of Wilhelmina, the Prince of Hesse’s sister, with the Czarevitch Paul.
In a very short time the skilful Grimm had gained the great Catherine’s
interest and consideration. Even Diderot’s warm heart and glowing genius
(he was staying at the Russian Court when Grimm arrived there) did not
win her so well as the German’s delicate tact and keen perceptions.
Herself before all things a great statesman, how should she not respect
the shrewd judgment, the strength, and the determination of a Grimm? It
is so rare to be clever and wise! It was most rare in the eighteenth
century. Two or three times a week Grimm dined with her Majesty _en
petit comité_--those dinners at which all men were equal, and at which
no servants appeared to hamper the conversation. Afterwards she talked
alone with him by the hour together. He told Madame Geoffrin how, when
he left her, he would pace his room all night with the splendid ideas
she had suggested coursing through his sleepless brain: ‘The winter of
1773-74 passed for me,’ he said, ‘_en ivresse continuelle_.’ But when
Catherine would have permanently attached him to her service, his stern
good sense helped him to refuse. There is no such dead-weight on genius
as a post at Court--be it the Court of a Catherine or a Frederick--and
Grimm knew it. ‘I have never seen you hesitate about anything,’ Madame
d’Épinay had once written to him; ‘when you have once decided with your
just, strong mind, it is for ever.’
His refusal was unalterable, and he returned to Paris. He was sure
enough of his firmness to visit his royal friend again, two years later,
in 1776. He had been acting tutor once more, to the two Counts Romanzoff
this time. He had taken them to Naples to embrace Galiani, to Ferney to
see Voltaire, and to Berlin to see Frederick. They arrived in
Petersburg in time for the second marriage of the Czarevitch, of whose
first marriage, with Wilhelmina of Hesse, Grimm had been the principal
promoter. Catherine received him with the same flattering interest and
offers, but he was as deaf to them as before. Then she gave him the
title of Colonel--to the intense amusement of King Frederick--and
appointed him her general agent in Paris at a salary of ten thousand
livres.
After his return to the capital this appointment formed a very large
occupation in his life.
His frequent absences had naturally not been the best thing in the world
for the ‘Literary Correspondence,’ but it would have been a much worse
thing if Diderot--Grimm’s ‘patient milch-cow whom he can milk an essay
from or a volume from when he lists’--had not been there to do his work.
The ‘Correspondence’ rightly appears with Diderot’s name as well as
Grimm’s on its title-page. In these latter years, indeed, its readers
often had to be content, not with Diderot, but with a mere Meister; and
when Grimm did write himself it was sometimes carelessly and in a hurry.
Not quite the first, or the last, perhaps, to commit that literary
enormity, he occasionally reviewed books he had not taken the trouble to
read.
His letters to and from Catherine, after the first few years, were not
conveyed through the post, but by special messenger, and are therefore
delightfully outspoken. Grimm’s contain indeed a good deal of flattery
and exaggeration; but Catherine’s are spontaneous enough. She used to
say she was as ‘frankly an original as the most determined Englishman.’
The pair wrote sometimes in French and sometimes in German. They had
nicknames for most of the crowned heads in Europe. Of ‘Brother George of
England’ Catherine had always spoken with contempt, and considered his
loss of the American colonies as ‘a State treason.’ But much of the
correspondence was devoted to mere homely details. As her agent, Grimm
bought the imperial rouge for the imperial cheeks, pictures, books, and
bon-bons. He took long journeys in her interest: he supplied her with
architects when she caught a fever for building; and presently, having
been discreet matchmaker for the Hesses and the Czarevitch, he was
commissioned to play the same delicate part for the Czarevitch’s
daughters.
He was living now in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin. His love of music
was still strong, and on young Mozart’s visits to Paris, Grimm was his
kindest and most influential patron. The next few years saw the deaths
of many old friends--of Voltaire, of Diderot, of Frederick the Great,
of d’Holbach, and of Madame d’Épinay. For ever trying to conciliate all
men, poor little volatile, self-deceived deceiver, under Grimm’s
masterful influence the best qualities of her nature had come to the
fore and the worst receded. She was to the last true to him as she had
never been true to anyone else. Grimm adopted her grand-daughter and
married her to the Comte de Bueil.
