"PHASIS FIRST (1725-1728).—The accomplished Duc de Sulli (Year 1725, day not recorded), is giving in his hotel a dinner, such as usual; and a bright witty company is assembled;—the brightest young fellow in France sure to be there; and with his electric coruscations illuminating everything, and keeping the table in a roar. To the delight of most; not to that of a certain splenetic ill-given Duc de Rohan; grandee of high rank, great haughtiness, and very ill-behavior in the world; who feels impatient at the notice taken of a mere civic individual, Arouet Junior. 'Quel est done ce jeune homme qui parle si haut, Who is this young man that talks so loud, then?' exclaims the proud splenetic Duke. 'Monseigneur,' flashes the young man back upon him in an electric manner, 'it is one who does not drag a big name about with him; but who secures respect for the name he has!' Figure that, in the penetrating grandly clangorous voice (VOIX SOMBRE ET MAJESTUEUSE), and the momentary flash of eyes that attended it. Duc de Rohan rose, in a sulphurous frame of mind; and went his ways. What date? You ask the idle French Biographer in vain;—see only, after more and more inspection, that the incident is true; and with labor date it, summer of the Year 1725. Treaty of Utrecht itself, though all the Newspapers and Own Correspondents were so interested in it, was perhaps but a foolish matter to date in comparison!
"About a week after, M. Arouet Junior was again dining with the Duc de Sulli, and a fine company as before. A servant whispers him, That somebody has called, and wants him below. 'Cannot come,' answers Arouet; 'how can I, so engaged?' Servant returns after a minute or two: 'Pardon, Monsieur; I am to say, it is to do an act of beneficence that you are wanted below!' Arouet lays down his knife and fork; descends instantly to see what act it is. A carriage is in the court, and hackney-coach near it: 'Would Monsieur have the extreme goodness to come to the door of the carriage, in a case of necessity?' At the door of the carriage, hands seize the collar of him, hold him as in a vice; diabolic visage of Duc de Rohan is visible inside, who utters, looking to the hackney-coach, some "VOILA, Now then!" Whereupon the hackney-coach opens, gives out three porters, or hired bullies, with the due implements: scandalous actuality of horsewhipping descends on the back of poor Arouet, who shrieks and execrates to no purpose, nobody being near. 'That will do,' says Rohan at last, and the gallant ducal party drive off; young Arouet, with torn frills and deranged hair, rushing up stairs again, in such a mood as is easy to fancy. Everybody is sorry, inconsolable, everybody shocked; nobody volunteers to help in avenging. 'Monseigneur de Sulli, is not such atrocity done to one of your guests, an insult to yourself?' asks Arouet. 'Well, yes perhaps, but'—Monseigneur de Sulli shrugs his shoulders, and proposes nothing. Arouet withdrew, of course in a most blazing condition, to consider what he could, on his own strength, do in this conjuncture.
"His Biographer Duvernet says, he decided on doing two things: learning English and the small-sword exercise. [La Vie de Voltaire, par M—(a Geneve, 1786), pp. 55-57; or pp. 60-63, in his SECOND form of the Book. The "M—" is an Abbe Duvernet; of no great mark otherwise. He got into Revolution trouble afterwards, but escaped with his head; and republished his Book, swollen out somewhat by new "Anecdotes" and republican bluster, in this second instance; signing himself T. J. D. V—(Paris, 1797). A vague but not dark or mendacious little Book; with traces of real EYESIGHT in it,—by one who had personally known Voltaire, or at least seen and heard him.] He retired to the country for six months, and perfected himself in these two branches. Being perfect, he challenged Duc de Rohan in the proper manner; applying ingenious compulsives withal, to secure acceptance of the challenge. Rohan accepted, not without some difficulty, and compulsion at the Theatre or otherwise:—accepted, but withal confessed to his wife. The result was, no measuring of swords took place; and Rohan only blighted by public opinion, or incapable of farther blight that way, went at large; a convenient LETTRE DE CACHET having put Arouet again in the Bastille. Where for six months Arouet lodged a second time, the innocent not the guilty; making, we can well suppose, innumerable reflections on the phenomena of human life. Imprisonment once over, he hastily quitted for England; shaking the dust of ungrateful France off his feet,—resolved to change his unhappy name, for one thing.
