The Age of Voltaire: The Story of Civilization, Volume IX

by Will Durant

Events and personalities go hand in hand through time, regardless of which were causes and which were effects; history speaks in events, but through individuals.

Passages in reduced type are especially dull and recondite, and are not essential to the general picture of the age.

The pupil, perhaps already botched by his paternal ancestry, took readily to his tutor’s instructions, and bettered them in mind and vice.

Like most of us he was a confusion of characters.

“From six o’clock in the morning till night I am subjected to prolonged and fatiguing labor; if I did not amuse myself after that, I could not bear it; I should die of melancholy.”

“My dear Count,” said the financier, “you come too late; I have just concluded a similar arrangement with your wife for half that sum.”

“The justice refused to the Protestants by the two factions in the Church was won for them only by philosophy.”

under the pious Louis XIV he had read Rabelais in church;

Philippe, by nature epicurean, remained a stoic till 5 P.M.;

But he shared the weakness of philosophers—the ability and willingness to see so many sides to a subject that time was absorbed in discussion, and decisive action was deferred.

It is one of the pitiful tragedies in the history of France that this man with so many virtues of mind and heart was sullied and weakened with the debauchery of his class and time.

“He would have had virtues,” said Duclos, “if one could have them without principles.”

“Today,” said Massillon in 1718, “ungodliness almost lends an air of distinction and glory; it is a merit that gives access to the great,… that procures for obscure men the privilege of familiarity with the people’s prince.”

Few of the younger generation thought of going from Catholicism to Protestantism; they went to atheism, which was much safer.

In the Middle Ages marriage had been counted on to lead to love; now marriage as seldom led to love as love to marriage; and even in adultery there was little pretense of love.

and Claudine herself was conscious of a beauty that itched to be sold.

Philippe replied that he did not like wenches who talked business between sheets;

she was interested in science and philosophy, and sometimes (says Voltaire) she talked above her own head; but the head was pretty and titled, which made any metaphysic effervesce.

bureau d’esprit, or ministry of mind,

She was one of the hundreds of gracious, cultured, civilized women who make the history of France the most fascinating story in the world.

Charles Cressent, chief cabinetmaker to the Regent, established the Regency style with chairs, tables, desks, and bureaus brilliant with mother-of-pearl marquetry and gay with conscious loveliness.

He would have been a highly civilized man had he not suffered from thirst and an uncontrollable appreciation of beauty.

He loved women from a timid distance, with all the longing of one too weak to woo; and he was moved not so much by cozy contours as by the luster of their hair and the sinuous flow of their robes.

Half the painting of France through the next one hundred years was a memory of Watteau.

“We embraced, and since then we are mortal enemies.”

He had become almost deaf at forty, but could hear with a trumpet; lucky man, who could close his ears at will, as we close our eyes.

“his mind seemed to rise and set with the sun.”

The doctors warned him that his mode of life was killing him. He did not care. He had drunk the wine of life too greedily, and had reached the dregs.

He had the vices of the flesh rather than of the soul: he was a spendthrift, a drunkard, and a lecher, but he was not selfish, cruel, or mean. He was a man of mercy, brave and kind.

Morally, the Regency was the most shameful period in the history of France.

skepticism forgot Epicurus, and became epicurean.

He enjoyed there everything but liberty.

Our priests are not what a silly populace supposes; all their learning consists in our credulity.”

We must not think of him as a revolutionist, except in religion.

Voltaire, he said, now owed him an epic and “a nice pair of sleeve ruffles.”

“I do not recognize in this disgraceful picture the God whom I must adore; I should dishonor him by such insult and homage.”

Believe that before his throne, in all times, in all places, the soul of the just man is precious; believe that the modest Buddhist monk, the kindly Moslem dervish, find more grace in his eyes than a pitiless [predestinarian] Jansenist or an ambitious pope.”

Doubtless he talked too much, which is the easiest thing in the world.

“Don’t strike his head; something good may come out of that.”

this “fortress built by Nature for herself against infection, … this blessed plot, … this England,”

Word peddlers tend to idealize the countryside, if they are exempt from its harassments, boredom, insects, and toil.

in Dante’s Florence factories were as numerous as poets;

the problem remained of finding some mechanical power to substitute cheaply for the muscles of men and the patience of women.

This clumsy and unsteady engine reached its zenith in the United Provinces in the eighteenth century, and then entered into its picturesque decline.

The capitalist was better able to organize quantity production and distant distribution; he had learned the subtle art of making money breed money; and he was favored by a Parliament eager for industrial capacity to supply far-ranging commerce and wars.

His wages were set by the hunger of men competing for jobs against women and children.

“The poor,” said a writer in 1714, “have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants, which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure.”

The age of “free enterprise” and laissez-faire had begun.

The great merchants were now rivaling the old landowning aristocracy in riches and power, determining foreign relations, fomenting and financing wars for markets, resources, and trade routes.

Aristocracy was passing into plutocracy; money was replacing birth as a title to power.