The life of Voltaire. Evelyn Beatrice Hall
and Historical Essays. Macaulay. Œuvres du Marquis de Villette. The Early History of Charles James Fox. Trevelyan. Lettres de l’Abbé Galiani. Causeries. Sainte-Beuve. Autobiography. Lady Morgan. Autobiography. Gibbon. Lettres de Mdlle. de Lespinasse. Essay on Shakespeare. Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu. Mémoires. Mademoiselle Clairon. Mémoires de Madame de Staal-Delaunay. Le Conseiller François Tronchin et ses Amis. Henry Tronchin. Correspondance Littéraire. Grimm. Correspondance inédite du Roi Stanislas-Augustus Poniatowski et de Madame Geoffrin. Lettres inédites de Madame la Marquise du Châtelet. Biographie de Albert de Haller. Mémoires. Bachaumont. Le Salon de Madame Necker. D’Haussonville. Les Mots de Voltaire. Lefort et Buquet. La Philosophie de Voltaire. Bersot. Correspondance complète de Madame du Deffand. Œuvres. D’Alembert. Mémoires. Comte de Montlosier. Mémoires. Duc de Richelieu. Vie Privée du Maréchal de Richelieu. Rousseau et les Génevois. Gabarel. Rousseau. Morley. Jean Calas et sa Famille. Coquerel. Dix-huitième Siècle: Études Littéraires. Faguet. Histoire du Dix-huitième Siècle. Lacretelle. Stanislaus et Marie Leczinska. Des Réaulx. Vie de Maupertuis. La Beaumelle.
THE LIFE OF VOLTAIRE
CHAPTER I
THE BOYHOOD
In 1694, when Louis XIV. was at the height of that military glory which at once dazzled and ruined France, there was born in Paris on November 21st a little, puny, weak, sickly son.
The house into which the infant was born was the ordinary house of a thoroughly comfortable well-to-do bourgeois of the time and place. A notary was M. Arouet père. His father had been a prosperous linen-draper; and Arouet the son, shrewd and thrifty in affairs, had bought, after the custom of his time and his profession, first one post and then another, until he was a man of some wealth and, for his class, of some position. Among his clients he could number the Dukes of Sully and of Richelieu, memoir-writing Saint-Simon, the poet Boileau, and the immortal Ninon de l’Enclos. He had a country house at Châtenay, five miles from Paris. Plenty of sound common-sense, liberal, practical, hospitable; just enough taste for literature to enjoy a doze over a book in the evening when his day’s labour was done; eminently respected and respectable; decently acquiescing in the national religion as such, and with no particular faith in anything but hard work and monetary prudence; not a little hasty in temper and deadly obstinate—such was Maître Arouet.
At thirty-four years old he had been prosperous enough to marry one Mademoiselle d’Aumard, of Poitou, whose gentle birth and a certain refinement of type, not at all shared by her husband, formed the chief part of her dowry. The biographers of her younger son have done their best to prove the d’Aumard family something more noble, and the Arouet family something less bourgeois, than they were. They need not have troubled. The man who afterwards called himself Voltaire valued his ancestry not at all, and owed it nothing. The most painstaking research has been unable to prove that there was a single one of his forbears who had the smallest taste for literature, or mental endowments above the common. Some have pretended that he owed to his mother the delicacy of his wit, as he certainly owed to her the delicacy of his body. Beyond the fact that she was the friend of her husband’s brilliant and too famous client Ninon, and of three abbés—clever, musical, and profligate—who were the amis de la maison Arouet and always about it, the theory is without the smallest foundation. Her great son does not mention her half a dozen times in that vast bulk of writings he left the world. To him she was but a shadow; to the world she must needs be but a shadow too.
She had two living children when this last frail baby was born on that November Sunday—Armand of ten and Catherine of nine. She had lost two infants, and she never really recovered this last one’s birth.
He himself had at the first but a poor chance of life. He was hurriedly baptised on Monday, November 22, 1694, by the names of François Marie. Every morning the nourrice came down from the attic where she tended him to say he could not live an hour. And every day one of those abbés, who had taken on himself the office of godfather and was called Châteauneuf, ran up to the attic to see the baby and suggest remedies to the nurse.
Perhaps the nurse did not try the remedies. At any rate, the puny infant disappointed the expectations of his relatives, and lived. Zozo they called him, or, from the wilfulness of his baby temper, “le petit volontaire.” Châteauneuf’s interest in him increased daily. He must have detected an extraordinarily precocious intelligence in the small creature, since, when he was but three years old, the abbé had begun to perform his godfatherly duties as he understood them, and to teach the child a certain ribald deistical poem by J. B. Rousseau called “Le Moïsade.”
It is not too much to say that at this period, and for about a hundred years afterwards, the name of abbé was synonymous with that of scoundrel. Free liver and free thinker, gay, base, and witty—“qui n’était d’église que pour les bénéfices,” as that little godson said of him hereafter—Châteauneuf was not worse than most of his kind, and perhaps, if anything, was rather better. He accepted, indeed, the emoluments of a religion in which he did not only not believe but at which he openly scoffed, in order to live at his ease a life quite profligate and disreputable. It is said, or he said, that he had the honour of being Ninon de l’Enclos’ last lover. But he was both goodnatured and kindhearted, and after his fashion was really fond of the little godson and doing his best to lead his baby mind away from a superstition which he himself had found, to be sure, tolerably profitable.
What a strange picture it is! This child lisped scoffings as other children lisp prayers. He had very big brown eyes, bright with intelligence, in his little, wizened, old man’s face. The precocity greatly entertained Châteauneuf. Père Arouet may have been amused too, in private, at this infant unbeliever—the state of the Church making it hard then for any man, at once honest and reasonable, to put faith in her teachings. The society of her three abbés and her Ninon must have made delicate Madame pretty used to free thought.
So the little boy learnt his “Moïsade” by heart and was taught to read out of the “Fables” of La Fontaine.
He was but seven when his mother died. Sister Catherine of sixteen was already thinking of a dot and a husband, as a prudent French girl should. Brother Armand of seventeen—“my Jansenist of a brother”—had imbibed extreme religious opinions at the seminary of Saint Magloire and was an austere youthful bigot.
So Zozo scrambled up as best he might among mortgages, bonds, and shares; designed from the first by his father to be avocat (wherein the family influence would be powerful to help him), a lonely and precocious little creature, and still the infant protégé of Châteauneuf.
In the December of 1704, when he was ten years old, he first affixed his name—his baby name of Zozo—to a letter which Brother Armand dutifully wrote at his father’s request to wish an aunt in Poitou the compliments of the New Year 1705. That letter may be taken as the small beginning of one of the most enormous correspondences in the world, which new discoveries are still increasing in bulk, and which, as has been said, seems likely to go on increasing until the Day of Judgment.
In that very same year 1704, Zozo was sent to the Jesuit College of St. Louis-le-Grand as a parlour boarder. The school was only a few minutes’ walk from his own home. But in that home there was no one to look after him save the busy middle-aged notary fully occupied in affairs. Catherine was married. Armand had already succeeded in repelling a volatile child’s spirit with his narrow harshness. So Zozo went to school, and took up his place in the very lowest class.
St. Louis-le-Grand—“the Eton of France”—had two thousand