Sly Friend of Kings

...Wayne Andrews' new Voltaire is a worthy addition to these previous efforts, for it is written with the wit and economy that marked its subject at his best...

...They would have been much more ruthless in dealing with him than Frederick ever was during their strange relationship as penurious patron and disrespectful client...

...Voltaire attracts biographers, and it is a compliment to his memory that most of them have been men and women of spirit and high intelligence, including Richard Aldington, Laura Riding and Nancy Mitford...

...It has not only consistently encouraged the avant-garde in American writing...

...Voltairean criticism has become the weapon of the powerless...

...He was not in the slightest troubled by taking his niece, Mme...

...I'd rather never wear a wig again...

...for example, he raised contributions from both Greats, Frederick and Catherine, to support his campaigns for persecuted Protestants...

...Indeed, he treated even the mild doctrinaires of the Enlightenment almost as disrespectfully as he did the dogmatists of the Roman Catholic Church...

...There were times when he shamed his royal acquaintances into humanitarian gestures that seemed inconsistent with their general records...

...It is a measure of how the world began to change shortly afterward that one cannot imagine similar encounters with the modern heirs of those despots...

...It was he, or rather his works, that formed my intellect and my judgment...

...Thinking over that remark in the light of Andrews' study, it struck me that attitudes toward the sage of Ferney are largely determined by temperament...

...Forty-five years later, it is hard to pay sufficient tribute to New Directions' contribution...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "The Writer and Politics," "Anarchism, " and "The Canadians" It is a truism that Voltaire ranks as a father-or at least a grandfather-of the French Revolution...

...He received official revolutionary sanctification...

...he had no democratic objection to associating with nobles and monarchs, whom he regarded as his mental equals or inferiors, and toward whom he behaved with exemplary cynicism...

...It is published by New Directions, and the dust jacket reminds us that, under the nom de plume of Montagu O' Reilly, Wayne Andrews wrote Pianos of Sympathy, the first book this house brought out when James Laughlin began his career as one of our great publishers in 1936...

...Catherine once said of Voltaire: " He is my master...

...Moreover, it follows the historical principle that made Voltaire's The Age of Louis XIVsuch a landmark in historical writing: Detail is subordinated to the essential outlines?in this case of a life-so that in a relatively few pages we are given a sharp, bright picture as full of character as the great portrait sculptures of Jean-Antoine Hou-don that have fixed our image of Voltaire in his still brilliant later years...

...Quite apart from providing an occasion to think again about one of the seminal figures of our Western culture, the appearance of Voltaire is a literary occasion of another kind...

...And in the sense that he taught men to criticize all things held holy, whether they were religious dogmas or the pretensions of royalty, he did help to prepare-as Beaumarchais did-a mental climate in which the Revolution could incubate...

...If you are inclined to see the world sentimentally, then Rousseau is probably your man...

...The Revolution would not long have had room for the man who said: "The people are not worthy of governing themselves...

...1 couldn't stand the sight of my wigmaker posing as a legislator...

...We were discussing a philosophy for growing old w hen Earle remarked, "Of course, we share the advantage of both being Voltaireans...

...His strategy of evasive yet invasive reason remains, though...

...Denis, as a mistress...

...we simply have to invent new tactics, new sallies from the garden of Voltaire...

...They were direct human contacts, however, between people whose minds had not been fixed by dogma...

...However, I gave up that habit more than 60 years ago, and unfortunately can't start over again...

...I treated him as though he were Solomon...

...On the other hand, if you see the world with irony and are willing to admit that a statement like "Friendship is a thousand times more important to me than love" is at the minimum worth considering, then Voltaire will be your man and you will feel the fire that shines through the ice...

...He treated me as though I were divine," Voltaire once said of Frederick the Great...

...Such meetings are unthinkable, for the rational and reasonable attitude to life that Voltaire represented more than anything else no longer exists on the level where power is currently exercised...

...Voltaire and Hitler...

...All these epithets do not cost anything...

...it has made available to English-speaking readers everywhere the works of those free spirits who have been the true heirs of Voltaire, the modern French classics, from Charles Baudelaire and the Gustave Flaubert of the Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, down to Raymond Queneau and Louis Ferdinand Celine in our time...

...In his concern for personal tragedies, his belief that happiness is a reasonable goal and his distrust of sweeping solutions to human problems, you will discern the signature of a man who not only ceased to go on all fours but constantly encouraged the upright individuality that-for good and evil equally-distinguishes man from the other beasts...

...Anyone who reads your book will want to crawl on all fours," he once wrote to Rousseau, whose sentimental deification of the idea of the natural man disgusted him...

...in 1791 his bones, like those of Rousseau (whom he once described as "the enemy of all mankind"), were buried in the Pantheon...

...From the perspective of the late 20th century, there may well appear to be something grotesque in these encounters between the Enlightenment's great iconoclast and the tyrants of his day...

...The narrow theoreticians who took control with the triumph of the Jacobins would soon have come to agree with Frederick the Great that Voltaire was "good to read, but a dangerous man to have anything to do with...

...Believing passionately in the rights of individuals, as he showed in the vast labor he undertook to gain justice for persecuted French Protestants like the Calas and Sirven families, Voltaire would have been suspicious in the extreme of anything so irrational as a political doctrine that claimed to establish universal virtue...

...Where she did extricate herself from the Byzantine darkness of Romanov despotism, Voltaire was doubtless an important influence...

...Since Voltaire saw others as individuals, not as types or groups, he refused to allow his relationships to be ruled by convention of any kind...

...But revolutions, like the Greek gods, destroy their fathers, and there seems little doubt that if Voltaire had been born a decade or so later he would have found himself forced, as was Condor-cet in 1794, to choose between poison and the guillotine...

...Just as I was about to start reading this book, my friend Earle Birney, one of Canada's finest poets, came to visit...

...Voltaire and Stalin...

...Voltaire will seem cold by comparison...