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Voltaire and the French Enlightenment-Will Durant · Classic Speeches

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  Speaker 1: Chapter one of Voltaire and the French Enlightenment. This is
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  Speaker 1: a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
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  Speaker 1: Recording by Pamela Nagami, m D. Voltaire and the French
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  Speaker 1: Enlightenment by will Durant, Chapter one, Paris a deep At
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  Speaker 1: Paris in seventeen forty two, Voltaire was coaching Mademoiselle d'umennille
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  Speaker 1: to rise to tragic heights in a rehearsal of his
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  Speaker 1: play Merope. She complained that she would have to have
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  Speaker 1: the very devil in her to simulate such passion as
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  Speaker 1: he required. That's just it, answered Voltaire, you must have
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  Speaker 1: the devil in you to succeed in any of the arts.
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  Speaker 1: Even his critics and his enemies admitted that he himself
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  Speaker 1: met this requirement perfectly.
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  Speaker 2: Lave le diable o court.
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  Speaker 1: He had the devil in his body, said Saint bierv
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  Speaker 1: And de Metre called him the man into whose hands
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  Speaker 1: hell had given all its powers. Unprepossessing, ugly, vain, flippant, obscene, unscrupulous,
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  Speaker 1: even at times dishonest. Voltaire was a man with the
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  Speaker 1: faults of his time and place missing hardly one. And
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  Speaker 1: yet this same Voltaire turns out to have been tirelessly kind, considerate,
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  Speaker 1: lavish of his energy in his purse, as sedulous in
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  Speaker 1: helping friends, as in crushing enemies, able to kill with
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  Speaker 1: a stroke of his pen, and yet disarmed by the
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  Speaker 1: first advance of conciliation.
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  Speaker 2: So contradictory is man.
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  Speaker 1: But all these qualities, good and bad, were secondary, not
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  Speaker 1: of the essence of Voltaire. The astounding and basic thing
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  Speaker 1: in him was the inexhaustible fertility and brilliance of his mind.
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  Speaker 1: His works fill ninety nine nine volumes, of which every
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  Speaker 1: page is sparkling and fruitful, though they range from subject
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  Speaker 1: to subject across the world, as fitfully and bravely as
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  Speaker 1: in an encyclopedia. My trade is to say what I think,
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  Speaker 1: And what he thought was always worth saying, as what
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  Speaker 1: he said was always said incomparably well. If we do
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  Speaker 1: not read him now, though men like Anatole France have
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  Speaker 1: been formed to subtlety and wisdom by pouring over his pages,
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  Speaker 1: it is because the theological battles which he fought for
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  Speaker 1: us no longer interest us. Intimately we have passed on,
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  Speaker 1: perhaps to other battlefields, and are more absorbed with the
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  Speaker 1: economics of this life than with the geography of the next.
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  Speaker 1: The very thoroughness of Voltaire's victory over ecclesiasticism and superstition
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  Speaker 1: makes dead those issues which he found alive. Much of
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  Speaker 1: his fame, too, came of his inimitable conversation, but demonant
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  Speaker 1: where bawolant, written words remain, while spoken words fly away,
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  Speaker 1: the winged words of Voltaire. With the rest what is
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  Speaker 1: left to us is too much, the flesh of Voltaire, too.
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  Speaker 2: Little, the divine fire of his spirit.
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  Speaker 1: And yet darkly, as we see him through the glass
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  Speaker 1: of time, what a spirit, sheer intelligence, transmuting anger into fun,
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  Speaker 1: fire into light, a creature of air and flame, the
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  Speaker 1: most excitable that ever lived, composed of more ethereal and
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  Speaker 1: more throbbing atoms than those of other men. There is
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  Speaker 1: none whose mental machinery is more delicate, nor whose equilibrium is,
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  Speaker 1: at the same time more shifting and more exact.
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  Speaker 2: Was he perhaps the.
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  Speaker 1: Greatest intellectual energy in all history. Certainly he worked harder
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  Speaker 1: and accomplished more than any other man of his epoch.
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  Speaker 1: Not to be o occupied and not to exist amount
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  Speaker 1: to the same thing he said, all people are good,
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  Speaker 1: except those who are idle. His secretary said that he
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  Speaker 1: was a miser only of his time. One must give
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  Speaker 1: oneself all the occupation one can to make life supportable
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  Speaker 1: in this world. The further I advance in life, the
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  Speaker 1: more I find work necessary. It becomes, in the long run,
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  Speaker 1: the greatest of pleasures, and takes the place of the
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  Speaker 1: illusions of life. If you do not want to commit suicide,
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  Speaker 1: always have something to do. Suicide must have been forever
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  Speaker 1: tempting him, for he was ever at work. It was
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  Speaker 1: because he was so thoroughly alive that he filled the
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  Speaker 1: whole era with his life contemporary with one of the
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  Speaker 1: greatest of centuries, sixteen ninety four to seventeen seventy eight.
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  Speaker 1: He was the sole and essence of it. To name
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  Speaker 1: Voltime tire, said Victor Hugo, is to characterize the entire
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  Speaker 1: eighteenth century. Italy had a Renaissance and Germany had a Reformation,
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  Speaker 1: but France had Voltaire. He was for his country both
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  Speaker 1: Renaissance and Reformation, and half the Revolution. He carried on
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  Speaker 1: the antiseptic skepticism of Montaigne and the healthy, earthy humor
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  Speaker 1: of Rabelais. He fought superstition and corruption more savagely and
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  Speaker 1: effectively than Luther or Erasmus, Calvin, or Knox or Molancheton.
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  Speaker 2: He helped to make.
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  Speaker 1: The powder with which Mirabeau and Mara, Danton and Robespierre
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  Speaker 1: blew up the old regime. If we judge of men
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  Speaker 1: by what they have done, said La Martine, then Voltaire
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  Speaker 1: is incontestably the greatest writer of modern Europe. Destiny gave
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  Speaker 1: him eighty three years of existence that he might slowly
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  Speaker 1: decomposed the decayed age. He had the time to combat time,
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  Speaker 1: and when he fell, he was the conqueror. No one
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  Speaker 1: never has a writer had in his lifetime such influence.
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  Speaker 1: Despite exile, imprisonment, and the suppression of almost every one
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  Speaker 1: of his books by the minions of church and state,
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  Speaker 1: he forged fiercely a path for his truth, until at
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  Speaker 1: last kings, popes and emperors catered to him, thrones trembled
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  Speaker 1: before him, and half the world listened to catch his
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  Speaker 1: every word. It was an age in which many things
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  Speaker 1: called for a destroyer, laughing lions must come, while Voltaire
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  Speaker 1: came and annihilated with laughter. He and Rousseau were the
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  Speaker 1: two voices of a vast process of economic and political
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  Speaker 1: transition from feudal aristocracy to the rule of the middle class.
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  Speaker 1: When a rising class is inconvenienced by existing law or custom,
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  Speaker 1: it appeals from custom to reason and from law to nature.
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  Speaker 1: Just as conflicting desires in the individuals sparkle into thought.
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  Speaker 1: So the wealthy bourgeoisie supported the rationalism of Voltaire and
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  Speaker 1: the naturalism of Rousseau. It was necessary to loosen old
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  Speaker 1: habits and customs, to renovate and invigorate feeling and thought,
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  Speaker 1: to open the mind to experiment and change before the
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  Speaker 1: Great Revolution could come. Not that Voltaire and Rousseau were
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  Speaker 1: the causes of the revolution. Perhaps, rather they were co
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  Speaker 1: results with it, of the forces that seethed and surged
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  Speaker 1: beneath the political and social surface of French life. They
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  Speaker 1: were the accompanying light and brilliance of the volcanic heat
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  Speaker 1: and conflagration. Philosophy is to history as reason is to desire.
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  Speaker 1: In either case, an unconscious process determines from below the
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  Speaker 1: conscious thought above. Yet we must not bend back too
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  Speaker 1: far in attempting to correct the philosopher's tendency to exaggerate
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  Speaker 1: the influence of philosophy Louis the sixteenth, seeing in his
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  Speaker 1: prison temple the works of Voltaire and Rousseau, said those
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  Speaker 1: two men have destroyed France, meaning his dynasty. The Bourbon
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  Speaker 1: might have preserved themselves, said Napoleon, if they had controlled
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  Speaker 1: writing materials. The advent of cannon killed the feudal system,
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  Speaker 1: inc will kill the modern social organization. Books rule the world,
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  Speaker 1: said Voltaire, or at least those nations in it which
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  Speaker 1: have a written language.
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  Speaker 2: The others do not count. Nothing.
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  Speaker 1: Enfranchise is like education, and he proceeded to enfranchise France.
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  Speaker 1: When once a nation begins to think, it is impossible
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  Speaker 1: to stop it. But with Voltaire, France began to think Voltaire,
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  Speaker 1: that is to say. Francois Marie a Rouet was born
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  Speaker 1: at Paris in sixteen ninety four, the son of a
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  Speaker 1: comfortably successful notary and a somewhat aristocratic mother. He owed
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  Speaker 1: to his father perhaps his shrewdness and irascibility, and to
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  Speaker 1: his mother something of his levity and wit. He came
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  Speaker 1: into the world, so to speak, by a narrow margin.
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  Speaker 1: His mother did not survive his birth, and he was
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  Speaker 1: so puny and sickly an infant that the nurse did
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  Speaker 1: not give him more than a day to live. She
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  Speaker 1: was slightly in error, as he lived almost to eighty four,
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  Speaker 1: but all through his life his frail body tormented with
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  Speaker 1: illness his unconquerable spirit. He had for his edification a
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  Speaker 1: model elder brother, armand a pious lad who felt in
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  Speaker 1: love with the Jansenist heresy and courted martyrdom for his faith.
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  Speaker 1: Well said Armand to a friend who advised the better
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  Speaker 1: part of valor, if you do not want to be hanged,
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  Speaker 1: at least do not put off other people. The father
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  Speaker 1: said he had two fools for sons, one in verse
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  Speaker 1: and the other in prose. The fact that Francois made
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  Speaker 1: verses almost as soon as he could write his name
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  Speaker 1: convinced his very practical father that nothing good would come
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  Speaker 1: of him. But the famous Hetaira Ninon de l'anclaus, who
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  Speaker 1: lived in the provincial town to which the arue had
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  Speaker 1: returned after the birth of Francois, saw in the youth
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  Speaker 1: the signs of greatness, and when she died, she left
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  Speaker 1: him two thousand francs.
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  Speaker 2: For the purchase of books.
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  Speaker 1: His early education came from these, and from a dissolute
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  Speaker 1: abbe Ajerome Cougnard in the Flesh, who taught him skepticism
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  Speaker 1: along with his prayers. His later educators, the Jesuits, gave
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  Speaker 1: him the very instrument of skepticism by teaching him dialectic,
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  Speaker 1: the art of proving anything and therefore at last the
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  Speaker 1: habit of believing nothing. Francois became an adept at argument,
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  Speaker 1: and while the boys played games in the fields, he
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  Speaker 1: aged twelve, stayed behind to discuss theology with the learned.
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  Speaker 1: When the time came for him to earn his living,
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  Speaker 1: he scandalized his father by proposing to take up literature
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  Speaker 1: as a profession. Literature, said Monsieur Arrouay, is the profession
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  Speaker 1: of the man who wishes to be useless to society
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  Speaker 1: and a burden to his relatives, and to die of hunger.
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  Speaker 1: One can see the table trembling under his emphasis. So Francois,
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  Speaker 1: when in for literature, not that he was a quiet
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  Speaker 1: and merely studious lad. He burnt the midnight oil of others.
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  Speaker 1: He took to staying out late, frolicking with the wits
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  Speaker 1: and roisterers of the town, and experimenting with the commandments,
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  Speaker 1: until his exasperated father sent him off to a relative
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  Speaker 1: at Conte, with instructions to keep the youth practically in confinement,
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  Speaker 1: but as jail or fell in love with his wit
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  Speaker 1: and soon gave him free reign. After imprisonment, Nours later
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  Speaker 1: came exile. His father sent him to the Hague with
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  Speaker 1: the French ambassador, requesting strict surveillance of the madcap boy,
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  Speaker 1: but Francois at once fell in love with a little
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  Speaker 1: lady Pimpette, held breathless clandestine interviews with her, and wrote
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  Speaker 1: to her passionate letters, ending always with the refrain I
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  Speaker 1: shall certainly love you forever. The affair was discovered and
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  Speaker 1: he was sent home. He remembered pimpet for several weeks.
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  Speaker 1: In seventeen fifteen, proud of his twenty one years, he
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  Speaker 1: went to Paris just in time to be in at
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  Speaker 1: the death of Louis the fourteenth, the succeeding Louis being
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  Speaker 1: too young to govern France, much less Paris, The power
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  Speaker 1: fell into the hands of a regent, and during this
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  Speaker 1: quasi interregnum, life ran riot in the capital of the world,
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  Speaker 1: and young Arue ran with it. He soon achieved a
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  Speaker 1: reputation as a brilliant and reckless lad When the Regent
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  Speaker 1: for economy sold half.
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  Speaker 2: The horses that filled the royal stables.
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  Speaker 1: Francois remarked how much more sensible it would have been
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  Speaker 1: to dismiss half the asses that filled the royal court.
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  Speaker 1: At last, all the bright and naughty things whispered about
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  Speaker 1: Paris were fathered upon him, and it was his ill
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  Speaker 1: luck that these included two poems accusing the Regent of
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  Speaker 1: desiring to usurp the throne. The Regent raged and meeting
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  Speaker 1: the youth in the park, one day, he said to him,
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  Speaker 1: Monsieur Arroue, I will wager that I can show you
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  Speaker 1: something that you have known ever seen before. What is
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  Speaker 1: that the inside of the bastille. Aarhuue saw it the
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  Speaker 1: next day, April sixteenth, seventeen seventeen. While in the bastille
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  Speaker 1: he adopted, for some unknown reason, the pen name of
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  Speaker 1: Voltairean became a poet in earnest and at length footnote.
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  Speaker 1: Carlyle thought it was an anagram for A R O
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  Speaker 1: U E T l j Lejeonne the younger, but the
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  Speaker 1: name seems to have occurred among the family of Voltaire's
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  Speaker 1: mother and footnote. Before he had served eleven months, he
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  Speaker 1: had written a long and not unworthy epic Theonriade, telling
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  Speaker 1: the story of Henry of Navarre. Then the regent, having
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  Speaker 1: discovered perhaps that he had imprisoned an innocent man, released
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  Speaker 1: him and gave him a pension, whereupon Voltaire wrote, thanking
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  Speaker 1: him for so taking care of his board, and begging
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  Speaker 1: permission hereafter to take care of his life. Lodging himself.
