Voltaire in Love (25 page)

During the rehearsals of the
Princesse de Navarre
Voltaire's brother died, leaving him the sole survivor of the Arouets. He may have wondered if he would not soon follow the others to the grave. His health had never been so bad, his liver and lights played him up terribly, and he had hardly been well a single day since leaving Cirey.

Voltaire was enjoying his new situation at Versailles when Mme du Chatelet's son, who was now seventeen and had been at the front with his father, was stricken down with smallpox at Châlons-sur-Marne. Voltaire and Émilie hurried to his bedside, where they could do nothing but observe the ignorant tyranny of the doctors. The Bishop of Châlons insisted that they should stay with him, in spite of possible contagion. When the boy was better they returned to Paris, but Voltaire was now forbidden to go near the Court for forty days. This was an inviolable rule for anybody who had been in contact with smallpox, whether they had had it themselves or not. Stupid prejudice, said he, and not the first time it had done him harm.

All Voltaire's friends, the King at their head, were off to the war and he had particularly wanted to say good-bye. Now, in his capacity of official historian he could only wait, his pen ready poised, to celebrate their feats of arms in prose and verse. He did not have to wait for long. On 12 May 1745 news came to Versailles of the brilliant French victory over the English and Dutch armies at Fontenoy. The Marquis d'Argenson (now Foreign Minister), who was at the front, wrote a preliminary account of the battle to ‘Monsieur l'Historien'. He described the irresistible, rolling fire of
the English, like hell itself, the moment when it seemed as if all were lost and the French would have to swallow a second Dettingen (where the English had beaten them earlier in this war), the imperturbable gaiety of the King, his refusal to budge and the final triumph of the household cavalry. ‘Your friend Richelieu was a veritable Bayard.'

Voltaire, in spite of his pacific principles, rejoiced at this victory. The French army had suffered many humiliating defeats of late and Voltaire had keenly felt the force of Frederick's jibes and insults at its expense. He was also delighted to have such a subject with which to begin his career as official historian. He wrote his famous poem:
La Bataille de Fontenoy gagnée par Louis
XV
sur les Alliés.
By 26 May it had already gone into five editions, each bringing in the names and feats of more warriors; Voltaire was besieged by women of his acquaintance who wanted a line or two about some loved one. In the end the thing became a farce and, the irreverent French being what they are, a parody of
Fontenoy
soon appeared. Whereas Voltaire's heroes are all, of course, nobly born, of the highest rank and most impeccable ancestry, in the parody they have names like Joli-Cœur, La Tulipe, or l'Espérance, sons of
tailleur de pierre, gros marchand d'eau-de-vie,
and so on. The literary critics were unanimous in their condemnation of
Fontenoy.
But Voltaire now only heeded the verdict of one judge. Louis XV was not much of a reader, and Maréchal de Noailles read the poem to him. Maréchal de Saxe wrote to Mme du Châtelet: ‘The King is very much pleased with it and even says that the work is beyond criticism.' Voltaire was delighted, but not surprised. There were little
finesses
in the poem, he said, which could only be understood by gentlefolk, and which were far above the heads of mere pen-pushers, sewers from Bicêtre, and the like. As usual he was buoyed up with enormous sales.

As well as the poem Voltaire had to write an historical account of Fontenoy in prose. He discovered that the Duke of Cumberland, the English commander, had one Fawkener attached to him, so he wrote asking if he were a relation of the Ambassador. To his surprise and delight it turned out that it was his own Fawkener. ‘How could I guess, my dear and honourable friend, that your Mussulman
person had . . . passed from the seraglio to the closet of the Duke of Cumberland?' He supplied Voltaire with details of the campaign from the English point of view. Lord Chesterfield wrote to a woman friend at Paris greatly praising Voltaire's
Fontenoy
which, he said, as far as he could make out was a perfectly correct report of the battle. He went on to say that nobody wanted peace more than he did but: ‘We want an equitable peace, you are for an advantageous one, so I am afraid it is further off than ever. We aim at nothing but the liberty and safety of Europe, you seek nothing but the advancement of your own despotism; how, then, can we agree?' All the same he was planning to send his son to school at Paris the following year to learn ‘that ease, those manners, those graces which are certainly nowhere to be found but in France'.

