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Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter V Section 3 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.  

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III. Cirey: The Romances

Nevertheless the Regent, not knowing of this chanticleer; sent Voltaire permission, in 1729, to return to France. For five years Voltaire enjoyed again that Parisian life whose wine flowed in his veins and whose spirit flowed from his pen. And then some miscreant of a publisher, getting hold of the Letters on the English, turned them without the author’s permission into print, and sold them far and wide, to the horror of all good Frenchmen, including Voltaire. The Parliament of Paris at once ordered the book to be publicly burned as “scandalous, contrary to religion, to morals, and to respect for authority”; and Voltaire learned that he was again on the way to the Bastille. Like a good philosopher, he took to his heels–merely utilizing the occasion to elope with another man’s wife. 

Voltaire was permitted to return to France in 1729; but within five years he was in trouble again and he had to take to his heels.

The Marquise du Chatelet was twenty-eight; Voltaire, alas, was already forty. She was a remarkable woman: she had studied mathematics with the redoubtable Maupertuis, and then with Clairaut; she had written a learnedly annotated translation of Newton’s Principia; she was soon to receive higher rating than Voltaire in a contest for a prize offered by the French Academy for an essay on the physics of fire; in short she was precisely the kind of woman who never elopes. But the Marquis was so dull, and Voltaire was so interesting -“a creature lovable in every way,” she called him; “the finest ornament in France.” He returned her love with fervent admiration; called her “a great man whose only fault was being a woman”; formed from her, and from the large number of highly talented women then in France, his conviction of the native mental equality of the sexes; and decided that her chateau at Cirey was an admirable refuge from the inclement political weather of Paris. The Marquis was away with his regiment, which had long been his avenue of escape from mathematics; and he made no objection to the new arrangements. Because of the mariages de convenances which forced rich old men on young women who had little taste for senility but much hunger for romance, the morals of the day permitted a lady to add a lover to her menage, if it were done with a decent respect for the hypocrisies of mankind; and when she chose not merely a lover but a genius, all the world forgave her. 

Voltaire had moved in with Marquise du Chatelet, who was also a genius in her own right.

In the chateau at Cirey they did not spend their time billing and cooing. All the day was taken up with study and research; Voltaire had an expensive laboratory equipped for work in natural science; and for years the lovers rivaled each other in discovery and disquisition. They had many guests, but it was understood that these should entertain themselves all day long, till supper at nine. After supper, occasionally, there were private theatricals; or Voltaire would read to the guests one of his lively stories. Very soon Cirey became the Paris of the French mind; the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie joined in the pilgrimage to taste Voltaire’s wine and wit, and see him act in his own plays. He was happy to be the centre of this corrupt and brilliant world; he took nothing too seriously, and for a while made “Rire et faire rire” [“To laugh and to make laugh.”] his motto. Catherine of Russia called him “the divinity of gayety.” “If Nature had not made us a little frivolous,” he said, “we should be most wretched. It is because one can be frivolous that the majority do not hang themselves.” There was nothing of the dyspeptic Carlyle about him. “Dulce est desipere in loco.[“It is sweet to be foolish on occasion.”] Woe to philosophers who cannot laugh away their wrinkles. I look upon solemnity as a disease.” [Letter to Frederick the Great, July, 1787.] 

Soon the chateau at Cirey became the Paris of the French mind; the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie joined in the pilgrimage to taste Voltaire’s wine and wit, and see him act in his own plays.

