Voltaire in Love

by Nancy Mitford

  17. Voltaire at Court

  Émilie had seen at once that Frederick was likely to become a dangerous rival but she never saw a greater danger, nearer home. Mme Denis, the widow-woman, now came to live in Paris where she set up house in the rue Pavée (a street hardly changed to this day). A cheerful, ugly little thing aged thirty-two, she established a salon for Voltaire’s bourgeois friends. When Mme du Châtelet went out gambling, or to suppers where he was not invited, Voltaire would go to his niece for a good laugh with her and the various men who frequented her house. Very soon he found that he was not too old to make love after all and that she had given him back ‘l’ âge des amours’. His love was most passionate and a deadly secret. None of his contemporaries knew of it, not even Voltaire’s manservant, and we only do from his letters, recently come to light. When his thoughts became very much inflamed, not to say pornographic, he would often express them in Italian. ‘Mia Cara,’ he calls her, ‘ma chère Italienne.’ ‘A few moments in your company and I forget all my past sorrows.’ ‘I shall never be happy until I can live with you. I cover your adorable body with kisses.’ (J’embrasse votre gentil cul et toute votre adorable personne.) ‘My soul is yours for ever.’ ‘Mme Duch dines today with the Duchesse de Modène and I with my dearest Muse whom I love more than life itself

  It must be borne in mind that an affair with a niece is not regarded as incestuous in a Latin country. To this day Frenchmen of the very best society marry their nieces with a Papal dispensation; at least one of Voltaire’s friends, Paris-Montmartel, had done so. If the affair was deplorable it was because of Mme Denis’s own character. She was to become an odious figure, eaten up with the love of money. But when she was young her faults were not so apparent. She was extremely attractive to men. Cideville wanted to marry her: Voltaire was enslaved by her. ‘You will always be my mistress.’ ‘I should like to live at your feet and die in your arms.’

  During the autumn and winter of 1744 Voltaire had two preoccupations, Mme Denis and the Princesse de Navarre. He fussed over this play, writing and rewriting it, asking everybody’s advice on little details, in such a torment of creation as even he had hardly ever known. If he livens up this scene, will the next one fall a trifle flat? How would d’Argental cope with it? What does Cideville think? Richelieu wants more ballets, but will they not stifle interest in the plot? He could have saved himself all this wear and tear; interest in his plot was stillborn.

  On 23 February 1745, the spectacle which had eaten up a whole year of Voltaire’s life, causing him a severe nervous breakdown, was performed in front of the newly-married Dauphin and Dauphine, the King and Queen, the Court and a little group of Voltaire’s own special friends, including, of course, Mme Denis. This audience was so beautiful that it quite outshone the actors, there was no comparison between the two sides of the curtain. It was like a swarm of golden bees, glittering round the King and buzzing so loud that verses and music could hardly be heard. Voltaire said afterwards that the play had been a firework which went off leaving no trace behind it, but the few members of the audience who paid him the compliment of attending to his script did not see it as a firework at all. They complained that it was exceedingly long and dull. The Dauphine said the jokes were flat, but she was well known to hate jokes: in spite of a French father and an Italian mother she was impregnated with Spanish gravity. Louis XV, however, who had been happily chatting away throughout the performance, pronounced himself more than satisfied. Voltaire wanted no other reward. He boasted to all his friends, even to the austere Vauvenargues who, himself an aristocrat, was not likely to have been impressed, that he now practically lived at Versailles. He excused himself, when he remembered to do so, for this sudden change of front about a Court which he used to regard as the very pit of corruption, explaining that only by royal favour could he be sheltered from the Mirepoix faction and get on with his work in peace. He was ashamed of becoming the King’s clown at the age of fifty-one, he said. He was, at the Court, like an atheist in a church. But in truth he was fascinated by Versailles and only when out of reach did the grapes turn sour for him again.

