By February, Voltaire was writing to Cideville at Rouen that the new edition of the “Henriade” was tacitly permitted in Paris by the authorities. While they had been busy suppressing it, those authorities had also been busy reading and admiring it themselves. Henceforth, it was allowed in France.
In March, M. de Voltaire announced his intention of returning to his dear England, and insinuated that he was going to print “Charles XII.” at “Cantorbéry.” In truth, Cideville had found his friend “a little hole” in Rouen—a very dirty and uncomfortable little hole as it turned out—where he could live incognito and superintend the secret printing and publishing there. He removed from the first little hole to the house of Jore, his printer and publisher, with whom he was to have only too many dealings in the future. He passed as an English gentleman. He had the society of Cideville to console him. He was five months in Rouen altogether, from March of 1731 until August. One of these months he spent in bed. Part of his time he was in the country. The whole time he was correcting the proof-sheets of the first part of “Charles XII.” and writing the latter, and composing two tragedies—“The Death of Cæsar” and “Ériphyle.”
He returned to Paris in August, 1731. On September 13th died the noble young Maisons, aged only thirty-one, of the smallpox which had spared him before. “He died in my arms,” said Voltaire, “not through the ignorance but through the neglect of the doctors.”
In October the secretly printed “Charles XII.” was introduced surreptitiously into Paris, as the “Henriade” had been. Like the “Henriade,” it became the mode and was read by all the educated classes; and soon, in translations, by the educated of other countries as well.
It is indeed a bold and vigorous story. Plenty of anecdote and action—a vivid drama wherein the characters play their parts with extraordinary spirit and energy. In the heat of so many battles the author has no time for reflections. But throughout, not the less, he shows very plainly his contempt for his hero, and his love for all those strange things—peace, liberty, enlightenment—which that hero had done so much to crush.
Many of his facts he had obtained first-hand from the Duchess of Marlborough, who remembered her husband’s dealings with Charles; and from Baron Goertz, who had been Charles’s favourite minister and then Voltaire’s personal friend.
Voltaire, as has been seen, loved his “Charles XII.” himself; and as usual had spared nothing to make it as good as he could.
“My great difficulty,” he wrote, “has not been to find memoirs, but to sift out the good ones. There is another inconvenience inseparable from writing contemporary history. Every captain of infantry who has served in the armies of Charles XII. and lost his knapsack on a march, thinks I ought to mention it. If the subalterns complain of my silence, the generals and ministers complain of my outspokenness. Whoso writes the history of his own time must expect to be blamed for everything he has said and everything he has not said; but these little drawbacks should not discourage a man who loves truth and liberty, expects nothing, fears nothing, asks nothing, and who limits his ambition to the cultivation of letters.”
By December of this year 1731 Voltaire was staying with a certain gay old Comtesse de Fontaine Martel who had a house in the Palais Royal, to which she made her visitor free, as to her carriage, her opera-box, and her fine company.
His friendship with the Bernières had cooled by this time. To be sure, he was no small acquisition to this corrupt old Countess, whose one aim in existence was to be amused if she could. “To be bored near Voltaire! Ah, Dieu! that is not possible!” said an enthusiastic lady admirer thereafter. He sonneted his hostess now, as only he knew how—delicate, graceful, French, delightful. “Ériphyle” was performed at her house very early in 1732. The guests were much too polite not to sob at its pathos and applaud it to the echo.