Voltaire in Love

by Nancy Mitford

  A few days later she has received a letter from Pan-pan, but another seems to be lost. He must tell her what was in it, without fail. Her vapours are no better, worse if anything, she seldom goes downstairs now at all. Oh! how divine philosophy would be if it were any help to one!

  Pan-pan’s next letter had definitely been opened and very badly re-sealed. How disagreeable, really. She is terribly worried about her future, she is sorry to bore Pan-pan with it, but who else is there? Were it not for the fat lady she would have gone mad by now. Of course that ass of a Dubois has allowed Lise to be covered, just as Mme de Grafigny had feared – now they’ll have to see about an abortion which may well have fatal results. She has never loved the poor little dog so much. That’s it, they can all laugh at her, laugh away, she’s only too delighted to make somebody laugh. Two more letters have arrived, obviously opened and Pan-pan seems not to have received hers asking for the stanza from Jeanne. She has written to see if her friend Mme de Chatenay can have her for a little while before she goes into a convent. Pan-pan must send her back that letter about Jeanne – oh she has already said this, the vapours are making her stupid. If he could see her trembling fits he would be sorry for her. She has been ill for a fortnight. Voltaire has been most good to her and so has Mme de Champbonin. She never goes down for coffee any more, she has some soup with those who dine at midday and the rest of the time she is in her own room. She did, however, sup with M. de Maupertuis when he was there and found him very jolly and learned. As she is neither she never opened her mouth.

  She must now tell Pan-pan a dreadful thing. She has no money at all. If he asks why, the answer is that on her way to Cirey she realized that her old dress would not do and she bought herself a satin one for a louis. Dubois needed a tidy cotton dress, which she also bought and tips to the coachmen finished her few remaining pence. She has written to Mme Badaud to see if she can give her a bed. It seems that Desmarets will be at Cirey in a day or two – Mme du Châtelet has sent up a message to say so, oh what good news!

  It is Shrove Tuesday. Desmarets has arrived. He has hardly spoken to her but they have been living in a whirl as an enormous programme of theatricals is on foot. They have learnt and rehearsed thirty-three different acts, have given Zaïre, L’Enfant prodigue, and L’Esprit de contradiction. Her vapours are cured, Mme Badaud can have her and she is to leave Cirey in a day or two. Dubois has already gone on, with the luggage. Desmarets is a wonderful actor, nobody can talk of anything else; the wretch has certainly missed his vocation. All day they rehearse and learn their parts and the acting goes on all night, there’s no time to breathe, let alone write letters. They have just finished the third act they have given today. It is midnight and they are going to sup, after which Mme du Châtelet will sing a whole opera. This is the last time she will write from Cirey, she can’t answer Pan-pan’s letter now, she rushes to the delights that beckon to her, though if she had wings she would fly into Pan-pan’s arms.

  How we wish we could leave Mme de Grafigny on this cheerful if slightly hysterical note. However the moment she was safely away from Cirey, on 12 February, she put into the post a letter she had been cooking up for several weeks, which threw a lurid light on past events and fully explained her change of spirits.

  ‘My dearest friend, I can now tell you a horrible thing that happened to me —’

  She told Pan-pan that on 29 December they said there were no letters for her. Supper went off fairly well, nobody spoke much certainly, but there was no indication that a storm was about to break over her head and she went quietly upstairs at bedtime. All of a sudden, to her great surprise, Voltaire burst into her room crying that he was lost, that she held his life in her hands, that copies of the last stanza of Jeanne were in full circulation, and that he would have to leave for Holland then and there. He said that Mme de Grafigny must write now, this minute, a letter, which M. du Châtelet himself would take, to Pan-pan begging him to call in all the copies. But would Pan-pan do it? Mme de Grafigny said of course Pan-pan would do anything for Voltaire and of course she would write. She was only too sorry that such a thing should have happened while she was at Cirey. ‘Don’t try wriggling, Madame, you sent it yourself.’ She could hardly believe her ears. She assured Voltaire that she had never seen a verse of Jeanne in her life, how could she have made a copy? He refused to listen to her. He said that Pan-pan had read it aloud in a friend’s house and had been giving it to everybody, saying that it came from Mme de Grafigny. Mme du Châtelet, he added, had the proof in her pocket. Poor Mme de Grafigny was completely at sea but nevertheless very frightened. He sat her down and told her to write for the original and the copies. As she really could not ask Pan-pan for something she had never sent, she told him to try and find out what had happened. Voltaire read the letter and threw it at her with yelps of despair, shrieking that his very life was at stake unless she would act in good faith. As nothing the poor woman could say had any effect she took refuge in silence.

