One poet received very short shrift from respectable, sensible old M. Arouet père, when he came home in the small hours of the morning from these orgies. The determined old man locked the house and went to bed, and behold! François Marie must pay for his amusements by walking the streets till morning. That did not daunt him. Nothing daunted him. He was young and enjoying himself, with the keenest sense of the ludicrous, and perfectly willing to take his pleasures—at a cost. One day, finding himself shut out as usual, he went to sleep in the porter’s chair in the Palais de Justice, and was carried, still asleep, the next morning, into a café hard by, by two legal wags, his friends. The recollection of Brother Armand’s long, disapproving face at home only lent additional piquancy to Arouet’s revels abroad. Another day, a noble lady with literary aspirations gives him a hundred louis for tactfully correcting her bad rhymes. Young Arouet, idly watching an auction, bids for a carriage and pair and has them knocked down to him. He drives about Paris all day with his friends, and at three o’clock in the morning takes the carriage home and tries to get the horses into his father’s stables. The noise wakes up Maître Arouet, who turns his scapegrace out of doors there and then, and sells the horses and carriage the very next day. One likes the peppery old father with his dogged determination. He would have won the battle over any other son but this one, and deserved to win. He sent the prodigal to Caen in disgrace, and Caen fell in love at once with a youth so clever and amusing, and turned the exile to a delight. There was a charming literary lady here also, who abandoned her protégé, however, when she found he could write indecorous verses too, and there was a Jesuit Father who prophesied a great future for this brilliant madcap. Then the old notary at home sent a message to his François Marie—if he would come back and settle to work he would buy him a good post; in time, get him made Counsel to the Parliament of Paris. “Tell my father,” was the answer, “I do not want any place that can be bought. I will make one for myself that will cost nothing.”
Twenty-six years after, one Voltaire, in his “Life of Molière,” wrote that all who had made a name in the beaux-arts had done so in spite of their relations. “Nature has always been much stronger with them than education;” and again, “I saw early that one can neither resist one’s ruling taste, nor fight one’s destiny.” It was so in this boy’s case at any rate. Some of the monetary prudence inherited from the old notary, and which was so greatly to distinguish a later Voltaire from most of his brothers of the pen, was in embryo within him now. Yet when he got back to Paris after those few months at Caen he was as gay, wild, and determined as ever, and M. Arouet, in despair, procured for him the post of page or attaché to the Marquis de Châteauneuf (brother of the abbé) and shipped him off with that ambassador to the Netherlands in the September of 1713.
The Marquis de Châteauneuf and suite reached The Hague on September 28, 1713, but did not formally enter the town until later. “It is amusing,” one of the suite wrote, “to make an entry into a city where you have already been living several weeks.”
Page, attaché, or diplomat, whichever people called him, this page, attaché, or diplomat was going to enjoy himself. Before they were well established at The Hague he must needs fall head over ears in love with a certain Olympe Dunoyer, the daughter of an adventurous mother who lived by her wits and an audacious society periodical called The Quintessence. Olympe, or, more endearingly, Pimpette, was one-and-twenty. She knew something of the world already. With such a mother and the impecunious roving life they had led, that was inevitable. She was not pretty, her lover said long after. She was what is a great deal more dangerous—fascinating and impulsive. He gave her from the first a boy’s honest ardent affection. He wrote her immensely long, vigorous, passionate epistles. He originated the most beautiful youthful scheme by which Protestant Pimpette (Madame Dunoyer and her daughter were Protestant) was to be brought back to the true Church, and to Paris, where her Catholic father and sister were living. For a couple of months, the worldly mother not suspecting its existence, the course of true love ran smoothly. But one fatal night Arouet coming home late after a blissful interview, encountered his chief. Madame Dunoyer will certainly disapprove of the addresses of a penniless boy of nineteen! Having a wholesome fear of that libellous “Quintessence,” the ambassador felt bound to disapprove too. The attaché must go back to France to-morrow. The attaché, with his irresistible energy and daring, got forty-eight hours’ grace. His valet, Lefèvre, was his accomplice; a certain shoemaker was Pimpette’s. A further unavoidable delay in the time of Arouet’s departure came to the lovers’ assistance. One moonlit night Arouet disguised himself, signalled beneath his mistress’s window, and drove her away to Scheveningen, five miles off, where he made her write three letters which were designed to help his scheme of getting her to Paris. Sometimes they met at the obliging shoemaker’s, daring, frightened, and happy, with the shoemaker’s wife for a sentinel outside.
Of course the ambassador got wind of the interviews and forbade his attaché to leave the embassy. But the irrepressible lover would see his mistress—“though it bring my head to the block.” He let himself down from a window by night, and met a trembling Pimpette who had escaped, heaven knows how! from the Argus-eyed mother—outside her home.
