The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

In this April Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet went to Lille, to stay with Madame Denis and her husband. At Lille, “Mahomet” was performed by a company of French players, who had been half engaged by Voltaire to go to Prussia in the employ of Frederick, and then thrown over by that busy monarch. The audience, each of the three nights the play was performed, was numerous and passionately enthusiastic. The clergy of Lille were powerfully represented and entirely approving. M. Denis and his plump three years’ bride of course came to clap the latest effort of Uncle Voltaire. Uncle Voltaire had a keen eye on the face, and a lean forefinger on the pulse of that audience to see how certain daring passages affected it. What Lille applauded, Paris might pass. On the first night, at the end of the second act, a despatch from the King of Prussia was handed to M. de Voltaire in his box. He read it aloud. “It is said the Austrians are retreating, and I believe it.” It was the declaration of the victory of Mollwitz. Lille had its own reasons for being passionately Prussian, and received the news with shouts of delight. If anything had been needed to complete the success of “Mahomet,” that despatch would have done it. The bearer of good news is always a popular person. But nothing was needed. The clergy of Lille begged, and were granted, an extra performance of the play for their especial benefit at the house of one of the chief magistrates. Orthodoxy seemed to be taking this Voltaire under her strong wing at last, and Voltaire accepted the situation with a very cynic grimace and a great deal of satisfaction. He and Madame du Châtelet left Lille with the most sanguine hopes of seeing “Mahomet” shortly and successfully produced in Paris. Until November, 1741, they were mostly in Brussels, watching the progress of the du Châtelet lawsuit. Madame had a little quarrel on hand with her tutor Koenig, in which Maupertuis joined.

In November they went to Paris and stayed, not in that splendid Palais Lambert which the Marquis du Châtelet had bought, but which was not yet completely furnished, but in Voltaire’s old quarters—the house which had belonged to Madame de Fontaine Martel. In December they returned to Cirey for a month; and in the January of the new year 1742 were again in Brussels. The lawsuit was positively progressing, and so favourably that they felt justified in spending the rest of the winter in Paris. Immediately on their arrival in the capital they were plunged into that “disordered life” which the Marquise loved and Voltaire loathed. “Supping when I ought to be in bed, going to bed and not sleeping, getting up to race about, not doing any work, deprived of real pleasures and surrounded by imaginary ones”—as a description of fashionable life the words hold good to this day. “Farewell the court,” he wrote again; “I have not a courtier’s health.” He spoke of himself as being always at the tail of that lawsuit—which the indefatigable and persistent Marquise must pursue to the bitter end.

They lingered in Paris through May, June, July—in their fine Palais Lambert now—and all the time no “Mahomet.” Voltaire should have been used to disappointments and delays, if any man should. He brought out everything he ever wrote at the point of the sword. There were always anxiously waiting to take offence the acutely susceptible feelings of a Church, a king, a court, a nobility, and a press censor. This time, first of all, it was the Turkish envoy who was being fêted in Paris, “and it would not be proper to defame the Prophet while entertaining his ambassador,” said the polite Voltaire. The second cause of delay was much more serious. Exactly at a moment when the policy of Frederick the Great appeared peculiarly anti-French and that monarch was enjoying the brief but vivid hatred of Paris, there crept out one of Voltaire’s rhyming letters to the Prussian King, in which the courtly writer lavishly praised and flattered his correspondent. M. de Voltaire had to be alert and active in a moment. He pursued his old line of policy. First of all, I did not write the letter. Secondly, if I did, it has been miscopied. Thirdly, if I did write it and it has not been miscopied, the reigning favourite of Louis XV., Madame de Mailly, must help me out of my dilemma. Voltaire wrote and asked her assistance. She could not do much. But Cardinal Fleury still looked upon Voltaire as a person to be conciliated as an influence on Prussia. He read the play, and approved. The censor did likewise. The murmur of the streets and the cafés was still against the too Prussian Voltaire. But for once the authorities actually seemed to be with him.

On August 19, 1742, “Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet” was performed to a house crammed with the rank, wit, and fashion of Paris, who applauded it to the echo. D’Alembert appeared for literature. The Bar and the Church were generously represented. The author himself was in the pit. This might be another “Zaire,” only a “Zaire” written in the plenitude of a man’s mental powers—stern, not tender—grand, not pathetic—the expression of matured and passionate convictions, instead of vivid, impulsive feelings. Voltaire was eight-and-thirty when he produced “Zaire,” and eight-and-forty when he produced “Mahomet.” How fully he had lived in those ten years! Then he felt: now he knew. He had often dared greatly in his plays: in “Mahomet” he dared all.

