At the death of Louis XIV. Paris was still the typical Paris of the old régime. Magnificence and squalor, dirt and splendour, a few men living like gods and most men living like beasts; narrow and filthy streets, and the sumptuous glory of the Court of the Sun King; a hungry canaille, and a noblesse whose exquisite finish of manner concealed the most profound corruption of morals the world has seen. Such was the Paris of 1715.
For the last few years of his life a woman and a priest had absolutely ruled the absolute King. “France forgave Louis his mistresses,” said Arouet, “but not his confessor.” The great Bull Unigenitus, that thunderbolt hurled at once against Jansenism and liberty, was the first rock on which the French monarchy struck. Everybody was to think as the King did! And France, who had starved patiently to pay for his conquests and his pleasures, received with open joy the news of the death of the man who had tried to strangle her soul with Unigenitus. Paris was flooded with satires as it had never been flooded even with panegyrics. The Court shook off the mantle of austerity which it had of late been wearing over its depravity. The flagrant vice of the Regency flaunted boldly in daylight, and men laughed openly at a religion in which for years they had concurred devoutly—with the tongue in the cheek.
The world wagged thus when Arouet came up from Fontainebleau. The great majority of men go through life accepting what they find in it without question—supposing that because things are, they will be and ought to be. But this boy had the order of mind which takes nothing for granted. A state religion? Well, what had it done for that state and for the souls of men? A paternal government that left its children to starve? Arouet had from the first “lisped in numbers, for the numbers came;” but when he saw on the one hand the crowded prisons and brutalised peasantry, and on the other the luxurious debauchery of the Regent’s Court, the numbers began for the first time to have a careless little note in them of a most piquant satire.
Louis died on September 1, 1715. Arouet was at his funeral—that funeral which was gayer than a fête. When a burlesque invitation to the obsequies of the Bull Unigenitus appeared, there were not wanting fingers to point at the notary’s son of one-and-twenty, who had come back to Paris more audacious than ever, and had immediately resumed his connection with his wild friends of the Temple.
He read aloud his “Œdipe” to them presently. That, and his epigrams, quickly opened to him half the salons in Paris. Then Chaulieu—President of the Temple—introduced him to the magnificent Duchesse du Maine, “that living fragment of the Grand Epoch,” and mistress of the famous “galères du bel esprit” at Sceaux. Madame must have him, and at once, in her salon. To be sure the boy has nothing but his play in his pocket and is of no birth at all! But what a wit and daring in his spirit! What a matchless sarcasm in those piercing eyes! The Duchess and her set worshipped cleverness and hated the Regent. It was the only religion they had. What could they do but fall in love with this “little Arouet” who could hardly have been dull if he had tried; and was much more than suspected of the authorship of a too-telling epigram on Philip of Orleans and his infamous daughter, du Berri?
“Little Arouet” read aloud “Œdipe” to the Duchess’s court. He was at ease in this society as he was at ease in all societies. “Men are born equal, and die equal.” “It is only externals which distinguish them.” Those were the sentiments of one Arouet de Voltaire. He must have known, not the less, that here, there was no one who was his equal. But he sentimentalised gaily in the moonlit gardens of Sceaux—her “white nights” the Duchess called them—and watched senile old Chaulieu making love to the Duchess’s companion, Mademoiselle de Launay; wrote wicked satirical poems to please his hostess; and was so clever and daring that at last all the bold brilliant things that were whispered in Paris were fathered on the presumptuous youth, the son of Saint-Simon’s notary.
In the spring of 1716 he stayed with Saint-Ange again. In May he was back in the capital. He did say, no doubt, when the Regent put down half the horses in the royal stables, that he would have done better to have dismissed half the asses who had surrounded the late King. Then a shameful epigram on the shameful du Berri came to the ears of the persons chiefly concerned. Young Arouet was exiled to Tulle—Tulle being changed pretty easily, at his father’s request, to Sully. No reason was assigned by the Government for this order of exile.
The Duke of Sully readily became a most hospitable host. The Duchess had a most charming poor companion, Mademoiselle de Livri. It was but an exile pour rire, after all—a warning fatherly rap from that paternal Government on the knuckles of an impertinent child.
It is strange to see how the boy chafed under that agreeable courtly life of hunting and conversation. “It would be delightful to stay at Sully,” he wrote, “If I were only allowed to go away from it.” The Duke was the most delightful of hosts, and his estate most charmingly situated. The young people of the château, in pairs, sonneted the midsummer moon in the gardens; and wrote each other dainty little quatrains and flatteries. Arouet loved verses and the society of charming and vivacious young women in general, and, here, of one charming and vivacious young woman in particular; and he was two-and-twenty. But he wrote himself back to Paris by poetic compliments to the Regent so finely turned that the author must have had some unusual spur on his imagination. He was, in fact, beginning to wonder if there was not a work waiting for him in the world.
If it was not his fault, it was the fault of the reputation he had made, that when there appeared in Paris, immediately he returned to it in the spring of 1717, two stinging satires on the state of France and the Regent’s manner of life called respectively “J’ai Vu” and “Puero Regnante,” they should at once be assigned to him.