voltaire and the history of tom jones

7/18/2019 Voltaire and the History of Tom Jones

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/voltaire-and-the-history-of-tom-jones 1/9

Holding a Mirror to Fiction: Voltaire and the History of Tom Jones1 jecs_ 46 7 5 9 7..604

E D O U A R D L A N G I L L E

Abstract: This paper sets out some striking parallels between Voltaire’s life and events in

Fielding’s Tom Jones, a work that inspired Candide. I argue that the autobiographicaldimension latent in Candide derives from the way Voltaire saw his own life story in terms of

Fielding’s fiction, revisited and corrigé by the contemporary translator Pierre-Antoine deLa Place.

Keywords: Voltaire, Fielding, Tom Jones, biography, art inventing life, art inspiring art

... my daughter hath fallen in love with your bastard ... I always thought what would come o’breeding up a bastard like a gentleman, and letting un come about to vok’s houses .

Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones2

... Si notre scène devient anglaise, nous sommes bien avilis. Nous ne sommes déjà que les traducteursde leurs romans. N’avons-nous pas déjà baissé assez pavillon devant l’Angleterre? C’est peu d’êtrevaincus, faut-il encore être copistes? Ô pauvre nation!

Voltaire to Mme d’Argental, 18 October 17603

In early middle age Voltaire tried to convince himself, or perhaps he just wished to convince

posterity, that the respectable Parisian notary François Arouet was not in fact his father. Itis not known whether the boy François-Marie really doubted Arouet’s paternity. What we

doknowisthatby 1744 thefifty-year-old Voltaire had begun hinting that he was a love childand that his true father was le chevalier Guérin de Rochebrune (or Roquebrune), anaristocrat, officer, composer of popular songs and, in Voltaire’s words, ‘a man of wit’.

Rochebrune lived for a time near Voltaire’s family home in the courtyard of the Palais. Hewas also a client of the elder Arouet. Biographers such as Theodore Besterman and René

Pomeau have recorded that the young François-Marie knew him well.4

Rochebrune is a shadowy figure. We do not even know his dates. Besterman spotted theRochebrune name in a few lines cut from the published version of a short erotic poem

entitled ‘Le Cadenas’ (1716), composed when Voltaire was just twenty.5 The poem tells thestory of a jealous sexagenarian who straps his younger, unfaithful wife into a chastity belt.

Critics following Besterman have speculated that this piece may have constituted acomment on Marie-Marguerite’s infidelities, and on her older husband’s response to them.Similarly, Voltaire’s first play, Œdipe (1719), has been interpreted as an expression of the

young playwright’s concern over his father’s identity and the circumstances of his ownbirth.6 The difficulty is that the young Voltaire wrote almost nothing about his father,

either good or ill. In middle age, from 1750 onwards, however, there is concrete evidence

that the great writer was increasingly preoccupied by the subject of his illegitimate birthand the true identity of his father.7

In Voltaire en son temps (1995) Pomeau addresses Voltaire’s latter day account of his

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 35 No. 4 (2012)



rather than the official, story of his birth.8 Several other critics have also connected thatstory with Voltaire’s most famous work, Candide.9 In his recent biography AlmightyVoltaire, Roger Pearson, for instance, asserts that, like Candide, ‘Zozo [the infant François-

Marie] was probably a bastard.’10

The belief that he was a love child with aristocratic antecedents may explain, in part,

why in the 1750s Voltaire was inspired by Fielding’s History of Tom Jones, a novel whichpoignantly explores that very theme. Voltaire’s Correspondance reveals that he was

acquainted with La Place’s adaptation of Tom Jones, entitled L’Enfant trouvé , almost assoon as it was printed in February 1750. Voltaire’s copy of this book remains in his librarytoday.11 He wrote at the time that he did not particularly like the novel. Recent study

strongly suggests, however, that L’Enfant trouvé provides the inspiration for key elements inCandide.12 Through the mediation of the La Place translation, Tom Jones influenced Candidein significant ways. The two works come together so precisely on specific points that thesimilarities noted between them can hardly have arisen by chance. Candide shares with

