Authors: Ian Buruma
Voltaire’s second literary success, which made him even more famous, could not be published legally in France. This time the poet aspired to wear Virgil’s mantle.
La Henriade
is an epic poem, modeled on the
Aeneid
, celebrating the glory of Henri IV. It was not the poetry
that offended the French censors but the ideas it contained. Henri IV had fought a war of succession to the French throne as a protector of the Protestants. He was backed by Queen Elizabeth of England. Although he later converted to Roman Catholicism—unconvincingly some thought—Henri signed the Edict of Nantes in 1598, guaranteeing freedom of conscience, the very thing that was revoked a hundred years later.
La Henriade
was an argument for religious tolerance and an attack on the fanaticism of the Catholic church. Since Catholicism was the French state religion, and religious dissent outlawed, Voltaire’s poem was about as subversive a document as one could wish. It was first printed in The Hague, and later published under the counter in Rouen.
One of Voltaire’s greatest admirers at the time was Henry St. John Bolingbroke, a Tory aristocrat compelled to live in France after conspiring with the Catholic pretender to the English throne. Bolingbroke shared with Voltaire a taste for libertinage, brilliant conversation, and unorthodox religious views. Voltaire recorded in his notebook how London prostitutes rejoiced when Bolingbroke became minister of war under Queen Anne. His new salary was greedily discussed by the whores in St. James Park. “God bless us,” they cried, “five thousand pounds and all for us.” In exile, Bolingbroke married the marquise de Villette, a French widow twelve years older than himself, and tended to his garden park at La Source, a woody estate near Orléans, which he transformed in the English mode, with streams, grottoes, groves, and a hermitage.
Voltaire visited La Source in 1722, and was enchanted. Bolingbroke, he wrote in a letter to his friend Nicolas-Claude Thieriot, was an illustrious Englishman who combined the erudition of England with the politesse of France. This was typical of Voltaire’s Enlightenment Anglophilia. England was the land of thinkers, of rationalists, while France was the nation of fine manners. Much of what we know about Voltaire in those days comes from his letters to Thieriot. Receiving Voltaire’s letters and acting as his drum-beater was Thieriot’s main role in life. He was a literary
flâneur
and a permanent guest at various grand houses, where he would recite Voltaire’s works and solicit praise for the master. It was to Thieriot that Voltaire later wrote
Letters concerning the English Nation
, his bible of Anglomania.
Dangerous ideas that could not be expressed publicly in early
eighteenth-century France were exchanged freely in cultivated circles. The natural habitat of the freethinker was the aristocratic salon. Bolingbroke was a Deist; that is to say, he believed in a natural order based not on revealed truth or church dogma but on reason. The creator was rational, a kind of heavenly philosopher. This belief was shared by other British thinkers of the time, notably the earl of Shaftesbury, whose writings on “natural” landscape gardening had a great influence in Europe. Voltaire is often considered to have been a Deist too. Perhaps he was. If Voltaire believed in any god at all, his deity was singularly lacking in heavenly trappings. It was Bolingbroke, in any event, who infected Voltaire with his first dose of Anglophilia. In the summer of 1724 Bolingbroke sent him a letter, setting down his views on life. In the manner of a Chinese gentleman-scholar, he compared the cultivation of a man’s character to that of his garden. The ideal was a natural order. He advised Voltaire to read Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
. And he pointed out that Sir Isaac Newton had shown the falsity of the Cartesian view of nature.
English ideas matched Voltaire’s anti-clerical, freethinking style. Locke’s views on limited government based on consent were particularly attractive to Voltaire. Like China, about which the
philosophes
expressed a similar enthusiasm, England provided a model for ideas that had already taken root. This was not necessarily a reason to visit England, even less China. The true Anglophile—like Maoist Sinophiles a few hundred years later—is liable to be disappointed with the real thing anyway. Better to stick to a vision, a representation, an image, like the English pub in Paris, where Huysmans’ dandy hero Des Esseintes ends his planned trip to England in
A rebours
. But Voltaire had a sound reason to leave France. Crossing the Channel would be a good career move. In England he would be able to publish
La Henriade
without problems. There was one other, even more pressing reason: Voltaire’s quarrel with the chevalier de Rohan.
