The Friends of Voltaire

D’alembert: the Thinker

Of that vast intellectual movement which prepared the way for the most stupendous event in history, the French Revolution, Voltaire was the creative spirit.

But there was a group of men, less famous but not less great, who also heralded the coming of the new heaven and the new earth; who were in a strict sense friends and fellow-workers of Voltaire, although one or two of them were personally little known to him; whose aim was his aim, to destroy from among the people ‘ignorance, the curse of God,’ and who were, as he was, the prophets and the makers of a new dispensation.

That many of these light bringers were themselves full of darkness, is true enough; but they brought the light not the less, and in their own breasts burnt one cleansing flame, the passion for humanity.

For the rest, they were the typical men of the most enthralling age in history--each with his human story as well as his public purpose, and his part to play on the glittering stage of the social life of old France, as well as in the great events which moulded her destiny and affected the fate of Europe.

Often talked about but little known, or vaguely remembered only as the patient lover of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, Jean Lerond d’Alembert, the successor of Newton, the author of the Preface of the Encyclopædia, deserves an enduring fame.

On a November evening in the year 1717, one hundred and eighty-nine years ago, a gendarme, going his round in Paris, discovered on the steps of the church of Saint-Jean Lerond, once the baptistery of Notre-Dame, a child of a few hours old. The story runs that the baby was richly clad, and had on his small person marks which would lead to his identification. But the fact remains that he was abandoned in mid-winter, left without food or shelter to take his feeble chance of life and of the cold charity of some such institution as the Enfants Trouvés. It was no thanks to the mother who bore him that the gendarme who found him had compassion on his helpless infancy. The man had the baby hurriedly christened after his first cradle, Jean Baptiste Lerond, took him to a working woman whom he could trust, and who nursed him--for six weeks say some authorities, for a few days say others--in the little village of Crémery near Montdidier.

At the end of the time there returned to Paris a certain gallant General Destouches, who had been abroad in the execution of his military duties. He went to visit Madame de Tencin, and from her learnt of the birth and the abandonment of their son.

No study of the eighteenth century can be complete without mention of the extraordinary women who were born with that marvellous age, and fortunately died with it. Cold, calculating, and corrupt, with the devilish cleverness of a Machiavelli, with the natural instinct of love used for gain and for trickery, and with the natural instinct of maternity wholly absent, d’Alembert’s mother was the most perfect type of this monstrous class. Small, keen, alert, with a little sharp face like a bird’s, brilliantly eloquent, bold, subtle, tireless, a great minister of intrigue, and insatiably ambitious--such was Madame de Tencin. It was she who assisted at the meetings of statesmen, and gave Marshal Richelieu a plan and a line of conduct. It was she who managed the affairs of her brother Cardinal de Tencin, and, through him, tried to effect peace between France and Frederick in the midst of the Seven Years’ War. It was she who fought the hideous incompetence of Maurepas, the Naval Minister; and it was she who summed herself up to Fontenelle when she laid her hand on her heart, saying, ‘Here is nothing but brain.’

From the moment of his birth she had only one wish with regard to her child--to be rid of him. A long procession of lovers had left her wholly incapable of shame. But the child would be a worry--and she did not mean to be worried! If the father had better instincts--well, let him follow them. He did. He employed Molin, Madame de Tencin’s doctor, to find out the baby’s nurse, Anne Lemaire, and claim the little creature from her.

The great d’Alembert told Madame Suard many years after how Destouches drove all round Paris with the baby (‘with a head no bigger than an apple’) in his arms, trying to find for him a suitable foster-mother. But little Jean Baptiste Lerond seemed to be dying, and no one would take him. At last, however, Destouches discovered, living in the Rue Michel-Lecomte, a poor glazier’s wife, whose motherly soul was touched by the infant’s piteous plight, and who took him to her love and care, and kept him there for fifty years.

