“No great things without great trouble.”
“It is precisely, gentlemen, because there is so much wit in France that there is so little real genius.”
No doubt those thirty-nine literary fogies had some sort of notion what a daring spirit they had admitted into their prosy body before that discourse was ended. The artful Voltaire did not forget to introduce into it dainty compliments to such varied persons as the King of France, the Empress of Russia, and the Pope; Frederick the Great and Maupertuis (who spoke and wrote the great French language as if it were their own); Montesquieu, Fontenelle, and Hénault, who adorned it; and my old schoolmaster, d’Olivet.
Sympathising and delighting in his genius and success was a certain new obscure young friend of Voltaire’s, who had just come up to Paris to seek his fortune, and who was named Marmontel.
“Sine virtute amicitia existere non potest,” says Cicero. If a man may be judged by the company he keeps, Voltaire’s character should not be meted a wholly unmerciful sentence. He had too in himself, in an extraordinary degree, the noble talent of friendship.
Fifty years after his school days he was still writing to Abbé d’Olivet, in terms of tenderest respect and affection. He began, as has been seen, his lifelong attachment to his “guardian angel,” d’Argental, at the same date and place. “I am not like most of our Parisians,” he wrote to Cideville, “I love my friends better than superfluities; and I prefer a man of letters to a good cook and two carriage-horses. One always has enough for others when one knows how to restrict oneself.” He acted on that principle through life. There must surely have been something more than commonly lovable in a character which three years earlier than this, in 1742, had commanded the love and admiration of Vauvenargues, the young soldier, the splendid thinker—daring spirit and noble mind. That friendship appealed not in vain to Voltaire on the finest side of his character, at the very moment when a Court, a king, a Pompadour, worldly gain, and the bauble of official favour tempted him on his worst. The pair wrote each other long letters, philosophic, thoughtful, enlightened. Vauvenargues loved to call Voltaire his “dear master.” And the master had for the pupil the tender respect, the generous admiration which a great father might feel for the possibilities of a son whom his fond hopes love to fancy greater still. The son went the way of all flesh in 1747, aged thirty-two. He left the world only one work; but those “Maxims” have been justly said to give the soul of man an impetus towards truth. They are too little known.
Marmontel was of a different calibre. A young, struggling, literary man in the provinces, he wrote to the chief of his profession, now sunning in court favour, for his advice. “Come up to Paris,” wrote the impulsive Voltaire at the end of 1745. He thought letters the noblest of all professions. To be sure, it was one not merely precarious, but generally ruinous. But then, to deliver one’s message—to help truth by speaking it—a Voltaire, if he could, would have encouraged the merest stutterer to do it, such as Marmontel was not. In the midst of the preparations for “The Temple of Glory” he had time to obtain the promise of a post for his protégé from the Comptroller-General of Finance. Up comes Marmontel to Paris, six louis in his pockets, and a translation. And the Comptroller-General has fallen out of favour and has no place to give away! Voltaire broke the news as gently as he could. Perhaps he looked the while out of his brilliant eyes to see how this new metal stood the furnace. Marmontel said that Adversity was his oldest acquaintance and that he was not afraid of her. And M. de Voltaire took upon himself to provide for him until his talents should make him independent. A hundred and fifty years ago and in Paris such conduct does not strike the reader as nearly so generous and Quixotic as if the same event had occurred in London and to-day. Yet the profession of letters was very much worse then than it is now. Voltaire had had unsuccessful literary protégés dependent on him for an unpleasantly long time before this, it will be remembered. He remembered it, no doubt. He was more fortunate in the present instance. Taught, advised, encouraged by Voltaire, Marmontel became the Marmontel of successful tragedies, of the “Contes Moraux,” of “Bélisaire,” and of the “Memoirs.”
In his hope that his chair at the Academy would afford him a little peace and rest, Voltaire was at first very much mistaken. His new honour was a signal for every enemy he had in the world—and he had a great many—to set upon him. Every envious, snarling cur of the scurrilous Grub Street of Paris came yelping at the mastiff’s heels. Old Roy burlesqued and lampooned him; and the thin-skinned poet, who should have been true enough to his own philosophy to have laughed at such a poor, miserable, effete old foe, was up and at him in a trice, whipping and stinging him with verses and epigrams whose rancour still glows and burns.
Other skits and satires followed. And Voltaire, with authority on his side for once—to say nothing of Madame de Pompadour—hunted out, accused, prosecuted the authors in a vehement activity and enthusiasm. To be sure, on one occasion, in his zeal he had the wrong person arrested, and had to pay damages in a law court for false imprisonment; besides promising after the fashion of the time, never to do anything so naughty again.
These skirmishes lasted for many months; nay, the Travenol case, for wrongful imprisonment, went on for two or three years. Voltaire came out of such affairs with neither success nor glory. He was always both too quick to anger, and too quick to forgive. The latter quality was as much a snare to him as the former.