Voltaire in Love (23 page)

The atmosphere at Berlin was not one of trustful affection. The two men still chatted together for hours on end but each knew that the other had betrayed him. Voltaire, disappointed and cross, took his revenge on Émilie, who complained that he hardly ever wrote, and when he did it was only a few cold lines. Another woman might have seen that this was a good sign, but she had no feminine intuition. She suffered, and did not keep her feelings to herself.

Voltaire could generally manage to be well when it suited him, and the visit to Bayreuth duly took place. Frederick, off on a tour of the German states, left him with the Margravine. Voltaire was much happier there than at Charlottenburg where the only woman was La Barbarini, an Italian dancer with the limbs of a young man. (The poor Queen of Prussia had kindled the sacred hearth alone ever since her husband's accession and was said to have become most disagreeable.) At Bayreuth he found a little Court like a French country house, an easy, natural, happy atmosphere and women with the usual contours. The charming Margravine soon coaxed back his good temper. ‘
Princesse philosophe,'
he called her, ‘
modèle de la politesse et de l'affabilité.'
She loved him as he had once thought Frederick would; she was, in fact, her brother in petticoats without the spiky, the uncomfortable, greatness. Voltaire's relationship with her and her sisters was the best result, for him, of his visits to Germany. He now wrote long letters to Émilie, drunk and mad, she said, with the pleasures he found in the silly little German Courts
(courettes).
She was beginning to think she would never see him again, and jealousy of Frederick gave way to jealousy of his sister. What was Voltaire doing in Bayreuth, alone, without the King?

He was only there a fortnight, and when the two men got back to Berlin their tempers were much better. Voltaire was preparing to leave and Frederick was putting on charm. There was the usual talk of Voltaire going to live there,
without others
of course. Indeed the du Châtelets would have been fish out of water in that homosexual society; and even Voltaire, much as he liked
having his cake and eating it, saw that he must choose between Frederick and Émilie. He still chose Émilie. Valory asked Voltaire to take advantage of the King's better mood to do something for a French gentleman who had been tortured and had his nose and ears cut off by the late King Frederick-William and who now languished in the fortress of Spandau. His crime was that, having been kidnapped and pressed into the regiment of giants he had tried to escape from it. Frederick consented to act, as he said,
La Clemenza di Tito.
He also agreed, at last, to settle with Thieriot. But Frederick was never as good as his word, in big things or in small. The Frenchman was only released in 1749, and Thieriot, after nine years of empty promises, received nothing.

Maupertuis had still not returned to Berlin after his adventures at Mollwitz; Voltaire wrote to his dear earth-flattener, painting his visit in the sunniest colours and giving a lively account of all their mutual acquaintances; Jordan (Frederick's great friend) is still like Ragotin the comic hunchback in one of Scarron's novels, but a genial, discreet Ragotin, now, with a good pension regularly paid; the Marquis d'Argens is Chamberlain with a huge gold key. The Academy, where Maupertuis is loved and regretted, is occupied with the experiments of Eller who thinks he can change water into elastic air. At Bayreuth, Her Royal Highness spoke much of Maupertuis; it is a delicious retreat, an agreeable Court without any tedious etiquette. Brunswick (whose Duchess was another of Frederick's sisters) has a different charm. Voltaire flies from planet to planet, to end up at tumultuous Paris where he will be sad indeed if he does not find unique Maupertuis whom he admires and loves for the rest of his life.

Voltaire left Berlin on 13 October and went back to The Hague by comfortable stages, visiting Brunswick on the way. The du Châtelets were waiting for him at Brussels. Émilie was in a morbidly self-pitying mood, and d'Argental, as usual, was the recipient of her whines. Twelve days from Berlin to The Hague when it had only taken him nine to go in the other direction. The absence, which was to have been of six weeks, has been prolonged to five months. Three whole weeks without a letter. For two months she has had to learn of his plans from Ambassadors or the gazettes.
Any other woman would have detached herself long ago, but Émilie's sensibilities cannot be extinguished and she will never be reasonable. Voltaire must, however, be made to feel how greatly she has suffered, and d'Argental must let him know what a state she has been in. Her health is sadly deranged, she coughs continually, has a pain between her shoulders and another in what she thinks must be her liver. Anybody else would be dead and it might really be all for the best if she were.

