The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  Memnon the Philosopher told the story of a man who “one day conceived the insane idea of becoming wholly reasonable.” He finds himself in a hopeless and besieged minority, encounters a hundred calamities, and decides that the earth is an insane asylum to which the other planets deport their lunatics.77

  The Travels of Scarmentado takes a young Cretan to country after country, opening up ever new vistas of fanaticism, chicanery, cruelty, or ignorance. In France the provinces are devastated by religious wars; in England Queen Mary burns five hundred Protestants, in Spain the people sniff with relish the odor of roasted heretics. In Turkey Scarmentado narrowly escapes circumcision; in Persia he gets involved in the conflict between the Sunna and Shi‘a sects of Islam; in China he is denounced by the Jesuits as a distinguished Dominican. At last he returns to Crete. “As I had now seen all that was rare, good, or beautiful on earth, I resolved for the future to see nothing but my own home. I took a wife, and soon suspected that she deceived me; but notwithstanding this doubt, I still found that of all conditions of life this was much the happiest.”78

  Micromégas developed the ideas of relativity exploited by Swift in The Travels of Lemuel Gulliver. “Mr. Micromegas,” as befitted an inhabitant of the great star Sirius, is “120,000 royal feet” tall, and fifty thousand around the waist; his nose is 6, 333 feet long from stem to stern. In his 670th year he travels to polish his education. Roaming about space, he alights upon the planet Saturn; he laughs at the pygmy stature—only six thousand feet or so—of its people, and wonders how these underprivileged Saturnians, with only seventy-two senses, can ever know reality. “To what age do you commonly live?” he asks an inhabitant. “Alas,” cries the Saturnian, “few, very few on this globe outlive five hundred revolutions around the sun [these, according to our way of reckoning, amount to about fifteen thousand years]. So, you see, we in a manner begin to die the very moment we are born.… Scarce do we learn a little when death intervenes before we can profit by experience.”79 The Sirian invites the Saturnian to join him in visiting other stars. They stumble upon the planet Earth; the Sirian wets his feet, the Saturnian is nearly drowned, as they walk through the Mediterranean. Reaching soil, they see masses of the tiny inhabitants moving about in great excitement. When the Sirian discovers that a hundred thousand of these earthlings, covered with hats, are slaying or being slain by an equal number covered with turbans, in a dispute [the Crusades] over “a pitiful molehill [Palestine] no longer than his heel,” he cries out indignantly, “Miscreants! … I have a good mind to take two or three steps and trample the whole nest of such ridiculous assassins under my feet.”80

  All this was general and genial, and might have passed without a stir. But in 1748 Voltaire troubled the winds of Paris with a little pamphlet called The Voice of the Sage and the People, which attacked the French Church at a very sensitive point—its property. “In France, where reason becomes more developed every day, reason teaches us that the Church ought to contribute to the expenses of the nation in proportion to its revenues, and that the body set apart to teach justice ought to begin by being an example of it.” He claimed that monasteries were wasting the seed of men and the resources of the land in vain idleness. He accused “superstition” of assassinating rulers and shedding streams of blood in persecution and war, and reminded sovereigns that no philosopher had ever raised his hand against his king. If kings would unite with reason and divorce themselves from superstition, how much happier the world would be!81 Rarely has so short an essay roused so long a storm. Fifteen counter-Voices were published to answer the anonymous “Sage.”

  During Voltaire’s hibernation at Sceaux, Mme. du Châtelet paid her gambling debts and quieted the resentment of the winners at Voltaire’s description of them. She brought him back to Paris, where he supervised the publication of his novelettes. Uncomfortable nevertheless, he thought it wise to accept the invitation of Stanislas Leszczyński to visit his court at Lunéville—some eighteen miles from Nancy, the capital of Lorraine. After a laborious journey the tired lovers reached Lunéville (1748); but a fortnight later a letter from d’Argental informed Voltaire that the actors of the Comédie-Française were ready to go into rehearsal of his play Sémiramis, and needed him to coach them in the interpretation of his lines. This play meant much to him. Pompadour, in the goodness of her sinful soul, had brought the impoverished Crébillon père back to the stage, and had given a lead to the applause; Marivaux had dared to rank the old man’s dramas above Voltaire’s; the thin-skinned poet had resolved to prove his superiority by writing plays on the same themes that Crébillon had used. So he hurried back to Paris, leaving Émilie in perilous freedom at Lunéville, and on August 29, 1748, Sémiramis had a successful première. After the second performance he hastened in disguise to the Café Procope and listened to the comments of those who had seen his play. There were some favorable judgments, which he accepted as his due, and some unfavorable, which pained him all the more because he had to bear them in silence. He profited from the criticisms to revise the play; it had a good run; and now it ranks among his best.

