Voltaire in Love

by Nancy Mitford

  Maupertuis had still not returned to Berlin after his adventures at Mollwitz; Voltaire wrote to his dear earth-flattener, painting his visit in the sunniest colours and giving a lively account of all their mutual acquaintances; Jordan (Frederick’s great friend) is still like Ragotin the comic hunchback in one of Scarron’s novels, but a genial, discreet Ragotin, now, with a good pension regularly paid; the Marquis d’Argens is Chamberlain with a huge gold key. The Academy, where Maupertuis is loved and regretted, is occupied with the experiments of Eller who thinks he can change water into elastic air. At Bayreuth, Her Royal Highness spoke much of Maupertuis; it is a delicious retreat, an agreeable Court without any tedious etiquette. Brunswick (whose Duchess was another of Frederick’s sisters) has a different charm. Voltaire flies from planet to planet, to end up at tumultuous Paris where he will be sad indeed if he does not find unique Maupertuis whom he admires and loves for the rest of his life.

  Voltaire left Berlin on 13 October and went back to The Hague by comfortable stages, visiting Brunswick on the way. The du Châtelets were waiting for him at Brussels. Émilie was in a morbidly self-pitying mood, and d’Argental, as usual, was the recipient of her whines. Twelve days from Berlin to The Hague when it had only taken him nine to go in the other direction. The absence, which was to have been of six weeks, has been prolonged to five months. Three whole weeks without a letter. For two months she has had to learn of his plans from Ambassadors or the gazettes. Any other woman would have detached herself long ago, but Émilie’s sensibilities cannot be extinguished and she will never be reasonable. Voltaire must, however, be made to feel how greatly she has suffered, and d’Argental must let him know what a state she has been in. Her health is sadly deranged, she coughs continually, has a pain between her shoulders and another in what she thinks must be her liver. Anybody else would be dead and it might really be all for the best if she were.

  D’Argental duly passed on these remarks to Voltaire, who had the usual male reaction of guilty annoyance, and thought it all a great fuss about nothing. It is not his fault if the posts are bad. He, too, was a long time without letters; he minded, of course, but he did not fly into a rage, or think himself betrayed, or stir up the whole of Germany. D’Argental’s friend has made things very tiresome for Voltaire, with all the steps she has been taking. But Voltaire does not have to justify himself to his old comrade who knows quite well what he is. D’Argental must tell his correspondent not to cover a sky, as serene as theirs, with clouds. Voltaire adds a postscript two days later (6 November 1743) to say that he has now arrived at Brussels and has had the joy of finding their female friend in much better health than himself.

  16. A Happy Summer at Cirey

  The two philosophers, reunited, were happy to be together again. ‘He loves me,’ said Émilie, while Voltaire, for his part, said he had never found her so adorable. Émilie, of course, could not help recapitulating her wrongs, and said this must be his very last visit to that horrid Germany where the heart learns to be hard. She is delighted that d’Argental has taken him to task; she can see that Voltaire has received his letter though of course they don’t mention it. They only stayed a couple of days in Brussels, then back to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré by way of Lille and Mme Denis. Du Châtelet went to Cirey and plans were made for spending the next summer there.

  In Paris, Voltaire worked and Mme du Châtelet gambled. There is a letter (perhaps the only one in existence) from her to Voltaire: it begins ‘Dear Lover’ (in English) and asks for fifty louis to pay a card debt. She got into further difficulties and had to borrow money from Helvétius. This led to unpleasantness, because she could not pay him back when the time came. Voltaire said of her that the people she gambled with had no idea that she was so learned, though sometimes they were astonished at the speed and accuracy with which she added up the score. He himself once saw her divide nine figures by nine others in her head. It might have been supposed that somebody so quick at figures would have had a good card sense but she hardly ever won, or if she did we do not hear of it. Her losses were often enormous.

  In her Réflections sur le bonheur, an essay written at about this time, Mme du Châtelet says that the only pleasures left to a woman when she is old are gambling, study, and greed, if she has the health for it. She considers that gambling, by which she means playing for high enough stakes to affect one’s fortune, is instrumental to happiness. The soul needs to be shaken up by hope and by fear. Gambling brings it within range of these two passions and keeps it in a healthy state. She herself has often been reconciled to her lack of fortune by the thought that she gets more excitement from playing cards than she would if she were rich.

