Voltaire in Love

by Nancy Mitford

  And now for the Academy. After such a rousing success, with the King’s mistress on his side and the King not, apparently, opposed to him, Voltaire felt that the moment had come to present himself openly as a candidate for Cardinal Fleury’s seat. He wrote a letter to one of the Academicians and circulated it in Paris and Versailles: Voltaire is a follower of Newton, and of all philosophers Newton is the most convinced that there is a God. His works are to the learned what the catechism is to a child. Voltaire is the enemy of faction, enthusiasm, and rebellion; he adores the religion which has made one great family of the human race. In fact, religion alone has supported him during the thirty years of sorrow and calumny which have rewarded his toil. Inspired by patriotism he has lived like a hermit and given himself over to the study of physics. Now he has been encouraged by various members of the Academy to ask for admission to that body, the glory of a reign on whose history he is engaged. He is particularly anxious to be the one to praise (in the inaugural speech always delivered by a new member) the father of Church and State so that he can make it quite clear, for evermore, how much he loves Cardinal Fleury’s religion and how great is his zeal for the Cardinal’s pupil, King Louis. It will be the final answer to cruel accusations which have maligned him and will provide a guarantee of his submission to those who are bringing up the Dauphin to be worthy of such a father.

  What followed was even more abject. He wrote to the Bishop of Mirepoix, denying authorship of the Lettres philosophiques. He has sometimes written letters to friends, but he would never have given them such a pretentious name. As a matter of fact most of those particular letters are forgeries. Ah! Well! He has been greatly persecuted but he knows how to forgive!

  Unfortunately he ate all this humble pie in vain. An old, dull bishop, brother of the Duc de Luynes, and a member of the Queen’s little circle at Versailles, was unanimously elected to the vacant place. Frederick was delighted. Voltaire’s friends in Paris were furious; Voltaire took to his bed. Frederick crowed and jeered and sneered and inflamed the wound by all the means in his power. He is astounded at Voltaire’s letter to the mitred Midas, and outraged to see a philosopher bending the knee to the idol of superstition. Surely, after this insult, Voltaire will come and live with a King who recognizes his merit and will give him his due?

  The Comédie Française had put La Mort de César into rehearsal. The night before the first performance the police ordered its withdrawal.

  It was no surprise to anybody that Voltaire should now turn savagely on his fellow countrymen. He has had enough of persecution and ridicule. Luckily there is in Europe a monarch, a real man who loves and cultivates the arts. Nobody now can prevent Voltaire from going to this Tacitus, this Xenophon – nobody, not even Mme du Chátelet. He will leave Minerva for Apollo: ‘You, Sire, are my greatest passion.’ Suspiciously gleeful, in high spirits and a hurry to be off, he began ostentatiously preparing his departure.

  The whole thing had been carefully contrived and plotted by Voltaire himself, Richelieu, and the d’Argenson brothers. The ban on La Mort de César had been arranged by the four of them to give colour to his indignation and make his flight seem natural. His journey was to be paid for by the French Court; he was granted a year’s extra pension and he and two of his cousins received the monopoly of providing clothes for the French army and hay for its horses. In other words he was taking enormous sums to go and spy on his adorable monarch, and do what he could to get him back into the war.

  The French were beginning to realize that their hasty and ill-considered move against Austria might turn out to be a poor gamble. A loan from England to Maria-Theresa was beginning to bear fruit. The French army, rushed off to Bohemia with bad generals and insufficient preparation, was suffering a series of defeats. Voltaire was always boasting about his influence with the King of Prussia; the government decided that he had better use it on this recalcitrant ally, to the benefit of his own King.

  Nothing could have exceeded the merriment with which the old school friends laid their plans. The mitred donkey and the hero of Mollwitz were the butt of equally hilarious jokes. The shrieks of laughter which rang through Versailles finally reached the ears of the Bishop who went and complained to Louis XV. He got small change. The King told him that everything was in order, that he himself knew exactly what was going on and that Monseigneur de Mirepoix had better forget all about it. Boyer (Mirepoix) was not Fleury and his influence was with the Queen, not the King.

  Frederick was triumphant. ‘This time I think Voltaire will leave France for good.’ ‘La belle Émilie and Paris are in the wrong at last.’ Paris was not very much cast down by the poet’s defection, but poor Émilie was. Before he left she made scene upon scene, begging him to stick it out in France, to go anywhere but to Berlin: she maddened him as only a woman in her situation can. ‘Don’t look at me with those hunted, troubled eyes [ces yeux hagards et louches],’ he is supposed to have said to her, during a quarrel. Finally, but only in order to shut her up, he let her into his secret and promised that she should play at spies with him. All his dispatches would pass through her hands. It might have pacified a politically ambitious woman or one who was only suffering from wounded pride. But Émilie’s strange heart beat for Voltaire: by leaving her for an indef-inite length of time to go to this man who hated and despised her, by his hurry to be off and his unkind cheerfulness, he trampled on it. The Parisians thought her transports of despair exceedingly funny. ‘This woman spent the whole of Saturday and part of today crying because she has not had a letter from this Adonis,’ wrote a police spy, soon after Voltaire’s departure.

