Voltaire

By Ian Davidson

The definitive biography of Voltaire's life—from his scandalous love affairs and political maneuverings to his inspired philosophy.

We think of Voltaire as the archetypal figure of the enlightenment; in his own time he was also the most famous and controversial figure in Europe. This dazzling new biography celebrates his extraordinary life.

Davidson tells the whole, rich story of Voltaire’s life (1694-1778): his early imprisonment in the Bastille; exile in England and his mastery of English; an obsession with money, of which he made a huge amount; a scandalous love life; a long exile on the borders of Switzerland; his human-rights campaigns and his triumphant return to Paris to die there as celebrity extraordinaire. Throughout all of this, Voltaire’s life was always informed by two things: a belief in the essential value of toleration in the face of fanaticism; and in the right of every man to think and say what he liked.

It is rare to have such a vivid portrait of a great man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Release date: Mar 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781681770390

Ian Davidson

Ian Davidson worked for the Financial Times for many years (among other things as Paris correspondent and as chief foreign affairs columnist). His earlier Voltaire in Exile (2004), was called 'powerful and illuminating ... revealing and disturbing' by the Sunday Times.

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VOLTAIRE

IAN DAVIDSON

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK

CONTENTS

Maps

Note to the Reader

Prologue

1 Youth: 1694–1713

2 Comédie Française: 1714–1718

3 Money, and the shortage of it: 1718–1722

4 Friends and lovers: 1722–1723

5 La Henriade: 1723–1726

6 From the court to the Bastille: 1725–1726

7 In England: 1726–1728

8 Return to France: 1729–1733

9 Lettres Philosophiques: 1731–1733

10 Voltaire and Émilie: 1733–1734

11 Émilie comes and goes: 1734–1735

12 The intellectual love-nest: 1735–1738

13 Ordeal of Mme de Graffigny: 1738–1739

14 Émilie’s court case: 1739–1740

15 Mission to Potsdam: 1741–1743

16 Voltaire at Court again: 1744–1746

17 End of a relationship: 1746–1747

18 Death of Émilie: 1748–1749

19 Voltaire in Prussia: 1750–1753

20 Humiliation at Frankfurt: 1750–1753

21 Sentence of exile: 1754–1755

22 Encyclopédie: 1753–1759

23 Ferney: 1758–1761

24 Mlle Corneille: 1760–1763

25 Campaigns for justice: 1761–1765

26 Damilaville: 1765

27 Beccaria: 1765–1766

28 Chevalier de La Barre: 1765–1768

29 Geneva troubles: 1765–1768

30 The quarrel with Mme Denis: 1767–1769

31 Watch-making at Ferney: 1770–1776

32 Last campaigns: 1770–1778

33 Triumph and death: 1778

Voltaire’s most important correspondents

Select bibliography

List of illustrations

Notes

Index

To Jennifer

NOTE TO THE READER

Francs and livres; pounds, shillings and pence; feet and inches

Under the ancien régime the structure of the French currency was very similar, for historical reasons, to that of Britain before decimalisation in 1971. The principal currency unit in France was the livre (meaning ‘pound’), and its symbol was £, a stylised form of the letter L; the franc was an equivalent term, meaning the same as livre. There were 20 sous to each livre, and 12 deniers to each sou (or sol). So the symbols for the main units of the French currency under the ancien régime were £ s. d., just as they were in England. The French currency also included the louis (a gold coin worth £24), the écu (a silver coin worth £6) and the petit écu (worth £3).

In this book, unless otherwise specified, the symbol £ should be taken to mean livre or franc.

There were analogous similarities of structure in French and English units of measurement: in France there were 12 pouces to the pied, just as there were 12 inches to the foot. But the French units were larger than the English: the pouce was 2.707 cm, and the pied was 32.5 cm, whereas the inch was 2.54 cm, and the foot 30.48 cm.

I have not attempted to make any direct translations between money values in the eighteenth century and money values today, because the attempt is hopeless: if you were to compare the price of bread then with the price of bread today, you would get one rate, but if you were to compare the prices of houses, you would get another. Theodore Besterman points out that commodity prices more than doubled between the death of Louis XIV and the French Revolution, whereas wages increased by only about 20 per cent, and yet he estimated in his biography Voltaire (1969) that the franc or livre of Voltaire’s day was roughly equivalent to a US dollar. This kind of exchange rate conversion implies a precision that is spurious and largely misleading. Moreover, Bester-man’s rate seems to me wildly out of kilter; if one had to choose a single exchange rate, it would probably have to be closer to £1 = $10.

In the last resort we probably cannot get a useful answer to the question ‘What would 50,000 livres be worth today?’, because it is the wrong question. What we should be asking instead is: ‘What would 50,000 livres have meant then?’ Following this line of thought, it has been argued that in the eighteenth century a person with an annual income of 15,000 livres or more could be described as wealthy, and a person with an income of 30,000 livres or more could be described as extremely wealthy.¹ If this benchmark is even roughly valid, it implies that when Voltaire became wealthy, after 1729, he became very, very, very wealthy.

Life expectancy

On average, life expectancy was much shorter in France in the eighteenth century than it is today; but only on average. Many died in infancy, and many died of disease; but those who survived the dangers of birth and sickness and who were spared the even greater dangers attendant on poverty and malnutrition, could live long lives, comparable to those of today.

Peri-natal mortality was very high, perhaps about 50 per cent. Voltaire’s mother, Marie-Marguerite Daumart, had five children, two of whom died almost immediately. Similarly, Émilie du Châtelet (Voltaire’s mistress and the love of his life) had three legitimate children by her husband. The first two survived to adulthood; the third died suddenly, in infancy, only sixteen months old. Fifteen years later, in 1749, she had a fourth child, by the Marquis de Saint-Lambert; she and the child, a daughter, both died in childbirth.

Death was also common in early adulthood. Voltaire’s mother died in 1701, when she was only forty-one, and Voltaire was seven; his sister, Marguerite-Catherine, died in 1726, when she was only thirty-nine.

