given him the name of Well-beloved, and whose attachment he had worn out
by his cold indifference about affairs and the national interests as much
as by the irregularities of his life.  With him died the old French
monarchy, that proud power which had sometimes ruled Europe whilst always
holding a great position therein.  Henceforth France was marching towards
the unknown, tossed about as she was by divers movements, which were
mostly hostile to the old state of things, blindly and confusedly as yet,
but, under the direction of masters as inexperienced as they were daring,
full of frequently noble though nearly always extravagant and reckless
hopes, all founded on a thorough reconstruction of the bases of society
and of its ancient props.  Far more even than the monarchy, at the close
of Louis XV.'s reign, did religion find itself attacked and threatened;
the blows struck by the philosophers at fanaticism recoiled upon the
Christian faith, transiently liable here below for human errors and
faults over which it is destined to triumph in eternity.




CHAPTER LV.----LOUIS XV., THE PHILOSOPHERS.

Nowhere and at no epoch had literature shone with so vivid a lustre as
in the reign of Louis XIV.; never has it been in a greater degree the
occupation and charm of mankind, never has it left nobler and rarer
models behind it for the admiration and imitation of the coming race;
the writers of Louis XV.'s age, for all their brilliancy and all their
fertility, themselves felt their inferiority in respect of their
predecessors.  Voltaire confessed as much with a modesty which was by no
means familiar to him.  Inimitable in their genius, Corneille, Bossuet,
Pascal, Moliere left their imprint upon the generation that came after
them; it had judgment enough to set them by acclamation in the ranks of
the classics; in their case, greatness displaced time.  Voltaire took
Racine for model; La Mothe imagined that he could imitate La Fontaine.
The illustrious company of great minds which surrounded the throne of
Louis XIV., and had so much to do with the lasting splendor of his reign,
had no reason to complain of ingratitude on the part of its successors;
but, from the pedestal to which they raised it, it exercised no potent
influence upon new thought and new passions.  Enclosed in their glory as
in a sanctuary, those noble spirits, discreet and orderly even in their
audacities, might look forth on commotions and yearnings they had never
known; they saw, with astonishment mingled with affright, their
successors launching without fear or afterthought upon that boundless
world of intellect, upon which the rules of conscience and the
difficulties of practical life do not come in anywhere to impose limits.
They saw the field everywhere open to human thought, and they saw falling
down on all sides the boundaries which they had considered sacred.  They
saw pioneers, as bold as they were thoughtless, marching through the
mists of a glorious hope towards an unknown future, attacking errors and
abuses, all the while that they were digging up the groundwork of society
in order to lay new foundations, and they must have shuddered even in
their everlasting rest to see ideas taking the place of creeds, doubt
substituted for belief, generous aspirations after liberty, justice, and
humanity mingled, amongst the masses, with low passions and deep-seated
rancor.  They saw respect disappearing, the church as well as the kingly
power losing prestige every day, religious faith all darkened and dimmed
in some corner of men's souls, and, amidst all this general instability,
they asked themselves with awe, "What are the guiding-reins of the
society which is about to be?  What will be the props of the new fabric?
The foundations are overturned; what will the good man do?"

[Illustration: Montesquieu----269]

Good men had themselves sometimes lent a hand to the work, beyond what
they had intended or foreseen, perhaps; Montesquieu, despite the wise
moderation of his great and strong mind, had been the first to awaken
that yearning for novelty and reforms which had been silently brooding at
the bottom of men's hearts.  Born in 1689 at the castle of La Brede, near
Bordeaux, Montesquieu really belonged, in point of age, to the reign of
Louis XIV., of which he bears the powerful imprint even amidst the
boldness of his thoughts and expressions.  Grandeur is the distinctive
characteristic of Montesquieu's ideas, as it is of the seventeenth
century altogether.  He was already councillor in the Parliament of
Bordeaux when Louis XIV. died; next year (1716) he took possession of a
mortar-cap president's (_president d mortier_) office, which had been
given up to him by one of his uncles.  "On leaving college," he says,
"there were put into my hands some law-books; I examined the spirit of
them."  Those profound researches, which were to last as long as his
life, were more suited to his tastes than jurisprudence properly so
called.  "What has always given me rather a low opinion of myself," he
would say, "is that there are very few positions in the commonwealth for
which I should be really fit.  As for my office of president, I have my
heart in the right place, I comprehend sufficiently well the questions in
themselves; but as to the procedure I did not understand anything about
it.  I paid attention to it, nevertheless; but what disgusted me most was
to see fools with that very talent which, so to speak, shunned me."  He
resolved to deliver himself from the yoke which was intolerable to him,
and resigned his office; but by this time the world knew his name, in
spite of the care he had taken at first to conceal it.  In 1721, when he
still had his seat on the fleurs-de-lis, he had published his _Lettres
persanes,_ an imaginary trip of two exiled Parsees, freely criticising
Paris and France.  The book appeared under the Regency, and bears the
imprint of it in the licentiousness of the descriptions and the witty
irreverence of the criticisms.  Sometimes, however, the future gravity of
Montesquieu's genius reveals itself amidst the shrewd or biting
judgments.  It is in the _Lettres persanes_ that he seeks to set up the
notion of justice above the idea of God himself.  "Though there were no
God," he says, "we should still be bound to love justice, that is to say,
make every effort to be like that Being of whom we have so grand an idea,
and who, if He existed, would of necessity be just."  Holy Scripture,
before Montesquieu, had affirmed more simply and more powerfully the
unchangeable idea of justice in every soul of man.  "He who is judge of
all the earth, shall not He do right?."  Abraham had said when
interceding with God for the righteous shut up in Sodom.

