It has been seen that he had loathed the Thing, a nameless monster, for fifty years. The insults of the “Journal de Trévoux” were the final spur to action. If Berthier had not pushed him to extremities, no doubt some other of “those serpents called Jesuits” would have done it equally effectually. The time was ripe; and Voltaire was ripe for the time. He flung down the glove at last and declared upon l’infâme an open war, which was to be war to the knife till he had no longer breath in his body, and the sword—his pen—fell from a dead hand.
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE BATTLE OF PARTICLES, AND THE BATTLE OF COMEDIES
On March 10, 1760, M. le Franc de Pompignan took the seat in the French Academy left vacant by the death of Maupertuis, and delivered an opening address which was nothing but an attack on the philosophic party.
Marquis and county magnate was Pompignan, rather a good minor poet, a native of Montauban, and, in his own province and his own estimation, a very great man indeed. In 1736, he had written a play with which he had tried, vainly, to supplant Voltaire’s “Alzire.” He and Voltaire met afterwards, in amicable fashion enough, at the house of a mutual friend. And then Voltaire retired to Cirey and Madame du Châtelet: and Le Franc to his magisterial duties in Montauban.
But by the year 1758 Montauban, and his own vanity, had so impressed the noble Marquis with the idea that his genius was wasted in a province, that he came up to Paris: stood for a vacant chair in the Academy; failed to gain it; stood again for another chair in 1760, and, as has been seen, won it, in succession to Maupertuis. When it is added that Le Franc was also Historiographer of France in place of Voltaire, and that he was practically the only nobleman in the kingdom who was at once clever, educated and orthodox, his design to use that Academical chair as a stepping-stone to the tutorship of the Dauphin’s sons—always one of the most influential posts in the kingdom—was not at all a wild ambition. He began his speech by praising his predecessor, Maupertuis, as in duty bound, and also as being sure to raise the ire of that arch-fiend of philosophers, Voltaire; and then abused those philosophers and their works roundly, soundly, and at length.
The chairman of the Academy made reply in a very fulsome speech, in which he compared Le Franc to Moses, and his younger brother, the Bishop of Puy, a not illiberal churchman, to Aaron. “The two brothers are consecrated to work miracles, the one as judge, the other as pontiff, in Israel.”
Moses was then granted an interview with the King, in which his Majesty highly praised that Academical discourse as little likely to be applauded by the impious, “or by strong minds”—which he took to be the finest compliment he could pay it.
On March 28th, one of those “esprits forts” was writing comfortably from Délices that he saw all storms, but saw them from the port. The port! Of course someone sent him that Academical discourse. He applied the remarks on the philosophers particularly to himself (to be sure, the cap fitted), and took upon himself to avenge them all.
One fine day there appeared in Paris, without date, without any indication as to the place in which it had been printed, a little brochure of seven deadly pages entitled the “Whens: or Useful Notes on a Discourse pronounced before the French Academy on March 10, 1760.” They were the little skiff in which Voltaire sailed into the teeth of the storm.
All his works are characteristic in a high degree, but hardly any are so characteristic as those he wielded in this Battle of the Particles.