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  Speaker 1: He passed now almost with a bound, from the prison
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  Speaker 1: to the stage. His tragedy Er Deep was produced in
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  Speaker 1: seventeen eighteen and broke all records of Paris by running
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  Speaker 1: for forty five consecutive nights. His old father come to
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  Speaker 1: upbraid him, sat in a box and covered his joy
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  Speaker 1: by grumbling at every hit.
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  Speaker 2: Oh, the rascal, the rascal.
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  Speaker 1: When the poet Fontanell met Voltaire after the play and
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  Speaker 1: damned it with high praise, saying it was too brilliant
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  Speaker 1: for tragedy, Fultaire replied, smiling, I must reread your pastorals.
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  Speaker 1: The youth was in no mood for caution or for courtesy,
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  Speaker 1: had he not put into the play itself these reckless lines.
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  Speaker 1: Our priests are not what simple folks suppose their learning is,
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  Speaker 1: but our credulity Act four, Scene one, And into the
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  Speaker 1: mouth of our rasp, this epoch making challenge. Let us
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  Speaker 1: trust but to ourselves see all with our own eyes.
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  Speaker 2: Let these be.
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  Speaker 1: Our oracles, our tripods, and our gods. The plain netted
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  Speaker 1: Voltaire four thousand francs, which he proceeded to invest with
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  Speaker 1: a wisdom unheard of in literary men. Through all his tribulations,
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  Speaker 1: he kept the art not merely of making a spacious income,
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  Speaker 1: but of putting it to work. He respected the classic
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  Speaker 1: adage that one must live before one can philosophize. In
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  Speaker 1: seventeen twenty nine, he bought up all the tickets in
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  Speaker 1: a poorly planned governmental lottery and made a large sum,
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  Speaker 1: much to the anger of the government. But as he
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  Speaker 1: became rich, he became ever more generous, and a growing
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  Speaker 1: circle of proteges gathered about him. As he passed into
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  Speaker 1: the afternoon of life. It was well that he added
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  Speaker 1: and almost to break, cleverness of finance to his gallic
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  Speaker 1: cleverness of pons. For his next play, Artemiir failed, Voltaire
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  Speaker 1: felt the failure keenly. Every triumph sharpens the sting of
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  Speaker 1: later defeats. He was always painfully sensitive to public opinion
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  Speaker 1: and envied the animals, because they do not know what
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  Speaker 1: people say of them. Fate added to his dramatic failure
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  Speaker 1: a bad case of smallpox. He cured himself by drinking
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  Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty pints of lemonade and somewhat less
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  Speaker 1: of physic When he came out of the shadow of death,
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  Speaker 1: he found that his an riad had made him famous.
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  Speaker 1: He boasted with reason that he had made poetry the fashion.
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  Speaker 1: He was received and feted everywhere. The aristocracy caught him
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  Speaker 1: up and turned him into a polished man of the world,
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  Speaker 1: an unequaled master of conversation, and the inheritor of the
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  Speaker 1: finest cultural tradition in Europe. For eight years he basked
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  Speaker 1: in the sunshine of the sallow, and then fortune turned away.
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  Speaker 1: Some of the aristocracy could not forget that this young
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  Speaker 1: man had no other title to place an honor than
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  Speaker 1: that of genius, and could not quite forgive him for
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  Speaker 1: the distinction. During a dinner at the Duc de Sulei's chateau,
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  Speaker 1: after Voltaire had held forth for some minutes with unabashed
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  Speaker 1: eloquence and wit, the Chevalier dor Roent asked, not so Rovouch,
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  Speaker 1: who is the young man who talks so loud, My
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: Lord answered Voltaire quickly. He is one who does not
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  Speaker 1: carry a great name, but wins respect for the name.
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  Speaker 1: He has to answer the Chevalier at all was impertinence
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  Speaker 1: To answer him unanswerably?
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  Speaker 2: Was treason?
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: The honorable Lord engaged a band of Ruffians to assault
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: Voltaire by night, merely cautioning them don't hit his head.
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  Speaker 2: Something good may come out of that.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: Yet, the next day at the theater, Voltail appeared, bandaged
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  Speaker 1: and limping, walked up to Rowan's box and challenged him
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  Speaker 1: to a duel. Then he went home and spent all
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  Speaker 1: day practicing with the foils. But the noble Chevalier was
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  Speaker 1: in no mind to be precipitated into heaven or elsewhere
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  Speaker 1: by a mere genius. He appealed to his cousin, who
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  Speaker 1: was Minister of Police, to protect him. Voltaire was arrested
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  Speaker 1: and found himself again in his old home, the bastile,
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  Speaker 1: privileged once more to view the world from the inside.
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  Speaker 1: He was almost immediately released on condition that he go
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: into exile in England. He went, but after being escorted
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  Speaker 1: to Dover, he recrossed the channel in disguise, burning to
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  Speaker 1: avenge himself warned that he had been discovered and was
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: about to be arrested a third time. He took ship
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: again and reconciled himself to three years in England seventeen
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: twenty six to twenty nine and of section one, chapter
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: two of Voltaire and the French Enlightenment by will Durant.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: This librovox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Pamelinagami,
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: Chapter two London, the Letters on the English. He set
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  Speaker 1: to work with Courage to master the new language. He
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: was displeased to find that Plague had one syllable and
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: Aegu two. He wished that Plague would take one half
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  Speaker 1: of the language and Aegu the other half. But soon
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: he could read English well, and within a year he
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: was master of the best English literature of the age.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: He was introduced to the literati by Lord Bolingbroke, and
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: dined with one after another of them, even with the
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: elusive and corrosive Dean Swift. He pretended to no pedigree
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: and asked none of others. When Congreve's folk of his
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: own plays as trifles and desired to be considered rather
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: a gentleman of leisure than an author, Voltaire said to
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: him sharply. If you had had the misfortune to be
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  Speaker 1: only a gentleman like any other, I should never have
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  Speaker 1: come to see you. What surprised him was the freedom
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  Speaker 1: with which bolingbroke, Pope, Addison, and Swift wrote whatever they pleased.
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  Speaker 1: Here was a people that had opinions of its own,
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: a people that had remade its religion, hanged its king,
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  Speaker 1: imported another, and built a parliament stronger than any king
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  Speaker 1: in Europe. There was no bastille here, and no letters
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  Speaker 1: to Cashet by which titled pensioners or royal idlers could
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: send their untitled foes to jail without cause and without trial.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: Here were thirty religions and not one priest. Here was
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  Speaker 1: the boldest sect of all the Quakers, who astonished all
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: Christendom by b behaving like Christians. Voltaire never to the
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  Speaker 1: end of his life ceased to wonder at them. In
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: the Dixionephulo Sophique, he makes one of them say, our God,
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: who has bidden us love our enemies and suffer evil
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: without complaint, assuredly has no mind that we should cross
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: the sea to go and cut the throats of our brothers,
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: because murderers in red clothes and hats two feet high
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: enlist citizens by making a noise with two sticks on
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: an asses skin. It was in England too, that throbbed
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: with a virile intellectual activity. Bacon's name was still in
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: the air, and the inductive mode of approach was triumphing
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: in every field. Hobbes fifteen eighty eight to sixteen seventy
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: nine had carried out the skeptical spirit of the Renaissance
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: and the practical spirit of his master, into so complete
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: and outspoken a materialism as would have one him in
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: France the honor of martyrdom for a fallacy. Locke sixteen
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: thirty two seventeen o four had written a masterpiece of
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: inductive psychological analysis, the Essay on the Human Understanding sixteen
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: eighty nine, without so much as mentioning the soul. Collins,
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: Tyndall and other Deists were reaffirming their faith in God
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: while calling into question every other doctrine of the established church.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: Newton had just died. Voltaire attended the funeral and spoke
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: repeatedly of the impression made upon him by the national
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: honors awarded to this modest Englishman. Not long ago, he writes,
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: a distinguished company were discussing the trite and frivolous question
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: who was the greatest man, Caesar, Alexander, Tamerlane or Cromwell,
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: some one answered that, without doubt it was Isaac Newton,
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: and rightly, for it is to him who masters our
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: minds by the force of truth, and not to those
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: who enslaved them by violence, that we owe our reverence.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: Voltaire became a patient and thorough student of Newton's works,
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: and was later the chief protagonist of Newton's views in France.
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: One must marvel at the quickness with which Voltaire absorbed
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: almost all that England had to teach him, its literature,
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: its science, and its philosophy. He took all these varied elements,
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: passed them through the fire of French culture and the
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: French spirit, and transmuted them into the gold of Gallic
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: wit and eloquence. He recorded his impressions in letters on
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: the English, which he circulated and manuscript among his friends.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: He did not dare to print them, for they praised
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: perfidious albiond too highly to suit the taste of the
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: royal censer. They contrasted england political liberty and intellectual independence
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: with French tyranny, and bondage. They condemned the idle aristocracy
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: and the tithe, absorbing clergy of France with their perpetual
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: recourse to the Bastille as the answer to every question
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: and every doubt. They urged the middle classes to rise
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: to their proper place in the state, as these classes
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: had in England, without quite knowing or intending it. These
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: letters were the first cox crow of the Revolution end
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: of chapter two, Chapter three of Voltaire and the French
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: Enlightenment by wil Durant. This Librovos recording is in the
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: public domain recording by Pamela Nagami, Chapter three, Siree the Romances. Nevertheless,
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: the Regent, not knowing of this chantically sent Voltaire permission
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: in seventeen twenty nine to return to France for five years.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: Voltaire enjoyed again that Parisian life, whose wine flowed in
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: his veins and whose spirit flowed from his pen. And
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: then some miscreant of a publisher, getting hold of the
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: letters on the English, turned them without the author's permission,
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: into print and sold them far and wide, to the
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: horror of all good Frenchmen, including Voltaire. The Parliament of
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: Paris at once ordered the book to be publicly burned
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: as scandalous, contrary to religion, to morals, and to respect
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: for authority. And Voltaire learned that he was again on
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: the way to the bastille. Like a good philosopher, he
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: took to his heels, merely utilizing the occasion to elope
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: with another man's wife. The Marquise du Chatelas was twenty eight,
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: Voltaire Alas was already forty. She was a remarkable woman.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: She had studied mathematics with the redoubtable Montpertuis, and then
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: with Clarat. She had written a learnedly annotated translation of
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: Newton's Principia. She was soon to receive higher rating than
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Voltaire in a contest for a prize offered by the
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: French Academy for an essay on the physics of fire.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: In short, she was precisely the kind of woman who
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: never elopes. But the Marquis was so dull, and Voltaire
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: was so interesting a creature, lovable in every way. She
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: called him the finest ornament in France. He returned her
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: love with fervent admiration, calling her a great man whose
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: only fault was being a woman. Formed from her and
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: from the large number of highly talented women than in France,
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: his conviction of the native mental equality of the sexes,
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: and decided that her chateau at Siree was an admirable
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: refuge from the inclement political weather of Paris. The Marquis
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: was away with his regiment, which had long been his
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: avenue of escape from mathematics, and he made no objection
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: to the new arrangements. Because of the mariage de convenance,
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: which forced rich old men on young women who had
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: no taste for senility but much hunger for romance, the
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: morals of the day permitted a lady to add a
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: lover to her manage if it were done with a
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: decent respect for the hypocrisies of mankind, and if she
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: chose not merely a lover but a genius, all the
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: world smiled and forgave her. In the Chateau at Siree,
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: they did not spend their time billing and cooing. All
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: the day was taken up with study and research. Voltaire
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: had an expensive laboratory fitted up for work in natural science,
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: and for years the lovers rivaled each other in discovery
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: and disquisition. They had many guests, but it was understood
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: that these should entertain themselves all day long till supper
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: at nine. After supper, occasionally there were private theatricals, or
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: Voltaire would read to the guests one of his lively stories.
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: Very soon, Siree became the mecca of the French mind.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: The aristocracy and the bourgeoisie joined in the pilgrimage to
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: taste Voltaire's wine and wit and see him act in
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: his own plays. He was happy to be the center
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: of this corrupt and brilliant world. He took nothing too seriously,
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: and for a while made rier efferrir to laugh, and
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: to make laugh his motto. Catherine of Russia called him
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: the divinity of gaiety. If nature had not made us
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: a little frivolous, he said, we should be most wretched.
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: It is because one can be frivolous that the majority
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: do not hang themselves. There was nothing of the dyspeptic
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: Carlisle about him. Duelque as disippary loco. It is sweet
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: to be foolish on occasion. Woe to philosophers who cannot
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: laugh away their wrinkles. I look upon solemnity as a disease.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: It was now that he began to write those delightful
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: romances Zadig, Candide, Micromegas, Lingenous, le Maude, Camille, vas et cetera,
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: which give the vultarian spirit in purer form than anywhere
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: else in his ninety nine volumes. They are not novels
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: but humoresque picuaresque novelettes. The heroes are not persons but ideas.
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: The villains are superstitions, and the events are thoughts. Some
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: are mere fragments, like Longenoeus, which is Rousseau. Before Jean Jacques,
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: a Huron Indian, comes to France with some returning explorers.
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: The first problem to which he gives rise is that
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: of making him a Christian, and Abbe gives him a
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: copy of the New Testament, which the Huron likes so
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: much that he soon offers himself not only for baptism,
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: but for circumcision as well. For he says, I do
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: not find in the book that was put into my
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: hands a.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: Single person who was not circumcised.
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: It is therefore evident that I must make a sacrifice
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: to the Hebrew custom, and the sooner the better. Hardly
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: has this difficulty been smoothed over. When he has trouble
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: over confession He asks where in the Gospel this is commanded,
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: and is directed to a passage in the Epistle of
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: Saint James's confess your sins to one another. He confesses,
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: but when he had done, he dragged the abbe from
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: the confessional chair, placed himself in the seat, and bade
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: the abbe confess in turn. Come, my friend, it is said,
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: we must confess our sins.
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: To one another. I have related my sins to you,
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: and you shall.
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: Not stir till you recount yours. He falls in love
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: with Miss Sentive, but is told that he cannot marry
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: her because she has acted as godmother at his baptism.