  15. Voltaire and Frederick

  As so often happens in life, Voltaire’s fourth visit to Frederick, so much dreaded by Mme du Châtelet, turned out to be less terrible for her than she had feared. He had been well received at his own Court; Versailles had begun to cast its spell; any other palace, any other King, must now come a bad second. Voltaire, with his sense of the theatre and his passion for history, loved grandeur and resounding titles. There could be, for him, no comparison between his own tall, handsome, dignified King, surrounded by fashionable Dukes whose names were part of the French epic, in the most splendid palace ever built by man, and a shivering, waspish little fellow in a duffle dressing-gown, still called the Marquis of Brandenburg by other monarchs, whose Court consisted of middle-class intellectuals, cosmopolitan sodomites and Prussian soldiers. Frederick’s greatness (though Voltaire, in his heart, was always aware of it) was not enough to turn the scales. Nor did the openly homosexual atmosphere of Potsdam attract him, although he rather loved to think how furious the idea of it must be making all the women of Europe.

  The only letter that exists from Voltaire to Émilie was written the day after his departure, in June 1743. Some of it is in a secret language, not unlike the wireless messages which the Free French used to send to the Resistance during the War. ‘ Que dites-vous de Saint Jean qui ne revient pas? Que dirons-nous de Martin? He feels foolish here without her. He has a greater desire to see her than she thinks. He is not well. They both thought, yesterday, that he was all right; he has paid for that illusion. ‘Point de nouvelles de Bretagne, point de lettres, cela veut dire que les nouvelles ne sont pas bonnes. I love you [sic] V.’

  He went first to The Hague, where he again lodged at LaVieille Cour. He did some useful preliminary spying there. The young Prussian Minister, Podewils, was in love with a Dutch politician’s wife who kept him informed of many interesting facts. They were an attractive couple and Voltaire became fond of them both. As he was supposed to be in disgrace with his own people, the Minister saw no harm in talking to him freely; and many secrets, highly inaccurate when it came to figures, found their way home via Émilie. He stayed so long at The Hague that she began to hope he would not, after all, go on to Berlin. But at the end of August, to her inexpressible affliction, she heard that he and Podewils were on the road to Prussia.

  The visit started very well. When the two men arrived at Berlin t
hey were immediately received by the King in the garden of his palace, Charlottenburg. He carried Voltaire off for a walk and then showed him the late Cardinal de Polignac’s collection of antique statues which he had just bought. Supper was extremely merry: as usual, there were nothing but men. Voltaire was given a room near the King’s; there was much coming and going, chat and banter.

  Voltaire has left an account of Frederick’s daily life. The King got up at five in summer and at six in winter. There were no ceremonies, no grandes et petites entrées; a footman came and lit his fire, dressed him, and shaved him. His bedroom was rather beautiful, there was a silver balustrade round the alcove. But the bed-curtains hid a book-case and the King slept on a thin mattress placed behind a screen. No stoic had ever lain so uncomfortably. When His Majesty was dressed and booted the stoic consecrated a little while to the sect of Epicurus. A few of the current favourites, young lieutenants, pages, or cadets, drank coffee with him and one of them would stay on alone. These schoolboy amusements over, the serious business of the day began. The prime minister, an old soldier who had become Frederick’s valet, arrived with a bundle of papers under his arm, sent by the other ministers for the King’s inspection. As Prussia was a total dictatorship there was no argument about anything: the affairs of state were regulated in an hour. At about eleven the King reviewed his Guards regiments; then he dined, as well as one can dine in a country where there is neither game nor poultry nor eatable butcher’s meat. After dinner he retired to his study and wrote poetry until five or six o’clock, when a young Frenchman came and read to him. At seven there was a concert at which the King played the flute as well as any professional. His own compositions were often played. Supper was in a little room whose principal ornament was a picture, designed by the King, of an orgy in which a crowd of humans and animals were all making love. The conversation generally turned on philosophy and the atmosphere was as though the seven sages of Greece were in a brothel. There were no limits to what could be said; God was respected but those who had deceived humanity in His name were not spared. Neither women nor priests ever set foot in that palace. In a word, Frederick lived without a court, without a council, and without religion.