L’Enfant trouvé an astonishing network of verbal, thematic and narrative analogies, which

strongly reinforce the thesis that Voltaire’s novel proceeds directly from it, in terms of thecharacters it portrays, the narrative that binds those characters together and the language

in which the whole is expressed.13 This is especially evident in Chapters 1-4 of Candide,which recapitulate, mutatis mutandis, the story of the well-meaning, poor and naiveorphan raised in a nobleman’s house, his expulsion from this childhood paradise for the

offence of falling in love with a gentlewoman, his adventures on the road and, mostespecially, his initiation into military life. There is also evidence that L’Enfant trouvé influenced Candide beyond Chapter 4, through striking intertextual echoes, similaranecdotes and numerous idiosyncratic words and phrases that reappear in Candide. It

seems clear that Voltaire was inspired by the general structure of L’Enfant trouvé , and that

he took up and adapted parts of that novel’s plot, starting with Tom’s idyllic childhood inSomerset and ending with his happy return to the paradise of his birth. The unlikely

reunion of the novel’s central couple is essential to Fielding’s purpose. The fact that, inCandide, the once luscious Cunégonde has become ugly and cantankerous at the tale’s

conclusion reinforces Voltaire’s ironic reading of Tom Jones.Why Voltaire was drawn to the French adaptation of Tom Jones, and why he never

acknowledged his debt to it, we cannot know for sure. The autobiographical themes latent

in Candide nevertheless suggest that the transposition of segments from L’Enfant trouvé to

Candide had a compelling psychological motivation.That Voltaire was drawn to explore his

own life story in literary terms will come as no surprise to those familiar with his many

voices and masks. That he identified with various aspects of Fielding’s text is thus notimplausible. In this essay I point out incidents common to Voltaire’s life and L’Enfanttrouvé . As indicated above, I will examine Voltaire’s speculation about his own parentage;and in addition I will consider his relationship with his older brother. I will then look at a

defining moment in Voltaire’s early life: his flogging in the rue St-Antoine by toughs(coupe-jarrets) in the pay of le chevalier de Rohan. This episode anticipates the fictional

attack on Tom Jones by a press gang at the conclusion of Book 16 of L’Enfant trouvé .Finally, I will suggest that Voltaire not only saw elements of his past in the story of Tom

Jones; he also carried Tom’s adventures with him, acting out, consciously or

unconsciously, at least one sequence from the novel in old age. The famous ‘aube sur le

Jura’ episode, recorded in Voltaire’s eighty-first year, mirrors an almost identical narrativesequence at the conclusion of Book 8 of L’Enfant trouvé .

Two facts connected with Voltaire’s birth are relevant to my discussion The first is that

598 EDOUARD LANGILLE



Starting in 1750, the year in which L’Enfant trouvé was published, Voltaire discreetly put itabout that he was born clandestinely on 20 February, rather than on 20 November 1694,and that Arouet senior, aware that Marie-Marguerite was carrying another man’s child,

removed his pregnant wife from public view until after the birth.14 Like the Joseph of theGospels, Arouet acted to protect his wife and avoid a scandal. He accordingly arranged for

Marie-Marguerite to go to the country for her confinement. The baby was born inFebruary and received at the time an informal baptism. The nine-month-old infant

François-Marie was later formally received into the Church in Paris on 22 November 1694;his official birthday was then recorded as 20 November of the same year. Writing of Voltaire’s highly constructed persona, Geoffrey Turnovsky tells us that ‘one cannot offer so

much as the date of his birth in 1694 without having to account for Voltaire’s persistentmanipulations of the fact in order to mould a particular image for himself ’.15