It was now that he began to write those delightful romances—Zadig, Candide, Micromégas, L’Ingenu, Le Monde comme il va [The World as it goes], etc.—which give the Voltairean spirit in purer form than anything else in his ninety-nine volumes. They are not novels, but humoresque-picaresque novelettes; the heroes are not persons but ideas, the villains are superstitions, and the events are thoughts. Some are mere fragments, like L’Ingenu which is Rousseau before Jean Jacques. A Huron Indian comes to France with some returning explorers; the first problem to which he gives rise is that of making him a Christian. An abbe gives him a copy of the New Testament, which the Huron likes so much that he soon offers himself not only for baptism but for circumcision as well. “For,” he says, “I do not find in the book that was put into my hands a single person who was not circumcised. It is therefore evident that I must make a sacrifice to the Hebrew custom, and the sooner the better.” Hardly has this difficulty been smoothed over when he has trouble over confession; he asks where in the Gospel this is commanded, and is directed to a passage in the Epistle of St. James: “Confess your sins to one another.” He confesses; but “when he had done he dragged the abbe from the confessional chair, placed himself in the seat, and bade the abbe confess in turn. “Come, my friend; it is said, ‘We must confess our sins to one another’; I have related my sins to you, and you shall not stir till you recount yours.” He falls in love with Miss St. Yves, but is told that he cannot marry her because she has acted as godmother at his baptism; he is very angry at this little trick of the fates, and threatens to get unbaptized. Having received permission to marry her, he is surprised to find that for marriage “notaries, priests, witnesses, contracts and dispensations are absolutely necessary. … ‘You are then very great rogues, since so many precautions are required.'” And so, as the story passes on from incident to incident, the contradictions between primitive and ecclesiastical Christianity are forced upon the stage; one misses the impartiality of the scholar and the leniency of the philosopher; but Voltaire had begun his war against superstition, and in war we demand impartiality and leniency only of our foes. 

Voltaire’s wrote and acted in plays that highlighted the contradictions between primitive and ecclesiastical Christianity. He had begun his war against superstition.

Micromegas is an imitation of Swift, but perhaps richer than its model in cosmic imagination. The earth is visited by an inhabitant from Sirius; he is some 500,000 feet tall, as befits the citizen of so large a star. On his way through space he has picked up a gentleman from Saturn, who grieves because he is only a few thousand feet in height. As they walk through the Mediterranean the Sirian wets his heels. He asks hls comrade how many senses the Saturnians have and is told: “We have seventy-two, but we are daily complaining of the smaller number.” “To what age do you commonly live?” “Alas, a mere trifle; … very few on our globe survive 15,000 years. So you see that in a manner we begin to die the very moment we are born: our existence is no more than a point, our duration an instant, and our globe an atom. Scarce do we begin to learn a little when death intervenes before we can profit by experience.” As they stand in the sea they take up a ship as one might pick up some animalcule.. and the Sirian poises it on his thumb-nail, causing much commotion among the human passengers. “The chaplains of the ship repeated exorcisms, the sailors swore, and the philosophers formed a system” to explain this disturbance of the laws of gravity. The Sirian bends down like a darkening cloud and addresses them: 

“O ye intelligent atoms, in whom the Supreme Being hath been pleased to manifest his omniscience and power, without doubt your joys on this earth must be pure and exquisite; for being unencumbered with matter, and—to all appearance—little else than soul, you must spend your lives in the delights of pleasure and reflection, which are the true enjoyments of a perfect spirit. True happiness I have nowhere found; but certainly here it dwells.” 

“We have matter enough,” answered one of the philosophers, “to do abundance of mischief. … You must know, for example, that at this very moment, while I am speaking, there are 100,000 animals of our own species, covered with hats, slaying an equal number of their fellow-creatures, who wear turbans; at least they are either slaying or being slain; and this has usually been the case all over the earth from time immemorial.” 

“Miscreants!” cried the indignant Sirian; “I have a good mind to take two or three steps, and trample the whole nest of such ridiculous assassins under my feet.” 

“Don’t give yourself the trouble,” replied the philosopher; “they are industrious enough in securing their own destruction. At the end of ten years the hundredth part of these wretches will not survive. … Besides, the punishment should not be inflicted upon them, but upon those sedentary and slothful barbarians who, from their palaces, give orders for murdering a million of men, and then solemnly thank God for their success.” 

Micromagus is a hilarious play that casts the slothful kings as waging war and killing people from their palaces.

Next to Candide, which belongs to a later period of Voltaire’s life, the best of these tales is Zadig. Zadig was a Babylonian philosopher, “as wise as it is possible for men to be; … he knew as much of metaphysics as hath ever been known in any age,—that is, little or nothing at all.” “Jealousy made him imagine that he was in love with Semira.” In defending her against robbers he was wounded in the left eye.

A messenger was despatched to Memphis for the great Egyptian physician Hermes, who came with a numerous retinue. He visited Zadig, and declared that the patient would lose his eye. He even foretold the day and hour when this fatal event would happen. “Had. it been the right eye,” said he, “I could easily have cured it; but the wounds of the left eye are incurable.” All Babylon lamented the fate of Zadig, and admired the profound knowledge of Hermes. In two days the abscess broke of its own accord, and Zadig was perfectly cured. Hermes wrote a book to prove that it ought not to have healed. Zadig did not read it.