  He hastened back through September storms halfway across France to Lunéville, nearly dying en route at Châlons. When Frederick urged him to continue on to Potsdam he excused himself on the ground that his illnesses had made him lose half his hearing and several teeth, so that he would be merely carrying a corpse to Berlin. Frederick replied: “Come without teeth, without ears, if you cannot come otherwise, so long as that indefinable something which makes you think, and inspires you so beautifully, comes with you.”82 Voltaire chose to stay with Émilie.

  V. LIEBESTOD

  Good “King” Stanislas loved literature, had read Voltaire, was infected with Enlightenment. In 1749 he would publish his own manifesto, The Christian Philosopher, which his daughter the Queen of France would read with sad displeasure. She warned him that his ideas smelled strongly of Voltaire’s; but the old man relished the ideas as well as the wit of Voltaire; and as he too had a mistress (the Marquise de Boufflers), he saw no contradiction in making the poet a favorite at his court. Moreover, he appointed Émilie’s broad-minded husband grand marshal of his household at two thousand crowns a year.

  Another officer, of Stanislas’ court was Marquis Jean François de Saint-Lambert, captain of the guards. Mme. du Châtelet had first met him in 1747, when he was thirty-one and she forty-one; it was a dangerous age for a woman whose lover had become only a devoted friend. By the spring of 1748 she was writing to the handsome officer love letters of almost girlish abandon. “Come to me as soon as you are dressed.” “I shall fly to you as soon as I have supped.” Saint-Lambert responded gallantly. Sometime in October Voltaire surprised them in a dark alcove conversing amorously. Only the greatest philosopher can accept cuckoldom graciously. Voltaire did not at once rise to the occasion; he reproached them volubly, but retired to his room when Saint-Lambert offered to give him “satisfaction”—i.e., to kill him at dawn. Émilie came to Voltaire at two o’clock in the morning. She assured him of her eternal love, but gently reminded him that “for a long time you have complained … that your strength abandons you.… Ought you to be offended that it is one of your friends who supplies your place?” She embraced him, called him the old pet names. His anger melted. “Ah, madame,” he said, “you are always right. But since things must be as they are, at least let them not pass before my eyes.” The next evening Saint-Lambert called upon Voltaire and apologized for his challenge. Voltaire embraced him. “My child,” he told him, “I have forgotten all. It was I who was in the wrong. You are in the happy age of love and delight; enjoy those moments, too brief. An old invalid like me is not made for these pleasures.” The next night all three supped together.83

  This ménage à trois continued until December, when Madame decided she must go to Cirey to arrange her finances. Voltaire accompanied her. Frederick renewed his invitation; Voltaire was now inclined to accept it. But soon after her arrival at Cirey the Marquise confided to him that she was pre
gnant, and that, at her age, now forty-three, she did not expect to survive childbirth. Voltaire sent word to Frederick not to expect him, and asked Saint-Lambert to come to Cirey. There the three lovers devised a plan to secure the legality of the child. Madame urged her husband to come home to accelerate some business. He was not disturbed to find two lovers supplementing him; he enjoyed the hospitality they gave him. The Marquise put on all her charms of dress and caress. He drank, and consented to make love. Some weeks later she told him that she had indications of pregnancy. He embraced her with pride and joy; he proclaimed the expected event to all and sundry, and everyone offered him congratulations; but Voltaire and Saint-Lambert agreed to “class the child among Mme. du Châtelet’s miscellaneous works [œuvres mêlées]”84 The Marquis and Saint-Lambert returned to their posts.

