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_ Letters on England
by Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet)
Francois Marie Arouet, who called himself Voltaire, was the son of
Francois Arouet of Poitou, who lived in Paris, had given up his
office of notary two years before the birth of this his third son,
and obtained some years afterwards a treasurer's office in the
Chambre des Comptes. Voltaire was born in the year 1694. He lived
until within ten or eleven years of the outbreak of the Great French
Revolution, and was a chief leader in the movement of thought that
preceded the Revolution. Though he lived to his eighty-fourth year,
Voltaire was born with a weak body. His brother Armand, eight years
his senior, became a Jansenist. Voltaire when ten years old was
placed with the Jesuits in the College Louis-le-Grand. There he was
taught during seven years, and his genius was encouraged in its bent
for literature; skill in speaking and in writing being especially
fostered in the system of education which the Jesuits had planned to
produce capable men who by voice and pen could give a reason for the
faith they held. Verses written for an invalid soldier at the age
of eleven won for young Voltaire the friendship of Ninon l'Enclos,
who encouraged him to go on writing verses. She died soon
afterwards, and remembered him with a legacy of two thousand livres
for purchase of books. He wrote in his lively school-days a tragedy
that afterwards he burnt. At the age of seventeen he left the
College Louis-le-Grand, where he said afterwards that he had been
taught nothing but Latin and the Stupidities. He was then sent to
the law schools, and saw life in Paris as a gay young poet who, with
all his brilliant liveliness, had an aptitude for looking on the
tragic side of things, and one of whose first poems was an "Ode on
the Misfortunes of Life." His mother died when he was twenty.
Voltaire's father thought him a fool for his versifying, and
attached him as secretary to the Marquis of Chateauneuf; when he
went as ambassador to the Hague. In December, 1713, he was
dismissed for his irregularities. In Paris his unsteadiness and his
addiction to literature caused his father to rejoice in getting him
housed in a country chateau with M. de Caumartin. M. de Caumartin's
father talked with such enthusiasm of Henri IV. and Sully that
Voltaire planned the writing of what became his Henriade, and his
"History of the Age of Louis XIV.," who died on the 1st of
September, 1715.
Under the regency that followed, Voltaire got into trouble again and
again through the sharpness of his pen, and at last, accused of
verse that satirised the Regent, he was locked up--on the 17th of
May, 1717--in the Bastille. There he wrote the first two books of
his Henriade, and finished a play on OEdipus, which he had begun at
the age of eighteen. He did not obtain full liberty until the 12th
of April, 1718, and it was at this time--with a clearly formed
design to associate the name he took with work of high attempt in
literature--that Francois Marie Arouet, aged twenty-four, first
called himself Voltaire.
Voltaire's OEdipe was played with success in November, 1718. A few
months later he was again banished from Paris, and finished the
Henriade in his retirement, as well as another play, Artemise, that
was acted in February, 1720. Other plays followed. In December,
1721, Voltaire visited Lord Bolingbroke, who was then an exile from
England, at the Chateau of La Source. There was now constant
literary activity. From July to October, 1722, Voltaire visited
Holland with Madame de Rupelmonde. After a serious attack of small-
pox in November, 1723, Voltaire was active as a poet about the
Court. He was then in receipt of a pension of two thousand livres
from the king, and had inherited more than twice as much by the
death of his father in January, 1722. But in December, 1725, a
quarrel, fastened upon him by the Chevalier de Rohan, who had him
waylaid and beaten, caused him to send a challenge. For this he was
arrested and lodged once more, in April, 1726, in the Bastille.
There he was detained a month; and his first act when he was
released was to ask for a passport to England.
Voltaire left France, reached London in August, 1726, went as guest
to the house of a rich merchant at Wandsworth, and remained three
years in this country, from the age of thirty-two to the age of
thirty-five. He was here when George I. died, and George II. became
king. He published here his Henriade. He wrote here his "History
of Charles XII." He read "Gulliver's Travels" as a new book, and
might have been present at the first night of The Beggar's Opera.
He was here whet Sir Isaac Newton died.
In 1731 he published at Rouen the Lettres sur les Anglais, which
appeared in England in 1733 in the volume from which they are here
reprinted.
H.M. _
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