Passionate Minds

by David Bodanis

  For five years Arouet had been working on and off on a play that was a retelling of Sophocles' tale. There's an advantage in an author not finishing a work, especially a young author who hates limits. Until the work is done, who can possibly know what your limits are? But of course, in all that delaying, you still haven't achieved anything important.

  Now Arouet resolved to finish off his play, and he also began detailed plans for another serious work. He would write his way out of the miserable position his vanity had led him to fall into. As would happen many times in his long life to come, he needed to reach that rock bottom before finding the energy—to refute his father's negative judgments?—that would pull him out.

  Orléans hadn't been able to write the order for imprisonment on his own. It had to be couched as if it was the will of the now seven-year-old Louis XV. This, clearly, was inane. Arouet thought back to a period when France had been transformed for the better: to the reign of Henri IV, the king who'd declared that Protestants should be treated fairly, thus leading to a century of relative prosperity for France. Arouet wouldn't be able to get ink and paper within the Bastille, but he began a long history in verse anyway, using a pencil stub to scrawl text in the margins of the books that were passed around the prison, then, more carefully, memorizing hundreds of lines of what he composed (for he couldn't trust that he would be allowed to take with him any notebook in which he wrote them down).

  He also prepared a deeper change. His father had no respect for him, he knew that. He would now retaliate in kind. He was making a life of his own, and probably wasn't even truly descended from Arouet after all. Molière's original name had been Poquelin. François resolved that when he got out of prison, he would change his name as well. One theory is that he chose an anagram of “Arouet le jeune,” for in the style of the time the letters v and u were often substituted, as were j and i.

  (“Arouet le jeune” then become abbreviated as “Arovet l i.”) Another theory is that he took a name from a book of pseudonyms available in the prison. Whatever his reasoning, henceforth he would be his own man: the grand Orléans did in fact let him out, after just eleven months, in April 1718, feeling that enough of an example had been made. Voltaire was supposed to stay away from Paris, but gradually he was allowed back in the city to finish his texts and supervise rehearsals: first for just one day, then for a month, and finally for as long as he wanted.

  There were some changes, not least that the fair Suzanne (“who would not sin [for]… those alabaster breasts; those lovely eyes”) had dumped him for a young man named Génonville, whose merits, aside from not being a convict, included being rich and very easygoing. Voltaire could attest to that, as before his imprisonment Génonville had been a good friend of his as well. But Voltaire's contacts at the official theater, the Comédie Française, were still in place, and once he finished the final editing he was able, on November 18, 1718, to get his Oedipus performed after all.

  The play was the success of the decade, receiving wave after wave of ovation. Some verses came just from his recent experience:

  What we are feeling, our Kings cannot know,

  They lash at the innocent, with random blows.

  But other lines went further:

  Yes we can have faith,

  but only in ourselves.

  Yes we can look forward,

  but with our vision alone:

  Not with false guides,

  Nor with false gods.

  It expressed with efficiency the views of the aristocrats and upper professional classes in the audience, who were united in finding most of the Church's guidance laughable. The Reformation had been beaten back so completely in France that this Church had become astoundingly corrupt. Rich youngsters could be created bishops simply because their families bought the position for them. The youngsters so elevated rarely had a religious conviction to match their holy ascendance, and instead used their position almost entirely to accumulate mistresses and wealth.

  The audience had further reasons for mistrusting the official attitude about how to live. The top lawyers and physicians among them, for example, recognized that aristocrats were at the pinnacle of society, and they hated the fact that they were looked down upon for failing to have clawed their way up there. The snub was made worse because of the law regulating how an aristocrat could lose his title. Lack of education, lunacy, or profound alcoholism would have no effect at all. But if an aristocrat engaged in the indignity of actually working for a living, then he could be dropped from the nobility (and his family would lose their exemption from tax). As a result, the lawyers and not-yet-ennobled administrators loved dialogue suggesting that professional diligence was the superior guide to follow.

  The aristocrats in the audience, for their part, invariably hated the rising professionals. There were ever more of these narrow creatures, who showed a distressing skill at acquiring wealth in business and law, despite the tax disadvantages they suffered from actually working. But the play mocked the administrative positions that many of the rising professionals had purchased for their families as well.

  Voltaire was careful never to go too far. The graceful verses in his Oedipus play didn't say which particular bishops or pompous officials were unworthy. He wasn't going to chance imprisonment again; the regent was mentioned not at all. All Voltaire was really doing was giving his audience an outlet for their general discontents. Nobody, of course, took it as undercutting the whole system of kings and regents and court appointees, for no one in the audience felt they were living seventy years before the French Revolution. On the contrary, they were part of a world that had existed stably for untold centuries, where there was a royal elite on top of society, peasants at the bottom, and a strict class system safely holding all the parts in between together. To move to better positions within that system might be desirable, and to be reminded of how so many individuals blocked you was satisfying as well. But there was no thought of putting the system as a whole in question.

