from the fight: that was Alliot, the Duke's _intendant_, who, by virtue of
his office, had it in his power to make his dislike sharply felt. With
what abhorrence he regarded the infidel guest, for whom he had to cater,
we may learn from the contemporary records of his clerical allies,
narratives which do not ordinarily come under the notice of persons
reading about Voltaire. One can scarcely help drawing the inference that
King Stanislas, with all his goodness and all his affected devotion to
_periculosa libertas_, was a little bit of a "Mr. Facing-both-ways," using
very different arguments in different companies--a Pharisee to the
Pharisees, a _philosophe_ to the _philosophes_. Only thus could it come
about that we have such extraordinary stories, altogether inconsistent
with known facts, vouched for on the authority of reverend divines like
Abbe Aubert and Abbe Proyart. "On vit quelquefois," says Abbe Proyart, "a
la Cour du roi de Pologne certains sujets peu dignes de sa confiance, et
le Prince les connoissoit; mais il trouvoit dans sa religion meme des
motifs de ne pas les eloigner." It was represented to him (by Alliot) that
Voltaire "faisoit l'hypocrite." "C'est lui meme, et non pas moi qu'il fait
dupe," replied the king. "Son hypocrisie du moins est un hommage qu'il
rend a la vertu. Et ne vaut-il pas mieux que nous le voyions hypocrite ici
que scandaleux ailleurs?" But "le vrai sage," the Abbe goes on, found
himself compelled at last to dismiss "le faux philosphe, qui commencoit a
repandre a sa Cour le poison de ses dangereuses maximes." Under this
clerical gloss the well-known story of Alliot stopping Voltaire's supply
of food and candles assumes a totally new shape. "Ce ne fut pas une petite
affaire que d'obliger Voltaire a sortir du chateau de Luneville." In vain
did the king treat his guest with marked coldness; the philosopher would
not take the hint. In his predicament Stanislas appealed to the
_intendant_ for advice. "Sire," replies Alliot, "_hoc genus daemoniorum non
ejicitur nisi in oratione et jejunio_," which means, he explains, that
"pour se debarrasser de pareilles pestes," having "prayed" them to go
without avail, he should now enforce a "fast," which would certainly drive
them out of the place. Stanislas is alleged to have fallen in with the
Jesuit's counsels; hence that open tiff with Alliot over the stoppage of
provisions, which made Voltaire complain that he had not been allowed
"bread, wine and candles." In truth, of course, all this clerical story is
pure invention. Of the stopping of the provisions Stanislas knew nothing
till advised by Voltaire, when he quickly set the matter right.
What with feasting, working, acting, dancing, travelling, the time passed
most pleasantly. "En verite," writes Voltaire to the Countess D'Argental,
"ce sejourci est delicieux; c'est un chateau enchante dont le maitre fait
les honneurs. Je crois que Madame du Chatelet passerait ici sa vie."
Sometimes at Commercy, sometimes at the Malgrange, most generally at
Luneville, with visitors coming and going, discussions raised, attentions
being paid this side and that, gallantry, billiards, _tric-trac_,
_lansquenet_, _comete_ (which was a great favourite), marionettes, fancy
balls, time could hang heavily on no one's hands. "On a de tout ici, hors
du temps." Madame du Chatelet, writing till five o'clock in the morning,
though she rose not later than nine, worked hard at her translation of
_Newton_, which Voltaire cried up as a masterpiece--more particularly the
preface. Whenever she found herself at fault, she had a splendidly
fitted-up astronomical cabinet, kept up by Stanislas, to fall back upon, a
cabinet which, says Voltaire, "n'a pas son pareil en France." Voltaire
himself carried on a brisk correspondence with the Argentals, with
Frederick the Great, with his friend Falkener in Wandsworth, and with many
more, and worked at his history "de cette maudite guerre," at the _Siecle
de Louis XIV._, at _Catilina_, and so on, with the easy industry which
comes from comfort and absolute absence of restraint amid agreeable
surroundings. To ingratiate himself the more with Madame de Boufflers, he
wrote _La Femme qui a raison_. He acted and he criticized. He performed
with a magic lantern, to the great amusement of the Court; and at masked
balls he got himself up, sometimes as a "wild man," sometimes as an
ancient augur. He was sorely troubled when threatened with a performance
in Paris of a travesty of _Semiramis_. Then he lost some manuscripts.
