sought for a long while to pave the way for the election of the Prince of Conti to the throne of Poland; the influence of Russia and of Prussia carried the day. Prince Poniatowski, late favorite of the Empress Catherine, was elected by the Polish Diet; in discouragement and sadness, four thousand nobles only had responded to the letters of convocation. The new king, Stanislaus Augustus, handsome, intelligent, amiable, cultivated, but feeble in character and fatally pledged to Russia, sought to rally round him the different parties, and to establish at last, in the midst of general confusion, a regular and a strong government. He was supported in this patriotic task by the influence, ever potent in Poland, of the Czartoriskis. The far-seeing vigilance of Frederick II. did not give them time to act. “Poland must be left in her lethargy,” he had said to the Russian ambassador Saldern. “It is of importance,” he wrote to Catherine, “that Her Majesty the empress, who knows perfectly well her own interests and those of her friends and allies, should give orders of the most precise kind to her ambassador at Warsaw, to oppose any novelty in the form of government, and, generally speaking, the establishment of a permanent council, the preservation of the commissions of war and of the treasury, the power of the king and the unlimited concession on the prince’s part of ability to distribute offices according to his sole will.” The useful reforms being thus abandoned and the king’s feeble power radically shaken, religious discord came to fill up the cup of disorder, and to pave the way for the dismemberment, as well as definitive ruin, of unhappy Poland.
Subjected for a long time past to an increasing oppression, which was encouraged by a fanatical and unenlightened clergy, the Polish dissidents had conceived great hopes on the accession of Stanislaus Augustus; they claimed not only liberty of conscience and of worship, but also all the civil and political rights of which they were deprived. “It is no question of establishing the free exercise of different religions in Poland,” wrote Frederick to Catherine; “it is necessary to reduce the question to its true issue, the demand of the dissident noblesse, and obtain for them the equality they demand, together with participation in all acts of sovereignty.” This was precisely what the clergy and the Catholic noblesse were resolved never to grant. In spite of support from the empress and the King of Prussia, the demand of the dissidents was formally rejected by the Diet of 1766. At the Diet of 1767, Count Repnin, Catherine’s ambassador and the real head of the government in Poland, had four of the most recalcitrant senators carried off and sent into exile in Russia. The Diet, terrified, disorganized, immediately pronounced in favor of the dissidents. By the modifications recently introduced into the constitution of their country, the Polish nobles had lost their liberum veto; unanimity of suffrages was no longer necessary in the Diet; the foreign powers were able to insolently impose their will upon it; the privileges of the noblesse, as well as their traditional faith, were attacked at the very foundations; religious fanaticism and national independence boiled up at the same time in every heart; the discontent, secretly fanned by the agents of Frederick, burst out, sooner than the skilful weavers of the plot could have desired, with sufficient intensity and violence to set fire to the four corners of Poland. By a bold surprise the confederates gained possession of Cracow and of the fortress of Barr, in Podolia; there it was that they swore to die for the sacred cause of Catholic Poland. For more than a century, in the face of many misatkes and many misfortunes, the Poles have faithfully kept that oath.
The Bishop of Kaminck, Kraminski, had gone to Versailles to solicit the support of France. The Duke of Choiseul, at first far from zealous in the cause of the Polish insurrection, had nevertheless sent a few troops, who were soon re-enforced. The Empress Catherine had responded to the violence of the confederates of Barr by letting loose upon the Ukraine the hordes of Zaporoguian Cossacks, speedily followed by regular troops. The Poles, often beaten, badly led by chieftains divided amongst themselves, but ever ardent, ever skilful in seizing upon the smallest advantages, were sustained by the pious exhortations of the clergy, who regarded the war as a crusade; they were rejoiced to see a diversion preparing in their favor by the Sultan’s armaments. “I will raise the Turks against Russia the moment you think proper,” was the assurance given to the Duke of Choiseul by the Count of Vergennes, French ambassador at Constantinople, “but I warn you that they will be beaten.” Hostilities broke out on the 30th of October, 1768; a Turkish army set out to aid the Polish insurrection. Absorbed by their patriotic passions, the Catholic confederates summoned the Mussulmans to their assistance. Prince Galitzin, at the head of a Russian force very inferior to the Ottoman invaders, succeeded in barring their passage; the Turks fell back, invariably beaten by the Russian generals. Catherine at the same time summoned to liberty the oppressed and persecuted Greeks; she sent a squadron to support the rising which she had been fomenting for some months past. After a few brilliant successes, her arms were less fortunate at sea than on land. A French officer, of Hungarian origin, Baron Tott, sent by the Duke of Choiseul to help the Sublime Porte, had fortified the Straits of the Dardanelles; the Russians were repulsed; they withdrew, leaving the Greeks to the vengeance of their oppressors. The efforts which the Empress Catherine was making in Poland against the confederates of Barr had slackened her proceedings against Turkey; she was nevertheless becoming triumphant on the borders of the Vistula, as well as on the banks of the Danube, when the far-sighted and bold policy of Frederick II. interfered in time to prevent Russia from taking possession of Poland as well as of the Ottoman empire.
Secretly favoring the confederates of Barr whom he had but lately encouraged in their uprising, and whom he had suffered to make purchases of arms and ammunition in Prussia, Frederick II. had sought in Austria a natural ally, interested like himself in stopping the advances of Russia. The Emperor, Maria Theresa’s husband, had died in 1764; his son, Joseph II., who succeeded him, had conceived for the King of Prussia the spontaneous admiration of a young and ardent spirit for the most illustrious man of his times. In 1769, a conference which took place at Neisse brought the two sovereigns together. “The emperor is a man eaten up with ambition,” wrote Frederick after the interview; “he is hatching some great design. At present, restrained as he is by his mother, he is beginning to chafe at the yoke he bears, and, as soon as he gets elbow-room, he will commence with some ‘startling stroke; it was impossible for me to discover whether his views were directed towards the republic of Venice, towards Bavaria, towards Silesia, or towards Lorraine; but we may rely upon it that Europe will be all on fire the moment he is master.” A second interview, at Neustadt in 1770, clinched the relations already contracted at Neisse. Common danger brought together old enemies. “I am not going to have the Russians for neighbors,” the Empress Maria Theresa was always repeating. The devastating flood had to be directed, and at the same time stemmed. The feeble goodwill of France and the small body of troops commanded by Dumouriez were still supporting the Polish insurrection, but the Duke of Choiseul had just succumbed to intrigue at home. There was no longer any foreign policy in France. It was without fear of intervention from her that the German powers began to discuss between them the partition of Poland.
She was at the same time suffering disseverment at her own hands through her intestine divisions and the mutual jealousy of her chiefs. In Warsaw the confederates had attempted to carry off King Stanislaus Augustus, whom they accused of betraying the cause of the fatherland; they had declared the throne vacant, and took upon themselves to found an hereditary monarchy. To this supreme honor every great lord aspired, every small army-corps acted individually and without concert with the neighboring leaders. Only a detachment of French, under the orders of Brigadier Choisi, still defended the fort of Cracow; General Suwarrow, who was investing it, forced them to capitulate; they obtained all the honors of war, but in vain was the Empress Catherine urged by D’Alembert and his friends the philosophers to restore their freedom to the glorious vanquished; she replied to them with pleasantries. Ere long the fate of Poland was about to be decided without the impotent efforts of France in her favor weighing for an instant in the balance. The political annihilation of Louis XV. in Europe had been completed by the dismissal of the Duke of Choiseul.
The public conscience is lightened by lights which ability, even when triumphant, can never altogether obscure. The Great Frederick and the Empress Catherine have to answer before history for the crime of the partition of Poland, which they made acceptable to the timorous jealousy of Maria Theresa and to the youthful ambition of her son. As prudent as he was audacious, Frederick had been for a long time paving the way for the dismemberment of the country he had seemed to protect. Negotiations for peace with the Turks became the pretext for war-indemnities. Poland, vanquished, divided, had to pay the whole of them. “I shall not enter upon the portion that Russia marks out for herself,” wrote Frederick to Count Solms, his ambassador at St. Petersburg. “I have expressly left all that blank in order that she may settle it according to her interests and her own good pleasure. When the negotiations for peace have advanced to a certain stage of consistency, it will no longer depend upon the Austrians to break them off if we declare our views unanimously as to Poland. She cannot rely any further upon France, which happens to be in such a fearful state of exhaustion that it could not give any help to Spain, which was on the point of declaring war against England. If that war do not take place, it must be attributed simply to the smash in the finances of France. I guarantee, then, to the Russians all that may happen to suit them; they will do as much for me; and, supposing that the Austrians should consider their share of Poland too paltry in comparison with ours, and it were desirable to satisfy them, one would only have to offer them that strip of the Venetian dominions which cuts them off from Trieste in order to keep them quiet; even if they were to turn nasty, I will answer for it with my head that our union with Russia, once clearly established, will tide them over all that we desire. They have to do with two powers, and they have not a single ally to give them a shoulder.”
Frederick said truly; his sound and powerful judgment took in the position of Europe: France, exhausted by the lingering decay of her government and in travail with new and confused elements which had as yet no strength but to shatter and destroy; Spain, lured on by France and then abandoned by her; England, disturbed at home by parliamentary agitation, favorably disposed to the court of Russia and for a long while allied to Frederick; Sweden and Denmark, in the throes of serious events; there was nothing to oppose the iniquity projected and prepared for with so much art and ability. It was in vain that the King of Prussia sought to turn into a joke the unscrupulous manoeuvres of his diplomacy when he wrote to D’Alembert in January, 1772, “I would rather undertake to put the whole history of the Jews into madrigals than to cause to be of one mind three sovereigns amongst whom must be numbered two women.” The undertaking was already accomplished. Three months later, the first partition of Poland had been settled between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, and on the 2d of September, 1772, the treaty was made known at Warsaw. The manifesto was short. “It is a general rule of policy,” Frederick had said, “that, in default of unanswerable arguments, it is better to express one’s self laconically, and not go beating about the bush.” The care of drawing it up had been intrusted to Prince Kaunitz. “It was of importance,” said the document, “to establish the commonwealth of Poland on a solid basis whilst doing justice to the claims of the three powers for services rendered against the insurrection.” The king and the senate protested. The troops of the allies surrounded Warsaw, and the Diet, being convoked, ratified by a majority of two voices the convention presented by the spoilers themselves. Catherine assigned to herself three thousand square leagues, and one million five hundred thousand souls, in Lithuania and Polish Livonia; Austria took possession of two thousand five hundred square leagues, and more than two million souls, in Red Russia and the Polish palatinates on the left of the Vistula; the instigator and plotter of the whole business had been the most modest of all; the treaty of partition brought Prussia only nine hundred square leagues and eight hundred and sixty thousand souls, but he found himself master of Prussian Poland and of a henceforth compact territory. England had opposed, in Russia, the cession of Dantzick to the Great Frederick. “The ill-temper of France and England at the dismemberment of Poland calls for serious reflections,” wrote the King of Prussia on the 5th of August, 1772: “these two courts are already moving heaven and earth to detach the court of Vienna from our system; but as the three chief points whence their support should come are altogether to seek in France, and there is neither system, nor stability, nor money there, her projects will be given up with the same facility with which they were conceived and broached. They appear to me, moreover, like the projects of the Duke of Aiguillon, ebullitions of French vivacity.”
France did not do anything, and could not do anything; the king’s secret negotiators, as well as the minister of foreign affairs, had been tricked by the allied powers. “Ah! if Choiseul had been here!” exclaimed King Louis XV., it is said, when he heard of the partition of Poland. The Duke of Choiseul would no doubt have been more clear-sighted and better informed than the Duke of Aiguillon, but his policy could have done no good. Frederick II. knew that. “France plays so small a part in Europe,” he wrote to Count Solms, “that I merely tell you about the impotent efforts of the French ministry’s envy just to have a laugh at them, and to let you see in what visions the consciousness of its own weaknesses is capable of leading that court to indulge.” “O! where is Poland?” Madame Dubarry had said to Count Wicholorsky, King Stanislaus Augustus’ charge d’affaires, who was trying to interest her in the misfortunes of his country.
The partition of Poland was barely accomplished, the confederates of Barr, overwhelmed by the Russian troops, were still arriving in France to seek refuge there, and already King Louis XV., for a moment roused by the audacious aggression of the German courts, had sunk back into the shameful lethargy of his life. When Madame Louise, the pious Carmelite of St. Denis, succeeded in awakening in her father’s soul a gleam of religious terror, the courtiers in charge of the royal pleasures redoubled their efforts to distract the king from thoughts so perilous for their own fortunes. Louis XV., fluctuating between remorse and depravity, ruled by Madame Dubarry, bound hand and foot to the triumvirate of Chancellor Maupeou, Abbe Terray, and the Duke of Aiguillon, who were consuming between them in his name the last remnants of absolute power, fell suddenly ill of small-pox. The princesses, his daughters, had never had that terrible disease, the scourge and terror of all classes of society, yet they bravely shut themselves up with the king, lavishing their attentions upon him to the last gasp. Death, triumphant, had vanquished the favorite. Madame Dubarry was sent away as soon as the nature of the malady had declared itself. The king charged his grand almoner to ask pardon of the courtiers for the scandal he had caused them. “Kings owe no account of their conduct save to God only,” he had often repeated to comfort himself for the shame of his life. “It is just He whom I fear,” said Maria Theresa, pursued by remorse for the partition of Poland.