Hygiene and medicine were both quite primitive, and one of the major killers was smallpox. Voltaire caught the disease in a major epidemic in 1723 and survived, but his close friend Nicolas de La Faluère de Génonville died of it. An even closer friend, Jean-René de Longueil, marquis de Maisons, also caught the disease at the same time as Voltaire; in fact, Voltaire caught it while staying in Maisons’s house. Maisons survived this epidemic but was infected again eight years later, in 1731, and this time he died of it.

But the survivors could live long lives. The table below shows that many of Voltaire’s most prominent contemporaries, and many of his most frequent correspondents, lived into their sixties, seventies, eighties, or even nineties. The most signal exception was Étienne-Noël Dami-laville, who died of throat cancer, aged forty-five.

Footnotes and endnotes

I have tried to keep footnotes to a minimum, but occasionally there is a gobbet of information that seems to me interesting and relevant, and worth including, even though it may not fit naturally into the body of the text.

There are many endnotes, but their sole function is to provide a source or citation for information in the body of the text, usually in the form of a quotation from a letter or other document. In the ordinary course of events, therefore, the general reader can simply ignore these endnotes.

PROLOGUE

THERE IS MUCH TALK of the Enlightenment these days; and whenever one thinks of the Enlightenment, one thinks, first or last, of Voltaire. The reason for this is not because of any discovery he made or any new theory he advanced; it is because of the way he thought and the way he talked. Voltaire’s voice is the voice of the Enlightenment.

Today the values of the Enlightenment, and therefore the values of our civilisation, are under attack as never before. On the one hand, we have lived through the barbarities of the Bush régime, which seemed determined to take America, and the world, a long way back, and in the process to undermine the values both of the Enlightenment and of their own founding fathers. On the other, we face an increasing threat of terrorist violence by Islamic fundamentalists, who seem determined to take the world even further back, overthrowing not merely the values of the West but also those of their own much earlier version of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was not, of course, confined to one country, let alone to one man. Yet if anyone could be said to epitomise the Enlightenment, it was undoubtedly Voltaire, as his contemporaries, both his friends and above all his enemies, recognised with the greatest clarity.

Even in this context, however, Voltaire is a paradoxical figure. Today we may think of him as a pioneer of a peculiarly French Enlightenment, yet he himself never sought to be a leader of the Enlightenment, or indeed of anything. On the contrary, so intense was his personal ambition for literary success, and so great his fear of rivals, or of persecution by the authorities, that his career was marked at every step by feuds and crises; despite his celebrity, he never managed to take a philosophical view of his own ups and downs; and he certainly never took a detached interest in the works of other writers. Indeed, it was not until the appearance of the Encyclopédie, when he was in his late fifties, that it seems to have occurred to him that he might be part of a wider intellectual movement, let alone part of a common enterprise.

What Voltaire wanted was to be an entertainer: a writer, a poet, a playwright and a storyteller. In this he succeeded brilliantly, with a meteoric career as France’s leading writer of classical verse tragedies; and in the process he became the most celebrated and the most controversial individual in Europe, for the fertility of his wit, intellect and imagination kept him permanently in the public eye; if he was a philosophe, he was also the first example of a truly international celebrity. In other words, he became one of Europe’s first public intellectuals, independent of any patron or employer; he may even be said to have started a tradition which continues to this day in France, where the ad hoc pronouncements on events of the day by a handful of self-styled philosophes are treated by the media and by the ordinary public with inordinate respect.

It was Voltaire’s celebrity which made him the father figure of the Enlightenment. What he needed most deeply was the freedom to write and the freedom to speak, and especially the freedom to question official doctrines; and he had two unique assets which enabled him to assert these rights, at a time when they were systematically and ferociously denied by the ancien régime: he was famous, and he was rich. The authorities could not effectively silence his voice, because everyone, but everyone, wanted to know what he was saying and writing; and they could not starve him into submission, because he had the independence of great wealth. In that sense Voltaire became a champion of the principle of freedom of speech, at least for himself; and towards the end of his very long life he went on to become the champion of justice for others.

The Enlightenment was not, of course, a uniquely French affair, although the French sometimes like to think that it was. What was unique about the Enlightenment in France was that it was characterised less by intellectual innovation than by a permanent running conflict between the emerging new movement of the philosophes, or free-thinkers, and the repressive apparatus of the ancien régime, in alliance with the deadly power of the Catholic Church.

In this conflict, which highlighted the all-too-slow death throes of the ancien régime, Voltaire’s iconic reputation as the standard-bearer of the Enlightenment is ironic. He did not deliberately choose to confront the powers of the state, at least not for the first sixty-five years of his life, for he was not naturally equipped to play a heroic role. On the contrary, he was liable to run away at the first whiff of danger, as Condorcet wrote in one of the earliest biographies of Voltaire: ‘He was often seen to expose himself to the storm, almost with temerity, but seldom to stand up to it with firmness; and these alternations of audacity and weakness have often afflicted his friends, and prepared unworthy triumphs for his cowardly enemies.’¹

For Voltaire was not by nature a heroic warrior for the truth. He simply wanted to succeed as a playwright and poet, he wanted readers and spectators, and when they came to see his plays, he wanted to move them: the ultimate test, in his mind, was whether he could make them cry. If he came repeatedly into conflict with the authorities, it was not as a deliberate strategic choice but as the unintended consequence of his determination to write what he wanted.

Moreover, if Voltaire was the standard-bearer of the philosophes, he was not really a philosopher at all, at least not in the modern Anglo-Saxon sense of the term. He has given us two wonderful sardonic masterpieces, the Lettres philosophiques and Candide, but he produced no worked-through corpus of original philosophical thought to compare with Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois, or Rousseau’s Le Contrat social.

On the other hand, he did believe passionately in two values that are at the heart of the Enlightenment: the essential value of toleration and pluralism, in the face of the fanaticism of the régime; and the right of every man to think and say what he liked, in the face of censorship and repression.

