Voltaire’s was a long and amazing life.
Voltaire’s was a long and amazing life. He was tragedian, satirist, mathematician, courtier, exile, jailbird, swindler, gardener, plutocrat, watchmaking entrepreneur, penal reform campaigner, celebrity, provocateur, useless loan-shark, serial feuder, coward, astronaut, niece-shagger, spy . . . Except ‘astronaut’, obviously. I made that up to check you were still paying attention. But he did shack up with his niece, the filthy old goat.
It seems a shame, then, that for most of us nowadays that long and amazing life is compressed into a couple of quotes from Candide and a few apocryphal stories about his table talk. Ian Davidson’s biography is the corrective: here’s the great man in the round.
Voltaire was, above all else, one of the world’s great kickers-against-the-pricks — though for much of his career it seemed to be recklessness rather than fearlessness that got him in trouble with said pricks. He just couldn’t help himself.
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