Then, again, Menoux frightened him with a tale that _Le Mondain_ and _Le
Portatif_, published at Amsterdam, had both been in France traced to his
pen. Among the visitors who in the second year of his stay came to enliven
the Court was our Young Pretender--over whose misfortunes Voltaire had
pathetically lamented before King Stanislas--and Prince Cantacuzene. The
Pretender's cause Voltaire had espoused with fervid warmth. The news of
his arrest in Paris arrived at Luneville at the very moment when he was
delighting the Lorrain Court with reading out his just completed chapter
of _Le Siecle de Louis XIV._, treating of the Stuarts. "O ciel!" he
exclaimed, "est-il possible que le roi souffre cet affront et que sa
gloire subisse une tache que toute l'eau de la Seine ne saurait laver?"
"Que les hommes prives," he wrote later, "qui se plaignent de leurs
infortunes jettent leurs yeux sur ce prince et sur ses ancetres."
Several times he left Lorraine for a brief time, going with Madame du
Chatelet to Cirey, to Chalons, and to Paris. One visit he paid to Paris by
himself, to see _Semiramis_ put on the stage. He came back in a pitiable
state, the account of which in Longchamp's journal reads comical enough.
"Il est vrai que j'ai ete malade," he writes later, "mais il y a plaisir a
l'etre chez le roi de Pologne; il n'y a personne assurement qui ait plus
soin de ses malades que lui. On ne peut pas etre meilleur roi et meilleur
homme." One would think not. Voltaire was petted like an invalid child. He
had but to send word that he wished to see Stanislas, to bring the king to
his bedside. When he found himself "malingre, bon a rien qu' a perdre ses
regards vers la Voge," he was taken out to Chanteheux, and made thoroughly
comfortable there, where he could best indulge in the idle pleasure of
contemplating the mountains. Meanwhile Madame du Chatelet had been to
Plombieres with Madame de Boufflers, and had come home just as much
disgusted with the place as Voltaire himself had been nine or ten years
before. Then the gay Court reassembled, and there was the same life, the
same succession of pleasures, the same effusion of wit and raillery.
Gilliers invented new dishes. King Stanislas exhibited his indifferent
pastels. Madame de Boufflers played the harp, and courtiers with voices
sang to her accompaniment. Under Voltaire's inspiration, all the Court
turned _litterateur_ and engaged in versifying. Stanislas took up his pen
once more and wrote, among other things, _Le Philosophe
Chretien_--horrifying thereby his daughter, the Queen of France, who
persuaded herself that in the book she discerned the malignant teaching of
the infidel Voltaire. Madame de Boufflers wrote; Saint Lambert composed
fresh ditties; Devaux grew industrious; even Galaiziere found himself
impressed by the lyric Muse. Every courtier mounted his own little Pegasus
and made an attempt to produce something witty, or clever, or at least
readable. Luneville became a modern Athens.
But there was a snake in the grass. One of the pleasantest features of the
remarkably sociable life carried on by the brilliant company assembled
under the roof of Stanislas, while at Luneville and at Commercy, were
those merry nocturnal gatherings held as soon as the king had retired to
rest--which he did punctually at ten o'clock, without ever troubling the
company, in spite of his jealousy, with an unexpected reappearance. Then
began Madame de Boufflers' reign in good earnest; and to the good cheer of
a choice little supper, to which often an exciting game of _comete_ or of
_cavagnole_ added a fresh delight, was summoned, by means of a lighted
candle placed in a particular window, a new guest, whom Stanislas'
jealousy would not otherwise tolerate in the palace. This guest was the
young and handsome Saint Lambert, a captain in the Duke of Lorraine's
Guards, the cynosure of the ladies' world, of whom it was said that no
fair heart to which he seriously laid siege could resist him. His muse had
not yet taken the frigid turn which eventually produced those dull and
chilling _Seasons_, a poem in which no one will now detect any merit,
though Voltaire praised it up to the skies, and French contemporaries
declared that the poet had surpassed Thomson. But he dabbled very neatly
in little ditties, _vers d'occasion_, and the like, some of them rather
light and pretty, though not of the most perfect style. Voltaire professes
to regard Saint Lambert as a _terrible eleve_, of whose poetry he owns
himself "jealous." "Il prend un pen ma tournure et l'embellit--j'espere
que la posterite m'en remerciera." Posterity has done nothing of the
kind. In matters of courtship Saint Lambert resembled the "_papillon
libertin_" sketched by himself in one of his prettiest _pieces
fugitives_:--
Plus pressant qu'amoureux, plus galant que fidele,
De la rose coquette allez baiser le sein.
