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Voltaire's Beatings: Part IIIVoltaire gets the snot beat out of him. Again. |
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To recap from last time: In 1717 our hero wrote some particularly scandalous poetry and distributed it anonymously. Perhaps confused by the concept of anonymity, he proceeded to brag about it in public. Unfortunately for him, a spy by the name of Beauregard happened to be present and was instrumental in sending him packing off to an eleven-month stay in the Bastille. In prison Voltaire wrote a fairly decent play that subsequently brought him fame and fortune at the tender age of 24, and upon his release he flitted about Parisian society, fancying himself an aristocrat. Alas, he was sadly deluded. Five years later, in 1722, Voltaire found himself dining at Claude LeBlanc's, the French Minister of War. (In those days they didn't have the gall to call the position 'Minister of Defense' -- if nothing else, you have to respect their honesty.) At the table he found the very same Beauregard who had sent him to the Bastille a half decade earlier. Needless to say, he was distressed to have him as a table-mate. Ever the busybody, he felt obliged to comment during a lull in the conversation. "I knew that spies were being paid," said Voltaire, "but I did not know until now that their reward was to dine at the Minister's table." Pretty cheeky. Beauregard, tattle-tale that he was, went to LeBlanc and told him what happened, suggesting that it was probably time to rough Voltaire up a little. "Go ahead," said LeBlanc, "but do it discreetly." Unfortunately, the French are known rather more for their indiscretion. Several days after the infamous dinner party, Beauregard intercepted Voltaire's coach on the bridge of the Sevres, pulled him out, and proceeded to beat him to a pulp in broad daylight. Voltaire walked off with a couple of shiners and some pretty serious lumps and bruises. One imagines the difficulties involved in explaining away these marks in days when public beatings of literary figures were sanctioned and encouraged. Our indefatigable protagonist refused to simply cower in private or mumble something about falling down the stairs, but rather strutted his injuries in front of the regent, the duc d'Orleans, complaining bitterly about the treatment he had received. The more alert reader may recall that the regent was the same man whom Voltaire had exposed for sleeping with his own daughter some seven years before. That's not the sort of publicity you live down very easily, and it seems the regent had certainly not forgotten. Upon hearing Voltaire's bitter whining, the regent retorted, "Monsieur Arouet [Voltaire], you are a poet and you have been beaten -- this is the order of things, and I have nothing more to say." We here at the History House heartily agree. Voltaire eventually got a little revenge -- Beauregard was subsequently jailed and paid a him a hefty indemnity. 1722 was a bumper crop year: Voltaire had the good fortune of contracting smallpox as well. As A. Owen Aldridge outlines in his Voltaire and the Century of Light, "Voltaire was seized with the smallpox on the fourth of November, was out of danger on the fifteenth, and began writing verses again on the sixteenth." Before the recovery, however, things looked grim and Voltaire even received last rites. What saved the little guy? Aldridge credits an "unorthodox treatment", but remains coy as to its exact nature. Fortunately, our good friend Besterman (in Voltaire) informs us that Voltaire's doctor had him drink two hundred pints of lemonade (!!). Seemed to fix him right up. Aldridge notes that no sooner had Voltaire recovered from smallpox than he fell fate to a horrible mishap. On December first, he finally felt strong enough to leave his house for the first time in weeks, but in an interesting twist on "out of the frying pan into the fire", Aldridge tells us "he had scarcely gone a hundred yards from the chateau when a part of the flooring of his room burst into flames, and almost the entire wing, including priceless furniture, was destroyed." Voltaire eventually learned his lesson. He decided to stop picking fights, and fifteen years later was trying to get ahead like the rest of us: through sheer unembarrassed sycophantic brown nosing. He fell in cahoots with the crown prince of Prussia, Frederick II, in 1736. They wrote each other letters that elevated ass kissing to an art form. In his biography, Frederick the Great, Robert B. Asprey tells us that Voltaire variously called Fred "a Caesar, an Augustus, a Marcus Aurelius, a Trajan, an Anthony, a Titus, a Julian, a Virgil, a Pliny, a Horace, a Mecene, a Solomon, a Prometheus, an Apollo, a Patroclus, a Socrates, an Alcibiades, an Alexander, a Henry IV, and a Francis I." This is not a list to sneeze at.... Voltaire also wrote embarrassing things like, "I prostrate myself before your scepter, your pen, your sword, your imagination, your justness of understanding, and your universality." Fairly embarrassing stuff from the pillar of the French Enlightenment. We said Voltaire did learn his lesson: you may be pleased to discover next time it's actually his turn to open up a can of whup-ass! Bibliography
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