The life of Voltaire. Evelyn Beatrice Hall
to amuse the royalties, and the master of the ceremonies preferred “Le Médecin Malgré Lui.” On Wednesday, September 5th, the wedding took place. Then the bride accorded her gracious permission to M. de Voltaire to dedicate to her “Œdipe” and “Mariamne.” Things were a little better! Her father, with whom Voltaire was to have much to do hereafter, begged for a copy of the “Henriade” on his daughter’s recommendation. Voltaire was presented to her Majesty. Things were better still. “She has wept at ‘Mariamne,’ she has laughed at ‘L’Indiscret,’ she talks to me often, she calls me her ‘poor Voltaire.’” Charming! charming! but just a little bit—well, unsubstantial. And then she allowed her poet a pension of fifteen hundred livres.
Voltaire’s state of mind at Court was the state of mind of many—perhaps of most—courtiers. It is a dreadful bore to be here—but it is very advantageous! The cage is really so exquisitely gilded that one must try not to see the bars through the gilt! I want to get out, and I could get out—but I am so very lucky to be here, and so many people envy me, that I certainly will not. What an inexplicable and yet what a very common state of mind it is!
Voltaire could now count on the friendship, not only of the Queen, but of Madame de Prie, and of the minister Duverney. He was a pensioner of both their Majesties. The Court acknowledged him the first poet in France. Epigrams and the Bastille were in the background. He had hopes of being useful to his friends.
All this was not ungenerous payment for three months’ ennui at the finest Court in the world. But was it sufficient? Voltaire had indeed his gift of satiric observation to make the dullest entertainment amusing. “The Queen is every day assassinated with Pindaric odes, sonnets, epistles, and epithalamiums,” he wrote; “I should think she takes the poets for the Court fools; and if she does she is right, for it is a great folly for a man of letters to be here.” The boredom was stronger than the satisfaction after all. To hang about in the antechamber, tickling the jaded fancy of the Court gentlemen with one’s mots—to try and rouse the sleepy selfishness of a callow king with one’s finest wit—to flatter and cajole a duke’s mistress and a poor, honest, simple little foreigner because she happened to be a king’s wife—to play for apples of Sodom that turned to dust and ashes at one’s touch—was it worth while? “It is better to be a lackey of wits than a wit of lackeys”—better to do any work than none—better any life than this narcotic sleep of easy idleness. In Voltaire’s ear that siren, Verse, was always whispering and calling him away. In his heart were passionate convictions throbbing to be spoken. He had been glad to go to Court. He was more than glad to get away.
His zeal for a fight must have been more to the fore than ever after those three months of amiable apathy. He had it soon enough.
It was in the December of 1725 that the great Chevalier de Rohan, meeting this lean, brilliant, impertinent upstart of an author at the opera, said to him scornfully, “M. de Voltaire—Arouet—whatever your name is——?”
The Chevalier de Rohan was himself the representative of the haughtiest and most illustrious family in France, and of the same house as that Rohan who was to drag its pride through the mud of the episode of the Diamond Necklace.
A middle-aged debauchee; “a degenerate plant, a coward and a usurer”—in the vigorous words of a contemporary—was this great Chevalier whom Voltaire met that night.
He made no answer at the moment. Two days after, at the Comédie Française—most likely in Adrienne Lecouvreur’s box there—Rohan repeated the question.
“I do not drag about a great name, but I know how to honour the name I bear,” was the answer. There is another version of it: “I begin my name; the Chevalier de Rohan finishes his.” Or, as Voltaire himself wrote after in “Rome Sauvée”:
My name begins with me: your honour fend
Lest yours with you shall have an end.
The answer was at least one which made the Chevalier raise his cane; and Voltaire clapped his hand on his sword. Adrienne, of course, fainted, and the incident closed.
A few days later Voltaire was dining with the Duke of Sully. He was called from the table to speak to someone in a carriage outside. He went unsuspiciously enough. A couple of Rohan’s lackeys fell on him and beat him over the shoulders. Rohan, it is said, looked out of the window of his coach and called out: “Don’t hit his head! something good may come out of that!” And the bystanders, cringing to rank and success as they needs must, observed admiringly, “The noble lord!” Voltaire, beside himself with fury, flung off his assailants at last, rushed back to Sully, begged him to redress the wrong, to go to the police, to speak to the minister. Voltaire had been as “a son of the house” for ten years, and had immortalised Sully’s ancestors in the “Henriade.” But Sully was not going to brave the wrath of such a great man as his cousin Rohan for a bourgeois author with a talent for getting into disgrace. Voltaire left the house—never to enter it again. He went straight to the opera, where he knew he would find Madame de Prie, told her his story, and enlisted her sympathy. For a few days it seemed as if she would succeed in getting her lover, the Duke of Bourbon’s, influence for Voltaire. But the friends of Rohan showed the Duke an epigram on his one eye, which sounded clever enough to be Voltaire’s, and ruined his credit at once. He was baffled on every side. Marais, that keen old legal writer of memoirs, declares that, though he showed himself as much as he could in town and Court, no one pitied him, and his so-called friends turned their backs. He had been publicly caned! He was ridiculous! And the fear of being absurd was a thousand times stronger than the fear of hell in eighteenth-century Paris. Any other but Voltaire would have hidden his head in obscurity and have been thankful to be forgotten.
But with this man an insult raised all the vivid intensity of his nature. “God take care of my friends,” said he; “I can look after my enemies myself.” For more than three months he led a life of feverish indignation and was every moment busy with revenge. He learnt fencing. He had no aptitude for any bodily exercise. But he perfected himself in this one with all the persistency and thoroughness of his nature. If he was not normally courageous, he had plenty of daring now. The Rohans, anyhow, feared him so much that they kept him under police supervision. On April 16, 1726, the lieutenant of police recorded that Voltaire intended to insult Rohan with éclat and at once; that he was living at his fencing master’s, but continually changing his residence. On April 17th Voltaire went to Adrienne Lecouvreur’s box at the Comédie, where he knew he would find Rohan. Theriot accompanied him and stood without the box, but where he could hear everything. “Sir,” said Voltaire, “if you have not forgotten the outrage of which I complain, I hope you will give me satisfaction.” The great man agreed. The hour fixed was nine o’clock the next morning; the place, St. Martin’s Gate. But before that, Voltaire found himself for the second time in the Bastille. One can hardly fancy a meaner revenge. By March 28, 1726, the influence, cunning, and poltroonery of Rohan had succeeded in getting signed the warrant for his enemy’s arrest and detention. Rohan, in fact, was a great noble; and Voltaire, as his rival playwright Piron said to himself, was “nothing, not even an Academician.” Armand and his faction were only too glad to be rid of such a stormy petrel.
It is not hard to understand what a passion against the bitter injustice of his gorgeous day must have surged in Voltaire’s heart. “You do not hear in England,” he wrote but a very short time after, “of haute, moyenne, and basse justice.” It was in fact literally true that in France at that period there was not only really, but avowedly, one “justice” for the noble, another for the bourgeois, and a third for the canaille. Voltaire was in the Bastille only a fortnight. He was very well treated. “Everyone he knew,” wrote Delaunay the governor, came to see him; so his visitors had to be limited to six a day. Theriot brought him English books. He dined at Delaunay’s table. Also imprisoned in the Bastille was the famous Madame de Tencin—young, clever, and corrupt. “We were like Pyramus and Thisbe,” Voltaire wrote, “only we did not kiss each other through the chink in the wall.” He could still write gaily. As some people never speak without a stammer, Voltaire never spoke without a jest. But what food in his heart for new strange thought! Under what crushing laws was this great