  In February, 1749, Émilie and Voltaire moved to Paris. There she worked on her translation of the Principia, aided by Clairaut. Two letters to Saint-Lambert (May 18 and 20) reveal her character:

  No, it is not possible for my heart to express to you how it adores you. Do not reproach me for my Newton; I am sufficiently punished for it. Never have I made a greater sacrifice to reason than in remaining here to finish it.… I get up at nine, sometimes at eight; I work till three; then I take my coffee; I resume work at four; at ten I stop.… I talk till midnight with M. de Voltaire, who comes to supper with me; at midnight I go to work again, and continue till five in the morning.… I finish the book for reason and honor, but I love only you.85

  On June 10 Frederick, thinking Voltaire freed by Saint-Lambert from further responsibility for Mme. du Châtelet, urgently renewed his invitation to Potsdam. Voltaire replied: “Not even Frederick the Great … can prevent me from carrying out a duty from which nothing can dispense me.… I will not leave a woman who may die in September. Her lying-in has every likelihood of being very dangerous; but if she escapes I promise you, Sire, that I will come and pay my court in October.”86

  In July he took her to Lunéville, where she could have proper medical attendance. The fear of death troubled her—to be taken off just when she had found love again, just when her years of study were to be crowned with the publication of her book. On September 4 she gave birth to a daughter. On September 10, after much suffering, she died. Voltaire, overcome with grief, stumbled out of her room, fell, and remained unconscious for some time. Saint-Lambert helped to revive him. “Ah, my friend,” said Voltaire, “it is you who have killed her.… Oh, my God, monsieur, what could have induced you to get her into that condition?” Three days later he asked Longchamp for the ring that had been removed from the dead woman’s hand. It had once held his own portrait; Longchamp found in it Saint-Lambert’s. “Such are women,” exclaimed Voltaire. “I took Richelieu out of that ring. Saint-Lambert expelled me. That is the order of nature; one nail drives out another. So go the affairs of this world.”87 Madame was buried at Lunéville with the highest honors of Stanislas’ court, and was soon followed by her child.

  Voltaire and the Marquis retired to Cirey. Thence Voltaire replied to some letters of condolence from Paris:

  You make my consolation, my dear angels; you make me love the unhappy remainder of my life.… I will confess to you that a house which she inhabited, although overwhelming me with grief, is not disagreeable to me.… I do not fly from that which speaks to me of her. I love Cirey; … the places which she embellished are dear to me. I have not lost a mistress, I have lost half of myself, a soul for whom mine was made, a friend of twenty years, whom I knew in her infancy. The most tender father loves not otherwise his only daughter. I love to find again everywhere the idea of her. I love to talk with her husband, with her son.88

  And yet he knew that he would waste away if he remained a widower in isolated Cirey. He sent his books, scientific apparatus, and art collection to Paris, and followed them on September 25, 1749. On October 12 he established himself in the capital, in a spacious mansion in the Rue Traversière.

  VI. MME. DENIS

  He easily persuaded his niece to come and play hostess for him, since she had for some time been his paramour.

  Born (1712) Marie Louise Mignot, she was the daughter of Voltaire’s sister Catherine. When Catherine died (1726), Voltaire assumed the protection of her children. In 1738, aged twenty-six but graced with a handsome dowry from her uncle, Marie Louise married Captain Nicolas Charles Denis, a minor official in the government. Six years later Denis died, just about the time that Voltaire and the Marquise removed to Paris. The widow sought comfort in Voltaire’s arms, and he found new warmth in hers. Apparently his avuncular affection was soon transformed into something quite uncanonical. In a letter of March 23, 1745, he addressed his niece as “my beloved.”89 III This could have been a term of innocent affection, but in December, two years before the Marquise met Saint-Lambert, Voltaire sent to the merry widow a letter which must be quoted verbatim to be believed:

  Vi baccio mlle volte. La mia anima baccia la vostra, mio cazzo, mio cuore sono innamorati di voi. Baccio il vostro gentil culo e tutta la vostra persona.90 IV