The success of the _Lettres persanes_ was great; Montesquieu had said
what many people thought without daring to express it; the doubt which
was nascent in his mind, and which he could only withstand by an effort
of will, the excessive freedom of the tone and of the style scared the
authorities, however; when he wanted to get into the French Academy, in
the place of M. de Sacy, Cardinal Fleury opposed it formally.  It was
only on the 24th of January, 1728, that Montesquieu, recently elected,
delivered his reception speech.  He at once set out on some long travels;
he went through Germany, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and ended
by settling in England for two years.  The sight of political liberty had
charmed him.  "Ambassadors know no more about England than a six months'
infant," he wrote in his journal; "when people see the devil to pay in
the periodical publications, they believe that there is going to be a
revolution next day; but all that is required is to remember that in
England as elsewhere, the people are dissatisfied with the ministers and
write what is only thought elsewhere.  England is the freest country in
the world; I do not except any republic."  He returned to France so
smitten with the parliamentary or moderate form of government, as he
called it, that he seemed sometimes to forget the prudent maxim of the
_Lettres persanes_.  "It is true," said the Parsee Usbeck, "that, in
consequence of a whimsicality (_bizarrerie_) which springs rather from
the nature than from the mind of man, it is sometimes necessary to change
certain laws; but the case is rare, and, when it occurs, it should not be
touched save with a trembling hand."

On returning to his castle of La Brede after so many and such long
travels, Montesquieu resolved to restore his tone by intercourse with the
past.  "I confess my liking for the ancients," he used to say; "this
antiquity enchants me, and I am always ready to say with Pliny, 'You are
going to Athens; revere the gods.'"  It was not, however, on the Greeks
that he concentrated the working of his mind; in 1734, he published his
_Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur et de la decadence des
Romaine_.  Montesquieu did not, as Bossuet did, seek to hit upon God's
plan touching the destinies of mankind; he discovers in the virtues and
vices of the Romans themselves the secret of their triumphs and of their
reverses.  The contemplation of antiquity inspires him with language
often worthy of Tacitus, curt, nervous, powerful in its grave simplicity.
"It seemed," he says, "that the Romans only conquered in order to give;
but they remained so positively the masters that, when they made war on
any prince, they crushed him, so to speak, with the weight of the whole
universe."

Montesquieu thus performed the prelude to the great work of his life; he
had been working for twenty years at the _Esprit des lois,_ when he
published it in 1748.  "In the course of twenty years," he says, "I saw
my work begin, grow, progress, and end."  He had placed as the motto to
his book this Latin phrase, which at first excited the curiosity of
readers: _Prolem sine matre creatam_ (Offspring begotten without a
mother).  "Young man," said Montesquieu, by this time advanced in years,
to M. Suard (afterwards perpetual secretary to the French Academy),
"young man, when a notable book is written, genius is its father, and
liberty its mother; that is why I wrote upon the title-page of my work,
"Prolem sine matre creatam."

It was liberty at the same time as justice that Montesquieu sought and
claimed in his profound researches into the laws which have from time
immemorial governed mankind; that new instinctive idea of natural rights,
those new yearnings which were beginning to dawn in all hearts, remained
as yet, for the most part, upon the surface of their minds and of their
lives; what was demanded at that time in France was liberty to speak and
write rather than to act and govern.  Montesquieu, on the contrary, went
to the bottom of things, and, despite the natural moderation of his mind,
he propounded theories so perilous for absolute power that he dared not
have his book printed at Paris, and brought it out in Geneva; its success
was immense; before his death, Montesquieu saw twenty-one French editions
published, and translations in all the languages of Europe.  "Mankind had
lost its titledeeds," says Voltaire; "Montesquieu recovered and restored
them."

The intense labor, the immense courses of reading, to which Montesquieu
had devoted himself, had exhausted his strength.  "I am overcome with
weariness," he wrote in 1747; "I propose to rest myself for the remainder
of my days."  "I have done," he said to M. Suard; "I have burned all my
powder, all my candles have gone out."  "I had conceived the design of
giving greater breadth and depth to certain parts of my _Esprit;_ I have
become incapable of it; my reading has weakened my eyes, and it seems to
me that what light I have left is but the dawn of the day when they will
close forever."

