFE AND WOEK. df long. I am with her ; I am sheltered from persecu- tion, and yet I regret you," etc. Voltaire did not flatter the city of Brussels in I'ZiO any more than in 1139 : " I have not yet had the consolation of seeing my works correctly published," he writes to Frederick. " I could profit by my residence in Brussels to make a new edition [the ' Elements ' are here alluded to], but Brussels is the abode of ignorance. There is not in it a printer, not an engraver, not a man of letters, and without Madame du Chatelet I could' not con- verse of literature here. Moreover, this country is a country of servility. It has a papal nuncio and no Frederick." In the course of January, 1*740, the authos- of " MaQo^ I'Escaut," the Abbe Prevost, had addressed a curious letter to Voltaire, in which he calls himself his most passionate admirer, and proposes becoming his liegeman to answer to the mob of pamphleteers bent on tarnishing his fame. Then, passing without other transition from his offer to the quest of ser- vices, he exposes to him his pressing need of twelve thousand livres, of which the lack causes him to be besieged by his creditors even into his very hotel. " Oat of one thousand opulent persons with whom I pass my life, I wish to die if I know one of whom I have the hardihood to ask this sum, and of whom I feel sure of obtaining it." Voltaire only answered the Abbe Prevost from Brussels in June, 1740. He begins by declaring himself highly flattered to be lauded by him, but that the motive which prevented the great Con do from writing his memoirs also stops him short, see- ing that, like him, he would be obliged t© bring on 53 VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. the Stage in a disagreeable manner a large number of persons of a notorious ingratitude toward him, to .begin with the Abbe Desfontains, who owes him his life, and who has rewarded him by every kind of insult and pamphlet. " Far from seeking to publish the shame of men of letters," adds Voltaire, " I only seek to cover it up. There is a writer (like La Jonchfere) who wrote me one day, ' Here is, sir, a libel I have written against you. If you will send me one hundred crowns it will not appear.' I informed him that one hundred crowns were too small a matter; that his libel should be worth to him at least one hundred pistoles, and that he should publish it. I would never end with similar anecdotes, but they -paint humanity in too ugly colors, and I prefer to forget them." Voltaire terminated his letter by informing the Abb6 Prevost that he intended sending him very shortly the twelve thousand livres which he needed, although in Brussels he was far from playing the part of a farmer-general and living in opulence. In reality, it was an amiable turn for a refusal. Some months after having received that answer from Voltaire, the Abb6 Provost vas himself obKged to take refuge in Brussels, after having been accused of ^collaborating in a secret gaaette which circulated in Paris. " For some time, reported a member of the " Me- moires Secrets de la Republique des Lettres," a one-horse gazette filled with scandalous chronicles has been circulated. The delivering agents have been arrested and put in jail; one of them has denounced the Abb6 Pr4vost. In coniscqnciice, the VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. /)9 Abbe Prevost has received the order of leavina the realm, and he started this morning for Brussels." The fate of pamphleteers had nothing very pleas- ant in the last century. They were not in security, even when abroad. Voltaire informs us that Henri Dabourg, a French publicist, was carried away, in Frankfort, by an officer in the French army, and taken to the Mont-Saint-Mlchel, where he died in a cage. That pamphleteer hid under the pseudonym of Dubourg his real name of Victor de la Castaigne. He belonged to a family in the south of France. It does not appear that the Abbe Prevost re- mained long in Brussels. He saw Voltaire there, after which he went to Holland, where he published several novels before going on to London. He took with him to the capital of Great Britain a young Holland woman who was passionately fond of him, and who would absolutely follow him in his new retreat. The poor Abbe Prevost, whom ill luck and women pursued all his life, returned to Prance only to meet a tragic end. While crossing the forest of Chautilly, he fell struck with apoplexy. Two passers-by raised him up and carried him to the house of a village priest. He gave no sign of life. To ascertain whether he was alive or dead, an igno- rant surgeon gave him a vigorous and mortal thrust of the lancet, which made him open his eyes. The Abbe Prevost lived a few minutes more-=— long enough to see himself murdered by that surgeon. 60 VOLTAIEK IN EXILE. VII. Frederick had ascended the throne of Prussia in the month of June, 1740. Once king, he altered his views upon the advisability of publishing the refuta- tion of Machiavel. lie had ordered Voltaire to have it printed at the Hague, but he requested him to stop the impression of the " Anti-Machiavel ;" of which Voltaire would say jocosely that the King of Prussia spit in the dish in order to disgust the rest. Voltaire flies to the Hague, but the publisher, Van Durel, did not consent to give up the manuscript of the " Anti-Machiavel," and was resolved on print- ing it nolens volens, in spite of Voltaire, who re- turned to Brussels defeated by the Dutch printer. Notwithstanding the King of Prussia burned with the desire to see Voltaire, the philosopher remained for some time deaf to the invitations of the king, as is attested by this letter of the 28th of June, 1740, addressed to M. de Cideville ; " Withal, I remain in Brussels, and the best king upon the earth, his merits and his glory, -will not draw me for one moment away from Emilie. Kings, even this one, must come only after friends." But, Frederick having used new persuasions, Vol- taire proposes to him to visit him in company with his Emilie, Madame du Chatelet; to which the King of Prussia answers : " I shall write to Madame du Chatelet in accord- ance with your desire. To speak frankly to you concerning her voyage, it is Voltaire, it is you, my friend, whom I desire to see; and the divine Emiio, VOLTAIRE IN EXILE, 61 with all her divinity, is but the accessory of Apollo Newtonized." Two days later conies another ironical letter from the king : " If it needs be that Emilie accompany Apollo, I consent. But if I can see you alone, I prefer this last. I would be too dazzled, I could not bear so much splendor at once; I would need Moses' veil to temper the united rays of your divinities." . But suddenly all is changed. The King of Prus- sia has projected a voyage to the Netherlands, which he will extend to Anvers and Brussels. The colony of Grosse-Tour street is upside down. Voltaire writes to Frederick that he shall expect to offer him the hospitality of his modest retreat, and that Mad- ame du Chatelet has already prepared his apart- ments. " If it became true," adds he, " that your human- ity should pass through Brussels, I implore her to bring me English drops, for I shall faint." " It will be the most charming day of my life," answers Frederick. " I believe I shall not survive ; but at least one could not choose a more agreeable manner of death." Unfortunately, a fever made a change in the trav- eling arrangements of the king. On the 6th of Sep- tember, 1740, he wrote to Voltaire from Wessel to beg him to come and meet him at Cleves : " My dear Voltaire, I must, say what I will, give up to the fever, which is more tenacious than a Jan- senist; and, however greatly I desired to go to Anvers and Brussels, I do not find myself in the condition to undertake such a voyage without risk. I would ask you, then, if the road from Brussels to 62 VOLTAIRE IN EXi.,E. Cleves would seem too long for you to join me there ? Let us defraud the fever, my dear Voltaire, and may I at least have the pleasure of embracing you. Be good enough to present to the Marchioness my excuses for being deprived of the satisfaction of seeing her in Brussels. Sunday next I shall be in a little place near by Cleves, where I shall be able to possess you really at my ease." . The meeting of the two illustrious friends took place on the 11th of September, 1740, in the castle of Moyland, near Cleves. It was a charming one. The presence of Voltaire, face to face with whom he found himself for the first time, gave such a delight to the king that his fever was checked by it so much that he arose and appeared at supper, where litera- ture and philosophy were discussed while flowed the champagne, less effervescent than Voltaire's wit. Frederick II. was delighted with the opportunity of at last conversing with the wittiest man of his time, the first of thinking beings. He cried out, like a jealous lover, " How happy is Emilie in possessing him !" To which the marchioness seemed to give an answer when she wrote from Brussels to Maupertuis, bitter- ly complaining to him of the prolonged absence of Voltaire : "I hope the King of Prussia," said she, "will soon send me back somebody with whom I intend to spend my life, and whom I only lent him for a few days." Madame du Chatelet deemed it monstrous to leave a woman to go and meet a sovereign. Pulled about between the marchioness and that king, Voltaire leaned to Frederick's side and com- peted with him in amiabilities and coquetries. Ilav- VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. 63 ing left him to go to the Hague to correct the proof- sheets of the " Anti-Machiavel," he had the cruelty of not returning to Brussels, where waited the dis- appointed Madame du Chatelet. He entered the Prussian realm under the jocular name of "Don Qui- xote, ^and rejoined Frederick at Remusberg. The time passed by Voltaire at Remusberg was a series of festivals, of merry banquets, a concert of mutual flatteries and admiration. However, Vol- taire remembers the divine Emilie. The time for leaving Prussia has arrived. But Frederick still wants to detain the first of thinking beings. Vol- taire sends him this last parting pastoral: " In spite of your great worth, in spite of all your charms, , My soul is discontented yet. No! no I you are but a coquette, Wlio subjugates our hearts and yet would flee our arms." Frederick, defeated in his endeavor to detain Vol- taire at his court and to separate him from Emilie, retorted: " My heart doth fully know the value of your charms; But do not deem it could thus be contented yet. Ah, traitor! you leave me, and that for a coquette; I ne'er could flee thy arms." After visiting Berlin to pay his court to the queen- mother and the sisters of the king, Voltaire started on his way to rejoin the "coquette" Emilie, as she was called by her rival, the King of Prussia. The marchionesis, who, with feminine tact, had felt a personal enemy in Frederick, and who at heart was wounded at not having been invited by him, could not forgive Voltaire for having preferred a 64 VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. king to her, and for having left her alone in Brussels with Koenig, his physique and intellect, and her interminable lawsuit. Voltaire developed all the amiability of his mind, and succeeded in obtaining forgiveness for his pro- longed absence, so that he wrote to the Count of Argental, "Never has Madame du Chatelet been more superior to kings." And, on her side, Madame du Chatelet informs the Count of Argental that " at last he [Voltaire] has arrived. All our sorrows are at an end, and he swears tp me they are indeed at an end forever. The King of Prussia is much astonished to find that one can leave him to go to Brussels. He asked three days' grace; but it was refused him. He has no conception of certain attachments; it is to be hoped that it will but make his friendships stronger. He has left nothing undone to retain our friend, and I believe him to be in a fury against me; but I defy him to hate me moi'e than I have hated him for two months past. Here is, you will allow, a merry rival- ry." And, in fact, the King of Prussia had for Voltaire one of those impassioned friendships which were seen in ancient Greece between men who chose one another, and which Frederick carried to the point of being jealous of Madame du Chatelet. At any rate, this duel between a king and a marchioness is of the greatest piquancy, and Madame du Chatelet goes to the very limits of irony when she writes, " He has no conception of certain attachments ; it is to be hoped that it will but make him love his friends the VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. 65 Voltaire, once more a Bruxellois, and reinstated in his Grosse-Tour street, to the great delight Of the Marchioness, gave the last touch to his " Mahomet," which was played in Lille, in April, 1740, with the plaudits of an enthusiastic audience. The prelates of Lille themselves contributed to this success. Perfectly quieA and sheltered from all persecution in Brussels, Voltaire worked at his tragedy of " Me- rope," when the lawsuit which had retained Madame du Chitelet in Brussels for such a long time called her back to Champagne to plead in the nearer juris- diction of Cirey; after which it became necessary again to return to Brussels. Voltaire accompanied his Emilie in all her judi- ciary peregrinations, and with her left the capital of Brabant in November, 1744, to go on to Cirey. From Cirey, Voltaire returned with his friend to Paris, which he called the " Capital of trifles," whilst he recognized all it had that was great aiid beau- tiful. His " Brutus " met with a season of renewed and lively success. All the clerical hounds, the Desfontaines and the Frerons, were let loose against this republican piece. Voltaire faced Lis enemies, ridiculing them, piercing them with his arrows, with his darts of sarcasm. Against his SHrorn enemy, Freron, he launched the following taunt, imitated from the " Anthologie :" " In yonder vale (I do not lie) A viper stung poor Jean Freron. What thit:k you happened thereupon? It was the snake that had to die." To the Abbe Couet, high-vicar of the Cardinal of Noailles, who had addressed him Lis Grace's man- 66 VOLTA.IEB IN EXILE, date, he retorted by sending one of his tragedien, " Marianne," with this quatrain : " Thy gracious mandate came to mc; I send thee back a tragedy. Thus, thou for me, and I for thee, Uo we both play the comedy." It is with enthasiasm that Goldsmith speaks of Voltaire, whom he saw at that time in a soiree of the Parisian society, where the conversation turned upon the merits of English literature. Fontenelle, being but little acquainted with it, did not appre- ciate it. Diderot contradicted him. But Voltaire presented its claims with a grace and a reality that charmed the author of the " Vicar of Wakefield." VIII. Soon another storm broke out over the head of Voltaire, who was, however, accustomed to these thunderbolts. One of his letters to the King of Prussia had been intercepted, and copies of it had been circulated. "Do you know the last thing out?" wrote the president Henault to Madame du Deff and. " It is a letter of Voltaire to the King of Prussia, the most foolish that could be imagined. He tells him he has done well to conclude peace, that the half of Paris approves him, that he has only gotten ahead of the cardinal, that he must busy himself now only with recalling pleasures, those children of the arts, the opera, comedy, etc. Madame de Mailly breathes only fire and revenge, and demands an exemplary punishment. It is not known what will come of it, TOLTMEE IN EXILE. tS7 and it is feared the en iar moments he playfully called Madume Alcine. Besides, in the scientific quarrel between Mauper- tuis and Koenig, Voltaire had taken sides with the latter in opposition to the king who, so to speak, worshiped Maupertuis. Jealous of Voltaire's superi- ority and influence, Maupertuis saw his advantage. He spread a report that Voltaire had derided the king's pretensions to talent, and that when criticising the veAes Frederick took delight in writing against the beloved Louis XV., he had said that the king could produce nothing of any merit. The accused was certainly prolific in epigrams. But he had never denied the king's talent, and the accusation was false. VOLTAIRE IN EXILE, Hi Learning from what direction tlio blow had come, Voltaire published in Berlin an anonymous pamphlet filled with keen thrusts and biting sarcasms against Maupertuis. But Frederick, still taking part with his savant, had the executioner burn in the open street the Diatribe of Doctor Akakia, This act on the part of the king irritated Voltaire. Life in Berlin, together with the despotic humor of Frederick, began to weigh upon our philosopher, who, loving freedom above all things, could never put on the regulation coat of the courtier without making it crack at every seam. He was willing to bow before f reethinking monarchs while he fashioned them according to his own ideas, but he intended they should first respect his intellectual royalty. In a word, he was resolved they should deal with him as power with power. His bitterness and disap- pointment were expressed in the following letter, addressed to Madame Denis, in December, 1752: "As I have not in the world fifty thousand mus- lachios at my service, I do not intend going to war. I am only thinking about deserting honorably, taking care of my health and forgetting this three years' dream. " I see plainly they have squeezed the orange ; I must take care now and save the peel. To amuse myself, I shall make a small lexicon for the use of kings. So, My dear friend, means you are more than indifferent to me. By I will make you happy, under- stand, I shall put up with you as long as I need you. Sup ioith me this evening signifies, I shall make sport of you this evening. What perplexes me is how to get out of this place." Lideed it was not easy to break away from the y2 VDLTAITJE m EXrCET. court of Prussia. Yet tlie day was not far distant wheft Voltaire and Frederick, these two Athenians of the eighteerrth century, were to separate in ill- humor. Bent on leaving, Voltaire returns to Fred- erick Ms cross and his key of Chamberlain. Freder- ick sends them back,, inviting Voltaire to follow him- to Postdam. Voltaire feigns sickness and talks of the waters of Plombieres, which would be of service' to him. Frederick replies that the springs of Glatzy in Moravia, will be excellent for the re-establishment of his health. A few days pass by. Voltaire,^ deter- mined to escape the claws of royal friendship, agaiit (Bends his insignia to Frederick and chooses for his teave-taking' the very moment when Frederick was- reviewing his troops. " Thus, you are determined to go ?" abruptly said the king. " Very well, then,- sir, fare ye well." Voltaire hastened away, and started in the direetiors of Strasburg by way of Frankfort-on-the-Main. The king of Prussia won-ied over Voltaire's de- parture. He would have kept him at his court and disciplined him as hfe soldiers; and, finding that impossible, he contrived a very disagreeabie surprise for the departing philosopher. Delighted with having regained Lis liberty, Vol- taire was flying at high speed, when, to his great stupefaction and lively indignation, he was on the 25th May, 1753, arrested as a malefactor,, searched, consigned to his hotel at Frankfort, and guarded bodily by the resident of the king of Prussia, in the name of the sovereign who accused him with noth- ing less than having defrauded him of his papers, his poetical pieces, his literary masterpieces,, and even his state secrets. VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. P3 ^ Voltaire justified himself from these prctoiided thefts without difficulty. He gave up to the resi- dent some letters of Frederick and a volume of poems given him by the king at Postdam, but lie remained a prisoner in the Jjion d' Or i^ntil the answer of the king had come. His niece, Madame Denis, who waited for her uncle in Strasburg, having learned that ho was a prisoner at Frankfort, hastened on to meet him. Voltaire, in whom patience was not a chief vir- tue, became impatient with the tardiness, doubtless calculated, with which Frederick was answering his resident Freitag, and escaped from the Golden Lion. But Freitag overtook him and had him led back into a city building, where he was closely guarded together with his niece. Soldiers mounted guard around Madame Denis' bed. All the luxuriant arbitrariness of the Prussian agents is detailed in tlie letters of Voltaire on that occurrence. He mimics the monsir and the 2^oeshie of the satellites of the king^ describes their officious and swaggering bru- tality toward a woman, and depicts the nights of Madame Denis, who had sentinels for chamber- maids and bayonets for bed-curtains, etc. At last came the order of liberation from the king, and Voltaire was enabled to go on his way v/ith Madam Denis. He escaped scot-free with the excep- tion of the fright, and Frederick had the ridicule of having uselessly committed an act of arbitrariness. Voltaire doubtless made the philosophical rellec- tion that it is sometimes dangerous to become too familiar with kings who have two hundred thousand grenadiers at their service. On his side the king consoled himself by saying of 94 VOLTAIRE IN BXILE. the philosopher, " He is a man good to read, but dangerous to know. . - ." Nevertheless Voltaire had done well to escape the despotism of the king of Sans-Souci, when he had felt it weighing too heavily upon him. Frederick was a great man in all the acceptation of the word. Admirable warrior, with the eye of an eagle, legislator, creator of a people, powerful mind, learned, lettered. Freethinker, turning his court into a refuge for proscribed philosophers, savants, and encyclopedists. But he had a rough and despotic hand, and oft«n, also, a fantastic temper. That singular sovereign united all contrasts within him- self, going from poetry to public business, from a philosophical discussion to a review, rhyming and writing memoirs in camp for his Berlin academy, a thundering Jove and pipe-playing Apollo, as austere as a Spartan, 'depraved and licentious at his private suppers, hiding his library behind a superb parade- bed, and sleeping upon a stretcher, dressing himself, and having hardly a single menial to wait upon him. He has in history neither a copy nor a parallel; not even in Julius CsBsar, who, like him, was an Epicurean and a Stoician by turns, a learned and shrewd man, a skilful general, with unheard-of muscular and mental activity, and, like him, absolute and a despot. But Cs8sar hastened the dissolution -of the Roman empire, while Frederick founded a kingdom on the strong bases of science and free thought. Indeed, it was with truth Madame du Chatelet had said that the king of Prussia was a phenomenon upon a throne; and Voltaire declared that there were two men in Frederick — Alexander and the abb6 Cotin ; Caesar and Pradon. VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. 