Word: besterman
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VOLTAIRE by Theodore Besterman. 637 pages. Harcourf, Brace & World...
...adulatory biographer like Theodore Besterman is just the further aggravation that a resenter of Voltaire's cocksure reformism does not need. Mercilessly detailed, Besterman's book is a scholarly but unabashed case of hero-worship by the English founder and director of the Institut et Musée Voltaire in Geneva and editor of the 107 volumes of Voltaire's Correspondence. Besterman's zeal can nearly do the impossible: make his scintillating subject dull. Yet Voltaire survives even his sedulous admiration-perhaps because no age can help finding a man fascinating who himself was so fascinated...
...bourgeois poet with the instincts of a grand seigneur" as Besterman puts it, Voltaire set out none too scrupulously to guarantee himself financial security. Before his 24th birthday, he had become an instant success with his first and most famous play, Oedipe, in which he used Greek tragedy to give vent to his lifelong hatred of absolute monarchy. A special lottery, which he manipulated to his advantage, was his first financial killing...
Once he had money and independence, Voltaire settled down to a cautious but often brilliantly effective guerrilla war against France's ancien régime. He was, Besterman suggests, the first man to recognize and mobilize that new creature, public opinion...
...simply overwhelmed his age with his will, energy and versatility. Yet out of the 10 million words that Besterman estimates he wrote, how many are read-how many are readable-today? Certainly not his dated verse tragedies about Frenchified classical heroes. Nor his special-pleading history. Nor his philosophical tracts like Traité de Métaphysique which placed him, in Besterman's phrase, only "the tiniest possible step away from atheism...