Louis XV. died on the 10th of May, 1774, in his sixty-fourth year, after reigning fifty-nine years, despised by the people who had not so long ago given him the name of Well-beloved, and whose attachment he had worn out by his cold indifference about affairs and the national interests as much as by the irregularities of his life. With him died the old French monarchy, that proud power which had sometimes ruled Europe whilst always holding a great position therein. Henceforth France was marching towards the unknown, tossed about as she was by divers movements, which were mostly hostile to the old state of things, blindly and confusedly as yet, but, under the direction of masters as inexperienced as they were daring, full of frequently noble though nearly always extravagant and reckless hopes, all founded on a thorough reconstruction of the bases of society and of its ancient props. Far more even than the monarchy, at the close of Louis XV.’s reign, did religion find itself attacked and threatened; the blows struck by the philosophers at fanaticism recoiled upon the Christian faith, transiently liable here below for human errors and faults over which it is destined to triumph in eternity.
CHAPTER LV.—-LOUIS XV., THE PHILOSOPHERS.
Nowhere and at no epoch had literature shone with so vivid a lustre as in the reign of Louis XIV.; never has it been in a greater degree the occupation and charm of mankind, never has it left nobler and rarer models behind it for the admiration and imitation of the coming race; the writers of Louis XV.’s age, for all their brilliancy and all their fertility, themselves felt their inferiority in respect of their predecessors. Voltaire confessed as much with a modesty which was by no means familiar to him. Inimitable in their genius, Corneille, Bossuet, Pascal, Moliere left their imprint upon the generation that came after them; it had judgment enough to set them by acclamation in the ranks of the classics; in their case, greatness displaced time. Voltaire took Racine for model; La Mothe imagined that he could imitate La Fontaine. The illustrious company of great minds which surrounded the throne of Louis XIV., and had so much to do with the lasting splendor of his reign, had no reason to complain of ingratitude on the part of its successors; but, from the pedestal to which they raised it, it exercised no potent influence upon new thought and new passions. Enclosed in their glory as in a sanctuary, those noble spirits, discreet and orderly even in their audacities, might look forth on commotions and yearnings they had never known; they saw, with astonishment mingled with affright, their successors launching without fear or afterthought upon that boundless world of intellect, upon which the rules of conscience and the difficulties of practical life do not come in anywhere to impose limits. They saw the field everywhere open to human thought, and they saw falling down on all sides the boundaries which they had considered sacred. They saw pioneers, as bold as they were thoughtless, marching through the mists of a glorious hope towards an unknown future, attacking errors and abuses, all the while that they were digging up the groundwork of society in order to lay new foundations, and they must have shuddered even in their everlasting rest to see ideas taking the place of creeds, doubt substituted for belief, generous aspirations after liberty, justice, and humanity mingled, amongst the masses, with low passions and deep-seated rancor. They saw respect disappearing, the church as well as the kingly power losing prestige every day, religious faith all darkened and dimmed in some corner of men’s souls, and, amidst all this general instability, they asked themselves with awe, “What are the guiding-reins of the society which is about to be? What will be the props of the new fabric? The foundations are overturned; what will the good man do?”
[Illustration: Montesquieu—-269]
Good men had themselves sometimes lent a hand to the work, beyond what they had intended or foreseen, perhaps; Montesquieu, despite the wise moderation of his great and strong mind, had been the first to awaken that yearning for novelty and reforms which had been silently brooding at the bottom of men’s hearts. Born in 1689 at the castle of La Brede, near Bordeaux, Montesquieu really belonged, in point of age, to the reign of Louis XIV., of which he bears the powerful imprint even amidst the boldness of his thoughts and expressions. Grandeur is the distinctive characteristic of Montesquieu’s ideas, as it is of the seventeenth century altogether. He was already councillor in the Parliament of Bordeaux when Louis XIV. died; next year (1716) he took possession of a mortar-cap president’s (_president d mortier_) office, which had been given up to him by one of his uncles. “On leaving college,” he says, “there were put into my hands some law-books; I examined the spirit of them.” Those profound researches, which were to last as long as his life, were more suited to his tastes than jurisprudence properly so called. “What has always given me rather a low opinion of myself,” he would say, “is that there are very few positions in the commonwealth for which I should be really fit. As for my office of president, I have my heart in the right place, I comprehend sufficiently well the questions in themselves; but as to the procedure I did not understand anything about it. I paid attention to it, nevertheless; but what disgusted me most was to see fools with that very talent which, so to speak, shunned me.” He resolved to deliver himself from the yoke which was intolerable to him, and resigned his office; but by this time the world knew his name, in spite of the care he had taken at first to conceal it. In 1721, when he still had his seat on the fleurs-de-lis, he had published his _Lettres persanes,_ an imaginary trip of two exiled Parsees, freely criticising Paris and France. The book appeared under the Regency, and bears the imprint of it in the licentiousness of the descriptions and the witty irreverence of the criticisms. Sometimes, however, the future gravity of Montesquieu’s genius reveals itself amidst the shrewd or biting judgments. It is in the _Lettres persanes_ that he seeks to set up the notion of justice above the idea of God himself. “Though there were no God,” he says, “we should still be bound to love justice, that is to say, make every effort to be like that Being of whom we have so grand an idea, and who, if He existed, would of necessity be just.” Holy Scripture, before Montesquieu, had affirmed more simply and more powerfully the unchangeable idea of justice in every soul of man. “He who is judge of all the earth, shall not He do right?.” Abraham had said when interceding with God for the righteous shut up in Sodom.
The success of the _Lettres persanes_ was great; Montesquieu had said what many people thought without daring to express it; the doubt which was nascent in his mind, and which he could only withstand by an effort of will, the excessive freedom of the tone and of the style scared the authorities, however; when he wanted to get into the French Academy, in the place of M. de Sacy, Cardinal Fleury opposed it formally. It was only on the 24th of January, 1728, that Montesquieu, recently elected, delivered his reception speech. He at once set out on some long travels; he went through Germany, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and ended by settling in England for two years. The sight of political liberty had charmed him. “Ambassadors know no more about England than a six months’ infant,” he wrote in his journal; “when people see the devil to pay in the periodical publications, they believe that there is going to be a revolution next day; but all that is required is to remember that in England as elsewhere, the people are dissatisfied with the ministers and write what is only thought elsewhere. England is the freest country in the world; I do not except any republic.” He returned to France so smitten with the parliamentary or moderate form of government, as he called it, that he seemed sometimes to forget the prudent maxim of the _Lettres persanes_. “It is true,” said the Parsee Usbeck, “that, in consequence of a whimsicality (_bizarrerie_) which springs rather from the nature than from the mind of man, it is sometimes necessary to change certain laws; but the case is rare, and, when it occurs, it should not be touched save with a trembling hand.”
On returning to his castle of La Brede after so many and such long travels, Montesquieu resolved to restore his tone by intercourse with the past. “I confess my liking for the ancients,” he used to say; “this antiquity enchants me, and I am always ready to say with Pliny, ‘You are going to Athens; revere the gods.'” It was not, however, on the Greeks that he concentrated the working of his mind; in 1734, he published his _Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur et de la decadence des Romaine_. Montesquieu did not, as Bossuet did, seek to hit upon God’s plan touching the destinies of mankind; he discovers in the virtues and vices of the Romans themselves the secret of their triumphs and of their reverses. The contemplation of antiquity inspires him with language often worthy of Tacitus, curt, nervous, powerful in its grave simplicity. “It seemed,” he says, “that the Romans only conquered in order to give; but they remained so positively the masters that, when they made war on any prince, they crushed him, so to speak, with the weight of the whole universe.”
Montesquieu thus performed the prelude to the great work of his life; he had been working for twenty years at the _Esprit des lois,_ when he published it in 1748. “In the course of twenty years,” he says, “I saw my work begin, grow, progress, and end.” He had placed as the motto to his book this Latin phrase, which at first excited the curiosity of readers: _Prolem sine matre creatam_ (Offspring begotten without a mother). “Young man,” said Montesquieu, by this time advanced in years, to M. Suard (afterwards perpetual secretary to the French Academy), “young man, when a notable book is written, genius is its father, and liberty its mother; that is why I wrote upon the title-page of my work, “Prolem sine matre creatam.”
It was liberty at the same time as justice that Montesquieu sought and claimed in his profound researches into the laws which have from time immemorial governed mankind; that new instinctive idea of natural rights, those new yearnings which were beginning to dawn in all hearts, remained as yet, for the most part, upon the surface of their minds and of their lives; what was demanded at that time in France was liberty to speak and write rather than to act and govern. Montesquieu, on the contrary, went to the bottom of things, and, despite the natural moderation of his mind, he propounded theories so perilous for absolute power that he dared not have his book printed at Paris, and brought it out in Geneva; its success was immense; before his death, Montesquieu saw twenty-one French editions published, and translations in all the languages of Europe. “Mankind had lost its titledeeds,” says Voltaire; “Montesquieu recovered and restored them.”
The intense labor, the immense courses of reading, to which Montesquieu had devoted himself, had exhausted his strength. “I am overcome with weariness,” he wrote in 1747; “I propose to rest myself for the remainder of my days.” “I have done,” he said to M. Suard; “I have burned all my powder, all my candles have gone out.” “I had conceived the design of giving greater breadth and depth to certain parts of my _Esprit;_ I have become incapable of it; my reading has weakened my eyes, and it seems to me that what light I have left is but the dawn of the day when they will close forever.”
Montesquieu was at Paris, ill and sad at heart, in spite of his habitual serenity; notwithstanding the scoffs he had admitted into his _Lettres persanes,_ he had always preserved some respect for religion; he considered it a necessary item in the order of societies; in his soul and on his own private account he hoped and desired rather than believed. “Though the immortality of the soul were an error,” he had said, “I should be sorry not to believe it; I confess that I am not so humble as the atheists. I know not what they think, but as for me I would not truck the notion of my immortality for that of an ephemeral happiness. There is for me a charm in believing myself to be immortal like God himself. Independently of revealed ideas, metaphysical ideas give me, as regards my eternal happiness, strong hopes which I should not like to give up.” As he approached the tomb, his views of religion appeared to become clearer. “What a wonderful thing!” he would say, “the Christian religion, which seems to have no object but felicity in the next world, yet forms our happiness in this.” He had never looked to life for any very keen delights; his spirits were as even as his mind was powerful. “Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against the disagreeables of life,” he wrote, “never having had any sorrow that an hour’s reading did not dispel. I awake in the morning with a secret joy at beholding the light; I gaze upon the light with a sort of enchantment, and all the rest of the day I am content. I pass the night without awaking, and in the evening, when I go to bed, a sort of entrancement prevents me from giving way to reflections.”
Montesquieu died as he had lived, without retracting any of his ideas or of his writings. The priest of his parish brought him the sacraments, and, “Sir,” said he, “you know how great God is!” “Yes,” replied the dying man, “and how little men are!” He expired almost immediately on the 10th of February, 1755, at the age of sixty-six. He died at the beginning of the reign of the philosophers, whose way he had prepared before them without having ever belonged to their number. Diderot alone followed his bier. Fontenelle, nearly a hundred years old, was soon to follow him to the tomb.
[Illustration: Fontenelle—-274]
Born at Rouen in February, 1657, and nephew of Corneille on the mother’s side, Fontenelle had not received from nature any of the unequal and sublime endowments which have fixed the dramatic crown forever upon the forehead of Corneille; but he had inherited the wit, and indeed the brilliant wit (_bel esprit_), which the great tragedian hid beneath the splendors of his genius. He began with those writings, superfine (_precieux_), dainty, tricked out in the fashion of the court and the drawing-room, which suggested La Bruyere’s piquant portrait.
“Ascanius is a statuary, Hegio a metal-founder, AEschines a fuller, and Cydias a brilliant wit. That is his trade; he has a sign, a workshop, articles made to order, and apprentices who work under him. Prose, verse, what d’ye lack? He is equally successful in both. Give him an order for letters of consolation, or on an absence; he will undertake them. Take them ready made, if you like, and enter his shop; there is a choice assortment. He has a friend whose only duty on earth is to puff him for a long while in certain society, and then present him at their houses as a rare bird and a man of exquisite conversation, and thereupon, just as the musical man sings and the player on the lute touches his lute before the persons to whom he has been puffed, Cydias, after coughing, pulling up his wristband, extending his hand and opening his fingers, gravely spouts his quintessentiated ideas and his sophisticated arguments.”
