Voltaire

Table of contents

1 Biography 1.1 Exile to England 1.2 Return to Paris 1.3 Cirey 1.4 Frederick the Great 2 Discussion 3 His works 4 Quotes 5 External links 6 References

Biography

He was born in Paris to François Arouet; and Marie-Marguerite Daumart or D'Aumard. Both parents were of Poitevin extraction, but the Arouets were long established in Paris, the grandfather being a prosperous tradesman. The family appears to have always belonged to the yeoman-tradesman class; their special home was the town of Saint-Loup.

Voltaire was the fifth child of his parents, preceded by twin boys (one of whom survived), a girl, Marguerite-Catherine, and another boy who died young. Voltaire's mother died when he was seven years old, she was probably the chief cause of his early introduction to high society, the Abbé de Châteauneuf; (his sponsor in more ways than one) having been her friend. His father appears to have been strict, but neither inhospitable nor tyrannical. Marguerite Arouet, of whom her younger brother was very fond, married early, her husband's family name being Mignot; the elder brother, Armand, was a strong Jansenist and had a poor relationship with François.

The Abbé de Châteauneuf instructed François in les belles lettres and deism, and the child showed a faculty for facile verse-making. Aged ten he was sent to the Collège Louis-le-Grand;, which was under the management of Jesuits, and remained there till 1711. As part of his general liberalism he depreciated the education he had received; but it seems to have been a sound one which formed the basis of his extraordinarily wide, though not always accurate, collection of knowledge, it also disciplined and exercised his literary faculty and judgement. There is little doubt that the great attention bestowed on acting — the Jesuits kept up the Renaissance practice of turning schools into theatres for the performance of plays both in Latin and in the vernacular — had much to do with Voltaire's lifelong devotion to the stage.

It was in his earliest school years that the celebrated presentation of him, by his godfather, to Ninon de Lenclos took place, for Ninon died in 1705. She left him two thousand francs "to buy books with". Some curious oddities are recorded of his life, one being that in the terrible famine year of Malplaquet a hundred francs a year were added to the usual boarding expenses, and yet the boys had to eat pain bis. In August 1711, at the age of seventeen, he came home and the usual battle followed between a son who desired no profession but literature and a father who refused to consider literature a profession at all so Voltaire studied law, at least nominally. The Abbé de Châteauneuf died before his godson left school, but he had already introduced him to the famous and dissipated coterie of the Temple, of which the grand prior Vendôme was the head, and the poets Chaulieu and La Fare were the chief literary stars. Voltaire's father tried to remove him from such society by sending him first to Caen and then, in the suite of the marquis de Châteauneuf, the abbé's brother, to The Hague. Here he met Olympe Dunoyer ("Pimpette"), a girl of respectable character and not bad connections, but a Protestant, penniless and daughter of a literary lady whose reputation was not spotless. The mother discouraged the affair and, though Voltaire tried to avail himself of the mania for proselytizing which then distinguished France, his father stopped any idea of a match by procuring a lettre de cachet, though, however, he never used it.

Voltaire was sent home and, for a time, pretended to work in a Parisian lawyer's office but he again manifested a faculty for getting into trouble — this time in the still more dangerous way of writing libelous poems — so that his father was glad to send him to stay for nearly a year (1714-15) with Louis de Caumartin, marquis de Saint-Ange, in the country. Here he was still supposed to study law but devoted himself in part to literary essays and in part to storing up his immense treasure of gossiping history. Almost exactly at the time of the death of Louis XIV he returned to Paris, to fall once more into literary and Templar society and to make the tragedy of Oedipe, which he had already written, privately known. He was introduced to a less questionable and even more distinguished coterie than Vendôme's, to the famous "court of Sceaux", the circle of the beautiful and ambitious duchesse du Maine. It seems that Voltaire lent himself to the duchess's frantic hatred of the regent, Philippe II of Orléans, and helped compose lampoons on him. In May 1716 he was exiled, first to Tulle, then to Sully, later, having been allowed to return, he was suspected of having been concerned in the composition of two violent libels — one in Latin and one in French — called, from their first words, the Puero Regnante and the J'ai vu. Inveigled by a spy named Beauregard into a real or burlesque confession he was sent to the Bastille on May 16, 1717, here he recast Oedipe, began the Henriade and decided to change his name.