So far, his own life had been singularly happy and successful. If he had
loved unwisely, he had taken care that the affection should never be of
that inordinate kind which is its own punishment. He had, too, one of
the dearest solaces of declining life in seeing young people growing up
about him. As to his career, he was not only attached to the royal house
of Orleans, but he was by now Catherine’s Councillor of State, Minister
Plenipotentiary to the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, and Baron of the Viennese
Empire. He was a rich man, with a fine collection of books, pictures,
and _vertu_. He should have died before 1789.
In that year came the stunning fall of the Bastille. Of liberty, Grimm
had talked easily enough, but he had also been shrewd enough to doubt
its promises. He had at least nothing of the calm confidence of the fine
ladies of the old _régime_ who drove out from modish Paris through the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine to look at the ruins of the great prison, as at a
sight prepared--for their amusement. To the wary German the destruction
of the Bastille spelt the ruin of France. The Revolution sped
on--Vengeance rushing through the night with a drawn sword in her hand.
In 1790 came the great emigration of the nobles. Who should be suspect
if not this correspondent of kings? Grimm fled to Frankfort; but in two
months’ time he plunged again into the whirlpool of Paris, to rescue the
Comtesse de Bueil, his dear adopted grandchild, then in sore straits. He
took her to Aix-la-Chapelle; but in October 1791 he returned himself to
the capital, to get the Empress’s letters out of France if he could. He
found he had already been denounced in the committees as carrying on a
correspondence with her ‘little favourable to the Revolution.’ His only
chance of safety lay, he saw, in ‘extreme circumspection.’ He had that
quality by nature to the full; but, none the less, stirred by a generous
pity, history tells of an interview he had with the royal saint, Madame
Elisabeth, in which he tried to assist both her and Marie Antoinette. He
could do nothing; fate and the fatal Bourbon character were too strong
for the Bourbons to be saved.
In 1792 Grimm, who had loved her long and owed her much, said farewell
to Paris for ever, leaving behind him, as he said, the fruit of the
wisdom of his whole life and his entire fortune, and finding himself as
naked as when he came into the world. He and Madame de Bueil lodged over
a chemist’s shop in Düsseldorf, and even had to sleep in the Natural
History Museum of that town. Grimm’s whole income was Catherine’s
pension of two thousand roubles; her generosity indeed often added to
it, and in 1796 she made him Russian Minister at Hamburg. This was one
of the last acts of her life. She died, and left her friend and servant
yet the poorer for her loss.
At Hamburg he had a disease of the eye which necessitated its removal.
Then he retired to Gotha and lived with the Comtesse de Bueil in a house
given him by the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, the munificent Duke providing
furniture, linen, kitchen utensils--everything. The Countess’s two young
daughters acted as Grimm’s secretaries. The music he had loved was still
a resource to him, and he seems to have kept to the last something of
his old power and mastery over others. Goethe found him, when he saw him
in 1801, still an agreeable man of the world and rich in interest and
experience, but unable to conceal a profound bitterness at the thought
of his misfortunes. Under the Directory some of his confiscated property
was restored to him. But it could hardly benefit him; he no longer
lived, he only existed. He, who had been born when the Regent Orleans
ruled France and the old order was at the supreme height of its
magnificence and depravity, was roused from the dotage of his last days
to hear the thunder of the cannon of Jena and Austerlitz, or the story
of the peace concluded between Catherine’s grandson, Alexander, and
Napoleon Bonaparte upon the raft at Tilsit.
Grimm died on December 19, 1807, aged eighty-four.
No unpleasing contrast, this ‘methodical, adroit, managing man,’ with
his cold uprightness and steady prudence, to a reckless, out-at-elbows
Diderot, or a mad, miserable Rousseau. Thriftiness and caution are
unromantic virtues and even accounted selfish; but, after all, the world
would have no beggars to relieve if every man laid by for himself.
If it was the Encyclopædists’ mission to teach the people to reform
their kings, it was Grimm’s to teach those kings to reform
themselves--to be as careful and judicious as he was. He tried; but from
long and close association with them he himself caught at last that
disease epidemic among rulers--oblivion to unpleasant consequences and a
relentless future--and never recovered from the fearful shock which
opened his eyes at last.
VII
_HELVÉTIUS: THE CONTRADICTION_
Most of the reforming philosophers of the eighteenth century were better
in word than deed.
Helvétius wrote himself down self-seeker and materialist, and in every
action of his life gave his utterance the lie. Helvétius was, as
Voltaire had been, a courtier--not the teacher of kings, like Grimm,
but their friend and servant. Helvétius alone was at once of that
body, which of all bodies the philosophers most hated, the
Farmers-General--the extortionate tax-gatherers of old France--and of a
practical philanthropy Voltaire himself might have envied.
