As soon as the Duchesse du Maine arrived back at Sceaux for the winter the ghosts turned up again and set on foot a season of theatrical performances. Mme du Châtelet, who had a talent for acting and a very pretty singing voice, always took the part of the leading lady, dressed up to kill and covered with diamonds. As usual Voltaire went too far and it all ended in tears. Determined to have a good audience he sent out circulars to his friends and acquaintances in Paris: ‘A new company of actors will present a new comedy Friday 15 Dec. [1747] at the theatre of Sceaux. All are welcome, without ceremony, at 6 o’clock precisely. Carriages must be in the courtyard between 7.30 and 8. The doors will be shut to the public after 6.00.’
So, one evening, the Duchess found five hundred total strangers thronging into her house, where Voltaire was receiving them exactly as if it were his. To make matters worse she discovered that he had told them they need not bother about her. After this it is hardly surprising that the Château de Sceaux closed its doors to Voltaire for a time.
The love affair was in the doldrums. It had imperceptibly turned into a marriage: Émilie found that she had two husbands on her hands while Voltaire was prevented by a middle-aged wife from establishing himself with his new mistress. Chains had been forged (as Mme Denis had truly observed in her honeymoon letter to Thieriot) which could not be broken. She very much wanted, now, to break them and Voltaire was obliged to explain to her why this was impossible. He owed it to his public, he said, not to make a scandal which would cover him with ridicule and contempt. He thought it right to follow a straight line and to respect what he called, with his usual inaccuracy, a liaison of twenty years (really about fifteen). If a man wants to leave a woman, however, he can always find ways and means of doing so. In truth, Voltaire was still very much attached to his Émilie, and when it came to possessing him, she won, as she always had.
Émilie, too, spoke of chains. In the Réflections sur le bonheur she described the course of events since the beginning of her life with Voltaire. Mme du Châtelet has received from God one of those tender, constant souls which can neither disguise nor moderate their passions. There can be no question, for her, of love growing weaker, it will resist everything, even the knowledge that it is not returned. For ten years she was perfectly happy, loving and beloved. She and Voltaire spent these years together without one moment of satiety. When age, illness, and perhaps also habit made him less ardent she did not notice it for a long time. She loved enough for both of them, he was always there, she had no suspicions and she was happy. Alas, this ideal state of things had not gone on for ever and she has shed many a tear.
Such chains, she continued, cannot be broken without a terrible upheaval. Her heart was wounded and it bled. She had just grievances but had forgiven everything. She was objective enough to realize that her heart was perhaps the only one in the world to be endowed with such constancy, while as for Voltaire, had his desires not been blunted by age and illness, they might yet have been for her. Even if his heart were now incapable of love, his tender friendship and his whole life were still dedicated to her. She knew that a return of the old passion was a thing that never happened in nature, she resigned herself to this fact and was fairly happy with what did remain, supplemented by her own love of study and work. The question now was whether such a sensitive heart as her own could go on being satisfied with the dull and peaceful sentiment of friendship. Was it right, even, to hope that it would be preserved for ever in a sort of vacuum?
It seems from this statement that Émilie’s body and soul were by no means ticking together in harmony like Leibnitz’s clocks, but were in a sad state of confusion. Had she quite forgotten Maupertuis and all her other lovers? What was their relationship to that heart, unique in its constancy?
Longchamp records that during the winter of 1747—8 Émilie and Voltaire were quarrelling a great deal. The scientist Clairaut came every day to the rue Traversière to verify the findings in her translation of Newton; he and she would shut themselves up together in a room at the top of the house, only appearing for supper and then often very late. One day Voltaire, who was punctual by nature, sent up to say that supper was ready. Émilie told the servant to put the dishes on the table, as she was coming at once. This was duly done, time passed, and the food began to get cold. Suddenly Voltaire lost his temper. He rushed upstairs, found Émilie’s study door locked, kicked it in, and possibly saw that something other than mathematics was going on. He began to scream, saying that they were conspiring to kill him. Presently the three of them came down in silence and nobody spoke a word during the meal. When Clairaut had gone, Émilie talked Voltaire back into a good temper. After that she made an effort to be more punctual.