Ever after his exit from the Bastille in April 1718 he was known as Arouet de Voltaire, or simply Voltaire, though legally he never abandoned his patronymic. The origin of the name has been much debated and attempts have been made to show that it existed in the Daumart pedigree or in some territorial designation. Some maintain that it was an abbreviation of a childish nickname, "le petit volontaire". The balance of opinion has, however, always inclined to the hypothesis of an anagram on the name "Arouet le jeune" or "Arouet l.j.", 'u' being changed to 'v' and 'j' to 'i' according to the ordinary rules of the game.

A further "exile" at Châtenay; and elsewhere followed the imprisonment however, though Voltaire was admitted to an audience by the regent and treated graciously, he was not trusted. Oedipe was performed at the Théâtre Français; on November 18 and was well received, though a rivalry grew between parties assisting its success. It had a run of forty-five nights and brought the author not a little profit, with these gains Voltaire seems to have begun his long series of successful financial speculations.

In the spring of the next year the production of Lagrange-Chancel's libels, entitled the Philip piques, again brought suspicion on Voltaire. He was informally exiled, and spent much time with Marshal Villars, again increasing his store of "reminiscences". He returned to Paris in the winter and his second play, Artemire, was produced in February 1720. It was a failure, and though it was recast with some success, Voltaire never published it as a whole and used parts of it in other work. He again spent much of his time with Villars, listening to the marshal's stories and making harmless love to the duchess.

In December 1721 his father died leaving him property, rather more than four thousand livres a year, which was soon increased by a pension of half the amount from the regent. In return for this, or in hopes of more, he offered himself as a spy — or at any rate as a secret diplomatist — to Dubois, but meeting his old enemy Beauregard in one of the minister's rooms and making an offensive remark, he was waylaid by Beauregard some time after in a less privileged place and soundly beaten.

His visiting espionage, as unkind critics put it — his secret diplomatic mission, as he would have liked to have it put himself — began in the summer of 1722 and he set out for it in company with a certain Madame de Rupelmonde, to whom he, as usual, made love, taught deism and served as an amusing travelling companion. He stayed at Cambrai for some time, where European diplomatists were still in full session, journeyed to Brussels, where he met and quarrelled with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, went on to the Hague and then returned. The Henriade had got on considerably during the journey and, according to his lifelong habit, the poet, with the help of his friend Thiériot and others, had been "working the oracle" of puffery.

During the late autumn and winter of 1722-1723 he lived chiefly in Paris, taking a kind of lodging in the town house of M. de Berniêres, a nobleman of Rouen and endeavouring to procure a "privilege" for his poem. In this he was disappointed but he had the work printed at Rouen nevertheless and spent the summer of 1723 revising it. In November he caught smallpox and was seriously ill, so that the book was not given to the world till the spring of 1724 (and then of course, as it had no privilege, appeared privately). Almost at the same time, on the 4th of March, his third tragedy, Marianne, appeared and was well received at first but underwent complete damnation before the curtain fell. The regent had died shortly before, not to Voltaire's advantage; for he had been a generous patron. Voltaire had made, however, a useful friend in another grand seigneur, as profligate and nearly as intelligent, the duke of Richelieu, and with him he passed 1724 and the next year chiefly recasting Marianne (which was now successful), but also writing the comedy of L'Indiscret and courting the queen.

Exile to England

The end of 1725 brought a disastrous close to this period of his life. He was insulted by the chevalier de Rohan, replied with his usual sharpness of tongue, and shortly afterwards, when dining with the duke of Sully, was called out and bastonadoed by the chevalier's hirelings, Rohan himself looking on.

Voltaire's friend Nicolas-Claude Thieriot reported that Rohan had started with: "Monsieur de Voltaire, Monsieur Arouet, exactly what is your name?" "I myself do not bear a great name," he said, "but I know how to honor the one I carry." Sort of a 'I know you are, but what am I?'