Fontenelle was not destined to stop here in his intellectual developments; when, at forty years of age, he became perpetual secretary to the Academy of Sciences, he had already written his book on the _Pluralite des Mondes,_ the first attempt at that popularization of science which has spread so since then. “I believe more and more,” he said, “that there is a certain genius which has never yet been out of our Europe, or, at least, has not gone far out of it.” This genius, clear, correct, precise, the genius of method and analysis, the genius of Descartes, which was at a later period that of Buffon and of Cuvier, was admirably expounded and developed by Fontenelle for the use of the ignorant. He wrote for society, and not for scholars, of whose labors and discoveries he gave an account to society. His extracts from the labors of the Academy of Science and his eulogies of the Academicians are models of lucidness under an ingenious and subtle form, rendered simple and strong by dint of wit. “There is only truth that persuades,” he used to say, “and even without requiring to appear with all its proofs. It makes its way so naturally into the mind, that, when it is heard for the first time, it seems as if one were merely remembering.”
Equitable and moderate in mind, prudent and cold in temperament, Fontenelle passed his life in discussion without ever stumbling into disputes. “I am no theologian, or philosopher, or man of any denomination, of any sort whatever; consequently I am not at all bound to be right, and I can with honor confess that I was mistaken, whenever I am made to see it.” “How did you manage to keep so many friends without making one enemy?” he was asked in his old age. “By means of two maxims,” he answered: “Everything is possible; everybody may be right” (_tout le monde a raison_). The friends of Fontenelle were moderate like himself; impressed with his fine qualities, they pardoned his lack of warmth in his affections. “He never laughed,” says Madame Geoffrin, his most intimate friend. “I said to him one day, ‘Did you ever laugh, M. de Fontenelle?’ ‘No,’ he answered; ‘I never went ha! ha! ha!’ That was his idea of laughing; he just smiled at smart things, but he was a stranger to any strong feeling. He had never shed tears, he had never been in a rage, he had never run, and, as he never did anything from sentiment, he did not catch impressions from others. He had never interrupted anybody, he listened to the end without losing anything; he was in no hurry to speak, and, if you had been accusing against him, he would have listened all day without saying a syllable.”
The very courage and trustiness of Fontenelle bore this stamp of discreet moderation. When Abbe St. Pierre was excluded from the French Academy under Louis XV. for having dared to criticise the government of Louis XIV., one single ball in the urn protested against the unjust pressure exercised by Cardinal Fleury upon the society. They all asked one another who the rebel was; each defended himself against having voted against the minister’s order; Fontenelle alone kept silent; when everybody had exculpated himself, “It must be myself, then,” said Fontenelle half aloud.
So much cool serenity and so much taste for noble intellectual works prolonged the existence of Fontenelle beyond the ordinary limits; he was ninety-nine and not yet weary of life. “If I might but reach the strawberry-season once more!” he had said. He died at Paris on the 9th of January, 1759; with him disappeared what remained of the spirit and traditions of Louis XIV.’s reign. Montesquieu and Fontenelle were the last links which united the seventeenth century to the new era. In a degree as different as the scope of their minds, they both felt respect for the past, to which they were bound by numerous ties, and the boldness of their thoughts was frequently tempered by prudence. Though naturally moderate and prudent, Voltaire was about to be hurried along by the ardor of strife, by the weaknesses of his character, by his vanity and his ambition, far beyond his first intentions and his natural instincts. The flood of free-thinking had spared Montesquieu and Fontenelle; it was about to carry away Voltaire almost as far as Diderot.
[Illustration: Voltaire—-277]
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire was born at Paris on the 21st of November, 1694. “My dear father,” said a letter from a relative to his family in Poitou, “our cousins have another son, born three days ago; Madame Arouet will give me some of the christening sugar-plums for you. She has been very ill, but it is hoped that she is going on better; the infant is not much to look at, having suffered from a fall which his mother had.” M. Arouet, the father, of a good middle-class family, had been a notary at the Chatelet, and in 1701 became paymaster of fees (_payeur d’epices_) to the court of exchequer, an honorable and a lucrative post, which added to the easy circumstances of the family. Madame Arouet was dead when her youngest son was sent to the college of Louis-le-Grand, which at that time belonged to the Jesuits. As early as then little Arouet, who was weak and in delicate health, but withal of a very lively intelligence, displayed a freedom of thought and a tendency of irreverence which already disquieted and angered his masters. Father Lejay jumped from his chair and took the boy by the collar, exclaiming, “Wretch, thou wilt one of these days raise the standard of Deism in France!” Father Pallou, his confessor, accustomed to read the heart, said, as he shook his head, “This, child is devoured with a thirst for celebrity.”
Even at school and among the Jesuits, that passion for getting talked about, which was one of the weaknesses of Voltaire’s character, as well as one of the sources of his influence, was already to a certain extent gratified. The boy was so ready in making verses, that his masters themselves found amusement in practising upon his youthful talent. Little Arouet’s snuff box had been confiscated because he had passed it along from hand to, hand in class; when he asked for it back from Father Poree, who was always indulgent towards him, the rector required an application in verse. A quarter of an hour later the boy returned with his treasure in his possession, having paid its ransom thus:
“Adieu, adieu, poor snuff-box mine; Adieu; we ne’er shall meet again:
Nor pains, nor tears, nor prayers divine Will win thee back; my efforts are in vain! Adieu, adieu, poor box of mine;
Adieu, my sweet crowns’-worth of bane; Could I with money buy thee back once more, The treasury of Plutus I would drain. But ah! not he the god I must implore; To have thee back, I need Apollo’s vein. . . ‘Twixt thee and me how hard a barrier-line, To ask for verse! Ah! this is all my strain! Adieu, adieu, poor box of mine;
Adieu; we ne’er shall meet again!”
Arouet was still a child when a friend of his family took him to see Mdlle. Ninon de l’Enclos, as celebrated for her wit as for the irregularity of her life. “Abbe Chateauneuf took me to see her in my very tender youth,” says Voltaire; “I had done some verses, which were worth nothing, but which seemed very good for my age. She was then eighty-five. She was pleased to put me down in her will; she left me two thousand francs to buy books; her death followed close upon my visit and her will.”
Young Arouet was finishing brilliantly his last year of rhetoric, when John Baptist Rousseau, already famous, saw him at the distribution of prizes at the college. “Later on,” wrote Rousseau, in the thick of his quarrels with Voltaire, “some ladies of my acquaintance had taken me to see a tragedy at the Jesuits in August, 1710; at the distribution of prizes which usually took place after those representations, I observed that the same scholar was called up twice. I asked Father Tarteron, who did the honors of the room in which we were, who the young man was that was so distinguished amongst his comrades. He told me that it was a little lad who had a surprising turn for poetry, and proposed to introduce him to me; to which I consented. He went to fetch him to me, and I saw him returning a moment afterwards with a young scholar who appeared to me to be about sixteen or seventeen, with an ill-favored countenance, but with a bright and lively expression, and who came and shook hands with me with very good grace.”
Scarcely had Francois Arouet left college when he was called upon to choose a career. “I do not care for any but that of a literary man,” exclaimed the young fellow. “That,” said his father, “is the condition of a man who means to be useless to society, to be a charge to his family, and to die of starvation.” The study of the law, to which he was obliged to devote himself, completely disgusted the poet, already courted by a few great lords who were amused at his satirical vein; he led an indolent and disorderly life, which drove his father distracted; the latter wanted to get him a place. “Tell my father,” was the young man’s reply to the relative commissioned to make the proposal, “that I do not care for a position which can be bought; I shall find a way of getting myself one that costs nothing.” “Having but little property when I began life,” he wrote to M. d’Argenson, his sometime fellow-pupil, “I had the insolence to think that I should have got a place as well as another, if it were to be obtained by hard work and good will. I threw myself into the ranks of the fine arts, which always carry with them a certain air of vilification, seeing that they do not make a man king’s counsellor in his councils. You may become a master of requests with money; but you can’t make a poem with money, and I made one.”
This independent behavior and the poem on the _Construction du Choeur de Notre-Dame de Paris,_ the subject submitted for competition by the French Academy, did not prevent young Arouet from being sent by his father to Holland in the train of the Marquis of Chateauneuf, then French ambassador to the States General; he committed so many follies that on his return to France, M. Arouet forced him to enter a solicitor’s office. It was there that the poet acquired that knowledge of business which was useful to him during the whole course of his long life; he, however, did not remain there long: a satire upon the French Academy which had refused him the prize for poetry, and, later on, some verses as biting as they were disrespectful against the Duke of Orleans, twice obliged their author to quit Paris. Sent into banishment at Sully-sur-Loire, he there found partisans and admirers; the merry life that was led at the Chevalier Sully’s mitigated the hardships of absence from Paris. “Don’t you go publishing abroad, I beg,” wrote Arouet, nevertheless, to one of his friends, “the happiness of which I tell you in confidence: for they might perhaps leave me here long enough for me to become unhappy; I know my own capacity; I am not made to live long in the same place.”
A beautiful letter addressed to the Regent and disavowing all the satirical writings which had been attributed to him, brought Arouet back to Paris at the commencement of the year 1717; he had been enjoying it for barely a few months when a new satire, entitled _J’ai vu_ (I have seen), and bitterly criticising the late reign, engaged the attention of society, and displeased the Regent afresh. Arouet defended himself with just cause and with all his might against the charge of having written it. The Duke of Orleans one day met him in the garden of the Palais-Royal. “Monsieur Arouet,” said he, “I bet that I will make you see a thing you have never seen.” “What, pray, monseigneur?” “The Bastille.” “Ah! monseigneur, I will consider it seen.” Two days later, young Arouet was shut up in the Bastille.
I needs must go; I jog along in style, With close-shut carriage, to the royal pile Built in our fathers’ days, hard by St. Paul, By Charles the Fifth. 0 brethren, good men all, In no such quarters may your lot be cast! Up to my room I find my way at last A certain rascal with a smirking face Exalts the beauties of my new retreat, So comfortable, so compact, so neat. Says he, “While Phoebus runs his daily race, He never casts one ray within this place. Look at the walls, some ten feet thick or so; You’ll find it all the cooler here, you know.” Then, bidding me admire the way they close The triple doors and triple locks on those, With gratings, bolts and bars on every side, “It’s all for your security,” he cried. At stroke of noon some skilly is brought in; Such fare is not so delicate as thin. I am not tempted by this splendid food, But what they tell me is, “‘Twill do you good So eat in peace; no one will hurry you.” Here in this doleful den I make ado, Bastilled, imprisoned, cabined, cribbed, confined, Nor sleeping, drinking, eating-to my mind; Betrayed by every one, my mistress too! O Marc Rene! [M. d’Argenson] whom Censor Cato’s ghost Might well have chosen for his vacant post, O Marc Rene! through whom ’tis brought about That so much people murmur here below, To your kind word my durance vile I owe; May the good God some fine day pay you out!
Young Arouet passed eleven months in the Bastille; he there wrote the first part of the poem called _La Henriade,_ under the title of _La Ligue;_ when he at last obtained his release in April, 1718, he at the same time received orders to reside at Chatenay, where his father had a country house. It was on coming out of the Bastille that the poet took, from a small family-estate, that name of Voltaire which he was to render so famous. “I have been too unfortunate under my former name,” he wrote to Mdlle. du Noy er; “I mean to see whether this will suit me better.”
The players were at that time rehearsing the tragedy of _OEdipe,_ which was played on the 18th of November, 1718, with great success. The daring flights of philosophy introduced by the poet into this profoundly and terribly religious subject excited the enthusiasm of the roues; Voltaire was well received by the Regent, who granted him an honorarium. “Monseigneur,” said Voltaire, “I should consider it very kind if his Majesty would be pleased to provide henceforth for my board, but I beseech your Highness to provide no more for my lodging.” Voltaire’s acts of imprudence were destined more than once to force him into leaving Paris; he all his life preserved such a horror of prison, that it made him commit more than one platitude. “I have a mortal aversion for prison,” he wrote in 1734; once more, however, he was to be an inmate of the Bastille.
Launched upon the most brilliant society, everywhere courted and flattered, Voltaire was constantly at work, displaying the marvellous suppleness of his mind by shifting from the tragedies of _Artemise_ and _Marianne,_ which failed, to the comedy of _L’Indiscret,_ to numerous charming epistles, and lastly to the poem of _La Henriade,_ which he went on carefully revising, reading fragments of it as he changed his quarters from castle to castle. One day, however, some criticisms to which he was not accustomed angered him so much, that he threw into the fire the manuscript he held in his hand. “It is only worth burning, then,” he exclaimed in a rage. President Henault dashed at the papers. “I ran up and drew it out of the flames, saying that I had done more than they who did not burn the AEneid as Virgil had recommended; I had drawn out of the fire _La Henriade,_ which Voltaire was going to burn with his own hands.