His belief in these two core values was fixed early. He was in his twenties when he articulated his belief in toleration, with the composition of his epic poem La Henriade, celebrating the precarious efforts of Henri IV in the sixteenth century to make peace in the long-running wars between Catholics and Protestants. And his belief in pluralism and free speech, stimulated by early visits to the Netherlands, was crystallised by his two-year exile in England and eventually took shape in the explosive satire of the Lettres philosophiques.

These were, of course, precisely the values that the ancien régime found most threatening. At bottom, they did not care two hoots about Newton’s laws of motion or Locke’s views on the nature of the soul, since they knew that these were questions that were of interest to only a tiny minority of obscure intellectuals; the only thing that they really could not stand was any claim to toleration, pluralism and freedom of speech. Voltaire’s pursuit of these values repeatedly got him into trouble with the authorities: he was twice locked up in the Bastille and three times sent into exile.

On the other hand, everyone (and that included everyone at court) was fascinated by Voltaire’s celebrity: they wanted to see his plays, and they wanted to know what he thought and said. At the same time the authorities always regarded him as a dangerous subversive and constantly tried to muzzle him. In practice, however, they could not silence him, and in his sixties and seventies Voltaire openly challenged the powers of the state in a series of sensational campaigns on behalf of victims of scandalous miscarriages of justice.

I have written this book as the story of Voltaire’s life as he lived it, up close and personal, concentrating more on the man than on his writings, for this is not what is sometimes called a critical biography. I have dwelled on some of his most memorable works – the Lettres philosophiques, Candide, and the Dictionnaire philosophique – as well as on his ‘human rights’ campaigns. But I make no pretence of analysing or assessing his oeuvre as a whole, let alone of discussing in detail all of his many plays or histories: most of his books have gone out of fashion, whereas his life and his personality remain as interesting, as entertaining and as instructive as ever.

The main difficulty, in telling this story, is that Voltaire was such an international celebrity, in his own time and since, that it has been encrusted by successive generations of angry critics and eager gossip-mongers. The angry critics, especially among the hard right and the Catholic Church, love to portray Voltaire as an atheist, which is quite simply and manifestly untrue. The eager gossip-mongers have decorated the picture with many layers of saucy tales, in which it is often difficult to distinguish uncertain fact from juicy fiction. I have tried to strip out some of the most obvious fabrications, even those which have been hallowed by long repetition and which are still regularly trotted out, straight-faced, by academics.

I have relied heavily on the work of many scholars, and especially on the monumental work of scholarship by René Pomeau and a team of collaborators, originally in five volumes, and subsequently reissued in two very thick volumes.² But by far my main source of information about all aspects of Voltaire’s life has been his voluminous correspondence, which must surely be accounted one of the greatest collections of correspondence ever; Jules Michelet, the great nineteenth-century historian of the French Revolution, described it as ‘le grand monument historique du XVIIIe siècle’.³

The importance of these letters, as an integral or even central part of Voltaire’s oeuvre, has long been recognised. Immediately after Voltaire’s death, Beaumarchais and Condorcet embarked on their project for the first complete posthumous edition of his works, and they launched a public appeal for copies of his letters, which were scattered far and wide throughout Europe; they received over 6,000, and in this so-called Kehl edition (they had to publish it on the other side of the Rhine, so as to avoid French censorship), they included some 4,500 of them. Over the next two centuries more and more of Voltaire’s letters emerged: Beuchot’s monumental edition of Voltaire’s complete works, in the early nineteenth century, included some 7,500 of his letters, while Moland’s even more monumental edition in the late nineteenth century, took the total up to over 10,000.

By now one might have thought that there could be few more surprises to come, but no. Theodore Besterman, perhaps the leading Voltaire scholar of the twentieth century, handsomely outstripped even Moland, with a new complete edition (or, as he called it, with characteristic self-importance, the Definitive Edition), which included 15,284 of Voltaire’s letters, plus nearly 6,000 other letters, either to Voltaire or between third parties, making a grand total, in 51 volumes, of 21,221 letters.

Not the least significant feature of Besterman’s researches was his publication of 142 letters from Voltaire to Mme Denis, which proved at last what had often been suspected, that Mme Denis, for many years Voltaire’s niece and companion, was also his mistress. Immediately after Voltaire’s death in 1778 Mme Denis sold the Ferney estate to the marquis de La Villette, and his library and most of his papers to Catherine the Great; but she kept back a small collection of private papers, and they remained in her family until about 1935. For the next twenty years, they disappeared; but when, in 1957, a private dealer put them on the market, Besterman persuaded the Pierpont Morgan Library of New York to buy the collection and in 1958 he published it⁴

What makes Voltaire’s correspondence so astonishing is that he writes with verve and wit about anything and everything: his anxieties about his latest play, his constipation, the reluctant death throes of an elderly lady, his latest quarrel with some literary rival, the constipation of Mme Denis, Newton’s theories, the entertainment value of the scandalous stories in the Old Testament, his finances, his new theatre, his research for his latest history book, his vegetable garden, his instructions to his printer, the education of his charming adoptive daughter, the acting of the latest star at the Comédie Française or the difficulties of buying decent meat. The sheer variety and vitality of Voltaire’s interests make his letters a permanent source of interest and of admiration, but it is the way he writes that ensures that he will always be read with amusement. Voltaire was not always gay; on the contrary, he was often depressed. But when he was gay, he was wonderfully entertaining, with an unmatched talent for coining free and fizzy phrases off-the-cuff. De l’Esprit des Lois and Le Contrat social are both important works, no doubt, but one cannot say that they contain many good jokes.

In the last resort the central constant in Voltaire’s life was his belief in toleration and freedom of speech, and it is that which makes his life so relevant and of such compelling interest today. We may believe that the world could and should be run on rational and reasonable lines, yet we also know that it is a world of violence, torture and terrorism, where the rage of groups of fanatical Muslims is matched by the atavistic intolerance of certain fundamentalist Christian sects. These conflicts recall those of the ancien régime and make us think, first and last, of Voltaire, the voice of the French Enlightenment.

