Voltaire in Love

by Nancy Mitford

  Voltaire could now think of nothing but his meeting with Frederick. The Prussian King was on the move, inspecting his dominions, and rumours about his future prospects filled the gazettes. His father had never allowed him to make the Grand Tour, which was considered to be part of a German Prince’s education and included Rome, Holland, Brussels, and Paris. It was thought that he now intended to do so. Voltaire and Émilie were determined that if he went to Brussels and Paris he should stay with them; they began to make preparations for receiving him. Voltaire wrote to the Abbé Moussinot instructing him to get the Hôtel Lambert ready without delay. Mme du Châtelet had left some of her possessions, notably a bed without a mattress, in the house of her midwife. Moussinot and the midwife were to go and buy whatever else was needed. (Oh happy age, when everything made by man was beautiful, when the furnishing of an Hôtel Lambert could as safely be left to a clergyman and a district-nurse as, nowadays, to a Ramsay or a Jansen!)

  In Brussels there was a nasty scene between Émilie and Princess Thurn and Taxis. The Princess announced that the King would be staying with her; not at all, said Émilie, the King belonged to Voltaire and would certainly not be allowed to stay anywhere but with him. Excitement mounted. Frederick, accompanied by Maupertuis, Algarotti, and Kaiserling, was on his way to Brussels. Voltaire and Émilie were to meet him at Antwerp and he would then go and stay for a few days, strictly incognito, in the rue de la Grosse Tour. But, when he was only 150 miles from Brussels, he suddenly fell ill. He sent for Voltaire to go to him at once but said that greatly to his sorrow, deeply to his disappointment, he was too unwell to receive a woman. Mme du Châtelet was very much offended, but agreed to lend him Voltaire for a few days. As nothing could have stopped him, she was obliged to put a good face on his departure. Of course she thought the King’s illness was a ruse to get Voltaire to himself, but it was quite genuine. He told his friend Jordan that at his first sight of Voltaire his mind was as unstrung as his body was feeble.

  Voltaire posted off under a harvest moon, and in two days (11 September 1740) he arrived at the derelict Castle of Moyland, near Cleves. Here he found his King, here his eyes finally beheld, across a huge, dark, empty room, a little fellow, wrapped in a blue duffle dressing-gown, shivering and shaking with the four-day ague. Voltaire, like all chronic invalids, was perfect in a sickroom; he broke the ice by sitting on the King’s bed and taking his pulse. He prescribed the Jesuits’ remedy (quinine) saying that the King of Sweden had been cured of the ague by it, and though the minds and souls of the two Monarchs had nothing in common, their bodies probably worked in the same way. Frederick declared that if the sight of Voltaire did not cure him he might as well seek absolution. Accordingly he rose from his bed, dressed, and dined with his friends. For three days they all enjoyed each other’s society to the full, talking of this and that, the immortality of the soul, fate, free-will, and the men-women of Plato. It was no doubt more amusing for Voltaire than if the du Châtelets had been there. He read out his new play Mahomet which delighted them all. He helped Frederick to write a manifesto to the Bishop of Liège, against whom the King had certain claims. Voltaire was so over-excited that he forgot his pacifist principles and cheered when he heard that 2,000 soldiers would carry it to the Bishop. He had brought Mme du Châtelet’s new book for Frederick, who lavished compliments on it to Voltaire though he told other friends that it was sad stuff and anyhow written by Koenig, embellished with a few of Voltaire’s brilliant remarks. But, oh what a lucky woman, to possess him! Why, anybody with a good memory could write a classic simply by making notes while he talked.

  As for Voltaire himself, his emotions on this occasion could only be expressed in platitudes. The King was such a charmer that, whoever he was, he would be an ornament to any society. A second Cideville in fact (Piron used to call Frederick ‘le Thieriot du Nord’). Voltaire had to keep reminding himself that the man who came and chatted with him, perching on the end of his bed, was the master of 100,000 soldiers. What a miracle that this son of a crowned ogre, brought up among animals, should have such a great love of French civilization. On this occasion there was no disillusionment and Frederick was more than ever determined to get Voltaire away from his Émilie. When the time came for the King to return to Berlin he prevailed upon Voltaire to go to The Hague on Anti-Machiavellian business, instead of immediately rejoining her in Brussels.

