THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

VOLTAIRE I59
philosophy; he took all these varied elements^ passed them through the
fire of French culture and the French spirit, and transmuted them into
the gold of Gallic wit and eloquence. He recorded his impressions in
Letters on the English, which he circulated in manuscript among his
friends; he did not dare to print them, for they praised "perfidious
Albion" too highly to suit the taste of the royal censor. They contrasted
English political liberty and intellectual independence with French
tyranny and bondage; 20
they condemned the idle aristocracy and the
tithe-absorbing clergy of France, with their perpetual recourse to the
Bastille as the answer to every question and every doubt; they urged the
middle classes to rise to their proper place in the state, as these classes had
in England. Without quite knowing or intending it, these letters were
the first cock's crow of the Revolution,
III. CIREY: THE ROMANCES
Nevertheless the Regent, not knowing- of this chanticleer, sent Voltaire
permission, in 1 729, to return to France. For five years Voltaire enjoyed
again that Parisian life whose wine flowed in his veins and whose spirit
flowed from his pen. And then some miscreant of a publisher, getting
hold of the Letters on the English, turned them without the author's
permission into print, and sold them far and wide, to the horror of all
good Frenchmen, including Voltaire. The Parliament of Paris at once
ordered the book to be publicly burned as "scandalous, contrary to re-
ligion, to morals, and to respect for authority"; and Voltaire learned that
he was again on the way to the Bastille. Like a good philosopher, he took to
his heeJs merely utilizing the occasion to elope with another man's wife.
The Marquise du Ghatelet was twenty-eight; Voltaire, alas, was already
forty. She was a remarkable woman: she had studied mathematics with
the redoubtable Maupertuis, and then with Clairaut; she had written a
learnedly annotated translation of Newton's Principia; she was soon to
receive higher rating than Voltaire in a contest for a prize offered by
the French Academy for an essay on the physics of fire; in short she was
precisely the kind of woman who never elopes. But the Marquis was so
dull, and Voltaire was so interesting "a creature lovable in every way,"
she called him; "the finest ornament in France." 21 He returned her love
'"Diderot -was jailed six months for his Letter on the Blind; ButTon, in 1751,
was made to retract publicly his teachings on the antiquity of the earth ; Freret was
sent to the Bastille for a critical inquiry into the origins of the royal power in
France; books continued to be burned officially by the public hangman till 1788,
as also after the Restoration in 1815; in 1757 an edict pronounced the death
penalty for any author who should "attack religion," i. e. 3 call in question any
dogma of the traditional faith. Robertson, 73, 84, 105, 107; Pellissier, Voltaire
Philosophe, Paris, 1908, p. 92; Buckle, History of Civilization, New York, 1913;
Vol. I, pp. 529 f.
a ln Sainte-Beuve, i 206.