Montesquieu was at Paris, ill and sad at heart, in spite of his habitual
serenity; notwithstanding the scoffs he had admitted into his _Lettres
persanes,_ he had always preserved some respect for religion; he
considered it a necessary item in the order of societies; in his soul and
on his own private account he hoped and desired rather than believed.
"Though the immortality of the soul were an error," he had said, "I
should be sorry not to believe it; I confess that I am not so humble as
the atheists.  I know not what they think, but as for me I would not
truck the notion of my immortality for that of an ephemeral happiness.
There is for me a charm in believing myself to be immortal like God
himself.  Independently of revealed ideas, metaphysical ideas give me, as
regards my eternal happiness, strong hopes which I should not like to
give up."  As he approached the tomb, his views of religion appeared to
become clearer.  "What a wonderful thing!"  he would say, "the Christian
religion, which seems to have no object but felicity in the next world,
yet forms our happiness in this."  He had never looked to life for any
very keen delights; his spirits were as even as his mind was powerful.
"Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against the disagreeables of
life," he wrote, "never having had any sorrow that an hour's reading did
not dispel.  I awake in the morning with a secret joy at beholding the
light; I gaze upon the light with a sort of enchantment, and all the rest
of the day I am content.  I pass the night without awaking, and in the
evening, when I go to bed, a sort of entrancement prevents me from giving
way to reflections."

Montesquieu died as he had lived, without retracting any of his ideas or
of his writings.  The priest of his parish brought him the sacraments,
and, "Sir," said he, "you know how great God is!"  "Yes," replied the
dying man, "and how little men are!"  He expired almost immediately on
the 10th of February, 1755, at the age of sixty-six.  He died at the
beginning of the reign of the philosophers, whose way he had prepared
before them without having ever belonged to their number.  Diderot alone
followed his bier.  Fontenelle, nearly a hundred years old, was soon to
follow him to the tomb.

[Illustration: Fontenelle----274]

Born at Rouen in February, 1657, and nephew of Corneille on the mother's
side, Fontenelle had not received from nature any of the unequal and
sublime endowments which have fixed the dramatic crown forever upon the
forehead of Corneille; but he had inherited the wit, and indeed the
brilliant wit (_bel esprit_), which the great tragedian hid beneath the
splendors of his genius.  He began with those writings, superfine
(_precieux_), dainty, tricked out in the fashion of the court and the
drawing-room, which suggested La Bruyere's piquant portrait.

"Ascanius is a statuary, Hegio a metal-founder, AEschines a fuller, and
Cydias a brilliant wit.  That is his trade; he has a sign, a workshop,
articles made to order, and apprentices who work under him.  Prose,
verse, what d'ye lack?  He is equally successful in both.  Give him an
order for letters of consolation, or on an absence; he will undertake
them.  Take them ready made, if you like, and enter his shop; there is a
choice assortment.  He has a friend whose only duty on earth is to puff
him for a long while in certain society, and then present him at their
houses as a rare bird and a man of exquisite conversation, and thereupon,
just as the musical man sings and the player on the lute touches his lute
before the persons to whom he has been puffed, Cydias, after coughing,
pulling up his wristband, extending his hand and opening his fingers,
gravely spouts his quintessentiated ideas and his sophisticated
arguments."

Fontenelle was not destined to stop here in his intellectual
developments; when, at forty years of age, he became perpetual secretary
to the Academy of Sciences, he had already written his book on the
_Pluralite des Mondes,_ the first attempt at that popularization of
science which has spread so since then.  "I believe more and more," he
said, "that there is a certain genius which has never yet been out of our
Europe, or, at least, has not gone far out of it."  This genius, clear,
correct, precise, the genius of method and analysis, the genius of
Descartes, which was at a later period that of Buffon and of Cuvier, was
admirably expounded and developed by Fontenelle for the use of the
ignorant.  He wrote for society, and not for scholars, of whose labors
and discoveries he gave an account to society.  His extracts from the
labors of the Academy of Science and his eulogies of the Academicians are
models of lucidness under an ingenious and subtle form, rendered simple
and strong by dint of wit.  "There is only truth that persuades," he used
to say, "and even without requiring to appear with all its proofs.  It
makes its way so naturally into the mind, that, when it is heard for the
first time, it seems as if one were merely remembering."

Equitable and moderate in mind, prudent and cold in temperament,
Fontenelle passed his life in discussion without ever stumbling into
disputes.  "I am no theologian, or philosopher, or man of any
denomination, of any sort whatever; consequently I am not at all bound to
be right, and I can with honor confess that I was mistaken, whenever I am
made to see it."  "How did you manage to keep so many friends without
making one enemy?" he was asked in his old age.  "By means of two
maxims," he answered: "Everything is possible; everybody may be right"
(_tout le monde a raison_).  The friends of Fontenelle were moderate like
himself; impressed with his fine qualities, they pardoned his lack of
warmth in his affections.  "He never laughed," says Madame Geoffrin, his
most intimate friend.  "I said to him one day, 'Did you ever laugh, M. de
Fontenelle?'  'No,' he answered; 'I never went ha! ha! ha!'  That was his
idea of laughing; he just smiled at smart things, but he was a stranger
to any strong feeling.  He had never shed tears, he had never been in a
rage, he had never run, and, as he never did anything from sentiment, he
did not catch impressions from others.  He had never interrupted anybody,
he listened to the end without losing anything; he was in no hurry to
speak, and, if you had been accusing against him, he would have listened
all day without saying a syllable."

