The Age of Voltaire Page 6

  Two years later Lesage reached almost the level of Molière with a comedy satirizing the financiers. Some of these had advance news of Turcaret, and tried to prevent its performance; a story, probably legendary, pictured them offering the author 100,000 francs to withdraw the play;78 the Dauphin, son of Louis XIV, ordered it produced. Turcaret is a contractor-merchant-moneylender who lives in luxury amid the destitution of war. He is generous only to his mistress, who bleeds him as sedulously as he bleeds the people. “I marvel at the course of human life,” says the valet Frontin; “we pluck a coquette; the coquette devours a man of affairs; the man of affairs pillages others; and all this makes the most diverting chain of knaveries imaginable.”79

  Perhaps the satire here is unfair and is edged with revenge. In the most famous of eighteenth-century French novels Lesage succeeded in depicting a more complex character, and with greater objectivity. Following Spanish models again, The Adventures of Gil Blas de Santillane moves in picaresque style through a world of banditry, drinking bouts, abductions, seductions, and politics, in which cleverness is the supreme virtue and success pardons all. Gil begins as an innocent youth, tender with ideals and love of mankind, but credulous, talkative, and vain. He is captured by robbers, joins them, learns their arts and ways, graduates from them to the Spanish court, and serves the Duke of Lerma as aide and pander. “Before I was about the court my nature was compassionate and charitable; but tenderness of heart is an unfashionable frailty there, and mine became harder than any flint. Here was an admirable school to correct the romantic sensibilities of friendship.”80 He turns his back upon his parents, and refuses to help them. His luck fails, he is imprisoned, he resolves to reform; he is released, retires to the country, marries, and tries to be a good citizen. Finding this an intolerable bore, he returns to the court and its code. He is knighted, marries again, and is surprised by the virtue of his wife and by his happiness in her children, of whom “I devoutly believe myself the father.”81

  Gil Blas became the favorite novel of French readers until Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862) challenged its size and supremacy. Lesage loved his book so well that he spread it over twenty years of his life. The first two volumes appeared in 1715, the third in 1724, the fourth in 1735; and, as in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the last was as good as the first. He financed his old age by writing little comedies for the popular Théâtre de la Foire (Theater of the Fair); and in 1738 he issued another novel, Le Bachelier de Salamanque, padding the book with unacknowledged pilferings in the manner of the time. He had become almost deaf at forty, but could hear with a trumpet; lucky man, who could close his ears at will, as we close our eyes. Toward the end of his life he lost the use of his faculties “except in the middle of the day,” so that, said his friends, “his mind seemed to rise and set with the sun.”82 He died in 1747, in his eightieth year.

  Lesage’s Gil Blas finds fewer readers today than the Mémoires of Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon. No one loves the Duke now, for he lacked the modest man’s ability to conceal his vanity. He never forgot that he was one of the ducs et pairs of France, ranking in grandeur only after the royal family itself; he never forgave Louis XIV for preferring bourgeois competence to noble mediocrity in the administration of the government, nor for putting the royal bastards ahead of the “dukes and peers” in the ritual of the court and succession to the throne. On September 1, 1715, he tells us,

  I learned the death of the King upon awakening. Immediately afterward, I went to pay my respects to the new monarch…. I went thence to M. le Duc d’Orléans; I reminded him of a promise he had given me, that he would allow the dukes to keep their hats on when their votes were asked for.83

  He loved the Regent sincerely, served him in the Council of State, admonished him to moderation in mistresses, and comforted him in bereavements and defeats. Close to events for fifty years, he began in 1694 to record them—from the standpoint of his class—from his own birth in 1675 to the Regent’s death in 1723. He himself survived till 1755 into an uncongenial age. The Marquise de Créqui set him down as “an old sick crow, burning with envy and devoured by vanity.”84 But she was writing memoirs, too, and could not stomach his obstinate continuance.