  Mme. Denis modestly crossed out some of these words, but presumably she responded amorously, for Voltaire wrote to her from Versailles on December 27, 1745:

  My dear one, … you tell me that my letter gave pleasure even to your senses. Mine are like yours; I could not read the delicious words you wrote without feeling inflamed to the depths of my being. I paid your letter the tribute I should like to pay to the whole of your person.… I will love you until death.92

  In three letters of 1746: “I count on kissing my beloved a thousand times.”93 “I should like to live at your feet and die in your arms.”94 “When shall I be able to live with you, forgotten by the whole world?”95 And on July 27, 1748:

  Je ne viendrais que pour vous e se il povero stato della mia salute me lo permesse mi gitturai alle vostre genochia e baccarei tutte la vostra Belta. In tanto io figo mlle baccii alle tonde poppe, alle transportatrici natiche, a tutta la vostra persona che m’ha fatto tante volte rizzare e m’ha annegato in un fiume di delizie96 V

  There is a dangerous age in men as well as in women; it lasts longer, and commits incredible follies. Voltaire was the most brilliant man of his century, but we should not rank him among the wise. A hundred times he fell into such foolishness, indiscretions, extremes, and childish tantrums as rejoiced his enemies and grieved his friends. Now, forgetting that verba volant but scripta manent, he put himself at the mercy of a niece who apparently was fond of him, but who loved his money with an expansive embrace; we shall find her using her power over him, and aggrandizing her fortune, to the day of his death. She was not a bad woman in terms of the time. But perhaps she went beyond the code of her age in taking a succession of lovers—Baculard d’Arnaud, Marmontel, the Marquis de Ximénès—to second her uncle’s attentions.98 Marmontel described her favorably in 1747: “That lady was agreeable with all her ugliness; and her easy and unaffected character had imbibed a tincture of that of her uncle. She had much of his taste, his gaiety, his exquisite politeness; so that her society was liked and courted.”99

  On the day of Mme. du Châtelet’s death Voltaire wrote to his niece:

  My dear child, I have just lost a friend of twenty years. For a long time now, you know, I have not looked upon Madame du Chastellet [sic] as a woman, and I am sure that you will enter into my cruel grief. It is frightful to have seen her die in such circumstances and for such a reason. I am not leaving Monsieur du Chastellet in our mutual sorrow.… From Cirey I shall come to Paris to embrace you, and to seek in you my one consolation, the only hope of my life.100

  During the eight months that he now spent in the capital he received new urgings from Frederick, and he was in a mood to accept. Frederick offered him the post of chamberlain, free lodgings, and a salary of 5,000 thalers.101 Voltaire, who was a financier as well as a philosopher, asked the Prussian King to advance him, as a loan, sufficient funds to defray the cost of the journey. Frederick complied, but with sly reproo
f likened the poet to Horace, who thought it wise to “mix the useful with the agreeable.”102 Voltaire asked permission from the French King for his departure; Louis readily agreed, saying to his intimates, “This will make one madman the more at the court of Prussia, and one less at Versailles.”103

  On June 10, 1750, Voltaire left Paris for Berlin.

  * * *

  I. “Barier engraves these features for your eyes; do look upon them with some pleasure. Your own are graved more deeply in my heart, but by a greater master still.”

  II. “If you wish me still to love, bring me back the age of loves; in the twilight of my days revive, if it is possible, the dawn. We die twice, I see it well. To cease to love and be lovable is a death unbearable; to cease to live is nothing.”

  III. This and the subsequent excerpts are taken from manuscript letters discovered by Theodore Besterman in 1957, and purchased by the Pierpont Morgan Library of New York from the descendants of Mme. Denis. Dr. Besterman, director of the Institut et Musée Voltaire at Les Délices, Geneva, published the text with a French translation as Lettres d’amour de Voltaire à sa nièce (Paris, 1957), and with an English translation as The Love Letters of Voltaire to His Niece (London, 1958). All but four of the 142 letters are in Voltaire’s hand. Some of them are in Italian, which Mme. Denis could understand. The letters range from 1742 to 1750, but only three are definitely dated, so that their exact chronology is not certain. The dates given in our text are those assigned by Dr. Besterman.