SOURCE: Pearson, Roger. “Statistics and Symposia: L'Homme aux quarante écus” and “Fallen Fables.” In Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire's ‘contes philosophiques’, pp. 20-38. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

[In these essays, Pearson focuses on the conte L'Homme aux quarante écus as a useful introduction to the contes in general, suggesting that in it, Voltaire outlines the basic themes of the Enlightenment. Pearson argues that the conte form offers Voltaire a great measure of philosophical and rhetorical freedom, and demonstrates Voltaire's writing to be a forerunner of modernity.]

STATISTICS AND SYMPOSIA: L'HOMME AUX QUARANTE éCUS

Messieurs, allez souper chez M. André.

(467)

Written in 1767, L'Homme aux quarante écus was published anonymously in Geneva by the Cramers in February 1768. It went through at least ten editions within the first year and on 24 September was condemned and ordered to be burned by the Paris Parlement, who also sentenced two booksellers to three days in the pillory and subsequent despatch to the galleys for having had the audacity to purvey it. The Vatican authorities finally placed it on their Index of forbidden works on 29 November 1771. For one of Voltaire's books, therefore, a fairly standard launch. But this initial success and notoriety were soon replaced by comparative oblivion, and the work has come generally to be seen as a septuagenarian's rather rambling and stubbornly repetitious attack on all-too-familiar bugbears. For many readers it is indeed scarcely a conte at all, given its comparative lack of action and the absence of traditionally delineated protagonists.¹ By reputation, therefore, L'Homme aux quarante écus is no more than a hastily conceived and rather irritable outburst against the economic theories of the Physiocrats.²

Also known as the ‘économistes’, these pioneers in the study of political economy³ argued against the prevailing orthodoxy of mercantilism, which holds that a nation's wealth depends on a favourable balance of trade with other nations and on the extent of its gold and silver reserves. They advocated that the way forward for France in its economic war with England was to develop its agriculture and reform its tax system. In particular they believed that only land is productive of wealth and hence that an increase in the products of the soil is the only means to an increase in prosperity. Le Mercier de la Rivière developed the political aspects of the Physiocratic doctrine known as ‘despotisme légal’ and contended that it was ‘natural’ for there to be a hereditary ruler who combined executive and legislative functions and who was joint-owner of the land with his subjects. Such despotism was legal because the ruler governed not arbitrarily but according to laws which were empirically manifest in the ‘natural order’. Le Mercier also proposed that France's old, cumbersome system of taxation be replaced by a single tax levied exclusively on income from land.⁴ The term ‘Physiocratie’, coined by Dupont de Nemours, advocates etymologically that nature should rule: i.e. that ‘market forces’ should prevail. Hence its proponents sought to free competition from restrictive practices and to provide for the free movement of goods both nationally and internationally. Hence, too, their famous motto: ‘laissez faire, laissez passer’. In short, the Physiocrats favoured a single market and looked forward to 1993.

Voltaire was not unsympathetic to these views. He accepted the need for taxes and advocated reform of the existing ones. He was in favour of the removal of restrictions on the movement of agricultural produce (eventually effected by Turgot), and in several previous works he had criticized some of the tenets of mercantilism.⁵ On the other hand, Le Mercier de la Rivière's ideas seemed to Voltaire quite simply risible. The proposed single tax on land income would exempt industrialists, merchants, and in many cases even the Church. As to royal joint-ownership of the land, the master of Ferney was not at all persuaded. Above all he was suspicious of the Physiocrats' system qua system, especially their axiomatic belief in the ‘naturalness’ of despotism. Instead of being the result of hasty vituperation, therefore, it is quite possible that the apparent disorder of this conte is intended as a riposte to the specious and dangerous tidiness of system-builders.

FROM MR AVERAGE TO M. ANDRé

What Voltaire has done in L'Homme aux quarante écus is to turn a statistic into a human being via the medium of the conte: narrative maketh man. For it is as if Voltaire had read that every family in Britain has 2.4 children and decided to write the biography of that 0.4 of a person. The Homme aux quarante écus is Mr Average. The population of France numbers twenty million; there are 130 million ‘arpents’ (roughly, acres) of which some 80 million are productive; and each ‘arpent’ brings in an annual income of 30 livres, or 10 écus. Mr Average will have four acres and thus an income of 40 écus per annum. By rights—or at least ‘suivant les registres du siècle d'or' (424)—this would have been every person's ‘portion égale’ in a prelapsarian world of evenly distributed wealth, but now—since ‘il faut compter suivant le siècle de fer’ (424)—it simply means poverty, especially if Mr Average has to share half his annual income with ‘la puissance législatrice et exécutrice … née de droit divin copropriétaire’ (417)—i.e. the King.

The hero of Voltaire's conte, therefore, is a figment of the administrative imagination, a ‘fable’ of reason; and his function is twofold. The first, and more obvious, is to show up the impracticability and injustice of the Physiocrats' proposed single tax on land. The financier, or ‘capitaliste’,⁶ would pay no tax because his capital is all in ‘contrats’ and ‘billets sur la place’ (418). The Carmelite (sect. IV)⁷ would pay no tax because the monks derive their wealth from donations of money on which tax has already been paid. But the Homme aux quarante écus, ‘seigneur terrien’ (418) that he is with his four broad acres, must pay his dues along with the wealthiest of the landed gentry. The latter, of course, could afford it, even if they did begrudge it, whereas half of forty écus leaves one with rather little to live on. Fortunately, in the end, the Contrôleur Général des Finances reveals that it was all a bad joke (sect. V).

