The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

On the first anniversary of his death, “Agathocle,” his last tragedy, still incomplete, was performed in Paris, with a prologue by d’Alembert.

A complete edition of Voltaire’s works appeared in 1780.

In 1784 there were secretly circulating in Paris the “Memoirs for the Life of Voltaire,” written by himself in 1759 and revenging himself on Frederick for Freytag and Frankfort with the most cool and deadly spite. The man who wrote them, in that perfectly easy and limpid French of which he was always master even when he was by no means master of himself, had never intended them to be published. He burnt the original manuscript; but he had two copies made. It will not be forgotten that La Harpe and Madame Denis were dismissed from Ferney for having stolen one of them. One became the property of Catherine the Great. The other, Madame Denis, remembering that “wearisome niece” and the “Golden Lion,” sent in 1783 to Beaumarchais, then editing Voltaire’s works. He did not dare to include the “Memoirs” therein, in Frederick’s lifetime. But they were passed from hand to hand in Paris, and it was doubtless well for Voltaire’s fame that Frederick had already eulogised him and said masses for the peace of his soul. The “Memoirs” are now always included in Voltaire’s works. It is not, all things considered, wholly his fault that many people, ignorant of the circumstances under which it was drawn, have assumed the malicious caricature of Frederick therein contained to be a faithful portrait.

For thirteen years the body of him “who against monks had never rested, among monks rested peacefully” enough. The Revolution he foresaw had come, though not as he had foreseen it.

His ideal of government had been a purified and constitutional monarchy, but always a monarchy. “My muscles are not very flexible: I do not mind making one bow, but a hundred on end would fatigue me.” By 1790 Louis XVI. was a king only in name. In that year the Abbey of Scellières, with all other religious houses, became the property of the nation. Villette had not merely fallen in with the views of the Revolution. They had been his when such convictions were dangerous and awkward, and he never forgot that Prophet of Revolution, Voltaire. It was through Villette that the Quai de Théatins, on which the Hôtel Villette stood, was renamed the Quai Voltaire.

In November, 1790, after a performance of “Brutus,” Charles Villette, ex-Marquis, harangued the audience and passionately pleaded, “in the name of the country,” that the remains of Voltaire might be brought to Paris and honourably buried. “This translation will be the dying sigh of fanaticism.” The idea pleased a people agog for excitement and drunk with the first deep draughts of a liberty which for centuries they had not been allowed even to taste.

On June 1, 1791, the National Assembly made Louis XVI. sign the decree which ordained that the ashes of his great enemy should be transferred from the church of Romilly to that of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris—Sainte-Geneviève, which was henceforth to be called the Pantheon of France.

On July 6th, a funeral car, decked with laurels and oak leaves, drawn by four horses and escorted by a detachment of the National Guard, left Romilly-on-Seine and began its solemn triumphal progress to Paris. On the front of the car was written, “To the memory of Voltaire.” On one side, “If man is born free, he ought to govern himself”; on the other, “If man has tyrants, he ought to dethrone them.”

As it passed through the villages, the villagers came out to greet it with wreaths of flowers and laurels in their hands. Mothers held up their babies that they too might say that they had seen this great day; old men pressed forward to touch and be healed. At night the villages through which the procession passed were illuminated; by day could be seen triumphal arches, girls dressed in white, and garlands of flowers. Out of their ignorance and wretchedness, this canaille recognised him who had wept and clamoured for the rights of all men and made freedom a possibility even for them.

At nightfall on July 10th, the cortège reached Paris. The sarcophagus was placed on an altar on the ruins of that tower of the Bastille in which Voltaire had been twice a prisoner.