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: He is very angry at this little trick of the
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: fates and threatens to get unbaptized. Having received permission to
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: marry her, he is surprised to find that for marriage notaries, priests, witnesses, contracts,
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: and dispensations are absolutely necessary. You are then very great rogues,
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: since so many precautions are required, And so as the
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: story passes from incident to incident, the contradictions between primitive
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: and ecclesiastical Christianity are forced upon the stage. One misses
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: the impartiality of the scholar and the leniency of the philosopher.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: But Voltaire had begun his war against superstition, and in
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: war we demand impartiality and leniency only of our foes.
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: Micro Megs is an imitation of Swift, but perhaps richer
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: than its model. In cosmic imagination, the Earth is visited
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: by an inhabitant from Syrius. He is some five hundred
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: thousand feet tall, as befits the citizen of so large
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: a star. On his way through space, he has picked
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: up a gentleman from Saturn, who grieves because he is
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: only a few thousand feet in height. As they walk
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: through the Mediterranean, the Syrian wets his heels. He asks
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: his comrade how many senses the Saturnians have, and is
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: told we have seventy two. But we are daily complaining
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: of the small number. To what age do you commonly
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: live alas a mere trifle?
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: Very few on our globe.
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: Survive fifteen thousand years. So you see that in a manner,
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: we begin to die the very moment we are born.
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: Our existence is no more than a point, our duration
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: in an instant in our globe and atom scarce do
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: we begin to learn a little when death intervenes before
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: we can profit by experience. As they stand in the sea,
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: they take up a ship as one might pick up
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: some animolecule, and the Syrian poisons it on his thumbnail,
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: causing much commotion among the human passengers. The chaplains of
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: the ship repeated exorcisms, the sailors swore, and the philosophers
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: formed a system to explain this disturbance of the laws
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: of gravity. The Syrian bends down like a darkening cloud
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: and addresses them, O, ye, intelligent atoms, in whom the
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: Supreme Being hath been pleased to manifest his omniscience and power.
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: Without doubt, your joys on this earth must be pure
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: and exquisite, For being unencumbered with matter, and to all
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: appearance little else than soul. You must spend your lives
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: in the the lights of pleasure and reflection, which are
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: the true enjoyments of a perfect spirit. True happiness I
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: have nowhere found, but certainly here it dwells. We have
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: matter enough, answered one of the philosophers. To do abundance
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: of mischief, You must know, for example, that at this
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: very moment, while I am speaking, there are one hundred
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: thousand animals of our own species covered with hats slaying
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: an equal number of their fellow creatures who wear turbans.
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: At least they are either slaying or being slain, and
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: this has usually been the case all over the earth
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: from time immemorial. Miscreants, cried the indignant Syrian, I have
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: a good mind to take two or three steps and
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: trample the whole nest of such ridiculous assassins under my feet.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: Don't give yourself the trouble, replied the philosopher. They are
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: industrious enough in securing their own destruction.
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: At the end of.
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: Ten years, the hundreth part of these wretches will not survive. Besides,
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: the punishment should not be inflicted upon them, but upon
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: those sedentary and slothful barbarians who, from their palaces give
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: orders for murdering a million of men, then solemnly thank
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: God for their success. Next to Condide, which belongs to
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: a later period of Voltaire's life, the best of these
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: tales is Zodig. Zodig was a Babylonian philosopher. As wise
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: as it is possible for men to be, he knew
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: as much of metaphysics as hath ever been known in
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: any age. That is, little or nothing at all jealousy
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: made him imagine that he was in love with Semira.
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: In defending her against robbers, he was wounded.
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: In the left eye.
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: A messenger was dispatched to Memphis for the great Egyptian
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: physician Hermes, who came with a numerous retinue. He visited
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: Zodig and declared that the patient would lose his eye.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: He even foretold the day in the hour when this
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: fatal event would happen. Had it been the right eye,
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: said he, I could easily have cured it, but the
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: wounds of the left eye are incurable. All Babylon lamented
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: the fate of Zodig and admired the profound knowledge of Hermes.
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: In two days, the abscess broke of its own accord,
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: and Zodig was perfectly cured. Hermes wrote a book to
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: prove that it ought not to have healed. Zodig did
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: not read it. He heard instead to Samirah, only to
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: find that upon hearing Herme's first report, she had betrothed
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: herself to another man, having, she said, an unconquerable aversion
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: to one eyed men. Zodig thereupon married a peasant woman,
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: hoping to find in her the virtues which had been
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: missing in the court Lady Samirah. To make sure of
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: the fidelity of his wife, he arranged with a friend
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: that he, Zodig, should pretend to die, and that the
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: friend should make love to the wife an hour later,
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: so Zodig had himself pronounced dead and lay in the coffin,
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: while his friend first commiserated and then congratulated the widow,
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: and at last proposed immediate marriage to her. She made
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: a brief resistance, and then, protesting she would ne'er consent, consented.
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: Zodig rose from the dead and fled into the woods
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: to console himself with the beauty of nature. Having become
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: a very wise man, he was made Vizier to the king,
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: to whose realm he brought prosperity, justice and peace. But
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: the queen fell in love with him, and the king,
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: perceiving it, began to be troubled. He particularly remarked that
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: the Queen's shoes were blue, and that Zodig's shoes were blue,
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: that his wife's ribbons were yellow, and that Zodig's bonnet
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: was yellow. He resolved to poison them both, but the
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: queen discovered the plot and sent a note to Zodig fly,
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: I conjure thee by our mutual love and our yellow ribbons.
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: Zodig again fled into the woods. He then represented to
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: himself the human species as it really is, as a
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: parcel of insects devouring one another on a little atom
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: of clay. This true image seemed to annihilate his misfortunes
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: by making him sensible of the nothingness of his own.
• 39:34
  Speaker 2: Being and that of Babylon.
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: His soul launched into infinity and detached from the senses,
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: contemplated the immutable order of the universe. But when afterwards,
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: returning to himself, he considered that the Queen had perhaps
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: died for him, the universe vanished from sight. Passing out
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: of Babylon, he saw a man cruelly beating a woman.
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: He responded to her crime for help, fought the man, and,
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: at last, to save himself, struck a blow which killed
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: his enemy. Thereupon, he turned to the lady and asked,
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: what further, Madam, wouldst thou have me do for thee
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: die villain, for thou hast killed my lover, Oh that
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: I were able to tear out thy heart. Zodoc was
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: shortly afterwards captured and enslaved, but he taught his master
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: philosophy and became his trusted counselor through his advice. The
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: practice of Seti, by which a widow was buried with
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: her husband, was abolished by a law which required that
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: before such martyrdom, the widow should spend an hour alone
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: with a handsome man. Sent on a mission to the
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: King of serendib Zodig taught him that an honest minister
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: could best be found by choosing the lightest dancer among
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: the applicants. He had the vestibule of the dance hall
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: filled with loose valuables easily stolen, and arranged that each
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: candidate should pass through the vestibule alone and unwatched. When
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: they had all entered, they were asked to dance. Never
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: had dancers performed more unwillingly or with less grace. Their
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: heads were down, their backs bent, their hands pressed to
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: their sides, and so the story rushes on. We can
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: imagine those evenings at Syree end of chapter three, Chapter
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: four of Voltaire and the French Enlightenment by wil Durant.
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: Pamel and Nagami. Chapter four Potsdam and Frederic. Those who
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: could not come to him wrote to him. In seventeen
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: thirty six, began his correspondence with Frederic, then prince and
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: not yet great. Frederic's first letter was like that of
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: a boy to a king. Its lavish flattery gives us
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: an inkling of the reputation which Voltaire, though he had
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: not yet written any of his masterpieces, had already won.
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: It proclaims Voltaire as the greatest man of France and
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: a mortal who does honor to language. I counted one
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: of the greatest honors of my life to be borne
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: the contemporary of a man of such distinguished attainments as yours.
• 42:29
  Speaker 2: It is not given to every.
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: One to make the mind laugh, and what pleasures can
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: surpass those of the mind. Frederick was a free thinker
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: who looked upon dogmas as a king looks upon subjects,
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: and Voltaire had great hopes that, on the throne, Frederic
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: would make the Enlightenment fashionable, while he himself perhaps might
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: play Plato to Frederick's Dionysius. When Frederic demurred to the
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: flattery with which Voltaire answered his own, Voltaire replied, a
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: prince who writes against flattery is as singular as a
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: pope who writes against infallibility. Frederic sent him a copy
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: of the Anti Machiavelle, in which the prince spoke very
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: beautifully of the iniquity of war and of the duty
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: of a king to preserve peace. Voltaire wept tears of
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: joy over this royal pacifist. A few months later, Frederic
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: made king, invaded Silesia and plunged Europe into a generation
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: of bloodshed. In seventeen forty five, the poet and his
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: mathematician went to Paris when Voltaire became a candidate for
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: membership in the French Academy. To achieve this quite superfluous distinction,
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: he called himself a good Catholic, complimented some powerful Jesuits,
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: lied inexhaustibly, and in general behaved as most of us
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: do in such cases.
• 44:00
  Speaker 2: He failed, but a year.
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: Later he succeeded and delivered a reception address which is
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: one of the classics of the literature of France. For
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: a while he lingered in Paris, flitting from salon to
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: salon and producing play after play. From udeep at eighteen
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: to Irene at eighty three, he wrote a long series
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: of dramas, some of them failures, most of them's successes.
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: In seventeen thirty Brutus failed, and in seventeen thirty two
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: A Refuel failed. His friends urged him to abandon the drama,
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: but in the same year he produced Zaiir, which became
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: his greatest success. Mohammet followed in seventeen forty one, Merope
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: in seventeen forty three, Semiramis in seventeen forty eight, and
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: tonk Read in seventeen sixty. Meanwhile, tragedy and comedy had
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: entered his own life. After fifteen years, his life for
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: Madame du Chatellais had somewhat thinned. They had even ceased
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: to quarrel. In seventeen forty eight, the Marquise fell in
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: love with the handsome young Marquis de Saint Lambert. When
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: Voltaire discovered it, he raged, but when Saint Lambert asked
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: his forgiveness, he melted into a benediction. He had reached
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: the crest of life now and began to see death
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: in the distance. He could not take it ill that
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: youth should be served. Such are women, he said philosophically,
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: forgetting that there are such men too, I displaced Richelieu,
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: Saint Lambert turns me out. That is the order of things.
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: One nail drives out another, so goes the world. He
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: wrote a pretty stanza to the third nail, Saint Lambert,
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: It is all for thee the flower grows, the roses
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: thorns are all for me, for thee the rose. Then,
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: in seventeen forty nine came the death of Madame du
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: Chatelas in childbirth. It was characteristic of the age that
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: her husband and Voltaire and Saint Lombert should meet at
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: her death bed with not one word of reproach, and
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: indeed made friends by their common loss. Voltaire tried to
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: forget his bereavement and work. For a time, he busied
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: himself with his Siecle de Louis Caturs. But what rescued
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: him from despondency was the opportune renewal of Frederick's invitation
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: to come to his court at Potsdam. An invitation accompanied
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: by three thousand francs for traveling expenses.
• 46:41
  Speaker 2: Was irresistible.
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: Voltaire left for Berlin in seventeen fifty. It soothed him
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: to find himself assigned to a splendid suite in Frederick's
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: palace and accepted on equal terms by the most powerful
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: monarch of the age. At first, his letters were full
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: of satisfaction. Writing on July twenty fourth to Dargental, he
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: describes Potsdam, one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, opera, comedy, philosophy, poetry,
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: grandeur and graces, grenadiers and muses, trumpets and violins, the
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: suppers of Plato, society and liberty. Who would believe it?
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: Yet it is very true. Years before he had written
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: mon Dieu, What a delightful life it would be to
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: lodge with three or four men of letters, with talents
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: and no jealousy. What imagination to love one another, live quietly,
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: cultivate one's art, talk of it, enliven ourselves mutually. I
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: picture to myself that I shall one day live in
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: this little paradise.
• 47:50
  Speaker 2: And here it was.
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: Voltaire avoided the state dinners. He could not bear to
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: be surrounded with bristling generals. He reserved himself for the
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: private suppers, to which Frederick later in the evening would
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: invite a small inner circle of literary friends. For this
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: greatest prince of his age yearned to be a poet
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: and a philosopher. The conversation at these suppers was always
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: in French. Voltaire tried to learn German, but gave it
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: up after nearly choking, and wished the Germans had more
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: wit and fewer consonants. One who heard the conversation said
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: that it was better than the most interesting and best
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: written book in the world. They talked about everything and
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: said what they thought. Frederick's wit was almost as sharp
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: as Voltaire's, and only Voltaire dared to answer him with
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: that finesse which can kill without giving offense. One thinks boldly,
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: one is free here, wrote Voltaire joyfully. Frederick scratches with
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: one hand, but caresses with the other. I am crossed
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: in nothing. I find a port after fifty years of storm.
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: I find the protection of a king, the conversation of
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: a philosopher, the charms of an agreeable man, united in
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: one who for sixteen years consoled me in misfortune and
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: sheltered me from my enemies. If one can be certain
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: of anything, it is of the character of the King
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: of Prussia. However, in November of this same year, Voltaire
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: thought he would improve his finances by investing in Saxon bonds.
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: Despite Frederick's prohibition of such investments. The bonds rose and
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: Voltaire profited, but his agent Hirsch, tried to blackmail him
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: by threatening to publish the transaction. Voltaire sprang at his
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: throat and sent him sprawling. Frederick learned of the affair
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: and fell into a royal rage. I shall want him
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: at the most another year, he said to Lametri. One
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: squeezes the orange and throws away the rind. La Matrie,
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: perhaps anxious to disperse his rivals, took care to report
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: this to Voltaire. The suppers were resumed, but wrote Voltaire,
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: the orange rind haunts my dreams. The man who fell
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: from the top of a steeple, and finding the falling
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: through the air soft said good provided at lasts, was
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: not a little as I am. He half desired a break,
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: for he was as homesick as only a Frenchman can be.
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: The decisive trifle came in seventeen fifty two. Moupertuis, the
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: great mathematician whom Frederick had imported from France with so
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: many others, in an attempt to arouse the German mind
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: by direct contact with the Enlightenment, quarreled with a subordinate mathematician,
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: Kunig over an interpretation of Newton. Frederic entered into the
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: dispute on the side of Moupertuis, and Voltaire, who had
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: more courage than entered it on the side of Kunig.
