Passionate Minds

by David Bodanis

  It was at this point that Voltaire's luck turned. In Paris the year before, he had met a passing English trader, Everard Fawkener, back from several years in Syria trading silk garments between Europe and India. Most educated Frenchmen had snubbed Fawkener for being a mere tradesman, but not Voltaire. He'd chatted with Fawkener about his business, and the archaeological sites he'd poked around in Syria, and now, in England, seemingly by chance—or with a little help from Voltaire—they met again. Fawkener had a mansion in the bucolic wonderland of Wandsworth, a country town with its own windmills outside of London. Voltaire needed a place to stay. He knew that there were a number of French-speaking émigrés in London, and with his literary reputation he could probably find one among them to stay with. If he did that, though, he wouldn't learn much of England: he'd stay immersed in émigré politics, and émigré arguments, and an émigré's ever more out-of-date language. He was too proud to do that, yet he was also too proud to scurry back to Paris and beg to be accepted by the French authorities again.

  Why couldn't he learn English well enough to become a great author in England instead?

  Fawkener had no idea what he was letting himself in for. Voltaire invited himself over and stayed for a week, and then another week, and then another, and yet another: he was transforming into that horror of the English countryside: The Guest Who Never Leaves. But he had one goal—to learn English perfectly—and he'd found the ideal place to do it.

  He began (“thirty and one of july a thousand seven hundred twenty and six”) by keeping a journal, carefully noting down verbs of interest. “Mr. Scuttlars history,” he slowly printed in English, “… He cured his wife of the spleen, with a good fuking.” Then Voltaire struck out the word fuking and above it thoughtfully wrote the shorter variant fuk, to be sure he got the spelling right. When he needed help in pronunciation he made his way to the theater at Drury Lane, where the prompter loaned him a copy of that night's Shakespeare script, so he could mouth the words to himself while listening to the actors speak them.

  He kept on going to the theater, and he kept up his journal, and just three months after moving in with Fawkener, the no longer indolent Voltaire had it cracked. By October he casually wrote a friend the following note, in English: “I intend to send you two or three poems of Mr Pope, the best poet of England, and at present, of all the world. I hope you are acquainted enough with the English tongue, to be sensible of all the charms of his works.” He knew very well which poems were considered good, for he'd begun corresponding with Pope, and soon Jonathan Swift, and Sir Hans Sloane, and Samuel Clarke (rector of St. James's, Piccadilly), and almost everyone else who counted in England.

  Voltaire got so good so quickly that when he finally did move out of Fawkener's home, he could joke—also in English—with Bolingbroke's secretary, John Brinsden (who had two school-age children):

  Sir, I wish you good health, a quick sale of your burgundy, much latin and greek to one of your children, much law… to the other, quiet and joy to mistress Brinsden, money to all… But dear John be so kind as to let me know how does mylady Bolingbroke.

  Since he was fluent in English, and the Bolingbrokes—both lord and mylady—were back from their summer country house, soon he was introduced everywhere in the bizarre country that was England. The distance of under thirty miles across the Channel meant a great deal then, for with no regular travel, and of course no television, radio, or magazine pictures, Voltaire had had hardly any clear idea of what to expect.

  Personal servants, he found, didn't have to carry letters between individual homes for delivery within a few hours: instead there was a “postal service,” more efficient than anything in France. He also learned that, at least in the wealthiest mansions, servants didn't have to carry water from room to room—there were miniature pumps and pipes instead, an arrangement that Paris entirely lacked.

  He discovered strange, meat-avoiding beings called “vegetarians,” who compounded their oddity by going for long brisk walks for their health. He found his way to the Royal Exchange, where there was the greater oddity that “the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together as tho' they all professed the same religion… and give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupt.” In France that would have been impossible, for non-Catholics were forbidden positions of power, and as seen, until recently when Protestants had been identified— often by informers—they had been tortured or thrown into slavery on galley ships.

  Often around London there were fierce military recruiters with bearskin hats and rapping drums, with the king's authority behind them, but Voltaire also learned that there were some Britons opposed to all that. He made his way to the wooded isolation of Hampstead, and discovered even greater radicals, called “Quakers.”

  “The reason of our not using the outward sword,” Voltaire recorded a leading Quaker there, Andrew Pitt, explaining:

  is that we are neither wolves, tygers, nor mastiffs, but men and Christians. Our God…would certainly not permit us to cross the seas, merely because murtherers cloath'd in scarlet, and wearing caps two foot high enlist citizens by a noise made with two little sticks on an ass's skin extended…. When, after a victory is gain'd the whole city of London is illuminated; when the sky is in a blaze of fireworks, and a noise is heard in the air of thanksgivings, of bells, of organs, and of the cannon, we groan in silence, and are deeply affected with sadness of spirit and brokenness of heart, for the sad havock which is the occasion of those public rejoycings.