95 After having received from the friendship of Frederick as painful a blow as that inflicted on him some years previous by Madame du Chatelet, Voltaire wandered from Plombieres to Strasburg, then to Colmar, where the bishop excommunicated him. On the 15th of November, 1754, he had an inter- view in Lyons with his hero, the Duke of Richelieu, whom he consulted and sounded upon the practica- bility of his return to Paris. But it is probable that the answer was a negative one, for Voltaire, imme- diately after the interview, made ready to leave France. Unable to return to Paris, which was forbidden him by the Jesuitic faction, Voltaire once more re- signed himself to exile. Again he had to seek a refuge of liberty, a shelter against the intolerance of his countrymen, to whom he gave this last affectionate adieu, " I leave you, arlequins anthropophages !" In Lyons, however, he had been gratified by numerous testimonies of sympathy, at which he must have felt satisfaction. He had been elected a mem- ber of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of that city. Besides, his Iferope and his Brutus had been played at the great theater of Lyons, and as soon as the author had shown himself he had been greeted with acclamations. But having obtained positive proofs of the bitter hostility of the cardinal-arcli- bishop of Zenia and of the governor of Lyons, he said to his secretary, " My friend, this country is not made for me." This time our wandering philosopher found a re- treat in Switzerland, where he simultaneously bought 90 vai.TAinE in exile. two estates — Moilrion, near Lausanne, his winter quarters, and at the doors of Geneva, his summer residence, Mont-Saint-Jean, which he also called the Delights. WOUrMKE ITS EXILE. SI XHI. As Antseus regained strengtli whenever lie toucTiefl 1;lie earth, so did yoltaire regain all his vigor in the 4and of exile. His life in Switzerland, at the "De- lights" and Monrion, was one of -constant struggle and toil. He sent numerous articles to the Encyclopedia, with letters of encouragement to its brilliant corps of collaborators. Every day, the Encyclopedia was threatened in its existence. The Jesuitic party howled ceaselessly against its editors, and strove ■continually to raise against them, the wrath of •clergy, court, and parliament. In th« eyes of fanatics and of the ignorant malti- stude, the jiame of Encyclopedist was synonymous with son of Satan and highway robber. Voltaire •exhorted his friends to union and cheerfulness in the -Struggle against the wretch (Vinfame). "Patience and courage," he wrote to D'Alembert and Diderot. " God will help us if we are united and •cheerful. The brethren must dine together at least once a week." Denis Did«rot was the corner- stone of that philo- sophical temple, of that new universal repertory of sciences, arts, and industry, of that Encyclopedia iie had conceived while in the dungeon of Vincennes where he had been thrown in expiation of his Letter on the Blind, and which he brought to a successful issue after thirty years assiduous labor and struggles §8 VOLTAIEE iU EXILE. with numberless obstacles and stormy persecutions. Voltaire^s letters breathe the most hearty sympa- thy and admiration for Didei-ot, that Vulcau of intellectual labor, full of wit and gaiety, 3 valiant worker, disinterested and modest, always in the iield, sharpening, hammering without ceasinL;' the philosophical steel, and meanwhile inaugurating the Domestic Drama by producing The Father of a Family, not allowing himself to become embittered by bad fortune, as Rousseau did, but laughing in its very face, giving his iron soul up to every noble enthusiasm, and revolving, digesting all ideas in his cyclopedic m'ind. Between Voltaire and Diderot, between these two companions in the same task, there never rose the least cloud of misunderstanding or distrust. The intelligent burghers of Geneva soon became assiduous frequenters of the Souse of Delights. Some Parisians came there too, D'Alembert among others, and the eelebi-ated actor, LeKain, who played the principal part in a new play of Vol- taire's, Tlie Chinese Orphan. The lord of the Mansion of Delights made friends by amusing and treating everybody well. "If Socrates," he was wont to say, "had kept open house, his enemies, far from putting him to death, would have invited him to dinner." His intellectual activity was prodigious. Whilst assiduously contributing to the Cyclopedia, he com- menced the publication of his Philosophical Dic- tionary, and terminated his Essay upon the Morals and Intellect of Nations, the pages of which are all impressed with a vigorous hate for despotism, fanaticism, and all that enslaves and deceives man. VOLTAIRE IN EXILK. 99 In tliis masterpiece Voltaire created or rather re- suscitated history by rejecting the marvelous, the divine sceneric, the providential plan of Bossuet, as well as the palingenesiac and fatalistic systems. He showed in history a mixture of good and evil, madness and reason, progress and retrogression, the natural product of human liberty. One thing must be noted here — this important and original work had been commenced at Brussels at the request of Madame du Chatelet, who had been desirous of seeing the ^metamorphoses, the successive variations, the modifications and changes of morals, customs, laws and ideas, unfolding themselves in the pages of a truly philosophical book. According to Voltaire, history in its essence is scarcely more than an extravagance, a madness with a method, a heap of crimes, of follies, and misfor- tunes, amongst which are witnessed some examples of virtue, some periods of happiness. Its panoramas show us error and prejudice lording it over truth and reason, the skilful and the strong reducing the weak to bondage and crushing the unfortunate, and the powerful themselves becoming in their turn the toys of fate as well as the slaves over which they rule. Finally, men becoming somewhat enlightened, and profiting by their experiences, their follies, errors, and misfortunes, learn to reflect. But the world "walks like a turtle toward common sense and wis- dom. It advances g,nd retreats alternately, and the same follies seem destined to reappear from time to time on the stage of history. We have here a theory of history far more real and true than the supposititious order of straightfor- ward and uninterrupted progress, which has been the 100 VOLTAIEE IN £XILE. theme of so many modern historians, but which is refuted by retrogradations and deteriorations as fre- quent, radical, and natural in the life of societies as they are in the individual man. "The history of kings and of battles has alone been chronicled," wrote Voltaire ; " the history of nations has not been written. Do our laws, our customs, our intelligence count for nought?" The JEssay on Morals created lively sympathies for its author. At a later period the importance and success of this work was recalled when Voltaire's portrait was engraved on a medal of which the exergue bore these words, " He takes away from THE NATIONS THE BANDAGE OF BEKOK." All this while Voltaire's resentment of the Teu- tonic manner in which he had been treated at Frank- fort by the king of Prussia had not diminished. Still under the same feeling of irritation he abused Frederick in several letters, giving him the name of Due after an ape which he had in his mansion of the Delights. Besides, he wrote a pamphlet upon the freaks and secret vices of the king of Prussia, which pamphlet remained in his Memoirs, and was only published after his death. Withal, Voltaire could not entirely forget the good hearty hours of effusion he had while d away with the Solomon of the north, nor the close communion of their philosophic belief. Therefore he was much moved when he learned of the military dis- asters of Frederick, who, almost at the beginning of the Seven Years' War, at Kollin, the 18th of June, 1757, had been completely beaten and routed by the Austrians. He wrote to hiir.. Frederic thanked him for the part he took in his niisfortunes. Soon VOLTAIKE IN EXILE- 101 after, Voltaire received a letter from Wilhelmine, the Margravine of Bayreuth, informing bim that the king, her father, despairing of triumph over his ene- mies, had resolvecj to kill himself. This was con- firmed by Frederick's own hand, who said in a letter, half rhyme and half pros€, according to his custom, " If I must to the wall. The storm I will defy j And, like a king, whate'er befalL Will think, and live, and die,^' And further; " I am a man. Enough 1 for sorrow being born, To fate I shall oppose my courage and my scorn." "But, with all these sentiments, I am very far from condemning Cato and Otho. The last had but one beautiful moment — it was that of his death." Voltaire energetically fought the dark resolution of Frederick by saying that suicide was a mean door through which to escape the difficulties of life. He gave him advice full of good sense, and did not spare him rugged truths. " You would die ! And you love glory ! How can you think of an act which will deprive you of glory's crown ? I have already represented to you the sorrows of your friends, the triumphs of your e^mies. " I must add that nobody will look upon you as a martyr of liberty. We must be just toward our- selves. You know in how many courts they persist in looking at your entrance into Saxony as a trespass against the rights of nations'. What will be said at these courts ? 102 voLTAiEE isr exim;. "A man who is but a king might believe himself very unfortunate. But a philosopher can do without estates. Would it be worth while to be a philoso- pher if you could not bear adversity?" Surrounded with victorious enemies, who had wrested Breslau from him; having on his shoulders Russia, Austria, Saxony, and France, the situation of the Prussian king was really critical, desperate, even, and he must have judged it so to have decided to write to the Marshal de Richelieu, who had been notified and prepared by Voltaire, the following letter: " I know, sir duke, that you have not been put where you are in order to negotiate. I am, never- theless, well persuaded that the nephew of the great Cardinal Richelieu is made to sign treaties just as well as to win battles. The matter is but a trifle — it is to make peace if it be so desired. I send you Mr. Delchetet, bearer of proposals, and in whom you can have full confidence. The man who has deserved statues at Genoa, who has conquered Minorca, can do nothing more glorious than to work for the res- toration of peace to Europe. Be sure that nobody will be more thankful for it than your true friend, " PSEDEEICK." The king of Prussia was skilfully striving to de- tach France from the coalition formed against him. It would have been in the interests of France to negotiate at that very moment and withdraw from the Seven Years' War. But nothing was done. Fred- erick neither made peace nor killed himself. lie only threw some verses — some flowers of rhetoric — over his still empty sarcophagus. Thanks to his military genius, he routed his enemies one after another, com- VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. 103 pletely beat them all, and in a short time R issia rose victorious out of a mighty struggle in whi .h it had been near perishing, body and soul. The refugee of Monrion and the Deligh 3 was still spoken of in Paris. His successive wovlcs exploded like shells in the midst of the gay city. \ aiuly did he deny their paternity, his style, his manni r, his fear- ful and destructive raillery, were too easily , ecognized to allow of a mistake. The Pucelle niadv/ a terrible noise. From his residence of the Delight Voltaire protested, while he secretly directed the destruction of the manuscript, which was done by a friend. But his translation into verses of the Canticles from. the book of Ecclesiastes, which he had signed, was de- clared licentious and an insult to the Bible and to religion. The Parliament of Paris condemned the book to the fagot. All the Jesuits and clerical pamphleteers, Nonotte, Berthier, Freron, Pompignan, Terray, Chaumaix, Vcrnet, La Baumelle, Patouillet, Laroher, Sa-batier, Ribalier, Coge, the whole Roman Catholic band, fell unbridled upon Voltaire. He became the target of the obscurantints, of the hirelings of the church. They preserved or at least affected a. certain forbearance for other Freethinkers, but they kept up a fire upon the general, upon him who incessantly repeated to his co-laborers,"^'(3rBso«s Vinfame" [Let us crush the wretch). But what superb replies, what terrific retorts ! Woe to those who dared to attack Voltaire. He transfixed his enemies with his feathered arrows, he nailed theiu to the pillory of their own infamy. Scarcely had ho received and read their pamphlets when the mail of Geneva carried toward Paris the scathing, the stu-ming re- plies which made the whole population of Pario 104 VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. laugh at the expense of the Jesuitic writers. " My God, render our enemies very ridiculous !" was the habitual prayer of Voltaire. But as Providence was somewhat derelict and given to being slow, he helped her by throwing ridicule upon his adversaries, poisoning them with their own venom, and transfixing them with his keen epigrams. The auto-da-fe of Voltaire's works took place at Geneva as well as in Paris. Upon the energetic remonstrances of the consistory, the Great Council caused Gandide and the Pucelle to be thrown to the fire. The rigorist party, conducted by evangelical ministers, remonstrated against the presence of Vol- taire upon Swiss territory and attributed to him a corrupting influence. The friends of Voltaire in Geneva were called relaxed. . A commission was .appointed to decide upon the necessity and urgency of expelling him from the canton. Voltaire began to conceive a keen hatred against that fanatic and demented republic, which he called the dwarf, the fetus of republics. Being never caught napping, and (very happily for him, for otherwise he would have experienced the same fate as his writings) abounding in expedients, Voltaire contrived to elude and disconcert the rig- orists of the evangelical consistory by buying two properties in France, one at Tournay, the other at Ferney, at one hour's distance from the Swiss fron- tier. Thenceforward he had his quadrilateral, his strategical position. " My left wing rests on Mount Jura," he writes to D'Alembert, " my right on the Alps, and I have the Geneva lake in front of my camp, a good castle on the border of France, the Delights on the Genevese soil, VOLTAIEB IN EXILE. 105 and a good house in Lausanne. Creeping thus from one resort to the other I foil the kings, . . . for," added he, "philosophers should always have two or three holes under ground to shelter them from the hounds." Indeed, for such a thrifty and adventurous philos- opher as Voltaire it was good to be astride of two frontiers. "When Calvinistic intolerance threatened him in Switzerland, he took refuge on the French border, at Ferney. "Was it, on the contrary, the wind of Catholic intolerance that blew with fury, he passed over into Switzerland. Voltaire always strove to escape his eneniies, the harlequins anthropophages, and he invariably suc- ceeded. As if Voltaire had not already adversaries enough, Jean Jacques Rousseau at last took part with them. During twelve years the intercourse of the two philosophers had been amicable. Diderot, the Prometheus, creator of men, had launched Jean Jacques in the arena, and Voltaire, who during his whole life sustained with' all his strength the cham- pions of thought, had cordially encouraged him, having never gone beyond meekly railing at the author of the Discourse on Arts and Sciences by writing to him that his publications made him feel like walking on all fours. Voltaire had many times, but unsuccessfully, in- vited Rousseau to come and rest himself in his hermit- age and to breathe thepicre air of the Delights. Rousseau committed the great wrong of joining the clerical pack- against Voltaire and the Cyclopedists. It was, so to speak, forordained that Voltaire should find all the Rousseaua in his way. Jean Jacques 106 VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. accused him of having corrupted Geneva, his birth- place, in exchange for the hospitality he had received there ; j ust as Jean Baptiste Rousseau had formerly- attributed the intention of spreading Atheism in the Netherlands, to the man who had said, " If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Tak- ing his text from a poem written by Voltaire upon the earthquake of Lisbon, Mequinez, and Tetaan, which, in 1755, had made so many thousand victims, the high priest Jean-Jacques had said the work was an insult to Providence and an attack agairst the de- ity, and that simply because the author of the Disaster of Lisbon had affirmed that everything was not for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that our globe was afflicted with physical and moral wrong ! Ah! most unhappy men, thou unhappy earth, Of all the plagues most sad, most frightful, ghostly hearthj Of aimless pangs and wounds, thou drear, ceaseless knell; False sages who persist in crying, all is well! But war was really kindled between the two champions by an article in the Cyclopedic emanating from the pen of D'Alembert, who recommended to the Genevans the foundation of a theater and dra- matic performances as a means of culture and polish. Immediately Jean Jacques published his famous Letter on dramatic performances, which according to that dramatic author were the perdition, and caused the demoralization of, human kind. Such a paradox was sharply refuted by Voltaire, just as he had already riddled through and through the absurd theories brought forward by Jean Jacques, who would have had humanity retrograde to its very cradle. VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. 