Shady

Colin Jones

  • Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom by Roger Pearson
    Bloomsbury, 447 pp, £18.99, November 2005, ISBN 0 7475 7495 2
  • Le Monde des salons by Antoine Lilti
    Fayard, 572 pp, £30.00, October 2005, ISBN 2 213 62292 2

The life of François-Marie Arouet, a.k.a. Voltaire (1694-1778), could hardly have been as colourful as that of the eponymous hero of his most famous novella, Candide. In his brief but eventful life, Candide encounters, inter alia, massacre, pillage, rape, piracy, mutilation, brutal militarism, cannibalism, slavery, bestiality, vivisection, religious fanaticism and political intolerance. After which, he turns his back on adventure and retires to cultivate his garden, a decision which evidently also appealed to his creator. In 1758 – just as he was writing Candide and following three decades of on-off nomadic wanderings – Voltaire bought an estate on the Franco-Swiss border at Ferney. There he would spend the rest of his life – as an improving landlord.

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[*] Odile Jacob, 320 pp., €27.90, February 2005, 2 7381 1591 8.