It was an England, too, that throbbed with a virile intellectual activity. Bacon’s name was still in the air, and the inductive mode of approach was triumphing in every field. Hobbes (1588–1679) had carried out the sceptical spirit of the Renaissance, and the practical spirit of his master, into so complete and outspoken a materialism as would have won him in France the honor of martyrdom for a fallacy. Locke (1632–1704) had written a masterpiece of psychological analysis (the Essay on the Human Understanding, 1689), without any supernatural assumptions. Collins, Tyndal and other deists were re-affirming their faith in God while calling into question every other doctrine of the established church. Newton had just died: Voltaire attended the funeral, and often recalled the impression made upon him by the national honors awarded to this modest Englishman. “Not long ago,” he writes, “a distinguished company were discussing the trite and frivolous question, who was the greatest man,—Cæsar, Alexander, Tamerlane, or Cromwell? Some one answered that without doubt it was Isaac Newton. And rightly: for it is to him who masters our minds by the force of truth, and not to those who enslave them by violence, that we owe our reverence.”19 Voltaire became a patient and thorough student of Newton’s works, and was later the chief protagonist of Newton’s views in France.
One must marvel at the quickness with which Voltaire absorbed almost all that England had to teach him—its literature, its science, and its philosophy; he took all these varied elements, passed them through the fire of French culture and the French spirit, and transmuted them into the gold of Gallic wit and eloquence. He recorded his impressions in Letters on the English, which he circulated in manuscript among his friends; he did not dare to print them, for they praised “perfidious Albion” too highly to suit the taste of the royal censor. They contrasted English political liberty and intellectual independence with French tyranny and bondage,20 they condemned the idle aristocracy and the tithe-absorbing clergy of France, with their perpetual recourse to the Bastille as the answer to every question and every doubt; they urged the middle classes to rise to their proper place in the state, as these classes had in England. Without quite knowing or intending it, these letters were the first cock’s crow of the Revolution.
III. Cirey: The Romances
Nevertheless the Regent, not knowing of this chanticleer, sent Voltaire permission, in 1729, to return to France. For five years Voltaire enjoyed again that Parisian life whose wine flowed in his veins and whose spirit flowed from his pen. And then some miscreant of a publisher, getting hold of the Letters on the English, turned them without the author’s permission into print, and sold them far and wide, to the horror of all good Frenchmen, including Voltaire. The Parliament of Paris at once ordered the book to be publicly burned as “scandalous, contrary to religion, to morals, and to respect for authority”; and Voltaire learned that he was again on the way to the Bastille. Like a good philosopher, he took to his heels—merely utilizing the occasion to elope with another man’s wife.
The Marquise du Chatelet was twenty-eight; Voltaire, alas, was already forty. She was a remarkable woman: she had studied mathematics with the redoubtable Maupertuis, and then with Clairaut; she had written a learnedly annotated translation of Newton’s Principia; she was soon to receive higher rating than Voltaire in a contest for a prize offered by the French Academy for an essay on the physics of fire; in short she was precisely the kind of woman who never elopes. But the Marquis was so dull, and Voltaire was so interesting—“a creature lovable in every way,” she called him; “the finest ornament in France.”21 He returned her love with fervent admiration; called her “a great man whose only fault was being a woman”; formed from her, and from the large number of highly talented women then in France, his conviction of the native mental equality of the sexes;22 and decided that her chateau at Cirey was an admirable refuge from the inclement political weather of Paris. The Marquis was away with his regiment, which had long been his avenue of escape from mathematics; and he made no objection to the new arrangements. Because of the mariages de convenance which forced rich old men on young women who had little taste for senility but much hunger for romance, the morals of the day permitted a lady to add a lover to her ménage, if it were done with a decent respect for the hypocrisies of mankind; and when she chose not merely a lover but a genius, all the world forgave her.
In the chateau at Cirey they did not spend their time billing and cooing. All the day was taken up with study and research; Voltaire had an expensive laboratory equipped for work in natural science; and for years the lovers rivaled each other in discovery and disquisition. They had many guests, but it was understood that these should entertain themselves all day long, till supper at nine. After supper, occasionally, there were private theatricals; or Voltaire would read to the guests one of his lively stories. Very soon Cirey became the Paris of the French mind; the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie joined in the pilgrimage to taste Voltaire’s wine and wit, and see him act in his own plays. He was happy to be the centre of this corrupt and brilliant world; he took nothing too seriously, and for a while made “Rire et faire rire” his motto.23 Catherine of Russia called him “the divinity of gayety.” “If Nature had not made us a little frivolous,” he said, “we should be most wretched. It is because one can be frivolous that the majority do not hang themselves.” There was nothing of the dyspeptic Carlyle about him. “Dulce est desipere in loco.24 Woe to philosophers who cannot laugh away their wrinkles. I look upon solemnity as a disease.”25
It was now that he began to write those delightful romances—Zadig, Candide, Micromégas, L’Ingenu, Le Monde comme il va, etc.—which give the Voltairean spirit in purer form than anything else in his ninety-nine volumes. They are not novels, but humoresque-picaresque novelettes; the heroes are not persons but ideas, the villains are superstitions, and the events are thoughts. Some are mere fragments, like L’Ingenu, which is Rousseau before Jean Jacques. A Huron Indian comes to France with some returning explorers; the first problem to which he gives rise is that of making him a Christian. An abbé gives him a copy of the New Testament, which the Huron likes so much that he soon offers himself not only for baptism but for circumcision as well. “For,” he says, “I do not find in the book that was put into my hands a single person who was not circumcised. It is therefore evident that I must make a sacrifice to the Hebrew custom, and the sooner the better.” Hardly has this difficulty been smoothed over when he has trouble over confession; he asks where in the Gospel this is commanded, and is directed to a passage in the Epistle of St. James: “Confess your sins to one another.” He confesses; but when he had done he dragged the abbé from the confessional chair, placed himself in the seat, and bade the abbé confess in turn. “Come, my friend; it is said, ‘We must confess our sins to one another’; I have related my sins to you, and you shall not stir till you recount yours.” He falls in love with Miss St. Yves, but is told that he cannot marry her because she has acted as godmother at his baptism; he is very angry at this little trick of the fates, and threatens to get unbaptized. Having received permission to marry her, he is surprised to find that for marriage “notaries, priests, witnesses, contracts and dispensations are absolutely necessary . . . . ‘You are then very great rogues, since so many precautions are required.’” And so, as the story passes on from incident to incident, the contradictions between primitive and ecclesiastical Christianity are forced upon the stage; one misses the impartiality of the scholar and the leniency of the philosopher; but Voltaire had begun his war against superstition, and in war we demand impartiality and leniency only of our foes.