Voltaire in Love (9 page)

He began to wonder how the public would take to
Alzire.
If it miscarried, ‘my enemies will be delighted; the Desfontaines of this world will seize the opportunity of holding me up to ridicule and contempt. For such is human injustice: nothing is punished so viciously as the desire to please, when that desire has failed.'

The Abbé Desfontaines, whom Voltaire had saved from the stake, was now his deadly enemy. Voltaire could not forget the lampoon which (according to Thieriot) the Abbé had written on coming out of Bicêtre. He hated the man and never lost an opportunity of hurting his feelings. For some obscure reason he had given the Abbé his
Essay on Epic Poetry
(written in English) to translate into French. Like all translators, the Abbé made one or two slips. Where Voltaire had written of ‘cakes devoured by them', the Abbé's translation read ‘the devouring hunger of Cacus (son of Vulcan)'. Voltaire flung himself upon this and other mistakes with eldritch shrieks
and made the Abbé look a fool. He could not leave the poor fellow's weakness alone, called him ‘
il buggerone abbate'
and made sly allusions to
les petit Savoyards.
(Paris sweeps are nearly all Savoyards to this day.) He stressed the fact, in and out of season, that he had snatched Desfontaines from the jaws of death. In short he was exceedingly unkind to the Abbé. Desfontaines was not a noble character; he did not turn the other cheek. He, too, had a talent for annoying and he had a powerful weapon:
Observations sur les écrits modernes,
a literary review of which he was the editor. Voltaire, who so loved teasing, was himself a very satisfactory subject for it; he never failed, as schoolboys say, to rise. Not for him the curled lip and contemptuous silence; nobody has ever been so easily aroused to rage. He enjoyed a battle. He liked all forms of human relationship and in some ways his enemies were more necessary to him than his friends. Literary enmities were never lacking.

He had long been at daggers drawn with Jean-Baptiste Rousseau. This popular poet, twenty-three years older than Voltaire, had once shown him an
Ode à la Postérité,
and Voltaire, unable to resist a joke, said that he feared the Ode would never reach its address. After this no punches were pulled. Rousseau was not so well-placed as Desfontaines to do harm to Voltaire, for he was in exile and disgrace at Brussels. He would really have been quite pleased to come to terms, but used to say, ‘What can I do? The war is begun and must be carried on.'

Voltaire seldom liked other middle-class writers and he would go out of his way to pick quarrels with them. Piron, a humble Burgundian, came to Paris filled with admiration for Voltaire whom he longed to meet. Mme de Mimeure, also a Burgundian, Voltaire's mistress at the time, took Piron under her wing. She said to him one day, ‘Go into my dining-room and there you will find Voltaire.' Sure enough there he was, huddling over the fire. When he saw Piron he pretended to be asleep. Piron sat and stared at him and in the end Voltaire could not keep it up. He took a bit of bread out of his pocket and began to nibble it, explaining that he had an illness which made it imperative for him to eat all day. Piron then produced a flask and said he had an illness which made it imperative for him to drink all day. The great man was not amused.
Piron endured many insults from Voltaire before he became another implacable enemy.

One critic whom Voltaire placed in a different category from ‘les Desfontaines' was the Abbé Prévost, author of
Manon Lescaut,
who ran a literary paper called
Le Pour et Contre.
The only things he had against him were his tonsure (a disgrace to humanity) and his lack of fortune. Whereas Desfontaines is a literary hack, Prévost is a man. It is very easy to see the difference between their natures, in what they write. One is clearly only fit to run after little boys; the other made for love. If ever Voltaire can render him a service he will be happy to do so.

If Voltaire, on the whole, detested the critics, ‘insects of a single day', he felt differently about the public. It was an axiom with him that a play which does not succeed is a bad play, a book which has been allowed to go out of print a rotten book. ‘No interesting play ever fails.' There were, according to his reckoning, about 4,000 educated play-goers in Paris and he was prepared to accept their verdict. It must be said that this attitude was made easier for him by the fact that all his books were best sellers and his plays seldom missed the mark.

