by Will Durant
But play was an incident, work was the order of the day. The lovers sometimes collaborated in the laboratory, but usually they worked in their separate quarters, hardly seeing each other during the day except at the main meal, which came toward noon. The Marquis quit the table before the conversation began; Voltaire, too, often left the others to entertain themselves, and stole back to his study. He had his own silver service there, for he sometimes ate alone. We rightly think of him as a vivacious talker; he could be the life of any gathering; but he hated small talk. “It is frightful,” he said, “the time we spend in talk. We ought not to lose a minute. The greatest expenditure we can make is of time.”31 Occasionally he hunted venison for exercise.
We must not picture the philosophic mates as angels. Madame could be harsh, overbearing, even cruel. She was a bit straitened in purse, severe and parsimonious with her servants, and she protested when Voltaire paid his more. She had no physical modesty; she thought nothing of completely disrobing in the presence of their secretary Longchamp, or of having him pour warm water upon her as she lay in the bath.32 She secretly read some of the letters written by or to her guests; but of this we have only the testimony of another woman.33 As for Voltaire, he had a hundred faults, which will appear in Duc course. He was as vain as a poet and could pout like a child; he took offense readily and had many a quarrel with his lady. These, however, were but passing clouds that accentuated the sunshine of their days. Voltaire soon recovered his spirits and good cheer, and never tired of telling his friends how happy he was, and how he loved Madame, in his own passionless way. He wrote to her a hundred little poems of affection, each a cameo of compact art. One such literary gem accompanied a ring into which his portrait had been engraved:
Barter grave ces traits destinés pour vos yeux;
Avec quelque plaisir daignez les reconnaître!
Les vôtres dans mon coeur furent gravés bien mieux,
Mais ce fut par un plus grand maître.34 I
And she, for her part, said, “I could not be away from him for two hours without pain.”35
Of the two she was the more deeply devoted to science. She exercised the unwritten law of feminine domain by hiding the half-finished manuscript of Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV, and sternly directing him to science as the proper study of modern man. Mme. de Graffigny, who was their guest in 1738, described her as more assiduous in her scientific pursuits than Voltaire, as spending most of the day and much of the night at her desk, sometimes till five or seven o’clock in the morning.36 Maupertuis came occasionally to Cirey to continue her lessons in mathematics and physics; perhaps those visits, and Madame’s open admiration for Maupertuis’ intellectual attainments, stirred in the sensitive Voltaire a jealousy that prepared him for his bout with Maupertuis in Berlin.
Was she a real scholar or did she put on science as a fashionable dress? Mme. du Deffand and several other ladies thought that her studies were a pose. The Marquise de Créqui alleged that “algebra and geometry had the effect of making her half crazy, while her pedantry on the subject of her learning made her insupportable. In reality she muddled up everything that she had learned.”37 But hear Mme. de Graffigny describe a session at Cirey:
This morning the lady of the house read us a geometrical calculation of an English dreamer.… The book was in Latin, and she read it to us in French. She hesitated a moment at each period, and I supposed it was to understand the mathematical calculations. But no; she translated easily the mathematical terms; the numbers, the extravagances, nothing stopped her. Is not that really astonishing?38
Voltaire assured Thieriot that Mme. du Châtelet understood English well, knew all the philosophical works of Cicero, and was deeply interested in mathematics and metaphysics.39 She once bettered the physicist and Academician de Mairan in a discussion of kinetic energy.40 She read Cicero and Virgil in Latin, Ariosto and Tasso in Italian, Locke and Newton in English. When Algarotti visited Cirey she conversed with him in Italian. She wrote, but did not publish, a six-volume Examen de Genèse, based on the work of English deists, and exposing the contradictions, improbabilities, immoralities, and injustices of the Bible. Her Traité de la bonheur was an original discourse on the foundations of happiness; these, she thought, were health, love, virtue, rational self-indulgence, and the pursuit of knowledge. She translated Newton’s Principia from Latin into French; edited by Clairaut, it was published in 1756, six years after her death. She composed an Exposition abrégée du système du monde, which was published in 1759, and which Voltaire, perhaps gallantly, pronounced superior to his Éléments de la philosophie de Newton (1738).41 When the Académie des Sciences offered (1738) a prize for the best essay on the nature and diffusion of fire, and Voltaire entered the competition, she secretly wrote and submitted her own essay, incognito; she wrote it at night to conceal it from Voltaire, “since in my essay I opposed nearly all of his ideas.”42 Neither won the prize, which went to Euler, but her paper, as well as Voltaire’s, was printed by the Academy. Each praised the other’s work in an ecstasy of amor intellectualis.
For his own essay Voltaire carried on many experiments, some in his laboratory, some in a foundry at neighboring Chaumont.43 He studied calcination, and came close to discovering oxygen.44 In May, 1737, we find him writing to the Abbé Moussinot in Paris, asking for a chemist to come and live at Cirey for a hundred écus per year and board; but the chemist must also know how to say Mass on Sundays and holydays in the chapel of the château.45 As for himself, he believed now only in science. “That which our eyes and mathematics demonstrate to us,” he wrote in 1741, “we must hold to be true. In all the rest we must say only, ’I do not know.’”46 Philosophy at this time meant to him only a summary of science.
