Voltaire.
(From the statue by Houdon in the foyer of the Comédie Française.)

FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS

"Dans la cour du Palais, je naquis ton voisin," wrote Voltaire to Boileau, in one of those familiar rhymed letters that soften the austere rhetoric of the French verse of that day. The place of Voltaire's birth, nearly sixty years after that of Boileau, was in the same Street of Jerusalem, at its corner with the Street of Nazareth, and it was only thus as a baby that he came ever in touch with the Holy Land. On November 22, 1694, the day after his birth, he was carried across the river to Saint-André-des-Arts—no one knows why his baptism was not in the island church of the parish—and there christened François-Marie Arouet. His earlier years were passed in the house of Boileau's nephew Dongois, whose airs of importance did not escape the keen infant eyes, as we have seen in the same letter in verse in our preceding chapter. Then he was sent to Lycée Louis-le-Grand, whither we have gone with young Poquelin, seventy years earlier. The college stands in its new stone on its old site in widened Rue Saint-Jacques.

We hear of no break in the tranquil course of young Arouet's studies, beyond the historic scene of his presentation to Mlle. Ninon de Lenclos at her home in the Marais, to which we shall go in a later chapter. This was in 1706, when she owned to ninety years of age at least, and she was flattered by the visit of the youth of twelve, and by the verse he wrote for her birthday. Dying in that year, she left a handsome sum to her juvenile admirer, to be spent for books. So, "secondé de Ninon, dont je fus légataire," the lad was strengthened in his inclination for the career of literature he had already planned for himself, and in his disinclination for the legal career planned for him by his father. The elder Arouet was a flourishing notary—among his clients was the Boileau family—who considered his own the only profession really respectable. He placed his boy, the college days being done, with one Maître Alain, whose office was near Place Maubert, between Rues de la Bucherie and Galande, a quarter crowded then with notaries and advocates, now all swept into limbo. But young Arouet spent too many of his days and nights with the congenial comrades that met in the Temple; "an advanced and dangerous" troop of swells and wits and pen-workers, light-heartedly bent on fun, amid the general gloom brought by Marlborough's victories, and by Madame de Maintenon's persistence in making Paris pious. Father Arouet sent his son away to The Hague; the first of his many journeys, enforced and voluntary. When allowed to return in 1715, he lost no time in hunting up his old associates; and soon, stronger hands than those of his father settled him in the Bastille, in punishment for verse, not written by him, satirizing the Regent and his daughter, Duchesse de Berri. There he spent his twenty-third year, utilizing his leisure to plan his "Henriade," and to finish his "Œdipe." When set free, he came out as Voltaire. Whether he took this new name from a small estate of his mother, or whether it was an anagram of Arouet fils, is not worth the search; enough for us that it is the name of him, who was to become, as John Morley rightly says, "the very eye of eighteenth-century illumination," and to whom we may apply his own words, used magnanimously of his famous contemporary, Montesquieu; that humanity had lost its title-deeds, and he had recovered them.

Once again in the world, he produced his "Œdipe" in 1718, with an immediate and resounding success, which was not won by his succeeding plays between 1720 and 1724. It was during this period that he spasmodically disappeared from Paris, reappearing at Brussels, Utrecht, The Hague; "jouant à l'envoyé secret," as was his mania then and in later years. During one of these flittings as an ambassador's ghost, he met Rousseau, and they were close friends until the day when Rousseau, showing to Voltaire his "Letter to Posterity," was told that it would never reach its address! That gibe made them sworn enemies. In Paris, during these years, Voltaire had no settled home. We have seen him in the salon of Mlle. Lecouvreur, in Rue Visconti, and we have seen him there, a sincere mourner at her death-bed. It has been told in an earlier chapter, how that fine creature had sat by Voltaire's sick-bed, careless of her own danger from the small-pox, with which he was stricken in November, 1723. He frequented many haunts of the witty and the wicked during these years, and a historic scene in one of these has been put on canvas by Mr. Orchardson. One evening in the year 1725, Voltaire was a saucy guest at the table of the Duc de Sully, descendant of Henri IV.'s great minister, in the noble mansion in Rue Saint-Antoine, to be visited by us later. On going out, he was waylaid and beaten by the lackeys of the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, who desired to impress by cudgels the warning that, while princes are willing to be amused at the table where sit "only princes and poets," the poets must not presume on the privilege. In the painting, Voltaire reappears in the room to the remaining guests, dishevelled and outraged. Later he challenged Rohan, whose reply came in an order of committal to the Bastille. After two weeks in a cell, Voltaire's request to go to England in exile was gladly accorded by the government.

We all know well the Voltaire of an older day, in his statues beside the Institute and within that building, beside the Panthéon, in Square Monge, and in the foyer of the Théâtre Français. To see him at this younger day, we must turn into the court-yard of the Mairie of the Ninth Arrondissement at No. 6 Rue Drouot—an ancient and attractive family mansion. In the centre of the court is a modern bronze, showing "the ape of genius" at the age of twenty-five, a dapper creature with head perked up and that complacent smile so marked in all his portraits. This smirk may be due less to self-satisfaction than to that physical peculiarity, claimed by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in his own case, which is caused by the congenital shortening of the levator muscles of the mouth. The statue's right hand rests jauntily on the hip, in the left hand is a book, and the left skirt of the long coat is blown back, showing the sword that was worn by young philosophers who would be young bloods. The pedestal holds two bas-reliefs; the youth in Ninon's salon, the patriarch at Ferney, and cut in it are his words: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

During his years in England, Voltaire made acquaintance with all the notable men of letters then living, and with William Shakespeare in his works. In them he tolerantly found much merit, but always styled their author a barbarian. Those barbarisms and savageries he civilized and smoothed to his pattern, for his "Brutus" is an unconscious echo of "Julius Cæsar," his "Zaïre" a shadow of "Othello." He refused to call on Wycherly "the gentleman," as Wycherly insisted, but was glad to meet Wycherly the playwright. Nor did Voltaire turn his back on men and women of fashion, but used them so cleverly as to enable him to carry home to France a small fortune, from the subscriptions to his English edition of the "Henriade." He was shrewd in money matters, and a successful speculator for many years. We first hear of him again in Paris in 1729, getting army contracts and making money in queer ways. Yet all through life his pen was always busy, and in this same year it is at work in a grand apartment of the Hôtel Lambert. This was the mansion of M. du Châtelet, husband—officially only—of "la sublime Émilie," with whom Voltaire had taken up his abode. The Hôtel Lambert remains unchanged at the eastern end of Île Saint-Louis, looking, from behind its high wall and its well-shaded garden, at its incomparable prospect. Its entrance at No. 2 Rue Saint-Louis-en-l'Île opens on a grand court and an imposing façade. "This is a house made for a king, who would be a philosopher," wrote Voltaire to his august correspondent Frederick the Great. He himself was neither king of this realm nor proved himself a philosopher in its grotesque squabbles. Madame du Châtelet was as frankly unfaithful to him as to her husband, who was frequently called in to reconcile the infuriated lovers. She was a woman of unusual abilities as well as of unusual indelicacies, with an itch for reading, research, and writing, her specialties being Newton and mathematics.