  If one person in the world was more malicious than Voltaire, it was Frederick. When he tumbled to the object of this visit, which he did almost at once, he began to rag his poor philosopher, pulling his leg unmercifully. Talking politics to Voltaire, he said, would be like offering a glass of medicine to one’s mistress. Much better for them to discuss poetry. Whenever Voltaire tried to bring the conversation round to serious matters, Frederick either made silly jokes and puns or became violently insulting about France, her army, her King, and her lack of soul. The French are amiable poltroons, who, having lived too much with women, have taken on all their defects. They are made for the theatre and should leave manly occupations, like warfare, to others. He repeated such gibes over and over again to Voltaire in front of everybody. Voltaire kept his temper and whenever he could he changed the subject or made a joke. Frederick said the French general, Broglie, ought to have his head cut off for doing so badly in Bohemia. Voltaire agreed but said, ‘We never cut off the head of a person who hasn’t got one.’ Naturally none of these conversations were sent to Versailles, but long colourless accounts of Frederick’s views and possible future intentions went there regularly. Voltaire wanted to show that he was doing his best: he cannot have thought such stuff would be useful to the ministers. He presented a written questionnaire to Frederick, whose answers were so flippant that most people would have thrown the whole thing into the fire instead of preserving it to amuse posterity.

  Voltaire: ‘Your Majesty knows that the Sieur Bassecour, 1st Burgomaster at Amsterdam, came to the French Minister with proposals for peace?’

  Frederick: ‘Old Bassecour [Poultry Yard] presumably fattens up the capons and guinea-fowls for these gentlemen.’

  Voltaire: ‘Is it not obvious that if Bassecour, one of the Dutch war-party, declares for peace, Holland will soon be out of the war? Is France not showing both vigour and wisdom?’

  Frederick: ‘I admire French wisdom but heaven forbid that I should ever copy it.’

  Voltaire: ‘The Austrians and their allies burn to reopen the Silesian campaign. In this case, Sire, what other ally have you than France?’

  Frederick: ‘On les recevra biribiri

  De la façon de Barbari, mes amis.’

  And so on.

  Voltaire also asked if he could go with Frederick on his forthcoming visit to his sister the Margravine of Bayreuth. Frederick said yes, but not if he was going to be ill. It depended on himself.

  As a matter of fact, Frederick had made up his mind to resume his alliance with France but was determined that Voltaire should not have any credit for this change of front. His aim was, on the contrary, to discredit him as much as possible with the French government, for he knew that he would never possess him if Versailles provided an alternative. One of Frederick’s agents in Paris was, at this very time, supplying the mitred donkey with letters containing insults to his person in prose and verse, which Voltaire had written to Frederick. Voltaire found this out and told Amelot, the Foreign Minister, that it was all part of Frederick’s scheme for possessing him. However, he would rather live in a Swiss village than be in the power of a man who could behave so badly. His explanation was accepted. The Bishop was not pleased, but nobody else minded very much, and that little plot of Frederick’s came to nothing.

  The atmosphere at Berlin was not one of trustful affection. The two men still chatted together for hours on end but each knew that the other had betrayed him. Voltaire, disappointed and cross, took his revenge on Émilie, who complained that he hardly ever wrote, and when he did it was only a few cold lines. Another woman might have seen that this was a good sign, but she had no feminine intuition. She suffered, and did not keep her feelings to herself.

  Voltaire could generally manage to be well when it suited him, and the visit to Bayreuth duly took place. Frederick, off on a tour of the German states, left him with the Margravine. Voltaire was much happier there than at Charlottenburg where the only woman was La Barbarini, an Italian dancer with the limbs of a young man. (The poor Queen of Prussia had kindled the sacred hearth alone ever since her husband’s accession and was said to have become most disagreeable.) At Bayreuth he found a little Court like a French country house, an easy, natural, happy atmosphere and women with the usual contours. The charming Margravine soon coaxed back his good temper. ‘Princesse philosophe,’ he called her, ‘modèle de la politesse et de l’affabilité.’ She loved him as he had once thought Frederick would; she was, in fact, her brother in petticoats without the spiky, the uncomfortable, greatness. Voltaire’s relationship with her and her sisters was the best result, for him, of his visits to Germany. He now wrote long letters to Émilie, drunk and mad, she said, with the pleasures he found in the silly little German Courts (courettes). She was beginning to think she would never see him again, and jealousy of Frederick gave way to jealousy of his sister. What was Voltaire doing in Bayreuth, alone, without the King?

  He was only there a fortnight, and when the two men got back to Berlin their tempers were much better. Voltaire was preparing to leave and Frederick was putting on charm. There was the usual talk of Voltaire going to live there, without others of course. Indeed the du Châtelets would have been fish out of water in that homosexual society; and even Voltaire, much as he liked having his cake and eating it, saw that he must choose between Frederick and Émilie. He still chose Émilie. Valory asked Voltaire to take advantage of the King’s better mood to do something for a French gentleman who had been tortured and had his nose and ears cut off by the late King Frederick-William and who now languished in the fortress of Spandau. His crime was that, having been kidnapped and pressed into the regiment of giants he had tried to escape from it. Frederick consented to act, as he said, La Clemenza di Tito. He also agreed, at last, to settle with Thieriot. But Frederick was ne
ver as good as his word, in big things or in small. The Frenchman was only released in 1749, and Thieriot, after nine years of empty promises, received nothing.