107 Jiff In fact, the first work of Rousseau, apart from his grandiloquent style, ought to have been signed by Freron or by the Jesuit Nonotte. lie had condemned civilization and held the primitive state of man up to our admiration by trying toj)rove the sciences and arts to hav been a source of corruption and social decadence. Nevertheless, it was readily understood that Rous- seau had only reviled civilization to render his criti- cism of society more stinging, and, in consequence, ' the philosophical group did not entertain any ill will toward him. Under pretense of exonerating himself from hav- ing authorized the printing of his strictures upon the Disaster of Lisbon, Rousseau wrote to Vol- taire a letter which ended with a declaration of hatred against him, as well as stinging reproaches for having perverted and alienated hia (Rousseau's) native land ! The foolish missive ended as follows: "I do not like you, sir; you have wronged me in every way and have goaded me wherever I, ycur dis- ciple and your enthusiastic admirer, was most sen- sitive. You have ruined Geneva as a return for the asylum it had given you; you have alienated from me my fellow-citizens as a reward for the praises which I had prodigally bestowed upon you in their very midst. " You alone it is who have rendered life in my own country unbearable to me; you will cause me to die in a foreign land, deprived of all the consolations of dying men, and my body will be thrown into the common grave as the sole honor it deserves, while you will, in my very native land, enjoy all the honors that a man may expect." 108 VOLTAIEE IN EXILI!. It is easy to see by the tenor of this letter that Jean Jacques was jealous of the fame and of the friends Voltaire had won in Switzerland. " Our friend Jean Jacques is in poorer health than I thought," replied Voltaire, "He needs neither advisers nor attendants, but baths and broths." And on the 22d of April, 1761, he wrote from Ferney to Mr. Damilaville: "I am an admirer of Mr. Diderot, because to his profound knowledge he adds the merit of not affecting the philosopher, and because he has always been enough of a philoso- pher not to bow down to the infamous prejudices which disgrace human reason. But when a Jean Jacques, a very Diogenes, emerges from the depths of his slime to declaim against comedy, after having written comedies himself (and detestable ones at that) ; when this waggish fellow has the insolence of of writing me that I am corrupting the morals of his country; when he gives himself airs of loving his country (which does not care a fig for him); and when ' finally this wretch, after three times having changed religion, concocts with some Sociriian priests of the city of Geneva to prevent the few Genevese who have any talent to come and exercise it in my house (which is not in his little territory of Geneva), he transgresses all bounds and gives us the sight of the most despicable fool I have ever known. "This is, dear sir, what I openly think, and what I beg you to say to Mr. Diderot." In the polemical arena Voltaire knew no re- straint. He became exceedingly embittered against Jean Jacques, calling him a fool and a false brother, publishing against him The Geneva War and other writings, taxing him with immorality, which was not VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. 109 true, and reproaching bim with having abandoned the two children he had from Therese Levasseur, which was true. In his Letters on the Mountain, Rousseau com- plains against the Geneva government, taxing it with tolerating the dangerous writings of Voltaire while prosecuting his. " It is not I who have desired war," writes Vol- taire ; " I would never have begun it." And in another letter: "How we would have cherished that fool had he not been a false brother !" Wlion the fire of their animosity somewhat passed away the two philosophers appreciated each other better. " It is not that he lacks genius," said Voltaire of Jean Jacques, " but it is genius allied to evil genius." "His first movements are good," said Rousseau in his turn ; " it is only by reflection that he grows wicked." Voltaire had a temper of incredible vivacity, and in polemics he was pitiless and cruel; but soon got over his fits of passion. After one of these acts of vivacity with a friend, he said to him: "For- give me. I am more to be pitied than you. It is not blood that runs in my veins; it is vitrei." As soon as Jean Jacques was threatened in his liberty by the publication of his JSmile, Voltaire offered him a refuge in Ferney. Rousseau harshly repulsed the fraternal hand stretched out to him. " He outrages me at pleasure," wrote Voltaire to a friend. " I had offered him not an asylum, but a house in which he could have lived as my brother." Although Voltaire pushed his animosity too far, the first blame in this quarrel must fall upon Jeah 110 VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. Jacques Rousseau. His misanthropy and surly temper, althougli well explained and extenuated by the misfortunes of his life, were the factors which led him sometimes to join the chorus of Voltaire's enemies. Jean Jacques was a suffering soul, a dark dreamer, speculative, subjective, sentimental, laehi-ymatory, connecting everything with his personality, believ ing that the whole of mankind had conspired for his ruin. His sickly injagination, his excessive sensi- bility, his bashfulness and backwardness, greatly increased the real misfortunes of his existence, which was but a painful poem from beginning to end. This philosopher who too often wallowed in the rut of vice while he possessed the enthusiasm of virtue; this reformer who three times changed his form of worship, and still kept a measure of religion; this apologist of maternity and childhood, who adored other people's children but abandoned his own; this artisan's boy, this lacquey* with an unbending pride, breaks off with all his friends, even with Diderot, who had not the time to quarrel with any one ; this philosopher who began his career like a Lefranc de Pompignan, by attacking Voltaire and the philoso- phers, presents a mass of contradictions^ and as many inconsistencies as a harlequin's dress. He is especially in a state of antagonism with his times, satirical, skeptical, and jocular as they were. Yet he opened for them well-springs of sentiment and magnificent vistas, which, although only made up of the substance of his dreams and illusions, brought *Rousseau, during his stay in Italy, had been for some time attached as a servant to the Countess of Vercelli. VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. Ill his dandified generation back to the truth and sim- plicity of nature, which conventional trappings dis- guised or altogether hid. The genius and misfortunes of Rousseau have gone far to cancel his faults, llis life was a succession of undeserved persecutions and humilia- tions, of miseries and blamable deeds, just as his works arc compounds of paradoxes, sophisms, and eloquent truths. At the moment when he ap- pears, Voltaire's powerful sarcasm having battered down a great many strongholds of iniquity and error, the new comer attempts the reconstruction of the ideal city. In his Gontrat Social he lays the foundation of the edifice, the corner-stone of the sovereignty of the people. In his EmiU he shows that the reform of edu- cation is the necessary preface, the inevitable ante- cedent of the democracy. In his Nouvelle Ileloise he moves and bring tears to the eyes of women, who become his impassioned readers. His ideas were for the most part drawn from Locke's philosophical books, as Mr. Villemain has so justly remarked. But he has developed them with the passionate eloquence and the contagious pathos that were the stamp of his admirable genius. Although Rousseau's influence cannot be com- ' pared with Voltaire's — for it must not be forgotten that Voltaire, workman of the first hour, had made the breach through which Rousseau could pass — pos- terity has settled the quarrel of the two great phi- losophers by comprehending them in one and the same admiration. Jean Jacques died in July, 1778, six weeks after Voltaire. The National Assembly in 1791 united 112 VOLTA.IKE IN EXILE. their remains in the Pantheon, and the Catholic reaction threw their ashes to the same breeze. Their immediate posterity had cast a shadow over a man who during his whole lifetime had been pleased to forget himself — the great, the im- mortal Diderot, resuscitated later in Dantoa. Now only is the star of the creator of the JEncyclopedie rising on the horizon of fame, and it is but justice that it should at last shine brilliantly in the in- tellectual firmament. Diderot is modern, actuel, as well as Voltaire, while Rousseau has largely grown old on account of his arbitrary idealism, his religious sentimeutalism, and his mysticism. His Utopia has had its day as well as that of Thomas More. He started from a false a priori, from an entity, an abstraction of impossible realization — the primitive state of man. Contrary to Saint-Simor, who saw progress and the terrestrial paradise before us in the future, Jean Jacques placed his ideal in I do not know what Spartan republic and Beotian state. Upon this he erected chimerical structures which cannot stand examination. Voltaire did not search after either an ideal land or an ideal society. The question for him was, be- f oris anything else, to cultivate his garden, as Candide used to say; to rid it from the Catholic brambles, from the tares of old customs and old prejudices; to give to this new soil sun, air, light, and mold, and to rid all the moral fruit trees from caterpillars and other kinds of parasitic insects. " Destroy, destroy all you can,"' he wrote to D'Alembert. "In so doing you will serve at once the state and philosophy." In fact it was necessary to tlii-ow dow.i the to'- TOLTAIEE IK EXILE. 113 tering hovels, to clear the social soil from its old oppressions and superannuated systems. Voltaire and Diderot did not pretend to found the new society on any precise basis beyond that of science, liberty, and justice, leaving to the future generations a free field for reconstruction and reorganization. "Everything through liberty !" was their motto, and it wa.'' a good one. If in this Herculean duty, as Auguste Comte has said, Diderot was the Atlas who bore the eighteenth century on his broad shoulders, Voltaire was the head of the giant, the shrewd, dissecting mind; and from the year 1718 to 1778, during sixty years, he ceased not to struggle a single day, a single hour. Voltaire and Diderot were not only philosophers and literary men, but also men of action, who were molding their time and preparing the future. These soldiers of the mind had a love of battle j they threw themselves briskly and joyfully into the conflict of the day. Jean Jacques offers a perfect contrast to them. He keeps aloof from the army, he remains away from the Encyclopedic battalion, and fights by himself. Metaphysician, exclusive ideologist that he is, he hates to struggle, and when compelled to face the enemy he does it only with groans and melan- choly complaints upon his sad destiny. He plows his solitary furrow apart from and outside of eon- temporary events. He applies himself to the study of primitive propensities, human passions, and f)oliti. il theories. The last he stamped with religion, ■.aixing and confounding the two, making one the antecedent and mistress of the other, whereas Vol- taire and Diderot completely rejected the a'iiance of religion and politics, endeavoring tofree the jwlitioaJ 114 VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. and social elements from all worships, from all tbeO" logical bondage. It is in this way that the hermit and the dreamer, the metaphysician Jean Jacques, grubbed up a forsaken corner of the philosophical field of the eighteenth century. We do not forget that Rousseau, with all his Uto- pian dreams and his religio-political fancies, did his share of the great work of his century by giving the death-blow to the worship of personal power, by putting the axe to the royal and seignorial tree, and to social privileges especially, by making of education the peristyle of the new society. Nature, aided by the misfortunes he underwent in the course of his painful existence, trained him so as to make of him a representative of the people and the living and speaking expression of the democracy. These three — ^Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau — supported by the phalanx of the Encyclopedists, were according to their different temperaments, the archi- tects of a radical revolution of the human mind. VOIiXAlEE IN EXILE. 115 XIV. Voltaire resided in turns now on the French fron- tier, now in the country of Gex, or at the Delights. In Tournay ho gave free vent to his taste for the theater, and organized dramatic performances. Not- withstanding Rousseau's denunciations, a great num- ber of Genevans took part as performers in his troupe. , Bringing out comedies did not cause Voltaire to forget his philosophical aims, and he pursued them with ardor by ceaselessly stimulating the zeal of all Freethinkers. He wrote to D'Alembert in 1757: " I do as Cato did of old. I always end my harangue by saying, Deleatur Carthago. It wants only five or six well united philosophers to throw down the colossus. The question is not to prevent our servants going to mass or to sermon; it is to free the heads of families from the tyranny of impostors and to dif- fuse the spirit of toleration. This great cause has already met with inspiring success. The vineyard of truth is well cultivated by the D'Alemberts, the Diderots, the Bolingbrokes, the Humes, etc. If the king of Prussia had been willing to confine himself to that holy work he would have lived happy, and all the academicians of Europe would have blessed him." And later he wrote to the same : " I hav suffered for forty years the outrages of the bigots and blackguards. I have seen there is noth- ing to be won by moderation ; it is folly to think it. 116 VOLTAIEB m EXTEE". We must make war and, if need be, die like men a> iJ fall upon the heap of the bigots we hare slain." At that time Fjsederick wrote from Siberia the let- ter in which he expresses such a true appreciation of the sympathetic genius of Voltaire : " Shall I speak you soft ? I will tell you the- truth. I see in you the most beautiful genius the- ages have produced. I admire your verses. I like your prose ; above all, those little detached pieces in your Miscellanies of Literature. Never before had an author so fine a tact f r a taste as cor- rect and as delicate as yours. You are charming in conversation; you know how to interest and amuse at the same time. You are the most seductive creature I know, able to make yourself loved by every- body,. Lf you choose. There is so much gracefulness- in your wit that you can offend and at the same time gain the indulgence of those who know you. Finally, you would be perfect if you were not as man." Another cloud passed over the renewed friendship of the two philosophers, as we learn from a sentence in a letter from Voltaire to Theriot, July 7, 1760 : " The Solomon of the North always- loves to write in prose or verse, and in whatever situation he may find himself ; but I could not bring him to atone, by the slightest gallantry, for the unworthy treatment inflicted upon my niece in Frankfort." To that COTnplaint of Voltaire Frederick had rudely replied v " If you had not had to deal with a fool in love with your beautiful genius, you would not have got- ten 80 well out of the matter with any one else.- A. wosd to-the wise is sufficient,, and- now letrnt heai; VOLTAIKE IN EXILE. 117 no more of that niece wlio worries me and wlio has not as much merit as her uncle to cover up her faults." This calling up of the irritating past brought a stop in the correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick. The king of Prussia would never own that he had been in the wrong in the Frankfort affair. Voltaire installed himself at Ferney, where he was to reside for such a long time, in September, 17G0. He inaugurated his patriar'jhate of Ferney by a, gen- erous action. Having learned that a granddaughter of the great Corneille was in very poor circumstances, he took her to his house, educated her, became her school-master, and lastly married her to a rich gen- tleman of the country of Gex. It turned out that Marie Corneille was not the granddaughter, but only a col- lateral relative of the great tragical poet of the sev- enteenth century. One degree more or less in con- sanguinity could be but of little importance to Vol- taire when good was to be accomplished. Nothing is more touching than his correspond- ence about his adopted daughter. Let us give some extracts. To Mr. Lebrun, who, in an ode, had asked him^to take care of the granddaughter of the great Corneille, he wrote : " I shall limit myself to tell you in prose how I like your ode and your proposition. It is only fitting for an old follower of Corneille to try to bf useful to the granddaughter of his general." To 'the Count of Argental : " We are very well satisfied withilfiss Rodogune. We find her natural, lively, and true. Her nose re- sembles that of Mme. de Ruffec. She has also tho 118 VOLVAIEE IN EXILE. eame roguish face, but more beautiful eyes, a nicer skin, to which add a large mouth, tolerably appetiz- ing, with two ranks of faultless pearls. If somebody liaa the pleasure to approach these teeth with his I wish it to be rather a Catholic than a Huguenot." Later, to the same ; " My arms are loaded down with troublesome aifairs, and my most diiRcult business is to teach grammar to Miss Corneillo, who has no disposition at all for that sublime science." Still to the same : "The philosopher who intends to marry us (ho speaks of the first pretender to the hand of Mario Cor- neille) will arrive to-morrow. We will prim up Miss Cornelie Chiffon ; wo will adorn her. She pretends she will know a little orthography; it is already something for a philosopher. Well, wo ji^ill do the best we can ; adventures of that kind always settle themselves. There is a providence for girls." To Mr. de Mairan : "That young person has as much artlessness as Pierre Corneille had of the grand air. Some one was reading Ginna to her the other day, when she heard this verse, ' I love you, Emily, and may heaven crush me . . .' ' Fie ! ' said she, ' do not pronounce those ugly words.' ' It is from your uncle,' they an- swered her.' So much the worse,' said she ; ' is it thus one speaks to his affianced ?' " To d'Argenteuil : " ■ ■ • Let me revive my spirits; I am ex- hausted. I have just come from a ball. I am not master of my senses. — A ball, old fool, a ball in thy mountains ! And to whom hast thou given it? to the badgers ? — No, if you please, to a very good company. VOLTAIKE IN EXILE. 119 Le droit du Seigneur (the lord's right) has delighted three hundred persons of all ages and conditions, lords, farmers, bigots, and gallant women. They came from Lyons, Dijon, and Turin. Would you believe that Miss Coi-neille carried all the suffrages ? How natural, lively, joyful she was ! How she masr tered her audience, striking the ground with her foot when not readily prompted. I acted the bailiff, and, may it not displease you, did it so as to make them split with laughter. . . ," To Damilaville: " We marry Miss Corneille to a gentleman of the neighborhood, an officer of dragoons, possessing 10,- 000 livres of income, or about that, in landed property at Ciderville, at the door of Ferney. I will harbor them both. We are all happy. I am ending my life like a true patriarch." Voltaire had other adopted children besides Marie Corneille; we mean the valiant phalanx of the Ency- clopedists who were struggling in Paris against wind and tide. From Ferney, Voltaire sustained them, sent them articles, took part in their struggle. His letters made an ardent propaganda and were all ter- minated by -the watchword, " Ecr. Vinf." {Let us crush the wretch), with his habitual abbreviation. " Above all, ci'ush the loretch" he wi'ites D'Alem- bert at the end of a correspondence. "And remem- ber well that if you do not crush liim, he will crush yon." But the infamous was not easily crushed. The lieads of the hydra were always renewing themselves, and menaced the champions of science and Free- thought. The archbishop of Paris liad fulminated an outrageous circular against the Encyclopedists and 120 VOLTAIKE IN EXILE. all their co-laborers, who were threatened with ban- ishment. Had it not been for the influence of the duke of Choiseul, the Encyclopedia, which, indeed, had already been suspended, would have been sup- pressed. Morellet and Marmontel had been thrown into the Bastille. Helvetius' book. The Mind, had been burned by the hand of the executioner. Rous- seau's Emile had met wifh. the same fate. Further- more, its author had been condemned to arrest by the Parliament of Paris "for having subjected religion to the examination of reason, and tried to destroy the certainty of the miracles recorded in the holy books, and also the infallibility and authority of the church." Members of that persecuting Parlia- ment had said," Nothing will have been done as long as the authors are not burnt together with their books." Rousseau, having escaped from France, intended to take refuge in Geneva, his birthplace. But he was literally caught between two fires; for a short time after the decree of the French Parliament, rendered in 1762, the great Council of Geneva, with- out even having read his Emile, caused it to be burnt as it had been in Paris. It was then that Rousseau, paraphrasing the words of Brutus, could have ex- claimed, " O Republic, thou art but a name — an empty word !" After wandering among the mountains of Switzer- land in quest of a shelter, Rousseau found an asylum in the canton of Neuf chatel by placing himself under the protection of the king of Prussia. He soon left Switzerland, however, to go to England and reside with Hume, with whom, unhappily, he did not re- main long on friendly terms. TOITMEE IN EXILE. 