The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

In the spring of 1719 the faithless and charming Mademoiselle de Livri insisted on his using his influence to get her a good part in his play. Perhaps she, Voltaire, and “little de Génonville” enjoyed themselves about Paris together as before. “Que nous nous aimions tous trois!... que nous étions heureux!” the forsaken lover wrote ten years later in his graceful poem to the memory of de Génonville.

Mademoiselle was no actress, though she wished to be one. Her very accent was provincial. She was laughed off the stage when “Œdipe” was revived after Lent, and Voltaire very nearly came to blows with one of the laughers, Poisson, who was one of the actors too. He had Poisson thrown into prison, and then himself obtained his release. Poisson and the public were right after all, and Voltaire soon knew it.

Mademoiselle retired from the boards, and married.

When a few years later, Voltaire went to call on her in her fine house when she was the Marquise de Gouvernet, and her huge Swiss porter, not knowing him, refused him admission, he sent her “Les Vous et Les Tu,” one of the most charmingly graceful and bantering of all his poems. In his old age at Ferney, when the first rose of the year appeared he would pluck it and kiss it to the memory of Mademoiselle de Livri. Perhaps it was of her he thought when he wrote one of the few tender lines to be found in his works, and one of the tenderest in any poetry:

C’est moi qui te dois tout, puisque c’est moi qui t’aime.

On his last great visit to Paris, when he was nearly eighty-four and she not much younger, the two met for the last time—ghosts out of shadowland—in a strange new world.

In this same spring of 1719 there appeared in Paris another satire on the Regent, called the “Philippics.” M. de Voltaire had not written it, to be sure. But it was clever, and sounded as if he had. Besides, he was known to be the friend of the Duchesse du Maine, at the present moment shut up, with her Court, in the Bastille; of the gorgeous Duke of Richelieu and of the Spanish ambassador who were accomplices in a conspiracy against Orleans. So in May the authorities requested M. de Voltaire to spend the summer in the country; and he spent it at Villars.

If the Maréchale had been charming in Paris, she was a thousand times more so here. If she had flattered a brilliant young author in her box at the theatre, she flattered and petted him a thousand times better now she had him to herself, an interesting young exile. Such a clever boy! so witty! so cynical! so amusing! He certainly ought to have been clever enough to guess that this woman of the world was only playing with him. But he was vain too—and did not guess it. “Friendship is a thousand times better worth having than love,” he wrote disconsolately in a letter after a while. “There is something in me which makes it ridiculous for me to love.... It is all over. I renounce it for life.” The renunciation was not so easy as he expected. He was, at least for a time, out of gear, restless, discontented. The husband, Louis XIV.’s famous marshal, had a thousand anecdotes of the Sun King to relate. And the future author of the “Century of Louis XIV.” was almost too distrait to listen to them. He forgot Paris and his career. He forgot the dazzling success of “Œdipe.” He would not indeed have been Voltaire, but some lesser man, if he had let this or any other passion ride over him rough-shod. He had the “Henriade” and a new play with him. He turned to his work—worked like a fury—until he had worked the folly out of him. But, not the less, “he never spoke of it afterwards but with a feeling of regret, almost of remorse.”

By June 25, 1719, he was at Sully, where he wrote most of his new play, “Artémire,” and spent the autumn and part of the winter. Paris had gone mad over the financial schemes of John Law, and it was well that a young man of five-and-twenty, with a taste for speculation and money in his pocket for the first time, should be out of the way of temptation. From Sully he went back to Villars, and from Villars to the Duke of Richelieu’s. “I go from château to château,” he wrote. He liked the life well, no doubt. It was gay, easy, witty. For anyone else it would have been idle too; but not for a Voltaire.

He had already complained that his passion for his Maréchale de Villars had lost him a good deal of his time. But, all the same, by February, 1720, “Artémire” was finished, and its author was back in Paris superintending its rehearsals.