The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Voltaire’s answer was a new edition of “Akakia” with the two supplements added, a travesty of the letter he had just received from Maupertuis, and a burlesque epistle to Formey in his official character of Secretary of the Berlin Academy. If the first part of “Akakia” had been laughable, the second was exquisitely ludicrous. It reached Frederick soon enough, as everything reached him.

On April 11th, he wrote a very memorable and famous order to his Resident at Frankfort—one Freytag. The King commanded Freytag to demand of Voltaire, when he passed through Frankfort, the Chamberlain’s Key, the Cross and Ribbon of the Order of Merit, every paper in his Majesty’s handwriting, and a book “specified in the note enclosed.” If Voltaire declined to do as he was told, he was to be arrested. On April 12th, Frederick wrote to his sister of Bayreuth a letter wherein he spoke of his “charming, divine Voltaire,” that “sublime spirit, first of thinking beings,” as the greatest scoundrel and the most treacherous rascal in the universe; and said that men were broken on the wheel who deserved it less than he.

The Margravine confessed that, for the life of her, she had not been able to keep her countenance while reading that second part of “Akakia”; but her brother was in no laughing mood. To soothe Maupertuis he had caused his curt dismissal to Voltaire of March 16th to appear in the newspapers. “Akakia” may be fairly said to have been one of the most famous jokes of the eighteenth century, and to have been the delight of every person who read it, save only Maupertuis and Frederick the Great.

For two-and-twenty days Voltaire passed his time not unhappily at Leipsic. He visited the University there. He arranged his books and papers. He had with him, besides Collini, a copyist and a manservant, both of whom he employed in literary work. He now was busy defending “Louis XIV.” against La Beaumelle’s criticisms. To be sure “Louis XIV.” was its own defence; but it was never in Voltaire’s irritable and pugnacious nature to let the curs bark at his heels unheeded. He must be for ever kicking them or stinging them with his whip and so goading them to fresh fury. To sit serene above the thunder was quite impossible to this god: he was always coming down from his Olympus to answer the blasphemies of the mortals and to fight the meanest of them.

On April 18th, after he had been in Leipsic rather less than a month, the travelling carriage stood once more at his door. The luggage which was heaped into it did not contain the book to which Frederick had alluded in his letter to Freytag. That luckless volume, in which were compiled the poetic effusions of Frederick the Great, freethinking, imprudent, and not a little indecent, had been given in charge of a merchant of Leipsic, who was to forward it, with many other of Voltaire’s books, to Strasburg.

Chief among the royal poems was a certain “Palladium,” imitated from the “Pucelle,” but very much more ribald and insulting to the Christian religion; and, in that it abused other kings who might be dangerous foes, certainly not a work of which King Frederick would care to own himself the author. It had been secretly printed in the palace at Potsdam in 1751.

Voltaire hoped to meet at Strasburg, not only his books, but the person whom Frederick spoke of as “that wearisome niece.” The criminal’s next stopping-place after Leipsic was Gotha. M. de Voltaire and suite intended to put up at the inn there, but were not installed in it when the delightful Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, not the least charming of Voltaire’s philosophic duchesses and with whom he had corresponded when he was at Cirey, begged him to be her guest, in her château. Forty years old, gentle, graceful, accomplished, with that love of learning without learnedness which was the peculiar charm of the women of the eighteenth century, Voltaire may well have found her, as he did find her, “the best princess in the world.” “And who—God be thanked,” he added piously, “wrote no verses.” She received him and his attendants with a delighted hospitality. She had a husband, who was not of much account on the present occasion. And there was a Madame de Buchwald, who also had all that fascination which seems to have been the birthright of the women of that time.

In all lives there are certain brief halcyon periods when one forgets alike the troubles that are past and the cares that are to come and enjoys oneself in the moment, defiant of fate, and with something of the abandon of a child. This month was such a period for Voltaire. After the fights and the worries of the past three years, he was peculiarly susceptible to the soothing flattery and the caressing admiration of this couple of gracious women.

He read them his “Natural Law.” He read them new cantos of the “Pucelle.” (Modesty was the lost piece of silver for which the woman of this period never even searched.) Nothing was bad about Gotha save its climate, said he. To please his dear Duchess and to instruct her son, the obliging Voltaire embarked here on a popular history of the German Empire from the time of Charlemagne.

“Annals of the Empire” is one of the least successful of Voltaire’s works. Truth compels the critic indeed to say that it comes very near to being hideously, preposterously, and unmitigatedly dull. It was written to order and without inspiration. It is laborious, monotonous, and long. That its conscientious list of Kings, Emperors, and Electors, and its neat little rhyming summary of each century, may have proved useful to the young gentleman they were designed to instruct, is very likely. But Voltaire did not put his soul in it. In the mechanical effort it required of his brain he was soon indeed to find great, and greatly needed, soothing. The month passed on winged feet. But Voltaire had to proceed, leisurely it might be, but still to proceed to Strasburg to embrace his niece.