[Illustration: The Rescue of “La Henriade.”—-283]
If I liked, I might ennoble this action by calling to mind that picture of Raphael’s at the Vatican which represents Augustus preventing Virgil from burning the AEneid; but I am not Augustus, and Raphael is no more.” Wholly indulgent and indifferent as might be the government of the Regent and of Dubois, it was a little scared at the liberties taken by Voltaire with the Catholic church. He was required to make excisions in order to get permission to print the poem; the author was here, there, and everywhere, in a great flutter and preoccupied with his literary, financial, and fashionable affairs. In receipt of a pension from the queen, and received as a visitor at La Source, near Orleans, by Lord Bolingbroke in his exile, every day becoming more brilliant and more courted, he was augmenting his fortune by profitable speculations, and appeared on the point of finding himself well off, when an incident, which betrayed the remnant still remaining of barbarous manners, occurred to envenom for a long while the poet’s existence. He had a quarrel at the Opera with Chevalier Rohan-Chabot, a court libertine, of little repute; the scene took place in the presence of Mdlle. Adrienne Lecouvreur; the great actress fainted they were separated. Two days afterwards, when Voltaire was dining at the Duke of Sully’s, a servant came to tell him that he was wanted at the door of the hotel; the poet went out without any suspicion, though he had already been the victim of several ambuscades. A coach was standing in the street, and he was requested to get in; at that instant two men, throwing themselves upon him and holding him back by his clothes, showered upon him a hailstorm of blows with their sticks. The Chevalier de Rohan, prudently ensconced in a second vehicle, and superintending the–execution of his cowardly vengeance, shouted to his servants, “Don’t hit him on the head; something good may come out of it.” When Voltaire at last succeeded in escaping from these miscreants to take refuge in Sully’s house, he was half dead.
Blows with a stick were not at that time an unheard-of procedure in social relations. “Whatever would become of us if poets had no shoulders!” was the brutal remark of the Bishop of Blois, M. de Caumartin. But the customs of society did not admit a poet to the honor of obtaining satisfaction from whoever insulted him. The great lords, friends of Voltaire, who had accustomed him to attention and flattery, abandoned him pitilessly in his quarrel with Chevalier de Rohan. “Those blows were well gotten and ill given,” said the Prince of Conti. That was all the satisfaction Voltaire obtained. “The poor victim shows himself as much as possible at court, in the city,” says the Marais news, “but nobody pities him, and those whom he considered his friends have turned their backs upon him.”
Voltaire was not of an heroic nature, but excess of rage and indignation had given him courage; he had scarcely ever had a sword in his hand; he rushed to the fencers’ and practised from morning till night, in order to be in a position to demand satisfaction. So much ardor disquieted Chevalier de Rohan and his family; his uncle, the cardinal, took precautions. The lieutenant of police wrote to the officer of the watch, “Sir, his Highness is informed that Chevalier de Rohan is going away to-day, and, as he might have some fresh affair with Sieur de Voltaire, or the latter might do something rash, his desire is for you to see that nothing comes of it.”
Voltaire anticipated the intentions of the lieutenant of police he succeeded in sending a challenge to Chevalier de Rohan; the latter accepted it for the next day; he even chose his ground: but before the hour fixed, Voltaire was arrested and taken to the Bastille; he remained there a month. Public opinion was beginning to pity him. Marshal Villars writes in his memoirs,–
“The chevalier was very much inconvenienced by a fall which did not admit of his handling a sword. He took the course of having a caning administered in broad day to Voltaire, who, instead of adopting legal proceedings, thought vengeance by arms more noble. It is asserted that he sought it diligently, but too indiscreetly. Cardinal Rohan asked M. le Duc to have him put in the Bastille: orders to that effect were given and executed, and the poor poet, after being beaten, was imprisoned into the bargain. The public, whose inclination is to blame everybody and everything, justly considered, in this case, that everybody was in the wrong; Voltaire, for having offended Chevalier de Rohan; the latter, for having dared to commit a crime worthy of death in causing a citizen to be beaten; the government, for not having punished a notorious misdeed, and for having put the beatee in the Bastille to tranquillize the beater.”
Voltaire left the Bastille on the 3d of May, 1726, and was accompanied by an exon to Calais, having asked as a favor to be sent to England; but scarcely had he set foot on English territory, scarcely had he felt himself free, when the recurring sense of outraged honor made him take the road back to France. “I confess to you, my dear Theriot,” he wrote to one of his friends, “that I made a little trip to Paris a short time ago. As I did not call upon you, you will easily conclude that I did not call upon anybody. I was in search of one man only, whom his dastardly instinct kept concealed from me, as if he guessed that I was on his track. At last the fear of being discovered made me depart more precipitately than I had come. That is the fact, my dear Theriot. There is every appearance of my never seeing you again. I have but two things to do with my life: to hazard it with honor, as soon as I can, and to end it in the obscurity of a retreat which suits my way of thinking, my misfortunes, and the knowledge I have of men.”
Voltaire passed three years in England, engaged in learning English and finishing _La Henriade,_ which he published by subscription in 1727. Touched by the favor shown by English society to the author and the poem, he dedicated to the Queen of England his new work, which was entirely consecrated to the glory of France; three successive editions were disposed of in less than three weeks. Lord Bolingbroke, having returned to England and been restored to favor, did potent service to his old friend, who lived in the midst of that literary society in which Pope and Swift held sway, without, however, relaxing his reserve with its impress of melancholy. “I live the life of a Bosicrucian,” he wrote to his friends, “always on the move and always in hiding.” When, in the month of March, 1729, Voltaire at last obtained permission to revisit France, he had worked much without bringing out anything. The riches he had thus amassed appeared ere long: before the end of the year 1731 he put _Brutus_ on the stage, and began his publication of the _Histoire de Charles XII.;_ he was at the same time giving the finishing touch to _Eriphyle_ and _La Mort de Caesar_. _Zaire,_ written in a few weeks, was played for the first time on the 13th of August, 1732; he had dedicated it to Mr. Falkner, an English merchant who had overwhelmed him with attentions during his exile. “My satisfaction grows as I write to tell you of it,” he writes to his friend Cideville in the fulness of joy: “never was a piece so well played as _Zaire_ at the fourth appearance. I very much wished you had been there; you would have seen that the public does not hate your friend. I appeared in a box, and the whole pit clapped their hands at me. I blushed, I hid myself; but I should be a humbug if I did not confess to you that I was sensibly affected. It is pleasant not to be dishonored in one’s own country.”
Voltaire had just inaugurated the great national tragedy of his country, as he had likewise given it the only national epopee attempted in France since the _Chansons de Geste;_ by one of those equally sudden and imprudent reactions to which he was always subject, it was not long before he himself damaged his own success by the publication of his _Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais_.
The light and mocking tone of these letters, the constant comparison between the two peoples, with many a gibe at the English, but always turning to their advantage, the preference given to the philosophical system of Newton over that of Descartes, lastly the attacks upon religion concealed beneath the cloak of banter–all this was more than enough to ruffle the tranquillity of Cardinal Fleury. The book was brought before Parliament; Voltaire was disquieted. “There is but one letter about Mr. Locke,” he wrote to M. de Cideville; “the only philosophical matter I have treated of in it is the little trifle of the immortality of the soul, but the thing is of too much consequence to be treated seriously. It had to be mangled so as not to come into direct conflict with our lords the theologians, gentry who so clearly see the spirituality of the soul that, if they could, they would consign to the flames the bodies of those who have a doubt about it.” The theologians confined themselves to burning the book; the decree of Parliament delivered on the 10th of June, 1734, ordered at the same time the arrest of the author; the bookseller was already in the Bastille. Voltaire was in the country, attending the Duke of Richelieu’s second marriage; hearing of the danger that threatened him, he took fright and ran for refuge to Bale. He soon left it to return to the castle of Cirey, to the Marchioness du Chatelet’s, a woman as learned as she was impassioned, devoted to literature, physics, and mathematics, and tenderly attached to Voltaire, whom she enticed along with her into the paths of science. For fifteen years Madame du Chatelet and Cirey ruled supreme over the poet’s life. There began a course of metaphysics, tales, tragedies; _Alzire, Merope, Mahomet,_ were composed at Cirey and played with ever increasing success. Pope Benedict XIV. had accepted the dedication of Mahomet, which Voltaire had addressed to him in order to cover the freedoms of his piece. Every now and then, terrified in consequence of some bit of anti-religious rashness, he took flight, going into hiding at one time to the court of Lorraine beneath the wing of King Stanislaus, at another time in Holland, at a palace belonging to the King of Prussia, the Great Frederick. Madame du Chatelet, as unbelieving as he at bottom, but more reserved in expression, often scolded him for his imprudence. “He requires every moment to be saved from himself,” she would say. “I employ more policy in managing him than the whole Vatican employs to keep all Christendom in its fetters.” On the appearance of danger, Voltaire ate his words without scruple; his irreligious writings were usually launched under cover of the anonymous. At every step, however, he was advancing farther and farther into the lists, and at the very moment when he wrote to Father La Tour, “If ever anybody has printed in my name a single page which could scandalize even the parish beadle, I am ready to tear it up before his eyes,” all Europe regarded him as the leader of the open or secret attacks which were beginning to burst not only upon the Catholic church, but upon the fundamental verities common to all Christians.
Madame du Chatelet died on the 4th of September, 1749, at Luneville, where she then happened to be with Voltaire. Their intimacy had experienced many storms, yet the blow was a cruel one for the poet; in losing Madame de Chatelet he was losing the centre and the guidance of his life. For a while he spoke of burying himself with Dom Calmet in the abbey of Senones; then he would be off to England; he ended by returning to Paris, summoning to his side a widowed niece, Madame Denis, a woman of coarse wit and full of devotion to him, who was fond of the drama and played her uncle’s pieces on the little theatre which he had fitted up in his rooms. At that time Oreste was being played at the _Comedie-Francaise;_ its success did not answer the author’s expectations. “All that could possibly give a handle to criticism,” says Marmontel, who was present, “was groaned at or turned into ridicule. The play was interrupted by it every instant. Voltaire came in, and, just as the pit were turning into ridicule a stroke of pathos, he jumped up, and shouted, ‘O, you barbarians; that is Sophocles!’ _Rome Sauvee_ was played on the stage of Sceaux, at the Duchess of Maine’s; Voltaire himself took the part of Cicero. Lekain, as yet quite a youth, and making his first appearance under the auspices of Voltaire, said of this representation, ‘I do not think it possible to hear anything more pathetic and real than M. de Voltaire; it was, in fact, Cicero himself thundering at the bar.'”
Despite the lustre of that fame which was attested by the frequent attacks of his enemies as much as by the admiration of his friends, Voltaire was displeased with his sojourn at Paris, and weary of the court and the men of letters. The king had always exhibited towards him a coldness which the poet’s adulation had not been able to overcome; he had offended Madame de Pompadour, who had but lately been well disposed towards him; the religious circle, ranged around the queen and the dauphin, was of course hostile to him. “The place of historiographer to the king was but an empty title,” he says himself; “I wanted to make it a reality by working at the history of the war of 1741; but, in spite of my work, Moncrif had admittance to his Majesty, and I had not.”
In tracing the tragic episodes of the war, Voltaire, set as his mind was on the royal favor, had wanted in the first place to pay homage to the friends he had lost. It was in the “eulogium of the officers who fell in the campaign of 1741” that he touchingly called attention to the memory of Vauvenargues. He, born at Aix on the 6th of August, 1715, died of his wounds, at Paris, in 1747. Poor and proud, resigning himself with a sigh to idleness and obscurity, the young officer had written merely to relieve his mind. His friends had constrained him to publish a little book, one only, the _Introduction de la connaissance de l’esprit humain, suivie de reflexions et de maximes_. Its success justified their affectionate hopes; delicate minds took keen delight in the first essays of Vauvenargues. Hesitating between religion and philosophy, with a palpable leaning towards the latter, ill and yet bravely bearing the disappointments and sufferings of his life, Vauvenargues was already expiring at thirty years of age, when Provence was invaded by the enemy. The humiliation of his country and the peril of his native province roused him from his tranquil melancholy. “All Provence is in arms,” he wrote to his friend Fauris de St. Vincent, “and here am I quite quietly in my chimney-corner; the bad state of my eyes and of my health is not sufficient excuse for me, and I ought to be where all the gentlemen of the province are. Send me word then, I beg, immediately whether there is still any employment to be had in our newly raised, levies, and whether I should be sure to be employed if I were to go to Provence.” Before his friend’s answer had reached Vauvenargues, the Austrians and the Piedmontese had been forced to evacuate Provence; the dying man remained in his chimney-corner, where he soon expired, leaving amongst the public, and still more amongst those who had known him personally, the impression of great promise sadly extinguished. “It was his fate,” says his faithful biographer, M. Gilbert, “to be always opening his wings and to be unable to take flight.”
Voltaire, quite on the contrary, was about to take a fresh flight. After several rebuffs and long opposition on the part of the eighteen ecclesiastics who at that time had seats in the French Academy, he had been elected to it in 1746. In 1750, he offered himself at one and the same time for the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Inscriptions; he failed in both candidatures. This mishap filled the cup of his ill-humor. For a long time past Frederick II. had been offering the poet favors which he had long refused. The disgust he experienced at Paris through his insatiable vanity made him determine upon seeking another arena; after having accepted a pension and a place from the King of Prussia, Voltaire set out for Berlin.
