The life of Voltaire. Evelyn Beatrice Hall
it himself as his favourite work, and “the one for which I have the bowels of a father.” Its breathless race of incident swept him along, and he had hardly time even to be sociable. Refusing one of Theriot’s invitations to dinner on May 15th, he said that he would drop in at the end of the entertainment “along with that fool of a Charles XII.” The subject engrossed him, as the subject he had in hand always engrossed him. Then, since he was no more an exile, he set to work with Theriot to get his pensions restored—and, succeeded.
One night when he was out at supper he heard talk of a lottery formed by Desforts, the controller-general. One of the guests observed that anyone who took all the tickets in the lottery would be greatly the gainer. Voltaire was as swift to act as swift to see. He formed a company who bought up all the tickets: and found himself the winner of a large sum. To be sure he had offended Desforts, who was thus written down an ass. So off went the poet to Plombières with Richelieu in August for a visit. When he returned to Paris the squall had blown over, and M. de Voltaire had made an uncommonly successful speculation.
He made others, too, about this period, and never again was in need of money.
In this December of 1729 Voltaire invited the actors of the Comédie Française to dinner and read them his new play, “Brutus.” It was accepted, rehearsed, and then suddenly and mysteriously withdrawn. Voltaire said there was a plot against it—a cabal of Rohan and his kind, and of Crébillon—famous rival playwright and gloomy tragic poet. But worse than any plot was the feebleness of the play itself and its fatal absence of love interest. The actors themselves thought it unworthy of a Voltaire and his public. Voltaire knew it to be so himself, and at once set about revising and rewriting it.
On March 20, 1730, there died after four days’ acute anguish, aged only thirty-eight, the great actress, Adrienne Lecouvreur. Her death was the supreme event of this period of Voltaire’s life. Perhaps it was one of the supreme events of his whole life. He had been, he said, “her admirer, her friend, her lover.” If the last word is to be taken literally, that relationship had long ceased. But he had for ever a passionate admiration for her talents. The last piece she played in was “Œdipe,” and she was taken ill upon the stage. Voltaire with his quick instinct of a passionate pity, hastened to her bedside, and she died in his arms in agonies for which there could be found no remedy. She was an actress, so she could have neither priest nor absolution, and dying thus, was refused Christian burial, and taken without the city at night and “thrown in the kennel,” like a dead dog.
What wonder if Paris was stirred to its soul? And if Paris was stirred, what must a Voltaire have been? Adrienne, it has been well said, had “all the virtues but virtue.” She was generous and disinterested to a high degree. She was a woman of supreme talent and achievements. She was at least morally no worse, as she was intellectually far greater, than those kings’ mistresses over whose graves prelates had thought it no shame to lift their voices in eulogies and orations, and who had been buried with royal honours and splendour.
In Voltaire’s mind England and Mrs. Oldfield’s burial were still fresh impressions. Injustice had begun to play the part with him that the lighted torch plays to the fagot. His soul was ablaze at once.
It is not fashionable to look upon him as a man of feeling. In the popular idea he is the scoffer who jeered at everything. Read the “Poem on the Death of Adrienne Lecouvreur” written, not on the passionate impulse of the moment, but many months later, and see in it a soul stirred to its profoundest depths—the ebullition of a feeling as deep as it is rare.
“Shall I for ever see … the light-minded French sleeping under the rule of superstition? What! is it only in England that mortals dare to think?”
“Men deprive of burial her to whom Greece would have raised altars.” “The Lecouvreur in London would have had a tomb among genius, kings, and heroes.” “Ye gods! Why is my country no longer the fatherland of glory and talent?”
Such words were enough to endanger its author’s safety.
It was well that when Theriot was showing them about the salons of Paris in June, 1731, Voltaire was living incognito in Rouen, and was supposed to be in England.
Paris forgot; but not Voltaire. For sixty years he never ceased to try and improve the condition of actors. Thirty years after Adrienne’s death he wrote as if it had happened yesterday: “Actors are paid by the King and excommunicated by the Church; they are commanded by the King to play every evening, and by the Church forbidden to do so at all. If they do not play, they are put into prison; if they do, they are spurned into the kennel. We delight to live with them, and object to be buried with them; we admit them to our tables and exclude them from our cemeteries. It must be allowed we are a very reasonable and consistent nation.” In his old age, his one dread was not the mysterious Hereafter, but that he too, dying unabsolved, might be “thrown into the gutter like poor Lecouvreur.”
By the spring of 1730, “Charles XII.” was almost ready for the press. The censor—its satire of current superstition was so very delicate the good man had not noticed it—passed the book.
The author was delighted, and was more than busy in preparing a large edition of the first volume for the press.
By the autumn of 1730, when he had two thousand six hundred copies on the eve of publication, the whole edition was suddenly seized by the paternal government. The censor had passed it? True. But a change in the political outlook made France uncommonly nervous of displeasing Augustus, the usurping King of Poland, of whom Voltaire, forsooth, had spoken disrespectfully. “It seems to me,” he wrote very reasonably, “that in this country Stanislas [the Queen’s father and ex-King] ought to be considered rather than Augustus.”
It is easy to fancy what a maddening irritation such a prohibition, and the delays, worries, and waste of time it caused, must have had on such an impatient and energetic temperament as Voltaire’s.
But he never gave up hope, as he never gave up work.
On December 11th of this year 1730 the rewritten “Brutus” was performed: very favourably received on the first night—by an audience composed entirely of the author’s friends—and damned with faint praise on the second. The author had quite enough vanity to be bitterly mortified. But, not the less, he wrote the kindest and most considerate of letters to the terrified ingénue of fifteen who had played one of the chief parts hopelessly badly. “Ce coquin-là,” one of his bitterest enemies said of him, “has one vice worse than all the rest; he has sometimes virtues.”
The last performance of “Brutus” took place on January 17, 1731. There had been but fifteen in all. In the Revolution it was revived, and received with tumultuous applause. Its motif, that of a father sacrificing his sons for the common good, appealed to those stirring times of reckless deeds, but not to the cultivated and sentimental dolce far niente of 1731.
By February, Voltaire was writing to Cideville at Rouen that the new edition of the “Henriade” was tacitly permitted in Paris by the authorities. While they had been busy suppressing it, those authorities had also been busy reading and admiring it themselves. Henceforth, it was allowed in France.
In March, M. de Voltaire announced his intention of returning to his dear England, and insinuated that he was going to print “Charles XII.” at “Cantorbéry.” In truth, Cideville had found his friend “a little hole” in Rouen—a very dirty and uncomfortable little hole as it turned out—where he could live incognito and superintend the secret printing and publishing there. He removed from the first little hole to the house of Jore, his printer and publisher, with whom he was to have only too many dealings in the future. He passed as an English gentleman. He had the society of Cideville to console him. He was five months in Rouen altogether, from March of 1731 until August. One of these months he spent in bed. Part of his time he was in the country. The whole time he was correcting the proof-sheets of the first part of “Charles XII.” and writing the latter, and composing two tragedies—“The Death of Cæsar” and “Ériphyle.”
He returned to Paris in August, 1731. On September 13th died the noble young Maisons, aged only thirty-one,