On another occasion the philosophers were having a heated argument while drinking coffee together. Voltaire leapt up from his chair, to illustrate some point, and in doing so he knocked Émilie’s cup from her hand and smashed it to atoms. It was a beautiful piece of Dresden china, which he himself had given her, lined with gold and ornamented with figures in a landscape. Émilie, deeply upset, went to her own room. Voltaire gave the broken bits to Longchamp and told him to go and match the cup at M. la Frenay’s china shop on the Île de la Cité. Longchamp found nothing as fine, but he brought back half a dozen cups for Voltaire to choose from. The one he picked out cost ten louis. He tried to bargain, M. la Frenay held his ground and Voltaire had to pay in full. However, Émilie liked the cup, received it with smiles, and all was well again.
In the New Year of 1748 they went to Cirey. All Paris was saying that Voltaire had been exiled, but there is no proof of this, and the reasons given for it varied wildly. Some said that the Queen and her children had insisted on it after the publication of a poem in which Voltaire exhorted both the King and Mme de Pompadour to keep their conquests. Others that he had spoken disrespectfully of the Queen’s favourite gambling game, cavagnole, and called it tedious. He was not the only person who thought so; cavagnole was out of fashion and the courtiers grumbled and groaned when they were made to play it. ‘Of course, naturally,’ said Voltaire, ‘if I had really said such a dreadful thing and been guilty of lèse-cavagnole, I would deserve any fate.’ He denied that he was exiled, and probably was not, in the strictest sense of the word, but the feeling at Versailles had certainly become hostile to him. He said that he was leaving Paris because he was a mere planet in the solar system of Émilie, obliged to turn in her orbit.
He wrote to Cideville: ‘My life is not as I should wish it to be; we are, in this world, like marionettes,’ and to Mme Denis, ‘I feel stupid and sad not to be able to live with you in a peaceful anonymity. Oh how dreary it is not to live with you in the same house!’ Mme Denis was threatening to marry a military man she had known at Lille. Voltaire said she must please herself. If she married, his greatest hope was that the wedding service would soon be followed by a funeral (that of the husband). But he would not try to influence her one way or the other. Meanwhile, when she wrote to Cirey, ‘bisogna scrivere discretamente perché le lettere sono tal volte aperte.’ ‘La dame is watching me as I write.’
The philosophers left Paris in bitterly cold weather, starting after supper. Émilie always travelled at night, to save time. She said that she could sleep but could not work on the road. She, Voltaire, and her maid were wedged in their places by a variety of parcels and things thrown in at the last minute. There was not room in the coach for another pin. They were to make their first stop at the country house of M. de Chauvelin, one of the King’s ministers, near Nangis (Seine-et-Marne). As their host was not there they sent Longchamp, on horseback, to acquaint the servants with their arrival and light fires in their rooms. At Nangis he found the inn shut up and everybody gone to a dance the other side of the town. An obliging neighbour went off to fetch the stable-boys, Longchamp ordered a change of horses to be made ready for Voltaire and then asked the way to M. de Chauvelin’s. They said it was a complicated road but they had a little white horse who knew it, they would lend him to Long
champ. After a certain turning, which they described, off the main road, he need only give the white horse his head. He did as he was told, and sure enough the faithful creature carried him to the house, which of course lay in total darkness. He knocked up the servants and told them to make the necessary preparations. They hurried to the poultry yard, killed a few pigeons and a chicken, and soon had them roasting on a spit. Then hours and hours went by with no sign of the travellers.
Meanwhile the two philosophers had been trotting along the high road from Paris to Nangis when they were violently woken from their first sleep. The back axle snapped in two and the coach fell on its side with a tremendous crash. Voltaire, buried beneath the two women and all the parcels, thought he was in danger of being smothered to death. The air was filled with his screams. He had to stay where he was a good long time, however. One of the footmen was hurt in the accident, and the others had difficulty in extracting the passengers through the up-turned door of the coach. Finally they had to be pulled out by their legs, Voltaire last and screaming all the time. The four men they had with them, one of whom was out of action, were not able to right the coach and they had to send for help to the nearest village, several miles away. Cushions were laid on the snowy banks of the road and Voltaire and Mme du Châtelet sat on them, shivering with cold in spite of their furs. It was a night of brilliant stars. The country was flat, there were no trees or houses, and the firmament could be observed from one horizon to the other. Both very fond of astronomy, they had never before seen the map of the heavens so clearly displayed. They soon forgot the cold and all their troubles as they gazed around them, speculating on the nature, the course, and the destination of thousands upon thousands of enormous globes hanging in space. They only needed a telescope to be perfectly happy. Too soon they were interrupted by the arrival of a band of peasants, complete with ropes and tools. The coach was righted, and the men patched up the axle as best they could, to be rewarded with twelve livres, which was far too little. They grumbled and argued furiously while the travellers and the luggage were being packed into their places again, but to no avail. However they had the last laugh. The coach advanced fifty yards and again collapsed on to the road, the right way up this time. Of course the discontented peasants now refused to help; they had to be bribed with enormous sums paid in advance before they would set to work again. Finally, in broad daylight, the coach was put into running order and the journey resumed. Just as Longchamp was setting out to see what could have happened to them, the philosophers arrived at M. de Chauvelin’s, fell voraciously on the pigeons and the chicken, went to bed and slept for hours.