What was the image that he wished to mould? Is it possible to know? In a letter to theduc de Richelieu dated 8 June 1744 Voltaire stated baldly that he was ‘le bâtard deRochebrune’.16 Voltaire, was given to making provocative comments, and it is tempting to

interpret this mysterious remark as no more than a passing whim, une foucade. But over thenext dozen or so years Voltaire repeatedly claimed that Rochebrune was his father. Writing

to his niece Mme Denis (11 August 1753), Voltaire recalled Rochebrune’s death fromdropsy in 1719; he worried that since he and Rochebrune shared the same ‘temperament’,he might soon succumb to the same malady.17 He repeated and expanded the same

anecdote three years later in company on 15 August 1756, following D’Alembert’s visit toLes Délices. D’Alembert, we know, was a bastard, and a foundling as well. Voltaire believed

him to be the son of the great Fontenelle. (D’Alembert’s parents were, in fact, Louis-CamusDestouches and Mme de Tencin.) Jean Louis du Pan, who was present that day, wrote that

the old man seized the occasion of D’Alembert’s visit to inform his nieces that his own

mother had had an affair with a certain ‘Roquebrune’, and that he was the product of their liaison. Mme Denis and Mme Fontaine were understandably appalled. Yet, far from

being ashamed of the fact, Voltaire maintained that he had always been grateful forhaving had as a father a ‘man of wit’, rather than the comparatively unimaginative and

low-born Arouet.18

If Voltaire truly believed himself to be illegitimate, the story of Tom Jones would surelyhave rung a bell. In Fielding’s novel the reader is constantly reminded that the foundling

Jones is little more than a lowly bastard. Especially gripping, then, is the novel’sconclusion, when, in a satisfying volte-face Tom Jones turns out to be the son of a man of

‘wit and breeding’. He is, in short, a gentleman. Tom’s noble extraction is hinted at much

earlier in the novel, but it is only at the end that we learn his true parentage from noneother than his putative mother, Jenny Jones (Mme Waters). Thus we learn that that Tom

Jones is the son of Bridget, sister of his protector Squire Allworthy, and of a certain scholarnamed Summer.

— Vous souvient-il d’un jeune homme nommé Summer?

— Je m’en souviens très fort, répondit M. Alworthy. C’était le fils d’un homme aussi vertueux

que savant et le plus cher de mes amis.

— Vous l’avez bien prouvé monsieur. C’est vous qui avez élevé son fils, qui l’avez entretenu à

l’Université et qui l’avez retiré chez vous après ses études finies. Je crois le voir encore. Il était

digne d’être aimé. (ET , vol. IV.231-2)

An important consequence of the revelation that Tom Jones is Bridget Allworthy’s son ishis discovery that he has a half brother the odious Blifil Blifil’s sanctimonious airs and

Holding a Mirror to Fiction 599



refers to the unmasked Blifil at the novel’s conclusion as a ‘wicked viper’.19 It would surelybe rash to call Armand Arouet a wicked viper, but he was a religious fanatic, arrested in

1737 for his Jansenist activities. Voltaire wrote little about his brother that has survived.

What documents we do possess leave little doubt about the nature of his feelings forArmand. Some few years after Armand’s death Voltaire wrote to the marquis d’Argens:

‘J’avais autrefois un frère janséniste; ses mœurs féroces me dégoûtèrent du parti.’20 He alsoseems to have remembered Armand in Chapter 21 of Candide, where Martin refers

scathingly to the ‘canaille convulsionnaire’ (C , p.205) and the disruptive activities of thissect. Relevant to my thesis is the fact that, though in fact younger than Tom Jones, Blifil ispresented by Fielding as being a disapproving and priggish ‘older brother’. Everything

about this character (whose very name suggests a bilious temperament) evokes the self-righteous Puritanism that Voltaire despised.21

Il était sobre, posé, pieux, discret bien plus qu’un autre à quarante ans. On l’aimait, en un mot,

autant que l’on haïssait Jones. (ET , vol. I.73)

