The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

He would have been a worse man than he was if every bitter feeling in his soul had not been stirred now. He was always acutely sensitive to any slight put on his mistress’s name, honour, intellect—on anything that belonged to her. If he was a good fighter when he was roused on his own account, he was a ten times better fighter when he was roused on hers. He was roused now. And he wrote the “Préservatif.”

It begins by a collection of all the slips, mistakes, misstatements, printers’ errors and illiteracies which he was able to find in two hundred numbers of Desfontaines’s weekly paper which was called “Observations on New Books.” They were grouped together with all a Voltaire’s ability—never a point missed, and so arranged as to make M. l’Abbé supremely ridiculous. The “Préservatif” purported to be by a Chevalier de Mouhy, a real person. At the end, the Chevalier presents to the public a letter he has received from M. de Voltaire giving the whole history of the Desfontaines affair in 1724—only not mentioning the nature of the crime of which the abbé had been accused.

The “Préservatif” ran through Paris at the end of 1738 as such a pamphlet would. With it, there ran a deadly epigram, and then a caricature, with another epigram beneath. Neither epigrams nor caricature would be tolerated by a decent age. They were all from the pen of M. de Voltaire. They told the nature of the abbe’s crime. They were a shameful weapon, shamefully used: and most deadly. Voltaire gave Madame de Graffigny the “Préservatif” to read. To mention the name of Desfontaines to him had soon the same effect as a red flag on a bull. He was beside himself when he thought of the man’s base treachery and ingratitude. He was beside himself when he wrote the epigrams and drew the caricature. It is their only excuse. They need one.

He also wrote against Desfontaines, anonymously, a little comedy called “L’Envieux”: but it was never played.

On that Christmas Day of 1738, Madame du Châtelet received a document by the post. She read it alone and said nothing about it to Voltaire. Whatever else she was, she was a woman of very strong sense and very just judgment. The document she had received was the “Voltairomanie” by Desfontaines—the retort to the “Préservatif”—the blasphemous shriek of a lunatic—“the howl of a mad dog.” She herself wrote a reply to it—still preserved. Voltaire must not see it! His health was wretched as ever. He had just had an access of fever. He was acutely sensitive. She did right to hide it from him. He was not less considerate. He had also received a copy of that “gross libel” and was hiding it from her. There must have been something good in the feeling these two people had for each other—in spite of quarrels and bickerings and the testimony of all the old women visitors in the world—they were so anxious to save each other pain. They discovered their mutual deception on New Year’s Day, 1739, and were the easier for being able to talk over the affair together.

The “Voltairomanie” is too savage to be sane. It brought that old accusation against Voltaire—a lack of personal courage. It recalled the affair of the Bridge of Sèvres and the affair of Rohan in terms which practice had made perfect in falsehood and offensiveness. It declared Voltaire liar as well as coward. In the “Préservatif” he had said that Theriot had shown him a libel Desfontaines had written against his benefactor, while Desfontaines was staying with the Bernières at Rivière Bourdet and only just released, by that benefactor’s efforts, from Bicêtre. “And behold!” says Desfontaines in the “Voltairomanie,” “M. Theriot has been obliged to deny all knowledge of the affair.”

Cirey at first was pretty calm, even under the matchless audacity of this last statement. Theriot had been staying at Cirey last October and had told with his own lips that very story just as Voltaire had told it in the “Préservatif.” Voltaire did not take the matter so much to heart as Madame du Châtelet had feared. He decided at once to treat Desfontaines’s attack as a criminal libel, and to take legal proceedings against him. He had witnesses as to the truth of his story. Madame de Bernières herself was one of them and prepared to write the most violent letters on behalf of a friend. And Theriot—Theriot whom Voltaire had made, loved, and trusted—why, Theriot had nothing to do but tell his tale as he had told it in letters to Voltaire and over the Cirey supper-table last autumn.

And Theriot never uttered a word. How hardly and slowly the conviction of his treachery took possession of Voltaire’s mind, there is evidence in his letters to show. Theriot false! Theriot time-server, coward, frightened of the sting of a Desfontaines—impossible! The softest spot in Voltaire’s heart was for this easy-going ne’er-do-weel who had been the friend of his youth—confidant and intimate for five-and-twenty years. Another man convinced of such a baseness as that, would have shaken the creature off—flung himself free of the traitor who had eaten his bread, accepted his money, lived on his fame, fattened on his benefits—and denied him.

And Voltaire wrote pleading, persuading, imploring: counselling repentance, eager to forgive: as a woman might have written to a scapegrace son whose sin she knows, whose reformation she hopes, and whom she must needs love for ever.

“Will you not have the courage to avow publicly what you have written to me so many times?... My honour, your honour, the public interest demand ... that you should own that this miserable Desfontaines did write an abominable libel called the “Apology of Sieur Voltaire” and had it printed at Rouen, and that you showed it me at Rivière Bourdet.”