The Friends of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

For seven years, through storms of which the story still shakes men’s souls, he had known in his own home, first on the Quai de Conti and then in the Rue de Lille, the deep, calm joys of his happy marriage. When the troubles of life come only from without, through the fiercest of such troubles man and wife may be happy still. It is those evils alone which rise from their own characters which can wholly destroy the beauty of life. In the serene tenderness of the woman who kept for ever, it is said, some of the virgin freshness of the girl, who united to strength gentleness, and to courage quietness, who was at once modest and clever, simple and intelligent, Condorcet was given a rich share of the best earth has to offer.

Their salon, of course, was no more. The beating of the pitiless storm had driven their Englishmen to covert in happier England. But it is only when one is discontented with one’s relatives that there is crying need of acquaintances. These two still had each other and their child. Condorcet had much to lose.

To go to the Rue de Lille would be courting death. He escaped first to his country home at Auteuil. From there, two friendly doctors took him to a house in the Rue Servandoni, belonging to Madame Vernet, the widow of the sculptor, and asked her to shelter a proscribed man. She only inquired if he was good and virtuous. When they answered, ‘Yes,’ she consented at once. ‘Do not lose a moment, you can tell me about him later.’ Regarding the value of the works of her husband there have been many opinions, but as to the value of her work there can be only one. Perfectly aware that she was endangering her life for a fugitive whom she had never seen, and who had not the slightest claim upon her generosity, she sheltered him for nine months, providing him all the time with every necessary of life and without the smallest hope of repayment. When he did leave her at last, he had to steal away from her self-sacrificing care by a subterfuge, like a thief. Strong, simple and energetic, high in courage and devotion, Madame Vernet is one of the unsung heroines of history.

Condorcet’s condition was destitute indeed. As an outlaw all his money had been seized. For himself that might have been bearable; even to the fate he foresaw too clearly he could be indifferent—for himself. One Sarret, to whom Madame Vernet was privately married and who lived in the house, speaks of the fugitive’s gentleness, patience, and resignation. He had given to his country his talents, his time, his fortune, his rank; and when she turned and rent him, he had for her nothing but compassion and the strong hope of a day that would dawn upon her clear and fair, after the storm was past.

But in the knowledge that he had brought ruin and disgrace on what he loved best in the world, Condorcet sounded one of the great deeps of human suffering. As the wife of an outlaw, Madame de Condorcet was not only penniless, but could not even sleep in the capital. Wholly dependent on her was her little girl of three years old, a young sister, and an old governess. She was herself still young and brought up in a class unused to work, in the sense of work to make money, for generations. But there was in her soul the great courage of a great love. The talents which had once charmed her salon she now turned to a means of livelihood. When her house at Auteuil was invaded by Republican soldiers, Madame softened their hearts and earned a pittance by taking their portraits. Twice a week, disguised as a peasant, she came on foot from Auteuil to Paris, passed through the gates with the fierce crowds thronging to the executions in the Place de la Révolution, and by painting miniatures of the condemned in the prisons, of proscribed men lying hidden in strange retreats, or of middle-class citizens, made enough to support her little household. Then, sometimes, she would creep to the Rue Servandoni, and for a few minutes forget parting, death, and the terrors of the unknown future, in her husband’s arms. He might well write, as he did write but a little while before he died, that even then he was not all unhappy—he had served his country and had had her heart.

He spent the long days of his hiding almost entirely in writing. He began by an exposition of his principles and conduct during the Revolution, and gave an account of his whole public career. He was writing it when, on October 3, 1793, he was tried, in his absence, before the Revolutionary Tribunal, with Vergniaud, Brissot, and others, accused of conspiring against the unity of the Republic, declared an emigrant, and condemned to death.

On the 31st of the same month came the fall of the Girondins. Though not himself a Girondin they had been once his friends, and in their ruin he saw the immediate presage of his own; and his own meant that also of Madame Vernet. He went to her at once. ‘The law is clear; if I am discovered here you will die as I shall. I am hors la loi; I cannot remain here longer. She answered that though he might be hors la loi he was not outside the law of humanity; and bade him stay where he was.

His wife, in her peasant’s dress, came to him then for one of those brief moments, stolen from Heaven. She knew him well. That ‘Justification’ of his conduct, his Apologia, that looking back on deeds and sacrifices meant to bring the Golden Age to men and which had brought, or so it seemed, the hell of the Terror—this was no fit work for him now. Look ahead! Look on to that new country which your pure patriotism and your self-devotion,—ay, and this Terror itself—shall have helped to make—that warless world of equal rights and ever widening knowledge, the beautiful dream of a sinless and sorrowless earth, which may yet be realised, in part.

On the manuscript of the ‘Justification’ there is written in her hand ‘Left at my request to write the History of the Progress of the Human Mind.’

In the very shadow of death, Condorcet told the story of men’s advance toward life, of the evolution of their understanding from the earliest times until now. Calm, just, and serene, with not an intemperate line, not an angry thought, the ‘Progress’ reads as if it had been written by some tranquil philosopher who had seen his plan for man’s redemption adopted, and had received for his labour honours, peace, and competence. Its fault, indeed, is its too sanguine idealism. Condorcet, like many enthusiasts, thought his own way of salvation for man the only way; he believed his own magnificent dream to be the only possible Utopia.