The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Les Délices stood on the top of a hill on the Lyons road and quite near to the town of Geneva. It was therefore in that republic, while it was ten minutes’ walk from the Sardinian province of Savoy, half an hour’s ride into France, and an hour’s ride into Vaud. Altogether, a most prudent situation for a Voltaire. Lake Leman lapped the foot of its terraces. It was surrounded by gardens, whose beauty was only marred by high walls which shut out the lovely surrounding country. His signature on the lease was still wet when this enthusiastic Voltaire began pulling down those walls that he might look uninterruptedly upon one of the most beautiful views in Switzerland—across the city of Geneva, the junction of the rivers Arne and Rhone, to the Jura and the Alps. He called the place the Délices, he said, because “there is nothing more delightful than to be free and independent.” Certainly, the Delights were his torments in some respects. He complained that the architect of Prangins had forgotten to make a garden, and the architect of Délices had forgotten to make a house. Its builder had built for himself; and the guest-rooms were inadequate and uncomfortable. But such defects could be remedied. The last occupant of Délices was the son of that Duchess of Saxe-Gotha who had inspired the “Annals.” That seemed like a good omen.

Monrion, the second purchase, was on the way from Lausanne to Ouchy—at the other end of the lake from Délices. “Les Délices will be for the summer, Monrion for the winter, and you for all seasons,” Voltaire wrote to Lawyer de Brenles, the very day he acquired Délices. “I wanted only one tomb. I shall have two.” Monrion was comfortable and “sheltered from the cruel north wind”—“my little cabin,” “my winter palace”—a “clean, simple house” such as its master loved. After his time it was inhabited by Tissot—a celebrated doctor, only second in reputation to Tronchin.

It is pleasant to see the keen youthful enjoyment and ardour with which Voltaire turned to the improvement of his new homes. The first letter he wrote from Délices is dated March 5, 1755, but, as has been noted, even before that date he was enthusiastically pulling down walls in the garden and planning new rooms for the house. By March 24th, he and Madame Denis were actually in the midst of building the “accommodation for our friends and our chickens—planting oranges and onions, tulips and carrots. One must found Carthage.” The new fascination—the safest and best he had ever known—the fascination of home and garden, of country life, of pride in simple things—took possession of the most susceptible of men. He said with his cynic smile that he “was born faun and sylvan.” He was at least strangely free from love of the pavement for a man who had spent on it all the most pliable years of his life. He wrote in this March that his whole conversation was of “masons, carpenters, and gardeners.” Even Madame Denis, whose “natural aversion to a country life” her poor uncle was to have bitter cause to lament, liked the hurry and bustle of moving, and was for a while content.

There was much to be done, too, within doors. For himself, Voltaire’s own tastes were always quite frugal and simple. He wanted neither fine furniture nor many servants. And as for rich eating and drink, from those, if he had ever desired them—which he had not—his health would have precluded him. His sternly frugal fare and love of simplicity about him should have pleased his Calvinistic neighbours. But he was a friend before all things. And Délices and Monrion were to be open to all his friends—who must be received with every hospitality and with every generous comfort of which their host could think. For them he would live like a rich man. For them he began spending that comfortable fortune he had acquired with so much sagacity, and very often with so much self-denial. He bought half a dozen horses and four carriages. He kept a couple of lackeys, a valet called Boisse, a French cook, and a cook’s boy; maidservants, coachmen, a postilion, and gardeners; beside Collini, whose duties were only less universal than Longchamp’s had been. That French cook soon had to provide a great many dinners for a great many diners; and generous suppers after evening theatricals. The carriages had to be sent to bring the economical, quiet-going neighbours to and from the dinner parties. The carriage Voltaire kept for his own use was of antique build, with a blue ground speckled with gold stars; but it was his fancy always to drive this remarkable equipage into Geneva with four horses to it—to the great excitement and astonishment of the grave little republic. On one occasion the people so crowded round him to see him alight from this extraordinary conveyance, that he called out, “What do you want to see, boobies? A skeleton? Well, here is one,” and he threw off his cloak. The establishment of Délices was further completed by a tame bear and a monkey. The monkey, who bit the hand that caressed him, was called Luc. So in his letters of the time Voltaire soon began to allude to a certain royal friend as Luc too.

Voltaire had been established at Délices about a month, when in April his first visitor, Lekain the actor, came to stay with him. Lekain, who in 1750 had been nobody at all but a clever young dependent on the bounty of the famous M. de Voltaire, was himself famous now, as one of the best tragedians in Paris. Of course the amateur dramatic talents of Délices took advantage of the professional genius of Lekain. “Zaire” was rehearsed; and then read aloud in one of the large rooms of the house. Denis and Lekain were in the principal parts. Voltaire took his favourite rôle of Lusignan, and declared gaily that no company in Europe had a better old fool in it than himself. The frigid Calvinists and the Tronchins, who formed the audience, were in tears. Lekain had more sentiment than voice, said Voltaire; and was so moved sometimes as to be inaudible. But then he moved his audience too. That was the great thing. He and his amateurs also read some part of the new play, “The Orphan of China”; and when Lekain left he carried away most of it in his box with the view of producing it in Paris.