In this first function the Homme aux quarante écus is complemented by the figure of the Géomètre who is, amongst other things, a surveyor with a sense of humour. As a practical man and not a system-builder, he represents the ideal philosophe and is Voltaire's answer to Fénelon's Mentor in Télémaque or the tutor in Rousseau's Emile (just as M. André is a wicker-worker rather than a joiner like Emile). Conscious that ‘la véritable géométrie est l'art de mesurer les choses existantes’ (419) the Géomètre takes a fairly cavalier attitude towards statistical computation. For ease of reckoning he is ready to round the figure for the amount of productive land in France up from 75 to 80 million acres; for ‘on ne saurait trop faire pour sa patrie’ (420). Likewise the average income per acre is rounded up to ‘trente livres’ (i.e. 10 écus) ‘pour ne pas décourager nos concitoyens’ (420-1). This means that the net annual national product is 2,400 million livres, which leaves him with something of a ‘mystère’ since there are only 900 million circulating in the economy (421). The Géomètre's statistical account of the average life-span is no less diverting. Given an average life expectancy in Paris of somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-three years, and having subtracted ten for childhood, and half of the remainder for sleep and boredom, one is left with six and a half in which to experience everything else—which leaves about three years of tolerable existence.

In these ways statistics are presented as being totally at variance with real experience, which leads on to the second function of the Homme aux quarante écus: he is to be the subject of what Voltaire in L'Ingénu (and in a different context in Le Taureau blanc) calls a ‘metamorphose’ (317). The statistical entity is to be fleshed out and given a reality by narrative which the inhumanity of demographic surmise has denied him. At the beginning he is simply the Homme aux quarante écus who exists by virtue of statistical calculation: and within the tale he has substance only in so far as he is its narrator. For the moment, like Candide and the Ingénu, he is a piece of white paper on which experience has yet to write itself. He is passive: he is spoken to by the ‘vieillard’, he is taxed, he is put in prison (‘et on fit la guerre comme on put’: 417), he is patronized by the fat financier. Mentally, however, he is beginning to be active: ‘je commence à réfléchir’ (416). Now he asks questions, of the financier, of the Géomètre, of the Carmelite. In section III he exists as both narrator and interlocutor: at the end of section IV he begins to tell stories to others. In section V he is active enough to petition the Contrôleur Général and achieves financial independence through being pardoned and awarded damages.

With this financial independence he emerges as a person in his own right: he ceases to be the first-person narrator and becomes the centre of other people's attention, at once a model (sect. VI) and a pupil (sects. VI, VIII-XII) and ultimately a much-admired, intimate friend (end of sect. XI, end of sect. XV, and sect. XVI). By the beginning of section VIII he is fully a member of the human race: ‘L'homme aux quarante écus s'étant beaucoup formé, et ayant fait une petite fortune, épousa une jolie fille qui possédait cent écus de rente’ (442: evidently his wife is worth two and a half average women). Moreover this wife is to bear him a child: the sterile statistic is to become a father. Upon achieving parenthood (exactly halfway through the story) ‘il commença à se croire un homme de quelque poids dans l'Etat’ (448). He is now maturely human in his response to events, both laughing with detached scorn at the idea that France should annually pay monetary tribute to the Vatican (453-4) and pleading with emotional involvement for a just and beneficent use of parish priests: ‘ce digne homme s'attendrissait en prononçant ces paroles; il aimait sa patrie et était idolâtre du bien public’ (454). He is reduced to tears of pity and outrage by the sight of an innocent miller being tortured for a confession and is now of one mind with his tutor the Géomètre (who has become the narrator): ‘nous plaignions la nature humaine, l'homme aux quarante écus et moi’ (457).

Once he has read Candide and spoken to a doctor (sect. XII), his education is almost complete: ‘c'est ainsi que l'homme aux quarante écus se formait, comme on dit, “l'esprit et le cœur”’ (464). He is now worthy of three accolades from his creator: description as ‘notre nouveau philosophe’ (465), a visit to Paris, and, above all, the humanity of a name: ‘On l'appelait M. André, c'était son nom de baptême’ (465). In Paris he becomes the ideal philosophe, and this—most importantly—by virtue of being a conteur. The dispute which has arisen as to whether or not Marcus Aurelius was an ‘honnête homme’ and whether he has gone to hell, purgatory, or merely limbo threatens to create ‘un schisme, comme du temps des cent et un contes de ma mère l'oie’ (466). But M. André, ‘excellent citoyen’ (466) that he now is, brings the opposing parties together for supper and achieves a reconciliation through narrative:

Il aurait fait souper gaiement ensemble un Corse et un Génois, un représentant de Genève et un négatif, le muphti et un archevêque. Il fit tomber habilement les premiers coups que les disputants se portaient, en détournant la conversation et en faisant un conte très agréable qui réjouit également les damnants et les damnés.

