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Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter V Section 7 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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VII. The Encyclopedia and the Philosophic Dictionary

The popularity of so irreverent a book as Candide gives us some sense of the spirit of the age. The lordly culture of Louis XIV’s time, despite the massive bishops who spoke so eloquent a part in it, had learned to smile at dogma and tradition. The failure of the Reformation to capture France had left for Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to the cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach and Diderot turned upon the religion of their fathers. Let us look for a moment at the intelleetual environment in which the later Voltaire moved and had his being. 

In the 17th century, France moved rapidly from hot faith of Christendom to cold hostility of scientific materialism.

La Mettrie (1709-61) was an army physician who had lost his post by writing a Naturtal History of the Soul, and had won exile by a work called Man a Machine. He had taken refuge at the court of Frederick, who was himself something of an advanced thinker and was resolved to have the very latest culture from Paris. La Mettrie took up the idea of mechanism where the frightened Descartes, like a boy who has burned his fingers, had dropped it; and announced boldly that all the world, not excepting man, was a machine. The soul is material, and matter is soulful; but whatever they are they act upon each other, and grow and decay with each other in a way that leaves no doubt of their essential similarity and interdependence. If the soul is pure spirit, how can enthusiasm warm the body, or fever in the body disturb the processes of the mind? All organisms have evolved out of one original germ, through the reciprocal action of organism and environment. The reason why animals have intelligence, and plants none, is that animals move about for their food, while plants take what comes to them. Man has the highest intelligence because he has the greatest wants and the widest mobility; “beings without wants are also without mind.” 

The emerging idea was that the soul is material, and matter is soulful; but whatever they are they act upon each other, and grow and decay with each other in a way that leaves no doubt of their essential similarity and interdependence. 

Though La Mettrie was exiled for these opinions, Helvetius (1715-71), who took them as the basis of his book On Man, became one of the richest men in France, and rose to position and honor. Here we have the ethic, as in La Mettrie the metaphysic, of atheism. All action is dictated by egoism, self-love; “even the hero follows the feeling which for him is associated with the greatest pleasure”; and “virtue is egoism furnished with a spy-glass.” Conscience is not the voice of God, but the fear of the police; it is the deposit left in us from the stream of prohibitions poured over the growing soul by parents and teachers and press. Morality must be founded not on theology but on sociology; the changing needs of society, and not any unchanging revelation or dogma, must determine the good. 

Here we have the ethic of atheism. All action is dictated by egoism, self-love. Conscience is not the voice of God, but the fear of the police. Morality must be founded not on theology but on sociology.

The greatest figure in this group was Denis Diderot (1713-84). His ideas were expressed in various fragments from his own pen, and in the System of Nature of Baron d’Holbach (1723-89), whose salon was the centre of Diderot’s circle. “If we go back to the beginning,” says Holbach, “we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them; and that custom respects and tyranny supports them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own interests.” Belief in God, said Diderot, is bound up with submission to autocracy; the two rise and fall together; and “men will never be free till the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” The earth will come into its own only when heaven is destroyed. Materialism may be an over-simplification of the world—all matter is probably instinct with life, and it is impossible to reduce the unity of consciousness to matter and motion; but materialism is a good weapon against the Church, and must be used till a better one is found. Meanwhile one must spread knowledge and encourage industry; industry will make for peace, and knowledge will make a new and natural morality. 

Here is the thinking that belief in God is bound up with submission to autocracy; the two rise and fall together. All matter is probably instinct with life, and it is impossible to reduce the unity of consciousness to matter and motion. Industry will make for peace, and knowledge will make a new and natural morality. 

These are the ideas which Diderot and d’Alembert labored to disseminate through the great Encyclopedie which they issued, volume by volume, from 1752 to 1772. The Church had the first volumes suppressed; and as the opposition increased, Diderot’s comrades abandoned him; but he worked on angrily, invigorated by his rage. “I know nothing so indecent,” he said, “as these vague declamations of the theologians against reason. To hear them one would suppose that men could not enter into the bosom of Christianity except as a herd of cattle enters a stable.” It was, as Paine put it, the age of reason; these men never doubted that the intellect was the ultimate human test of all truth and all good. Let reason be freed, they said, and it would in a few generations build Utopia. Diderot did not suspect that the erotic and neurotic Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), whom he had just introduced to Paris, was carrying in his head, or in his heart, the seeds of a revolution against this enthronement of reason; a revolution which, armed with the impressive obscurities of Immanuel Kant, would soon capture every citadel of philosophy. 

