The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  Prostitution was popular among the poor and the rich. In the towns employers paid their female help less than the cost of necessaries, and allowed them to supplement their daily labor with nocturnal solicitation.14 A contemporary scribe reckoned the prostitutes in Paris at forty thousand; another estimate said sixty thousand.15 Public opinion, except in the middle classes, was lenient to such women; it knew that many nobles, clerics, and other pillars of society helped to create the demand that generated this supply; and it had the decency to condemn the poor vendor less than the affluent purchaser. The police looked the other way except when some private or public complaint was made against the filles; then a wholesale arrest would be made to clear the skirts of the government; the women would be herded before some judge, who would condemn them to jail or hospital; they would be shaved and disciplined, and soon released, and their hair would grow again. If they gave too much trouble, or offended a man of power, they could be sent to Louisiana. Insolent courtesans displayed their carriages and jewels on the Cours-la-Reine in Paris or on the promenade at Longchamp.16 If they secured membership, even as supernumeraries, in the Comédie-Française or the Opéra, they were usually immune to arrest for selling their charms. Some of them rose to be artists’ models or the kept women of nobles or financiers. Some captured husbands, titles, fortunes; one became the Baronne de Saint-Chamond.

  Love marriages, without parental consent, were increasing in number and in literature, and they were recognized as legal if sworn to before a notary. But in the great majority of cases, even in the peasantry, marriages were still arranged by the parents as a union of properties and families rather than as a union of persons. The family, not the individual, was the unit of society; hence the continuity of the family and its property was held more important than the passing pleasures or tender sentiments of precipitate youth. Moreover, said a peasant to his daughter, “chance is less blind than love.”17

  The legal age of marriage was fourteen for boys, thirteen for girls, but they might be legally betrothed from the age of seven, which medieval philosophy had fixed as beginning the “age of reason.” The hounds of desire were so hot in the chase that parents married off their daughters as soon as practicable to avoid untimely deflowering; so the Marquise de Sauve-boeuf was a widow at thirteen. Girls in the middle and upper classes were kept in convents until their mates had been chosen; then they were hurried from nunnery to matrimony, and had to be well guarded on the way. In this immoral regime nearly all women were virgins at marriage.

  Since the French aristocracy disdained commerce and industry, and feudal revenues seldom paid for court residence and display, the nobility resigned itself to mating its land-rich, money-poor sons with land-poor, money-rich daughters of the upper bourgeoisie. When the son of the Duchesse de Chaulnes objected to marrying the richly dowered daughter of the merchant Bonnier, the mother explained to him that “to marry advantageously beneath oneself is merely taking dung to manure one’s acres.”18 Usually, in such unions, the titled son, while using his wife’s livres, periodically reminded her of her lowly origin, and soon took a mistress to certify his scorn. This too was remembered when the middle classes aided the Revolution.

  No social stigma, in the aristocracy, was attached to adultery; it was accepted as a pleasant substitute for the divorce that the national religion forbade. A husband serving in the army or the provinces might take a mistress without giving his wife an acceptable reason for complaint. He or she might be separated by attendance at court or duties on the manor; again he might take a mistress. Since marriage was contracted with no pretense that sentiment could override property, many noble couples lived much of their lives apart, mutually licensing each other’s sins, provided these were gracefully veiled and, in the woman’s case, confined to one man at a time. Montesquieu made his Persian traveler report that in Paris “a husband who would wish to have sole possession of his wife would be regarded as a disturber of public happiness, and as a fool who should wish to enjoy the light of the sun to the exclusion of other men.”19 The Duc de Lauzun, who for ten years had not seen his wife, was asked what he would say if his wife sent him word that she was pregnant; he answered like an eighteenth-century gentleman: “I would write and tell her that I was delighted that Heaven had blessed our union; be careful of your health; I will call and pay my respects this evening.”20 Jealousy was bad form.

