“The inside of the Bastille.”
“I take it as seen,” replies Arouet airily.
He could, all things considered, have been very little surprised when on May 16th, Whitsunday, while he was still sleeping calmly in bed, he was served with a lettre de cachet, his room and person ignominiously searched, and himself removed the next day to that historic prison. Perhaps he smiled a little, but not bitterly, when they discovered on him Pimpette’s poor little note. “I am not made for the passions,” he said a year or two later. He was not. A great work and a great passion seldom run together. The work must be the only passion one has.
The prison was not very painful, it appears. Arouet was allowed an excellent room, books, a fire, good wine, first-rate coffee, the use of the bowling-green and the billiard-room, visitors, to a reasonable extent, and often a seat at the governor’s dinner-table. Some of the King’s guests might be rotting forgotten for unknown crimes in the dungeons beneath; but, although almost all the literary men of the period were bastilled some time or other in their lives, they unite in praising the prison as very reasonably comfortable.
The present prisoner was nothing if not a philosopher. Since I am here, I may as well be as easy as I can! The captives were allowed to make purchases. Arouet entered the Bastille, Monday, May 17, 1717. On the following Thursday he signed a receipt for a couple of volumes of Homer, two Indian handkerchiefs, a little cap, two cravats, a nightcap, and a bottle of essence of cloves. He had everything he wanted, in fact, save two things. For the first few weeks of his imprisonment it seems almost certain that he was not allowed pen and ink.
But if he could not write, he could and did compose. There was that poem. Should it be called the “League,” the “Henriade,” or “Henry of Navarre,” or what? What’s in a name after all? He had a memory so marvellous and so exact that he could not only invent, without committing to paper, whole cantos of that infant epic, but remember them. The subject possessed him. He said he dreamt in his sleep, in the Bastille, the second canto on the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew exactly as it stands to-day. It is not unlikely. Now and ever when he was writing, what he was writing was to him food, air, warmth, light, life. “His prison became his Parnassus,” said Frederick the Great in his funeral oration on Voltaire. Hundreds of projects besides that epic, to be called the “Henriade” finally, coursed through that brain, which was surely the most active ever given to man. From his captivity he could look out on his world. What was there not to do there? He must have asked himself a thousand times what part his was to be on the great stage of human existence.
“I knew how to reap benefit from my misfortune,” he wrote afterwards. “I learnt how to harden myself against sorrow, and found within me a strength not to be expected from the lightness and follies of my youth.”
And at Court, honest memoir-writing Saint-Simon was apologising for mentioning to his readers so insignificant a fact as that one Arouet, “the son of my father’s notary,” was imprisoned for some audacious verses; while at home that good old notary announced vindictively: “I told you so! I knew his idleness would lead to disgrace. Why did he not go into a profession?”
Something else Arouet did in the Bastille besides dreaming epics. He changed his name. It is now generally thought that he called himself by that one with which he has gone among the gods, after a family who were his mother’s ancestors. Before the existence of this family was discovered some supposed that Voltaire was an anagram on the paternal Arouet—Arouet, L. J. (le jeune). Others believed that, remembering not untenderly from a prison those who had called him “le petit volontaire” in his childhood’s home, he corrupted and abbreviated it into the Voltaire he was to make immortal. As to the reason for the change—“I was very unlucky under my first name,” he wrote; “I want to see if this one will succeed any better.” Beyond the wildest dream that ever Hope dreamt, “this one” was to succeed indeed.
The real author, a certain Le Brun, confessed to that terrible “J’ai Vu” presently, and the irrepressible supposed author, who was imprisoned for it, sat down in his prison and wrote a burlesque and very profane poem on his arrest, which had taken place, it will be remembered, on Whitsunday.