THE ACADEMY, AND A VISIT
Who is it that having climbed to a height does not look on the prospect
that it affords him, and wonder if that prospect be worth the bogs and
the mire, the stones and the boulders, the steep places and the thorns
that lay on the way to it? Voltaire was not given to useless
reflections. Yet it could but occur to his cynic soul that his
friendship with a king’s mistress had gained him a reward that all his
writings and genius could not; just as he had declared in a verse, whose
gay bitterness is Voltaire’s only, that his “Henriade,” his “Zaire,” and
his “Alzire” had not won him a single glance of kingly favour, while for
a “farce of the fair,” “The Princess of Navarre,” honours and fortune
had rained on him. He might well be a cynic.
What use would that coveted chair among the Forty be to him now he had
it? Was it the hall-mark, the sign and seal of talent? That sign and
seal were on every line the man had written. He, who had made by his
works so startling an impression on the human mind that, though he had a
host of enemies, adorers, fearers, none could be indifferent with regard
to him, had surely no need of the cold distinction of an academical
honour. But he thought that it would be valuable as a refuge from
_lettres de cachet_ and official interference. It conferred various
legal privileges. It would be his passport, obtained from red-tapeism,
to be flaunted in the face of it, to show the Voltairian right to say
what a Voltaire pleased. The position further gratified a naïve and very
human vanity. And now I _am_ here I will be so uncommonly active,
lively, and reforming as to drive my thirty-nine solemn, pompous,
formal, conservative, elderly brethren pretty well distracted!
It was _de rigueur_ in the inaugural address to do nothing but praise
Cardinal Richelieu and flatter one’s predecessor in the chair. And up
gets M. de Voltaire and delivers a brilliant discourse on the French
language and French taste--smooth, polished, graceful, and with the grip
of the iron hand felt always through the velvet glove.
“Gentlemen, your founder put into your society all the nobility and
grandeur of his soul: he wished you to be always free and equal.”
“No great things without great trouble.”
“It is precisely, gentlemen, because there is so much wit in France that
there is so little real genius.”
No doubt those thirty-nine literary fogies had some sort of notion what
a daring spirit they had admitted into their prosy body before that
discourse was ended. The artful Voltaire did not forget to introduce
into it dainty compliments to such varied persons as the King of France,
the Empress of Russia, and the Pope; Frederick the Great and Maupertuis
(who spoke and wrote the great French language as if it were their own);
Montesquieu, Fontenelle, and Hénault, who adorned it; and my old
schoolmaster, d’Olivet.
Sympathising and delighting in his genius and success was a certain new
obscure young friend of Voltaire’s, who had just come up to Paris to
seek his fortune, and who was named Marmontel.
“Sine virtute amicitia existere non potest,” says Cicero. If a man may
be judged by the company he keeps, Voltaire’s character should not be
meted a wholly unmerciful sentence. He had too in himself, in an
extraordinary degree, the noble talent of friendship.
Fifty years after his school days he was still writing to Abbé d’Olivet,
in terms of tenderest respect and affection. He began, as has been seen,
his lifelong attachment to his “guardian angel,” d’Argental, at the same
date and place. “I am not like most of our Parisians,” he wrote to
Cideville, “I love my friends better than superfluities; and I prefer a
man of letters to a good cook and two carriage-horses. One always has
enough for others when one knows how to restrict oneself.” He acted on
that principle through life. There must surely have been something more
than commonly lovable in a character which three years earlier than
this, in 1742, had commanded the love and admiration of Vauvenargues,
the young soldier, the splendid thinker--daring spirit and noble mind.
That friendship appealed not in vain to Voltaire on the finest side of
his character, at the very moment when a Court, a king, a Pompadour,
worldly gain, and the bauble of official favour tempted him on his
worst. The pair wrote each other long letters, philosophic, thoughtful,
enlightened. Vauvenargues loved to call Voltaire his “dear master.” And
the master had for the pupil the tender respect, the generous admiration
which a great father might feel for the possibilities of a son whom his
fond hopes love to fancy greater still. The son went the way of all
flesh in 1747, aged thirty-two. He left the world only one work; but
those “Maxims” have been justly said to give the soul of man an impetus
towards truth. They are too little known.
Marmontel was of a different _calibre_. A young, struggling, literary
man in the provinces, he wrote to the chief of his profession, now
sunning in court favour, for his advice. “Come up to Paris,” wrote the
impulsive Voltaire at the end of 1745. He thought letters the noblest of
all professions. To be sure, it was one not merely precarious, but
generally ruinous. But then, to deliver one’s message--to help truth by
speaking it--a Voltaire, if he could, would have encouraged the merest
stutterer to do it, such as Marmontel was not. In the midst of the
preparations for “The Temple of Glory” he had time to obtain the promise
of a post for his _protégé_ from the Comptroller-General of Finance. Up
comes Marmontel to Paris, six louis in his pockets, and a translation.
