Voltaire/Chapter 8
HIS MIDDLE AGE.
CHAPTER VIII.
ADRIENNE LE COUVREUR.
On Voltaire's return to Paris in 1728, he for some time lived retired, almost concealed, in a remote faubourg, and began to develop his extraordinary talent for financial speculation. He had inherited from his father (who died in 1722) and his brother some little income, which, together with his pension, made up about £400 a-year; to this he had just added the English subscription for his "Henriade." But as his first financial successes seem to have come in the form of large winnings in a lottery, it is not necessary to look beyond these for the basis of his fortune. He largely increased his gains by investing them in various well-selected enterprises, such as the commerce with Cadiz and speculations in Barbary corn. He then acquired an interest in a contract for provisioning the army of Italy, by which he gained £30,000. His subsequent investments were so advantageous—in annuities, loans, and mortgages—that he lived and died the richest of all eminent men of letters, and was quite independent of the profits of his writings, of which he always appears to have been careless.
His play of "Brutus" was the first fruit of his exile; and this he considered his most forcibly written tragedy. It breathed a spirit of freedom long unknown to the French stage, and set forth in eloquent language the rights of an oppressed people. After the performance of it, Fontenelle told the author that "he did not think him fitted for tragedy; that his style was too forcible, too lofty, too brilliant." "Then I must study your pastorals again," said Voltaire.
It was about this time that Voltaire, finding his former friend Suzanne, now Marquise de Gouvernet, inhabiting a fine house in a fashionable quarter of Paris, wished to renew his acquaintance with her. She had intimated no such wish; but he, who had made love to so many high-born ladies, might without presumption approach this butterfly Marquise with whom he had been so intimate when she was a chrysalis. When he presented himself at her house, a huge Swiss hall-porter inquired Voltaire's name, on learning which, he observed, in a tone by no means encouraging, that it was not on the Marquise's visitors' list. On returning home, Voltaire turned this rebuff to excellent account: he wrote to the Marquise a poetical epistle, of that half gay, half serious, and all graceful cast, in which he is unrivalled, and which is to this day among the most famous of his lighter poems.[1]
There is no doubt that Voltaire felt keenly the indignity and injustice which he had undergone, and which had forced him into exile. In a letter of instructions written from England to his agent, he says, "If messieurs my debtors profit by my misfortunes and my absence to refuse payment, as others have done, you must not trouble yourself to bring them to reason—'tis but a trifle. The torrent of bitterness that I have drunk makes these few drops of small account." Nevertheless, except the good-humoured piece, the "Bastille," already mentioned, there is not a word in any of his writings to show that he was mindful of having been so grievously insulted and oppressed. What is no less extraordinary is, that possessing the courage, power, and disposition to defy those whom it was so dangerous to provoke, he never assailed the Government under which it had been possible to inflict on him such a measure of injury, and the hostility of which, directed by his potent enemies, rendered his long existence one of contest, evasion, and exile. No Frenchman living was more alive than he to the evils of absolute power. "Despotism," he says, "is the abuse of royalty, as anarchy of republics. A sultan who, without justice, or form of justice, imprisons or puts to death his subjects, is a highway robber who calls himself Your Highness." Nor was any one more alive than he to the evil of a privileged class. "That government would be worthy of Hottentots," he tells us, "in which a certain number of men should be allowed to say, 'Tis for those who work to pay—we owe nothing, because we do nothing." But it is only in such abstract fashion that he lets his ideas about government be seen. He flattered the Regent and Louis XV.; his eulogies on Louis XIV. are splendid; he would have been a courtier if he could. Far different is the spirit in which he attacked what he called superstition. It is evident that he thought spiritual despotism worse, and therefore a fitter object of hostility, than temporal despotism. The lower classes were sunk in ignorance, the upper in frivolity; while among their pastors a vicious life was so common as to be scarcely a scandal. Amid such a state of things the Church sought to maintain its authority not by amending the lives of the priesthood and humanising their precepts, but by maintaining the empire of stupidity and superstition over the ignorant, and by forcibly repressing the dissent of those who were neither stupid nor superstitious. Voltaire, therefore, believed that to sap the misused authority of the Church was the first necessary step towards awakening the mind of the nation.