At the Duc de Sully's, Voltaire was called to the front door. When he was on the street he was invited to a carriage stationed there, whereupon he was seized by two hoodlums and beaten with a cudgel while Rohan, who had hired the thugs, sat in his coach and watched. Rohan would allegedly have commanded, Don't hit him on the head, something good may come out of it.

As a paid entertainer, this was his reputation, nobody would take his part, and at last, nearly three months after the outrage, he challenged Rohan, who accepted the challenge, but on the morning appointed for the duel Voltaire was arrested and sent for the second time to the Bastille. He was kept in confinement a fortnight, and was then packed off to England in accordance with his own request. Voltaire revenged himself on the duke of Sully for his conduct towards his guest by cutting Maximilien de Béthune's name out of the Henriade.

An anecdote describes how, one day in London, he was surrounded by an angry mob calling "Hang him! Hang the Frenchman!". Voltaire bravely faced the mob and called out: "Men of England! You wish to kill me because I am a Frenchman. Am I not punished enough in not being born an Englishman?" The crowd cheered him and escorted him safely back to the inn where he was staying.

No competent judges have ever mistaken the importance of Voltaire's visit to England, and the influence it exercised on his future career. In the first place, the ridiculous and discreditable incident of the beating by Rohan had time to blow over; in the second, England was a very favourable place for Frenchmen of note to make money; in the third, and most important of all, his contact with a people then far more different in every conceivable way from their neighbours than any two peoples of Europe are different now, acted as a sovereign tonic and stimulant on his intellect and literary faculty. While in England Voltaire was attracted to the philosophy of John Locke and ideas of the great scientist Sir Isaac Newton. He studied England's constitutional monarchy, its religious tolerance, its philosophical rationalism and most importantly the "natural sciences".

Before the English visit Voltaire had been an elegant trifler. He returned from that visit one of the foremost literary men in Europe, with views on all les grands sujets, and with a solid stock of money. The visit lasted about three years, from 1726 to 1729; and, as if to make the visitor's luck certain, George I died and George II succeeded soon after his arrival. The new king was not fond of "boetry" [poetry?], but Queen Caroline was, and international jealousy was pleased at the thought of welcoming a distinguished exile from French illiberality.

Horace Walpole, George Bubb Dodington, Bolingbroke, William Congreve, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Alexander Pope were among his English friends. He made acquaintance with, and at least tried to appreciate, the work of William Shakespeare. He was much struck by English manners and by English toleration for personal free thought and eccentricity, and gained some thousands of pounds from an authorized English edition of the Henriade, dedicated to the queen. But he visited Paris now and then without permission, and his mind was always set thereon. He gained full licence to return in the spring of 1729.

Return to Paris

He was full of literary projects, and immediately after his return is said to have increased his fortune immensely by a lucky lottery speculation. The Henriade was at last licensed in France; Brutus, a play which he had printed in England, was accepted for performance, but kept back for a time by the author; and he began the celebrated poem of the Pucelle, the amusement and the torment of great part of his life. But he had great difficulties with two of his chief works which were ready to appear, Charles XII and the Lettres sur les Anglais. With both he took all imaginable pains to avoid offending the censorship; for Voltaire had, more than any other man who ever lived, the ability and the willingness to stoop to conquer.

At the end of 1730 Brutus was actually staged. In the spring of the next year, Voltaire went to Rouen to get Charles XII surreptitiously printed. In 1732 another tragedy, Eriphile, appeared, with the same kind of halting success which had distinguished the appearance of its elder sisters since Oedipe. At last, on the 13th of August 1732, he produced Zaire, the best (with Mérope) of all his plays, and one of the ten or twelve best plays of the whole French classical school. Its motive was borrowed to some extent from Othello. In the following winter the death of the comtesse de Fontaine-Martel, whose guest and supposed lover he had been, turned him out of a comfortable abode. He then took lodgings with an agent of his, one Demoulin, in an out-of-the-way part of Paris, and was, for some time at least, as much occupied with contracts, speculation and all sorts of means of gaining money as with literature.