They had left Paris at short notice, and were not expected at Cirey. Mme de Champbonin was not there to welcome them, or any other neighbours. This was soon rectified. L’aimable champenoise arrived with a niece, the whole neighbourhood flocked to them and rehearsals of a comedy were put in hand at once. A few days later, in the middle of a cheerful bustle, a coach drove into the courtyard. It was a very grand affair, displaying the arms of Stanislas, ex-King of Poland; from it emerged a black-habited man of God, a Jesuit priest, Père Menou. An unfamiliar face is always enlivening to a small society; the busy household welcomed him. If he could not act, he could occupy a seat and applaud, which really suited them better. He did so, and was such an appreciative audience that Voltaire pronounced him to be the most enlightened Jesuit he had ever met. How could anybody have foreseen that, more like the wizard in a fairy tale than a priest, he was going to cast a spell that would transform smiling Cirey into a place of mourning?
*The Chevalier de Gaya, a hanger-on of the Duchess’s court.
†A gambling game.
19. An Invitation
Père Menou was King Stanislas’s chaplain and he brought an invitation from his master to the philosophers. Would they go back with him to Lunéville? He must have been the first and last Jesuit who ever wanted to import Voltaire into his own sphere of influence; he was driven to this rash act by the following circumstances.
King Stanislas, having been twice chased off the throne of Poland, was comfortably ending his days as the ruler of Lorraine. His Court was a toy model of Versailles. The royal palace was not in the capital, Nancy, but at Lunéville, a small garrison town some miles away. Like his son-in-law, Louis XV, Stanislas had country houses within an easy day’s drive of his palace, where he could go with a few friends when he wanted to get away from the crowd of courtiers. He, too, was fond of building; Nancy, rebuilt by him, became one of the most beautiful small towns in Europe. The Place Stanislas there inspired the King of France to make the Place Louis XV (Concorde). Stanislas, like Louis, had a neglected Queen, and was governed by a beautiful Marquise. His cousin, the Duke Ossolinski, had the title, at Lunéville, of M. le Duc like the King of France’s cousin, the Duc de Bourbon, at Versailles. At the beginning of his reign Stanislas had filled his Court and its offices with Polish refugees. In due course, however, his ancient mistress ‘Mme la Duchess’ (Ossolinska) was replaced by the young Lorrainer Marquise de Boufflers, after which the atmosphere at Lunéville turned very French.
Stanislas was a merry old soul and the Lorrainers loved him, although they had been passionately attached to their own ruling family and were distressed by the fact that, on his death, their ancient duchy was to become a province of France. No two people could have been found to bridge the awkward period of transition so well as he and his ‘Chancellor’ the Marquis de La Galaizière, who was really the French intendant. In perfect harmony they ruled Lorraine together: the King was the figurehead, the Marquis did the work – and so it was in all things, including their liaison with Mme de Boufflers.
