Voltaire: The Seine and the Louvre from Quai Voltaire
LOCATIONS: 13, rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie, Le Procope; 2, rue Saint-Louis en l’Île: Île Saint-Louis, Hôtel Lambert; 23, Quai de Conti, Institut de France; 27, Quai Voltaire: Le Voltaire Café
MÉTRO: Saint-Michel
Born François-Marie Arouet. Nickname “Zozo.” Brilliant child, Paris bad boy, adored playwright. Bastille prisoner, exile, scourge of l’Ancien Régime and the Catholic Church. His Treatise on Tolerance condemned. Acid wit, ardent lover: “Pleasure is the greatest reality of our existence.” Motto: “Get to the point.”
Voltaire (1694–1778) was lionized in the streets of his native city but not so welcome in the throne rooms of power. Royals and aristocrats feared his iconoclastic wit almost as if they intuited the threat that the precocious young man’s critical spirit posed to their world. It would be, after all, “ideas that destroyed the ancient regime.”1 Orders of exile or warrants for his arrest were routine responses to his publications, his scrapes, his cheek when up against this duke or that king. But Paris audiences loved the iconoclasm of his plays. Without the bite and moral vision of his writings some say that 1789 would never have happened.
He was born in Rue Guénégaud, between Quai de Conti and rue Mazarine, a narrow old Left Bank street named for a disgraced finance minister. There is no plaque.
Voltaire’s “father” moved his family across the Petit Pont to the Île de la Cité when Zozo (who was probably a bastard) was seven and newly motherless. Tutors and Zozo’s godfather, Abbé de Châteauneuf, taught him to memorize and write long poems; from the time he was three he became known as a prodigy in the salons of Place Royale (now Place des Vosges), including the salon of Ninon de l’Enclos on rue des Tournelles (see here).
His godfather also introduced him to religious skepticism years before Zozo moved up the hill to 123, rue Saint-Jacques to board and study at the Jesuits’ college, now Lycée Louis-le-Grand. (Virtual tours only on www.louislegrand.org.) The Jesuits were fond of Louis XIV for revoking, in 1685, Henri IV’s wishy-washy Edict of Nantes which had made religious tolerance of Protestants the law of the land. Thanks to the Sun King, Protestants after 1685 were once again declared heretics, risking exile, prison, torture, and death for following their consciences. Such intolerance made Voltaire a lifelong opponent of organized religion. “Papist fanatics, Calvinist fanatics, all are molded from the same shit, and soaking in corrupted blood,” he wrote to another philosophe. But he was not an atheist as is often claimed. Like other philosophes, he was a deist: “When I see a clock, I believe in a clock-maker.”
At lycée he was the Jesuits’ star pupil, making friends with some of them, grateful for an education that despite all the “Latin and a lot of nonsense” taught him how to read literature, write prose, and think for himself. Law school, on the other hand, where his father forced him to enroll after lycée, served up “useless rubbish.” He escaped by spending wild nights in the Place Royale and writing verse, staging plays, making love to actresses, hiding out at Le Temple, the twelfth-century property of the Knights Templar and in the early eighteenth century a free zone (the police could not enter) for freethinkers and aristocratic hedonists who could break wineglasses with their teeth. Le Temple is now the much reduced Square du Temple, a pretty garden on the Right Bank, in the northern Marais.
His father, disgusted by Zozo’s debts and all-night carousing sent him to Holland as secretary to an ambassador. More disaster: a love affair and an attempt to elope with a Protestant, the luscious “Pimpette.” Back in Paris, the law-school dropout with the sparkling eyes finally went too far. In pretend-funny verses he attacked the Duke of Orléans (the prince regent for the child king Louis XV) for his incestuous affair with his daughter; in 1717 the prince regent sent him off to an eleven-month incarceration in a dark windowless cell in the Bastille because he could. François/Zozo spent his jail time writing.
For the Traveler
His first play, Oedipus, ran as a sold-out success at the old Comédie-Française at 14, rue de l’Ancienne Comédie (between boulevard Saint-Germain and rue de Buci and a five-minute walk west of the Saint-Michel métro, along the crowded boutique-y rue Saint-André-des-Arts). The Comédie-Française is now located on the Right Bank at the Palais Royal on Place Colette and rue de Richelieu, with a statue of a seated Voltaire by Houdon in the foyer.