  This dreadful scene had gone on for a whole hour when in surged the dame. She howled and raged like a fury repeating what Voltaire had already said, over and over again, Mme de Grafigny keeping the same silence. At last the dame produced a letter which she handed to Mme de Grafigny saying: ‘You wretched creature, you beast, I’ve been sheltering you for weeks, not from friendship God knows but because you’d nowhere to go, and now you have betrayed me – murdered me – stolen a paper from my desk and copied it —’ She went on like this, screaming into Mme de Grafigny’s face; only the presence of Voltaire seemed to restrain her from physical violence. At last Mme de Grafigny said, ‘Madame, I am a poor thing – you have no right to treat me so.’ Voltaire then put an arm round Mme du Châtelet and pulled her away, after which she strode up and down the room crying treachery. Dubois, two rooms off, heard every word. Poor Mme de Grafigny was more dead than alive. At last she asked for the proof of her alleged misdeed. It was a letter to her from Pan-pan and merely said, ‘the stanza from Jeanne is charming’. Then of course Mme de Grafigny saw the whole thing, as she would have seen it sooner if they had given her time to collect her thoughts. She explained that what she had sent Pan-pan was a little account of the stanza and the impression it had made on her. Voltaire believed her at once and begged her pardon. He said that Pan-pan had read her letter to Desmarets, who had told somebody about it. That somebody had told Mme du Châtelet who had then opened Pan-pan’s letter which seemed to confirm her worst fears. It was now five in the morning. Mme du Châtelet was still not appeased. Voltaire talked to her for a long time in English and finally obliged her to say that she believed Mme de Grafigny and was sorry she had spoken as she did. They made her write to Pan-pan and ask for her original letter, to prove that she was innocent, and then they left her. An hour after they had gone the fat lady who, hearing all the noise had looked in and quickly fled again, came back. Mme de Grafigny was being sick.

  She asked Pan-pan to envisage her situation after this, without a home, without money, and unable to leave a house where she had been so insulted. She would rather have slept on straw than stayed there, but had not the wherewithal even to go to the nearest village. ‘Oh! Pan-pan!’ Next day at noon the good Voltaire came back, almost in tears at the state he found her in; he said over and over again how sorry he was. M. du Châtelet came too and was very kind to her. At eight o’clock the dame came, supported by M. du Châtelet and the fat lady. She curtseyed, said: ‘Madame, I am sorry for what happened last night’, and then calmly spoke of other things. Ever since then Mme de Grafigny’s life had simply been hell. She was shut up in her room all day and every day with nothing to read but the deadliest books. Voltaire and the dame got all the novelties from Paris but nobody else ever saw them. The suppers were an agony with the Shrew giving her furious looks; as soon as they were over she went upstairs again. The fat lady was nice to her but she is their friend and naturally was obliged to take their side. She said the Shrew was being so disagreeable because she felt guilty. All the same, Mm
e de Grafigny will never forget the fat lady’s goodness.

  When at last Desmarets came things were not much better. The first thing he did was to tell Mme de Grafigny that all was over between him and her; he neither loved nor wished to love her. Then the dame made up to him quite brazenly, languishing after him like a silly little débutante and they had an affair under the very noses of herself and Voltaire. Voltaire was furious, bitterly sarcastic with both of them.

  When Mme du Châtelet knew that Mme de Grafigny had made arrangements to leave Cirey she began begging her to stay on: ‘What will Mme de Richelieu say if she hears you are going already?’ (It is regrettable to note that as soon as Mme de Grafigny had got away from Cirey, Émilie wrote her a very undignified letter, asking did she love the inhabitants of Cirey a little? She was clearly very much afraid of the stories which her erstwhile guest might put about Paris.)