He belonged to a family famous in the medical profession. His
great-grandfather, a religious refugee from the Palatinate, had been a
clever quack, practising in Holland. His grandfather introduced
ipecacuanha to the doctors of Paris, and his father, having saved Louis
XV.’s life in some childish complaint, was made physician to the Queen
and Councillor of State. Still, the
[Illustration: CLAUDE-ADRIEN HELVÉTIUS.
_From an Engraving by St. Aubin, after the Portrait by Vanloo._]
family fortunes were but mediocre. Little Claude-Adrien, who was born in
1715, was at first educated at home by a mother ‘full of sweetness and
goodness.’ Her tenderness, perhaps, was an ill preparation for the
harsher, wider world of the famous school of Saint Louis-le-Grand,
whither Claude-Adrien was presently sent. It was Voltaire’s old school,
and it was Voltaire’s old school-master, Père Porée, who helped the shy,
sensitive, new boy with kindliness and encouragement, and first roused
in him a love of letters. Grimm, who nearly always has his pen pointed
with malice when he writes of Helvétius, records that poor Claude-Adrien
always seemed stupid at school through being the victim of a chronic
cold in the head: an unromantic affliction, which would make genius
itself uninteresting. Young Helvétius was no genius, however.
After leaving school he was sent to an uncle, who was a superintendent
of taxes at Caen, to learn finance. There he wrote the usual boyish
tragedy of promise--never to be performed--and the usual youthful
verses, and was made a member of the Caen Literary Academy. The
sensitive shyness soon disappeared. Young, healthy, and handsome, loving
literature much and women more, an excellent dancer and fencer, clever,
cool, agreeable, and much minded to get on in the world, young
Helvétius comes up to Paris. At three-and-twenty, in 1738, being the son
of his father, and having the necessary financial equipment, he was made
Farmer-General, a post certain to bring in two or three thousand a year,
and possibly, with the requisite extortion and unscrupulousness, a good
deal more.
Paris, in the years between 1738 and 1751, was certainly the most
delightful and the most seductive city in the world. In the early part
of that period, Madame de Tencin, the mother of d’Alembert and the
sister of the Cardinal, was forming the youth of the capital in her
famous _salon_. In the later period, Madame de Pompadour was revealing
to it by her example the whole secret of worldly success--a clear head
and a cold heart. The Court was eternally laughing, play-acting,
intriguing. For the few, the world went with the liveliest lilt; and for
the many--the many were dumb.
Helvétius was one of the few. Now at Madame de Tencin’s, ‘gathering in
order that he might one day sow;’ now in the _foyer_ of the Comédie,
where Mademoiselle Gaussin, the charming comic actress, nourished a
hopeless passion for him; now at the opera, seeing for the first time
Buffon, Diderot, d’Alembert, and joining hotly in the question of French
or Italian music, which agitated the capital a thousand times more than
national glory or shame; now at Madame de Pompadour’s famous little
dinners of the Entresol, or at Court, daintily distinguishing between
the Queen of reality and the poor Queen _en titre_--the new young
Farmer-General was Everywhere where Everybody who is Anybody goes, and
Nowhere where Nobody goes. Be sure there was a fashionable shibboleth
then as there is now, and be sure Helvétius prattled it and lived up to
it. Grimm declared that if the word ‘gallant’ had not been in the French
language, it would certainly have had to be invented in order to
describe him.
One day, society heard of him dancing at the opera under the mask of the
famous dancer, Dupré. The next, he was whispered to be the lover of a
modish Countess, who had taken Atheism as other women took Jansenism,
Molinism, or a craze for little dogs, and passionately imbued her lover
with the exhilarating doctrine of All from Nothing to Nothing. Then he
posed as the _amant-en-titre_ of the Duchesse de Chaulnes. For the
passions were only a pose--like the opera dancing. Helvétius was merely
minded to get on in the world, and was looking about for the shortest
cut to glory. He soon saw, or thought he saw, a pleasant road thereto
called Verse.
