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There is a popular opinion that Voltaire made considerable money by his pen, but the fact is, that at no period of his life did literature contribute in but a very scanty way to his prosperity.

After the lottery scheme, Voltaire embarked in grain speculations, importing wheat from Barbary for French consumption. In this he made a fair profit, but when war broke out between Italy and France, he entered into an arrangement with Duverney, who had the army commissariat in his hands, to provision the troops. It was not much of a war, but it lasted long enough, as most wars do, for a few contractors to make much moneys. The war spirit is usually fanned by financiers, Kuhn, Loeb and Company giving the ultimatum.

Voltaire cleared about twenty thousand pounds out of his provision contract.

Thus we find this thrifty poet at forty with a fortune equal to a half-million dollars. This money he loaned out in a way of his own–a way as original as his literary style. His knowledge of the upper circles again served him well. Among the proud scions of nobility there were always a few who, through gambling proclivities, and other royal qualities, were much in need of funds. Voltaire picked the men who had only a life interest in their estates, and made them loans, secured by the rentals. The loans were to be paid back in annuities as long as both men lived.

All insurance is a species of gambling–the company offers to make you a bet that your house will burn within a year.

In life-insurance, the company’s expert looks you over, and if your waist measurement is not too great for your height, a bargain is entered into wherein you agree to pay so much now, and so much every year as long as you live, in consideration that the company will pay your heirs so much at your death.

The chief value of life-insurance lies in the fact that it insures a man against his own indiscretion, a thing supposedly under his own control–but which never is. Voltaire’s scheme banked on the man’s weakness, and laid his indiscretion open before the world. It was life-insurance turned wrong side out, and could only have been devised and carried out by a man of courage with an actuary’s bias for mathematics.

Instead of agreeing to pay the man so much at death, Voltaire paid him the whole sum in advance, and the man agreed to pay, say, ten per cent interest until either the lender or the borrower died. No principal was to be paid, and on the death of either party, the whole debt was canceled.

Voltaire picked only men younger than himself. It was a tempting offer to the borrower, for Voltaire looked like a consumptive, and it is said that on occasion he evolved a wheezy cough that helped close the deal. The whole scheme, for Voltaire, was immensely successful. On some of the risks he collected his yearly ten per cent for over forty years, or until his death.

On Voltaire’s loan of sixteen hundred pounds to the Marquis du Chatelet, however, it is known that he collected nothing either in way of principal or interest. This was as strange a piece of financiering as was ever consummated; and the inside history of the matter, with its peculiar psychology, has never been written. The only two persons who could have told that story in its completeness were Voltaire and the Madame du Chatelet, and neither ever did.

* * * * *

Madame du Chatelet–the divine Emilie–was twenty-seven and Voltaire was thirty-nine when they first met.

He was living in obscure lodgings in Paris for prudential reasons, the executioner having just burned, in the public street, all the copies of his last book that could be found.