He hurried, instead, to Semira, only to find that upon hearing Hermes’ first report she had betrothed herself to another man, having, she said, “an unconquerable aversion to one-eyed men.” Zadig thereupon married a peasant woman, hoping to find in her the virtues which had been missing in the court lady Semira. To make sure of the fidelity of his wife, he arranged with a friend that he, Zadig, should pretend to die, and that the friend should make love to the wife an hour later. So Zadig had himself pronounced dead, and lay in the coffin while his friend first commiserated and then congratulated the widow, and at last proposed immediate marriage to her. She made a brief resistance; and then, “protesting she would ne’er consent, consented.” Zadig rose from the dead and fled into the woods to console himself with the beauty of nature. 

Having become a very wise man, he was made vizier to the king, to whose realm he brought prosperity, justice, and peace. But the queen fell in love with him; and the king, perceiving it, “began to be troubled. … He particularly remarked that the queen’s shoes were blue, and that Zadig’s shoes were blue; that his wife’s ribbons were yellow, and that Zadig’s bonnet was yellow.” He resolved to poison them both; but the queen discovered the plot, and sent a note to Zadig! “Fly, I conjure thee, by our mutual love and our yellow ribbonsI” Zadig again fled into the woods. 

He then represented to himself the human species, as it really is, as a parcel of insects devouring one another on a little atom of clay. This true image seemed to annihilate his misfortunes, by making him sensible of the nothingness of his own being and that of Babylon. His soul launched into infinity; and detached from the senses, contemplated the immutable order of the universe. But when, afterwards, returning to himself, … he considered that the Queen had perhaps died for him, the universe vanished from sight. 

Passing out of Babylon he saw a man cruelly beating a woman; he responded to her cries for help, fought the man, and at last, to save himself, struck a blow which killed his enemy. Thereupon he turned to the lady and asked, “What further, madam, wouldst thou have me do for thee?” “Die, villain! for thou hast killed my lover. Oh, that I were able to tear out thy heart!” 

Zadig was shortly afterward captured and enslaved; but he taught his master philosophy, and became his trusted counsellor. Through his advice the practice of suttee (by which a widow had herself buried with her husband) was abolished by a law which required that before such martyrdom the widow should spend an hour alone with a handsome man. Sent on a mission to the King of Serendib, Zadig taught him that an honest minister could best be found by choosing the lightest dancer among the applicants: he had the vestibule of the dance hall filled with loose valuables, easily stolen, and arranged that each candidate should pass through the vestibule alone and unwatched; when they had all entered, they were asked to dance. “Never had dancers performed more unwillingly or with less grace. Their heads were down, their backs bent, their hands pressed to their sides.”—And so the story rushes on. We can imagine those evenings at Cirey! 

Zadig is another hilarious story filled with satire on human nature.

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Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter V Section 1 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.  

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I. Paris: Oedipe

At Paris in 1742 Voltaire was coaching Mlle. Dumesnil, to rise to tragic heights in a rehearsal of his play Mérope. She complained that she would have to have “the very devil” in her to simulate such passion as he required. “That is just it,” answered Voltaire; “you must have the devil in you to succeed in any of the arts.” Even his critics and his enemies admitted that he himself met this requirement perfectly. “Il avait Ie diable au corps—he had the devil in his body,” said Sainte-Beuve; and De Maistre called him the man “into whose hands hell had given all its powers.” 

Voltaire had the devil in his body.

Unprepossessing, ugly, vain, flippant, obscene, unscrupulous, even at times dishonest,—Voltaire was a man with the faults of his time and place, missing hardly one. And yet this same Voltaire turns out to have been tirelessly kind, considerate, lavish of his energy and his purse, as sedulous in helping friends as in crushing enemies, able to kill with a stroke of his pen and yet disarmed by the first advance of conciliation;—so contradictory is man.

But he was also kind and considerate.

