The Friends of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

At first the Encyclopædia was not only heard gladly by the common people, but was splendidly set forth with the approbation and Privilège du Roi. Even the wise and thoughtful melancholy of d’Alembert’s temperament may have been cheered by such good fortune, while the sanguine Diderot naturally felt convinced it would last for ever.

Both worked unremittingly. His authorship of the Preface immediately flung open to d’Alembert all the salons in Paris, and for the first time in his life he began to go into society. Then Frederick the Great made him a rich and splendid offer, the Presidency of the Berlin Academy. Consider that though the man was famous he was still very poor. The little pension which was his all ‘is hardly enough to keep me if I have the happiness or the misfortune to live to be old.’ From the Government of his country he feared everything and hoped nothing. He was only thirty-five years of age. A new world was opened to him. The glazier’s attic he could exchange for a palace, and the homely kindness of an illiterate foster-mother for the magnificent endearments of a philosophic king. Was it only the painful example of friend Voltaire’s angry wretchedness as Frederick’s guest that made him refuse an offer so lavish and so dazzling? It was rather that he had the rare wisdom to recognise happiness when he had it and did not mistake it for some phantom will-o’-the-wisp whom distance clothed with light. ‘The peace I enjoy is so perfect,’ he wrote, ‘I dare run no risk of disturbing it.... I do not doubt the King’s goodness ... only that the conditions essential to happiness are not in his power.’

Any man who is offered in place of quiet content that most fleeting and unsubstantial of all chimeras—fame and glory—should read d’Alembert’s answer to Frederick the Great.

Frederick’s royal response to it was the offer of a pension of twelve hundred livres.

In September 1754 the fourth volume of the Encyclopædia was hailed by the world with a burst of enthusiasm and applause, and in the December of that year d’Alembert received as a reward for his indefatigable labours a chair in the French Academy. He had only accepted it on condition that he spoke his mind freely on all points and made court to no man. The speech with which he took his seat, though constantly interrupted with clapping and cries of delight, was not good, said Grimm. All d’Alembert’s addresses and éloges spoken at the Academy leave posterity, indeed, as cold as they left the astute German journalist. The man was a mathematician, a creature of reason. The passion that was to rule that reason and dominate his life was not the gaudy and shallow passion of the orator.

In 1756 he went to stay with the great head of his party, Voltaire, at the Délices, near Geneva. The Patriarch was sixty-two years old, but with the activity and the enthusiasm of youth. At his house and at his table d’Alembert met constantly and observed deeply the Calvinistic pastors of Geneva. He returned to Paris with his head full of the most famous article the Encyclopædia was to know. At the back of his mind was a certain request of his host’s, that he should also make a few remarks on the benefits that play-acting would confer on the Calvinistic temperament.

No article in that ‘huge folio dictionary’ brewed so fierce a storm or had consequences so memorable and far-reaching as d’Alembert’s article ‘Geneva.’ In his reserved and formal style he punctiliously complimented the descendants of Calvin as preferring reason to faith, sound sense to dogma, and as having a religion which, weighed and tested, was nothing but a perfect Socinianism. Voltaire laughed long in his sleeve, and in private executed moral capers of delight. The few words on the advantages of play-acting, which he had begged might be added, had not been forgotten.

The Genevan pastors took solemn and heartburning counsel together, and on the head of the quiet worker in the attic in Paris there burst a hurricane which might have beaten down coarser natures and frightened stouter hearts. Calvinism fell upon him, whose sole crime had been to show her the logical outcome of her doctrines, with the fierce fury of a desperate cause. Retract! retract! or at least give the names of those of our pastors who made you believe in the rationalism of our creed! As for the remarks on plays, why, Jean Jacques Rousseau, our citizen and your brother philosopher, shall answer those, and in the dazzling rhetoric of the immortal ‘Letter on Plays’ give, with all the magic and enchantment of his sophist’s genius, the case against the theatre.

Then, on March 8, 1759, the paternal government of France, joining hands with Geneva, suppressed by royal edict that Encyclopædia of which a very few years earlier it had solemnly approved. The accursed thing was burnt by the hangman. The printers and publishers were sent to the galleys or to death. The permit to continue publishing the work was rescinded. The full flowing fountain of knowledge was dammed, and the self-denial of d’Alembert’s patient life wasted. The gentle heart, which had never harmed living creature, fell stricken beneath the torrent of filthy fury which the gutter press poured upon him. His Majesty—his besotted Majesty, King Louis the Fifteenth—finds in the Encyclopædia, forsooth, ‘maxims tending to destroy Royal authority and to establish independence ... corruption of morals, irreligion, and unbelief.’ Sycophant and toadying Paris went with him. Furious and blaspheming, passionate Diderot came out to meet the foe. Dancing with rage, old Voltaire at Délices could only calm himself enough to hold a pen in his shaking fingers and pour out incentives to his brothers in Paris to fight till the death. To him injustice was ever the bugle-call to battle. But not to d’Alembert. He shrank back into his shell, dumb and wounded. ‘I do not know if the Encyclopædia will be continued,’ he wrote, ‘but I am sure it will not be continued by me.’ Even the stirring incitements of his chief could not alter his purpose. He had offered sight to the blind, and they had chosen darkness; he would bring them the light no more. That Diderot considered him traitor and apostate did not move him. He would not quarrel with that affectionate, hot-headed brother worker, but for himself that chapter of his life was finished, and he turned the page.

In the very same year he gave to a thankless world his ‘Elements of Philosophy;’ and he again refused Frederick the Great’s invitation to exchange persecuting Paris for the Presidency of the Berlin Academy. But there was no reason why he should not escape from his troubles for a time and become Frederick’s visitor.