121 Voltaire had projected to draw the Eneyelopedists away from the tormented life of Paris and the dangers that -threatened them every day by found- ing at Cleves a republic of philosophers, destined to become a new Sunium — a second Salenta. The king of Prussia had given his assent to the scheme. D' Alembert, frightened or wearied out, had retired from the Encyclopedia. Th« indefatigable Diderot had remained alone at tbe head of a small company of obscure eo-laborers, who very carefully hid their oames a-nd their participation in that dictionary of •jsoiences and arts, exposed, as it was, to the thunder- bolts of Parliament and clergy. Voltaire wrote to Damilaville : "I do not doubt that if you came and settled at Gleves with Plato {Diderot) and other friends, they would propose very advantageous conditions to you. They would put up a press capable of bringing out a great deal of work. They would establish another much more important «ianufachire — that of truth. Plato could go with liis wife or his daughter, or leave them in Paris, at ills option-" And to Diderot ; " By going to Cleves you would -exchange slavery for liberty. A man like you should regard only with horror the country in which it is your misfortune to live. Thinking and sensible be- ings ought to live in a corner of the world, sheltered from the absurd knaves who disfigure it." To take Diderot away from his charming and intelligent wife, from his Caf>6 Procope, from his be- loved Paris, from his philosophical workshop, was •an imiaoBsible undertaking. So he replied to Vol- taire that it was necessary to stay in Paris, fight the Koman Catholic monster face to face, on his owJi 122 VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. ground, in spite of storms and perils ; and the beauti- ful plan of a philosophical colony was abandoned. XV. Voltaire lived sixteen years in Ferney, and the reader will appreciate what frightful ravages, what moral disorders, these terrible Freethinkers occa- sioned wherever they set up their tent, when he knows how Voltaire made of the miserable borough' of Ferney a very prosperous little town by building three schools, patronizing agriculture and industry, spreading ease and comfort, and placing capital as suggested to him by his large experience, profound knowledge of things, and acute intellect. His tenants, his numerous employes, as well as all the land tillers surrounding Ferney, to whatever re- ligion they belonged. Catholic or Protestant, loved Voltaire. They consulted him concerning their pri- vate affairs. Whenever he went on his rounds through the country he found himself surrounded by them as by a family. The country of Gex experiencing a famine after an entirely sterile and unproductive season, Voltaire distributed all the grain in his possession. He never learned of a misfortune without hastening to alleviate it. He was good, affable, humane with all. At every turn he would loan money without the slightest hope of being reimbursed. When unemployed workmen knocked at his door he gave them work. Numerous artisans having emigrated after the grievous troubles of 1770, they found in the manor YOLTAIEE IN BXILK. 123 at Perney both refuge and employment. Vc4taire liad erected in the village several stocking and watch factories. Not content with being simply an agri- culturist and horticulturist, he must also become a manufacturer. Those who have accused Voltaire of coldness of heart, of false and ridiculous pride, do not know him or have refused to study his patriarchal life in Fer- ney. To all the compliments that were paid him he was pleased to answer, "I have done a little good; it is my- best work." Justly proud of what he had accomplished, in 1761 he wrote to D' Alembert : " Yes, Mordieu, I serve God, for I love my country, for I erect schools, for I mean to erect an hospital, for there are no longer any paupers on my land, despite the revenue hounds." The bishop of Annecy, who had the borough of Ferney in his diocese, was consumed with rage at the sight of a popular philosopher in the country of Gex, spreading around him happiness and well-being. He watched an opportunity which would allow him to bring down upon Voltaire the thunders of the church. That much desired Occasion was not long in presenting itself. Voltaire had always possessed architectural no- tions. He had formerly reconstructed Cirey, for the present he was building and rebuilding Ferney. Ac- cording to his plans, the old church, which masked the mansion, had to disappear. He caused another to be built, located it by the side of the theater, finding the parallel to his taste, and dedicated it to God with this inscription, " Deo erexit Voltaire." " The church I have had built," he said to the 124 VOLTAIRE EST EXILE. EnpiTIshman, Kicharrl Twis, " is the only church in the universe dedicated to God alone. All others are dedicated to the saints. For my part, I would rather build a church to the master than to the servants." About a crucifix which he had painted anew, he wrote to Madame de Fontaine: "I am very sorry not to have you marry in my church in the presence of a large Jesus in gilt, with the mien of a Roman emperor, whose former silly expression of countenance I have taken away." It was pretended he had given his own features to it, so that the good people who thought they were kneeling to Jesus did in reality worship Voltaire. From time to time he took the fancy of catechising the peasants and peasant women of the neighborhood who came to his church. He preached sermons to them, inspiring them with horror for theft, then very common in the country of Gex ; he also preached to them charity and toleration. The officiating priest was sometimes the curate of Ferney, and sometimes Father Adam, a Jesuit to whom he had given the hospitality of his mansion. This man said mass, supervised the works, and played chess with Voltaire, who thrashed him whenever he was the loser. The patriarch of Ferney had his two beasts in his mansion — the Abb6 Voisenon, and the reverend Father Adam, who, said he, was not the first man in the world. The bishop of Annecy brought against Voltaire the accusation of sacrilege for having erected a tem- ple without canonical authorization — for having pro- faned the rites and ceremonies of religion by his unauthorized preaching. The clergy came to take VOLTAIKE IN EXIT.E. 125 tiTvay the lioly sacrament, which, they said, had Tieen desecrated. Furthertaore, some women testified that in the presence of a cboss from the old church Vol- taire had exclaimed, " Take away that gibbet !" The sacrilege was denounced before the authorities at Gex, and the law made a descent upon the chateau of Ferney. " I have hidden from you a part of my troubles," wrote Voltaire to the count of Argental, "but at last you must be aware that I have war with the clergy. I am building a tolerably good church, I founded a school, and, as a reward for my good deeds, a curate from a neighboring village, calling himself a pro- moter, and another curate who calls himself an vfficial, have begun a criminal suit against me for one foot and a half of grouird in a cemetery, and for two mutton chops which were mistaken for unearthed human bones. " They wanted to excommunicate me for having moved a wooden cross from its place and insolently pulled down part of a barn which they pompously styled a parish church. " As I love passionately to be master of the situa- tion, I threw down the whole church in answer to the complaint of having pulled down half, then took away the bells, the altar, the confessionals, the bap^. tistery, and sent my parishioners to go and hear mass three miles away. " The prosecuting attorney -and the procurator of the king came to me with a complaint. I sent them all to China. I made them understand they were egregious donkeys, as indeed they are. I had so taken my measures that the general procurator to the Parliament corroborated my assertions before them. 126 TOLVAIEB IN EXILE. I am now about to liavc the lienor of appealin<^ against these abuses. ... I believe I shall kill my bishop with grief, if he does not first die from superfluous fat. . . . " You will note, if you please, that at the same time I apply to the pope for redress. My destiny is to baffle Rome and to make her subservient to my gracious will. The Mahomet affair encourages me. " If my request to the pope and my letter to the Cardinal Passionei are ready when the mail leaves, I shall put them under my angel wings, who will have the kindness to forward my package to the duke of Choiseul, for I want him io laugh at these things and to stand by me. This negotiation will be easier to bring about honorably than peace." &' Meanwhile the trial was preparing; the proceed- ings were sent by the bailiff to the Parliament of Dijon. But the intervention of influential persons fortunately prevented its continuance. The bishop of Annecy had transmitted his com- plaint of sacrilege to the archbishop of Paris, who on that account asked, at Versailles, the expulsion of the philosopher of Femey. The devout Maria Lesezinzka, at the instigation of the archbishop, urged Louis XV. to avenge the church by proscribing Vol- taire. Louis XV., out of patience at last, replied to the fanatical queen : " What would you have me do, Madame ? If Vol- taire were in Paris, I should banish him to Ferney." Louis XV., desired but one thing, to be rid of Vol- taire's presence. The bishop of Annecy and his eurates excited every day by their violent harangues the fanaticism of the credulous population against the sacrilegious VOLTAIKE IN EXILE. 127 patriot of Ferney. Voltaire took fright. He sought refuge iu Switzerland. But ho soon returned to Ferney with the resolution of foiling the bishop and his acolytes by a trick of his own. He put himself to bed, while his servants reported in the neighbor- hood that he he was very sick. Shortly after, he ordered a monk of the capuchins to bo called in order to receive his confession ; he also sent after a notary. The capuchin asked a permit from the bishop, who had forbidden either communion or absolution to be given to Voltaire. But delighted with the prospect of soon being rid of such an adversary by death, the bishop raised the ban. When the Capuchin entered Voltaire's room he trembled like a leaf. It seemed to him as if ho had the devil himself to confess. " You will have to prompt me in my credo and my confiicor, which I have somewhat forgotten," said to him the dying man. The capuchin mumbled his Latin, and Voltaire re- peated after him, after which ho made his confession, which was nothing else than his own eulogy and glorification. He declared that during his whole life he had done nothing but good, and ordered the ca- puchin to give him the absolution, which was done. The curate of Ferney entering thereupon, the dying man received the extreme unction. Then he mg^e the following declaration : " Having my God in my mouth, I declare that I sincerely forgive all who have calumniated me to the king (this was meant for the bishop of Annecy), and have not succeeded in their bad designs, and I ask for a written affidavit from Raffo, notary public." 128 TOLTAIRE IN EXILE. The ceremonial being at an end, every one left, well edified. " Scarcely had everybody gone out of the castle, when," relates the secretary, Wagai5re, " Mons. de Voltaire, with whom I had been left alone, said to me, as he nimbly jumped out of bed: 'I had some trouble with that scapegrace of a capuchin. But, after all, it was amusing, and can o'nly d j good. Let us take a walk through the garden.' " Voltaire was not unused to this comedy of death. He had played it at Colmar, when excommunicated by the bishop of that city. Looking upon the cere- monies of Catholic worship as purely theatric5al mummeries, and upon the priests as astute comedi- ans, he felt no scruple in using their repertory and indulging in pasquinades to which he attached no real importance. His confession and receiving of the /■extreme unction at Ferney were thus a skilful retort at once to the accusation of sacrilege made by the bishop of Annecy, to the proceedings already had against him, and to the fanatical denunciations of the ^clergy. Voltaire carried this irreligious jesf as far as to have himself received as a capuchin and to send the benediction of the father capuchin of the country of Gex to several of his friends. If, perchance, some severe censor feel tempted to condemn these comedies of Voltaire, let him not for- get that these were at the worst only small spots on the resplendent sun, and served, besides, to shield him and help in some degree the accomplishment .of his work. Voltaire made no distinction between the several cohorts of the clerical band. In his eyes they pos- VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. 129 sessed the same tendencies, the same vices, and tlie same final aims. However, he has observed that, the •Jesuits were conspicuous for their pride. Thus t]icy oecame indignant and entirely lost their self-control if they heard themselves called monks. They did not wish to be confounded with the other monastic orders. In nearly all the philosopher's works the Jesuits are the butt of his keenest jests — of his most cutting raillery. In Ferney they pitted themselves against him. In the country of Gex, as elsewhere, the reverend fathers were given to inveigling and usurpation. They found Voltaire in their way. In 1761 their arch enemy wrote to the Marquis d'Ar- gence: "I, indeed, have had the gratification of driving the Jesuits from a hundred acres of land out of which they had swindled the king's otficers, but I cannot strip them of some lands they possessed previously, and which they obtained through the confiscation of a nobleman's property. Impossible to sever, at once, all the heads of the hydra !" XVI. Voltaire exercised a veritable public ministry in Ferney. The numerous victims of fanaticism and judiciary errors having implored his intervention, he devoted himself to the redress of their wrongs. The patriarch of Ferney was not simply a thinker, a theorizer, but also a man of action, a knight cased in steel and fighting for the right. He stood always ready to throw himself into the thickest of the fight to redress the iniquities of his time. 130 VOLTAIRE IW EXILE. At that period the Catholic party, wishing to strike the reformation to the heart and to extirpate it from the kingdom, had imagined nothing better than ; to accuse with imaginary crimes the Protestants, who, since the revocation of the edict of Nantes, were in a most precarious situation, being simply tolerated. Thus the parliaments cringingly subserved the wishes of the clergy and listened to the most iniquitous and false accusations. First, it was the Protestant Calas (1761), con- demned to the wheel by the Parliament of Toulouse, under the false accusation of having murdered his son, who, according to the denunciators, had been hung by his father for having avowed his purpose to apostatize and embrace the Catholic religion. Calas had been executed in Toulouse on the 9th of March, 1762. After him came the turn of the Calvinist Sirven, from Castres, sentenced to death by the tribunal of Mazamet for having drowned his daughter, whom the Catholics had vainly tried to contort by martyr- izing her in a convent, and who, in j. fit of insanity resulting from her hardships, had acxiidentally thrown herself in a well. Then the young De la Barre, son of an officer, and D'Etallonde, son of a presidiijg judge, were sen- tenced, in 1766, to the torture of the wheel for hav- ing insulted and damaged a wooden crucifix at one end of the bridge of Abbeville, inPicardy. D'Etal- londe had escaped death by flight. De la Barre, after having had his tongue torn out, was decapi- tated and his body was thrown to tie fagots, to- gether with a copy of the Philosophicuf Dictionary VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. 131 of Voltaire. In the accusations, the latter had been denounced as the inspirer of the sacrilege. All these judiciary crimes were at the same time the work of the Catholic party, of the Parliaments, and of detestable laws and judicial forms against which Voltaire had long and unceasingly protested by asking the revision of the criminal code. The sage of Ferney took in hands the cause of the innocents stricken down by the parliaments and un- dertook their rehabilitation. He first published for this purpose his celebrated Treatise on Tolerance, on the occasion of the death of Calas. More fortunate than Calas, Sirven and his family succeeded in escaping their persecutions. But at what price was this ! What a painful odyssey, that of the Sirven family, the father fleeing in one direc- tion, the wife and the daughter in another, the former being as long as three months before he could reach Geneva, and the latter being able to cross the Swiss frontiers after five months of hiding and fearful anxieties, under the very eye of fanaticism, watch- ing and searching for them to deliver them up to the executioner. Where is a pen eloquent enough to narrate that poem of sorrow, anguish, and tears ? Voltaire opened wide his doors, at Ferney, to the mother and daughter of Sirven,- and provided for the husband and father, who was in Geneva. At the same time he wrote to Madame Calas and to her daughter in order to comfort them and make them hope for a speedy redress of their grievances. He protested with indignation against the assassina- tion of young De la Barre, and stretched out his hand to the refugee D'Etallonde. 132 VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. Voltaire interested all Protestant Europe in tbe fato of' these persecuted families. To begin with, the sovereigns, Frederick, Christian VII., the king of Poland, and Catharine 11., sent him donations for his clients. " I believe I have told you," he ■writes to Damila- ville on the 9th of February, 1767, "that the king of Denmark has just placed himself in the ranks of our benefactors. I have four kings in my hand, I must win the game. Do you not marvel at seeing how this life is made up of high and low, of white and black ? and are you not sorry that, among our four kings, there is not one from the south?" The mother of Sirven died with grief, and his wife gave birth to a dead- child ! " Tou see," wrote Voltaire to D'Alembert, " what terrible misfortunes are caused by fanaticism." But, as D'Alembert seemed to him altogether too impassive, he sent him the following reproachful letter: " I cannot conceive how thinking beings can live in a nation of apes, where the apes become so often transformed into tigers. As for myself, I am ashamed to be even on the frontier. It is no longer time for jesting. Wit does not befit massacres. What ! monsters in judges' gowns take amid the most horrid suflEerings the lives of sixteen-year- old children ! And the nation suffers it ! Scarcely two words are spoken about it, then everybody runs off to the comic opera. I feel ashamed to show myself so sensitive and quick tempered at my age. But I mourn for those who have had their tongue torn out, while you use yours to say very agreeable and very pleasant things. You digest well, my dear VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. 