The very courage and trustiness of Fontenelle bore this stamp of discreet
moderation.  When Abbe St. Pierre was excluded from the French Academy
under Louis XV. for having dared to criticise the government of Louis
XIV., one single ball in the urn protested against the unjust pressure
exercised by Cardinal Fleury upon the society.  They all asked one
another who the rebel was; each defended himself against having voted
against the minister's order; Fontenelle alone kept silent; when
everybody had exculpated himself, "It must be myself, then," said
Fontenelle half aloud.

So much cool serenity and so much taste for noble intellectual works
prolonged the existence of Fontenelle beyond the ordinary limits; he was
ninety-nine and not yet weary of life.  "If I might but reach the
strawberry-season once more!" he had said.  He died at Paris on the 9th
of January, 1759; with him disappeared what remained of the spirit and
traditions of Louis XIV.'s reign.  Montesquieu and Fontenelle were the
last links which united the seventeenth century to the new era.  In a
degree as different as the scope of their minds, they both felt respect
for the past, to which they were bound by numerous ties, and the boldness
of their thoughts was frequently tempered by prudence.  Though naturally
moderate and prudent, Voltaire was about to be hurried along by the ardor
of strife, by the weaknesses of his character, by his vanity and his
ambition, far beyond his first intentions and his natural instincts.  The
flood of free-thinking had spared Montesquieu and Fontenelle; it was
about to carry away Voltaire almost as far as Diderot.

[Illustration: Voltaire----277]

Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire was born at Paris on the 21st of
November, 1694.  "My dear father," said a letter from a relative to his
family in Poitou, "our cousins have another son, born three days ago;
Madame Arouet will give me some of the christening sugar-plums for you.
She has been very ill, but it is hoped that she is going on better; the
infant is not much to look at, having suffered from a fall which his
mother had."  M. Arouet, the father, of a good middle-class family, had
been a notary at the Chatelet, and in 1701 became paymaster of fees
(_payeur d'epices_) to the court of exchequer, an honorable and a
lucrative post, which added to the easy circumstances of the family.
Madame Arouet was dead when her youngest son was sent to the college of
Louis-le-Grand, which at that time belonged to the Jesuits.  As early as
then little Arouet, who was weak and in delicate health, but withal of a
very lively intelligence, displayed a freedom of thought and a tendency
of irreverence which already disquieted and angered his masters.  Father
Lejay jumped from his chair and took the boy by the collar, exclaiming,
"Wretch, thou wilt one of these days raise the standard of Deism in
France!" Father Pallou, his confessor, accustomed to read the heart,
said, as he shook his head, "This, child is devoured with a thirst for
celebrity."

Even at school and among the Jesuits, that passion for getting talked
about, which was one of the weaknesses of Voltaire's character, as well
as one of the sources of his influence, was already to a certain extent
gratified.  The boy was so ready in making verses, that his masters
themselves found amusement in practising upon his youthful talent.
Little Arouet's snuff box had been confiscated because he had passed it
along from hand to, hand in class; when he asked for it back from Father
Poree, who was always indulgent towards him, the rector required an
application in verse.  A quarter of an hour later the boy returned with
his treasure in his possession, having paid its ransom thus:

"Adieu, adieu, poor snuff-box mine;
Adieu; we ne'er shall meet again:
Nor pains, nor tears, nor prayers divine
Will win thee back; my efforts are in vain!
Adieu, adieu, poor box of mine;
Adieu, my sweet crowns'-worth of bane;
Could I with money buy thee back once more,
The treasury of Plutus I would drain.
But ah! not he the god I must implore;
To have thee back, I need Apollo's vein.  .  .
'Twixt thee and me how hard a barrier-line,
To ask for verse!  Ah! this is all my strain!
Adieu, adieu, poor box of mine;
Adieu; we ne'er shall meet again!"

Arouet was still a child when a friend of his family took him to see
Mdlle. Ninon de l'Enclos, as celebrated for her wit as for the
irregularity of her life.  "Abbe Chateauneuf took me to see her in my
very tender youth," says Voltaire; "I had done some verses, which were
worth nothing, but which seemed very good for my age.  She was then
eighty-five.  She was pleased to put me down in her will; she left me two
thousand francs to buy books; her death followed close upon my visit and
her will."

Young Arouet was finishing brilliantly his last year of rhetoric, when
John Baptist Rousseau, already famous, saw him at the distribution of
prizes at the college.  "Later on," wrote Rousseau, in the thick of his
quarrels with Voltaire, "some ladies of my acquaintance had taken me to
see a tragedy at the Jesuits in August, 1710; at the distribution of
prizes which usually took place after those representations, I observed
that the same scholar was called up twice.  I asked Father Tarteron, who
did the honors of the room in which we were, who the young man was that
was so distinguished amongst his comrades.  He told me that it was a
little lad who had a surprising turn for poetry, and proposed to
introduce him to me; to which I consented.  He went to fetch him to me,
and I saw him returning a moment afterwards with a young scholar who
appeared to me to be about sixteen or seventeen, with an ill-favored
countenance, but with a bright and lively expression, and who came and
shook hands with me with very good grace."

