VOLTAIRE, FRANCOIS MARIE AROUET DE (1694-1778), whose real name was Francois Marie Arouet simply, was born on Nov. 21, 1694 at Paris, and was baptized the next day. His father was Francois Arouet, a notary; his mother was Marie Marguerite Daumart or D'Aumard. Both father and mother were of Poitevin extraction, but the Arouets had been for two generations established in Paris, the grandfather being a pros perous tradesman. He was the fifth child of his parents. Not very much is known of the mother, who died when Voltaire was but seven years old. She pretty certainly was the chief cause of his early introduction to good society, the abbe de Chateauneuf (his sponsor in more ways than one) having been her friend.
The abbe instructed him early in belles-lettres and deism, and he showed when a child an unsurpassed faculty for facile verse making. At the age of ten he was sent to the College Louis-le Grand, which was under the management of the Jesuits, and re mained there till 1711. It was his whim, as part of his general liberalism, to depreciate the education he received; but it seems to have been a sound and good education. Nor can there be much doubt that the great attention bestowed on acting—the Jesuits kept up the Renaissance practice of turning schools into theatres for the performance of plays both in Latin and in the vernacular—had much to do with Voltaire's lifelong devotion to the stage. It must have been in his very earliest school years that the celebrated presentation of him by his godfather to Ninon de Lenclos took place, for Ninon died in 1705. She left him two thousand francs "to buy books with." In August 1711, at the age of seventeen, he came home, and the usual battle followed between a son who desired no profession but literature and a father who refused to consider literature a profession at all. For a time Voltaire submitted, and read law at least nominally. The abbe de Chateauneuf died before his godson left school, but he had already introduced him to the famous and dissipated coterie of the Temple. His father tried to break him off from such society by sending him in the suite of the marquis de Chateauneuf, the abbe's brother, to The Hague. Here he met a certain Olympe Dunoyer ("Pimpette"), a girl apparently of respectable character and not bad connections, but a Protestant, penniless, and daughter of a literary lady whose literary reputa tion was not spotless. His father stopped any idea of a match by procuring a lettre de cachet, which, however, he did not use.
Voltaire, who had been sent home, submitted, and for a time pre tended to work in a Parisian lawyer's office; but he again mani fested a faculty for getting into trouble—this time in the still more dangerous way of writing libellous poems—so that his father was glad to send him to stay for nearly a year (1714-15) with Louis de Caumartin, marquis de Saint-Ange, in the country. When he returned to Paris, Voltaire was forthwith introduced to a less questionable and even more distinguished coterie than Vendome's, to the famous "court of Sceaux," the circle of the beautiful and ambitious duchesse du Maine. It seems that Voltaire lent himself to the duchess's frantic hatred of the regent Orleans, and helped to compose lampoons on that prince. At any rate, in May 1716 he was exiled, first to Tulle, then to Sully. Allowed to return, he again fell under suspicion of having been concerned in the composition of two violent libels and on May 16, 1717 was sent to the Bastille. He there recast Oedipe, began the Henriade and determined to alter his name. Ever after his exit from the Bastille in April 1718 he was known as Arouet de Voltaire, or simply Voltaire, though legally he never abandoned his patronymic. Probably the name is an anagram on "Arouet le jeune," or "Arouet 1. j." A further "exile" at Chatenay and elsewhere succeeded the imprisonment, and though Voltaire was admitted to an audience by the regent and treated graciously he was not trusted. Oedipe was acted at the Theatre Francais on Nov. 18 of the year of release. It had a run of forty-five nights, and brought the author not a little profit. With these gains Voltaire seems to have begun his long series of successful financial speculations. But in the spring of next year the production of Lagrange-Chancel's libels, entitled the Philippiques, again brought suspicion on him. He was informally exiled, and spent much time with Marshal Villars, again increasing his store of "reminiscences." He returned to Paris in the winter, and his second play, Artemire, was produced in February 172o. It was a failure. In December 1721 his father died, leaving him property (rather more than four thousand livres a year), which was soon increased by a pension of half the amount from the regent. In return he offered himself as a secret diplo matist to Dubois.