Largely through the efforts of Mmes du Châtelet and de Richelieu, Voltaire was allowed to go back to Paris at the end of March 1735. The Chief of Police, who had been at school with him, sent him this leave, and begged him, in future, to behave like a grown-up person. Voltaire hurried off at once, but when he arrived in the capital he did not care for what he found there. Maupertuis was now the darling of the salons. Dukes, Duchesses, and pretty women had taken to science and were queueing up to have lessons with the great man; he was constantly at Versailles; Newton as expounded by Maupertuis was the modish topic of conversation; high society protested the advantage of the law of gravity over Cartesian whirlwinds. Much as Voltaire was supposed to love and admire Maupertuis – ‘tenderly attached to you for life – penetrated by the most tender esteem for you' – he was decidedly put out when he found that his great friend had become such a centre of interest.

He wrote, furiously, to Cideville: ‘Now they've taken to reasoning.
Sentiment, imagination, and the graces are banished. Literature is visibly perishing. Of course, I am not displeased that philosophy should be cultivated, but it must not become a tyrant, to the exclusion of everything else. With the French, one fashion succeeds another, only to pass away in its turn.' Émilie was all in favour of this new trend and said, ‘long may it last', but Voltaire was not so sure. However, he had something in his luggage that would stir up all these silly, amateur philosophers; something that would fix attention on him again, if only he dared to publish it; something that could put him in the Bastille for ever and in a dungeon at that, far from the Governor's excellent suppers. This barrel of gunpowder was
La Pucelle,
one of the most unseemly poems, according to Lord Morley, that exist in any tongue. Of all Voltaire's works
La Pucelle
was his own most cherished darling; for years he went on adding to it and polishing it up. It is a satirical poem, farcical in parts, about the Maid of Orléans in which religion, patriotism, virtue, courage, the Maid herself, and most of Voltaire's friends are held up to irreverent mockery. Voltaire thought it intensely funny. When he felt low or depressed he would go and read it to himself and it never failed to send him into fits of giggles.

He also tells Cideville that the Abbé Linant has been to see him. He has grown enormously fat, and
Rameses,
which he read out loud, is no good at all. The actors would never consent to put it on and they would be quite right. It seems hardly possible that he could have done so badly when Voltaire himself has taken the trouble to find him such an excellent, interesting, one might almost say cast-iron subject. Now the question is what can become of Linant? It will be difficult to place him as tutor on account of his stammer, shortsightedness, and lack of education. However, Voltaire thinks Mme du Châtelet might engage him for her little boy of nine. ‘But Mme du Châtelet has a husband, this goddess is married to a mortal, and the mortal takes it upon himself to have ideas of his own.' This is the first time the goddess's lover ever mentions the poor mortal.

Altogether the Paris visit was not a success, nor did it last very long. Voltaire was warned that he had better make himself scarce again. People had begun to talk about
La Pucelle
which, needless
to say, he had not left quietly lying in his luggage. Eschewing the advice of the Chief of Police and other friends to behave like a grown-up person, he had been trotting the poem round the salons, reading out little samples to whet the appetite of the Parisians and give them a rest from too much science. He read some of it to Maurepas, a man who loved to laugh. No doubt he did laugh, but he advised Voltaire to keep it under lock and key, because it was enough to get him shut up for life. Mme du Châtelet told Richelieu that the short time Voltaire had been in Paris had proved fatal; impossible to describe the agitation and excitement caused by
La Pucelle.
How could such a clever man be so blind to his own danger? However, she still loved him enough to give up the world and its pleasures to go and live quietly with him alone.

Richelieu was still at the front. He had promised to take du Châtelet in hand and explain the new situation to him, pointing out that it would be foolish to be jealous of a wife who suited him so well in every way. He must get used to the idea of Voltaire living at Cirey. Like many another woman Mme du Châtelet dreaded the end of hostilities and the return of the warrior. She had told Voltaire that everything was going to be all right and that the three of them would get on famously together, but in her heart she was far from sure of it and had a feeling that the whole thing might end badly. Voltaire was also writing to Richelieu and urging him to live with them at Cirey, on condition that he would spare ‘the beauty whom my heart adores'. Richelieu was not the man to go back to an old mistress and there was little danger in that direction. As a matter of fact he and Mme du Châtelet had settled down to a particularly comfortable friendship. She said she could not have believed that Richelieu would ever care for somebody who was not necessary to his pleasure, who could not be useful to him in any way, and who was not even a friend of his mistress (at this time the Duchesse de Brancas). But care he did; he was very fond of her.