But even at Délices the man who had written the “Pucelle” could not long expect to find only the pleasures of play-acting and the agreeable troubles of an estate. Since he began it, in 1730, the thing had been copied, and miscopied, read, re-read, quoted, and travestied a thousand times. It had been imitated by King Frederick in the “Palladium”; and read aloud to the Prussian princesses and the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha. It had been transcribed for Prince Henry, and by Longchamp. It was everybody’s secret; but still it was a secret. There was one indecorum it had not yet committed—that of print.

And in this January of 1755 had come that unpleasant news that a manuscript was in the possession of Mademoiselle du Thil; and then, like a clap of thunder, the announcement that the thing “was printed and being sold for a louis in Paris.”

The publication of such a work would have been disastrous for Voltaire at any moment; but it was doubly disastrous now. Here he was just settling down upon his estate as a sober, respectable country gentleman, very much minded to stand well with his strait-laced neighbours, very fond of his new home, not at all inclined to leave it, and having nowhere to go if he did leave it—yet holding his land and his right to live on it only at the “good pleasure” of a very strict Seigneury. To make matters worse, the printed “Pucelle” was (of course) full of errors; and while it was much less witty than the original, was not at all less indecent. At first there seemed to be nothing to be done but to follow the old, old plan. The thing is not mine at all! Here, for instance, is a passage abusing Richelieu—and Richelieu is my friend! And then, to make assurance doubly sure, Voltaire tried another very artful and most characteristic ruse. He employed hundreds of copyists in Paris to copy it as incorrectly as possible. Then all his friends, as well as himself, denied loudly and vehemently that he was the author thereof. A Voltaire write such bad verse—so fade, so plat, so prosy! Impossible! At the same time, Voltaire sent copies of such a “Pucelle”—or such parts of the “Pucelle”—as he wished to avow, to all his acquaintance and all persons in authority. It was a very good idea. It cost a great deal of money, and a great deal of trouble; and might have been of some use if M. de Voltaire’s character and writings had not been known and feared these forty years.

On July 26th, Grasset, a publisher of Lausanne, appeared at the Délices and kindly offered to sell M. de Voltaire the incorrect copy of his own “Pucelle” for fifty louis. Voltaire had already written to Grasset to tell him in no mild terms that those “rags of manuscript” were not his “Pucelle” at all, but the work of some person who had neither “poetic art, good sense, nor good morals”; and that of such a thing Grasset would not sell a hundred copies. His rage, therefore, may be imagined. He denounced Grasset to the Genevan authorities; and had the satisfaction of seeing that misguided person made fast in prison—for a time. On July 27th, factotum Collini was sent up to Paris to see if he could not better matters there. But Paris burnt the “Pucelle.” The Pope prohibited it; and it sold lustily. It is not a little curious that Voltaire himself never in all his life suffered anything worse from it than frights: though of those he had enough and to spare. In 1757, a Parisian printer was sentenced to nine years at the galleys for printing an edition. Geneva—pretending to believe, and trying to believe, that M. de Voltaire was not its author—burnt the accursed thing as Paris had done; knowing that M. de Voltaire could only be glad to see the destruction of such a wicked travesty of his respectable poem. With what a wry smile he must have watched that bonfire!

The republic, however, for the moment, ostensibly gave him the benefit of the doubt. And then in this very July, just when he ought to have been most cautious and circumspect, if this imprudent, mischievous person does not begin making a stage of inverted wine-barrels, painting scenery, getting together theatrical costumes, flashing sham lightning in a dust-pan, preparing sham thunder by means of the rims of two cartwheels—and, worse than all, a thousand times worse—recruiting a theatrical company from among the young people of Geneva! The young people were only too willing. The Council of State had swallowed—in disapproving silence—that reading of “Zaire” when Lekain had reduced “Tronchins and syndics” to tears. But this was a little too much. So on July 31st the Council met, and, as the result of a solemn confabulation, reminded M. de Voltaire that the drama, played publicly or privately, was contrary to their regulations, and that no Calvinists were allowed to take part in, or to witness, the same. Voltaire replied with a suspicious meekness that his only desire was to obey the “wise laws” of the government. He further wrote to Councillor Tronchin in terms quite abject. “No man who owes to your honourable body the privilege of living in this air ought to displease anyone who breathes it.”