When Voltaire was set at liberty, the Regent, whom, as we have just said, he had reviled, made him a very handsome offer of his protection. The poet’s reply is well known: “My lord, I thank your royal highness for being so good as to continue to charge yourself with my board, but I beseech you no longer to charge yourself with my lodging.” The young writer thus obtained from the Regent a pension of 400 crowns, which later on the latter augmented to 2000 livres.
Voltaire was sent to the Bastille a second time in April, 1726. For this new detention there was no justification whatever. He had had a violent quarrel, one evening at the Opera, with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot. On another occasion, at the Comédie Française, the poet and the nobleman had a warm altercation in the box of Mdlle. Lecouvreur. Rohan raised his stick, Voltaire put his hand on his sword, and the actress fainted. Some days later “the gallant chevalier, assisted by half a dozen ruffians, behind whom he courageously posted himself,” gave our poet a thrashing in broad daylight. When relating the adventure later, the Chevalier said pleasantly: “I commanded the squad.” From that moment Voltaire sought his revenge. “The police reports reveal curious details of the loose, erratic, and feverish life he lived between the insult and his arrest,” writes the careful biographer of Voltaire, Desnoiresterres. From one of these police reports we see that the young writer established relations with soldiers of the guard: several notorious bullies were constantly about him. A relative who attempted to calm him found him more irritated and violent in his language than ever. It appears certain that he was meditating some act of violence, which indeed would not have been without justification. But the Cardinal de Rohan contrived that he should be arrested on the night of April 17, 1726, and placed in the Bastille.
Speaking of this new imprisonment Marshal de Villars writes: “The public, disposed to find fault all round, came to the conclusion on this occasion that everybody was in the wrong: Voltaire for having offended the Chevalier de Rohan, the latter for having dared to commit a capital offence in causing a citizen to be beaten, the government for not having punished a notorious crime, and for having sent the injured party to the Bastille to pacify the injurer.” Nevertheless, we read in the report of Hérault, the lieutenant of police: “The Sieur de Voltaire was found armed with pocket pistols, and his family, when informed of the matter, unanimously and universally applauded the wisdom of an order which saves this young man the ill effects of some new piece of folly and the worthy people who compose his family the vexation of sharing his shame.”
Voltaire remained at the Bastille for twelve days: he was permitted to have a servant of his own choice to wait on him, who was boarded at the king’s expense; as for himself, he took his meals whenever he pleased at the governor’s table, going out of the Bastille, as the governor’s residence stood outside the prison. Relatives and friends came to see him; his friend Thiériot dined with him; he was given pens, paper, books, whatever he desired in order to divert himself. “Using and abusing these opportunities,” writes Desnoiresterres, “Voltaire believed that he could give audience to all Paris. He wrote to those of his friends who had not yet shown a sense of their duty, exhorting them to give him proof they were alive.” “I have been accustomed to all misfortunes,” he wrote to Thiériot, “but not yet to that of being utterly abandoned by you. Madame de Bernières, Madame du Deffand, the Chevalier des Alleurs really ought to come and see me. They only have to ask permission of M. Hérault or M. de Maurepas.” At the time of the poet’s entrance to the Bastille, the lieutenant of police had written to the governor: “The Sieur de Voltaire is of a genius that requires humouring. His Serene Highness has approved of my writing to tell you that the king’s intention is that you should secure for him mild treatment and the internal liberty of the Bastille, so far as these do not jeopardize the security of his detention.” The warrant setting him at liberty was signed on April 26.
La Beaumelle.
In M. Bournon’s list La Beaumelle comes second. The circumstances under which he was put into the Bastille were as follows. After having fallen out at Berlin with Voltaire, whom he had compared to a monkey, La Beaumelle returned to Paris, whence he had been exiled. There he got printed a new edition of Voltaire’s Age of Louis XIV., unknown to the author, and interpolated therein odes insulting to the house of Orleans. “La Beaumelle,” exclaimed Voltaire, “is the first who dared to print another man’s work in his lifetime. This miserable Erostrates of the Age of Louis XIV. has discovered the secret of changing into an infamous libel, for fifteen ducats, a work undertaken for the glory of the nation.”
La Beaumelle became an inmate of the Bastille in April, 1753, and remained there for six months. Writing on May 18, 1753, to M. Roques, Voltaire said that “there was scarcely any country where he would not inevitably have been punished sooner or later, and I know from a certain source that there are two courts where they would have inflicted a chastisement more signal than that which he is undergoing here.”
It was not long before La Beaumelle issued his edition of Notes towards the History of Madame de Maintenon and that of the past century, with nine volumes of correspondence. He had fabricated letters which he attributed to Madame de Saint-Géran and Madame de Frontenac, and published a correspondence of Madame de Maintenon which M. Geffroy, in a work recognized as authoritative, regards as full of barefaced falsehoods and foul and scurrilous inventions. He had inserted in his work the following phrase: “The court of Vienna has been long accused of having poisoners always in its pay.”
It must be observed that La Beaumelle’s publication owed its great vogue to special circumstances. The author’s reputation abroad, the very title of the book, lent it great importance; and France, then engaged in the Seven Years’ War, found it necessary to keep in Austria’s good graces. La Beaumelle was conveyed to the Bastille a second time. The lieutenant of police, Berryer, put him through the usual examination. La Beaumelle was a man of the world, so witty that in the course of their quarrels he drove Voltaire himself to despair. He showed himself such in his examination. “La Beaumelle,” said Berryer to him, “this is wit you are giving me when what I ask of you is plain sense.” On his expressing a wish for a companion, he was placed with the Abbé d’Estrades. The officers of the château had all his manuscripts brought from his house, so that he might continue his literary work. He had at the Bastille a library of 600 volumes, ranged on shelves which the governor ordered to be made for him. He there finished a translation of the Annals of Tacitus and the Odes of Horace. He had permission to write to his relatives and friends, and to receive visits from them; he had the liberty of walking in the castle garden, of breeding birds in his room, and of having brought from outside all the luxuries to which he was partial. The principal secretary of the lieutenant of police, Duval, reports the following incident: “Danry (the famous Latude) and Allègre (his companion in confinement and ere long in escape) found means to open a correspondence with all the prisoners in the Bastille. They lifted a stone in a closet of the chapel, and put their letters underneath it. La Beaumelle pretended to be a woman in his letters to Allègre, and as he was a man of parts and Allègre was of keen sensibility and an excellent writer, the latter fell madly in love with La Beaumelle, to such a degree that, though they mutually agreed to burn their letters, Allègre preserved those of his fancied mistress, which he had not the heart to give to the flames; with the result that, the letters being discovered at an inspection of his room, he was put in the cells for some time. The prisoner amused himself also by composing verses which he recited at the top of his voice. This gave much concern to the officers of the garrison, and Chevalier, the major, wrote to the lieutenant of police on the matter: “The Sieur de la Beaumelle seems to have gone clean out of his mind; he seems to be a maniac; he amuses himself by declaiming verses in his room for a part of the day: for the rest of the time he is quiet.”
This second detention lasted from August, 1756, till August, 1757.