  At The Hague Voltaire was grandly if uncomfortably lodged in La Vieille Cour, a palace belonging to Frederick, which served as Prussian embassy. It was 200 years old and Voltaire described its crumbling magnificence in a poem – rotting floor-boards, leaking roof, gilded rooms minus doors and windows, attics full of rusty armour. There were books but they were read only by rats and the thickest cobwebs in Europe veiled them from a profane eye.† Voltaire was not displeased with the address, and wrote to all his humbler friends in Paris: A la Haye, au palais du roi de Prusse. The first round of the fight between Frederick and Émilie went to the King.

  Mme du Châtelet, however, was by no means defenceless. She now had the clever idea of patching up Voltaire’s quarrel with the French authorities and getting him invited to his own Court. She knew that, if ever he found himself welcome there, no German in the world would be able to entice him away. So she left Brussels and went off bag, baggage, and husband to join the Court at Fontainebleau, where she began a campaign on Voltaire’s behalf. One kind protectress was lost to them: the Duchess de Richelieu had died, after a long illness following a difficult pregnancy, on 2 August. The Duke was extremely sad. ‘Are you satisfied with your confessor?’ he asked her. ‘Yes, since he has not forbidden me to love you.’ She said her only wish was to die in her husband’s arms; she did so. Voltaire, Maupertuis, and many others regretted her deeply. She was one of the few women who really liked Mme du Châtelet.

  But Émilie never lacked powerful men-friends, and never minded bothering people. By a cunning move she made Frederick instruct his ambassador to speak up for Voltaire; Frederick knew that this was playing the enemy’s game, but could not very well do otherwise. She brought a letter from Voltaire for Cardinal Fleury with a handsome copy of the Anti-Machiavel. Voltaire reminded His Eminence of old times at Villars. He said he had just left the author of this book and would be visiting him again soon. Had the Cardinal any message for him? Voltaire, who always liked to see himself in some new role, thought he might become an unofficial envoy between the French and the Prussian Courts. Frederick had taken a great dislike to the Marquis de Valory, the new French Ambassador at Berlin. Valory had a bumptious manner and was fond of laying down the law; he talked to Frederick in the tones of an experienced soldier to a young man who had never been at the front and Frederick complained to Voltaire: ‘I am always afraid that he will mistake me for a fortification and launch an attack on me.’ Voltaire, too, had reasons to be displeased with the Ambassador, whom he did not know but who had spread a rumour that he lived in Brussels because he had been exiled from Paris. In the end both men became very fond of ‘my fat Valory’ as Frederick called him (perhaps they were both seduced by the Ambassador’s excellent cook with whom Voltaire used to say he was in love). But at present he was ‘not a man one could ask to dinner’. So Voltaire planted the idea of a different sort of mission in the mind of Cardinal Fleury and the Cardinal was thinking it over when events in Europe began to move.

  The year 1740 was fatal to three crowned heads. Frederick William of Prussia’s death was followed, within a week of each other at the end of October, by those of the Emperor Charles VI and the Empress Anne of Russia. Charles VI had no male heir; he left his possessions to his twenty-three-year-old daughter, Maria-Theresa, having made an agreement with the sovereigns of Europe (the Pragmatic Sanction, 1713) by which they were to respect her rights. No sooner was he dead, however, than they all remembered that they had wives or female ancestresses through whom they themselves might have a claim to the Empire. Europe was thrown into confusion. Frederick wrote to Voltaire, ‘this death has disturb
ed my pacific ideas’, and then, bursting, as he loved to do, into French verse:

  Déjà j’entends l’orage du tambour,

  De cent heros je vois briller la rage,

  Déjà je vois envahir cent états

  Et tant d’humains moissonnés avant l’âge.

