THOMAS CARLYLE
Ce siècle à perruque est celui oú l’homme s’est le moins masqué
FRANÇOIS MAURIAC
Acknowledgements
I owe an enormous debt to Mr Theodore Besterman. Although he does not, I think, quite approve of this enterprise, he has helped me in every possible way. I have had access to all the material in his possession including the newly-discovered letters from Voltaire to Mme Denis which reveal the full extent of their clandestine love affair. Mr Besterman also had the goodness to read my book in typescript and to make many valuable comments on matters of fact and style.
Comtesse Carl Costa de Beauregard had me to stay at beautiful Fontaines where I wrote much of the book. I am also grateful to Signor Cipriani and everybody at Torcello where I worked for two months. M. de Gandarillas in whose house at Hyeres I also worked was a very kind host as always.
Comte Jean de Baglion and Princess Chavchavadze lent me some scarce and valuable books. The Librarian of the London Library has been kind and helpful; so have Mr Heywood Hill, Mrs St George Saunders, Miss Irene Clephane, Comte Charles de Breteuil, and Mr Roderick Coupe. Miss Henrietta Lamb found most of the illustrations for me.*
* The original illustrations have been omitted from this edition.
Author’s Note
There are many hundreds of books about Voltaire. This one is not a biography, still less a study of his literary and philosophical achievements (which would indeed be above my station), but simply an account of his relationship with Mme du Châtelet. Voltaire’s work as a reformer only began after her death. His campaigns for the rehabilitation of Calas and Lally Tollendal; his contributions to the Encyclopédie; his quarrel with Jean-Jacques Rousseau; Candide and his reiterated ‘Écrasez l’infâme’ all belong to his old age.
In order to reduce the number of footnotes I have put the full names and dates of the characters in the Index.
1. Voltaire and Émilie
The love of Voltaire and the Marquise du Châtelet was not an ordinary love. They were not ordinary people. Voltaire’s Mémoires begin with their meeting which he regarded as the turning point of his life: ‘I found, in 1733, a young woman who thought as I did, and who decided to spend several years in the country, cultivating her mind.’ It is rather mysterious that he had not found her sooner, for they moved in the same world; his father was her father’s man of affairs; the Duc de Richelieu, one of his greatest friends, had been her lover. Voltaire used to say that he had ‘seen her born’ but this was a literary convention he often used; another one was ‘he (or she) died in my arms’.
However, as soon as they saw each other, the famous love affair began and was soon announced. Love, in France, is treated with formality; friends and relations are left in no doubt as to its beginning and its end. Concealment, necessitating confidants and secret meeting places, is only resorted to when there is a jealous husband or wife. The Marquis du Châtelet always behaved perfectly.
Writing to Cideville, companion of his schooldays, Voltaire said of Mme du Châtelet: ‘You are a male Émilie and she is a female Cideville.’ He could not have praised her more highly, for Cideville was one of his great friends. So frivolous, so volatile in his likes and dislikes, Voltaire was unshakeable in friendship. He also compared her to Newton, the master of his thought. He said that though she was a genius and inclined to require a metaphysical approach at moments when it is more usual to think only of love, she fully understood the art of flirtation. From the first he wrote of her, in letters to his intimates as well as in the many poems he addressed to her, as Émilie. This was another literary convention; in those days Christian names were not used, even between brother and sister, and Voltaire certainly never spoke to her as anything but Madame. Sometimes, in his writings, she is Uranie, because Mme du Châtelet, though she moved in the thoughtless circles of high society, was learned and a scientist. The Breteuil family, whose glory and whose shame she is, speak of her to this day as Gabrielle-Émilie, her real name.
While Voltaire’s friends were left in no doubt as to the new relationship, Mme du Châtelet herself went even further. She declared that she was planning to spend the rest of her life with him. Among the first to be informed was the Duc de Richelieu. We do not know when and how the news was broken to M. du Châtelet.
The lovers were not young. Voltaire was thirty-nine, Mme du Châtelet twenty-seven. She had been married eight years and was the mother of three children, one of whom was only a few months old. Each had had a chequered past. Émilie was a passionate creature, excessive in everything. Her physical attraction for men was not great enough for the demands of her own nature and this often made her restless and unhappy. To look at she was quite unlike the general idea of an eighteenth-century Marquise. Mme du Deffand, who never forgave her for carrying off the greatest entertainer of the age, has left a description of her which is certainly too catty but may have some truth: thin, dry, and flat-chested, huge arms and legs, huge feet, tiny head, tiny little sea-green eyes, bad teeth, black hair, and a weather-beaten complexion, vain, overdressed, and untidy. Cideville, on the other hand who, like most of Voltaire’s men friends, was attracted by Émilie, speaks of her beautiful big soft eyes with black brows, her noble, witty and piquant expression. Calling on her one day and finding her in bed, he wrote:
Ah mon ami que dans tel lit
Pareille philosophie inspire d’appétit!
Over and over again she is described, in letters and memoirs of her day, as beautiful; reading between the lines one can conclude that she was what is now called a handsome woman. She was certainly not a beauty in the class of Mme de Pompadour, nor, in spite of a great love of dress, was she ever really elegant. Elegance, for women, demands undivided attention; Émilie was an intellectual; she had not endless hours to waste with hairdressers and dressmakers.
She was born, 17 December 1706, a Le Tonnelier de Breteuil. Her immediate ancestors had risen to power and riches in the magistracy. France was governed by such families, many of which had plebeian origins whereas the Breteuils were of the minor nobility. The great territorial nobles had had their wings cut by Louis XIV and now, powerless but decorative, they only had two professions open to them: the Court and the Army. Magical Versailles was their reward for this loss of power; a hundred useless privileges bolstered up their pride and self-esteem. They heartily despised people like the Breteuils, whose men-folk had administrative posts at the Court, but whose women never went there. Madame de Créquy says that it was during a long visit to her cousins the Breteuils that she learnt not to mention the noblesse de robe (the nobles of the magistracy) without first looking round to see that none were present, as one does with hunchbacks and redheaded folk.
The Paris society in which Émilie grew up was extraordinarily democratic. It consisted of the magistrates and the fermiers-généraux, each with a circle of friends and dependants. The fermiers-généraux ran the country’s finances and made enormous fortunes for themselves in the process. They often came from the lowest strata of society. Old Poisson, Madame de Pompadour’s father, once burst out with a vulgar guffaw, at the dinner table of one of these magnates: ‘I can’t help laughing when I think that if a foreigner dropped into this party he would take us for an assembly of princes! Yet you, M. de Montmartel, are the son of an inn-keeper; you, Savalette, the son of a vinegar merchant; you, Bouret, the son of a servant, and as for me – everybody knows what I am!’ Yet Poisson’s daughter was one of the most civilized women of her time.
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 wa
rs 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.
2. The Young Voltaire
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.