THE MARQUIS DE SAINT-LAMBERT
One of Madame du Châtelet’s idiosyncrasies was to travel only by night;
and another, to overload the travelling carriage with luggage. She
insisted on having her way in both particulars this time. It has been
aptly said of Voltaire that he was at once patient and hasty. He
certainly must have been patient to take the road with a woman whose
packages frequently numbered a hundred and who could never travel
without her lady’s maid. That he usually lost his temper on such
journeys, is simply to say that he was human.
On the present occasion, as they were nearing Nangis, the hind spring of
the carriage broke, and the overladen vehicle fell over on the side of
Voltaire. Madame du Châtelet, large and bony, the _femme de chambre_
(whose weight and figure history does not record), and a vast quantity
of bandboxes and parcels, came tumbling on the top of him. He relieved
his feelings by uttering “piercing shrieks.” Two footmen, by getting on
the roof of the overturned carriage and dragging their mistress, the
lady’s maid, and the bandboxes up through the doors “as from a well,” at
last released M. de Voltaire in the same manner. It was bitterly cold
and a brilliant starlight night. The two footmen, aided by the
postillions, tried to set the carriage straight again, and failed. One
of the postillions rode on into the next village for further assistance.
And Voltaire and Émilie sat by the roadside on the carriage cushions,
and would have been “perfectly happy” shiveringly studying astronomy, if
they had only had a telescope. They _were_ philosophers, after all.
The carriage was mended at last. But it had not gone fifty paces before
it broke down again. The workmen, who considered Madame had underpaid
them, had to be brought back by force--and promises. At last the
carriage was able to proceed at a walking pace the nine miles to the
Château of Chapelle, where the travellers halted. They reached Cirey
about the middle of January, 1748, without further adventure.
The month they spent there was a gay one. Neither was anxious for too
many _tête-à-têtes_. The honeymoon had set for ever. When they were
alone, each wrote all day; in the evenings they read aloud together or
played trictrac. Émilie had an aggravating habit of keeping her Voltaire
waiting till supper was cold while she finished “a little calculation.”
That her Voltaire, himself orderly and punctual, was extremely _vif_ at
the delay need not be doubted. Madame du Deffand had once said that he
followed Émilie like a faithful dog with the collar round his neck.
Well, the dog was faithful still. But the collar irked and worried him;
and there were times when he snapped at the hand that had put it there.
Madame de Champbonin reappeared on the scene very soon, with a hoydenish
twelve-year-old niece in her train. She had been very warmly invited--if
only to finish that solitude _à deux_. The whole neighbourhood received
invitations presently to act in, or to witness, theatricals. Émilie
wrote charades for the occasion. She played comic parts as well as any
other. Sometimes the servants were pressed into the cast and acted too.
The _bonhomme_ would seem to have been conveniently absent, as usual.
Voltaire doubtless enjoyed the freedom of private life after the slavish
etiquette of the Court. He was certainly able to enjoy theatricals to
his last breath.
About the middle of February he and Madame went to visit another Court,
at Lunéville, where the etiquette was not slavish at all, and where a
king was a great deal more anxious to have them than ever dull Louis had
been.
Stanislas, once King of Poland, had been not a little thankful to
exchange that quarrelsome and much quarrelled over kingdom for the
peaceful little duchy of Lorraine, the tranquil enjoyment of a pipe six
feet long and the _dolce far niente_ of his lazy and easy-going
mistress, Madame de Boufflers. He still had the title of King. He still
had a position--he was the father of Marie Leczinska. His miniature
Court had all the pleasures and intrigues of a greater, with no weary
formalism. Stanislas had his Jesuit, Menou, to rule him just as other
kings had their priests to rule them. The priest fought the mistress for
the command of the royal puppet, in the approved, courtly fashion; and
the mistress fought the priest, when she was not too lazy.
The little Court was further ornamented by a child dwarf, who could
sleep in a _sabot_, and a most beautiful young guardsman, six feet high.
