Voltaire in Love (18 page)

In August Voltaire and Mme du Châtelet were on the road again, this time for a short visit to Paris, ‘a town of which one used to hear much good'. Voltaire wrote to his ‘
gros chat',
Mme de Champbonin, saying that if she asks why he goes there his answer is because he follows Émilie. But why does Émilie go? He has no idea. She declares that it is necessary and it is his destiny to believe her as well as to follow her. Not a single fête on the way back, they are like a village doctor who is fetched in a carriage and sent home on foot. Voltaire had bought pictures in Brussels for the Palais Lambert at a cost of about 6,000 livres. He declared their value at the customs as 260 livres, was caught out by the excise men and all the pictures were confiscated.

In Paris Émilie stayed with the Richelieus and Voltaire took a furnished room at the Hôtel de Brie, rue Cloche-perce, in the Marais. Two pieces of news were very well received by him on arrival. Linant had won an Academy prize for a poem
Le progrès de l ‘éloquence sous le règne de Louis-le-Grand
and Louis XV had at last taken a mistress, Mme de Mailly. ‘Down with hard hearts. God
loves a tender soul.' Paris was
en fête;
the King was marrying his eldest daughter to a Spanish Prince. Voltaire thought the various entertainments were inadequate. Under Louis XIV such fêtes were presented by Molière, Corneille, Lully, and Le Brun and works of art were the result. Under the Romans solid stone arches were erected for a day's ceremonies. But now, a scaffolding is put up outside the Hôtel de Ville, where only yesterday a couple of thieves were broken on the wheel, and a few fireworks are attended by a mob of over-dressed bourgeois and poor people. The money would be better spent on a theatre or an opera house, both of which are inadequate in Paris. (Louis XV's contemporaries were always scolding him for not spending enough money.) Frederick, to whom Voltaire wrote all this, replied that he heard of nothing but fêtes and balls on every hand. In Petersburg the niece and heiress of the Empress Anne was marrying the Duke of Brunswick. Frederick had recently seen this Prince with the Duke of Lorraine (Maria-Theresa's husband) and said that he could not imagine why Providence should arrange for these two to govern the greater part of Europe between them. ‘I've seen them chattering together in a way which hardly smelt of kingship.' On the other hand he was all in favour of fêtes. ‘Pleasure is the greatest reality of our existence.'

Voltaire did not really enjoy his two months in Paris. The wear and tear of the life was destructive to a temperament like his own, and he realized that he would never be able to live there again for very long at a time. Everybody is in too much of a hurry, there is too much noise, haste, and confusion, impossible to get hold of one's friends: the whole town seems to be whirling round in Descartes' vortex. One flies between the Opera, the theatre and seeing the sights like a foreigner. There are a hundred people to be embraced in a single day, a hundred protestations to be made and received; not a moment to oneself, no time to write, to think, or to sleep. However there is one comfort, Desfontaines never shows his face anywhere now, just as J.-B. Rousseau never shows his in Brussels. These spiders are not to be found in well-kept houses.

Émilie had soared back into the social life which she loved so
much. She was at the age for it, and it did not tire her. Her unsatisfactory relationship with Maupertuis was resumed; she still pursued him with little notes, alternately ordering and imploring him to come and see her. He must find her a substitute for Koenig who does not look like staying. At the Court everything seems much more as it should be now that the King has a mistress. Her friends there do not change, they are delightfully frivolous.

As inconsequently as she had dragged Voltaire to Paris, she dragged him back to Brussels, calling at Cirey on the way. This journey was made disagreeable by a dispute which broke out and raged in the carriage between Émilie and Koenig on the subject of the infinitely little. They were at it hammer and tongs the whole way to Brussels. There had already been quarrels between them; Koenig was supposed to have been ungrateful in some respect. This was the end of their association, though by no means the end of their differences. Maupertuis offended Mme du Châtelet deeply by taking Koenig's side. After this she and Maupertuis were on bad terms for a while until at last Voltaire wrote him a conciliatory letter. He was afflicted, he said, by the coldness between Maupertuis and the only woman in the world capable of understanding him. ‘You two are made to love each other.' (In 1752 Koenig got into trouble with the Berlin Academy for publishing a forged letter from Leibnitz. On this occasion Voltaire supported him in order to annoy Maupertuis.)

It was as well that they had returned to Brussels when they did. They had hardly arrived there when they received bad news from Paris. Voltaire had given a few oddments to his new publisher Prault – the first chapters of the
Siècle de Louis XIV,
an
Ode sur lefanatisme,
and various pieces which had already been published – to make up a book called
Recueil de pièces fugitives.
Whether because the censor really found something objectionable in this little collection, or because Prault was printing the book without a
privilège,
the police raided his premises and confiscated the sheets. He was fined 500 livres and obliged to shut his bookshop for three months. Had Voltaire been in Paris all this would have been disagreeable; as it was, safely in Brussels and working harder than ever, he did not take it to heart. This time there was no quarrel with the publisher:
he was entirely on Prault's side and himself paid the 500 livres. Of course he wrote his usual letters of complaint to d'Argental and protest to the authorities. ‘I love the French, but I hate persecution so I shall stay here.'

