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. Attribution may also be by way of circumlocution, as in the case of De la prédication, par l’auteur du Dictionnaire philosophique. The place and date of publication of this work are given as “Aux Délices, 1766,” a complex double bluff, since Voltaire himself would never have signed by such a circumlocution; and readers in the know would have realized that in 1766 the patriarch of Ferney had long since ceased to live at Les Délices in the Genevan republic. Finally, attribution to Voltaire may be expressed indirectly by the publisher. Tronchin addressed a public letter to Pictet on February 8, 1767, about the troubles in Geneva, and on
6. See Cronk, “Voltaire and the Posture of Anonymity.” Voltaire’s Apocrypha 557
March 19 the Mémoires secrets published a facetious reply, allegedly from Pictet, explaining that “on attribue même cette facétie à un grand poète, si bien accoutumé à tourner tout en ridicule.” Damning by association is a technique familiar from modern tabloid journalism. In many cases, the false attribution is never meant to persuade or sound even plausible. The Adieux de M. de Voltaire aux Muses (1739), a poem by Piron, is quite clearly a satire against Voltaire (indeed “M. de Voltaire” is named in the footnotes). Similarly, the poem Ma Confession: Par M. de V*** (“À Genève, chez les Frères Cramer, 1760”) is another virulent satire directed against Voltaire, although composed in Voltaire’s frst person. Works such as these are not true apocryphal works: they exploit Voltaire’s name purely for propagandistic purposes, to write satires against him. The Testament of Voltaire was almost a genre in itself, cultivated by writers who keenly anticipated the great man’s demise. La Relation de la maladie, de la confession, de la fn de M. de Voltaire (1761) was reprinted the following year with another work, Le Testament de M. de Voltaire, trouvé parmi ses papiers après sa mort (1762). Later, in 1770, appeared the Testament politique de M. de V***, now thought to be by the lawyer J.-H. Marchand; it was reprinted the following year as the Testament politique de M. de Voltaire. In the case of all these works, the satirical intent is self-evident, and the attribution to Voltaire deliberately and provocatively implausible. In other cases an attribution to Voltaire seems motivated not by any satirical intention but by purely commercial considerations. A collection of verse appeared in 1715 under the title Portefeuille de Mme ***; it contains not a single word by Voltaire (then aged twenty-one), but when the work was reprinted in 1751, it appeared as Le Portefeuille de Mme de T***, donné au public par M. de V***, and just to make sure, the place of publication is given as “Berlin.” Another such example might be De l’esprit, par M. de V*** (“Genève, 1762”); neither the subject matter nor the style is particularly Voltairean, but the title, with its echo of Helvétius, sounds potentially dangerous, and the addition of “M. de V***” adds spice to the title page. Fréron, writing in L’Année littéraire, was not deceived:
A la tête d’une petite brochure in-12 de 79 pages, intitulée De l’Esprit, on lit par M. de V***, et le lieu de l’impression est désigné Genève. Beaucoup de gens, à l’inspection de cette bagatelle, l’attribueront à M. de Voltaire; il faut croire que c’est une petite supercherie innocente pour donner quelque vogue à ce morceau, qui, en lui-même, est très peu de chose. (1762, 2:340)
More interesting are the true apocryphal works, where the attribution to Voltaire seems at least plausible and the use of his name is not simply 558 Nicholas Cronk opportunistic. Take the Epître à Messieurs La Beaumelle, Fréron, Clément et Sabatier, suivie de la Profession de foi, autre Epître du même auteur: Par M. de V*** (1773), which poses a double challenge. The frst Épître, addressed to Voltaire’s notorious enemies, could well be by Voltaire; and it is followed by another work, “Ma profession de foi,” which begins:
Je n’ai point la sotte manie D’annoncer, la trompette en main, Des prétentions au génie: Je suis un bon diable d’humain Qui rimaille par fantaisie. (19)
The modesty topos here hardly sounds typically Voltairean, but again these slight verses might, just possibly, come from the voice of the great man. The work as a whole is written to defend Voltaire and to tease the reader—even Voltaire was puzzled, as he wrote to Marmontel:
J’ai reçu une brochure imprimée chez Valade. C’est une épitre à Sabatier et compagnie. J’ignore à qui j’en suis redevable. Je soupçonne M. l’abbé Duvernet, et encore un autre abbé dont j’ignore la demeure. Je ne m’attendais pas, je l’avoue, à être défendu par des gens d’église. Ceux-ci me paraissent de la petite église des gens d’esprit, et du petit nombre des élus. Dans l’embarras où je suis de savoir à quel saint je dois des actions de grâce, je m’adresse à vous, mon cher ami. Je vous envoie ma réponse tout ouverte. Je vous supplie d’y mettre l’adresse, et de l’envoyer à l’auteur qui est sans doute connu de vous ou de M. D’Alembert. (9 Aug. 1773, D18503)
The Epître à Henri-Quatre, sur l’avènement de Louis XVI: Par M. de V. (1774) provides a parallel example. Voltaire’s attachment to Henri IV was well known, and he had already, in 1766, addressed an épître to him, making the attribution to Voltaire at least plausible. The work was certainly attributed to him in the Mémoires secrets, and subsequently by both Antoine-Alexandre Barbier and Joseph-Marie Quérard. Georges Bengesco, however, inclines against Voltaire’s authorship, and modern editions of the complete works have chosen, probably correctly, not to include it in his oeuvre. Voltaire’s strong sense of the ludic happily infects some of his imitators; indeed, that is when they are perhaps at their most persuasive. Take the example of a seven-page poem published in quarto format, Ode sur les conquêtes du Roi: Par M. de Voltaire (“La Haye, Pierre Paupié, 1744”). The formal title page features Voltaire’s name in capitals: this looks like the real thing. The Voltaire’s Apocrypha 559 octosyllabic verse is respectably regular, and could be by Voltaire. The poem praises the king’s recent victory, but also his clemency and his humanity—all this at a time when Voltaire was striving to be well seen at court (he would be named royal historiographe the following year).7 It is only perhaps in the fnal verse that one begins to have suspicions: here the “Voltaire” persona declares that the king has now earned the right for him, Voltaire, to submit to his authority:
Né libre, des yeux de la haine Je vois ton rang et sa ferté: Ta vertu, ta conduite enchaine Mon orgueilleuse liberté. Je cedois à ce droit suprême Qu’en toi le sang avoit transmis. Tu méritois le diadême, Je t’admire & je suis soumis. (7)
The voice of the would-be courtier turning over a new leaf does not ring true. The work circulated widely and inspired a parody by an unnamed “avocat,” using the same rhymes; and this parody in turn provoked a response, still with the same rhymes (now italicized, to make the point): Ode en réponse à celle de M. l’Avocat ***, Sur les mêmes rimes. A note in this last work makes clear that the attribution of the frst poem was nothing more than that: “L’Ode de M. l’Avocat*** est composée sur les mêmes rimes que celle attribuée à M. Voltaire, & elle en est une Parodie critique” (my emphasis). The attribution to Voltaire has become something of a game, a game for the authors of the apocryphal works, and a game above all for the reader.
