Micromegas and Other Short Fictions (Penguin ed.) Read online

  MICROMÉGAS AND OTHER SHORT FICTIONS

  FRANÇOIS – MARIE AROUET (1694–1778), who later took the name of VOLTAIRE, was the son of a notary and educated at a Jesuit School in Paris. His father wanted him to study the law, but the young man was determined on a literary career. He gained an introduction to the intellectual life of Paris and soon won a reputation as a writer of satires and odes – a not altogether enviable reputation, for the suspicion of having written a satire on the Regent procured him a term of six months’ imprisonment in the Bastille. On his release, his first tragedy, Œdipe, was performed (1718) in Paris with great success and soon after he published the poem he had written in prison, a national epic, La Henriade (1723), which placed him with Homer and Virgil in the eyes of his contemporaries. After a second term of imprisonment in the Bastille, Voltaire spent two and a half years (1726–8) in England, and returned to France full of enthusiasm for the intellectual activity and the more tolerant form of government he found there. His enthusiasm and his indictment of the French system of government are expressed in his Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733), published in France as the Lettres philosophiques, but whose sale was absolutely forbidden in France.

  The next fifteen years were spent at the country seat of his friend, Madame du Châtelet, where he wrote his most popular tragedies and his Zadig, a witty Eastern tale, and started work on his Century of Louis XIV. After Madame du Châtelet’s death in 1749, Voltaire was induced to pay a prolonged visit to the Court of Frederick the Great, with whom he had been in correspondence for several years. While there he completed his important historical work Essay on Customs (Essai sur les Moeurs et l’Esprit des Nations) and began his Philosophic Dictionary. Voltaire and Frederick could not agree for long and in 1753 Voltaire decided to leave Prussia. But he was not safe in France. After two years of wandering he settled near Geneva and at last made a home at Ferney. It was during the last, and most brilliant, twenty years of his life that he wrote Candide, his dialogues and more tales, and published his widely-read Philosophic Dictionary (1764) in ‘pocket form’, while conducting his ceaseless and energetic attack against what he called the ‘infamous thing’ – all manifestations of tyranny and persecution by a privileged orthodoxy in Church and State. He died at the age of eighty-four, after a triumphant visit to Paris, from which he had been exiled for so long.

  THEO CUFFE was educated in Dublin and at the Sorbonne. He has translated Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and Letter to a Hostage for Penguin, and is completing a new translation of Voltaire’s Candide for Penguin Classics.

  HAYDN MASON, Emeritus Professor in the University of Bristol and Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Linguistiques, was until recently General Editor of the Complete Works of Voltaire and previously Editor of the Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (1977–95). He is the author of several works on literature, thought and society in eighteenth-century France, including a book on Voltaire’s Candide and also an edition of that tale. A Professor in French at the Sorbonne (1979–81), he was President of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (1991–5). He is currently working on a number of studies of Voltaire’s relationships with England.

  VOLTAIRE

  Micromégas and

  other Short Fictions

  Translated by THEO CUFFE

  With an Introduction and Notes by

  HAYDN MASON

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  www.penguin.com

  This edition first published 2002

  8

  Translations (except ‘Dialogue between the Cock and the Hen’) and Translator’s Note

  copyright © Theo Cuffe, 2002

  ‘Dialogue between the Cock and the Hen’ translated by Haydn and Adrienne Mason,

  first published in Comparative Criticism, 20, 184–7, 1998, copyright ©

  Cambridge University Press, 1998

  Introduction and notes copyright © Haydn Mason, 2002

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 9781101492697

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHRONOLOGY OF VOLTAIRE’S LIFE AND TIMES

  FURTHER READING

  NOTE ON THE TEXTS

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  CONTES

  Cuckoldage

  The One-eyed Porter

  Cosi-Sancta

  Micromégas

  The World As It Is

  Memnon

  Letter from a Turk

  Plato’s Dream

  The History of the Travels of Scarmentado

  The Consoler and the Consoled

  The Story of a Good Brahmin

  Pot-Pourri

  An Indian Incident

  Lord Chesterfield’s Ears

  MÉLANGES

  Account of the Illness, Confession, Death and Apparition of the Jesuit Berthier

  Dialogue between a Savage and a Graduate

  Dialogue between Ariste and Acrotal

  The Education of Daughters

  Wives, Submit Yourselves to Your Husbands

  Dialogue between the Cock and the Hen

  Conversation between Lucian, Erasmus and Rabelais, in the Elysian Fields

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  This volume brings together a selection of Voltaire’s short fiction under the headings of Contes and Mélanges. In a happy phrase, Voltaire’s contes have been called ‘the fables of reason’.1 The description adroitly sums up that mixture of fantasy and rationality which characterizes these short stories. The protagonist in each one usually goes on a journey, literal or metaphorical. In so doing he acquires experience of the real world, both as actor and spectator. Travelling in a strange environment, he is educated, often by pure surprise. The knowledge gained will destroy belief in any ‘system’ that reduces the world and mankind to a formula, optimistic or otherwise. Behind the central character stands the author, ever present, guiding the reader towards a conclusion that, in a host of diverse ways, mocks at set patterns of faith. All around us complexity and contradiction reign. Once we begin to appreciate that, we may possibly start to show greater tolerance for others, avoiding dogmatic attitudes which bring only oppression and cruelty in their wake. The tales are ‘philosophical’, if that can be taken as epistemology and empirical enquiry, but not if it connotes metaphysics and unknowable truths beyond the sphere of human reason.

