Part 34

From this time on to the end of his life, he was full of lavish praise for royalty. He was needlessly loyal, and dedicated poems and pamphlets to nobility, right and left, in a way that would have caused a smile were not nobility so hopelessly bound in three-quarters pachyderm. He also wrote religious poems, protesting his love for the Church. And here seems a good place to say that Voltaire was a member of the Catholic Church to his death. Many of his worst attacks on the priesthood were put in way of defense for outrageous actions which he enumerated in detail. He kept people guessing as to what he meant and what he would do next.

Immediately after the death of President McKinley there was a fine scramble among the editors of certain saffron sheets--to get in line and shake their ulsters free from all taint of anarchy. Some writers, in order to divert suspicion from themselves, hotly denounced other men as anarchists.

Throughout his life Voltaire had spasms of repentance, prompted by caution, possibly, when he warmly denounced atheists, and swore, i' faith, that one object of his life was to purify the Church and cleanse it of its secret faults.

In his twenty-sixth year, when he was trying hard to be good, he got into a personal altercation with the Chevalier de Rohan, an insignificant man bearing a proud name. The Chevalier's wit was no match for the other's rapier-like tongue, but he had a way of his own in which to get even. He had his servants waylay the luckless poet and chastise him soundly with rattans.

Voltaire was furious; he tried to get the courts to take it up, but the prevailing idea was that he had gotten what he deserved, and the fact that the whole affair occurred after dark and the Chevalier did not do the beating in person, made conviction impossible.

But Voltaire now quit the anapest and dactyl and devoted his best hours to taking fencing lessons. His firm intent was to baptize the soil with Rohan's blood. Voltaire was of enough importance so the secret police knew of all his doings. Suddenly he found himself taking a post-graduate course in the Bastile. I am not sure that the fiery little man was entirely displeased with the procedure. It proved to the world that he was a dangerous character, and it also gave him a respite from the tyranny of the fencing-master, and allowed him to turn to his first, last and only love--literature. In Voltaire's cosmos was a good deal of the Bob Acres quality.

There were plenty of reasons for locking him up--heresy and treason have ever been first cousins--and pamphlets lampooning Churchmen high in office were laid at his door. No doubt some of the anonymous literature was not his--"I would have done the thing better or not at all," he once said in reference to a scurrilous brochure. The real fact was, that that particular pamphlet was done by a disciple, and if Voltaire's writings were vile, then was his offense doubled in that he vitalized a ravenous brood of scribblers. They played Caliban to his Setebos.

Voltaire's most offensive contributions were always attributed by him to this bishop or that, and to various dignitaries who had no existence save in the figment of his own fertile pigment.

He once carried on a controversy between the Bishop of Berlin and the Archbishop of Paris, each man thundering against the other with a monthly pamphlet wherein each one gored the other without mercy, and revealed the senselessness of the other's religion. They flung the literary stinkpot with great accuracy. "The other man's superstition is always ridiculous to us--our own is sacred," said Voltaire, and so he allowed his controversialists to fight it out for his own quiet joy, and the edification of the onlookers.

Then his plan of printing an alleged sermon, giving some unknown prelate due credit on the title-page, starting in with a pious text and a page of trite nothings and gradually drifting off into ridicule of the things he had started in to defend--all this gives a comic tinge to his wail that "some evil-minded person is attributing things to me I never wrote," If an occasional sly Churchman got after him with his own weapon, writing things in his style more hazardous than he dare express, surely he should not have complained.

But this was a fact--the enemy could not follow him long with a literary fusillade--they hadn't the mental ammunition.

Well has Voltaire been called "the father of all those who wear shovel-hats."

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A few months in the Bastile, and Voltaire's indeterminate sentence was commuted to exile. He was allowed to leave his country for his country's good. Early in the year Seventeen Hundred Twenty-six he landed in England, evidently knowing nobody there except one merchant, a man of no special prominence.

Voltaire belonged to the nobility by divine right--as much as did Disraeli. Both had an inward contempt for titles, but they knew the hearts of the owners so well that they simply played a game of chess, and the "men" they moved were live knights, bishops, kings and queens, with rollers under the castles. The pawns they pushed here and there were the literary puppets of the time.