2. Silent Attribution Second, there are many works that appear anonymously but that by various means became attached to Voltaire’s name—after all, Voltaire did often publish anonymously. Sometimes, for purely marketing reasons, a publisher will attempt the old trick of guilt by association: in 1772 the reputable Paris printer Valade produced a volume Les Oreilles des bandits de Corinthe, avec
7. The context is important here: the poem appears at a moment when fattering verses were being churned out in great quantity, for example, Fréron’s Les Conquêtes du Roi: Ode (1744), an infated and absurdly rhetorical work. See the collection “Recueil de cinquante pièces, tant en vers qu’en prose, sur la Bataille de Fontenoy et la convalescence du Roy en 1744 et 1745,” Bibliothèque nationale de France, shelfmark Z Beuchot—1903. 560 Nicholas Cronk une lettre de M. de Voltaire sur les comètes. Voltaire was indeed the author of the letter on comets (written to Clairaut in 1759), but not of the other work: this did not stop the Mémoires secrets from attributing the whole book, so both works, to Voltaire.8 In this case, one wonders whether Voltaire remembered Les Oreilles des bandits de Corinthe when in 1775 he came to write Les Oreilles du comte de Chesterfeld: a forger, after all, can hardly complain of being plagiarized. More often a work might be casually attributed to Voltaire for no better reason than that the content or subject matter was closely identifed with him. An early example is the tragedy Coligni, ou la Saint-Barthélemy; it was published anonymously in 1740, and the same year, a response to the play attributed it to Voltaire. Writing from Brussels to his friend Cideville, Voltaire expressed privately his frustration:
Mon Dieu, pourquoy me parlez vous de la tragédie soit disante de Coligni? Il semble que vous ayez soupçonné qu’elle est de moy. Le Du Sauzet, libraire de Hollande, et par conséquent doublement fripon, a eu l’insolence absurde de la débiter sous mon nom. Mais Dieu mercy le piège est grossier; et fût il plus fn vous n’y serez pas pris. Cette pitoyable rapsodie est d’un bon enfant nommé Darnaud, qui s’est avisé de vouloir mettre le second chant de la Henriadea en tragédie. Heureusement pour luy sa personne et sa pièce sont assez inconnues. (25 Apr. 1740, D2201)
Another example is the ode Bing au peuple anglais, Héroïde, published in 1760. Admiral Byng, facing execution, justifes himself with nobility, showing himself to be a victim of injustice: “L’Univers plaindra Bing en voyant son supplice” (13). While the style is hardly Voltairean and the tone, one of unrelieved sensibilité, distinctly un-Voltairean, the allusion to Bing, made (in)famous in Candide the previous year, together with the associated theme of injustice, was suffcient for the work to be laid at Voltaire’s door. Another example of this phenomenon is De l’imposture sacerdotale, ou Recueil de pièces sur le clergé: Traduites de l’anglais (“Londres, 1768”). This work contains fve brochures about popery and priestly power, all very much in the tradition of English radical freethinking; one piece, for example, is titled “Le prêtrianisme opposé au christianisme, ou la religion des prêtres comparée à celle de Jésus-Christ” (85). Of course, the ideology is highly Voltairean, and the English connection is appropriate to Voltaire, so the work was attributed to Voltaire, even though the style of these works is completely un-Voltairean
8. See Bengesco 4:370. Voltaire’s Apocrypha 561 and they lack entirely his humor, his irony, deftness, and rapidity: in the eyes of some readers, at least, content was all. And sometimes books were attributed to Voltaire on the slenderest of evidence: the Lettre d’un laboureur de Picardie, à M. N.***, Auteur prohibitif, à Paris (1775) is a pamphlet on fnance and tax, addressed to Necker. There is nothing especially Voltairean about the work’s contents, but neither Voltaire—nor for that matter his disciple Condorcet, the pamphlet’s true author—would have been offended by the misattribution. Voltaire was of course a celebrated antagonist, famous for his enduring quarrels, and this is another potent source of alleged attributions. Voltaire’s antagonism toward Jean-Jacques Rousseau became integral to his authorial posture, and whenever an anonymous attack on Rousseau appeared, it was inevitably attributed to Voltaire, sometimes—but not always—correctly. Charles Bordes (or Borde, 1711–1781) was a minor author living in Lyon; a friend of Voltaire’s, he shared his ideological positions and made something of a career writing “Voltairean” critiques of Rousseau. The Prédiction tirée d’un vieux manuscrit sur La nouvelle Héloïse, roman de J. J. Rousseau (1761), the Profession de foi philosophique (1763), the Tableau philosophique, du genre humain depuis l’origine du monde, jusqu’à Constantin, traduit de l’anglois (1767), Le Cathecumene (1768): all were attributed to Voltaire, and all seem to be by Bordes. Of the Profession de foi philosophique, Voltaire writes to Bordes: “L’auteur de la profession de foi a bien connu ce misérable qui a le coeur aussi faux que l’esprit, et dont tout le mérite est celui des charlatans qui n’ont que du verbiage et de la hardiesse” (23 Mar. 1765, D12497)— presumably Voltaire realized that he was addressing the true author of the work; and he is clearly delighted that others have taken up his crusade, even to lend his name if necessary. Any attack on one of Voltaire’s enemies would necessarily be attributed to Voltaire himself, or to one of his defenders, and as his reputation and the number of his enemies grew, so did the number of his supporters and the sense that he spoke for a collective, a “société de gens de lettres.”