Following the example of Frederick, Stanislas was a feeble author
himself and a very enthusiastic admirer of the literary Voltaire. The
literary Voltaire was not sorry to show the offended Court of France
that he stood well with its offended Queen’s royal father. So the
visitors and the visited were gratified alike.
The visit was a gay one. “Issé” was played; and “Mérope,” when everyone
sobbed just as they had done in Paris. In the evenings they played
lansquenet or talked. It was an agreeable, idle life. Voltaire, ailing
as usual, was humoured and made much of by the King. Émilie overwhelmed
the inert and voluptuous Madame de Boufflers with her energetic
friendship. And then--
The Marquis de Saint-Lambert is one of the most picturesque figures of
his century. Poet and soldier, handsome, haughty and cold, with just
enough disdain in his perfect manner to make every woman adore him and
long to thaw that flawless ice--he had almost every quality which makes
riches superfluous. He was, in fact, nothing but the officer of a
company of Lorraine guards. He was much in Lunéville because he had,
said the world, a fancy for his King’s mistress, Madame de Boufflers.
His own age accounted him celebrated because he wrote the loveliest
drawing-room verses and was the author of a poem called “The
Seasons”--much duller than Thomson’s. The present age only knows him as
the man who robbed Rousseau of Madame d’Houdetot and Voltaire of Madame
du Châtelet.
In 1738, when Madame de Graffigny, who was a friend of his, was at
Cirey, she had corresponded with him. He had much wished to be asked to
stay there. Since he knew how “to read and rest in his own room during
the day” and would only expect to be amused in the evenings, Madame du
Châtelet desired to have him for a visitor. But the plan, probably owing
to the rupture with Madame de Graffigny, had never been carried out.
Madame du Châtelet was now two-and-forty years old, and, on the
unanimous testimony of all her female friends, not at all beautiful. But
that inflammable temperament, which years before had made her fling
honour and prudence to the winds and give her heart and life to
Voltaire, was hers still. Age had not quenched the fire. Abstruse
thought and long devotion to the exact sciences had still left her, on
one side of her nature, passionately a woman. Voltaire had passed
quickly and easily from love to friendship--but not Émilie. Her jealousy
of Frederick the Great was a proof that she loved her lover as he had
long ceased to love her. As early as 1741, in Brussels, after his return
from his second Prussian visit, she had bitterly reproached him with no
longer caring for her. He had replied to her in verses of which the
following give the keynote.
If you want me still to love
Give me back love’s golden morn;
To the twilight of my days
Join, forsooth, love’s happy dawn.
Even the sunrise touches night.
One hour is mine: and is no more.
We pass: the race which follows us,
Another follows: all is o’er.
In the year after he first met her, on the occasion of Richelieu’s
marriage to Mademoiselle de Guise, in April, 1734, he had written:
Love not too much: and so you may
Love alway.
For were it not the better far to be
Friends for eternity
Than lovers for a day?
He had always been honest at least. If he had been still lover indeed,
it might yet never have occurred to him that there could be cause for
jealousy of Émilie of two-and-forty and a young guardsman of
one-and-thirty.
When did that wild passion begin? Did it begin in those idle, early days
of the Lunéville visit, gradually nourished by propinquity, that gay,
easy life, those lovely society verses, and the tantalising fact that
Saint-Lambert was a little bit in love with that stupid, lazy,
self-indulgent de Boufflers? It would have been an irresistible
temptation to Émilie’s cleverness and energy to win away such a man from
such a woman.
But it seems more likely that she had no time for designs, that she fell
head over ears in love madly, recklessly, and at once--with that utter
_abandon_, all foolish and half pathetic, with which an old woman too
often loves a young man. Was it the handsome face and cold manner and
heart that attracted her? The whole eighteenth century found them
attractive. Saint-Lambert had so much, too, of that particularly vague
quality called taste! He liked being amused, though he found it too much
trouble to be amusing himself. And here was one of the cleverest women
of her day, or of any day, who could not be dull if she tried and wanted
nothing better than to entertain him. She was an invigorating change
from the sleepy de Boufflers, at any rate. He was not sorry, too, to
obtain the _cachet_ which would accrue to him for having robbed a
Voltaire.