Voltaire now went to Lorraine where he lay low, not even announcing himself at the Court there until Mme du Châtelet got word from the Garde des Sceaux that he could live unmolested at Cirey. Richelieu also obtained a guarantee for him. Reassured, he
went back to Cirey where he was joined by Mme du Châtelet, her daughter, who was to go to a nearby convent, her son, and the new tutor, M. (no longer l'Abbé) Linant. Voltaire had made him abandon Holy Orders, saying: ‘We'll have no priests at Émilie's.' He was not much good as a tutor. Mme du Châtelet was obliged to give him lessons in Latin which he was supposed to pass on to his charge. As usual he spent half his life sleeping. In his waking moments he could find nothing more tactful to do than make advances to Mme de la Neuville, which were very badly received. Voltaire had to pacify her with a letter – ‘He was quite carried away' – and some verses. At last Linant pulled himself together and wrote a little poem to the effect that a traveller coming upon Cirey might well think it was a palace until he caught sight of Émilie when he would realize that he was in a temple. This was extravagantly applauded; Linant had the makings of a poet, after all.

Voltaire was in a calm, happy mood, for once. ‘I am tasting, in absolute peace and a fully occupied leisure, the sweets of friendship and study with one who, unique among women, can read Ovid and Euclid and who possesses the imagination of the one allied to the precision of the other.' He had begun his
Siècle de Louis XIV,
which was not to be a history of the reign, still less a life of the King, but a picture of French civilization. It is written in the laconic, witty style which was to be borrowed with such effect by Lytton Strachey. ‘The King reproached himself for his attachment to a married woman, and felt the scruple more deeply when he had ceased to be in love.' Voltaire was always asking his acquaintances for anecdotes of that reign: its end he himself could remember (he was nineteen when Louis XIV died) but its beginnings seemed incredibly remote. He loved to illustrate his writings with anecdotes and it is he who preserved for us the story of Newton and the apple. He thought that an historical study should be composed like a play, with a beginning, a middle and an end, not a mere collection of facts: ‘If you want to bore the reader, tell him everything.'

Calm and happiness were soon succeeded, as usual, by a storm. On 21 August the boys at the Collège d'Harcourt put on Voltaire's
La Mort de César.
He described this play, written on his return
from England, as ‘a fairly faithful translation from an English author who lived 150 years ago called Shakespeare, the Corneille of London. He was quite mad, but wrote some admirable things.'
La Mort de César
had been acted once before by amateurs, but Voltaire had never published it. It seemed unlikely to please, since there were no women's parts and it was ‘too Roman'. He was delighted to present it to the world in this way. It was, of course, a success. The friends and relations of the boys applauded wildly, two of the actors were said to be good enough for the Comédie Française; the production, in short, was greatly over-praised as amateur theatricals so often are. Voltaire was touched and amused. ‘I now only write poetry for schools. I have renounced two theatres where intrigue is rife, the Comédie Française and the world.' He sent his compliments to all concerned. Then trouble began to brew. One of the young gentlemen at the Collège d'Harcourt, or possibly one of the professors, made an incorrect copy of
La Mort de César,
added a few dreadful verses of his own, and sent it to a publisher. It came out, as pirated works often did, under an Amsterdam imprint. Voltaire was incensed by all the mistakes in the text: ‘He has massacred Caesar more than Brutus and Cassius ever did.' Seeing a move ahead and hoping to forestall the worst, he quickly wrote to Abbé Desfontaines and told him exactly what had happened, ‘so that he shall not pour his poisons into this wound'. Forlorn hope, of course. As soon as
il buggerone abbate
got hold of
La Mort de César,
he poured the poison of ridicule upon it, in his paper
Observations.
He said, among other things, that Voltaire's Brutus was more of a Quaker than a Stoic, that it was contrary to public morals to put the assassination of Caesar on the stage, and that though there were some fine verses, others were feeble and stiff, while many of the rhymes were detestable. But, far worse than any criticism, however annoying, he published Voltaire's letter to him, dated from Cirey. The whole world could now see, written in black and white, what was supposed to be a secret whispered among a chosen few: Voltaire was living with Mme du Châtelet in her husband's ancestral home. Richelieu needed all his tact and prestige to calm down du Châtelet; the Marquise's Breteuil relations, too, were very much annoyed.