But why did his greatest book bring him exile? Because, by telling the truth, it offended everybody. It especially enraged the clergy by taking the view later developed by Gibbon, that the rapid conquest of paganism by Christianity had disintegrated Rome from within and prepared it to fall an easy victim to the invading and immigrating barbarians. It enraged them further by giving much less space than usual to Judea and Christendom, and by speaking of China, India and Persia, and of their faiths, with the impartiality of a Martian; in this new perspective a vast and novel world was revealed; every dogma faded into relativity; the endless East took on something of the proportions given it by geography; Europe suddenly became conscious of itself as the experimental peninsula of a continent and a culture greater than its own. How could it forgive a European for so unpatriotic a revelation? The King decreed that this Frenchman who dared to think of himself as a man first and a Frenchman afterward should never put foot upon the soil of France again.
VI. Ferney: Candide
Les Délices had been a temporary home, a centre from which Voltaire might prospect to find a shelter of more permanence. He found it in 1758 at Ferney, just inside the Swiss line near France; here he would be secure from the French power, and yet near to French refuge if the Swiss Government should trouble him. This last change ended his Wanderjahre. His fitful runnings to and fro had not been all the result of nervous restlessness; they had reflected, too, his ubiquitous insecurity from persecution; only at sixty-four did he find a house that could be also his home. There is a passage at the end of one of his tales, “The Travels of Scarmentado,” which almost applies to its author: “As I had now seen all that was rare or beautiful on earth, I resolved for the future to see nothing but my own home; I took a wife, and soon suspected that she deceived me; but notwithstanding this doubt I still found that of all conditions of life this was much the happiest.” He had no wife, but he had a niece—which is better for a man of genius. “We never hear of his wishing to be in Paris . . . . There can be no doubt that this wise exile prolonged his days.”46
He was happy in his garden, planting fruit trees which he did not expect to see flourish in his lifetime. When an admirer praised the work he had done for posterity he answered, “Yes, I have planted 4000 trees.” He had a kind word for everybody, but could be forced to sharper speech. One day he asked a visitor whence he came. “From Mr. Haller’s.” “He is a great man,” said Voltaire; “a great poet, a great naturalist, a great philosopher, almost a universal genius.” “What you say, sir, is the more admirable, as Mr. Haller does not do you the same justice.” “Ah,” said Voltaire, “perhaps we are both mistaken.”47
Ferney now became the intellectual capital of the world; every learned man or enlightened ruler of the day paid his court either in person or by correspondence. Here came sceptical priests, liberal aristocrats, and learned ladies; here came Gibbon and Boswell from England; here came d’Alembert, Helvetius, and the other rebels of the Enlightenment; and countless others. At last the entertainment of this endless stream of visitors proved too expensive even for Voltaire; he complained that he was becoming the hotel-keeper for all Europe. To one acquaintance who announced that he had come to stay for six weeks, Voltaire said: “What is the difference between you and Don Quixote? He mistook inns for chateaux, and you mistake this chateau for an inn.” “God preserve me from my friends,” he concluded; “I will take care of my enemies myself.”
Add to this perpetual hospitality, the largest correspondence the world has ever seen, and the most brilliant. Letters came from all sorts and conditions of men: a burgomaster wrote from Germany asking “in confidence whether there is a God or not,” and begging Voltaire to answer by return post;48 Gustavus III of Sweden was elated by the thought that Voltaire sometimes glanced at the North, and told him that this was their greatest encouragement to do their best up there; Christian VII of Denmark apologized for not establishing at once all reforms; Catherine II of Russia sent him beautiful presents, wrote frequently, and hoped he would not consider her importunate. Even Frederick, after a year of doldrums, returned to the fold, and resumed his correspondence with the King of Ferney.
“You have done me great wrongs,” he wrote. “I have forgiven them all, and I even wish to forget them. But if you had not had to do with a madman in love with your noble genius, you would not have gotten off so well . . . . Do you want sweet things? Very well; I will tell you some truths. I esteem in you the finest genius that the ages have borne; I admire your poetry, I love your prose . . . . Never has an author before you had a tact so keen, a taste so sure and delicate. You are charming in conversation; you know how to amuse and instruct at the same time. You are the most seductive being that I know, capable of making yourself loved by all the world when you choose. You have such graces of mind that you can offend and yet at the same time deserve the indulgence of those who know you. In short, you would be perfect if you were not a man.”49
Who would have expected so gay a host to become the exponent of pessimism? In youth, as a reveler in Paris’s salons, he had seen the sunnier side of life, despite the Bastille; and yet even in those careless days he had rebelled against the unnatural optimism to which Leibnitz had given currency. To an ardent young man who had attacked him in print, and had contended with Leibnitz that this is “the best of all possible worlds,” Voltaire wrote, “I am pleased to hear, sir, that you have written a little book against me. You do me too much honor . . . . When you have shown, in verse or otherwise, why so many men cut their throats in the best of all possible worlds, I shall be exceedingly obliged to you. I await your arguments, your verses, and your abuse; and assure you from the bottom of my heart that neither of us knows anything about the matter. I have the honor to be,” etc.
Persecution and disillusionment had worn down his faith in life; and his experiences at Berlin and Frankfort had taken the edge from his hope. But both faith and hope suffered most when, in November, 1755, came the news of the awful earthquake at Lisbon, in which 30,000 people had been killed. The quake had come on All Saints’ Day; the churches had been crowded with worshippers; and death, finding its enemies in close formation, had reaped a rich harvest. Voltaire was shocked into seriousness and raged when he heard that the French clergy were explaining the disaster as a punishment for the sins of the people of Lisbon. He broke forth in a passionate poem in which he gave vigorous expression to the old dilemma: Either God can prevent evil and he will not; or he wishes to prevent it and he cannot. He was not satisfied with Spinoza’s answer that good and evil are human terms, inapplicable to the universe, and that our tragedies are trivial things in the perspective of eternity.
I am a puny part of the great whole.
Yes; but all animals condemned to live,
All sentient things, born by the same stern law,
Suffer like me, and like me also die.
The vulture fastens on his timid prey,
And stabs with bloody beak the quivering limbs:
All’s well, it seems, for it. But in a while
An eagle tears the vulture into shreds;
The eagle is transfixed by shafts of man;
The man, prone in the dust of battlefields,