The original theater took its name from the street where it was located, a street jammed with carriages and theatergoers as it is now with shoppers. It stood opposite Le Procope at 13, rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. The city’s first coffeehouse, started by a Sicilian, François Procope, served up two absolute necessities of eighteenth-century Paris, coffee and conversation. Voltaire, said to have drunk forty cups a day (afflicted with nervous indigestion, he said all ill health was caused by overeating) was a regular here along with fellow philosophes determined to overturn the dominant superstitions of the Middle Ages and enshrine the light of reason over affairs of state, religion, culture. The philosophes valued material evidence over blind faith, a defiant reversal of priorities. Over coffee, Voltaire, Diderot, d’Alembert, Beaumarchais, and others came up with the idea of the Encyclopédie, a book of definitions and commentaries on the main ideas relating to the Enlightenment, the most significant intellectual development of the modern era. But it was not radically new: it drew on an older tradition of Renaissance humanism.
Le Procope, café and restaurant, now done up in high neoclassical exuberance, is still open for business (daily, 11:45–midnight; reservations at: 1.40.46.79.00) and well worth a visit, mostly for the ambience—bookcases and walls crowded with the luminaries’ books and images. Explore the upstairs dining rooms, imagining the very amiable Benjamin Franklin making an entrance in one of them, looking for his friend Voltaire whose desk and table are on display.
Voltaire’s literary success intensified in 1724 with the publication of La Henriade, his epic poem in praise of his favorite royal, the tolerant Henri IV (see here) whose monument is not a classical domed building but the very practical and useful-to-the-people Pont Neuf (see here). All Paris (except for Henri’s son King Louis XIII) adored the poem, embracing Henri as “its Best and Favourite King”2 and Voltaire as France’s greatest living writer.
Then, because Voltaire had the nerve to fight back, arranging a duel with a swinish aristocrat who had had him beaten up, he found himself again locked up in the Bastille. He asked to be set free on condition that he exile himself in England.
That exile changed everything. A child of the bourgeoisie, unprotected by power and lineage, throughout his youth he’d suffered the double-edged despotism of the French state and the Catholic Church. Coming from a country in which the people had no say, he now observed a society marked by a high degree of religious tolerance, political freedom, a limited democracy, and enlightened ideas on science and philosophy, a country where writers and artists were respected. In Letters Concerning the English Nation—or simply Letters on England—published a few years after he came home to Paris, he praised the foreign land where he had even considered settling for life. (He’d learned English in three months.) The book was condemned and banned by the Paris Parliament, burned in front of the Palais du Justice; a warrant was issued for Voltaire’s arrest. His praise of England was rightly interpreted as criticism of France, how unjustly things were done at home.
Fearing for his freedom—another sentence to the Bastille where one never knew if his case would be heard in court, where he could rot for the rest of his life depending on the whim of a royal judge—Voltaire again fled Paris, finding refuge in eastern France in the château of his lover Émilie, marquise du Châtelet (1706–1749), wife of an old marquis who liked Voltaire and didn’t care what he and his wife were up to after hours.
“A remarkable feminist exemplar of the Enlightenment,”3 and a brilliant mathematician and scientist who translated Isaac Newton, Émilie—Voltaire called her the “she-philosopher”—lived in happy exile with Voltaire for ten years. They passed their days studying, reading and writing, making love, and savoring the pleasures of the table in the middle of the night: the daytime eroticism of the intellectual life fueled their passion. To him, she was “a prodigy.”
Now and then they returned to Paris. Émilie missed entertaining and court gossip. In 1739, she bought, and Voltaire paid for, the magnificent Hôtel Lambert on the eastern tip of Île Saint-Louis at 2, rue Saint-Louis en l’Île. (From the Sully–Morland métro, cross Pont de Sully onto the island; or walk ten minutes east from the Saint-Michel métro along the Left Bank quays to Pont de la Tournelle and onto Île Saint-Louis.)
Palais Lambert, as Émilie called it, remains today the same luxurious mansion where Chopin, George Sand, and Lizst were hosted; the Rothschilds and other lords of finance lived; and the present owner, the brother of the former emir of Qatar plans to install an underground parking lot and interior elevators to the horror of preservation-conscious Parisians worrying about the stability of the original seventeenth-century architecture, gardens, frescoes, windows. The renovations continue, with 2019 the supposed year of completion.
