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Updated: May 12, 2025
I read him French books of the last century, the memoirs of Saint Simon, of Mably, Renal, Helvetius, Voltaire's correspondence, the encyclopedists, of course without understanding a word, even when, with a smile and a grimace, he ordered me, 'relire ce dernier paragraphe, qui est bien remarquable! Ivan Matveitch was completely a Frenchman.
But he exhibited the depressing calm of a careworn man who cannot foresee how things will result. The days were long at the Kremlin while the Emperor awaited Alexander's reply, which never came. At this time I noticed that the Emperor kept constantly on his table Voltaire's history of Charles XII.
It was thought War could not survive Voltaire's remark that a monarch picks up a parcel of men who have nothing to do, dresses them in blue cloth at two shillings a yard, and marches away with them to glory but here is our Henley singing a song of the sword, while all our novelists are looking to their weapons. Despite Heine's sarcasm, the collection of English kings is as incomplete as ever.
One of them had taken from a little leather bag placed on the table her blessed rosary and was repeating her prayers, while her sister was reading a volume of Voltaire's correspondence which she held at a distance from her eyes, her lips moving as she perused it.
The whole of Europe beheld at Ferney the oracle, not only of philosophy, but of good taste; for thirty years every scribbler, every rising genius, and every crowned head, submitted his verses to the censure of Voltaire; Voltaire's plays were performed before crowded houses; his epic was pronounced superior to Homer's, Virgil's, and Milton's; his epigrams were transcribed by every letter-writer, and got by heart by every wit.
It is not the same as to its nature; it matters little to religion of what substance is the soul, if only it be virtuous. In the various editions of Voltaire's collected works published in the last century these letters do not appear as a series, but their contents is distributed among the miscellaneous articles, and those of the Dictionnaire philosophique.
This is an ideal to which Locke, anxious to make disciples by his regular and sometimes racy use of language, never attained. La Bruyère, who did not address the passing age, so polished his periods that all successive generations have hailed him as one of the greatest masters of prose. Voltaire's definition of the style of La Bruyère is well known, but cannot too often be repeated.
Then I remember also a translation of Voltaire's "Candide," and "Rasselas;" and, vast book though it was, I really believe I read, in a muzzy sort of way of course, from end to end, and even with some reference now and then to the Atlas, Gibbon in twelve volumes. These readings whetted my taste for more, and surreptitiously I raided the bookcases in the big saloon.
Voltaire's inimitable style had at last found a medium in which it could display itself in all its charm and all its brilliance. The pointed, cutting, mocking sentences laugh and dance through his pages like light-toed, prick-eared elves. Once seen, and there is no help for it one must follow, into whatever dangerous and unknown regions those magic imps may lead.
I will make you my subject; I will bind you with orders and titles; I will compel you to accept a salary from me; and then, should they seek to ravish you from me, I will have a right to withhold you from all the potentates of the world." Voltaire's face was again radiant. "Ah! sire, no power or chains will be necessary to bind me here; your majesty's command alone would suffice." "And your duty!
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