  That spring was one of the periods when all went well with Voltaire. He was appointed official historian and gentleman-in-ordinary to the King, with 2,000 livres a year and an apartment at Versailles. This apartment was really one smelly, shabby room over the public privies and the Prince de Condé’s kitchen. However it provided what is known as ‘a good address’. Most probably he lodged, as usual, with Richelieu. The Comédie Française revived his L’Enfant prodigue, Mérope, Zaïre, Œdipe, and Alzire. Best of all the King now acquired a new mistress. Mme de Châteauroux had died suddenly at the age of twenty-seven, just after his own recovery. He mourned her for a few months and fell in love again. Fascinating Mme d’Étiolles, soon to be Mme de Pompadour, had been brought up in the world of high finance so well known to Voltaire. ‘I saw her born.’ He was delighted that the King’s choice should have fallen on her. Mme de Pompadour was a woman of taste and learning and the writers of the day hoped that through her influence they would henceforth receive more equitable treatment. For the same reason, her rise to power was distressing to the Bishop of Mirepoix, who had done everything he could to prevent it. The mitred ass was soon to receive an even greater blow.

  Various events in the families of Mme du Châtelet and Voltaire must be recorded. Her plump little daughter, who used to be brought from her convent to act at Cirey, reached the age of sixteen and was brought from it again to marry an old Neapolitan Duke of Montenero, with a flat chest and a huge nose. He carried her off to live at Capodimonte and she was never more seen by Mme du Châtelet who took less interest in her than in the puppies of Dear Love, her black dog. Voltaire, more of a human being than most of his contemporaries in such matters, disapproved of the bridegroom and corresponded by fits and starts with the bride.

  The du Châtelets’ lawsuit was finally settled; they won it, and yet in some miraculous way managed to remain on good terms with their opponent, the Marquis de Hoensbrock, who wrote and thanked Voltaire for the part he had played. Du Châtelet also wrote, saying that he and his family had many reasons to be grateful to Voltaire and that he absolutely relied on him never to leave Mme du Châtelet. In the summer of 1745 Mme du Châtelet moved from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré to a house in the rue Traversière (now rue Molière) where Voltaire occupied the whole of the first floor.

  During the rehearsals of the Princesse de Navarre Voltaire’s brother died, leaving him the sole survivor of the Arouets. He may have wondered if he would not soon follow the others to the grave. His health had never been so bad, his liver and lights played him up terribly, and he had hardly been well a single day since leaving Cirey.

  Voltaire was enjoying his new situation at Versailles when Mme du Chatelet’s son, who was now seventeen and had been at the front with his father, was stricken down with smallpox at Châlons-sur-Marne. Voltaire and Émilie hurried to his bedside, where they could do nothing but observe the ignorant tyranny of the doctors. The Bishop of Châlons insisted that they should stay with him, in spite of possible contagion. When the boy was better they returned to Paris, but Voltaire was now forbidden to go near the Court for forty days. This was an inviolable rule for anybody who had been in contact with smallpox, whether they had had it themselves or not. Stupid prejudice, said he, and not the first time it had done him harm.

  All Voltaire’s friends, the King at their head, were off to the war and he had particularly wanted to say good-bye. Now, in his capacity of official historian he could only wait, his pen ready poised, to celebrate their feats of arms in prose and verse. He did not have to wait for long. On 12 May 1745 news came to Versailles of the brilliant French victory over the English and Dutch armies at Fontenoy. The Marquis d’Argenson (now Foreign Minister), who was at the front, wrote a preliminary account of the battle to ‘Monsieur l’Historien’. He described the irresistible, rolling fire of the English, like hell itself, the moment when it seemed as if all wer
e lost and the French would have to swallow a second Dettingen (where the English had beaten them earlier in this war), the imperturbable gaiety of the King, his refusal to budge and the final triumph of the household cavalry. ‘Your friend Richelieu was a veritable Bayard.’

  Voltaire, in spite of his pacific principles, rejoiced at this victory. The French army had suffered many humiliating defeats of late and Voltaire had keenly felt the force of Frederick’s jibes and insults at its expense. He was also delighted to have such a subject with which to begin his career as official historian. He wrote his famous poem: La Bataille de Fontenoy gagnée par Louis XV sur les Alliés. By 26 May it had already gone into five editions, each bringing in the names and feats of more warriors; Voltaire was besieged by women of his acquaintance who wanted a line or two about some loved one. In the end the thing became a farce and, the irreverent French being what they are, a parody of Fontenoy soon appeared. Whereas Voltaire’s heroes are all, of course, nobly born, of the highest rank and most impeccable ancestry, in the parody they have names like Joli-Cœur, La Tulipe, or l’Espérance, sons of tailleur de pierre, gros marchand d’eau-de-vie, and so on. The literary critics were unanimous in their condemnation of Fontenoy. But Voltaire now only heeded the verdict of one judge. Louis XV was not much of a reader, and Maréchal de Noailles read the poem to him. Maréchal de Saxe wrote to Mme du Châtelet: ‘The King is very much pleased with it and even says that the work is beyond criticism.’ Voltaire was delighted, but not surprised. There were little finesses in the poem, he said, which could only be understood by gentlefolk, and which were far above the heads of mere pen-pushers, sewers from Bicêtre, and the like. As usual he was buoyed up with enormous sales.