D'aimer et de changer faites-vous une loi:
A ces douces erreurs consacrez votre vie.
Neither Society nor History would ever have known him, nor have detected
any talent in him, had it not been his fortune to dispossess his two great
contemporaries, Voltaire and Rousseau, successively of their mistresses,
conquering the heart, first of Madame du Chatelet, and later that of
Madame de Houdetot. Madame de Houdetot and he turned out to be really
congenial spirits. For Madame du Chatelet his own conduct shows that he
did not really care--as how could a young man of thirty-one for a woman of
forty-two or else forty-seven, who had been some years a grandmother? Her
letters are full of impassioned professions of affection, impatient
longings for his presence, reproaches for his indifference. On his side it
was all a question of vanity. It flattered him to think that he had
eclipsed the great genius of the age in the affections of a woman of whom
all the polite world was talking. What she was he knew well enough. More
than once had she tasted of the forbidden fruit. Voltaire's _Epitre a la
Calomnie_ had not whitewashed the Magdalen who had had relations
successively with Guebriant, with Richelieu, and with Voltaire. Of
Voltaire's overstrained praise of her assumed modesty Saint Lambert
himself writes:--
De cette tendre Courtisane
Il faisait presque une Susanne.
But what could have induced Madame du Chatelet to engage in this
conspiracy of deceit all round--deceit on her part towards Voltaire,
deceit on Saint Lambert's part towards both Voltaire (with whom he was not
then on terms of intimacy) and Madame de Boufflers (with whom he had a
standing _liaison_)? It was in Madame de Boufflers' drawing-room, of all
places, that the courtship was most actively carried on. Her gilt-framed
harp, we hear, served as a letter-box for the lovers. There was a slit in
it just of a convenient size to hold the letters, which passed daily. Of
Madame du Chatelet's passion there could be no doubt. She threw herself
into the _amour_ with the fervour of a girl of sixteen. She sent her lover
dainty _billets-doux_ written on pink and blue-edged, fringed, and scented
paper; declared that she could not live two days without hearing from him,
when he was away; appointed _rendez-vous_ in the "Bosquet"--watched and
waited for him. It seems ridiculous in a grandmother; but she was not the
first woman of her age to go wrong.
Clogenson will have it that the attachment sprang up some years
before--that Madame du Chatelet became annoyed at Voltaire's long absence
at the Court of King Frederick, and looked out for a new lover. We know,
however, that Emilie and Saint Lambert met for the first time at the
Lorrain Court in 1748, when Voltaire had long been back from Berlin, and
was devoting himself to his lady with an assiduity which could not be
excelled. Besides, we know--from correspondence quite recently come to
light--that as late as 1744 the relations between Voltaire and Emilie were
still quite unclouded. The miniature portrait of Voltaire, which she wore
so long secretly in her ring, and which was after her death found to have
been replaced by one of Saint Lambert, was painted in 1744. In February of
that year she writes to Abbe Moussinot: "Je vous laisse la choix du
peintre, et je ne le trouverai pas cher, quoiqu'il puisse couter." That
does not sound like pining for a fresh lover. Evidently the later
attachment dated only from 1748, when she first became personally
acquainted with Saint Lambert; and, as the late M. Meaume puts it, "threw
herself at his head." There is no need to look very far for an
explanation. Emilie herself is perfectly outspoken about it. The
temptation came. She had yielded so often that she had not sufficient
virtue left to resist. The odd part of the business is, that Voltaire so
readily forgave her; that he continued to dote upon her, to look upon her
as half of his own self; and that he grew fast and admiring friends,
almost _in consequence_ of the betrayal, with his betrayer, Saint Lambert.
Many years after, Saint Lambert very naively set forth his own views on
the proper conduct of friends in matters of this kind in his _Conte
Iroquois_. Voltaire accepted that not very chivalrous theory readily, and
contented himself with protesting--"O ciel! voila bien les femmes! J'en
avais ote Richelieu, Saint Lambert m'a expulse: cela est dans l'ordre, un
clou chasse l'autre."
Growing poetic, he says:
"Dans ces vallons et dans ces bois,
Les fleurs dont Horace autrefois
Faisait des bouquets pour Glycere--
Saint Lambert ce n'est que pour toi
Que ces belles fleurs sont ecloses:
C'est ta main qui cueille les roses.
Et les epines sont pour moi."
