Voltaire in Love (6 page)

A meeting with Congreve is on record. Voltaire, rather gushingly, no doubt, said that he had long wished to meet one whom he put on a par with Molière and regarded as the greatest living playwright. Congreve: ‘I had rather you wished to meet me because I am an English gentleman.' Voltaire: ‘But there are so many of them!'

Voltaire could not live without working and as soon as he was settled in England he took up his
Henriade
once more. He re-wrote the part already published, eliminated all references to the great Duc de Sully, ancestor of the ex-adorable, and added to the poem. When it was ready he applied for, and received, permission to dedicate it to Queen Caroline. A limited edition was very soon subscribed by English bibliophiles, while the popular edition on sale in London had to be reprinted three times in the first three weeks. In France Voltaire's agent for the new
Henriade
was Thieriot. Eighty copies of the limited edition there, all subscribed, were stolen while Thieriot was at Mass or in other words by the wretched
fellow himself. This was a financial blow to Voltaire, but the
Henriade
earned large sums in England, which he invested cleverly, laying the foundation of his riches. His love for his friend was not affected. ‘I always forgive the weak and am only inflexible towards wickedness . . . Men, in general, are so treacherous, so envious, and so cruel that it is a comfort to find one who is only weak.' A few months later he was writing, in English, to Thieriot: ‘We fall out for ever if you do not take 500 French livres from the arrears which the Queen owes me. You must have an hundred crowns beside from Bernard . . . that must be so or we are no friends'. Later, when Thieriot went to England, he lived entirely on Voltaire's royalties there.

In March 1729, Voltaire was allowed to go back to France. In spite of his love for England, he had become homesick; like many a Frenchman, he could not stand the austerity. In well-to-do houses, according to him, there was no silver on the table; tallow candles were burnt by all but the very rich; the food everywhere was uneatable. The arts of society, the art of pleasing were hardly cultivated and social life very dull compared with that in France. Furthermore, the weather did not suit his ‘unhappy machine'. He often said that his unhappy machine demanded a Southern climate but that between the countries where one sweats and those where one thinks, he was obliged to choose the latter. The climate of Paris was bad enough but that of London was killing him. So, all in all, he was glad to go home. He never crossed the Channel again.

Warned that it would be better, for the present, if he did not go to Paris itself, Voltaire took lodgings at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, appearing from time to time ‘like a hobgoblin' at the town houses of such faithful friends as the Duc de Richelieu. Soon, however, he was allowed ‘to drag my chain in Paris', that is to say full liberty to resume his old life of work and pleasure. Richelieu took him down to Fontainebleau and arranged that he should pay his court to the Queen; this put him on the same social footing as before the exile. The Duc de Bourbon had been overthrown while Voltaire was in England. He had been banished to Chantilly, and Mme de Prie to her husband's château, where she very soon committed suicide. The boredom of country life was more than she could
endure. The young King made his tutor, Cardinal Fleury, chief Minister. The Cardinal had been Bishop of Fréjus, an obscure diocese in Provence, most of his life; at seventy-three he found himself dictator of France. He ruled for seventeen years.

Everything Voltaire touched now turned to gold. He won an enormous state lottery, his investments prospered and his books were selling better than ever.
Zaïre,
the best of his tragedies, was published. It is about a Christian-born slave in Turkey who reverts to the faith and dies: the censor could find no objection to it. But of course Voltaire provided one. He dedicated it to Mr Fawkener (‘I like to dedicate my works to foreigners because it gives me the opportunity to speak of the follies of my fellow-countrymen'). He used the opportunity, in this case, to compare French intolerance with English freedom; the preface was seized by the police. Voltaire, however, made the necessary cuts and they withdrew their objections. Another play,
Brutus,
received a
privilège;
the
Histoire de Charles XII,
one of the most readable of all Voltaire's books, appeared without the formal consent of the authorities but without any unpleasant consequences. He then settled down to write his next two works,
Le Temple du Goût
and
Lettres philosophiques,
for both of which unpleasant consequences were in store.