This laughing beauty, whose lovers dreaded her jokes even more than her infidelities, had been born and bred for the post of King’s mistress. She was one of the eighteen children of the Princesse de Beauvau who had held it during the reign of Duke Leopold. Stanislas worshipped her, but he realized that, in his sixties, he could hardly expect to fulfil all the requirements of a lovely woman thirty years younger. So, at a certain moment, he would leave her room saying, ‘My Chancellor must tell you the rest.’ (This was the favourite story of Louis XV.) La Galaizière, too, loved her passionately. She was perfectly bewitching, and no unkind word has ever been said about her, either during her lifetime or since her death. Like the Marquise at Versailles, of whom she was very fond (and whose greatest friend was her sister the Marquise de Mirepoix), Mme de Boufflers had been well educated. She wrote light verse of merit and charm, and was an accomplished pastellist. She possessed every virtue except chastity; while there was a special place in her heart for the King, while the love of her life was La Galaizière, she had a regiment of other lovers. In 1748 she was at the beginning of a new affair. A year or two before, Pan-pan had been the favoured one, Mme de Grafigny's Panpichon. But though both he and Mme de Boufflers cherished the memory of their love into extreme old age, Panpichon had one signal disadvantage as a lover: when his mistress was in his arms, desire for her would fade, only to be reborn in all its force when she was no longer there. In these circumstances it was no surprise to anybody that, while she kept a tender regard for Pan-pan, she should turn to his friend, Saint-Lambert.
The Marquis de Saint-Lambert has not been well treated by historians. The admirers both of Voltaire and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau have had reason to be unkind about him; his poetry has long been out of fashion; his title even has been disputed. But his contemporaries saw him as a fascinator. At Lunéville he was distinguished from the other courtiers by his manner, different indeed from theirs. King Stanislas, who loved pleasure and ease, had abolished all ceremony at his Court and its atmosphere was that of a large, rather silly, country-house party. The courtiers twittered and shrieked and romped from morning to night; practical jokes were encouraged. The horrid dwarf, Bébé, was the centre of everything, hiding in the women’s skirts, losing himself in a cornfield, always bad-tempered, smasher of china, cruel to animals, but adored by Stanislas. He lived in a
house three feet high and was dressed in the uniform of a hussar. ‘Just imagine,’ wrote President Hénault, ‘his idiot of a mother spends her time praying that he will grow!’
In this exuberant society Saint-Lambert stood conspicuously aloof. He observed the antics around him with a sardonic eye, he never used exaggerated phrases, never flattered anybody, seldom laughed. There was something Byronic about him, and like Lord Byron he was a poet, though not so talented. He wrote about nature and the countryside. Mme du Deffand, who hardly ever spoke well of anybody except the members of her own clique, said that he was ‘froid, fade, et faux’ (cold, insipid, and false) and of his poetry ‘sans les roseaux, les ruisseaux, les ormeaux et leurs rameaux il aura bien peu de choses à dire’ which might be translated ‘he would be lost without pines and vines and twining eglantines’. Diderot remarked that though his body might be in the fields his soul was in the town. All the same, he has his place among minor French poets and he became a member of the Académie Française.
He was capable of love and constancy. His affair with Mme d’Houdetot, with whom Jean-Jacques Rousseau had also been in love, lasted fifty-two years. When she and M. d’Houdetot, who had lived comfortably together, wanted to celebrate their golden wedding, Saint-Lambert flew into a rage of jealousy and forbade it. In his youth he liked to capture hearts and to break up love affairs. Women generally loved him longer than he loved them, but not Mme de Boufflers, though their liaison, while it lasted, was extremely passionate. Stanislas and his Chancellor put up with an endless succession of infidelities, but she was at pains to keep this one from them – it was so serious.
Mme de Boufflers was the least grasping of women, she accepted fewer presents and favours than almost any other royal mistress on record, but it would have been foolish to throw away her brilliant position simply for lack of a little prudence, and she was not foolish. Besides, she was fond of her old King and loved La Galaizière. On the other hand, she and Saint-Lambert wanted more than an occasional hasty rendezvous; they liked to spend whole nights together, to go to sleep and wake up in each other’s arms. This was rather difficult to arrange. Saint-Lambert was a captain in the regiment of Mme de Boufflers’s brother Alexandre de Beauvau; he was often on garrison duty in the town of Lunéville but had no function in the royal household and therefore no apartment in the château. He went there to pay his court, like the other officers. Mme de Boufflers’s rooms were on the ground floor, with their own entrance to the street, but comings and goings were observed by the sentry and were never a secret for very long. However, she discovered a tiny empty room between her own apartment and the chapel. She managed somehow to get a bed put into it without the whole world knowing and here she and her lover spent delicious nights. Luckily, King Stanislas dropped with sleepiness by nine and was never in bed later than ten, a habit which had long been encouraged by his mistress.
Voltaire in Love Page 21