  The rest of Mme de Grafigny’s retrospective letter was full of reproaches to Pan-pan for his various indiscretions, not only the things he had repeated at Lunéville from her letters and the silly observations on them which he made in his (all read, of course, by the dame), but for the irresponsible way in which he sent back her letter with the account of Jeanne. She had written in it that she was hoping to arrange things so that she could stay on at Cirey. As usual they had opened it before sending it up to her – see how humiliating this was in the circumstances! Really Pan-pan might have cut that bit out. Summing up the character of Nicodème and Dorothée she said they were both eaten with jealousy, he of other writers and she of him. According to Mme de Grafigny Émilie kept a servant who did nothing but report Voltaire’s movements to her – if he went to see either of the other women in their rooms a message would immediately come summoning him to Mme du Châtelet. One day he invited Mme de Grafigny to his room and was reading something aloud to her, when suddenly the dame appeared in the doorway, her hair down, her eyes flashing, white with rage, and said, ‘Madame, I wish to speak with Monsieur if you please!’

  Safely on the road to Paris, with Desmarets, Mme de Grafigny wrote more and more cattily about her erstwhile hosts, Desmarets joining in. For his part he has never spent such an agreeable week, Voltaire’s jealousy adding greatly to the fun; Mme du Châtelet has invited him to go back and he’ll be hanged if he’ll refuse. ‘The voluptuous disorder which reigns in that house makes me regard it as a terrestrial paradise.’

  Mme de Grafigny lived for the next eighteen months in elegant luxury with the Duchesse de Richelieu at Paris and Versailles. But her troubles were not over. In 1740 the Duchess died to the great sorrow of everybody who knew her. She left Mme de Grafigny a little pension, but it was not paid regularly and the unlucky woman found herself too poor even to retire into a convent. The actress Clairon took her as dame de compagnie for a while, but Mlle Clairon’s men friends were very much against ‘l’ exécrable Grafigny and that came to an end. An Irish lover called Drumgold was her next venture; he wrote a satire against Voltaire, and together they kept a lodging house. She published a few little things with no success; at last, in 1747, her undoubted literary talent came into its own, with Lettres d’une péruvienne which had a vogue of sixty years and a host of admirers, including Charles X. This was followed by Cénie, a phenomenally successful play seen by 20,000 people. She opened a literary salon and took a niece to live with her. This niece married, for love, the enormously rich Helvétius and became a feature of Parisian society. In 1758 a play by Mme de Grafigny, La Fille d’Aristide, was produced, and was a failure. She died a few months later. Abbé de Voisenon said: ‘She read me her play, I thought it bad, she thought me unkind. The play was put on, the public died of boredom and she of grief.’ She left debts to the tune of 47,000 livres.

  *The Marquis de Saint-Lambert, another Lunéville friend. Mme du Châtelet did not know him as yet.

  †Mme du Châtelet’s brother, born 1711, was christened Élisabeth.

  ‡Léopold Desmarets was Mme de Grafigny’s lover.

  12. Various Journeys

  Voltaire’s health had been so much impaired and his nerves so shattered by all the events of that winter, that Émilie thought it imperative for him to have a change of scene. They had been at Cirey over four years; their honeymoon had been long and on the whole successful and now they were both ready to face the world again. For some months Mme du Châtelet had been negotiating the purchase of the Hôtel Lambert or, as she called it, the Palais Lambert, a wonderful house on the Île Saint-Louis, which has been preserved through all vicissitudes and for over a hundred years now (1957) has belonged to the Czartoryski family. She was buying, Voltaire was paying. The sale went through in the spring of 1739. They gave 200,000 livres for it and thought it a great bargain because it had cost over a million to build. But the district had become unfashionable. Voltaire said they were not buying a palace but a solitude; none but philosophers would visit them there. It was much too far away for society people. When they left Cirey, however, they did not go to Paris but to Brussels. Mme du Châtelet wanted to wind up the family lawsuit. Her husband’s cousin, the Marquis de Trichâteau, who would benefit if the case were won, was safely expiring at Cirey. He had no children and had made a will in their favour. The moment seemed to have come when the affair should be settled.