But lately allied to France, to which he was ere long to deal such heavy blows, Frederick II. was French by inclination, in literature and in philosophy; he was a bad German scholar; he always wrote and spoke in French, and his court was the resort of the cultivated French wits too bold in their views to live in peace at Paris. Maupertuis, La Mettrie, and the Marquis of Argens had preceded Voltaire to Berlin. He was received there with enthusiasm and as sovereign of the little court of philosophers. “A hundred and fifty thousand victorious soldiers,” he wrote in a letter to Paris, “no attorneys, opera, plays, philosophy, poetry, a hero who is a philosopher and a poet, grandeur and graces, grenadiers and muses, trumpets and violins, Plato’s symposium, society and freedom! Who would believe it? It is all true, however!” Voltaire found his duties as chamberlain very light. “It is Caesar, it is Marcus Aurelius, it is Julian, it is sometimes Abbe Chaulieu, with whom I sup; there is the charm of retirement, there is the freedom of the country, with all those little delights of life which a lord of a castle who is a king can procure for his very obedient humble servants and guests. My own duties are to do nothing. I enjoy my leisure. I give an hour a day to the King of Prussia to touch up a bit his works in prose and verse; I am his grammarian, not his chamberlain. The rest of the day is my own, and the evening ends with a pleasant supper. . . . Never in any place in the world was there more freedom of speech touching the superstitions of men, and never were they treated with more banter and contempt. God is respected, but all they who have cajoled men in His name are treated unsparingly.”
The coarseness of the Germans and the mocking infidelity of the French vied with each other in license. Sometimes Voltaire felt that things were carried rather far. “Here be we, three or four foreigners, like monks in an abbey,” he wrote; “please God the father abbot may content himself with making fun of us.”
Literary or philosophical questions already gave rise sometimes to disagreements. “I am at present correcting the second edition which the King of Prussia is going to publish of the history of his country,” wrote Voltaire; “fancy! in order to appear more impartial, he falls tooth and nail on his grandfather. I have lightened the blows as much as I could. I rather like this grandfather, because he displayed magnificence, and has left some fine monuments. I had great trouble about softening down the terms in which the grandson reproaches his ancestor for his vanity in having got himself made a king; it is a vanity from which his descendants derive pretty solid advantages, and the title is not at all a disagreeable one. At last I said to him, ‘It is your grandfather, it is not mine; do what you please with him,’ and I confined myself to weeding the expressions.”
Whilst Voltaire was defending the Great Elector against his successor, a certain coldness was beginning to slide into his relations with Maupertuis, president of the Academy founded by the king at Berlin. “Maupertuis has not easygoing springs,” the poet wrote to his niece; “he takes my dimensions sternly with his quadrant. It is said that a little envy enters into his calculations.” Already Voltaire’s touchy vanity was shying at the rivals he encountered in the king’s favor. “So it is known, then, by this time at Paris, my dear child,” he writes to his niece, “that we have played the Mort de Cesar at Potsdam, that Prince Henry is a good actor, has no accent, and is very amiable, and that this is the place for pleasure? All that is true . . . but . . . The king’s supper-parties are delightful; at them people talk reason, wit, science; freedom prevails thereat; he is the soul of it all; no ill temper, no clouds, at any rate no storms; my life is free and well occupied . . . but . . . Opera, plays, carousals, suppers at Sans- Souci, military manoeuvres, concerts, studies, readings . . but . . The city of Berlin, grand, better laid out than Paris; palaces, play-houses, affable parish priests, charming princesses, maids of honor beautiful and well made; the mansion of Madame de Tyrconnel always full, and sometimes too much so . . . but . . . but. . . . My dear child, the weather is beginning to settle down into a fine frost.”
The “frost” not only affected Voltaire’s relations with his brethren in philosophy, it reached even to the king himself. A far from creditable lawsuit with a Jew completed Frederick’s irritation. He forbade the poet to appear in his presence before the affair was over. “Brother Voltaire is doing penance here,” wrote the latter to the Margravine of Baireuth, the King of Prussia’s amiable sister he has a beast of a lawsuit with a Jew, and, according to the law of the Old Testament, there will be something more to pay for having been robbed. . . .” Frederick, on his side, writes to his sister, “You ask me what the lawsuit is in which Voltaire is involved with a Jew. It is a case of a rogue wanting to cheat a thief. It is intolerable that a man of Voltaire’s intellect should make so unworthy an abuse of it. The affair is in the hands of justice; and, in a few days, we shall know from the sentence which is the greater rogue of the two. Voltaire lost his temper, flew in the Jew’s face, and, in fact, behaved like a madman. I am waiting for this affair to be over to put his head under the pump or reprimand him severely (_lui laver la tete_), and see whether, at the age of fifty-six, one cannot make him, if not reasonable, at any rate less of a rogue.”
Voltaire settled matters with the Jew, at the same time asking the king’s pardon for what he called his giddiness. “This great poet is always astride of Parnassus and Rue Quincampoix,” said the Marquis of Argenson. Frederick had written him on the 24th of February, 1751, a severe letter, the prelude and precursor of the storms which were to break off before long the intimacy between the king and the philosopher. “I was very glad to receive you,” said the king; “I esteemed your wit, your talents, your acquirements, and I was bound to suppose that a man of your age, tired of wrangling with authors and exposing himself to tempests, was coming hither to take refuge as in a quiet harbor; but you at the very first, in a rather singular fashion, required of me that I should not engage Frerron to write me news. D’Arnauld did you some injuries; a generous man would have pardoned them; a vindictive man persecutes those towards whom he feels hatred. In fine, though D’Arnauld had done nothing so far as I was concerned, on your account he had to leave. You went to the Russian minister’s to speak to him about matters you had no business to meddle with, and it was supposed that I had given you instructions; you meddled in Madame de Bentinck’s affairs, which was certainly not in your province. Then you have the most ridiculous squabble in the world with that Jew. You created a fearful uproar all through the city. The matter of the Saxon bills is so well known in Saxony that grave complaints have been made to me about them. For my part, I kept peace in my household until your arrival, and I warn you that, if you are fond of intrigue and cabal, you have come to the wrong place. I like quiet and peaceable folks who do not introduce into their behavior the violent passions of tragedy; in case you can make up your mind to live as a philosopher, I shall be very glad to see you; but, if you give way to the impetuosity of your feelings and quarrel with everybody, you will do me no pleasure by coming hither and you may just as well remain at Berlin.”
Voltaire was not proud; he readily heaped apology upon apology; but he was irritable and vain; his ill-humor against Maupertuis came out in a pamphlet, as bitter as it was witty, entitled _La Diatribe du Docteur Akakia;_ copies were circulating in Berlin; the satire was already printed anonymously, when the Great Frederick suddenly entered the lists. He wrote to Voltaire, “Your effrontery astounds me after that which you have just done, and which is as clear as daylight. Do not suppose that you will make black appear white; when one does not see, it is because one does not want to see everything; but, if you carry matters to extremity, I will have everything printed, and it will then be seen that if your works deserve that statues should be raised to you, your conduct deserves handcuffs.”
Voltaire, affrighted, still protesting his innocence, at last gave up the whole edition of the diatribe, which was burned before his eyes in the king’s own closet. According to the poet’s wily habit, some copy or other had doubtless escaped the flames. Before long _Le Docteur Akakia_ appeared at Berlin, arriving modestly from Dresden by post; people fought for the pamphlet, and everybody laughed; the satire was spread over all Europe. In vain did Frederick have it burned on the Place d’Armes by the hands of the common hangman; he could not assuage the despair of Maupertuis. “To speak to you frankly,” the king at last wrote to the disconsolate president, “it seems to me that you take too much to heart, both for an invalid and a philosopher, an affair which you ought to despise. How prevent a man from writing, and how prevent him from denying all the impertinences he has uttered? I made investigations to find out whether any fresh satires had been sold at Berlin, but I heard of none; as for what is sold in Paris, you are quite aware that I have not charge of the police of that city, and that I am not master of it. Voltaire treats you more gently than I am treated by the gazetteers of Cologne and Lubeck, and yet I don’t trouble myself about it.”
Voltaire could no longer live at Potsdam or at Sans-Souci; even Berlin seemed dangerous: in a fit of that incurable perturbation which formed the basis of his character and made him commit so many errors, he had no longer any wish but to leave Prussia, only he wanted to go without embroiling himself with the king. “I sent the Solomon of the North,” he writes to Madame Denis on the 13th of January, 1753, “for his present, the cap and bells he gave me, with which you reproached me so much. I wrote him a very respectful letter, for I asked him for leave to go. What do you think he did? He sent me his great factotum Federshoff, who brought me back my toys; he wrote me a letter saying that he would rather have me to live with than Maupertuis. What is quite certain is, that I would rather not live with either one or the other.”
Frederick was vexed with Voltaire; he nevertheless found it difficult to give up the dazzling charm of his conversation. Voltaire was hurt and disquieted; he wanted to get away–the king, however, exercised a strong attraction over him. But in spite of mutual coquetting, making up, and protesting, the hour of separation was at hand; the poet was under pressure from his friends in France; in Berlin he had never completely neglected Paris. He had just published his _Siecle de Louis XIV.;_ he flattered himself with the hope that he might again appear at court, though the king had disposed of his place as historiographer in favor of Duclos. Frederick at last yielded; he was on the parade, Voltaire appeared there. “Ah! Monsieur Voltaire,” said the king, “so you really intend to go away?” “Sir, urgent private affairs, and especially my health, leave me no alternative.” “Monsieur, I wish you a pleasant journey.” Voltaire jumped into his carriage, and hurried to Leipsic; he thought himself free forever from the exactions and tyrannies of the King of Prussia.
The poet, according to his custom, had tarried on the way. He had passed more than a month at Gotha, being overwhelmed with attentions by the duke, and by the duchess, for whom he wrote the dry chronicle entitled _Les Annales de L’Empire_. He arrived at Frankfort on the 31st of May only: the king’s orders had arrived before him.
“Here is how this fine adventure came to pass,” says Voltaire. “There was at Frankfort one Freytag, who had been banished from Dresden, and had become an agent for the King of Prussia. . . . He notified me on behalf of his Majesty that I was not to leave Frankfort till I had restored the valuable effects I was carrying away from his Majesty. ‘Alack! sir, I am carrying away nothing from that country, if you please, not even the smallest regret. What, pray, are those jewels of the Brandenburg crown that you require?’ ‘It be, sir,’ replied Freytag, ‘the work of poesy of the king, my gracious master.’ ‘O! I will give him back his prose and verse with all my heart,’ replied I, ‘though, after all, I have more than one right to the work. He made me a present of a beautiful copy printed at his expense. Unfortunately this copy is at Leipsic with my other luggage.’ Then Freytag proposed to me to remain at Frankfort until the treasure which was at Leipsic should have arrived; and he signed an order for it.”
The volume which Frederick claimed, and which he considered it of so much importance to preserve from Voltaire’s indiscretions, contained amongst other things a burlesque and licentious poem, entitled the Palladium, wherein the king scoffed at everything and everybody in terms which he did not care to make public. He knew the reckless malignity of the poet who was leaving him, and he had a right to be suspicious of it; but nothing can excuse the severity of his express orders, and still less the brutality of his agents. The package had arrived; Voltaire, agitated, anxious, and ill, wanted to get away as soon as possible, accompanied by Madame Denis, who had just joined him. Freytag had no orders, and refused to let him go; the prisoner loses his head, he makes up his mind to escape at any price, he slips from the hotel, he thinks he is free, but the police of Frankfort was well managed. “The moment I was off, I was arrested, I, my secretary and my people; my niece is arrested; four soldiers drag her through the mud to a cheese-monger’s named Smith, who had some title or other of privy councillor to the King of Prussia; my niece had a passport from the King of France, and, what is more, she had never corrected the King of Prussia’s verses. They huddled us all into a sort of hostelry, at the door of which were posted a dozen soldiers; we were for twelve days prisoners of war, and we had to pay a hundred and forty crowns a day.”
[Illustration: Arrest of Voltaire—-298]
The wrath and disquietude of Voltaire no longer knew any bounds; Madame Denis was ill, or feigned to be; she wrote letter upon letter to Voltaire’s friends at the court of Prussia; she wrote to the king himself. The strife which had begun between the poet and the maladroit agents of the Great Frederick was becoming serious. “We would have risked our lives rather than let him get away,” said Freytag; “and if I, holding a council of war with myself, had not found him at the barrier, but in the open country, and he had refused to jog back, I don’t know that I shouldn’t have lodged a bullet in his head. To such a degree had I at heart the letters and writings of the king.”