1

YOUTH

1694–1713

VOLTAIRE WAS BORN in 1694, in the declining years of Louis XIV. He was not, of course, called ‘Voltaire’ at this stage. His real name was François Marie Arouet, and it was not until 1718, when he was twenty-four and a rising literary star, that he adopted the assumed name ‘Voltaire’.

His father, François Arouet, was a successful lawyer with a flourishing professional practice at the heart of Paris, right next to the law courts and the parlement. Voltaire was the youngest of Arouet’s three surviving children: the eldest was his brother, Armand, who was nine years older, born in 1685; the second was his sister, Marguerite-Catherine, who was eight years older, and born in 1686. Voltaire cordially detested Armand, whom he later despised as a fanatical member of the revivalist Jansenist sect; but he was deeply attached to his sister, Marguerite-Catherine, and when she married, he became very fond of her two daughters.

There are two uncertainties about Voltaire’s birth; at least, there were in Voltaire’s mind. Officially, he was born in Paris on 21 November 1694; he was baptised at the Église St André des Arts in Paris on 22 November, and the certificate says he was born the previous day. But Voltaire disputed that this was his birthday: in later life he maintained that he had in fact been born nine months earlier, on 20 February 1694. He also believed that his real father was not François Arouet but a shadowy figure called Rochebrune, who was some kind of mousquetaire, officer and occasional poet. He did not give any evidence for either belief.

Voltaire spent much of his youth in a solitary confrontation with his father, François Arouet. His mother, Marie-Marguerite Daumart, died young, on 13 July 1701, at the age of forty-one. His detested brother Armand must have left home in 1703 or 1704, when Voltaire was nine or ten; and his much-loved sister, Marguerite-Catherine, got married (to Pierre François Mignot) in 1709, when Voltaire was fifteen. So from the middle of his adolescence until he finally left home Voltaire lived alone with his domineering father.

François Arouet must have done very well financially, because he had been able to buy a law practice (cabinet de notaire) in Paris at the age of twenty-six. In 1696, two years after Voltaire was born, his father sold his law practice and bought instead the more elegant position of tax collector on spices at the Court of Public Accounts (Receveur des Épices à la Chambre des Comptes), which went with an official apartment in La Cour Vieille du Palais, near the Sainte-Chapelle.

It was a striking story of a family on the rise. Voltaire’s great-grandfather had been a country landowner in Poitou; the grandfather (also called François Arouet) had moved to Paris as a trader in silk and cloth; and Voltaire’s father completed the transition by becoming a lawyer. In short, the Arouet family was climbing the professional ladder fast and efficiently, and was well on its way to making the transition from the status of mere commoners to something more elevated.

Professional advancement also brought François Arouet personal and social preferment. His clients included such noble and influential names as the families of Saint-Simon, Villars, Villeroy and Richelieu. The old duc de Richelieu condescended to be godfather to Voltaire’s elder brother, Armand; and his son went to the same school as Voltaire and remained a personal friend for life. Another client was Mademoiselle Ninon de Lenclos, one of the most celebrated and most beautiful courtesans of the reign of Louis XIV; Voltaire met her once, shortly before her death, when she was very old and he was very young.

Voltaire’s father also knew some of the leading literary figures of the day, including the poet and essayist Nicolas Boileau, and the famous playwright Pierre Corneille; Voltaire could even have met Boileau, who died in 1711, though not Corneille, who died ten years before Voltaire was born.

Voltaire did not get on with his father: in particular, he and his father quarrelled repeatedly over Voltaire’s desire to be a writer. Arouet père was convinced, conventionally enough, that he had done very well in his profession, and he did his best to persuade, and then to pressure, his son into following in his footsteps. Voltaire was equally determined to be a poet and not a lawyer. This debate turned virtually the whole of Voltaire’s youth and adolescence into a ceaseless struggle of wills with his father.

Voltaire did not give up, and neither did his father. Voltaire resisted repeated efforts by his father to force him to follow a career in the law; and he eventually proved his point, when at the age of twenty-four he achieved a sensational success at the Comédie Française with his first tragedy, Œdipe; that same year he changed his name to Voltaire. His father died four years later, after grudgingly conceding that his son had talent, but he still tried to carry on the argument from beyond the grave by penalising Voltaire in his will.

Voltaire has left us almost no trace of his relationship with his parents, since he very seldom refers either to his father or to his mother in his letters. During his adolescence and youth he occasionally alluded to his father, but exclusively as an authority figure who must be obeyed or appeased; there is no trace in his letters at the time of his father as a human being. His mother died when he was only seven, and he does not even mention her in any letters until fifty years after her death. Perhaps Voltaire’s idea that he was illegitimate was really just a story he told himself, for archetypal and mythical reasons, as a way of diminishing his father and rationalising the absence of his mother.

In October 1704, when Voltaire was ten years old, his father sent him, as a boarder, to the Collège de Louis-le-Grand, in the rue Saint-Jacques. This was one of the oldest schools in Paris, having been founded by the Jesuits in 1563 under the name Collège de Clermont. It was a very large school, with 3,000 pupils, of whom some 500 were boarders. Throughout most of its long history it had been in conflict with the university next door, which regarded it as an unfair competitor for students, for the Jesuits had decided that education was a charity and that tuition should be free. (The boarders had to pay boarding fees.) Although this conflict had in the past periodically caused trouble for the school, by the end of the seventeenth century the Jesuits were at the height of their power and influence in France, and in 1682 Louis XIV gave the college his patronage, and with it the right to call itself the Collège de Louis-le-Grand.

François Arouet’s decision to send his younger son to a Jesuit school is tantalising. The Catholic Church in France was at the time riven by an intense antagonism between two rival sects, the Jesuits and the Jansenists, and Arouet père had sent his eldest son, Armand, to a Jansenist institution. There were doctrinal and specifically religious differences between the two sects, but from a political point of view the main difference between them was that the Jesuits tended to be identified with the monarchy and the court, whereas the Jansenists tended to be identified with the milieu of the law courts and the parlement, if only because the lawyers of the parlement saw their role as one of resistance or even opposition to the monarchy. For François Arouet, a professional lawyer, to send his eldest son to a Jansenist school might have been a natural reflex; what needs explaining is why he made a different choice for his second son.