Voltaire did not enjoy himself on these return junkets to Paris. He complained that “everybody is in too much of a hurry … not a moment to oneself, no time to write, to think or to sleep,” as Nancy Mitford tells it. And he often had to look over his shoulder for the censors or the police, sent by the king or one of the many aristocrats who loathed his subversive writings which the literate bourgeoisie devoured and read aloud in Le Procope. His enemies united to make sure that that “atheist,” the most important writer in eighteenth-century France, was rejected several times over for membership in the prestigious Académie Française.
Walking west from Île Saint-Louis, across Île de la Cité and Henri IV’s Place Dauphine where Voltaire and Émilie heard open-air concerts, bear left over the Pont Neuf and then right (west) along the Left Bank quays until you see on your left the domed beauty of the Institut de France (23, Quai de Conti): It overlooks the Seine and the Pont des Arts, facing the Louvre. Originally a college, it became the home of five academies, the most renowned of which is the exclusive Académie Française, which was, in Voltaire’s day, housed in the Louvre.
Founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, its primary function is to guard the purity of the French language, creating and updating the dictionary and defending French-speaking communities. Membership is restricted to forty illustrious members—les Immortels—each one nominated (after rigorous screening) and appointed on the death of one of the forty. Gaining acceptance was an extremely political business. Voltaire cared enough about admission that he whored himself continuously, manipulating and flattering the sitting members (and the pope who had a say in everything) until he was finally admitted in 1746.
HOURS: The Académie Française and the other academies are open to the public once a year, in the third week of September, the French Heritage days. Only the Institute’s Bibliothèque Mazarine is open to the public year-round (Mon–Fri, 10–6). To enter, cross the Institute’s octagonal courtyard to the front entrance, show a picture ID, and continue into the next courtyard and then left up the winding staircase leading to the Bibliothèque named for and donated by Louis XIV’s hated chief financial minister, Cardinal Mazarin, a Roman by birth.
Bibliophiles will want to settle in forever in this seventeenth-century sanctuary. The first free public library in France, it holds 650,000 volumes of French literature in all genres. The exhibits of rare books, manuscripts, and maps are tastefully displayed, there is not a sound in the long, dark, wood-paneled reading room, lined on all sides with ceiling-high bookshelves, the French windows (with window seats) letting in the light from the river. Golden chandeliers and reading lamps on the long tables create a well-lit serenity. Busts of the ancients decorate the aisles; the beloved American, Benjamin Franklin, is honored on his pedestal.
* * *
Voltaire took his green academician’s uniform with bicorn and sword back to eastern France, now a permanent exile after Louis XV told his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, a friend of Voltaire, to let him know he was not ever welcome at court. He’d had enough of his plays’ and poems’ jokes that made the courtiers roar laughing and stop paying attention to Louis.
In the last decades of his life, following the death of Émilie in 1749, Voltaire wrote his masterpiece, Candide (1759), renowned ever since for its prescription of moral health: We must cultivate our garden. The garden is what there is: according to his philosophy of activity, instead of a posturing pessimism and depression, we must work on the material and the local, on the cultivation of the earth or the city or wherever we find ourselves. He himself, as an urban reformer, urged greater hygiene in the streets of Paris as well as cleaner air, all of which would enhance the city’s beauty. He cared deeply about the aesthetics of “the capital of the world” and in particular the design of its streets.
At a distance from Paris, he continued to crusade against what he called l’Infame, the persecution and intolerance practiced by the Church in alliance with the state. As he aged, he became an indefatigable advocate of human rights, working to overturn a number of unjust death penalty edicts of the French judicial system, and, posthumously, the unjust guilty verdicts of Protestant victims of the Catholic state and Church. He also took up the cause of the impoverished peasants who worked on his estates. He was caught up, too, in these years away from Paris, with business deals with Jews that went sour, leading to charges against Voltaire as an anti-Semite.
When his Treatise on Tolerance (1763) was published in Paris, he again feared for his freedom, so outrageous did the aristocracy find his ideas:
What is tolerance? It is the prerogative of our humanity. We are all fashioned of weaknesses and mistakes. Let us pardon each other for our blunders. This is the first law of nature.
