The Friends of Voltaire — A Reader’s Guide

Epithets as Structural Devices

Hall assigns each friend a subtitle—"the Thinker," "the Talker," "the Wit," "the Aphorist," "the Host," "the Journalist," "the Contradiction," "the Statesman," "the Playwright," "the Aristocrat"—that governs the selection of anecdote and quotation. For Grimm, labeled "the Journalist," the narrative dwells on his Correspondance littéraire: its promise of "unlimited truthfulness," its fortnightly dispatches to distant courts, its coverage of everything from ventriloquism to mouth-wash. Hall's diction reinforces the label: she calls Grimm "the first critic of his day" and notes that he was "thinker as well as chronicler." The epithet is not merely descriptive but prescriptive, shaping what evidence Hall chooses to present.

Dialogue and Reported Speech

Hall rarely invents dialogue; instead, she paraphrases or quotes from letters and published works. In the Grimm chapter, she reports his stated intentions—"He set forth a flaming prospectus, promising an 'unlimited truthfulness'"—and his declared policy: "The sheets shall be 'dedicated to confidence and frankness!'" The exclamation marks are Hall's, not Grimm's, and they inject a tone of wry admiration. She also uses indirect discourse to convey his views: "he adduced his theories on government, he himself believing in the divine rights neither of the 'Social Contract' nor of kings." This technique keeps the focus on Grimm's ideas while maintaining narrative control.

Descriptive Economy and Judgment

Hall's descriptive passages are lean, often folding evaluation into observation. Of Grimm's character-sketches, she writes: "Nothing could be more fair and shrewd than Grimm's character-sketches. He solves in them the supreme difficulty—how to be at once honest and charitable." The second sentence is a judgment, but it is presented as a natural consequence of the first. Similarly, she notes that Grimm "was sometimes, naturally and inevitably, mistaken" about literary longevity, but that "as a rule his opinions have been confirmed by posterity." The qualifiers—"naturally and inevitably," "as a rule"—create an impression of balanced assessment, mirroring the very fairness she attributes to Grimm.

Recurring Motifs: The Foreign Critic

Hall repeatedly emphasizes Grimm's status as a foreigner writing in French: "Foreigner though he was, he had learnt to write the French language in a style" (the sentence is cut off in the excerpt, but the implication is clear). This motif appears in other chapters as well—Galiani was an Italian abbé, d'Holbach a German-born baron—and Hall uses it to highlight the cosmopolitan nature of Voltaire's circle. For Grimm, his outsider perspective is tied to his role as a critic: he could be "candid, impartial, and safe" precisely because he wrote for distant courts, not Parisian salons. The motif of distance—geographical, linguistic, intellectual—runs through the portrait.

Hall's biographical method is additive: each chapter contributes a distinct facet of the Enlightenment's intellectual culture, but the whole is greater than the sum. Readers attentive to her authorial choices—the epithets, the reported speech, the balanced judgments—will find a coherent argument about how Voltaire's friends shaped and were shaped by the ideas they championed. The book rewards those who read it not just for information, but for the craft of its construction.