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Voltaire's Garden

newyorker.com · 4,844 words · saved by 8 readers

From 2005: The philosopher was a grand bourgeois with a big house, Adam Gopnik writes. By the end, he was also a dissident.

Save this story Save this story Voltaire ended up as a cross between Andrei Sakharov and Mr. Toad of Toad Hall—a grand bourgeois who was also a dissident. Illustration by Floc’h Voltaire, like God, whom he patronized, is always there. “No authors ever had so much fame in their own life-time as Pope and Voltaire,” Dr. Johnson dogmatized in the late eighteenth century, and though Pope still sings for those with ears to hear him, Voltaire still squabbles, a more lifelike sound, and does it everywhere. On the Op-Ed page of the Times , he can ornament Paul Krugman or offend William Safire, and he i

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