It was in this sense that he used the term in his Éléments de la philosophie de Newton. He sought the royal privilege for its publication, but was refused. An edition appeared in Amsterdam (1738) without his consent; his own edition came out there in 1741. It was a substantial volume of 440 pages, a splendid example of what the French, with no derogatory intent, call vulgarisation— that is, an attempt to make the difficult and recondite more widely understood. The printer added a subtitle: Mis à la portée de tout le monde— “brought within the comprehension of everyone”; the Abbé Desfontaines, in a hostile review, altered this to Mis à la porte de tout le monde— “shown the door by everyone.” On the contrary, nearly everyone praised it; even the Jesuits were generous to it in their Journal de Trévoux.47 Now the Newtonian cosmology of gravitation finally ousted Descartes’ vortices from the French mind. Voltaire included an exposition of Newton’s optics; he verified the experiments in his own laboratory, and contrived others of his own. He went out of his way to stress the consistency of Newton’s philosophy with belief in God; at the same time he emphasized the universality of law in the physical world.
Despite these efforts Voltaire had neither the spirit nor the limitations of a scientist. It is said that he failed as a scientist; we should rather say that he was too rich and varied a personality to give himself fully and finally to science. He used science as a liberation of the mind; that done, he passed on to poetry, drama, philosophy in its largest sense, and humanitarian involvement in the basic affairs of his time. “We should introduce into our existence all imaginable modes, and open every door of the soul to all sorts of knowledge and feeling. So long as these do not go in pell-mell, there is plenty of room for everything.”48 So he wrote at this time (1734) a Discours sur l’homme, largely echoing Pope’s Essay on Man, even to sanctioning the quite un-Voltairean idea that “all is right.”49 He composed in these years most of La Pucelle d’Orléans, perhaps as a relief from Newton. And he expounded his own philosophy in a Traité de métaphy sique which he judiciously refrained from publishing.
It was as unique as all his productions. He began by imagining himself to be a visitor from Jupiter or Mars; so, he thought, he could not be expected to reconcile his views with the Bible. Landing among the Kaffirs of South Afr
ica, he concludes that man is an animal with black skin and wooly hair. Passing to India, he finds men with yellow skin and straight hair; he concludes that man is a genus composed of several distinct species, not all derived from one ancestor.50 He judges from the appearances of order in the world, and of purposeful design of organs in animals, that there is an intelligent deity designing the whole. He sees no evidence of an immortal soul in man, but he feels that his will is free. Long before Hume and Adam Smith, he derives the moral sense from fellow feeling, sympathy. Long before Helvétius and Bentham, he defines virtue and vice as “that which is useful or injurious to the society.”51 We shall look at the Traité again later on.
How different from this treatise was Voltaire’s rollicking versification of Jeanne d’Arc’s history! If we open that mock epic today we must remember that French speech and French literature were freer then than in the first half of the twentieth century. We have seen an example in the Lettres persanes of the magistrate Montesquieu; Diderot was even freer, not only in Les Bijoux indiscrets but in Jacques le fataliste. Compared with these La Pucelle, as finally published by Voltaire in 1756, is innocuously mild; presumably the privately circulated original was more Rabelaisian. The grave Condorcet defended the poem, and we are told that Malesherbes, a high official in the French government, learned it by heart.52 A sedulous search has found some mildly sensual passages in the twenty-one cantos; they are as forgivable as similar pictures in Ariosto; and they are redeemed by many passages of graphic description and vigorous narrative. Like many Frenchmen of his time, Voltaire thought of Jeanne as a healthy and simple peasant girl, probably of bastard birth, given to superstitions and hearing “voices”; and he suspected that France would have been saved from the Goddams (Jeanne’s name for the English invaders) even if she had never been born. Otherwise, and allowing for some historical blunders, he told the story faithfully, merely salting it with humor.
Turning his head toward the dauntless Joan,
Thus spake the King, in a majestic tone
Which any might have feared but her alone:
“Joan, hear me: if thou art a maid, avow.”
She answered: “Oh, great Sire, give orders now
That doctors sage, with spectacles on nose,
Who, versed in female mysteries, can depose;
That clerks, apothecaries, matrons tried
Be called at once the matter to decide;
Let them all scrutinize, and let them see.”
By this sage answer Charles knew she must be
Inspired and blessed with sweet virginity.
“Good,” said the King, “since you know so well,
Daughter of heaven, I prithee, instant tell
What with my fair one passed last night in bed?
Speak free.” “Why, nothing happened,” Joan said.