But all these qualities, good and bad, were secondary, not of the essence of Voltaire; the astounding and basic thing in him was the inexhaustible fertility and brilliance of his mind. His works fill ninety-nine volumes, of which every page is sparkling and fruitful, though they range from subject to subject across the world as fitfully and bravely as in an encyclopedia. “My trade is to say what I think”: and what he thought was always worth saying, as what he said was always said incomparably well. If we do not read him now (though men like Anatole France have been formed to subtlety and wisdom by poring over his pages), it is because the theological battles which he fought for us no longer interest us intimately; we have passed on perhaps to other battle-fields, and are more absorbed with the economics of this life than with the geography of the next; the very thoroughness of Voltaire’s victory over ecclesiasticism and superstition makes dead those issues which he found alive. Much of his fame, too, came of his inimitable conversation; but scripta manent, verba volant—writtenwords remain, while spoken words fly away, the winged words of Voltaire with the rest. What is left to us is too much the flesh of Voltaire, too little the divine fire of his spirit. And yet, darkly as we see him through the glass of time, what a spirit!—“sheer intelligence transmuting anger into fun, fire into light”; “a creature of air and flame, the most excitable that ever lived, composed of more ethereal and more throbbing atoms than those of other men; there is none whose mental machinery is more delicate, nor whose equilibrium is at the same time more shifting and more exact.” Was he, perhaps, the greatest intellectual energy in all history? 

The astounding and basic thing in Voltaire was the inexhaustible fertility and brilliance of his mind.

Certainly he worked harder, and accomplished more, than any other man of his epoch. “Not to be occupied, and not to exist, amount to the same thing,” he said. “All people are good except those who are idle.” His secretary said that he was a miser only of his time. “One must give one’s self all the occupation one can to make life supportable in this world. … The further I advance in age, the more I find work necessary. It becomes in the long run the greatest of pleasures, and takes the place of the illusions of life.” “If you do not want to commit suicide always have something to do.”  

Votaire worked harder, and accomplished more, than any other man of his epoch.

Suicide must have been forever tempting him, for he was ever at work.” It was because he was so thoroughly alive that he filled the whole era with his life.” Contemporary with one of the greatest of centuries (1694-1778), he was the soul and essence of it. “To name Voltaire,” said Victor Hugo, “is to characterize the entire eighteenth century.” Italy had a Renaissance, and Germany had a Reformation, but France had Voltaire; he was for his country both Renaissance and Reformation, and half the Revolution. He carried on the antiseptic skepticism of Montaigne, and the healthy earthy humor of Rabelais;’he fought superstition and corruption more savagely and effectively than Luther or Erasmus, Calvin or Knox or Melanchthon; he helped to make the powder with which Mirabeau and Marat, Danton and Robespierre blew up the Old Regime. “If we judge of men by what they have done,” said Lamartine, “then Voltaire is incontestably the greatest writer of modern Europe. … Destiny gave him eighty-three years of existence, that he might slowly decompose the decayed age; he had the time to combat time; and when he fell he was the conqueror.”

Voltaire was so thoroughly alive that he filled the whole era with his life.

No, never has a writer had in his lifetime such influence. Despite exile, imprisonment, and the suppression of almost everyone of his books by the minions of church and state, he forged fiercely a path for his truth, until at last kings, popes and emperors catered to him, thrones trembled before him, and half the world listened to catch his every word. It was an age in which many things called for a destroyer. “Laughing lions must come,” said Nietzsche; well, Voltaire came, and “annihilated with laughter.” He and Rousseau were.the two voices of a vast process of economic and political transition from feudal aristocracy to the rule of the middle class. When a rising class is inconvenienced by existing law or custom it appeals from custom to reason and from law to nature—just as conflicting desires in the individual sparkle into thought. So the wealthy bourgeoisie supported the rationalism of Voltaire and the naturalism of Rousseau; it was necessary to loosen old habits and customs, to renovate and invigorate feeling and thought, to open the mind to experiment and change, before the great Revolution could come. Not that Voltaire and Rousseau were the causes of the Revolution; perhaps rather they were co-results with it of the forces that seethed and surged beneath the political and social surface of French life; they were the accompanying light and brilliance of the volcanic heat and conflagration. Philosophy is to history as reason is to desire: in either case an unconscious process determines from below the conscious thought above.

Voltaire forged fiercely a path for his truth, until at last kings, popes and emperors catered to him, thrones trembled before him, and half the world listened to catch his every word.

