Voltaire in Love (3 page)

These men were not too busy coining money to educate themselves. They patronized literature and art, made magnificent collections, built splendid houses and financed the most beautiful editions of the French classics that have ever been produced. Courtiers from Versailles, especially those with intellectual tastes, such as the Ducs de Nivernais, LaVallière, and Gontaut, accepted their hospitality, made love to their wives, and sometimes even married their daughters.

France was prosperous, having recovered from the wars of Louis XIV and not, as yet, embarked on those of Louis XV. Money flowed in the capital. Voltaire, describing life in Paris under Louis XV, makes it clear that magistrates of quite ordinary means lived in a style that few people could afford today. Their wives were covered with diamonds and dressed, as they were themselves, in embroidered clothes worth a small fortune. Nothing could exceed the elegance and beauty of their possessions; their furniture, silver, china, and pictures were of the finest quality; their gardens were bedded out with rare plants; their carriages and coaches a joy to behold. A good cook in Paris received as much as 1,500 livres a year.
*
Voltaire reckoned that five or six hundred big supper parties took place every night, and that after each of them thousands of livres would change hands over the card tables without anybody being the least perturbed. More poultry and game was consumed in one night in Paris than in a week in London, and innumerably more wax candles were burnt.

The Breteuils lived in a big house looking over the Tuileries gardens. It was divided, as French houses generally are, into apartments inhabited by various members of the family: the Marquise, the Comtesse (both widows), and the Commandeur de Breteuil, the Bishop of Rennes, and the Baron de Breteuil, with his wife and five children, of whom Émilie was one. The Baronne, sister of the Marquise, was born Froulay, and was a member of the old nobility. Émilie's father was a fashionable but slightly ridiculous figure, well known in Paris and at Versailles where he was
‘Introducteur des Ambassadeurs' (head of the protocol). Nobody liked him very much; but his wife used to say that for her part she was grateful to him for taking her out of a convent and giving her children. Although she had been brought up in this convent and had never, says Mme de Créquy, had the opportunity to breathe the good air of Versailles, her manners were those of a great lady, and she taught her sons and daughters to mind theirs. ‘Do not blow your nose on your napkin – you might think it unnecessary for me to tell you this; but I have seen the Montesquiou brothers blow theirs on the tablecloth which is really too disgusting. Break your bread and do not cut it. Always smash an egg-shell when you have eaten the egg, to prevent it from rolling off the plate. Never comb your hair in church. Be careful with the word Monseigneur, it is pronounced differently for a Prince of the Church and for a Prince of the Blood. If there is a Priest in the room always give him the chair nearest the fire and serve him first at meals, even if he has modestly set himself at the bottom of the table.'

Émilie did not benefit much from all this. She was too much taken up with her own thoughts ever to be polite, and indeed was famous in later life for her ill-breeding. But her intellectual instruction was another matter. Her father was shrewd enough to realize that he had produced a marvel. Whereas most young women of her class were left to pick up what knowledge they could from the servants (practical knowledge as a rule, later to be very useful to those who fled penniless to England and America from the Revolution) Émilie was well educated by any standards. She learnt Latin, Italian, and English; Tasso and Milton were as familiar to her as Virgil. She translated the
Aeneid,
knew long passages from Horace by heart, and studied the works of Cicero. She refused to bother with Spanish, having heard that the only book in that language was frivolous. Her real aptitude was for mathematics. In this she was encouraged by M. de Mézières, a friend of the family and grandfather of Mme de Genlis.

The Breteuils entertained lavishly, they were never less than twenty to supper, and, although their house was by no means a centre for intellectuals, certain literary figures were to be seen there. Fontenelle, the nephew of Corneille, came every Thursday. He was
secretary of the Académie des Sciences and as a popularizer of scientific thought was a dim forerunner of Voltaire. Born in 1657, he was in his middle age when Émilie was a child. He used to say: ‘I would love to see one more strawberry season'; and noted with satisfaction on his deathbed that he had seen ninety-nine. Other habitual callers were the Duc de Saint-Simon and the Marquis de Dangeau, who were both considered rather dreadful old men. Saint-Simon's eyes were like dead cinders in an omelette, according to another friend of the house, Jean-Baptiste Rousseau. The Duke never came to supper for fear of being obliged to return hospitality; in his memoirs he did indeed bite the hand that had not fed him: ‘Breteuil was by no means without parts, but was eaten up with love of the Court, of ministers, of anybody fashionable. He made money whenever he could, by promising his support [over government contracts]. We put up with him, laughed at him and teased him unmercifully.'