Voltaire, now retired to Cirey, science, and Madame du Châtelet, had
made poetry the fashion. I too will be a poet! The young Farmer-General
racked his sharp brains a little, and as a result sent Voltaire some
long, dismal cantos on ‘Happiness.’ The master replied with the
kindliest criticism, and offered advice so keen and excellent that if
poets were made, not born, Helvétius’ verses might still live. But,
after all, advice by post is always unsatisfactory. Helvétius’
Farmer-Generalship made periodical tours in the provinces an agreeable
necessity. On a journey through Champagne, what more natural than to
stop awhile at Cirey, where Voltaire was writing ‘Mahomet,’ and Madame
du Châtelet was the most delightful of blue-stocking hostesses? Between
Arouet of five-and-forty and Claude-Adrien of five-and-twenty a warm
friendship was cemented. All Voltaire’s correspondence from 1738 until
1771 is studded with letters to Helvétius. The young man was his ‘very
dear child,’ ‘my rival, my poet, my philosopher.’ If he took so large
and liberal a view of Helvétius’ talents as to declare that, as a poet,
he had as much imagination as Milton, only more smoothness and
regularity (!), yet he was not afraid to wrap up the pill of many a
shrewd home truth in the fine sugar-plums of compliments.
But, after all, _is_ poetry the easiest way to glory? Claude-Adrien,
returned to Paris, walking through the Tuileries gardens one day, saw
the hideous Maupertuis, the geometrician, surrounded by all the charming
and pretty women, adoring him, and immediately decided to abandon verse
and be a geometrician instead. But before he had taken a couple of steps
in this direction, the publication of the ‘Spirit of Laws’ in 1748
electrified Europe, and changed his mind. To be sure, when, three years
earlier, Montesquieu had brought the book up to Paris and asked the
young Farmer-General’s judgment on it, Helvétius had replied that it was
altogether unworthy of the author of the ‘Persian Letters,’ and had
strongly recommended him not to publish it. Well, that advice can be
conveniently forgotten. Helvétius paid Montesquieu the sincerest of all
flattery by resolving on the spot to be a philosopher himself.
If, between these eventful years of three-and-twenty and six-and-thirty,
Helvétius had been nothing but an astute, ambitious young
man-about-town, seeking the likeliest way to fame and fortune, he would
have been undistinguishable from hundreds of others around him, and not
worth distinguishing. But, at his worst, there was something in him
which was never in that selfish crowd which thronged the galleries of
Versailles.
As tax-gatherer, it was his interest and profession to extract the
uttermost farthing--and he did not do it. Nay, he pleaded in high places
for the wretches it was his business to ruin. When in Bordeaux they
rebelled against an iniquitous new tax on wine, he encouraged the
rebellion. Though he was constantly at Court and in a position which
entailed lavish personal expenditure, he pensioned Thomas, the poet, out
of his own pocket; and by an annuity of a thousand écus opened the world
of letters to Saurin, hereafter the dramatist. The Abbé Sabatier de
Castres declared himself to have been the recipient of his delicate and
generous charity. Marivaux, the novelist and playwright, who was
personally very uncongenial to Helvétius, received from him a yearly sum
of two thousand livres.
It was in Helvétius’ house in Paris, as he afterwards told Hume, the
historian, that he concealed, coming and going for ‘nearly two years,’
Prince Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, at a time ‘when the danger
was greater in harbouring him in Paris than in London’ on account of the
clause in the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle of the year 1748, which
stipulated that France should shelter no member of the family in her
domains. Helvétius, like many another generous dupe, fell a victim to
the Stuart grace and charm: ‘I had all his correspondence pass through
my hands; met with his partisans upon the Pont Neuf; and found at last I
had incurred all this danger and trouble for the most unworthy of all
mortals,’ for a poor coward who ‘was so frightened when he embarked on
his expedition to Scotland’ that he had literally to be carried on board
by his attendants. (It is fair to say that Helvétius made this statement
only on the testimony of a third person whose name is not given.) The
sole good quality, indeed, his host ended by finding in this faint hope
of Britain, the guest for whom he had risked his safety and spent his
money, was that he was ‘no bigot.’ As this meant he had ‘learnt a
contempt of all religions from the philosophers in Paris,’ not everyone
would consider even this an advantage.
In 1740, Madame de Graffigny, famous as the gossiping visitor at Cirey
with whom Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet quarrelled, had arrived in
Paris, and there, in the Rue d’Enfer, near the Luxembourg, had set up
her _salon_. To insure its success, Madame, who was five-and-forty, fat
and unbeautiful, had with her a charming niece, Mademoiselle Anne
Catherine de Ligniville, who was then one-and-twenty, fair, handsome,
intelligent. A year or two before, her aunt had adopted and so rescued
her from a convent, to which the fact of the unfortunate girl having
nineteen living brothers and sisters had condemned her.
