Voltaire

Use these rferences:

1) https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=RJ6pd40SjvIC&oi=fnd&pg=PT7&dq=voltaire&ots=GF_eWWwNJP&sig=G9oNCImAJT3UL5B4Lbw6gLysHiY#v=onepage&q=voltaire&f=false

2) Attached

3) Pick the last reference

 

Write a 900-1200 word essay on the below topics.  

 The lessons reflect upon how the ideas of certain philosophers influenced literary works produced during the Enlightenment and Modern literary periods.  Choose one philosopher from our lessons (Voltaire) and show how your chosen philosopher’s theories influence the literature of either the Enlightenment or Modern era.  You are not required to cite the original work from the philosopher. Rather, for this essay, you may consult sources that explain your chosen philosopher’s theories.

Please remember the following:

Avoid any and all summary sites within your essay.  This includes Sparknotes, Shmoop, Cliff’s Notes, and Wikipedia.

1. Use MLA format and citations in this essay. Also, please write this essay using the objective third-person point of view.
2. You may not use any wording from previous essays or forums.
3. Note that the works cited page and headings are not included in the page count. Please use one-inch margins, double-space, and do not add extra line spaces between paragraphs (or anywhere else). Use 12-point Times New Roman font. 
4. Scholarly sources generally come from academic journals and have been examined by experts in the field for accuracy.  
5. Make sure your essay has a clear introduction with a thesis statement (usually a single sentence that identifies a specific, narrow topic and offers an opinion or point of view on the topic) at the end of the introduction.  
6. Make sure your body paragraphs are focused on proving your thesis statement. Do not summarize the readings.Instead, use the readings to support your own original ideas.
7. Be sure that your thesis expresses an analytical thought and is not just a statement of simple fact or plot summary.
8. Make sure to have a conclusion that does not bring in new information. The conclusion should be more than just summary, and you should never repeat your thesis statement.  In the conclusion, explain what the reader should have learned by reading your essay. Conclude.

L I F E O F V O L T A I R E .

C H A P T E R I.

ANCESTORS.

Feancois-Mabie A r o t j e t , who at the age of twenty-four
assumed the name of Voltaire, was born at Paris on Sunday,
November 21, 1694.

A t that time Louis X I V . had been for fifty-one years styled
King of France, and had twenty-one years to live. William
and Mary reigned in England. Prussia was a dukedom.
Charles X I I . of Sweden was a good and studious boy of twelve
under his father’s tutelage, and Peter I. of Russia, twelve
years Czar, had not begun to build the present capital of the
Russian Empire. The great Newton, still in the prime of his
years, had done the immortal part of his work, and was about
to become Master of the Mint. Racine lived, the first name
in the literature of the Continent, and Dryden, the head of
English literature, was translating Virgil. Pope was six years
of age.

Francois-Marie was the first of the Arouets to acquire dis-
tinction, and he neither knew nor cared for his pedigree. I n
one of the last weeks of his life, when a local genealogist
wrote to him to say that two cities of old Poitou were con-
tending for the honor of having nourished his ancestors, he
replied by a jocular allusion to the seven cities that claimed
to be the birthplace of Homer, and added, ” I have no way of
reconciling this dispute.”1 I n his vast correspondence, all
topics are more frequently touched upon than that of his own
family and origin. I n old age he wrote once to a neighbor
who meditated buying a piece of land in which he held a life
interest, ” Now, sir, I give you notice that I count upon living
to the age of eighty-two at least, since my grandfather, who

1 Voltaire to Du Moustier de La Fond, April 7, 1778

10 LIFE OF VOLTAIRE.

was as dried up as I am, and wrote neither verse nor prose,
lived to eighty-three.” 2

This dried-up grandfather was Francois Arouet, of Paris, a
retired draper, living in 1666 in his own house, Rue St. Denis,
with his two children, Marie and Frangois. Country born
and bred, he had come up to Paris in early life, probably with
some capital, and, having established himself in business, had
thriven, married, and gained a competence. I t was a time
when a Paris tradesman could comfortably retire upon a capi-
tal of a hundred thousand francs.