The dramatic revelation at the novel’s end of Blifil’s evil nature gives an ironic twist to the frères ennemis theme, which the contemporary French critic Fréron saw as the heart of Fielding’s novel. In fact, Fréron’s article of 1751 anticipates the very title of Candide,

published eight years later. Tom Jones, he records, is a victim of his own innocence; hisessential flaw the consequence of ‘trop de candeur [...] dégénér[ée] en impudence’.22

There is a further, hitherto unnoticed, example of how Fielding’s novel mirrorsVoltairean biography. This may be seen in the episode where the innocent andunsuspecting Jones is viciously attacked in the street, first by the Irish peer Fitzpatrick, and

then, immediately afterwards, by a group of ruffians in the pay of Tom’s rival the English

aristocrat Fellamar. This unprovoked attack calls call to mind the way Voltaire wasambushed and beaten up in the rue St-Antoine by thugs hired by the chevalier de Rohan-Chabot. Virtually all biographers agree that this bastonnade was a devastating humiliationand a decisive turning point in the young poet’s life.23

The similarities between Fitzpatrick’s attack on Tom Jones and Rohan’s on Voltaire areindeed striking. Both take place in the street, where the respective victims are ambushed by

hired thugs. Like Voltaire, Tom is an unskilled swordsman, although he is, in fact, armed.His physical strength enables him to defend himself, and he mortally wounds Fitzpatrick.Like the waylaid Voltaire, however, he is powerless when Fellamar’s gang then falls upon

him like a pack of hounds.

I have noted elsewhere that the flow of ideas in the passage from L’Enfant trouvé following the attack anticipates that in Chapter 9 of Candide, and even uses the samewording. In spite of his inexperience in swordsmanship, Voltaire’s hero manages to kill the

Jew don Isaacar and, in quick succession, the Inquisitor.24 A similar circumstance occursin Chapter 15, when Candide unintentionally kills Cunégonde’s brother, claiming at thetime: ‘Je suis le meilleur homme du monde et voilà déjà trois hommes que je tue’ (C , p.75).

For his part, La Place’s Tom Jones maintains that ‘quoique convaincu de n’être pascoupable aux yeux des lois, le poids du sang que j’ai versé n’en est pas moins un cruel

fardeau pour mon cœur’ (ET , vol. IV.94). This is how that scene takes shape in the Frenchtranslation of 1750:

A ces mots, tirant son épée, M. Fitzpatrick se mit en défense, seule position des armes qu’il eût

j i J i l t éb lé d’ tt q i i é it t t l’é é




sur l’Irlandais, qu’après avoir fait sauter sa garde en pièces, il passa son épée au travers du

corps de ce gentilhomme qui, ayant chancelé quelques pas, s’écria en tombant,

— J’en ai assez ... Je suis un homme mort !

— J’espère que non, s’écria Jones, en courant à lui, mais quoiqu’il en arrive, vous ne pouvez

l’imputer qu’à vous-même. (ET , vol. IV.91)

It is at this juncture that the two strands of Tom Jones’s story combine to suggest precisely

the Rohan bastonnade. Tom no sooner repels Fitzpatrick’s assault than he is againattacked in the street by Fellmar’s press gang. With Fitzpatrick’s life in the balance, Tom

Jones is brutally assaulted and then led to Newgate prison to await his fate. Voltaire, it will

be recalled, was locked up in the Bastille following the Rohan incident. If one overlooks thedetails particular to Jones, the following passage could apply word for word to Voltaire’s

predicament that fateful evening in February 1727:

Dans ce moment un certain nombre d’hommes armés tombèrent sur notre héros et se

saisirent de sa personne. [...] Le pauvre Jones essuya mille [...] railleries de cette canaille quin’était autre que la troupe employée par milord Fellamar pour l’enlever et le faire conduire à

la flotte. Ces misérables, postés au coin de la rue, l’avaient vu entrer chez Mme Fitzpatrick et

n’attendaient que sa sortie pour faire leur coup lorsque ce malheureux accident était arrivé.

