Voltaire in Love (26 page)

It is a commonplace that no literary exercise is so easy as the denigration of a writer and his works. While talent and discernment are needed for constructive criticism, a clever child can demolish almost any book by a twisted analysis and a false conclusion. Voltaire's greatest surviving enemy was by no means a child. He was that poet Roy on whose account, many years before, Voltaire said, jokingly, that he had changed his name. Like Desfontaines and Jean-Baptiste Rousseau he was a well-known literary figure, older than Voltaire. Fontenelle used to say that he was the dullest wit
(homme d'esprit)
he had ever known. Roy was
disgusted at Voltaire's election to the Academy from which he himself had been excluded. He wrote a parody of
Fontenoy
and several pamphlets against Voltaire and reissued a new, long version of a poem he had once written, reconstructing all the farcical and discreditable episodes in Voltaire's life. Furthermore he called Mme du Châtelet a goat. He then used the well-known Voltairean dodge of furiously denying that these writings were by him. If Voltaire could have pretended not to notice, all would have been forgotten in a few weeks and his enemies deprived of their miserable little immortality. (Desfontaines is mentioned in Larousse as
‘connu par ses démêlées avec Voltaire'
.) But he, who so loved to laugh, never could laugh at himself and never could ignore such attacks. He always hit back wildly.

Voltaire's quarrel with Roy, with Travenol, an obscure violinist at the Opera, who was supposed to have distributed anti-Voltairean literature, and with one or two other dim, pathetic figures followed the well-known pattern of such quarrels, except that Voltaire, being more powerful than formerly, was able to take a more effective revenge. He forgot that freedom of speech was the most desirable of all freedoms, he forgot that it is wicked to imprison writers because of what they write: he took out
lettres de cachet
against his various persecutors. He then had the joy of seeing them in a situation which he himself knew too well, though in the last resort he had always been protected by his highly-placed friends. They were hunted by the police, their houses were searched and they themselves imprisoned or exiled. Unluckily, in the case of Travenol, the police made a mistake and dragged his ancient old father, ‘
vieillard irréprochable'
, to gaol. He was released again at once, and Voltaire took him out to dinner and wept with him, but public opinion was inflamed by this incident. The inevitable lawsuit which followed ended in the inevitable draw. Meanwhile we have the curious spectacle of Voltaire, on the side of law and order and of the police, writing to Vauvenargues: ‘I am glad to think that this affair will serve to distinguish those who deserve the protection of the government from those who deserve its displeasure and that of the general public.'

Voltaire now regarded himself as a dying man. ‘I am coming
peacefully to the end of my career.' His only regret was that his works had never been correctly printed. He bequeathed his manuscripts to Frederick, hoping that he would publish a proper edition of them. But Voltaire's career, never peaceful, was not yet ended.

No doubt a sweet, domesticated woman entirely devoted to his interests would have bored Voltaire. He needed mental stimulants, not to say mental strife, and these Émilie provided. But she was too selfish to be of much use to him in other ways. She had her own career and ambitions to consider; pleasure too was an absorbing factor. In the autumn of 1746 another woman might have realized that Voltaire was boiling up for a brainstorm. He had been hanging about the Court for nearly two years, during which he had hardly ever felt well. Illness with him always came from nervous strain and at this time it can be partly attributed to his affair with Mme Denis. He had been ill, in the same way, for months, at the beginning of that with Émilie herself. Mme du Châtelet did not know this reason for his illness, but she ought to have realized that he needed a period of peaceful country life. She should have carried him off to Cirey, instead of which she carried him off to Fontainebleau where the Court was in residence. She intended to settle down there to some heavy gambling.

This visit was a disaster from beginning to end. Two days before the philosophers were to leave Paris all their servants walked out of the house in a body. Émilie was a bad housekeeper, and an unpopular employer. A maid, who had been with her four years, said that she was sick to death of science, verses, and all the rest of it. Émilie's men-servants were underpaid and had too much time on their hands. She hardly ever entertained; when she did there was only enough food for the guests and no pickings for the servants' hall. She never laid down a cellar but sent round to the
wine merchant for a few cheap bottles as she wanted them. She herself only ate once a day, at supper, and was very seldom at home for this. The servants lived on board wages. When they heard that they were going to Fontainebleau they demanded a rise because the cost of living there was much higher than at Paris. Mme du Châtelet refused, so they left. She had forty-eight hours in which to replace them, and she managed to do so, but only by taking what she could get.

Voltaire, too, was in a predicament. He had a secretary who was always fully employed, not to say overworked, since he had to make copies of Voltaire's manuscripts for the friends to read and comment upon. Certain letters, too, were copied over and over again; indeed the mind boggles at the idea of such endless movement of quill on paper. This secretary was suddenly taken ill and had to leave Voltaire. Unable to lay his hands on another to go to Fontainebleau with him, he remembered a young footman once in Émilie's service who used to do a little copying in his spare time. Unfortunately he had also stolen and sold various manuscripts. Voltaire, who was never very exacting about the honesty of his associates, took him on again. The young man's name was Longchamp and we owe a great deal of information about the lives and loves of the two philosophers to his spicy memoirs.

