Voltaire in Love (10 page)

Voltaire's pen never spluttered when he was in a rage. The letters which now filled his outgoing post were written as usual in his small, neat, legible handwriting; they were none the less furious for that. Words were not minced: ‘How I repent of having pulled him out of Bicêtre and saved him from la Grève. Better to burn a priest than bore the public.' (His greatest insult was to call somebody a bore.
*
‘Oh what a bore you are,' he once wrote to Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, when all other epithets failed him.) Desfontaines, calm, aloof, and irritating beyond words, said he was sorry but he could not admit that simply because a man had saved him from prison, he, a well-known critic, must praise that man's work to the end of time. He had his own integrity to consider. He put himself in the right over
César
by publishing a statement that the pirated edition had been defective. After this Voltaire calmed down a little for a while, soon to flare again to fury when Desfontaines printed one of his poems to Émilie after having been expressly told not to. Both the opponents were playing a dangerous game. Desfontaines could not afford to be denounced as a sodomite too often since he still was one and sodomy was still punishable by death. And in view of Voltaire's tricky relationship with ‘Keeper', as he called the Garde des Sceaux, such criticism as that of Desfontaines might well be his undoing. Desfontaines cunningly pointed out all the revolutionary and freethinking trends in Voltaire's work. It would have been greatly to the interest of each to leave the other alone. However ‘
qui plume a guerre a'
, as Voltaire used to say; these were but minor skirmishes before the great battle was engaged between them.

In the middle of all this upset, Mme de Breteuil fell ill at her house near Paris and Mme du Châtelet had to hurry to her. She found her mother out of danger and was only away for a week altogether. Her one idea was to see Maupertuis. She wrote him a letter to be delivered to him at once wherever he might be. ‘If you still love me a little, come and see me. You know my mother well enough for that. If you wish, she need never know that you are here.' But he neither replied nor came to her.

*
Ennuyeux.

Life at Cirey began to take shape. Du Châtelet accepted the presence of Voltaire in his establishment; all was exactly as Émilie had hoped. Indeed the two men became fond of each other. The story that du Châtelet once caught out Voltaire with another woman and furiously reproached him for being ‘unfaithful to us' is probably apocryphal, but quite in character. He was very dull but he accepted the fact that he had nothing to say to his wife's intellectual friends and never imposed his presence upon them. He liked large, regular meals, and greatly disliked the hours that Émilie and Voltaire kept. When they were working they had little snacks at any odd moment. So du Châtelet had his meals with Linant and the boy, dinner at midday and supper at eight. He was proud of his wife, but could do very well without too much of her company. In any case he was away with his regiment for months at a time.

The workmen finally packed up and left the house and it became possible to have guests. This was very important. Voltaire loved to see his friends and he needed a troupe of actors. Cut off from the Comédie Française, where he spent much of his time in Paris, he now had no means of seeing his plays on the boards when he wanted to put finishing touches to them. The solution was amateur theatricals. Voltaire contrived a tiny theatre in a loft, which still exists; when that was ready, anybody, however dull, who could learn a part was welcome at Cirey. All the neighbours were roped in, Mme du Châtelet's little girl was often brought from the convent and made to act; du Châtelet, too, was forced on to the stage, putting up a remarkably poor performance.

The life of steady, quiet, regular work, which Voltaire so much wanted to lead, was not without interruptions. He still received occasional danger signals from friends at the Court which drove him into Holland for a few weeks, or he engaged in litigation which took him away from Cirey. A new quarrel with Jore ended in a lawsuit during the course of which it appeared that Voltaire (though he may well have been the injured party) had been telling lies. He was quite discredited; even such friends as the Duc de Richelieu shrugged their shoulders and refused to listen to his explanations. They persuaded him to withdraw. Then the du Châtelets were involved in one of those legal disputes which, in the eighteenth century, used to go on through several generations. Mme du Châtelet acted for her husband; this made it imperative for her to be sometimes at Brussels and Voltaire would go with her. But, from now on, their home was Cirey.

