Contes. Edited by H.W. Preston

Quand je m'ennuyais trop en classe (she says), je me faisais mettre à la porte pour aller au jardin, tu comprends! Oh! mon Dieu, c'était bien facile, j'avais un moyen ! Au miUeu d'un grand silence, je m'écriais : * Ah ! ce Voltaire, quel génie ! ' La Sœur Séraphine me disait tout de suite : ' Sortez, mademoiselle ! ' Ce n'était pas long, et ça prenait toujours.

Once the Mother Superior was présent.

Tableau ! elle ne m'a pas envoyée au jardin, non, elle m'a renvoyée ici.

Almost the whole réputation of Voltaire is there : on the one hand, a rather mahcious enthusiasm ; on the other, instant and décisive condemnation.

And for each there is ample warrant. Indeed, it might be maintained that there were two Voltaires : a Voltaire of clear intelligence, brilliant wit and fine taste, sensible, essentially serions, kindly, generous, possessed by a passion for justice, for truth ; and a Voltaire childish, prejudiced, mean, jealous, violent, rapacious and conceited, scandalously untruthful, a man, in the phrase of Frederick II, with ail the tricks of a monkey : the véritable Jckyll and Hyde of Utcrature. Yet both were the real Voltaire, as varying

viii CONTES DE VOLTAIRE

circuinstauces brouglit to tlie iioiil the varied qualities of his inaiiy-sided and too sensitive nature.

He was born when France hcld the first place in Europe and the French monarchy was absolute : he died M'ithin a few years of the Révolution that swept the monarchy out of existence and brought the armies of Europe to Paris ; and during the intervening years he had suffered nearly every change of fortune : he was imprisoned, he was a favourite at Versailles, he was beaten by footmen, he was an honoured guest at Potsdam, he was ranked above Corneille and Racine, he saw his books burnt by the hangman, he was elected a member of the Academy ; he lived in a sort of exile, he died after a sort of apotheosis in Paris. And thèse vicissitudes were but natural incidents in the long war he waged against worn-out forms of thought which he did more than any other man to destroy.

The name that has become famous was not his own : it is apparently an anagram of Arouet l.j. (le jeune), adopted early in his career in place of the one under which, as he said, he had been too unhappy. He was born — François-Marie Arouet — on November 21, 1694, the son of a notary in Paris, and educated at the Jesuit Collège of Louis-le-Grand. His precocious genius, his zest for hfe, won liim a place in the frivolous society of the Regency, where he developed the poetic talent that is the spécial mark of his earher years. Imprisonment in 1717 for a satire he had not wTitten was the prélude to an expérience that had more lasting conséquences. A young aristocrat inquired one evening in Society : ' Quel est ce jeune homme qui parle si haut ? ' * Monsieur,' Voltaire answered for lilmseLf, ' c'est un homme

INTRODUCTION ix

qui ne traîne pas un grand nom, mais qui honore celui qu'il porte.' Afew days later at supper with the Duc de SuUy, Voltaire is asked for at the door : he goes out, and is soundly beaten by the ChevaHer's lacqueys. He demands protection from the Duke, appeals to the law, leams to fence and challenges the ChevaUer ; ail in vain. He complains to the authorities and is again sent to the Bastille. Permitted, a few weeks later, to expiate his crimes by exile, he came to England.

' During the two générations,' Buckle affirms in his History of Civilization, ' which elapsed between the death of Lewis XIV and the outbreak of the Révolution, there was hardly a Frenchman of eminence who did not either visit England or learn Enghsh, while many did both.' Voltaire did both. He came to the England of Pope and S^ift, of Newton and Berkeley, of BoHngbroke and Chesterfield : in comparison with the France of that time, a home of pohtical liberty and freedom of speech, of scientific discovery and philosophie thought. Voltaire made the acquaintance of ail the men of note : he read Shakespeare and Milton ; he studied Newton and Locke ; he was the friend of Dr. Samuel Clarke. In 1729 he was permitted to return home. ' He lef t France,' says Lord Morley, ' a poet, he returned to it a sage.'

An almost unparalleled literary activity occupicd the whole of his long life. His works fill ninety volumes. There are twenty-eight tragédies, two of which hâve kept the stage for over a hundred and fifty years ; and twelve comédies ; the Siècle de Louis XIV, a new and original history of which he said that ten lines of certain chapters had cost him a fortnight's reading ; the Histoire de Charles XII, a masterpiece of lucid narrative ; the