After all, Voltaire was not a perfect hater.
That sodden, worthless Theriot came to Délices for a three months’ visit in July, with all his treachery and ingratitude amply forgotten; and in October that very showy hero, Richelieu, who was always in money debt to Voltaire, descended upon his creditor with a suite of no fewer than forty persons. They had to be accommodated at Tourney, and fêtes and theatricals devised for their master’s benefit. The Duchesse d’Enville and the Duke of Villars were also staying with Voltaire, who was quite delighted to discover that a Richelieu of sixty-six still kept up his character for gallantry, and to surprise him at the feet of a charming Madame Ménage, a Tronchin patient. The pretty face and wit of Madame Cramer also quite vanquished the susceptible elderly heart of the conqueror. Voltaire offered to get rid—temporarily—of her husband. But Richelieu had reckoned, not without his host indeed, but without his hostess. Sprightly Madame Cramer laughed in his face.
The first authorised publication of a work which had been suggested at Richelieu’s supper-table thirty-two years earlier belongs, by some bizarrerie of destiny, to this 1762, which also saw the noblest work of Voltaire’s life—the defence of Calas and the preaching of the Gospel of Tolerance.
Whoso has followed its author’s history has also followed the “Pucelle’s.”
Alternately delight and torment, danger and refuge; now being read in the Cirey bathroom to the ecstatic bliss of Madame de Graffigny, now passed from hand to hand and from salon to salon in Paris, now being copied in Prussia, and then burnt in Geneva, hidden in Collini’s breeches at Frankfort, and stolen from Émilie’s effects by Mademoiselle du Thil—the adventures of the “Pucelle” would form a volume.
Considered intrinsically, it is at once Voltaire’s shame and fame. It is to be feared that there are still many people who are only interested in him as the author of the “Pucelle”; while there are others to whom the fact that he wrote it blots out his noble work for humanity, and the bold part he played in the advancement of that civilisation which they, and all men, enjoy to-day.
That Voltaire took in vain the name of that purest of heroines, Joan of Arc, is at least partially forgivable. He did not know, and could not have known, the facts of her life as everybody knows them to-day. His offences against decency may be judged in that well-worn couplet:
Immodest words admit of no defence,
And want of decency is want of sense.
Only one excuse need even be offered. Voltaire wrote to the taste of his age. As the coarse horseplay and boisterous mirth of the novels of Fielding perfectly portrayed humour as understood by eighteenth-century England, so the gay indelicacies of the “Pucelle” represent humour as understood by eighteenth-century France.
The fact that women, and even women who were at least nominally respectable, were not ashamed to listen to and laugh at those airy, shameful doubles ententes, proves that the thing was to the taste of the time; as the fact that “Tom Jones” and “Joseph Andrews” were read aloud to select circles of admiring English ladies proves that Fielding likewise had not mistaken the taste of his public.