3. The Question of Form: The Oriental Novel It seems that content, more often than style, was what justifed an attribution to Voltaire, and in the case of oriental fction, for example, his name came to be associated with an entire subgenre. As early as 1745, there appeared the Histoire de Zaire, Par M. de V.***, a story characterized as a “nouvelle arabe.” Not only does “M. de V.***” appear on the title page, the dedicatory epistle, to “Madame de G**,” is also signed “Madame, Votre très humble et très obéissant serviteur de V.***.” Many years later, L’Optique ou Le Chinois, à Memphis, Essais traduits de l’Egyptien (1763) appeared 562 Nicholas Cronk anonymously.9 This is a tale of travel and adventure, with interludes of tears, and experiences of different cultures; an imitation perhaps of Voltaire’s brand of philosophical fction, but entirely devoid of his edgy incisiveness; even so it was attributed to Voltaire. Another oriental tale published at the end of Voltaire’s life is Fo-Ka, ou Les Métamorphoses, conte chinois, Dérobé à M. de V*** (“Pékin et se trouve à Paris, Vve Duchesne, 1777”). Voltaire’s involvement here goes no farther than the title page, but the pretence of a manuscript smuggled from his possession gives added spice to the work. Grimm was not impressed: “On ne peut citer ici cette plate imitation du Sopha que pour s’assurer qu’elle n’a été dérobée à aucun homme de lettres connu, et moins à M. de Voltaire qu’à aucun autre. Le livre tombe des mains à la première page” (11:540). A familiar technique was to write a suite or continuation of a known work of Voltaire’s. The abbé Coyer wrote a sequel to L’Homme aux quarante écus that he published anonymously in 1768: Chinki, histoire cochinchinoise qui peut servir à d’autres pays. On the frontispiece of one copy, an early reader has written: “seconde partie de l’Homme aux quarante écus.” For the most part, however, no one was taken in; the Mémoires secrets went so far as to name Coyer, and Grimm was scathing: “Si M. de Voltaire avait envoyé promener Chinki dans les rues de la capitale, combien la satire de nos moeurs, de nos sages réglements, de notre belle police, serait devenue vive, piquante, ingénieuse et variée” (8:160). The association of Voltaire’s name with this genre proved enduring. On January 1, 1771, there appeared in the Journal encyclopédique a brief philosophical tale, “Sourdin et Zaraïne, conte oriental, par M. de Voltaire,” printed only a few pages before a copy of a letter by Voltaire: the very proximity of the apocryphal work to the real letter seemingly adds to the plausibility of the attribution. Were the editors of the journal deliberately enticing their readership with an apocryphal work? Or were they themselves deceived? Many of these attributions do not even pretend to be plausible: L’Odalisque, ouvrage traduit du Turc (“A Constantinople, avec privilège de Sa Hautesse et du Muphti, 1779”) opens with a “Préface turque,” followed by an “Approbation du muphti,” signed “Ali Mehemet &c.” This is all strongly reminiscent of Zadig, and furthermore, the tale begins where Candide fnishes, in Constantinople. The tale itself, however, is utterly obscene, with triple asterisks standing in for the French three-letter words that translate four- letter words in English: Voltaire would never have published such a crude text. When this novel was republished in the revolutionary period, it was openly
9. According to Barbier, the true author is Jean-Nicolas-Marcellin Guérineau de Saint-Péravi. Voltaire’s Apocrypha 563
attributed to Voltaire: L’Odalisque, ouvrage traduit du Turc, Par Voltaire (1796), and this later edition now has to be read, or rather looked at, in the “Enfer” of the Bibliothèque nationale, on account of four highly obscene plates.10 The novel’s text does not change in this reedition, but there is now an “Avis de l’éditeur” on the verso of the title page:
Voltaire a composé cet ouvrage à l’âge de 82 ans. Le manuscrit nous a été remis par son secrétaire intime; ce qui nous autorise à assurer l’authenticité de ce que nous avançons. On verra qu’il nous aurait été facile de faire disparaître quelques expressions aussi graveleuses qu’énergiques; mais par-tout le mot propre est employé: une froide périphrase n’aurait pas aussi bien rendu l’expression du personnage. Au surplus, nous pensons qu’il faut respecter un grand homme jusques dans les écarts de son imagination. (iv)
By a piece of delicious logic, the obscenity has been scrupulously retained out of deference to the great man. The attribution is not meant to be persuasive, but Voltaire’s name serves as a label of ludic subversiveness.
The Problem of the Apocrypha The existence of these apocryphal works necessarily affects how we conceive of Voltaire’s oeuvre, and of course they pose an immediate challenge to the editors of Voltaire’s complete works, who need to establish their corpus. The pioneering editors of the Kehl edition (1784), working soon after Voltaire’s death, explain that they have had to exclude from their edition those works “dont les auteurs inconnus au public ne l’étaient ni aux rédacteurs ni aux gens de lettres qui cultivent cette partie de l’histoire de la littérature.”11 But we do not always have the insider’s knowledge to identify with confdence the authorship of certain works. Let us take the example of a poem, “A M. le Maréchal duc de Richelieu, Sur la prise de Mahon, Qui ft éclore dans Paris beaucoup de méchants vers,” celebrating the French victory over the English at the naval battle of Port Mahon (1756):
Rival du conquérant de l’Inde, Tu bois, tu plais, et tu combats. Le pampre, le laurier, le myrte suit tes pas; Tu prends Chypre et Mahon, mais nous perdons le Pinde.