It was the age of reason; these men never doubted that the intellect was the ultimate human test of all truth and all good.

Naturally enough, Voltaire, who was interested in everything, and had a hand in every fight, was caught up for a time in the circle of the Encyclopedists; they were glad to call him their leader; and he was not averse to their incense, though some of their ideas needed a little pruning. They asked him to write articles for their great undertaking, and he responded with a facility and fertility which delighted them. When he had finished this work he set about making an encyclopedia of his own, which he called a Philosophic Dictionary; with unprecedented audacity he took subject after subject as the alphabet suggested them, and poured out under each heading part of his inexhaustible resources of knowledge and wisdom. Imagine a man writing on everything, and producing a classic none the less; the most readable and sparkling of Voltaire’s works aside from his romances; every article a model of brevity, clarity, and wit. “Some men can be prolix in one small volume; Voltaire is terse through a hundred.” Here at last Voltaire proves that he is a philosopher. 

Voltaire was caught up for a time in the circle of the Encyclopedists. When he had finished this work he set about making an encyclopedia of his own, which he called a Philosophic Dictionary.

He begins, like Bacon, Descartes and Locke and all the moderns, with doubt and a (supposedly) clean slate. “I have taken as my patron saint St. Thomas of Didymus, who always insisted on an examination with his own hands.” He thanks Bayle for having taught him the art of doubt. He rejects all systems, and suspects that “every chief of a sect in philosophy has been a little of a quack.” “The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers what novels are for women.” It is only charlatans who are certain. We know nothing of first principles. It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God formed the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” “I do not know how I was made, and how I was born. I did not know at all, during a quarter of my life, the causes of what I saw, or heard, or felt. … I have seen that which is called matter, both as the star Sirius, and as the smallest atom which can be perceived with the microscope; and I do not know what this matter is.”

Voltaire begins, like Bacon, Descartes and Locke and all the moderns, with doubt and a (supposedly) clean slate. “Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” “I have seen that which is called matter… and I do not know what this matter is.”

He tells a story of “The Good Brahmin,” who says, “I wish I had never been born!” 

“Why so?” said I. 

“Because,” he replied, “I have been studying these forty years, and I find that it has been so much time lost. … I believe that I am composed of matter, but I have never been able to satisfy myself what it is that produces thought. I am even ignorant whether my understanding is a simple faculty like that of walking or digesting, or if I think with my head in the same manner as I take hold of a thing with my hands. … I talk a great deal, and when I have done speaking I remain confounded and ashamed of what I have said.”

The same day I had a conversation with an old woman, his neighbor. I asked her if she had ever been unhappy for not understanding how her soul was made? She did not even comprehend my question. She had not, for the briefest moment in her life, had a thought about these subjects with which the good Brahmin had so tormented himself. She believed in the bottom of her heart in the metamorphoses of Vishnu, and provided she could get some of the sacred water of the Ganges in which to make her ablutions, she thought herself the happiest of women. Struck with the happiness of this poor creature, I returned to my philosopher, whom. I thus addressed: 

“Are you not ashamed to be thus miserable when, not fifty yards from you, there is an old automaton who thinks of nothing and lives contented?” 

”You are right,” he replied. “I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my oId neighbor; and yet it is a happiness which I do not desire.” 

This reply of the Brahmin made a greater impression on me than anything that had passed.

Even if Philosophy should end in the total doubt of Montaigne’s “Que sais-je?” [What do I know?] It is man’s greatest adventure, and his noblest. Let us learn to be content with modest advances in knowledge, rather than be forever weaving new systems out of our mendacious imagination. 

The above paragraph needs to read repeatedly until fully understood.

We must not say, Let us begin by inventing principles whereby we may be able to explain everything; rather we must say, Let us make an exact analysis of the matter, and then we shall try to see, with much diffidence, if it fits in with any principle. … The Chancellor Bacon had shown the road which science might follow. … But then Descartes appeared and did just the contrary of what he should have done: instead of studying nature, he wished to divine her. … This best of mathematicians made onIy romances in philosophy. … It is given us to calculate, to weigh, to measure, to observe; this is natural philosophy; almost all the rest is chimera.

