Voltaire’s Apocrypha Nicholas Cronk THE SELFLESS AUTHOR: VOLTAIRE’S APOCRYPHA La condition d’un homme de lettres ressemble à celle de l’âne du public, chacun le charge à sa volonté, et il faut que le pauvre animal porte tout. Lancez la fèche sans montrer la main.1 —Voltaire e are familiar with the idea that the growth of printing in the Renaissance Wbrought about an information explosion: the abundance of books in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created a situation in which, as Ann Blair has recently put it, there was just “too much to know.” But we too easily forget that a second revolution in printing occurred in the eighteenth century, one that brought about the extraordinary multiplication of presses and the lowering of costs; this revolution, no less great than the frst, generated a superabundance of books, as works were published and republished, in different formats for new and larger publics. In this Grub Street culture, books and information were cheap and cheapened, and Robert Darnton has described how eighteenth-century Paris was “an early information society,” in which polemical anecdotes and portraits of individuals were written and rewritten in a process of blossoming information that he compares to the twenty-frst- century blog. This revolution in the print world of the Enlightenment changed notions of authorship rapidly and radically; the marquis d’Argens seems to have had Voltaire in mind when he wrote: Ce qu’il y a de surprenant dans ce pays, c’est la fureur que l’on a de vouloir sans preuves attribuer certains livres, et certains écrits, à des gens qui les désavouent. Tu te tromperais, si tu croyais qu’en France un auteur n’est responsable que de ses propres ouvrages: il l’est de tous ceux qu’il plaît au public, et à ses ennemis, de lui attribuer. (2:210) 1. Letter to Cramer, 3 Nov. 1768, D15289; and letter to D’Alembert, 28 Sept. 1763, D11433. The number refers to Voltaire, Correspondence and Related Documents. Spelling of quotations from this edition have been modernized. The Romanic Review Volume 103 Numbers 3–4 © The Trustees of Columbia University 554 Nicholas Cronk Voltaire complains vociferously about the spread of worthless books and pamphlets in his own century: Adieu les beaux arts dans le siècle où nous sommes. Nous avons des vernisseurs de carrosses et pas un grand peintre, cent faiseurs de doubles croches, et pas un musicien, cent barbouilleurs de papier et pas un bon écrivain. Les beaux jours de la France sont passés. (14 July 1773, D18474) Mes anges, mes pauvres anges, le bon temps est passé. Vous avez quarante journaux, et pas un bon ouvrage; la barbarie est venue à force d’esprit. Que Dieu ait pitié des Welches! (20 Mar. 1775, D19380) Paradoxically, of course, this is precisely the publishing environment in which Voltaire thrived, and his prominence and celebrity as an author owe all to his mastery of the functioning of the print trade. The frst publication of Candide in 1759, to take only the most fagrant example, is nothing less than a media event: the appearance of seventeen editions across Europe in the space of twelve months left the authorities powerless to intervene. Moreover, in addition to the enormous number of printings of Voltaire’s own works, there exists a proliferation of other works attributed to Voltaire: fakes, forgeries, hoaxes, what I am here calling his apocrypha.2 What are we to make of this vast body of writing? And has it anything to tell us about Voltaire and the remarkably innovative style of authorship that he fostered?3 Defning the Corpus of Voltaire’s Apocrypha What does the corpus of Voltaire’s apocrypha look like? There are, to begin with, those works attributed to Voltaire and published after his death, like the pamphlet Voltaire aux Welches, facétie datée du Purgatoire (1780). The Lettres de Ninon de Lenclos were well-known, and in 1782 a publisher brought out a new edition with the enticing title Lettres de Ninon de Lenclos au marquis de Sévigné, avec sa vie: Nouvelle édition, augmentée d’une infnité de Notes & de Remarques philosophiques trouvées dans les papiers de M. de Voltaire, & enrichie du véritable portrait de Ninon. Although one letter 2. There have been two major attempts to catalog Voltaire’s apocryphal or attributed works: Bengesco 4:273–380; and Catalogue général des livres imprimés de la Bibliothèque nationale, vol. 214, pt. ii, col. 1781–823. 