  So, on 8 May 1739, the du Châtelets and Voltaire set out for the Low Countries, to the despair of all the Cirey neighbours. They had tasted the delights of Voltaire’s company for so long, it must have been hard for them to return to bucolic dullness. The philosophers took in their train one Koenig, a protégé of Maupertuis, who was to give Mme du Châtelet lessons in algebra. They went by easy stages, much fêted on the way. At the garrison town of Valenciennes there were balls, ballets, comedies, and many gallant colonels. They stayed a while in a dilapidated castle belonging to du Châtelet in a land of savages, cut off from all news, impossible to get the gazette, no bathrooms but fine avenues of trees. It could not compare with Cirey. Émilie was doing well with her algebra which would be a comfort all her life, according to Voltaire, and make her very agreeable in society. At last they arrived in Brussels where they took a house in the rue de la Grosse Tour and as there was nothing else to do they both settled down to hard work. Voltaire was writing Mahomet (a play), finishing Louis XIV, and, as usual, rewriting and correcting old publications. Émilie, as well as her algebra, had acquainted herself with every detail of the lawsuit and was on the way to becoming a wise young judge. Voltaire had taken the practical step of getting Frederick to put in a word with the Imperial judiciary (telling them to flap it up a bit, says Carlyle) and the case, though sure to go slowly, was as good as won.

  After the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 Belgium had ceased to be the Spanish Netherlands and became the Austrian Netherlands. Its history was sad and deplorable. It had been the cockpit of Europe for generations. Any native of the country who showed signs of being at all bright in the head had had it chopped off by the Regents of Spanish tyranny. It was safer not to think. The Flemings were now entirely occupied with material progress and the rebuilding of their cities; they had neither the time nor the wish for an intellectual life. It was no place for Voltaire and he complained bitterly. ‘Brussels is the extinguisher of imagination.’ ‘It is the home of ignorance and stupid indifference. There is no decent printer or engraver, not one single man of letters . . . This is the country of obedience.’ When he gave a fête for Émilie he sent out invitations in the name of’the Envoy from Utopia’, only to find that not one of the guests had ever heard of Utopia. He and Émilie went to stay at Enghien with the Duc d’Arenberg, where the only books in the whole house were those they brought with them. The host, however, charmed them (he was a powerful duke) and the gardens were lovely. Frederick said d’Arenberg was a debauched old fellow and told Voltaire to stop him writing letters in German. When people wrote to Frederick they should do so in French. The Prince sympathized with Voltaire’s complaints about the Flemings but said he should see what the Germans were like: feroci
ous as the beasts they pursued. There was, however, a certain intellectual awakening at Berlin of which he had hopes; some few roses were blossoming among the nettles.

  Frederick, greatly encouraged by Voltaire and other hopeful liberals all over Europe, was now engaged upon his Anti-Machiavel. He was going to refute the cynical maxims of that Italian enemy of the human race, mouthpiece of Satan, and prove that it was to the interest of a ruler to be good, honest, and above board. He also had a plan for sponsoring a great édition-de-luxe of the Henriade, to be printed and illustrated by the Englishman Pine, famous for his beautiful Horace. Pine’s Henriade, however, came to nothing; he was busy with the Aeneid; Frederick declared that he ought to abandon it, since Voltaire was greater than Virgil. Pine may not have agreed with this verdict.

  In August Voltaire and Mme du Châtelet were on the road again, this time for a short visit to Paris, ‘a town of which one used to hear much good’. Voltaire wrote to his ‘gros chat’, Mme de Champbonin, saying that if she asks why he goes there his answer is because he follows Émilie. But why does Émilie go? He has no idea. She declares that it is necessary and it is his destiny to believe her as well as to follow her. Not a single fête on the way back, they are like a village doctor who is fetched in a carriage and sent home on foot. Voltaire had bought pictures in Brussels for the Palais Lambert at a cost of about 6,000 livres. He declared their value at the customs as 260 livres, was caught out by the excise men and all the pictures were confiscated.