In the middle of this period, in 1733, two important books, the Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais and the Temple du goat appeared. Both were likely to make bad blood, for the latter was, under the mask of easy verse, a satire on contemporary French literature, especially on Rousseau, and the former was, in the guise of a criticism or rather panegyric of English ways, an attack on everything established in the church and state of France. It was published with certain "remarks" on Blaise Pascal, more offensive to orthodoxy than itself, and no mercy was shown to it. The book was condemned (June 10, 1734), the copies seized and burned, a warrant issued against the author, and his dwelling searched. He himself was safe in the independent duchy of Lorraine with Emilie de Breteuil, marquise du Chatelet, with whom he began to be intimate in 1733; he had now taken up his abode with her at the château of Cirey.

Cirey

If the English visit may be regarded as having finished Voltaire's education, the Cirey residence was the first stage of his literary manhood. He had written important and characteristic work before, but had not decided a direction. He now obtained a settled home for many years and, taught by his numerous brushes with the authorities, he began his future habit of keeping out of personal harm's way, and of at once denying any awkward responsibility, which made him for nearly half a century at once the leader of European heretics in regard to all established ideas. It was not till the summer of 1734 that Cirey, a half-dismantled country house on the borders of Champagne, France and Lorraine, was fitted up with Voltaire's money and became the headquarters of himself, of his hostess, and now and then of her accommodating husband.

Many pictures of the life here, some of them not a little malicious, survive. Emilie's temper was violent, and after a time she sought lovers who were not so much des cérébraux as Voltaire. Nevertheless, it provided him with a safe and comfortable retreat, and with every opportunity for literary work. In March 1735 the hat was formally taken off him, and he was at liberty to return to Paris, a liberty of which he availed himself sparingly. At Cirey he wrote indefatigably and did not neglect business. The principal literary results of his early years here were the Discours en vers sur l'Homme, the play of Aizire and L'Enfant prodigue (1736), and a long treatise on the Newtonian system which he and Madame du Chatelet wrote together. But, as usual, Voltaire's extraordinary literary industry was shown rather in a vast amount of fugitive writings than in substantive works, though for the whole space of his Cirey residence he was engaged in writing, adding to, and altering the Puerile.

In the very first days at Cirey he had written a pamphlet with the title of Treatise on Metaphysics. In March 1736 he received his first letter from Frederick II of Prussia, then crown prince. He was soon again in trouble, this time for the poem, Le Mondain, and he at once crossed the frontier and made for Brussels. He spent about three months in the Low Countries, but in March 1737 returned to Cirey and continued writing, making experiments in physics (he had at this time a large laboratory), and busying himself with iron-founding, the chief industry of the district.

The best-known accounts of Cirey life, those of Madame de Grafigny, date from the winter of 1738-39; they are very amusing, depicting the frequent quarrels between Madame du Chatelet and Voltaire, his intense suffering under criticism, his constant dread of the surreptitious publication of the Pucelle (which nevertheless he could not keep his hands from writing or his tongue from reciting to his visitors), and so forth. The chief and most galling of his critics at this time was the Abbé Desfontaines, and the chief of Desfontaines's attacks was entitled La Voltairomanie, in reply to a libel of Voltaire's called Le Préservatif. Both combatants had, according to the absurd habit of the time, to disown their works, Desfontaines's disavowal being formal and needing all Voltaire's own influence both at home and abroad to bring it about. For he had as little notion of tolerance towards others as of dignity in himself.

In April 1739 a journey was made to Brussels, to Paris, and then again to Brussels, which was the headquarters for a considerable time, owing to some law affairs, of the Du Chatelets. Frederick, now king of Prussia, made not a few efforts to get Voltaire away from Madame du Chatelet, but unsuccessfully, and the king earned the lady's cordial hatred by persistently refusing or omitting to invite her.

At last, in September 1740, master and pupil met for the first time at Cleves, an interview followed three months later by a longer visit. Brussels was again the headquarters in Source | Copyright

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