(ET , vol. IV.92)

The uncanny concordance of life and fiction must have struck a deep chord with theageing Voltaire, who – can there be any doubt? – would surely have recognised aspects of

his own life story in Tom Jones’s fictional adventures.What we now must consider is the impact of L’Enfant trouvé on Voltaire’s imagination in

old age. This takes me to the last chapter of Book 8 of L’Enfant trouvé , where Tom Jones and

the Man of the Hill spend a wintry night outdoors reflecting on various philosophical andtheological matters. Tom is so enthralled by the old man’s conversation that he cannot

resolve to leave him. The old man, in the role of mentor, invites the younger man toaccompany him to a nearby hilltop, from where he hopes to watch the sunrise.25 This final

segment of this episode reaffirms the glory and the goodness of God in spectacular fashion,and the Man of the Hill tellsTom Jones that for many years his sole preoccupation has beenthe single act of ‘contemplation and worship of God and His creation’. In the Eldorado

chapter of Candide another venerable vieillard says much the same, announcing to Candideand Cacambo that the inhabitants of Eldorado ‘ador[ent] Dieu du soir jusqu’au matin’

(C , p.188).

A similar episode is also recorded in the American Night sequence in Voltaire’s Histoirede Jenni (1775),26 which has been linked to an incident published by Lord Brougham in his

Lives of Men of Letters (1845),27 republished recently, by Pomeau,28 Pearson29 and Brown.30

According to this story, in May 1775 or 1776 the octogenarian Voltaire rose one morning

at three o’clock. Donning a full-bottomed wig, and in his finest court clothes, he proceededwith his guests, the marquis de La Tour du Pin Gouvernet and the marquis de Villette, ona lantern-lit nocturnal excursion to a remote hilltop. Voltaire wished to experience the

splendour of God’s creation by observing the sunrise over the Jura mountains. As themorning light illuminated the eastern sky and drew silhouettes of the rows of fir trees,

Voltaire is reported to have been exultant. He clapped his hands, removed his hat and

bowed deeply, exclaiming: ‘Je crois, je crois en Toi! Dieu puissant, je crois. Quant àMonsieur le Fils et à Madame sa Mère, c’est une autre affaire.’31

The Deist views expressed in the only version of this event to have come down to us are




Starry Winter Night episode recorded by his secretary Longchamp and published in1826.32 We now know that Longchamp’s text contains no reference to God, and that thesuperb lines starting with ‘Ravis du magnifique spectacle déployé au-dessus et autour

d’eux’ were interpolated in Longchamp’s memoires by the nineteenth-century editorDecroix.33 What, then, are we to make of Brougham’s story, published more than seventy

years after Voltaire’s death, and the source of which is unknown? Recent biographers suchas Pomeau claim that the anecdote rings true. In support of the general mise en scène one

can reference Huber’s portrait of Voltaire en extase, arms outstretched as if wanting toembrace the glory of Nature, and by implication the Creator.34 True or not, the scenerequires a literary rather than a biographical explanation. The author of this anecdote

remarks that the ‘aube sur le Jura’ sequence was inspired by the introductory pages of thethird book of Rousseau’s Emile (1762), a passage written in 1757 and known as LaProfession de foi d’un vicaire Savoyard . According to Brougham, Voltaire declared: ‘je sorspour voir un peu le lever du soleil: cette Profession de foi d’un vicaire Savoyard m’en a donnéenvie.’35 Here we observe the Patriarch d’après nature, as it were, acting out a literary

conceit avowedly inspired by Rousseau but present in all its important details in the earlierMan of the Hill sequence. Voltaire’s famously retentive memory was unimpaired, even in

old age. Did he realise the almost exact concordance of these two sunrise narratives?Dramatising Rousseau’s novel, was he not also implicitly acknowledging Fielding’shermit, a character whose decrepitude and eccentric appearance are more reminiscent

of Voltaire himself than of Rousseau’s much younger vicaire? Voltaire and Fielding’s Manof the Hill certainly have a good deal in common. From 1770 onwards the patriarch of