Freytag’s zeal received a cruel rebuff: orders arrived to let the poet go. “I gave you no orders like that,” wrote Frederick, “you should never make more noise than a thing deserves. I wanted Voltaire to give up to you the key, the cross, and the volume of poems I had intrusted to him;, as soon as all that was given up to you I can’t see what earthly reason could have induced you to make this uproar.” At last, on the 6th of July, “all this affair of Ostrogoths and Vandals being over,” Voltaire left Frankfort precipitately. His niece had taken the road to Paris, whence she soon wrote to him, “There is nobody in France, I say nobody without exception, who has not condemned this violence mingled with so much that is ridiculous and cruel; it makes a deeper impression than you would believe. Everybody says that you could not do otherwise than you are doing, in resolving to meet with philosophy things so unphilosophical. We shall do very well to hold our tongues; the public speaks quite enough.” Voltaire held his tongue, according to his idea of holding his tongue, drawing, in his poem of _La Loi naturelle,_ dedicated at first to the margravine of Baireuth and afterwards to the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, a portrait of Frederick which was truthful and at the same time bitter:
“Of incongruities a monstrous pile, Calling men brothers, crushing them the while; With air humane, a misanthropic brute; Ofttimes impulsive, sometimes over-‘cute; Weak ‘midst his choler, modest in his pride; Yearning for virtue, lust personified; Statesman and author, of the slippery crew; My patron, pupil, persecutor too.”
Voltaire’s intimacy with the Great Frederick was destroyed it had for a while done honor to both of them; it had ended by betraying the pettinesses and the meannesses natural to the king as well as to the poet. Frederick did not remain without anxiety on the score of Voltaire’s rancor; Voltaire dreaded nasty diplomatic proceedings on the part of the king; he had been threatened with as much by Lord Keith, Milord Marechal, as he was called on the Continent from the hereditary title he had lost in his own country through his attachment to the cause of the Stuarts:–
“Let us see in what countries M. de Voltaire has not had some squabble or made himself many enemies,” said a letter to Madame Denis from the great Scotch lord, when he had entered Frederick’s service: “every country where the Inquisition prevails must be mistrusted by him; he would put his foot in it sooner or later. The Mussulmans must be as little pleased with his Mahomet as good Christians were. He is too old to go to China and turn mandarin; in a word, if he is wise, there is no place but France for him. He has friends there, and you will have him with you for the rest of his days; do not let him shut himself out from the pleasure of returning thither, for you are quite aware that, if he were to indulge in speech and epigrams offensive to the king my master, a word which the latter might order me to speak to the court of France would suffice to prevent M. de Voltaire from returning, and he would be sorry for it when it was too late.”
Voltaire was already in France, but he dared not venture to Paris. Mutilated, clumsy, or treacherous issues of the _Abrege de l’Histoire Universelle_ had already stirred the bile of the clergy; there were to be seen in circulation copies of _La Pucelle,_ a disgusting poem which the author had been keeping back and bringing out alternately for several years past. Voltaire fled from Colmar, where the Jesuits held sway, to Lyons, where he found Marshal Richelieu, but lately his protector and always his friend, who was repairing to his government of Languedoc. Cardinal Tencin refused to receive the poet, who regarded this sudden severity as a sign of the feelings of the court towards him. “The king told Madame de Pompadour that he did not want me to go to Paris; I am of his Majesty’s opinion, I don’t want to go to Paris,” wrote Voltaire to the Marquis of Paulmy. He took fright and sought refuge in Switzerland, where he soon settled on the Lake of Geneva, pending his purchase of the estate of Ferney in the district of Gex and that of Tourney in Burgundy. He was henceforth fixed, free to pass from France to Switzerland and from Switzerland to France. “I lean my left on Mount Jura,” he used to say, “my right on the Alps, and I have the beautiful Lake of Geneva in front of my camp, a beautiful castle on the borders of France, the hermitage of Delices in the territory of Geneva, a good house at Lausanne; crawling thus from one burrow to another, I escape from kings. Philosophers should always have two or three holes under ground against the hounds that run them down.”
The perturbation of Voltaire’s soul and mind was never stilled; the anxious and undignified perturbation of his outer life at last subsided; he left off trembling, and, in the comparative security which he thought he possessed, he gave scope to all his free-thinking, which had but lately been often cloaked according to circumstances. He had taken the communion at Colmar, to soften down the Jesuits; he had conformed to the rules of the convent of Senones, when he took refuge with Dom Calmet; at Delices he worked at the _Encyclopcedia,_ which was then being commenced by D’Alembert and Diderot, taking upon himself in preference the religious articles, and not sparing the creed of his neighbors, the pastors of Geneva, any more than that of the Catholic church. “I assure you that my friends and I will lead them a fine dance; they shall drink the cup to the very lees,” wrote Voltaire to D’Alembert. In the great campaign against Christianity undertaken by the philosophers, Voltaire, so long, a wavering ally, will henceforth fight in the foremost ranks; it is he who shouts to Diderot, “Squelch the thing (_Ecrasez l’infame_)!” The masks are off, and the fight is barefaced; the encyclopaedists march out to the conquest of the world in the name of reason, humanity, and free-thinking; even when he has ceased to work at the Encyclopaedia, Voltaire marches with them.
The _Essai sur l’Histoire generale et les Moeurs_ was one of the first broadsides of this new anti-religious crusade. “Voltaire will never write a good history,” Montesquieu used to say: “he is like the monks, who do not write for the subject of which they treat, but for the glory of their order: Voltaire writes for his convent.” The same intention betrayed itself in every sort of work that issued at that time from the hermitage of Delices, the poem on _Le Tremblement de Terre de Lisbonne,_ the drama of _Socrate,_ the satire of the _Pauvre Diable,_ the sad story of _Candide,_ led the way to a series of publications every day more and more violent against the Christian faith. The tragedy of _L’ Orphelin de la Chine_ and that of _Tancrede,_ the quarrels with Freron, with Lefranc de Pompignan, and lastly with Jean Jacques Rousseau, did not satiate the devouring activity of the Patriarch, as he was called by the knot of philosophers. Definitively installed at Ferney, Voltaire took to building, planting, farming. He established round his castle a small industrial colony, for whose produce he strove to get a market everywhere. “Our design,” he used to say, “is to ruin the trade of Geneva in a pious spirit.” Ferney, moreover, held grand and numerously attended receptions; Madame Denis played her uncle’s pieces on a stage which the latter had ordered to be built, and which caused as much disquietude to the austere Genevese as to Jean Jacques Rousseau. It was on account of Voltaire’s theatrical representations that Rousseau wrote his _Lettre centre les Spectacles_. “I love you not, sir,” wrote Rousseau to Voltaire: “you have done me such wrongs as were calculated to touch me most deeply. You have ruined Geneva in requital of the asylum you have found there.” Geneva was about to banish Rousseau before long, and Voltaire had his own share of responsibility in this act of severity so opposed to his general and avowed principles. Voltaire was angry with Rousseau, whom he accused of having betrayed the cause of philosophy; he was, as usual, hurried away by the passion of the moment, when he wrote, speaking of the exile, “I give you my word that if this blackguard (_polisson_) of a Jean Jacques should dream of coming (to Geneva), he would run great risk of mounting a ladder which would not be that of Fortune.” At the very same time Rousseau was saying, “What have I done to bring upon myself the persecution of M. de Voltaire? And what worse have I to fear from him? Would M. de Buffon have me soften this tiger thirsting for my blood? He knows very well that nothing ever appeases or softens the fury of tigers; if I were to crawl upon the ground before Voltaire, he would triumph thereat, no doubt, but he would rend me none the less. Basenesses would dishonor me, but would not save me. Sir, I can suffer, I hope to learn how to die, and he who knows how to do that has never need to be a dastard.”
Rousseau was high-flown and tragic; Voltaire was cruel in his contemptuous levity; but the contrast between the two philosophers was even greater in the depths of them than on. the surface. Rousseau took his own words seriously, even when he was mad, and his conduct was sure to belie them before long. He was the precursor of an impassioned and serious age, going to extremes in idea and placing deeds after words. In spite of occasional reticence dictated by sound sense, Voltaire had abandoned himself entirely in his old age to that school of philosophy, young, ardent, full of hope and illusions, which would fain pull down everything before it knew what it could set up, and the actions of which were not always in accordance with principles. “The men were inferior to their ideas.” President De Brosses was justified in writing to Voltaire, “I only wish you had in your heart a half-quarter of the morality and philosophy contained in your works.” Deprived of the counterpoise of political liberty, the emancipation of thought in the reign of Louis XV. had become at one and the same time a danger and a source of profound illusions; people thought that they did what they said, and that they meant what they wrote, but the time of actions and consequences had not yet come; Voltaire applauded the severities against Rousseau, and still he was quite ready to offer him an asylum at Ferney; he wrote to D’Alembert, “I am engaged in sending a priest to the galleys,” at the very moment when he was bringing eternal honor to his name by the generous zeal which led him to protect the memory and the family of the unfortunate people named Calas.
The glorious and bloody annals of the French Reformation had passed through various phases; liberty, always precarious, even under Henry IV., and whilst the Edict of Nantes was in force, and legally destroyed by its revocation, had been succeeded by periods of assuagement and comparative repose; in the latter part of Louis XV.’s reign, about 1760, fresh severities had come to overwhelm the Protestants. Modestly going about their business, silent and timid, as inviolably attached to the king as to their hereditary creed, several of them had undergone capital punishment. John Calas, accused of murdering his son, had been broken on the wheel at Toulouse; the reformers had been accustomed to these sombre dramas, but the spirit of the times had marched onward; ideas of justice, humanity, and liberty, sown broadcast by the philosophers, more imbued than they were themselves aware of with the holy influences of Christianity, had slowly and secretly acted upon men’s minds; executions which had been so frequent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries caused trouble and dismay in the eighteenth: in vain did the fanatical passions of the populace of Toulouse find an echo in the magistracy of that city: it was no longer considered a matter of course that Protestants should be guilty of every crime, and that those who were accused should not be at liberty to clear themselves. The philosophers had at first hesitated. Voltaire wrote to Cardinal Bernis, “Might I venture to entreat your eminence to be kind enough to tell me what I am to think about the frightful case of this Calas, broken on the wheel at Toulouse, on a charge of having hanged his own son? The fact is, they maintain here that he is quite innocent, and that he called God to witness it. . . . This case touches me to the heart; it saddens my pleasures, it taints them. Either the Parliament of Toulouse or the Protestants must be regarded with eyes of horror.” Being soon convinced that the Parliament deserved all his indignation, Voltaire did not grudge time, efforts, or influence in order to be of service to the unfortunate remnant of the Calas family. “I ought to look upon myself as in some sort a witness,” he writes: “several months ago Peter Calas, who is accused of having assisted his father and mother in a murder, was in my neighborhood with another of his brothers. I have wavered a long while as to the innocence of this family; I could not believe that any judges would have condemned to a fearful death an innocent father of a family. There is nothing I have not done to enlighten myself as to the truth. I dare to say that I am as sure of the innocence of this family as I am of my own existence.”
For three years, with a constancy which he often managed to conceal beneath an appearance of levity, Voltaire prosecuted the work of clearing the Calas. “It is Voltaire who is writing on behalf of this unfortunate family,” said Diderot to Mdlle. Voland: “O, my friend, what a noble work for genius! This man must needs have soul and sensibility; injustice must revolt him; he must feel the attraction of virtue. Why, what are the Calas to him? What can awaken his interest in them? What reason has he to suspend the labors he loves in order to take up their defence?” From the borders of the Lake of Geneva, from his solitude at Genthod, Charles Bonnet, far from favorable generally to Voltaire, writes to Haller, “Voltaire has done a work on tolerance which is said to be good; he will not publish it until after the affair of the unfortunate Calas has been decided by the king’s council. Voltaire’s zeal for these unfortunates might cover a multitude of sins; that zeal does not relax, and, if they obtain satisfaction, it will be principally to his championship that they will owe it. He receives much commendation for this business, and he deserves it fully.”
The sentence of the council cleared the accused and the memory of John Calas, ordering that their names should be erased and effaced from the registers, and the judgment transcribed upon the margin of the charge-sheet. The king at the same time granted Madame Calas and her children a gratuity of thirty-six thousand livres, a tacit and inadequate compensation for the expenses and losses caused them by the fanatical injustice of the Parliament of Toulouse. Madame Calas asked no more. “To prosecute the judges and the ringleaders,” said a letter to Voltaire from the generous advocate of the Calas, Elias de Beaumont, “requires the permission of the council, and there is great reason to fear that these petty plebeian kings appear powerful enough to cause the permission, through a weakness honored by the name of policy, to be refused.”