Yet we must not bend back too far in attempting to correct the philosopher’s tendency to exaggerate the influence of philosophy. Louis XVI, seeing in his Temple prison the works of Voltaire and Rousseau, said, “Those two men have destroyed France,’ —meaning his dynasty. “The Bourbons might have preserved themselves,” said Napoleon, “if they had controlled writing materials. The advent of cannon killed the feudal system; ink will kill the modern social organization.” “Books rule the world,” said Voltaire, “or at least those nations in it which have a written language; the others do not count.” “Nothing enfranchises like education”;—and he proceeded to enfranchise France. “When once a nation begins to think, it is impossible to stop it.” But with Voltaire, France began to think. 

With Voltaire, France began to think. 

”Voltaire,” that is to say, Francois Marie Arouet, was born at Paris in 1694, the son of a comfortably successful notary and a somewhat aristocratic mother. He owed to his father, perhaps, his shrewdness and irascibility, and to his mother something of his levity and wit. He came into the world, so to speak, by a narrow margin: his mother did not survive his birth; and he was so puny and sickly an infant that the nurse did not give him more than a day to live. She was slightly in error, as he lived almost to eighty-four; but throughout his life his frail body tormented with illness his unconquerable spirit. 

Voltaire owed to his father, perhaps, his shrewdness and irascibility, and to his mother something of his levity and wit. 

He had for his edification a model elder brother, Armand, a pious lad who fell in love with the Jansenist heresy, and courted martyrdom for his faith. “Well,” said Armand to a friend who advised the better part of valor, “if you do not want to be hanged, at least do not put off other people.” The father said he had two fools for his sons—one in verse and the other in prose. The fact that Francois made verses almost as soon as he could write his name, convinced his very practical father that nothing good would come of him. But the famous hetaira, Ninon de l’Enclos, who lived in the provincial town to which the Arouets had returned after the birth of Francois, saw in the youth signs of greatness; and when she died she left him 2000 francs for the purchase of books. His early education came from these, and from a dissolute abbe (a Jerome Coignard in the flesh) who taught him scepticism along with his prayers. His later educators, the Jesuits, gave him the very instrument of scepticism by teaching him dialectic—the art of proving anything, and therefore at last the habit of believing nothing. Francois became an adept at argument: while the boys played games in the fields, he, aged twelve, stayed behind to discuss theology with the doctors. When the time came for him to earn his living, he scandalized his father by proposing to take up literature as profession. “Literature,” said M. Arouet, “is the profession of the man who wishes to be useless to society and a burden to his relatives, and to die of hunger”;—one can see the table trembling under his emphasis. So Francois went in for literature. 

When the time came for Voltaire to earn his living, he scandalized his father by proposing to take up literature as profession. 

Not that he was a quiet and merely studious lad; he burnt the midnight oil—of others. He took to staying out late, frolicking with the wits and roisterers of the town, and experimenting with the commandments; until his exasperated father sent him off to a relative at Caen, with instructions to keep the youth practically in confinement. But his jailer fell in love with his wit, and soon gave him free rein. After imprisonment, now as later, came exile: his father sent him to the Hague with the French ambassador, requesting strict surveillance of the madcap boy; but Francois at once fell in love with a little lady, “Pimpette,” held breathless clandestine interviews with her, and “wrote to her passionate letters ending always with the refrain, ‘’I shall certainly love you forever.” The affair was discovered, and he was sent home. He remembered Pimpette for several weeks. 

Voltaire was wildly impulsive as a lad.

In 1715, proud of his twenty-one years, he went to Paris, just in time to be in at the death of Louis XIV. The succeeding Louis being too young to govern France, much less Paris, the power fell into the hands of a regent; and during this quasi-interregnum life ran riot in the capital of the world, and young Arouet ran with it. He soon achieved a reputation as a brilliant and reckless lad. When the Regent, for economy, sold half the horses that filled the royal stables, Francois remarked how much more sensible it would have been to dismiss half the asses that filled the royal court. At last all the bright and naughty things whispered about Paris were fathered upon him; and it was his ill luck that these included two poems accusing the Regent of desiring to usurp the throne. The Regent raged; and meeting the youth in the park one day, said to him: “M. Arouet, I will wager that I can show you something that you have never seen before.” “What is that?” “The inside of the Bastille.” Arouet saw It the next day, April 16, 1717. 

Because of his wild antics Voltaire was imprisoned in Bastille in 1717 at the age of twenty-three.