The family was ancient and respectable. The earliest an-
cestor of whom anything is known was Helenus Arouet, who
was living in 152-3 at a village in the valley of the Thouet, a
tributary of the Loire, not far from Poitiers, and about two
hundred miles southwest of Paris. He was a tanner by trade,
married a tanner’s daughter, and brought up one of his sons
a tanner. He possessed and transmitted two small estates.
Probably the family had been established in the region for
generations: an ancestor may have witnessed the battle of
Poitiers in 1356, whence the Black Prince bore away captive
to England John, King of France. There is no part of France
more purely and primitively French than that portion of the
old province of Poitou. A grandson of this Helenus Arouet,
who was also named Helenus, passed his days at the little
town of St. Loup, in the same neighborhood, where he became
the father of five children, and inherited one of his grand-
father’s small estates. Francois, the retired cloth merchant
of Paris, was one of his sons. After serving the usual long
apprenticeship to a weaver in a village of the same neighbor-
hood, Francois Arouet passed some years in business at his
native city of St. Loup, and then made a bold stroke to im-
prove his circumstances in removing to Paris. This he did
about the year 1621, when the Pilgrim Fathers of New Eng-
land were starving through their first summer at Plymouth.
When he died, in 1667, a dried-up grandfather of eighty-three,
his son Francois was eighteen years of age, and his daughter
Marie was twenty. She married Mathurin Marchand, a ” pur-
veyor to Monsieur, the brother of the king.”

Besides these lineal ancestors of Voltaire, we have slight
1 2 Lettres Ine’Jites de Voltaire, 163. Paris. 1857.

ANCESTORS. 11

occasional notices of other connections and relations, all in-
dicating the respectable bourgeois rank of the family. He
speaks himself, in his ” Charles X I I . ” (Book V . ) , of deriving
important information from ” the letters of M. Bru, my re-
lation, first dragoman (drogman, he spells i t ) at the Ottomnn
Porte.” Jean Arouet, a near relation of his father, was the
apothecary of St. Loup for many years, and Samuel Arouet, an-
other relation, was the notary of the same place. But there
is no trace of a literary man in any record of the family vet
discovered : for that Rene” Arouet, notary and poet of Poi-
tou, who died in 1499, and who has been reckoned among the
progenitors of Voltaire for a century past, proves to be Rene”
Adouet.1

I t was then not alone the extremely dry grandfather of Vol-
taire who wrote neither prose nor verse. No known Arouet
has ever written except Franqois-Marie Arouet, the subject
of this work. A thriving, painstaking race they seem to have
been, with some spirit of enterprise among them ; trustworthy,
vivacious, irascible, but not gifted, nor interested in the prod-
ucts of the gifted. The occupations often chosen by them —
tanner, weaver, draper, apothecary, purveyor, notary—are
such as required exactness, fidelity, patience, and contentment
with moderate gains.

St. Loup, in or near which for many generations the Arou-
ets exercised such useful and homely vocations, is an ancient
little city, the centre of the wine, leather, and wool trade of
the vicinity, containing at present seventeen hundred inhab-
itants. Sheep, cattle, asses, and the vine, then as now, made
the wealth of the region round about, and the trades of the
Arouets, particularly tanner, weaver, and draper, are still
among those that most flourish there. I n portions of the de-
partment, now named Deux-Sevres, industry is almost confined,
says Reclus, to tanning and weaving, and to the breeding of
horses, asses, and mules. During the Revolution, St. Loup,
mindful of its Arouets and their famous descendant, changed
its ancient name to Voltaire. But the new appellation did not
adhere. A t present they who would find the name upon the
map of the world must look for it among the possessions of
Great Britain. Cape Voltaire is a headland of Australia.

1 La Jeunesse de Voltaire, par Desnoiresterres, page 6.