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Voltaire was furious; he tried to get the courts to take it up, but the prevailing idea was that he had gotten what he deserved, and the fact that the whole affair occurred after dark and the Chevalier did not do the beating in person, made conviction impossible.

But Voltaire now quit the anapest and dactyl and devoted his best hours to taking fencing lessons. His firm intent was to baptize the soil with Rohan’s blood. Voltaire was of enough importance so the secret police knew of all his doings. Suddenly he found himself taking a post-graduate course in the Bastile. I am not sure that the fiery little man was entirely displeased with the procedure. It proved to the world that he was a dangerous character, and it also gave him a respite from the tyranny of the fencing-master, and allowed him to turn to his first, last and only love–literature. In Voltaire’s cosmos was a good deal of the Bob Acres quality.

There were plenty of reasons for locking him up–heresy and treason have ever been first cousins–and pamphlets lampooning Churchmen high in office were laid at his door. No doubt some of the anonymous literature was not his–“I would have done the thing better or not at all,” he once said in reference to a scurrilous brochure. The real fact was, that that particular pamphlet was done by a disciple, and if Voltaire’s writings were vile, then was his offense doubled in that he vitalized a ravenous brood of scribblers. They played Caliban to his Setebos.

Voltaire’s most offensive contributions were always attributed by him to this bishop or that, and to various dignitaries who had no existence save in the figment of his own fertile pigment.

He once carried on a controversy between the Bishop of Berlin and the Archbishop of Paris, each man thundering against the other with a monthly pamphlet wherein each one gored the other without mercy, and revealed the senselessness of the other’s religion. They flung the literary stinkpot with great accuracy. “The other man’s superstition is always ridiculous to us–our own is sacred,” said Voltaire, and so he allowed his controversialists to fight it out for his own quiet joy, and the edification of the onlookers.

Then his plan of printing an alleged sermon, giving some unknown prelate due credit on the title-page, starting in with a pious text and a page of trite nothings and gradually drifting off into ridicule of the things he had started in to defend–all this gives a comic tinge to his wail that “some evil-minded person is attributing things to me I never wrote,” If an occasional sly Churchman got after him with his own weapon, writing things in his style more hazardous than he dare express, surely he should not have complained.

But this was a fact–the enemy could not follow him long with a literary fusillade–they hadn’t the mental ammunition.

Well has Voltaire been called “the father of all those who wear shovel-hats.”

* * * * *

A few months in the Bastile, and Voltaire’s indeterminate sentence was commuted to exile. He was allowed to leave his country for his country’s good. Early in the year Seventeen Hundred Twenty-six he landed in England, evidently knowing nobody there except one merchant, a man of no special prominence.

Voltaire belonged to the nobility by divine right–as much as did Disraeli. Both had an inward contempt for titles, but they knew the hearts of the owners so well that they simply played a game of chess, and the “men” they moved were live knights, bishops, kings and queens, with rollers under the castles. The pawns they pushed here and there were the literary puppets of the time.

The first thing Voltaire had to master in England was the language, and this he did passably inside of three months. He took Grub Street by storm; dawdled at Dodsley’s; met Dean Swift, and these worthies respected each other’s wit so much that they simply took snuff, grimaced and let it go at that; Pope came in for a visit, and the French poet crossed Twickenham ferry and offered a handmade sonnet in admiration of the “Essay on Man,” which he had probably never read. Gay gave Voltaire “The Beggar’s Opera,” in private, and together they called on Congreve, who interrupted the Frenchman’s flow of flattery long enough to say that he wished to be looked on as a gentleman, not a poet. And Voltaire replied that there were many gentlemen but few poets, and if Congreve had had the misfortune to be simply a gentleman he would not have troubled to call on him at all. Congreve, who really regarded himself as the peer of Shakespeare, was won, and sent Voltaire on his way with letters to Horace Walpole of Strawberry Hill. Thomson, who lived at Hammersmith, and wrote his “Seasons” in a “public” next door to Kelmscott, corrected and revised some of Voltaire’s attempts at English poetry. Young evolved some of his “Night Thoughts” while on a visit with Voltaire at Bubb Dodington’s.