Voltaire spent part of the summer at Étiolles where Mme de Pompadour was living quietly with her family until Louis XV should return from the war. A fellow guest was the Abbé de Bernis, an amiable, chubby little young man, who for no particular reason was a member of the Académie Française and who, also for no particular reason, was presently to be Foreign Minister. Everybody liked Bernis. Voltaire teased him, called him Babet la Bouquetière, and was not even envious of him. Indeed it was so ridiculous that Babet, in ‘her' twenties, should be an Academician while Voltaire, in his fifties, was not, as to be a cause for amusement rather than envy. Voltaire loved Mme de Pompadour as most people did who knew her and she was fond of him and understood him. She bossed him about as only a young and pretty person can boss an old, illustrious man. He told Émilie that here was a beauty who hated gambling, it bored her to death. How strange, when Émilie-Newton wasted such hours at the card-table! Mme du Châtelet may well have been jealous of this other Marquise since she was unaware of the much more sinister reason she now had for jealousy.

She was Émilie-Newton again in good earnest. The Père Jacquier had caused her to realize the errors of her Leibnitzian ways and she had begun her translation of Newton. Even so her abounding energy was not fully engaged; she gambled until four or five every morning and went a great deal to Versailles where she was plaguing the War Minister to make her little boy a colonel. The Marquis
du Châtelet was now a general, covering himself with glory in a series of prudent retreats. Émilie was in a particularly tiresome frame of mind just then, overdoing everything and giving herself ridiculous airs at Court. She had certain privileges usually reserved for Duchesses, on account of her husband's position in Lorraine. One of these was to travel in the Queen's retinue. When the Court left Versailles for its autumn visit to Fontainebleau, Émilie told the Mistress of the Robes, the Duchesse de Luynes, that she would be wanting a place in one of the coaches and this was duly arranged. The Queen herself left with Mme de Luynes and three other Duchesses straight from the chapel as soon as Mass was over. Two more coaches were waiting in the Cour d'Honneur to bring Mesdames de Montaubon, Fitzjames, Flavacourt, and du Châtelet. Hardly had the Queen driven off than Mme du Châtelet hopped into one of them, settled herself comfortably in the corner, and called out something like: ‘Come on, plenty of room!' The other women, outraged by this lack of manners, all got into the second coach, leaving Émilie alone in hers. Seeing that she had gone too far, she got down again and went to join them but a footman stopped her, saying that there was no room for her. So she drove in solitary state to Fontainebleau. As soon as she arrived she told Richelieu what had happened and he went off to see Mme de Luynes, one of those rare people who like to make everything easy and pleasant. She presented Mme du Châtelet's apologies to the Queen and all was forgiven, but as nothing else was talked of at Fontainebleau the atmosphere cannot have been very comfortable for Émilie. Indeed, she and Voltaire went back to Paris almost at once. The Duc de Luynes, telling the story in his journal, excuses her on the grounds that she is not as other women but a scientist who has actually had a book printed. He charitably puts her behaviour down to absent-mindedness.

Voltaire now disconcerted the French Church by entering into correspondence with the Pope. He thought that he could thus cut the ground from under the feet of Monseigneur de Mirepoix and prepare the way to the Académie Française. Benedict XIV was a shrewd, learned man with a sense of humour. At the death of Clement XII the conclave of Cardinals, shut up in the Vatican to
elect a new Pope, was even longer than usual in agreeing. At last Cardinal Lambertini said to them: ‘If you want a saint you must elect Gotti; if a politician, Aldobrandi; but if you want an ordinary good sort of fellow, what about me?' They elected him and he was Pope from 1740 to 1758. Exceptionally humane, he made various reforms and issued a bull demanding better treatment for the American Indians. He was not at all fond of the French Church; he thought it expended too much energy in hunting down Jansenists and other nonconformists. Voltaire could not have fallen upon a better Pope to make friends with. ‘He has the face of a good devil who knows what the whole thing is worth.' With his usual energy Voltaire pulled strings in many directions; he wrote to Cardinals; Mlle du Thil, a relation of Mme du Châtelet, wrote on his behalf to a powerful Abbé at the Vatican and d'Argenson wrote to the French envoy there. The Pope, who admired Voltaire's works, responded to the first advance by sending him a large medal with his portrait. Not knowing this, the French envoy asked for a large medal for Voltaire. ‘But I couldn't give him a larger one if he were St Peter himself!' Voltaire sent him his
Mahomet,
which the Pope very sensibly took at its face value without searching for hidden blasphemies. He praised it and allowed Voltaire to dedicate it to him. Needless to say, this commerce with the Vatican was heavily publicized.