After the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January 2015, Voltaire’s essay on “Tolerance” became a best seller in Paris, reprinted many times. Nearly half as many copies were sold in the three weeks after the killings as have been sold in the last twelve years. Intellectuals have been quick to draw comparisons between Voltaire and Charlie Hebdo. The Société Voltaire, a group that safeguards his legacy, called him the rallying symbol for those who do not accept violence in the name of religion. At a time when “our way of life, of being and living together has come under attack,” wrote a spokesperson for Gallimard, Voltaire’s publisher, “this book is an antidote, a way of resisting.”
* * *
In 1778, in terrible health, making sure before he ordered the carriages that he was not a wanted philosophe, he traveled to Paris to see the production of his play Irène. He stayed in the Hôtel de Villette owned by his friends the Villettes and now called Le Voltaire Café, at the corner of the rue de Beaune and the Quai des Théatins, named Quai Voltaire in 1791 (between the Pont Royal and the Pont du Carrousel). He’d known the building intimately in his profligate youth; he’d rented an apartment there in his twenties and had an affair with the then owner, Madame de Bernières. The entrance to the apartments, restored but not open to the public, is around the corner on rue de Beaune.
Irène was another triumph. At one performance, the audience cheered as a bust of Voltaire was crowned onstage, in his presence, the actors placing wreath upon wreath on the marble head. Crowds mobbed his carriage, hailing him as “the defender of the poor and oppressed.” Day and night many old friends came to visit, including Benjamin Franklin with his grandson by the hand; Voltaire dropped in at the Académie Française (in the Louvre) and was greeted at the door and celebrated by all the members except the bishops and clergy.
As he got sicker, priests from nearby Saint-Sulpice came to the Hôtel de Villette, at first to visit, then to harass. They wanted a deathbed confession, a recanting they could publicize for propaganda’s purposes. There are varying accounts of what actually happened as Voltaire, in great pain, began to die. One witness claimed he was demented, gone mad; a priest said there was a smell of sulfur and smoke in the bedchamber as Voltaire’s soul descended into hell; others disputed all of this except that he was in pain and told the badgering priests to get out.
For his deathbed integrity, he was refused a Christian burial by the Church. His hearse left Paris with his body, which was buried on the grounds of an abbey in Champagne where his nephew was abbot, following a funeral Mass. Until 1791 he rested in peace. Then the Revolution, claiming him as one of its founding rebels—“he prepared us to be free” was incised on his coffin—reburied him in the Panthéon. Voltaire himself would have denounced a Paris gone mad with everything he loathed: intolerance, injustice, cruelty.
Inside Le Voltaire, the café on the corner of Quai Voltaire (open Tues–Sat for lunch and dinner, tel: 01.42.61.17.41) in the building where he died, a glass panel at a right angle to the bar is incised with some of his final words:
Je meurs en adorant dieu, en aimant mes amis, en ne haïssant pas mes enemis en detéstante la superstition. (I am dying adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, hating superstition.)
The dimly lit wood-paneled café bar with the velvet banquettes is a good place to ponder Voltaire and his eighteenth-century Paris late into a fall evening, away from the traffic on Quai Voltaire, the Seine and the Louvre in full view. His genius, his flawed humanity (the philandering and anti-Semitic resentments), his humor, and courage as a champion of civil liberties—he knew the limits and the dangers of enlightenment thinking even then in 1778 when the world looked new.
Without him, in the opinion of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution would never have happened.
Nearby
SQUARE HONORÉ-CHAMPION Through an arch to the right of the Institut de France, a statue of Voltaire stands on a green mound landscaped with flowers and trees. There’s an appealing modesty in this hidden site of memory.
LE BISTROT MAZARIN 42, rue Mazarine. Excellent for long lunches and good food. At the end of the street where Voltaire was born, in rue Guénégaud.
CAFÉ DE L’ODÉON www.theatre-odeon.eu. Inside the famous theater, up a grand staircase leading to the Grand Foyer. At the top of rue de l’Odéon, south of boulevard de Saint-Germain, surrounded by arcades. Quiet at midday, electric on theater nights.
