Voltaire in Love (33 page)

Voltaire was sometimes too ill and often too bored to dine with the rest of the party. He considered that the food which was sent up to him on these occasions was nasty and inadequate. Suddenly, on 29 August, he seized his pen and wrote a violent letter of complaint to Alliot. Voltaire has left everything to come and pay his court to the King. But he is a sick man, and unfortunately the times of meals often coincide with those of his worst pains. Also, in such freezing weather, it would be most dangerous for an invalid to leave his room in the mornings and evenings. Will M. Alliot see to it that in future he will be sent what is necessary, or must Voltaire complain to the King himself?

This letter went off to Alliot's office in the palace at 9 a.m. At nine-fifteen, having received no reply Voltaire wrote again. The
King of Prussia is for ever asking Voltaire to go and live with him. At Berlin he is not obliged to beg for bread, wine, and a candle. It is monstrous that an officer of the French Court, visiting the King of Poland, should be obliged to solicit these elementary attentions.

No reply. Voltaire gave it another half-hour and then wrote to Stanislas.

At last Voltaire received a reply from Alliot, to whom Stanislas had passed on his letter.

For once in his life Voltaire was silenced by this letter, which brings to an end the exchange of notes that summer morning.

Four days later, Mme du Châtelet was sitting, as usual, at her writing-table when she felt something. This something was a little girl. Émilie barely had time to call her maid, the maid barely had time to hold out her apron and receive the child, who was then put on a large book, while her mother arranged some papers and went to bed. Soon they were both sleeping like dormice. The birth which had been so much dreaded was as easy as that. Voltaire wrote to all the friends describing this event in letters radiant with joy and relief. It has been much easier for Mme du Châtelet to have a baby than for him to write
Catalina.
She is so well that she has only gone to bed because it is usual to do so, and is only not
writing herself to announce the news because that is not usual. But to Mme Denis he made it all sound rather tedious. ‘Mme du Châtelet has had her baby and I have lost a whole week.'

For several days Mme du Châtelet was perfectly well. Everybody assembled in her room and the jolly communal life flowed round her. The baby was put out to nurse. Then Émilie began to have some fever. There was a heat-wave, for the first time that summer. She never liked hot weather and it added, now, to her discomfort. She asked for an iced drink, very popular at Lunéville, made of almonds. They all tried to dissuade her, but she would have it and drank a large quantity. It seemed to have a bad effect, stopping a natural function of the body necessary to a woman in her state. The King's doctor came and ordered a treatment which succeeded fairly well. The next day she had palpitations and trouble with her breathing. On 10 September two more doctors were called in, from Nancy. They gave her some medicine to calm her; she seemed better and disposed to sleep. Voltaire and du Châtelet went off to sup with Mme de Boufflers, leaving Saint-Lambert, Mlle du Thil, and Mme du Châtelet's maid in the sick-room. Saint-Lambert sat talking to Émilie but he thought she was falling asleep so he left her and went across the room to join Longchamp and the two women. Suddenly there was a noise from the bed like snoring, punctuated by hiccups after which Mme du Châtelet lay quite still. They tried to revive her by making her smell vinegar, slapping her hands, and moving her feet, but to no avail. She was dead. ‘She never knew the horror of death; that was left to us,' said Voltaire.

Mme de Boufflers and her supper party heard that Mme du Châtelet was worse; they rushed to her room where they learnt the truth. There was a terrible silence followed by unrestrained weeping and sobbing which went on for a long time. Somebody led the husband away, by degrees the others went to bed until only Voltaire, Saint-Lambert, and Longchamp were left. Voltaire, like a man in a dream, wandered to the outside door leading to the terrace. Here he staggered, fell, rolled down the steps, and began beating his head on the stone pavement. Longchamp and Saint-Lambert, who had followed, ran to him and lifted him up. Seeing Saint-Lambert through his tears, Voltaire, said, gently and sadly, ‘
Ah!
Mon ami! C'est vous qui me l'avez tuée.'
*
Suddenly, as though waking from his dream he cried in a terrible voice: 
‘
Eh! Mon Dieu, Monsieur, de quoi vous avisiez-vous de lui faire un enfant?”
†
The two men, exhausted by emotion, then parted and went each to his own room.

The next day Mme de Boufflers sent for Longchamp. She told him that it was very important for her to have a cornelian ring set in diamonds that Mme du Châtelet always wore. Longchamp slipped it off the dead woman's finger and took it to Mme de Boufflers. She pressed a secret catch and removed a miniature of Saint-Lambert which was inside the stone, after which Longchamp put the ring back among Mme de Châtelet's effects. He was worried about Voltaire – who was in a black misery – and thought that if he told him about the miniature it might help to cure him by making him angry. Voltaire clasped his hands, raising his eyes to heaven and said that women were all the same. ‘I replaced Richelieu, Saint-Lambert has driven me out. It is the natural order of things, one nail knocks out another, and so it is, in this world.'