  The champion adulterer and model of fashion in this age was Louis François Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, grandnephew of the austere Cardinal. A dozen titled ladies fell in turn into his bed, drawn by his rank, his wealth, and his reputation. When his ten-year-old son was rebuked for slow progress in Latin, he retorted, “My father never knew Latin, and yet he had the fairest women in France.”21 This did not prevent the Duke’s election to the French Academy twenty-three years before his friend and creditor Voltaire, who was two years his senior. Public opinion frowned, however, when he served as procurer of concubines for the King. Mme. Geoffrin barred him from her circle as an “épluchure [select assemblage] des grands vices.”22 He lived to the age of ninety-two, escaping the Revolution by one year.

  Such being the relations of spouses, we can imagine the fate of their children. In the nobility they were frankly treated as impediments. They were dismissed at birth to wet nurses; they were brought up by governesses and tutors; they only intermittently saw their parents. Talleyrand said he had never slept under the same roof as his father and mother. Parents thought it wise to maintain a respectful distance between themselves and their progeny; intimacy was exceptional, familiarity was unheard of. The son always addressed his father as “monsieur”; the daughter kissed her mother’s hand. When the children grew up they were sent off to the army, to the Church, or to a nunnery. As in England, nearly all the property went to the eldest son.

  This way of life continued in the court nobility till the accession of Louis XVI in 1774. It revealed in another aspect the loss of religious belief in the upper classes; the Christian conception of marriage, like the medieval ideal of chivalry, was quite abandoned; the pursuit of pleasure was more nakedly “pagan” than at any time since Imperial and decadent Rome. Many works on morality were published in eighteenth-century France, but books of deliberate indecency abounded, and circulated widely, though clandestinely. “The French,” wrote Frederick the Great, “and above all the inhabitants of Paris, were now sybarites enervated by pleasure and ease.”23 The Marquis d’Argenson, about 1749, saw in the decline of moral sensibility another omen of national disaster:

  The heart is a faculty of which we despoil ourselves every day by giving it no exercise, while the mind is continually sharpened and refined. We become more and more intellectual.… I predict that this realm will perish from the extinction of the faculties that derive from the heart. We have no more friends; we no longer love our mistresses; how shall we love our country? … Men lose daily some part of that fine quality which we call sensibility. Love, and the need to love, disappear.… Calculations of interest absorb us continually; everything is a commerce of intrigue.… The interior fire goes out for lack of nourishment; a paralysis creeps over the heart.24

  It is the voice of Pascal speaking for Port-Royal, the voice of Rousseau a generation before Jean Jacques, the voice of sensitive spirits in any age of intellectual ferment and liberation. We shall hear it again.

  III. MANNERS

  Never was a reckless morality so gilded with refinement of manners, elegance of dress and speech, variety of pleasures, the charm of women, the flowery politeness of correspondence, the brilliance of intellect and wit. “Never before had there been in France, nor was there in contemporary Europe, nor … has there ever been in the world since, a society so polished, so intelligent, so delightful, as French society of the eighteenth century.”25 The French, said Hume in 1741, “have in a great measure perfected that art, the most useful and agreeable of any, l’art de vivre, the art of society and conversation.”26 It was toward the end of this period t
hat the word civilization came into use. It did not appear in Johnson’s Dictionary in 1755, nor in the Grand Vocabulaire published in thirty volumes in Paris in 1768.

  The French felt especially civilized in their dress. Men quite rivaled women in the care they took with their clothes. In the upper classes fashion required them to wear a large three-cornered hat, with feathers and gold braid; but as this disturbed their wigs they usually wore it under the arm. Wigs were smaller now than under the Great King, but they were more general, even among artisans. There were twelve hundred wig shops in Paris, with six thousand employees. Hair and wig were powdered. Male hair was usually long, caught behind the neck by a ribbon or in a bag. A long coat of fancy coloring and material—generally of velvet—covered the inner’ costume, which showed a vest open at the throat, a fluffy silk shirt, a wide cravat, and sleeves spreading into ornate ruffles at the wrists. Knee breeches (culottes) were colored; stockings were of white silk, shoes were buckled with silver clasps. Courtiers, as a distinguishing mark, wore shoes with red heels. Some of them used whalebones to keep their coattails in proper spread; some wore diamonds in their buttonholes; all carried a sword, and some a cane. The wearing of a sword was forbidden to servants, apprentices, and musicians.27 The bourgeois dressed simply, in coat and culottes of plain dark cloth, with stockings of black or gray wool, and shoes with thick soles and low heels. Artisans and household help took on the discarded garments of the rich; the elder Mirabeau grumbled that he could not tell a blacksmith from a lord.

