and one phrase, “Autres temps, autres mœurs,” has become part not only of the French language, but of our own.
On January 1st of the new year 1756, Voltaire sent an incomplete copy of the poem to the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha. On the margin he wrote the word “Secret.” But on January 8th he was telling d’Argental, “My sermon on Lisbon was only for the edification of your flock. I do not throw the bread of life to dogs.” So many confidences and so many confidential friends had their usual result. “The Disaster of Lisbon” appeared in Paris. With it was also published the “Poem on Natural Law,” begun in Prussia in 1752.
CHAPTER XXIX
“NATURAL LAW,” THE VISIT OF D’ALEMBERT, AND THE AFFAIR OF BYNG
The “Poem on Natural Law” was an answer to Frederick the Great’s version of the stupendous question of Pilate—“What is truth?” The poem is in four short parts and an “easy and limpid versification.” In it, Voltaire calls it a “seeking for the law of God.” Condorcet says it is “the most splendid homage man ever paid to Divinity.” Desnoiresterres speaks of its “incontestable orthodoxy.” At once profound and simple—the simple expression of profound problems—“Natural Law” and “The Disaster of Lisbon” are almost the only works of the man who has been called the Prince of Scoffers which are completely reverent. They are pre-eminently not the writings of an atheist, but of one who gropes for a God he knows to exist, though he knows neither how nor where.
But, not the less, the whole world, and all the Churches fell upon them both, tooth and nail. In 1759, “Natural Law” was publicly burnt by the hangman in Paris; and immediately after it appeared, the pious Genevans begged J. J. Rousseau to refute the horrible heterodoxy of “The Disaster of Lisbon.” In July, 1757, Marie Leczinska, going to mass, saw a copy of “Natural Law”—which was then commonly entitled “Natural Religion”—on a bookstall. On her return from church she took the pamphlet and tore it across, and told the astonished shop woman (“who had supposed, from its title, the work to be one of edification”) that if she sold such things her licence should be taken from her. It is true, there was a smile for Voltaire and all the world in such stories. There is a smile still in the fact that works far more freethinking than “Natural Law” and “Lisbon” are avowed now by persons who continue to call themselves not only Christians, but orthodox Catholic churchmen.
The January of 1756 passed quietly at Monrion, where Voltaire had arrived for the winter at the end of December. In spite of his opinions, Lausanne ministers, always more liberal-minded than the Genevans, came much to see him. He liked them not a little. “They are very amiable and well read,” he wrote. “It must be granted there is more wit and knowledge in that profession than in any other. It is true I do not listen to their sermons.” Other visitors were Lawyer de Brenles and his charming young wife. Voltaire, disappointed of his play-acting in Geneva, had greatly encouraged a scheme for building a theatre here in Lausanne. But the earthquake had made all men thoughtful. They mistrusted their love of the drama, and filled the churches instead.
That wave of austerity swept also over Paris and the Court. They were in the vanguard of this new mode of seriousness, as of every other. To quite propitiate an angry heaven Madame de Pompadour renounced her connection with the King. His private entrance to her apartments was closed; and in February Madame was created Maid of Honour (of honour!) to the Queen.
Voltaire had dedicated “Lisbon” to a certain courtier friend—the Duc de la Vallière—grandson of the hapless Louise de la Vallière, the mistress of Louis XIV. In return, possibly, for the compliment of that dedication the good-natured Duke consented to be the emissary of Madame de Pompadour, and to write from Court on March 1st to make a really most advantageous proposal to M. de Voltaire. We are all serious here now, you know! Can you not take advantage of our seriousness and versify some of the Psalms which I, the Duke, will at once have printed at the Louvre? The typical wit of the eighteenth century has no doubt lost something by the fact that Voltaire’s two letters in reply to this proposal are missing. He did not versify the Psalms. Condorcet says that he could not be a hypocrite even to be a cardinal. It seems, if not certainly, at least very likely, to be true that a red hat was held out to him—in those fairest of white hands—as an inducement to fall in with the grave vogue of the Court and employ that matchless irony and that scathing wit for, instead of against, the established religion.
It was the chief duty of the mistresses of Louis XV. to keep him from being bored; and the Pompadour knew her business to perfection. What reason was there why Voltaire, who could do it so well, should not help her to “égayer the King’s religion”—for a reward? That age had had worse cardinals than he would have been. It still remembered Iscariot Dubois, traitor, usurer, debauchee; and Mazarin, that synonym for lies.
Carlyle, who, by every instinct of his character and every racial trait, was necessarily out of sympathy with such a man as Voltaire, said of him, “that he has never yet in a single instance been convicted of wilfully perverting his belief; of uttering in all his controversies one deliberate falsehood.”