The life of Voltaire. Evelyn Beatrice Hall
a revenue of thirty thousand francs from his benefices to pay for his excesses. Vile, witty, and blasphemous, he was not more so than the noble and titled company over which he presided. It had every vice but one—that of dulness. Most of its members were old men, and as literary critics of the evanescent literature of the hour, unrivalled. To them, it is said, virtue and faith were alike the prejudices of fools. The notary’s son, who was nobody and had done nothing, had but two claims for admission to such a society: one was the mental emancipation he had received from his godfather, and the other the daring brilliancy all his own. The Temple suppers were soon incomplete without him. Young Arouet was already showing himself a versifier of astounding audacity. The company of dukes and nobles, of men vastly his superior in age and acquirements, did not daunt him in the least. A penniless boy, he had that careless ease with great people—a certain charming air of familiarity—which never offended if it made old men smile at a boyish vanity, and which he never afterwards lost. Some of his mots at those suppers have come down to posterity, and were not less acceptable to the Temple because they are no longer transcribable. At an epicurean supper at the Prince of Conti’s, young Arouet could turn to the company and exclaim, “Here we are all princes or poets!”
One poet received very short shrift from respectable, sensible old M. Arouet père, when he came home in the small hours of the morning from these orgies. The determined old man locked the house and went to bed, and behold! François Marie must pay for his amusements by walking the streets till morning. That did not daunt him. Nothing daunted him. He was young and enjoying himself, with the keenest sense of the ludicrous, and perfectly willing to take his pleasures—at a cost. One day, finding himself shut out as usual, he went to sleep in the porter’s chair in the Palais de Justice, and was carried, still asleep, the next morning, into a café hard by, by two legal wags, his friends. The recollection of Brother Armand’s long, disapproving face at home only lent additional piquancy to Arouet’s revels abroad. Another day, a noble lady with literary aspirations gives him a hundred louis for tactfully correcting her bad rhymes. Young Arouet, idly watching an auction, bids for a carriage and pair and has them knocked down to him. He drives about Paris all day with his friends, and at three o’clock in the morning takes the carriage home and tries to get the horses into his father’s stables. The noise wakes up Maître Arouet, who turns his scapegrace out of doors there and then, and sells the horses and carriage the very next day. One likes the peppery old father with his dogged determination. He would have won the battle over any other son but this one, and deserved to win. He sent the prodigal to Caen in disgrace, and Caen fell in love at once with a youth so clever and amusing, and turned the exile to a delight. There was a charming literary lady here also, who abandoned her protégé, however, when she found he could write indecorous verses too, and there was a Jesuit Father who prophesied a great future for this brilliant madcap. Then the old notary at home sent a message to his François Marie—if he would come back and settle to work he would buy him a good post; in time, get him made Counsel to the Parliament of Paris. “Tell my father,” was the answer, “I do not want any place that can be bought. I will make one for myself that will cost nothing.”
Twenty-six years after, one Voltaire, in his “Life of Molière,” wrote that all who had made a name in the beaux-arts had done so in spite of their relations. “Nature has always been much stronger with them than education;” and again, “I saw early that one can neither resist one’s ruling taste, nor fight one’s destiny.” It was so in this boy’s case at any rate. Some of the monetary prudence inherited from the old notary, and which was so greatly to distinguish a later Voltaire from most of his brothers of the pen, was in embryo within him now. Yet when he got back to Paris after those few months at Caen he was as gay, wild, and determined as ever, and M. Arouet, in despair, procured for him the post of page or attaché to the Marquis de Châteauneuf (brother of the abbé) and shipped him off with that ambassador to the Netherlands in the September of 1713.
The Marquis de Châteauneuf and suite reached The Hague on September 28, 1713, but did not formally enter the town until later. “It is amusing,” one of the suite wrote, “to make an entry into a city where you have already been living several weeks.”
Page, attaché, or diplomat, whichever people called him, this page, attaché, or diplomat was going to enjoy himself. Before they were well established at The Hague he must needs fall head over ears in love with a certain Olympe Dunoyer, the daughter of an adventurous mother who lived by her wits and an audacious society periodical called The Quintessence. Olympe, or, more endearingly, Pimpette, was one-and-twenty. She knew something of the world already. With such a mother and the impecunious roving life they had led, that was inevitable. She was not pretty, her lover said long after. She was what is a great deal more dangerous—fascinating and impulsive. He gave her from the first a boy’s honest ardent affection. He wrote her immensely long, vigorous, passionate epistles. He originated the most beautiful youthful scheme by which Protestant Pimpette (Madame Dunoyer and her daughter were Protestant) was to be brought back to the true Church, and to Paris, where her Catholic father and sister were living. For a couple of months, the worldly mother not suspecting its existence, the course of true love ran smoothly. But one fatal night Arouet coming home late after a blissful interview, encountered his chief. Madame Dunoyer will certainly disapprove of the addresses of a penniless boy of nineteen! Having a wholesome fear of that libellous “Quintessence,” the ambassador felt bound to disapprove too. The attaché must go back to France to-morrow. The attaché, with his irresistible energy and daring, got forty-eight hours’ grace. His valet, Lefèvre, was his accomplice; a certain shoemaker was Pimpette’s. A further unavoidable delay in the time of Arouet’s departure came to the lovers’ assistance. One moonlit night Arouet disguised himself, signalled beneath his mistress’s window, and drove her away to Scheveningen, five miles off, where he made her write three letters which were designed to help his scheme of getting her to Paris. Sometimes they met at the obliging shoemaker’s, daring, frightened, and happy, with the shoemaker’s wife for a sentinel outside.
Of course the ambassador got wind of the interviews and forbade his attaché to leave the embassy. But the irrepressible lover would see his mistress—“though it bring my head to the block.” He let himself down from a window by night, and met a trembling Pimpette who had escaped, heaven knows how! from the Argus-eyed mother—outside her home.
Then the ambassador offered this impossible attaché his choice—to leave Holland immediately—or in a week’s time with a solemn vow not to leave his quarters meanwhile. Arouet chose the week and the vow. He sent Lefèvre with a letter to Pimpette. “If I cannot come to you, you must come to me! Send Lisbette at three o’clock and I will give her a parcel for you containing a boy’s dress.” The mad night came, and Pimpette, the most endearing boy in the world, with it. The whole escapade was wild enough. It says something for this impassioned Arouet of nineteen that at its worst it was nothing but an escapade. “My love is founded on a perfect esteem,” he had written, and “I love your honour as I love you.” He rallied her, not a little gaily, in prose and verse, after that dear meeting. She was such a pretty boy! “I fear you did not take out your sword in the street, which was all that was needed to make a perfect young man!” “But while I am teasing you I learn that Lefèvre suspected you yesterday.” Of course he did. But Lefèvre would not betray his master to the ambassador, who had more than a suspicion of the interview. And the next night Arouet broke his parole, got out of the window, and met Pimpette outside her house once more. The ambassador heard of this too, wrote a furious letter to Maître Arouet describing the whole affair, and on December 18, 1713, the lover was despatched home.
He went on writing to Pimpette, of course. It was her fate that agitated him—not his. She must be sure to burn his letters—she must not expose herself to the fury of that termagant of a mother. She must take heart; she must be true to him! The letter from the boat which was carrying him to France was full of that capital, clever plan for bringing her over to the Jesuits—to be converted, as near to Arouet as possible, in Paris. All these love letters to Pimpette are much more loving than witty. They are so enthusiastic and earnest and young, so energetic and devoted, so unselfish and hopeful! They make one feel young to read them. It has been said that they are not the letters of Mirabeau. They are those of an honester man.