  The garrulous Duke was always biased, often unjust in his judgments, occasionally careless of chronology,85 sometimes consciously incorrect in his report;86 he ignored everything but politics, and lost himself, now and then, in bootless gossip about the aristocracy; but his twenty volumes are a detailed and precious record by an observant and penetrating eye and a fluent pen; they enable us to see Mme. de Maintenon, Fénelon, Philippe d’ Orléans, and Saint-Simon almost as vividly as Bourrienne allows us to see Napoleon. To give his prejudices freedom, he tried to keep his memoirs secret, and forbade their publication within a century of his death. None of them reached print till 1781, many of them not before 1830. Of all the memoirs that illuminate the history of France these stand unrivaled at the top.

  VIII. THE INCREDIBLE CARDINAL

  If we were to believe Saint-Simon, the most inspiring maxims of our youth were contradicted by the career of Guillaume Dubois. He had all the vices, and every success except succès d’estime. Hear Saint-Simon again on his fellow councilor:

  His intellect was of the most ordinary kind; his knowledge the most commonplace; his capacity nil; his exterior that of a ferret, of a pedant; his conversation disagreeable, broken, always uncertain; his falsehood written upon his features…. Nothing was sacred to him…. He had a declared contempt for faith, promises, honor, probity, truth; took pleasure in laughing at all these things; was equally voluptuous and ambitious…. With all this he was soft, cringing, supple, a flatterer, a false admirer, taking all shapes with the greatest facility…. His judgment… was involuntarily crooked…. With such defects it is surprising that the only man he was able to seduce was M. le Duc d’Orléans, who had so much intelligence, such a well-balanced mind, and so much clear and rapid perception of character87

  —which should have led the acidulous author to doubt the perspicacity of his jealousy. We must confess, however, that Duclos agrees with Saint-Simon.88

  Dubois was in his sixtieth year when the Regency gave him power. He was a bit dilapidated, having survived several venereal diseases,89 but he was able to entertain Mme. de Tencin when she fell out of Philippe’s arms. In any case he must have had some intellectual acumen, for he managed foreign affairs reasonably well. He took a fat bribe from Britain to do what he thought was good for France. The Whigs in England and Emperor Charles VI in Austria were plotting to repudiate the Treaty of Utrecht and renew the war against France. Philip V, not content with the throne of Spain, was itching to be king of France, and thought an entente with England would clear his way. If England, Spain, Austria, and the Austrian Netherlands (“Belgium”) should unite in another Grand Alliance, the old circumvallation of France would rise again, and all the policies and victories of Richelieu and Louis XIV would be annulled. To forestall such a union Dubois and Philippe signed an accord with England and the United Provinces (“Holland”) on January 4, 1717. This was a boon to France, to the European balance of power, and to Britain; for if France and Spain had come under one head their combined fleets would have challenged England’s control of the seas. It was also a boon to the new and insecure Hanoverian monarchy in England, since France was now pledged to give no further aid to the Stuart claimants to the English crown.

  The Spanish government was outwitted, and was not pleased. Its ruling minister, Alberoni, joined in the plot of Cellamare and the Duchesse du Maine to overthrow the Regent and make Philip V king of France. Dubois unearthed the conspiracy, and persuaded the reluctant Philippe to follow England in declaring war against Spain (1718). The Treaty of The Hague (1720) ended this conflict. To consolidate the peace, Dubois arranged the mating of Philip’s daughter to Louis XV, and of Philippe’s daughters to Philip’s sons. The marriages were contracted on the frontier island of Bidassoa (January 9, 1722), and were celebrated with an auto-da-fé.90 A
s the Infanta María Ana Victoria was only three years old, it would be some time before Louis XV could elicit from her an heir to the throne; if in this interim the young King should die, the Regent would become king of France, and Dubois would be his perpetual minister.

  He climbed subtly step by step. In 1720 he was made archbishop of Cambrai; by the humor of history a Protestant king, George I, asked the skeptical Regent to persuade the Pope to give Dubois this famous archiepiscopal see, recently ennobled by Fénelon; and the bishops of France, including the saintly Massillon, joined in the ceremonies conferring this dignity upon a man whom many Frenchmen considered an epitome of sin. Dubois felt himself inadequately rewarded for his services to France. He used French money to promote to the papacy a candidate pledged to send him a red hat. Innocent XIII sadly kept the promise, and the Archbishop became Cardinal Dubois (July 16, 1721). A year later he was made principal minister of the realm, with a salary of 100,000 livres. As he had an income of 120,000 livres from his archbishopric, and 204,000 from seven abbeys, and 100,000 as superintendent of the post, and an English pension reckoned by Saint-Simon at 960,000, Dubois now had an annual income of some 1,500,000 livres.91 His only worry was that his wife, who was still alive, might refuse his bribes, reveal her existence, and invalidate his ecclesiastical dignities.92

