Corpus des notes marginales de Voltaire, 8: Rollin—Sommier (review)

This is the eighth volume of a projected ten reproducing all the marks and notes that Voltaire (and a few privileged members of his circle) made in the books of his last library, the collection he installed and built up at Ferney between 1758 and 1778. Upon receiving the news of his death, Catherine the Great immediately set her agents to work to secure the library intact and have it transported to the Hermitage, where even the order of shelving was replicated. This cherished set of books, later transferred to what is now the National Library in St Petersburg, is thus an exceptional example of reverential preservation—but not preservation in amber, for followers and scholars with the right credentials, granted access, were able occasionally to make use of the books for their own purposes. This scholarly edition makes widely available materials that have been known about and in some cases published, though only in a piecemeal way, for a very long time.

In fact the process of preservation began before Catherine stepped in. Voltaire himself, with the assistance of his secretary Wagnière, who eventually oversaw the packing and transfer of the books, made the first catalogue as a finding tool. They developed methods for distinguishing the books that had been supplemented with marks and notes, chiefly by introducing strips of paper labelled ‘n. m.’ (note marginale) as bookmarks. Some of the bookmarks were themselves used as the vehicles of notes, though most of them simply marked the spot where notes or lines, crosses, and other signs of attention would be found. Voltaire made his marks with deliberation, in ink: he thought he might have occasion to consult his notes or study the marked passages again. Because of the unusually well documented history of the collection, the editors are justified in including even such non-verbal and nongraphic evidence of Voltaire’s reading as dog-eared pages.

Roughly 2000 of the almost 7000 volumes (representing 3000 titles) in the collection contain such marks, but the majority include no written commentary, only ‘silent’ proofs that Voltaire certainly read at least parts of them. Volume eight covers just under 100 titles: histories, dictionaries, political pamphlets, fiction, poetry, travels, biography, etc., mainly eighteenth-century works with a sprinkling of older titles. There was nothing strikingly original about Voltaire’s way of working with his books; it is entirely traditional. What makes his marks worthy of the kind of scholarly investment represented by this edition is in the first place his stature as a writer and leader of the Enlightenment, which gives value to everything associated with him; and secondly the vivacity of his response when he did engage in verbal commentary. Voltaire was a purposeful reader. He mined his books for information and ideas but also, characteristically, engaged in combat with them, taking up the authors (whom he generally ‘tutoyered’) point by point in a highly focused, very specific way. These quarrels and refutations sometimes formed the foundation of more measured opinions expressed later in correspondence or in print. Thus the works included in this edition go some way to showing not only what Voltaire read closely in his years at Ferney, but also how he read and what he made of his reading.

The annotated volumes are arranged alphabetically by author (excluding all works by Voltaire himself) and Volume eight has the good fortune to include all the known surviving annotated copies of works by Rousseau, whom Voltaire detested. These are in some ways typical, in others exceptional on account of the historical importance of both parties. (They never met. A representative note on a recurring theme is Voltaire’s outburst, ‘tu parles trop de toy. tu crois que l’univers est occupé de j jaques’ [‘You talk about yourself too much. You think the whole world cares about Jean-Jacques’].) They are given special editorial treatment, with a separate editor and a...