“Natural Law,” it will be remembered, was nothing but a seeking for an answer to that everlasting question “What is truth?”
“On the Mind” was the naïve expression of the materialism of the wittiest freethinker in Paris, Helvétius, maître d’hôtel to the Queen and Farmer-General. But the Dauphin showed it to his mother, and it received the compliment of burning. “What a fuss about an omelette!” said Voltaire contemptuously. The destruction of his own “Natural Law” disturbed him as little. “Burn a good book, and the cinders will spring up and strike your face” was one of his own axioms. From the flames of its funeral pyre, the thing would rise a phœnix gifted with immortal life and fame.
But the suspension of the “Encyclopædia” hit him hard.
Since the attempted assassination of the King by Damiens the laws against the freedom of the press had been growing daily more severe. True, the poor creature had had a Bible in his pocket, but the churchmen argued somehow that it was the New Learning which had guided the dagger. Then France had had reverses in war. Suppose these misfortunes all came from these cursed philosophers and their “Encyclopædia”! As, later, whole nations attributed the rot in the crops and the ague in the bones of their children to the withering influence of that great little Corporal, hundreds of miles away from them, so in the eighteenth century in France a great party in the State attributed to the extension of learning every disaster which their own folly or foolhardiness brought upon them.
They turned, and brought all their power, influence, and money against the Encyclopædists. D’Alembert was no fighter. Student, recluse, and gentle friend—he was not one of those who could write with a pen in one hand and a sword in the other. “I do not know if the ‘Encyclopædia’ will be continued,” he wrote to Voltaire as early as the January of 1758, “but I am sure it will not be continued by me”; and though the pugnacious little warrior of Délices wrote and passionately urged his peaceful friend not to do what his absurd enemies wished—not to let them enjoy “that insolent victory”—still, d’Alembert withdrew. On February 9, 1759, Voltaire wrote that he seemed to see the Inquisition condemning Galileo.
But it was as he said. The cinders from the burning sprang up and burnt the burners. They could mutilate the “Encyclopædia,” but they could not kill it. Its very mutilations attracted interest, and “Natural Law” and “On the Mind” continued to be sold—in open secrecy—a hundred times more than ever.
It will not have been forgotten that with “Natural Law” had originally been published “The Disaster of Lisbon”; and that the doctrines of “Lisbon” had been refuted, by the request of the Genevans, in a long, wild, rambling letter by Jean Jacques Rousseau, wherein that absurd person had pointed out that if we lived in deserts, not towns, the houses would not fall upon us, because there would not be houses to fall.
Answer a fool according to his folly! A few gay bantering lines were all Voltaire’s reply at the moment. To strike quickly—or wait long—this man could do both. He loved best to strike at once; but if he could have patience and wait to gather his weapons, to barb his arrows, to poison his darts, why, he was of nature the more deadly. This time he had waited long. The bantering note was but a sop thrown to his impatience. Rousseau’s Letter on Optimism bears the date
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