Name-dropping:
Voltaire (pronunciation: vol-TARE) (1694–1778).
Writer, philosopher, and stalwart representative of the Enlightenment in Europe.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Voltaire lends himself to a number of conversational topics: reason, promiscuity, Deism, the surprising attractiveness of female mathematicians, and the rights of those accused of crimes. This is the great joy of getting to know a multifaceted famous person.

The Basics
Although widely considered to be among the greatest French writers ever, very little of Voltaire’s work is read today. Voltaire was born François-Marie Arouet (why he picked the pen name Voltaire is an enduring mystery) into a middle-class family. Initially, Voltaire gained prominence as sort of the Dorothy Parker of 18th-century France. His aphorisms (e.g., “Common sense is not so common”) were widely quoted, but he wanted more.

Never a terribly modest man (“Paradise is where I am,” he once noted), the young Voltaire wanted to be France’s Virgil, an epic poet who would reinvigorate French intellectualism. Unfortunately, Voltaire wasn’t that great a poet. His one epic poem, Henriade, reads like someone competing for an award for Worst Imitation of Virgil.

Then he got thrown into the Bastille after an argument with a nobleman who’d made fun of the name Voltaire. (Really.) The next decades of his life were spent in periodic exile, as Voltaire began writing plays and history that openly criticized the irrational and outmoded morality of Church and government alike.

In 1734, Voltaire met the love of his life, Gabrielle-Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet, who unfortunately was married, but fortunately was married to a guy who didn’t seem to care that she spent all her time with Voltaire. Their love affair lasted 15 years, until Châtelet’s death during childbirth. (See sidebar.) Not until he was 64 did he write the Enlightenment classic Candide, a long short story detailing the sad life of a young philosopher who finally realizes the only way to happiness is “to cultivate one’s own garden.” This commonsense, nonidealized construction of happiness became identified forever after with Voltaire.

His other central contribution also came late in life. After he retired to a large estate in the town of Ferney, Voltaire began more actively crusading against oppression and bigotry. His writing advocated religious tolerance, the abolition of torture, and civil rights of commoners. It was in these liberal polemics, almost all of them written when he was an old man, that he truly established his lasting reputation.

Mme du Châtelet
Voltaire had many, many affairs, but Mme du Châtelet was the love of his life. And no wonder. While most women of her generation were demure homebodies, Mme du Châtelet was a mathematician and physicist. After meeting Voltaire, she endeavored to learn English so she could translate Newton’s The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy into French, hoping that it might bring about a move toward reason and scientific exploration. She died in 1749, and it was seven more years before her translation of Newton began to be published. Amazingly, however, it did indeed lead to a reinvigorated interest in scientific study, bolstering the Enlightenment ideals she and Voltaire both cherished.

God Bless ‘Em
After Voltaire purchased his estate at Ferney, he rebuilt the church there, and wasn’t bashful about it. Above the church door read the inscription “Deio Erexit VOLTAIRE” (”Erected to God by Voltaire”), which was blasphemous if only because Voltaire made his own name so much bigger than God’s. Even though Voltaire wrote extensively about the irrationality and dangers of the Church (and publicly stated that he didn’t believe Jesus every existed), he somehow convinced the pope himself to send him a relic–that is, a piece of a dead saint’s body–to sanctify Voltaire’s crazy church.

Conversation Starters
◆ Although Voltaire came from a fairly well-off family, he didn’t become really rich until he played the lottery. In 1728, a friend of Voltaire’s noticed that the French government had accidentally created a lottery in which the prize money was significantly larger than the cost of all the tickets combined. So Voltaire formed a syndicate, bought all the tickets and won the lottery.

◆ Voltaire had many hated rivals, but he reviled no man quite so much as Élie-Catherine Fréron, a journalist who attacked the ideas of the Enlightenment and savagely panned one of Voltaire’s plays (Fréron was right on that count—the play was horrible). Voltaire disliked Fréron so deeply that he had a painting of Fréron displayed in his dining room at Ferney. Of course, the portrait was no ordinary pic: It featured a terrified Fréron getting whipped by a band of demons.

◆ Like a lot of intellectuals who’d come after him, Voltaire loved coffee—really, really loved it, to the tune of a purported 50 cups a day (the cups were smaller than today’s uber-grande lattes, but still!). So the next time someone says coffee is bad for you, point out that, in an era when popular treatments for disease included leeches and “quieting the nervous energy,” Voltaire lived to the ripe old age of 83.