In 1747, Madame de Graffigny attained celebrity by her ‘Letters from a
Peruvian.’ Turgot did her the honour of criticising them: frequented her
_salon_, which rapidly became famous, and at which, in 1750, Helvétius,
still young, rich, agreeable, and unmarried, became a constant visitor.
For a year, he was there perpetually. ‘The sheepfold of _bel esprit_,’
people called it. Helvétius liked to be thought a _bel esprit_, and it
was _de rigueur_ to admire the hostess’s ‘Peruvian’ and her play
‘Cénie,’ which was produced in 1750. He soon came to admire something
besides her writings. ‘Minette,’ as she nicknamed her niece, was such a
woman as fashionable eighteenth-century society rarely produced--such a
woman as any fashionable society rarely produces. Strong in mind and
body, good, straightforward and serene, refreshingly unconventional in
an age which had no god but the _convenances_, not half so clever as
that accomplished old fool, her aunt, and a hundred times more
sensible--such was Mademoiselle de Ligniville.
Helvétius studied her in his calm manner for a year, and at the end of
it proposed to her. Then he resigned his Farmer-Generalship with its
rich income; bought, to pacify his father, the post of _maître d’hôtel_
to Queen Marie Leczinska, and the estates of Voré and Lumigny in
Burgundy, and, on June 17, 1751, married Mademoiselle de Ligniville, who
was a Countess of the Holy Roman Empire, satisfactorily connected with
the nobility, and had not a single franc to her _dot_.
All these actions caused something very like consternation in the world
in which Helvétius lived. Give up a Farmer-Generalship! The man must be
mad! ‘So you are not insatiable, then, like the rest of them?’ says
Machault, the Controller-General. As to the estates in Burgundy, one
might as well be buried alive at once! While to marry a woman who is by
now certainly not a day less than two-and-thirty, has not an écu, and
has a tribe of hungry brothers and sisters clinging to her, as it were,
is certainly not the act of a sane person! Followed by the mingled pity
and contempt of all Paris, Helvétius and his wife left immediately for
Voré, and settled down to the eight happiest years of their lives.
Voré was one of those country estates which would still be called dull.
In those days, before railways, with a starving peasantry at its gates,
with rare posts of the most erratic description, and with the vilest
impassable roads between one country house and another, it might have
been called not merely dull, but dismal. But, after all, happiness is
what one is, not where one is. Perfectly content with each other, the
Helvétius would have been contented in a wilderness. Minette, says a
biographer, asked nothing better than to adore her husband and
perpetually to sacrifice herself to him.
If it was not in his calmer nature to adore anyone, his love for her is
on the testimony of the whole eighteenth century. His married happiness
‘bewildered and astonished’ it. ‘Those Helvétius,’ said a country
neighbour discontentedly, ‘do not even pronounce the words, _my
husband_, _my wife_, _my child_, as we others do.’ ‘Good husband, good
father, good friend, good man,’ wrote unfavourable Grimm. The easy
prosperity of Helvétius’ love for his wife, its freedom from storm and
stress, left it, doubtless, a lighter thing than if it had been forged
in the fire and beaten by the blows of affliction and reverse. It was
thus with all his qualities. Kind, rather than lovable; charming, rather
than great; equable, because nothing in his destiny came to move the
deep waters, or because there were no deep waters to be moved: these
were the key-notes to Helvétius’ character.
The first child of the marriage, a daughter, was born in 1752, and the
second, also a daughter, in 1754. Father and mother devoted themselves
to the education of the little girls, though in their time polite
society considered that parents had sufficiently obliged their children
by bringing them into the world, and that further favours, such as a
judicious training, were entirely superfluous.
The household was completed by two superannuated secretaries, whom
Helvétius kept, very characteristically, not because he wanted them, but
because he feared no one else would want them either. One of them,
Baudot, had known his master from a child, and spoke to him as if he
were one still. ‘I have certainly not _all_ the faults Baudot finds in
me,’ observed Helvétius tranquilly, ‘but I have some of them. Who would
tell me of them if I did not keep him?’
Sometimes visitors came to Voré, but for so sociable an age, not very
often. Though they were always made generously welcome, they must have
known they were not necessary to that _ménage_. Still, they were useful,
if only to prove to these married lovers how much happier they were
alone--just as the four gay winter months they spent in Paris doubled
the delights of peaceful Voré.