133 philosoplier, but I have a poor digestion. You are still young, and I am an old and a sick man. For- give me this sadness." During eight years, Voltaire, assisted by the cele- brated advocate, Elie de Beaumont, struggled against the Parliament and the clergy in order to obtain a new trial of the Calas and Sirven suits. " During that time," said he, " not an outburst of laughter escaped my lips with which I did not re- proach myself as with a crime." His generous exertions were finally crowned with success. The memory of Calas, whose innocence was acknowledged, was first of all rehabilitated by the Parliament of Toulouse ; then Sirven, who had deliv- ered himself up to his judges, was declared not guilty by tlie same Parliament. In his enthusiasm Diderot wrote to Mile. Vo- land : " It is Voltaire who pleads and writes for that unfortunate family. Oh, my friend, what a beautiful use of genius ! That man must have a soul alive witii sensibility to rebel as he does against injustice, and he must feel all the impulses of virtue. What are the Calases to him ? What can interest him in their favor ? What motive has he to interrupt the work he loves in order to undertake their defense ? Were there a Christ, I assure you that Voltaire would bo saved ! . . ." Voltaire again caused the rehabilitation of Gen- eral Lally, whom a sentence of the Paris Parliament had sent to the hangman, and brought about a new trial of the suit brought against Montbailly and his wife, who had been sentenced to death by the judges of Arras under pretense of having murdered their mother, who had really died from apoplexy. Mont- 134 VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. bailly was executed. The pregnancy of his wife having postponed her execution, Voltaire was in time to liberate her and rehabilitate the memory of her husband. He also obtained the rehabilitation of a poor field laborer, Martin, accused of a murder, the true author of which surrendered himself and con- fessed the commission of the deed some time after the execution of the innocent man. Besides, by his Request to all Ihe Magietrates of the Kingdom, Vol- taire pleaded and won against the canons of Saint- Claude the cause of the serfs of Jura, those victims of the mortmain.* In a word, Voltaire, at Ferney, was the universal advocate of right, the judge of the public conscience, the great champion of justice and humanity. It was not, however, without peril that the patri- arch of Ferney executed his mission of redresser of the iniquitous sentences rendered by the parliaments. He was himself vehemently threatened by the Par- liament of Paris. This body had his books burned, and the minister, duke of Ghoiseul, his protector, said, " I will not bo answerable for what the Parlia- ment will do if Voltaire falls into its hands." From 3.11 parts of France the unfortunate, the oppressed, all who were molested in their freedom of conscience, wrote to the- patriarch of Ferney, or came there to get from him support, advice, and money. And never did Voltaire refuse to any one either money, counsel, or time. Ferney had become a kind of Mecca and Rome combined — the Mecca and the Rome of Freethought. *The term was then applied to conveyances of land made to ecclesiastical bodies. VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. 135 XVII. In May, 1764, Voltaire -wrote to Pastor Bortrand : " My dear philosopher, I have, thank God, broken all intercourse with kings. I know for the present no life but one of retirement with Madame Denis." This was probably the faint echo of his last quarrel with Frederick about the Frankfort affair. But he could well say, " To be loved and to be free, these are the things that kings lack." He was not as well cured of the kings as he wished to appear, and it was not long before he be- lied himself by beginning an exchange of letters with the empress of Russia, and writing to one of his friends: "I absolutely need a crowned head. I must have one at any price." To the Alexander of the north he added the Semiramis of the north. A strange woman, a com- plex being, a hybrid, a veritable sphin.Y, was that empress, the murderess of her husband; a Messalina in her passions, yet cool as Minos, and with an unerring insight into great under- takings and state affairs. A superior organiza- tion was hers, and a mighty brain. Raising barba- rous Russia to the rank of civilized nations, she became, at the same time, the mistress and the con- queror of a part of Poland and of almost the entire eastern empire. A great legislator, she was also a woman of letters, and, above all, a Freethinker and a friend of philosophers. Unable to have Voltaire at her court on account of his great age, which did not permit him to live on the banks of the Neva, she called to St. Petersburgh, Bernardin de St. Pierre, S6gur, and the Encyclopedists Grimm and Diderot. 136 V0LTAIEE IN EXILE. In the middle of a conversation, as the latter fiery philosopher was developing his Meas with his usual free manner and crudity of expressions, he stopped short, fearing he had wounded the feelings of the empress as well as offended the woman. " Keep on, Mr. Diderot," quietly said Catharine, " we are all men here.^^ She was indeed Catharine the Great. So she was called by Voltaire, who qualified her in turn as empress, Semiramis, and harlot. In some letters from Catharine to the. patriarch of Ferney, she seems constantly engrossed with the idea of paring the nails of the Russian Bear, of glossing his bristled hair, of dressing him, of bringing him nearer to the rest of civilized Europe, upon which she draws for teachers, male and female, savants, philosophers, and men of letters. Yoltaire overdid his adulation for the northern Semiramis so far as willingly to absolve her from the murder of her consort, Peter the third- -a "trifle; a family affair." "I am her knight toward and agaiiist all," he wrote to Madame du Deffand. "I know very well she is reproached with some trifle about her husband, but these are private affairs • with which I have nothing to do. . . . Besidee, would Peter III. have done what she has done ?" Let us quote here a beautiful page of Jules Janin, who sketches one of the numerous phases of the many-sided Catharine. It was on the occasion of meeting, in one of her voyages, with the tumular stone of the unfortunate and immortal author of the Metam.or2)hoses, who died in exile in Scythia, among the Sarmatians;. rOLTAIEE IN EXILE. 137 " One day as she was walking about, dreaming of the futtO-e splendors of her unlimited dominions, the great Empress Catharine discovered, among some ruins, an abandoned tomb, and wanted to know who it was that rested under those briars. She was an- swered that it was a poet, a Roman, whose name was obliterated and forgotten. But she was a woman ; she was the friend and disciple of Voltaire; she knew the history of her empire; and on that stone, worn out by time, she divined the name of Ovid. Then, in the midst of their journey through the deserts, a tear was seen dampening the eyes of this woman, who was little used to weeping. O sublime praise, eloquent, and thrice glorious tear ! It is thus that at a distance of eighteen centuries this absolute woman-sovereign has washed away the wrong of that absolute despot, Augustus, emperor." In his correspondence with Catharine, Voltaire does not spare genuflexions and worship. In a word, he was as much of a courtier toward her as he had been toward the king of Prussia. But he had his hours of free speech, when he said rough truths to the crowned heads, impelling them vigorously in the pathway of reason and progress. Besides, the reader must take good care not to judge Voltaire from the point of view of our nineteenth century, freed, as it has been, by the French Revolution. At the end of the previous age the crowned philosophers, the Fredericks and the Catharines, the Christians, the Josephs 11., were the men who served as a shield for the Freethinker, the Encycl<5pedisty and, first of all, for Voltaire, against the roaifing pack of Jesuits and clericals, the masters of F'rance, and the despotic, bigoted, aud corrupted court of Louis XY., 108 VOLTAiaE IN EXILE. who was but the tool of his confessors, and the puppet of his mistress. In answer to the furious attacks of the Jesuitical party, the Nonottes and the Patouillets, the patriarch of Ferney loved to say to Catharina : " I have on my side, at least, the sovereign whose sway extends over two thousand leagues of land. That consoles me from the rogues. . . ." Fell destroyer of the old world, Voltaire makes everything subserve his purpose. The champion of liberty, he uses royal and princely tools, which he sharpens and bends at will. New Proteus, he appears in every shape, even as a courtier around the Pompadour, and about Cotillon II., who, through his influence and with the aid of Choiseul, will protect the Encyclopedists and expel the Jesuits. It is true, this great man sometimes stooped before the powerful more than befitted a philosopher, but it was really with the purpose of lifting up mankir.d ; of bringing it out of its darkness; of delivering it from the chains that bound it ; it was the better to crush the wretch, as he styled the hydra of fanaticism. It is true, he bowed before kings, but only on the condi- tion that they became his instruments of progress — harnessed themseWes to his Freethinker's chariot and established in their domain religious and political tolerance. " Philosophers have cringed long enough before kings," said Frederick; " it is now the kings' turn to Cringe before philosophers." Thus crowned heads rendered Voltaire's mission ^and propaganda easy. Under their shield he was ' able to make a fatal breach into the rampart of VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. ] ;3 error and superstition. It was tirougli the kings i,o acted upon the nations. If Voltaire sometimes sacrificed to fortug and played the supple courtier, he never denied eiilior his principles or personal opinions, even before or with respect to kings or emperors. When D'AIera- bert wrote him that the article on the Empiess Catherina was about to appear in the Enoyclopcdie, asking him whether it would be advisable to insert what related to her private life and passion as well as to the murder of Peter III., Voltaire answered, "Tell the truth." After a lapse of silence and mutual coldness, the correspondence with Frederick was once more renewed. The king wrote, "I believed you so taken up with crushing the wretch that I did not presume you would think of anything else." Frederick seems, in this letter, to regret the pique at Berlin, with its consequences: " You have preserved all the grace and amenity of your youth. You are the Prometheus of Geneva. If you had remained with us we would be something by this time. A fatality that presides over the things of this life has denied us so great an advan- tage," etc. There arose no more misunderstandings between the two friends and philosophers. Frederick re- mained to the last faithful to the admiration with which Voltaire had inspired him in his youth. In- deed, he had been the very first, when yet crown jDrince of Prussia, to divine and appreciate the genius of Voltaire. When Frederick knew that the Count of Falken- stein (Joseph II.) was in Paris and intended return- 140 TOLTAIEE IN ESILE. 1 ing by way of Lyons and Switzerland, he wrote tcf the Count of Lamberg, " I expect he will pass by Ferney, for he will de- sire to see and hear the man of the century, the Vir- gil and Cieero of our day." But hearing that the emperor of Austria had passed Ferney without a word, the king looked upon that show of indifference as an insult to philosophy, and immediately wrote to D'Alembert: " I hear that the Count of Falkenstein has seen nutnbers of arsenals, manufactUires, ships, and sea- ports, but has not 'seen Voltaire. These other things are found everywhere, but to produce a Voltaire a century is necessary. Had I been in the emperor's place I should not have passed Ferney without wait- ing for the old patriarch, to be able to say at least that I had seen and heard him. I think a certaiit lady Theresa, a very poor philosopher, has forbidden her son to see the patriarch of tolerance." Frederick had correctly surmised. It was Maria Theresa who had represented to her son that his visit to Ferney would be considered as an indorsement of the philosopher's irreligious doctrines. Joseph II., still under tutelage and merely a nominal emperor as yet, dared not disobey the maternal order, notwithstand- ing his eager desire to see the patriarch of Ferney, of whom he was the disciple, as he proved himself afterward. The king of Denmark, Christian VII,, at the time of his visit to the Count of Versailles, had been dis- agreeably surprised to find Voltaire detested and feared there. As he expressed his astonishment, they answered, " Voltaire has genius enough, but uc seligion !" VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. Ml The patriarch of Ferhey, who corresponded with the king of Denmark, addressed him an ode iu which he congratulated him for his liberal administration and reforms, and severely criticised the censorship of the press in France, as can be seen from the following extract: "The right to freely think thou dost to man restore, And sermons, science, art, or fictions all may treat, Whilst others hiss at will, or praise the author's lore; The wings of Pegasus, alas, have been cropt'here. In Paris oft a clerk well up in formal phrase. Does say to me: ' You must before my desk appear. Without the king's consent how dare you think apace ? If vou would air your wit, the king's poUce entreat. The girls do so, and that without a thought of shame. Their trade is well worth yours; is it not far more sweet ? We surely prize it much above your vauated fame.' " Voltaire wrote in prose or verse to king, prince, or empress, to the great as to the humble. He re- ceived not less than fifty letters a day, and not one remained without an answer, if we except, however, such as apostrophized him as a firebrand of hell, tool of Satan, or oldest son of his Plutonic majesty; all of which did not prevent his doing the honors of Femey to the visitors who flocked to his hearth, and whose overflowing enthusiasm he knew how to re- prove and quell by some pleasant stroke of wit. " I salute you, light of the world," said one of these." " Madame Denis," exclaimed Voltaire, " bring us a pair of snuffers." Notwithstanding these corrections, he could not prevent those who came to see him from expressing their admiration. A Flemish lady, Madame Suard, whom he had 142 VOLTAIEE IN EXILE, known as a young girl, while in her native land, wrote what follows, after a visit to Ferney : " The sight, the conversation, of Voltaire are en- chanting. There is not upon his face a trace, a fur- row of age, that is not a charm." To Madame Suard Voltaire seems almost divine. Before leaving him she asked his blessing and kissed his hands. " Fortunately I am on the brink of the grave," said the witty old man. " You would not treat me so if I were but twenty." "It was a sight," says the field-marshal, prince of Ligny, " to behold him when animated by his beauti- ful and brilliant imagination, scattering wit by hand- fuls, imparting its sparkle to every one disposed to understand and believe the beautiful and the good, causing all to think and speak who were capable of it ; building houses for poor families, and good-natured in his own interior, good-natured in his village, a good-natured and a great man at the same time (bon- homme et grand homme tout L la f ois), a union with- out which a man is never completely either one or the other, for genius gives extent to goodness, and goodness to genius." The prince of Ligny was right. The patriarch of Ferney was not only the gTeatest mind, but also one of the kindest hearts of his century. The admiration which he inspired suggested to the Parisians the idea of organising a subscription for raising a statue to him. Its execution was intrusted to the sculptor, Pigale. Many foreigners having ex- pressed their desire to subscribe themselves to the Parisian initiative, the subscription became European. VOLTAIEE IT^ EXILE. 143 Voltaire, meanwhile, rejected Jean Jacques Rons- seau's subscription. This statue was only finished in 1776. It is to-rlay in the library of the Institut with this dedication en- graved on the pedestal: " To M. de Voltaire, from the men of letters, his compatriots and contemporaries, 1778." XVIII. All his household, and especially Madame Denis, urged Voltaire to go to Paris. He dreadel this voyage, and exclaimed: " Go to Paris ! but do you know there are in that city forty thousand fanatics who, with praises to heaven, would carry forty thousand fagots to build up a funeral pile for me ? That would be my bed of honor !"■ Notwithstanding, being persuaded by his niece, who was passionately fond of city life, he left Ferney on the 6th of February, 1778, to come and die in that very same year, decked with the flowers of his apotheosis, in Paris. He was received with universal rapture. The philosopher who had been all his life outside of France returned to the capital in triumph. The Parisian popijilation nobly avenged on that day his long struggle against religious and political despotism, as well as the persecutions he had experienced. " He comes, the defender of Calas ! Vive Vol- taire!" they cried, when he appeared in the streets, "lie has been persecuted for fifty years !" 144 VOLTAIRB IN EXILE. The academies went in a body to his hotel, as did also the consuls. The British ambassador left, mar- veling at having heard Voltaire speak a faultless English. The illustrious Franklin presented his grandson and asked Voltaire to bless him. Voltaire, resting his hands on the head of the child, pro- nounced these words : " God and Liberty." These two words, containing all the profession of faith of Voltaire, and summing up, so to speak, his life struggles, formed the charter of the American republic and were soon to become the watchword of the French Revolution. The American patriarch and the patriarch of Fer- ney embraced each other with emotion. It seemed to the witnesses of the scene as if the old world and the net were come together in fraternal embrace. From the genial enthusiasm which had declared itself on the arrival of Voltaire, it was clearly seen how rapid a progress his ideas had made, and how the revolution was already accomplished in the minds of men by the light he had projected and imparted to them, by the propagating power of his civiliz- ing genius, beneath which the bastiles of the old regime crumbled one after another. It may be that Louip XVI. had a presentiment of the danger, for he thought somewhat about expelling Voltaire from Paris, after his predecessor's example, and it was only upon the pressing entreaties of his young queen, Marie Antoinette, that he decided to authorize the philosopher's presence in the capital. Voltaire could not leave his hotel without being surrounded and acclaimed. " No," says a contemporary, " the apparition of a ghost, of a prophet, or even of an apostle, would not VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. 145 have produced more surprise and admiration that M. de Voltaire's arrival." Age had made him lose nothing of his ironical nerve. When he had entered the city by the gate of Fontaineblean, the custom officers having asked him •whether he had anything liable to duty, Voltaire answered, " Gentlemen, I am the only contraband article here " One day, when his carriage was surrounded by an •enthusiastic crowd -which obstinately pursued him with its acclamations, the councilor of state, M. Elos, who was also in the carriage, said, to him, " Yet, all these people are here to do you homage." " Yes," replied Voltaire, " but were I being led te the scaffold there would be a great many more of them." Plis change of location brought on a severe indis- position, which gratified the enemies of the sage of Ferney to such a degree that all the pious gazettes printed, with an ill-disguised Joy, these welcome words, Voltaire is dying ( Voltaire se meurt). A large number of people went to his hotel and left their names in token of sympathy; others, in spite of the peremptory prohibition of M. Tronchin, his physician, forced their way to the sick man, sur- i-ounded his bedside, and wearied him out. He grew worse, and began to spit blood. Mme. Denis sent for the Abb^ Gautier and rnta*oduced him. It has been asserted that Voltaire made a formal retraction of his principles to him. The reality of the impu- tation is more than doubtful, and it is contradicted by a note which Voltaire left with his seci'etary Wag- ni^re- The note read thu^: 146 VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. "I die worshiping God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition." (" Signed) Voltaieb." "February 28, 1778." Nevertheless, the nervous vitality with which Vol- taire was endowed triumphed over his malady. Scarcely out of his bed of sickness, he takes up anew his work with his usual feverish activity. Irene is played on the 16th of May. At the sixth representa- tion of this tragedy, the Parisian gave him a veritable apotheosis, a triumph in truly antique fashion. The Theatre Fran9ai8 was surrounded by a crowd which acclaimed Voltaire as soon as he appeared, with his great peruke and long sleeves of point lace, together with the magnificent sable furs of which Catherine II. had made him a present. Within, the audience packed, crammed the thea- ter to its utmost capacity. When Voltaire entered he was greeted, overwhelmed with flowers and bravos. The ladies, standing up in their boxes, frantically applauded him; and the acclamations did not even end with the piece, which had scarcely been listened to, notwithstanding the efforts of the poet, who tried in vain to arrest the impetuous tide of enthusiasm, as he wept with joy and cried out, " Would you then have me die with pleasure and smother beneath your blossoms !" From the green-room the bust of Voltaire was brought upon the stage and covered with crowns and garlands amid a storm of plaudits. Mme. Vestris (Irene) then advanced to the footlights and read the following verses, written by the marquis of Saint Marc: VOLTAIEH IN EXILB. . 