CHAPTER XXI.
HISTORY.
While he was in Prussia, 'The Age of Louis XIV.' had been published. It was probably fortunate that he was absent from France when giving it the last touches. "I have finished the work," he says, "expressly to make for myself a way to the esteem of good people. The matter is so delicate that I believe I could not have dealt with it except from a distance. History demands such freedom of truth that an historiographer of France can only write when out of France." And again:—
"I shall finish here [Potsdam] this work, which perhaps would never have been finished in Paris. The stones with which I raise this monument in honour of my country would have served to crush me. A bold word would have been called unbridled licence—the most innocent things would have been interpreted with that charity which poisons everything. See what happened to Duclos after his History of Louis XI. If he is to be my successor in historiography, as is reported, I advise him not to write except when he may make, like me, a little journey out of France."
To the advantage thus gained he joined many others for the execution of his task. He had known in his youthful days many of those men who had rendered the earlier part of Louis's reign so splendid, and had caught the echoes of those resounding times while witnessing the disasters which clouded, in the king's last years, the glory and prosperity of France. Now, removed by age to a stand-point whence he could view the whole period as in a picture, the historian, while divested of the prejudices and illusions which beset a contemporary, still possessed, in complete maturity, his judicial faculty and his literary excellence. A finer subject could not offer itself to a Frenchman than the long reign in which France, seeming, at a bound, to emerge from a base condition of manners, of public morals, of government, and of policy, stood forth resplendent in letters, arts, arms, statecraft, and social refinement. The unerring literary judgment of Voltaire caused him to feel that in this field his fine wit and keen satire would be out of place; nor is there any irreverence in the work, for though it deals severely with the feuds of sects which hated each other, still, as he truly says, these are not religion, and he thought he was doing good service to the human intellect in rendering fanaticism hateful. And the picture he draws of Louis is especially notable. Though the historian had suffered so much from despotic power, he does full justice to the king; and while dwelling strongly and truly on such dark blots as the religious persecutions which he authorised, the impolitic wars into which his arrogance plunged him, and the miserable condition into which he allowed his people to lapse, yet the celebration of his great and kingly qualities is so generous as to form a splendid eulogy. Thus executed, the 'Age of Louis XIV.' excited less hostility, and evoked more unqualified praise, than any of his works, and retains its popularity undiminished at the present day.
Although he recounts with pride, in his History, the triumphs of the French arms, and often makes feats of valour the theme of his verse, yet it is singular how different were his views from those of his own or any preceding age, on the subject of military glory.
"When I have asked you," he writes to Thiriot, "for anecdotes about the age of Louis XIV., it is less about his person than about the arts which have flourished in his time. I like better details of Racine and Boileau, Quinault, Lulli, Molière, Le Brun, Bossuet, Poussin, Descartes, &c., than of the battle of Steinkirk. Nothing but the name remains of those who have led battalions and squadrons. The human race gains nothing by these pitched battles. But the great men I have mentioned have prepared pure and durable pleasures for posterity. A canal which joins two seas, a picture by Poussin, a fine tragedy, a truth discovered, are a thousand times more precious than all the annals of a Court, all the records of a campaign. You know that, with me, the great men come first, the heroes last. I call great men those who have excelled in the useful or the agreeable; the pillagers of provinces are mere heroes."
In a similar vein is a little stanza which he wrote, in old age, to a lady:—
"A Hero, ravaging our sphere,
- To my mind is a monstrous evil;
Far more a Founder I revere,—
- This is a god, but that a devil."
By one of those grotesque caprices which are to be looked for when absolute power is exercised by a Louis XV., the author of this fine contribution to French history had already been deprived of his post of historiographer, while allowed to retain that of gentleman-in-ordinary. And now, while Frenchmen, in reading these brilliant annals, felt a new pride in their nationality, the sullen dislike of the apathetic king kept the annalist excluded from the country the glory of which he had so worthily celebrated. Halting on the Rhine to wait for that permission which never came, he made Colmar his headquarters, where he spent nearly six months on a sick-bed. The disordered health of which he so frequently complained while in Prussia was due to a scorbutic affection, which, besides general injury to the system, deprived him of nearly all the remainder of his teeth—and from this disease he had not yet recovered. It was while on his way to drink the waters of Plombières that he halted at the Abbey of Sénones, as already mentioned. The Abbot, Calmet, was himself a man of letters—the library was almost the finest in France, and especially rich in rare medieval literature; and here, for a month, Voltaire led the life of a veritable Benedictine, spending his days in making extracts from these old books, and sharing the meals of the monks in their refectory, while the old Abbot constantly pleased himself with the thought that he was on the point of making a convert of his sceptical guest.