Voltaire, however, was triumphant. “You were at Paris,” he writes to M. de Cideville, “when the last act of the tragedy finished so happily. The piece is according to the rules; it is, to my thinking, the finest fifth act there is on the stage.” Henceforth he finds himself transformed into the defender of the oppressed. The Protestant Chaumont, at the galleys, owed to him his liberation; he rushed to Ferney to thank Voltaire. The pastor, who had to introduce him, thus described the interview to Paul Rabaut: “I told him that I had brought him a little fellow who had come to throw himself at his feet to thank him for having, by his intercession, delivered him from the galleys; that it was Chaumont whom I had left in his antechamber, and whom I begged him to permit me to bring in. At the name of Chaumont M. de Voltaire showed a transport of joy, and rang at once to have him brought in. Never did any scene appear to me more amusing and refreshing. ‘What,’ said he, ‘my poor, little, good fellow, they sent you to the galleys! What did they mean to do with you? What a conscience they must have to put in fetters and chain to the oar a man who had committed no crime beyond praying to God in bad French!’ He turned several times to me, denouncing persecution. He summoned into his room some persons who were staying with him, that they might share the joy he felt at seeing poor little Chaumont, who, though perfectly well attired for his condition, was quite astonished to find himself so well received. There was nobody, down to an ex-Jesuit, Father Adam, who did not come forward to congratulate him.”
Innate love of justice and horror of fanaticism had inspired Voltaire with his zeal on behalf of persecuted Protestants; a more personal feeling, a more profound sympathy, caused his grief and his dread when Chevalier de la Barre, accused of having mutilated a crucifix, was condemned, in 1766, to capital punishment; the scepticism of the eighteenth century had sudden and terrible reactions towards fanatical violence, as a protest and a pitiable struggle against the doubt which was invading it on all sides; the chevalier was executed; he was not twenty years old. He was an infidel and a libertine, like the majority of the young men of his day and of his age; the crime he expiated so cruelly was attributed to reading bad books, which had corrupted him. “I am told,” writes Voltaire to D’Alembert, “that they said at their examination that they had been led on to the act of madness they committed by the works of the _Encyclopaedists_. I can scarcely believe it; these madmen don’t read; and certainly no philosopher would have counselled profanation. The matter is important; try to get to the bottom of so odious and dangerous a report.” And, at another time, to Abbe Morellet, “You know that Councillor Pasquier said in full Parliament that the young men of Abbeville who were put to death had imbibed their impiety in the school and the works of the modern philosophers. . . . They were mentioned by name; it is a formal denunciation. . . . Wise men, under such terrible circumstances, should keep quiet and wait.”
Whilst keeping quiet, Voltaire soon grew frightened; he fancied himself arrested even on the foreign soil on which he had sought refuge. “My heart is withered,” he exclaims, “I am prostrated, I am tempted to go and die in some land where men are less unjust.” He wrote to the Great Frederick, with whom he had resumed active correspondence, asking him for an asylum in the town of Cleves, where he might find refuge together with the persecuted philosophers. His imagination was going wild. “I went to him,” says the celebrated physician, Tronchin, an old friend of his; “after I had pointed out to him the absurdity of his fearing that, for a mere piece of imprudence, France would come and seize an old man on foreign soil to shut him up in the Bastille, I ended by expressing my astonishment that a head like his should be deranged to the extent I saw it was. Covering his eyes with his clinched hands and bursting into tears, ‘Yes, yes, my friend, I am mad!’ was all he answered. A few days afterwards, when reflection had driven away fear, he would have defied all the powers of malevolence.”
Voltaire did not find his brethren in philosophy so frightened and disquieted by ecclesiastical persecution as to fly to Cleves, far from the “home of society,” as he had himself called Paris. In vain he wrote to Diderot, “A man like you cannot look save with horror upon the country in which you have the misfortune to live; you really ought to come away into a country where you would have entire liberty not only to express what you pleased, but to preach openly against superstitions as disgraceful as they are sanguinary. You would not be solitary there; you would have companions and disciples; you might establish a chair there, the chair of truth. Your library might go by water, and there would not be four leagues’ journey by land. In fine, you would leave slavery for freedom.”
All these inducements having failed of effect, Voltaire gave up the foundation of a colony at Cleves, to devote all his energy to that at Ferney. There he exercised signorial rights with an active and restless guardianship which left him no illusions and but little sympathy in respect of that people whose sacred rights he had so often proclaimed. “The people will always be sottish and barbarous,” he wrote to M. Bordes; “they are oxen needing a yoke, a goad, and a bit of hay.” That was the sum and substance of what he thought; he was a stern judge of the French character, the genuine and deep-lying resources of which he sounded imperfectly, but the infinite varieties of which he recognized. “I always find it difficult to conceive,” he wrote to M. de Constant, “how so agreeable a nation can at the same time be so ferocious, how it can so easily pass from the opera to the St. Bartholomew, be at one time made up of dancing apes and at another of howling bears, be so ingenious and so idiotic both together, at one time so brave and at another so dastardly.” Voltaire fancied himself at a comedy still; the hour of tragedy was at hand. He and his friends were day by day weakening the foundations of the edifice; for eighty years past the greatest minds and the noblest souls have been toiling to restore it on new and strong bases; the work is not finished, revolution is still agitating the depths of French society, which has not yet recovered the only proper foundation-stones for greatness and order amongst a free people.
Henceforth Voltaire reigned peacefully over his little empire at Ferney, courted from afar by all the sovereigns of Europe who made any profession of philosophy. “I have a sequence of four kings” (_brelan de roi quatrieme_), he would say with a laugh when he counted his letters from royal personages. The Empress of Russia, Catherine II., had dethroned, in his mind, the Great Frederick. Voltaire had not lived in her dominions and at her court; he had no grievance against her; his vanity was flattered by the eagerness and the magnificent attentions of the Semiramis of the North, as he called her. He even forgave her the most odious features of resemblance to the Assyrian princess. “I am her knight in the sight and in the teeth of everybody,” he wrote to Madame du Deffand; “I am quite aware that people bring up against her a few trifles on the score of her husband; but these are family matters with which I do not meddle, and besides it is not a bad thing to have a fault to repair. It is an inducement to make great efforts in order to force the public to esteem and admiration, and certainly her knave of a husband would never have done any one of the great things my Catherine does every day.” The portrait of the empress, worked in embroidery by herself, hung in Voltaire’s bedroom. In vain had he but lately said to Pastor Bertrand, “My dear philosopher, I have, thank God, cut all connection with kings;” instinct and natural inclination were constantly re-asserting themselves. Banished from the court of Versailles by the disfavor of Louis XV., he turned in despite towards the foreign sovereigns who courted him. “Europe is enough for me,” he writes; “I do not trouble myself much about the Paris clique, seeing that that clique is frequently guided by envy, cabal, bad taste, and a thousand petty interests which are always opposed to the public interest.”
Voltaire, however, returned to that Paris in which he was born, in which he had lived but little since his early days, to which he belonged by the merits as well as the defects of his mind, and in which he was destined to die. In spite of his protests about his being a rustic and a republican, he had never allowed himself to slacken the ties which united him to his Parisian friends; the letters of the patriarch of Ferney circulated amongst the philosophical fraternity; they were repeated in the correspondence of Grimm and Diderot with foreign princes; from his splendid retreat at Ferney he cheered and excited the literary zeal and often the anti-religious ardor of the _Encyclopaedists_. He had, however, ceased all working connection with that great work since it had been suspended and afterwards resumed at the orders and with the permission of government. The more and more avowed materialistic theories revolted his shrewd and sensible mind; without caring to go to the bottom of his thought and contemplate its consequences, he clung to the notion of Providence as to a waif in the great shipwreck of positive creeds; he could not imagine
“This clock without a Maker could exist.”
It is his common sense, and not the religious yearnings of his soul, that makes him write in the poem of La Loi naturelle,–
O God, whom men ignore, whom everything reveals, Hear Thou the latest words of him who now appeals; ‘Tis searching out Thy law that hath bewildered me; My heart may go astray, but it is full of Thee.
When he was old and suffering, he said to Madame Necker, in one of those fits of melancholy to which he was subject, “The thinking faculty is lost just like the eating, drinking, and digesting faculties. The marionettes of Providence, in fact, are not made to last so long as It.” In his dying hour Voltaire was seen showing more concern for terrestrial scandals than for the terrors of conscience, crying aloud for a priest, and, with his mouth full of the blood he spat, still repeating in a half whisper, “I don’t want to be thrown into the kennel.” A sad confession of the insufficiency of his convictions and of the inveterate levity of his thoughts; he was afraid of the judgment of man without dreading the judgment of God. Thus was revealed the real depth of an infidelity of which Voltaire himself perhaps had not calculated the extent and the fatal influences.
Voltaire was destined to die at Paris; there he found the last joys of his life and there he shed the last rays of his glory. For the twenty- seven years during which he had been away from it he had worked much, written much, done much. Whilst almost invariably disavowing his works, he had furnished philosophy with pointed and poisoned weapons against religion; he had devoted to humanity much time and strength; one of the last delights he had tasted was the news of the decree which cleared the memory of M. de Lally; he had received into his house, educated and found a husband for the grand-niece of the great Corneille; he had applied the inexhaustible resources of his mind at one time to good and at another to evil, with almost equal ardor; he was old, he was ill, yet this same ardor still possessed him when he arrived at Paris on the 10th of February, 1778. The excitement caused by his return was extraordinary. “This new prodigy has stopped all other interest for some time,” writes Grimm; it has put an end to rumors of war, intrigues in civil life, squabbles at court. Encyclopeadic pride appeared diminished by half, the Sorbonne shook all over, the Parliament kept silence; all the literary world is moved, all Paris is ready to fly to the idol’s feet.” So much attention and so much glory had been too much for the old man. Voltaire was dying; in his fright he had sent for a priest and had confessed; when he rose from his bed by a last effort of the marvellous elasticity, inherent in his body and his mind, he resumed for a while the course of his triumphs. “M. de Voltaire has appeared for the first time at the Academy and at the play; he found all the doors, all the approaches to the Academy besieged by a multitude which only opened slowly to let him, pass and then rushed in immediately upon his footsteps with repeated plaudits and acclamations. The Academy came out into the first room to meet him, an honor it had never yet paid to any of its members, not even to the foreign princes who had deigned to be present at its meetings. The homage he received at the Academy was merely the prelude to that which awaited him at the National theatre. As soon as his carriage was seen at a distance, there arose a universal shout of joy. All the curb-stones, all the barriers, all the windows were crammed with spectators, and, scarcely was the carriage stopped, when people were already on the imperial and even on the wheels to get a nearer view of the divinity. Scarcely had he entered the house when Sieur Brizard came up with a crown of laurels, which Madame de Villette placed upon the great man’s head, but which he immediately took off, though the public urged him to keep it on by clapping of hands and by cheers which resounded from all corners of the house with such a din as never was heard.
“All the women stood up. I saw at one time that part of the pit which was under the boxes going down on their knees, in despair of getting a sight any other way. The whole house was darkened with the dust raised by the ebb and flow of the excited multitude. It was not without difficulty that the players managed at last to begin the piece. It was _Irene,_ which was given for the sixth time. Never had this tragedy been better played, never less listened to, never more applauded. The illustrious old man rose to thank the public, and, the moment afterwards, there appeared on a pedestal in the middle of the stage a bust of this great man, and the actresses, garlands and crowns in hand, covered it with laurels; M. de Voltaire seemed to be sinking beneath the burden of age and of the homage with which he had just been overwhelmed. He appeared deeply affected, his eyes still sparkled amidst the pallor of his face, but it seemed as if he breathed no longer save with the consciousness of his glory. The people shouted, ‘Lights! lights! that everybody may see him!’ The coachman was entreated to go at a walk, and thus he was accompanied by cheering and the crowd as far as Pont Royal.”
Thus is described in the words of an eye-witness the last triumph of an existence that had been one of ceaseless agitation, owing to Voltaire himself far more than to the national circumstances and events of the time at which he lived. His anxious vanity and the inexhaustible movement of his mind had kept him constantly fluctuating between alternations of intoxication and despair; he had the good fortune to die at the very pinnacle of success and renown, the only immortality he could comprehend or desire, at the outset of a new and hopeful reign; he did not see, he had never apprehended the terrible catastrophe to which he had been thoughtlessly contributing for sixty years. A rare piece of good fortune and one which might be considered too great, if the limits of eternal justice rested upon earth and were to be measured by our compass.
Voltaire’s incessant activity bore many fruits which survived him; he contributed powerfully to the triumph of those notions of humanity, justice, and freedom, which, superior to his own ideal, did honor to the eighteenth century; he became the model of a style, clear, neat, brilliant, the natural exponent of his own mind, far more than of the as yet confused hopes and aspirations of his age; he defended the rights of common sense, and sometimes withstood the anti-religious passion of his friends, but he blasted both minds and souls with his sceptical gibes; his bitter and at the same time temperate banter disturbed consciences which would have been revolted by the materialistic doctrines of the Encyclopaedists; the circle of infidelity widened under his hands; his disciples were able to go beyond him on the fatal path he had opened to them. Voltaire has remained the true representative of the mocking and stone-flinging phase of free-thinking, knowing nothing of the deep yearnings any more than of the supreme wretchlessness of the human soul, which it kept imprisoned within the narrow limits of earth and time. At the outcome from the bloody slough of the French Revolution and from the chaos it caused in men’s souls, it was the infidelity of Voltaire which remained at the bottom of the scepticism and moral disorder of the France of our day. The demon which torments her is even more Voltairian than materialistic.
