ABSTRACT
Monsieur de Voltaire took refuge at her Chateau de Cirey from the tempest roused by the Lettres Philosophiques and the “affaire Jore”. It was in fact a different Monsieur de Voltaire who returned to France in the spring of 1729. Up to 1726 and the amenities of the Chevalier de Rohan, with their resultant humiliations and demonstration of aristocratic indifference to a “mere “poet of bourgeois rank, Voltaire may have been an agitator; he was not then a genuine reformer. Voltaire’s ruin was like his dying, indefinitely postponed; neither prevented his working; for his usual state was like that reported by Mme. du Chatelet in a letter to Duc de Richelieu, “Voltaire has been ill for three weeks—he has written two Operas”. It is easy to see how such words might offend the prejudices of the age; but the authorities were too wise to persecute the poet when public opinion was so obviously on his side, and Voltaire escaped with nothing worse than his fears.