Voltaire's favour at Versailles continued but was never very firmly established because Louis XV could not get fond of him. He understood the value of Voltaire. Condorcet says: ‘It was not without a feeling of pride that he saw one of his subjects acknowledged by the whole of Europe as being among the most illustrious of men. He respected the glory of France in him.' But when they came face to face, Voltaire, anxious to make an impression, too often made a gaffe. His cheeky yet subservient manner embarrassed and irritated the King. With Rameau he wrote another
divertissement, Le Temple de la Gloire,
to celebrate the recent French victories. In it Voltaire doled out a good deal of heavy flattery to Louis XV who figured as benign, majestic Trajan. At the royal performance he said to Richelieu, in the King's hearing: ‘Is Trajan pleased?' Trajan was displeased at such manners and showed it, and there
was as much of a to-do over this incident as over Émilie's little miscalculation in the coach. However, Mme de Pompadour and Richelieu saw to it that the King and his historian should hardly ever meet, and the royal favour was not withdrawn for the present. The smaller fry among the courtiers were in a fury at Voltaire's appointment as gentleman-in-ordinary, a post hitherto reserved for the nobility. His new colleagues decided that when he came to dine with them they would send him to Coventry. But of course when he did present himself he had the whole table roaring with laughter in no time. The boot was on the other foot: these gentlemen bored Voltaire so much that he never went near them again. Very soon, with the King's consent, he sold his appointment while keeping all its privileges.

Voltaire, universally admitted to be the greatest living French writer, corresponding with the Pope, and a courtier at Versailles, could no longer be kept out of the Académie Française; his election took place quite easily and smoothly in the spring of 1746. He was too ill to pay the customary visits and it seemed unlikely that he would live to enjoy his new honour for very long. He succeeded to the
fauteuil
of Bouhier, a magistrate; of his eight successors in it only two have been interesting, Saint-René Taillandier and Paul Bourget. It need hardly be said that Voltaire's inaugural speech gave rise to controversy. He departed from the traditional practice of praising three people: Cardinal Richelieu, Chancellor Séguier, and the previous occupant of the
fauteuil.
He took as his theme the universality of the French language. He named his foreign benefactors who spoke it perfectly: Princess Louisa Ulrica of Prussia (now Crown Princess of Sweden), Benedict XIV, and Frederick. From them he went on to various French friends such as Richelieu, Fontenelle, President Hénault, and, of course, the father of his people, dear, good Louis XV. Those who were mentioned thought this an excellent innovation; those who were not complained that the speech was too long, too dull, and in very poor taste.

From the moment of his election Voltaire's luck began to turn against him. His triumph was poisoned for him by the appalling state of his health and by an affair which, since it upset his nerves,
certainly prevented his recovery. Though Voltaire had managed for once in his life to pacify Church and State, he had more enemies than ever. Desfontaines was ‘dead and gone to Sodom', but many other little insect scribblers, their hearts black with envy, were out for his blood. His election to the Academy was followed by a perfect storm of pamphlets, poems, and the whole paraphernalia of an eighteenth-century slander campaign. He was not only criticized by petty courtiers and jealous writers. Society people were complaining of his and Émilie's manners. When they went to stay in country houses their fellow guests said they made no effort to be agreeable and only spoke to each other. Finally the Pope received at least one letter saying that the French Catholics had learnt with sorrow that His Holiness had given a gold medal to the infamous atheist Arouet de Voltaire.

His friends were becoming seriously worried about his unpopularity. Vauvenargues, almost the only one of his many young protégés who behaved well to Voltaire and who loved him deeply, told him, in May 1746, that he had never known such feeling against him as there had been during the past four months. He said the things he had read about Voltaire set him against not only men of letters but literature itself. Soon afterwards Cideville wrote: ‘I really must scold you.' He begs him not to be so high and mighty with his fellow Academicians, and not to tell illiterate Abbés that they do not know how to read. One must be polite to one's inferiors and not proud with one's equals, anyhow who is the equal of Voltaire? Charming Cideville, no wonder he kept the lifelong affection of that touchy friend.