While in the Bastille he adopted, for some unknown reason, the pen-name of Voltaire,* and became a poet in earnest and at length. Before he had served eleven months he had written a long and not unworthy epic, the Henriade, telling the story of Henry of Navarre. Then the Regent, having discovered, perhaps, that he had imprisoned an innocent man, released him and gave him a pension; whereupon Voltaire wrote thanking him for so taking care of his board, and begging permission hereafter to take care of his lodging himself.

*Carlyle thought it an anagram for A-r-o-u-e-t l. j. (le jejune, the younger). But the name seems to have occurred among the family of Voltaire’s mother.

During this imprisonment Voltaire wrote his epic Henriade.

He passed now almost with a bound from the prison to the stage. His tragedy, Oedipe, was produced in 1718, and broke all the records of Paris by running for forty-five consecutive nights. His old father, come to upbraid him, sat in a box, and covered his joy by grumbling, at every hit, “Oh, the rascal! the rascal!” When the poet Fontenelle met Voltaire after the play and damned it with high praise, saying it was “too brilliant for tragedy,” Voltaire replied, smiling, “I must re-read your pastorals.” The youth was in no mood for caution or for courtesy; had he not put into the play itself these reckless lines?— 

Our priests are not what simple folk suppose;
Their learning is but our credulity. (Act iv, sc. 1); 

and into the mouth of Araspe this epoch-making challenge?—

Let us trust to ourselves, see all with our own eyes;
Let these be our oracles, our tripods and our gods. (ii, 5) 

The play netted Voltaire 4000 francs, which he proceeded to invest with a wisdom unheard of in literary men; through all his tribulations he kept the art not merely of making a spacious income, but of putting it to work; he respected the classic adage that one must live before one can philosophize. In 1719 he bought up all the tickets in a poorly planned government lottery, and made a large sum, much to the anger of the Government. But as he became rich he became ever more generous; and a growing circle of proteges gathered about him as he passed into the afternoon of life. 

Voltaire was a genius not only in play writing but also in investing his money. He was also quite generous with his fortune.

It was well that he added an almost Hebraic subtlety of finance to his Gallic cleverness of pen; for his next play, Artemire, failed. Voltaire felt the failure keenly; every triumph sharpens the sting of later defeats. He was always painfully sensitive to public opinion, and envied the animals because they do not know what people say of them. Fate added to his dramatic failure a bad case of small-pox; he cured himself by drinking 120 pints of lemonade, and somewhat less of physic. When he came out of the shadow of death he found that his Henriade had made him famous; he boasted, with reason, that he had made poetry the fashion. He was received and feted everywhere; the aristocracy caught him up and turned him into a polished man of the world, an unequalled master of conversation, and the inheritor of the finest cultural tradition in Europe. 

Voltaire’s rise was rapid with his successes. He mingled with aristocracy and became very polished.

For eight years he basked in the sunshine of the salons; and then fortune turned away. Some of the aristocracy could not forget that this young man had no other title to place and honor than that of genius, and could not quite forgive him for the distinction. During a dinner at the Duc de Sully’s chateau, after Voltaire had held forth for some minutes with unabashed eloquence and wit, the Chevalier de Rohan asked, not sotto voce, “Who is the young man who talks so loud?” “My Lord,” answered Voltaire quickly, “he is one who does not carry a great name, but wins respect for the name he has.” To answer the Chevalier at all was impertinence·; to answer him unanswerably was treason. The honorable Lord engaged a band of ruffians to assault Voltaire by night, merely cautioning them, “Don’t hit hIs head; something good may come out of that yet.” The next day, at the theatre, Voltaire appeared, bandaged and limping, walked up to Rohan’s box, and challenged him to a duel. Then he went home and spent all day practicing with the foils. But the noble Chevalier had no mind to be precipitated into heaven, or elsewhere, by a mere genius; he appealed to his cousin, who was Minister of Police, to protect him. Voltaire was arrested, and found himself again in his old home, the Bastille, privileged once more to view the world from the inside. He was almost immediately released, on condition that he go into exile in England. He went; but after being escorted to Dover he recrossed the Channel in disguise, burning to avenge himself. Warned that he had been discovered, and was about to be arrested a third time, he took ship again, and reconciled himself to three years in England (1726-29). 

Voltaire got into trouble with aristocracy due to his impertinence and had to leave France for England.

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