Exquisitely dainty and gay: as fine and as sharp as needles from my lady’s work-basket, and yet as “biting and incisive as a poignard”: such are the hall-marks of those little instruments of torture of which the “Whens” was the first.
“When one has the honour to be admitted into a respectable company of literary men, one need not make one’s opening speech a satire against them.”
“When one is hardly a man of letters and not at all a philosopher, it is not becoming to say that our nation has only a false literature and a vain philosophy.”
“When one is admitted into an honourable body, one ought, in one’s address, to hide under a veil of modesty that insolent pride which is the prerogative of hot heads and mean talents.”
Voltaire would not have been Voltaire, nor of his century, if he had not gone on to remind this highly correct Marquis that in a free youth he had himself coquetted with Deism and translated and circulated “The Universal Prayer”—then commonly called “The Deists’ Prayer”—of Mr. Pope. He also added that for his Deistic opinions this proper Le Franc had been deprived of the charge of his province; which was not true, but made the story much better.
It is hardly necessary to say that Voltaire denied the “Whens.” “I did not write them,” he told Theriot on May 20th, “but I wish I had.”
They had roused his party very effectively. If “the shepherd, the labourer, the rat retired from the world in a Swiss cheese,” was pushed, as the rat said, into the “deluge of monosyllables,” how should the philosophers in Paris escape it? The famous Morellet, abbé, writer, freethinker, one of the “four theologians of the Encyclopædia,” whom Voltaire called Mords-les (Bite them) from the caustic nature of his wit, rushed into the fray with the “Ifs” and the “Wherefores”; and a reproduction of the luckless Le Franc’s translation of “The Universal Prayer.” Délices followed up at once with the “Yeses” and the “Noes,” the “Whats,” the “Whys,” and the “Whos.” Délices said that chuckling sustained old age: no wonder his old age was so vigorous. There was not a vulnerable inch in the body or soul of that unhappy Marquis which one of those particles did not wound. A riddle ran through Paris, “Why did Jeremiah weep so much during his life?” “Because, as a prophet, he foresaw that after death he would be translated by Le Franc”—Le Franc having compensated for that “Universal Prayer” by writing the most devout works ever since. Later were to come the “Fors” and the “Ahs.” Some were by other hands than Voltaire’s. But his was the spirit that inspired them all. Some were in verse. All were brief. Then he published extracts from an early tragedy of Le Franc’s, making them as absurd as he alone knew how. The affair was the talk of Paris: the most delicious farce in the world. Madame du Deffand spoke of Le Franc as buried under “mountains of ridicule.” Wherever he was recognised he excited shouts of laughter. He solemnly and prosily defended his translation of “The Universal Prayer” as a mere exercise in English, which it very likely was. And Paris laughed afresh. Voltaire declared that Tronchin had ordered him to hunt Pompignan for two hours every morning for the good of his health. Poor Pompignan, goaded to madness, presented a petition to the King in which he asked the assistance of their Majesties and recalled to them the splendid welcome they had accorded to himself and his Academical discourse.
But Louis XV. could not prevent Paris laughing nor Voltaire answering by what purported to be an extract from a newspaper of Le Franc’s native Montauban, wherein the natives of that place were represented as appointing a committee to go to Paris and inquire into the mental condition of the unfortunate Marquis. But this thing was a brochure—a nothing.
Délices had not done with Montauban yet. There was a pause. And then Voltaire produced one of the most scathing and trenchant satires of which even he was capable. It was in verse, and it was called “Vanity.” It began:
Well, what’s the matter, little bourgeois of a little town?