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 pic
tures 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.
Like all those who live in the country, Voltaire and Mme du Châtelet greatly depended on the post-bag. They complained loudly if they thought that their friends did not write often enough, though they seldom praised a letter, except from royal personages. Lord Hervey, with whom Voltaire had been intimate in London, would have been a more agreeable acquaintance, they said, were he capable of answering a letter. He did not even acknowledge a book that Voltaire sent him, which was not only unfriendly but rude. Thieriot, lazy and selfish, was, of course, a hopeless correspondent. Cideville was better: he lived in the country and had more time. D’Argental, the guardian angel, was perfection in this as in every other way; but then he lived for Voltaire, his only other interest in life being the Comédie Française. He had been so passionately in love with Adrienne Lecouvreur that he had asked her to marry him in spite of her profession, reputation and illegitimate children. After her death he married a charming person, much loved by Voltaire and Émilie, a second angel. He was a pillar of the theatre, had great influence with the actors, and was particularly useful to Voltaire when he could not be in Paris to rehearse his own plays. Voltaire never minded how much he bothered and teased d’Argental, knowing quite well that all the trouble he took was a joy to him.
Maupertuis wrote sometimes ‘from the pole’. He went off, in 1736, to Lapland where he expected to prove that Newton was right and the Cassinis, father and son, were wrong about the shape of the earth. Newton said that it was flatter at the poles, while the Cassinis thought that on the contrary it was elongated. Maupertuis was to measure the length of a degree of the meridian. This expedition, which included another friend of Émilie’s, the scientist Clairaut, was financed by Louis XV; La Condamine was sent at the same time to the equator, Émilie told Richelieu that Maupertuis had only gone because he could not bear Paris without her. When Maupertuis duly brought back the measurements proving Newton to have been right he was said to have flattened the earth and the Cassinis; after this Voltaire dated letters to him such-and-such a time since the earth was flattened. Maupertuis also brought back a female Lapp who had enlivened his sojourn at the pole, and her sister. Les tendres Hyperboréennes seemed very much less attractive in Paris than in their native land; soon he longed to be rid of them. He opened a subscription to which Voltaire gave 100 livres and Émilie fifty; with the proceeds he placed one sister in a convent. The Duchesse d’Aiguillon’s excellent butler found a husband for the other, but she turned out to be a disappointing wife, in fact a whore.
From London they heard that a rich, elderly Mr Bond, great admirer of Zaïre, had taken Covent Garden and was putting it on there. He himself was to act the part of Zaïre’s Christian, nobly-born old father. On the night, he threw himself into it with such fervour that when the moment came for him to die in her arms, he did, actually, expire. This display of sensibility was very well received at Cirey.
They also heard from London that Everard Fawkener, now a knight, had been appointed English Ambassador to the Porte. Voltaire begged him to go and stay with them at Cirey on his way there; Fawkener was unable to do this. When he had arrived at Constantinople Voltaire wrote to him, in English:
Now the honest, the simple and good Philosopher of Wandsworth represents his King and his country and is equal to the grand signior. Certainly England is the only country where commerce and virtue are to be rewarded with such an honour. If any grief rests still upon me, my dear friend (for friend you are, tho a minister) tis that I am unable to be a witness of your new sort of glory and felicity. Had I not regulated my life after a way that makes me a kind of solitary I would fly to that nation of savage slaves whom I hate, to see the man I love. What would be my entertainment and how full the overflowing of my heart, in contemplating my dear Fawkener amidst so many infidels of all hues, smiling with his humane philosophy on the superstitious follies that reign on the one side at Stamboul and on the other at Galata. I would not admire, as says mylady Mary Wortley:
The vizier proud distinguished from the rest
Six slaves in gay attire his bridle hold
His bridles rich with gems, his stirrups gold.
For how the devil should I admire a slave upon a horse? My friend Fawkener I should admire. But I must bid adieu to the great town of Constantin and stay in my little corner of the world, in that very same castle where, you was invited to come in your way to Paris, in case you should have taken the road from Calais to Marseilles. Your taking the other way was certainly a great disappointment to me and especially to that lady who makes use of your locks* and more of your books. Upon my word, a french lady who reads Newton, Locke, Adisson and Pope and who retires from the bubbles and stunning noise of Paris to cultivate in the country the great and amiable genius she is born with, is more valuable than your Constantinople and all the turkish empire. You may confidently write to me by Marseilles chez madame la marquise du Châtelet at Cirey en Champagne. Be sure I shall not stir from that spot of ground before the favour of your letter comes to me.
You will see perhaps a renegado, the bastard offspring of an Irishman who went at Paris by the name of Makarty, a bold busy stirring and not scrupulous man. He had the honour, by chance, of being known to the Marquise Duchatelet, but expelled from her house for his rogueriness and impudence before he left Paris with two young men in debt whom he seduced to turn musulmen. His story and his character must be known at Constantinople. I would fain know what sort of life he leads now with the followers of Mahomet.
But what concerns me more, what I long more to be informed of, is whether you are as happy as you seem to be. Have you got a little private Serraglio or are you married? Are you over-stoked with business, does your laziness comply with your affairs? Do you drink much of that good Cyprus wine? For my part I am too happy, tho my health is ever very weak,
excepto quod non simul esses, caetera lactus.
Addio mio carissimo ambasciadore, adio, le baccio umilmente le mani. L’amo e la riverisco
a Cirey ce 22 Fevrier 1736 N.S.
VOLTAIRE
*Brought over from England by Thieriot at Voltaire’s request.
8. Frederick Appears on the Scene
In August 1736 Voltaire received a letter, in bad French, from a
young German admirer. Well over 1,000 words, painfully banal (‘One feels that Brutus must either be a Roman or an Englishman’), full of heavy praise and metaphysical reflections, enclosing a book which the master was invited to read and comment upon, demanding a reply, it was the kind of letter all writers receive from time to time and which, if they happen to be busy, they positively dread. However, two things made it remarkable. The book which came with it was a French translation of some essays by Christian Wolff, the follower of Leibnitz, and the letter ended with the words: ‘If my destiny refuse me the happiness of being able to possess you may I hope, at least one day, to see the man whom I have so long admired from afar, and to assure you, face to face, that I am, with all the esteem and consideration due to those who, following the torch of truth, consecrate their efforts to the public good, Monsieur, your friend Fédéric, P.R. de Prusse.’ The long and famous relationship had begun, and so had the tussle between Frederick and Émilie as to who should ‘possess’ Voltaire.
Voltaire was enchanted. He replied at once, in well over 1,000 words, praising the Prince for praising him; he cannot thank enough for the little book by Wolff whose metaphysical ideas do honour to the human intellect. (As a matter of fact it was Émilie who fell upon this book and assimilated its ideas, which Voltaire thought great nonsense.) He would consider it a priceless happiness to go and pay his court to H.R.H. One goes to Rome to see the churches, pictures, ruins, and bas-reliefs. Such a prince is worth much more than a journey and is a most marvellous rarity. But friendship keeps Voltaire in his present retreat and does not permit of his leaving it. No doubt H.R.H. would agree with Julian who said that friends should always be preferred to kings.