The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

In this 1759 he produced the first volume of that “History of Peter the Great,” which he had undertaken to write two years earlier, in 1757, at the request of Peter’s daughter, Elizabeth.

In the spring of 1717, when Arouet was an imprudent young Paris wit of three-and-twenty, awaiting his first introduction to the Bastille, he had seen the great Peter in the flesh, being shown the shops of the capital, the lion of its season—“neither of us thinking then that I should become his historian.”

But directly Elizabeth made the suggestion, a Voltaire of sixty-three had embraced it with an enthusiasm which would not have been astonishing in an Arouet of twenty-three, and set to work at once.

The subject bristled with difficulties. First it involved an enormous correspondence with Schouvaloff, the Russian minister. Schouvaloff was ready and eager to shower maps, medals, and documents upon the historian. But the medals, as the historian pointed out, were not of the slightest use; the maps were inadequate; and the documents had too often been tampered with.

Then, too, there was an immeasurable difficulty, for a writer who wanted to tell the truth, in the fact that his hero’s own daughter was not only living, but had commissioned him to write the work. When Frederick wanted to know what in the world made Voltaire think of writing the history of the wolves and bears of Siberia, he represented the point of view from which most people then regarded Russia. A cold, ugly, barbarous, uninteresting place—what in the world can you have to say about it? The veil of tragedy and romance which now hangs before that great canvas did not give it the potent charm of mystery in the eighteenth century. Only Voltaire would then have dared to write “Russia under Peter the Great,” and only Voltaire could have made it readable.

He took a flying leap into that sea of difficulties, and came up to the top safely as usual. He gave Schouvaloff a plan of the work in advance. First, there are to be no unnecessary details of battles; secondly, the thing will be called not “The History of Peter the Great,” but “Russia under Peter I.,” as giving me greater liberty, and explaining to my readers in advance the real aim of the book; thirdly, Peter’s little weaknesses are not to be concealed when necessary to expose them.

The rough sketch was bold, and so was the finished picture. But to its boldness were united that grace and charm by which Voltaire could make disagreeable truths sound like compliments. If to the world generally Peter was, and should be, but the “wisest and greatest of savages,” “only a king,” and a badly brought up one at that—to Russia he was, and ought to be, a great man and a hero; and, Peter apart altogether—and there is a good deal of the work from which Peter is entirely apart—the book “revealed Russia to Europe and herself,” and brought that great country to the knowledge and the interest of other nations.

The style sometimes bears trace of the difficulties its author had to overcome—the fact that the subject was chosen for him, not by him. “I doubt,” he wrote to Madame du Deffand, “if it will be as amusing as the ‘Life of Charles XII.,’ for Peter was only extraordinarily wise, while Charles was extraordinarily foolish.” All the time he was writing it, “Tancred,” Ferney, “Candide,” Frederick, were calling his attention away from it.

Not the less, the History was a very successfully executed order, with which the orderer was so pleased that in 1761 she sent the author her portrait set in diamonds.

To the end of 1759 also belongs a very different work of Voltaire’s—one of those spontaneous, impulsive, rollicking, daring things which must have been no little relief to his méchanceté to turn to from those grave ploddings through Schouvaloff’s documents. Encouraged by that burning of “Natural Law” and its companion volumes, and by the suppression of the “Encyclopædia” in the early part of the year, in November a weekly Jesuit organ called the “Journal de Trévoux,” edited by one Berthier, furiously assailed not only “Natural Law,” which fires could not destroy, but the “Encyclopædia,” which prohibitions could not suppress, and all the works of enlightenment in France. Voltaire had always an inconsistent tendresse for the Jesuits. They had been good to him in his school days: and among them he still numbered some of his friends. But this thing was too monstrous! Voltaire attacked it with sharpest ridicule, and wrote anonymously that scathing pamphlet called “The Narrative of the Sickness, Confession, Death, and Re-appearance of the Jesuit Berthier.” This he followed by another pamphlet, “The Narrative of Brother Grasse.” Both were but burlesques. True, there was a hit in every line; and then, if not now, every arrow went home. But the real significance of the pamphlets is in the fact that they were a declaration of war. Gardens and architecture, farms and beehives—in these things is to be found happiness perhaps. But there has been no great man in the world who ever thought happiness enough. That hatred of intolerance, that passion for freedom which had been the motive power of a young and struggling Arouet, was still the motive power of this affluent, comfortable Voltaire of sixty-five. To be sure, it is easier to feel sympathy with the oppressed and the needy when one is oneself downtrodden and poor: and something more difficult when one is oneself prosperous and independent. It must be accounted to Voltaire for righteousness that when he no longer suffered himself, the sufferings of others appealed to him only with a double force. It was in those smiling days of Délices and Ferney that he framed his battle-cry and formulated the creed of all the philosophers, and the aim and the conviction of his own life, into one brief phrase—Écrasez l’infâme.