  How could this be? In France, no religion that opposed the king's militarism could survive. But in England there was far more freedom for minority religions than in France. Voltaire talked it over with Bolingbroke, and he read Swift's newly published Gulliver's Travels (“stick to the first [volume], the other is overstrained”), and he began to imagine a new way to work. He'd been a poet before, and willing to mock public inanities, but that had mostly been in scattered, merely clever remarks. There was no system, no consistent vision.

  What if he could create a new form of writing to take his new insights further?

  It couldn't be through poetry—it's too hard to carry logical arguments along that way—so he would have to find his new approach in prose. The letters he'd been writing to Thieriot could be a start, since letters seem an innocuous, nonthreatening style of writing. But their very informality would allow him to casually put across views that in fact he'd thought about a lot. If he compiled enough of these chatty yet analytic letters, building up on each other, he could develop a powerful critique of his home country.

  He began editing his letters to Thieriot, playing with ways of drawing out the conclusions he liked. The more he saw of England's probusiness attitude, for example, the more he liked it. “I do not know,” he tried composing, “which is the more useful to the State, a well powdered courtier who knows to a moment the hour at which the King rises and at which he goes to bed…or a merchant who is enriching his country, who gives from his office orders for [Bombay] and for Cairo, and who contributes to the happiness of the world.” Voltaire realized this would be the way to show what else was wrong about the profoundly snobbish country he'd left behind.

  There was a lot more to learn in England, about religion and business and science (although Newton had had the bad grace to die just a bit too soon to be interviewed by Voltaire). Yet as the months in England turned into years, in 1727 and especially 1728, his enthusiasm began to fade. Voltaire had been enjoying himself, and even had the good fortune that Suzanne de Livry had arrived in London, alone and lost and needing comforting. But there comes a time when every émigré has to face what it would really mean to be in exile forever.

  Voltaire's English was better than ever, and he wrote poems in English and began literary works (“You will be surprised,” he wrote in English to Swift, a year after he arrived, “in receiving an English essay from a french traveller”). But he recognized that he was never going to be able to write like Shakespeare, while in France he'd received acclai
m for writing as well as Racine and Molière.

  He began to spend time with other Frenchmen in London, at their coffee shops near the Strand. He missed the easy conversation in his native language. De Rohan was disagreeable but wasn't going to show his cowardice by attacking him again. Politics was changing, and there had been letters hinting that the court might be ready to discreetly overlook what had happened. Voltaire had been in England long enough. It was time to go home.

  He arrived back in France in the autumn of 1728, a little over two years after leaving. For a few months he cautiously stayed far from Paris, going over his notes, trying to relax by horse riding and working at his tennis. His good friend Richelieu was still stationed in Vienna, and Voltaire wrote asking him to check with his contacts at court and in the police if it really would be safe to enter the capital. By early 1729 he received confirmation, and probably in April that year he went back.

  There was no question what he would do first. “I was not born rich, far from it… [and] I saw so many poor and despised men of letters that I decided… not to add to their numbers…. There is always one way or another by which a private individual can profit without incurring an obligation to anyone.”

  His lessons in ingenuity went far back. Voltaire had been a student at the Jesuit school Louis le Grand in the hunger year of 1709, when a catastrophic winter saw wolves enter the outskirts of many French cities, and the failure of crops the subsequent summer caused mass starvation. The clerics who ran the school had managed to keep the students fed and scrounged enough wood for the stoves through one series of black-market machinations after another. Although Voltaire had not been taught any science or modern history, that example of practical skill from his teachers and others had done wonders in showing him how obstacles could be overcome.

  He had the opportunity to use that now, right at the moment of his return to Paris. The city government had recently defaulted on its municipal bonds, which meant that there were a lot of wealthy individuals who owned valueless bonds. If the government left it at that, those individuals would be very wary of ever investing in future bond issues. To show good faith—and make up for some of the investors' losses—the city government now decided to offer a lottery, to which only owners of those now valueless bonds could apply. Since the angry bondholders wouldn't participate in an ordinary lottery (having been so misled before), the government decided to go further and add substantial extra funds to the total lottery amount. The government felt this was safe, since it expected only a few holders of the original bonds to invest, despite the sweetener of the increased payment per ticket.

  What it didn't reckon with was Voltaire's ingenuity, aided by his new friend the mathematician La Condamine. Voltaire had been audacious and creative in literature. Now he applied the same skills to finance. What if someone went around and bought all the valueless bonds that were in default? It was easy enough, for the owners of the bonds were still so upset at having lost all their money in the city's original default that they didn't really believe the promises the city gave that there would be extra money in the lottery.

  In fact, though, these bonds weren't quite valueless, for Voltaire— and La Condamine, and a very few others he brought into his syndicate—weren't blinded by that recent experience of financial loss, and so understood that the bonds were “tickets” they could use to enter the city's lottery. And since the city genuinely had added extra funds to sweeten the lottery…

  The only possible way that Voltaire could lose would be if, by horrible chance, one of the original bondholders entered the lottery. To forestall that, he and La Condamine effectively bought every single one of the defaulted bonds. In other words, they bought, at a greatly discounted price, almost every ticket for a lottery that was guaranteed to pay out more than the total price of all its tickets.

