of the Roi-Philosophe, he recommenced a friendly correspondence with the monarch, and occupied himself in the most good-natured manner imaginable in correcting his verses.
The fact is that Voltaire’s natural bias of character found itself so completely at home in the age, country, and environments in which he lived, that it cannot be matter of surprise that, with such natural tendencies as his, they should become developed in the manner and to the extent they did.
He was born with an extraordinary amount of esprit; esprit of the bright, light, keen, mocking order; with little depth or breadth of view, much vanity, extraordinary expertness and adroitness, no reverence. He was especially easy-going, good-natured,—even generous and highly charitable on occasions;—not spiteful, notwithstanding his singular epigrammatic powers, amiable to those about him; a man easy to live with, always preferring to glide out of a quarrel, a difficulty, a danger, to running his head against it.
And such qualities were, among those with whom he lived, considered invaluable. That he had little faith in God or man; that his morals were of the laxest, that he only cared for truth inasmuch as it could be proved, and satisfactorily and willingly accepted as such by those people, and that its acceptance or assertion on his own part was not likely to lead him into trouble; that he had no earnestness, no devotion, no true heroism,—what was all this to men and women who laughed at such characteristics as proofs of weakness, folly, Quixotism? Is it likely, is it possible—that possessing such qualities as he did, and having them considered as the greatest and most precious a man could own, he would undervalue them, or seek to raise himself to a higher standard?—or that when his faults,—even his gravest sins, so far from being considered in that light, were such as were daily committed, tolerated, even applauded, in his own circle, he should be troubled with any remorseful sense of them, any idea of the necessity of reforming them?
What can be more significantly characteristic of the man and of the time than the fact that not long after the production of his epic, his great tragedies, his history of Charles XII., &c., we find him busily engaged, in company with Rameau, the musician, M. de la Popelinière, the fermier-général, and Madame de Pompadour, in composing, for the fêtes of the marriage of the Dauphin with the Infanta of Spain, a spectacle de cour, in which the decorations, the music and the ballet played the chief parts!
The Queen of France, Marie Leczinska, was so great an admirer of his talents that she admitted him to her intimacy, and gave him a pension:—what then? “He had the happy chance,” writes one of his panegyrists, “to please her Majesty the Queen, and to please the favourite (Madame de Pompadour) at the same time.” And through the same favourite he intrigued, might and main, to obtain from “Trajan,” Louis XV (!) titles and honours, but was fain to content himself, faute de mieux, with the modest appointment of gentilhomme de la chambre to the king,—who turned his back upon him!
And while he wrote poems, tragedies, histories, epigrams and court entertainments, his hard shrewd head was busily and most successfully employed in making his fortune.
He speculated in the funds, traded with America, and for years was a victualling contractor for armies. At Ferney, “l’auberge de l’Europe,” as he was pleased to call it, he received men and women of every sort of celebrity; he corresponded with kings, queens, princes, philosophers, with the Empress Catherine of Russia, and the Pope Benedict. An active life, truly, and one strangely occupied and organised.
The Du Châtelet episode filled up fifteen years of his life. Fifteen stormy years they were, yet borne with a fortitude worthy of a better cause.
Marvellous are those records of Voltaire’s mode of life in connection with the “Sublime Emilie,”—her perfectly trained, altogether accommodating husband, D’Alembert, St. Lambert! What scenes, when Urania came down from the stars, and shrieked and stormed, and brandished knives in the merest Xantippe fashion: the while this French eighteenth century Socrates bore all with, we cannot say, Christian resignation.
What journeyings, when it pleased the Marquise to change her quarters, in quest of other scenes, other excitements, other homage! What absurd and disgraceful humiliations he supported from this elderly, pretentious, gambling, shameless shrew and termagant! In what terms he records the last, and, as it afterwards proves, the fatal event of her life! All these details paint not merely the individuals immediately concerned, but the state of morals and manners then existing, in a way that goes far to explain the peculiarities of Voltaire’s life, writings, and how it was that he and they held the place and exercised the sway they did. His grief for the loss of this wonderful woman is displayed in a manner no less characteristic of the times, when “taste,” and “the rules,” were held to be the sole conditions of poetry—
L’univers a perdu la sublime Emilie,
Elle aima les plaisirs, les arts, la vérité:
Les dieux, en lui donnant leur âme et leur génie,
N’avoient gardé pour eux que leur immortalité.
Strange, that the greatest persifleur, the keenest mocker, perhaps, of any age, should have been utterly blind to the long series of parodies, follies, vices, basenesses, and preposterous vanities that composed the existence of this god-gifted woman, whose loss not only he and his friends, but the whole universe, were to feel as a breavement.
With regard to Voltaire’s attacks on the Christian religion, the subject is one far too weightily momentous to be entered on here. But this much we may say. In the first place, it was impossible for a man of Voltaire’s character, turn of mind, mode of life, culture and surroundings, to have anything like an idea of the real spirit, foundation, and tendencies of Christianity; nor had he ever regarded the question in anything but a doctrinal and polemical point of view, and with that essentially French democrat principle of changing, destroying, treating with hatred or ridicule things that nought but an infinite feeling of love, reverence, and