The simplest, if speculative, explanation is that this shift corresponded to the rapid advancement of his own career. Armand Arouet was born in 1685, and so was ready for school in about 1695. In the following year his father bought the lucrative position of a receveur des épices, but he only secured the full benefits of the situation five years later, in 1701. So when Voltaire was ready for school, in 1704, his father was in the full flower of his prosperity, and he may have thought he could raise his sights to the Collège de Louis-le-Grand, which he may have perceived (rightly) as the school most favoured by the nobility, the rich and the powerful. In short, François Arouet’s decision may have been motivated simply by an upward shift in his parental ambitions.

The régime at Louis-le-Grand was strict, and the academic standards high, with a curriculum consisting mainly of Latin. When he emerged seven years later, Voltaire was utterly familiar with the great Latin authors, and for the rest of his life he could readily quote apposite chunks of Virgil, Horace or Cicero. But his education was narrow: he learned little or no history (except ancient history), little or no mathematics, little or no science and little or no modern languages. This narrowness did not prove a material handicap, since he always intended to aim for a literary career. Moreover, he later acquired fluent English and Italian, as well as a certain amount of Spanish; and he even taught himself enough mathematics to persuade himself that he could understand Newton’s theories of physics. But the paradox was that his Classical education was itself one-sided, since he learned little or no Greek; so when he set out to become a writer of classical tragedies, ultimately modelled on the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, he had no access to the originals, except through French or Latin translations.

The school is there still; it is now called the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. It is still one of the most prestigious schools in France; it is still a very large school, of 1,800 students; and it still takes in a significant minority of boarders (339 at the last count), who pay €2,023 per year. But it is now co-educational, and the academic emphasis has shifted radically away from Latin to a pre-eminence in maths and science.

In one respect the school is unchanged: it has remained a top forcing ground for the power élite. Today admission is strictly based on intellectual competition, but in Voltaire’s day it attracted pupils from many of the leading aristocratic and professional families, including some of the most glittering names of the nobility: Bourbon, Condé, Guise, Joyeuse, La Trémoïlle, Montmorency, La Tour d’Auvergne, Clermont-Tonnerre, Nemours, Noailles, Richelieu. This was the place to make contacts among the rich and the powerful, and one of the most enduring benefits of Voltaire’s schooling was that it brought him a number of good friends from the élite of French society, many of whom remained friends for the rest of his life.

The friends Voltaire made at school generally came either from the nobility or from the most successful members of the upper ranks of the legal hierarchy, known as the noblesse de robe or robins. They included: the two brothers d’ Argenson, the elder of whom (the marquis), later became Foreign Minister under Louis XV, the younger (the comte), minister of war; the duc de Richelieu, a great-nephew of Cardinal Richelieu, who became a leading courtier at Versailles and a marshal of the French army; and two literary friends, Pierre-Robert Le Cornier de Cideville, who became a conseiller at the parlement of Rouen; and the comte d’ Argental, who became a conseiller at the parlement of Paris and remained one of Voltaire’s dearest friends.

How close Voltaire was to any of these five during his school years we do not know. The elder d’ Argenson was exactly the same age, and they may have been in the same class; but it seems that he was at Louis-le-Grand only during Voltaire’s last two years there. The younger d’ Argenson and the duc de Richelieu were two years younger than Voltaire. And d’ Argental was six years younger, so he and Voltaire may not have known each other at all at school.

The only fellow-pupil of whom Voltaire has left any really vivid trace of friendship at the time of his school days, was a sixth young man, called Claude Philippe Fyot de La Marche, from a rich and powerful family linked to the parlement of Burgundy. Voltaire and Fyot de La Marche were in the same class and left school in the same year, 1711, but Fyot de la Marche evidently went home before the end of the school year, leaving Voltaire sad and lonely. Between May and August 1711, the seventeen-year-old Voltaire wrote him a sequence of five touchingly nostalgic letters, which are virtually the earliest letters that have come down to us.

I can assure you, without any pretence, that I really see that you are no longer here; every time that I look through the window, I see your empty room; I no longer hear your laughter in class; I miss you everywhere, and I have only the pleasure of writing to you, and of speaking about you with your other friends. I should gladly travel to Burgundy, to say what I am now writing; your departure so disoriented me, that I had neither the wit nor the strength to speak, when you came to say good-bye.¹

The last of this series of Voltaire’s letters to Fyot de La Marche throws a vivid light on one aspect of the curriculum at the Collège Louis-le-Grand: the staging of plays, directed by the Jesuits and performed by the boys.

I have delayed writing to you for two or three days, in order to tell you news of the tragedy which Father Le Jay has just put on. Heavy rain made them divide the performance into two after-dinners, which gave as much pleasure to the students as pain to Father Le Jay; two monks broke their collarbones one after the other, so neatly, that it seemed they had fallen down just to entertain us; the nuncio of His Holiness gave us eight days holiday; M. Theuenart sang; Father Le Jay lost his voice; Father Porée prayed to God for fine weather, but at the height of his prayer the skies opened; that is more or less what has happened here; all that remains, for me to enjoy the holidays, is to have the pleasure of seeing you in Paris.²

Voltaire’s gentle mockery at the ineffectiveness of Father Porée’s prayer is often cited as early evidence that he was already a sceptic about the Christian religion. Well, maybe; but almost any intelligent and highly educated adolescent is liable to question received orthodoxy, especially if it is preached in the hot-house of a high-pressure school. If a clever young man expresses mild derision at the ineffectiveness of a prayer for fine weather, it need not be taken as evidence of anything much, except that he is bold enough to express his scepticism in a letter to a friend.