10. Bibliothèque nationale de France, shelfmark Enfer 579. 11. Quoted by Bengesco, 4:138. 564 Nicholas Cronk
En vain l’Anglais moqueur lançait de toutes parts, Sur un vainqueur musqué, les vers et les brocards: Chez nous l’ambre est ami de la fatale poudre; Tu semais les bons mots, le sourire et la foudre: L’ironie à tes pieds tombe avec leurs remparts. Leurs chansons t’insultaient, leurs défaites te vantent. Mais nos rimailleurs m’épouvantent: Leur essaim bourdonnant obscurcit tes lauriers. Veux-tu rendre l’éclat à tes succès guerriers, Reviens siffer ceux qui les chantent.12
We know Voltaire was a close friend of the duc de Richelieu, so to compliment the duke on his victory, while lamenting the fact that it has given rise to so much bad verse, is a nice Voltairean paradox. The style is characteristically Voltairean, in particular in the use of antithesis (“tu prends”/“nous perdons,” “leurs chansons”/“leurs défaites”), and all in all, the poem has a distinctly Voltairean feel. It frst appeared in 1757 in a collection, Le Portefeuille trouvé, published in Geneva and containing numerous other Voltaire items. It was then printed under Voltaire’s name in other collections, the Nouvelle anthologie française (1769) and the Elite de poésies fugitives, before appearing, in 1771, in Panckoucke’s collected edition of Voltaire’s works. After so many editions— and no adverse comment from Voltaire himself—it is hardly surprising that the poem ended up being included in the Kehl edition (1784). The poem had become a part of the Voltairean oeuvre. In 1811, unexpectedly, the poet Le Brun (known to his contemporaries as Le Brun Pindare) included the poem in an edition of his own works, adding a footnote intended to set the record straight:
Ces vers sont de moi. Ils ont été imprimés plusieurs fois sous le nom de M. de Voltaire. Ne voulant pas qu’ils courussent sous mon nom, je les fs dans sa manière. J’y prodiguai l’antithèse. Ils ont paru sous son nom dans plusieurs Recueils, mais toujours infdèlement. Je les ai retrouvés et corrigés. (Note de l’Auteur.) (3:342)
There seems no reason to disbelieve Le Brun when he claims to have composed the verses as a deliberate pastiche of Voltaire’s style, and so in 1833, the great Voltaire scholar and editor Beuchot excluded the work from his collected
12. “Vers du même auteur [M. de V***] à M. de Richelieu, au sujet des ouvrages qui ont paru sur la prise de Port-Mahon,” Le Portefeuille trouvé, ou tablettes d’un curieux, 2:339–40. Voltaire’s Apocrypha 565
edition,13 a decision that has been followed in every collected edition of Voltaire’s works ever since. Le Brun’s pastiche of Voltaire is all the same an accomplished piece of writing, and without his footnote reclaiming the work, we would still be reading it today as Voltaire’s; moreover, for readers up to the 1830s, this was a work of Voltaire’s, so arguably the poem merits a place anyway in Voltaire’s complete works. There are many such problematic cases, particularly in the area of the minor verse, where there are discoveries still to be made and earlier decisions to be questioned. For example, an Epître à M. le duc de R***, printed in the Almanach des Muses in 1775, was included after Voltaire’s death in an 1817 edition of the collected works,14 but then excluded by Beuchot from his edition. The poem has remained outside the canon ever since, probably correctly, but who can be sure? A different sort of problem is posed by the Mandement du muphti, which appeared anonymously in England in 1772, a brilliant pastiche of Voltaire’s style—so brilliant in fact that one wonders if Voltaire might not be the author of this playful attack against himself. In this case, the work has been tentatively attributed to Voltaire only in 2009.15 The apocryphal works clearly cause “problems for the Voltairean canon,” to quote the late Pat Lee, author of a pioneering article on this subject. But perhaps the apocrypha are more than just a problem. Or to put the question differently, were they a problem for Voltaire? Of course, misattributions have the potential to cause embarrassment. Any writer can deny authorship of a work wrongly attributed, but Voltaire manages to turn denial into a game, not to say an art form. He will often protest ignorance of works attributed to him, in letters, “private” letters designed more often than not to be shown around and circulated. This becomes a signifcant theme of his correspondence,16 as when Voltaire writes to the marquis d’Argence:
Je ne sais pas pourquoi vous m’attribuez une pièce de Grécourt qui n’est que grivoise, et dont vous citez ce vers: “L’Amour me dresse son pupitre.” Vous devriez bien sentir que la belle chose dont il est question, ne ressemble point du tout à un pupitre. Ce n’est pas là le ton de la bonne compagnie. (12 Nov. 1764, D12188)
13. Voltaire [Beuchot], vol. 14 (Poésies, vol. 3), 1833. At the beginning of the section “Poésies mêlées,” there is an “Avis du nouvel Editeur” (303–8), signed simply “Beuchot”: “J’ai dû porter mon attention à faire disparaître des Poésies mêlées les pièces qui ne sont point de Voltaire” (303). 14. See Bengesco 4:296. 15. Voltaire [OCV] 75B:265–319. 16. See, e.g., D7213, D11434, D12206. 566 Nicholas Cronk
A turning point is reached in the early 1770s, when three works in a row are falsely attributed to Voltaire, the source of considerable embarrassment, as he explains to Condorcet: “C’est pour la troisième fois que je me vois la victime d’imprudences que je n’ai pas à me reprocher. La Lettre de l’abbé Pinzo, la Lettre du théologien, et la témérité du prétendu chevalier de Morton” (27 Apr, 1775, D19441).17 This leads to a change of strategy, and in the Dialogue de Pégase et du vieillard (1774), Voltaire, in the voice of M. de Morza, actually comes out in print to defend the integrity of his published works, detailing in a long footnote some of those works wrongly attributed to him.18 (A tactic not without its diffculties, since he denies at least one work, “Le Vrai Dieu,” which we know to be his). This becomes a preoccupying theme, and he returns to it in other works published in 1775 and 1776.19 Not all attributions to Voltaire are hostile, of course: when the Journal encyclopédique published an Ode sur la guerre on August 1, 1761, attributed “à un illustre auteur,” it was surely in good faith (in fact, it is by Bordes). But Voltaire on this occasion decided to deny publicly the attribution, and he wrote to the editor of the journal explaining that there were too many linguistic errors in the poem for it to be his work: “Cette ode me paraît d’un homme de génie; mais il y a trop de fautes contre la langue. Elle commence par des idées très fortes, peut-être trop fortes, mais elle ne se soutient pas. Elle est d’un étranger qui a beaucoup d’esprit’ (to Pierre Rousseau, 16 Sept. 1761, D10025). Most intriguing is the opening sentence of this letter, in which he denies authorship of two works: “Je ne connais pas plus, monsieur, la Lettre de M. de Formey que l’Ode sur la guerre.” The problem here is that Voltaire certainly was the author of the Lettre; one denial muddles another, and so the game goes on. Hoist by his own petard, Voltaire’s denials were effective only up to a certain point—which is probably just how he wanted it.