In spite of his prosperity, however, Voltaire was unhappy. ‘My misery embitters me and makes me shy.' He told Thieriot that he had more friends in Constantinople than in Paris, since there he had two and in Paris only Thieriot – who, however, was well worth two Turks. He wandered from lodging to lodging; he needed an anchor. His affair with Mme de Bernières did not begin again; hardly had he left for England than she was seen at the Opera with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot. Voltaire had forgiven her, but she belonged to the past. His sister, whom he was so fond of, had died while he was away. Matters were made worse for him by two more deaths, those of Adrienne Lecouvreur and of the Marquis de Maisons who, having nursed Voltaire through the smallpox in 1723, was himself carried off by that disease in 1731. Both these dear friends ‘died in my arms'. As always when he was unhappy his health began to suffer and sometimes he wondered whether he would be able to go on working at all.

In the winter of 1731—2 Voltaire took up with an old Baronne de Fontaine-Martel. He went to live in her house in the rue des Bons-Enfants, looking over the gardens of the Palais-Royal, acted as host at her supper parties, conducted rehearsals of his plays in the drawing-room, and generally dug himself in. She was most unattractive. She had been obliged to give up having lovers, not because of old age, which is never taken into account in these matters by the French, but because of her eczema. She was rich and miserly, her suppers were nasty, unless a Prince of the Blood happened to announce himself, when they became just eatable. Voltaire said the passport to her favour was impotence; she had a morbid fear that some man would cut her throat in order to give her money to an actress. She put up with Voltaire (according to him) because he was too ill to make love.

‘I live very easy at the Baronne's house.' He thought it would be a good idea for Thieriot to live easy there, too, but the Baronne was no fool; she refused to fall in with this plan. She also, quite rightly, refused to harbour a new friend and protégé of Voltaire's, the Abbé Linant. Linant, who came from Rouen where his mother kept a tavern, was an unlucky find of Cideville's. He had literary ambitions and was writing a tragedy of ancient Rome. Cideville sent him to Voltaire, who soon became quite obsessed with him, bothering all his friends to find some agreeable, well-paid job for the Abbé. He admitted to Cideville, however, that it was not easy to place Linant, who was neither attractive nor well-read, whose writing was too illegible for secretarial work, who stammered too much to be a reader and who possessed the amiable virtue of idleness. Never mind, this excellent fruit would no doubt ripen.

In January 1733 Mme de Fontaine-Martel was taken ill, and Voltaire had to tell her that she was dying. She had no desire to see a priest, but he insisted that she should, fearing that if she did not people would say that he had prevented her from doing so. He went out himself and found one. He had never become fond of her and was jocular about the way in which she received the Sacrament. She did not die in his arms. His only regret was for the excellent house of which he had been master and the 40,000 livres a year which had been spent on his pleasures.

Mme de Fontaine-Martel's last words were very strange: ‘What time is it?' ‘Two o'clock, Madame.' ‘Ah,' said she, ‘how consoling to think that whatever time it may be there is somebody preventing the extinction of our race.'

*
This Queen only existed in Voltaire's imagination. George I was still on the throne.

The great question now was not who would inherit Mme de Fontaine-Martel's fortune and furniture but who would inherit Voltaire? Her house had been a centre of merriment for the whole of Paris while he lived there; what lucky person would now carry off this fascinator? The answer was not long in coming. Voltaire took a lodging in a wretched neighbourhood and a hideous house, behind the Hôtel de Ville. Here, one summer evening, 1733, he received a surprise visit: the three angels appearing to Abraham, he said. Two of the angels were lovers, the Duchesse de Saint-Pierre and M. de Fourqualquiers; they were chaperoning Voltaire's new friend, the Marquise du Châtelet. The occasion was very cheerful. Whereas the three angels had supped with Abraham, Voltaire's angels, fearing perhaps that the food in his bachelor establishment would not be up to much, preferred to take him to an inn where they ate fricassée of chicken. Just as well: ‘Marianne, my cook, would have screamed at the idea of such a supper-party in this slum.' Voltaire probably showed his visitors the view, from his window, of the façade of Saint-Gervais saying that it was the only friend his
Temple du Goût
had made him. It was a joke he was very fond of and had a certain truth.