But whether the passion on both sides was born full-grown, dominant, and
irresistible, or had slower roots in vanity and idleness, matters not.
It was soon an accomplished fact. Madame du Châtelet wrote her
Saint-Lambert the most mad, adoring letters on rose-coloured or sky-blue
notepaper with an edge of lace. She put the letters in Madame de
Boufflers’s harp in the salon. And when everyone had gone to bed, the
young guardsman came and found them there. He replied of course. If he
did not adore, he graciously submitted to be adored. “Come to me as soon
as you are up,” wrote the deluded woman. And sometimes, secretly
creeping round by the thickets of the garden, _she_ would visit _him_.
She hardly thought her conduct required apology. She loved him. That
was enough. Or if it did, well then, for years Voltaire had been but her
friend when he should have been her lover. “I loved for both.” “I had
reason to complain and I forgave all.” She had tried to be satisfied
with friendship: but she could not. She wrote thus to d’Argental in a
letter not devoid of genuine feeling and even of pathos. She _had_ some
excuse. But she made the common mistake of thinking that an excuse and a
justification are the same thing.
The Abbé Voisenon has recorded how once Madame du Châtelet, after, it
may be guessed, a quarrel with Voltaire, spoke of herself as entirely
alienated from him. The Abbé took down one of the eight volumes of
Voltaire’s manuscript letters to her and read some aloud. All his love
letters contained, says the Abbé, more epigrams against religion than
madrigals for his mistress. But when the reader stopped, Émilie’s eyes
were wet. She was not cured yet. A few years later, in 1749, her
priestly friend tried the same experiment. She listened unmoved. She was
cured indeed: and the doctor had been Saint-Lambert.
The Lunéville visit lasted from about February, 1748, until the end of
April. Then Madame du Châtelet left the Court, and returned to Cirey,
where she and Saint-Lambert may have spent a few blissful, uninterrupted
days together. Voltaire prolonged his visit to Stanislas a short time.
By May 15th he and Madame du Châtelet were both once more at Cirey _en
route_ for Paris.
During her stay at Lunéville the energetic Marquise had not only found a
lover, but obtained for her _bonhomme_ the lucrative post of the Grand
Marshal of the Household to Stanislas, and a commission in the army for
her son.
But her thoughts were not with husband, son, or friend (as, she still
called her Voltaire), but with M. de Saint-Lambert. Wherever she was she
wrote to him continually--letters filled with passion, _abandon_,
tenderness, bitterness, doubt. He had purposed taking a journey in
Italy, but renounced it at her pleading. She thanked him with the
melancholy effusion and the humiliating gratitude of the woman who has
obtained from her master a sacrifice she knows to be unwilling. She and
her unsuspecting Voltaire came up to Paris. If she spent her time
writing to her lover, Voltaire spent his in superintending the
rehearsals of his new tragedy “Semiramis.” One day his versatility
appeared in a new character, and he wrote a prologue for his “Death of
Cæsar” for a girls’ school that proposed to act it. It is characteristic
of the man that he adapted himself to this entirely new _rôle_ with the
most perfect flexibility and thoroughness. The prologue’s chief
characteristics are its “ease and orthodoxy.” He wrote it leaning on a
mantelpiece, on the spur of the moment. He included a charming little
letter to the Sister Superior and even begged the prayers of that good
lady on his behalf!
On June 28th he and Madame du Châtelet left Paris for Commercy, another
seat of Stanislas, where that King then was.
Voltaire was ill and miserable and Madame a more impossible travelling
companion than ever. On their route, at Châlons-sur-Marne, she must
needs engage in the most vociferous, fatiguing dispute with the landlady
of an inn over a basin of soup.