The Benefts of the Apocrypha In fact, notwithstanding the occasional embarrassment, the fact of having so many works attributed to him rather suits Voltaire and the style of authorship which he creates. Firstly, it is important to consider the aesthetic
17. The three works referred to are the Lettre de M. l’abbé Pinzo au surnommé Clément XIV (1772); the Lettre d’un théologien à l’auteur du Dictionnaire des trois siècles (1774), by Condorcet; and the Epître au comte de Tress., sur ces pestes publiques qu’on appelle philosophes: Par le chevalier de Morton (1775), by Michel de Cubières- Palméze. See also D19409 and D19412. 18. Voltaire [OCV] 76:542–46, note (g). 19. See the Lettre de La Visclede (1775; incorrectly dated in Moland), [Moland] 30:324–25; his letter to the comte de Tressan (22 Mar. 1775, D19381), reprinted in Nouveaux mélanges, vol.18 (1776), with an appendix, which fnally remained unpublished, D.app.408; and the Commentaire historique (1776), [Moland] 1:123–25. Voltaire’s Apocrypha 567
of the receuil. Voltaire often publishes short works in larger collections, and the signifcance of this publishing strategy remains to be fully studied. One advantage of the Sammelband, containing works by different authors, is that the borderlines of individual authorship are blurred, and there is greater security for all when authorial identity is fudged. The Nouveaux Délassements de M. de Voltaire (1773) is a modest affair, a ffteen-page collection of verse. It opens with two pieces by Voltaire (the “Vers au Roi de Suède” and “Vers à Mademoiselle Clairon”), followed by other poems clearly not by him, including “A ma retraite du pays de Vaud” and “Le Curé gourmand,” verses that are Voltairean in theme but not in style. In this case, we are dealing with a harmless confection assembled by a publisher relying on the name of Voltaire to make a quick sale. In the case of other recueils, like the Evangile de la raison, the Recueil nécessaire, or Les Choses utiles et agréables, all published in the 1760s, Voltaire’s own polemical works mingle confusingly with the polemical works of others, making it diffcult, indeed impossible, to disentangle them and to apportion the blame of authorship.20 When Voltaire needed to deny authorship of a piece, he had only to point to other doubtfully attributed works in the same volume to sow the seeds of doubt and confusion. There is safety in numbers, and falsely attributed works can usefully distract attention away from other works bearing false signatures that really are by Voltaire. The editors of the Kehl edition are surprisingly blunt about the convenience of falsely attributed works:
D’ailleurs il [Voltaire] n’a jamais voulu ni recueillir ces pièces, ni en avouer aucune collection. Celles qu’on en a publiées de son vivant, sous ses yeux, contenaient des pièces qu’il n’avait pu faire, et dont il connaissait les auteurs. C’était un moyen qu’il se réservait pour se défendre contre persécution que chaque édition nouvelle de ses ouvrages réveillait. (“Préface des éditeurs” 14:5)
Second, apocryphal works empower their readers. A work like L’Honnêteté théologique, which appeared in 1767 as the second section of the Pièces relatives à Bélisaire, provided a real guessing game for contemporaries. “Il n’est pas juste de m’attribuer l’Honnêteté théologique quand je ne l’ai pas faite,” wrote Voltaire to Damilaville. “J’ai bien assez de mes péchés sans me charger encore de ceux de mon prochain” (11 Nov. 1767, D14528). But although Voltaire disavowed the work, and some attributed it to Damilaville or even Turgot, both Morellet and Diderot assumed the work to be Voltaire’s.21 Grimm clearly understood the tactical advantage of passing works off as Voltaire’s:
20. On the complexities of these recueils, see Moureaux. 21. See Diderot to Sophie Volland: “Ajoutez à tous ces honneurs le plaisir d’être vengé par de Voltaire. Celui cy vient de décocher contre les Cogé, les Riballier et autres 568 Nicholas Cronk
Damilaville ft l’année dernière un pamphlet intitulé l’Honnêteté théologique, pour venger Marmontel des attaques de l’absurde Riballier et de son aide-de-camp Cogé; c’est son meilleur ouvrage. Il nous le donna pour être de M. de Voltaire, et tout le monde le crut. En effet, il l’avait fait imprimer à Genève, et M. de Voltaire l’avait rebouisé. (8:224)
Faced by a text of dubious provenance, readers necessarily wonder about its content and style and are thus encouraged to exercise their literary critical skills. Barthélemy wrote to Mme Du Deffand in September 1772 to say that he had read Le Compère Matthieu: “L’auteur quel qu’il soit, a voulu imiter Rabelais. Dans certains endroits on croirait reconnaître en effet M. de Voltaire, mais ils sont clairsemés.”22 Unattributed works turn readers into critics. A book collector might express his opinion simply in the way he has his books bound: thus one eighteenth-century collector has bound into one volume La Princesse de Babylone and L’Odalisque, ouvrage traduit du Turc , putting within the same covers a conte by Voltaire and a conte that would like to be.23 The owner of a volume can also express his or her view by writing on the volume itself. Take the Epître à Monsieur de V . . . Traduite de l’anglois (1742), a poem of modest quality on the distinctly unpoetic subject of English foreign policy. It is hard even to see why it is addressed to Voltaire (except that he is a famous anglophile?), but even so, in the copy in the Réserve of the Bibliothèque nationale, we fnd that an eighteenth-century hand has written on the title page, after the title: “par Mr. de Voltaire même.” Readers exercise their own authority in deciding authorship. One of the best-known collections of Voltaire’s verse was Le Portefeuille trouvé, ou Tablettes d’un curieux, contenant quantité de pièces fugitives de M. de Voltaire, qui ne sont dans aucune de ses éditions (Genève, 1757). The work is in several sections, of which the frst is “Pièces fugitives de Mr. de Voltaire,” followed by “Vers de Boudier,” “Pièces de Mr. de S***,” “Juvenilia, par Mr. de Voltaire,” “Petits ouvrages de Mlle de Scudéry” and fnally “Opuscules de M. Regnard et autres auteurs.” However, the two sections of the work that purportedly collect Voltaire’s verse contain a tantalizing mix of authentic and dubious works, so again readers are required to exercise critical judgment. A copy of this work held in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal contains marginalia giving us a fascinating insight into the reactions of one eighteenth-century théologiens fanatiques, auteurs de la censure, une satyre d’une gaieté d’enfant, mais d’une méchanceté effroyable. Elle est intitulée: Honnêtetés théologiques” (11 Oct. 1767, Correspondance 7:175–76). 22. Quoted by T. Besterman, in the commentary to letter D17907. 23. This volume is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, shelfmark Z Bengesco—243. The binding suggests that the volume was assembled in the eighteenth century. Voltaire’s Apocrypha 569