(467)

For the first time in the story he is endowed with a physical feature: ‘une physionomie ronde qui est tout à fait persuasive’ (467). The statistic has a body; the round number has a round face. Not that the power to reconcile should be confused with indiscriminate tolerance: the despatch of the ‘anti-philosophe’ in Section XIV of the story shows that. His judgement is now almost impeccable: ‘On ne peut guère tromper M. André. Plus il était simple et naïf quand il était l'homme aux quarante écus, plus il est devenu avisé quand il a connu les hommes’ (468). This representative of ‘un temps où la raison humaine commence à se perfectionner’ (469) has become ‘au fait de toutes les affaires de l'Europe, et surtout des progrès de l'esprit humain’ (469). He can even treat the Parisian narrator to an allegory of the voyage of reason (469-70) which bears no little resemblance to Voltaire's own Eloge historique de la raison to be written seven years later.

His apotheosis comes in the final section where he presides over a supper-party which is the epitome of civilized living. This illustrates that the reconciliation of opposites should not be taken to mean a return to some presumed uniformity of opinion or experience. When the narrator speaks of a ‘schisme, comme du temps des cent et un contes de ma mère l'oie’, his mock-serious elaboration of the point suggests that this is just another ‘fable’ belonging to the ‘siècle d'or’: ‘C'est une chose bien épouvantable qu'un schisme; cela signifie “division dans les opinions”, et jusqu'à ce moment fatal tous les hommes avaient pensé de même’ (466). How dull such a world must have been. The final supper-party shows that enlightened reconciliation tolerates and even encourages a plurality of opinion and experience. Like the community described at the end of Candide, M. André's guests are a decidedly mixed and international bag. French Catholic, Dutch Protestant, Swiss Calvinist, Portuguese Jew, and Greek Orthodox dine together as amicably as the lion lay down with the lamb.

THE CONVIVIAL CONTE

Contrary to the general view, therefore, there is a strong narrative line in L'Homme aux quarante écus. At the same time the diachronic development from statistic to ideal human being is complemented by a synchronic repetition of the opposition between system and reality. The satire focuses in turn on the systems of statistics, which posit phenomena that do not exist; of militarism, which spreads the pox and promotes a war in which nothing can be gained and much lost; of Christianity, which allows a monk both to withhold alms and to exact tithes; of agricultural theories that ruin; of biological and geological theories that reduce man variously to the level of a baboon or a cornflour eel, and even substantiate the ‘fable’ of the Flood; of metaphysics, with its monads, its plenum, and its materia subtilis; of genetics, which turns children into eggs, women into ambulant glands, and gestation into an ungainly jostle for position; of law, medicine, and theology, each with its own special absurdities.

In place of ‘systems’ we are offered the ethos of the Enlightenment: moderation, scepticism, discernment, and reading. ‘Gardez le milieu en tout. Rien de trop’ (432); ‘il est fort sage de douter’ (447); ‘il faut en user avec eux [i.e. ‘des livres’] comme avec les hommes, choisir les plus raisonnables, les examiner, et ne se rendre jamais qu'à l'évidence’ (453). And we are offered the power of the conte. Where systems put people in prison, and torture them, and bankrupt the state (sect. X), the conte brings peace and harmony to troubled disputants. As the allegorical figure of ‘la philosophie’ points out, France is actually governed by the book, by ‘l'ordonnance civile, le code militaire, et l'Evangile’ (460).⁸ Yet these are instruments of oppression, words to be accepted without question or challenge. Rather, Philosophy exhorts: ‘que toute la France lise les bons livres’ (459); and the clear implication of L'Homme aux quarante écus is that there is no better book than itself.

Just as the Homme aux quarante écus reaches perfection by becoming a conteur and hosting a supper-party that at once instructs and delights, so L'Homme aux quarante écus achieves perfection as a text of the Enlightenment by telling a story in the manner of a supper-party. It takes a symposium to beat the systems.⁹ Just as ‘c'est le sort de toutes les conversations de passer d'un sujet à l'autre’ (474), so does this conte; just as the Parisian narrator at the end exclaims: ‘De quoi ne parla-t-on point dans ce repas’, so perhaps do we of the polemical feast which Voltaire has provided. For the fare is certainly copious, and Henri Bénac is not alone in having been reminded of the comic encyclopedism of Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet.¹⁰ The reader's reaction may well be that of M. André: ‘il me prend quelque-fois des envies de rire de tout ce qu'on m'a dit’ (447). Every branch of intellectual enquiry, every country of consequence, every class of society, every walk of life is there: from alchemy to sociology, from Mexico to Russia, from king to convict, from theologian to basket-weaver, the Voltairian panorama stretches with comprehensive ease. But whereas Flaubert's two protagonists must complete the syllabus in order that their ultimate decision once more to become copyists should represent an indictment of all human aspiration to knowledge, Voltaire's Everyman must complete his education in order to be thoroughly up-to-date and poised on the very frontiers of knowledge. Only on such a basis can his rejection of academic quibbling in favour of urbanity and wit carry due conviction.