Soon after his return to France, an event occurred which was well calculated to exasperate his hostility against intolerance. Adrienne le Couvreur, the finest tragic actress of the age, the best who had ever at that time trod the French stage, died in Paris in the height of her fame. She was a woman of a warm and generous heart; she wrote letters in a way in which only the most cultivated Frenchwomen of the time, such as Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Sevigné, could write them—that is to say, in a way which raised and refined the standard of the French language. She was the first example of a French actress who combined professional renown with consideration in society. She had Jong been the dear and intimate friend of Voltaire, had represented with extraordinary effect most of his heroines, and had played Jocasta only five days before her death. He had been summoned to her deathbed, and she died in his arms. Such was the woman to whom the clergy of Paris refused Christian burial, because of her profession. Her body was taken secretly by night in a hackney-coach to the bank of the Seine, not very far from where is now the Pont de la Concorde, and there hastily interred. It may be imagined with what feelings Voltaire, bringing with him from England a tenfold horror of fanaticism, beheld this outrage; and those feelings, which he himself describes as "indignation, tenderness, and pity," found expression in verse;[2]—
"On the Death of the Renowned Actress, Mademoiselle le Couvreur.
The lovely eyes, so eloquently bright,
With livid horrors of the grave o'erspread!
O Muses, Graces, Loves, whose looks she wore,
Whom we both worshipped, your own work restore!
Too late—tis o'er—one kiss, and she is dead.
Is dead!—and as the dismal tidings fly,
All hearers stand transfixed with grief, as I.
I hear the sorrowing Arts their loss deplore;
Weeping, they cry, 'Melpomene's no more!"
Who learn the cruel wrong these Arts forlorn
Endure from those who rob the dead of peace?
A grave they her deny with scorn—
Her, to whom altars had been raised in Greece,
Flattered, adored, while she on earth remained,
I saw obsequious crowds her glance await.
She dies—and so the idol is profaned !
She charmed the world—a sin to expiate
The spot where thy rejected dust finds room,
By thy shade hallowed, in our verse renowned,
Is more a temple than a tomb.
Here my Saint Denis[3] is. I reverent bow
Before the shrine of genius, spirit, grace;
I loved them living, I adore them now,
Despite the grisly king's embrace—
Despite the ungrateful and the base,
Who bear this grave's dishonour deep, not thou.
So light and gay, with bigot laws at strife?
Our fickle race, whose views uncentred range,
Exalt, disparage, as the mood may change?
Is there no land but England where
Man's thought is free, and gains free birth?
Rival of Athens, region blest and fair,
That, with its other tyrants, has cast forth
Old shameful bigotries; where sages dare
Speak all their thought, where honour waits on worth
No art is scorned there, no achievement vain;
The conqueror of our host on Blenheim's plain,
Dryden the lofty, Addison the wise,
Sweet Oldfield,[4] Newton, reader of the skies—
All share the hospitable fane.
And Adrienne's dust in Westminster would lie
With statesmen, poets, kings, and chivalry,
For England's gifted rank her great among;
Freedom and plenty in their island-home,
Have roused up from its sleep of ages long
The spirit that ennobled Greece and Rome.
Are then Apollo's laurels dead beneath
Neglect and drought in our unkindly sand?
Why is my native land no more the land
Of genius and its honouring wreath?"
The young Count D'Argental, Voltaire's friend, was an ardent admirer of this lady, from whom he received in return for his devotion nothing but friendship and good advice. He lived to be very old; and, fifty years after her death, being then past eighty, he heard that the owner of some ground near the river had discovered, while preparing to build there, some vestiges of her grave. The old man hastened to the spot, recognised the resting-place as hers, and obtained leave to erect a monument over it, on which he inscribed some verses expressive of the passion that half a century had not sufficed to extinguish.
- ↑ This piece is not of a kind to which translation could do justice. The name by which it is known to French readers, "The You and the Thou," implies this. In the passages where he reverts to their former intimacy, he uses the Thou,—where he speaks of her present position, the You; and we have, of course, no equivalent pronouns of famili- arity and respect. To this, and to its grace of expression, the poem owes its fame, rather than to more substantial merits.
- ↑ In poems of this class he seeks compensation for the severe restrictions to which writers of French poetry must submit, in frequently varying the order of the rhymes and the measure; and in these particulars the translation follows the original with sufficient closeness to preserve the external resemblance. In translating pieces of similar versification the same rule is observed in this volume.
- ↑ The burial-place of French royalty.
- ↑ Mrs Oldfield, the famous actress, died in the same year as Mlle Le Couvreur, and was buried in Westininster Abbey.