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: Unluckily for me, he wrote to Madame Denis, I am
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: also an author, and in the opposite camp, to the King,
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: I have no scepter, but I have a pen. About
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: the same time, Frederick was writing to his sister, the
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: devil is incarnate in my men of letters. There is
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: no doing anything with them. These fellows have no intelligence
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: except for society. It must be a consolation to animals
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: to see that people with minds are often no better
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: than they. It was now that Voltaire wrote against Moutpiertui
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: his famous diatribe of Doctor Akakia. He read it to Frederic,
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: who laughed all night over it, but begged Voltaire not
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: to publish it. Voltaire seemed to acquiesce, but the truth
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: was that the thing was already sent to the printer,
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: and the author could not bring himself to practice in
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: phanticide on the progeny of his pen. When it appeared,
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: Frederick burst into flame, and Voltaire fled from the conflagration
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: at Frankfort. Though in territory quite outside Frederick's jurisdiction. He
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: was overtaken and arrested by the King's agents and told
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: that he could not go on until he surrendered Frederick's
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: poem The Palladium, which had not been adapted for polite society,
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: and out to sell Voltaire's pusel itself. But the terrible
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: manuscript was in a trunk which had been lost on
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: the way, and for weeks till it came, Voltaire was
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: kept almost in prison. A bookseller to whom he owed something,
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: thought it an opportune moment to come and press for
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: the payment of his bill. Voltaire, furious, gave him a
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: blow on the ear, whereupon Voltaire's secretary, Collini, offered comfort
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: to the man by pointing out, Sir, you have received
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: a box eyes the ear from one of the greatest
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: men in the world. Freed at last, he was about
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: to cross the frontier into France when word came that
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: he was exiled. The hunted old soul hardly knew where
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: to turn. For a time, he thought of going to Pennsylvania.
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: One may imagine his desperation. He spent the March of
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: seventeen fifty four seeking an agreeable tomb in the neighborhood
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: of Geneva, safe from the rival autocrats of Paris and Berlin.
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: At last he bought an old estate called Les de Lies,
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: settled down to cultivate his garden and regain his health,
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: and when his life seemed to be ebbing away into senility,
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: entered upon the period of his noblest and greatest work.
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: End of chapter four Chapter five of Voltaire and the
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: French Enlightenment by will Durant. This librovox recording is in
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: the public domain recording by Pamela and Nagami. Chapter five
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: Les de Lies, the Essay on Morals What was the
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: cause of his new exile that he had published in Berlin,
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: the most ambitious, the most voluminous, the most characteristic, and
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: the most daring of his works. Its title was no
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: small part of it essay sieurles mour ellesprit de nascient
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: a surre principal fet de listrois de put Charlemagne Gusca
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: luisitrez an essay on the morals and the Spirit of
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: the Nations from Charlemagne to Louis the thirteenth. He had
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: begun it at Siree for Madame duchatelais spurred on to
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: the task by her denunciation of history, as she is
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: writ it is an old almanac. She had said, what
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: does it matter to me, a french woman living on
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: my estate, to know that Eegiel succeeded Haquin in Sweden
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: and that Ottoman was the son of Ortigorole. I have
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: read with pleasure the history of the Greeks and the Romans.
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: They offered me certain pictures which attracted me. But I
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: have never yet been able to finish any long history
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: of our modern nations. I can see scarcely anything in
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: them but confusion, a host of minute events without connection
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: or sequence, a thousand battles which settled nothing. I renounced
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: the study which overwhelms the mind without illuminating Itvoltaire had agreed.
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: He had made his angenous say history is nothing more
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: than a picture of crimes and misfortunes, and he was
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: to write to Horace Walpole July fifteenth, seventeen sixty eight, truly,
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: the history of the Yorkists and Lancastrians and many others
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: is much like greeting the history of highway robbers.
• 56:03
  Speaker 2: But he had.
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: Expressed to Madame du Chatelas the hope that a way
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: out might lie in applying philosophy to history, and endeavoring
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: to trace beneath the flux of political events the history
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: of the human mind. Only philosophers should write history, he said,
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: In all nations history is disfigured by fable till at
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: last philosophy comes to enlighten man. And when it does
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: finally arrive in the midst of this darkness, it finds
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: the human mind so blinded by centuries of error that
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: it can hardly undeceive it. It finds ceremonies, facts and
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: monuments heaped up to prove lies. History, he concludes, is
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: after all, nothing but a pack of tricks which we
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: play upon the dead. We transform the past to suit
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: our wishes for the future, and in the upshot history
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: proof roofs that anything can be proved by history. He
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: worked like a miner to find in this mississippi of
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: falsehoods the grains of truth about the real history of mankind.
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: Year after year he gave himself to preparatory studies. A
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: history of Russia, a history of Charles the twelfth, the
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: Age of Louis the fourteenth, and the Age of Louis
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: the thirteenth, and through these tasks he developed in himself
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: that unflagging intellectual conscience which enslaves a man to make
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: a genius. The Jesuit per Daniel, who produced a history
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: of France, had placed before him in the Royal Library
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: of Paris twelve hundred volumes of documents and manuscripts. Spent
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: an hour or so looking through them, and then turning
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: to father Turnemine, the former teacher of Vultaire, dismissed the
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: matter by declaring that all this material was useless old paper,
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: which he had no no need of for the purpose
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: of writing his history.
• 58:04
  Speaker 2: Not so Voltaire.
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: He read everything on his subject that he could lay
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: his hands on. He poured over hundreds of volumes of memoirs,
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: he wrote hundreds of letters to survivors of famous events,
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: and even after publishing his works, he continued to study
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: and improved every edition. But this gathering of material was
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: only preparatory. What was needed was a new method of
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: selection and arrangement. Mere facts would not do, even if,
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: as so seldom happens, they chanced to be facts. Details
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: that lead to nothing are to history what baggage is
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: to an army, and pedimenta for we must look at
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: things in the large, for the very reason that the
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: human mind is so small and sinks under the weight
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: of minutia.
• 58:57
  Speaker 2: Facts should be.
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: Collected by analysts and arranged in some kind of historical dictionary,
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: where one might find them at need, as one finds words.
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: What Voltaire sought was a unifying principle by which the
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: whole history of civilization in Europe could be woven on
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: one thread, and he was convinced that this thread was
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: the history of culture. He was resolved that his history
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: should deal not with kings, but with movements, forces and masses.
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: Not with nations but with the human race. Not with wars,
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: but with the march of the human mind. Battles and
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: revolutions are the smallest part of the plan. Squadrons and battalions,
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: conquering or being conquered, Towns taken and retaken are common
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: to all history. Take away the arts and the progress
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: of the mind, and you will find nothing in any
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: age remarkable enough to attract the attention of posterity. And
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: so he produced the first history of philosophy, the first
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: systematic attempt to trace the streams of natural causation in
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: the development of the European mind. It was to be
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: expected that such an experiment should follow upon the abandonment
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: of supernatural explanations. History could not come into its own
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: until theology gave way. According to Buckle, Voltaire's book laid
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: the basis of modern historical science. Gibbon, Nebua, Buckle, and
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: Grote were his grateful debtors and followers. He was the
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: cockput neelie of them all, and is still unsurpassed in
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: the field which he first explored. But why did his
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: greatest book bring him exile? Because by telling the truth
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: it offended everybody. It especially enraged the clergy. By taking
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: the view later developed by Gibbon that the rapid conquest
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: of Paganism by Christianity had disintegrated Rome from within and
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: prepared it to fall an easy victim to the invading
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: and immigrating barbarians. It enraged them further by giving much
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: less space than usual to Judea and Christendom, and by
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: speaking of China, India and Persia, and of their faiths
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: with the impartiality of a Martian. In this new perspective,
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: a vast and novel world was revealed. Every dogma faded
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: into relativity, The endless East took on something of the
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: proportions given it by geography. Europe suddenly became conscious of
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: itself as the experimental peninsula of a continent and a
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: culture greater than its own.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 2: How could it.
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: Forgive a European for so unpatriotic a revelation?
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 2: The King decreed.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: That this Frenchman, who dared to think of himself as
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: a man first and a Frenchman afterward, should never put
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: his foot upon the soil of France again.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 2: End of chapter five, Chapter.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: Six of Voltaire and the French Enlightenment by wil Durant.
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: This librovox recording is in the public domain recording by
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: Pamel Andagami.
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 2: Chapter six.
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: Ferne Candide late de Lies had been a temporary home,
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: a center from which Voltaire might prospect to find a
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: shelter of more permanence. He found it in seventeen fifty
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: eight at Fernee, just inside the Swiss line near France.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: Here he would be secure from the French power and
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: yet near to French refuge if the Swiss government should
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: trouble him. This last change ended his vande jarre. These
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: fitful runnings to and fro had not been the result
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: of his nervous restlessness. They had reflected too his ubiquitous
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: insecurity from persecution. Only at sixty four did he find
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: a house that could be also his home. There is
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: a passage at the end of one of his tales,
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: the Travels of Scarmentado, which almost applies to its author.
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: As I had now seen all that was rare or
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: beautiful on earth, I resolved for the future to see
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: nothing but my own home.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 2: I took a wife, and.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: Soon suspected that she deceived me. But notwithstanding this doubt,
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: I still found that of all conditions of life, this
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: was much the happiest. He had no wife, but he
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: had a niece, which is better for a man of genius.
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: We never hear of his wishing to be in Paris.
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: There can be no doubt that this wise exile prolonged
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: his days. He was happy in his garden, planting fruit trees,
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: which he did not expect to see flourish in his lifetime.
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: When an admirer praised the work he had done for posterity,
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: he answered, yes, I have planted four thousand trees. He
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: had a kind word for everybody, but could be forced
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: to sharper speech one day, he asked the visitor whence
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: he came from mister Haller's. He is a great man,
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: said Voltaire, a great poet, a great naturalist, a great philosopher,
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: almost a universal genius. What you say, sir, is the
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: more admirable, as mister Holler does not do you the
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: same justice, Ah, said Voltaire. Perhaps we are both mistaken.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: Fernay now became the intellectual capital of the world. Every
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: learned man or enlightened ruler of the day paid his court,
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: either in person or by correspondence. Here came skeptical priests,
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: liberal aristocrats and learned ladies. Here came Gibbon and Boswell
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: from England. Here came Dalombert Elvesius and the other rebels
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: of the Enlightenment, and countless others. At last, the entertainment
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: of this endless stream of visitors proved too expensive even
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: for Voltaire. He complained that he was becoming the hotel
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: keeper for all Europe. To one acquaintance, who announced that
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: he had come to stay for six weeks, Voltaire said,
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: what is the difference between you and Don Quixote? He
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: mistook inns for chateau, and you mistake this chateau.
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 2: For an inn.
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: God, preserve me from my friends, he concluded, I will
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: take care of my enemies myself. Add to this perpetual hospitality.
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: The largest correspondence the world has ever seen, and the
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: most brilliant letters came from all sorts and conditions of men.
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: A burgomaster wrote from Germany, asking in confidence whether there
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: is a God or not, and begging Voltaire to answer
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: by return post. Gustavus the third of Sweden was elated
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: by the thought that Voltaire sometimes glanced at the north,
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: and told them that this was their greatest encouragement to
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: do their best up there. Christian the seventh of Denmark
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: apologized for not establishing at once all reforms. Catherine the
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: second of Russia sent him beautiful presents, wrote frequently, and
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: hoped he would not consider her importunate. Even Frederick, after
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: a year of Doldrum's, returned to the Fold and resumed
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: his correspondence with the King of Fernay. You have done
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: me great wrongs, he wrote, I have forgiven them all.
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: I even wish to forget them. But if you had
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: not had to do with a madman in love with
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: your noble genius, you would not have gotten off so well.
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 2: Do you want sweet things? Very well?
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: I will tell you some truths. I esteem in you
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: the finest genius that the ages have borne. I admire
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: your poetry. I love your prose. Never has an author
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: before you had attacked so keen a taste, so sure
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: and delicate. You are charming in conversation. You know how
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: to amuse and instruct at the same time. You are
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: the most seductive being that I know, capable of making
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: yourself loved by all the world when you choose. You
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: have such graces of mind that you can offend and
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: yet at the same time deserve the indulgence of those
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: who know you.
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 2: In short, you.
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: Would be perfect if you were not a man who
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: would have expected so gay a host to become the
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: exponent of pessimism in youth. As a reveler in Paris's saloon,
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: he had seen the sunnier side of life despite the bastillo,
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: and yet even in those careless days he had rebelled
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: against the unnatural optimism to which Leipnitz had given currency
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: to an ardent young man who had attacked him in print,
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: and had contended with Leipnitz that this is the best
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: of all possible worlds, Voltaire wrote, I am pleased to hear, sir,
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: that you have written a little book against me. You
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: do me too much honor when you have shown in
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: verse or otherwise, why so many men cut their throats
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: in the best of all possible worlds. I shall be
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: exceedingly obliged to you. I await your arguments, your verses,
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: and your abuse, and assure you from the bottom of
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: my heart that neither of us knows anything about the matter.
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: I have the honor to be and et cetera. Persecution
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: and disillusionment had worn down his faith in life, and
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: his experiences at Berlin and Frankfort had taken the edge
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: from his hope. But both and hopes suffered most when
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: in November seventeen fifty.
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 2: Five came the news of the.
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: Awful earthquake at Lisbon, in which thirty thousand people had
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: been killed. The quake had come on All Saints Day,
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: the churches had been crowded with worshipers, and death, finding
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: its enemies in close, formation, had reaped a rich harvest.
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: Voltaire was shocked into seriousness and raged when he heard
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: that the French clergy were explaining the disaster as a
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: punishment for the sins of the people of Lisbon. He
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: broke forth in a passionate poem in which he gave
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: vigorous expression to the old dilemma. Either God can prevent
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: evil and he will not, or he wishes to prevent
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: it and he cannot. He was not satisfied with Spinoza's
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: answer that good and evil are human terms inapplicable to
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: the universe, and that our tragedies are true things in
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: the perspective of eternity. I am a puny part of
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: the great whole. Yes, But all animals condemned to live,
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: All sentient things, borne by the same stern law suffer
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: like me, and like me also die. The vulture fastens
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: on his timid prey and stabs with bloody beak the
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: quivering limbs. All's well, it seems for it, But in
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: a while an eagle tears the vulture into shreds. The
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: eagle is transfixed by shafts of man. The man, prone
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: in the dust of battlefields, mingling his blood with dying
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: fellow men, becomes in turn the food of ravenous birds.