D'Argental duly passed on these remarks to Voltaire, who had the usual male reaction of guilty annoyance, and thought it all a great fuss about nothing. It is not his fault if the posts are bad. He, too, was a long time without letters; he minded, of course, but he did not fly into a rage, or think himself betrayed, or stir up the whole of Germany. D'Argental's friend has made things very tiresome for Voltaire, with all the steps she has been taking. But Voltaire does not have to justify himself to his old comrade who knows quite well what he is. D'Argental must tell his correspondent not to cover a sky, as serene as theirs, with clouds. Voltaire adds a postscript two days later (6 November 1743) to say that he has now arrived at Brussels and has had the joy of finding their female friend in much better health than himself.

The two philosophers, reunited, were happy to be together again. ‘He loves me,' said Émilie, while Voltaire, for his part, said he had never found her so adorable. Émilie, of course, could not help recapitulating her wrongs, and said this must be his very last visit to that horrid Germany where the heart learns to be hard. She is delighted that d'Argental has taken him to task; she can see that Voltaire has received his letter though of course they don't mention it. They only stayed a couple of days in Brussels, then back to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré by way of Lille and Mme Denis. Du Châtelet went to Cirey and plans were made for spending the next summer there.

In Paris, Voltaire worked and Mme du Châtelet gambled. There is a letter (perhaps the only one in existence) from her to Voltaire: it begins ‘Dear Lover' (in English) and asks for fifty louis to pay a card debt. She got into further difficulties and had to borrow money from Helvétius. This led to unpleasantness, because she could not pay him back when the time came. Voltaire said of her that the people she gambled with had no idea that she was so learned, though sometimes they were astonished at the speed and accuracy with which she added up the score. He himself once saw her divide nine figures by nine others in her head. It might have been supposed that somebody so quick at figures would have had a good card sense but she hardly ever won, or if she did we do not hear of it. Her losses were often enormous.

In her
Réflections sur le bonheur,
an essay written at about this time, Mme du Châtelet says that the only pleasures left to a woman
when she is old are gambling, study, and greed, if she has the health for it. She considers that gambling, by which she means playing for high enough stakes to affect one's fortune, is instrumental to happiness. The soul needs to be shaken up by hope and by fear. Gambling brings it within range of these two passions and keeps it in a healthy state. She herself has often been reconciled to her lack of fortune by the thought that she gets more excitement from playing cards than she would if she were rich.

These
Réflections,
she explains, are not written for humanity in general, but for
les gens du monde,
people with an assured position in life. Unfortunately we only see how to achieve happiness when age and the fetters we have forged for ourselves are beginning to make it difficult. In order to be happy we must be virtuous, get rid of our prejudices, enjoy good health, have strong tastes and passions, and keep our illusions. Most pleasure comes from illusions, and he who has lost them is seldom happy. Those moralists who think that we should rid ourselves of passions and desires know nothing about happiness, which chiefly comes from their satisfaction. Le Nôtre was quite right when he asked the Pope to give him temptations rather than indulgences. But, she will be asked, do not passions make more people unhappy than happy? Impossible to say, because it is the unhappy people who talk about themselves, the happy ones remain anonymous. Nobody writes plays about happy lovers. But even if it is true that strong passions make many people unhappy, she still asserts that they are desirable since really great pleasure is impossible without them.