The first thing Voltaire had to master in England was the language, and this he did passably inside of three months. He took Grub Street by storm; dawdled at Dodsley's; met Dean Swift, and these worthies respected each other's wit so much that they simply took snuff, grimaced and let it go at that; Pope came in for a visit, and the French poet crossed Twickenham ferry and offered a handmade sonnet in admiration of the "Essay on Man," which he had probably never read. Gay gave Voltaire "The Beggar's Opera," in private, and together they called on Congreve, who interrupted the Frenchman's flow of flattery long enough to say that he wished to be looked on as a gentleman, not a poet. And Voltaire replied that there were many gentlemen but few poets, and if Congreve had had the misfortune to be simply a gentleman he would not have troubled to call on him at all. Congreve, who really regarded himself as the peer of Shakespeare, was won, and sent Voltaire on his way with letters to Horace Walpole of Strawberry Hill. Thomson, who lived at Hammersmith, and wrote his "Seasons" in a "public" next door to Kelmscott, corrected and revised some of Voltaire's attempts at English poetry. Young evolved some of his "Night Thoughts" while on a visit with Voltaire at Bubb Dodington's.

A call on the Duchess of Marlborough led to a dinner at Lord Chesterfield's. Next he met Queen Caroline and assured her that she spoke French like a Parisian. King George the Second quite liked Voltaire, because Voltaire quite liked Lady Sandon, his mistress. Only a Frenchman could have successfully paid court to the King, Queen and Lady Sandon at the same time, as Voltaire did. His great epic poem, "Henriade," that he had been sandpapering for ten years, was now published, dedicated to the Queen. The King headed the subscription-list with more copies than he needed, at five guineas each, on agreement. Voltaire afterward said that he would not be expected to read the poem. The Queen's good offices were utilized--she became for the time a royal book-agent, and her signature and the author's adorned all deluxe copies. A suggestion from the Queen was equal to an order, and the edition was soon worked off.

Voltaire now spent three years in England. He had written his "Life of Charles the Twelfth," several plays, an "English Note-Book," and best of all, had gotten together a thousand pounds good money as proceeds of "Henriade," a stiff and stilted piece of pedantic bombast, written with sweat and lamp-smoke.

The "Letters on the English" were published a few years later in Paris with good results, considering it was only a by-product. It is a deal better-natured than Dickens' "American Note-Book," and had more humor than Emerson's "English Traits." Among other things quite Voltairesque in the "Letters" is this: "The Anglican Church has retained many of the good old Catholic customs--not the least of which is the collection of tithes with great regularity."

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The priestly habit of Voltaire's life manifested itself even to the sharp collecting from the world all that the world owed him.

The snug little sum he had secured in England would have shown his ability, but there was something better in store, awaiting his return to France. It seems the Controller of Finance had organized a lottery to help pay the interest on the public debt. A considerable sum of money had been realized, but there was still a large number of tickets unsold, and the drawing was soon to take place. Voltaire knew the officials who had the matter in charge and they knew him. He organized a syndicate that would take all tickets there were left, on guarantee that among the tickets purchased would be the one that called for the principal prize of forty thousand pounds. Just how it was known in advance what ticket would win must be left to those good people who understand these little things in detail. In any event, Voltaire put in every sou he had--and his little fortune was then a matter of about ten thousand dollars. Several of his friends contributed a like sum.

The drawing took place, and the prize of forty thousand pounds was theirs. It is said that Voltaire took twenty-five thousand pounds as his share--the whole scheme was his anyway--and his friends were quite satisfied with having doubled their money in a fortnight.

Immediately on securing this money, Voltaire presented himself at the office of the President of Accounts, and asked for the legacy left him by his father. As proof of his financial ability, and as a guarantee of good faith, he opened a hand-satchel and piled on the President's table a small mountain of gold and bank-notes. The first question of the astonished official was, "Will M. de Voltaire have the supreme goodness to explain where he stole all this money?"

This was soon followed by an apology, as the visitor explained the reason of his visit.

The father's legacy amounted to nearly four thousand pounds, and this was at once paid over to Voltaire with a flattering letter expressing perfect faith in his ability to manage his own finances.

There is a popular opinion that Voltaire made considerable money by his pen, but the fact is, that at no period of his life did literature contribute in but a very scanty way to his prosperity.

After the lottery scheme, Voltaire embarked in grain speculations, importing wheat from Barbary for French consumption. In this he made a fair profit, but when war broke out between Italy and France, he entered into an arrangement with Duverney, who had the army commissariat in his hands, to provision the troops. It was not much of a war, but it lasted long enough, as most wars do, for a few contractors to make much moneys. The war spirit is usually fanned by financiers, Kuhn, Loeb and Company giving the ultimatum.