Other influences, more sincere and at the same time more dangerous, were simultaneously undermining men’s minds. The group of Encyclopaedists, less prudent and less temperate than Voltaire, flaunted openly the flag of revolt. At the head marched Diderot, the most daring of all, the most genuinely affected by his own ardor, without perhaps being the most sure of his ground in his negations. His was an original and exuberant nature, expansively open to all new impressions. “In my country,” he says, “we pass within twenty-four hours from cold to hot, from calm to storm, and this changeability of climate extends to the persons. Thus, from earliest infancy, they are wont to shift with every wind. The head of a Langrois stands on his shoulders like a weathercock on the top of a church-steeple; it is never steady at one point, and, if it comes round again to that which it had left, it is not to stop there. As for me, I am of my country; only residence of the capital and constant application have corrected me a little.”
[Illustration: Diderot—-314]
Narrow circumstances had their share in the versatility of Diderot’s genius as well as in the variety of his labors. Son of a cutler at Langres, a strict and virtuous man, Denys Diderot, born in 1715, had at first been intended by his father for the church. He was educated at Harcourt College, and he entered an attorney’s office. The young man worked incessantly, but not a law-book did he open. “What do you mean to be, pray?” the lawyer asked him one day; “do you think of being an attorney?” “No.” “A barrister?” “No.” “A doctor?” “No more than the rest.” “What then?” “Nothing at all. I like study, I am very happy, very contented, I ask no more.” Diderot’s father stopped the allowance he had been making his son, trusting thus to force him to choose a profession. But the young man gave lessons for a livelihood.
“I know a pretty good number of things,” he wrote towards the end of his life, “but there is scarcely a man who doesn’t know his own thing better than I do. This mediocrity in every sort is the consequence of insatiable curiosity and of means so small, that they never permitted me to devote myself to one single branch of human knowledge. I have been forced all my life to follow pursuits for which I was not adapted, and to leave on one side those for which I had a call from inclination.” Before he was thirty years old, and without any resource but his lessons and the work of every sort he did for third parties, Diderot married; he had not asked the consent of his parents, but this did not prevent him from saddling them before long with his wife and child. “She started yesterday,” he writes quite simply to his father, “she will be with you in three days; you can say anything you like to her, and when you are tired of her, you can send her back.” Diderot intended to be free at any price, and he threw off, one after another, the fetters he had forged for himself, not without remorse, however, and not without acknowledging that he was thus wanting to all natural duties. “What can you expect,” he would exclaim, “of a man who has neglected wife and daughter, got into debt, given up being husband and father?”
Diderot never neglected his friends; amidst his pecuniary embarrassments, when he was reduced to coin his brain for a livelihood, his labor and his marvellous facility were always at the service of all. It was to satisfy the requirements of a dangerous fair friend that he wrote his _Pensees philosophiques,) the sad tale of the _Bijoux indiscrets_ and the _Lettre sur les Aveugles,_ those early attacks upon religious faith which sent him to pass a few months in prison at the Castle of Vincennes. It was to oblige Grimm that he for the first time gave his mind to painting, and wrote his _Salons,_ intended to amuse and instruct the foreign princes. “A pleasure which is only for myself affects me but slightly and lasts but a short time,” he used to say; “it is for self and friends that I read, reflect, write, meditate, hear, look, feel. In their absence, my devotion towards them refers everything to them. I am always thinking of their happiness. Does a beautiful line strike me, they shall know it. Have I stumbled upon a beautiful trait, I make up my mind to communicate it to them. Have I before my eyes some enchanting scene; unconsciously, I meditate an account of it for them. To them I have dedicated the use of all my senses and of all my faculties, and that perhaps is the reason why everything is exaggerated, everything is embellished a little in my imagination and in my talk; and they sometimes reproach me with this, the ingrates!”
It was, further, in conjunction with his friends and in community of ideas that Diderot undertook the immense labor of the _Encyclopaedia_. Having, in the first instance, received a commission from a publisher to translate the English collection of [Ephraim] Chambers, Diderot was impressed with a desire to unite in one and the same collection all the efforts and all the talents of his epoch, so as to render joint homage to the rapid progress of science. Won over by his enthusiasm, D’Alembert consented to share the task; and he wrote the beautiful exposition in the introduction. Voltaire sent his articles from Delices. The Jesuits had proposed to take upon themselves a certain number of questions, but their co-operation was declined: it was a monument to philosophy that the Encyclopaedists aspired to raise; the clergy were in commotion at seeing the hostile army, till then uncertain and unbanded, rally organized and disciplined around this vast enterprise. An early veto, soon, however, taken off, compelled the philosophers to a certain moderation; Voltaire ceased writing for the _Encyclopaedia;_ it was not sufficiently free-going for him. “You admit articles worthy of the Trevoux journal,” he said to D’Alembert. New severities on the part of the Parliament and the grand council dealt a blow to the philosophers before long: the editors’ privilege was revoked. Orders were given to seize Diderot’s papers. Lamoignon de Malesherbes, who was at that time director of the press, and favorable to freedom without ever having abused it in thought or action, sent him secret warning. Diderot ran home in consternation. “What’s to be done?” he cried; “how move all my manuscripts in twenty- four hours? I haven’t time even to make a selection. And, above all, where find people who would and can take charge of them safely?” “Send them all to me,” replied M. de Malesherbes; “nobody will come thither to look for them.”
Feeble governments are ill served even by their worthiest servants; the severities ordered against the _Encyclopaedia_ did not stop its publication; D’Alembert, however, weary of the struggle, had ceased to take part in the editorship. Naturally cool and moderate, when it was nothing to do with Mdlle. de Lespinasse, the great affection of his life, the illustrious geometer was content with a little. “Twelve hundred livres a year are enough for me,” he wrote to the Great Frederick who was pressing him to settle in his dominions. “I will not go and reap the succession to Maupertuis during his lifetime. I am overlooked by government, just as so many others by Providence; persecuted as much as anybody can be, if some day I have to fly my country, I will simply ask Frederick’s permission to go and die in his dominions, free and poor.”
[Illustration: Alembert—-317]
Frederick II. gave D’Alembert a pension; it had but lately been Louis XIV. who thus lavished kindnesses on foreign scholars: he made an offer to the Encyclopaedists to go and finish their vast undertaking at Berlin. Catherine II. made the same offers, asking D’Alembert, besides, to take charge of the education of her son. “I know your honesty too well,” she wrote, “to attribute your refusals to vanity; I know that the cause is merely love of repose in order to cultivate literature and friendship. But what is to prevent your coming with all your friends? I promise you and them too all the comforts and every facility that may depend upon me; and perchance you will find more freedom and repose than you have at home. You do not yield to the entreaties of the King of Prussia, and to the gratitude you owe him, it is true, but then he has no son. I confess that I have my son’s education so much at heart, and that you are so necessary to me, that perhaps I press you too much. Pardon my indiscretion for the reason’s sake, and rest assured that it is esteem which has made me so selfish.”
D’Alembert declined the education of the hereditary Grand Duke, just as he had declined the presidency of the Academy at Berlin; an infidel and almost a materialist by the geometer’s rule, who knows no power but the laws of mathematics, he did not carry into anti-religious strife the bitterness of Voltaire, or the violence of Diderot. “Squelch the thing! you are always repeating to me,” he said to Voltaire on the 4th of May, 1762. “Ah! my good friend, let it go to rack and ruin of itself, it is hurrying thereto faster than you suppose.” More and more absorbed by pure science, which he never neglected save for the French Academy, whose perpetual secretary he had become, D’Alembert left to Diderot alone the care of continuing the _Encyclopaedia_. When he died, in 1783, at fifty-six years of age, the work had been finished nearly twenty years. In spite of the bad faith of publishers, who mutilated articles to render them acceptable, in spite of the condemnation of the clergy and the severities of the council, the last volumes of the _Encyclopaedia_ had appeared in 1765.
This immense work, unequal and confused as it was, a medley of various and often ill-assorted elements, undertaken for and directed to the fixed end of an aggressive emancipation of thought, had not sufficed to absorb the energy and powers of Diderot. “I am awaiting with impatience the reflections of _Pantophile Diderot on Tancrede,_” wrote Voltaire: “everything is within the sphere of activity of his genius: he passes from the heights of metaphysics to the weaver’s trade, and thence he comes to the stage.”
The stage, indeed, occupied largely the attention of Diderot, who sought to introduce reforms, the fruit of his own thought as well as of imitation of the Germans, which he had not perhaps sufficiently considered. For the classic tragedies, the heritage of which Voltaire received from the hands of Racine, Diderot aspired to substitute the natural drama. His two attempts in that style, _Le Pere de Famille_ and _Le Fils natural,_ had but little success in France, and contributed to develop in Germany the school already founded by Lessing. An excess of false sensibility and an inflation of expression had caused certain true ideas to fall flat on the French stage.
“You have the inverse of dramatic talent,” said Abbe Arnauld to Diderot; “the proper thing is to transform one’s self into all the characters, and you transform all the characters into yourself.” The criticism did Diderot wrong: he had more wits than his characters, and he was worth more at bottom than those whom he described. Carried away by the richness as well as the unruliness of his mind, destitute as he was of definite and fixed principles, he recognized no other moral law than the natural impulse of the soul. “There is no virtue or vice,” he used to say, “but innate goodness or badness.” Certain religious cravings, nevertheless, sometimes: asserted themselves in his conscience: he had. a glimmering perception of the necessity for a higher rule and law. “O God, I know not whether Thou art,” he wrote in his _Interpretation de la Nature,_ but I will think as if Thou didst see into my soul, I will act as if I were in Thy presence.”
A strange illusion on the part of the philosopher about the power of ideas as well as about the profundity of evil in the human heart! Diderot fancied he could regulate his life by a perchance, and he was constantly hurried away by the torrent of his passion into a violence of thought and language foreign to his natural benevolence. It was around his name that the philosophic strife had waxed most fierce: the active campaign undertaken by his friends to open to him the doors of the French Academy remained unsuccessful. “He has too many enemies,” said Louis XV. “his election shall not be sanctioned.” Diderot did not offer himself; he set out for St. Petersburg; the Empress Catherine had loaded him with kindnesses. Hearing of the poverty of the philosopher who was trying to sell his library to obtain a dower for his daughter, she bought the books, leaving the enjoyment of them to Diderot, whom she appointed her librarian, and, to secure his maintenance in advance, she had a sum of fifty thousand livres remitted to him. “So here I am obliged, in conscience, to live fifty years,” said Diderot.
[Illustration: Diderot and Catherine II—-321]
He passed some months in Russia, admitted several hours a day to the closet of the empress, chatting with a frankness and a freedom which sometimes went to the extent of license. Catherine II. was not alarmed. “Go on,” she would say; amongst men anything is allowable.” When the philosopher went away, he shed hot tears, and “so did she, almost,” he declares. He refused to go to Berlin; absolute power appeared to him more arbitrary and less indulgent in the hands of Frederick than with Catherine. “It is said that at Petersburg Diderot is considered a tiresome reasoner,” wrote the King of Prussia to D’ Alembert in January, 1774; “he is incessantly harping on the same things. All I know is that I couldn’t stand the reading of his, books, intrepid reader as I am; there is a self-sufficient tone and an arrogance in them which revolts my sense of freedom.” The same sense of freedom which the king claimed for himself whilst refusing it to the philosopher, the philosopher, in his turn, refused to Christians not less intolerant than he. The eighteenth century did not practise on its own account that respect for conscience which it, nevertheless, powerfully and to its glory promoted.
Diderot died on the 29th of July, 1784, still poor, an invalid for some time past, surrounded to the end by his friends, who rendered back to him that sincere and devoted affection which he made the pride of his life. Hearing of his sufferings from Grimm, the Empress Catherine had hired a furnished apartment for him; he had just installed himself in it when he expired; without having retracted any one of his works, nearly all published under the veil of the anonymous, he was, nevertheless, almost reconciled with the church, and was interred quietly in the chapel of the Virgin at St. Roch. The charm of his character had often caused people to forget his violence, which he himself no longer remembered the next day. “I should like to know this hot-headed metaphysician,” was the remark made to Buffon by President De Brosses, who happened to be then at Paris; and he afterwards added,
“He is a nice fellow, very pleasant, very amiable, a great philosopher, a mighty arguer, but a maker of perpetual digressions. Yesterday he made quite five and twenty between nine o’clock and one, during which time he remained in my room. O, how much more lucid is Buffon than all those gentry!”
The magistrate’s mind understood and appreciated the great naturalist’s genius. Diderot felt in his own fashion the charm of nature, but, as was said by Chevalier Chastellux, “his ideas got drunk and set to work chasing one another.” The ideas of Buffon, on the other hand, came out in the majestic order of a system under powerful organization, and informed as it were with the very secrets of the Creator. “The general