3. See also Cronk, “Voltaire and Authorship.” Voltaire’s Apocrypha 555 recycles the well-known tale of Ninon de Lenclos leaving the young Voltaire a legacy to buy books, Voltaire has absolutely nothing to do with this work, and the notes, few in number, are descriptive rather than philosophical. The reference to Voltaire on the title page (reinforced by the place of publication being given as “Kehl”) is nothing more than a naked commercial attempt to excite the purchaser’s interest. Voltaire’s name came to be much used in the revolutionary period. In 1790 there appeared a Discours aux Welches, followed swiftly by a Nouveau Discours aux Welches, par Blaise Vadé, fls d’Antoine et neveu de Guillaume: Précédé d’un avertissement qu’il faut lire, pour l’intérêt de l’innocence accusée; in 1791 there appeared a continuation of La Pucelle in seven cantos, “poème héroï-comique par M. de Voltaire, trouvé à la Bastille, le 14 juillet 1789.” In a quite different mode, the author of an Epître de Voltaire à M. Beuchot (1817) wrote in the voice of Voltaire to express his admiration for the great Voltaire editor of the day, Adrien Beuchot, while wondering why he, Voltaire, continued to provoke such controversy. Voltaire’s afterlife was, in all senses, apocryphal. In none of the examples quoted above is the reader ever intended to believe in Voltaire’s authorship: these are works that toy with the name of Voltaire so as to pay homage to his authority. I propose here to focus on the body of works attributed to Voltaire that were published in his lifetime. Intelligent and informed readers accepted these works as being by Voltaire, and so they contribute powerfully to their and our sense of Voltaire’s authorship: to avoid the potentially misleading connotations of terms such as hoax or forgery—and to emphasize their sense of quasi-biblical authority—I call these works Voltaire’s apocrypha. The eighteenth century was a golden age for literary fraud and forgery—in Britain, we think of James Macpherson’s invention of Ossian, Thomas Chatterton’s creation of medieval documents, William Henry Ireland’s fabrications of Shakespeare, and many more.4 So the climate favored literary pastiche, and any prolifc and successful author was liable to be a magnet for imitators.5 Voltaire’s apocrypha are in a different league, however, in terms of both quantity and quality. The business of attributing works to Voltaire begins early, when he is still in his twenties: Oedipe is frst published in 1719, and a Dutch edition of the play appears in that same year, “avec quelques autres pièces,” including Le Ballet de la sottise (by Jean-Frédéric Barnard) and other verses not by Voltaire. This process will 4. See Haywood, ch. 2. 5. As a general rule, anonymous works are regularly attributed to prolifc authors, often on the slimmest of evidence. The Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de Perse has been attributed to Voltaire on the slimmest of arguments (see Bengesco 4:325–34). In eighteenth-century English literature, there is an entire industry devoted to attributing, deattributing, and reattributing works to Daniel Defoe (see, e.g., Baine, Rothman, and Rudman). 556 Nicholas Cronk continue for the rest of his life, and indeed, as I have shown, posthumously. The apocrypha that appeared in his lifetime include works in a wide range of genres, from poetry to prose, from theater to polemical pamphlet. We are talking here about a vast corpus—and one that continues to grow, as we make further discoveries. How Are Apocryphal Works Attached to Voltaire’s Name? A practical question, to begin with: what is the mechanism by which readers attribute works to Voltaire? Very broadly, there are two categories of apocryphal work, those that are signed for Voltaire and those that appear anonymously. 1. False Attribution First, there are those works that declare themselves to be written by Voltaire. That in itself should make us suspicious, when we recall how rarely and playfully Voltaire signs his own works.6 The signing of an apocryphal work can take different forms. In some cases, Voltaire’s name appears in full on the title page; on other occasions we fnd the characteristic signature “V.” or “M. de V.” Some authors go so far as to invent a typically Voltairean pseudonym, as in the case of the Essai sur la poésie lyri-comique, par Jérôme Carré (1770). Grimm is not taken in by this work: “L’auteur anonyme, en empruntant un des noms facétieux employés par M. de Voltaire, vous avertit d’abord qu’il voudrait être aussi gai et aussi plaisant que le patriarche; mais le caractère des emprunteurs, c’est de n’avoir rien en propre” (15 Mar. 1771, 9:270). Sometimes Voltaire inspires his imitators to be as playful as he is, so one author imagines a letter written by an imaginary rabbi to a Voltairean pseudonym, the Lettre du rabin Aaron Mathathaï, à Guillaume Vadé, traduite du hollandais par le Lévite Joseph Ben-Jonathan, et accompagnée de Notes plus utiles— and it is worth noting here the further nod to Voltaire in the reference to “useful notes,” a characteristic authorial device.