The life of Voltaire

In 1694, when Louis XIV. was at the height of that military glory which at once dazzled and ruined France, there was born in Paris on November 21st a little, puny, weak, sickly...

At the death of Louis XIV. Paris was still the typical Paris of the old _régime_. Magnificence and squalor, dirt and splendour, a few men living like gods and most men living li...

The subject of the play is classical and the plot entirely impossible. Love interest there is none. The style is not a little bombastical and long-winded. The characters are alw...

The subject is the life of Henry of Navarre; the chief event, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Truth, Discord, and other abstract virtues are embodied, and talk at some length....

It was the last year of the reign of George I. Swift was Dean of St. Patrick’s. Pope was writing that masterpiece of brilliant malice, the “Dunciad,” at Twickenham. Gay, Young,...

In the middle of March, 1729, there was a man calling himself M. Sansons, living over a wigmaker’s at St. Germain-en-Laye. At the end of the month M. Sansons came to Paris, and...

In 1706, there was born one Émilie, the daughter of the Baron de Breteuil. Émilie grew up into a tall slip of a girl with very long legs, very bright eyes, very little grace, an...

After the death of Madame du Châtelet, Longchamp, Voltaire’s secretary, rescued from the flames in which many of her papers were burning, a number of letters in a very small han...

The spring of 1737 passed quietly enough. Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet were occupied in scientific experiments, and as delighted as two children with wonderful discoveries an...

On December 4, 1738, there arrived at Cirey, having been almost upset out of her post-chaise, and actually compelled to wade through the midwinter mud of the worst roads in Fran...

In 1724, when Voltaire was thirty years old and in Paris, Theriot had introduced to him Desfontaines, then a journalist, and an ex-abbé. Their acquaintance was of the slightest....

Since that first letter of the August of 1736 the correspondence and friendship between Voltaire and Prince Frederick of Prussia had grown more and more enthusiastic. The devote...

Before Voltaire reached Brussels--nay, before he had written to Frederick that letter from the ice-bound boat off the coasts of Zealand--he had received one of the greatest ment...

Voltaire had a little distraction from his disappointment about the Academy in the April of this 1743 in the marriage of Pauline du Châtelet, the vivacious little amateur actres...

The new favour Voltaire had obtained had to be paid for like any other advantage of fortune. Then, as now, the finer the post, the more ennui and exaction in filling it. The nea...

Who is it that having climbed to a height does not look on the prospect that it affords him, and wonder if that prospect be worth the bogs and the mire, the stones and the bould...

It was one of the very doubtful privileges of Madame du Châtelet’s rank that she was permitted to play cards at the Queen’s table. Émilie had never done anything in moderation i...

One of Madame du Châtelet’s idiosyncrasies was to travel only by night; and another, to overload the travelling carriage with luggage. She insisted on having her way in both par...

He had been slow to see anything. But when he did see, he saw all. He broke into the most passionate and violent reproaches. The lofty Saint-Lambert responded that no one had th...

For a while he was utterly crushed and broken. He wrote of himself to his friends as the most wretched of men. He was alone, abandoned, dying. Everything that made life worth ha...

Clean, quiet Potsdam stands on the river Havel and is sixteen miles from Berlin. In 1745, the great Frederick had begun to build there the little, white, one-storied palace call...

ON November 6, 1750, at Potsdam, and after he had been in Prussia rather less than three months, Uncle Voltaire took his versatile pen in hand and wrote to Louise Denis a famous...

Arouet had heard with his own ears the strange tales told in Paris at that monarch’s death. In 1719, when he was five-and-twenty and falling in brief love with the exquisite Mar...

With the exception of the Hirsch affair there is no episode in Voltaire’s life about which so many statements (usually conflicting) have been made as about the quarrel with Maup...

Frederick the Great had the misfortune to suffer now from subordinates so loyal that they went beyond their master’s commands, and officials with a blundering zeal not according...

The arrival of Voltaire at Mayence rang down the curtain upon the greatest act of one of the most famous dramas of friendship in the world. It left Frederick enraged: first of a...

Receiving no answer to his request to be allowed to travel, Voltaire prudently resolved to consider that silence gave consent. But he was still not a little nervous that if he t...

In 1755, the little republic of Geneva contained twenty thousand of some of the most simple, honest, frugal, and industrious persons in the world. Calvin had been dead two centu...

The “Poem on Natural Law” was an answer to Frederick the Great’s version of the stupendous question of Pilate--“What is truth?” The poem is in four short parts and an “easy and...

On January 5, 1757, Damiens, an unfortunate lunatic, made a very feeble attempt upon the life of Louis XV. As is usual in such cases, the King was accredited with infinite calm...

person replied “Ah! Madame, you are a living proof to the contrary!” Uncle Voltaire would have been very _vif_, no doubt, if he had known of Gibbon’s unflattering criticism on h...

On June 21, 1758, Voltaire was writing delightedly to his Angel to tell him that through the offices of the pink-cheeked Bernis, Louis XV. had been good enough to give a formal...

Ferney, as has been said, stood on the north shore of Lake Leman, in the district of Gex, three and a half miles from Geneva and almost joining Délices. The village to which it...

“On the Mind” was the naïve expression of the materialism of the wittiest freethinker in Paris, Helvétius, _maître d’hôtel_ to the Queen and Farmer-General. But the Dauphin show...

On March 10, 1760, M. le Franc de Pompignan took the seat in the French Academy left vacant by the death of Maupertuis, and delivered an opening address which was nothing but an...

It is hardly possible to write a life of Rousseau or of Voltaire without comparing them. Voltaire, all sharp sense: and Rousseau all hot sensibility; Rousseau, visionary, dreame...

In 1761 and 1762, Toulouse, the capital of Languedoc and the seventh city of France, was one of the most priest-ridden in the kingdom. The anniversary of that supreme crime of h...

One of the disadvantages of biography as compared with fiction is, that in real life many events occur simultaneously, and the dramatic effect of a crisis is often spoilt by tha...

Desnoiresterres has well observed that this mad eighteenth century produced the extraordinary anomaly of being at once that of scepticism and intolerance, of the most degraded s...

He played the part to the life. He amicably exchanged seeds and bulbs with his neighbours, and admired their gardens in return for their admiration of his; he invited them to di...

“What harm can a book do that costs a hundred crowns?” Voltaire had written to Damilaville on April 5, 1765. “Twenty volumes folio will never make a revolution; it is the little...

The plan was immediately approved and acted upon by her seventeen guests. They formed themselves into a committee to receive subscriptions, and decided that the work should be e...

Voltaire’s old age was naturally something less eventful than the “crowded hour” of his youth and manhood. But if ever his private life afforded him a chance of quiet, public ev...

Morley speaks of Voltaire’s last visit as “one of the historic events of the century,” “the last great commotion in Paris under the old _régime_.” “A ghost, a prophet, an apostl...

The accounts of the dying of Voltaire would fill a volume. Round this great deathbed were gathered persons who each had a different end to serve by differently describing it.