had an aptitude for looking on the tragic side of things, and one of
whose first poems was an "Ode on the Misfortunes of Life." His mother
died when he was twenty. Voltaire's father thought him a fool for his
versifying, and attached him as secretary to the Marquis of Chateauneuf;
when he went as ambassador to the Hague. In December, 1713, he was
dismissed for his irregularities. In Paris his unsteadiness and his
addiction to literature caused his father to rejoice in getting him
housed in a country chateau with M. de Caumartin. M. de Caumartin's
father talked with such enthusiasm of Henri IV. and Sully that Voltaire
planned the writing of what became his _Henriade_, and his "History of
the Age of Louis XIV.," who died on the 1st of September, 1715.

Under the regency that followed, Voltaire got into trouble again and
again through the sharpness of his pen, and at last, accused of verse
that satirised the Regent, he was locked up--on the 17th of May, 1717--in
the Bastille. There he wrote the first two books of his _Henriade_, and
finished a play on OEdipus, which he had begun at the age of eighteen. He
did not obtain full liberty until the 12th of April, 1718, and it was at
this time--with a clearly formed design to associate the name he took
with work of high attempt in literature--that Francois Marie Arouet, aged
twenty-four, first called himself Voltaire.

Voltaire's _OEdipe_ was played with success in November, 1718. A few
months later he was again banished from Paris, and finished the
_Henriade_ in his retirement, as well as another play, _Artemise_, that
was acted in February, 1720. Other plays followed. In December, 1721,
Voltaire visited Lord Bolingbroke, who was then an exile from England, at
the Chateau of La Source. There was now constant literary activity. From
July to October, 1722, Voltaire visited Holland with Madame de
Rupelmonde. After a serious attack of small-pox in November, 1723,