"Smelfungus, denouncing the torpid fatuity of Voltaire's Biographers, says he never met with one Frenchman, even of the Literary classes, who could tell him whence this name VOLTAIRE originated. 'A PETITE TERRE, small family estate,' they said; and sent him hunting through Topographies, far and wide, to no purpose. Others answered, 'Volterra in Italy, some connection with Volterra,'—and seemed even to know that this was but fatuity. 'In ever-talking, ever-printing Paris, is it as in Timbuctoo, then, which neither prints nor has anything to print?' exclaims poor Smelfungus! He tells us at last, the name VOLTAIRE is a mere Anagram of AROUET L. J.—you try it; A.R.O.U.E.T.L.J.=V.O.L.T.A.I.R.E and perceive at once, with obligations to Smelfungus, that he has settled this small matter for you, and that you can be silent upon it forever thenceforth.
"The anagram VOLTAIRE, gloomily settled in the Bastille in this manner, can be reckoned a very famous wide-sounding outer result of the Rohan impertinence and blackguardism; but it is not worth naming beside the inner intrinsic result, of banishing Voltaire to England at this point of his course. England was full of Constitutionality and Freethinking; Tolands, Collinses, Wollastons, Bolingbrokes, still living; very free indeed. England, one is astonished to see, has its royal-republican ways of doing; something Roman in it, from Peerage down to Plebs; strange and curious to the eye of M. de Voltaire. Sciences flourishing; Newton still alive, white with fourscore years, the venerable hoary man; Locke's Gospel of Common Sense in full vogue, or even done into verse, by incomparable Mr. Pope, for the cultivated upper classes. In science, in religion, in politics, what a surprising 'liberty' allowed or taken! Never was a freer turn of thinking. And (what to M. de Voltaire is a pleasant feature) it is Freethinking with ruffles to its shirt and rings on its fingers;—never yet, the least, dreaming of the shirtless or SANSCULOTTIC state that lies ahead for it! That is the palmy condition of English Liberty, when M. de Voltaire arrives there.
"In a man just out of the Bastille on those terms, there is a mind driven by hard suffering into seriousness, and provoked by indignant comparisons and remembrances. As if you had elaborately ploughed and pulverized the mind of this Voltaire to receive with its utmost avidity, and strength of fertility, whatever seed England may have for it. That was a notable conjuncture of a man with circumstances. The question, Is this man to grow up a Court Poet; to do legitimate dramas, lampoons, witty verses, and wild spiritual and practical magnificences, the like never seen; Princes and Princesses recognizing him as plainly divine, and keeping him tied by enchantments to that poor trade as his task in life? is answered in the negative. No: and it is not quite to decorate and comfort your 'dry dung-heap' of a world, or the fortunate cocks that scratch on it, that the man Voltaire is here; but to shoot lightnings into it, and set it ablaze one day! That was an important alternative; truly of world-importance to the poor generations that now are; and it was settled, in good part, by this voyage to England, as one may surmise. Such is sometimes the use of a dissolute Rohan in this world; for the gods make implements of all manner of things.
"M. de Voltaire (for we now drop the Arouet altogether, and never hear of it more) came to England—when? Quitted England—when? Sorrow on all fatuous Biographers, who spend their time not in laying permanent foundation-stones, but in fencing with the wind!—I at last find indisputably, it was in 1726 that he came to England: [Got out of the Bastille, with orders to leave France, "29th April" of that year (OEuvres de Voltaire, i. 40 n.).] and he himself tells us that he 1728.' Spent, therefore, some two years there in all,—last year of George I.'s reign, and first of George II.'s. But mere inanity and darkness visible reign, in all his Biographies, over this period of his life, which was above all others worth investigating: seek not to know it; no man has inquired into it, probably no competent man now ever will. By hints in certain Letters of the period, we learn that he lodged, or at one time lodged, in 'Maiden Lane, Covent Garden;' one of those old Houses that yet stand in Maiden Lane: for which small fact let us be thankful. His own Letters of the period are dated now and then from 'Wandsworth.' Allusions there are to Bolingbroke; but the Wandsworth is not Bolingbroke's mansion, which stood in Battersea; the Wandsworth was one Edward Fawkener's; a man somewhat admirable to young Voltaire, but extinct now, or nearly so, in human memory. He had been a Turkey Merchant, it would seem, and nevertheless was admitted to speak his word in intellectual, even in political circles; which was