Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/313

Rh VOLTAIRE 289 was constantly jealous both of his equals in age and re putation, such as Maupcrtuis, and of his juniors and in feriors, such as Baculard D Arnaud. lie was greedy, restless, and in a way Bohemian. Frederick, though his love of teasing for teasing s sake has been exaggerated by Macaulay, was anything but amiable in disposition, was a martinet of the first water, had a sharp though one-sided idea of justice, and had not the slightest intention of allowing Voltaire to insult or to tyrannize over his other guests and servants. If he is to be blamed in this parti cular matter, the blame must be chiefly confined to his imprudence in inviting Voltaire at the beginning and to the brutality of his conduct at the end. Within Voltaire there was always a mischievous and ill-behaved child ; and he was never more mischievous, more ill-behaved, and more childish than in these years. But, knowing as we do what he was, there is much excuse for him. He tried to get D Arnaud exiled and succeeded. He got into a quite unnecessary quarrel with Lessing, the most distinguished, or at least the most gifted, German author of the day. He had not been in the country six months before he engaged in a discreditable, and in Prussia directly illegal, piece of financial gambling with Hirsch, the Dresden Jew. He had the extreme unwisdom and meanness to quarrel with this agent of his about money, and was at least accused of something like downright forgery that is to say, of altering a paper signed by Hirsch after he had signed it. The king s very well justified disgust at this affair (which came to an open scandal before the tribunals) was so great that he was on the point of ordering Voltaire out of Prussia, and Darget the secretary had no small trouble in arranging the affair (February 1751). Then it was Voltaire s turn to be disgusted with an occupation he had undertaken himself the occupation of &quot;backwash- ing &quot; the king s French verses. However, he succeeded in finishing and printing the Siecle de Louis XIV., while the Dictionnaire Philosophique is said to have been devised and begun at Potsdam. But Voltaire s restless temper was brewing up for another storm. In the early autumn of 1751 La Mettrie, one of the king s parasites, and a man of much more talent than is generally allowed, horrified Voltaire by telling him that the king had in con versation applied to him, Voltaire, a proverb about &quot; suck ing the orange and flinging away its skin;&quot; and about the same time the dispute with Maupertuis, which had more than anything else to do with his exclusion from Prussia, came to a head. No one quite knows how it began, though it is probably enough to say that Maupertuis and Voltaire had been of old quasi-rivals in the favour of the &quot;divine Emilie,&quot; that as president of the Berlin Academy Maupertuis was in a manner Voltaire s literary superior, that he was a man of rough and boorish manners, and that he is said at least to have refused his aid in the Hirsch affair. He also seems to have had something at least to do with a tedious and complicated squabble arising from the work of a certain La Beaumelle, a literary hack of the time, not without ability, who chose to visit Berlin and court Voltaire. The final rupture was provoked b} Maupertuis himself, though indirectly, by a dispute into which he got with one Konig. The king took his pre sident s part ; Voltaire (unluckily for him, but with suffi cient adroitness to make no open breach) took Konig s. But Maupertuis must needs write his Letters, and there upon (1752) appeared one of Voltaire s most famous, though perhaps not one of his most read works, the Diatribe du Docteur Akakia. Even Voltaire did not venture to publish this lampoon on a great official of a prince so touchy as the king of Prussia without some permission, and if all tales are true he obtained this by another piece of some thing like forgery getting the king to endorse a totally different pamphlet on its last leaf, and affixing that last leaf to Akakia. Of this Frederick was not aware ; but he did get some wind of the Diatribe itself, sent for the author, heard it read to his own great amusement, and either actually burned the MS. or believed that it was burnt. In a few days printed copies appeared. Now Frederick did not like disobedience, but he still less liked being made a fool of, and he put Voltaire under arrest. But again the affair blew over, which is at least a proof that the king was not wanting in long-suffering. He believed that the edition of Akakia confiscated in Prussia was the only one. Alas ! Voltaire, according to his usual fashion, had sent copies away ; others had been printed abroad ; and the thing was irrecoverable. Of course it could not be proved that he had ordered the printing, and all Frederick could do was to have the pamphlet burnt by the hangman. Things Avere now drawing to a crisis. One day Voltaire sent his orders, &amp;lt;fcc., back ; the next Frederick returned them, but Voltaire had quite made up his mind to fly. A kind of reconciliation occurred in March, and after some days of good-fellowship Voltaire at last obtained the long-sought leave of absence and left Potsdam on the 26th of the month (1753). It was nearly three months afterwards that the famous, ludicrous, and brutal arrest was made at Frankfort, on the persons of him self and his niece, who had met him meanwhile. There was some faint excuse for Frederick s wrath. In the first place, after a plea of business in Paris, of the necessity of the waters of Plombieres, and so forth, it was a little in congruous that the poet should linger at Leipsic. In the second place, in direct disregard of a promise given to Frederick, a supplement to Akakia appeared, more offen sive than the main text, and was followed by a paper war of letters with Maupertuis. But the king cooked his spleen and bided his time. From Leipsic, after a month s stay, Voltaire moved to Gotha, and seemed once more in no hurry to go on, his excuse being the compilation of Annals of the Empire, asked of him by the duchess of Saxe- Weimar. Once more, on May 25, he moved on to Frankfort, and here the blow fell. Frankfort, nominally a free city, but with a Prussian resident who did very much what he pleased, was not like Gotha and Leipsic. An excuse was provided in the fact that the poet had a copy of some unpublished poems of Frederick s, and as soon as Voltaire arrived the thing was done, at first with courtesy enough. The resident, Freytag, was not a very wise person (though he probably did not, as Voltaire would have it, spell &quot;pocsie&quot; &quot;po6shie&quot;); constant references to Frederick were necessary; and the affair was prolonged so that Madame Denis had time to join her uncle. At last Voltaire did the unwisest thing he could have done by trying to steal away. He was followed, arrested, his niece seized separately, and sent to join him in custody; and the two, with the secretary Collini, were kept close prisoners at an inn called the Goat. This situation lasted some time (a time, indeed, since the &quot;ceuvre de poe shie &quot; was at once recovered, rather unintelligible except on the score of Freytag s folly), and was at last put an end to by the city authorities, who probably felt that they were not playing a very creditable part. Voltaire left Frankfort on July 7th, travelled safely to Mainz, and thence to -Mannheim, Strasburg, and Colmar. The last-named place he reached (after a leisurely journey and many honours at the little courts just mentioned) at the beginning of October, and here he proposed to stay the winter, finish his Annals of the Empire, and look about him. Voltaire s second stage was now over, and he was about to try what an Englishman would have tried long before . complete independence of hosts and patrons, mistresses and friends. Even now, however, in his sixtieth year, it XXIV. -37