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In 1715, early in Voltaire's life, King Louis XIV of France died. Louis XV, his son, was just a young pup, so the duc d'Orleans took over as regent. The transformation here, for those paying attention, went from imposed morality (Louis XIV presided over this conflict between the Jansenists and Gallicists. Obnoxious goodie-two-shoes, both of 'em) to a boozin' and sexual free-for-all. As our buddy Theodore Besterman himself laments, "Happy days, when love was sometimes taken lightly, and a poet could mention one mistress to another!" We won't take this point to examine Besterman's marital relations in detail, but instead use it to mention that the duc d'Orleans was almost certainly sleeping with Marie Louise, the duchesse de Berry, his own daughter. Voltaire knew about this and just couldn't help himself, so he wrote a couple of poems about it. Here's one he addressed to the regent's daughter and denied he did after publication: At last your mind is cured
of the fears of the vulgar
lovely duchesse de Berry,
complete the mystery.
Mother of the Moabites,
a new Lot serves as your husband;
may you soon give birth
to a race of Ammonites. Um, okay. Voltaire claimed he couldn't have written this one because "A rhymer educated by the Jesuits... knows only the Sodomites," which is probably an argument that would hold water today (snicker). Anyways, Voltaire got the boot from Paris for this one. He returned a few months later, and wrote another poem that said things like "A boy reigning, / a man notorious for poisoning and incest ruling, etc. ... France is about to perish," again denying authorship. Unfortunately, since the regent had everybody spying on everybody else, Voltaire got caught bragging about writing it in some bar. He'd drunkenly told the spy that the duchesse du Berry had just been spirited away from Paris pregnant (yes, that's correct, carrying a child conceived by her own father), and was irritated because the regent had him exiled: "Do you know what that bugger has done to me? He exiled me because I revealed to the public that his Messalina of a daughter was a whore!" Voltaire got ratted on by the spy, one gent named Beauregard. [Don't worry, we'll see more of the rat next week.] Some months later, strolling about the Palais Royal, Voltaire bumped into the regent and got thrown in the Bastille. To be helpful during his arrest, he told the police that he had hidden more incriminating poems in his latrine. After two full days of searching and finding nothing but, "water and floating objects," they gave up. The officers in question decided he'd done this "out of a an acrid disposition and in order to furnish them useless activity." (from Prod'homme's Voltaire raconte par ceux qui 'lont vu) We can imagine a very self-satisfied Voltaire giggling away in the Bastille. His father, a respected lawyer, cried out, "I had indeed foreseen that his idleness would bring on some disgrace. Why did he not take up a profession?" Sounds familiar, at least to us. Voltaire spent 13 months in prison, but as a postscript, seemed pretty jolly there. At one point he asked the governor for "two volumes of Homer, Latin-Greek; two linen handkerchiefs; a little bonnet; two cravats; a night-cap; a little bottle of essence of cloves." Makes the Bastille sound like a spa weekend. Don't worry, he gets to go back a few more times. What? Upset because Voltaire didn't actually get beaten this week? Don't worry -- he gets publicly pummeled by the very spy who turned him in next time. Not only that, but we also get a glimpse of the depth of Voltaire's true calling in this eighteenth-century universe of royalty and appeasement: ass-kissing Bibliography- Theodore Besterman.
Voltaire. Longmans, 19??.
- Alfred Owen Aldridge.
Voltaire and the Century of Light. Princeton University Press, 1975.
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