L'Homme aux quarante écus imitates a supper-party not only in its wide-ranging scope, but also in its polyphony. While we are denied the song with which M. and Mme André's evening is said to end, the story nevertheless provides an extraordinary gamut of narrative viewpoints, voices, registers, and intertextual echoes. Whereas the Establishment is said to govern despotically through the univocal texts of the Bible and the ‘code militaire’, Voltaire invites his reader to think independently by liberating his writing from generic affiliation and by devolving his authorial power. Hence the dialogic interplay of textual forms: pseudo-oral narrative, letter, manuscript extract, theatrical script, published ‘discours’, etc. Hence the bevy of narrators: the Homme aux quarante écus (I-V), a fellow-victim of newfangled notions (VI), a caricature of Voltaire himself (VII), a dead-pan, anonymous narrator for the delicate matter of how babies are made (VIII), the Géomètre (IX-XI/?XII), a further anonymous narrator (XII/?XIII-XIV), and lastly a like-minded Parisian (XV-XVI). Mediated through these narrators are the further voices of the reactionary ‘vieillard’ (sect. I), the ‘avocat général de Dauphiné’, the allegorical figure of ‘Philosophie’ (both in sect. XI), and the ‘chirurgien-major’ (sect. XII). Each is watched over by an unpredictable provider of footnotes rather as one might be interrupted by a pedant at the dinner-table.

Haunting the feast are a number of intertextual ghosts, whose words are quoted verbatim or to whom allusion is explicitly or implicitly made: Le Mercier de la Rivière, of course (417), but also Boileau (415) and Horace (431), St Matthew (435) and Candide (461), to name but a very few. As any annotated edition reveals, there is an abundance of such references, and their effect is further to erode Voltaire's privileged position as author and unique provider of sacred writ and to implicate this conte in a universal and eternal dialogue of reason. Moreover this dialogue is seen to take place at—and between—different linguistic registers. The participants contribute variously in Latin or the vernacular, in verse or in prose, in high rhetoric (of the ‘avocat-général’) or low colloquialisms (for example ‘trigaud’ (416), ‘badaud’ (419)), in the technical language of statistical calculation and the biological sciences, or in the easy, conversational manner of the Homme aux quarante écus at the beginning and the Parisian at the end.

Indeed attention is called to the slipperiness of language itself as a medium for dialogue: ‘la “haute science”’ may be as full of charlatanry (419) as the lowest trick; the monk intent on exacting his ‘dîmes’ from the citizens in his parish refers to them feudally as ‘ses paysans’ (434); ‘se sauver’ (450) is all right for a monk but not for a soldier. Yet linguistic accuracy is of the utmost importance, as may be inferred from the humorous theory that the Jesuits were expelled from France because one of their number mistranslated a single verb in Horace (453).

MODERNITY

What L'Homme aux quarante écus demonstrates, therefore, is that in modelling the conte on the polyphonic disorder of a supper-party Voltaire was seeking to match his literary form to the Enlightenment values which the tale advocates. One of these values is modernity. Lurking among the many disputes which this conte seeks to contain lies the Querelle des anciens et des modernes. The opening section opposes a ‘vieillard, qui “toujours plaint le présent et vante le passé”’ and the Homme aux quarante écus, who is the man of the moment. The description of the ‘vieillard’ is a quotation from Boileau, and his sentiments are those of Fénelon, author of Télémaque. As has already been seen, the narrative line of L'Homme aux quarante écus leads from M. André's incipient scepticism (‘Le raisonnement de ce vieillard, bon ou mauvais, fit sur moi une impression profonde … Je ne sais s'il avait raison en tout’: 416) to his being sure in his judgement and bang up-to-date (‘Il est aujourd'hui au fait de toutes les affaires de l'Europe, et surtout des progrès de l'esprit humain’: 469). Unlike those of Ovid (439), M. André's is a thoroughly modern metamorphosis; and this coming up-to-date is reflected in the chronology of the story, which emerges at the end from a temporal penumbra and moves briskly from ‘la semaine passée’ (beginning of sect. XIV) to ‘mardi dernier’ (XV) to ‘hier’ (XVI).

At the final supper-party Boileau is mentioned again, and the conversation engages with the past/present opposition in the sphere of literature: ‘On remarqua surtout avec beaucoup de sagacité que la plupart des ouvrages littéraires du siècle présent, ainsi que les conversations, roulent sur l'examen des chefs-d'œuvre du dernier siècle. Notre mérite est de discuter de leur mérite’ (474). There is no little self-irony here on the part of the author of chapter 12 of L'Ingénu (let alone Le Siècle de Louis XIV), but the point is serious and one often made by Voltaire.¹¹ What L'Homme aux quarante écus does, however, is to break free of the literary past, to reject any sense of inferiority, and to assert the virtues of modernity. Just as M. André has no Latin but does have a brain, so this conte flouts the canonical in the cause of truth. The passage just quoted continues: ‘Nous sommes comme des enfants déshérités qui font le compte du bien de leurs pères. On avoua que la philosophie avait fait de très grands progrès, mais que la langue et le style s'étaient un peu corrompus.’ More self-irony, not to mention a possible pun on ‘compte’ (and even on ‘bien’). The conte philosophique is a bastard genre, conceived outside the legitimizing prescriptions of neo-classical poetics and sinful in its disregard for the virtues of ‘good taste’. It favours Tasso against Homer, the conscious absurdities of Rabelais against the revered nonsense of Greek myth, the flaws of Montesquieu against the ‘fatras’ of Grotius (473-4). And, as we have seen, it prefers itself to Plato's Symposium, not to mention the feasts of Atticus and Lucullus (472-3).