Here they lived, worked, and conducted their famous love affair. Famous indeed it soon became. Jealous eyes were turned upon the lovers from all over Europe; not so much with sexual jealousy, as at the thought of their brilliant conversation wasted on the cold winds of Champagne. Their contemporaries could hardly bear it, since, of all forms of entertainment, conversation was rated the highest. Every scrap of news that came from Cirey, every doing and saying were noted with passionate interest. Parisian hostesses were as furious with Émilie for stealing Voltaire as if they had been theatrical managers and he a star. As time went on and they got angrier and angrier, so, according to them, Émilie became more and more unattractive. They hit out at her wildly. Mme du Deffand, supposed to be a friend, wrote and re-wrote her beastly pen-portrait of the great desiccated creature without any curves, covered with diamonds, and wearing cheap underclothes. Émilie's cousin, Mme de Créquy, said, ‘We could never hear of the sublime genius and profound knowledge of Mme du Châtelet without bursting out laughing.' Such women have no yard-stick with which to measure an Émilie; when they are puzzled or a little frightened by something they often take refuge in idiotic laughter. None of this worried her while she was alive, nor can it detract from her now that she is dead. She was miles above such creatures – a superior person, as Sainte-Beuve said, ‘
pas une personne
vulgaire'.
She was learned, which is rare enough in her sex. Her scientific and mathematical knowledge surpassed Voltaire's and was respected by those qualified to judge. Maupertuis may never have loved her but he had a real affection for her, ‘beautiful as well as pretty, the best natured and most amiable woman in France'. ‘Marvellous,' he said on another occasion, ‘to find sublime knowledge which seems made for our sex, allied to the most lovable qualities of hers. Clever and witty as she was, there was no cattiness; she never said a horrid thing about anybody.' What sets her apart, of course, is Voltaire's regard for her. He was no fool where human beings were concerned, nor was he a knightly character. He was often, in fact, caddish and his pen easily ran away with him. He lived with Émilie in a deep intimacy and knew her inside out; only once or twice did he ever speak of her in disrespectful terms. These lapses have of course been seized upon and magnified. But nearly every day for sixteen years he wrote about her, in his letters, poems, epistles, and dedications with loving praise. If he overdid it, giving rise to unkind remarks (‘some wags may say they didn't realize they had slept with such a great philosopher', wrote a friend of Cideville's), there is no doubt that his feelings were genuine. It is a judgement that must be accepted. Mme du Deffand saw that it would be, and she pretended that Émilie was attached to Voltaire only because he brought her into the limelight and would give her immortality. At that time Mme du Deffand knew nothing about love and its many strange manifestations. Her own poor old sawdust heart had not yet begun to beat and break.

One of the first people to drop in at Cirey was a certain M. de Villefort, gentleman-in-waiting to the Comte de Clermont. His account of the visit lost nothing in the telling. He said that though he arrived in broad daylight he found the house shuttered and in darkness. The Marquise was informed of his presence and consented to receive him, upon which he was led by a servant with a lantern through several large deserted rooms. At last they came to the enchanted regions; a door opened upon a drawing-room lit by twenty candles. The Divinity sat at a writing table covered with pieces of paper on which she had scribbled x x; books and scientific instruments lay all round her. She glittered with diamonds like an operatic Venus. After a little conversation
she suggested that they should go and see Voltaire who was in his own part of the house. They went up a secret staircase and knocked at his door. In vain, the Magician was weaving spells and the hour had not yet come for him to appear. However, the rules were broken in favour of M. de Villefort and he came and joined them. Presently a bell rang and they all went to the dining-room which had two hatches, one for the food and the other for the dirty plates. No servant appeared; they helped themselves. (In France it is considered faintly improper for rich people to help themselves at meals. Louis XV used to do so when alone with his mistress or a few intimates and the table, which came up through the floor with all the food on it, is still shown at the Petit Trianon with more than a suspicion of a wink.) The food and wine were exquisite and the supper very long. When it was over, another bell rang to announce moral and philosophical readings. The guest was asked his permission and the readings took place. An hour later a bell rang for bedtime; the party broke up. At four in the morning there was another bell. A servant came to ask M. de Villefort if he would care to join a poetry reading which he did out of curiosity. Next day they had a picnic. Venus and Adonis in a chariot, the Stranger on horseback, proceeded to a little wood where they ate cutlets. They were followed by a second carriage full of books. The husband never appeared at all.