The story has been told before, but it bears repeating, for without this quarrel Voltaire might never have come to England. And like the sunny weather on his arrival in Greenwich, it sets a suitable scene for Voltaire’s English love affair. It lends a literary frame to the tale of the enlightened Anglomane leaving the feudal darkness of France for the bright liberty of England. The story goes as follows.
Voltaire was at the theater in Paris on a December evening in 1725,
entertaining his companion, the celebrated tragic actress Adrienne Lecouvreur, with gallant remarks between acts, when he was rudely interrupted by a loutish young aristocrat named Gui-Auguste de Rohan-Chabot. The chevalier had already insulted Voltaire once before, at the Opéra, where he had made a sneering remark about Voltaire’s change of name from Arouet to the grander-sounding de Voltaire. Different versions of Voltaire’s reply have been recorded. In one—the most cutting—he is supposed to have said, “I begin my name, the chevalier de Rohan ends his.” Whereupon Rohan raised his cane, Voltaire put his hand to his sword, and Mademoiselle Lecouvreur fainted. (The tragic actress was to die tragically in Voltaire’s arms, at the age of thirty-seven; being a mere actress, her body was dumped into a ditch filled with quicklime. Voltaire remained obsessed with burials, including his own, for the rest of his life.)
The Rohan affair did not end there. A few days later, Voltaire was dining at the house of his friend the duc de Sully, a cultivated bachelor whose amateur theatricals were legendary. In the middle of dinner, Voltaire was called to the front door. As soon as he emerged from the house, he was dragged to a cab, where one thug held him while another beat him about the shoulders with a stick. The chevalier de Rohan, watching the scene from the darkness of his own carriage, told his men to avoid striking the poet’s head, for “something good may possibly come from that.” Several curious people had gathered to observe the commotion and much admired this magnanimous gesture:
“Ah! le bon seigneur,”
they cried.
Furious, Voltaire rushed back to the dinner table, where his companions were still exchanging risqué witticisms in the candlelight. But he found no support from his friend the duke, who could not possibly risk offending a fellow nobleman for the sake of a common poet, no matter how entertaining his company. The French regent was no more sympathetic. “You are a poet,” he said, “and you have had a beating; what can be more natural?” And so the verb
voltairiser
, “to thrash,” was born. But Voltaire was not satisfied. He began to take fencing lessons. Thinking the affair had gone far enough, Rohan’s family took the precaution of drawing up an order to arrest Voltaire in case he should cause any trouble. The moment Voltaire challenged the chevalier to a duel, he was jailed in the Bastille, where he spent a fortnight reading English books, brought in by the faithful Thieriot. The time
had clearly come to sail for England. Voltaire was duly released and put on a coach to Calais. In his first letter from England (to Thieriot) he declared that he was now in a nation “where the arts are all honoured and rewarded, where there is a difference between the stations in life, but none other between men except that of merit.”
As usual, this was an exaggeration. Voltaire was in fact in low spirits. His sister had died just after he arrived in London. And the insult from the chevalier still rankled. To make things worse, his bills of exchange turned out to be worthless, for, as he wrote (in English) to Thieriot, “at my coming to London I found my damned Jew was broken.” The Jew was a banker named Medina, who could not be blamed for this misfortune. And although Voltaire took a harsh view of Judaism, he blamed Medina neither for his faith nor his financial problems. Aside from that, Voltaire was “sick to death of a violent ague,” and he felt helpless, alone, isolated, and obscure in London. Lord and Lady Bolingbroke were back in England again, but away in the country, and Voltaire felt too wretched to see the French ambassador. Indeed, he wrote: “[I] had never undergone such distress; but I am born to run through all the misfortunes of life.”
Voltaire always was a great complainer. All his life he liked nothing better than to moan about his health and general disposition. “Always on the go and always ill” was one of his phrases. In fact he had come to London with excellent introductions. Bolingbroke might have been at his estate in Dawley, playing the pastoral philosopher, dining on bacon and beans, and having the walls painted with pictures of pitchforks, but his house in Pall Mall was open to Voltaire. The British ambassador in Paris had recommended Voltaire to the duke of Newcastle. Voltaire was to be received by the king. And the English edition of
La Henriade
was dedicated to Queen Caroline, because, as Voltaire put it, “she understood him the best, and loved Truth the most.” She was just one of the more illustrious of the powerful wives he sought to flatter.