  As well as the poem Voltaire had to write an historical account of Fontenoy in prose. He discovered that the Duke of Cumberland, the English commander, had one Fawkener attached to him, so he wrote asking if he were a relation of the Ambassador. To his surprise and delight it turned out that it was his own Fawkener. ‘How could I guess, my dear and honourable friend, that your Mussulman person had . . . passed from the seraglio to the closet of the Duke of Cumberland?’ He supplied Voltaire with details of the campaign from the English point of view. Lord Chesterfield wrote to a woman friend at Paris greatly praising Voltaire’s Fontenoy which, he said, as far as he could make out was a perfectly correct report of the battle. He went on to say that nobody wanted peace more than he did but: ‘We want an equitable peace, you are for an advantageous one, so I am afraid it is further off than ever. We aim at nothing but the liberty and safety of Europe, you seek nothing but the advancement of your own despotism; how, then, can we agree?’ All the same he was planning to send his son to school at Paris the following year to learn ‘that ease, those manners, those graces which are certainly nowhere to be found but in France’.

  Voltaire spent part of the summer at Étiolles where Mme de Pompadour was living quietly with her family until Louis XV should return from the war. A fellow guest was the Abbé de Bernis, an amiable, chubby little young man, who for no particular reason was a member of the Académie Française and who, also for no particular reason, was presently to be Foreign Minister. Everybody liked Bernis. Voltaire teased him, called him Babet la Bouquetière, and was not even envious of him. Indeed it was so ridiculous that Babet, in ‘her’ twenties, should be an Academician while Voltaire, in his fifties, was not, as to be a cause for amusement rather than envy. Voltaire loved Mme de Pompadour as most people did who knew her and she was fond of him and understood him. She bossed him about as only a young and pretty person can boss an old, illustrious man. He told Émilie that here was a beauty who hated gambling, it bored her to death. How strange, when Émilie-Newton wasted such hours at the card-table! Mme du Châtelet may well have been jealous of this other Marquise since she was unaware of the much more sinister reason she now had for jealousy.

  She was Émilie-Newton again in good earnest. The Père Jacquier had caused her to realize the errors of her Leibnitzian ways and she had begun her translation of Newton. Even so her abounding energy was not fully engaged; she gambled until four or five every morning and went a great deal to Versailles where she was plaguing the War Minister to make her little boy a colonel. The Marquis du Châtelet was now a general, covering himself with glory in a series of prudent retreats. Émilie was in a particularly tiresome frame of mind just then, overdoing everything and giving herself ridiculous airs at Court. She had certain privileges usually reserved for Duchesses, on account of her husband’s position in Lorraine. One of these was to travel in the Queen’s retinue. When the Court left Versailles for its autumn visit to Fontainebleau, Émilie told the Mistress of the Robes, the Duchesse de Luynes, that she would be wanting a place in one of the coaches and this was duly arranged. The Queen herself left with Mme de Luynes and three other Duchesses straight from the chapel as soon as Mass was over. Two more coaches were waiting in the Cour d’Honneur to bring Mesdames de Montaubon, Fitzjames, Flavacourt, and du Châtelet. Hardly had the Queen driven off than Mme du Châtelet hopped into one of them, settled herself comfortably in the corner, and called out something like: ‘Come on, plenty of room!’ The other women, outraged by this lack of manners, all got into the second coach, leaving Émilie alone in hers. Seeing that she had gone too far, she got down again and went to join them but a footman stopped her, saying that there was no room for her. So she drove in solitary state to Fontainebleau. As soon as she arrived she told Richelieu what had happened and he went off to see Mme de Luynes, one of those rare people who like to make everything easy and pleasant. She presented Mme du Châtelet’s apologies to the Queen and all was forgiven, but as nothing else was talked of at Fontainebleau the atmosphere cannot have been very comfortable for Émilie. Indeed, she and Voltaire went back to Paris almost at once. The Duc de Luynes, telling the story in his journal, excuses her on the grounds that she is not as other women but a scientist who has actually had a book printed. He charitably puts her behaviour down to absent-mindedness.

