The Friends of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

He had plenty of work to do in Paris. Besides the impossible task of keeping Frisen in order, he had his own way and fortune to make and his own friends to cultivate. His passion for Mademoiselle Fel was not his only introduction to Parisian society. Jean Jacques Rousseau (then a brilliant pauper copying music for his support and dreaming masterpieces of which he had not yet written a line) introduced him to d’Holbach and to Madame d’Épinay. He soon became fast friends with Madame Geoffrin (to whose tranquil common-sense his judicious and well-ordered mind particularly appealed), with Helvétius, and with Marmontel; he began a life-long friendship with Diderot, and once a week at Frisen’s house, in the Faubourg St. Honoré, he gave the most delightful bachelor dinner to his friends, played exquisitely on the clavecin for their benefit, took their amusement at his German-French in perfectly good part, and was entirely witty and agreeable, while keeping always a certain reserve and remaining entirely master of the situation.

In a very short time the poor German tutor was one of the most sought after persons in Paris, fêted and petted by all the great people, and minded to live no longer as bear-leader to boys, but by his own head and pen.

His taste for music gave him a golden opportunity. Shall we have French music at the opera, or Italian? Paris was as hotly divided on the question, said Rousseau, as if the affair had been one of religion. The French side had all the money, the fashion, and the women, and the Italian side a very little party of real connoisseurs. Grimm joined the Italians and wrote on their behalf, in 1753, a pamphlet called ‘The Little Prophet of Boehmischbroda,’ in which the style is profanely imitated from the prophets of the Old Testament. As Madame de Pompadour was on the French side, which she protected by force and by summarily dismissing the Italian singers on the spot, the pamphlet did no harm to French music; but it made Grimm famous. Voltaire read it, and asked how this Bohemian dares to have more wit than We have? And this Bohemian, having made so successful a literary venture in a small part, now looked round with his clever eyes for a larger one.

In 1754, he travelled for a time with d’Holbach, who had just lost his wife; and in the following year Frisen, whom Grimm’s guardianship had not been able to save from the fatal consequences of his depravity, died, and left his mentor a free man.

In 1755 he began what was to be the work of his life and is his true title to glory, the ‘Literary Correspondence.’

The idea of communicating to the sovereigns of Europe by letter, news of the literature, science, and philosophy of Paris, that centre of the world’s cultivation, was not a new one. In limiting the freedom of the press, sovereigns had limited their own freedom. Newspapers were official bulletins, not daring to utter unacceptable truths or unpalatable opinions on any truths. Kings, as well as their subjects, yawned over journals of this kind. So King Frederick the Great originated the idea of paying an intelligent man in Paris to write him direct the news and the gossip of the capital. Theriot, Voltaire’s friend, filled the post very unsuccessfully, and Frederick complained bitterly that Theriot never had a cold in his head without scribbling four pages of rodomontade to tell him about it. La Harpe occupied the same position to the Czarevitch Paul, and Suard and the Abbé Raynal, Grimm’s nurse and friend, to the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha.

The idea was good, but it had been badly worked out. As Diderot and d’Alembert quickened into mighty life the little Encyclopædia of Chambers, so Grimm breathed vitality into the languishing ‘Literary Correspondence.’ He saw in it, first of all, the germ of a great career; but he saw in it, too, an influence which, by informing the minds of kings, might change the destiny of kingdoms. To teach the people was difficult in those days; to teach their rulers was well nigh impossible. Here, then, was a chance, the one splendid chance, of showing them the progress of the world, the ominous advance of knowledge and of the old order towards the new. Raynal handed over to Grimm the correspondence he had established with the Courts of the north and south of Germany; and with this small connection Grimm began his work.

The ‘Literary Correspondence’ remains to-day the only literary review which has survived the passage of time, and is still not merely a great name, but a great living work. The ‘Spectator’ and the ‘Tatler’ of Addison and Steele are kept eternally fresh by an exquisite charm of style; but they rarely aspired to serious criticism, and are mainly a record of modes and manners, not of literature or of science. The ‘Literary Correspondence’ is as much to-day as on the day it was written, the guide-book to the letters, the art, and the drama of the eighteenth century; the open door to its society and to the mind of cultivated Paris; a book which is equally indispensable to the scholar or to the novelist writing of its period, and which is certainly both the most instructive and the most amusing literary compilation extant.

Of no settled length and in manuscript, it was despatched to its subscribers twice a month. It had no fixed price, its readers paying as much as they chose for it, or as much as Grimm could make them pay. His old friend the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha was, as has been seen, one of his first subscribers. The Landgrave of Hesse, the Queen of Sweden, and Catherine the Great of Russia soon joined his select and limited clientèle. Stanislas Augustus, King of Poland, the Margrave of Anspach, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany joined later. Frederick the Great, after his unlucky experience with Theriot, was extremely dilatory and vacillating in having anything to do with it; when he did add his name to the list of subscribers he never paid his subscription and harried Grimm to insert the scandals and the on dits of the cafés and the Court, which Grimm declined to do.

For greater security, the sheets did not go through the post, but through the legations of the various countries. The thing was, in fact, a secret, and a well-kept secret, for more than half a century, and never knew the danger of print until it was published in 1812, under the Empire, with many cautious Napoleonic omissions. In the meantime, its secrecy and the limited number of its readers gave the discreet Grimm, who declared that the most enlightened reasoning was not worth a night in the Bastille, and who was cautious to the very fibre of his bones, the opportunity of being at once candid, impartial, and safe.