Voltaire in Love by Nancy Mitford Read Free Book Online

generous affection of this man, who soothes the bitterness of my life, brings me to love you more and more. All the instances of friendship endear my friend Tiriot to me . . .’
    The ‘other London citizen’ of whom Voltaire speaks was Everard Fawkener, a merchant. While Voltaire was in England he met Pope, Gay, Swift, Congreve, Wilkes, Lord Hervey, Lord Oxford, the Duchess of Marlborough, Lord Peterborough (with whom he stayed for three months), and many other prominent and charming people, but far the best he loved Everard Fawkener. Fawkener was ten years older than he and came from the same class; his father was a mercer, as Voltaire’s grandfather had been, and his grandfather a druggist. Like Voltaire, but more mysteriously, as it is not recorded that he was particularly brilliant in any way, he cut a figure in society. He was knighted in 1735, became English Ambassador to the Porte, then secretary to the Duke of Cumberland. Later in life he married a natural daughter of General Charles Churchill and, although he died poor, their children made good marriages. His daughter, Mrs Bouverie, was both fast and fashionable, the bosom friend of Mrs Crewe.
    â€˜Hypochondriacs’, said Voltaire, ‘are very well received here.’ So were exiled French poets; the English were not at all averse from showing their old enemies across the Channel how a famous man of letters ought to be treated. King George II sent him 100 guineas and Queen Caroline a gold medal. England then was regarded by writers rather as France is now: the only country in the world where there was a real respect for literature, where it was encouraged, and where anything, however outspoken, could be printed without fear of the police.
    Voltaire noted the ‘difference between their liberty and ourslavery, their sensible toughness and our mad superstition, the encouragement that all the arts receive at London and the shameful oppression under which they languish at Paris’. He really loved and admired England, no doubt, but he also made the most of this love and admiration in order to tease his fellow countrymen. He laid it on very thick, writing to his French friends in English and referring to France as ‘your nation’. ‘I write and think as a free Englishman.’ He arrived knowing English like a dead language, able to read and write but not to speak it. An interview with Pope, who had no French, was so frustrating that Voltaire retired to Mr Fawkener’s house at Wandsworth for three months, and only reappeared in London society when he could speak fluently.
    You are so witty, profligate and thin
    At once we think you Milton, Death and Sin.
    So wrote Edward Young after a discussion in which Voltaire had held forth about Milton’s dialogue between Sin and Death. His English must have become very good as it is not easy to be witty in a foreign language.
    A meeting with Congreve is on record. Voltaire, rather gushingly, no doubt, said that he had long wished to meet one whom he put on a par with Molière and regarded as the greatest living playwright. Congreve: ‘I had rather you wished to meet me because I am an English gentleman.’ Voltaire: ‘But there are so many of them!’
    Voltaire could not live without working and as soon as he was settled in England he took up his Henriade once more. He re-wrote the part already published, eliminated all references to the great Duc de Sully, ancestor of the ex-adorable, and added to the poem. When it was ready he applied for, and received, permission to dedicate it to Queen Caroline. A limited edition was very soon subscribed by English bibliophiles, while the popular edition on sale in London had to be reprinted three times in the first three weeks. In France Voltaire’s agent for the new Henriade was Thieriot. Eighty copies of the limited edition there, all subscribed, were stolen while Thieriot was at Mass or in other words by the