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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 Frenchexiles 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.