  They got very, very rich. Voltaire amassed a fortune that— combined with other shrewd investments—meant not only did he never have to worry about money, or ask an aristocratic “friend” for financial help, ever again in his life, but he was actually now richer than most aristocrats in France.

  Now he was free; now he could do what he wished. But what was that? He couldn't really spend much time with Sully or his other previous hosts. They might be willing not to bring up the de Rohan matter, but they were never going to apologize for their coldness. And they had all been complacent—almost enjoying the joke—when his Rouen mistress, de Bernières, had ostentatiously gone to the Opera on the arm of de Rohan himself, just a few months after the beating outside Sully's.

  There were other reminders of what he couldn't accept. With Suzanne left behind in England, he'd started up with the intelligent, breezy actress Adrienne Lecouvreur again. But then, scarcely a year after he got back, and with Adrienne only in her thirties, she seems to have been struck by typhoid and died. (Paris still got much of its drinking water from the Seine, into which a city's worth of raw sewage poured.) Voltaire had spent her last days trying to help her, but when she died he found that she couldn't be buried in any of the cemeteries she'd have wished for—since she was an actress, she was officially excommunicated by the Catholic Church in France.

  Instead of a respectable burial, where Voltaire and her family could have mourned, her body was dragged away in a cheap municipal carriage and thrown into a shallow grave in an open field outside the city gates. Sizzling lime was poured over her corpse, and that was it: it was unsanctified ground, and no headstone or any other memorial was allowed.

  How could this happen? In England in the same year, the great actress Anne Oldfield died, and in the British tradition was granted a richly attended funeral in Westminster Abbey. That was how Voltaire wished Lecouvreur had been commemorated. He wrote bitter lines of poetry about the injustice to Lecouvreur, contrasting it with what happened in Britain, and he called on future generations as yet unborn to remember that such a thing could once have occurred.

  He recognized that the reason had to lie in some deep difference between France and England. On the surface, the two countries had many similarities: both had overseas empires and had suffered civil wars and great religious battles. Yet England respected its artists and thinkers—Newton had been buried in Westminster Abbey as well—in a way that France did not. The entire climate of opinion was different. Possibly it was linked to the greater tyrannical power of the French king, and the court's dislike of any competitors; possibly—in some way Voltaire couldn't yet grasp—it was linked to the more advanced developments in science over in England. But although he wanted to put a section on Newton right at the center of what became known as his Letters from England, the mathematics was too hard for him to advance on his own.

  He fell back on poetry and drama. The fame from his Oedipus play and other writings had lingered, and he was still respected as an important writer in France. But that simply meant he had to spend boring evenings in the salons of Paris (“If you neglect to enroll yourself among the courtiers, you are…crushed”). Was Bolingbroke right, after all, that he was never going to fulfill his promise?

  The years went on, he was getting old—in his late thirties by now—and possibly he was getting disheartened as well. Despite the clove mouth rinse he used on his teeth, his gums were receding; he often suffered from terrible dysentery as well.

  To save the effort of supervising a staff of servants and cooks and porters he moved in with a wealthy and shockingly unattractive widow, who luckily had no sexual interest in him (but enjoyed the reflected fame of this author's presence). When she died, in January 1733, he moved again, to a house near the river in central Paris. He was investing in the grain business, and also had been overseeing a factory to fabricate paper, and wanted to be near the dock where his barges arrived in the city. It was a life, but not a very interesting one. He had no one to fight against, but no one to live for either. He was in a rut.

  And then, one summer evening, a couple he knew came visiting. They were bringing a friend: a young woman who divided her time betwe
en Semur and Paris. They thought the two might like each other.

  5

  Meeting… and Caution

  PARIS, 1733–1734

  The friends and Emilie turned up, giggling and laughing, in this unfashionable quarter of Paris just before dusk on a warm summer's night. Voltaire might have called down from his windows, but he couldn't invite his visitors in, for there wasn't enough food—without refrigerators it was hard to store fresh meat in the summer—and anyway his housekeeper would yell at him if he asked her to get something together this late. It was easier to go out.

  They rode to an inn outside the city walls, they had chicken cooked in wine, there were candles everywhere, and Emilie sparkled as her words leaped around Voltaire's. He'd never even had a male friend like this, so what kind God had created this delightful woman, still just twenty-seven?

  Voltaire kept it a secret at first. To the mutual friend who'd brought Emilie, he merely wrote a polite thank-you for the evening. But he and Emilie had become lovers almost immediately, and just a few weeks later he wrote a poem for Emilie:

  …Why did you only reach me so late?

  What happened to my life before?

  I hunted for love, but found only mirages

  I found only the shadow of our pleasure.

  You are a delight

  You are tender

  What pleasure I find in your arms