The wrath and disquietude of Voltaire no longer knew any bounds; Madame Denis was ill, or feigned to be; she wrote letter upon letter to Voltaire’s friends at the court of Prussia; she wrote to the king himself. The strife which had begun between the poet and the maladroit agents of the Great Frederick was becoming serious. “We would have risked our lives rather than let him get away,” said Freytag; “and if I, holding a council of war with myself, had not found him at the barrier, but in the open country, and he had refused to jog back, I don’t know that I shouldn’t have lodged a bullet in his head. To such a degree had I at heart the letters and writings of the king.”
Freytag’s zeal received a cruel rebuff: orders arrived to let the poet go. “I gave you no orders like that,” wrote Frederick, “you should never make more noise than a thing deserves. I wanted Voltaire to give up to you the key, the cross, and the volume of poems I had intrusted to him; as soon as all that was given up to you I can’t see what earthly reason could have induced you to make this uproar.” At last, on the 6th of July, “all this affair of Ostrogoths and Vandals being over,” Voltaire left Frankfort precipitately. His niece had taken the road to Paris, whence she soon wrote to him, “There is nobody in France, I say nobody without exception, who has not condemned this violence mingled with so much that is ridiculous and cruel; it makes a deeper impression than you would believe. Everybody says that you could not do otherwise than you are doing, in resolving to meet with philosophy things so unphilosophical. We shall do very well to hold our tongues; the public speaks quite enough.” Voltaire held his tongue, according to his idea of holding his tongue, drawing, in his poem of La Loi naturelle, dedicated at first to the margravine of Baireuth and afterwards to the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, a portrait of Frederick which was truthful and at the same time bitter:
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“Of incongruities a monstrous pile, Calling men brothers, crushing them the while; With air humane, a misanthropic brute; Ofttimes impulsive, sometimes over-’cute; Weak ‘midst his choler, modest in his pride; Yearning for virtue, lust personified; Statesman and author, of the slippery crew; My patron, pupil, persecutor too.” |
Voltaire’s intimacy with the Great Frederick was destroyed it had for a while done honor to both of them; it had ended by betraying the pettinesses and the meannesses natural to the king as well as to the poet. Frederick did not remain without anxiety on the score of Voltaire’s rancor; Voltaire dreaded nasty diplomatic proceedings on the part of the king; he had been threatened with as much by Lord Keith, Milord Marechal, as he was called on the Continent from the hereditary title he had lost in his own country through his attachment to the cause of the Stuarts:—
“Let us see in what countries M. de Voltaire has not had some squabble or made himself many enemies,” said a letter to Madame Denis from the great Scotch lord, when he had entered Frederick’s service: “every country where the Inquisition prevails must be mistrusted by him; he would put his foot in it sooner or later. The Mussulmans must be as little pleased with his Mahomet as good Christians were. He is too old to go to China and turn mandarin; in a word, if he is wise, there is no place but France for him. He has friends there, and you will have him with you for the rest of his days; do not let him shut himself out from the pleasure of returning thither, for you are quite aware that, if he were to indulge in speech and epigrams offensive to the king my master, a word which the latter might order me to speak to the court of France would suffice to prevent M. de Voltaire from returning, and he would be sorry for it when it was too late.”
Voltaire was already in France, but he dared not venture to Paris. Mutilated, clumsy, or treacherous issues of the Abrege de l’Histoire Universelle had already stirred the bile of the clergy; there were to be seen in circulation copies of La Pucelle, a disgusting poem which the author had been keeping back and bringing out alternately for several years past. Voltaire fled from Colmar, where the Jesuits held sway, to Lyons, where he found Marshal Richelieu, but lately his protector and always his friend, who was repairing to his government of Languedoc. Cardinal Tencin refused to receive the poet, who regarded this sudden severity as a sign of the feelings of the court towards him. “The king told Madame de Pompadour that he did not want me to go to Paris; I am of his Majesty’s opinion, I don’t want to go to Paris,” wrote Voltaire to the Marquis of Paulmy. He took fright and sought refuge in Switzerland, where he soon settled on the Lake of Geneva, pending his purchase of the estate of Ferney in the district of Gex and that of Tourney in Burgundy. He was henceforth fixed, free to pass from France to Switzerland and from Switzerland to France. “I lean my left on Mount Jura,” he used to say, “my right on the Alps, and I have the beautiful Lake of Geneva in front of my camp, a beautiful castle on the borders of France, the hermitage of Delices in the territory of Geneva, a good house at Lausanne; crawling thus from one burrow to another, I escape from kings. Philosophers should always have two or three holes under ground against the hounds that run them down.”
