The “Temple” is one of the most graceful and easy of the works of an author who always possessed those two qualities in an extraordinary degree. It shows, as no other writing of Voltaire’s had yet shown, his delicate and perfect critical judgment. He expresses his damning opinion—so gaily, so charmingly, so innocently—on many other over-rated celebrities besides Rousseau. The piquancy of the thing lies in the fact that three fourths of those celebrities were then living. It hits off every passing craze. Every line contains a deadly allusion. Every other word is a mot almost. No translation can give any idea of the full and deadly effect of that easy, trifling, bantering style. “The Temple of Taste” is a flame which still leaps and shines, though it burns no more.
By February “the Temple,” wrote its builder, “had become a Cathedral.” In April it was in the hands of the censor. Voltaire quite expected to be given a privilege for it. The censor did not seem to see anything objectionable in it.
It is easy to fancy what a success a work so gay, witty, and daring would meet with, when it dropped red-hot from the press, while it was still in the hands of the authorities awaiting the coveted yellow seal. If it was a cathedral, it was one which afforded the author no sanctuary. The old dangers and the old outcries, to which he should have been getting wearily used by now, met him as usual. There was a threatened lettre de cachet. “Here is little villain of a writer who ought to be sent over the sea again,” said Marais.
All Paris was up in arms in fact. “This ‘Temple of Taste’ has roused those whom I have not praised enough for their liking,” Voltaire wrote to Theriot on May 1st, “and still more those whom I have not praised at all ... add to that the crime of having printed this bagatelle without a permission, and the anger of the minister against such an outrage; add to that the howlings of the Court and the menace of a lettre de cachet, and, with all, you will have but a feeble idea of the pleasantness of my position and of the protection afforded to literature.”
“I must then rebuild a second Temple,” he added cheerfully; and he positively set to work to do it, missing out some of the stones of offence in the first.
On May 15th he left the late Comtesse de Martel’s comfortable house and went to live at the mean lodging of his man of business—“in the worst quarter of Paris in the worst house”—opposite the Church of St. Gervais. “The place is more deafened with the sound of bells than a sacristan,” said he, “but I shall make so much noise with my lyre the bells will be nothing to me.”
One hardly knows whether to admire more the man’s admirable indifference to things material, or that genius for hard work which stood him in as good stead in a garret as in a palace.
He was not long alone in these rooms. He soon had with him two literary protégés whom he fed, lodged, and entertained “like my own children.” One of them, Lefèvre, died young. For the other, Linant, Voltaire had done his very best to get the good offices of Madame de Fontaine Martel. But that worldly-wise old person, who had already been much tried by friend Theriot, declined to accommodate Linant in her house. Then Voltaire besought Madame du Deffand for him.
The protégés were always going to do great things and never did them. Voltaire believed in them exactly as devout and simple persons will long believe in the reclamation of the irreclaimable. “I am persuaded,” he had said in that “Temple of Taste,” “that if a man does not cultivate a talent it is because he does not possess it; there is no one who does not write poetry if he is a poet; or music, if he is a musician.”