I love Voltaire.

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Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter V Section 6 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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VI. Ferney: Candide

Lea Délices had been a temporary home, a centre from which Voltaire might prospect to find a shelter of more permanence. He found it in 1758 at Ferney, just inside the Swiss line near France; here he would be secure from the French power, 

and yet near to French refuge if the Swiss Government should trouble him. This last change ended his Wanderjahre. His fitful runnings to and fro had not been all the result of nervous restlessness; they had reflected, too, his ubiquitous insecurity from persecution; only at sixty-four did he find a house that could be also his home. There is a passage at the end of one of his tales, “The Travels of Scarmentado,” which almost applies to its author: “As I had now seen all that was rare or beautiful on earth, I resolved for the future to see nothing but my own home; I took a wife, and soon suspected that she deceived me; but notwithstanding this doubt I still found that of all conditions of life this was much the happiest.'” He had no wife, but he had a niece—which is better for a man of genius. ”We never hear of his wishing to be in Paris. … There can be no doubt that this wise exile prolonged his days.”

At the age of sixty-four, Voltaire finally settled at Ferney, just inside the Swiss line near France, where he felt more secure. 

He was happy in his garden, planting fruit trees which he did not expect to see flourish in his lifetime. When an admirer praised the work he had done for posterity he answered, ”Yes, I have planted 4000 trees.” He had a kind word for everybody, but could be forced to sharper speech. One day he asked a visitor whence he came. “From Mr. Haller’s.” ”He is a great man,” said Voltaire; “a great poet, a great naturalist; a great philosopher, almost a universal genius.” “What you say, sir, is the more admirable, as Mr. Haller does not do you the same justice.” “Ah,” said Voltaire, “perhaps we are both mistaken.”

Votaire had a kind word for everybody, but could be forced to sharper speech.

Ferney now become the intellectual capital of the world; every learned man or enlightened ruler of the day paid his court either in person or by correspondence. Here came sceptical priests, liberal aristocrats, and learned ladies; here came Gibbon and Boswell from England; here came d’Alembert, Helvetius, and the other rebels of the Enlightenment; and countless others; At last the entertainment of this endless stream of visitors proved too expensive even for Voltaire; he complained that he was becoming the hotel-keeper for all Europe. To one acquaintance who announced that he had come to stay for six weeks, Voltaire said: ”What is the difference between you and Don Quixote? He mistook inns for chateaux, and you mistake this chateau for an inn.” “God preserve me from my friends,” he concluded; “I will take care of my enemies myself.” 

Ferney now become the intellectual capital of the world; every learned man or enlightened ruler of the day paid his court either in person or by correspondence.

Add to this perpetual hospitality, the largest correspondence the world has ever seen, and the most brilliant. Letters came from all sorts and conditions of men: a burgomaster wrote from Germany asking “in confidence whether there is a God or not,” and begging Voltaire to answer by return post; Gustavus III of Sweden was elated by the thought that Voltaire sometimes glanced at the North, and told him that this was their greatest encouragement to do their best up there; Christian VII of Denmark apologized for not establishing at once all reforms; Catherine II of Russia sent him beautiful presents, wrote frequently, and haped he would not consider her importunate. Even Frederick, after a year of doldrums returned to the fold, and resumed his correspondence with the King of Ferney. 

“You have done me great wrongs,” he wrote. “I have forgiven them all, and I even wish to forget them. But if you had not had to do with a madman in love with your noble genius, you would not have gotten off so well. … Do you want sweet things? Very well; I will tell you some truths. I esteem in you the finest genius that the ages have borne; I admire your poetry, I love your prose. … Never has an author before you had a tact so keen, a taste so sure and delicate. You are charming in conversation; you know how to amuse and instruct at the same time. You are the most seductive being that I know, capable of making yourself loved by all the world when you choose. You have such graces of mind that you can offend and yet at the same time deserve the indulgence of those who know you. In short, you would be perfect if you were not a man.”

Letters came from all sorts and conditions of men. Even Frederick, after a year of doldrums returned to the fold, and resumed his correspondence with Voltaire. 