There is, of course, the danger that this rejection of the traditional canon leads to mere superficiality. But Voltaire is alive to the impending charge:

les esprits superficiels préfèrent l'héroïsme extravagant aux grandes vues d'un législateur; … la plupart des lecteurs aiment mieux s'amuser que s'instruire. De là vient que cent femmes lisent Les Mille et une Nuits contre une qui lit deux chapitres de Locke.

(475)

Superficiality is in the mind of the reader. The aim of the conteur is to instruct as he pleases. The ancestry of the conte is popular and oral, not bookish and academic. Metaphysical, religious, and economic systems take themselves seriously and purport to be true, yet turn out to be pernicious fictions, sinister ‘fables’ of reason. The conte, on the other hand, like the literary figures it champions, flaunts its implausibility and punctures the pompous: it brings laughter, it breeds tolerance, it humanizes.

For all that the conte enjoys considerable structural freedom, however, this particular one (like all of Voltaire's) is held together by a unifying thread: here the story of M. André's education. As if to remind the reader of the distance travelled, the story comes full circle by ending as it began with references both to seventeenth-century literature and to the science of demography. But Boileau has been replaced by the conte, and a theory of population by a living human being. Common to both themes is the question of creation. At the beginning of the extract from the manuscripts ‘d'un vieux solitaire’, Voltaire's alter ego prefaces his onslaught on systems with the following remark:

Je vois que, si de bons citoyens se sont amusés à gouverner les Etats et à se mettre à la place des rois, si d'autres se sont crus des Triptolèmes et des Cérès, il y en a de plus fiers qui se sont mis sans façon à la place de Dieu, et qui ont créé l'univers avec leur plume, comme Dieu le créa autrefois par la parole.

(439)

The systems he goes on to deride concern the origins of the earth, and the extract is followed by the section in which M. André and the Géomètre review theories of our human origins. In each case arrogant human minds are presuming to construct grandiose theories about the nature of God's creation. Has perhaps Voltaire, in L'Homme aux quarante écus, substituted for these arrogant rewritings of Genesis his own more humble, less dogmatic account of how to create a happy citizen? Cleaner air, a healthier diet, more exercise, breast-feeding, inoculation (423): it is an agenda that might have been written for the ‘bien-pensants’ of our own day, except that the programme also includes marriage and lots of children as the means to an increase in the male individual's material prosperity. For all that the openness of Voltaire's text may allow the reader to jib at the message of bourgeois liberalism if he or she wishes, it is nevertheless clear that the literary creation of the conte emerges from L'Homme aux quarante écus with rather more credit than the fantastical creations of the fashionable intellectuals whom it ridicules.

For these intellectuals, too, were bang up-to-date; and it is easy to lose sight of the fact from a late-twentieth-century perspective in which the medium of ridicule may seem only slightly less antiquarian than its objects. As the invitation from Catherine of Russia indicates, Le Mercier de la Rivière's ideas, and those of the Physiocrats generally, were potentially very influential: hence the urgent need to throw some cold water on them. In doing so Voltaire finds himself in a difficult polemical position, for he is having to counter the new as opposed to the old. The deist who wanted to ‘écraser l'infâme’ could present himself as a modern believer in progress and an enemy of superstition, tradition, institutions, and fusty scholarship. Even when the enemy was the contemporary, voguish thought of Leibniz and Wolff, he had managed to suggest that it belonged to the past (and anyway its authors were German: look how clever they had been to start the Seven Years War). But how to oppose his fellow philosophes, indeed how to oppose the new generation of philosophes who were in many respects his intellectual heirs?

Voltaire's answer is to send up both his own elderliness and his own impatience with scientific hypothesizing, to offer an oblique reminder of his activities as a champion of human rights (on behalf of Calas and Sirven), and to make the humane, level-headed, practical-minded Géomètre his principal spokesman and narrator. those aspects of the contemporary Voltaire legend that might have made his reader resistant are thus neutralized by being wittily recuperated in the text (the ‘vieillard’ of sect. I, the experimental farmer of sect. VI, the ‘vieux solitaire’ of sect. VII). At the same time the urbane Parisian narrator who befriends M. André at the end is a portrait of Voltaire's ideal reader, a man who would have no more truck with systems than Voltaire himself, a man who shuns the controversy that destroys empires (473) in favour of the conversation that unites ‘la bonne compagnie’ (475). This man is struck by the thought that whereas those great empires ‘d'Occident et d'Orient’ are gone, ‘les ouvrages de Virgile, d'Horace et d'Ovide subsistent’ (473). So, doubtless, is Voltaire. Political regimes may come and go, but literature survives—and survives to invite future generations of readers to its feast. Therein lies the hoped-for modernity of L'Homme aux quarante écus even though it attacks some aspects of the modern. In the event, a work which questions the human consequences of economic theories and the justice of a single tax universally applied may not have dated quite as quickly as one might have imagined. Nor, indeed, has the écu.

FALLEN FABLES

Après cela, messieurs les savants, faites des calculs et des systèmes, ils seront aussi faux les uns que les autres.