The more interesting aspect of this letter to Fyot de La Marche is the light it throws on the Jesuits’ practice of writing and staging plays for the boys to perform. This was no doubt in part a reflection of the importance of the theatre in high-society life in early eighteenth-century France and of the central role played in public entertainment by the Comédie Française. In turn, this early exposure to the experience of live, if amateur, theatre must have exerted a crucial influence on the formation of Voltaire’s own sensibility, and may well have played a key role in encouraging him to venture into the writing of plays himself. The Jesuit fathers could not have foreseen that Voltaire would go on to be the most successful and celebrated writer of classical verse tragedies of his time.

After leaving school, Voltaire at first submitted to his father’s wish that he follow a course at law school. But his heart was not in it, and he spent much of his time frequenting wits and poets, trying to become a wit and a poet himself, and above all seeking to socialise with those in high society or literary society, whom he might seek to impress and who might help him make his name. This party-going lifestyle was not at all what his father wanted to see, but Arouet clearly did not know how to deal with his recalcitrant son. At first, in the spring of 1713, he sent him out of Paris, to Caen in Normandy, but that did not last long. Then he tried to bribe him, by offering to buy him a position as a king’s advocate; Voltaire turned down the offer. Then his father raised his price and offered to buy him a much more expensive position, as a conseiller at the parlement of Paris, which was equivalent to buying him an elevated place among the noblesse de robe. Voltaire again refused.

His father made another attempt to get Voltaire out of harm’s way by sending him abroad. It so happened that Voltaire’s godfather, the abbé de Châteauneuf, had a brother, Pierre-Antoine de Castagnère, marquis de Châteauneuf, who had just been appointed French ambassador to The Hague. Arouet asked him to take on Voltaire as his private secretary, the marquis obliged and Voltaire obeyed. No sooner had he arrived in The Hague, however, than he fell madly in love with a charming young woman, and she, apparently, with him. It was a most unsuitable relationship.

The mother of the girl, Madame du Noyer, was something of an adventuress, a French former Protestant who had abandoned her Protestantism and her husband in France, and was now living by her wits in The Hague, partly by editing a controversial news-sheet. She had two daughters: Anne-Marguerite, who had been twice married and twice widowed; and her younger sister, Catherine-Olympe, known as Pimpette. It was with Pimpette that Voltaire fell in love. She had already been engaged to a Protestant rebel leader from the Cévennes and abandoned by him. She had then married a self-styled baron de Winterfeldt, and borne a child by him, but he also abandoned her.³ So though she was not in any sense an innocent, she was still only twenty-one years old, two years older than Voltaire, and it is clear from his letters to her that she must have been absolutely enchanting.

Voltaire wasted no time in declaring his love; but the ambassador wasted even less time, for as soon as he learned of the affair, he immediately forbade Voltaire to carry on his liaison with Pimpette and instructed him to return at once to Paris. ‘I believe, my dear Demoiselle,’ Voltaire wrote to her on 25 November 1713,

that you love me; so prepare to use all the force of your wits on this occasion. As soon as I returned home yesterday evening, M. l’ambassadeur told me that I must leave today, and the most I could do was to persuade him to postpone it until tomorrow; but he forbade me to go out before my departure; I am absolutely compelled to leave, and to leave without seeing you. In the name of the love I have for you, send me your portrait. I shall love you always; I love your virtue as much as I love your person.⁴

Three days later, Voltaire was still in The Hague but effectively under house arrest.

I am here a prisoner in the name of the King, but they can take away my life but not my love for you. Yes, my adorable mistress, I shall see you this evening, though I should carry my head on a scaffold … Keep away from Madame your mother, as from your cruellest enemy, what am I saying, keep away from everybody, trust nobody, keep yourself in readiness as soon as the moon shall appear, I shall leave the house incognito, I shall take a carriage, or a chaise, we shall go like the wind to Scheveningen, I shall bring ink and paper, we shall write our letters [of engagement?]. Be ready at four o’clock, I shall wait near your street. Adieu my dear heart.⁵

Two days later Voltaire was still in The Hague, and still making plans to see Pimpette.

I shall not leave, I think, before Monday or Tuesday; it seems, my dear, that they are only postponing my departure in order to make me feel more acutely the pain of being in the same town as you, and not being able to see you. They are watching my every step; it is impossible for me to get to you by day, I shall climb out of a window at midnight. Let me know if I can come to your door tonight. Adieu, my lovely mistress, I adore you …⁶

Two days later Voltaire was still in The Hague, and still making plans for a secret rendezvous with his lovely mistress.

Send Lisbette at three o’clock, I shall give her a packet for you containing some men’s clothes, you will get ready at her place, and if you have enough goodness to want to see a poor prisoner who adores you, you will take the trouble to come at dusk. But as they know my clothes and could therefore recognise you, I shall send you a cloak which will hide your suit and your face; I shall even hire a man’s suit for greater safety.⁷

It seems, from the letter that Voltaire wrote to her two days later, that Pimpette’s visit, disguised as a boy, had been wonderfully successful.

I do not know if I should call you Monsieur or Mademoiselle; by my faith you are an adorable young knight, and our doorman, who is not in love with you, thought you were a very pretty boy. Yet your appearance was as daunting as it was adorable, I was only afraid that you might draw your sword in the street, just so as to leave out none of the character of a young man; yet after all, even disguised as a young man, you are as good as a girl. I have to leave on Friday, wait patiently until I write from Paris, be always ready to leave, whatever happens I shall see you before I go: all will be well, provided that you are willing to come to France and leave your mother.⁸

Voltaire’s departure was delayed yet again, and he finally left for Paris on 18 December without seeing her again.⁹ But when he reached Paris, on Christmas Eve, he found that he was in such deep trouble at home that he did not dare show his face.

