But far stronger than any merely literary reasons for denying such a paternity was the bold, free-spoken character of this son of his genius. Voltaire knew that no work he had ever written would so bar his way back to his country as this one. Every line glowed with some truth hateful to Boyers and to tyranny. There was never any mistaking a Voltaire’s meaning. Now, more than ever, he had written in luminous words which, like sunbeams, being much condensed, greatly burnt. His principles were as lucid as daylight. There was hardly a phrase which would not draw upon him “the implacable wrath of the clergy.” How could he forget in it such remarks as the following—“Rome has always decided for the opinion which most degraded the human mind and most completely annihilated human reason”?
“Whoso thinks makes others think.”
How could he help remembering that he had taken the Protestant Reformation as a new tyranny—not an emancipation; that he had degraded war “from the highest to the lowest place in the historian’s regard”; and had declared that “Tyrants sacrifice the human race to an individual”—a dangerous sentence in itself, and which that abominable pirate publisher had rendered a thousand times more dangerous by misquoting as “Kings sacrifice the human race to a caprice”? He had offended every powerful class, and every cherished prejudice. But action was now, not less than ever, his forte. If it could not save him from his enemies, it could save him from himself—from that worst combination, idleness with misery.
On December 28, 1753, he wrote to Néaulme, and told M. Jean his candid opinion about that edition. He also wrote not a little piteously, a very few days after, to his old friend Madame de Pompadour—the publication of that “Essay” forcing him to prove, he said, his innocence to his master the King—of France.
But it was in vain he reminded Louis XV., through her, that he had spent years of his life in writing the history of Louis’s predecessor; “and alone of the Academicians had had his panegyric translated into five languages.” That surly Bourbon, with that intuition which saved his degraded race a hundred times from earlier and completer ruin, saw in the genius of Voltaire the fuse which was to set ablaze the gunpowder of sedition and misery with which his France was undermined. He turned to Madame de Pompadour and said that he “did not wish” Voltaire to return to Paris. It is not difficult to imagine the exile’s state of mind. “I have no comfort but in work and solitude,” he wrote; and to Cideville, on January 28th of this new year 1754: “My dear Cideville, at our age one must mock at everything and live for self. This world is a great shipwreck. Sauve qui peut! but I am far from the shore.”
On what shore would he be allowed to land if he could gain one?
Colmar, he soon discovered, was “a town of Hottentots governed by German Jesuits.” On February 17th, he wrote a very meek, artful letter to one of those Jesuits, Father Menou (whom he had known at the Court of Stanislas and of whom he speaks in his “Memoirs” as “the boldest and most intriguing priest I ever knew”), pleading his cause with him. He pleaded it, too, with the Archbishop of Paris through M. de Malesherbes. But it was all in vain. The Church was as offended as the King.
On February 2Oth, pushed to extremity, and neither able to leave nor to stay in this wretched Colmar without the sanction of his French Majesty, the unhappy man asked d’Argenson to “sound the King’s indulgence”—to know if he might travel.
On February 22d, he called in two notaries, who compared the correct manuscript of his “Essay” with the two incorrect volumes published at The Hague; and drew up a formal declaration in which they affirmed that the Dutch edition was “surreptitious, full of errors, and worthy of all contempt,” and that the real “Essay” was at least eight times longer than the false one. But that also was useless. Neither Court nor Catholic meant to be convinced.
Then, as if her uncle’s cup of misfortune were not brimming over already, niece Denis’s bad management and extravagance with his money in Paris forced him to appoint an agent to look after her affairs; and she, living on his bounty, turned and accused him of avarice. No public wrongs are so cruel as private ones. Beside Madame Denis’s ingratitude, excommunication, said Voltaire, would have been a light penalty. He had given her an ample fortune—a larger one than old Maître Arouet had left his Voltaire. Her reproaches were the unkindest cut of all.