(472)

The lesson of L'Homme aux quarante écus is the lesson of all Voltaire's contes, and indeed for many commentators the principal message of the Enlightenment. In The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, for example, Ernst Cassirer stresses the way in which ‘the thought of the Enlightenment again and again breaks through the rigid barriers of system and tries, especially among its greatest and most original minds, to escape this strict systematic discipline’.¹² For Cassirer the real originality of the Enlightenment lies not so much in what it thought as in how it thought; and he offers an account of what the eighteenth century meant by ‘reason’ which is particularly helpful for an understanding of Voltaire's contes:

In the great metaphysical systems of [the seventeenth century]—those of Descartes and Malebranche, of Spinoza and Leibniz—reason is the realm of the ‘eternal verities’, of those truths held in common by the human and the divine mind. What we know through reason, we therefore behold ‘in God’. Every act of reason means participation in the divine nature; it gives access to the intelligible world. The eighteenth century takes reason in a different and more modest sense. It is no longer the sum total of ‘innate ideas’ given prior to all experience, which reveal the absolute essence of things. Reason is now looked upon rather as an acquisition than as a heritage. It is not the treasury of the mind in which the truth like a minted coin lies stored; it is rather the original intellectual force which guides the discovery and determination of truth. This determination is the seed and the indispensable presupposition of all real certainty. The whole eighteenth century understands reason in this sense; not as a sound body of knowledge, principles, and truths, but as a kind of energy, a force which is fully comprehensible only in its agency and effects.¹³

Reason, then, is a process, the means to a systematic destruction of systems. The Voltairian conte is also a process rather than a ‘treasury … in which the truth like a minted coin lies stored’: his fables teach us not what the reason but how to reason. In L'Homme aux quarante écus this process is one of humanization and education, and its movement from the stupidity of systems to the ‘sagacité’ (474) of the supper-party is paradigmatic of the majority of Voltaire's stories. In this respect, at least, they may legitimately be seen as essentially repetitive in their principal polemical and ideological strategy—as indeed Voltaire makes humorously plain in L'Homme aux quarante écus in the concluding remarks of the ‘vieux solitaire’: ‘Je suis bien vieux; j'aime quelquefois à répéter mes contes, afin de les inculquer mieux dans la tête des petits garçons, pour lesquels je travaille depuis si longtemps’ (442).

Broadly speaking, the typical Voltairian conte begins by introducing a theory, prejudice, or complacent assumption. Through the eyes and experience of an initially innocent observer this ‘system’ is juxtaposed with the facts of life, with the result that the observer's outlook is gradually transformed and he is brought to adopt a provisional modus vivendi based on moderation and discernment and a scepticism which does not prevent useful, practical action. In Voltaire's hands the conte is thus an instrument of demythification, of ‘defabulation’, which inculcates a habit of mind more than it illustrates a series of aphoristic truths. Typically his contes demonstrate that systems are an unwarranted and unsustainable imposition of false order on the facts of life, and they trace a coming to terms: with human ignorance, with the contingencies of living (or is it providence?), with other people. They tend to depict an accommodation with reality, a movement from system to ‘sagesse’, from being ‘philosophique’ in the sense of being abstract and unemotionally logical to being ‘philosophique’ in the sense of being knocked about by life.

Protagonist and reader are, as it were, ejected from a fool's paradise, shown the lessons of experience, and left in a kind of sceptical suspense. Paradoxically Voltaire uses fiction (in the sense of invented stories) to provide the empirical evidence, the facts of life, upon which the initial, illusory system founders, with the result that both protagonist and reader are brought to believe not in a theory or an abstraction but in the evidence of their own eyes (even if, like the ‘crocheteur borgne’, Memnon, or Pangloss, they have only one). They are subjected to what Jean Starobinski calls ‘la riposte du monde à l'euphorie du système’.¹⁴

In narrative terms this process is reflected in a movement from ‘fable’, in the sense of what is fantastical, naïve, implausible, to conte, the Voltairian fable of reason which presents a veiled lesson of experience and ends with an invitation to a plural response. Thus, for example, Zadig opens with an assertion of its Oriental affiliations in the ‘Epître dédicatoire’ and proceeds to employ the structure of the Oriental tale as apparently corresponding to some providential order: all will be well in the end, though we cannot yet quite see how. But then the ending (of 1752) undermines this. The two appended chapters bring us, by their close approximation to the style of the Thousand and One Nights, stylistically full circle back to the register of the ‘Epître dédicatoire’; but now the Oriental tale serves as an expression of perplexed uncertainty. The future is no longer full of Eastern promise, merely more of the same: the dirty tricks of destiny. Voltaire's sceptical conte has replaced the starry-eyed fable.

Similarly, in Candide, the marvellous world of chivalric romance is replaced by the sober realism of the garden suburb. The typical sequence of trial by ordeal—uncertain birth, capture, duel, disguise, abduction, chase, storm, shipwreck, piracy, captivity, recognition, release, and reunion—is shown to be no more bizarre than the manifold manifestations of man's (and God's) inhumanity to man and the systems used to justify it. The ‘fables’ of romance and Optimism become the conte of utilitarian survival.

