An Age of Characters

THE AGE OF REASON (433 pp.)--Harold Nicolson--Doubleday ($5.95).

If Louis XIV was the sun king, Louis XV had all he could do to reign. He was lazy, lecherous and indecisive. History has preserved his notoriety in such personal institutions as the Pare aux Cerfs (the deer park), a town house where, actually, he maintained a private brothel, and, as Author Nicolson puts it, "thereby did much damage to his repute, his constitution, and his power of application." However, one of Louis XV's nightly customs reveals far more about the so-called Age of Reason than his deer park.

Bedtime a I'ancien regime was a charade of pomp and circumstantial evidence. Each evening Louis XV pretended to occupy the monumental bed in the grandiose official apartment of Louis XIV at Versailles, while grand dukes and marquises vied to hold a candle or the King's nightshirt. As soon as the last light was snuffed out, Louis XV scrambled out of bed, scurried up a secret staircase and bedded down comfortably in his own cozy petit appartement. In the morning the whole absurd ritual began again in reverse.

This gap between appearance and reality, pretension and performance plagued the Age of Reason (roughly 1657-1757) and made it an age of paradox. The age professed skepticism and credulously embraced charlatans like Count Cagliostro, who had a yellow pill that would keep one permanently young, `a la Dorian Gray. The age prattled of liberty, but the man the intellectual French Encyclopedists hailed as a philosopher king, Frederick the Great, was described by one British observer as "the completest tyrant God ever made. I had rather be a post horse than his first Minister, or his brother, or his wife." The age worshiped good sense, yet "the High Priest of Reason," Dr. Johnson, would scrape his knuckles with a penknife till they were raw, and insisted on touching every post when walking down a street.

The Facts of Life. The age was often out of character but never out of characters. That is what fascinates Harold Nicolson, who scants history for personality, and arranges his book as a gallery of portraits bathed in the warm glow of idiosyncrasy rather than the cold light of 100% accuracy. The result is an "entertainment" written in the witty and amusing fashion of a male Nancy Mitford. Among the chief sitters: Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Frederick the Great, Voltaire, Saint Simon, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Ben Franklin, Louis XIV, Louis XV, John Wesley and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Intellectual and psychological vignettes illuminate the contradictions of ruler and sage. As a bride of 16, Catherine the Great was ignorant of the facts of life, thought the only difference between men and women was that men, for some odd reason, had to shave. Her Romanov husband was impotent, mad and sadistic, and his favorite pastime was to play with his toy soldiers or flog a dachshund suspended by a rope from the ceiling. "In later life," writes Nicolson, in a sly reference to her 30-odd lovers, "she did much to repair this gap in her experience." In later life she was also a great lip servant of liberty ("Liberty is the core of everything; without it there would be no life"). The French philosopher Diderot once shook her till her shoulders were black and blue to get her to apply a little enlightenment to her realm. With regal practicality she retorted: "Your medium is paper, and paper is always patient. I, Empress that I am, have to write on the sensitive skins of human beings." She did not add that she preferred to write with a knout.

Most of the 18th century's intellectual love affairs between autocrats of the salon and fust plain autocrats were tetchy. Voltaire, who hated oppression, was oppressively tightfisted with money. Indeed, he made himself a millionaire as a moneylender. As the house guest of Frederick the Great, Voltaire was caught out in a shady currency-smuggling scheme. Frederick, the ruthless practitioner of Realpolitik, was shocked at the low moral code of writers. "If your work deserves statues," he wrote, "your conduct merits chains." Voltaire wrote to friends: "The King is an exceptional man--very attractive at a distance." The pair resumed their friendship later, since Frederick, an incorrigible scribbler of poor verse, could not bear to have anyone but Voltaire edit and polish his poems. As Author Nicolson succinctly puts it, "The literary vanity of soldiers passes human comprehension."

In the Draft. The stock market of 18th century thought was the Parisian salon, and Author Nicolson gracefully traces its origins and culls its quotations. He argues that it sharpened wits and spread ideas. He also feels that it stamped on the French mind one of its congenital flaws--"the tendency to believe that an idea that is ingeniously expressed, even in the form of a bright epigram, must in some ways be true."

What was the age's impact? It was too much of a minority movement of intellectuals to stir such profound upheavals as the French Revolution, and to the limited extent that Nicolson implies such an impact, he exaggerates or falls into error.

One may agree with him that the Age of Reason infused the European mind with a critical spirit and a habit of analytical thinking. Faith in divine revelation was succeeded by belief in individual experience. The supernatural was discarded in favor of the natural. Acceptance of authority changed to defiance of authority. Reverence for king and church was transformed into an impassioned ardor for "liberty" and "the rights of the individual." A new element was in the air: doubt. The Age of Reason had unbolted one of the doors of intellectual history. From that time on, man has had to sit in the chilling and bracing draft of an open mind.

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