In order to have passions and to be able to satisfy them good health is essential and this depends on ourselves. We are all born healthy and made to last a certain length of time. If we do not destroy our constitution by overeating, late hours, and other excesses, we shall live the ordinary length of human life. She does not speak of sudden death which is out of our control. What about people whose chief pleasure is food? Greed is a wonderful source of regular happiness and it is quite possible to indulge in it without affecting our health, though this entails a certain amount of eating at home. Mme du Châtelet herself has had to renounce alcohol. She often feels so much too hot that she spends her mornings swallowing
all sorts of liquids. She gives way to her greed, but as soon as she is uncomfortable she goes on a strict diet.

It is very important in life to know what we want. Too many people have no idea, and yet without an aim there can be no happiness. We destroy in the morning what we did the night before; we commit blunders; we repent. This repentance is one of the most disagreeable of all the feelings that assail us, and we must be careful to protect ourselves from it. As nothing in life happens twice in the same way it is useless to dwell on past faults. We must go on from where we are without looking back, and always substitute agreeable reflections for disagreeable ones. It is foolish, for instance, to dwell upon death, whether our own or that of other people, a sad and humiliating thought which does us no good at all.

For a woman, debarred as she is from political and military ambitions, study is the greatest of resources. Other forms of pleasure extolled by Mme du Châtelet in this sensible analysis are the acquisition of new pieces of furniture, snuff-boxes, and so on, which she says give her intense happiness, regular visits to the privy, and keeping warm in very cold weather.

Voltaire was ill in bed most of that winter. The gossips said that he was having an affair with the actress Mlle Gaussin and that she visited him at Mme du Châtelet's house when he could not go to hers. Du Châtelet was tired of living alone at Cirey and wanted Émilie to keep him company there, but Voltaire had no wish to leave Paris. He was most disagreeable to Émilie, made scenes, and often made her cry. However, he was about to begin a piece of work to which he attached the greatest importance and for which he needed a country solitude. So at last she persuaded him to go with her to Cirey, and in very bad tempers they set off at the beginning of April 1744.

Hardly had they arrived than they got word that M. Denis was ill. Two or three days later he died. His wife and Voltaire both seem to have been sincerely fond of him; Voltaire wrote her a heartfelt letter of sympathy on hearing the news. To Thieriot he wrote that it was for Mme Denis a dreadful loss by day and by night of fortune and a man who adored her.

After an unpromising start, the philosophers spent one of the
happiest summers they had ever had together. Cirey had never seemed so enchanting – ‘a jewel,' said Voltaire, dating his letter ‘
à Cirey en félicité' , ‘
my kingdom and my academy'. He wrote over the door of his gallery:

Mme du Châtelet, he said, was in the gallery with him most of the time and that was why it had such a happy atmosphere. Voltaire, who generally had many different works in progress, was now concentrated on one. He had come away from the distractions of Paris in order to bestow all his time and attention on it, so wholehearted in his application that anybody might have supposed his literary career to be at stake. A young man writing his first book could not have taken it more seriously.

The Duc de Richelieu, as First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, was this year in charge of all the fêtes at Versailles. The King and the courtiers were always nagging at him about the poor quality of the entertainments he provided. These generally consisted of elaborate fireworks; people complained that they provided food for the eye but not for the intellect. At last the Duke, tired of hearing these complaints every time a gala was in preparation, said that when the Dauphin married the Infanta of Spain he would get Voltaire and Rameau to write the
divertissement.
The wedding was to take place in February 1745; poet and composer were given a year in which to prepare their work. Voltaire had already written an opera,
Samson,
with Rameau, and knew his difficult character. Rameau attached no importance whatever to the libretto, and thought that nothing mattered but the music.

‘Sing faster!'

‘But, Maître, if I do the words will be lost.'

‘Who cares?'

Voltaire was an easy person to work with, owing, no doubt, to years spent in the theatre. He was always ready to alter, shorten,
or lengthen his verses and would even give way about the words he used: ‘If you like I will remove the word
d'outrageuse,
though I would point out that both Boileau and Corneille use it.' He never minded how much trouble he took, it was a pleasure to go over and over what he had written; he knew that a fresh eye often perceives small inadequacies which the author by himself might never notice.