With this household, scratched together, Voltaire and Mme de Châtelet settled as usual into Richelieu's hotel at Fontainebleau. The Duke was not there. Voltaire worked, he was polishing up
Sémiramis,
and Émilie gambled. She was out of luck. She lost all the money she and Voltaire had brought with them. Then she began borrowing to right and to left. Finally one evening at the Queen's table she lost the enormous sum of 84,000 livres. Voltaire was standing behind her stool. He hated and despised gambling as much as Émilie loved it. He thought it waste of time – to him the most precious thing in the world – and of money, which, since it represented freedom, was precious too in his eyes. It tortured him to stand there and see time and money being poured away. At last he could bear it no more, he burst out, in English, to Émilie that she was playing with cheats. Only the highest in the land were allowed at the Queen's table: it was madness for a bourgeois like Voltaire
to utter the word cheat in their presence. Émilie was certain that he had been overheard. She got up and left the table and insisted on leaving Fontainebleau there and then, though it was past midnight.

None of the servants slept in the house except Longchamp and Émilie's maid. They were roused from their beds and Longchamp had to run all over the town after the coachman and stable boys. At last the horses were harnessed, a couple of bags were packed, and they started off. Voltaire was a most unlucky traveller; his journeys are one long chronicle of disasters, though strange to say he hardly ever fell ill on the road. This time they had only gone a few miles when a breakdown occurred. They had difficulty in finding people to repair the carriage, and then neither Voltaire nor Émilie had money to pay them. Luckily an early morning traveller coming from Paris turned out to be an acquaintance. They borrowed from him and resumed their journey. But Voltaire, who was by now appalled at the thought of his gaffe, decided that he had better not show his face in the capital. Mme du Châtelet left him in a small village off the highroad and from there he sent a note to the Duchesse du Maine, at Sceaux, telling her what had happened and asking if she would shelter him for a while.

The Duchesse du Maine, the widow of Louis XIV's eldest legitimized bastard, was now seventy. She was a tiny creature like a fairy who had lived in a perpetual masquerade. Everything about her had always seemed unreal – the intellectual and philosophical tastes that she paraded, her political intrigues, even her love-affairs. She could not have been more royal, having been born Condé, yet she gave the impression of a pantomime princess ruling over a tinsel court at her palace of Sceaux. She liked to think that it was a more intellectual Versailles and that she bestowed aid and comfort on writers who were persecuted by her cousin the King. Unfortunately her aid and comfort were too whimsical to be worth very much. However Voltaire, who had known her all his life, guessed that his predicament would appeal to her and that she would take him in, as indeed she did. She loved conspiracy, had an age-old grudge against the Court and relished the society of amusing men. Now, for several weeks, she had the most amusing
man in France entirely to herself. By day he was concealed in a room, with its own staircase, in a deserted part of the château; as soon as everybody had retired for the night, Voltaire crept downstairs, a table was laid by the little old Duchess's bed and the two of them made merry until dawn. When she was in a good mood she could be excellent company and had a hundred fascinating stories of her father-in-law's reign. Voltaire spent the days in his hiding-place writing
Zadig, Babouc,
and other tales for the amusement of his hostess, to whom he read them aloud after supper. These are the
Contes philosophiques
in which the antics of be-turbaned Eastern potentates, their slaves, their viziers, and their odalisques reflect the state of society in eighteenth-century France. They are exceedingly funny, and it may be assumed that they kept the Duchess and her poet in fits of laughter.

The only other people who knew where Voltaire was hiding were Mme du Châtelet, d'Argental, and, no doubt, Mme Denis; everybody else thought he had gone abroad. Émilie was not having nearly such a delightful time as Voltaire. She was sadly engaged in raising enough money to pay her gambling debts. Some of her creditors, knowing that she was far from rich, accepted a substantial reduction for cash down. Only when the last penny had been paid did Voltaire feel he could creep back to Paris and his normal life. This episode was really the end of his career as a courtier: never again was he kindly received by Louis XV. In any case his downfall could not have been deferred for much longer as he seemed unable to do right at Versailles. Among his many mistakes was to underestimate the Queen's influence. He paid his court to Mme de Pompadour, spoke to her and wrote about her, exactly as if she had been married to the King. But Louis XV, who respected his wife and tenderly loved their children, disliked allusions, even when presented in classical guise, to the fact that he had a mistress. Voltaire never understood this. There was as yet no open break, he continued to go to Court, but he felt that his short period of favour was at an end. His letters from Versailles lack their usual gusto: ‘Kings are nothing to me,' he said, most untruthfully. His other King, Frederick, still invited Voltaire to go and live with him, but for the time being did not press the matter very hard.

Unwelcome at Versailles and bored with Paris, Voltaire and Mme du Châtelet began to spend much of their time with the Duchesse du Maine. ‘A whole month away from you!' Voltaire wrote to Mme Denis when about to leave for Anet, the Duchess's country house in Normandy. Nevertheless he tore himself from his ‘muse' and followed Émilie, as in the last resort he always did. Mme de Staal de Launay, who had been the Duchesse du Maine's lady-in-waiting for years, wrote an account of this visit to Mme du Deffand. Knowing that her correspondent was not fond of Émilie, Mme de Staal did not mince her words.