Commercy was as gay as Lunéville. There were the inevitable operas and
comedies, and on July 14th Providence kindly arranged a total eclipse of
the sun to further amuse the little Court. One of its number had
astronomised ever so many years ago at Sceaux and at Villars: and had
not forgotten those times.
On August 26th he returned to Paris, leaving Madame du Châtelet behind
him. She did not complain of his neglect this time. King Stanislas also
came up to Paris to stay for a few days with his daughter, the Queen.
Voltaire arrived in the capital on the very day of the production of
“Semiramis”--probably August 29, 1748.
There had long been forming a cabal against the piece, headed by enemy
Piron and joined by most of the adherents of that dismal old playwright
Crébillon, who had himself written a clumsy “Semiramis” in 1717. Well,
conspiracy for conspiracy. What weapons you use against me, I have the
right to use against you. That was Voltaire’s theory now as ever. He met
cunning with cunning. He bought up half the seats in the house. He gave
them to persons who could be absolutely relied upon to clap and cry at
the right moments, and to drown all hisses with applause. Theriot helped
him. The d’Argental husband and wife had been already active on his
behalf. Voltaire too had boldly asked the patronage of King Louis and
Madame de Pompadour, and the King, in consideration of the piece having
been originally written for the late Dauphine, agreed to pay the
expenses of putting it on the stage. If the play but once had a hearing
Voltaire believed that no conspiracy could damn it.
The little scheme succeeded fairly well. M. de Voltaire’s friends wept
and applauded to perfection. But the first three acts were received by
the audience as a whole with only a very moderate warmth. And in the
fourth, the play was nearly ruined. It was then the custom in France for
the spectators to sit and walk about on the stage. During this fourth
act, at a scene at the tomb of Ninus, there were so many of them, that
the too enthusiastic player who took the part of the sentinel and was
guarding the tomb, called out: “Make way for the ghost, if you please,
gentlemen. Make way for the ghost!” which set the house in a roar. The
playwright, to be sure, had no reason to find the incident amusing. He
complained to the Lieutenant of Police, and in future performances of
“Semiramis” the abuse was corrected.
That first night, then, was by no means so decidedly successful as its
author had hoped.
On the second night, August 30th, M. de Voltaire, wanting to hear what
his friends as well as his enemies said of the piece behind his back,
disguised himself and went to the famous Café Procope, opposite the
Comédie Française, and largely frequented by literary and theatrical
people. He had been an amateur actor to some purpose, and understood the
art of make-up as well as any professional on the boards. With cassock
and bands, an old three-cornered hat, and an immense full-bottom
unpowdered wig that showed hardly anything of his face except the sharp
end of his long, pointed nose, he looked the part of an abbé to
perfection. He put a breviary under his arm; arrived at the _café_;
possessed himself of a newspaper; chose a dark corner; put on his
spectacles, and read the paper over a modest repast of a cup of tea and
a roll. The _café_ filled presently--journalists, actors, some of the
partisans of Crébillon and some of Voltaire--all fresh from the play and
all anxious to air their views thereon. That sensitive, thin-skinned,
long-nosed abbé in the corner had to exercise all his self-control to
keep himself from contradicting an enemy who criticised unjustly, or a
friend who praised foolishly. But he did it. The _rôle_ pleased his
sense of humour. And one or two of his critics quoted some of his fine
passages not amiss. He sat there for an hour and a half, keenly
attentive to the conversation. The result as a whole was not
unsatisfactory. The play would do.
It ran for fifteen nights in succession. When a month or so later a vile
parody appeared on it, Voltaire, supported by her father’s friendship,
begged Marie Leczinska to suppress that parody. But the Queen,
remembering Voltaire not as the man whose “Indiscret” and “Mariamne” had
charmed her youth, but as the imprudent friend of Madame de Pompadour,
coldly declined to interfere. The Pompadour herself could do little. But
the parody did not much harm the original after all. On October 24,
1784, “Semiramis” was performed at Fontainebleau and well received. The
play is still of interest to English people--not for itself, but for the
“Advertisement” which precedes it: and which contains the most famous
and the most adverse criticism upon Shakespeare in the world. He was “a
drunken savage”; and “Hamlet” “a coarse and barbarous piece which would
not be endured by the dregs of the people in France or Italy.” In his
head “Nature delighted to bring together the noblest imagination with
the heaviest grossness.” This was Voltaire’s most remarkable word on the
great Englishman. But it was not his last.