Voltaire spoke no English at first, but this was not a drawback among “people of quality.” The language of the court was French, and most of Voltaire’s aristocratic friends, such as Bolingbroke, spoke fluent French. His favorite British authors were the “Frenchified” Pope and Addison, both sometimes criticized for their “Gallicised neatness.” The only English phrases known to Bolingbroke’s French wife were “very cold” and “very warm.” That was all she needed. Other French
exiles were happy to spend their time arguing in French at the Rainbow Coffee-house. There was even a French theater in London.
But Voltaire wanted to learn English. There were practical reasons. For as Frenchified as the manners of the upper class may have been, the common Englishmen and -women did not much care for the French. In his silk Parisian clothes and long powdered wig, Voltaire was a natural target for English prejudice. Out walking one day in London he was set upon by a jeering mob, and he managed to save the situation only by climbing on a pedestal and shouting: “Brave Englishmen, am I not already unhappy enough in not having been born among you?” whereupon the crowd of true-born Britons carried the Frenchman home on their shoulders. Or so the story goes.
Another reason to learn English had more to do with Voltaire’s idea of England. Like American English now, English was associated with modernity and freedom. Voltaire called it the too free language of a too free people. He also found it lacking in elegance. Shakespeare’s prose, for example, he likened to a rough diamond full of flaws. But he admitted that it would lose its weight if it were polished.
I have heard Japanese speak of American English in this way: frank, rough, free, no doubt a perfect vehicle for political or commercial information, but without the subtlety of, say, Japanese. Voltaire’s view of English was similar, but with an odd Voltairean twist. Ten years after he had left England, he wrote about the language he had so studiously acquired: “The force of that idiom is wonderfully heightened by the nature of the government which allows the English to speak in public, and by the liberty of conscience, which makes them more conversant in the Scripture and hath rendered the language of the Prophets so familiar to them that their poetry savours very much of that Eastern out-of-the-way sublimity; nay, 60 or 80 years ago all the speeches in Parliament were crammed with expressions taken from the Jewish writings.” Knowing what he thought of prophets and Jewish writings, I find it hard to tell if he meant this as a compliment or a criticism. But it was a rather Anglican thing to say: he could admire the style of religion without dwelling too much on the content.
Voltaire’s study of the English language did not involve Scripture, however. He learnt English at the theater, much as people now acquire it at the movies. He would sit in the stalls at Drury Lane, often in the company of Colley Cibber, the actor-dramatist, and follow the play
with the help of a script provided by the prompter, one W. R. Chetwood. Perhaps as a result, Voltaire picked up idioms more suited to the green rooms and coffeehouses than to polite society. There are stories to suggest that Voltaire was sometimes confused. His first dinner with Pope, for example, ended in a social disaster. This is how it was related to Thomas Gray: “As he [Voltaire] supped one night with Mr Pope at Twickenham, he fell into a fit of swearing and of blasphemy about his constitution. Old Mrs Pope asked him how his constitution came to be so bad at his age. ‘Oh! (says he) those damned Jesuits, when I was a boy, bugger’d me to such a degree that I shall never get over it as long as I live.’ ” Mrs. Pope, mortified, showed Voltaire the door.
Voltaire’s enthusiasm for the English theater was not without reservations. For him, Shakespeare was at best a savage kind of genius, lacking in classical grace and ignorant of the Aristotelian principles that Voltaire believed to be indispensible to good theater. In this respect, Voltaire was a typical Frenchman of his time. But there is a parallel here too with modern attitudes to America, particularly Hollywood. Voltaire likened the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays in England to the plebeian taste for spectacles, such as cockfights. In a letter to Lord Lyttelton, Voltaire observed (in somewhat eccentric English) how the English theater was full of “wild scenes,” “tumultuous events,” “comical expressions,” and “bloody deeds.” Even the politest English theater audiences “in point of tragedy” had the taste of “the Mob at Bear-garden.” The French theater, he admitted, was a little wordy, but English entertainment had far too much action. Perfection would be a “due mixture of the French taste and the English energy.”