The life of Voltaire. Evelyn Beatrice Hall
or omitted to teach, exactly according to the royal pleasure and the fashion of the day.
A very thin-faced, keen-witted little youth was its new ten-year-old scholar. It did not take him long to conceive a passion for Cicero, for Horace, and for Virgil. He soon discovered that he was learning “neither the constitution nor interests of my country: not a word of mathematics or of sound philosophy. I learnt Latin and nonsense.” But he applied himself to that “Latin and nonsense” with that passionate voracity for information, useful or useless, good, bad, or indifferent, which he retained till his death. He must have been one of the quickest boys that ever Jesuit master taught. He had an intelligence like an arrow—and an arrow which always went straight to the mark. Before he was eleven he was writing bad verses with a facility and enthusiasm alike extraordinary. The masters were, with one exception, his friends and admirers. While the other boys were at their games this one would walk and talk with the Fathers; and when they told him that he should play like the others, he looked up with those brilliant eyes that lighted the little, lean, sallow face like leaping flames—“Everybody must jump after his own fashion,” said he.
His especial tutor was a certain Abbé d’Olivet, then a young man, for whom the promising little scholar conceived a lifelong friendship. Another tutor, called Tournemine, was also first the boy’s teacher and then his pupil. Yet another Father, called Porée, would listen long and late to the child’s sharp questions on history and politics. “That boy,” said he, “wants to weigh the great questions of Europe in his little scales.”
He had friends among the boys too, as well as the masters. It was at school he met the d’Argensons—afterwards powers to help him in the French Government—Cideville and d’Argental, his lifelong friend, whom he called his guardian angel.
In 1705, those fluent verses he had written came to the notice of Godpapa Châteauneuf. As a reward the abbé took him to see Ninon de l’Enclos, that marvellous woman who was as charming at eighty as at eighteen, who “looked on love as a pleasure which bound her to no duties and on friendship as something sacred,” and was in some sort an answer to her own prayer, “God make me an honest man but never an honest woman!” She received the child in the midst of her brilliant circle with that infinite tact and kindness which have made her as immortal as her frailties. His bright, quick answers, his self-confidence, his childish store of information delighted her. Châteauneuf said that she saw in him “the germ of a great man.” Perhaps she did. When she died a few months later, she left him two thousand francs in her will, with which to buy books. And the “great man,” many years after, wrote an account of the interview as if it had happened yesterday.
He went back to school after that episode and learnt, and knew he was learning, though he was only twelve years old, “a prodigious number of things” for which he had no talent.
Porée taught him a good deal of Latin, and the primers a very little Greek. He learnt no history, no science, and no modern languages. That he acquired a knowledge of the history and government of France is as undoubted as that he was never formally taught it.
Young Abbé d’Olivet inspired him with his own love of Cicero. Châteauneuf had taught his godson to worship Corneille; and young Arouet championed him valiantly against Father Tournemine’s dear hero, Racine.
Other seeds which Châteauneuf had sown in a childish heart were growing and ripening fast. His one enemy among the masters, Father Lejay, answered a too brilliant and too daring retort with the words, “Wretch! you will one day be the standard-bearer of Deism in France!”
The enterprising Deist was still only twelve when, encouraged by Ninon’s pension perhaps and the success of some impromptu verses made in class, he attempted a tragedy called “Amulius and Numitor.” He burnt it thereafter—very wisely no doubt. But verse-making was in his blood, though his blood was Maître Arouet’s and the noble, dull Aumards’ of Poitou. Play-acting at the school prize-givings encouraged a love of the drama, also inborn. François Marie Arouet was not yet thirteen when he wrote a versified petition to Louis XIV. to grant an old soldier a pension, wherein the compliments were so delicately turned as to attract the momentary attention of the best flattered monarch who ever sat upon a throne. The old soldier obtained his pension, and François Marie enough fame and flattery to turn a youthful head.
When he was fifteen, in 1709, Châteauneuf died, Malplaquet was lost, and France starving to pay for her defeats. In the midst of that bitter winter of famine, when young Arouet’s high place in class always kept him away from the comforting stove, he called out to the lucky dullard who was always near it, “Get out, or I’ll send you to warm with Pluto!” “Why don’t you say hell?” asked the other. “Bah!” replied Arouet; “the one is no more a certainty than the other.”
Here spoke the religious influence of the priestly godfather,
NINON DE L’ENCLOS
who, before he died, had tried to form the godson’s mind by recounting to him some of Ninon de l’Enclos’ most marvellous adventures.
In 1710, at the midsummer prize-giving, Arouet, runs the story, took so many prizes as to attract the notice of the famous J. B. Rousseau, the author of the “Moïsade,” the first poet in France, and once shoemaker to the Arouet family. The great man congratulated and encouraged the boy who was to be so much greater. To be sure he was an ugly boy for all that keen look of his! Ugly boy and mediocre poet were to fight each other tooth and nail hereafter, with the ugly boy the winner for ever.
If young Arouet was anything like an older Voltaire, he knew how to play as well as how to work, and how to work gaily with a jest always ready to relieve the tedium.
The defeat of Blenheim had shadowed the year 1704 when he went to school. In 1711, when he left it, three heirs to the throne died one after the other as if the judgment of God had already fallen upon their wicked house. Abroad, were Marlborough and defeat; at home, death, hunger, and religious persecution. Arouet had a heart always sensitive to misfortune, but he was gay, seventeen, and fresh from drudgery.
When he came home from St. Louis-le-Grand in that August of 1711 it was with every intention on his father’s part, and no kind of intention on his own, that he should become avocat.
Was it the passing success of that poetical petition to the king which had put the idea of literature as a profession into his head? Was it Ninon’s pension? or the approval of poet Rousseau? The love of letters had been in this boy always, a dominant taste, a ruling passion, which he could no more help than he could help the feebleness of his body or the astounding vigour of his mind.
He took the earliest opportunity of announcing to his father that he intended to devote himself to writing.
M. Arouet received the announcement exactly as it might have been expected he would. Literature! Better be a lackey or a play-actor at once. Literature! What did that mean? The Bastille for a couplet, ruin, poverty, disgrace. Rousseau himself had just been degraded from the highest place to the lowest for verses he was only supposed to have written. “Literature,” said Maître Arouet with the irate dogmatism which takes no denial, “is the profession of the man who wishes to be useless to society, a burden to his relatives, and to die of hunger.” The relatives, fearing the burden, vociferously agreed with him.
Arouet père had most unluckily once taken wine with the great Corneille and found that genius the most insufferable old bore, of the very lowest conversation. The indignant parent made the house of Arouet exceedingly unquiet with his fumings and growlings. Pressure was very strong and François Marie was eighteen. The youth who said that his motto was “To the point” was soon engaged in the matchless intricacies of French law, as yet unsimplified by a master mind into the Code Napoleon.
What would be the natural result of a distasteful occupation, youth, wit, and gaiety in eighteenth-century Paris? Such a result supervened with young Arouet almost at once. Boy though he was, Châteauneuf had already introduced him