Transcribed from the 1894 Cassell & Co. edition ,email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
François Marie Arouet, who called himself Voltaire, was theson of François Arouet of Poitou, who lived in Paris, had givenup his office of notary two years before the birth of this his thirdson, and obtained some years afterwards a treasurer’s office inthe Chambre des Comptes. Voltaire was born in the year 1694. He lived until within ten or eleven years of the outbreak of the GreatFrench Revolution, and was a chief leader in the movement of thoughtthat preceded the Revolution. Though he lived to his eighty-fourthyear, Voltaire was born with a weak body. His brother Armand,eight years his senior, became a Jansenist. Voltaire when tenyears old was placed with the Jesuits in the Collège Louis-le-Grand. There he was taught during seven years, and his genius was encouragedin its bent for literature; skill in speaking and in writing being especiallyfostered in the system of education which the Jesuits had planned toproduce capable men who by voice and pen could give a reason for thefaith they held. Verses written for an invalid soldier at theage of eleven won for young Voltaire the friendship of Ninon l’Enclos,who encouraged him to go on writing verses. She died soon afterwards,and remembered him with a legacy of two thousand livres for purchaseof books. He wrote in his lively school-days a tragedy that afterwardshe burnt. At the age of seventeen he left the Collège Louis-le-Grand,where he said afterwards that he had been taught nothing but Latin andthe Stupidities. He was then sent to the law schools, and sawlife in Paris as a gay young poet who, with all his brilliant liveliness,had an aptitude for looking on the tragic side of things, and one ofwhose first poems was an “Ode on the Misfortunes of Life.” His mother died when he was twenty. Voltaire’s father thoughthim a fool for his versifying, and attached him as secretary to theMarquis of Châteauneuf; when he went as ambassador to the Hague. In December, 1713, he was dismissed for his irregularities. InParis his unsteadiness and his addiction to literature caused his fatherto rejoice in getting him housed in a country château with M.de Caumartin. M. de Caumartin’s father talked with suchenthusiasm of Henri IV. and Sully that Voltaire planned the writingof what became his Henriade, and his “History of the Ageof Louis XIV.,” who died on the 1st of September, 1715.
Under the regency that followed, Voltaire got into trouble againand again through the sharpness of his pen, and at last, accused ofverse that satirised the Regent, he was locked up—on the 17thof May, 1717—in the Bastille. There he wrote the first twobooks of his Henriade, and finished a play on Œdipus, whichhe had begun at the age of eighteen. He did not obtain full libertyuntil the 12th of April, 1718, and it was at this time—with aclearly formed design to associate the name he took with work of highattempt in literature—that François Marie Arouet, agedtwenty-four, first called himself Voltaire.
Voltaire’s Œdipe was played with success in November,1718. A few months later he was again banished from Paris, andfinished the Henriade in his retirement, as well as another play,Artémise, that was acted in February, 1720. Otherplays followed. In December, 1721, Voltaire visited Lord Bolingbroke,who was then an exile from England, at the Château of La Source. There was now constant literary activity. From July to October,1722, Voltaire visited Holland with Madame de Rupelmonde. Aftera serious attack of small-pox in November, 1723, Voltaire was activeas a poet about the Court. He was then in receipt of a pensionof two thousand livres from the king,