And the Comptroller-General has fallen out of favour and has no place to
give away! Voltaire broke the news as gently as he could. Perhaps he
looked the while out of his brilliant eyes to see how this new metal
stood the furnace. Marmontel said that Adversity was his oldest
acquaintance and that he was not afraid of her. And M. de Voltaire took
upon himself to provide for him until his talents should make him
independent. A hundred and fifty years ago and in Paris such conduct
does not strike the reader as nearly so generous and Quixotic as if the
same event had occurred in London and to-day. Yet the profession of
letters was very much worse then than it is now. Voltaire had had
unsuccessful literary _protégés_ dependent on him for an unpleasantly
long time before this, it will be remembered. _He_ remembered it, no
doubt. He was more fortunate in the present instance. Taught, advised,
encouraged by Voltaire, Marmontel became the Marmontel of successful
tragedies, of the “Contes Moraux,” of “Bélisaire,” and of the “Memoirs.”
In his hope that his chair at the Academy would afford him a little
peace and rest, Voltaire was at first very much mistaken. His new honour
was a signal for every enemy he had in the world--and he had a great
many--to set upon him. Every envious, snarling cur of the scurrilous
Grub Street of Paris came yelping at the mastiff’s heels. Old Roy
burlesqued and lampooned him; and the thin-skinned poet, who should have
been true enough to his own philosophy to have laughed at such a poor,
miserable, effete old foe, was up and at him in a trice, whipping and
stinging him with verses and epigrams whose rancour still glows and
burns.
Other skits and satires followed. And Voltaire, with authority on his
side for once--to say nothing of Madame de Pompadour--hunted out,
accused, prosecuted the authors in a vehement activity and enthusiasm.
To be sure, on one occasion, in his zeal he had the wrong person
arrested, and had to pay damages in a law court for false imprisonment;
besides promising after the fashion of the time, never to do anything so
naughty again.
These skirmishes lasted for many months; nay, the Travenol case, for
wrongful imprisonment, went on for two or three years. Voltaire came out
of such affairs with neither success nor glory. He was always both too
quick to anger, and too quick to forgive. The latter quality was as much
a snare to him as the former.
By the August of 1746 this energetic courtier had reached the fourth act
of a play written to order for the Dauphine, and entitled “Semiramis.”
The Dauphine died at that juncture; but its author continued “Semiramis”
all the same. He paid a flying visit in September to a very old friend,
the Duchesse du Maine. In October he and Madame du Châtelet came up to
Fontainebleau with the Court, and stayed at Richelieu’s house there,
which he had lent them. Just as she was about to leave Versailles, the
whole of Madame’s servants, except Longchamp, had left her in a body.
Now, as at Cirey, she was a mistress not a little expectant and
inconsiderate, and by fits and starts, if not habitually, mean. The
invaluable Longchamp saved the present situation. He was not sorry when,
at Fontainebleau, he was allowed to renounce a post in which he
sometimes appears to have acted, literally, as the Marquise’s lady’s
maid, for that of secretary to the quick-tempered and kind-hearted M. de
Voltaire.
A new weapon was put into Voltaire’s hands in December wherewith to
defend himself from his enemies, and, having been promised the post for
two years, he was made Gentleman of the Chamber to Louis XV. What an
honour, what a splendid honour, for the author of the “Henriade” and the
“English Letters”--for the man who had already begun to inaugurate a new
era of thought in Europe, and who was to make Voltairism such a power in
the world that it would one day shake Catholicism on her immemorial
foundations! What an honour--what a noble honour! M. de Voltaire did not
meet with at all a warm reception from his brother Gentlemen. Bah! the
creature was but a _bourgeois_. Where were his pedigree and his
letters-patent of nobility? In his books? We do not want any literary
hacks among Us! One youthful Gentleman of the Chamber, noble, but very
uncertain as to his spelling, wrote to his uncle that the appointment of
“ce Voltere” was a “dezoneur” to gentlemen of name and arms, and the
King really should have known better. The naïve youth consulted his
“respequetable oncle” as to whether it would not be best for the Chamber
to refuse to receive “this Person named Arouet.” But at a very early
date this Person named Arouet showed himself more than a match for the
noble young gentleman and all his brethren at once.
Talking of the coming marriage of a lord’s daughter with a
Farmer-General--that synonym for dishonesty and extortion--one of the
Gentlemen inquired where the pair would be married. “At the tax-office,”
suggested someone. “There is no chapel there,” said another. “Pardon me,
gentlemen,” said Voltaire, who hitherto had not spoken a word, “there is
the Chapel of the Impenitent Thief.”
It may be guessed that the Gentlemen of the Chamber at least learnt to
respect a brother with such a killing tongue.
He passed the early months of 1747 busy with his Travenol lawsuit,
taking patent pills which he was always warmly recommending to
Frederick, and “making his court” to Madame de Pompadour. On July 2d he
was congratulating the Minister of War on the French victory of Lawfeld;
which he afterwards celebrated in an epistle, not at all equal to his
“Fontenoy.”
