The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

“What answer did you make?” someone said to him.

“None; I brought out ‘Zaire.’”

“Zaire” was written in twenty-two days.

“The subject carried me away with it; the piece wrote itself.” It is a tragedy full of love and pathos, which still in some degree keeps its popularity. It has been ably criticised as being not the best of Voltaire’s tragedies, but the most inspired. It reads as if its author were a lover of five-and-twenty—quick with the emotions he describes. “Whoso paints the passions has felt them,” he said himself. What an unknown Voltaire “the tender Zaire” must have revealed to his friends! It was his first real dramatic success since “Œdipe.” It was a greater success than “Œdipe” had been. At the first performance, indeed, on August 6, 1732, the pit was somewhat noisy, and vociferously called attention to defects arising from hasty writing. But, after all, the play moved the heart. At the fourth performance the author was called from his box to receive the unanimous plaudits of the house. He himself wrote a notice of the play in the “Mercure”—the first time such a thing had ever been done. On October 14th it was played before the King and Queen at Fontainebleau. It brought its author much of what he called “that smoke of vainglory” for which he had written ‘Ériphyle’ and ‘Brutus’ all over again, and in vain. He himself superintended the performance. He was at Court six weeks. “Mariamne” was also performed; and the “Gustave” of that rival playwright, Alexis Piron, was not. Voltaire met Piron at Court one day. “Ah! my dear Piron, what are you doing here? I have been here three weeks. The other night they played my ‘Mariamne’; they are going to play ‘Zaire.’ How about ‘Gustave’?” Bitter Piron himself tells the story. It does not sound like truth. An enemy’s ill-luck nearly always killed the Voltairian spite at a blow. But if it be true, it is easy to understand that this cool, witty Arouet, the son of the notary, was not precisely popular. While at Court he rewrote his “English Letters” on “Newton” and “Gravitation”; read aloud to Cardinal Fleury, with a few judicious omissions, that one on the Quakers, and corresponded with a man who was now his scientific teacher and, to be, his admired friend and his bitter enemy. His name was Maupertuis.

When Voltaire had returned to his comfortable quarters at the Palais Royal, “Zaire” was acted there by amateurs in January, 1733. Voltaire himself took the part of Lusignan, the heroine’s father, in spite of his health, which was so bad that “I dread being reduced to idleness, which to me would be a terrible disgrace.”

In that very same month of January the Comtesse de Fontaine Martel died very suddenly. She had her card parties and her salon to the last. She was quite old, wicked, godless, charming and generous, a perfect type of her class and her age. Voltaire was at her bedside when she died. “What time is it?” she asked with her last breath. Before she could be answered—“Thank God!” said she, “whatever time it is, there is somewhere a rendezvous.”

Voltaire said that he lost, by her death, a good house of which he was the master, and an income of forty thousand francs which was spent in amusing him.

He stayed on in her house for some time. He was there when there swept over him one of the noisiest hurricanes of all his stormy existence.

In 1731, that envious old exiled J. B. Rousseau had circulated in Paris a very venomous letter on the subject of Voltaire. The brilliant success of ‘Zaire’ was the signal for him to attack it with fury. The criticism was so manifestly unjust and so manifestly dictated by jealousy, that Voltaire might have been well content to leave it alone. But almost the only thing he could not do was to do nothing. So he wrote “The Temple of Taste.”

“The Temple of Taste” is a brilliant burlesque, half prose, half verse. Pope’s “Dunciad” is the only English poem with which it can be compared. Its story is that Cardinal Fleury and the poet go together to the “Temple of Taste” criticising every foible of the age on their way there. Near the entrance they meet the candidates for admission to the “Temple,” great among whom is J. B. Rousseau.