  These Réflections, she explains, are not written for humanity in general, but for les gens du monde, people with an assured position in life. Unfortunately we only see how to achieve happiness when age and the fetters we have forged for ourselves are beginning to make it difficult. In order to be happy we must be virtuous, get rid of our prejudices, enjoy good health, have strong tastes and passions, and keep our illusions. Most pleasure comes from illusions, and he who has lost them is seldom happy. Those moralists who think that we should rid ourselves of passions and desires know nothing about happiness, which chiefly comes from their satisfaction. Le Nôtre was quite right when he asked the Pope to give him temptations rather than indulgences. But, she will be asked, do not passions make more people unhappy than happy? Impossible to say, because it is the unhappy people who talk about themselves, the happy ones remain anonymous. Nobody writes plays about happy lovers. But even if it is true that strong passions make many people unhappy, she still asserts that they are desirable since really great pleasure is impossible without them.

  In order to have passions and to be able to satisfy them good health is essential and this depends on ourselves. We are all born healthy and made to last a certain length of time. If we do not destroy our constitution by overeating, late hours, and other excesses, we shall live the ordinary length of human life. She does not speak of sudden death which is out of our control. What about people whose chief pleasure is food? Greed is a wonderful source of regular happiness and it is quite possible to indulge in it without affecting our health, though this entails a certain amount of eating at home. Mme du Châtelet herself has had to renounce alcohol. She often feels so much too hot that she spends her mornings swallowing all sorts of liquids. She gives way to her greed, but as soon as she is uncomfortable she goes on a strict diet.

  It is very important in life to know what we want. Too many people have no idea, and yet without an aim there can be no happiness. We destroy in the morning what we did the night before; we commit blunders; we repent. This repentance is one of the most disagreeable of all the feelings that assail us, and we must be careful to protect ourselves from it. As nothing in life happens twice in the same way it is useless to dwell on past faults. We must go on from where we are without looking back, and always substitute agreeable reflections for disagreeable ones. It is foolish, for instance, to dwell upon death, whether our own or that of other people, a sad and humiliating thought which does us no good at all.

  For a woman, debarred as she is from political and military ambitions, study is the greatest of resources. Other forms of pleasure extolled by Mme du Châtelet in this sensible analysis are the acquisition of new pieces of furniture, snuff-boxes, and so on, which she says give her intense happiness, regular visits to the privy, and keeping warm in very cold weather.

  Voltaire was ill in bed most of that winter. The gossips said that he was having an affair with the actress Mlle Gaussin and that she visited him at Mme du Châtelet’s house when he could not go to hers. Du Châtelet was tired of living alone at Cirey and wanted Émilie to keep him company there, but Voltaire had no wish to leave Paris. He was most disagreeable to Émilie, made scenes, and often made her cry. However, he was about to begin a piece of work to which he attached the greatest importance and for which he needed a country solitude. So at last she persuad
ed him to go with her to Cirey, and in very bad tempers they set off at the beginning of April 1744.

  Hardly had they arrived than they got word that M. Denis was ill. Two or three days later he died. His wife and Voltaire both seem to have been sincerely fond of him; Voltaire wrote her a heartfelt letter of sympathy on hearing the news. To Thieriot he wrote that it was for Mme Denis a dreadful loss by day and by night of fortune and a man who adored her.

  After an unpromising start, the philosophers spent one of the happiest summers they had ever had together. Cirey had never seemed so enchanting – ‘a jewel,’ said Voltaire, dating his letter ‘à Cirey en félicité’ , ‘my kingdom and my academy’. He wrote over the door of his gallery:

  Asile des beaux arts, solitude où mon cœur

  Est toujours occupé dans une paix profonde

  C’est vous qui donnez le bonheur

  Que promettait en vain le monde.

