The summer of 1758 passed without much incident at Délices. Elsewhere, there was only too much. The Seven Years’ War—“the most hellish war that ever was fought,” said Voltaire—raged with unabated fury. Frederick had recovered Silesia by a great victory at Leuthen on December 5, 1757, when he beat an army of Austrians three times as large as his own. On August 25th of this 1758 he beat the Russians at Zorndorf. And then his evil star rose again. On October 14th, he was taken by surprise and defeated with great loss at Hochkirch. But he suffered a still greater loss that day in the death of Wilhelmina, Margravine of Bayreuth. Worthy in courage to be the sister of Frederick, and in intelligence to be the friend of Voltaire, both men mourned her as she deserved to be mourned. Frederick wrote that there are some troubles against which all stoicism and all the reasonings of the philosophers are alike useless. He was face to face with such a trouble now. Voltaire, at the King’s request, wrote to her memory an ode beginning, “Dear and illustrious shade, soul brave and pure.” But it is not always when the writer is himself most moved that his writings are most moving. There are some griefs which paralyse the brain and make every utterance cold. Voltaire was no more satisfied with his poem than was Frederick. He wrote another, which gave the unhappy brother the first moment of comfort he had had, he said, for five months. For a time their mutual loss and grief drew the two friends together as of yore. They put away their grievances. The “old need of communication, of finding each other again, at least in thought,” was powerfully present. Over Wilhelmina’s grave they forgot for a while Maupertuis and Akakia, Freytag and Frankfort.
Voltaire would have known himself forgotten and obscure if he had ever lived six consecutive months in his life without being plunged in some or other kind of quarrel. That “Geneva” article was still a tree of discord bearing fruit. It will not be forgotten that to oblige the most hospitable host in the world, d’Alembert had introduced into it a few remarks on the beneficial effects of play-acting in general, and the peculiar benefits which would accrue from it to Geneva in particular.
In the October of 1758, from the depths of his forest of Montmorency, Jean Jacques Rousseau—intense, morbid, bitter, with so much amiss in himself that he supposed all other men to be unreasonable and out of gear—wrote to d’Alembert his famous “Letter on Plays.”
He had “tried his wings” against d’Alembert’s friend, in his reply to the “Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon,” and Voltaire had laughed at him gaily and civilly enough. If Jean Jacques’s impetuosity had ever waited for reason, there would have seemed none now why he should not enter the lists again, and tilt once more with this active, mocking, sprightly little opponent, whom everybody knew to have inspired d’Alembert’s sentiments.
Jean Jacques, it is true, was a strange person to write against plays. He had written them himself. He had a genuine admiration for M. de Voltaire’s. If all plays were but like his! But, then, they are not. So he brought to bear against them all the magic and the fervour of his style, and flung on to four hundred pages of paper his astonishing views not only on play-acting, but on women, on love, and on literature.
No one reads “La Lettre sur les Spectacles” now. But everybody read it then, and though the stricter of the educated Calvinists only coldly acknowledged Rousseau as an ally, the common people heard him gladly. The aristocracy of Geneva had enjoyed Voltaire’s theatrical evenings too much to bring themselves to disapprove of them.
From Paris the little frail d’Alembert “deigned to overwhelm that fool Jean Jacques with reasons,” in a letter full of grave and stately irony. As for Voltaire, he waited, as he could afford to wait. He had taught some at least of the Genevans to be as “mad for theatres” as he was himself; and—he had “Candide” up his sleeve.
Running parallel with that controversy on theatres was another. Of course Voltaire was in it—and the soul of it. That goes without saying. He had been but a short time settled in Lausanne, when one Saurin, a poet-neighbour of his there, begged him to contradict a certain history of Joseph Saurin, his father, as given by Voltaire in a Catalogue of French Writers, added to his “Century of Louis XIV.” In that catalogue Voltaire had written of Joseph what not only he, but all the world, believed to be true. Joseph had been a pastor who, hating the life of Switzerland, had allowed himself to be very easily brought back by the preaching of Bossuet to Roman Catholicism and to France. But in France he was poor, and he hated poverty. Presently came rumours of robbery—of robbery he had committed in church. In a letter to a Lausanne pastor, Gonon, Saurin practically confessed to these robberies. This letter was published in the “Swiss Mercury” of April, 1736, and Saurin did not attempt to refute it. He had since died; and now, at his son’s suggestion, this energetic Voltaire must needs unearth the whole story, and with a very rash good-nature, set to work to prove that that letter to Gonon was nothing but a forgery after all. He obtained a certificate from three of the Lausanne ministers who had been principally concerned in the affair, declaring that they had never seen the original. This certificate Voltaire put into the second edition of his “Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations.”
But in this October of 1758, some impertinent anonymous person reproduces the whole letter from Saurin to Gonon in another Swiss newspaper, and positively dares to doubt the authenticity of Voltaire’s certificate from the three pastors.
On November 15th, M. de Voltaire sits down and writes “A Refutation of an Anonymous Article,” wherein he dwells on the useless danger and cruelty to an innocent family of attempting to convict their dead father of heinous crime.