FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?
cousin the lawyer or his brother the village cure because he had
privileges which they did not. It was from the Court and nobility
that he borrowed his manners and the very graces of his style. Glory,
his dearest hope and his consecration, had become for him a slippery
and ambiguous notion; a fresh idea of glory was rising up in which
a writer was truly recompensed if an obscure doctor in Bruges or
a briefless lawyer in Rheims devoured his books almost in secret.
But the diffuse recognition of this public which he hardly knew
only half touched him. He had received from his elders a traditional
conception of celebrity. According to this conception, it was the
monarch who consecrated his genius. The visible sign of his success
was for Catherine or Frederick to invite him to their tables. The
recompense given to him and the dignities conferred from above
did not yet have the official impersonality of the prizes and decora–
tions awarded by our republics. They retained ·the quasi-feudal
character of man-to-man relations. And since he was, above all, an
eternal consumer in a society of producers, a parasite of a parasitic
class, he treated money like a parasite. He did not
eam
it since there
was no common measure between his work and his remuneration;
he only
spent
it. Therefore, even
if
he was poor, he lived in luxury.
Everything was a luxury to him, including, and in fact particularly
so, his writings. Yet, even in the king's chamber he retained a rough
force, a potent vulgarity; Diderot, in the heat of a philosophical
conversation, pinched the thigh of the Empress of Russia until the
blood flowed. And then,
if
he went too far, he could always be made
to feel that he was only a scribbler. The life of Voltaire, from his
beating, · his imprisonment, and his flight to London, to the inso–
lence of the King of Prussia was a succession of triumphs and hu–
miliations. At times the writer enjoyed the passing favors of a mar–
quise, but he married his maid or a bricklayer's daughter. Hence,
his mind, as well as his public, was tom apart. But this did not cause
him to suffer; on the contrary, this original contradiction was the
source of his pride. He thought that he had no obligations to anyone,
that he could choose his friends and opponents, and that it was
enough for him to take his pen in hand to free
himself
from the
conditioning of milieu, nation, or class. He fl ew, he soared, he was
pure thought, pure observation. He chose to write to vindicate his
unclassing which he assumed and transformed into solitude. From
539