What we see, therefore, in many of Voltaire's contes, is that the main part of the story, the process of disillusion and debunking, is a kind of Fall as protagonist and reader alike eat of the Tree of Knowledge. Such an analogy may not be entirely fanciful. As a genre the fable originated in primitive allegory which presented animals and plants speaking like human beings;¹⁵ and this is exactly what one finds in La Princesse de Babylone, where the phoenix belonging to Amazan tells Formosante of this ideal place, the ‘pays des Gangarides’, where men and animals still converse to their mutual educational benefit. Mocking the naïvety of ancient fable, Voltaire here sends it up by taking its allegories as literally true. Thus the phoenix reveals that animals have stopped talking in the rest of the world because ‘les hommes ont pris enfin l'habitude de nous manger, au lieu de converser et de s'instruire avec nous’ (363). If Formosante does not believe him, she has only to read ‘Les fables de votre ancien Locman, traduites en tant de langues’ which provide ‘un témoignage éternellement subsistant de l'heureux commerce que vous avez eu autrefois avec nous. Elles commencent toutes par ces mots: “Du temps que les bêtes parlaient”’ (363-4).

The fable, then, is associated with a mythical realm and a mythical age (‘du temps que les bêtes parlaient’); it represents the fantastical epoch before the Enlightenment, of which Voltaire's own contes are the modern, fallen fables. Locman has given way to the new man, Locke. And this will be the lesson of Le Taureau blanc. Like La Princesse de Babylone it takes fables literally, here the many ‘fables’ contained within the Old Testament. In this ancient Egyptian world the local fauna are positively garrulous, but the heroine belongs to the Age of Enlightenment. Amaside prefers Locke to Locman, and when the Serpent tells her stories, she insists on ‘vraisemblance’ (553-4). Like the Serpent's ensuing tale, the Voltairian conte is an onslaught on taboo. Wielded as an invaluable weapon in Voltaire's long campaign against bigotry and intolerance and in favour of open-minded enquiry and debate, it is a ‘fallen’ fable in the sense that, whereas the fable of old appealed to a childlike credulity and fostered the passive acceptance of incontrovertible moral truths, the conte philosophique is like an apple plucked from the Tree of Knowledge and handed to us by the Serpent himself that we should gorge ourselves and feel the nakedness of our prejudice. We should eat, question, and consider.

In summary, the Voltairian conte mocks and undermines systems, those ‘fables’ of reason concocted by metaphysicians, theologians, economists, and rationalists of every sort. It substitutes the authentic fable of reason, which is the story of how the human mind gathers evidence, weighs it, and reaches conclusions which are acceptable only because they are provisional. It provides not the answer, but the means to an answer. Like Flaubert, Voltaire believed that ‘la bêtise consiste à vouloir conclure’.¹⁶ True human ‘esprit’ means an open mind and the wit that comes from an awareness of the surprises, paradoxes, and ironies of the human condition. System-building derives from a nostalgic desire for the unity of a prelapsarian world in which all were of one mind: Enlightenment ‘sagesse’ lies in the recognition that it takes all sorts, and that it is usually better, whatever the issue, to be in two minds. In the cause of humanity the supper-table is altogether more salutary than the drawing-board.

I now propose to trace Voltaire's career as a conteur in chronological order, paying detailed attention to each individual story in turn. Interestingly, a similar pattern will emerge. His earlier stories tend to be more schematic and one-tracked in their presentation: Micromégas is ‘about’ relativity, Zadig is ‘about’ goodness defeated, Le Monde comme il va is ‘about’ mixture. Gradually they fill out with the hurly-burly and muddle of human experience, and Candide and L'Ingénu both conceal considerable complexity beneath their easy-going surfaces. From L'Homme aux quarante écus onwards the moral complexity begins to be matched by an increasing complexity of form such that the Voltairian conte comes to resemble nothing more than that ‘ragoût exquis’ which so delighted Flaubert.¹⁷ Moreover, just as each story breaks down a system on the anvil of the facts, so too the Voltairian contes hammer away successively at the hallowed clichés of narrative before proposing a new form of story-telling that is all apparent improvisation, orality, disjointed textual fragments. The conte of ingenious allegory gradually becomes the conte of conversation. In so doing it approximates more and more closely to the eighteenth-century ideal of good manners which the narrator of Tristram Shandy so eloquently describes:

Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is), is but a different name for conversation. As no one who knows what he is about in good company would venture to talk all; so no author who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding would presume to think all. The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.¹⁸

Notes

1. See Voltaire, Romans et contes, ed. Henri Bénac (Paris, s.d. [1949]), p. v; Nuçi Kotta, 'L'Homme aux quarante écus. A Study of Voltairian Themes (The Hague and Paris, 1966), 15; Vivienne Mylne, ‘Literary Techniques and Methods’, 1056; and Van den Heuvel, Voltaire dans ses contes, 327.

2. See Kotta, ‘L'Homme aux quarante écus’, 17; Romans et contes, [RC] ed. René Pomeau (Paris, 1966), 383; and RC, p. lxv. A worthy exception to this dismissive consensus is provided by Robert Ginsberg, ‘The Argument of Voltaire's L'Homme aux quarante écus: A Study in Philosophic Rhetoric’, SVEC 56 (1967).