  Women still enjoyed the freedom of their legs within the spacious sanctum of their farthingales. The clergy denounced as “she-monkeys” and “clerks of the Devil” the women who wore such hoopskirts, but the ladies loved them for the majesty they gave to their figures even when enceintes. Mme. de Créqui tells us, “I could not whisper to Mme. d’Egmont, because our hoops prevented our being near together.”28 Milady’s high-heeled shoes—of colored leather set off with embroidery of silver or gold—made her feet entrancing if unseen; her bootmakers rose into the upper bourgeoisie by such artistry; romances were written about a pretty foot, which was usually a pretty shoe. Almost as exciting were the flowered heelless “mules” which Milady wore at home. Useful also were the flounces, ribbons, fans, and pretintailles, or ornamental “pretties,” that caught the male’s roving eye or disguised the female’s roving form. Corsets of whalebone molded that form to fashionable shape. Enough of the bosom was shown to certify a cozy amplitude. Coiffures were low and simple; the tower hairdo waited till 1763. Cosmetics doctored hands, arms, face, and hair; but men fell little short of women in using perfume. Every ladylike face was painted and powdered, and strategically patched with beauty-spot mouches (flies) made of black silk and cut in the shape of hearts, teardrops, moons, comets, or stars. A great lady would wear seven or eight of these pasted on the forehead, on the temples, near the eyes, and at the corners of the mouth; she carried a patch-box with additional mouches in case any should fall off. A rich lady’s boudoir table shone with nécessaires— boxes of gold or silver or lapis lazuli designed to hold toiletries. Costly jewels sparkled on arms, throat, and ears, and in the hair. Favored males were admitted to the boudoir to converse with Milady as her maids equipped her for the campaigns of the day. In the aristocracy men were slaves to women, women were slaves to fashion, and fashion was determined by couturiers. Attempts to control fashion or dress by sumptuary laws were abandoned in France after 1704. Western Europe generally followed French fashions, but there was also a reverse flow: so the marriage of Louis XV with Marie Leszczyńska brought in styles à la Polonaise; the war against Austria-Hungary introduced hongrelines; and the marriage of the Dauphin to the Infanta María Teresa Rafaela (1745) restored the mantilla to popularity in France.

  Meals were not as ornate as dress, but they required as subtle and varied a science, as delicate an art. French cooking was already the model and peril of Christendom. Voltaire warned his countrymen in 1749 that their heavy repasts would “eventually numb all the faculties of the mind”;29 he gave a good example of simple diet and nimble wits. The higher the class, the more was eaten; so a typical dinner at the table of Louis XV included soup, a roast of beef, a cut of veal, some chicken, a partridge, a pigeon, fruit, and preserves.30 “There are very few peasants,” Voltaire tells us, “who eat meat more than once a month.”31 Vegetables were a luxury in the city, for it was difficult to keep them fresh. Eels were in fashion. Some grands seigneurs spent 500,000 livres a year on their cuisine; one spent 72,000 on a dinner given to the King and the court. In great houses the maître d’hôtel was a person of impressive majesty; he was richly clad, wore a sword, and flashed a diamond ring. Women cooks were contemned. Cooks were ambitious to invent new dishes to immortalize their masters; so France ate filet de volaille à la Bellevue (Pompadour’s favorite palace), poulets à la Villeroi, and sauce mayonnaise which commemorated the victory of Richelieu at Mahón.32 The main meal was taken at three or four in the afternoon; supper was added at nine or ten.

  Coffee now rivaled wine as a drink. Michelet must have loved coffee, for he thought that its mounting influx from Arabia, India, the island of Bourbon, and the Caribbean contributed to the exhilaration of spirit that marked the Enlightenment.33 Every apothecary sold coffee in grain or in a drink at the counter. There were three hundred cafés in Paris in 1715, six hundred in 1750, and a proportionate number in the provincial towns. At the Café Procope—called also the Cave, because it was always kept dark—Diderot spilled ideas and Voltaire came in disguise to hear comments on his latest play. Such coffeehouses were the salons of the commoners, where men might play chess or checkers or dominoes, and, above all, talk; for men had grown lonelier as city crowds had increased.

