THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

VOLTAIRE I57
It was well that he added an almost Hebraic subtlety of finance to his
Gallic Cleverness of pen; for his next play, Artemire 3 failed. Voltaire felt
the failure keenly; every triumph sharpens the sting of later defeats. He
was always painfully sensitive to public opinion, and envied the animals
because they do not know what people say of them. Fate added to his
dramatic failure a bad case of small-pox; he cured himself by drinking
120 pints of lemonade, and somewhat less of physic. When he came out
of the shadow of death he found that his Henriade had made him famous;
he boasted, with reason, that he had made poetry the fashion. He was
received and feted everywhere; the aristocracy caught him up and
turned him into a polished man of the world, an unequalled master of
conversation, and the inheritor of the finest cultural tradition in Europe.
For eight years he basked in the sunshine of the salons; and then
fortune turned away. Some of the aristocracy could not forget that this
young man had no other title to place and honor than that of genius, and
could not quite forgive him for the distinction. During a dinner at the
Due de Bully's chateau, after Voltaire had held forth for some minutes
with unabashed eloquence and wit, the Chevalier de Rohan asked, not
sotto uoce, "Who is the young man who talks so loud?" "My Lord/*
answered Voltaire quickly, "he is one who does not carry a great name,
but wins respect for the name he has." To answer the Chevalier at all was
impertinence; to answer him unanswerably was treason. The honorable
Lord engaged a band of ruffians to assault Voltaire by night, merely
cautioning them, "Don't hit his head; something good may come out of
that yet." The next day, at the theatre, Voltaire appeared, bandaged and
limping, walked up to Rohan's box, and challenged him to a duel. Then
he went home and spent all day practising with the foils. But the noble
Chevalier had no mind to be precipitated into heaven, or elsewhere^ by
a mere genius; he appealed to his cousin, who was Minister of Police a to
protect him. Voltaire was arrested, and found himself again in his old
home, the Bastille, privileged once more to view the world from the inside.
He was almost immediately released, on condition that he go into exile in
England. He went; but after being escorted to Dover he recrossed the
Channel in disguise, burning to avenge himself. Warned that he had been
discovered, and was about to be arrested a third time, he took ship again^
and reconciled himself to three years in England (1726-29) .
II. LONDON: LETTERS ON THE ENGLISH
He set to work with courage to master the new language. He was dis-
pleased to find that plague had one syllable and ague two; he wished that
plague would take one-half the language, and ague the other half. But
soon he could read English well; and within a year he was master of the
best English literature of the age. He was introduced to the literati by