  Time caught up with him. On February 5, 1723, Louis XV came of age, and the Regency ended. Still only thirteen, the King, enjoying life at Versailles, asked Philippe to continue to govern the kingdom, and Dubois remained Philippe’s principal aide. But on August ı the Cardinal’s bladder burst, and suddenly, loaded with livres, he was dead. Philippe took over the administration, but with him too time had run out. Surfeited with women, stupefied with drink, losing his sight, losing even his good manners, he bore in semiconsciousness the contumely of a regime that had begun with almost universal good will and was ending in official abasement and public contempt. The doctors warned him that his mode of life was killing him. He did not care. He had drunk the wine of life too greedily, and had reached the dregs. He died of an apoplectic fit, December 2, 1723, falling into the arms of his mistress pro tem. He was forty-nine years old.

  Philippe d’Orléans does not impress us as a bad man, despite the gamut of his sins. He had the vices of the flesh rather than of the soul: he was a spendthrift, a drunkard, and a lecher, but he was not selfish, cruel, or mean. He was a man of mercy, brave and kind. He won a kingdom by a gamble, and gave it away with light heart and open hand. His wealth provided him with every opportunity, his power offered him no discipline. It is a pitiful sight—a man brilliant in mind, liberal in views, struggling to repair the damage done to France by the bigotry of the Great King, letting noble purposes drown in meaningless intoxication, and losing love in a maelstrom of debauchery.

  Morally, the Regency was the most shameful period in the history of France. Religion, beneficent in the villages, disgraced itself at the top by anointing men like Dubois and Tencin with high honors, so losing the respect of the emancipated intellect. The French mind enjoyed comparative freedom, but used it not to spread a humane and tolerant intelligence so much as to loose human instincts from the social control necessary to civilization; skepticism forgot Epicurus, and became epicurean. Government was corrupt, but it preserved peace long enough to let France recover from a devastating reign of grandeur and war. The “System” of Law collapsed in bankruptcy, but it gave a powerful stimulus to the French economy. Those eight years saw the spread of free education, and the liberation of art and literature from royal tutelage and domination; they were the years of The Embarkation for Cythera, of Gil Blas, of Oedipe, of Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes. The Regency sent Voltaire to the Bastille, but it gave him such freedom and toleration as he would never know again in France even in the hour of his triumph and his death.

  IX. VOLTAIRE AND THE BASTILLE: 1715–26

  A characteristic passage in Saint-Simon describes a young upstart who made much noise during the Regency:

  Arouet, son of a notary who was employed by my father and me until his death, was exiled… to Tulle at this time [1716] for some verses very satirical and very impudent. I should not amuse myself by writing down such a trifle if this same Arouet, having become a great poet and academician under the name of Voltaire, had not also become… a manner of personage in the republic of letters, and even achieved a sort of importance among certain people.93

  This young upstart, now twenty-one, described himself as “thin, long, and fleshless, without buttocks.”94 Perhaps because of this disability, he pranced from one host or hostess to another, welcomed even in lordly circles for his sparkling verse and ready wit, imbibing and effusing heresy, and playing the gallant. Shining especially at Sceaux, he pleased the Duchesse du Maine by satirizing the Regent. When Philippe reduced by a half the horses in the royal stables, Arouet quipped that he would have done better to dismiss half the asses that crowded his Highness’s court. Worse yet, he seems to have set afloat some lines on the morals of the Duchesse de Berry. Voltaire denied authorship, but those lines were later published in his Works. He kept up this strategy of denial almost to the end of his life, as a forgivable protection against a threatening censorship. The Regent could pardon lampoons of himself, for they were often undeserved; but he was deeply hurt by squibs on his daughter, for they were mostly true. On May 5, 1716, he issued an order that “the Sieur Arouet, the son, be sent to Tulle”—a town three hundred miles south of Paris, famed for its odorous tanneries, not yet for the delicate fabric that later took its name. Arouet’s father persuaded the Regent to change the place of exile from Tulle to Sully-sur-Loire, a hundred miles from the capital. Arouet went, and was received as a house guest by the current Duc de Sully, descendant of Henry IV’s great minister.