  Mme du Châtelet, he said, was in the gallery with him most of the time and that was why it had such a happy atmosphere. Voltaire, who generally had many different works in progress, was now concentrated on one. He had come away from the distractions of Paris in order to bestow all his time and attention on it, so wholehearted in his application that anybody might have supposed his literary career to be at stake. A young man writing his first book could not have taken it more seriously.

  The Duc de Richelieu, as First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, was this year in charge of all the fêtes at Versailles. The King and the courtiers were always nagging at him about the poor quality of the entertainments he provided. These generally consisted of elaborate fireworks; people complained that they provided food for the eye but not for the intellect. At last the Duke, tired of hearing these complaints every time a gala was in preparation, said that when the Dauphin married the Infanta of Spain he would get Voltaire and Rameau to write the divertissement. The wedding was to take place in February 1745; poet and composer were given a year in which to prepare their work. Voltaire had already written an opera, Samson, with Rameau, and knew his difficult character. Rameau attached no importance whatever to the libretto, and thought that nothing mattered but the music.

  ‘Sing faster!’

  ‘But, Maître, if I do the words will be lost.’

  ‘Who cares?’

  Voltaire was an easy person to work with, owing, no doubt, to years spent in the theatre. He was always ready to alter, shorten, or lengthen his verses and would even give way about the words he used: ‘If you like I will remove the word d’outrageuse, though I would point out that both Boileau and Corneille use it.’ He never minded how much trouble he took, it was a pleasure to go over and over what he had written; he knew that a fresh eye often perceives small inadequacies which the author by himself might never notice.

  The divertissement which he now planned, opera, ballet, fêtes within fêtes, and tableaux vivants, was to be called La Princesse de Navarre and its hero, the Duc de Foix, was to be modelled on Richelieu. The whole long summer Voltaire thought of nothing else at all. He hardly wrote any letters, most unusual for him, and none to Frederick. He constantly sent rough drafts of the Princesse to Richelieu, asking for his advice and approval, but was rather annoyed when he found that all Versailles was reading them. ‘Very few people can see the quality of the gold when it is still in a mine, covered with earth.’ Also, though Richelieu is a great connoisseur, he writes like a cat, impossible to read his letters. Never mind, on with the work. Mme du Châtelet is watching over it and she is the severest of all critics, absolutely reliable in her judgements. Voltaire had never been so anxious to have a success. He hardly hoped to amuse the Dauphin and Dauphine, whose thoughts presumably would be elsewhere at this important juncture in their lives (anyhow they were unamusable) but he longed for the approbation of the King.

  Voltaire’s feeling for Louis XV was much more straightforward than his love-hatred for Frederick. It was simply that of a subject, anxious to please. There never could have been any question of his sitting on the end of the King of France’s bed or assisting with him at homosexual orgies. Such goings-on were unknown at Versailles. The King, apart from the etiquette upon which he thought it right to insist, was a shy man who only felt at his ease with a few old friends. He hardly ever threw Voltaire a word. In spite of this and of the petty persecutions he endured from various officers of the crown, Voltaire often paid tribute to the charm of Louis XV and praised his character. In the Éloge Funèbre, written when he no longer had anything to hope or to fear from the King, he warned posterity against listening to ‘those secret legends which are spread about a Prince in his lifetime out of spite, or a mere love of gossip, which a mistaken public believes to be true and which, in a few more years, are adopted by the historians who thus deceive themselves and the generations to come’. He could not have foreseen more clearly what would happen.

  He laboured at his Princesse de Navarre, hoping to entertain the Monarch, taking more trouble than he ever had for the Comédie Française and the 4,000 educated Parisian playgoers. Émilie too was working hard. She had a new tutor, Père Jacquier, who was to wean her from the ideas of Leibnitz and put her back on the wholesome diet of Newton. In July 1744 President Hénault, the Queen’s great friend and the lover since all time of Mme du Deffand, spent a day at Cirey on his way to the watering-place, Plombières. Voltaire and Émilie were delighted by his admiration of their house and perhaps even more by his undisguised amazement at the beauty and luxury in which they lived. He was quite unprepared for what he found. He wrote various accounts of his visit. To the Comte d’Argenson: ‘I have never seen anything like it. They are there, the two of them, alone, leading a most agreeable life. One makes verses, and the other, triangles. The architecture of the house is romantic and surprisingly magnificent. Voltaire has an apartment ending in a gallery which looks like that picture, The School of Athens, where there is a collection of all sorts of instruments for mathematics, physics, astronomy, and so on, and with all this there are old lacquer, looking-glasses, pictures, Dresden china – really I assure you one thinks one is dreaming. Voltaire read me his play and I liked it very much. He manages to be both comic and touching. He has taken all my advice and accepted all my corrections. But what do you think of Rameau’s behaviour, turning into a literary critic and correcting Voltaire’s verses? I’ve written to Richelieu about it.’

