bonne pour faire rire le public’; upon which,
according to one account, there were exclamations from
the crowd which had gathered round of ‘Ah! le
bon seigneur!’ The sequel is known to everyone:
how Voltaire rushed back, dishevelled and agonised,
into Sully’s dining-room, how he poured out
his story in an agitated flood of words, and how that
high-born company, with whom he had been living up
to that moment on terms of the closest intimacy, now
only displayed the signs of a frigid indifference.
The caste-feeling had suddenly asserted itself.
Poets, no doubt, were all very well in their way, but
really, if they began squabbling with noblemen, what
could they expect? And then the callous and stupid
convention of that still half-barbarous age—the
convention which made misfortune the proper object
of ridicule—came into play no less powerfully.
One might take a poet seriously, perhaps—until
he was whipped; then, of course, one could only laugh
at him. For the next few days, wherever Voltaire
went he was received with icy looks, covert smiles,
or exaggerated politeness. The Prince de Conti,
who, a month or two before, had written an ode in which
he placed the author of Oedipe side by side
with the authors of Le Cid and Phedre,
now remarked, with a shrug of the shoulders, that ’ces
coups de batons etaient bien recus et mal donnes.’
’Nous serions bien malheureux,’ said another
well-bred personage, as he took a pinch of snuff,
‘si les poetes n’avaient pas des epaules.’
Such friends as remained faithful were helpless.
Even Madame de Prie could do nothing. ‘Le
pauvre Voltaire me fait grande pitie,’ she said;
’dans le fond il a raison.’ But the
influence of the Rohan family was too much for her,
and she could only advise him to disappear for a little
into the country, lest worse should befall. Disappear
he did, remaining for the next two months concealed
in the outskirts of Paris, where he practised swordsmanship
against his next meeting with his enemy. The situation
was cynically topsy-turvy. As M. Foulet points
out, Rohan had legally rendered himself liable, under
the edict against duelling, to a long term of imprisonment,
if not to the penalty of death. Yet the law did
not move, and Voltaire was left to take the only course
open in those days to a man of honour in such circumstances—to
avenge the insult by a challenge and a fight.
But now the law, which had winked at Rohan, began
to act against Voltaire. The police were instructed
to arrest him so soon as he should show any sign of
an intention to break the peace. One day he suddenly
appeared at Versailles, evidently on the lookout for
Rohan, and then as suddenly vanished. A few weeks
later, the police reported that he was in Paris, lodging
with a fencing-master, and making no concealment of
his desire to ’insulter incessamment et avec
eclat M. le chevalier de Rohan.’ This decided
the authorities, and accordingly on the night of the
17th of April, as we learn from the Police Gazette,
‘le sieur Arrouet de Voltaire, fameux poete,’
was arrested, and conducted ‘par ordre du Roi’
to the Bastille.