  The play went on to run for more consecutive performances than any other of the time. The British ambassador attended and reported to London that Voltaire was “ye best poet maybe ever was in France.” As news of the play's success continued, George I sent this foreign marvel a gold watch and medal. A distinguished prince wrote an ode in Voltaire's honor, exalting him above Pierre Corneille, the great dramatist of the previous century, and inviting the young poet to dine. Voltaire even got his father to attend one performance, and—perhaps despite himself—the old man was seen applauding madly.

  Even Orléans relented, bestowing on the new “Voltaire” the closest he could get to an apology: yet another gold watch and, better yet, a substantial annual subsidy. (Though when Orléans personally told him of the annuity, Voltaire replied that although he thanked the regent for helping to pay for his food, in the future he would prefer to take care of his lodgings himself.)

  Paris was far more welcoming than before. When he met Suzanne de Livry again she quickly explained that she hadn't really been interested in Génonville—these silly oversights will happen—and as Voltaire would have heard, or at least she would now tell him, she had already dumped that really quite unimpressive young man. It was to Voltaire that she had been attracted all along. Voltaire believed her, sort of, or at least appreciated how she then carried out her apologies. He commissioned a leading artist to paint his portrait for her, which she liked, but when he also accepted her suggestion to cast her as Jocasta (Oedipus' mother) in a planned revival of his great play, she liked that even more.

  Unfortunately, Suzanne's skills didn't extend to the theater boards, and when she laboriously declaimed the lines of the queen of Thebes in her strong rural accent the crowd hooted and booed. For a while Voltaire defended her, and they continued spending time together. But there was also an up-and-coming actress at the Comédie Française, Adrienne Lecouvreur, who had a breezy, natural manner of speaking unknown before. Actresses were usually considered little more than conveniently display
ed prostitutes (“it was routine to offer a performance in bed, after a performance in the theater”). That made this new woman's obvious intelligence especially startling. Audiences were enchanted, and to Suzanne's distress, and Lecouvreur's contentment, Voltaire became close with her as well.

  Everything was going right. Voltaire made connections at court and at one point was sent by the French prime minister on secretive missions to the German states and to Brussels—somewhat between espionage and diplomacy—where he satisfied the minister, and certainly satisfied himself, playing tennis daily, riding horses, visiting most intriguing brothels, and all in all reporting that he “felt so well that he was astonished.”

  Back in France he spent weeks on end in the country homes of his new aristocrat friends, spinning out rhymes for his hosts, pleasing them with conversation about music and social intrigue and the arts, putting down anyone who talked too much about finances or politics or real science. Instead, in Rouen he made friends with the marquis de Bernières, made love with the marquis's wife, and when he couldn't be with her in person maintained a correspondence that all three appreciated.

  Voltaire remained as wickedly quick as ever. If conversation turned to sibling rivalries, he might point out that indeed it was true that brothers argued—which was why the sovereigns of Europe were called brothers to each other. If they were discussing a poet who was writing an ode to posterity, he could remark that, knowing this poet, he doubted whether the gift would reach its destination.

  His long poem on Henri IV was finished, or at least an early version was. Since it lauded that king, who'd encouraged religious minorities, by implication it was critical of Louis XIV, who'd believed in persecuting non-Catholics. (If a suspected Protestant tried not to swallow a wafer being stuffed in his mouth at communion, the penalty— which king and Church supported—could be to be dragged out of the church and burned alive.) Voltaire arranged for copies to be printed abroad and smuggled past the guards at the gates of Paris, stowed neatly inside the furniture-laden carriages of a wealthy friend; daring readers left it on their tables for visitors to see.

  But that was about the extent of his rebellion. Voltaire was aware that the Protestant thinker Pierre Bayle had written deep critiques of the whole French establishment's selfishness and waste, but he was not going to jeopardize his new life by elaborating on that, let alone use his charm to galvanize any unified opposition to the established powers in the land.

  The years were passing since he'd been in the Bastille. As his midtwenties turned into his late twenties and he moved about France (“I spend my days traveling from château to château”), Voltaire especially began spending time with his closest friend, the duc de Sully, who luckily was a bachelor, with an estate on the Loire that was huge, wooded, and inviting. Many distinguished women visited, as well as a number of selected locals. In quiet sections of the forest, Voltaire noted, the bark on the trees was getting ever more carved with intertwined names gouged by the various couples who'd enjoyed time there. There were evenings spent gossiping under the stars, drunkenly trying to make sense of astronomy, though since the visitors used opera glasses rather than telescopes, the locations of the planets were regularly muddled.

  Was it enough? To stern lawyers such as Voltaire's father it was the waste of a life. But Voltaire was determined to be accepted among this easy, aristocratic crowd. He knew that his father had never been able to afford a noble title and had constantly suffered insults to his dignity from old-money families who had been ennobled for so long that all doors in top society were open for them. Voltaire once wrote that “in this world one is reduced to being either hammer or anvil.” He was not going to be an anvil anymore.