Ferney styled himself a recluse whose appearance visitors found bizarre, even spectral.36

The Man of the Hill is also a recluse, and his presence, as described by La Place, is

other-worldly, to say the least:

A dire le vrai, la première vue de ce personnage aurait eu droit de troubler une âme plus ferme

que celle de Partridge. Figurez-vous une taille fort au-dessus de l’ordinaire, une barbe blanche

longue et épaisse, l’air aussi sévère que décrépit, le tout enveloppé d’une peau d’âne taillée

grossièrement en forme simarre et la tête couverte d’un énorme bonnet d’ours. Tel était notre

ermite. (ET , vol. II.65)

In addition to his frightening appearance, it is the Man of the Hill’s life of solitary study

that reminds us of Voltaire. In La Place’s translation: ‘il est peu d’hommes plus savants quelui’ (ET , vol. II.60). The same, of course, was said of Voltaire, who in the last decades of his

life became a real-life Man of the Hill, so to speak, his final, fatal journey to Paris

notwithstanding. Long before he reached that venerable status, however, the author of Candide transferred elements of Fielding’s Man of the Hill to another fictional proxy whose

voice is unmistakably Voltaire’s own. The ‘plus savant homme du royaume’ (C , p.187) inEldorado (Chapter 18) is Voltaire’s response to La Place’s ‘homme de la montagne’. That

unnamed character is arguably also another avatar of Voltaire himself.37

We will never know with certainty whether the middle-aged Voltaire was entirelyconscious of the parallels between his real life and the fictional life of Tom Jones. What we

can affirm with increasing assurance is that La Place’s adaptation of Tom Jones was animportant source for Candide. Voltaire read that translation closely, making detailed notes

of the several passages he incorporated into his most enduring creation. Candide is widely

believed to be Voltaire’s most autobiographical work. We know, too, that at the time whenthat novel was gestating Voltaire was preoccupied with the question of his own paternity.Over time he seems to have become convinced that he was the love child of someone other




trouvé almost as soon as it was published, he could hardly have missed the similaritiesbetween the story of his own birth that he was actively propagating and the sensationalbirth of the fictional love child Tom Jones. As I have argued, Voltaire’s consciousness of

these similarities may well have been heightened by other episodes in L’Enfant trouvé which also paralleled his own experiences, and in particular the striking resemblance

between the puritanical Blifil and the Jansenist Armand Arouet. Even more arresting is thesimilarity between the fictional Fitzpatick–Fellamar assault and the Rohan bastonnade,

which figured so vividly in Voltaire’s life. Voltaire’s nocturnal excursion to a remote hilltopmay never have happened. If it did, Voltaire was clearly acting out a scene from a novel inwhich he was assuming the role of Fielding’s wise and benevolent Man of the Hill.

Finally, Voltaire’s response to L’Enfant trouvé illustrates how a literary source helped theauthor of Candide transform elements of his own life story into a literary masterpiece in

which the authorial moi is at once revealed and disguised.

NOTES

1. With thanks to Garry Apgar and especially Peter Urbach for their judicious and helpful comments.2. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, The Works of Henry Fielding, ed. F. Bowers and

M. C. Battistin, 2 vols (Oxford: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), vol. I.305. Subsequent references will be tothis edition, cited within the text as TJ .

3. Voltaire, Correspondence and Related Documents, ed. T. Besterman, OCV (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation,1968-), D 9327. Subsequent references will be to this edition, cited within the Notes as D.