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: Thus the whole world, in every member groans, all born
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: for torment and for mutual death. And o'er this ghastly chaos,
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: you would say, the ills of each make up the
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: good of awe what blessedness? And as with quaking voice,
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: mortal and pitiful, ye cry all's well. The universe belies you,
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: and your heart refutes a hundred times your mind's conceit.
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: What is the verdict of the vastest mind?
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 2: Silence?
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: The book of fate is closed to us. Man is
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: a stranger to his own research. He knows not whence
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: he comes, nor whither goes. Tormented atoms and a bed
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: of mud devoured by death, a mockery of fate. But
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: thinking Adams, whose far seeing eyes, guided by thought, have
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: measured the faint stars. Our being mingles with the infinite,
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: ourselves we never see or come to know. This world,
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: this theater of pride and wrong, swarms with sick fools
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: who talk of happiness. Once did I sing in less
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: lugubrious tone, the sunny ways of pleasure's genial rule. The
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: times have changed and taught by growing age and sharing
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: of the frailty of mankind. Seeking a light amid the
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: deepening gloom, I can but suffer and will not repine.
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: A few months later, the Seven Years War broke out.
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: Voltaire looked upon it as madness and suicide, the devastation
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: of Europe to settle whether England or France should win
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: a few acres of snow in Canada. On the top
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: of this came a public reply by Jean Jacques Rousseau
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: to the poem on Lisbon. Man himself was to be
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: blamed for the disaster, said Rousseau.
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 2: If we lived out in the.
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: Fields and not in the towns, we should not be
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: killed on so large a scale. If we lived under
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: the sky and not in houses, houses would not fall
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: upon us. Voltaire was amazed at the popularity won by
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: this profound the odyssey, and angry that his name should
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: be dragged into the dust by such a quixote. He
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: turned upon Rousseau that most terrible of all the intellectual
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: weapons ever wielded by man, the mockery of Voltaire. In
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: three days in seventeen fifty one, he wrote, Condide. Never
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: was pessimism so gaily argued, Never was man made to
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: laugh so heartily while learning that this is a world
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: of woe, And seldom has a story been told with
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: such simple and hidden art. It is pure narrative and dialog.
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: No descriptions patted out, and the action is riotously rapid
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: in Voltaire's fingers, says Anatole Franz. The pen runs and laughs.
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: It is perhaps the finest short story in all literature. Condide,
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: as his name indicates, is a simple, an honest lad
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: son of the great baron Tundu Tendocht of Westphalia, and
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: pupil of the learned Pangloss. Pangloss was a professor of metaphysico,
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: theologico cosmonagology. It is the monstrable, said he, that all
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: is necessarily for the best end. Observe that the nose
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: has been formed.
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 2: To bear spectacles.
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: Legs were visibly designed for stockings, stones were designed to
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: construct castles. Pigs were made so that we might have
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: pork all the year round. Consequently, they who assert that
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: all is well have said a foolish thing. They should
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: have said all is for the best. While Pangloss is discoursing,
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: the castle is attacked by the Bulgarian army, and Candide
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: is captured and turned into a soldier. He was made
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: to wheel about to the right and to the left
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: to draw his rammer to return his rammer to present.
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 2: To fire to march.
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: He resolved one fine day in spring to go for
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: a walk, marching straight before him, believing that it was
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: the privilege of the human as well as the animal species,
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: to make use of their legs as they pleased. He
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: had advanced two leagues when he was overtaken by four
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: heroes six feet tall, who bound him and carried him
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: to a dungeon. He was asked which he would like
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: the best, to be whipped six and thirty times through
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: all the regiment, or to receive at once two balls
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: of lead in his brain. He vainly said that human
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: will is free, and that he chose neither the one
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: nor the other. He was forced to make a choice.
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 1: He determined, in virtue of that gift of God called liberty,
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: to run the gauntlet six and thirty times. He bore
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: this twice. Candid escapes, takes passage to Lisbon, and on
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: board ship meets Professor Pangloss, who tells how the baron
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: and baronet were murdered and the castle destroyed. All this,
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: he concludes, was indispensable for private misfortunes make the general good,
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: so that the more private misfortunes there are the greater
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: is the general good. They arrive in Lisbon just in.
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 2: Time to be caught in the earthquake.
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: After it is over, they tell each other their adventures
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: and sufferings, whereupon an old servant assures them that their
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: misfortunes are as nothing compared with her own.
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 2: A hundred times.
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: I was on the point of killing myself, but I
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: loved life. This ridiculous foible is perhaps one of our
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: most fatal characteristics. For is there anything more absurd than
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: to wish to carry continually a burden which one can
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: always throw down? Or, as another character expresses it, all
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: things considered, the life of a gondolier is preferable to
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: that of a doge. But I believe the difference is
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: so trifling that it is not worth the trouble of examining.
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 2: Condide.
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: Fleeing from the Inquisition, goes to Paraguay. There the Jesuit
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: fathers possess all, and the people nothing. It is a
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: masterpiece of reason and justice. In a Dutch colony, he
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: comes upon a negro with one hand, one leg, and
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: a rag for clothing.
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 2: When we work at the sugar.
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: Canes, the slave explains, and the mill snatches hold of
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: a finger, they cut off a hand, and when we
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: try to run away, they cut off a leg. This
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe.
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: Condide finds much loose gold in the unexplored interior. He
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: returns to the coast and hires a vessel to take
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: him to France, but the skipper sails off with the
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: gold and leaves Condide philosophizing on the wharf with what
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: little remains to him. Condide purchases a passage on a
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: ship bound for Bordeaux, and on board strikes up a
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: conversation with an old sage Martin. Do you believe, said Condide,
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: that men have always massacred one another as they do today,
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: That they have always been liars, cheats, traders, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious,
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: bloody minded calumniators, debachiese fanatics, hypocrites and fools. Do you believe,
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: said Martin, that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: have found them without doubts, said Condide. Well, then, said Martin,
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: if hawks have always had the same character, why should
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: you imagine that men may have changed theirs, oh said Condide.
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: There is a vast deal of difference for free will
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: and reasoning. Thus they arrived at Bordeaux. We cannot follow
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: Condide through the rest of his adventures, which form a
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: rollicking commentary on the difficulties of medieval theology and Leibnitzian optimism.
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: Your suffering a variety of evils among a variety of men,
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: Condide settles down as a farmer in Turkey, and the
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: story ends with a final dialogue between master and pupil.
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: Pangloss sometimes said to Candide, there is a concatenation of
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: events in this best of all possible worlds. For if
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle,
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: if you had not been put into the inquisition, if
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: you had not walked over America, and if you had
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: not lost all your gold, you would not be here
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: eating preserved citrons and pistachio nuts. All that is very well,
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: answered Candide. But let us cultivate our garden.
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 2: End of chapter six.
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: Chapter seven of Voltaire and the French Enlightenment by Will Durant.
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: This librovox recording is in the public domain. Recording by
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: Pamela and Nagami, the Encyclopedia, and the Philosophic Dictionary. The
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: popularity of so irreverent a book as Condide gives us
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: some sense of the spirit of the age. The lordly
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: culture of Louis the fourteenth time, despite the massive bishops
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: who spoke so eloquent a part in it, had learned
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: to smile at dogma and tradition. The failure of the
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: Reformation to capture France had left for Frenchmen no half
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: way house between infallibility and infidelity. And while the intellect
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: religious evolution, the mind of France jumped precipitately from the
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: hot faith which massacred the Huguenot to the cold hostility
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: with which la Maitri, Elvesius, Albach and Diderot turned upon
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: the religion of their fathers. Let us look for a
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: moment at the intellectual environment in which the later Voltaie
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: moved and had his being. Lamettrie seventeen o nine to
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: fifty one was an army physician who had lost his
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: post by writing a natural history of the soul, and
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: had one exile by a work called man A machine.
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 2: He had taken.
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: Refuge at the court of Frederic, who was himself something
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: of an advanced thinker, and was resolved to have the
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: very latest culture. From Paris, Lemetrie took up the idea
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: of mechanism, where the frightened descartes like a boy who
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: has burned his fingers, had dropped it and announced boldly
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: that all the world, not accepting man, was a machine.
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: The soul is material, and matter is soulful. But whatever
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: they are, they act upon each other and grow and
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: decay with each other in a way that leaves no
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: doubt of their essential similarity and interdependence. If the soul
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: is pure spirit, how can enthusiasm warm the body, or
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: fever in the body disturbed the processes of the mind.
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: All organisms have evolved out of one original germ through
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: the reciprocal action of organism and environment. The reason why
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: animals have intelligence and plants none is that animals move
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: about for their food, while plants take what comes to them.
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: Man has the highest intelligence because he has the greatest
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: wants and the widest mobility. Beings without wants are also
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: without mind. Although Lametrie was exiled for these opinions, Elvesius
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 1: seventeen fifteen to seventeen seventy one, who took them as
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: the basis of his book on Man, became one of
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: the richest men in France and rose to position and honor.
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: Here we have the ethic, as in Lameitrie, the metaphysic
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: of atheism. All action is dictated by egoism. Self love.
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: Even the nero follows the feeling which for him is
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: associated with the greatest pleasure and virtue is egoism furnished
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: with a spyglass. Conscience is not the voice of God
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: but the fear of the police. It is the deposit
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: left in us by the stream of prohibitions poured over
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: the growing soul by parents and teachers and press. Morality
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: must be founded not on theology, but on sociology. The
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: changing needs of society, and not any unchanging revelation or
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: dogma must determine the good. The greatest figure in this
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: group was Denis di Derhut seventeen thirteen to eighty four.
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: His ideas were expressed in various fragments from his own
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: pen and in the system of nature of Baron Dolbach
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: seventeen twenty three to eighty nine, whose salon was the center.
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 2: Of Diderot's circle.
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: If we go back to the beginning, says Olbach, we
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods, that fancy,
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: enthusiasm or deceit adorned or disfigured them, That weakness worships them,
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: that credulity preserves them, and that custom respects and tyranny
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: supports them in order to make the blindness of men
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: serve its own interests. Belief in God, said Diderot, is
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: bound up with submission to autoqucy. The two rise and
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: fall together, and men will never be free till the
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: The earth will come into its own only when Heaven
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: is destroyed. Materialism may be an oversimplification of the world.
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: All matter is probably instinct with life, and it is
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: impossible to reduce the unity of consciousness to matter and motion.
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: But materialism is a good weapon against the Church, and
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: must be used till a better one is found. Meanwhile,
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: one must spread knowledge and encourage industry. Industry will make
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: for peace, and knowledge will make a new and natural morality.
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: These are the ideas which Diderot and Dalombert labored to
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 1: disseminate through the Great Donciklope D, which they issued volume
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: by volume from seventeen fifty two to seventeen seventy two.
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 1: The Church had the first volumes suppressed, and as the
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: opposition increased, Didero's comrades abandoned him, but he worked on angrily,
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: invigorated by his rage. I know nothing so indecent, he said,
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: as these vague declamations of the theologians against reason. To
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: hear them, one would suppose that men could not enter
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 1: into the bosom of Christianity, except as a herd of
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: cattle enters a stable. It was, as Pain put it,
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: the age of reason. These men never doubted that the
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: intellect was the ultimate human test of all truth and
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: all good. Let reason be freed, they said, and it would,
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: in a few generations build utopia. Diderot did not suspect
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 1: that the erotic and neurotic Jean Jacques Rousseau seventeen twelve
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: seventy eight, whom he had just introduced to Paris, was
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 1: carrying in his head or in his heart, the seeds
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: of a revolution against this enthronement of reason, a revolution
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: which armed with the impressive obscurities of a manual Kant
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: would soon capture every citadel of philosophy. Naturally enough, Voltaire,
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 1: who was interested in everything and had a hand in
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: every fight, was caught up for a time in the
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: circle of the encyclopedists. They were glad to call him
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: their leader, and he was not averse to their incense,
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: though he thought some of their ideas needed a little biting.
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: They asked him to write articles for their great undertaking,
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: and he responded with the facility and fertility which delighted them.
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: When he had finished this work, he set about making
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: an encyclopedia of his own, which he called a philosophic dictionary.
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: With unprecedented audacity, he took subject after subject as the
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: alphabet suggested them, and poured out under each heading, part
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: of his inexhaustible resources of knowledge and wisdom. Imagine a
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: man writing on everything and producing a classic, Nonetheless the
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: most readable and sparkling of Voltaire's works. Aside from his romances,
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: every article a model of brevity, clarity, and wit. Some
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: men can be prolix In one small volume, Voltaire is
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: terse through a hundred. Here at last, Voltaire proves that
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: he is a philosopher. He begins, like Bacon, Descartes, and
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: Locke and all the moderns, with doubt and a supposedly
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: clean slate. I have taken as my patron Saint Saint
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: Thomas of Didymus, who always insisted on an examination with
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: his own hands. He thanks Baileeh for having taught him
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: the art of doubt. He rejects all systems and suspects
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: that every chief of a sect in philosophy has.
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 2: Been a little of a quack.
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: The further I go, the more I am confirmed in
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers, that
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 1: novels are for women. It is only Charlatan's who are
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: certain we know nothing of first principles. It is truly
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: extravagant to define God angels minds and to know precisely
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: why God formed the world, when we do not know
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: a very agreeable state, but certainly is it's a ridiculous one.
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: I do not know how I was made and how
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: I was born. I did not know it all during
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: a quarter of my life. The causes of what I saw,
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: or heard or felt. I have seen that which is
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: called matter, both as the star serious and as the
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: smallest atom which can be perceived with the microscope. And
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: I do not know what this matter is. He tells
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: the story of a good Brahman who says, I wish
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: I had never been born. Why so said I, because
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: he replied, I have been studying these forty years, and
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: I find that it has been so much time lost.
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: I believe that I am composed of matter, but I
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: have never been able to satisfy myself what it is
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: that produces thought. I am even ignorant whether my understanding
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: is a simple faculty like that of walking or digesting,
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: or if I think with my head in the same
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: manner as I take hold of a thing with my hands.
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: I talk a great deal, and when I have done speaking,
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: I remain confounded and ashamed of what I have said.
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 1: The same day, I had a conversation with an old woman,
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: his neighbor. I asked her if she had ever been
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: unhappy for not understanding how her soul was made. She
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: did not even comprehend my question. She had not, for
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: the briefest moment in her life, had a thought about
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: these subjects with which the good Brahmin had so tormented himself.
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 2: She believed in the bottom of.
