[42] Duvernet, ch. ii. The free-hearted Ninon de l’Enclos, brightest of old ladies, is to be numbered among the pre-Voltairean freethinkers, and to be remembered as leaving young Voltaire a legacy to buy books. She refused to “sell her soul” by turning dévote on the invitation of her old friend Madame de Maintenon. Madame D’Épinay, Voltaire’s “belle philosophe et aimable Habacuc,” Madame du Deffand, and Madame Geoffrin were among the later freethinking grandes dames of the Voltairean period; and so, presumably, was the Madame de Créquí, quoted by Rivarol, who remarked that “Providence” is “the baptismal name of Chance.” As to Madame Geoffrin see the Œuvres Posthumes de D’Alembert, 1799, i, 240, 271; and the Mémoires de Marmontel, 1804, ii, 102 sq. If Marmontel is accurate, she went secretly at times to mass (p. 104). [↑]
[43] Deslandes wrote some new chapters of his Réflexions in London, for the English translation. Eng. tr. 1713, p. 99. [↑]
[44] Pour et Contre, ou Épitre à Uranie. It was of course not printed till long afterwards. Diderot, writing his Promenade du Sceptique in 1747, says: “C’est, je crois, dans l’allée des fleurs [of his allegory] entre le champagne et le tokay, que l’épitre à Uranie prit naissance.” (L’Allée des Marronniers, ad init.) This seems unjust. [↑]
[45] He has been alternately represented as owing everything and owing very little to England. Cp. Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit, Eng. tr. p. 58. Neither view is just. [↑]
[46] In his Essay upon the Civil Wars of France, and ... upon Epick Poetry (2nd ed. 1728, “corrected by himself”), written and published in English, he begins his “Advertisement” with the remark: “It has the appearance of too great a presumption in a traveller who hath been but eighteen months in England, to attempt to write in a language which he cannot pronounce at all, and which he hardly understands in conversation.” As the book is remarkably well written, he must have read much English. [↑]
[47] Lord Morley (Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 40) speaks of the English people as having then won “a full liberty of thought and speech and person.” This, as we have seen, somewhat overstates the case. But discussion was much more nearly free than in France. [↑]
[48] Probably as much on political as on religious grounds. The 8th letter, Sur le Parlement, must have been very offensive to the French Government; and in 1739, moved by angry criticisms, Voltaire saw fit to modify its language. See Lanson’s ed. of the Lettres, 1909, i, 92, 110. [↑]
[49] Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire, ed. 1792, p. 92. In reprints the poem was entitled Sur la religion naturelle, and was so commonly cited. [↑]
[51] See above, pp. 213–14, as to the works of Boulainvilliers, Tyssot de Patot, Deslandes, and others who wrote between 1700 and 1715. [↑]