Who would have expected so gay a host to become the exponent of pessimism? In youth, as a reveler in Paris’s salons, he had seen the sunnier side of life, despite the Bastille; and yet even in those careless days he had rebelled against the unnatural optimism. to which Leibnitz had given currency. To an ardent young man who had attacked him in print, and had contended with Leibnitz that this is “the best of all possible worlds,” Voltaire wrote, “I am pleased to hear, sir, that you have written a little book against me. You do me too much honor. … When you have shown, in verse or otherwise, why so many men cut their throats in the best of all possible worlds, I shall be exceedingly obliged to you. I await your arguments, your verses, and your abuse; and assure you from the bottom of my heart that neither of us knows anything about the matter. I have the honor to be,” etc. 

Persecution and disillusionment had worn down his faith in life; and his experiences at Berlin and Frankfort had taken the edge from his hope. But both faith and hope suffered most when, in November, 1755, came the news of the awful earthquake at Lisbon, in which 80,000 people had been killed. The quake had come on All Saints’ Day; the churches had been crowded with worshippers; and death, finding its enemies in close formation, had reaped a rich harvest. Voltaire was shocked into seriousness and raged when he heard that the French Clergy were explaining the disaster as a punishment for the sins of the people of Lisbon. He broke forth in a passionate poem in which he gave vigorous expression to the old dilemma: Either God can prevent evil and he will not; or he wishes to prevent it and he cannot. He was not satisfied with Spinoza’s answer that good and evil are human terms, inapplicable to the universe, and that our tragedies are trivial things in the perspective of eternity. 

I am a puny part of the great whole.
Yes; but all animals condemned to live,
All sentient things, born by the same stern law, 
Suffer like me, and like me also die.
The vulture fastens on his timid prey,
And stabs with bloody beak the quivering limbs: 
All’s well, it seems, for it. But in a while
An eagle tears the vulture into shreds;
The eagle is transfixed by shafts of man;
The man, prone in the dust of battlefields, 
Mingling his blood with dying fellow men, 
Becomes in turn the food of ravenous birds. 
Thus the whole world in every member groans, 
All born for torment and for mutual death. 
And o’er this ghastly chaos you would say 
The ills of each make up the good of all!
What blessedness! And as, with quaking voice, 
Mortal and pitiful ye cry, “All’s well,” 
The universe belies you, and your heart
Refutes a hundred times your mind’s conceit. …

What is the verdict of the vastest mind?
Silence: the book of fate is closed to us.
Man is a stranger to his own research;
He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes. 
Tormented atoms in a bed of mud, 
Devoured by death, a mockery of fate;
But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes, 
Guided by thoughts, have measured the faint stars. 
Our being mingles with the infinite;
Ourselves we never see, or come to know.
This world, this theatre of pride and wrong, 
Swarms with sick fools who talk of happiness. …

Once did I sing, in less lugubrious tone,
The sunny ways of pleasure’s general rule;
The times have changed, and, taught by growing age, 
And sharing of the frailty of mankind,
Seeking a light amid the deepening gloom,
I can but suffer, and will not repine.

Voltaire became more pessimistic as he aged. Persecution and disillusionment had worn down his faith in life

A few months later the Seven Years’ War broke out; Voltaire looked upon it as madness and suicide, the devastation of Europe to settle whether England or France should win “a few acres of snow” in Canada. On the top of this came a public reply, by Jean Jacques Rousseau, to the poem on Lisbon. Man himself was to be blamed for the disaster, said Rousseau; if we lived out in the fields, and not in the towns, we should not be killed on so large a scale; if we lived under the sky, and not in houses, houses would not fall upon us. Voltaire was amazed at the popularity won by this profound theodicy; and angry that his name should be dragged into the dust by such a Quixote, he turned upon Rousseau “that most terrible of all the intellectual weapons ever wielded by man, the mockery of Voltaire.” In three days, in 1759, he wrote Candide. 

Voltaire was aghast at the tragedies unfolding in Europe and the justifications provided for them.

Never was pessimism so gaily argued; never was man made to laugh so heartily while learning that this is a world of woe. And seldom has a story been told with such simple and hidden art; it is pure narrative and dialogue; no descriptions pad it out; and the action is riotously rapid. “In Voltaire’s fingers,” said Anatole France, “the pen runs and laughs.” It is perhaps the finest short story in all literature. 

Candide, as his name indicates, is a simple and honest lad, son of the great Baron of Thunder-Ten-Trockh of Westphalia, and pupil of the learned Pangloss. 