Then the ambassador offered this impossible attaché his choice—to leave Holland immediately—or in a week’s time with a solemn vow not to leave his quarters meanwhile. Arouet chose the week and the vow. He sent Lefèvre with a letter to Pimpette. “If I cannot come to you, you must come to me! Send Lisbette at three o’clock and I will give her a parcel for you containing a boy’s dress.” The mad night came, and Pimpette, the most endearing boy in the world, with it. The whole escapade was wild enough. It says something for this impassioned Arouet of nineteen that at its worst it was nothing but an escapade. “My love is founded on a perfect esteem,” he had written, and “I love your honour as I love you.” He rallied her, not a little gaily, in prose and verse, after that dear meeting. She was such a pretty boy! “I fear you did not take out your sword in the street, which was all that was needed to make a perfect young man!” “But while I am teasing you I learn that Lefèvre suspected you yesterday.” Of course he did. But Lefèvre would not betray his master to the ambassador, who had more than a suspicion of the interview. And the next night Arouet broke his parole, got out of the window, and met Pimpette outside her house once more. The ambassador heard of this too, wrote a furious letter to Maître Arouet describing the whole affair, and on December 18, 1713, the lover was despatched home.
He went on writing to Pimpette, of course. It was her fate that agitated him—not his. She must be sure to burn his letters—she must not expose herself to the fury of that termagant of a mother. She must take heart; she must be true to him! The letter from the boat which was carrying him to France was full of that capital, clever plan for bringing her over to the Jesuits—to be converted, as near to Arouet as possible, in Paris. All these love letters to Pimpette are much more loving than witty. They are so enthusiastic and earnest and young, so energetic and devoted, so unselfish and hopeful! They make one feel young to read them. It has been said that they are not the letters of Mirabeau. They are those of an honester man.
The very first thing Arouet did when he reached Paris on this Christmas Eve of 1713 was exactly what he had told Pimpette he would do. He went straight to his old master, Father Tournemine, at St. Louis-le-Grand, to whom he had already written some of the circumstances, to arrange with the Jesuits for bringing back the lost Protestant sheep to the Roman fold. Arouet did not think it necessary to mention that the lost sheep was, in point of fact, a lamb—charming, and one-and-twenty—or that he had ever seen her. Good Tournemine promised to do his very best to get Pimpette’s father to take her in. In fact the whole scheme was working beautifully when that irascible and dogged old Maître Arouet, who had received not only the ambassador’s version of the affair but the furious Madame Dunoyer’s, positively obtained a lettre de cachet for his scapegrace son, with which to get him arrested and imprisoned.
Young Arouet had not been home, which was very prudent of him. His presence would only have further exasperated his father. The lettre de cachet was not put into effect. The lover went on loving, adoring, and writing to his mistress. What was an angry father after all? A necessary rôle in the comedy. What was distance or opposition, what was anything or anybody to Arouet if Pimpette only loved him? Of the two, she was far the more cool and reasonable. She urged him to study law as his father bade him. And for her sake he did even that. A year or two later she became Countess of Winterfeld. Some years later still, he had the pleasure of seeing some of his own love letters to her figuring in a scandalous work of her mother’s called “Lettres Historiques et Galantes.” Even these events did not disturb a certain tender respect for her memory which he bore to the end of his life. When he was imprisoned in the Bastille four years later, he still carried about with him a little, undated, misspelt letter about one of those dear, stolen interviews—half maternal, half tender in tone—the only letter of Pimpette’s which has come down to posterity.
January, 1714, then, beheld Arouet at the bidding of Pimpette, and having made the most abject apologies to his father (François Marie was nothing if not thorough), installed as clerk to a Maître Alain, and living with that dull and worthy solicitor and his wife. He learnt something of law here, no doubt. Nay, he must have learnt a great deal to be hereafter that shrewd and capable man of affairs he proved himself. But it was a dull time and an unfortunate. Maître Arouet kept his prodigal very close in the matter of money; and his prodigal affixed his name to certain bills which gave him trouble hereafter. Pimpette’s letters were getting fewer and fewer. Pimpette was false. Then, in the August of this 1714, young Arouet tried for a prize offered by the French Academy for a poem celebrating the King’s generosity in giving a new choir to Notre Dame; and failed. The failure attacked La Motte, the judge—the unjust judge, Arouet thought him—with epigrams, and then wrote a satire, called “Mud,” on La Motte’s “Fables.” Old Arouet was furious again, and young Arouet’s only consolation in life was the friendship of one Theriot, also clerk to the Alains, an idle, goodnatured, amusing scapegrace, nobody’s enemy but his own, and to be Arouet’s friend, though not always a faithful friend, for sixty years.