A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 6

by François Guizot

Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire was born at Paris on the 21st of November, 1694. “My dear father,” said a letter from a relative to his family in Poitou, “our cousins have another son, born three days ago; Madame Arouet will give me some of the christening sugar-plums for you. She has been very ill, but it is hoped that she is going on better; the infant is not much to look at, having suffered from a fall which his mother had.” M. Arouet, the father, of a good middle-class family, had been a notary at the Chatelet, and in 1701 became paymaster of fees (payeur d’epices) to the court of exchequer, an honorable and a lucrative post, which added to the easy circumstances of the family. Madame Arouet was dead when her youngest son was sent to the college of Louis-le-Grand, which at that time belonged to the Jesuits. As early as then little Arouet, who was weak and in delicate health, but withal of a very lively intelligence, displayed a freedom of thought and a tendency of irreverence which already disquieted and angered his masters. Father Lejay jumped from his chair and took the boy by the collar, exclaiming, “Wretch, thou wilt one of these days raise the standard of Deism in France!” Father Pallou, his confessor, accustomed to read the heart, said, as he shook his head, “This, child is devoured with a thirst for celebrity.”

Even at school and among the Jesuits, that passion for getting talked about, which was one of the weaknesses of Voltaire’s character, as well as one of the sources of his influence, was already to a certain extent gratified. The boy was so ready in making verses, that his masters themselves found amusement in practising upon his youthful talent. Little Arouet’s snuff box had been confiscated because he had passed it along from hand to, hand in class; when he asked for it back from Father Poree, who was always indulgent towards him, the rector required an application in verse. A quarter of an hour later the boy returned with his treasure in his possession, having paid its ransom thus:

“Adieu, adieu, poor snuff-box mine; Adieu; we ne’er shall meet again: Nor pains, nor tears, nor prayers divine Will win thee back; my efforts are in vain! Adieu, adieu, poor box of mine; Adieu, my sweet crowns’-worth of bane; Could I with money buy thee back once more, The treasury of Plutus I would drain. But ah! not he the god I must implore; To have thee back, I need Apollo’s vein. . . ‘Twixt thee and me how hard a barrier-line, To ask for verse! Ah! this is all my strain! Adieu, adieu, poor box of mine; Adieu; we ne’er shall meet again!”

Arouet was still a child when a friend of his family took him to see Mdlle. Ninon de l’Enclos, as celebrated for her wit as for the irregularity of her life. “Abbe Chateauneuf took me to see her in my very tender youth,” says Voltaire; “I had done some verses, which were worth nothing, but which seemed very good for my age. She was then eighty-five. She was pleased to put me down in her will; she left me two thousand francs to buy books; her death followed close upon my visit and her will.”

Young Arouet was finishing brilliantly his last year of rhetoric, when John Baptist Rousseau, already famous, saw him at the distribution of prizes at the college. “Later on,” wrote Rousseau, in the thick of his quarrels with Voltaire, “some ladies of my acquaintance had taken me to see a tragedy at the Jesuits in August, 1710; at the distribution of prizes which usually took place after those representations, I observed that the same scholar was called up twice. I asked Father Tarteron, who did the honors of the room in which we were, who the young man was that was so distinguished amongst his comrades. He told me that it was a little lad who had a surprising turn for poetry, and proposed to introduce him to me; to which I consented. He went to fetch him to me, and I saw him returning a moment afterwards with a young scholar who appeared to me to be about sixteen or seventeen, with an ill-favored countenance, but with a bright and lively expression, and who came and shook hands with me with very good grace.”