  In his memoirs he wrote: ‘I found them alone with a Franciscan Father, a great geometrician and professor of philosophy at Rome. If one wanted to paint a delicious retreat, a peaceful refuge, a calm communion of souls, amenities, talents, reciprocity of admiration, the attraction of philosophy allied to the charm of poetry, one would paint Cirey. A simple, elegant one-storied building contains cabinets full of instruments both mechanical and chemical, and Voltaire in his bed, beginning, continuing and finishing work of every description.’ He wrote to Voltaire from Plombières saying that he was greatly edified by ‘your happiness together’.

  The President was wholeheartedly on Voltaire’s side against Rameau who was, as usual, being extremely awkward. Richelieu, too, wrote to him sharply. They thought he should be reminded that Voltaire was not just any librettist. Voltaire himself took the whole thing light-heartedly. Rameau wanted him to expand four verses into eight and shorten eight verses into four. Oh well, Rameau is a genius and has the right to be a little mad. In spite of his madness and tiresomeness, Voltaire made over to him all the royalties on their joint work. At last his anxiety to finish in time and his efforts to please everybody made Voltaire ill. Émilie became seriously worried about him; he had a high fever, which always frightened her, especially in the country; he could neither sleep nor eat. She said that he was not to be sent any more suggestions, until he arrived in Paris for the rehearsals.

  They left Cirey sooner than they had meant to, for various reasons. The farm animals had a disease (foot and mouth?). They thought they would like to be in Paris for the rejoicings at Louis XV’s recovery from his illness at Metz
. Voltaire wanted to see Richelieu before he went to Spain to fetch the Infanta. He must be made to have a few words with Rameau who was beginning to trade on his genius a little too much; if he went on being so difficult the divertissement might never take place at all. So by the end of August 1744 they were back in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. For the next year they divided their time between Paris and Champs, the country house of the Duc de LaVallière. He and his wife were friends of both Voltaire and Mme du Châtelet; he was an extremely civilized person, one of the great bibliophiles of the eighteenth century. Champs is just outside Paris in Seine-et-Marne. The two philosophers kept bedrooms there and came and went whenever they liked.

  The thanksgiving festivities for the King’s recovery lasted several days. Paris was in a state of delirium and the traffic became disorganized. Voltaire and Mme du Châtelet went to an open-air concert in the Place Dauphine and on their way home their carriage was held up by a gigantic traffic-block in the rue Saint-Honoré. The street was impassable, 2,000 carriages were said to have been immobilized, while to make matters worse the Duc d’Orléans and his retinue of coaches complete with outriders, guards, and pages were trying to get through to the Palais-Royal. Émilie’s coachman had never been in Paris before. At last Voltaire and Émilie decided to brave the crowd which surged, drunk and disorderly, round them and walk to President Hénault’s house, 219 rue Saint-Honoré. (It still exists.) Émilie was covered with diamonds and screaming like a peacock, but nobody molested her and they arrived safely. The President was away; they made themselves at home, sent out for a roast chicken, and drank the health of their absent host. Voltaire wrote and told him all this, adding that they had been lucky to find this friendly shelter so near, because nobody could move until 3 a.m. Émilie’s house in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré was only a few hundred yards away, but it would have been impossible for them to have walked home even had there been no crowd; people of quality never set foot in the streets, they were much too dirty. The first person to build a pavement on which it was possible to walk was the Duc d’Antin, outside his own house. This street is known as the Chaussée d’Antin.