Indeed, his relations with Madame du Chatelet were not those of an
ordinary lover. He did not look upon her as in his young days he had
looked upon the inconstant "Pimpette," on the beautiful "Aurore," the
pretty "Artemire," on the very "natural" Rupelmonde, or the false
Adrienne. His heart beat to a different tune at Cirey from what it did in
the Rue Cloche Perce. She was a companion and a friend--"une ame pour qui
la mienne etait faite."
There is no need to review the incidents of that melancholy love-making in
detail. They are well known. It was at Commercy that the treachery was
detected, and that those half-comical, half pathetic scenes described by
Longchamp occurred--Voltaire, mad with a sense of the injury endured,
firing up, abjuring Emilie, almost accepting Saint Lambert's challenge to
fight, ordering his valet, Longchamp, to bespeak a coach and horses at
once, that very night, for Paris. Longchamp knew too well who was master.
Instead of rushing to the posting-house, he went quietly to Emilie, who
directed him to let post-master, horses, and coach alone, and report that
there were none to be had. Her cynically frank explanation, next morning,
in Voltaire's own room put matters straight and Saint Lambert was not
only pardoned but asked pardon of by Voltaire and admitted as a friend to
both parties. Later came the ludicrous trick played off upon the Marquis
at Cirey. Last of all, there was the sad ending at Luneville.
Madame du Chatelet had a short time before met Stanislas at the Trianon,
and had begged him for the use, for the time of her confinement, of "le
petit appartement de la reine" in the ducal palace, a handsome set of
apartments on the ground-floor, looking out on one side on the Cour
d'Honneur, on the other on the private gardens reserved for the
Court--apartments which were magnificently furnished, but were prized by
the petitioner chiefly for their comfort, and for their nearness to those
other rooms, on the first floor (which command a splendid view across the
Bosquet, bounded in the distance by the gorgeous facade of Chanteheux), in
which Voltaire was to be lodged. Those rooms in the first story are now
appropriated as a granary. Madame du Chatelet's apartments serve as
quarters for the divisional General. King Stanislas, kind-hearted as ever,
gladly acceded to the petition, and entered into all the arrangements with
particular personal interest, as if they had concerned some near relative
of his. Under his own and Madame de Bouffler's attentive care (to say
nothing of Voltaire and Mademoiselle du Thil), we know how admirably
Emilie was looked after, how satisfactorily at first all seemed to
proceed--her _Newton_ was finished just in the nick of time--till that
fatal glass of iced _orgeat_ suddenly turned happiness into grief, and
made the palace a house of mourning.
Voltaire was dazed at the loss, unable to command his words or his steps.
He tottered out on to the little flight of stairs, where he sat in dull
despair and stupefaction. In spite of all that had happened of late, he
declared that he had lost, not a mistress, but "half of his own self." The
world would be a different world to him now. There was to be no more of
woman's love for him in his after-life. Luneville was no longer a place
for him. "Je ne pourrais pas supporter Luneville, ou je l'ai perdue d'une
maniere plus funeste que vous ne pensez." Stanislas, kind to the last, did
all that he could to comfort his distressed friend. On the day of his
great trial he went up thrice into his room, sat with him, and wept with
him. We hear little of the funeral, except that it was carried out in a
magnificent style, attended by the whole of the Court, and with all the
honours which were due to a member of one of the four "_Grands Chevaux_."
It seemed like a mockery of Fate that, on being carried out to be placed
on the car the bier should have broken down in the large saloon in which
only a few weeks before Emilie had gathered brilliant laurels in her
favourite character of Isse, and that a mass of flowers, with which her
coffin was covered, should have dropped on the very spot where on that
occasion had fallen a shower of bouquets thrown in token of admiration.
The parish church of St. Remy, then quite new, received the body--it is
that same hideously grotesque rococo church now dedicated to St. Jacques,
overladen with misshapen ornament, whose two lofty but gingerbread spires,
"bourgeoises, lourdes, cossues et bonhommes au demeurant," as Edmond About
describes them, stand up, a conspicuous landmark, visible from afar off,
and looking down on a scene far more attractive than themselves--the
little town with its rectangular streets and squares, brightly-green
vineyards all around, and laughing hop-grounds, carefully-kept gardens,
dark bosquets, and luxuriant meadows, watered on one side by the broad
Meurthe, on the other by the modest Vesouze--with the chain of the Vosges
rising in the distance, overtopping those prettily undulating elevations
with which Luneville is fenced in. The tomb was new, the first dug in the
nave--and it has remained the last. A black marble slab, bearing no
inscription, was laid over the grave. That same black slab is there still.