  Voltaire now disconcerted the French Church by entering into correspondence with the Pope. He thought that he could thus cut the ground from under the feet of Monseigneur de Mirepoix and prepare the way to the Académie Française. Benedict XIV was a shrewd, learned man with a sense of humour. At the death of Clement XII the conclave of Cardinals, shut up in the Vatican to elect a new Pope, was even longer than usual in agreeing. At last Cardinal Lambertini said to them: ‘If you want a saint you must elect Gotti; if a politician, Aldobrandi; but if you want an ordinary good sort of fellow, what about me?’ They elected him and he was Pope from 1740 to 1758. Exceptionally humane, he made various reforms and issued a bull demanding better treatment for the American Indians. He was not at all fond of the French Church; he thought it expended too much energy in hunting down Jansenists and other nonconformists. Voltaire could not have fallen upon a better Pope to make friends with. ‘He has the face of a good devil who knows what the whole thing is worth.’ With his usual energy Voltaire pulled strings in many directions; he wrote to Cardinals; Mlle du Thil, a relation of Mme du Châtelet, wrote on his behalf to a powerful Abbé at the Vatican and d’Argenson wrote to the French envoy there. The Pope, who admired Voltaire’s works, responded to the first advance by sending him a large medal with his portrait. Not knowing this, the French envoy asked for a large medal for Voltaire. ‘But I couldn’t give him a larger one if he were St Peter himself!’ Voltaire sent him his Mahomet, which the Pope very sensibly took at its face value without searching for hidden blasphemies. He praised it and allowed Voltaire to dedicate it to him. Needless to say, this commerce with the Vatican was heavily publicized.

  Voltaire’s favour at Versailles continued but was never very firmly established because Louis XV could not get fond of him. He understood the value of Voltaire. Condorcet says: ‘It was not without a feeling of pride that he saw one of his subjects acknowledged by the whole of Europe as being among the most illustrious of men. He respected the glory of France in him.�
�� But when they came face to face, Voltaire, anxious to make an impression, too often made a gaffe. His cheeky yet subservient manner embarrassed and irritated the King. With Rameau he wrote another divertissement, Le Temple de la Gloire, to celebrate the recent French victories. In it Voltaire doled out a good deal of heavy flattery to Louis XV who figured as benign, majestic Trajan. At the royal performance he said to Richelieu, in the King’s hearing: ‘Is Trajan pleased?’ Trajan was displeased at such manners and showed it, and there was as much of a to-do over this incident as over Émilie’s little miscalculation in the coach. However, Mme de Pompadour and Richelieu saw to it that the King and his historian should hardly ever meet, and the royal favour was not withdrawn for the present. The smaller fry among the courtiers were in a fury at Voltaire’s appointment as gentleman-in-ordinary, a post hitherto reserved for the nobility. His new colleagues decided that when he came to dine with them they would send him to Coventry. But of course when he did present himself he had the whole table roaring with laughter in no time. The boot was on the other foot: these gentlemen bored Voltaire so much that he never went near them again. Very soon, with the King’s consent, he sold his appointment while keeping all its privileges.

  Voltaire, universally admitted to be the greatest living French writer, corresponding with the Pope, and a courtier at Versailles, could no longer be kept out of the Académie Française; his election took place quite easily and smoothly in the spring of 1746. He was too ill to pay the customary visits and it seemed unlikely that he would live to enjoy his new honour for very long. He succeeded to the fauteuil of Bouhier, a magistrate; of his eight successors in it only two have been interesting, Saint-René Taillandier and Paul Bourget. It need hardly be said that Voltaire’s inaugural speech gave rise to controversy. He departed from the traditional practice of praising three people: Cardinal Richelieu, Chancellor Séguier, and the previous occupant of the fauteuil. He took as his theme the universality of the French language. He named his foreign benefactors who spoke it perfectly: Princess Louisa Ulrica of Prussia (now Crown Princess of Sweden), Benedict XIV, and Frederick. From them he went on to various French friends such as Richelieu, Fontenelle, President Hénault, and, of course, the father of his people, dear, good Louis XV. Those who were mentioned thought this an excellent innovation; those who were not complained that the speech was too long, too dull, and in very poor taste.