The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

But if he wrote lightly hereafter, his mood when he landed in England was no laughing one.

This vif and sensitive child of fortune could not forget that he was an exile—and exiled unjustly. His pensions both from King and Queen had been stopped. He had an exchange letter on a Jew in London, but before he presented it the Jew was bankrupt and could not pay him, and he was forced to accept a few guineas King George I. “had the generosity to give me.” His health was as indifferent as usual. He was in a country of which he knew little or nothing of the language or the customs. He had begun the world brilliantly perhaps, but he had greatly fallen. Those first few weeks in England are likely to have been among the unhappiest in his life.

He had been on English shores but a very short time when he slipped back incognito to Paris (he had promised the paternal government to go to England, not to stay there), and, with his life in his hands, waited about in the capital for two months for the man Rohan, “whom the instinct of his cowardice hid from me.” Theriot knew of the escapade, but no one else. Voltaire wrote him an account of it on August 12, 1726.

He was hardly back in England again when, in September and in the first budget of letters he had had in his exile, he received the news of the death of his sister Catherine. She was nine years older than himself. She had long been married to M. Mignot, and had children and cares of her own to engross her affections and her thoughts. It does not seem that Voltaire had of late seen very much of her. But all the mothering he had had since he was seven years old she had given him. Her death filled his soul with a gloomy despair. “I should have died and she have lived,” he wrote to Madame de Bernières. “It was a mistake of destiny.” To the end of his days he benefited her children with a large generosity. Bearing evident reference to her death is that letter, called the Letter of Consolation, written from England in 1728 to a friend in sorrow. No reader of it who has himself suffered will doubt that its writer knew how to suffer too, and will find in that wise and patient philosophy a soothing of the troubles common to a Voltaire and to all men.

He had plenty of introductions in England. His acquaintance with the Count de Morville, the intimate of the Walpoles, gave him the entrée of the great Whig houses. Bolingbroke, who had returned from France in 1723, would present him to the Tories. He further knew, it is said, Lord Stair and Bishop Atterbury. He had a talent—that delightful French talent—for making new friends. And he was soon engrossed in an astounding application to the English language, and a study of its government, laws, literature, and progress which remains the best ever made by a Frenchman.

It is doubtful if, when he landed here in May, 1726, he knew a single syllable of English except what he had gathered from the English books Theriot had procured for him when he was in the Bastille. There is a letter to a wine merchant, in very bad English certainly, but still in English, which he is supposed to have written when he had been at the most a few months in England.

The year 1726 was not out when he was writing to other friends in that intricate tongue and attacking its idioms with a splendid dash and audacity.

In 1727, he composed some melodious English verses to Lady Harley; and in his English letters of this and the next year to Theriot and others it will be seen that the language was sufficiently his own for him to stamp it with his inimitable style. Authorities differ as to how good or how bad was the accent with which he spoke.

He is said, when he discovered that the word “plague” was pronounced as one syllable, to have wished that plague would take one half of the language and ague the other; and to have complained a good deal of a tongue in which a word spelt handkerchief was pronounced ’ankicher. That he was fluent in it there is no doubt. An uncharitable person declared that he had soon mastered the language, even to the oaths and curses. Why not? Oaths and curses adorned the polite conversation of the day, and why should a Voltaire omit them? But besides that dinner-table English he could soon speak easily the very different English required for discussing science, philosophy, religion—the speciality of an English expert, in that expert’s mother tongue.

Soon after he returned to France he declared, in the dedication of his play “Brutus” to Lord Bolingbroke, that, having “passed two years in a constant study of the English language,” he found it awkward to write in French. “I was almost accustomed to think in English.”