When this report came back, as it duly did, to Mme du Châtelet, she was annoyed. She said it was a fairy tale without rhyme or reason. Nevertheless certain elements of it are borne out by other visitors: the incessant work, Émilie's diamonds which she always wore, the curious hours kept at Cirey, and the excellence of the fare. The lantern-lit walk through empty rooms was quite likely to have been true as they never did up the whole house but built a little wing for themselves. Their own rooms were luxurious and magnificently furnished.

Voltaire was now very rich. His fortune came neither from his books, which were too often pirated, nor from his plays, whose royalties he always gave to the actors, but from astute business dealings. He would exert himself to any extent, he would rise from a sick bed and travel across France, if he saw a good profit to be made. He had no wish for money troubles in addition to all his
others and used to say that a man should live to work but not work to live. On one occasion, by a simple calculation which others had overlooked, he discovered that whoever bought up a certain percentage of a public lottery would win, in prizes, much more than the money laid out. He raised enough cash to do this. The minister of finance was furious when he realized what had happened, and tried to bring a law-suit, but he had no case against Voltaire who was perfectly in order. On another occasion he went the whole way to Lorraine from Paris to subscribe to a State loan which seemed very advantageous. When he arrived in Nancy, ill and shaken by the journey, he discovered that only native Lorrainers were eligible. He made such a song and dance that the authorities allowed his subscription on the tenuous grounds that his name, Arouet, was the same as that of the Prince de Beauvau's castle near Nancy, Haroué. This investment trebled in a few months. Voltaire never kept all his eggs in one basket and had interests in every sort of commodity and enterprise: house property, army supplies, the Barbary trade, and so on. The Paris brothers, most powerful of all the financiers, were his friends and often put him in the way of a good thing. He had a talent for high finance and, almost as valuable, a devoted man of affairs: the Abbé Moussinot. Now that Voltaire was living in the country he wrote to Moussinot for everything he wanted from Paris. Oranges, books, diamond shoe-buckles, a carpet ten feet by ten, an enormous pot of face-cream from
Provost au signe des parfums,
a thermometer that will not burst in boiling water (Fahrenheit's is better than M. de Réaumur's), a silver watch – quick, quick, for Mme du Châtelet's little boy, he's ten years old, he'll certainly break it, but he wants it – two or three fine sponges, 300 louis well packed up, no need to declare them; all these things and many more were put on the bi-weekly coach from Paris to Bar-sur-Aube, the post town for Cirey. The Abbé distributed the countless sums of money which Voltaire gave away to friends, acquaintances, and even to people he had never seen but of whom he had heard some sad story. He collected the interest due to Voltaire from his debtors; Richelieu and Guise were two very tough nuts and a great deal of persuasion had to be used on them when it was time for payment. Moussinot performed all
sorts of other jobs. He was told to find some clever young man who could write all the Paris gossip once a week. He also looked out for pictures to add to Voltaire's collection which included, at this time, works by Teniers, Tiepolo, Watteau, Lancret, Albani, Marot, and a pair of Galloches. Voltaire sometimes bought pictures purely as an investment, telling the Abbé that he had a certain sum to place and leaving the choice to him. Moussinot never let Voltaire down. He was much more than an agent, a loving and beloved friend, who could hardly be made to accept suitable remuneration for all the trouble he took.

Mme du Champbonin now had her own room at Cirey, and came and went as it suited her. The first guest from the outside world to stay there for any length of time was a twenty-three-year-old Venetian, Algarotti. He had decided that he wished to live among eminent folk and to this end had wisely acquired a knowledge of science which opened doors to him all over Europe. His attraction for both sexes did the rest. He was now on his way to England, to study philosophy, and was writing a simplification of Newton's theories intended for Italian women. Carlyle sees him as ‘not supremely beautiful, though much the gentleman in manners as in ruffles and ingeniously logical; rather yellow, to me, in mind as in skin and with a taint of obsolete Venetian macassar'. Anyhow, he was tenderly loved, almost regarded as a son of the house at Cirey. But Émilie and Voltaire shook their heads in private over his
Newtonianismo per le dame,
which they thought too frivolous, with too many jokes and not enough stuffing. Émilie begged him to come whenever he liked and stay as long as he could. She pointed out that she and Voltaire each had an excellent library, hers being scientific and philosophical, and his literary and historical. Algarotti stayed, this first time, for a month, November 1735. When he left he turned out to be a poor letter-writer, and both the ‘Emilians' scolded him constantly; however, he made up for this by returning to Cirey for another long visit the following year.