Le Temple du Goût
had just appeared and hardly had a single supporter. Most people nowadays would agree with the choice of writers, artists, and monuments which Voltaire allowed into the temple. They include Mme de Lafayette, Mme de Sévigné, Pascal (with reservations), the inimitable Molière, Racine who was Voltaire's favourite poet, La Fontaine; Poussin, Lebrun, Le
Sueur, Le Vau, Perrault and his
cour carrée
at the Louvre, the fountains of Jean Goujon and Bouchardon, the Porte Saint-Denis, and the façade of Saint-Gervais. ‘All these monuments are neglected by the barbarous masses as well as by frivolous society people.' His exclusions are more questionable. Notre Dame, ‘cluttered up with rubbishy old ornament', is one. (The hatred of Gothic art in France during the eighteenth century was extravagant: one wonders that any was allowed to survive.) The chapel at Versailles and ‘that monument of bad taste' which was being built by Servandoni, the church of Saint-Sulpice, were also excluded from the temple. Perhaps nothing arouses such strong feelings in the breasts of civilized human beings as questions of taste and Voltaire laid down the law in a very provocative manner. Even Cideville said that his feelings were hurt by some of the statements. The Comte de Caylus, a great collector and connoisseur but a disagreeable man, who was praised in the poem, asked that his name should be removed from it.

Voltaire had rashly attacked the whole body of literary critics, ‘cowardly persecutors . . . who used to pretend that Scudéry was greater than Racine,' as well as various contemporary writers, including Jean-Baptiste Rousseau and the Abbé Desfontaines. This stirred up a hornets' nest and the hornets began to buzz. At the Marionettes there was a skit on
Le Temple du Goût
which was both coarse and cruel. Polichinelle is ill – comes the doctor – orders a good beating and a purge – after which the
Temple du Goût
is carried on to the stage, in the shape of an object that can be imagined. Voltaire, by bothering his powerful friends, had this parody taken off. Another one then appeared at the Comédie Italienne in which Voltaire, dressed as an Englishman in checks, made idiotic remarks on the subject of taste. Voltaire never could bear parodies of his works; he was now so furious that he became ill with inflammation of the bowels.

In the middle of this fuss about his
Temple,
Voltaire was courting Émilie. The day after the angels' visit he wrote a letter to the Duchesse de Saint-Pierre which was clearly meant to be read, over her shoulder, by another angel. ‘The charming letters that you write, Madame, and those sent you by somebody else turn
the head of the people who see them . . . I no longer venture to write in prose since I have read yours and that of your friend.' It was natural that he and Mme du Châtelet should be attracted to each other. He had come back from England imbued with the scientific discoveries of Newton and the philosophical teaching of Locke. There were few people in Paris with whom he could discuss such matters, certainly no woman except Émilie. The French academic scientists were still Cartesians and looked with the greatest suspicion at the new ideas from England. Émilie, however, young, ardent, with a brilliant scientific mind, not only understood what he was talking about but was quite ready to be convinced by his arguments. She loved to learn; the tutor-pupil aspect of their relationship was not the least of its charms in the eyes of both. Voltaire was gratified, too, by her rank and the enormous privileges which she enjoyed at Court. He was never insensible to such trivia, least of all now. It was soothing to his pride that a woman of genuine social importance should become his mistress. His love-affairs had hitherto been rather insignificant, but he had never been without one until his exile had put an end to that with Mme de Bernières. In England we hear of whores and Laura Harley, who, most likely, only provided him with an exercise in English verse:

After that, for four years nothing at all (unless, indeed, he had a little fancy for the Abbé Linant? His preoccupation with the chubby fellow is so difficult to account for otherwise). Voltaire could not live without feminine company: ‘the only difference between men and women is that women are more amiable.' But he was never a very ardent lover, even in his youth. He met Émilie only a few weeks after having announced that he was too ill to make love, and he once said: ‘I feel that it is ridiculous for me to be in love.' A man who has had this feeling is incapable of passion such as Émilie would have liked to inspire. However, the compensations were great. Voltaire may never quite have satisfied
her physical nature or her romantic cravings, but for many years she was contented with what he did give. The most famous, most amusing man in the world was pulling out his conjuring-tricks for her and her alone. It was not nothing.