V L T A I R E 287 was much struck (and it would appear not unfrequently hoaxed) by English manners, was deeply penetrated by English toleration for personal freethought and eccen tricity, and (though the amount is very variously stated) certainly gained some thousands of pounds from an auth orized English edition of the llenriade dedicated to the queen. But he visited Paris now and then, without per mission (at other times he obtained permission to go with out visiting it), and his mind, like the mind of every exiled Frenchman, was always set thereon. He at last gained full licence to return in the spring of 1729. He was full of literary projects, and immediately after his return he is said to have increased his fortune im mensely by a lucky lottery speculation. The llenriade was at last licensed in France ; Brutus, a play which he had printed in England, was accepted for performance, but kept back for a time by the author ; and he began the celebrated poem of the Pucelle, the amusement and the torment of great part of his life. But he had great difficulties with two of his chief works which were ready to appear, and did after a fashion appear in 1731, to wit, Charles XII. and the Lettres sur les Awjlals. With both he took all imaginable pains to avoid offending the censorship ; for Voltaire had, more than any other man who ever lived, the ability and the willingness to stoop to conquer. At the end of 1730 Brutus did actually get acted with not incon siderable but gradually decreasing success. Then in the spring of the next year he went to Rouen to get Charles XII. surreptitiously printed, which he accomplished. In all this nomadic life of his, which had now reached more than " the middle of the way," he had never had a house of his own, nor had he now, though for a rather unusually long time he was half -guest half -boarder with the Comtesse de Fontaine-Martel. In 1732 another tragedy, Eriphile, appeared with the same kind of halting success which had distinguished the appearance of its elder sisters since (Edipe. But at last, on August 13, 1732, he produced Zaire, the best (with Merope) of all his plays, and one of the ten or twelve best plays of the whole French classical school. Its motive was borrowed to some extent from Othello, but that matters little. In the following winter the death of his hostess turned him out of a comfortable abode. He still, however, did not set up housekeeping, but took lodgings with an agent of his, one Demoulin, in an out-of-the-way part of Paris, and was, for some time at least, as much occupied with contracts, speculation, and all sorts of means of gaining money as with literature. It was in the middle of this period, however, in 1733, that two important books, the Lettres Philosophiques sur les Anglais and the Temple du Gout appeared. Both were likely to make bad blood, for the latter was, under the mask of easy verse, a satire on contemporary French litera ture, especially on J. B. Rousseau, and the former was, in the guise of a criticism or rather panegyric of English ways, an attack on everything established in the church and state of France. It was published with certain " re marks " on Pascal, more offensive to orthodoxy than itself, and no mercy was shown to it. The book was condemned (June 10, 1734), the copies seized and burnt, a warrant issued against the author, and his dwelling searched. He himself, as usual henceforward, took care to be out of the way of danger, and was safe in the independent duchy of Lorraine with Madame du Chatelet, not having taken, but very shortly about to take, up his abode with that " respectable Emily " at her famous chateau of Cirey. If the English visit may be regarded as having finished Voltaire s education, the Cirey residence may be justly said to be the first stage of his literary manhood. He had written important and characteristic work before ; but he had always been in a kind of literary Wanderjahre. He now obtained a settled home for many years, and, taught by his numerous brushes with the authorities, he began and successfully carried out that system of keeping out of personal harm s way, and of at once denying any awkward responsibility, which made him for nearly half a century at once the chief and the most prosperous of European heretics in regard to all established ideas. He was in no great or immediate danger on this particular occasion, especially as he was perfectly ready to deny his authorship, and he travelled about for some time, visiting the camp at Philippsburg, where some not very important fighting, notable only for being the last campaign of Eugene, was going on. It was not till the summer of 1734 that Cirey, a half-dismantled country house on the borders of Champagne and Lorraine, was fitted up with Voltaire s money and be came the headquarters of himself, of his hostess, and now and then of her accommodating husband. Many pictures of the life here, some of them not a little malicious, survive. It was not entirely a bed of roses, for the "respectable Emily s " temper was violent, and after a time she sought lovers who were not so much des cerebraux as Voltaire. But it provided him with a safe and comfortable retreat and with something of the same kind of convenience for literary work which matrimony provides for more commonplace or more scrupulous men of letters. In March 1735 the ban was formally taken off him, and lie was at liberty to return to Paris, a liberty of which he availed himself but sparingly now and ever afterwards, finding himself better away from the capital. At Cirey he wrote indefatigably and did not neglect business. The principal literary results of his early years here were the play of Alzirc, (1736) and a long treatise on the Newtonian system which he and Madame du Chatelet an expert mathematician wrote together. But as usual A 7 oltaire s extraordinary literary industry was rather shown in a vast amount of fugitive writings than in substantive works, though for the whole space of his Cirey residence he was engaged in writing, adding to, and altering the Pucelle. In the very first days of his sojourn he had thus written a pamphlet with the imposing title of " Treatise on Metaphysics." Of metaphysics proper Voltaire neither now nor at any other time understood anything, and the subject, like every other, merely served him as a pretext for laughing at religion with the usual reservation of a tolerably affirmative deism. In March 1736 one of the least creditable events of his life, yet still not wholly discreditable, happened. An avowal of the Enr/lish Letters was got out of him privately and then used publicly as an engine of extortion. In the same year he received his first letter from Frederick of Prussia, then crown prince only. He was soon again in trouble, this time for the poem of the Mondain, and he at once crossed the frontier and then made for Brussels. He spent about three months in the Low Countries, and in March 1737 returned to Cirey, and continued writing, making experi ments in physics (he had at this time a large laboratory), and busying himself not a little with iron-founding, the chief industry of the district. The best known accounts of Cirey life, those of Madame de Grafigny, date from the winter of 1738-39; they are, as has been said, somewhat spiteful but very amusing, depicting the constant quarrels between Madame du Chatelet and Voltaire, Jiis intense suffering under criticism, his constant dread of the sur reptitious publication of the Pucelle (which nevertheless he could not keep his hands from writing or his tongue from reciting to his visitors), and so forth. The chief and most galling of his critics at this time was the Abbe Desfontaines, and the chief of Desfontaines s attacks was entitled La Voltairomanie, in reply to a libel of Voltaire s called Le Preservatif. Both combatants had, according to the absurd
habit of the time, to disown their works, Desfontaines s