3. They included François Quesnay (1694-1774), who was the author of articles for the Encyclopédie (‘Fermiers’ in 1756, and ‘Grains’ in 1757) and a Tableau économique (1758) which became early Physiocrat manifestos; Dupont de Nemours (1739-1817), who gave the school its name by publishing a collection of Quesnay's essays under the title La Physiocratie ou Constitution naturelle du gouvernement le plus avantageux au genre humain (1767), and whose own Origine et progrès d'une science nouvelle appeared in 1768; and Le Mercier de la Rivière (1720-93), author of L'Ordre essentiel et naturel des sociétés politiques (1767), which, thanks to the intervention of an enthusiastic Diderot, brought him an invitation to Russia from Catherine the Great to help her draft a new constitution.

4. According to Kotta no one ever attempted to put this into practice except for the Margrave of Baden, and with disastrous results: ‘It led to a sharp drop in the value of the land and to the multiplication of bars and taverns’ (‘L'Homme aux quarante écus’, 68).

5. See Kotta, ‘L'Homme aux quarante écus’, 38-45, 68-83. Kotta finds it puzzling that Voltaire should revert in L'Homme aux quarante écus to antiquated mercantilist views when he had shown himself more progressive (even than Adam Smith) in previous writings, especially in his Dialogue entre un philosophe et un contrôleur général des finances (1751). Broadly Kotta sees Voltaire as being initially impressed by Physiocrat theories, then revolting against the single tax and the idea of joint-ownership, and finally taking refuge in mercantilism but without renouncing the Physiocrats' central view that land alone was productive of wealth.

6. See RC, 1069, n. 1.

7. The divisions of the conte may helpfully be numbered as follows: I (‘Un vieillard …’); II (‘Désastre de l'homme aux quarante écus’); III (‘Entretien avec un géomètre’); IV (‘Aventure avec un carme’); V (‘Audience de monsieur le contrôleur général’); VI (‘Lettre à l'homme aux quarante écus’); VII (‘Nouvelles douleurs occasionnées par les nouveaux systèmes’); VIII (‘Mariage de l'homme aux quarante écus’); IX (‘L'Homme aux quarante écus, devenu père, raisonne sur les moines’); X (‘Des impôts payés à l'étranger’); XI (‘Des proportions’); XII (‘De la vérole’); XIII (‘Grande querelle’); XIV (‘Scélérat chassé’); XV (‘Le bons sens de M. André’); XVI (‘D'un bon souper chez M. André’).

8. Cf. the Homélies prononcées à Londres en 1765 (1767): ‘Les livres gouvernent le monde’ (3^e Homélie: ‘Sur l'Interprétation de l'Ancien Testament’, Mélanges, 1144).

9. Moreover Voltaire envisaged this story as an after-dinner entertainment: ‘Cependant, Monsieur, si vous jugiez qu'il y eût dans cette rapsodie quelque plaisanterie bonne ou mauvaise qui pût le faire digérer gaiement après ses tristes dîners [of the duc de Choiseul], je hasarderai de mettre à ses pieds, comme aux vôtres, l'homme aux quarante écus’ (D14719: 3 Feb. 1768, to Chardon).

10. Romans et contes, ed. Bénac, p. v.

11. e.g. in La Princesse de Babylone (RC, 400).

12. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, tr. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ, 1931), p. ix.

13. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 13. Cf. Peter Gay, Voltaire's Politics. The Poet as Realist, 2nd edn. (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1988), 26-8: ‘The Enlightenment was not an Age of Reason but a Revolt against Rationalism’ (27).

14. ‘Sur le style philosophique de Candide’, Comparative Literature, 28 (1976), 198; reprinted in Le Remède dans le mal. Critique et légitimation de l'artifice à l'âge des lumières (Paris, 1989), 129.

15. See Alex Preminger (ed.), Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 2nd edn. (London and Basingstoke, 1975), 269.

16. Letter of 4 Sept. 1850 (to Louis Bouilhet) and passim.

17. Letter of 7 June 1844 (to Louis de Cormenin).

18. Bk. 2, ch. 11.

Select Bibliography

The Works of Voltaire

Romans et contes, ed. Henri Bénac (Paris, s.d. [1949]).

Romans et contes, ed. René Pomeau (Paris, 1966).

Romans et contes, ed. Frédéric Deloffre and Jacques Van den Heuvel (Paris, 1979).

Mélanges, ed. Jacques Van den Heuvel (Paris, 1961).

Studies on Voltaire

Gay, Peter, Voltaire's Politics. The Poet as Realist, 2nd edn. (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1988).

Ginsberg, R., ‘The Argument of Voltaire's L'Homme aux quarante écus: A Study in Philosophic Rhetoric’, SVEC 56 (1967), 611-57.

Kotta, Nuçi, ‘L'Homme aux quarante écus’. A Study of Voltairian Themes (The Hague and Paris, 1966).

Mylne, Vivienne, ‘Literary Techniques and Methods in Voltaire's contes philosophiques’, SVEC 57 (1967), 1055-80.

Starobinski, Jean, ‘Sur le style philosophique de Candide’, Comparative Literature, 28 (1976), 193-200; reprinted in Le Remède dans le mal. Critique et légitimation de l'artifice à l'âge des lumières (Paris, 1989), 123-33.

Van den Heuvel, Jacques, Voltaire dans ses contes. De ‘Micromégas’ à ‘L'Ingénu’, 3rd edn. (Paris, 1967).

General

Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, tr. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ, 1951).

Preminger, Alex (ed.), Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 2nd edn. (London and Basingstoke, 1975).