Pangloss was professor of metaphysicotheologicocosmonigology. … “It is demonstrable,” said he, “that all is necessarily for the best end. Observe that the nose has been formed to bear spectacles … legs were visibly designed for stockings … stones were designed to construct castles … pigs were made so that we might have pork all the year round. Consequently, they who assert that all is well have said a foolish thing; they should have said all is for the best.” 

While Pangloss is discoursing, the castle is attacked by the Bulgarian army, and Candide is captured and turned into a soldier.

He was made to wheel about to the right and to the left, to draw his rammer, to return his rammer, to present, to fire, to march. … He resolved, one fine day in spring, to go for a walk, marching straight before him, believing that it was a privilege of the human as well as the animal species to make use of their legs as they pleased. He had advanced two leagues when he was overtaken by four heroes six feet tall, who bound him and carried him to a dungeon. He was asked which he would like the best, to be whipped six and thirty times through all the regiment, or to receive at once two balls of lead in his brain. He vainly said that human will is free, and that he chose neither the one nor the other. He was forced to make a choice; he determined, in virtue of that gift of God called liberty, to run the gauntlet six-and-thirty times. He bore this twice.

Candide escapes, takes passage to Lisbon, and on board ship meets Professor Pangloss, who tells how the Baron and Baroness were murdered and the castle destroyed. “All this,” he concludes, “was indispensable; for private misfortune makes the general good, so that the more private misfortunes there are, the greater is the general good.” They arrive in Lisbon just in time to be caught in the earthquake. After it is over they tell each other their adventures and sufferings; whereupon an old servant assures them that their misfortunes are as nothing compared with her own. “A hundred times I was on the point of killing myself, but I loved life. This ridiculous foible is perhaps one of our most fatal characteristics; for is there anything more absurd than to wish to carry continually a burden which one can always throw down?” Or, as another character expresses it, “All things considered, the life of a gondolier is preferable to that of a doge; but I believe the difference is so trifling that it is not worth the trouble of examining.”

The urge to survive is perhaps one of our most fatal characteristics, a foible.

Candide, fleeing from the Inquisition, goes to Paraguay; “there the Jesuit Fathers possess all, and the people nothing; it is a masterpiece of reason and justice.” In a Dutch colony. he comes upon a negro with one hand, one leg, and a rag for clothing. “When we work at the sugar canes,” the slave explains, “and the mill snatches hold of a finger, they cut off a hand; and when we try to run away, they cut off a leg. … This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe.” Candide finds much loose gold in the unexplored interior; he returns to the coast and hires a vessel to take him to France; but the skipper sails off with the gold and leaves Candide philosophizing on the wharf. With what little remains to him, Candide purchases a passage on a ship bound for Bordeaux; and on board strikes up a conversation with an old sage, Martin. 

“Do you believe,” said Candide, “that men have always massacred one another as they do today, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites and fools?” 

“Do you believe,” said Martin, “that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?” 

”Without doubt,” said Candide. 

“Well, then,” said Martin, ”if hawks have always had the same character, why should you imagine that men have changed theirs?” . 

“Oh!” said Candide, “there is a vast deal of difference, for free will—“ 

And reasoning thus they arrived at Bordeaux.

We cannot follow Candide through the rest of his adventures, which form a rollicking commentary on the difficulties of medieval theology and Leibnitzian optimism. After suffering a variety of evils among a variety of men, Candide settles down as a farmer in Turkey; and the story ends with a final dialogue between master and pupil: 

Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: 

“There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle; … if you had not been put into the Inquisition; if you had not walked over America; … if you had not lost all your gold; … you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.” 

“All that is very well,” answered Candide; ”but let us cultivate our garden.” 

Candide attacks the passivity inspired by Leibniz’s philosophy of optimism through the character Pangloss’s frequent refrain that circumstances are the “best of all possible worlds”.