History has concerned itself much less with Madame Rousseau than with Madame de Tencin. Yet it was the glazier’s wife who was d’Alembert’s real mother after all. If she was low-born and ignorant, she had yet the happiest of all acquirements--she knew how to win love and to keep it. The great d’Alembert, universally acclaimed as one of the first intellects of Europe, had ever for this simple person, who defined a philosopher as ‘a fool who torments himself during his life that people may talk of him when he is dead,’ the tender reverence which true greatness, and only true greatness perhaps, can bear towards homely goodness. From her he learnt the blessing of peace and obscurity. From his association with her he learnt his noble idea--difficult in any age, but in that age of degrading luxury and self-indulgence well nigh impossible--that it is sinful to enjoy superfluities while other men want necessaries. His hidden life in the dark attic above her husband’s shop made it possible for him to do that life’s work. For nearly half a century he knew no other home. When he left her roof at last, in obedience to the voice of the most masterful of all human passions, he still retained for her the tenderest affection, and bestowed upon her and her grandchildren the kindness of one of the kindest hearts that ever beautified a great intelligence.

Little Jean Baptiste was put to a school in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where he passed as Madame Rousseau’s son. General Destouches paid the expenses of this schooling, took a keen pleasure in the child’s brightness and precocity, and came often to see him. One day he persuaded Madame de Tencin to accompany him. The seven-year-old Jean Baptiste remembered that scene all his life. ‘Confess, Madame,’ says Destouches, when they had listened to the boy’s clever answers to his master’s questions, ‘that it was a pity to abandon such a child.’ Madame rose at once. ‘Let us go. I see it is going to be very uncomfortable for me here.’ She never came again.

Destouches died in 1726, when his son was nine years old. He left the boy twelve hundred livres, and commended him to the care of his relatives. Through them, at the age of twelve, Jean Baptiste received the great favour of being admitted to the College of the Four Nations, founded by Mazarin, and in 1729 the most exclusive school in France. Fortunately for its new scholar it was something besides fashionable, and did its best to satisfy his extraordinary thirst for knowledge. His teachers were all priests and Jansenists, and nourished their apt scholar on Jansenist literature, imbuing him with the fashionable theories of Descartes. How soon was it that they began to hope and dream that in the gentle student called Lerond, living on a narrow pittance above a tradesman’s shop, they had found a new Pascal, a mighty enemy of the Archfiend Jesuitism?

But beneath his timid and modest exterior there lay already an intellect of marvellous strength and clearness, a relentless logic that tested and weighed every principle instilled in him, every theory masquerading as a fact. He quickly became equally hostile to both Jesuit and Jansenist. It was at school that he learnt to hate with an undying hatred, religion--the religion that in forty years launched, on account of the Bull Unigenitus, forty thousand lettres de cachet, that made men forget not only their Christianity but their humanity, and give themselves over body and soul to the devouring fever called fanaticism. At school also he conceived his passion for mathematics, that love of exact truth which no Jansenist priest, however subtle, could make him regard as a dangerous error.

When he was eighteen, in 1735, he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts and changed his name. D’Alembert is thought to be an anagram on Baptiste Lerond. Anagrams were fashionable, and one Arouet, who had elected to be called Voltaire, had made such an alteration of good omen. D’Alembert went on studying at the College, but throughout his studies mathematics were wooing him from all other pursuits. The taste, however, was so unlucrative, and the income from twelve hundred livres so small, that a profession became a necessity. The young man conscientiously qualified for a barrister. But ‘he loved only good causes’ and was naturally shy. He never appeared at the Bar.

Then he bethought him of medicine. He would be a doctor! But again and again the siren voice of his dominant taste called him back to her. His friends--those omniscient friends always ready to put a spoke in the wheel of genius--entreated him to be practical, to remember his poverty, and to make haste to grow rich. He yielded to them so far that one day he carried all his geometrical books to one of their houses, and went back to the garret at Madame Rousseau’s to study medicine and nothing else in the world. But the geometrical problems disturbed his sleep.