Scarcely had Francois Arouet left college when he was called upon to
choose a career.  "I do not care for any but that of a literary man,"
exclaimed the young fellow.  "That," said his father, "is the condition
of a man who means to be useless to society, to be a charge to his
family, and to die of starvation."  The study of the law, to which he was
obliged to devote himself, completely disgusted the poet, already courted
by a few great lords who were amused at his satirical vein; he led an
indolent and disorderly life, which drove his father distracted; the
latter wanted to get him a place.  "Tell my father," was the young man's
reply to the relative commissioned to make the proposal, "that I do not
care for a position which can be bought; I shall find a way of getting
myself one that costs nothing."  "Having but little property when I began
life," he wrote to M. d'Argenson, his sometime fellow-pupil, "I had the
insolence to think that I should have got a place as well as another,
if it were to be obtained by hard work and good will.  I threw myself
into the ranks of the fine arts, which always carry with them a certain
air of vilification, seeing that they do not make a man king's counsellor
in his councils.  You may become a master of requests with money; but you
can't make a poem with money, and I made one."

This independent behavior and the poem on the _Construction du Choeur de
Notre-Dame de Paris,_ the subject submitted for competition by the French
Academy, did not prevent young Arouet from being sent by his father to
Holland in the train of the Marquis of Chateauneuf, then French
ambassador to the States General; he committed so many follies that on
his return to France, M. Arouet forced him to enter a solicitor's office.
It was there that the poet acquired that knowledge of business which was
useful to him during the whole course of his long life; he, however, did
not remain there long: a satire upon the French Academy which had refused
him the prize for poetry, and, later on, some verses as biting as they
were disrespectful against the Duke of Orleans, twice obliged their
author to quit Paris.  Sent into banishment at Sully-sur-Loire, he there
found partisans and admirers; the merry life that was led at the
Chevalier Sully's mitigated the hardships of absence from Paris.  "Don't
you go publishing abroad, I beg," wrote Arouet, nevertheless, to one of
his friends, "the happiness of which I tell you in confidence: for they
might perhaps leave me here long enough for me to become unhappy; I know
my own capacity; I am not made to live long in the same place."

A beautiful letter addressed to the Regent and disavowing all the
satirical writings which had been attributed to him, brought Arouet back
to Paris at the commencement of the year 1717; he had been enjoying it
for barely a few months when a new satire, entitled _J'ai vu_ (I have
seen), and bitterly criticising the late reign, engaged the attention of
society, and displeased the Regent afresh.  Arouet defended himself with
just cause and with all his might against the charge of having written
it.  The Duke of Orleans one day met him in the garden of the
Palais-Royal.  "Monsieur Arouet," said he, "I bet that I will make you
see a thing you have never seen."  "What, pray, monseigneur?"  "The
Bastille."  "Ah! monseigneur, I will consider it seen."  Two days later,
young Arouet was shut up in the Bastille.

I needs must go; I jog along in style,
With close-shut carriage, to the royal pile
Built in our fathers' days, hard by St.  Paul,
By Charles the Fifth.  0 brethren, good men all,
In no such quarters may your lot be cast!
Up to my room I find my way at last
A certain rascal with a smirking face
Exalts the beauties of my new retreat,
So comfortable, so compact, so neat.
Says he, "While Phoebus runs his daily race,
He never casts one ray within this place.
Look at the walls, some ten feet thick or so;
You'll find it all the cooler here, you know."
Then, bidding me admire the way they close
The triple doors and triple locks on those,
With gratings, bolts and bars on every side,
"It's all for your security," he cried.
At stroke of noon some skilly is brought in;
Such fare is not so delicate as thin.
I am not tempted by this splendid food,
But what they tell me is, "'Twill do you good
So eat in peace; no one will hurry you."
Here in this doleful den I make ado,
Bastilled, imprisoned, cabined, cribbed, confined,
Nor sleeping, drinking, eating-to my mind;
Betrayed by every one, my mistress too!
O Marc Rene! [M. d'Argenson] whom Censor Cato's ghost
Might well have chosen for his vacant post,
O Marc Rene! through whom 'tis brought about
That so much people murmur here below,
To your kind word my durance vile I owe;
May the good God some fine day pay you out!

Young Arouet passed eleven months in the Bastille; he there wrote the
first part of the poem called _La Henriade,_ under the title of _La
Ligue;_ when he at last obtained his release in April, 1718, he at the
same time received orders to reside at Chatenay, where his father had a
country house.  It was on coming out of the Bastille that the poet took,
from a small family-estate, that name of Voltaire which he was to render
so famous.  "I have been too unfortunate under my former name," he wrote
to Mdlle. du Noy er; "I mean to see whether this will suit me better."

The players were at that time rehearsing the tragedy of _OEdipe,_ which
was played on the 18th of November, 1718, with great success.  The daring
flights of philosophy introduced by the poet into this profoundly and
terribly religious subject excited the enthusiasm of the roues; Voltaire
was well received by the Regent, who granted him an honorarium.
"Monseigneur," said Voltaire, "I should consider it very kind if his
Majesty would be pleased to provide henceforth for my board, but I
beseech your Highness to provide no more for my lodging."  Voltaire's
acts of imprudence were destined more than once to force him into leaving
Paris; he all his life preserved such a horror of prison, that it made
him commit more than one platitude.  "I have a mortal aversion for
prison," he wrote in 1734; once more, however, he was to be an inmate of
the Bastille.

