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VOLTAIRE ALMIGHTY

BLOOMSBURY

Chapter One

How Zozo came to live in a beautiful courtyard, and how he was kicked out of the same

Once upon a time in Paris, in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice, there lived a young boy whom nature had endowed with the quickest of wits and the most wilful of dispositions. His soul - if he had one - was written upon his countenance. He was quite sound in his judgement, and he had the most straightforward of minds. His family nicknamed him Zozo: he later called himself Voltaire. While he believed in God Almighty, he none the less considered that there was still work to be done. 'God created man free,' he wrote at the age of seventy-three: 'and that is what I have become.' This is the story, of his extraordinary life, the story of a search for freedom.

Zozo was probably a bastard. Like Candide, the hero of his most famous work. Officially little François-Marie was born in Paris on Sunday, 21 November 1694, the second surviving son of François Arouet, a lawyer, and his wife Marie-Marguerite (née Daumard). Unofficially - but according to Voltaire himself; on several occasions - he entered the best of all possible worlds on Friday, 20 February 1694, the son of the chevalier Guérin de Rochebrune (or Roquebrune), a writer of popular songs. This was certainly his preferred paternal origin, and he defended his mother's honour by claiming that it lay in her preference for 'a man of wit and intelligence' - 'a musketeer, officer, and author' - over 'Monsieur his father who, in the matter of genius, was a very mediocre man'.

Little is known about Rochebrune except that he was descended from an ancient, aristocratic family from the Haute Auvergne and died of 'dropsy' in 1719. Though he wrote the libretto for a cantata on the subject of Orpheus, he appears mostly to have written songs of a rather more facetious and ephemeral kind. Curiously Voltaire includes a reference to him in a short verse tale he wrote in 1716, Le Cadenas (The Padlock), in which a sixty-year-old husband seeks to ensure his beautiful young wife's fidelity by the imposition of a chastity belt. Was the son paying tribute to his father by imitating his bawdy? Quite possibly. Voltaire may even have met Rochebrune, because the chevalier is known to have been living in the close vicinity of the Arouet family in 1707. But when did young François-Marie learn that he was his real father? Was there perhaps a physical resemblance? We do not know.

But we do know that Rochebrune was a client of Zozo's ostensible father, and it is likely that this is how the musketeer-lyricist first attracted his mother's attention. Marie-Marguerite Arouet came from a good Parisian family. Her father held an important position in the Paris parlement and stood one rung beneath that of noble on the ladder of social status - reflected in heraldic quartering - which was then so important. Accordingly, when she married François Arouet on 7 June 1683, she represented a step up for him (and he a handsome purse for her). In the marriage certificate her age is stated as 'about 22' - clearly this family were not sticklers for birthdays - and so she was about twenty-three when her first child, Armand-François, was born on 18 March the following year. He died soon afterwards - as did approximately 50 per cent of infants born at that time - and he was followed almost exactly a year later by Armand, on 22 March 1685, who survived to become Zozo's elder 'brother'. On 28 December 1686 came Marguerite-Catherine, subsequent mother of three - including the eldest, Marie-Louise, whom Voltaire would later take as his mistress and companion for the last thirty years of his life. Robert Arouet, born on 18 July 1689, fared no better than Armand-François. Thereafter Marie-Marguerite Arouet appears to have favoured a rest - or practised birth control - before the happy event of five years later that brought the future hero of the Enlightenment into being.

Was it a happy event? Without being quite a Madame Bovary, Marie-Marguerite Arouet would seem to have been unwilling to forgo some of the legitimate if illegal pleasures of adultery. She had done her maternal duty with scrupulous statistical exactitude - two dead, two alive, one boy, one girl - and it was time for some fun, especially as wet-nurses and nannies did all the hard work. Her husband was eleven years older and somewhat suspicious of pleasure. She began to mix with another of his clients, the legendary courtesan Ninon de Lenclos, who had been one of the most celebrated salon hostesses of the century, at once a great intellect and a full-blooded proponent of free love and freethinking. And she began to meet some of the young and not-so-young men who gathered like moths round Ninon's ageing but still beguiling flame, men of wit and talent and amorous designs ...

On the basis of the limited available information the likeliest scenario is that Marie-Marguerite fell for Rochebrune and became pregnant by him in the course of 1693. When the child was born on 20 February 1694 (discreetly, at Chatenay, then a country village some five miles north of the centre of Paris), it was sickly and not expected to live - which might, in the circumstances, have been helpful. The baby was duly 'ondoyé', the French term for the unofficial baptisms performed even to this day in bidet, bath, or kitchen sink by doting Catholic parents (or nervous, interfering grandparents) just in case some accident should befall their treasured offspring before its day in church and so deprive it of eternal bliss. Indeed something similar had happened four years earlier with young Armand, who had arrived in such a precarious state of health that eleven days elapsed before he could be properly baptized. Perhaps Marie-Marguerite's poor record in producing viable male heirs would allow her highly respectable husband to avoid the necessity of legitimating a poetaster's bastard son as his own. For how else does one explain the enormous gap of nine months that elapsed before the official baptism in November? And why nine months? Was that the deal? If baby François-Marie could survive for the same time outside the womb as he had within, then François Arouet would do the decent thing? For the long delay suggests that he knew the child was not his own. At any rate the sickly baby did survive, and so began a life of stubborn insistence that would inconvenience many more people than just his parents.