The perturbation of Voltaire’s soul and mind was never stilled; the anxious and undignified perturbation of his outer life at last subsided; he left off trembling, and, in the comparative security which he thought he possessed, he gave scope to all his free-thinking, which had but lately been often cloaked according to circumstances. He had taken the communion at Colmar, to soften down the Jesuits; he had conformed to the rules of the convent of Senones, when he took refuge with Dom Calmet; at Delices he worked at the Encyclopaedia, which was then being commenced by D’Alembert and Diderot, taking upon himself in preference the religious articles, and not sparing the creed of his neighbors, the pastors of Geneva, any more than that of the Catholic church. “I assure you that my friends and I will lead them a fine dance; they shall drink the cup to the very lees,” wrote Voltaire to D’Alembert. In the great campaign against Christianity undertaken by the philosophers, Voltaire, so long, a wavering ally, will henceforth fight in the foremost ranks; it is he who shouts to Diderot, “Squelch the thing (Ecrasez l’infame)!” The masks are off, and the fight is barefaced; the encyclopaedists march out to the conquest of the world in the name of reason, humanity, and free-thinking; even when he has ceased to work at the Encyclopaedia, Voltaire marches with them.
The Essai sur l’Histoire generale et les Moeurs was one of the first broadsides of this new anti-religious crusade. “Voltaire will never write a good history,” Montesquieu used to say: “he is like the monks, who do not write for the subject of which they treat, but for the glory of their order: Voltaire writes for his convent.” The same intention betrayed itself in every sort of work that issued at that time from the hermitage of Delices, the poem on Le Tremblement de Terre de Lisbonne, the drama of Socrate, the satire of the Pauvre Diable, the sad story of Candide, led the way to a series of publications every day more and more violent against the Christian faith. The tragedy of L’Orphelin de la Chine and that of Tancrede, the quarrels with Freron, with Lefranc de Pompignan, and lastly with Jean Jacques Rousseau, did not satiate the devouring activity of the Patriarch, as he was called by the knot of philosophers. Definitively installed at Ferney, Voltaire took to building, planting, farming. He established round his castle a small industrial colony, for whose produce he strove to get a market everywhere. “Our design,” he used to say, “is to ruin the trade of Geneva in a pious spirit.” Ferney, moreover, held grand and numerously attended receptions; Madame Denis played her uncle’s pieces on a stage which the latter had ordered to be built, and which caused as much disquietude to the austere Genevese as to Jean Jacques Rousseau. It was on account of Voltaire’s theatrical representations that Rousseau wrote his Lettre centre les Spectacles. “I love you not, sir,” wrote Rousseau to Voltaire: “you have done me such wrongs as were calculated to touch me most deeply. You have ruined Geneva in requital of the asylum you have found there.” Geneva was about to banish Rousseau before long, and Voltaire had his own share of responsibility in this act of severity so opposed to his general and avowed principles. Voltaire was angry with Rousseau, whom he accused of having betrayed the cause of philosophy; he was, as usual, hurried away by the passion of the moment, when he wrote, speaking of the exile, “I give you my word that if this blackguard (polisson) of a Jean Jacques should dream of coming (to Geneva), he would run great risk of mounting a ladder which would not be that of Fortune.” At the very same time Rousseau was saying, “What have I done to bring upon myself the persecution of M. de Voltaire? And what worse have I to fear from him? Would M. de Buffon have me soften this tiger thirsting for my blood? He knows very well that nothing ever appeases or softens the fury of tigers; if I were to crawl upon the ground before Voltaire, he would triumph thereat, no doubt, but he would rend me none the less. Basenesses would dishonor me, but would not save me. Sir, I can suffer, I hope to learn how to die, and he who knows how to do that has never need to be a dastard.”