Before “Semiramis” was performed at Court Voltaire had returned to
Lunéville. The excitements of Paris had been too much for him. From
being always ailing, he was now really ill. Longchamp was his travelling
companion. By the time they reached that unlucky Châlons, on September
12th, Voltaire was in a high fever and compelled to take to his bed in a
wretched post-house. Longchamp, seeing that his condition was critical
(Voltaire never gave in to illness until he could neither stand nor
speak), told the bishop and intendant of the place. They hastened to the
patient and offered him hospitality, which he declined; and then they
sent him a doctor. He listened to the professional advice very
patiently. Long ago, at Cirey, Madame de Graffigny had noted his good
humour and politeness in sickness: and recorded how he was grateful even
for advice and prayers! His gratitude for advice fortunately did not
extend to following it. On the present occasion he heard meekly and
replied laconically when he was told he must be bled and swallow various
violent and nauseous mixtures. But he was not bled and he did not take
the medicines. Temperance and exercise in health, and abstinence and
rest in illness, were the main principles of the system which he
followed all his life. That with a wretched constitution and a fatal
habit of taking too little sleep and doing far too much brain-work, he
lived to be eighty-four at a period when the threescore years and ten of
the Psalmist were accounted very old age, is a proof that his _régime_
was not wholly a mistaken one.
On the present occasion he was so ill that he thought himself dying. But
he still read and still dictated letters to Longchamp; though he was so
weak he could only sign himself “V.” After a few days on a self-imposed
diet of tea, toast, and barleywater, the fever left him. He was far too
feeble to stand. But he made Longchamp wrap him up in his dressing-gown
and carry him into the post-chaise, in which they proceeded towards
Lunéville. He was still so ill that he travelled thirty miles without
uttering a single word. Before this, unknown to him, Longchamp, who was
very sincerely attached to him, had written to tell Madame du Châtelet
and Madame Denis of his condition. Once, Émilie would have hastened to
him, and half killed him with her vigorous, overwhelming affection and
attentions. It was as well for his health that she was quite engrossed
with her lover at Lunéville and simply sent a courier with a message.
That message cheered the sick man a little. If he was but her friend, he
was her very faithful friend. And friendship meant much more to Voltaire
than to most people.
He was better by the time he reached Lunéville. The urgent desire to get
well as soon as possible, on that old principle that illness was a kind
of degradation, may have helped his recovery.
Madame du Châtelet insisted upon his being cheerful because she felt so
herself. He was soon fairly well again, and that miserable journey faded
into a bad dream.
In the early part of the October of 1748, Stanislas, and his little
Court with him, moved again to Commercy. The guilty loves of Madame du
Châtelet and Saint-Lambert were still not even suspected by Voltaire.
The guardsman, who soon resigned his commission to become Grand Master
of Stanislas’s Royal Wardrobe, seems to have been not a little
embarrassed by the vehemence of Émilie’s passion. But in exact
proportion as he was cold, she was ardent. His letters to her have not
survived; but from hers to him it is evident that while she was
imprudent, headlong, and reckless, he was at least cool enough to see
danger and discourage the maddest of her schemes.
The discovery of their secret was of course only a matter of time. One
night early in that October of 1748 at Commercy, Voltaire walked into
Madame du Châtelet’s apartments, unannounced as his habit was, and there
in a little room at the end of the suite, lighted by only one candle, he
found the handsome young soldier and his clever, foolish, elderly
mistress “talking upon something besides poetry and philosophy.”