Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/134

 94 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS during the first year. The child was abandoned to the care of a nurse, his mother being an invalid. She died when he reached the age of seven. By the time the infant was two years old he began to thrive, and grew into an active, healthy child. Not robust, he was, nevertheless, wiry, and endowed with nervous energy. His earliest instruction was from the Abbe - de Chateauneuf, who taught him belles lettres and deism. At a very early age the little lad exhibited a precocious talent for versification. When ten years old he was sent to the College Louis- le-Grand. Here he remained until he was seventeen, receiving an education which, though always depreciated by him, provided the basis of a wide and varied knowledge. The Jesuits, who were the instructors at this college, retained the methods of the schools of the Renaissance, in which plays in Latin and French were enacted by the scholars. This may explain his lifelong devotion to the drama. His remarkable poetic talent led to an introduction, when he was but eleven years old, to Ninon de l'Enclos, who, in her nineteenth year, was the leader of a brilliant coterie of society. This unaccountable and marvellous woman was so pleased with the lad that she left him a legacy of two thousand livres " to buy books with." When his college days were ended his troubles began. His father had deter- mined to make him a notary. The youth wanted to follow literature, which the father regarded as equal to no profession at all. The father triumphed in so far as securing the young man's consent to begin the study of law. He began but never proceeded, and gave himself to everything but the pursuit of legal lore. The Abbe* de Chateauneuf, the godfather of Voltaire, died before the boy's col- lege days were over, but before his death he introduced his pupil to the celebrated society of the Epicureans of the Temple. Here the youth gathered the vast mass of historical gossip which served him so well in later years. His father was dis- gusted with his son's pursuits, and, alarmed at his association with princes and philosophers, he sent him away to the ancient Norman city of Caen. This did not effect a cure. The notary sent word to his son that if he would settle down and finish his studies he would purchase- for him a commission as counsellor to the Parliament of Paris. " Tell my father," he answered, " that I do not desire any place which can be bought. I shall know how to make one for myself that will cost nothing." Voltaire had a brother, named Armand, who was a Jansenist and bigot. Their father commented on his two sons by saying, " I have a pair of fools for sons, one in verse and the other in prose." In the year 171 3 the Marquis de Chateauneuf, a brother of the Abbe ap- pointed Voltaire to the office of page in his diplomatic corps. The marquis was Ambassador to The Hague. Here the young man fell desperately in love with Olympe Dunoyer, a younrj woman about twenty-one years of age, and the daugh- ter of a woman who had separated from her husband, and supported herself by writing disreputable scandal and gossip. This love affair- was violently opposed