What step did I take upon this occasion? My reader will already have guessed it, if he has taken the trouble to pay the least attention to my narrative.The impossibility of attaining real beings threw me into the regions of chimera, and seeing nothing in existence worthy of my delirium, I sought food for it in the ideal world, which my imagination quickly peopled with beings after my own heart.This resource never came more apropos, nor was it ever so fertile.In my continual ecstasy I intoxicated my mind with the most delicious sentiments that ever entered the heart of man.Entirely forgetting the human species, I formed to myself societies of perfect beings, whose virtues were as celestial as their beauty, tender and faithful friends, such as I never found here below.I became so fond of soaring in the empyrean, in the midst of the charming objects with which I was surrounded, that I thus passed hours and days without perceiving it;and, losing the remembrance of all other things, I scarcely had eaten a morsel in haste before I was impatient to make my escape and run to regain my groves.When ready to depart for the enchanted world, I saw arrive wretched mortals who came to detain me upon earth, Icould neither conceal nor moderate my vexation; and no longer master of myself, I gave them so uncivil a reception, that it might justly be termed brutal.This tended to confirm my reputation as a misanthrope, from the very cause which, could the world have read my heart, should have acquired me one of a nature directly opposite.
In the midst of my exaltation I was pulled down like a paper kite, and restored to my proper place by means of a smart attack of my disorder.I recurred to the only means that had before given me relief, and thus made a truce with my angelic amours; for besides that it seldom happens that a man is amorous when he suffers, my imagination, which is animated in the country and beneath the shade of trees, languishes and becomes extinguished in a chamber, and under the joists of a ceiling.I frequently regretted that there existed no dryads; it would certainly have been amongst these that I should have fixed my attachment.
Other domestic broils came at the same time to increase my chagrin.Madam le Vasseur, while making me the finest compliments in the world, alienated from me her daughter as much as she possibly could.I received letters from my late neighborhood, informing me that the good old lady had secretly contracted several debts in the name of Theresa, to whom these became known, but of which she had never mentioned to me a word.The debts to be paid hurt me much less than the secret that had been made of them.How could she, from whom Ihad never had a secret, have one from me? Is it possible to dissimulate with persons whom we love? The Coterie Holbachique, who found I never made a journey to Paris, began seriously to be afraid I was happy and satisfied in the country, and madman enough to reside there.
Hence the cabals by which attempts were made to recall me indirectly to the city.Diderot, who did not immediately wish to show himself, began by detaching from me De Leyre, whom I had brought acquainted with him, and who received and transmitted to me the impressions Diderot chose to give without suspecting to what end they were directed.
Everything seemed to concur in withdrawing me from my charming and mad reverie.I was not recovered from the late attack I had when Ireceived the copy of the poem on the destruction of Lisbon, which Iimagined to be sent by the author.This made it necessary I should write to him and speak of his composition.I did so, and my letter was a long time afterwards printed without my consent, as I shall hereafter have occasion to remark.
Struck by seeing this poor man overwhelmed, if I may so speak, with prosperity and honor, bitterly exclaiming against the miseries of this life, and finding everything to be wrong, I formed the mad project of making him turn his attention to himself, and of proving to him that everything was right.Voltaire, while he appeared to believe in God, never really believed in anything but the devil; since his pretended deity is a malicious being, who, according to him, had no pleasure but in evil.The glaring absurdity of this doctrine is particularly disgusting from a man enjoying the greatest prosperity;who, from the bosom of happiness, endeavors, by the frightful and cruel image of all the calamities from which he is exempt, to reduce his fellow creatures to despair.I, who had a better right than he to calculate and weigh all the evils of human life, impartially examined them, and proved to him that of all possible evils there was not one to be attributed to Providence, and which had not its source rather in the abusive use man made of his faculties than in nature.I treated him, in this letter, with the greatest respect and delicacy possible.Yet, knowing his self-love to be extremely irritable, I did not send the letter immediately to himself, but to Doctor Tronchin, his physician and friend, with full power either to give it him or destroy it.Voltaire informed me in a few lines that being ill, having likewise the care of a sick person, he postponed his answer until some future day, and said not a word upon the subject.
Tronchin, when he sent me the letter, inclosed it in another, in which he expressed but very little esteem for the person from whom he received it.
I have never published, nor even shown, either of these two letters, not liking to make a parade of such little triumphs; but the originals are in my collections.Since that time Voltaire has published the answer he promised me, but which I never received.This is the novel of Candide, of which I cannot speak because I have not read it.