‘Scarcely had I arrived in Paris, on Christmas Eve’, he told Pimpette, ‘than I learned that my father had taken out an arrest warrant [lettre de cachet] to have me imprisoned. I asked people to talk to him, but the most they could get out of him was to have me sent instead to the [West Indies] islands; they could not get him to change his decision to cut me out of his will.’¹⁰ Voltaire submitted to this lesser sentence, in the only letter from him to his father which has survived: ‘I consent, my father, to go to America, and even to live on bread and water, provided that, before my departure, you permit me to embrace your knees.’¹¹

Within days his father had weakened. He withdrew his sentence of banishment to the French colonies, provided that Voltaire agreed to pursue a serious legal career; Voltaire did agree, and by 20 January he was telling Pimpette that he had become a boarding pupil in the office of Maître Alain, prosecutor at the Châtelet court, ‘in order to learn the profession of robin to which my father has consigned me, and by which I hope to recover his friendship. Write to me care of Maître Alain, rue pavé Saint Bernard. Adieu, my dear; you know that I shall always love you.’¹²

But Pimpette was no longer answering his letters, and at this point, for all practical purposes, their love affair ended; shortly thereafter, Pimpette took another lover, called Guyot de Merville, a bookseller in The Hague. Voltaire was deeply upset by her betrayal; twenty-four years later he wrote: ‘Guyot de Merville has never ceased to hurt me because he had the same mistress as me twenty years ago.’¹³ This was not the only time Voltaire lost a mistress to another man, but it may be the only occasion when he gave open expression to such long-lasting sexual jealousy, which may be an indication of the intensity of this first love affair.

What is striking about Voltaire’s love letters to Pimpette is the way his feelings seem to be reflected in his diction. In the first two letters he used the formal style of address, vous; in the last letters to her, Letters 15 to 21, when in practice he had ceased to see her, he again addressed her as vous. But in the middle of their affair, in Letters 9, 12 and 14, he oscillated, sometimes in the same letter, between the polite vous and the intimate tu; this may be related to the intensity of his emotional and sexual excitement.

These seem to be almost the only occasions in the whole of his surviving correspondence when Voltaire used the intimate tu form of address. The one exception is in his correspondence with Nicolas-Claude Thieriot, whom he met when they were both young legal apprentices in the office of Maître Alain in the early months of 1714, when Voltaire was twenty and Thieriot eighteen. In his first letter to Thieriot, in the enthusiasm of new-found friendship, as if to a schoolfriend or copain, he addresses him as tu. But thereafter, in a correspondence of some 500 letters, and in a friendship to which Voltaire clung for the rest of his life, despite Thieriot’s repeated lapses from loyalty and decency, he always uses the more formal vous.

The most tantalising uncertainty on this subject is how he addressed Émilie du Châtelet, the most intimate love of his life. We know that he called her ‘Émilie’. This was a quite unusual familiarity for those days, but she obviously regarded it as an endearing sign of affection, for she virtually boasted of the fact, in her letters to others. But we do not know if he addressed her as tu, since virtually all his letters to her were lost or destroyed.

After his letter of 10 February 1714 the correspondence of Voltaire and Pimpette apparently went dead: no further letters to her from Voltaire have survived. But he did not forget her, nor she him. Several times during the next forty years he did little acts of kindness for her; in 1736 he had a small table bought for her; in 1751 he paid off some longstanding debts which she had incurred; in 1754 he sent her a package; and in 1760, forty-six years after the end of their youthful affair, he used her name as an introduction to the husband of Mme de Pompadour. Throughout these succeeding decades he obviously remained aware of her existence and in contact with her.

Pimpette’s mother carefully collected and kept Voltaire’s letters to Pimpette. At the time she was violently opposed to her daughter’s relationship with a young upstart, but in 1720, when he had ceased to be an upstart and had become a celebrity, she published his letters, no doubt for money.¹⁴

2

COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE

1714–1718

IT DID NOT TAKE VOLTAIRE long to break his promise to his father and abandon his legal apprenticeship. But he did not at first find it easy to discover how to make a literary career instead.

He went to the theatre and fell in love with Mademoiselle Duclos, the star of the Comédie Française; but she was too beautiful and too old for him (she was forty-four), he was too insignificant and too young for her (he was only twenty), and she was not interested. He tried to attract attention from potential patrons by pretending to be a smart young man about town, by developing his skills of wit and repartee or by composing and circulating well-turned verses. And he solicited invitations from the leading figures of French society, who were always on the look-out for brilliant young entertainers, either in Paris or in their country châteaux.

One of the most brilliant of the country châteaux frequented by Voltaire was that of Sceaux, home of the duc and duchesse du Maine. The duc was the illegitimate son of Louis XIV by his mistress Mme de Mon-tespan: Louis had legitimated him and in his will had tried to ensure that du Maine would have a powerful role in the government of France. But when Louis died in 1715, the duc d’Orléans (the regent) contemptuously overturned the will, and the duc and duchesse du Maine were simply excluded. In reaction, they promoted their own extremely lavish and brilliant court at Sceaux, in some sense a rival and opposition to the official court at Versailles.

Voltaire realised quite soon that his ephemeral pirouettes were not getting him anywhere and that he would only make his way if he wrote something more substantial, which probably meant that he would have to write a play for the Comédie Française. In Voltaire’s day there was only a handful of theatres in Paris. There was the Opéra, there was the Théâtre des Italiens and there were the fairground theatres. But the Comédie Française had a virtual monopoly as the only theatre authorised and supervised by the court for the staging of tragedies and serious dramas. And since theatre was the main form of public entertainment at the time, the Comédie Française had a unique position in the cultural and social life of the city. Everybody went to the theatre, and almost anybody who wanted to be a writer wanted to write for the Comédie Française.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Voltaire should have set his sights on writing a play for the Comédie Française, but it is a measure of his ambition that he should have chosen, as his first subject, one of the greatest tragic legends of Classical Greek mythology, made famous by Sophocles’ play Oedipus Tyrannus (Oedipus the King).

Voltaire’s biographers sometimes assert that Voltaire’s choice of the Oedipus theme, the most famous story of parricide in European literature, may have been in part an expression of his own antagonistic relationship with his own father. This is very far-fetched. There is no evidence that Voltaire’s relationship with his father, despite their long-running struggle, was pathologically hostile. On the contrary, he seems to have had some underlying feelings of regard and even affection for him. It is much more plausible to assume that Voltaire was drawn to the Oedipus story, partly because it is immensely powerful, but partly because it resonated strongly, in the early eighteenth century, with the sectarian controversy then raging within the Catholic Church, between Jesuits and Jansenists, over sin, grace and predestination.

