The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

He had no thought at present of bringing out those “English Letters.” The time was not yet ripe; and discretion here, certainly, was the better part of valour. He applied himself instead to his “Charles XII.” He spoke of it himself as his favourite work, and “the one for which I have the bowels of a father.” Its breathless race of incident swept him along, and he had hardly time even to be sociable. Refusing one of Theriot’s invitations to dinner on May 15th, he said that he would drop in at the end of the entertainment “along with that fool of a Charles XII.” The subject engrossed him, as the subject he had in hand always engrossed him. Then, since he was no more an exile, he set to work with Theriot to get his pensions restored—and, succeeded.

One night when he was out at supper he heard talk of a lottery formed by Desforts, the controller-general. One of the guests observed that anyone who took all the tickets in the lottery would be greatly the gainer. Voltaire was as swift to act as swift to see. He formed a company who bought up all the tickets: and found himself the winner of a large sum. To be sure he had offended Desforts, who was thus written down an ass. So off went the poet to Plombières with Richelieu in August for a visit. When he returned to Paris the squall had blown over, and M. de Voltaire had made an uncommonly successful speculation.

He made others, too, about this period, and never again was in need of money.

In this December of 1729 Voltaire invited the actors of the Comédie Française to dinner and read them his new play, “Brutus.” It was accepted, rehearsed, and then suddenly and mysteriously withdrawn. Voltaire said there was a plot against it—a cabal of Rohan and his kind, and of Crébillon—famous rival playwright and gloomy tragic poet. But worse than any plot was the feebleness of the play itself and its fatal absence of love interest. The actors themselves thought it unworthy of a Voltaire and his public. Voltaire knew it to be so himself, and at once set about revising and rewriting it.

On March 20, 1730, there died after four days’ acute anguish, aged only thirty-eight, the great actress, Adrienne Lecouvreur. Her death was the supreme event of this period of Voltaire’s life. Perhaps it was one of the supreme events of his whole life. He had been, he said, “her admirer, her friend, her lover.” If the last word is to be taken literally, that relationship had long ceased. But he had for ever a passionate admiration for her talents. The last piece she played in was “Œdipe,” and she was taken ill upon the stage. Voltaire with his quick instinct of a passionate pity, hastened to her bedside, and she died in his arms in agonies for which there could be found no remedy. She was an actress, so she could have neither priest nor absolution, and dying thus, was refused Christian burial, and taken without the city at night and “thrown in the kennel,” like a dead dog.

What wonder if Paris was stirred to its soul? And if Paris was stirred, what must a Voltaire have been? Adrienne, it has been well said, had “all the virtues but virtue.” She was generous and disinterested to a high degree. She was a woman of supreme talent and achievements. She was at least morally no worse, as she was intellectually far greater, than those kings’ mistresses over whose graves prelates had thought it no shame to lift their voices in eulogies and orations, and who had been buried with royal honours and splendour.

In Voltaire’s mind England and Mrs. Oldfield’s burial were still fresh impressions. Injustice had begun to play the part with him that the lighted torch plays to the fagot. His soul was ablaze at once.

It is not fashionable to look upon him as a man of feeling. In the popular idea he is the scoffer who jeered at everything. Read the “Poem on the Death of Adrienne Lecouvreur” written, not on the passionate impulse of the moment, but many months later, and see in it a soul stirred to its profoundest depths—the ebullition of a feeling as deep as it is rare.

“Shall I for ever see ... the light-minded French sleeping under the rule of superstition? What! is it only in England that mortals dare to think?”

“Men deprive of burial her to whom Greece would have raised altars.” “The Lecouvreur in London would have had a tomb among genius, kings, and heroes.” “Ye gods! Why is my country no longer the fatherland of glory and talent?”