  This may not have been very elegant but was perfectly clear.

  Fleury wrote to Voltaire, who was still at The Hague. He knows Voltaire through and through, a good, honest man. But he was once young and has been too long in growing up. When young he kept what mistaken people called good company, that of the greatest in the land. These high and mighty lords had spoilt Voltaire, they praised him and were right to do so, but they gave way to him in everything and went too far. Now Voltaire himself has become aware of all this and in his letter to the Cardinal, which has given great pleasure, he speaks respectfully of religion. A civilized man owes two main duties – to his King and to his creator – even barbarians know that. It is time that Voltaire should return to his native land with these thoughts in mind. His talents do honour to his country, now he should put them to a patriotic use which will bring him lasting fame.

  This letter expressed, with affectionate moderation, the official view of Voltaire. He was an enfant terrible, and it was time he grew up. The clever old priest was now going to give him a chance of serving his country instead of sitting on its frontiers flouting and annoying the authorities. He told him to go to Berlin and see what Frederick intended to do in the new international situation. Fleury himself, old (he was eighty-seven), wise, and ruler of a land that had all the territory it wanted, was in favour of the status quo, but if others were going to snatch and grab he might have to reconsider his position. Why had Frederick suddenly sent troops to Silesia? Fleury waded through the Anti-Machiavel and found no answer there. He now had two official envoys in Berlin, Valory and the Marquis de Beauvau; they were both at sea. Perhaps Frederick would open his heart to his great new friend.

  Pleased as Punch, without having seen Émilie between the two visits, Voltaire started off for Berlin. There were one or two little matters he wanted to settle on his own account, apart from his important mission. Frederick must be made to pay Voltaire’s out-of-pocket expenses for the Anti-Machiavel, he must also pay Thieriot for his news-letter and the books and pamphlets he had been sending Frederick, for four years now, from Paris. Voltaire was accompanied on his journey by one Dumolard, an orientalist, protégé of Thieriot, who was to take up the post of librarian to the King.

  The second meeting of Voltaire and Frederick was not such an enchantment as the first. Frederick complained of Voltaire's bill on which he had put, as well as everything else, his accounts for the journey to Berlin. ‘As Court Jesters go, this one is expensive.’ All through their long friendship Frederick accused him of being a miser. He must have known the symptoms, nobody was more miserly than he. But the correspondence between Voltaire and Moussinot shows Voltaire to have been generosity itself. He certainly disliked being cheated, particularly of small sums. But when he lost, as he sometimes did in the course of his speculations, many thousands of livres, he was always very philosophical about it. He never set up a Shylock wail. He saw no reason why Frederick should not pay what he owed. On this occasion Frederick made the ridiculous observation that as his purse was longer than that of Mme du Châtelet he had every chance of getting Voltaire away from her. Meanwhile, in spite of repeated promises, the King had still not given Thieriot one penny.

  At the end of the visit Voltaire, whose rashness when he put pen to paper was inconceivable, sent a note to Maupertuis inviting him to come and sup with Valory and Beauvau. He wishes to embrace his philosopher before taking leave of ‘la respectable, singulière et aimable putain qui vient’. Marcus Aurelius, on further acquaintance, had turned into a respectable prostitute.

  These were afterthoughts: while they were together, the miser and the prostitute made merry. Voltaire’s health had never been better; Frederick’s malaria had been cured by the death of the Emperor. They wrote verses, some of a curious nature, calling each other coquette, and maîtresse.They gossiped, made music, and gambled in a purely masculine society. The vice which was so disgusting and ignoble when practised by Desfontaines, took on a classical, lyrical aspect when tendre Algarotti and beau Lugeac‡ forgot themselves in Valory’s drawing-room. Shades of a young, handsome, Venetian Socrates were evoked. Had not Voltaire always said that Frederick’s court would be the modern Athens?