The Jansenists, following the seventeenth-century Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen, believed that man’s original sin is so great that he can attain salvation only through the grace of God; and since not all men would be eligible for salvation, this doctrine ultimately amounted to a belief in predestination. The Jesuits, by contrast, believed in free will, and in the ability and duty of man to make his own efforts for salvation. In 1713 the Pope came down on the side of the Jesuits, by publishing a bull, Unigenitus dei filius,* which condemned the Jansenists for heresy. The doctrinal argument soon turned into a power struggle. The bull was resisted by the French bishops and the theologians in the Sorbonne, in the name of the autonomy of the French church, and by the lawyers and magistrates in the parlement, who were mostly aligned with the Jansenists and who were formally contesting the legality of the Unigenitus bull, in terms that virtually amounted to a protest movement.

Throughout his life Voltaire was intensely interested in questions of good and evil. He may not have believed much in sin or in eternal salvation, but he was deeply allergic to ideological fanaticism, and in the debate between the Jesuits and the Jansenists he undoubtedly regarded the Jansenists as the fanatics. He may well have been additionally inclined to such a view from the fact that his elder brother, Armand, whom he cordially disliked, had been educated at a Jansenist school and had embraced an extreme, revivalist form of Jansenism.

This contemporary French controversy over sin and free will reached a peak in 1717, and it is difficult to believe that it could have failed to have a significant influence both on Voltaire in the writing of Œdipe and on the response to it of the Paris audience. Oedipus killed his father and married his mother. Was he guilty, even though his sins were involuntary? Could he have avoided his sins? Was it the fault of the gods? In Voltaire’s version Oedipus’ mother, Jocasta, criticises the role of the priests: ‘Our priests are not what the foolish people imagine; their wisdom is based solely on our credulity.’¹ This pithy little maxim, with its implicit critique of the Christian church, struck a lively chord with the audience, and it has remained to this day one of the most frequently cited quotations from Voltaire.

Voltaire started work on Œdipe in the spring of 1715, and he made rapid progress on a first draft of it. But well before he had arrived at a final version, he conceived a second grand project, almost equally ambitious: to write a long epic poem. This was ambitious in two ways. First, France had no significant national tradition of epic poetry, so Voltaire was tacitly setting himself up against the most celebrated models of epic poetry in ancient literature; he eventually called his epic La Henriade, in deliberate imitation of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid.* Second, Voltaire chose as his theme what he regarded as the virtuous and heroic achievement of the French king Henri IV, in bringing about, if not a peace, at least a truce in the murderous wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants in sixteenth-century France.

This was not just a bold choice of subject, it was also politically reckless: the virtues of religious tolerance and reconciliation, which for Voltaire were exemplified by Henri IV and the truce of the Edict of Nantes in 1598, had in fact been rejected less than a century later by Louis XIV, and the persecution of French Protestants by the Catholic hierarchy of Church and state had continued in his own day under Louis XV So for Voltaire to write an epic poem in praise of Henri IV and religious tolerance was an open and potentially seditious act of criticism of the French régime. But Voltaire never abandoned his belief in toleration, and towards the end of his life the unremitting persecution of Protestants at last provoked him into campaigning openly on behalf of some individual Protestants against the injustices of the French state.

By this time Voltaire was deeply involved in composing his first tragedy, Œdipe, and though he worked at it with great speed, as he did with almost all his later plays, he was not finding it easy. A serious play had to observe a whole series of formal principles of composition, ostensibly handed down from Aristotle, starting with the three unities of time, place and action. It was also expected to portray the interaction of noble characters dealing nobly with their predicaments and their emotions, and to exclude any representation of vulgar or low-life characters. As a result, French classical dramas tended to be dignified and high-minded.

Matters were not made any easier by the physical configuration of the Comédie Française theatre. At that time it was located on the left bank, in a street which was then called the rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain, and which is now called (for obvious reasons) the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie, in the 6th arrondissement. It had been built thirty years earlier, on a site previously occupied by a former royal tennis court, known as the Jeu de Paume de l’Étoile. As a result it had a long, narrow auditorium, shaped like a shoe box, with three tiers of boxes on each of the two long sides. At the time of its construction it had been considered rather a marvel, with brilliant lighting under large circular chandeliers, and with the stage (at the narrow end of the auditorium) being slightly lower than the first tier of boxes and slightly higher than the parterre, which was for men only, and standing-room only.

This architectural arrangement of the theatre was not necessarily kind either to the plays or to the players, and the actors could certainly not assume that the audience would be silent or attentive, let alone respectful. The elegant people in the boxes could see the people in the boxes opposite more easily than they could see the stage and were liable to show as much interest in the other spectators as in the play. The most fashionable spectators would arrive late or leave early, or both. And the male spectators jostling around in the parterre below them were liable to be boisterous and vocal; it was common for plays to be barracked with cat-calls and whistles, sometimes causing the action on stage to be interrupted, sometimes even causing the entire production to fail.

On the stage, the actors were constrained by the fact that a considerable proportion of the space was occupied by spectators: there were three rows of benches on either side of the stage and in full view of the auditorium, and there were more spectators standing at the back of the stage in among the scenery. These places for spectators on stage were essential to the finances of the theatre, for they were highly prized and highly priced, and usually occupied by dandies and young bloods. But the result was that the stage was a rather crowded place, which severely limited the options of the players for much movement, or indeed for much of what we would call acting.

Frequently the presence of these spectators on stage obstructed the entrances and exits of the actors, sometimes with unintended comical effects. When Voltaire wrote his tragic melodrama Sémiramis, thirty years later, he intended to bring the curtain down at the end of Act III with a sensational coup de théâtre: the appearance of a menacing ghost at the back of the stage.