Émilie was far too vivid and vital a person to die with her death, and it was many weeks before she began to fade from the consciousness of Voltaire. By day he shut himself up writing innumerable letters about her, at night he would wake from a troubled sleep and wander from room to room calling her. In the first extremity of his grief he even spoke of entering a monastery. ‘My tears will never stop flowing.' ‘I only hope to join her soon.' ‘It is not a mistress I have lost but half of myself, a soul for which my soul seems to have been made.' ‘I love to find her again, as I talk to her husband and her son.' To d'Argental: ‘I come to weep out the rest of my unhappy existence in your arms.' He was tormented, now, to think of the light-hearted, joking way in which, so few days before, he had announced the birth of the child to their friends: ‘I was very far from suspecting the slightest danger.' Mme du Châtelet herself, always conscious that this pregnancy had its ridiculous side, had decreed the tone
she wished him to take. (She knew her compatriots. At Versailles they were saying: ‘How like that pretentious Mme du Châtelet to die in childbirth at her age.') Voltaire said: ‘The unhappy little girl who caused her death had no interest for me.' This poor baby herself died a few days later, regretted by nobody. Had she lived, she would certainly have been shut up in a cold, damp convent and never heard of again.

Stanislas, very sad, gave Mme du Châtelet a state funeral, and then did all he could to keep Voltaire with him. But Voltaire felt that he must get away from ‘abominable Lunéville, the cause of her death' as soon as he could. He also clung very much to du Châtelet at this time. When the funeral was over, the two men and Émilie's son went to Cirey. At first Voltaire felt comforted there, but in a day or two the atmosphere of a house which he and Émilie had embellished together, where they had been so happy for years, and where he had expected to die in her arms made his grief more real and terrible than ever. Cirey, he said, had become ‘
un objet d'horreur'
to him. In a mad desire to get away for ever he had all his possessions, which included much of the furniture in Émilie's rooms as well as that in his own, piled on to wagons and sent to Paris. He and du Châtelet were prevented by some inhibition from discussing this matter and in the end the arrangement suited neither of them. Du Châtelet would have been glad to buy the furniture, as it was needed at Cirey, and Voltaire had nowhere to put it. The house in the rue Traversière, which he now took over entirely, was already furnished. Later on, Voltaire went to see du Châtelet's sister and settled his accounts with the Marquis. He had lent him 40,000 livres for the rebuilding of Cirey. Of this, du Châtelet had engaged to pay back 30,000 but he had never done so and Voltaire had had no interest on it. In the end du Châtelet paid 10,000 and Voltaire let him off the rest saying that friendship was more to him than money.

In spite of Voltaire's grief it was, as usual, easy to amuse him and he would shriek with laughter at a joke. He had perfectly clear intentions about his future, which was bound up with Mme Denis. On the day of Émilie's death, he wrote to his niece:

From Cirey he wrote, ‘My dear heart', and said: ‘You can see by my present grief that I have a soul which is made to love; you are far dearer to me than a person for whom, as you know, my only feeling was that of gratitude. Give me your heart and regret me, one day, as much as I am regretting Madame du Chastellet.'

Voltaire could not bear to stay at Cirey, but was not in a hurry to get to Paris. He spun out the journey, making various excuses to Mme Denis. He had to go slowly, he had lent his fast carriage to Émilie's son who had smashed it up. He said he could not face, as yet, the curiosity of his Paris acquaintances, their sympathy and the endless mortuary discussions which French people think suitable at these times. So he went to the Bishop of Châlons and other friends and only arrived at the rue Traversière a month after Émilie's death. He had stayed two nights with Mme de Champbonin before leaving Champagne for ever.

*
‘Ah, my friend, it is you who have killed her for me.'

†
‘What gave you the idea of getting her with child?'

Du Châtelet lived to be seventy. He never married again. Émilie's son was created a Duke and was Ambassador to London 1768—70. He was guillotined at the age of sixty-six. His son also died in the Revolution, in prison, and the family became extinct. Voltaire set up house with Mme Denis and lived another twenty-nine years. After his death she married a man ten years her junior. Saint-Lambert set up house with M. and Mme d'Houdetot and lived another fifty-four years.

Émilie's translation of Newton was published by Clairaut in 1756. Her correspondence with Voltaire, which is known to have been bound up in eight large morocco volumes, is generally thought to have been destroyed by Saint-Lambert after her death. There is no shadow of proof that this was so, but Saint-Lambert is known to have burnt all Jean-Jacques Rousseau's letters to Mme d'Houdetot. Another story is that these volumes lay about at Cirey until the Revolution, when they disappeared. Mr Besterman still has hopes that one day they will turn up, to be included in his great edition of Voltaire's correspondence.

Most of the information in this book comes from Voltaire's Correspondence, edited by Theodore Besterman. This edition, indispensable to any student of Voltaire, is not yet complete but it covers the death of Mme du Châtelet. It contains already twice as many letters as any of the other editions and also gives those of various members of Voltaire's circle.