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Updated: May 12, 2025
In a word, Voltaire's work from first to last was alert with unquenchable life. Some of it, much of it, has ceased to be alive for us now in all that belongs to its deeper significance, yet we recognize that none of it was ever the dreary still-birth of a mind of hearsays. There is no mechanical transmission of untested bits of current coin.
When they go, their places are soon supplied, so that there is a constant rotation of society at Ferney. These, with Voltaire's own family and his visitors from Geneva, compose a company of twelve or fourteen people, who dine daily at his table, whether he appears or not. All who bring recommendations from his friends may depend upon being received, if he be not really indisposed.
From the wings I watched the house well lighted, for the king's Majesty was there, looking frightfully bored in the royal box and a mob of fine people. I presumed, from seeing Voltaire's piece played, that he was at last home from England, and sure enough, there he was, sitting in a box. He had but lately arrived, as I afterward learned. He looked well dressed, well fed and very impudent.
I long to read Voltaire's 'Rome Sauvee', which, by the very faults that your SEVERE critics find with it, I am sure I shall like; for I will at an any time give up a good deal of regularity for a great deal of brillant; and for the brillant surely nobody is equal to Voltaire.
To return to the Essay, it flung down the gage of battle to that conception of the history of the world which had been brilliantly represented by Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle. This work was constantly in Voltaire's mind.
Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book. The title of this first Essay, The Age of Sesostris, was perhaps suggested by Voltaire's Age of Lewis XIV. which was new and popular; but my sole object was to investigate the probable date of the life and reign of the conqueror of Asia.
"I brought you in here that you might sit at Voltaire's table, and eat your steak under the shadow of Voltaire's bust; but this salon is chiefly frequented by law-students the other by medical and art students. Your place, mon chér, as well as mine, is in the outer sanctuary." "That infernal Martial!" groaned one of the domino-players at the other end of the table.
Goethe carried his condescension so far that he even wrote a continuation of an after-piece of Florian's; and his taste was so impartial that he even translated several of Voltaire's tragedies for the German stage.
Yet it was exactly the Dark Ages from which the great romantic revival drew its very life-breath. "In the eighteenth century," it has been said, "it was really the reminiscence of the classic spirit which was awakened in the newer life of Europe, and made prominent." This is true in a certain historic sense of Rousseau's politics, and perhaps of Voltaire's rationalism.
Of his envies, deep-hidden splenetic discontents and rages, with Voltaire's return for them, there will be enough to say in the ulterior stages. Maupertuis is well known at Cirey; such a lion could not fail there. A BON GARCON, Voltaire says; though otherwise, I think, a little noisy on occasion.
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