WORK AT CIREY
The spring of 1737 passed quietly enough. Voltaire and Madame du
Châtelet were occupied in scientific experiments, and as delighted as
two children with wonderful discoveries and a dark room. They paid very
little heed to the summer which was coming, tender and fragrant, to
crown desolate Cirey with loveliness. Nothing was so unfashionable as
Nature in the eighteenth century. Even the poets neglected her--save one
ploughman in his barren North. To painters she served only as the
unheeded background to a trim Watteau shepherdess courting a bashful
shepherd on a fan. To Voltaire and his Marquise she hardly formed even a
background. In all his writings there is not the slightest evidence that
he had so much as a perception of natural beauty. He was fond of
pointing out how much better off was a modern, cultivated, luxurious
Frenchman, than a happy Adam in some wild Eden, and hereafter was
quickly irate, after his fashion, with that absurd theory of Jean
Jacques Rousseau’s that the “state of Nature is the reign of God.”
About midsummer there arrived at Cirey on a visit, one Kaiserling, a
Prussian, young, gay, delightful, with a pretty talent for making French
verses--_tant bien que mal_--and the social ambassador of Prince
Frederick. Kaiserling brought his master’s portrait as a present to his
master’s guide, philosopher, and friend, and the warmest of greetings
and messages, besides the second part of somebody’s Metaphysics and the
whole of somebody else’s Dissertations. He was received, he said, as
Adam and Eve received the angel in Milton’s garden of Eden, only the
hospitality was better and the _fêtes_ more gallant. There were plays
and conversations. Eve, as Madame du Châtelet, was the easiest and most
delightful hostess in the world, who sang to the celestial organ, played
the spinet, spoke all languages, and no doubt amused the visitor, if he
were not of nervous habit, by driving him about the country in her
“phaeton for fairies drawn by horses as big as elephants.”
In the evenings, if one did not read aloud a canto of that wicked
“Pucelle” or a chapter of “Louis XIV.,” there were fireworks, the most
beautiful fireworks with letters of flame spelling Frederick’s name and
surrounded by the motto “To the Hope of the human race.” It is not a
little curious to note the naïve delight Voltaire took to the very end
of his days in these, and such, amusements. He had always something of
the child in him--the child’s love of laughter, the child’s love of the
gaudy, as well as the child’s hot temper, generous impulse, and
quickness to forgive. Nothing was so small that he was too great to be
amused by it. “Rire et fais rire” was one of his mottoes. He threw
himself into those firework preparations as thoroughly as a very few
months later, and after days passed in the most abstruse studies, he
devoted himself body and soul to marionnettes, charades, and a
magic-lantern. To say that he was a versatile Frenchman is some
explanation: but it is not a sufficient one. He worked and thought so
hard that the more frivolous the recreation, the more it recreated. “The
divinity of gaiety,” Catherine the Great called him. “If Nature had not
made us a little frivolous we should be most wretched,” he said himself.
“It is because one can be frivolous that the majority of people do not
hang themselves.” It was because Voltaire could always laugh and work
that it could be truly said of one of the most impressionable and
sensitive of human creatures that “sixty years of persecution never gave
him a single headache.”
After three weeks’ stay, Kaiserling left, taking with him to his Prince
a part of “Louis XIV.” and some short poems. They both wanted--and
begged--just a few cantos of the “Pucelle.” But on this point the
goddess of Cirey was perfectly firm. “The friendship with which she
honours me does not permit me to risk a thing which might separate me
from her for ever,” Voltaire wrote. Entrust King and Kaiserling with a
bomb which might explode at any moment and scatter love, liberty, peace,
to atoms! Madame was too clever a woman for that. The guest left without
his “Pucelle,” and Émilie and Voltaire plunged deeply again into the
scientific studies and experiments which were the particular madness of
the hour.
At the end of the year 1737, the lazy Linant, the tutor, was very
rightly discharged by Madame du Châtelet. She had extended her kindness
to both his mother and sister. But the sister was as unpromising as the
brother. They left Cirey. Voltaire said he had given his word of honour
not even to write to his former _protégé_; “but I have not promised not
to help him.” Through a mutual friend he was weak and generous enough to
send this “enfant terrible,” as Diderot called him, fifty livres: and
thereafter took no little pride and interest in Linant’s third-rate
writings.
There are some very characteristic letters of Voltaire’s written at this
period in which he economically tries to arrange, through Moussinot, for
the engagement of a young priest, who is also to be something of a
chemist, so that he can say mass in the Cirey chapel on Sundays and
Saints’ days and devote himself to the laboratory all the others. This
_factotum_ did not turn out a success, and a separate young man had to
be engaged for each occupation.