  Frederick played the flute. He showed Voltaire his collection of pictures which included four little Watteaus declared by Voltaire to be copies. ‘Germany is full of sham pictures; the Princes there are easy to cheat and not at all averse from cheating when they get the opportunity.’

  Nothing could have been more diverting than the Prussian Court; nothing more mysterious than the Prussian King’s intentions. Funnily enough, he never spoke of them. Voltaire was no more successful in finding out what he was up to than Valory, Beauvau, Dickens, and all the other ambassadors. On 12 December 1740, however, Frederick gave a bal masqué and on the 13th he invaded Silesia. Voltaire had already left. After a visit of a fortnight he had suddenly torn himself away from his coquette, who begged in vain for three more days. ‘Tyrannical Émilie, violent in her jealousy’, as Frederick rather smugly put it, had written threatening suicide.

  This second journey to Frederick had thrown her into a state of despair. She told d’Argental that it was a cruel reward for her efforts on Voltaire’s behalf in France, where she had paved the way for an honourable return, and even for membership of various Academies. He had announced his departure to her dryly, knowing that it would wound her. Very well, now she is ill and will soon be in her grave, like poor Mme de Richelieu, though quicker than she and with fewer regrets. Voltaire may be sorry, in the end. The Prussian Court will lose its attractions and he may well be tormented by the remembrance of Émilie. She only hopes her friends will never reproach him for what he has done to her.

  Angry and distracted, but not actually dying, Mme du Châtelet left Paris for Brussels where her presence was again needed for the lawsuit and where she hoped to meet the returning Voltaire. Since he had abandoned her to go to Frederick at the Castle of Moyland everything had gone wrong for her. In Paris they were saying that Koenig had written her book.§ They were also saying, though it is to be hoped she did not know this, that her despair at the absence of Voltaire was accounted for by the fact that he did her work for her. This, of course, simply shows up the stupidity of those who believed it. Voltaire could no more have done her work than she could have written Le Mondain. Another humiliation: while she was at Fontainebleau, where she stayed, as she always did, with Richelieu, she had tried in vain to renew their old love affair. No doubt the Duke had other fish to fry. Waiting for Voltaire at Brussels she wrote to Richelieu (24 December 1740): ‘I have suffered the only two misfortunes which could really wound me to the heart; I have cause to complain of him for whom I have left everything and without whom the universe (if you were not part of it) would be nothing to me; and my best friends are suspecting me of unworthy behaviour. Your friendship is my only consolation, but you are 300 leagues away. My heart feels at home in your company, since you alone understand it. What seems to others a pitiable folly is a sentiment not foreign to your own nature, even though it may be unnatural. I do not know why I made you that confession at Fontainebleau. Do not ask me, for I cannot explain it. It was the truth, and I always like you to know the truth about me. I could not have stopped myself; I might feel sorry except that I know you so well, so well that I shall always tell you openly, remorselessly, what my heart feels about you. This would be incomprehensible to anybody else and it has nothing to do with the frenzied passion which is killing me at present. Useless to say “all this is impossible” because I have an unanswerable reply, “it is so” – even if you don’t happen to like it. I hear from Paris that my book is a success; I now wish its success to make itself felt.’

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nbsp; At Brussels she waited a whole month for Voltaire. He was having a dreadful winter journey through ‘detestable Westphalia’ and other German states whose inhabitants were more like beasts than men, so that a traveller whose arrangements went wrong was in for a rough if not a dangerous time. At last, early in the New Year, 1741, he arrived safely and there was a touching reunion. He had a little inflammation of the eyes, and in a letter to Frederick he blamed Émilie for this, saying that on her account he had lost his eyesight, his happiness, and his King. But he told all his other correspondents that Mme du Châtelet had never seemed so far above monarchs.

  But Émilie was not in luck that year. No sooner had Voltaire returned to her arms than he announced that he was now too old (forty-six) to make love! ‘The heart does not age, but this immortal is condemned to live in a ruin.’