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: Her heart and the metamorphoses of Vishnu, and provided she
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: could get some of the sacred water of the Ganges
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: in which to make her ablutions, she thought herself the
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: happiest of women. Struck with the happiness of this poor creature,
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 1: I returned to my philosopher, whom I thus addressed, Are
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: you not ashamed to be thus miserable, when not fifty
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: yards from you there is an old automaton who thinks
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: of nothing and lives contented? You are right, he replied.
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 1: I have said to myself a thousand times that I
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 1: should be happy if I were but as ignorant as
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: my old neighbor. And yet it is a happiness which
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: I do not desire. This reply of the Brahmin made
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: a greater impression on me than anything that had passed.
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: Even if philosophy should end in total doubt and Montaigne's casasia,
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: it is man's greatest adventure and his noblest Let us
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 1: learn to be content with modest advances and knowledge, rather
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: than be forever weaving new systems out of our mendacious imagination.
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 2: We must not say.
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: Let us begin by inventing principles, whereby we may be
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 1: able to explain everything. Rather, we must say, let us
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: make an exact analysis of the matter, and then we
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: shall try to see with much diffidence if it fits
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: in with any principle. The Chancellor Bacon had shown the
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: road which science might follow. But then Descartes appeared and
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: did just the contrary of what he should have done.
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: Instead of studying nature, he wished to divine her. This
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: best of mathematicians made only romances. In philosophy, it is
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: given us to calculate, to weiy, to measure, to observe.
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 1: This is natural philosophy. Almost all the rest is chimera
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: and end of chapter seven Chapter eight of Voltaire and
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: the French Enlightenment by Will Durant. This librovox recording is
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 1: in the public domain recording by Pamelinagami a case l'enfarmes.
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: Under ordinary circumstances, it is probable that Voltaire would never
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: have passed out of the philosophic calm of this courteous
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: skepticism to the arduous controversies of his life later years.
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: The aristocratic circles in which he moved agreed so readily
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: with his point of view that there was no incentive
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: to polemics. Even the priests smiled with him over the
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: difficulties of the faith, and cardinals considered whether, after all
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 1: they might not yet make him into a good capuchin.
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 2: What were the events.
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: That turned him from the polite persiflage of agnosticism to
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: a bitter anti clericalism which admitted no compromise but waged
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: relentless war to crush the infamy of ecclesiasticism. Not far
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: from Fernay Lay Toulouse, the seventh city of France in
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: Voltaire's day, the Catholic clergy enjoyed absolute sovereignty there. The
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: city commemorated with frescoes the revocation of the Edict of Nant,
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 1: an edict which had given freedom of worship to Protestants,
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: and celebrated as a great feast the day of the
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: massacre of Saint Bartholomew. No Protestant in Toulouse could be
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: a lawyer or a physician, or an apothecary, or a grocer,
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: or a bookseller or a printer. Nor could a Catholic
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: keep a Protestant servant or clerk. In seventeen forty eight,
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: a woman had been fined three thousand francs, an impressive
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: sum in those days, for using a Protestant midwife. Now
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 1: it happened that Jean Calas, a Protestant of Toulouse, had
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: a daughter who became a Catholic and a son who
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: hanged himself, presumably because of disappointment and business. There was
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: a law in to Loose that every suicide should be
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: placed naked on a hurdle with face down, drawn thus
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: through the streets, and then hanged on a gibbet. The father,
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: to avert this, asked his relatives and his friends to
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 1: testify to a natural death. In consequence, rumor began to
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: talk of murder and to hint that the father had
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: killed the son to prevent his imminent conversion to Catholicism.
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: Callous was arrested, put to the torture, and died soon
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 1: after seventeen sixty one. His family, ruined and hunted, fled
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: to Fernay and sought the aid of Voltaire. He took
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: them into his home, comforted them and marveled at the
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: story of medieval persecution, which they told about the same time.
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: Seventeen sixty two came the death of Elizabeth Servant again
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: rumor charged that she had been pushed into a well
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 1: just as she was about to announce her conversion to Catholicism.
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: That a timid minority of Protestants would hardly dare to
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 1: behave in this way was a rational consideration, and therefore
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: out of.
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 2: The purview of rumor.
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: In seventeen sixty five, a young man by the name
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: of La Barre, age sixteen, was arrested on the charge
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: of having mutilated crucifixes. Subjected to torture, he confessed his guilt.
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: His head was cut off and his body was flung
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: into the flames, while the crowd applauded. A copy of
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 1: Voltaire's Philosophic Dictionary, which had been found on the lad
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: was burned with him. For almost the first time in
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 1: his life, Voltaire became a thoroughly serious man. When Dalombert
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: disgusted equally with state Church and people wrote that hereafter
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 1: he would merely mock at everything, Voltaire answered, this is
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: not a time for jesting. Wit does not harmonize with massacres.
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: Is this the country of philosophy and pleasure? It is
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: rather the country of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew. It
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: was with Voltaire. Now, as with Zola and Anatole, France,
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: in the case of this Tyrannus, injustice lifted him up.
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: He ceased to be merely a man of letters, became
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 1: a man of action too. He laid aside philosophy for war,
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: or rather turned his philosophy into relentless dynamite. During this time,
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: not a smile escaped me without my reproaching myself for it.
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 1: As for a crime.
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 2: It was now that he.
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 1: Adopted his famous motto a casee l'anfarmes, and stirred the
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: soul of France against the abuses of the church. He
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 1: began to pour forth such intellectual fire and brimstone as
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: melted miters and scepters, broke the power of the priesthood
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 1: in France and helped to overthrow a throne. He sent
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: out a call to his friends and followers, summoning them
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: to battle. Come, brave de d'aux intrepid d'Alembert, ally yourselves,
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: overwhelm the fanatics and the knaves. Destroy the insipid declamations,
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 1: the miserable sophistries, the lying history, the absurdities without number.
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 1: Do not let those who have sense be subjected to
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: those who have none, and the generation which is being
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: born will owe to us its reason and its liberty.
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: Just at this crisis, an effort was made to buy
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: him off through Madame de Pompadour. He received an offer
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: of a cardinal's hat as the reward of reconciliation with
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: the Church, as if the rule of a few tongue
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: tied bishops could interest a man who was the undisputed
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 1: sovereign of the world of intellect. Voltaire refused, and, like
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: another Cato, began to end all his letters with crushed
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 1: the infamy, he sent out his treatise on Toleration. He
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: said he would have borne with the absurdities of dogma
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: had the clergy lived up to their sermons, and had
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: they tolerated differences. But subtleties of which not a trace
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: can be found in the Gospels, are the source of
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 1: the bloody quarrels of Christian history. The man who says
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 1: to me, believe as I do, or God will damn you,
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: will presently say believe as I do, or I shall
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: assassinate you. By what right could a being created free
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 1: force another to think like himself? A fanaticism composed of
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: superstition and ignorance has been the sickness of all the centuries.
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: No such perpetual peace as the Abbe de Saint Pierre
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: had pleaded for, could ever be realized unless men learn
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: to tolerate one another's philosophic, political, and religious differences. The
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 1: very first step towards social health was the destruction of
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: the ecclesiastical power in which intom lance had its route.
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: The Treatise on Toleration was followed up with a niagara
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: of pamphlets, histories, dialogues, letters, catechisms, diatribes, squibs, sermons, verses, tales, fables,
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: commentaries and essays, under Voltaire's own name and under a
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: hundred pseudonyms. The most astonishing pell mell of propaganda ever
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 1: put out by one man. Never was philosophy phrased so
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 1: clearly and with such life. Voltaire writes so well that
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: one does not realize that he is writing philosophy. He
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 1: said of himself over modestly, I express myself clearly enough.
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 1: I am like the little brooks, which are transparent because
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: they are not deep. And so he was read. Soon everybody,
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: even the clergy, had his pamphlets, of some of them
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: three hundred thousand copies were sold, though read were far
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: fewer than than now. Nothing like it had ever been
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: seen in the history of literature. Big books, he said,
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 1: are out of fashion. And so he sent forth his
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: little soldiers week after week, month after month, resolute and tireless,
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: surprising the world with the fertility of his thought and
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: the magnificent energy of his seventy years. As Elvesius put it,
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 1: Voltaire had crossed the Rubicon and stood before Rome. He
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: began with a higher criticism of the authenticity and reliability
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 1: of the Bible. He takes much of his material from Spinoza,
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 1: more of it from the English Deists, most of it
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: from the critical Dictionary of Belah sixteen forty seven to
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 1: seventeen o six. But how brilliant and fiery their material
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 1: becomes in his hands. One pamphlet is called the Questions
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: of Sapata, a candidate for the priesthood. Sapata asks, innocently,
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 1: how shall we proceed to show that the Jews whom
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 1: we burned by the hundred were, for four thousand years
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: the chosen people of God. Footnote Voltaire himself was something
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 1: of an antisemite, chiefly because of his not quite admirable
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: dealings with the financiers and footnote. And he goes on
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: with questions which lay bare the inconsistencies of narrative and
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: chronology in the Old Testament. When two counsels anathematize each other,
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 1: as has often happened, which of them is infallible? At last, Sapata,
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: receiving no answer, took to preaching God in all simplicity.
• 1:42:41
  Speaker 1: He announced to men the common Father, the rewarder, punisher,
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: and pardoner. He extricated the truth from the lies, and
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 1: separated religion from fanaticism. He taught and practiced virtue. He
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: was gentle, kindly, and modest. And he was burned at
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 1: Valladolid in the Year of Grace sixteen thirty one. Under
• 1:43:04
  Speaker 1: the article on prophecy in the Philosophic Dictionary, he quotes
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: Robin Isaac's Bulwark of Faith against the application of Hebrew
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: prophecies to Jesus, and then goes on ironically. Thus these
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: blind interpreters of their own religion and their own language
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: combated with the Church and obstinately maintained that this prophecy
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 1: cannot in any manner regard Jesus Christ. Those were dangerous
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: days in which one was compelled to say what one
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 1: meant without saying it, and the shortest line to one's
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: purpose was anything but straight. Voltaire likes to trace Christian
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: dogmas and rites to Greece, Egypt, and India, and thinks
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 1: that these adaptations were not the least cause of the
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 1: success of Christianity in the ancient world. Under the article
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 1: on religion, he asks slyly, after our own holy religion,
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 1: which doubtless is the only good one, what religion would
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: be the least objectionable, and he proceeds to describe a
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: faith and worship directly opposed to the Catholicism of his day.
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 1: Christianity must be divine, he says in one of his
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: most unmeasured sallies, since it has lasted seventeen hundred years,
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: despite the fact that it is so full of villainy
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: and nonsense, he shows how almost all ancient peoples had
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: similar myths, and hastily concludes that the myths were thereby
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: proved to have been the inventions of priests. The first
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 1: divine was the first rogue who met the first fool. However,
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: it is not religion itself which he attributes to the priests,
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: but theology. It is slight differences in theology that have
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: caused so many bitter disputes and religious wars. It is
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: not the ordinary people who have raised these ridiculous and
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 1: fatal quarrels, the sources of so many horrors. Men fed
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 1: by your labors, in a comfortable idleness, enriched by your
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: sweat and your misery, struggled for partisans and slaves. They
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 1: inspired you with the destructive fanaticism that they might be
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 1: your masters. They made you superstitious, not that you might
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: fear God, but that you might fear them.
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 2: Let it not be.
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 1: Supposed from all this that Voltaire was quite without religion.
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: He decisively rejects atheism, so much so that some of
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: the encyclopedists turned against him, saying Voltaire is a bigot.
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 1: He believes in God. In The Ignorant Philosopher, he reasons
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: towards Spinosa's pantheism, but then recoils from it as almost atheism.
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 1: He writes to Diderot, I confess that I am not
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 1: at all of the opinion of Saunderson, who denies a
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 1: God because he was born soightless. I am perhaps mistaken,
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: but in his place I should recognize a great intelligence
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: who had given me so many substitutes for sight and
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: perceiving on reflection the wonderful relations between all things. I
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: should have suspected a workman infinitely able, if it is
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 1: very presumptuous to divine what he is and why he
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 1: has made everything that exists, So it seems to me
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 1: very presumptuous to deny that he exists. I am exceedingly
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: anxious to meet.
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 2: And talk with you.
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: Whether you think yourself one of his works or a
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: particle drawn of necessity from eternal and necessary matter. Whatever
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: you are, you are a worthy part of that great
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 1: whole which I do not understand. To old Bach, he
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: points out that the very title of his book, The
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 1: System of Nature, indicates a divine organizing intelligence. On the
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 1: other hand, he stoutly denies miracles and the supernatural efficacy
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 1: of prayer. I was at the gate of the convent
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 1: when Sister Fessu said to Sister Comfitte, Providence takes a
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 1: visible care of me. You know how I love my sparrow.
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: He would have been dead if I had not said
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: nine ave marias to obtain his cure. A metaphysician said
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: to her sister. There is nothing so good as ave Marius,
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 1: especially when a girl pronounces them in Latin in the
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: suburbs of Paris. But I cannot believe that God has
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 1: occupied himself so much with your sparrow, pretty as it is.
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 1: I pray you to believe that He has other things
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: to attend to, Sister. Fesieux, Sir, this discourse savors of heresy.
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: My confessor will infer that you do not believe in
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: providence metaphysician. I believe in a general providence, dear sister,
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 1: which is laid down from all eternity, the law which
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 1: governs all things, like life from the sun. But I
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 1: believe not that a particular providence changes the economy of
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 1: the world for your sparrow. His sacred majesty Chance decides everything.
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: True prayer lies not in asking for a violation of
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: natural law, but in the acceptance of natural law as
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 1: the unchangeable will of God. Similarly, he denies free will.
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: As to the soul, he is an agnostic. Four thousand
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 1: volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is.
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: Being an old man, he would like to believe in immortality,
• 1:48:39
  Speaker 1: but he finds it difficult.
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 2: Nobody thinks of giving.
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 1: An immortal soul to the flea, Why then to an
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 1: elephant or a monkey or my valet. A child dies
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: in its mother's womb, just at the moment when it
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 1: has received a soul? Will it rise again? Fetus or
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: boy or man? To rise again? To be the same
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 1: person that you were, you must have your memory perfectly
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: fresh and present, for it is memory that makes your identity.
