Leaving school determined to be a poet, Voltaire's satires were admired in aristocratic circles as well as the freethinking, hedonistic "Societe du Temple". However, they soon earned him notoriety, and, in 1717, eleven months imprisonment in the Bastille. This volume brings together Voltaire's earliest poetic works, from student experimentation in rhetoric to his first major philosophical poem "Epitre a Uranie". Voltaire remained a writer who shaped himself to his audience, and these works for a private circle of intimates show a rare private persona of the poet, the opposite of the official Voltairean voice on the stage of the Comedie-Francaise. This edition includes the subversive poem "Regnante puero" attributed to Voltaire, together with a detailed overview of the political repurcussions. The one Voltairean literary genre which is still widely read today, the conte philosophique, emerges in two prose tales, which, however light-heartedly, pose disturbing questions about social behaviour.
