FRANÇOIS MARIE AROUET, who by assuming the name of Voltaire has rendered
it so famous, was born at Chatenay, on the 20th of February, 1694, and was bap-
tised at Paris, in the church of St. André-des-Arcs, on the 22nd of November in
he same year. His excessive weakness was the cause of this delay, which, during
life occasioned doubts concerning the place and time of his birth.

The father of M. de Voltaire exercised the office of treasurer to the Chamber of
Accounts; his mother, Marguerite d'Aumart, was of a noble family of Poitou.
Their son has been reproached for having taken the name of Voltaire; that is, for
having followed a custom at that time generally practised by the rich citizens and
younger sons, who, leaving the family name to the heir, assumed that of a fief, or
perhaps of a country house. His birth was questioned in numerous libels. His
nemies, among men of literature, seemed to fear that the fashionable world would
too readily sacrifice its prejudices to the pleasure found in his society, and the
admiration his talents inspired, and that a man of letters should be treated with too
much equality. Such reproaches did him honour; malignity does not attack the
birth of a man of literature, but from a secret consciousness, which it cannot stifle,
that is wholly unable to diminish his personal fame.

The fortune which M. Arouet, the father enjoyed, was doubly advantageous to
his son; it procured him the advantages of education, without which genius never
attains those heights to which it might otherwise arise Nor was the advantage of
being born to an independent fortune less inestimable. M. de Voltaire never felt
the misery of being obliged to abandon his liberty that he might procure subsist-
ence; to subject his genius to labour, which the necessity of living enforced;
nor to flatter the prejudices, or the passions, of a patron.

The young Arouet was sent to the Jesuits' College, where the sons of the first
nobility, except those of the Jansenists, received their education. The professors
of rhetoric, under whom he was placed, were Father Porée and Father Jay: the
first, being a man of understanding, and of a good heart, discovered the seeds of a
future greatness in his scholar; and the latter, struck with the boldness of his
opinions and the independence of his mind, predicted that he would become the
apostle of deism in France: both of which prophecies were verified by time.