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 1: If your memory be lost, how will you be the
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 1: same man? Why do mankind flatter themselves that they alone
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: are gifted with a spiritual and immortal principle, Perhaps from
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 1: their inordinate vanity. I am persuaded that if a peacock
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 1: could speak, he would boast of his soul and would
• 1:49:29
  Speaker 1: affirm that it inhabited his magnificent tail. And in this
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 1: earlier mood, he rejects also the view that belief in
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 1: immortality is necessary for morality. The ancient Hebrews were without
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 1: it just when they were the chosen people, and Spinoza
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: was a paragon of morality. In later days, he changed
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 1: his mind. He came to feel that belief in God
• 1:49:55
  Speaker 1: has little moral value unless accompanied by belief in an
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 1: i immortality of punishment and reward. Perhaps for the common people,
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 1: la Canai of rewarding and avenging God is necessary. Belah
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 1: had asked if a society of atheists could subsist. Voltaire answers, yes,
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: if they were also philosophers. But men are seldom philosophers.
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: If there is a hamlet to be good, it must
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 1: have a religion. I want my lawyer, my tailor, and
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 1: my wife to believe in God, says a in a b. C.
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: So I imagine I shall be less robbed and less deceived.
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: If God did not exist, it would be necessary to
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: invent him. I begin to put more store on happiness
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 1: and life than on truth, A remarkable anticipation in the
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: midst of the Enlightenment of the very doctrine with which
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 1: a manual Kant was later to combat the Enlightenment. He
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 1: defends himself gently against his friends, the atheists. He addresses
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 1: Olbach in the article on God in the Dictionary. You
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 1: yourself say that belief in God has kept some men
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 1: from crime. This alone suffices me. When this belief prevents
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: even ten assassinations ten columnies, I hold that all the
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: world should embrace it. Religion you say has produced countless misfortunes,
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: say rather, the superstition which reigns on.
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 2: Our unhappy globe.
• 1:51:32
  Speaker 1: This is the cruelest enemy of the pure worship due
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 1: to the supreme being. Let us detest this monster, which
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 1: has always torn the bosom of its mother. Those who
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: combat it are the benefactors of the human race. It
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 1: is a serpent which chokes religion in its embrace. We
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 1: must crush its head without wounding the mother whom it devours.
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: This distinction between superstition and religion is fundamental with him.
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 1: He accepts gladly the theology of the Sermon on the
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 1: Mount and acclaims Jesus in tributes which could hardly be
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: matched even with the pages of saintly ecstasy. He pictures
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: Christ among the sages, weeping over the crimes that have
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: been committed in his name. His profession of faith in
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 1: God seems to have been sincere. We see a reference
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 1: to himself when he makes an Athenian say of Socrates. Yes,
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 1: that is the sage who has no religion. That is
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 1: the atheist who says there is only one God. At last,
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 1: he built his own church with the dedication Deo erects
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 1: at Woltaire, the only church in Europe. He said that
• 1:52:42
  Speaker 1: was erected to God. He addresses to God a magnificent prayer,
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 1: and in the article Theist he expounds his faith finally
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 1: and clearly. The theist is a man firmly persuaded of
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: the existence of a supreme being as good as he
• 1:52:59
  Speaker 1: is powerful, who has formed all things, who punishes without
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 1: cruelty all crimes, and recompenses with goodness all virtuous actions.
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 1: Reunited in this principle with the rest of the universe.
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 2: He does not.
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 1: Join any of the sects, which all contradict one another.
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: His religion is the most ancient and the most widespread,
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: for the simple worship of a God preceded all the
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 1: systems of the world. He speaks a language which all
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: peoples understand, while they do not understand one another. He
• 1:53:33
  Speaker 1: has brothers from Pikin to Cayenne, and he counts all sages.
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 2: For his fellows.
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 1: He believes that religion consists neither in the opinions of
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: an unintelligible metaphysic, nor in vain shows, but in worship
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 1: and in justice. To do good is his worship. To
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 1: submit to God is his creed. The Mohammedan cries out
• 1:53:58
  Speaker 1: to him, Beware if you fail to make the pilgrimage
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: to Mecca.
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 2: The priest says.
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 1: To him, curses on you if you do not make
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 1: the trip to Notre Dame de Lorette. He laughs at
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 1: Lorette and at Mecca, but he succors the indigent and
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 1: defends the oppressed. End of chapter eight Chapter nine of
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 1: Voltaire and the French Enlightenment by Will Durant. This LibriVox
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 1: recording is in the public domain recording by Pamel Andagami
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 1: Voltaire and Rousseau. Voltaire was so engrossed in the struggle
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 1: against ecclesiastical tyranny that during the later decades of his
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: life he was compelled almost to withdraw from the war
• 1:54:48
  Speaker 1: on political corruption and oppression.
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 2: Politics is not in my line.
• 1:54:53
  Speaker 1: I have always confined myself to doing my little best
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 1: to make men less foolish and more honorable. He knew
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: how complex a matter political philosophy can become, and he
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 1: shed his certainties as he grew. I am tired of
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 1: all these people who govern states from the recesses of
• 1:55:11
  Speaker 1: their garrets, These legislators who rule the world at two
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 1: cents a sheet, unable to govern their wives or their households.
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 1: They take great pleasure in regulating the universe. It is
• 1:55:24
  Speaker 1: impossible to settle these matters with simple and general formulae,
• 1:55:29
  Speaker 1: or by dividing all people into fools and knaves on
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: the one hand, and on the other ourselves. Truth has
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 1: not the name of a party, And he writes to Vobanagha,
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: it is the duty of a man like you to
• 1:55:43
  Speaker 1: have preferences, but not exclusions. Being rich, he inclines toward
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 1: conservatism for no worse reason than that which impels the
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 1: hungry man to call for a change. His panacea is
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 1: the spread of property.
• 1:55:59
  Speaker 2: Ownership.
• 1:56:00
  Speaker 1: Whip gives personality and an uplifting pride. The spirit of
• 1:56:04
  Speaker 1: property doubles a man's strength. It is certain that the
• 1:56:08
  Speaker 1: possessor of an estate will cultivate his own inheritance better
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: than that of another. He refuses to excite himself about
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: forms of government. Theoretically he prefers a republic, but he
• 1:56:22
  Speaker 1: knows its flaws. It permits factions, which, if they do
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 1: not bring on civil war, at least destroy national unity.
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 1: It is suited only to small states, protected by geographical situation,
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 1: and as yet unspoiled and untorn with wealth. In general,
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 1: men are rarely worthy to govern themselves. Republics are transient
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 1: at best. They are the first form of society, arising
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 1: from the union of families. The American Indians lived in
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 1: tribal republics, and Africa is full of such democracricies. But
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 1: differentiation of economic status puts an end to these egalitarian governments,
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 1: and differentiation is the inevitable accompaniment of development.
• 1:57:12
  Speaker 2: Which is better?
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 1: He asks a monarchy or a republic? And he replies,
• 1:57:18
  Speaker 1: for four thousand years this question has been tossed about.
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 1: Ask the rich foreign answer, they all want aristocracy. Ask
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 1: the people, they want democracy. Only the monarchs want monarchy.
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 1: How then has it come about that almost the entire
• 1:57:37
  Speaker 1: earth is governed by monarchs? Ask the rats who propose
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: to hang a bell about the neck of the cat.
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 1: But when a correspondent argues that monarchy is the best
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 1: form of government, he answers, provided Marcus Aurelius as monarch?
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 1: For otherwise, what difference does it make to a poor
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 1: man whether he is devoured by a lion or by.
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 2: A hundred rats?
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 1: Likewise, he is almost indifferent to nationalities, Like a traveled man.
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: He has hardly any patriotism in the usual sense of
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 1: that word, patriotism commonly means. He says that one hates
• 1:58:14
  Speaker 1: every country but one's own. If a man wishes his
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 1: country to prosper, but never at the expense of other countries,
• 1:58:22
  Speaker 1: he is at the same time an intelligent patriot and
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 1: a citizen of the universe, like a good European. He
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 1: praises England's literature and pruscious king, while France is at
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 1: war with both England and Prussia. So long as nations
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 1: make a practice of war, he says, there is not
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 1: much to choose among them, for he hates war above
• 1:58:45
  Speaker 1: all else. War is the greatest of all crimes. And
• 1:58:49
  Speaker 1: yet there is no aggressor who does not color his
• 1:58:52
  Speaker 1: crime with the pretext of justice. It is forbidden to kill.
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 1: Therefore all murderers are punished, unless they kill in large
• 1:59:01
  Speaker 1: numbers and to the sound of trumpets. He has a
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 1: terrible general reflection on man at the end of the
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 1: article on man in the Dictionary. Twenty years are required
• 1:59:12
  Speaker 1: to bring a man from the state of a plant,
• 1:59:15
  Speaker 1: in which he exists in the womb of his mother,
• 1:59:18
  Speaker 1: and from the state of an animal, which is his
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 1: condition in infancy, to a state in which the maturity
• 1:59:25
  Speaker 1: of reason begins to make itself felt. Thirty centuries were
• 1:59:29
  Speaker 1: necessary in which to discover even a little of his structure.
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 1: An eternity would be required to know anything of his soul.
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 1: But one moment suffices in which to kill him. Does
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 1: he therefore think of revolution as a remedy. No, For
• 1:59:47
  Speaker 1: first of all, he distrusts the people. When the people
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 1: undertake to reason, all is lost. The great majority is
• 1:59:56
  Speaker 1: always too busy to perceive the truth until change has
• 1:59:59
  Speaker 1: made the te truth and error and its intellectual history,
• 2:00:03
  Speaker 1: is merely the replacement of one myth by another. When
• 2:00:07
  Speaker 1: an old error is established, politics uses it as a
• 2:00:11
  Speaker 1: morsel which the people have put into their mouths, until
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 1: another superstition comes along to destroy this one, and politics
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 1: profits from the second error, as it did from the first,
• 2:00:23
  Speaker 1: and then again. Inequality is written into the very structure
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 1: of society and can hardly be eradicated. While men are
• 2:00:29
  Speaker 1: men and life is a struggle, those who say that
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 1: all men are equal speak the greatest truth if they
• 2:00:36
  Speaker 1: mean that all men have an equal right to liberty,
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 1: to the possession of their goods, and to the protection
• 2:00:42
  Speaker 1: of the laws. But equality is at once the most
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 1: natural and the most chimerical thing in the world. Natural
• 2:00:50
  Speaker 1: when it is limited to rights, unnatural when it attempts
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 1: to level goods and powers. Not all citizens can be
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 1: equally strong, but they can all be equally free. It
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 1: is this which the English have won. To be free
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 1: is to be subject to nothing but the laws. This
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 1: was the note of the liberals of Tugo and Condorcet
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 1: and Mirabo, and the other followers of Voltaire, who hoped
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 1: to make a peaceful revolution.
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 2: It could not.
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 1: Quite satisfy the oppressed, who called not so much for
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 1: liberty as for equality, a quality even at the cost
• 2:01:29
  Speaker 1: of liberty. Rousseau, voice of the common man, sensitive to
• 2:01:35
  Speaker 1: the class distinctions which met him at every turn, demanded
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 1: a leveling. And when the revolution fell into the hands
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: of his followers Marat and Robespierre, equality had its turn,
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 1: and liberty was guillotined. Voltaire was skeptical of utopias to
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 1: be fashioned by human legislators who would create a brand
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 1: new world out of their imaginations. Society is a growth
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: in time, not a syllogism in logic, and when the
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 1: past is put out through the door, it comes in
• 2:02:08
  Speaker 1: at the window. The problem is to show precisely by
• 2:02:12
  Speaker 1: what changes we can diminish misery and injustice in the
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 1: world in which.
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 2: We actually live.
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 1: In the historical eulogy of Reason, Truth, the daughter of
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 1: Reason voices her joy at the accession of Louis the
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 1: sixteenth and her expectation of great reforms, to which Reason replies,
• 2:02:31
  Speaker 1: my daughter, you know well that I too desire these
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 1: things and more. But all this requires time and thought.
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 1: I am always happy when amid many disappointments, I obtain
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 1: some of the amelioration I long for. Yet he too
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 1: rejoiced when Tuago came to power and wrote, we are
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 1: in the Golden age up to our necks.
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 2: Now would come the.
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 1: Reforms he had advocated, juries abolition of the tithe and
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 1: exemption of the poor from all taxes, et cetera. And
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 1: had he not written that famous letter, everything that I
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 1: see appears to be throwing broadcast the seed of a
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 1: revolution which must some day inevitably come, but which I
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: shall not have the pleasure of witnessing. The French always
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 1: come late to things, but they do come at last.
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 1: Light extends so from neighbor to neighbor that there will
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 1: be a splendid outburst on the first occasion, and then
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 1: there will be a rare commotion. The young are fortunate,
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: they will see fine things. Yet he did not quite
• 2:03:37
  Speaker 1: realize what was happening about him, and he never for
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 1: a moment supposed that in this splendid outburst all France
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 1: would accept enthusiastically the philosophy of this queer, Jean Jacques Rousseau,
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 1: who from Geneva and Paris was thrilling the world with
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 1: sentimental romances and revolutionary pamphlets. The complex soul of France
• 2:04:01
  Speaker 1: seemed to have divided itself into these two men, so
• 2:04:05
  Speaker 1: different and yet so French. Nietzsche speaks of le gaya, scienza,
• 2:04:10
  Speaker 1: the light feet, wit, fire, grace, strong logic, arrogant intellectuality,
• 2:04:16
  Speaker 1: the dance of the stars. Surely he was thinking of Voltaire.
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 1: Now beside Voltaire put Rousseau, all heat and fantasy, a
• 2:04:26
  Speaker 1: man with noble and j June visions the idol of
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: la bourgeoise Jontifames, announcing like Pascal that the heart has
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: its reasons which the head can never understand. In these
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 1: two men we see again the old clash between intellect
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 1: and instinct. Voltaire believed in reason always we can by
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: speech and pen make men more enlightened and better. Rousseau
• 2:04:52
  Speaker 1: had little faith and reason. He desired action. The risks
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 1: of revolution did not frighten him. He relied on the
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 1: sentiment of brotherhood to reunite the social elements scattered by
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 1: turmoil and the uprooting of ancient habits. Let laws be removed,
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 1: and men would pass into a reign of equality and justice.
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 1: When he sent to Voltaire his discourse on the Origin
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 1: of Inequality, with its arguments against civilization, letters and science,
• 2:05:22
  Speaker 1: and for a return to the natural condition as seen
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 1: in Savages and Animals, Voltaire replied, I have received, sir,
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 1: your new book against the human species, and I thank
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 1: you for it. No one has ever been so witty
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 1: as you are in trying to turn us into brutes.