reader.24 This reader marks typographical and other errors, but also comments on attributions. Faced by the “Epître à Madame de ***” (31) (“Belle maman, soyez l’arbitre, / Si la fèvre n’est pas un titre”), the reader notes that this is not by Voltaire but perhaps by Grécourt. Another poem (“Pour soumettre mon ame / A l’empire des plaisirs”) “nest pas de voltaire plutot de labbe de lattaignant” (36). The “Etrennes à Mme Du Châtelet” (“Une étrenne frivole à la docte Uranie”) calls forth a note that this poem is not by Voltaire but was sent to two other women (40). Of the “Poème sur le soin que le Roy prend de l’éducation de la noblesse” (Noblesse, heureux hasard, digne de nos hommages’), the comment is clear: “nullement de voltaire” (53). And of the four verses “Pour mettre en bas du portrait de Mr. de Voltaire,” the name of Voltaire is crossed out, to be replaced by that of “Valliere, l.t g.al commandant lartillerie” (106), which makes much more sense of verses about a soldier interested in arts, combining Jupiter and Minerva. In the case of “Le Philosophe à Madame le marquise de T***, par M. de Voltaire” (“Tu m’appelles à toi, vaste et brillant génie”), the printed words “de T***” are crossed out and replaced by “du chatelet” (184). This is a fascinating exercise in reader response, and while we do not know the identity of the annotator (there is no bookplate), he or she is clearly well informed. Who is the annotator writing for? Are these notes for purely personal use, or to be shown to others? Or are they perhaps for posterity, for us? A different example of this same phenomenon is provided by a manuscript volume, from the collection of the comte de Launoit, that is in effect a personalized Voltaire anthology. Eighteenth-century readers would sometimes assemble for their own use and pleasure a private manuscript anthology of works (printed or manuscript). On the title page it bears the title “Recueil de différentes pieces en prose et en vers,” and it has an eighteenth-century binding; of the eighteen pieces anthologized, all but two are explicitly attributed to Voltaire. Here, alongside works like La Bataille de Fontenoy and Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, which both appear complete with their notes (as in the printed editions), we also fnd other less familiar works which this particular reader/copyist/collector claims as Voltaire’s: thus L’apothéose du roi Pétaut was written, we are informed, “Par Mr. de Voltaire en 1738”; L’aigle, le renard, le serpent is presented similarly as a “Fable allégorique sur la disgrâce de M. le duc de Choiseul par Mr. de Voltaire en 1770.”25 It makes little sense in this context to protest that these are “apocryphal” works (though that is what they are): this particular eighteenth-century reader has made them works of Voltaire. In these cases, attributed works empower the
24. Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, shelfmark 8-BL-10071. The hand appears to be eighteenth century. 25. “Recueil de différentes pieces en prose et en vers,” 43, 46. 570 Nicholas Cronk reader to take control; their very existence puts into question the notion of authorial dominance. Third, there is the question of stylistic recognition. We have already seen how works were usually attributed to Voltaire on account of their subject matter alone, but in the case of the more “plausible” attributions, questions of style also sometimes come to the fore, and a work will be given to Voltaire because its style “feels” like his. The opposite is true, too: Grimm in the Correspondance littéraire reports on an ode with the unlikely title Voltaire pénitent: “Ceux qui ont cru cette ode de M. de Voltaire ne doivent jamais se mêler de juger des vers” (4:44). The argument from style is equally one that Voltaire himself uses when he wishes to disavow a work. With reference to the Ode sur les conquêtes du Roi, already mentioned, Voltaire wrote to d’Argental: ‘S’il est bien vrai que le roy ait dit de lui-même que l’ode de Mme Bienvenu était trop mauvaise pour être de moi nous sommes trop heureux. Nous avons un roy qui a du goût’ (c. 15 Aug. 1744, D3017). Voltaire’s highly characteristic style and voice invite imitation (and we should remember that all students of the Jesuits were taught to imitate classical authors from an early age). The editors of the Kehl edition suggest that it was diffcult to mimic Voltaire in his longer works, but easy enough to imitate the shorter poems:
Dans le cours d’un long ouvrage en vers, il eût été presque impossible d’imiter la grâce piquante, le coloris brillant, la philosophie douce et libre qui caractérise toutes les poésies de cet homme illustre: son cachet ne pouvait être aussi reconnaissable dans quinze ou vingt vers presque toujours impromptus. Il était plus aisé, en s’appropriant quelques-unes de ses idées et de ses tournures, d’atteindre à une imitation presque parfaite. (“Préface des éditeurs” 14:5)