  But how to define a Voltairean conte in terms of genre? No simple defi
nition will suffice. For Voltaire himself was chary of providing a neat domain with clearly delineated frontiers. He used the term sparingly, and it was late in his life before any volumes by him bearing the term appeared; even then, it may well have been his publisher’s idea. Stories like ‘Plato’s Dream’ and ‘Micromégas’ came out first as Mélanges philosophiques; ‘The Consoler and the Consoled’ and ‘The History of the Travels of Scarmentado’ were originally Mélanges de littérature. As one can see from these titles, ‘mélanges’ (literally, ‘mixture’) is an even vaguer description. So any attempt at a tight genre-definition is doomed from the start.

  The very looseness of the form helped to provide its inherent attraction, since it allowed for an unlimited mixture of registers and unfettered literary experimentation. The classicist Voltaire, who held the ‘noble’ genres of tragedy and epic in high regard, could afford to let his hair down in an area that had no traditional prestige attached to it. Besides, this love of story-telling appears everywhere in his writings: histories, philosophical treatises, correspondence. It was his way of giving indirect expression to his private feelings; indeed, it is not too far-fetched to see them as fulfilling a personal catharsis.

  Story-telling, in fact, runs right through Voltaire’s life. The first tales go back to 1715, the final one received its last revisions sixty years later. The diversity of the form is reflected in the Contes de Guillaume Vadé (1764), the first volume from Voltaire to include ‘conte’ in the title – where the first seven are in verse! Yet until very recently, editions of his contes were selected exclusively from his prose works,2 despite Voltaire’s frequent habit of intermingling prose and verse in many of his works and correspondence. So it is not surprising to find that the influences discernible in his contes stem from poets like La Fontaine as well as from prose writers. To recognize this fluidity, the present edition includes one of Voltaire’s shorter narrative poems (‘Cuckoldage’), which may serve to stand as a promise of the great comic poem La Pucelle to come in later years.

  But that is not all, so far as we are presently concerned. Voltaire’s polemical writings also took in mélanges (like conte, the French term is more useful than its equivalent in English). The author often dubbed them facéties (merry pranks). But the ‘jokes’ could be serious in their mischievousness. Some, like the ‘Account of the Jesuit Berthier’, develop a narrative in a way that makes them virtually contes. Others are in dialogue form. But all aim to shake the reader’s conventional assumptions, to make him think for himself. Enlightenment is all. Satire, irony, dream-like imaginings, solid historical fact, parody: these are some of the tools which Voltaire uses in his pursuit of that end.

  René Pomeau once described Voltaire as ‘interminablement bref’.3 The paradox admirably sums up the philosophe’s endlessly prolific capacity for concise statement, which has the incidental consequence that over a score of his writings can be included in this edition. Many are scarcely known outside France, yet they deserve recognition for the new insights they offer to those who have read only ‘Candide’ and perhaps ‘L’Ingénu’ or ‘Zadig’. Together they show the author’s vitality in casting his thoughts into ever-new combinations.

  Although Voltaire never provided a definition of the conte, he made clear his intentions in Le Taureau blanc (The White Bull), published in 1774, when the heroine speaks for him. Her wish, says Amaside, is that ‘sous le voile de la fable, il [le conte] laissât entrevoir aux yeux exercés quelque vérité fine qui échappe au vulgaire’: ‘beneath the veil of fable, it should allow the practised eye to perceive some subtle truth unnoticed by the common horde’.4 The same point is made in the ‘Conversation between Lucian, Erasmus and Rabelais’. Circumspection had been essential for Erasmus if he did not want to be murdered or burned at the stake. Rabelais, for his part, had decided that to act the madman was the only way he could pour ridicule on the religious and political injustices of his time. Voltaire was to take his own path of concealment.

  It is through such approaches that the contes and the diverse mélanges can be seen as part and parcel of the whole Voltairean polemic. But the substance of these short works is bound up inextricably with the manner of their presentation. The greatness of ‘Candide’, it has been said, lies less in the actual arguments against Optimism than in the realization that they are demolished by ‘l’obsession d’un style’.5 The same observation applies to the works in this edition. Voltaire’s bewilderment at the existence of evil in a Newtonian universe and his fight against l’Infâme (religious intolerance) have both passed into history. But the uniquely Voltairean style in which those preoccupations were couched remains, in all its protean variety.