In the November of 1737 died M. Mignot, the husband of Voltaire’s dead
sister Catherine. M. Mignot left behind two slenderly portioned and
unmarried daughters--and behold! the versatile Voltaire in the part of
the paternal uncle, seeking them husbands and furnishing them with
_dots_. He wanted Louise, the elder, to marry the son of his Cirey
neighbour, the stout, good-natured Madame de Champbonin. But Louise, who
was a bouncing young woman of four-and-twenty, with a pronounced love of
pleasure and the sound of her own voice, entirely declined to be buried
alive for the rest of her life in an impossible country neighbourhood:
and expressed these sentiments quite distinctly to Uncle Voltaire. In
practice, as well as principle, he was for freedom of action. In his
day, the father, or the person who stood in place of the father to a
marriageable girl, disposed of her literally without consulting her, and
exactly as it seemed best to himself.
“They are the only family I have,” Voltaire wrote of his nieces rather
sadly. “I should like to become fond of them.... If they marry
_bourgeois_ of Paris I am their very humble servant, but they are lost
to me.” But he had said too that to restrict the liberty of a fellow
creature was a sin against Nature. So on February 25, 1738, Louise
Mignot married a M. Denis, who was in the Commissariat Department in
Paris, and received from Uncle Voltaire a wedding present of thirty
thousand francs.
In March, the young couple came to spend part of their honeymoon at
Cirey. It has already been said that Madame Denis found the country
horribly, abominably, and dismally dull. There was a theatre, to be
sure! But where was one to find actors in this desert? The bride had to
put up with a puppet show, which, indeed, was very good, she added
grudgingly. They were received in “perfect style” too. That must have
been comforting to the soul of a Madame Denis. Uncle Voltaire was
building “a handsome addition to the château”--also comforting perhaps
to the Denisian temperament. The bride added naively that her uncle was
very fond indeed of M. Denis, “which does not astonish me, for he is
very amiable.”
But what an eerie enchanted castle it was amid these tangled forests of
Champagne! Its sorceress--pretty and charming as well as clever, niece
Denis found her--brewed every potion that could keep a lover, humoured
his whims, dressed for him, sang to him, decorated the house to his
fancy and--strange love-philtre!--quoted him “whole passages of the best
philosophers.” The captive was an unconscious captive, but a captive
still. The chains were gold, but there were chains. And even gold chains
chafe and bruise and eat into the flesh at last. The commonplace niece
saw much to which the brilliant Madame and her Voltaire were both as yet
blind. She loudly regretted that her uncle should be lost to his
friends and bound hand and foot by such an attachment. Voltaire and
Émilie parted from the bride and bridegroom, it may be assumed, pretty
cheerfully. They were not only still happy in each other, they had a
prodigious amount of work to get through. And your idle people, not
content with doing nothing themselves, are the surest prevention of work
in others and grudge the industry they will by no means imitate.
In the June of 1738, the second Mademoiselle Mignot was married to a M.
de Fontaine. Voltaire did his duty and gave the bride twenty-five
thousand francs: but he hated weddings and was not to be persuaded to go
to this one, any more than to Madame Denis’s.
Lazy, good-natured Theriot came to stay at Cirey in October, and no
doubt did _his_ idle best to wean his indefatigable host from the
scientific labours to which he was devoted, soul and body. The Cirey
goddess did not care about M. Theriot. If she was not married to
Voltaire she was at least wifely in her failings, and not at all too
disposed to like her lover’s old friends. Voltaire went into the parting
guest’s bedchamber, and under pretence of helping him to pack, slipped
into his box fifty louis. He was a man of substance by now. It is
estimated that at this period his income must have been about three
thousand pounds per annum (English money). Few men who have made wealth
as hardly and thriftily as he did, and are of temperament naturally
shrewd and prudent, have been as generous with it when made. Voltaire
was not only fully alive to the claims of his relatives and to the needs
of his friends, but had a strangely soft spot in his cynic heart for
anyone who was forlorn and poor. It was in 1737 he had written to
Moussinot to go, from him, to a certain Demoiselle d’Amfreville and, for
no better reason than that she was needy and had once had “a sort of
estate” near Cirey, “beg her to accept the loan of ten pistoles, and
when she wants more, I have the honour to be at her service.”
Ever since Voltaire returned from England he had been the most
enthusiastic hero-worshipper of the great Newton and the great Newtonian
system. In England, he had talked with Clarke, the dead Newton’s
successor and friend. The year following his arrival at Cirey he had
devoted himself to science as only a Voltaire understood devotion. At
his side was the woman who was the aptest pupil of Maupertuis and almost
the only other person in France who understood Newtonianism, save
Maupertuis himself, Voltaire, and one Clairaut. The rest of the world
was Cartesian. The philosophy of Descartes was _de rigueur_.
Fontenelle’s “Plurality of Worlds,” which clothed that philosophy with
all the grace and charms of a perfect style, was on the toilet table of
every woman of fashion. The government said Descartes was infallible, so
he _must_ be infallible. With what a passion of zeal those two people
set themselves to seek truth for truth’s sake--to seek truth whether it
agreed with the fashionable belief and the text-books or whether it did
not--to find it, and to give it to the world! To make Newton
intelligible to the French people--to present his theories so that they
would read as delightfully as a romance--to teach his countrymen to
think boldly as Newton had thought--to weigh, to ponder, and consider
whether the popular faiths were the true faiths--to believe
intelligently or to deny, not afraid--that was Voltaire’s aim. “Nothing
enfranchises like education.” “When once a nation begins to think, it is
impossible to stop it.” The French were to be taught to think by the
“Elements of Newton’s Philosophy.” The censor prohibited the work with
its dangerous and terrible anti-Cartesian theories when it appeared. But
in ten years’ time, the Cartesian theories were proscribed in the
schools of Paris and the Newtonian taught everywhere in their stead.
Voltaire hardly ever won a finer victory.
In 1735, there had begun, then, to arrive by that bi-weekly coach from
Paris air-pumps, crucibles, prisms, compasses, almost every kind of
scientific appliance then known. One day the coach brought a practical
young chemist (not a priest)--also purchased by the useful Mouissinot.
Voltaire and Madame were by no means going to be content with reading of
Newton’s experiments. They must try them themselves! One day, with a
good deal of outside help, it may be presumed, they weighed a ton of
red-hot iron. The dark room gave an almost childish pleasure to them
both. Voltaire tried experiments of his own. He was so absorbed in them
that he neglected his correspondence even. For the time being he was the
most scientific scientist who ever breathed--in a fever of interest in
his work, agog to know more, for more time, more power to labour,
longing for a body that never wanted sleep or rest, change or
refreshment. “How will you be the better,” a friend inquired of him,
“for knowing the pathway of light and the gravitation of Saturn?” It was
a stupid question, to be sure, to ask a Voltaire. All knowledge was a
priceless gain, he thought. We must open our souls to all the arts, all
the sciences, all the feelings! Poetry, physics, history, geometry, the
drama--everything. What! to miss knowing what one might have known! to
have a mind only ready for one kind of learning, when it had room in it,
if properly arranged, for every kind! Friend Cideville had mistaken his
man.
The Marquise was no whit less enthusiastic. Voltaire’s own mathematical
education had been neglected. But not hers. The pupil of Maupertuis
could help out her lover’s defects. Metaphysics was her passion. She had
the accuracy of Euclid, Voltaire said, and algebra was her amusement. In
his dedicatory Epistle to the “Elements,” which was the fruit of their
joint labour, he spoke of her in terms which were, at once, high-flown
compliment and hard fact. She _had_ penetrated “the depths of
transcendent geometry” and “alone among us has read and commented on the
great Newton.” She _had_ “made her own by indefatigable labour, truths
which would intimidate most men,” and had “sounded the depths in her
hours of leisure of what the profoundest philosophers study
unremittingly.” She had corrected many faults in the Italian
“Newtonianism for Ladies” written by their visitor Algarotti, and knew a
great deal more about the subject than he did himself. It is not hard to
understand how Voltaire came by what he called his “little system”--that
women are as clever as men, only more amiable. He had Madame du Châtelet
always with him--Madame whose whole aim in life then was to work, and
to please him. Her industry was as great as his own. The word “trouble”
was never in her vocabulary. He loved her intellect if he did not love
her. They should have been happy. If they ever were, it was over the
“Elements of Newton’s Philosophy.”
The book was ready at last. To make the theory of gravitation clear--and
entertaining--had been Voltaire’s chief difficulty. If any man was
adapted to enlighten obscurity, he was that man. His own mind was not
only extraordinarily brilliant, but it was extraordinarily neat. In the
“Elements” sequence follows sequence, and effect, cause, as incisively
as in a proposition of Euclid.
It has been seen that while Voltaire was in Holland in the spring of
1737 he was superintending the printing of these “Elements.” Before
forwarding the last chapters to the printers he sent the whole book for
the inspection of the Chancellor of France, full of hope. “The most
imbecile fanatic, the most envenomed hypocrite can find nothing in it to
object to,” he wrote in his vigorous fashion. Six months passed, and no
answer. And then the French authorities sent a refusal. “It is dangerous
to be right in things in which those in power are wrong,” wrote
Voltaire. Very dangerous. And how unmannerly of this presumptuous
Voltaire to dare to treat the beloved Descartes with cool logic and
relentless scrutiny just as if he were not sealed, signed, and stamped
by the infallible decree of fashion!
But, though it was not permitted, as Voltaire said, to a poor Frenchman
to say that attraction is possible and proved, and vacuum demonstrated,
yet, as usual, the pirate publishers would by no means miss their
chance.
The printers of Amsterdam produced an edition of the work which they
called the “Elements of Newton’s Philosophy Adapted to Every Capacity”
(_Mis à la Portée de Tout le Monde_). Of course there was not wanting to
Voltaire an enemy to say the title should have been written _Mis à la
Porte de Tout le Monde_--shown the door by everybody. The author raged
and fumed not a little over the printers’ blunders and incorrectness.
The usual host of calumnies attacked him again. Society and the gutter
press united in feeling that a person who dared to doubt their darling
Cartesian system _must_ be of shameful birth and the most abandoned
morals. They insulted him with all “the intrepidity of ignorance.” He
was accused of intrigues with persons he had never seen or who had never
existed. The vile licence of that strictly licensed press is the finest
argument for a free press to be found: the freest is less scurrilous
than those much watched and prohibited journals of old France.
Not the less, the storm which heralded its birth thundered the “Elements
of Newton’s Philosophy” into fame. It is forbidden: so we _must_ read
it! If Fontenelle had made the system of Descartes intelligible,
Voltaire made the system of Newton amusing. In 1741, he brought out an
authorised edition. In ten years, as has been said, there were hardly so
many Cartesians in France.
To this same year 1738 belongs a Prize Essay which Voltaire wrote for
the Academy of Sciences on the “Nature and Propagation of Fire.” There
were plenty of foundries near Cirey, where he could make practical
observations on the subject. So he went and observed. Time? The man had
on his hands, to be sure, a lawsuit, a tragedy, a history, an enormous
correspondence, a “Pucelle,” a love affair, an estate, and a couple of
chattering lady visitors who had to be amused in the evenings with
music, with readings, and charades. He had nearly finished writing the
essay when Madame du Châtelet, whose opinions differed from his and who
always had the courage of them, must needs write, in secret, a rival
essay on the same subject.
She began to work on it but a month before it had to be sent in. She
could only write at night, since Voltaire did not know she was doing it.
Her husband--strange confidant!--was the only person in the secret. For
eight nights, she only slept one hour in each. Every now and then she
thrust her hands into iced water to refresh herself, and paced her room
rapidly. The idea possessed her. “I combated almost all Voltaire’s
ideas,” she said herself.
He once very happily defined their connection as “an unalterable
friendship and a taste for study.” It _was_ friendship and would have
been happier for both if no softer feeling had entered it. They were
friends who could intellectually differ and be friends still: who never
sacrificed truth to sentiment, and whose bond of union was not a passion
for each other, but for knowledge.
Both of them sent in their efforts. Madame’s was chiefly remarkable for
the statement that different-coloured rays do not give an equal degree
of heat: since proved indisputably correct by repeated experiments.
Voltaire’s paper, as well as Émilie’s, contained many new ideas. That of
itself was sufficient to disqualify their efforts for the prize. It did
do so. It was divided between three other competitors, who were
correctly orthodox and anti-Newtonian.
Then Madame told her secret, and Voltaire wrote a favourable anonymous
review of that essay which contradicted his own, and should have made
Madame du Châtelet famous in a better way than as his mistress.
Both of them were as disappointed as two children might have been at
their failure. “Our Essays really _were_ the best!” they wrote and told
Maupertuis, almost in so many words. They were, although neither of them
is now worth much as science. Some of their theories have been
superseded; or proved absolutely wrong. But they were wise for their
age, and brilliantly expressed. That may be said, but not much more than
that, for all Voltaire’s scientific works. They were the alphabet of the
language--to teach a scientific childhood to think for itself. It is
because they accomplished that aim to the full that they are forgotten
to-day.