The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Desnoiresterres has well observed that this mad eighteenth century produced the extraordinary anomaly of being at once that of scepticism and intolerance, of the most degraded superstition and the most barefaced irreligion. It might be thought—it is generally thought—that persecution would certainly not proceed from persons who were too indifferent to their faith to make the slightest attempt to live up to it. But if the history of religious hatred be closely followed, it will be seen that it is precisely these persons who are the cruellest persecutors. Perhaps they act on that old principle of compensation—“Give me the desire of my soul, and the gratification of my flesh, and by the scaffold, the torture, and the wheel, I will bring souls to the faith I only profess.” There seems no other explanation of the fact that this “rotten age whose armies fled without a fight before a handful of men; this age which laughed at everything and cared for nothing but wit,” was as fiercely intolerant and besottedly bigot as the age of Ignatius Loyola and Catherine de’ Medici.

The case of Calas was but one of many. It was not finished when another, scarcely less sombre and terrible, was brought under Voltaire’s notice.

In 1760 there lived near fanatic Toulouse, at a place called Castres, a Protestant family of the name of Sirven. Sirven père, aged about fifty-one, was a professional feudiste; that is to say, he was a person learned in feudal tenures, who kept registers and explained the obsolete terms of ancient leases, and thus was brought much in contact with the great families of the province. Thoroughly honest, honourable, and respectable, his wife shared these qualities with him. They had three daughters—Marie Anne, who was now married, Jeanne and Elizabeth, who both lived at home.

Elizabeth, the youngest, was feeble-minded: but on that very account—on that old, tender parental principle of making up by love for the cruelty of fortune—she was the dearest to her parents. On March 6, 1760, the poor girl suddenly disappeared. After vainly hunting for her all day, when Sirven reached his home at night he was told that the Bishop of Castres desired to see him. He went. The Bishop informed him that Elizabeth, whose deficient brain was certainly not equal to weighing the pros and cons of different religions, had ardently desired to become a Roman Catholic, and that to receive instruction in that faith she had been placed in the Convent of the Black Ladies. The poor father received the news more calmly than might have been expected. He said that he had no idea his daughter wished to change her religion; but that if the change was to be for her good and happiness, he would not oppose it.

The situation was a strange one. But it had a very common solution. The Bishop had a strong-minded sister who had caught that “epidemic of the time,” which the infected called religious zeal.

Meanwhile poor Elizabeth in her convent, having been first “taught her catechism by blows,” as Voltaire said, began, like many another weak intellect under strong suggestion, to see visions and to dream dreams. She became, in short, what a nun might call a saint, but what a doctor would call a lunatic. The Black Ladies declared that she implored them to corporally chastise her for the good of her soul; and it was certainly a fact that when she was returned to her parents in the October of 1760, quite insane, her body was “covered with the marks of the convent whip.” If her father complained loudly of her treatment, such complaints, though natural, were infinitely imprudent. My Lord Bishop and the authorities kept a very keen official eye on M. Sirven, and harried him on the subject of his daughter whenever a chance offered. The sheep had gone back to the wolves, the brand to the burning. Rome never yet sat down with folded hands, as other Churches have done, and calmly watched her children desert her.

In the July of 1761 the Sirvens moved to a village called St. Alby, that Sirven might be near some business on which he was engaged.

On December 17, 1761, when he was staying at the château of a M. d’Esperandieu, for whom he was working, Elizabeth slipped out of her home at night, and never returned. Her mother and sister had at once given notice of her disappearance, and prayed that a search might be made. Sirven, called home, arrived on the morning of the 18th, and caused a still further search to be prosecuted. But in vain. A fortnight passed. On January 3, 1762, the unhappy father, who fancied, not unnaturally, that Elizabeth might have been decoyed away by her Roman friends, had to go in pursuit of his trade to a place called Burlats.

That same night the body of Elizabeth was discovered in a well at St. Alby.

The authorities were at once communicated with, and the judge of Mazamet, the David de Beaudrigue of the case. The body was taken to the Hôtel de Ville. There was abundant local testimony to the effect that the poor girl, had often been seen looking into the well, muttering to herself. The case was clearly one of suicide or misadventure. Either was possible. But that it was one of the two was morally certain.