It was displaced once, when the rough champions of the Revolution raised
it, in order to possess themselves of the lead of the coffin, scattering
about rudely the bones which that coffin enclosed--almost at the precise
moment when the body of Voltaire was being carried in triumph to the
Pantheon in Paris. Pious hands gathered the remains once more together,
and there they rest in the same humble vault.
Voltaire wrote serious verses upon Emilie's death; King Frederick the
Great wrote flippant ones. Maupertuis lamented the possessor of brilliant
powers never put to a bad use, a woman guilty of "ni tracasserie, ni
medisance, ni mechancete." Madame de Grafigny mourned over one who had
"never told a lie:" Voltaire added that she had "never spoken ill of
anyone." It all mattered little after she was gone. Voltaire packed up his
things, and hurried off sorrowfully to Cirey, where he gathered together
the various chattels with which he had made that place more habitable and
more attractive; and before the Marquis could seriously object, he had
carried them off to Paris.
He had done his work at Luneville. He had put the stamp of literature and
taste on the place. He had set the current of learning flowing towards the
Lorrain capital, where a year after de Tressan appeared, to add one more
captive to the admiring army vanquished by de Boufflers--Tressan, the
"Horace, Pollion et Tibulle" of Voltaire, but forgotten now--who in 1751
founded, under Stanislas' auspices, that "Societe de Sciences et de Belles
Lettres," which soon acquired the name of "Academy," and took rank in
public estimation almost on a par with the sacred Olympus of the "Forty"
at Paris. Montesquieu, Helvetius, Henault, Fontenelle, Bishop Poncet,
Bishop Drouas--all begged as a favour to be admitted. Really, that
Academy--which is still a flourishing institution at Nancy--was Voltaire's
work. Stanislas' fond dream had been realized, and the Court of Lorraine
had become a foremost seat of the Muses.
Voltaire never forgot the hospitality received at Stanislas' hands. To the
time of that nominal sovereign's melancholy death, he continued in
friendly and affectionate correspondence with him. In 1760, after Louis
XV. had refused him permission to settle once more on the banks of the
Vesouze, we find him writing to the Polish king:--"Je me souviendrai
toujours, Sire, avec la plus tendre et la plus respectueuse reconnaissance
des jours heureux que j'ai passes dans votre palais. Je me souviendrai que
vous daigniez faire les charmes de la societe comme vous faisiez la
felicite de vos peuples, et que si c'etait un bonheur de dependre de vous,
c'en etait un plus grand de vous approcher."
Six years after that the little drama of the Lorrain Court was played out.
Blind, and old, and deserted, Stanislas was not even sufficiently cared
for to have some one handy to help when his silk dressing-gown caught
fire. He died of his wounds--with an innocent _bon-mot_ on his lips. The
Lorrains, who had been slow to welcome him, crowded round his sick bed and
his hearse. He had done his work. In spite of his failings, his posings,
his airs, and his frivolities, no one need grudge him that tribute of
esteem. He had made the change from independence, dear as life itself to
the Lorrains while under their own dukes, to incorporation with France
very much easier. He had done much material good to the Duchy, and to
literature he had rendered very useful service. His Court is forgotten
now. His Palace is turned into a barrack; and the once gay capital has,
but for its garrison, become a sleepy little provincial town, in which the
presence of a stray stranger puts the police at once on the _qui vive_.
The hop-trade and the manufacture of _dentelleries_ monopolize the
attention of the inhabitants; and only rarely is it that some inquiring
traveller comes to inspect with interest the spot on which was enacted the
most important scene of what the late Comte d'Haussonville has aptly
called "the great second act" of the _comedie_ of Voltaire's life--that
act which, according to the same gifted author, might be named "L'amour de
la science, et la science de l'amour."
VII.--THE PRINCE CONSORT'S UNIVERSITY DAYS.[10]
"Quarum virtutum laude hominum animas, dum in hac urbe morabaris,
mirifice Tibi devinxisti."--_Address of the Senate of Bonn to Prince
Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, January, 28, 1840._
There are incidents in a man's life--sometimes important, sometimes
insignificant--which impress themselves upon his mind as if graven in
"with a pen of iron." Thirty-two years have now passed away, but I
remember, as if it had happened only a few weeks ago, old "Senius" putting
his weather-worn face into my bedroom at Bonn, on the memorable grey
morning of mid-December, 1861, to make the melancholy announcement: "Uuer
Prinz is doht." "Dat war 'ne johde Heer," he added rather impressively.