In the summer of 1740, Prault published a book by Émilie called
Institutions de physique,
in which she expounded the ideas of Leibnitz as disseminated by Wolff. It was dedicated to her little boy: ‘I have always thought it a solemn duty to educate children so that they will have no reason to regret their youth, the only time of life when it is possible to learn. You, my dear son, are at that happy age when the mind begins to think and is not troubled as yet by the passions of the heart . . . So I want you to take advantage of the awakening of reason and I shall try and protect you from that ignorance which is only too common among people of your rank . . .' Leibnitz was introduced to the French by Mme du Châtelet as Newton was by Voltaire. Her contemporaries admired this work for its extraordinary clarity. ‘Everybody understands the monads,' said La Mettrie, ‘since the Leibnitzians made the brilliant acquisition of Mme du Châtelet.' Voltaire disagreed with the argument of the book and was sorry that Venus-Newton should have turned into La Belle Wolffienne. He had nothing but praise for the quality of her work. She surpassed Leibnitz, he thought, in elegance, lucidity, and method. But he disapproved of her wasting her time over ‘the scientific absurdities that Leibnitz gave to the world from vanity and which Germans study because they are German. It is deplorable that a Frenchwoman such as Mme du Châtelet should use her intelligence to embroider such spiders' webs and make these heresies attractive.'

One of the interminable quarrels which the philosophers of Cirey so often drew upon themselves broke out over this book. The tutor Koenig, who had left them after the acrimonious scene on the high road, told everybody in Paris that
Institutions de physique
was a rehash of his own lessons to Mme du Châtelet. When Émilie heard this she retorted that he had been engaged to teach her algebra, not metaphysics. True, he said, and he had indeed begun with algebra. But at the end of every lesson Mme du Châtelet would madden him by remarking smugly, ‘
Celà, c'est évident.'
One
day he was stung into offering to teach her truths of equally great importance but without one shred of evidence, in other words metaphysics. At this she burst into shrieks of annoying laughter. However, she told him he could try and interest her if he liked and he succeeded so well that her book was a collection of these lessons.

Mme du Châtelet was, naturally, furious. She had acknowledged Koenig's help in the book itself and in a letter to Maupertuis, but it was ridiculous to suggest that it was not her own work. A great deal of it had been written before she had ever set eyes on Koenig. She dragged the Académie des Sciences into the dispute, appealing to Mairan, the secretary-general, to tell the world that she had expounded her Leibnitzian views to him a whole year before Koenig went to Cirey. Mairan's reply was ambiguous. The whole thing was unfair because all the scientists knew that Mme du Châtelet was perfectly competent to write such a book. Perhaps they would have been more ready to take her side, had she not been a woman. Parisian society and the scientific world buzzed over this dispute for months. Voltaire tried to keep out of it as much as possible, he wanted to be on the right side of the Académie des Sciences. He thought metaphysical speculation a great waste of time and could not get excited over the controversy; his aim now was to bring Émilie back to Newton.

Voltaire to M. Fawkener, 2 March 1740, received 1 August (in English):

In Voltaire's New Year letter to Frederick, 1740, he asks what can be wished for a Prince who not only has everything which, as a Prince, he could desire, but also has talents that would make the fortune of any commoner. He therefore wishes nothing for Frederick. For himself, he repeats
ut videam salutare meum.
*
For the public, that it will be allowed to see the refutation, by a Prince, of Machiavelli, corrupter of Princes. Voltaire and Mme du Châtelet have been devouring this precious monument of literature. Their only criticism is that, in one or two places, the author's zeal against the tutor of tyrants has carried him almost too far; a fault, however, on the right side. Certain branches of the splendid tree might be pruned and Voltaire is going to submit a plan for the pruning to his Prince. He also begs to be allowed to write the preface. He has had an enthusiastic account from Algarotti of his visit to Rheinsberg, where he went with Lord Baltimore on their way back from Russia. Ah! Why is Voltaire not Algarotti and M. du Châtelet not Lord Baltimore?

Voltaire often hinted that du Châtelet should be given a post of some sort in Prussia, so that the three of them could go and live with their Prince. In that case he would see the model for all Kings. Meanwhile, he remains with the model for all women. But Frederick was good at turning a deaf ear to suggestions that did not appeal to him, another of which was that he should buy the du Châtelet estate under litigation. He passionately wanted Voltaire,
but was determined to possess him without all these encumbrances, while Voltaire was equally determined not to abandon Émilie. The correspondence between the philosopher and the Prince, or, as Frederick would have it, the two philosophers, flourished more than ever. Voltaire corrected the
Anti-Machiavel
while Frederick corrected
Mérope;
each privately thought that the other's observations on his work were idiotic, but their letters were none the less loving for that. Voltaire continued to compare him, favourably, with Aesculapius, Trajan, Prometheus, Marcus Aurelius, Horace, Hercules, the Infant Christ, and other respected figures.