But as the brave and unyielding enemy of all that was stupid and narrow and bigoted and cruel, he wielded an influence which has endured until the beginning of the Great Civil War of the year 1914.
The age in which he lived was a period of extremes. On the one hand, the utter selfishness and corruption of a religious, social and economic system which had long since outlived its usefulness. On the other side, a large number of eager but overzealous young men and young women ready to bring about a millennium which was based upon nothing more substantial than their good intentions. A humorous fate dropped this pale and sickly son of an inconspicuous notary public into this maelstrom of sharks and pollywogs, and bade him sink or swim. He preferred to swim and struck out for shore. The methods he employed during his long struggle with adverse circumstances were often of a questionable nature. He begged and flattered and played the clown. But this was in the days before royalties and literary agents. And let the author who never wrote a potboiler throw the first stone!
Not that Voltaire would have been greatly worried by a few additional bricks. During a long and busy life devoted to warfare upon stupidity, he had experienced too many defeats to worry about such trifles as a public beating or a couple of well aimed banana peels. But he was a man of indomitable good cheer. If today he must spend his leisure hours in His Majesty’s prison, tomorrow he may find himself honored with a high titulary position at the same court from which he has just been banished. And if all his life he is obliged to listen to angry village priests denouncing him as the enemy of the Christian religion, isn’t there somewhere in a cupboard filled with old love letters that beautiful medal presented to him by the Pope to prove that he can gain the approbation of Holy Church as well as her disapproval?
It was all in the day’s work.
Meanwhile he fully intended to enjoy himself hugely and crowd his days and weeks and months and years with a strange and colorful assortment of the most variegated experiences.
By birth Voltaire belonged to the better middle class. His father was what for the lack of a better term we might call a sort of private trust company. He was the confidential handy-man of a number of rich nobles and looked after their legal and financial interests. Young Arouet (for that was the family name) was therefore accustomed to a society a little better than that of his own people, something which later in life gave him a great advantage over most of his literary rivals. His mother was a certain Mademoiselle d’Aumard. She had been a poor girl who did not bring her husband a cent of dowry. But she was possessed of that small “d’” which all Frenchmen of the middle classes (and all Europeans in general and a few Americans in particular) regard with humble awe, and her husband thought himself pretty lucky to win such a prize. As for the son, he also basked in the reflected glory of his ennobled grandparents and as soon as he began to write, he exchanged the plebeian François Marie Arouet for the more aristocratic François Marie de Voltaire, but how and where he hit upon this surname is still a good deal of a mystery. He had a brother and a sister. The sister, who took care of him after his mother’s death, he loved very sincerely. The brother, on the other hand, a faithful priest of the Jansenist denomination, full of zeal and rectitude, bored him to distraction and was one of the reasons why he spent as little time as possible underneath the paternal shingles.
Father Arouet was no fool and soon discovered that his little “Zozo” promised to be a handful. Wherefore he sent him to the Jesuits that he might become versed in Latin hexameters and Spartan discipline. The good fathers did their best by him. They gave their spindly-legged pupil a sound training in the rudiments of both the dead and living tongues. But they found it impossible to eradicate a certain bump of “queerness” which from the very beginning had set this child apart from the other scholars.
At the age of seventeen they willingly let him go, and to please his father, young François then took up the study of the law. Unfortunately one could not read all day long. There were the long hours of the lazy evenings. These hours François whiled away either writing funny little pieces for the local newspapers or reading his latest literary compositions to his cronies in the nearest coffee-house. Two centuries ago such a life was generally believed to lead straight to perdition. Father Arouet fully appreciated the danger his son was running. He went to one of his many influential friends and obtained for M. François a position as secretary to the French Legation at the Hague. The Dutch capital, then as now, was exasperatingly dull. Out of sheer boredom Voltaire began a love affair with the not particularly attractive daughter of a terrible old woman who was a society reporter. The lady, who hoped to marry her darling to a more promising party, rushed to the French minister and asked him to please remove this dangerous Romeo before the whole city knew about the scandal. His Excellency had troubles enough of his own and was not eager for more. He bundled his secretary into the next stage-coach for Paris and François, without a job, once more found himself at the mercy of his father.
In this emergency Maître Arouet bethought himself of an expedient which was often used by such Frenchmen as had a friend at court. He asked and obtained a “lettre de cachet” and placed his son before the choice of enforced leisure in a jail or industrious application in a law-school. The son said that he would prefer the latter and promised that he would be a model of industry and application. He was as good as his word and applied himself to the happy life of a free lance pamphleteer with such industry that the whole town talked about it. This was not according to the agreement with his papa and the latter was entirely within his rights when he decided to send his son away from the flesh-pots of the Seine and packed him off to a friend in the country, where the young man was to remain for a whole year.
There, with twenty-four hours leisure each day of the week (Sundays included) Voltaire began the study of letters in all seriousness and composed the first of his plays. After twelve months of fresh air and a very healthy monotony, he was allowed to return to the scented atmosphere of the capital and at once made up for lost time by a series of lampoons upon the Regent, a nasty old man who deserved all that was said about him but did not like this publicity the least little bit. Hence, a second period of exile in the country, followed by more scribbling and at last a short visit to the Bastille. But prison in those days, that is to say, prison for young gentlemen of Voltaire’s social prominence, was not a bad place. One was not allowed to leave the premises but otherwise did pretty much as one pleased. And it was just what Voltaire needed. A lonely cell in the heart of Paris gave him a chance to do some serious work. When he was released, he had finished several plays and these were performed with such tremendous success that one of them broke all records of the eighteenth century and ran for forty-five nights in succession.