To be precise, Voltaire invites not just imitation but pastiche. This is important, because if authors successfully copy his style (this is pastiche rather than parody), then they will also be spreading the Voltairean message. When Cazotte composes a seventh canto to the Guerre civile de Genève, it is an act of homage to Voltaire, clearly pastiche and not parody. This brings us fnally to the notion of Voltaire’s thought as a brand. In the history of fame, says Leo Braudy, the eighteenth century is “an age preoccupied with the question of self-defnition in public” (371). Voltaire enjoyed unprecedented fame in the republic of letters. It is not just that he wrote a great deal over many years, he enjoyed a particular kind of celebrity, which meant that his name was always good for business: in trading terms, “Voltaire” was a best-selling brand. Celebrity of this type inevitably encourages imitators, like Voltaire’s Apocrypha 571
the abbé Dulaurens, who in the 1760s made a career out of writing “Voltaire”: almost all his works (published anonymously or pseudonymously), including Candide, seconde partie, Le Balai, Les Jésuitiques, L’Arrétin, and Le Compère Matthieu were at some time attributed to Voltaire, who cheerfully complained to his publisher Cramer, “On m’a imputé Le Balai, Les Jesuitiques, Compère Mathieu. Je ne fnirais pas” (31 Mar. 1770, D16267). (Voltaire had his revenge: his Relation du banissement des Jésuites de la Chine of 1768 was signed on the title page by “l’auteur du Compère Matthieu”). Voltaire’s style is a style of thought; in imitating his style, authors replicate that thought. There are of course cases in which authors use the name of Voltaire in order to attack him, but in these instances, the works are not truly apocryphal, since they are not plausibly by Voltaire. True apocryphal works are those where writers adopt the style of Voltaire to mimic his way of thinking, in order to promote Voltaire, or, more precisely, “Voltaire.” Consider a work from Voltaire’s Ferney years, the Epître au chevalier d’Oliveyra, sur le dernier acte de foi de Lisbonne, par M. de ***, dated 1762, with the imprint “Genève.” The chevalier d’Oliveyra had been critical of the Portuguese ecclesiastical régime, and his Discours pathétique (1756) and its Suite (1757) caused much offense to the authorities. In September 1761 he was burned in effgy, together with his offending book, at the same auto-da-fé in which father Malagrida was executed. The Epître opens with an “Avertissement” critical of the Inquisition, and such expressions as “[le] meilleur des mondes” and “la raison suffsante” put us in mind of Candide; there is a reference to the banning of the Encyclopédie, an allusion to “vos miracles risibles,” and many footnoted references to Bayle; the “Avertissement” concludes with an extensive attack on the intolerance of all religions. The “Epître” itself is written in the voice of a Jesuit whose rigid defense of the status quo renders him ridiculous. The ideological thrust of this work is clearly Voltairean, all the more so since Voltaire’s Sermon du rabbin Akib, which he sent to Vernes in December 1761, also treated the Malagrida affair, in the assumed voice of an imagined rabbi. It is now known that the Epître was written by Mathieu Maty, a Huguenot living in London, who had befriended Oliveyra. He composed his work as a plausible pastiche of Voltaire, perhaps to conceal his own authorship, but most of all because “Voltaire” provided the ideological shorthand in which he could most effectively express himself. In his work as a biblical critic, Voltaire was much preoccupied, one might say obsessed, with the biblical Apocrypha.26 He opens an article on the subject in the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie: “Apocryphe, du mot grec qui signife ‘caché.’” He acknowledges the modern use of the term to designate “les livres
26. See Voltaire [OCV] 38:449, note * (by John Renwick). 572 Nicholas Cronk qui ne méritent aucune créance,” but is also at pains to emphasize that the biblical Apocrypha command authority, even though (perhaps because) their authors remain hidden:
On remarque très bien, dans le Dictionnaire encyclopédique, que les divines Ecritures pouvaient être à la fois sacrées et apocryphes; sacrées, parce qu’elles sont indubitablement dictées par Dieu même; apocryphes, parce qu’elles étaient cachées aux nations, et même au peuple juif.27
I have used here the term apocrypha, partly for its ironical overtones of biblical authority and partly because this notion of a work at once authoritative (“sacré”) and concealed (“caché”) is emblematic of Voltaire’s authorial strategy. As patriarch of Ferney, encouraging his brothers-in-arms to join the crusade to “écraser l’Infâme,” he repeatedly urges them to show caution in covering their traces. To Helvétius he writes: “Vous pouvez plus que personne écraser l’erreur sans montrer la main qui la frappe” (1 May 1763, D11183); and similarly to d’Alembert: ‘Ecrasez l’infâme, sans pour tant risquer de tomber comme Samson sous les ruines du temple qu’il démolit. [. . .] Dites hardiment et fortement tout ce que vous avez sur le coeur. Frappez, et cachez votre main” (7–8 May 1761, D9771). Voltaire’s whole literary aesthetic is an exercise in “hiding his hand,” and the apocryphal works are therefore intimately connected with Voltaire’s elaboration of an authorial posture. In direct contrast to Rousseau, who (as Kelly has shown) cultivates an authorial identity of unrelenting authenticity, who always insists on putting his name to everything he publishes, Voltaire—who is not of course called Voltaire—only rarely puts his name to what he writes. He relishes playing games with authority, and with the authority of his texts, creating a multiplicity of voices within his texts and deploying anonymity and pseudonymity to stand at a remove from his published pronouncements. Many Enlightenment authors experiment with collective writing,28 and Voltaire, even in works that are wholly his own, such as the Dictionnaire philosophique portatif or the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, likes to cultivate the illusion of collective authorship, pretending that some of the articles are not his own work: collective writing implies collective thinking, and collective responsibility. With such an authorial posture, Voltaire was all but encouraging the creation of apocryphal works, as his unprecedented celebrity made him the irresistible object of imitation and pastiche.
