The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

He was at least too honest a man to be a cardinal. A little later he did write “a free, too free imitation” of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon. But he cannot be charged with pandering in these works to the popular creed. His Notes on his paraphrases are profane and coarse; and the paraphrases themselves miss all the dignity and beauty of the original. The only merit they have is that they truthfully express the unpalatable opinions their writer held—to his loss.

In May, Voltaire paid a brief visit to Berne. On June 12th, Collini left his service. He had been with him four years. Bright-witted, quick-tempered, too fond of pleasure, and “loving women,” said Madame Denis, “like a fool,” Collini had never been a satisfactory servant. It is only a very noble character which can remain unspoilt by spoiling. Voltaire certainly did not understand the Napoleonic principle of government—to be feared before you are loved. He had apologised to Collini. He had forgiven him a hundred times; nay more, when it was the servant who was in the wrong it was the master who had won him back to good temper by a thousand injudicious indulgences. Voltaire was lax enough on the subject himself, heaven knows; but now his foolish secretary must needs conduct himself in a love affair in a manner which offended even this easy-going master. Then, Collini speaks ill of us behind our backs! That seemed one of the worst failings in the world to a man who understood the art of friendship so completely as Voltaire. And then—then—the foolish secretary—called away suddenly to get a carriage for Madame de Fontaine, who was just going to arrive at Délices from Paris—leaves open on his desk a letter in which he had laughed at Madame Denis; and Madame Denis’s maid, coming in, reads the letter and carries it to her mistress. Voltaire had been infinitely loyal to Madame du Châtelet. He was not less so to this chattering bourgeoise of a niece. He gave the secretary his congé the next day—sadly, but firmly at last—as a decision that admitted of no appeal. Collini must go! Collini implies in his Memoirs that a kind of flirtation between himself and Madame Denis was one of the causes of his dismissal. Madame Denis was certainly foolish enough. It is also on his testimony that when his master said good-bye to him, he talked with him for more than an hour and asked if he had enough money for his journey to Paris—“and to last some time.” As he spoke Voltaire went to his desk and took from it a rouleau of louis, saying “Take that: one never knows what may happen.” And Collini adds, “with tears in my eyes I left the Délices.” Three years later, Voltaire procured a post for him at the Court of the Elector Palatine, which Collini is believed to have kept till his death. Written long after their parting are many friendly letters from the master to the servant.

Collini had his significance and his uses. From his “Séjour auprès de Voltaire,” wherein he tries to make Voltaire appear as faulty and himself as faultless as he can, the master still comes out better than the servant. There is no more reliable testimony to character than that wrung out of an unfriendly witness. On one point at least the ill-tempered young Italian has cleared his master’s reputation for ever. “Stinginess never had a place in his house I have never known a man whose servants could rob him with greater ease. I repeat it, he was miser of nothing but his time.”

Collini’s place was at once filled by Wagnière, a Genevan boy, now sixteen years old, who had been in Voltaire’s service since 1754. As if he had nothing else to do in the world Voltaire taught him Latin and trained him in his duties himself.

Collini’s departure for Paris seems to have suggested to his master that he too would like to pay a visit to the capital—just a very flying visit to see about some business. So he wrote off to one d’Argenson, to ask him to get the requisite permission from the other d’Argenson, the Secretary of State. But in spite of that old school friendship, the minister was not at all too friendly just now to this presumptuous exile. The permission was refused: and Voltaire revenged himself by an epigram. He had a richer revenge, if he had wanted it in the January of the next year, 1757, when the Secretary was banished to please her Mightiness the Pompadour. But he did not want it. The spiteful epigram relieved his feelings and his temper. And it will be remembered of an earlier Voltaire, that from the moment an enemy became unfortunate, this inconsistent person could not help regarding him as a friend.

In August, J. J. Rousseau wrote, as the Genevan ministers had asked him, to remonstrate with Voltaire on that unorthodox “Disaster of Lisbon.” Jean Jacques permitted himself to admire the grace and beauty of M. de Voltaire’s poem, while continuing to find the optimism of Mr. Pope much more consolatory, and deducing from the earthquake a splendid argument for his darling theory of the advantages of savage over civilised life. Do you not see, my dear M. de Voltaire, that if people did not build themselves houses seven stories high and huddle together in great towns, earthquakes really would not be nearly so disastrous?

The letter was scarcely one which called for a serious reply. But it was instinct with all the glow and passion of that matchless style which made men forget to examine the common-sense of the ideas it clothed; and it fitted in admirably with the fashionable optimism which was naturally popular with the well-to-do and the powerful. The world did take it gravely. And in September M. de Voltaire sent a reply of airy badinage.

“Madame de Fontaine has been in danger of her life, and I have been ill too; so I am waiting till I am better and my niece cured, to dare to think as you do.”

The note was a little trifling, certainly; but Rousseau wrote to Tronchin that he was charmed with it. As for Voltaire, the very idea of that further scathing rollicking answer that was to come had not yet even occurred to him. He had as little time as desire to quarrel with anybody at the present moment. Besides all his new duties as a landed proprietor, a tragedy, history, verses, correspondence, he was engrossed with d’Alembert as a visitor and the “Encyclopædia” as a hobby.

The story of the foundling who, thirty-nine years earlier, had been discovered on the steps of a Parisian church, is hardly less familiar to our own century than it was to the eighteenth. Brought up by a compassionate poor woman, a glazier’s wife, it was not until he had become the great d’Alembert, the first geometrician and philosopher of the day, that the false mother who had borne and abandoned him—Madame de Tencin, the old acquaintance of Voltaire—would fain have avowed a child so creditable. But that child had not a characteristic in common with her. He denied her. He had no mother but the glazier’s wife. In her home he grew up to be one of the wisest and gentlest of great men. In her home he learnt the blessings of peace and privacy, of work and obscurity. “Simple, sober, and proud,” too well acquainted with Poverty to be afraid of her, he always shunned a society which could give him nothing and might rob him of the time to work out the work of his life. Above that glazier’s shop, after long throes and travail of delightful pain, he brought forth in 1750 the first-born son of his genius, the Preliminary Discourse of the great “Encyclopædia.” In 1756 he became a member of the French Academy. In 1772 he was made its perpetual secretary. His long passion for that most ardent and unhappy woman, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, was for eleven years of his later life at once its consolation and its despair. As a writer his style has all the clumsiness of the savant who has so much to say that he has no time to take care how he says it, and all the coldness of the mathematician. But it was only his writing that was cold.