  He enjoyed there everything but liberty. Soon he addressed a verse “Épître á M. le duc d’Orléans,” protesting his innocence, and begging release. It was granted; and by the end of the year he was back in Paris, fluttering and rhyming, sometimes obscenely, often superficially, always cleverly. Consequently any able satire running anonymously along café tables was ascribed to him. Early in 1717 an especially pointed diatribe appeared, in which each sentence began with J’ai vu—“I have seen.” For example:

  I have seen the Bastille and a thousand other prisons filled with brave citizens, faithful subjects.

  I have seen the people wretched under a rigorous servitude.

  I have seen the soldiery perishing of hunger, thirst… and rage.

  I have seen a devil in the guise of a woman… ruling the kingdom….

  I have seen Port-Royal demolished….

  I have seen—and this includes all—a Jesuit adored….

  I have seen these evils, and I am not yet twenty years old.95

  Obviously these verses referred to Louis XIV and Mme. de Maintenon, and they must have been written by a Jansenist foe of the Jesuits, rather than by an impious skeptic who still had a kindly beat in his heart for the Society of Jesus. The real author was A. L. Le Brun, who later begged Voltaire’s forgiveness for having let him bear the blame.96 But gossip lauded Arouet for the poem; literary gatherings importuned him to recite it, and no one (except the author) believed his denials. Reports to the Regent accused him not only of the J’ai-vus but also—and apparently with justice—of a Latin inscription, “Puero regnante…”—“A boy [Louis XV] reigning; a man notorious for poisoning and incest ruling;… public faith violated [failure of Law’s bank];… the country sacrificed to the hope of a crown; an inheritance basely anticipated; France about to perish.”97 On May 16, 1717, a lettre de cachet directed “that Sieur Arouet be arrested and taken to the Bastille.” The poet was surprised in his rooms, and was allowed to take with him nothing but the clothes he wore.

  He had no time to bid adieu to his current mistress, Suzanne de Livry; his friend Lefèvre de Genonville took his place on her bosom; Arouet pardoned them philosophically—“We must put up with these bagatelles.”98 A few years later Lefèvre
died, and Voltaire wrote to his memory verses that may exemplify the young rebel’s talent for gracious poetry, and the tender sentiments always deeper in him than his doubts:

  Il te souvient du temps, et l’aimable Égérie,

  Dans les beaux jours de notre vie,

  Nous nous aimions tous trois. La raison, la folie,

  L’amour, l’enchantement des plus tendres erreurs,

  Tout réunissait nos trois coeurs.

  Que nous étions heureux! même cette indigence,

  Triste compagne des beaux jours,

  Ne put de notre joie empoisonner le cours.

  Jeunes, gais, satisfaits, sans soins, sans prévoyance,

  Aux douceurs du présent bornant tous nos désirs,

  Quel besoin avions-nous d’une vaine abondance?

  Nous possédions bien mieux, nous avions les plaisirs.99 II

  Suzanne married the wealthy Marquis de Gouvernet, and refused to admit Voltaire when he called at her home. He consoled himself with the thought that “all the diamonds and pearls that deck her now are not worth one of her kisses in the old days.”100 He did not see her again until, fifty-one years later, he came back to Paris to die; then, aged eighty-three, he made it a point to visit the widowed Marquise, aged eighty-four. There was a devil in this Voltaire, but also the kindest heart in the world.

  He did not find the Bastille intolerable. He was allowed to send—and pay—for books, furniture, linen, a nightcap, and perfume; he often dined with the governor, played billiards and bowling with prisoners and guards; and he wrote La Henriade. The Iliad was among the books he had sent for; why should he not rival Homer? And why limit epics to legends? There, in living history, was Henry IV, gay, bold, heroic, lecherous, tolerant, generous; why could not that adventurous, tragic life be fit for epic poetry? The prisoner was not allowed writing paper, for this in his hands could be a deadly weapon; so he wrote the first half of his epic between the lines of printed books.