He had now reached the climax of his favour. The Historiographer of
France, the Gentleman of the Chamber, and the favourite of the mistress,
may well have seemed a fixture at Court.
He was not sorry to escape from it on August 14th for a few days’ visit
to the Duchesse du Maine, now at Anet. Voltaire must have altered
greatly since he was first her guest as a promising boy of twenty-one,
two-and-thirty years ago. The promise had become fulfilment. Once, he
had been honoured in being the Duchess’s visitor; now, she was honoured
in being his hostess. She allowed him to bring Madame du Châtelet with
him, because he would by no means have been allowed to come without her.
The Duchess was still the “sublime personage” Voltaire remembered. With
her haughty and imperious temper, her brilliant grace and wit, her
stately courtesy, and her magnificent condescension, she was the living
type of those women who went later to the guillotine, scornful to the
last of the _canaille_ that brought them there--the women who lived so
ill, and died so well. A little deformed was the great Duchess: very
small; fair-haired; loving amusement and hating boredom above everything
in this world and
[Illustration: MARIE LECZINSKA
_From the Picture by Carle Van Loo in the Louvre_]
the world to come; seventy years old, but as appreciative of a Voltaire
as she had been at forty.
With her was Madame de Staal, formerly Mademoiselle de Launay, whom
Voltaire already knew; half maid, half companion, very observant and
with a brilliant, satirical pen, much in use for writing famous Memoirs
and recounting the gossip of the Maine court to Madame du Deffand in
Paris.
There were various other visitors. The Duchess liked society, she said,
because everybody had to listen to her and she had to listen to nobody.
Play-acting was much in vogue. Cleverness was _de rigueur_. To be moral
was unnecessary--but to be a bore, that was not to be dreamt of. It was
upon this court that the erratic Émilie, with her lover and a great
quantity of luggage in her train, descended very late on the evening of
the day before she was expected.
There was a fine fuss, according to the acid, elderly de Staal. The pair
wanted supper. One of the visitors had to give up his bed to Madame du
Châtelet, who complained of it the next morning. She tried two other
rooms, and grumbled at _them_. She was determined, as usual, to carry on
her studies, and required a bedroom where she could have silence, not so
much by night, as by day. She shut herself up there and worked hard at
Newton, joining the other visitors only in the evenings. Sublimely
indifferent to social obligations was the Marquise. The stupid rules
which govern guests in most polite societies she ignored entirely. She
preferred work to tittle-tattling with the other women; so she worked.
There were not enough tables in her room for her papers, her jewels, and
her _pompons_; so she made a foraging expedition round the house and
appropriated six or seven for her use. Anyone with a taste for
occupation, and condemned to polite idleness, will understand and
sympathise with Madame du Châtelet. It is also easy to understand that
the old Duchess, who invited her guests solely to amuse herself, was
offended. And that Voltaire, whose own passion for work kept him shut up
alone almost as much as Émilie, felt it necessary to atone for their
conduct by writing the Duchess lovely, gallant verses, and when he
_did_ appear, by being delightfully amusing and agreeable.
In a few days the company began to rehearse Voltaire’s farce
“Boursouffle,” which had formed the amusement of a Cirey evening nine
years before. Madame du Châtelet took a part and would not submit, wrote
the acrimonious de Staal, to the simplicity of costume it demanded, but
persisted in dressing it like a Court lady.
She and Voltaire had a passage of arms on the point, de Staal added.
“But she is the sovereign, and he the slave”; and of course the slave
had to submit. It is noticeable here, again, that it was the other women
who abused Émilie, and not Émilie the other women. Perhaps her eternal
Newton, at which they sneered, kept her from the meanness and the
backbiting which disfigured their own conduct. Let her sublime
inconsideration for other people’s feelings and her childish fondness
for fine clothes be granted. Those failings were common to most of the
great ladies of the eighteenth century, and, no doubt, to Émilie’s
detractors among them. Her passion for work and her noble intellectual
endowments were her own alone.
“Boursouffle” was an immense success. Voltaire and Madame took leave of
the Duchess on August 25, 1747, the morning after its performance, and
in their usual confusion of bandboxes, chiffons, and papers, left
“Boursouffle” behind them. Madame de Staal, whose temper was perhaps
rendered uncertain by her post of polite maid-of-all-work to all the
Duchess’s guests, received agonised letters from Voltaire imploring her
to send the farce by a safer means than the post, for fear it should be
copied, and to keep the list of characters “under a hundred keys.” He
and Madame were back at Court again--with the sun of kingly favour
shining on them, it seemed, as brightly as ever. Six weeks passed
without any distinguishing events. On October 14, 1747, the Court was at
Fontainebleau, and Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet, its constant
attendants, still staying at the house of the Duke of Richelieu in the
same place.