27. Voltaire [OCV] 38:449, 451–52. 28. See, in this issue, the article by Thomas Wynn, “Collaboration and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century French Theater.” Voltaire’s Apocrypha 573
The father of a counterfeiter in Chekhov’s story “In the Ravine” frets that every coin he touches is a fake, and in the same way, readers of Voltaire could easily end up worrying that every Voltaire text they touch is apocryphal. Discussion of literary plagiarism, in the eighteenth century as now, often revolves around a preoccupation with ownership (see Theisohn). Mimicking Voltaire, however, is a different business. He does not want to own his ideas; on the contrary, he wants to disown them, and so share them as widely as possible. Voltaire creates a distinctive style and voice that embody a distinctive worldview, and his name comes to stand for a style of thinking that reaches beyond him. The authors of Voltaire’s apocrypha, in adopting his discourse, were enrolling in his campaign. In that sense, Voltaire’s apocrypha rank among his most characteristic and successful works.
*** What, fnally, can Voltaire’s—entirely uncharacteristic—style of authorship tell us about authorship more generally in this period? The author of the ancien régime still typically negotiates protection from an individual or institution, though increasingly there is a tension between a desire for protection, on the one hand, and for independence, on the other. The role of the man (or, rarely, woman) of letters is becoming increasingly professionalized, as discussion of ideas of copyright, starting in the theater, becomes more common, and there is a growing sense of authors as “owners” of their writings. Michel Foucault places this tipping point at the end of the eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century’s preoccupation with ownership, placing the author squarely within a capitalist system of production, will lead to a glorious counterpreoccupation with such literary phenomena as plagiarism and “la supposition d’auteurs.” Charles Nodier’s Questions de littérature légale: Du plagiat, de la supposition d’auteurs, des supercheries qui ont rapport aux livres, frst published in 1812, and revised and enlarged in 1828, is a potent celebration of these new concerns about authorial identities. Many modern writers, Jean-Benoît Puech, for example, have experimented with the notion of “la supposition d’auteurs,” and in using Nodier’s term, it has been widely assumed that the idea is of his period.29 The nineteenth century has recently been characterized as “le siècle de la mystifcation,”30 and authorial mystifcation is widely seen as a marker of modernity, yet as
29. The frst critical edition of Nodier’s Questions de littérature légale appeared only in 2003. However, chapter 8, “De la supposition d’auteurs,” had become familiar to critics, after it was included in 1985 as a “document” in a number of Poétique devoted to “Le biographique.” 30. See Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze and Alain Vaillant, “Le siècle de la mystifcation.” 574 Nicholas Cronk
McGinnis has argued, literary mystifcation, far from being opposed to the movement of the Enlightenment, is an intrinsic part of it. Charles Nodier is of course steeped in the literature of the eighteenth century, and in discussing the pleasures of plagiarism, he adds a long note on Voltaire, borrowed largely from Fréron.31 When Nodier discusses the practice of attributing one’s works to those of another, what he terms “la supposition d’auteurs,” it is to Voltaire that he turns for a telling anecdote:
Ce dernier genre de supercherie [. . .] est même assez souvent un moyen sûr de désarmer les injustes préventions, et de ramener à la vérité les jugements du public, ou du moins d’en obtenir des opinions plus douces. Voltaire raconte qu’un jour, dans un cercle où l’on se réunissait à dépriser le mérite de La Motte, et à lui opposer celui de La Fontaine avec un avantage réellement incontestable, il s’avisa de proposer une fable de La Fontaine pour preuve du sentiment général, et cita de mémoire une fable de La Motte. L’approbation fut unanime à la première lecture, et se démentit à la seconde: La Motte avait été nommé. (57–58)32
In some respects, Voltaire’s notion of authorship, constructed with a wistful backward glance to the siècle de Louis XIV, might seem willfully old- fashioned;33 but in the context of Nodier’s Questions de littérature légale, Voltaire’s stance comes to seem paradoxically forward-looking. His carefully won fnancial independence meant that issues of ownership and copyright mattered little to Voltaire, while his unprecedented celebrity allowed him to play continually with his authorial image and exploit to the full the expectations of his audience(s). So he plays, for example, with the notion of multiple authorship, publishing volumes of mélanges by different authors in which their separate identities become obscured while creating other collections of works all his own, in which he invents phantom participants: such tactics of concealment were well known, but Voltaire pushes well beyond the conventions to create a sort of fantasy of collective writing (and, by implication, of collective thinking). Voltaire is, after all, a writer of ideas frst and foremost, and his fundamental aim is less to “own” new ideas than to publicize and share them. Voltaire, as his celebrity grows, becomes increasingly
31. Nodier, Questions de littérature légale, 20, 166–87 n. 1. 32. On this anecdote, see Voltaire, Doutes nouveaux sur le Testament attribué au cardinal de Richelieu [1764], [Moland] 25:303–4. See also D12909 and D17809; and Cronk, “Voltaire and the Posture of Anonymity,” 774. 33. See Cronk, “Voltaire au pays des folliculaires: Une carrière littéraire entre deux siècles.” Voltaire’s Apocrypha 575
a target for imitation and pastiche, and as Voltaire’s apocrypha multiply, far from discouraging them, he seems almost to encourage their growth. Each time that a reader has to ask if a work signed by Voltaire really is by him, or if an anonymous work might not perhaps be by him, that reader is turned into a critic as he or she engages critically with Voltaire’s writing and thought— and what more could he ask? Works of unstable authorship empower their readers, who are thereby recruited to the cause of “écraser l’Infâme,” and it matters not at all that the “integrity” of Voltaire’s oeuvre is compromised in the process. His overwhelming literary achievement is the creation of his authorial persona, making him the perfect exemplar of what Lavialle and Puech call “l’auteur comme oeuvre.” Or as Voltaire puts it, “Les noms, en tout genre, font plus d’impression que les choses.”34 The selfess author is paradoxically more dominant, because more omnipresent, than the Author (Rousseau, for example?) who insistently asserts his or her self. Voltaire’s unique style of authorship exploits to the full the somewhat chaotic freedoms of the publishing world of his time. We think of him as the incarnation of the ancien régime author, accommodating himself to the powers that be, but there is also a ludic side to his authorship that looks forward to the next century and beyond. In his literary playfulness, in his sheer inventiveness, in his exploitation of new freedoms, Voltaire constantly reminds us of the range of modes of authorship that the print world of the Enlightenment makes possible.
Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford
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