  This aimless, lilting life might have gone on forever, but one evening in January 1725, when Voltaire had just turned thirty-one and was at the opera with his friends around him, an arrogant aristocrat whom he'd known vaguely from Sully's circles came up to join them. This was Auguste de Rohan-Chabot, who was always slower than Voltaire in conversation and must have recognized how much he was shown up at those long picnics or dinners at Sully's estate. Now de Rohan called out words to the effect of Ah, there you are, M. Voltaire, or Arouet, or whatever it is you call yourself. It was a slur, a reminder of Voltaire's origins, but trying to win a match of wits with Voltaire was not an intelligent gambit. Voltaire easily replied: Yes, I am the first to honor my name, but what have you done to honor yours? Then he turned away; the fool had been seen off.

  A few days later Voltaire was at the Comédie Française, with Adrienne Lecouvreur—now the most sought-after actress of the time— sitting close to him. The theater was plush but had been built around a long open space, and there were stretches of darkness between the clusters of candles. De Rohan might have been stalking him, for he appeared again. (De Rohan had also had an ancestor who'd been humiliated in love by a lowly playwright—Racine—so seeing Voltaire with Lecouvreur probably made him more upset.) I repeat what I said to you before, de Rohan was said to have muttered. Voltaire looked back at him, unfazed, and responded calmly: I've already told you my reply.

  At that de Rohan reached for his cane, to hit Voltaire for his impudence, but Voltaire tried to grab for a weapon as well. There were shrieks, and Lecouvreur conveniently fainted before anything more could happen. De Rohan stormed away.

  Everyone talked about it, not least Voltaire, who yet another few days later was dining at Sully's townhouse, on the Rue St. Antoine, when there was a knock on the big gated door. It was cold outside on this winter midday, and one of Sully's servants carried the message in: there was a gentleman outside to see Mr. Voltaire.

  Voltaire went out and had only a moment to recognize de Rohan's carriage before a group of de Rohan's bodyguards jumped him. They smashed him with cudgels and kept on beating him, breathing hard, as he went down. De Rohan watched, delighted, from inside his carriage, “supervising the workers,” as he later described it. Finally he called them off: it was enough to leave this rascal bleeding and splayed in the dirt.

  Somehow Voltaire managed to crawl back to the gates and drag himself into Sully's home. But instead of sympathy or even outrage, he found a great cold distance. Sully and his friends had nothing to say. They certainly wouldn't go to the police with him to back up his complaint. A wordsmith had overstepped certain bounds and now had simply been put in his place.

  Voltaire was dumbfounded. How could his friends do this to him? He managed to clean himself up a bit, and set out to reach his other aristocratic friends in Paris. But they too now all withdrew. Jolly rhymes were one thing—that's what clever commoners were brought to great country houses for. But no one was going to turn against a fellow aristocrat who had been in danger of being humbled.

  Everything he'd assumed true was falling apart. After one final try at Versailles he gave up on his wealthy friends. Voltaire would take revenge on his own. The sentence for murder was death, but he didn't care.

  For several weeks he dropped out of sight, but then reports appeared that Voltaire had begun to take fencing lessons. This was getting too serious. De Rohan's uncle was a cardinal. He had a word with the now fourteen-year-old king, there was a police hunt, and on the night of April 17 Voltaire was arrested.

  Voltaire tried a final time, writing with his coldest irony to the secretary of state, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Maurepas:

  My lord, I submit very humbly that I have been attacked by the Cheva-lier de Rohan, helped by six cut-throats, behind whom he had courageously stationed himself. Since then I have sought to restore, not my honor, but his…. I am, my lord, your very humble and very obedient servant, Voltaire.

  But Phélypeaux had nothing in common with Voltaire. He had been granted high office as a boy, and the world of inherited privilege— de Rohan's world—was all that he knew. There was a lesson to be taught. When the guards arrested Voltaire, there was only one place for him. Seven years before, Voltaire had been freed from the one confinement he hated more than any other. In
all the time since he had trusted the new world of connections he'd built up. Yet where were any of them now?

  In April 1725 he was thrown into the Bastille again, but that wasn't enough: he was still a danger from the attention he was getting, plus the likelihood he would try to attack de Rohan again if he was let out. After just two weeks he was escorted to the port of Calais. There were ships there to England, or the forests of America, or the deserts of the Sahara. It didn't matter which he got on, but he was being expelled from France.

  3

  Young Woman

  BURGUNDY AND PARIS, 1727–1731

  Emilie's confidence had been knocked out of her by her marriage. Her husband, Florent-Claude, was kind enough, and never criticized her for spending so much time reading—if anything, he seemed proud to have such an intelligent wife. But he was busy supervising his military garrisons and largely left his young bride behind with his sisters, to deal with the two children—a boy and a girl—they'd quickly had.

  Even child rearing wasn't something she could take much pride in, for parents of her class were strongly discouraged from spending much time with their children when very young. There were wet nurses and nannies to handle these “primitive” tasks.