But how, in the small world of Paris, does one publicly baptize a bastard child of nine months without setting tongues wagging? The godparents of Zozo's elder brother Armand had been the answer to a parvenu's prayers. His godmother was the duchesse de Saint-Simon, whose husband had been a member of the conseil d'état - the highest council of ministers - under Louis XIV. The godfather was the duc de Richelieu, father of Voltaire's lifelong friend, and nephew of the great Armand du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, who had become prime minister under Louis XIII at the age of thirty-nine and more or less single-handedly governed France until his death eighteen years later in 1642. Like François Arouet's family the Richelieus originally came from the Poitou region in the west of France, which may explain the connection. But compare baby François-Marie's godparents, whose Christian names not only became his own but were - oh so coincidentally - also those of his mother and supposed father. The godmother, Marie Daumart (née Parent) was the wife of a cousin on his mother's side, Symphorien (or Sébastien) Daumard, a highly placed official in the royal constabulary whose title of écuyer or squire placed him on the bottom rung of the aristocratic ladder (entitling him to one heraldic quarter). This godmother therefore constituted the best the Arouets could do in social terms while also guaranteeing discretion by being a member of the family.

The godfather was François de Castagnèe, abbé de Châteauneuf. As an 'abbé' he had - like so many male offspring of the French aristocracy in the eighteenth century who had the misfortune not to be first-born - received a theological training and assumed a quasi-ecclesiastical status without being fully ordained. Often this meant being able to derive an income from a benefice, or living, without having to work, itself such an unaristocratic thing to do. In this capacity the abbé could lend an air of religious propriety to the proceedings. Moreover he was well connected: his brother was a senior diplomat. He was also a friend of the family and so could be relied on for his discretion. Such religious scruples as he might have had at becoming godfather to a nine-month-old bastard would have been offset by the freethinking spirit in which he, too, frequented the circle of Ninon de Lenclos. (He later boasted that it was to his own handsome person that the ageing beauty had granted her last favours - as a sixtieth-birthday present to herself.) Moreover he doted on the child and visited the wet-nurse daily to advise on the best means of ensuring its survival. Were it not for Voltaire's own testimony about Rochebrune, one might even suspect the abbé of having been his father. But perhaps he was a close friend of Rochebrune - as well as Marie-Marguerite - and saw it as his duty to take his godfatherly role seriously on their behalf. Indeed in 1751 Voltaire would write that it was entirely thanks to Châteauneuf that he had been properly baptized at all. As we shall see, this godfatherly solicitude would also extend to ensuring that young François was introduced to Ninon de Lenclos in the autumn of 1704. He was ten (or nine), and she was eighty-three: their meeting would represent a further baptism of sorts, and it would transpire that her favours extended beyond the sexual.

And so, on Monday, 22 November 1694, Zozo officially became the son of François Arouet. This man whom we must henceforth call his father had been born in Paris on 19 August 1649. He was the son of another François (born c.1605), who, in very early adulthood, had come from the village of Saint-Loup near Airvault in the Poitou to settle in Paris as a silk and cloth merchant. The family had been in the tanning business originally, and Voltaire's father and grandfather could trace their solid merchant heritage back to Hélénus Arouet at the end of the fifteenth century. From tanning, the business had evolved over the generations into one that traded also in wool and cloth, but grandfather Arouet's move to Paris and into the luxury commodity of silk represented a definite step upmarket. He married a certain Marie Mallepart in 1636, who bore him seven children (and lived till 1688). Voltaire's father was the youngest of these and clearly decided to raise the family's status still further by studying law. On 19 February 1675, at the age of twenty-five, he bought a practice as a notary and worked hard to better himself before marrying somewhat above his station eight years later.