147 Before rejoicing Paris, here, Receive this day an homage true, Which after ages, though severe, Can but confirm and join in, too. Thou need'st not cross beyond grim death's uncertain bound Before thou dost enjoy sweet immortality. Voltaire, accept this crown ; It is thy due to-day; A glorious gift 'tis to receive, When France deems it a joy to give ! Mme. Vestris repeated this rather mediocre piece, ■which, however, was greeted with frantic trans- ports, and, nolens volens, Voltaire had to submit and allow himself to be crowned. They decked his head with laurels; the enthusiasm knew no bounds. Vol- taire, exhausted, retires. The crowd opens to let him pass. But every one wants to approach him, to touch him, to kiss his hands, to hear him speak a single word. Along the street, his carriage is surrounded, stopped, aud the throng endeavor tc- unhitch the horses in order to carry him in triumph. Everywhere the cry is heard, Vive Voltaire ! At last the coachman succeeds in disengaging the vehicle and saving his master from the dangerous pressure of the delirious crowd. "Envy and hatred," says Grimm, after this unpre- cedented triumph, " dared to growl only in secret; and for the first time, perhaps, public opinion in France was seen to enjoy full and undisputed sway." Voltaire, although on the brink of the tomb, did not cease either to think or labor. On the 2d of April, 1778, he is received as a member by the Ma- sonic lodge of the Neuf Sceurs (Nine Sisters). A few days after, he persuades the Academic Frangaise 148 VOLTAIEE IIT EXILE. to publish a dictionary upon a new plan, himself taking charge of the letter A. " I thank you in the name of the alphabet," said Voltaire on leaving the learned assembly. " And we thank you in the name of letters" replied the chevalier de Chastelux. Voltaire goes again to the Theatre Frangais to witness the representation of his Alzire. New accla- mations and plaudits. " He attends the sessions of the Academy of Sciences ; he stops only when worn* out nature refuses longer to follow this vigorous and indefatigable mind. It is in vain he uses coffee and abuses it ; his stomach will not perform its work any longer. On the 20th of May, attacked with strangury, he took to his bed, fell in a kind of tor- por, and ten days after, the 30th of May, 1778, ex- pired at the mansion of the Marquis de Villette, on the quay of the Th^atins, to-day called Quai Voltaire. He had attained the age of eighty-four years, three months, and ten days. His birth had been at Chdtenay, near Sceaux, on the 20th of February, 1694. To his very last breath Voltaire was animated with the spirit of justice. Four days before his death he seemed to come to life again on learning through the son of Lally-Tollendal of his father's rehabilita- tion. This was one of the cases taken hold of and pleaded by the patriarch of Ferney. He wrote to Lally the following letter (the last he ever penned), which seems worthily to crown his life of struggle for the right: " The dying man returns to life on learning this happy news. He tenderly embraces M. de Lally. He sees the king is the friend of justice; he will die content." VOLTAIEE m EXII-E. 149 It is useless to mention the filthy inventions through which the Catholic writers have tried to sully the memory of Voltaire by representing his death-agony as that of a repenting sinner. The truth is that he repelled the services of the Abb6 L'At- taignant, saying, "Let me die in peace." He is reported to have answered the curate of Saint-Sul- pice, who exhorted him to invoke Jesus Christ, " In the name of God, do not speak of that man to me." At the last stage of his agony he addressed these words to M. Morand, "Adieu, my dear Morand; I am dying." Seven years before, Voltaire had written to the king of Prassia: "I do not fear death, which approaches apace; but I have an unconquerable aversion for the manner in which we have to die in our holy, Catholic, apos- tolic, and Roman religion. It seems to me extremely ridiculous to have myself oiled to depart to the other world as we grease the axles of our wagons before a trip. This stupidity and all that follows is so repugnant to me that I am tempted tp have myself carried to Neufchatel to have the pleasure of dying within your dominions." In November, 1777, he again wrote Frederick on the same subject, as follows : " I am to-day eighty- four years old. I have more aversion than ever for extreme unction and those who administer it." The remains of Voltaire, although he had expired without the sacraments of the church, were, notwith- standing his expressed wish to be buried in Ferney, transported to the abbey of Scelli^res (Episcopal See of Troyes, about eighty miles nearly southeast of 150 VOLTAIRE IN EXILK. Paris), by the order of his nephew, the Abb6 Mig- not, and interred in the center of the nave. The bishop of Troyes had forbidden the prior to proceed with the interment and to have a religious service, but the Episcopal prohibition had arrived too late. Through a last irony of fate, the enemy of the church was buried in consecrated ground and in her very bosom. Before this present centenary year (1878), the memory of the great philosopher had already received many public homages. The first came, from the king of Prussia, Frederick, who on the 26th of November, 1778, read before the Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres of Berlin a Eulogy of Voltaire, writ- ten at the camp of Schatlzar. In 1779 the Academie Fran9ai8e listened to a triple encomium on Voltaire delivered respectively by Duels (who inherited his chair in the Academy), D'Alembert, and the abbe of Radouviliers. Voltaire having been the motor, the powerful im- pulse, of the new world of ideas and principles which expressed and materialized itself in the French Revolution, it was natural for his legitimate off- spring and child to give a signal testimonial of its filial gratitude to his memory. The National As- sembly voted the removal of his ashes to the Pan- theon,. They were accordingly taken from the abbey of Scelli^res and transferred to Paris on the 11th of July, 1791. The National Assembly, the municipal officers, the State bodies, and a multitude whose ac- clamations in honor of their heroic champion were not quelled even by this renewed national sorrow, followed the casket to the vaults of the Pantheon. In 1822 the remains of Voltaire and Rousseau VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. 151 were clandestinely taken from the Pantheon and thrown in the gutter by thn Jesuitic Restoration. Even beyond the tomb has the church, conscious of the mortal wound she received at the hands of Voltaire, pursued him with her hatred and her vengeance. But if she threw Voltaire's ashes to the wind, she has been herself unable to prevent the Voltairian ideas from instilling themselves and breathing life into the minds of this, our own age, to-iiay celebrating the anniversary of the great phi- losopher of the eighteenth century. THE WORK OF VOL- TAIRE. VOLTAIEE IN EXTT.E. 155 XIX.— THE WORK OE VOLTAIRE. After La Harpe, Palissot, Duvernet, Villemain, Pierre Leroirs, Sainte - Beuve, Philar5te Chasles, Nisard, Desnoireterre, Ars^ne Iloussaye, David Fred- erick Strauss, it may seem superfluous to attempt anew an appreciation of the genius and great facul- ties of Voltaire. In the following concise terms, he has been most admirably painted by the eloquent pen of Goethe : " Genius, imagination, depth, extent, reason, taste, philosophy, elevation, originality, nat- uralness, wit and the graces of wit, variety, accu- racy, finesse, warmth, charm, grace, force, informa- tion, vivacity, preciseness, clearness, elegance, elo- quence, gayety, ridicule, pathos, and truth, that is Voltaire. He is the French writer joar excellence.'''' Goethe has also said : " It is not astonishing to learn that Voltaire se- cured to himself, uncontested, the universal empire over the minds of Europe. " Voltaire will ever be regarded as the greatest man of literature in modern times, and perhaps even in all times ; as the most astonishing creation of the author of nature, a creation in which he has been pleased to unite at once, in the frail and perilous or- ganization of man, all the varieties of talent, all the glories of genius, all the potencies of thought." Who has not read Voltaire ? Who ignores that throughout the eiiventy volumes that make up his lit- 156 yOLTAIEE IN BXILE. erary work he steadily pursues the same end, that is, to clean out the stables of Augeas, to drive away the darkness of ignorance from the mind of man, to break the shackles of superstition, to disperse the phantoms that would haunt his perplexed brain, in a word, to give him his intellectual compass ? The works of Voltaire are an immortal monument raised up to human progress, reason, justice, and common sense. They are all pervaded with a passion- ate love of the just and the true. In his Essay Upon the Morals and Mind of Na- tions, in his Charles XII., and in the Age of Loms XIV., he renovates history; throughout the march of events he seeks to retrace the Odyssey of the human mind. In his Philosophical Dictionary he cre- ates the power of criticism, he proclaims the inde- pendence of all moral law from superstition or relig- ious creed, he lifts up human kind from its kneeling posture before the idols of divine right. In his classical drama he is still pursuing his po- lemical warfare; he pleads tolerance, and the horror of fanaticism and superstition. In his philosophical novels he quizzes and finally tears to shreds the yet triumphant absurdities and prejudices, the errors of his age, the false systems d la Pangloss.* He charms and instructs at the same time, lavishing on his reader the sparkling flowers of his wit. " I do not see," says M. Taine, " in what idea the man would be wanting who had as his breviary the * Pangloss, preceptor oi Candide, the hero of Oandide or. Optimism, taught the " metaphysieo-theoiogo-cosmolo-block- headology," and held that all was " for the best in this best of worlds." VOLTA.IRE IN EXILE. 157 Dialogues, the Dictionary, and the novels of Vol- taire." To the silly, ridiculous, distorted humanity he had before him, Voltaire offered the noble image of the ideal humanity, which he carried within him. By his writings, illuminated witli the flashes of his mind and the fire of his genius, Ae threw the sursum Gorda to the generations of his time, and succeeded in setting them upon their feet by steadying them against the immovable pillar of liberty, truth, and reason. What is, after all, more important to bring to light than the words of Voltaire is the work of Voltaire, his individuality, the influence of his ideas upon his times, upon the Europe of the eight- ^epth century. vDuring more than a half century, and up to his very death at the age of eighty-four years, Voltaire held the intellectual and moral scepter of Europe. In contrast with Fontenelle* he opens wide his hands and scatters truth broadcast in every fashion — through his eloquence, his admirable writings, his witty conversa- tion, and no less witty correspondence, in which he reveals himself in all the brightness of his good sense, unequaled genius, and passionate love for hu- m.anity. The Vulcan of mind and truth, he ham- mers oat those keen darts, those curt and palpitating sentences, that would have pierced the skin of a hip- popotamus, and with them ran the cuirass of fanati- cism through and through. To formulate his ideas, to draw up his code of common sense, to render his judgments and shape *Bernard de Foatenelle, poet and philosopher, 1657-1754. 158 VOLTAIRE IN EXILB. the public conscience and opinion, Voltaire finrls an idiom as luminous as a sun ray, as clear as a eryi»tal spring reflecting the azure sky in its pure and 'tran- quil bosom; he creates that admirable French tongue which since his time has been so poorly spoken and written, spoiled as it has been by the adjunct of heavy and discordant tinsel. In the midst of a discussion, some quidam having spoken ironically of the fine and grand sentences of "Voltaire, the latter quickly replied, "My fine sen- tences ! . . . Know sir, that I have never made oiie." / Voltaire was then the indefatigable pioneer of Freethought. He broke over all intellectual bar- riers, pulled down with a strong hand all the worm- eaten hulks of the past, the superannuated dogmas, the political and religious jails. With strokes of axe and pick he cleared up the inextricable forest of errors and prejudices, and opened out a straightfor- ward and free highway for the human caravan. He impudently laughed in the face of all the nonsense of past and present, laughed with the sparkling and withering laughter we know him by. With a sarcasMc word, with a single ironical shaft, Voltaire ruimadim established system. The exaggerated optimism of Leibrirtz crumbled beneath the single aphorism of Dr. Pangloss in .his Candide : " All is for the best in this best of possible worlds." After sketching the bloody and dismal Odyssey of departed generations, Voltaire exclaimed, " It seems as if the history of man had been written by the hand of the executioner !" But, spite of the dark pages of history, Voltaire asserted his faith in progress by this witty axiom, VOLTAJEE IN EXILE. 159 " Truth is the child of time, and her father must sooner or later allow her to go into society " (la lais- eer aller dans le monde). This great philosopher so well understood the civ- ilizing necessities and the interests of that Europe of which he was the most illustrious representative, that he wrote the following very sound aphorism, over which certain diplomats of our day might do well to meditate : " Every war between Europeans is a civil war." y^^o appreciate the merit, difficulty, and greatness of Voltaire's work, it is necessary to remember that he lived in a period when the books of Freethought were burned by the executioner's hand; when, Freethinkers were'led to the scaffold, to the pile, or suffered banishment; when the Spanish Inquisition still made auios da fe with heretics ; when did not exist the liberty of conscience any move than the liberty of the press; in a word, when political and religious barbarism reigned over Europe^/ Now we shall see what consequences, what happy results were accomplished by Voltaire's apostolate, and how that powerful genius transformed the bar- barism of Europe into civilization. Thanks to the incessant harangues and superhuman efforts of this ever active tribune, the minds of men are electrified, the current of ideas is checked and turned in an opposite direction. Through the influence of Voltaire, the great Fred- erick, in Prussia, establishes and promotes religious tolerance, free thought, and scientific activity. We must seek nowhere else the secret of the powerful and rapid development of Prussia. On the day 160 VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. when Frederick II. gave her the liberty to think, and encouraged science by the foundation of academies, by the pensioning of savants and lettered men, by every possible means he created its strength and prepared her future triumph. Following the example of the Prussian king, the most of the petty princes of Germany, as also the kings of Denmark, Sweden, Poland, and Joseph 11., emperor of Austria, allow in their realms free research and freedom of thought and expression. The inqui- sition was abolished in Spain. Still through Voltaire's influence, the empress Catherine abolishes torture and decrees tolerance in her vast empire. In France, the cases against Galas, Sirven, Lally, Montbailly, are reinvestigated, the judgments reversed and their memory rehabilitated. Thus is a man of genius capable of accomplishing great results. Thus he may spur along, teach, and transform his age, when his name is Voltaire. What makes this most astonishing, is that this Hercules, who bore the new world upon his power- ful shoulders, was almost constantly ill. He found consolation for his precarious health in saying, " The puppets of Providence cannot last as long as she." And he wrote to the count d'Argental : " I gambol every day over my grave. Life is a child we have to rock until it falls asleep." On an anniversary of the Saint Bartholomew, he was taken with a violent fever, which was acceler- ated and increased by the profound indignation with which the execrated memory of the great Catholic massacre inspired him. " It is the Furies of the Saint Bartholomew, the Dragonnadea, and the war of tlic Albigoiises," VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. 161 Strauss has saidj " which in Voltaire brandish their torches against Christianism." From what source did this valetudinarian draw his indefatigable activity, his ever-renewing ardor, his invincible strength ? He drew them from the senti- ment of justice and intense love for humanity. Of Voltaire it can truly be said that nothing that is human was foreign to him. Every outrage, every violence, every wound inflicted on humanity, he felt ■within himself ; he resented and avenged them ! Henry Heine has said of the author of Faust and Werther, "When nature wished to recognize and admire herself, she created Goethe." In the same manner, when the genius of humanity would have the consciousness of its strength and its splendor, it created Voltaire, and built him of sensibility, com- mon sense, wit, and judgment, kneaded together through and through. Neither Montesquieu, Rousseau, nor Diderot, great as they were, had the intellectual power and uni- versality of Voltaire. Neither of them has weighed so heavily in the scale of his respective age. Vol- taire stands as the central and immovable pillar of Freethought, which no religious reaction will either beat down or pass. The most violent tides of ob- scurantism have beaten themselves again, and ex- pired in impotent rage at the foot of his statue. The formidable influence of Voltaire upon his own epoch has been continued into ours, and it is in part to this still active power we owe the great springs of our civilization, the idea of progress, the definitive triumph over religious intolerance, the liberty of conscience, boons which will not be torn away from US, whatever the enemies of progress may do. 162 VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. What is worthy of our admiration in the eightee:ith century, is the ardent love of liberty and the frank- ness of expression of those who fight in the arena of Freethought. How nimble and sprightly they are ! They feel they bear within themselves the destinies of humanity and the. gestation of a revolution of thought. Ileproduoing the heroic energy, the con- tempt for danger of the valiant group of the thinkers of the sixteenth century (De la Boetie, Pierre Char- ron, Rabelais, Montaigne), they do not hesitate, they never erase, but go straight to their aim and to the fact. They call a cat a cat, a priest a hypocrite, and the obscurantists consummate rascals. In this they have set a great example for our age of tergiver. satioii, happy means, and delicate equivocations, which eclecticism, in a compromise with clericalism, has kept in bonds and retarded during a space of almost fifty years. The eighteenth century had the good fortune to find in Voltaire its man, its expression, and its inter- preter, a good fortune which has not fallen to our nineteenth century, still so troubled, drawn hither and thither, muddled, priest-ridden, and hesitating between progress and tradition, authority and free- dom, the revolution and counter-revolution, science and religion, faith and common sense, and actually in the condition of Bm-ida^'s ass between two meas- ures full of oats. Perhaps all our century lacks to bring order to its chaos and light up its torch, is simply a flcU lux, a living encyclopedia, a synthetic, clear, and power- ful genius like Voltaire. Not a thinker of our age has felt his shoulders strong enough to don the armor of that knight of reason. No man is now giant VOLTAIKE IN EXILE. 