Launched upon the most brilliant society, everywhere courted and
flattered, Voltaire was constantly at work, displaying the marvellous
suppleness of his mind by shifting from the tragedies of _Artemise_ and
_Marianne,_ which failed, to the comedy of _L'Indiscret,_ to numerous
charming epistles, and lastly to the poem of _La Henriade,_ which he went
on carefully revising, reading fragments of it as he changed his quarters
from castle to castle.  One day, however, some criticisms to which he was
not accustomed angered him so much, that he threw into the fire the
manuscript he held in his hand.  "It is only worth burning, then," he
exclaimed in a rage.  President Henault dashed at the papers.  "I ran up
and drew it out of the flames, saying that I had done more than they who
did not burn the AEneid as Virgil had recommended; I had drawn out of the
fire _La Henriade,_ which Voltaire was going to burn with his own hands.

[Illustration: The Rescue of "La Henriade."----283]

If I liked, I might ennoble this action by calling to mind that picture
of Raphael's at the Vatican which represents Augustus preventing Virgil
from burning the AEneid; but I am not Augustus, and Raphael is no more."
Wholly indulgent and indifferent as might be the government of the Regent
and of Dubois, it was a little scared at the liberties taken by Voltaire
with the Catholic church.  He was required to make excisions in order to
get permission to print the poem; the author was here, there, and
everywhere, in a great flutter and preoccupied with his literary,
financial, and fashionable affairs.  In receipt of a pension from the
queen, and received as a visitor at La Source, near Orleans, by Lord
Bolingbroke in his exile, every day becoming more brilliant and more
courted, he was augmenting his fortune by profitable speculations, and
appeared on the point of finding himself well off, when an incident,
which betrayed the remnant still remaining of barbarous manners, occurred
to envenom for a long while the poet's existence.  He had a quarrel at
the Opera with Chevalier Rohan-Chabot, a court libertine, of little
repute; the scene took place in the presence of Mdlle. Adrienne
Lecouvreur; the great actress fainted they were separated.  Two days
afterwards, when Voltaire was dining at the Duke of Sully's, a servant
came to tell him that he was wanted at the door of the hotel; the poet
went out without any suspicion, though he had already been the victim of
several ambuscades.  A coach was standing in the street, and he was
requested to get in; at that instant two men, throwing themselves upon
him and holding him back by his clothes, showered upon him a hailstorm of
blows with their sticks.  The Chevalier de Rohan, prudently ensconced
in a second vehicle, and superintending the--execution of his cowardly
vengeance, shouted to his servants, "Don't hit him on the head; something
good may come out of it."  When Voltaire at last succeeded in escaping
from these miscreants to take refuge in Sully's house, he was half dead.

Blows with a stick were not at that time an unheard-of procedure in
social relations.  "Whatever would become of us if poets had no
shoulders!" was the brutal remark of the Bishop of Blois, M. de
Caumartin.  But the customs of society did not admit a poet to the honor
of obtaining satisfaction from whoever insulted him.  The great lords,
friends of Voltaire, who had accustomed him to attention and flattery,
abandoned him pitilessly in his quarrel with Chevalier de Rohan.  "Those
blows were well gotten and ill given," said the Prince of Conti.  That
was all the satisfaction Voltaire obtained.  "The poor victim shows
himself as much as possible at court, in the city," says the Marais news,
"but nobody pities him, and those whom he considered his friends have
turned their backs upon him."

Voltaire was not of an heroic nature, but excess of rage and indignation
had given him courage; he had scarcely ever had a sword in his hand; he
rushed to the fencers' and practised from morning till night, in order to
be in a position to demand satisfaction.  So much ardor disquieted
Chevalier de Rohan and his family; his uncle, the cardinal, took
precautions.  The lieutenant of police wrote to the officer of the watch,
"Sir, his Highness is informed that Chevalier de Rohan is going away
to-day, and, as he might have some fresh affair with Sieur de Voltaire,
or the latter might do something rash, his desire is for you to see that
nothing comes of it."

Voltaire anticipated the intentions of the lieutenant of police he
succeeded in sending a challenge to Chevalier de Rohan; the latter
accepted it for the next day; he even chose his ground: but before the
hour fixed, Voltaire was arrested and taken to the Bastille; he remained
there a month.  Public opinion was beginning to pity him.  Marshal
Villars writes in his memoirs,--

"The chevalier was very much inconvenienced by a fall which did not admit
of his handling a sword.  He took the course of having a caning
administered in broad day to Voltaire, who, instead of adopting legal
proceedings, thought vengeance by arms more noble.  It is asserted that
he sought it diligently, but too indiscreetly.  Cardinal Rohan asked M.
le Duc to have him put in the Bastille: orders to that effect were given
and executed, and the poor poet, after being beaten, was imprisoned into
the bargain.  The public, whose inclination is to blame everybody and
everything, justly considered, in this case, that everybody was in the
wrong; Voltaire, for having offended Chevalier de Rohan; the latter, for
having dared to commit a crime worthy of death in causing a citizen to be
beaten; the government, for not having punished a notorious misdeed, and
for having put the beatee in the Bastille to tranquillize the beater."

