his time with Villars, listening to the marshal's stories and making harmless love to the duchess. In December 1721 his father died, leaving him property (rather more than four thousand livres a year), which was soon increased by a pension of half the amount from the regent. In return for this, or in hopes of more, he offered himself as a spy—or at any rate as a secret diplomatist—to Dubois. But meeting his old enemy Beauregard in one of the minister's rooms and making an offensive remark, he was waylaid by Beauregard some time after in a less privileged place and soundly beaten.
His visiting espionage, as unkind critics put it his—secret diplomatic mission, as he would have liked to have it put himself—began in the summer of 1722, and he set out for it in company with a certain Madame de Rupelmonde, to whom he as usual made love, taught deism and served as an amusing travelling companion. He stayed at Cambrai for some time, where European diplomatists were still in full session, journeyed to Brussels, where he met and quarrelled with Jean Baptiste Rousseau, went on to the Hague, and then returned. The Henriade had got on considerably during the journey, and, according to his lifelong habit, the poet, with the help of his friend Thiériot and others, had been “working the oracle” of puffery. During the late autumn and winter of 1722-23 he abode chiefly in Paris, taking a kind of lodging in the town house of M. de Bernières, a nobleman of Rouen, and endeavouring to procure a “privilege” for his poem. In this he was disappointed, but he had the work printed at Rouen nevertheless, and spent the summer of 1723 revising it. In November he caught smallpox and was very seriously ill, so that the book was not given to the world till the spring of 1724 (and then of course, as it had no privilege, appeared privately). Almost at the same time, the 4th of March, his third tragedy, Mariamne appeared, was well received at first, but underwent complete damnation before the curtain fell. The regent had died shortly before, not to Voltaire's advantage; for he had been a generous patron. Voltaire had made, however, a useful friend in another grand seigneur, as profligate and nearly as intelligent, the duke of Richelieu, and with him he passed 1724 and the next year chiefly, recasting Mariamne (which was now successful), writing the comedy of L'Indiscret, and courting the queen, the ministers, the favourites and everybody who seemed worth. The end of 1725 brought a disastrous close to this period of his life. He was insulted by the chevalier de Rohan, replied with his usual sharpness of tongue, and shortly afterwards, when dining with the duke of Sully, was called out and bastinadoed by the chevalier's hirelings, Rohan himself looking on. Nobody would take his part, and at last, nearly three months after the outrage, he challenged Rohan, who accepted the challenge, but on the morning appointed for the duel Voltaire was arrested and sent for the second time to the Bastille. He was kept in confinement a fortnight, and was then packed off to England in accordance with his own request. Voltaire revenged himself on the duke of Sully for his conduct towards his guest by cutting Maximilien de Béthune's name out of the Henriade.
No competent judges have ever mistaken the importance of Voltaire's visit to England, and the influence it exercised on his future career. In the first place, the ridiculous and discreditable incident of the beating had time to blow over; in the second, England was a very favourable place for Frenchmen of note to pick up guineas; in the third, and most important of all, his contact with a people then far more different in every conceivable way from their neighbours than any two peoples of Europe are different now, acted as a sovereign tonic and stimulant on his intellect and literary faculty. Before the English visit Voltaire had been an elegant trifler, an adept in the forms of literature popular in French society, a sort of superior Dorat or Boufflers of earlier growth. He returned from that visit one of the foremost literary men in Europe, with views, if not profound or accurate, yet wide and acute on all les grands sujets, and with a solid stock of money. The visit lasted about three years, from 1726 to 1729; and, as if to make the visitor's luck certain, George I. died and George II. succeeded soon after his arrival. The new king was not fond of “boetry,” but Queen Caroline was, and international jealousy was pleased at the thought of welcoming a distinguished exile from French illiberality. The Walpoles, Bubb Dodington, Bolingbroke, Congreve, Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, Pope, were among his English friends. He made acquaintance with, and at least tried to appreciate, Shakespeare. He was much struck by English manners, was deeply penetrated by English toleration for personal free thought and eccentricity, and gained some thousands of pounds from an authorized English edition of the Henriade, dedicated to the queen. But he visited Paris now and then without permission, and his mind, like the mind of every exiled Frenchman, was always set thereon. He 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 immensely by a lucky lottery speculation. The Henriade 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, Charles XII. and the Lettres sur les Anglais. 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. Then in the spring of the next year he went to Rouen to get Charles XII. surreptitiously printed, which he accomplished. In 1732 another tragedy, Ériphile, appeared, with the same kind of halting success which had distinguished the appearance of its elder sisters since Œdipe. But at last, on the 13th of August 1732, he produced Zaïre, the best (with Mérope) 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 the comtesse de Fontaine-Martel, whose guest he had been, turned him out of a comfortable abode. He then 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 gaming money as with literature.
In the middle of this period, however, in 1733, two important books, the Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais and the Temple du goût appeared. Both were likely to make bad blood, for the latter was, under the mask of easy verse, a satire on contemporary French literature, 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 “remarks” on Pascal, more offensive to orthodoxy than itself, and no mercy was shown to it. The book was condemned (June 10th, 1734), the copies seized and burnt, a warrant issued against the author and his dwelling searched. He himself was safe in the independent duchy of Lorraine with Émilie de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet,[1] with whom he began to be intimate in 1733; he had now taken up his abode with her at the château of Cirey.
If the English visit may be regarded as having finished
- ↑ Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet (1706-1749), was the daughter of the baron de Breteuil, and married the marquis du Châtelet-Lomont in 1725. She was an accomplished linguist, musician and mathematician, and deeply interested in metaphysics. When she first became intimate with Voltaire she was practically separated from her husband, though he occasionally visited Cirey. She is only important from her connexion with Voltaire, though an attempt has been made to treat her as an original thinker; see F. Hamel, An Eighteenth Century Marquise (1910). She wrote Institutions de physique (1740), Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu (1744), Doutes sur les religions reculées (1792), and in 1756 published a translation of Newton's Principia.