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 1: To read your book makes one long to go on
• 2:05:41
  Speaker 1: all fours. As however, it is now some sixty years
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 1: since I gave up the practice, I feel that it
• 2:05:48
  Speaker 1: is unfortunately impossible for me to resume it. He was
• 2:05:52
  Speaker 1: chagrined to see Rousseau's passion for savagery continued into the
• 2:05:56
  Speaker 1: Social Contract Ah Monsieur. He writes to Monsieur Bourde. You
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: see now that Jean Jacques resembles a philosopher as a
• 2:06:05
  Speaker 1: monkey resembles a man. He is the dog of Diogenes
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 1: gone mad. Yet he attacked the Swiss authorities for burning
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 1: the book, holding to his famous principle, I do not
• 2:06:17
  Speaker 1: agree with a word that you say, but I will
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 1: defend to the death your right to say it. And
• 2:06:23
  Speaker 1: when Rousseau was fleeing from a hundred enemies, Voltaire sent
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 1: him a cordial invitation to come and stay with him
• 2:06:30
  Speaker 1: at Les de Lies. What a spectacle that would have been.
• 2:06:34
  Speaker 1: Voltaire was convinced that all this denunciation of civilization was
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 1: boyish nonsense, that man was incomparably better off under civilization
• 2:06:44
  Speaker 1: than under savagery. He informs Rousseau that man is by
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 1: nature a beast of prey, and that civilized society means
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: a chaining of this beast, a mitigation of his brutality,
• 2:06:58
  Speaker 1: and the possibility of the developer through social order of
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 1: the intellect and its joys. He agrees that things are bad.
• 2:07:07
  Speaker 1: A government in which it is permitted a certain class
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 1: of men to say, let those pay taxes who work,
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 1: we should not pay because we do not work is
• 2:07:17
  Speaker 1: no better than a government of hottentots. Paris has its
• 2:07:22
  Speaker 1: redeeming features, even amidst its corruption. In the world as
• 2:07:27
  Speaker 1: it goes, Voltaire tells how an angel sent Babuk to
• 2:07:30
  Speaker 1: report on whether the city of Persepolis should be destroyed.
• 2:07:35
  Speaker 1: Babuk goes and is horrified with the vices he discovers,
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 1: But after a time he began to grow fond of
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 1: a city, the inhabitants of which were polite, affable, and beneficent.
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 1: Though they were fickle, slanderous in vain. He was much
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 1: afraid that Persepolis would be condemned. He was even afraid
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 1: to give in his account. This he did. However, in
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 1: the following manner. He caused a little statue composed of
• 2:08:02
  Speaker 1: different metals of earth and of stones, the most precious
• 2:08:07
  Speaker 1: and the most vile, to be cast by one of
• 2:08:09
  Speaker 1: the best founders of the city, and carried it to
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 1: the angel. Wilt thou break said, he this pretty statue,
• 2:08:17
  Speaker 1: because it is not wholly composed of gold and diamonds.
• 2:08:21
  Speaker 1: The angel resolved to think no more of destroying Persepolis,
• 2:08:25
  Speaker 1: but to leave the world as it goes. After all,
• 2:08:29
  Speaker 1: when one tries to change institutions, without having changed the
• 2:08:33
  Speaker 1: nature of men. That unchanged nature will soon resurrect those institutions.
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 1: Here was the old vicious cycle men form institutions and
• 2:08:45
  Speaker 1: institutions for men. Where could change break into this ring?
• 2:08:51
  Speaker 1: Boltaire in the liberals thought that intellect could break the
• 2:08:55
  Speaker 1: ring by educating and changing men slowly and peacefully. Rousseau
• 2:09:01
  Speaker 1: and the radicals felt that the ring could be broken
• 2:09:03
  Speaker 1: only by instinctive and passionate action that would break down
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 1: the old institutions and build at the dictates of the
• 2:09:11
  Speaker 1: heart new ones under which liberty, equality, and fraternity would reign.
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 1: Perhaps the truth lay above the divided camps, that instinct
• 2:09:21
  Speaker 1: must destroy the old, but that only intellect can build
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 1: the new. Certainly the seeds of reaction lay fertile in
• 2:09:30
  Speaker 1: the radicalism of Rousseau, for instinct and sentiment are ultimately
• 2:09:35
  Speaker 1: loyal to the ancient past, which has begotten them, and
• 2:09:39
  Speaker 1: to which they are stereotyped adaptations. After the Catharsis of revolution,
• 2:09:45
  Speaker 1: the needs of the heart would recall supernatural religion and
• 2:09:49
  Speaker 1: the good old days of routine in peace. After Rousseau
• 2:09:53
  Speaker 1: would come Chateau Brion and Distall, and Demetre and Kante
• 2:09:59
  Speaker 1: end of chapter nine Chapter ten of Voltaire and the
• 2:10:09
  Speaker 1: French Enlightenment by wil Durant. This LibriVox recording is in
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 1: the public domain recording by Pamela and Nagami de Numo. Meanwhile,
• 2:10:20
  Speaker 1: the old laughing philosopher was cultivating his garden at Fernay.
• 2:10:25
  Speaker 1: This is the best thing we can do on earth.
• 2:10:29
  Speaker 1: He had asked for a long life. My fear is
• 2:10:32
  Speaker 1: that I shall die before I have rendered service. But
• 2:10:35
  Speaker 1: surely now he had done his share. The records of
• 2:10:38
  Speaker 1: his generosity are endless. Every One far or near claimed
• 2:10:42
  Speaker 1: his good offices. People consulted him, relating the wrongs of
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 1: which they were the victims, and solicited the help of
• 2:10:49
  Speaker 1: his pen and his credit. Poor people guilty of some
• 2:10:53
  Speaker 1: misdemeanor were his especial care. He would secure a pardon
• 2:10:57
  Speaker 1: for them, and then set them up in side honest occupation,
• 2:11:01
  Speaker 1: meanwhile watching and counseling them. When a young couple who
• 2:11:06
  Speaker 1: had robbed him went down on their knees to beg
• 2:11:08
  Speaker 1: his forgiveness, he knelt to raise them, telling them that
• 2:11:12
  Speaker 1: his pardon was freely theirs, and that they should kneel
• 2:11:15
  Speaker 1: only for gods. One of his characteristic undertakings was to
• 2:11:20
  Speaker 1: bring up, educate, and provide a dowry for the destitute
• 2:11:24
  Speaker 1: niece of Corney. The little good I have done, he said,
• 2:11:27
  Speaker 1: is my best work. When I am attacked, I fight
• 2:11:31
  Speaker 1: like a devil. I yield to no one, but at
• 2:11:35
  Speaker 1: bottom I am a good devil, and I end by laughing.
• 2:11:39
  Speaker 1: In seventeen seventy, his friends arranged a subscription to have
• 2:11:43
  Speaker 1: a bust made of him. The rich had to be
• 2:11:46
  Speaker 1: forbidden to give more than a mite for thousands asked
• 2:11:49
  Speaker 1: the honor of contributing. Frederick inquired how much he should give.
• 2:11:54
  Speaker 1: He was told a crown, peace, sire, and your name
• 2:11:59
  Speaker 1: Voltaire can congratulated him on adding to his cultivation of
• 2:12:02
  Speaker 1: the other sciences, this encouragement of anatomy. By subscribing for
• 2:12:07
  Speaker 1: the statue of a skeleton. He demurred to the whole undertaking,
• 2:12:12
  Speaker 1: on the ground that he had no face left to
• 2:12:14
  Speaker 1: be modeled. You would hardly guess where.
• 2:12:17
  Speaker 2: It ought to be.
• 2:12:19
  Speaker 1: My eyes have sunk in three inches, my cheeks are
• 2:12:22
  Speaker 1: like old parchment, and the few teeth I had are gone,
• 2:12:26
  Speaker 1: to which Dalembert replied, Genius has always a countenance, which
• 2:12:32
  Speaker 1: Genius its brother will easily find. When his pet Belle
• 2:12:37
  Speaker 1: Ebn kissed him, he said it was life kissing death.
• 2:12:41
  Speaker 1: He was now eighty three, and a longing came over
• 2:12:44
  Speaker 1: him to see Paris.
• 2:12:45
  Speaker 2: Before he died.
• 2:12:47
  Speaker 1: The doctors advised him not to undertake so arduous a trip.
• 2:12:51
  Speaker 1: But if I want to commit a folly, he answered,
• 2:12:53
  Speaker 1: nothing will prevent me. He had lived so long and
• 2:12:57
  Speaker 1: worked so hard that perhaps he felt he had a
• 2:13:00
  Speaker 1: right to die in his own way. And then that
• 2:13:02
  Speaker 1: electric Paris, from which he had been so long exiled.
• 2:13:07
  Speaker 1: And so he went weary mile after weary mile across France.
• 2:13:12
  Speaker 1: And when his coach entered the capital, his bones hardly
• 2:13:16
  Speaker 1: held together. He went at once to the friend of
• 2:13:19
  Speaker 1: his youth, dar Gentale, I have left off dying to
• 2:13:22
  Speaker 1: come and see you, he said. The next day his
• 2:13:25
  Speaker 1: room was stormed by three hundred visitors, who welcomed him
• 2:13:29
  Speaker 1: as a king. Louis the sixteenth fretted with jealousy. Benjamin
• 2:13:34
  Speaker 1: Franklin was among the callers and brought his son for
• 2:13:37
  Speaker 1: Voltaire's blessing. The old man put his thin hands upon
• 2:13:42
  Speaker 1: the boy's head and bade him dedicate himself to God
• 2:13:45
  Speaker 1: and liberty. He was so ill now that a priest
• 2:13:49
  Speaker 1: came to shrive him. From whom do you come, monsieur l'abbey,
• 2:13:53
  Speaker 1: asked Voltaire. From God himself was the answer, Well, well, sir,
• 2:13:57
  Speaker 1: said Voltaire, your credentials. The priest went away without his prey. Later,
• 2:14:04
  Speaker 1: Voltaire sent for another abbe, Gautier, to come and hear
• 2:14:08
  Speaker 1: his confession. Gautier came, but refused voltaire absolution until he
• 2:14:13
  Speaker 1: should sign a profession of full faith in Catholic doctrine.
• 2:14:18
  Speaker 1: Voltaire rebelled. Instead, he drew up a statement, which he
• 2:14:21
  Speaker 1: gave to his secretary Wagner. I die adoring God, loving
• 2:14:26
  Speaker 1: my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition, signed Voltaire,
• 2:14:33
  Speaker 1: February twenty eighth, seventeen seventy eight. Though sick and tottering,
• 2:14:39
  Speaker 1: he was driven to the Academy through tumultuous crowds that
• 2:14:42
  Speaker 1: clambered on his carriage and tore into souvenirs the precious
• 2:14:46
  Speaker 1: pelice which Catherine of Russia had given him. It was
• 2:14:50
  Speaker 1: one of the historic events of the century. No great captain,
• 2:14:54
  Speaker 1: returning from a prolonged campaign of difficulty and hazard, crowned
• 2:14:58
  Speaker 1: by the most glorious mi victory, ever, received a more
• 2:15:02
  Speaker 1: splendid and far resounding greeting. At the academy, he proposed
• 2:15:07
  Speaker 1: a revision of the French dictionary.
• 2:15:09
  Speaker 2: He spoke with.
• 2:15:10
  Speaker 1: Youthful fire, and offered to undertake all such part of
• 2:15:13
  Speaker 1: the work as would come under the letter A. At
• 2:15:17
  Speaker 1: the close of the sitting he said, gentlemen, I thank
• 2:15:20
  Speaker 1: you in the name of the alphabet, to which the
• 2:15:23
  Speaker 1: chairman Chastelu replied, and we thank you in the name
• 2:15:27
  Speaker 1: of letters. Meanwhile, his play Irene was being performed at
• 2:15:32
  Speaker 1: the theater, against the advice of the physicians. Again he
• 2:15:36
  Speaker 1: insisted on attending. The play was poor, but people marveled,
• 2:15:41
  Speaker 1: not so much that a man of eighty three should
• 2:15:44
  Speaker 1: write a poor play, but that he should write any
• 2:15:47
  Speaker 1: play at all, And they drowned the speech of the
• 2:15:49
  Speaker 1: players with repeated demonstrations in honor of the author. A
• 2:15:54
  Speaker 1: stranger entering supposed himself to be in a madhouse, and
• 2:15:58
  Speaker 1: rushed back, frightened, into the street. When the old Patriarch
• 2:16:02
  Speaker 1: of Letters went home that evening, he was almost reconciled
• 2:16:06
  Speaker 1: to death. He knew that he was exhausted, now that
• 2:16:09
  Speaker 1: he had used to the full, that wild and marvelous
• 2:16:13
  Speaker 1: energy which nature had given to him, perhaps more than
• 2:16:16
  Speaker 1: to any man before him. He struggled as he felt
• 2:16:19
  Speaker 1: life being torn from him, but death could defeat even Voltaire.
• 2:16:25
  Speaker 1: The end came on May thirtieth, seventeen seventy eight. He
• 2:16:30
  Speaker 1: was refused Christian burial in Paris, but his friends sat
• 2:16:34
  Speaker 1: him up grimly in a carriage and got him out
• 2:16:37
  Speaker 1: of the city by pretending that he was alive.
• 2:16:40
  Speaker 2: At Seliere, they.
• 2:16:41
  Speaker 1: Found a priest who understood that rules were not made
• 2:16:44
  Speaker 1: for geniuses, and the body was buried and holy ground.
• 2:16:48
  Speaker 1: In seventeen ninety one, the National Assembly of the Triumphant
• 2:16:52
  Speaker 1: Revolution forced Louis the sixteenth to recall Voltaire's remains to
• 2:16:57
  Speaker 1: the ponteon The ashes of the great Flame that had
• 2:17:02
  Speaker 1: been were escorted through Paris by a procession of one
• 2:17:06
  Speaker 1: hundred thousand men and women, while six hundred thousand flank
• 2:17:10
  Speaker 1: the streets. On the funeral car were the words he
• 2:17:14
  Speaker 1: gave the human mind a great impetus. He prepared us
• 2:17:18
  Speaker 1: for freedom. On his tombstone, only three words were necessary.
• 2:17:23
  Speaker 1: Here lies Voltaire. End of Chapter ten. Recording by Pamelinagami M. D.
• 2:17:30
  Speaker 1: In Encino, California, February twenty twenty one. End a Voltaire
• 2:17:35
  Speaker 1: and the French Revolution by Will Durant