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Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter V Section 4 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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IV. Potsdam and Frederick

Those who could not come to him wrote to him. In 1736 began his correspondence with Frederick, then Prince, and not yet Great. Frederick’s first letter was like that of a boy to a king; its lavish flattery gives us an inkling of the reputation which Voltaire—though he had not yet written any of his masterpieces—had already won. It proclaims Voltaire as “the greatest man of France, and a mortal who does honor to language. … I count it one of the greatest honors of my life to be born the contemporary of a man of such distinguished attainments as yours. … It is not given to everyone to make the mind laugh”; and “what pleasures can surpass those of the mind?” Frederick was a free-thinker, who looked upon dogmas as a king looks upon subjects; and Voltaire had great hopes that on the throne Frederick would make the Enlightenment fashionable, while he himself, perhaps, might play Plato to Frederick’s Dionysius. When Frederick demurred to the flattery with which Voltaire answered his own, Voltaire replied: “A prince who writes against flattery is as singular as a pope who writes against infallibility.” Frederick sent him a copy of the Anti-Machiavel, in which the prince spoke very beautifully of the iniquity of war, and of the duty of a king to preserve peace; Voltaire wept tears of joy over this royal pacifist. A few months later Frederick, made king, invaded Silesia and plunged Europe into a generation of bloodshed. 

Prince Frederick was very charmed by Voltaire. And Voltaire had great hopes of Frederick as King.

In 1745 the poet and his mathematician went to Paris, when Voltaire became a candidate for membership in the French Academy. To achieve this quite superfluous distinction he called himself a good Catholic, complimented some powerful Jesuits, lied inexhaustibly, and in general behaved as most of us do in such cases. He failed; but a year later he succeeded, and delivered a reception address which is one of the classics of the literature of France. For a while he lingered in Paris, flitting from salon to salon, and producing play after play. From Oedipe at eighteen to Irene at eighty-three he wrote a long series of dramas, some of them failures, most of them successes. In 1730 Brutus failed, and in 1732 Eriphyle failed; his friends urged him to abandon the drama; but in the same year he produced Zaire, which became his greateat success. Mahomet followed in 1741, Merope in 1743, Semiramis. n 1748, and Tancrede in 1760. 

Voltaire, in writing drama, had some failures but mostly successes.

Meanwhile tragedy and comedy had entered his own life. After fifteen years, his love for Mme. du Chatelet had somewhat thinned; they had even ceased to quarrel. In 1748 the Marquise fell in love with the handsome young Marquis de Saint-Lambert. When Voltaire discovered it he raged; but when Saint-Lambert asked his forgiveness he melted into a benediction. He had reached the crest of life now, and began to see death in the distance; he could not take it ill that youth should be served. “Such are women,” he said philosophically (forgetting that there are such men too): “I displaced Richelieu, Saint-Lambert turns me out! That is the order of things; one nail drives out another; so goes the world.” He wrote a pretty stanza to the third nail: 

Saint-Lambert, it is all for thee 
The flower grows; 
The rose’s thorns are all for me; 
For thee the rose. 

Then, in 1749, came the death of Mme. du Chatelet in childbirth. It was characteristic of the age that her husband and Voltaire and Saint-Lambert should meet at her death-bed with not one word of reproach, and indeed made friends by then common loss. 

Voltaire had quite a love life.

Voltaire tried to forget his bereavement in work; for a time he busied himself with his Siecle de Louis XIV; but what rescued him from despondency was the opportune renewal of Frederick’s invitation to come to his court at Potsdam. An invitation accompanied by 3000 francs for traveling expenses was irresistible. Voltaire left for Berlin in 1750. 

It soothed him to find himself assigned to a splendid suite in Frederick’s palace, and accepted on equal terms by the most powerful monarch of the age. At first his letters were full of satisfaction: writing on July 24 to d’Argental he describes 

Potsdam—“150,000 soldiers; … opera, comedy, philosophy, poetry, grandeur and graces, grenadiers and muses, trumpets and violins, the suppers of Plato, society and liberty,—who would believe it? Yet it is very true.” Years before, he had written: “Mon Dieu! … what a delightful life it would be to lodge with three or four men of letters with talents and no jealousy” (what imagination!), “to love one another, live quietly, cultivate one’s art, talk of it, enlighten ourselves mutually!—I picture to myself that I shall some day live in this little Paradise.” And here it was! 

In 1750, Voltaire moved to Potsdam at King Frederick’s invitation. At first, he found a lot of satisfaction there.

Voltaire avoided the state dinners; he could not bear to be surrounded with bristling generals; he reserved himself for the private suppers to which Frederick, later in the evening, would invite a small inner circle of literary friends; for this greatest prince of his age yearned to be a poet and a philosopher. The conversation at these suppers was always in French; Voltaire tried to learn German, but gave it up after nearly choking; and wished the Germans had more wit and fewer consonants. One who heard the conversation said that it was better than the most interesting and best-written book in the world. They talked about everything, and said what they thought. Frederick’s wit was almost as sharp as Voltaire’s; and only Voltaire dared to answer him, with that finesse which could kill without giving offense. “One thinks boldly, one is free here,” wrote Voltaire joyfully. Frederick “scratches with one hand, but caresses with the other. … I am crossed in nothing … I find a port after fifty years of storm. I find the protection of a king, the conversation of a philosopher, the charms of an agreeable man, united in one who for sixteen years consoled me in misfortune and sheltered me from my enemies. If one can be certain of anything it is of the character of the King of Prussia.” However … 

He had great company at private suppers with the King of Prussia.

In November of this same year Voltaire thought he would improve his finances by investing in Saxon bonds, despite Frederick’s prohibition of such investments. The bonds rose, and Voltaire profited; but his agent, Hirsch, tried to blackmail him by threatening to publish the transaction. Voltaire “sprang at his throat and sent him sprawling.” Frederick learned of the affair and fell into a royal rage. “I shall want him at the most another year,” he said to La Mettrie; “one squeezes the orange and throws away the rind.” La Mettrie, perhaps anxious to disperse his rivals, took care to report this to Voltaire. The suppers were resumed, “but,” wrote Voltaire, “the orange rind haunts my dreams. … The man who fell from the top of a steeple, and finding the falling through the air soft, said, ‘Good, provided it lasts,’ was not a little as I am.” 

But then he ran afoul of the King by profiting from a prohibited investment.

He half desired a break; for he was as homesick as only a Frenchman can be. The decisive trifle came in 1752. Maupertuis, the great mathematician whom Frederick had imported from France with so many others in an attempt to arouse the German mind by direct contact with the “Enlightenment,” quarreled with a subordinate mathematician, Koenig, over an interpretation of Newton. Frederick entered into the dispute on the side of Maupertuis; and Voltaire, who had more courage than caution, entered it on the side of Koenig. “Unluckily for me,” he wrote to Mme. Denis, “I am also an author, and in the opposite camp to the King. I have no scepter, but I have a pen.” About the same time Frederick was writing to his sister: “The devil is incarnate in my men of letters; there is no doing anything with them. These fellows have no intelligence except for society. … It must be a consolation to animals to see that people with minds are often no better than they.” It was now that Voltaire wrote against Maupertuis his famous “Diatribe of Dr. Akakia.” He read it to Frederick, who laughed all night over it, but begged Voltaire not to publish it. Voltaire seemed to acquiesce;· but the truth was that the thing was already sent to the printer, and the author could not bring himself to practice infanticide on the progeny of his pen. When it appeared Frederick burst into flame, and Voltaire fled from the conflagration. 

The decisive trifle came in 1752. And Voltaire fled from Potsdam.

At Frankfort, though in territory quite outside Frederick’s jurisdiction, he was overtaken and arrested by the King’s agents, and told that he could not go on until he surrendered Frederick’s poem, the Palladium, which had not been adapted for polite society, and out-Pucelled Voltaire’s Pucelle itself. But the terrible manuscript was in a trunk which had been lost on the way; and for weeks, till it came, Voltaire was kept almost in prison. A book-seller to whom he owed something thought it an opportune moment to come and press for the payment of his bill; Voltaire, furious, gave him a blow on the ear; whereupon Voltaire’s secretary, Collini, offered comfort to the man by pointing out, “Sir, you have received a box on the ear from one of the greatest men in the world.” 

Voltaire own life was quite dramatic.

Freed at last, he was about to cross the frontier into France, when word came that he was exiled. The hunted old soul hardly knew where to turn; for a time he thought of going to Pennsylvania—one may imagine his desperation. He spent the March of 1754 seeking “an agreeable tomb” in the neighborhood of Geneva, safe from the rival autocrats of Paris and Berlin; at last he bought an old estate called Les Delices; settled down to cultivate his garden and regain his health; and when his life seemed to be ebbing away into senility, entered upon the period of his noblest and greatest work. 

Exiled from France, and fleeing for Germany, he finally settled in Geneva. When his life seemed to be ebbing away into senility, entered upon the period of his noblest and greatest work. 

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