Read Voltaire in Love for Free Online

edited the Grande Mademoiselle’s memoirs when they appeared in 1729, and became the greatest living expert on Voltairiana.
    All this time Voltaire was busy with the Henriade. It might have been supposed, and no doubt he hoped, that a poem in praise of that King of France from whom the reigning King was five times descended would have been well-received at Court. Had Voltaire been an obscure scribbler living in some garret his work might have been taken at its face value. But his iconoclastic point of view was well known and prejudiced the authorities against his books. Everything that he wrote was regarded with the deepest suspicion, every phrase examined for a subversive meaning. The Henriade, subjected to this treatment, was supposed to smell of Jansenism; Coligny, the Protestant Admiral, was overrated while the King was presented as a mere human being and not a demigod. The first set-back was when Voltaire was refused leave to dedicate the poem to Louis XV. Worse still, he was also refused a privilège, the guarantee of royal permission to print. So it seemed wiser to have it published at Rouen and not at Paris; an edition of 4,000 copies was then secretly brought to Paris and circulated from hand to hand. Another startling triumph. Every woman of fashion displayed the Henriade on her dressing-table when she received her friends during the ‘toilette’, while the literary pundits could not praise it enough. Henri IV who, in the course of years, had been forgotten by the French, now sprang to the position of Best and Favourite King from which he has never since been ousted. The poem was frowned on but not normally forbidden by the police. In this case Voltaire made the best of both worlds; he benefited from the publicity caused by any sort of official disapproval and at the same time was free to arrange for new editions to be printed. But the whole affair had been nervous work. On the other hand his Marianne was given at the Comédie Française without let or hindrance; it was a failure and Voltaire realized when he saw it on the boards that this had been inevitable.
    His star continued to rise. At the age of thirty young Arouet had become the famous M. de Voltaire, France’s greatest living writer. His little love affairs prospered. Except for that with Mme de Bernières they were quite unimportant; in all of them it was he who called the tune and the women who made the jealous scenes. After the Regent’s death in 1723 France was ruled by the Duc de Bourbon whose mistress, Mme de Prie, was very much attached to Voltaire. She took him to Versailles where he was made welcome. The young Queen, Marie-Leczinska, told him that she had wept at Marianne and laughed at his L’Indiscret; she called him ‘mon pauvre Voltaire’ and settled a pension on him. His influence seemed unlimited, and in 1725 he put it to the proof.
    A literary acquaintance, the Abbé Desfontaines, was arrested and sent to the criminal prison at Bicêtre for corrupting little chimneysweeps. Voltaire said he must have mistaken them for Cupids, withtheir bandaged eyes and iron rods. The current, rather excessive punishment for sodomy was burning at the stake in the Place de la Grève outside the Hôtel de Ville; Desfontaines trembled in his shoes and wrote frantic letters to all his friends, begging them to help him. Nobody lifted a finger except Voltaire. Although he was ill, he got up and went to Fontainebleau where the Court was in residence. He saw people, pulled strings, and rescued Desfontaines from an unpleasant death. The trial was stopped and the Abbé set free. Thieriot, who had introduced the two men in the first place, now took it upon himself to make mischief between them. It seemed that no sooner was Desfontaines out of Bicêtre than he had written a disgusting pamphlet against Voltaire. He showed it to Thieriot who very properly threw it in the fire, but then could not resist telling Voltaire