Scarcely had Francois Arouet left college when he was called upon to choose a career. “I do not care for any but that of a literary man,” exclaimed the young fellow. “That,” said his father, “is the condition of a man who means to be useless to society, to be a charge to his family, and to die of starvation.” The study of the law, to which he was obliged to devote himself, completely disgusted the poet, already courted by a few great lords who were amused at his satirical vein; he led an indolent and disorderly life, which drove his father distracted; the latter wanted to get him a place. “Tell my father,” was the young man’s reply to the relative commissioned to make the proposal, “that I do not care for a position which can be bought; I shall find a way of getting myself one that costs nothing.” “Having but little property when I began life,” he wrote to M. d’Argenson, his sometime fellow-pupil, “I had the insolence to think that I should have got a place as well as another, if it were to be obtained by hard work and good will. I threw myself into the ranks of the fine arts, which always carry with them a certain air of vilification, seeing that they do not make a man king’s counsellor in his councils. You may become a master of requests with money; but you can’t make a poem with money, and I made one.”

This independent behavior and the poem on the Construction du Choeur de Notre-Dame de Paris, the subject submitted for competition by the French Academy, did not prevent young Arouet from being sent by his father to Holland in the train of the Marquis of Chateauneuf, then French ambassador to the States General; he committed so many follies that on his return to France, M. Arouet forced him to enter a solicitor’s office. It was there that the poet acquired that knowledge of business which was useful to him during the whole course of his long life; he, however, did not remain there long: a satire upon the French Academy which had refused him the prize for poetry, and, later on, some verses as biting as they were disrespectful against the Duke of Orleans, twice obliged their author to quit Paris. Sent into banishment at Sully-sur-Loire, he there found partisans and admirers; the merry life that was led at the Chevalier Sully’s mitigated the hardships of absence from Paris. “Don’t you go publishing abroad, I beg,” wrote Arouet, nevertheless, to one of his friends, “the happiness of which I tell you in confidence: for they might perhaps leave me here long enough for me to become unhappy; I know my own capacity; I am not made to live long in the same place.”

A beautiful letter addressed to the Regent and disavowing all the satirical writings which had been attributed to him, brought Arouet back to Paris at the commencement of the year 1717; he had been enjoying it for barely a few months when a new satire, entitled J’ai vu (I have seen), and bitterly criticising the late reign, engaged the attention of society, and displeased the Regent afresh. Arouet defended himself with just cause and with all his might against the charge of having written it. The Duke of Orleans one day met him in the garden of the Palais-Royal. “Monsieur Arouet,” said he, “I bet that I will make you see a thing you have never seen.” “What, pray, monseigneur?” “The Bastille.” “Ah! monseigneur, I will consider it seen.” Two days later, young Arouet was shut up in the Bastille.

I needs must go; I jog along in style, With close-shut carriage, to the royal pile Built in our fathers’ days, hard by St. Paul, By Charles the Fifth. O brethren, good men all, In no such quarters may your lot be cast! Up to my room I find my way at last A certain rascal with a smirking face Exalts the beauties of my new retreat, So comfortable, so compact, so neat. Says he, “While Phoebus runs his daily race, He never casts one ray within this place. Look at the walls, some ten feet thick or so; You’ll find it all the cooler here, you know.” Then, bidding me admire the way they close The triple doors and triple locks on those, With gratings, bolts and bars on every side, “It’s all for your security,” he cried. At stroke of noon some skilly is brought in; Such fare is not so delicate as thin. I am not tempted by this splendid food, But what they tell me is, “‘Twill do you good So eat in peace; no one will hurry you.” Here in this doleful den I make ado, Bastilled, imprisoned, cabined, cribbed, confined, Nor sleeping, drinking, eating-to my mind; Betrayed by every one, my mistress too! O Marc Rene! [M. d’Argenson] whom Censor Cato’s ghost Might well have chosen for his vacant post, O Marc Rene! through whom ‘tis brought about That so much people murmur here below, To your kind word my durance vile I owe; May the good God some fine day pay you out!

Young Arouet passed eleven months in the Bastille; he there wrote the first part of the poem called La Henriade, under the title of La Ligue; when he at last obtained his release in April, 1718, he at the same time received orders to reside at Chatenay, where his father had a country house. It was on coming out of the Bastille that the poet took, from a small family-estate, that name of Voltaire which he was to render so famous. “I have been too unfortunate under my former name,” he wrote to Mdlle. du Noyer; “I mean to see whether this will suit me better.”