Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Year 1981. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> In presenting this fragment of Voltaire’s otherwise lost play from my library I have presumed to offer a short survey of the writer’s life so that one may have an idea of the successes the turmoils and the pressures which led eventually to the Th?r?se affair. It is by no means everybody who accepts the premise that Voltaire beyond reasonable doubt ranks with Shakespeare Goethe and Dante as the four great literary geniuses of the Western World. In fact I remember once lunching with that much beloved lady Mrs Paul Hirsch in Cambridge and she told a brilliant young Fellow of my own Col- lege King’s sitting opposite me that Voltaire was perhaps the main interest in my life. “Oh he said ‘what do you want to bother with him for? But as he was only an economist I did not feel called upon to reply. Yet it is true that there are those who cannot appreciate the razor edge of Voltaire’s weapons and the insidious cunning with which he used them. Alas we cannot be concerned with his triumphs over injustice since they came later; but it must be remem- bered that if he had not been the most famous and feared living author in Europe he would never have had the power to hoist French justice with its own rather nasty petard. Fran?ois Marie Arouet who took the name of Voltaire was born in Paris on 31 November 1694. He was so sickly so puny that his life was despaired of and he was therefore hurriedly baptized on the following day. But as so often happened he had the last laugh and died in Paris on 30 May 1778. He was the fifth child of a prosperous notary who numbered among his clients the Duc de Sully the Duc de Richelieu the Duc de Saint-Simon Boileau the poet and the immortal prostitute Ninon de l’Enclos. (LL)