4. T. Besterman, Voltaire (London: Longman, 1969); R. Pomeau, Voltaire en son temps, 2 vols (Paris andOxford: Fayard/Voltaire Foundation, 1995); J.-M. Raynaud, Voltaire, soi-disant (Lille: Presses Universitaires deLille, 1983), p.30-35.

5. Besterman, Voltaire, p.20-23.6. Pomeau, Voltaire en son temps, vol. I.87.

7. For a psychoanalytical approach to Voltaire’s Oedipus complex see A. J. Nemeth, Voltaire’s Tormented Soul:A Psychobiographic Inquiry (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses; Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh UniversityPress, 2008).

8. Chapter 2 of Pomeau’s biography is entitled ‘Two Fathers and Two Baptisms?’ Pomeau, Voltaire en sontemps, vol. I.17.

9. Voltaire, Candide, ou L’optimisme, ed. R. Pomeau, OCV 48 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1980).Subsequent references will be to this edition, cited within the text as C .

10. R. Pearson, Almighty Voltaire (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2005), p.9. See also Candide, trans.Roger Pearson, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p.xxv.

11. Histoire de Tom Jones, ou L’Enfant trouvé , traduction de l’anglais de M. Fielding par MDLP [P.-A. de La Place],enrichie d’estampes dessinées par M. Gravelot, 4 vols (‘Londres, chez J. Nourse’ [Paris], 1750). Subsequentreferences are to this edition, cited within the text as ET . See also M. P. Alekseev, Catalogue des livres de labibliothèque de Voltaire (Leningrad: Academy of Sciences, 1961), BV 1341.

12. E. M. Langille, ‘La Place’s Histoire de Tom Jones, ou l’enfant trouvé and Candide’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction19 (2007), p.267-89.

13. E. M. Langille, ‘L’Histoire de Tom Jones, ou l’enfant trouvé’ (1750) et lastructure narrative de Candide’,Dix-Huitième Siècle 43 (2011), p.653-69.

14. ‘La plus ancienne notice biographique le concernant remonte à 1750. Elle fut rédigée par son disciple etalors ami Baculard d’Arnaud pour figurer en tête d’une édition de ses Œuvres que devait publier les libraires deRouen. Elle lui fut soumise. Il en changea ou retrancha plusieurs passages. Mais il laissa sans changement ceci:«François-Marie de Voltaire [...] naquit le 20 février 1694’. Pomeau, Voltaire en son temps, vol. I.9.

15. G. Turnovsky, ‘The Making of a Name: A Life of Voltaire’, Cambridge Companion to Voltaire, ed. N. Cronk(New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p.17.

16. ‘Je crains bien qu’en cherchant de l’esprit et des traits/ Le bâtard de Rochebrune/ Ne fatigue etn’importune/ le successeur d’Armand et les esprits bien faits’. Voltaire to the duc de Richelieu, 4 June 1744(D 2989).

17. ‘Je m’imagine que la cour sera revenu de Compiègne, que M. Senac sera à Versailles, que vous pourrez lui

écrire un petit mot sur le commencement d’hydropisie. Vous savez que Rochebrune en est mort, et que j’aiquelques raisons de prétendre à son tempérament’. Voltaire to Marie-Louise Denis, 11 August 1753 (D 5475).

18. ‘Je crois aussi certain, leur dit-il, que D’Alembert est le fils de Fontenelle, comme il est certain que je le suis




Roquebrune, mousquetaire, officier, auteur, à Mr son père qui pour le génie était un homme très commun, et ditqu’il s’était toujours flatté d’avoir l’obligation de sa naissance à Roquebrune’. Jean-Louis du Pan to SuzanneCatherine Freudenreich, 15 August 1756 (D 6968).

19. ‘Votre ami, madame, votre ami Jones est mon neveu ! ... Il est le frère de ce serpent que j’ai si longtempsréchauffé dans mon sein !’ (ET , vol. IV.260).