1C3 enough to undertake and carry through sixty years of such a merciless and deadly warfare as Voltaire led against the spirit of darkness. He was the or- chestra leader, the goad, the impressario and director of that valiant band of living Encyclopedists who neither put water in their wine nor ambiguous Vords in their sentences. lie was, in short, king Voltaire ; a king without a realm, a king of the mind, perpetu- ally driven from France by the wretches whe waxed fat on the credulity and servileness of men who did not intend to have the springs of their revenue dried up by the truths of a philosopher. He so riddled the intolerants with epigrams, so ridiculed their ab- surd doctrines, so worried the wretch and the wretches, as he said; he thi-ew such floods of light into the dark recesses where the chains of slav- ery were forged ; he so transfixed with his pointed arrows the monster of fanaticism and despotism that the bleeding and furious bull came and threw itself headlong upon the avenging sword of the French Revolution ! This memorable and most fruitful revolution had been clearly predicted by Voltaire in his letter dated Api-il 2, 1764, and addressed to the Marquis de Chauvelin: " All that I see scatters the seed of a revolution which will inevitably take place, and which I shall not have the pleasure of witnessing. The French pro- gress slowly in everything, but they progress. The light has spread from man to man in such a degree that at the first opportunity it will break out, and then there will be a noisy time. Our young men are fortunate. They will see some beautiful things J" VOLTAIRE'S PROPA- GANDISM. VOLTAIEB IN EXILE. 167 XX. —VOLTAIRE'S PROPAGANDISM. Voltaire accelerated the gestation of that great revolution which he announced and felt near at hand during the last year of his life not only by his own writings but also by the editing and publication of the works of others whenever they seemed to him useful productions. Having heard of the philosoph- ical testament of Meslier, curd of Etrdpigny, in the Department of Ardennes, he wrote in 1735 to Thie- rot : "Who can this village cure be of whom jyou- speak? What ! a cure, and a French cure at that, as much of a philosopher as Locke ? .Could you not send me the manuscript? I would faithfully return it to you." But not until 1762 did Voltaire succeed in securing the testament of Meslier, a production we must con- sider as the first prelude to the Revolution. Voltaire published thousands upon thousands of copies. Criti- cising its " horse-cart " style and tedious details, he gave only a number of extracts from it. But later the work appeared entire. According to his prudent custom, Voltaire has- tened to protest against the publication of the book he had edited. In 1763 he wrote to D'Alembert the following letter, meant to be hawked around : " There has been printed in Holland the Testament of Jean Meslier; it is only a portion of that cure's testament. I was filled with horror as I read it. The 168 VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. testimony of a priest who on his death-bed asks God's forgiveness for having taught the Christian religion may throw a great weight in the scale of the libertines. I will send you a copy of this Testa- ment of the antichrist, since you want to refute it. It is written with a coarse simplicity which, unfor-^ tunately, looks like candor." But some time afterward he wrote : " It seems to me that the Testament of Jean Mes- ller is producing more effect; all who read it remain convinced; that man discusses and proves. He speaks at the moment of death, a moment when liars tell the truth; that is the strongest argument. . . . Jean Meslier must convert the world. Wh/ is his gospel in so few hands ?" Lnd Voltaire took good care to multiply the edi- tions, wEichTrGre_^rapidly taken up. But it was not idle in him to defend himsGlf against the production of a book 80 essentially revolutionary, and which sapped at once the walls of royalty and of the church. Its effect was immense, and there is no doubt that it hastened the fall of the royal and cler- ical despotism. After having passed the greater part of a modest and virtuous existence in Etrdpigny, in Ardennes, where he had a crow to pick with the archbishop of Rheims, who maltreated and robbed the peasants, Meslier left, in 1729, the year of his death, a politi- cal and religious testament of 366 pages, registered in the court records of Saint Menehould, Department of Marne. In 1793 Anacharsis Clotz proposed to the Convention the erection of a monument to the Abb^ Meslier, the first priest who had the courage and loy- alty to abjure religious error. TOLTAIEE IN EXILE. 169 The cure of Etr^pigny sees in the multiplicity of Teligions on the earth th-e conclusi-ve proof of their common falseness. Each of them, he says, proclaims itself the only true one and claims divine origin ; but all cannot be true and divine, since they contradict «ach other on so many points, and mutually antago- nize as -well as damn each other. All religions, the 3loman Catholic Hke all ■ethers, are the work o€ men, and the fact that they all pretend to divine ori- gin shows them to reiy and build upon an imposture primarily invented by designing leaders, then improv- ed upon and developed by impostors and false proph- ets, eagerly accepted by human ignorance, and used by the great and the powerful of earth as a scarecrow for the masses. If a God, infinitely wise and good, iiad thought it necessary to reveal a religion, he would have rendered all error, all negation, impossi- ble by impressing it with the unmistakable signs of its divinity. Since no religion bears these marks, all being open aud vulnerable to negation and contesta- tion, it follows that none is the result of divine rev- delation. The proof of the impostur-e of all religions is found, besides, in their f oundation,yai7ft, that is a certainty without proofs, forbidding discussion and de- nouncing the light of reason and researches of science as crimes against the Divinity. Far from being a source of truth, faith is only a source of error, illu- sion, and fraud. The Christian religion has vainly sought to draw proofs of the truth of its doctrines from miracles, themselves requiring proof; from her martyrs, who, according to their own co-religionists' avowals, irrationally sought a useless death ; and from |>rophecies recorded in the holy scriptures, the very 170 TOXTAIBE IX EXILE. hook needing- proof of its gemuinenesff and divioe origin. ^ According t» the priest Meslier> these hypothe8es> webs of error, fables, and contradictions,, are de- serving of no credeaee. The stoa-ies of Eden and of the serpent, the histCH-y of the prophets,, the Old and the Kew Testaments,, the gospel, with its vulgar parables, do not come up to the fables of ^sop, and are far below the works of heathenish antiquity. The so-called sacred book& are the production of ignorant and coarse minds. Mealier pitilessly rails at the belief of Christianity, at the absurd doctrine of the trinity, according to which one is three and three are one; he keenly de- rides the biblical stories, the God of the Old Testa- ment, who,, like any other man, talks with Adam, walks around the garden of Eden with him, and finally damns him for having tasted of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and for having foolishly eaten, together with Eve, of the apple of damnation. The cure of Etrepigny asks himself how God ever could have interested himself in such an insignifi- cant and unworthy tribe as the Jews, to whom he promises supremacy over all other nations. Under a sense of humiliation and regret for having been obliged to teach the divinity of the son of Mary and the carpenter Joseph, the cure of the Ardennes avenges himself by incisive criticisms of that pretended savior's mission. This so-called God, he says, has had all the weaknesses^ all the pas- sions of men, as is attested by his relations with the courtesan, Mary Magdalene,, who was possessed of devils. This thaumaturgist, who heals a few sick Jews, has allowed all the ills and pests of hu- VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. 171 manity to remain after him. Jesus has simply been made the object and excuse of an apotheosis, after the model of ancient divinities, " of illtistrious men and women, princes and princesses, for instance, or other persons of distinction who have arrogated to themselves, or to whom ignorance, servility, or flattery have applied the name of god or goddess." Contradicting the deism of Voltaire, and going much farther than he, tlie cure Meslier denies the creating principle. " What is gained," he asks, " by the hypothesis of such a being? I see motions and forms, the phenomena of nature, which fill me with astonishment. Shall I have a better con- ception of them when I have invented a being who will have endowed her with these peculiarities ? Besides, God, a perfect being, can never have cre- ated a world so imperfect, so filled with suffering and misery, a world made up of a mixture of good and evil. This heterogeneous admixture proves that no such being exists. Being is simply a phe- nomenon of matter." Meslier denies a future life, and holds the life of men and animals to be nothing more than a kind of fermen- tation of the matter of which they are constituted. Sensation and thought are only special and limited modifications of that perpetual modification or fer- mentation called life ; at death the process comes to an end, and what we call soul becomes extinguished as does the light of an exhausted candle. As for an existence beyond our mundane sphere, it is simply an invention of the priests, who make it the means of domineering over humanity, to live idly and uselessly on the honey and fat of the land, and therefore exert themselves in offering to the credulous an eternal 172 VOLTAIEE IN KXILK. felicity in a fantastic paradise, while awing their im- agination by fears of the endless torments of an imaginary hell. Our Afdennese curate was no less bold and radical on the political than on the religious question. He begins by criticising- the attitude of the church toward the state and its abuses. " A religion," says Meslier, " that tolerates abuses contrary to justice and natural equity, and therefore contrary to the proper government of men and injuri- ous to the public good, a religion that approves and authorises these abuses and even indorses tyranny or the tyrannical government of earthly kings or princes, cannot be a true religion." In his Age of Louis J^IV., Voltaire had sketched the brilliant sides and happy influences of a reign which patronized genius and allowed civilizing ideas to shine and spread their rays about. Meslier, on the contrary, shows us the shadows of the sun-king * and the frightful misery caused by absplute mon- archy. " Do you wonder, O unhappy nations," said he, " how it is you have to struggle with many difficul- ties and bear so much suffering in this life ? It is because you carry alone all the heaviness and weight of labor and heat, just as the laborers spoken of in a parable of the gospel; it is because you are laden^ you and your like, with all the monk tribe, the legal pack, the soldiering hosts, the excise bands, the swarming gatherers of salt and tobacco tax, in a word with all the lazy and useless species in the world. Louis XIV. has been poetically called le roi-aeleil, the slin- king. VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. ITS For it is only with the fruits of your painful labor that such people live, as well as of all the kind, male and female, that serve them. You furnish through your work all that is necessary for their existence ; more even, all that can minister to their recreation and pleasures." And farther on: "They speak to you about th« evil one; they frighten you with the mere name of the devil be- cause they want to have you believe that devils are the most wicked, mean, and frightful of beings. But our painters deceive themselves when on their canvas they represejit devils as monsters frightful to see ; they deceive themselves, I say, and deceive yon, as also do your sermonizers, when in their pictures or sermons they make them appear to you so homely, hideous, and misshapen. They should rather, both painters and preachers, represent them to you as these fine grandees and nobles all, as these fine ladies and young damsels whom you see so well tricked up, so well dressed, curled, and scented, and so dazzling with gold, silver, and precious stones. The devils which your preachers and painters sketch for you and represent under such homely and monstrous forms and countenance, are certainly no more than imaginary devils, who could only frighten children or ignorant boors, and who could only inflict imagin- ary evil on those who bear them. But these he and she devils, these ladies and fine gentlemen of whom I speak to yon, are certainly not imaginary, they are really visible, they must assuredly know how to in- spire fear, and the evil they do to the poor is most undeniably real and palpable." 1T4 TOLTAIEE in EXILffi. After this the curate handles the topic of social conditions and of the complicity of princes and priests in maintainiBg their social despotism : "All men are equal by nature," says Meslier; " they have all an equal right to live and inhabit the 'earth, an equal right to enjoy upon it their national liberty and to share of the fruits of the earth by usefully laboring to obtain the things necessary and useful to life. As they live in societies, it is abso- lutely necessary there should be aniong men interde- pendence and subordination. But this dependence and subordination should bo just and fairly adjusted; that is, they sliould not tend to elevate the one too highly ■while lowering the other too much, noi to favor the one while crushing the others, nor to give all to the first and nothing to the rest, nor lastly, to place all possession and pleasure on one side and all burdens, cares, sorrows, and hardship on the other. Religion, we might think, should condemn the harsh- ness and injustice of a tyrannical regime, just as we might expect, on the other side, to see a wise polit- ical science put a curb on the errors and abuses of a false religion. Certainly it should be. Yet it is not thus. State and religion have a mutual understand- ing and work into each other's hands, as do two ac- complices. The priests recommend obedience to the authority of princes, whom they represent as being chosen of God ; the princes, in return, uphold iihe functions of the clergy and furnish them with reve- nue. It is necessary, then, to fight both evils. All nations should unite and forget whatever quarrels may divide them in order to shake oU the yoke which, with the help of tyrants and clergy, princes and nobles have, imposed upon the people. All VOLTAIEE I^- EXILE. 175 nations should combine and forget all differences of a nature to alienate them in order to work in com- mon at this truly useful and necessary task, the annihilation of the monsters who enslave and oppress them." Would it not seem as if Diderot had paraphrased this passage of Meslier in his famous dithyramb : ' ' And with his hands he would the bowels of the priest, In lack of cord, entwine and twist to strangle kings." But the cure of Etr^pigny thinks it is best to begin with the church and religion, which keep in their leading strings the intellect and soul of the masses and dissuade nations from resisting tyrannical gov- ernments. In a word, the priest who sounds the tocsin of the Revolution looks upon human kind aa mystified, de- ceived by priests and oppressed by tyrants. In his eyes all religions are founded on imposture, all gov- ernments on a system of brigandage, arbitrariness, and oppression. Thorough and vigorous logician in his political and religious criticism, Meslier is weaker when the question is to reconstruct the ruined social edifice. The advocate of communistic association, he imag- ines that all the inhabitants of a city, parish, or vil- lage should form an only family, consider each other as brothers and sisters, j)arents and children, and consequently partake in common of the same food, wear the same garb, dwell in similar houses, and distribute labo? in comiaoii according to need or talent. The neigliboriug commimitics aJiould form alliances among thorn, by which they would bind themselves to treat each other with kindness and justice, to lend each other assistance., etc. 176 VOLTAIEB IN EXILE. Such is, in a concise way, the ■will and testament of the cure Meslier; puch is this forerunner of the Revolution of '89, which, although shorn at first of its political portion, had Voltaire for its propagator and first editor. PHILOSOPHICAL SYS- TEM OF VOLTAIRE. TOLTAIBE IN EXILE. 179 XXI. —THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM OF VOLTAIRE. The eighteenth century was neither sentimental nor greatly metaphysical. '■'■It is brain J have here," said Mme. de Tencin,* as she placed her hand upon her heart. Her words express quite fairly the moral state of the eighteenth century. In meta- physics it has remained non-committal. Possessed of too much intelligence to feed on the great empty words which have been the chief pabulum of our pe- dantic and puffed-np age, decisive and unequivocal in their affirmations and negations, the philosophers of the eighteenth century showed no particular taste for the fussy passages at arms now in vogue, in which existence and non-existence, absolute and contingent, subjective and objective, origin of matter, final causes, transcendent and unknowable, and such bom- bastic terms, are like trtmendous projectiles thrown from the philosophical mortars, to rise and fall recip- rocally upon the heads of the several contestants, with no other result than to leave the world in greater ignoranae and confusion upon the principles in- volved than before their wordy warfare had begun. Voltaire loved to rail at these abstract speculators, saying that whenever two interlocutors ceased to understand each other it was because ttxej were talk- *ClauiHnofle Tenoin, 1681-1749, born in Grenoble, woman of the world, writer of several novels and friend of Fontenelle. 180 VOLTAIEB IN EXILE. ing metaphysics. "And what are the romances of our unreliable imagination worth in these inaccessible questions ?" he would exclaim. "What is attractive about the eighteenth century is precisely the sincerity of its doubts, the frankness of its skepticism, its love of clearness and horror of the nebulous. It seeks for truth, but failing to find it declares without equivocation that there are bounds for human knowledge. Its greatest thinkers were subject to frequent metaphysical shiftings. Diderot had begun with deism, to ground himself at last in pantheism, or rather in naturalism. His creative mind animated matter and made it the concrete ex- pression of the forces, probabilities, and forms of being. One day, a friend surprising him absorbed in med- itation in the middle of a solitary wood, slipped up to him and touched him on the shoulder, and asked, "What are you doing here, Diderot ?" "I am list- ening," he answered. Diderot thought that with his monads, Leibnitz had no use for a God. With this restriction he was a follower of Leibnitz and a believer in monads. For him nature was, after all, but. a grand and sin- gle being, becoming self-conscious in the brain of man. It is very nearly Hegel's theory and his infinite manifested through the human mind. In spite of his sallies against metaphysics, Voltaire constantly interested himself in the great questions of God, the soul, thought, free will. In contrast with Diderot, he had begun with Spinozism. After having wandered for some time on the vast ocean of matter, he had returned to deism. He draws his first proof of God from social utility. VOLTAIRE m EXILE. 