The play has indeed the perfect smoothness and elegance dear to the French soul. All the unities are nicely observed, and there is never an anachronism. But to make it the astounding success it was, it must have had in it something better even than the brilliant ingenuity of a Voltaire—something better even than a Voltaire’s perfect knowledge of the human nature for which he was writing. It contained the first trumpet call of the Voltairian message.
The house was crowded. It was the custom of the day for the playwright to beat up his friends and engage them to applaud the first steps of the child of his brain. But here also were enemies and neutrals—all Paris agog to see the next move in the game of a daring player. Among the audience, half grumbling, half delighted, was old Maître Arouet. “The rascal! the rascal!” he muttered, as some bold touch brought down the house. Brother Armand should have been there too, to have heard the strangely passionate enthusiasm with which was received the couplet which, after all, merely referred to the pagan priesthood of a long dead age:
Our priests are not what a foolish people think them!
Our credulity makes all their knowledge.
But “when fanaticism has once gangrened a brain, the malady is incurable,” said Voltaire; and neither he nor any other could alter an Armand. A certain Maréchale de Villars—galante, coquette, with all the easy ton learnt in Courts, and all the French woman’s aplomb and grace to make five-and-thirty more dangerous than five-and-twenty—leant curiously out of her box presently to watch a young buffoon of an actor who was doing his best to ruin M. de Voltaire’s play. The high priest, in a scene essentially grave and tragic, has as train-bearer a lean-faced, narrow-shouldered, boyish-looking youth who must needs take his part as comic, and make a fool not of himself only but of his high priest also. Who is the ridiculous boy? M. de Voltaire. It appears deliciously piquant to the Maréchale that an author should run the risk of damning his own work for a jest. What a refreshing person to have to stay when one is a little bored! Madame receives him in her box—he knows quite well how to behave and how to be as affable, daring, and amusing as could be wished—and they begin a friendship, not without result.
There were some allusions to the Regent and Madame du Berri in “Œdipe,” very vociferously applauded, which must have made Maître Arouet groan in spirit and think that after all his Armand, his rigid “fool in prose” at home, was safer to deal with than this “fool in verse” on the boards, who would not be warned and must come to the gallows. But the Regent, like a wise man, hearing of that astounding first night and the allusions, presented the author with a gold medal and a thousand crowns; talked with him publicly at the next Opera ball, and made a point of coming to the performance to show that the arrows could not have been really intended for him after all.
As for the Duchesse du Berri, she came five nights in succession to the piece. And of course all the little, witty, disaffected Court of Maine were there too, enjoying those allusions and looking hard at their enemies, the Regent and his daughter.
The curtain went down on perhaps the most successful début that ever playwright had made. “Œdipe” ran for forty-five nights. Clever Philip commanded it to Court to be performed before the little Louis XV. The enterprising and energetic young author asked, and obtained, permission to dedicate it, in book form, to downright old Charlotte Elizabeth, the Regent’s mother. He sent a copy, with a flaming sonnet, to George I. of England; and yet another copy to the Regent’s sister, the Duchess of Lorraine, with a letter wherein is to be found his first signature of his new name, Arouet de Voltaire. When the Prince de Conti, his old Temple companion, complimented “Œdipe” and its author in a poem of his own, “Sir,” said Voltaire airily, “you will be a great poet; I must get the King to give you a pension.”
The young playwright gained from “Œdipe”—not including the Regent’s present—about four thousand francs, besides a fine capital of fame. He was the old notary’s son to some purpose after all, and began to invest money. As to the fame, he took that very modestly. When the women declared his “Œdipe” to be a thousand times better than his old hero Corneille’s play on the same subject, the young man made the happiest quotation from Corneille himself, disclaiming superiority.
He attended every one of the forty-five performances—a learner of his own art and of the actors’.
He must have gone back gay and well pleased enough on those evenings to his furnished room in the Rue de Calandre.