But real social advancement came from working for the king. If one had the money and the right credentials it was possible to buy a position in the administration, a royal office. Such offices had been created and sold by the crown in large numbers since the early sixteenth century. They were an excellent source of capital. The king would create a new court or tribunal to exercise judicial or administrative functions in a particular area - taxation, for example - and the consequent new offices would be offered for sale: a small salary was attached, plus various privileges, exemptions and fee-generating opportunities that made them highly remunerative. Such offices could then be sold on or bequeathed like franchises, and - as in the case of the husband of Voltaire's godmother - they sometimes brought entitlement to hereditary noble rank. Accordingly, on 16 December 1692, François Arouet sold his notary's practice in the Châtelet, and on 10 September 1696 - having now acquired his new 'son' - bought a position as 'receveur des épices' in the Chambre des Comptes. The latter was a so-called 'sovereign court', charged with the supervision of royal finances and the receipt of taxes: in François Arouet's case, the taxes levied on the lucrative spice trade. The required expertise was a legal training and a head for figures: the reward was a healthy commission on all tax raised. Not to mention some very prestigious accommodation in the Palais de Justice, the former medieval palace of the kings of France.

For the first five years the new taxman-cum-magistrate had to bide his time as the assistant to his predecessor, but once he had assumed the succession the Arouet family duly departed from their house on the rue Guénégaud, which runs down to the river beside the Hôtel des Monnaies and the Institut de France. From this address in the parish of Saint-André-des-Arts on the Left Bank, they moved into a ten-bedroom house on the Île de la Cité, complete with cellar, attic and stables. On one side the house gave on to their private garden, while on another they looked out on to the central courtyard of the Palais - and the imposing prospect of the Sainte-Chapelle. They lived at the end of the rue Nazareth, near the rue Bethléhem and the rue Jérusalem, and so it was clear that they had arrived in some style at the Holy of Holies: the legal and administrative centre of Paris.

Zozo could hardly have felt more legitimate. Nor more sad. For his mother died soon afterwards, on 13 July 1701, aged 'about 40'. How or why? We do not know. This left François Arouet to finish bringing up his three children, Armand (16), Catherine (14), and Francois-Marie (7ish) on his own. He certainly had the means to do it. In 1696 he had paid 240,000 livres for the post in the Chambre des Comptes - that is to say, over a thousand times the annual pay of a well-paid manual worker. He owned two houses in Paris, one in the rue Saint-Denis (where his grandfather had set up in business on first arriving in Paris, with a shop called 'The Peacock') and the other in the rue Maubué, as well as a sizeable property in the country at Gentilly. This he would sell in 1707 in order to buy another, at Chatenay, with courtyard, garden, and six bedrooms, which he retained until his death on 1 January 1722. In Paris he ran two berlins - a four-wheeled covered carriage with an external seat behind for the footman. On 27 January 1709 he married his daughter off to his own mirror-image: Pierre-François Mignot, the son of a merchant and now - like himself - a conseiller du Roi (or King's Counsel) and an important official in the Chambre des Comptes. As a dowry he gave Catherine the house in the rue Maubué, plus 60,000 livres, plus a pearl necklace and a diamond, together worth 5,000 livres, plus a 'bottom drawer' of conjugal necessities worth a further 1,000. This was the dowry gift of a wealthy man. When he died, his estate was worth 367,845 livres, all paid - of which Zozo would get a third. Though he very nearly didn't.

Such wealth did not derive solely from his official post at the Chambre des Comptes. Having sold his notary's practice Voltaire's father had continued to work as a freelance legal consultant to wealthy clients. And he was also a money-lender. In those days of the most rudimentary banking arrangements, it was customary for the rich to make money by lending to the needy, and the posher the needy the better. He had lent the duchesse de Saint-Simon fifty écus (the equivalent of 150 livres) back in 1689 - for godmotherly services rendered? - but she had proved an unreliable debtor and the IOU was still among his papers when he died. Other debtors, however, must have contributed to the Arouet fortune and paid good rates of interest. And his youngest son would later follow most profitably in his usurious footsteps.

Thus by the summer of 1701 Zozo had moved into a beautiful courtyard at the heart of the best of all possible cities. One of his neighbours was the writer Nicolas Boileau (or Boileau-Despréaux). Born in 1636, the son of an official in the Paris parlement, he had studied law at the Sorbonne and become an advocate. But when he inherited on his father's death in 1657 he was then able to devote himself to literature. In 1674 he published his Art poétique, a didactic poem in four cantos modelled on Horace's Ars poetica and which later achieved comparable status as the authoritative statement of neo-classical aesthetics in France. Accordingly Boileau is often seen as the founding father of French literary criticism. He knew the great writers of the seventeenth century as friends - Racine, Molière, La Fontaine, etc. - and his election to the Académie Française in 1684, at the behest of Louis XIV, set the seal on an illustrious career. And there he lived, just across the way: the lawyer who had legislated for poetry. Voltaire's mother knew him, albeit judging him to be rather a silly man for one who had written such a good poem, and there is every reason to suppose that her son, too, met him and was thrilled to rub shoulders with such a celebrity.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from VOLTAIRE ALMIGHTY by Roger Pearson Copyright © 2005 by Roger Pearson. Excerpted by permission.
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