  The author’s immediate emotions are transmuted: anger into derision, pain into jocularity. Bitter scores are paid off through ridicule. Comic effects are conveyed through a large diversity of techniques.6 Cruel caricature of the Catholic Church as a Punch and Judy show (‘Pot-Pourri’); or ironic portrayal of the Jesuit Father Berthier as central player in a farce of yawning, coma and convulsions: such are the modes employed. Reductionist methods are applied to human behaviour: the history of the world is construed in terms of constipation (‘Lord Chesterfield’s Ears’: would Charles I have been saved from execution if Cromwell had not been intestinally blocked for the whole of the previous week?). The author creates a host of literary personae: those with whom he can identify (Micromégas, Scarmentado, the good Brahmin) or, more commonly, those he can assail in one form or another (the vindictive Acrotal, the perfectionist Memnon, the gross Bababec). He invents absurdist names (Merry Hissing probably takes pride of place in this edition). Writers are satirized obliquely: Fontenelle through the over-eager Saturnian, Rousseau, Descartes and Leibniz through their philosophies.

  Through all this, Voltaire’s ideal figure is, to cite the title of one of his essays, Le Philosophe ignorant (1766): the modest intellectual who stops short of dogmatic world-views, is free of the constrictions of the Church, and can get on with using his reason to penetrate accessible truths. By contrast, the only suitable response to the absurd little cleric in ‘Micromégas’ is Homeric laughter. The world and the human race are alike in being so full of contradictions that no overall body of doctrine can make sense of them. We must resign ourselves to living in uncertainty; and that uncertainty is the principle by which to exercise tolerance towards one’s fellows: ‘become honest men; exercise compassion’ (‘Dialogue between Ariste and Acrotal’). In a world of incomprehensible evil, pity and justice are the only decent response on the part of the honnête homme.

  CONTES

  Cuckoldage

  This verse tale, mildly ribald in character, dates from around 1715. It demonstrates Voltaire’s gift, even in early manhood, for parody. In his poem, an orthodox mythological account of the gods is transformed into the birth of the scabrous deity of the name of ‘Cuckoldage’. The poet addresses his lady love as though he were in a conventional romance. Alas! she is married, so the only god who can help him is this disreputable instigator of infidelity. Voltaire is following in the line of La Fontaine’s fables of the previous century, but here they are given a new treatment: sprightly, irreverent, in keeping with the aristocratic tone of the circle in which the author was moving. Already, if only by implication, Christian values are dismissed in favour of a pagan world of free love.

  The One-eyed Porter

  The suggestively erotic quality of the above poem is also a striking feature of this, one of Voltaire’s earliest prose narratives, which we now know to date from about 1715 (although not published before 1774). This story was written to be read aloud in Sceaux, at the court of the duchesse du Maine, which was famous for its divertissements, and its essentially oral, improvised style is readily apparent. The magical, dreamlike tone shows Voltaire as under the influence, like many another contemporary writer, of the Oriental A Thousand and One Nights, which had appeared in French for the first time in 1702. The transformation of the poor one-eyed hero into a resplendent (and two
-eyed!) young man comes straight from Araby. But the author conceals till near the end that it is all a dream, even though enough fantastic details have already been recounted to make one feel that this is surely a phallic wish-fulfilment. There is, however, also a darker side. The evils of life make their appearance in the first lines, never again to disappear completely from the Voltairean tale.

  Cosi-Sancta

  Like The One-eyed Porter, this tale originated at Sceaux in about 1715, as can be guessed from its similarly libertine attitude. But to this Voltaire adds an open tilt at Christian beliefs. St Augustine is cited as the source for the story that leads to the provocatively ironic comment which the author makes on female virtue. But what in Augustine’s tale is a drama of sacrifice for love that leads to moral improvement all round is transformed by Voltaire into a mocking satire of morals when they are too rigidly held. Cosi-Sancta’s troubles arise in the first place from her being a child of Jansenist parents who have inculcated in her a totally unrealistic sense of virtue. Voltaire delights in understated euphemism: the honeymoon night spent asleep; the danger to morality from mendicant monks; the brutally simple explanation from Cosi-Sancta’s seducers as to what they want of her. One feels that already more than a hint of the black humour of ‘Candide’ is present.

  Micromégas

  Although it was not published until 1752, many of the essential elements of this story were apparently to be found in a tale entitled ‘Voyage du baron de Gangan’, subsequently lost, which Voltaire had sent to Frederick of Prussia in 1739.7 In this tale the author had made comprehensive use for the first time of the imaginary voyage as an experience to broaden the traveller’s view of life. The inhabitants of Sirius and Saturn move with ease through a friendly and homogeneous universe, made comprehensible by the discoveries of Newton about gravitation. Space is no more than a featureless landscape between two towns. Contrary to the Jansenist pessimism of Pascal in the previous century, the infinity of the cosmos is reassuring, since modern man has learned, thanks to science, to understand and exploit it.