181 " This sublime system," says he, in his poem to the author of the Three Impostors, " This sweet, sublime belief isneedfal to our race; It is the sacred bond of our society; The first foundation of celestial equity, The curb of evil men, the hope of all the just. If heaven e'er, despoiled of a most sacred trust, Could cease to manifest a G-od and honor him, If God were not, we must invent and worship him." Voltaire founds his belief in God principally on the cosmological argument. Something exists ; there- fore something has existed from all eternity (Vol- taire, in spite of himself, falls into pantheism here). j The woild is built with intelligence, therefore it has i been created by an intelligence, by the Great Archi- 1 tect of the universe. The movements of heavenly '; bodies, the gravitation of our globe around the sun, are subject to and accomplished through laws of math- .ematical exactness. Either the stars are themselves great geometers or else they are the work of the great geometer, in accordance with Plato's definition. In a dialogue in the Philosophical Dictionary a philos- opher asks of Nature how, so rugged and silent in the mountain, she appears so industrious in its animals and trees. " My poor child," answers she, " shall I tell the truth ? They have given me a name that does not fit me. They call me Nature, and I am all art." A work of art implies, necessarily, creation. God's nature is action; he has ever acted, and the world is an eternal emanation of his person. (Hero we land in Brahmanism and Buddhism.) According to Spinoza, God is the whole of every- thing; according to Voltaire, on the contrary, every- thing springs from God : " From the Supreme Being, 182 VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. eternal and intelligent, spring in all time all beinga and all forms of being in space." Thus he approaches Spinoza, but he differs from him again by his notions of finality -which the Amsterdam philosopher rejected in his ideas of nature. To Voltaire, therefore, there exists a creative in- telligence from all eternity, and that intelligence is in all that exists. The Supreme Being, although possessing the highest power, is yet not without bounds. He has been able to create the world only in the conditions in which it is existing. In the physical world, for instance, how could God have made a body constituted like that of man and of the animals indissoluble, or have made dissolution pain- less ? As for the moral world, how could he have formed a being living and acting without love or the passions that so often and so fatally lead him astray ? Yet these very imperfections and evils with which our earth is afflicted attest that the supreme intelligence has limits. God has wished to prevent evil and failed, according to the tenet of Epicurus. " Those who cry. All is well ! " says Voltaire, in his poem on Lisbon, " are charlatans. Evil exists, it is absurd to deny it. The earth is but a vast field of carnage and destruction. The individual man is a very miserable being who has a few hours of rest, a few moments of satisfaction, but a long series of sorrowful days in his brief existence." And in his Candide, his hero, after having gone through a thousand unpleasant trials, after having been a witness to the carnage of war, massacres, pes- tilences, and earthquakes, exclaims, " If this is the best of worlds, what must be the others!" VOLTAIKB IN EXILE. 183 Voltaire does not believe that the creator of the world governs it. But, through his utilitarianism and social bias, he admits him as a Judge and remu- nerator : " Is it more advantageous for the general good of such thinking and miserable beings as we are," he has written, " to recognize a God who rewards and punishes, who upholds and consoles us, or must we reject this idea and give ourselves up to our misery without a consolation and without a curb for our vices ?" "All nature," he wrote to the royal prince of , " has proved the existence of the supreme God to you; it remains for your heart to feel the existence of a just God. How could you be just if God were not? And how could he be just if he could neither reward nor punish ?" And in his treatise on God and Men : "No society can exist without justice; let us therefore announce a just God. If the law of the State punisi.es known crimes, let us announce a God who will punish undetected crimes. Let a philoso- pher be a Spinozist if he will, but let the Statesman be a theist. You do not know who or what God is, how he punishes or rewards, but you know he must be sovereign reason, sovereign equity; that is enough. No mortal has a right to contradict you, since you state a thing probable and necessary to mankind." Thoroughly conscious of the weak points and con- tradictions of his theodicy, Voltaire, like a true son of the eighteenth century, takes refuge in doubt, since certainty fails him : "For my part, I am sure of nothing; I believe 184 VOLTAIKE IN BXILK. there is an intelligent being, a creative power, a God. I creep about in darkness about all the rest. I affirm a belief to-day, doubt it to-morrow, and deny it the next day; and each day I may have been mistaken. All honest philosophers have acknowledged to me, when they have had a drop of wine in them, that the great Being has not given them a better share of evidence than he has given me." In his Memoirs he says again : "The fact is that we know nothing of ourselves; we have motion, life, sentiment, and thought with- out knowing how ; we are only blind creatures walking about in the dark and reasoning in a groping way" . And elsewhere : " Metaphysics have been, up to Locke, a vast field of error. Locke has really been useful only because he has narrowed down the area wherein philosophy aimlessly wandered. " When we have discussed mind and matter, we end by not, understanding each other. No phi- losopher has ever been able to raise, by his own strength, the veil nature has spread over the first principles of things. " I do not know the quomodo, it is true. I had rather stop than go astray. Philosophy consists in stopping when the torch of science fails us. I ob- serve the phenomena of nature, but I admit I do not understand first principles any better than you." That was certainly good faith and frankness in a philosopher ! It is still with the expression of doubts on first causes tliat Voltaire ends his poem on the disaster of Lisbon: * TOLTAIBB IN EXILE. I8& "What can of our poor mind the most extended flight ? Ah, naught ! The book of fate is closed to our sight; And man, to himself strange, to man remains unknown. I What am I ? where am I ? and whercfrom have I come ? Poor atoms tormented upon this muddy heap. Whom death soon hurries ofE, whose fate is most to weep. Yet thinking atoms, we, of whom the searching eyes By thought uplift and led, have measured e'en the skiesj Into the infinite we plunge with eager wing. Yet scarcely of ourselves can find or know a thing. This earth where only reigns dark error, lust, and pride. Is fuH of those who think aU good in life doth bide; Yet all complain, all grieve. E'er seeking joy or gain, Man ne'er would die and still ne'er would be bom again. We sometimes, in the midst of aU our woes and fears, The hand of pleasure seek to brush away our tears; But pleasure takes to wing, and like a phantom flees, Whilst losses, pains, regrets are brought on every breeze. The past does offer us but memories void of pith. The present is a farce if the future be a myth, ' If the drear hand of death the thinking soul destroys. One day aR shaU he well, this is our hope, in sooth; But, aU is well to-day, nay, tJmb is not the truth." Voltaire, who separated God and nature, was not a dualist with regard to the body and soul. They are but one for him. What is understood by spirit or soul is after all nothing more than mind, than the faculty of thinking given to the refined matter of the brain. He approaches Locke's definition,, that it is not impossible that God may have communicated the faculty of thinking to a particle of matter, the human brain. But he denies the immortality of the soul, that is the survival of thought to the brain. Man, he says, is like a musical instrument which gives forth no sound after it is broken. Animals, like our- selves, have sensations, ideas, memory, desires, mo- 186 VOLTAIEE IN EXII.E. tives, and yet no serious thinker has ventured to attribute immortality to them. Why should wo need such a thing to explain the little superiority in facul- ties and activity of thought of which, however, we are so proud ? A divine power reveals itself in the sensations of the least of insects as in the brain of a Newton. But these sensations are themselves but a higher grade of effects from the same mechanical laws, which, emanating from God, act throughout all parts of nature. Some say they cannot conceive how sensation and thought may be imparted to extended or material being; but have we any ideas, asks Vol- taire, concerning a being not extended ? Matter and spirit are only words. We have no clearer concep- tion of the one than the other. That is the reason why we cannot decide « priori as to what the one or the other is capable of. To deny to the body the faculty of thinking is no less bold than it would be to refuse it to the soul. But now, what is the soul ? A being made up of faculties, as memory, will, speech, etc. Such beings have no existence. It is after all the ma7i who wills, remembers, speaks. The soul, which we look upon as a being per se, is in reality nothing but a faculty granted to superior beings. " It is a faculty which has been mistaken for a substance." In his Treatise on Metaphysics, written for Mme. du Ch^telet, Voltaire declares that "his reason has taught him that all our ideas come' to us through the senses;" he admits he cannot forbear laughing when he is told that men will still have ideas when they no longer have senses ; he would as soon believe we shall eat and drink after death, when we have no longer any stomachs or mouths. " What ! I refuse immortality to whatever animates that parrot, this thrush, this VOLTAIEE IN BS3LE. 187 dog, and I grant it to man simply because he desires it? It would be very pleasant indeed to survive this life eternally to preserve the most excellent part of our being after the destruction of the other, to live for- ever surrounded with our friends, etc. This illusion would be consoling amidst real sufferings. I do not affirm I have positive desionstrations against the spirituality and immortality of the soul, but all the probabilities are against it." As for the persecution of the good and the impunity of the wicked, consequences of thus ranking the im- mortal soul among the chimera, Voltaire solved the question simply by draping himself in the mantle of the Stoicibt. The virtuous man is rewarded by the sentiment of having done his duty, by peace of heart, by the friendship of the good. " It is Cicero's opinion; it is that of Cato, of Marcus Aurelius, of Epictetus; it is my own." " The wicked are punished by remorse, which never fails, and by human Justice, which fails but rarely." t Firm in his deism while denying the immortality \oi the soul, Voltaire asserts the freedom of the will and comes forward as the champion of human lib- 'erty. To will and to act without being constrained, that is to be free. Such is the freedom of the divine nature, such is the freedom of man. The erroneous opinion that man is not free comes from beholding the passions which often against his will impel him to certain acts; thus anger, love, pride. But to say that man is not free because sometimes he is not, is to say. Men are sick sometimes, therefore they are never well. It is very certain that men are not all equally free, as they are not all in equally sound health. In common jHotL-Locke,. Voltaire -.re j.e.cte.d iuiiati^'. 188 TOLTAIBS IK EXILE, ideas. However, lie admits we are not always ma^ ters of the ideas wMch enter our brain, and as this avowal somewhat damages his free will doctrines, he says that if ever our will is determined by our ideas^ moral perceptions must be counted among these. "■ The idea of justice is so entirely recognized that the greatest crimes which afflict human society are all committed under a false appearance of justice. The greatest, at least the most destructive, of these, crimes is war. But there is no aggressor who does not deck his misdeed with the pretext of justice." •• After sketching Voltaire's theodicy, it remains- for us to consider his struggle against Christianity, [ of which he was the most formidable adversary. He looks upon it as a series of impostures imposed by audacious charlatans upon human credulity, as the scourge of humanity, as a shroud thrown upon thought and civilization throughout long centuries- of mourning, suffering and ignorance, and a tyrant which for ages has crushed and debased the race by its loathsome domination. Voltaire began to express his opinions upon the Christian doctrines in his famous Ode to Urania, then in his Philosophical Dictionary, in his Dinner With the Count of Jioulainvilliers^ and passim throughout all his works. Voltaire spares the personality of Jesus and dis- tinguishes it from the idolatrous worship which has been founded upon the apocryphal gospels. Accord- ing to him, Jesus was never a ChristiaUf a fortiori, a Catholic. He would have repudiated such doctrines with horror. " He was a sort of rustic Socrates, an obscure man born among the dregs of the people. who gave himself out as a prophet, as so many othsi i ■ VOLTAIRE IN EXILS. 189 have done. He has written nothing, because lie could not write, and he has founded a sect upon the enthusiasm of weak imaginations, just like the quaker, Fox, who preached his doctrine and traveled through the country dressed in leather." Very different from our times, in which science refuses any place for miracles, either in nature or history, antiquity believed in prodigies, super- natural effects, and that especially among the Jews, a barbarous, ferocious, repulsive, and self -infatuated people. Jesus, having attacked the priests of his time, was crucified, and to avenge him his disciples corroborated the miraculous stories about him, espe- cially that of his resurrection. In reality we know nothing of Jesus. On the worship of this individ- ual has been based a religion which has caused more blood to flow than all " the most cruel wars." Jesus became the pretext of our fantastic doctrines and of our religious persecutions, but he was not their author. Wh&n he discusses the foundations of the Chris- tian religion, Voltaire sees in them nothing " but a mass of the flatest impostures invented by the vilest rabble, which alone embraced Christianity during the first hundred years. The Christians make up an uninterrupted series of counterfeiters. They forge letters of Jesus Christ, of Pilate, of Seneca; infamous archives of falsehood which have been called pious frauds. What proves the falsity of the gospels, is their contradictory system of morals, good in what it ex- tracts from the ancient philosophers, revolting in several of its tenets, breathing war and fanaticism, inspiring hatred against the family, against society. 190 VOLTAIKE IN EXILB. • making itself the apologist of ignorance, f oolisliness, and idleness. " Platonism is the father of Christianism of which the Jewish religion is the mother." After riddling with his crushing irony the Bible, the Old and New Testaments, Voltaire wonders how mankind have ever been able to accept such idle stories and extravaganzas, born of uncultivated and coarse minds. The history of the whole Church is a mass of prodigious and absurd inventions ; with punctilious and hair-splitting councils ; its monarch- ism destructive of all society; its bishops and its popes inconceivably outrageous impostors and felons. " If it be evident that the life of the Church is a con- tinuous series of quarrels, impostui-es, vexations, swindles, robberies, and murders, it is demonstrated then that the abuse is in the thing, in the system itself, just as it is plain that a wolf has always been ravenous." Voltaire absolutely lacks in respect for the holy mass: " Your Roman Catholics have carried their Catho- lic extravagance far enough to say that they change a piece of dough into a god, through the virtue of a few words in Latin, and that all the particles of that dough become so many gods and creators of the universe. A vagrant who has been consecrated a priest, a monk just out of the arms of a prostitute, will, for twelve sous, come all rigged up in a clown- ish dress, and mumble to me in a foreign tongue what you call a mass, split the air into four with hia three fingers, bow, straighten up again, turn to the right and to the left, backward and forward, and make as many gods as suit him, drink them, eat VOLTAIEE IN EXILE. 191 them, and evacuate them afterward ! And you will not admit that it is the most monstrous and ridicu- lous idolatry which has ever dishonored human na- ture ? Must not a man himself be changed into a dumb brute before he will imagine that white bread and red wine can be changed into a god ? Modern idolaters, do not compare yourselves to the ancient who worshiped Zeus, the demiourgos, master of God and men, and did homage to secondary gods. Know that Ceres, Pomona, and Flora were far above your Ursula with her eleven thousand virgins, and that it does not beseem the priests of Mary Magdalene to laugh at the priests of Minerva." At the end of the article on Tolerance in the PM- losophical Dictionary Voltaire thus rails at the Bible and the Jews : " I shall say to my brother the Chinaman, let us sup together without ceremony, for I do not like mummeries, but I like thy law, the wisest of all, and perhaps the most aged. I shall say pretty much the same thing to my brother the Hindoo. But what shall I say to my brother the Jew? Shall I give him to sup ? Yes, provided that during the meal Balaam's ass does not take it into his head to bray, that Ezekiel does not attempt to mix his breakfast with our supper, that no fish will come and swallow some of our guests and keep them three days in its belly; that no serpent will come and mingle in the conversation to seduce my wife; that no prophet will presume to go to bed with her after supper, as did the good man Hosea for fifteen francs and a bushel of barley; and especially provided that no Jew will march around my house blowing his trumpet, tumble my walls to the ground, ani slaugh- 192 VOLTAIRE IN EXILE. ter me, my father, my mother, my -wife, my children, my oat, and my dog, according to the ancient Jewish custom. Come, friends, let us have peace; let us all say our benedieiie /" As for the social influences of the Christian relig- ion, they have been most detrimental and disastrous. Christianity has been a step backward, a retrogra- dation, a return of mankind to primitive barbarism. No religion has accumulated so many ruins or caused such overwhelming darkness. The tolerating spirit of the religions of pagan antiquity is well known. Enumerating the murders, the massacres perpe^ trated daring the fifteen centuries of the Christian domination, Voltaire sets them at nine million four hundred and eight thousand eight hundred men who have perished by tke hand or through the means of Christianity. The Christians having grounded their power on pious frauds and impostures, the rogues became cruel and sanguinary toward those who ven- tured to doubt the legitimacy of their power or dared to offer them the slightest opposition. " From the Nicean Council to the sedition in the Cevennes, there has not elapsed a single year in which Christianity did not shed blood. Read only the Jlistoire Eccl'esiastique ! See the Donatists and their adversaries pelting one another; the Athana- sians and Arians filling the Roman empire with carnage for the sake of a diphthong ! Hear those barbarous Christians complaining that the wise Emperor Julian forbids them to throttle and destroy each other 1 Look at the frightful series of massa- cres : so many citizens dying oa the scaffold, so many princes assassinated; the fagots set ablaze by the councils ; twelve millions of innocent victims, inhab- VOLTAERE IN EX1LT5. 183 itants of a new hemisphere, slaughtered like wild ■beasts in the hnnt, under pretext that th«y will not be Christians ! And in our oM hemisphere, behold the Christians ceaselessly murdering each other; aged men, children, mothers, wives, daughters, •expiring in crowds in the crusade against the Alhi- genses, against the Huguenots, the Calvinists, the Anabaptists J Think of our St. Bartholomew, the massacres in Ireland, in Piedmont, in the Cevennes, whilst a bishop of Rome, lazily reclining on a bed of fepose, has his feet kissed, and fifty eunu-chs exercise in quavers and trills to divert him !" In his JPhilosopMcal Dictionnary, after reckon- ing up these religious murders, which he estimates at nine and a half millions of people, either slaughtered, drowned, burned, broken on the wheel, or hung for ihe love of God, Voltaire a^ds this stirring conclusion : " Whoever thou mayest be, reader, if thou hast .preserved thy family archives, consult them, and ihou wilt see thou hast had more than one ancestor immolated under the pretense of religion, or at least cruelly persecuted (unless he was persecutor, which anust be still more melancholy). Whether thy name be Argyle, Perth, Montrose, Hamilton, or Douglas, re- member thy forefathers had their hearts torn out on a scaffold because of a liturgy or of two yards of linen. Art thou Irish ? Then read the