Voltaire

L I F E O F V O L T A I R E .

C H A P T E R I.

ANCESTORS.

Feancois-Mabie A r o t j e t , who at the age of twenty-four assumed the name of Voltaire, was born at Paris on Sunday, November 21, 1694.

A t that time Louis X I V . had been for fifty-one years styled King of France, and had twenty-one years to live. William and Mary reigned in England. Prussia was a dukedom. Charles X I I . of Sweden was a good and studious boy of twelve under his father's tutelage, and Peter I. of Russia, twelve years Czar, had not begun to build the present capital of the Russian Empire. The great Newton, still in the prime of his years, had done the immortal part of his work, and was about to become Master of the Mint. Racine lived, the first name in the literature of the Continent, and Dryden, the head of English literature, was translating Virgil. Pope was six years of age.

Francois-Marie was the first of the Arouets to acquire dis- tinction, and he neither knew nor cared for his pedigree. I n one of the last weeks of his life, when a local genealogist wrote to him to say that two cities of old Poitou were con- tending for the honor of having nourished his ancestors, he replied by a jocular allusion to the seven cities that claimed to be the birthplace of Homer, and added, " I have no way of reconciling this dispute."1 I n his vast correspondence, all topics are more frequently touched upon than that of his own family and origin. I n old age he wrote once to a neighbor who meditated buying a piece of land in which he held a life interest, " Now, sir, I give you notice that I count upon living to the age of eighty-two at least, since my grandfather, who

1 Voltaire to Du Moustier de La Fond, April 7, 1778

10 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE.

was as dried up as I am, and wrote neither verse nor prose, lived to eighty-three." 2

This dried-up grandfather was Francois Arouet, of Paris, a retired draper, living in 1666 in his own house, Rue St. Denis, with his two children, Marie and Frangois. Country born and bred, he had come up to Paris in early life, probably with some capital, and, having established himself in business, had thriven, married, and gained a competence. I t was a time when a Paris tradesman could comfortably retire upon a capi- tal of a hundred thousand francs.

The family was ancient and respectable. The earliest an- cestor of whom anything is known was Helenus Arouet, who was living in 152-3 at a village in the valley of the Thouet, a tributary of the Loire, not far from Poitiers, and about two hundred miles southwest of Paris. He was a tanner by trade, married a tanner's daughter, and brought up one of his sons a tanner. He possessed and transmitted two small estates. Probably the family had been established in the region for generations: an ancestor may have witnessed the battle of Poitiers in 1356, whence the Black Prince bore away captive to England John, King of France. There is no part of France more purely and primitively French than that portion of the old province of Poitou. A grandson of this Helenus Arouet, who was also named Helenus, passed his days at the little town of St. Loup, in the same neighborhood, where he became the father of five children, and inherited one of his grand- father's small estates. Francois, the retired cloth merchant of Paris, was one of his sons. After serving the usual long apprenticeship to a weaver in a village of the same neighbor- hood, Francois Arouet passed some years in business at his native city of St. Loup, and then made a bold stroke to im- prove his circumstances in removing to Paris. This he did about the year 1621, when the Pilgrim Fathers of New Eng- land were starving through their first summer at Plymouth. When he died, in 1667, a dried-up grandfather of eighty-three, his son Francois was eighteen years of age, and his daughter Marie was twenty. She married Mathurin Marchand, a " pur- veyor to Monsieur, the brother of the king."

Besides these lineal ancestors of Voltaire, we have slight 1 2 Lettres Ine'Jites de Voltaire, 163. Paris. 1857.

ANCESTORS. 11

occasional notices of other connections and relations, all in- dicating the respectable bourgeois rank of the family. He speaks himself, in his " Charles X I I . " (Book V . ) , of deriving important information from " the letters of M. Bru, my re- lation, first dragoman (drogman, he spells i t ) at the Ottomnn Porte." Jean Arouet, a near relation of his father, was the apothecary of St. Loup for many years, and Samuel Arouet, an- other relation, was the notary of the same place. But there is no trace of a literary man in any record of the family vet discovered : for that Rene" Arouet, notary and poet of Poi- tou, who died in 1499, and who has been reckoned among the progenitors of Voltaire for a century past, proves to be Rene" Adouet.1

I t was then not alone the extremely dry grandfather of Vol- taire who wrote neither prose nor verse. No known Arouet has ever written except Franqois-Marie Arouet, the subject of this work. A thriving, painstaking race they seem to have been, with some spirit of enterprise among them ; trustworthy, vivacious, irascible, but not gifted, nor interested in the prod- ucts of the gifted. The occupations often chosen by them — tanner, weaver, draper, apothecary, purveyor, notary—are such as required exactness, fidelity, patience, and contentment with moderate gains.

St. Loup, in or near which for many generations the Arou- ets exercised such useful and homely vocations, is an ancient little city, the centre of the wine, leather, and wool trade of the vicinity, containing at present seventeen hundred inhab- itants. Sheep, cattle, asses, and the vine, then as now, made the wealth of the region round about, and the trades of the Arouets, particularly tanner, weaver, and draper, are still among those that most flourish there. I n portions of the de- partment, now named Deux-Sevres, industry is almost confined, says Reclus, to tanning and weaving, and to the breeding of horses, asses, and mules. During the Revolution, St. Loup, mindful of its Arouets and their famous descendant, changed its ancient name to Voltaire. But the new appellation did not adhere. A t present they who would find the name upon the map of the world must look for it among the possessions of Great Britain. Cape Voltaire is a headland of Australia.

1 La Jeunesse de Voltaire, par Desnoiresterres, page 6.