‘Who wrote the paternoster?' M. de Breteuil was asked at a dinner-party. Pause. M. de Caumartin, his cousin, whispered to him, ‘Moses.' ‘Well, but of course, Moses,' said M. de Breteuil brightly, amid general merriment. He was better informed on the events of his own day and is presented as an infallible gossipmonger by La Bruyère, in his
Caractères,
under the name of Celse.

The Breteuils were related to Lord Clare, who brought many exiled Jacobites to their house. The Old Pretender himself once spent several nights there, disguised as an Abbé. Émilie, whether from a spirit of contradiction or because she had seen too much of the Jacobites, used to say that she was for good King George of Hanover.

When she was nineteen Mlle de Breteuil married the thirty-year-old Marquis du Châtelet, colonel of a regiment and the head of one of the great families known as
les chevaux de Lorraine.
He was distantly related to the Guises, and bore
the fleur-de-lis
on his coat of arms; his wife enjoyed the privilege, usually reserved for Duchesses, of sitting in the presence of the Queen and of travelling in her suite. His ancestors had been soldiers; his grandfather a Marshal of France. The family estates were neglected, the château of Cirey, his country house, an empty, ruinous shell, and the revenue
from his land less than it should have been. He was, in fact, far from rich. Émilie, however, had a good dowry.

Two children, a boy and a girl, were born during the first years of their marriage. Du Châtelet's only interest was the army; he was generally absent on garrison duty and Émilie was left very much to her own devices. Like her father she loved society and the life at Court; she acquired a taste for gambling and plunged into amorous adventure. In spite of her careful upbringing and the outlet provided by a diversity of interests, she always had something of the whore. A man engaged as footman in her house has told how, on the first morning, he was sent for to her bedroom. While she was giving him orders she took off her nightdress and stood naked as a marble statue. On another occasion she rang for him when she was in her bath, told him to take a kettle of hot water from the fire and pour it into the bath which was getting cold. As she did not use bath salts the water was clear and she was naked in it. Without any embarrassment she separated her legs so that he could pour the water between them. Eighteenth-century manners may have been free and easy, but this was not the ordinary behaviour of an honest woman. The proof is that the man was perfectly horrified.

Mme du Châtelet's first declared lover was the Marquis de Guébriant. After a while, he left her for another woman. Émilie took it very badly. When she realized that he had no intention of returning to her she asked for a final interview. This passed off calmly. Émilie made Guébriant pour her out a cup of soup which she drank; then they said farewell. He left the house with a last note from her in his pocket. Luckily he read it at once; it was to say that the soup was poisoned and she was now dying at the hands of her beloved. The beloved, seriously alarmed, lost no time, rushed back to her, and found her indeed very ill. He took energetic measures which saved her life. The love affair, however, was not resumed. Émilie's next lover was the Duc de Richelieu whose worldly wisdom and knowledge of the human heart enabled him, when the time came, to extricate himself from the situation without any such painful scene. He and Mme du Châtelet remained close friends for the rest of her life. When she was twenty-seven she had
a third baby, a little boy, after whose birth she settled down to the study of mathematics. She was waiting, unconsciously, for that revolution which often comes in the life of a woman no longer young and directs the future course of her existence.

*
Mr Besterman says that the purchasing power of the livre was that of the U.S. dollar in 1956. There were twenty-four livres to a louis, which was the equivalent of an English guinea.

Voltaire's life, too, had been agitated, though not by love. François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris 21 November 1694. This fact was not known until recently. He himself pretended that he had been born in the country in March and hinted that he was a bastard. He loved mystification and had no wish to dwell on his origins. When he grew up he changed his name. A sickly baby, he was the third surviving child of delicate parents, neither of whom reached old age, nor did his brother and sister. At no time during his long life did Voltaire expect to last more than a few weeks. Mme Arouet died when he was seven; the children were brought up by their father, who never married again.