Surprised, the King knelt down and cried aloud,
“A miracle!” then crossed himself and bowed.53
Voltaire amused his guests by reading a canto or two of La Pucelle to warm a winter evening. Usually Mme. du Châtelet kept the swelling manuscript under lock and key, but Voltaire carelessly allowed some parts of it to circulate among his friends. Parts were copied, and went the rounds of impolite society more widely than was wise. The fear that the French government would prosecute him—not for the obscenity of the poem but for its incidental satire of monks, Jesuits, prelates, popes, and the Inquisition-became one of the haunting worries of Voltaire’s life.
He was more serious with Alzire, which had a happy première at the Théâtre-Français on January 27, 1736. It made theatrical history by dressing the actors in the costumes of the indicated time and place—the Spanish conquest and spoliation of Peru. Alvarez, the Spanish governor of the fallen state, pleads with the victors to abate their cruelty and greed:
We are the scourge
Of this new world, vain, covetous, unjust. …
We alone
Are the barbarians here; the simple savage,
Tho’ fierce by nature, is in courage equal,
In goodness our superior.54
Paris acclaimed the piece for twenty successive nights, paying 53,640 livres. Voltaire gave his share of the receipts to the players.
On August 8, 1736, he received his first letter from Frederick of Prussia; so began a remarkable correspondence and a tragic friendship. In this same year he published a poem, Le Mondain (The Worldly Man), which reads like an answer, by anticipation, to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750). Voltaire had no patience with the visionaries who were idealizing the “friendly and flowing savage,” or were recommending a “return to nature” as an escape from the strains, hypocrisies, and artifices of modern life. He himself was quite comfortable amid his tribulations, and he thought he ought to say a good word for civilization. He saw no virtue in poverty, and no harmony between bugs and love. Primitive men may have been communists, but only because they had nothing; and if they were sober it was only because they had no wine. “For my Part I thank the wise nature that for my happiness gave me birth in this age so decried by our melancholy critics. This profane time is just right for my ways. I love luxury, even a soft life [mollesse], all the pleasures, the arts in their variety, cleanliness, taste, and ornaments.” All this seemed to him clearly preferable to the Garden of Eden. “My dear father Adam, confess that you and Madame Eve had long nails black with dirt, and that your hair was a bit out of order.… In vain have scholars sought to locate the Garden of Eden; … the terrestrial paradise is where I am.”
The ecclesiastics did not like this picture of Adam and Eve; they insisted that the Book of Genesis was good history, and they did not agree with Voltaire about Adam’s nails and Eve’s hair. Again the word went forth for the arrest of the impious devil of Cirey. Again friends warned him, and he decided to travel. On December 21, 1736, he left Cirey and Émilie, and made his way to Brussels, disguised as the merchant Revol. His admirers there laughed at his disguise, and, in his honor, staged Alzire. Jean Baptiste Rousseau warned the Bruxellois that Voltaire had come to preach atheism. Voltaire moved on to Leiden, where crowds collected to see him, and to Amsterdam, where he supervised the printing of his book on Newton. The Marquise began to fear that he would never return. “Two weeks ago,” she wrote to d’Argental, “I was in torture if I let two hours pass without seeing him; I wrote to him from my room to his; now two weeks have gone by, and I don’t know where he is or what he is doing.… I am in a terrible state.”55 At last he returned (March, 1737), vowing that only his love for her could keep him in a France that so hounded him.
In May, 1739, the lovers went to Brussels, where Voltaire used his legal and other wits to defend the Marquise in a suit affecting her property. Then, with her husband, they went on to Paris, where Voltaire offered two plays, Mahomet and Mérope, to the Comédie-Française, and Madame saw through the press her three-volume Institutions de physique. In these “lessons” she played truant from both Voltaire and Newton by favoring the monadic philosophy of Leibniz. In September they returned to Cirey, and soon afterward to Brussels for a long stay. Thence, in September, 1740, Voltaire hurried to Cleves for his first meeting with Frederick—now king—who refused to include Émilie in his invitation. In November he traveled 350 painful miles to Berlin, hoping to play diplomat for Cardinal Fleury; more of this later. Émilie meanwhile went to Fontainebleau, where she labored to secure permission for Voltaire to reside in Paris; apparently Cirey had become a bore. On November 23 she wrote to d’Argental:
I have been cruelly rewarded for all that I have done at Fontainebleau. I have adjusted the most difficult matters; I have obtained for M. de Voltaire the right to return to his country openly; I won him the good will of the ministry, and paved his way for acceptance by the Academies; in a word, I have given him back in three weeks all that he has taken pains to lose in six years.
And do you know how he repays such zealous devotion? He informs me dryly that he has gone to Berlin, knowing perfectly well that
he is piercing my heart, and leaves me in a state of indescribable torture.… A fever has seized me, and I hope soon to end my life.… And would you believe that the thought that is uppermost in my mind, when I feel that my grief will kill me, is the terrible sorrow my death would bring to M. de Voltaire? .. . I cannot bear the idea that the memory of me will one day cause him unhappiness. All those who have loved him must refrain from reproaching him.
Voltaire tore himself away from Potsdam and royal adulation to rejoin his mistress. On the way back he sent to Frederick a letter that gives his side of the matter: