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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 timehad clearly come to sail for