Voltaire in Love (11 page)

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:

*
Brought over from England by Thieriot at Voltaire's request.

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.

In spite of Émilie's protests Voltaire sent his new friend various philosophical writings of his own which, if they were read in Paris, would be enough to get him exiled for ever. Émilie saw the red light at the first exchange of letters. Knowing that Voltaire dearly loved a royal highness and had a weakness for clever young men, she realized that this heir to a throne, babbling of metaphysics, might easily become a dangerous rival. Voltaire lost no time in telling the world what had happened. Here is an enlightened Prince (buried away, unfortunately, in Germanie) who knows a philosopher when he sees one. If they are not careful at Versailles, Voltaire will be lost to France for ever; this splendid Prince, writing as Julian might have written to Libanius, has invited him to his Court. Frederick's letters were copied and copied again and sent off in every direction. Voltaire enjoining each and all of the recipients to keep them a deadly secret. For the present he intends to stay at Cirey and meet the claims of friendship; for the future, who can tell?

We English can only think of Frederick the Great in the accents of Carlyle, who, anxious to seem ‘Teutsch', always spelt the name of his hero Friedrich whereas the hero, anxious to seem French, signed himself Fédéric. On 6 August, two days before writing to Voltaire, Frederick had ‘kindled the sacred hearth' with his wife. Carlyle knew quite well that their marriage was never consummated; he only meant that they now had an establishment of their own at Rheinsberg. ‘Here he lives to the Muses, to the spiritual improvements, to the social enjoyments and has . . . a sunny time.' ‘Voltaire was the spiritual complement of Friedrich; what little of lasting their poor century produced lies mainly in these two.' ‘Admit it, reader,' says Carlyle.

Frederick answered Voltaire's letter with another of enormous length which drew tears of joy from the recipient. He foresees that this Prince will be the beloved of the human race: ‘You think like Trajan, you write like Pliny and you speak French like any of our
best writers. Under your auspices Berlin will become the Athens of Germany and perhaps of the whole of Europe.' Perhaps he really thought so; who can tell what Voltaire really thought? Later in life, speaking of this correspondence, he said, ‘all these epithets cost us nothing. He hadn't much to do so he spent his time writing to French men of letters. The principal burden fell on me.' He certainly did not think that Frederick wrote French ‘like any of our best writers'. His French was very poor indeed, full of mistakes which Voltaire called ‘
fautes de doigts
'. He took good care to correct the letters before boastfully broadcasting them to his friends in Paris. Presents soon began to arrive, portraits of the Prince, bibelots for Émilie, and a cane with a golden head of Socrates, who, Frederick said, could be compared with Voltaire except for the calumnies with which Socrates had been blackened.

Voltaire wrote all the developments of this interesting friendship to Thieriot. Knowing everybody in Paris, invited everywhere, Thieriot was an excellent publicity agent since this entailed no work or trouble. Voltaire and his doings were news and Thieriot dined out on them. Voltaire engaged him, on Frederick's behalf, to write a regular letter of literary gossip to Berlin. As this did entail a little work and trouble he did it badly, though he kept it up in a desultory way for years. He never failed to include anything disagreeable that appeared about Voltaire, keenly gathering up all the most damaging libels against his old friend and benefactor in order to post them off to Frederick. Voltaire was aware of this, and sometimes said how pleased he would be if Thieriot would include the good things that were written about him. They were generally forgotten. It was understood that Frederick would pay Thieriot for his trouble, not at once, but on his accession to the throne. He never did. When Thieriot complained about this, Voltaire would vaguely reply that one day he would hear the words ‘well done, thou good and faithful servant'.

Voltaire was becoming more and more interested in natural philosophy. As always when an author turns to something new, his friends thought it a great pity that he should give up writing poetry and plays. Cideville sadly asked him what he gained by knowing the weight of Saturn? D'Argenson said there were plenty of people
to instruct the world in physical science, but very soon there would be nothing amusing to read. The actors of the Comédie Française were crying out for a play, and Voltaire said they must cry in vain. His mind was filled with Newton and he had time for little else. He was conducting optical experiments, in a dark room, with the aid of instruments sent him by the Abbé Moussinot and was writing
Les Éléments de la philosophie de Newton.
At that time hardly anybody outside England understood these elements; Newton's own book was written in Latin and in algebra and was therefore incomprehensible to the common man. Voltaire performed a service to France by forcing himself to understand it so that he could make it clear to others. Very likely he never would have done so but for Émilie. ‘
Minerve dictait,'
he said himself, ‘
et j'écrivais.'

When he had been studying physics for some years, he asked Clairaut to give a candid opinion on his progress. Clairaut, who could be trusted to tell the truth, as he was a good and simple man, jealous of nobody, replied that Voltaire had no gift for science and that the greatest industry would never make a first-class scientist of him. After this, independent search for physical truth was given up. Voltaire's real interest was in the human race, past, present, and to come. Émilie thought he was too fond of history, which she regarded as singularly useless. ‘What does it matter to me, a Frenchwoman living on my estates, that Egil succeeded Harquin in Sweden? I renounced a study which overwhelms the mind without illuminating it.' His scientific work at Cirey however was by no means such waste of time as his Parisian friends thought it. Nearly all that is still read of Voltaire was influenced by it. Nobody now can wade through his tragedies, which seem to us like bad Racine; nobody acts his comedies, or reads the
Henriade.
Marivaux, whom Voltaire despised from the bottom of his heart, has survived as a playwright; Voltaire has not. But
Candide
and the other tales, the
Dictionnaire philosophique,
and his letters which increased in number, depth, and importance during the Cirey period will be read as long as our civilization endures.