Voltaire and the Monks

Abstract

‘You can never cross the Pont Neuf without seeing a monk, a white horse and a whore’, ran the proverb – which was hard luck on the two ladies who stood there and saw the first two but could not find the third: ‘Pour la catin, vous et moi nous n’en sommes pas en peines’. Members of the religious Orders in their costumes of black, white, brown and grey were a feature of the scene in the streets of every town, and everyone had a monk or nun among their relatives. Voltaire’s sardonic examples of the characteristic features of the civilisation of his day included them: ‘man will always be what he is now; this does not mean to say, however, that there will always be fine cities, cannons firing a shot of 24 lbs weight, comic operas and convents of nuns’. Routine gossip slipped naturally into analogies drawn from the cloister – she is as fat as a monk; they were like children at a window crying out when they first see a Capucin friar; you are like a novice who climbs the walls looking for a lover, while the nuns in the chapel pray for her. Voltaire uses monastic titles in jocular descriptions of himself and his friends. He is the ‘old hermit’, the ‘lay brother’, the ‘solitary’, ‘brother Voltaire, dead to the world and in love with his cell and his convent’, and once, when his play Octave et le jeune Pompée was a flop, he decided to be, for a while, ‘the little ex-Jesuit’, ‘le petit défroqué’. He hopes ‘brother’ Helvétius will be elected to the Academy: ‘these are the most ardent prayers of the monk Voltairius, who from his lonely cell unites himself in spirit with his brethren’. The badinage of monastic seclusion hinted at protest at his long exile from Paris; it also served to mask the social distinctions, which, in spite of familiarity and, even, friendship, were never forgotten between the court grandees and the intellectuals. It was easier for Choiseul to write to him as ‘mon cher solitaire’, just as Voltaire avoided routine sycophancy by writing, with exaggerated deference, to Richelieu as ‘mon héros’.