But on March 6th “Alzire” was repeated: with Voltaire in the audience. The King was well pleased with “Alzire,” but not with its author.
When the play was over he said loudly that he was astonished that the author of so good a play as “Alzire” could also have written “Oreste”; and the writer of “Oreste” had to swallow that royal rebuff in silence.
It was in this same March of the year 1750 that Voltaire was stung to fresh action by the attacks of Fréron, enemy and journalist, the tool of Boyer, and the acknowledged foe of all the light and knowledge in France. Fréron had written an unsuccessful poem on the victory of Fontenoy, and had never forgiven Voltaire for winning where he had failed. All the aggressions seem to have been on the part of Fréron. Voltaire was only aggravatingly successful and good-humoured. Fréron had not found it an easy task to goad him to anger. But he had done it at last. “That worm from the carcase of Desfontaines” was Voltaire’s vigorous epithet for him now. And when in this March there was question of this “worm” being made Parisian correspondent to Frederick the Great—“to send him the new books and new follies of our country”—Voltaire flung on to paper a warm remonstrance to his King against any such appointment; and then recommended in writing to Darget, Frederick’s friend, the Abbé Raynal for the post instead. Raynal was not appointed; but then neither was Fréron. For many years, Fréron was to Voltaire the wasp who stung, and stung, and stung again—with a sting not deadly indeed, but infinitely annoying and malicious.
The death of Madame du Châtelet had, not unnaturally, been the signal for King Frederick to renew his pressing invitations to Voltaire to visit him. In the November of 1749 this most persistent of monarchs and of men had written to reproach his friend for making excuses for not coming. They must be excuses now! And Voltaire was so apt in them! In December the King wrote again. In the January of 1750, more persistently still. In February—“well, I will not press an immediate visit: but I will hold you bound to come when the weather is better and Flora has beautified this climate of mine.”
It was all very flattering. Voltaire felt it to be so. He was in the not uncommon position of the man who likes to be asked but does not want to go. There were many reasons against his going. He had just settled into his house in Paris. Niece Denis had come to look after it for him. All his friends lived hard by. The feverish events of the past year had made rest and quiet peculiarly desirable. His health made them almost necessary. Travelling was exceedingly expensive. But if these were all good reasons for remaining in the Rue Traversière-Saint-Honoré, there were better ones for leaving it.
Running now through Paris were those gay satirical contes of his which ridiculed every vice of the old régime and made King, Court, and confessor supremely ridiculous. The graceless old Duchesse du Maine, sitting up in bed at three o’clock in the morning, had laughed to hear her order burlesqued in “Zadig.” But all her class had not her saving sense of humour. The satire was too keen not to cut—the portraits too lifelike to be unrecognised.
If he had stopped at “Zadig,” at “Barbouc,” at “Scarmentado,” there was no reason in the world why Voltaire should be a popular member of the society he had chastised with such whips. And when he chastised it with the scorpions of that deadly pamphlet of brief paragraphs called the “Voice of the Sage and the People,” there was very small wonder that he should once more find Paris getting too hot to hold him.
The “Voice of the Sage and the People” is the voice of the man who could sting with bald truths as well as lively satires. It hacked at superstition and the Mirepoix with a hatchet that always went to the root of the tree. “A government in which it is permitted a certain class of men to say, ‘Let those pay taxes who work: we should not pay because we are idle’—is no better than a government of Hottentots.” “A woman who nurses a couple of children and spins does more for the State than all convents have ever done.” “The Church ought to contribute to the expenses of the nation in proportion to its revenues.... The body set apart to teach justice should begin by giving an example of it.” Forty years later these truths were enforced by the blood of the Revolution.
Could Voltaire have thought even in 1750 that they were politic truths to utter in a city where he had just bought a house and was much minded to settle down and be at peace? It is to his infinite and lifelong credit that he seldom cared whether a truth were politic or not. The moment he saw it to be truth he must utter it in scorn of consequence.
Even “Rome Sauvée” and “Oreste” could not shield a man responsible for the paternity of such writing as this, nor the uncertain smile of a Pompadour save him from its consequences. Well, he had better go! He had always wished to travel in Italy. He would take Potsdam and Berlin en route. His visit there could be brief. On May 8, 1750, he wrote to Frederick saying that, though he was rich, “even very rich for a man of letters,” his house in Paris and the du Châtelet affairs had made him so short of money that he must beg the royal permission for Mettra, an exchange dealer of Berlin, to advance him four thousand crowns for the expenses of his proposed journey. The delighted King wrote back on May 24th enclosing a letter of exchange for sixteen thousand francs. He was willing to pay, and to pay highly, for a man who was “a whole Academy of belles-lettres in himself.” Voltaire was gratified of course. But he wrote dismally that he was more in need of a doctor than a king, and on June 9th spoke of himself to that King, in verse which was meant to be gay and sounds a little dreary, as “your very aged Danaë, who leaves his little home for your star-spangled dwelling-place, of which his years make him unworthy.” A little home is so much more comfortable than a star-spangled dwelling-place, after all! Voltaire in fact needed a spur to make him undertake that long-talked-of visit with alacrity. And he had it.