20. Voltaire to the marquis d’Argens, 1752(?) (D 4930).

21. La Place consistently describes the young Blifil in ways that emphasise his puritanical austerity:‘le religieux Blifil’, ‘le grave Blifil’, ‘le froid Blifil’, ‘le triste Blifil’ and, finally, ‘l’odieux Blifil’.22. ’Son dessein dans tout le cours de cet ouvrage, est de rendre l’innocence et la bonté aimables, et surtout

de faire voir, par les portraits de Jones et de Blifil, que la différence estgrande entre les fautes que trop de candeurfait dégénérer en impudence, et celles qui procèdent uniquement d’un cœur faux et gâté’. Elie Catherine Fréron,Lettres sur quelques écrits de ce temps 5 (July 1751), p.19.

23. Pomeau, Voltaire en son temps, vol. I.158).24. Langille, ‘La Place’s Histoire de Tom Jones’, p.278.25. ‘L’aurore me paraît belle et je vais jouir du haut de ces montagnes d’un spectacle toujours aussi beau que

nouveau pour mes yeux’ (ET , vol. II.119).26. Histoire de Jenni, Chapters 8-11, ‘Dialogue de Freind et de Birton sur l’athéisme’, in Romans et contes, ed.

F. Deloffre et J. Van den Heuvel (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p.630-54.27. Henry, Lord Brougham, Lives of Men of Letters (London: Charles Knight, 1845), vol. I.141-2.28. Pomeau, Voltaire en son temps, vol. II.170-71.

29. Pearson, Almighty Voltaire, p.359-60.30. Cahiers Voltaire 4 (2005), p.198.31. Brougham, Lives of Men of Letters, vol. I.142.32. Mémoires sur Voltaire et sur ses ouvrages, par Longchamp et Wagnière, ses secrétaires; suivis de divers écrits

inédits [...] tous relatifs à Voltaire, 2 vols (Paris: Aimé André, 1826), vol. II.168-9.33. N. Cronk, ‘(Ré) écrire les années de Cirey’, Les Vies de Voltaire: discours et représentations biographiques

XVIII e-XIX e siècles, ed. C. Cave and S. Davies, SVEC 2008:4 (2008), p.178.34. G. Apgar, L’Art singulier de Jean Huber (Paris: A. Biro, 1995), p.90, 94, 158.35. ‘Il me mena hors de la ville, sur une haute colline au-dessous de laquelle passait le Pô, dont on voyait le

cours à travers les fertiles rives qu’il baigne : dans l’éloignement, l’immense chaîne des Alpes couronnait lepaysage ; les rayons du soleil levant rasaient déjà les plaines, et, projetant sur les champs par longues ombres lesarbres, les coteaux, les maisons, enrichissaient de mille accidents de lumière le plus beau tableau dont l’œilhumain puisse être frappé. On eût dit que la nature étalait à nos yeux toute sa magnificence pour en offrir le

texte à nos entretiens’. J.-J. Rousseau, Profession de foi d’un vicaire Savoyard , ed. P. M. Masson (Fribourg and Paris:Hachette, 1914), p.34-5.36. Charles Burney wrote in 1771: ‘It is not easy to conceive it possible for life to subsist in a form so nearly

composed of mere skin and bone, as that of M. de Voltaire. He complained of decrepitude, and said he supposedI was curious to form an idea of the figure of one walking after death’. British Library, MSS 35122, fols 26-7.

37. ‘Après cette longue conversation, le bon vieillard fit atteler un carrosse à six moutons, et donna douz e deses domestiques aux deux voyageurs pour les conduire à la cour. “Excusez-moi, leur dit-il, si mon âge me privede l’honneur de vous accompagner. Le roi vous recevra d’une manière dont vous ne serez pas mécontents, etvous pardonnerez sans doute aux usages du pays, s’il y en a quelques-uns qui vous déplaisent” ’ (C , p.189-90).

edouard langille is professor of French at St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada.




Copyright of Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not

be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written

permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.