Voltaire left the Bastille on the 3d of May, 1726, and was accompanied by
an exon to Calais, having asked as a favor to be sent to England; but
scarcely had he set foot on English territory, scarcely had he felt
himself free, when the recurring sense of outraged honor made him take
the road back to France.  "I confess to you, my dear Theriot," he wrote
to one of his friends, "that I made a little trip to Paris a short time
ago.  As I did not call upon you, you will easily conclude that I did not
call upon anybody.  I was in search of one man only, whom his dastardly
instinct kept concealed from me, as if he guessed that I was on his
track.  At last the fear of being discovered made me depart more
precipitately than I had come.  That is the fact, my dear Theriot.  There
is every appearance of my never seeing you again.  I have but two things
to do with my life: to hazard it with honor, as soon as I can, and to end
it in the obscurity of a retreat which suits my way of thinking, my
misfortunes, and the knowledge I have of men."

Voltaire passed three years in England, engaged in learning English and
finishing _La Henriade,_ which he published by subscription in 1727.
Touched by the favor shown by English society to the author and the poem,
he dedicated to the Queen of England his new work, which was entirely
consecrated to the glory of France; three successive editions were
disposed of in less than three weeks.  Lord Bolingbroke, having returned
to England and been restored to favor, did potent service to his old
friend, who lived in the midst of that literary society in which Pope and
Swift held sway, without, however, relaxing his reserve with its impress
of melancholy.  "I live the life of a Bosicrucian," he wrote to his
friends, "always on the move and always in hiding."  When, in the month
of March, 1729, Voltaire at last obtained permission to revisit France,
he had worked much without bringing out anything.  The riches he had thus
amassed appeared ere long: before the end of the year 1731 he put
_Brutus_ on the stage, and began his publication of the _Histoire de
Charles XII.;_ he was at the same time giving the finishing touch to
_Eriphyle_ and _La Mort de Caesar_.  _Zaire,_ written in a few weeks, was
played for the first time on the 13th of August, 1732; he had dedicated
it to Mr. Falkner, an English merchant who had overwhelmed him with
attentions during his exile.  "My satisfaction grows as I write to tell
you of it," he writes to his friend Cideville in the fulness of joy:
"never was a piece so well played as _Zaire_ at the fourth appearance.
I very much wished you had been there; you would have seen that the
public does not hate your friend.  I appeared in a box, and the whole pit
clapped their hands at me.  I blushed, I hid myself; but I should be a
humbug if I did not confess to you that I was sensibly affected.  It is
pleasant not to be dishonored in one's own country."

Voltaire had just inaugurated the great national tragedy of his country,
as he had likewise given it the only national epopee attempted in France
since the _Chansons de Geste;_ by one of those equally sudden and
imprudent reactions to which he was always subject, it was not long
before he himself damaged his own success by the publication of his
_Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais_.

The light and mocking tone of these letters, the constant comparison
between the two peoples, with many a gibe at the English, but always
turning to their advantage, the preference given to the philosophical
system of Newton over that of Descartes, lastly the attacks upon religion
concealed beneath the cloak of banter--all this was more than enough to
ruffle the tranquillity of Cardinal Fleury.  The book was brought before
Parliament; Voltaire was disquieted.  "There is but one letter about Mr.
Locke," he wrote to M. de Cideville; "the only philosophical matter I
have treated of in it is the little trifle of the immortality of the
soul, but the thing is of too much consequence to be treated seriously.
It had to be mangled so as not to come into direct conflict with our
lords the theologians, gentry who so clearly see the spirituality of the
soul that, if they could, they would consign to the flames the bodies of
those who have a doubt about it."  The theologians confined themselves to
burning the book; the decree of Parliament delivered on the 10th of June,
1734, ordered at the same time the arrest of the author; the bookseller
was already in the Bastille.  Voltaire was in the country, attending the
Duke of Richelieu's second marriage; hearing of the danger that
threatened him, he took fright and ran for refuge to Bale.  He soon left
it to return to the castle of Cirey, to the Marchioness du Chatelet's, a
woman as learned as she was impassioned, devoted to literature, physics,
and mathematics, and tenderly attached to Voltaire, whom she enticed
along with her into the paths of science.  For fifteen years Madame du
Chatelet and Cirey ruled supreme over the poet's life.  There began a
course of metaphysics, tales, tragedies; _Alzire, Merope, Mahomet,_ were
composed at Cirey and played with ever increasing success.  Pope Benedict
XIV.  had accepted the dedication of Mahomet, which Voltaire had
addressed to him in order to cover the freedoms of his piece.  Every now
and then, terrified in consequence of some bit of anti-religious
rashness, he took flight, going into hiding at one time to the court of
Lorraine beneath the wing of King Stanislaus, at another time in Holland,
at a palace belonging to the King of Prussia, the Great Frederick.
Madame du Chatelet, as unbelieving as he at bottom, but more reserved in
expression, often scolded him for his imprudence.  "He requires every
moment to be saved from himself," she would say.  "I employ more policy
in managing him than the whole Vatican employs to keep all Christendom in
its fetters."  On the appearance of danger, Voltaire ate his words
without scruple; his irreligious writings were usually launched under
cover of the anonymous.  At every step, however, he was advancing farther
and farther into the lists, and at the very moment when he wrote to
Father La Tour, "If ever anybody has printed in my name a single page
which could scandalize even the parish beadle, I am ready to tear it up
before his eyes," all Europe regarded him as the leader of the open or
secret attacks which were beginning to burst not only upon the Catholic
church, but upon the fundamental verities common to all Christians.