  Clubs were private cafés, restricted in membership and tending to specific interests. So the Abbé Alari established (c. 1721) the Club de l’Entresol (a mezzanine in the abbé’s home) where some twenty statesmen, magistrates, and men of letters gathered to discuss the problems of the day, including religion and politics. Bolingbroke gave it its name, and so brought the word club into the French language. There the Abbé de Saint-Pierre expounded his plans for social reforms and perpetual peace; some of these worried Cardinal Fleury, who ordered the disbandment of the club in 1731. Three years later Jacobite refugees from England founded in Paris the first French Freemasonry lodge. Montesquieu joined it, and several members of the high nobility. It served as a refuge for deists and as a center of political intrigue; it became a channel of English influence, and prepared the way for the philosophes.

  Bored with the round of domestic toil, men and women flocked to the promenades, dance halls, theaters, concerts, and opera; the rich took to the hunt, the bourgeoisie to fêtes champêtres. The Bois de Boulogne, the Champs-Élysées, the Jardins des Tuileries, the Luxembourg Gardens, and the Jardin des Plantes—or “Jardin du Roi,” as it was then called—were favorite resorts for carriage rides, walks, lovers’ haunts, and Easter parades. If people stayed home they amused themselves with indoor games, dances, chamber concerts, and private theatricals. Everyone danced. Ballet had become a complex and royal art, in which the King himself occasionally pranced a part. Ballet dancers like La Camargo and La Gaussin were the toast of the town and the delicacies of millionaires.

  IV. MUSIC

  Music in France had declined since Lully had outdone Molière in amusing the Great King. There was not here the same madness about music that made Italy forget its political subjection, nor that laborious devotion to compositional technique which was creating the massive Masses and prolonged Passions of Bach’s Germany. French music was in transition from classic form to baroque decoration to rococo grace, from complex counterpoint mutilating words to fluent melodies and tender themes congenial to French character. Popular composers still issued amorous, satirical, or melancholy songs deifying lasses, defying kings, deprecating virginity and delay. Patronage of music was spreading from kings requiring majesty to financiers apologizing for their fortunes with
concerts, dramas, and poetry open to the influential few. Rousseau’s opera Les Muses galantes was produced in the home of the farmer general La Popelinière. Some rich men had orchestras of their own. Performances open to the public for an admission charge were regularly offered in Paris by the Concerts Spirituels, organized in 1725; and other cities followed suit. Opera was presented in the Palais-Royal, usually in late afternoon, concluding by 8:30 P.M.; then the audience, in evening dress, promenaded in the Tuileries Gardens, and singers and instrumentalists entertained them in the open air; this was one of many charming features of Paris life.

  We perceive in reading Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau how many composers and executants were then the rage who are forgotten now. Only one French composer in this period left behind him works that still cling to life. Jean Philippe Rameau had every impulse to music. His father was organist in the Church of St.-Étienne at Dijon. Enthusiastic biographers assure us that Jean at seven could read at sight any music placed before him. At college he so absorbed himself in music that the Jesuit fathers expelled him; thereafter he hardly ever opened a book except of or on music. Soon he was so proficient on organ, harpsichord, and violin that Dijon had nothing more to teach him. When he strayed into love, his father, thinking this a waste of talent, sent him to Italy to study its secrets of melody (1701).

  Back in France, Jean served as organist in Clermont-Ferrand, succeeded his father in Dijon (1709–14), returned to Clermont as organist of the cathedral (1716), and settled in Paris in 1721. There, in 1722, aged thirty-nine, he wrote the outstanding work of musical theory in eighteenth-century France—Traité de l’harmonie réduite à ses principes naturels. Rameau argued that in a proper musical composition there is always, whether scored or not, a “fundamental base” from which all chords above it can be derived; that all chords can be deduced from the harmonic series of partial tones; and that these chords may be inverted without losing their identity. Rameau wrote in a style intelligible only to the most obdurate musicians, but his ideas pleased the mathematician d’Alembert, who gave them a more lucid exposition in 1752. Today the laws of chordal association formulated by Rameau are accepted as the theoretical foundation of musical composition.34