Lord Chesterfield had regarded the tragedy as a covert attack on Christianity. It must have been the sceptical reputation of M. de Voltaire which made Lord Chesterfield so think. No impartial person reading it now could find an anti-Christian word in it. It is a covert attack on nothing. It is an open attack on the fanaticism, bigotry, intolerance, which degrade any religion. It is a battle against the “shameful superstition which debases humanity.” Worth, not birth, is its motto. “All men are equal: worth, not birth, makes the difference between them,” says Omar, one of the characters. In this play is found that famous and scornful line, “Impostor at Mecca and prophet at Medina.” There is scarcely a sentence in it which is not a quivering and passionate protest against the crafty rule of any priesthood which would keep from the laity light, knowledge, and progress. “I wished to show in it,” said Voltaire to M. César de Missy, “to what horrible excess fanaticism can bring feeble souls, led by a knave.”

If there were dissentient voices—and there were—the applause of that brilliant first night drowned them. The play was repeated a second time and a third. Voltaire may have begun to feel safe: to congratulate himself that at last free thought uttered freely was permissible even in France. He was always hopeful. But his enemies were too mighty for him. Working against him always, untiring, subtle, malicious, was the whole envious Grub Street of Paris led by beaten Desfontaines and jealous Piron. The man in the street was now bitterly against him too. The Solicitor-General, who, on his own confession, had not read a word of the play, much less seen it acted, was soon writing to the Lieutenant of Police that he “believed it necessary to forbid its performances.” On the valuable evidence of hearsay, he found “Mahomet” “infamous, wicked, irreligious, blasphemous,” and “everybody says that to have written it the author must be a scoundrel only fit for burning.” It was still in the power of this remarkable officer of most remarkable justice to prosecute Voltaire for the “Philosophic Letters,” which he threatened to do, if “Mahomet” were not removed. Feeling ran so high that friend Fleury himself was compelled to advise the withdrawal of the play. It was performed once more—that is, in all four times—and then withdrawn.

A man of much more placid disposition might have been roused now. But this time Voltaire was too disgusted, too sick at heart with men and life, to have even the strength to be angry. He and Madame du Châtelet left for Brussels on August 22d. He was ill in bed by August 29th—ten days after that first brilliant performance—trying to sit up and make a fair copy of the real “Mahomet” to send to Frederick the Great.

The spurious editions, shamefully incorrect, which were appearing all over Paris, must have been the overflow of the invalid’s cup of bitterness.

“It is only what happened to ‘Tartuffe,’” he wrote from that sick bed to Frederick. “The hypocrites persecuted Molière, and the fanatics are risen up against me. I have yielded to the torrent without uttering a word.... If I had but the King of Prussia for a master and the English for fellow-citizens! The French are nothing but great children; only the few thinkers we have among us are so splendid as to make up for all the rest.” And a day or two later to another friend: “This tragedy is suitable rather for English heads than French hearts. It was found too daring in Paris because it was powerful, and dangerous because it was truthful.... It is only in London that poets are allowed to be philosophers.”

The words sound as if the writer were weary, las, at the end of his tether. On September 2, 1742, he went for a very few days’ rest and refreshment to Aix-la-Chapelle to see Frederick the Great, who had just signed a treaty of peace. Madame du Châtelet did not object to that brief holiday, and entertained no idea of making a third person thereat herself. She was more confident of her Voltaire now—hopeful that he was hers, body and soul, for ever. When he was at Aix, Frederick offered him a house in Berlin and a charming estate—peace, freedom, and honour for the rest of his life. And Voltaire said he preferred a second storey in the house of his Marquise—slavery and persecution in Paris, to liberty and a king’s friendship in Berlin. “I courageously resisted all his propositions,” was his own phrase. For this man when he was virtuous always knew it, and keenly felt how much pleasanter it would have been to be wicked instead. Fleury approved of the little visit, and though it was a holiday and Frederick was his friend, Voltaire did still his best to subtly find out the royal disposition towards France.