The Arouets, established in Paris, originally came from Poitou and belonged to a good old bourgeois family. Voltaire's father was a prosperous notary with a middle-class outlook and an aristocratic clientèle. He wanted his sons to follow safe and honourable professions in his own walk of life; the elder son conformed, the younger did not.

He was the bad boy of the Jesuits at their school of Louis-le-Grand. ‘Arouet, give him back his glass; you are a tease, you will never go to Heaven,' says one of the fathers.

‘What's he talking about, with his Heaven?' says little Arouet. ‘Heaven is the great dormitory of the world.'

His confessor said he had never known a child so devoured by a thirst for celebrity. But he had an affectionate nature, and the companions of his later life were nearly all friends he had made at school: the Comte d'Argental (his ‘guardian angel'),
Pierre-Robert de Cideville, a bourgeois from Rouen, the Duc de Richelieu, the brothers d'Argenson, Marquis and Count. He kept in touch with the priests who had educated him, and cherished their praise. When the time came for him to choose a profession he told his father that he was going to be a man of letters. ‘In other words,' said Arouet, ‘you want to be useless to society, a charge on your family and eventually to die of hunger.' The child had been in the hands of money-lenders from the age of thirteen; Arouet was not very hopeful about his future. He put him to read for the law, but Voltaire did not settle down to that. He stayed up too late at night and generally made a nuisance of himself.

At last young Arouet's high spirits and contempt for office-hours got so much on his father's nerves that he packed him off, as unpaid attaché, to the French embassy at The Hague (1713). Here he fell in love, more, perhaps, than ever again, with a girl he could not marry. He caused a scandal by trying to elope with her and came home in disgrace. His father then put him into a solicitor's office where, without much enthusiasm, he acquired a knowledge of business and legal matters which was to be invaluable during the rest of his chequered, quarrelsome existence. He also acquired a crony. Nicolas-Claude Thieriot was a fellow-clerk in the office; the two boys soon became inseparable. Thieriot was a charmer; a funny, lazy, cynical, dishonest ne'er-do-well. Of Voltaire's other intimate friends, Cideville and d'Argental were exceptionally high-minded, while Richelieu was a Duke; he was slightly in awe of all three, for these different reasons. Thieriot appealed to the lower side of his nature. He could boast and brag to him about things which would not have impressed the others in the least; could engage in doubtful transactions with him, and shriek with laughter at doubtful jokes. For years the two young men were so close that if one were ill the other would have a sympathetic fever. In Voltaire's youth Thieriot and Cideville were his chief correspondents; the worthlessness of the former, the goodness of the latter, are evident in every line.

From the age often, when he first went to Louis-le-Grand with a tutor and a man-servant, as boys used to go to Eton, Voltaire began to gravitate towards high society. At twenty-one he was its
darling. He had every qualification, except that of birth. His appearance was delightful, a droll, impertinent, inquisitive look, dancing black eyes, a turned-up nose, elegant little figure, beautifully dressed, nothing out of place, he was like a creature of spun glass. His conversation matched his looks, droll, impertinent, inquisitive, dancing, elegant, and brittle. He was the greatest amuser of his age and all history does not record a greater. Dukes and Duchesses, Marshals of France, Ministers, and Royal Princes fell over themselves to invite the lawyer's clerk to their supper-parties and country-houses. Only the Church hung back. There were rumours that young Arouet's impertinence extended even to sacred matters. Cardinal Fleury, who knew and liked him, and the Fathers at Louis-le-Grand said with sorrow that this excellent material was being spoilt. Poor Arouet thought so, too. It seemed to him that his son did nothing but get into scrapes with the kind of friends who do a young man no good, older than himself and far above him in rank. As for the poetry which the idle fellow scribbled from morning to night, it brought in no money and led to trouble. Voltaire was often to say that those who make names for themselves in literature and the arts have generally cultivated them against the wishes of their parents.