Madame du Chatelet died on the 4th of September, 1749, at Luneville,
where she then happened to be with Voltaire.  Their intimacy had
experienced many storms, yet the blow was a cruel one for the poet; in
losing Madame de Chatelet he was losing the centre and the guidance of
his life.  For a while he spoke of burying himself with Dom Calmet in the
abbey of Senones; then he would be off to England; he ended by returning
to Paris, summoning to his side a widowed niece, Madame Denis, a woman of
coarse wit and full of devotion to him, who was fond of the drama and
played her uncle's pieces on the little theatre which he had fitted
up in his rooms.  At that time Oreste was being played at the
_Comedie-Francaise;_ its success did not answer the author's
expectations.  "All that could possibly give a handle to criticism," says
Marmontel, who was present, "was groaned at or turned into ridicule.  The
play was interrupted by it every instant.  Voltaire came in, and, just as
the pit were turning into ridicule a stroke of pathos, he jumped up, and
shouted, 'O, you barbarians; that is Sophocles!' _Rome Sauvee_ was played
on the stage of Sceaux, at the Duchess of Maine's; Voltaire himself took
the part of Cicero.  Lekain, as yet quite a youth, and making his first
appearance under the auspices of Voltaire, said of this representation,
'I do not think it possible to hear anything more pathetic and real than
M. de Voltaire; it was, in fact, Cicero himself thundering at the bar.'"

Despite the lustre of that fame which was attested by the frequent
attacks of his enemies as much as by the admiration of his friends,
Voltaire was displeased with his sojourn at Paris, and weary of the court
and the men of letters.  The king had always exhibited towards him a
coldness which the poet's adulation had not been able to overcome; he had
offended Madame de Pompadour, who had but lately been well disposed
towards him; the religious circle, ranged around the queen and the
dauphin, was of course hostile to him.  "The place of historiographer to
the king was but an empty title," he says himself; "I wanted to make it a
reality by working at the history of the war of 1741; but, in spite of my
work, Moncrif had admittance to his Majesty, and I had not."

In tracing the tragic episodes of the war, Voltaire, set as his mind was
on the royal favor, had wanted in the first place to pay homage to the
friends he had lost.  It was in the "eulogium of the officers who fell in
the campaign of 1741" that he touchingly called attention to the memory
of Vauvenargues.  He, born at Aix on the 6th of August, 1715, died of his
wounds, at Paris, in 1747.  Poor and proud, resigning himself with a sigh
to idleness and obscurity, the young officer had written merely to
relieve his mind.  His friends had constrained him to publish a little
book, one only, the _Introduction de la connaissance de l'esprit humain,
suivie de reflexions et de maximes_.  Its success justified their
affectionate hopes; delicate minds took keen delight in the first essays
of Vauvenargues. Hesitating between religion and philosophy, with a
palpable leaning towards the latter, ill and yet bravely bearing the
disappointments and sufferings of his life, Vauvenargues was already
expiring at thirty years of age, when Provence was invaded by the enemy.
The humiliation of his country and the peril of his native province
roused him from his tranquil melancholy.  "All Provence is in arms," he
wrote to his friend Fauris de St. Vincent, "and here am I quite quietly
in my chimney-corner; the bad state of my eyes and of my health is not
sufficient excuse for me, and I ought to be where all the gentlemen of
the province are.  Send me word then, I beg, immediately whether there is
still any employment to be had in our newly raised, levies, and whether I
should be sure to be employed if I were to go to Provence."  Before his
friend's answer had reached Vauvenargues, the Austrians and the
Piedmontese had been forced to evacuate Provence; the dying man remained
in his chimney-corner, where he soon expired, leaving amongst the public,
and still more amongst those who had known him personally, the impression
of great promise sadly extinguished.  "It was his fate," says his
faithful biographer, M. Gilbert, "to be always opening his wings and to
be unable to take flight."

Voltaire, quite on the contrary, was about to take a fresh flight.  After
several rebuffs and long opposition on the part of the eighteen
ecclesiastics who at that time had seats in the French Academy, he had
been elected to it in 1746.  In 1750, he offered himself at one and the
same time for the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Inscriptions;
he failed in both candidatures.  This mishap filled the cup of his
ill-humor.  For a long time past Frederick II. had been offering the poet