THE DEATH OF MADAME DU CHÂTELET
If the invasion of Silesia by King Anti-Machiavelli-Frederick-the-Great
had given Voltaire a moral shock difficult to recover from, he
experienced a shock far greater in degree and kind now.
He had been slow to see anything. But when he did see, he saw all. He
broke into the most passionate and violent reproaches. The lofty
Saint-Lambert responded that no one had the right to criticise _his_
conduct, and that if M. de Voltaire did not like it, he had better leave
the château. The remark irritated Voltaire to a frenzy. Émilie stood by,
nonplussed for once in her life, not at all ashamed, but in very
considerable difficulty. One can fancy the half dark study, the
abominably aggravating coolness of Saint-Lambert, and the inarticulate
fury of Voltaire. He flung himself out of the room in one of the
greatest passions of his life. He called Longchamp, said that he must
beg, borrow, or steal a post-chaise, and make ready to start for Paris
that very night. The artful valet went straight to Madame du Châtelet
for an explanation. “No post-chaise is to be found on any
consideration,” said Émilie. An outcry would ruin her reputation. (It is
inconceivable, but true, that Madame du Châtelet considered her
reputation as yet immaculate.) At two o’clock in the morning Longchamp
came to his master’s rooms and announced that a post-chaise was an
impossibility. Then ride to Nancy at daybreak and get one! M. de
Voltaire’s passion had not yet spent its force. He went to bed. And
Longchamp crept down again to Madame du Châtelet. That marvellous woman
was writing at her desk, and announced the extraordinary intention of
going to see M. de Voltaire herself, then and there, and bring him to
reason.
She did it. She took a seat on the end of his bed. She spoke to him in
English, that old language of their quarrels and love, and by a tender
name, long disused. Longchamp lit a couple of candles and retired--to
listen to the conversation through the wall. It was the most marvellous
conversation in the world. They spoke in French now. Émilie tried to
excuse herself--somehow. The lean, furious, exhausted, unhappy man in
bed started up.
“Believe you!” he cried. “Now! I have sacrificed health and fortune for
you, and you have deceived me.”
And Émilie proceeded to explain with a perfect plainness of speech that
Voltaire had long ceased to love her as a lover, and that since she
_must_ love someone, he should be pleased that her choice had fallen on
a mutual friend, like M. de Saint-Lambert.
How the piercing eyes in the thin face on the pillow must have looked
her through and through! Voltaire answered with a very fine irony:
“Madame, you are always right; but if things must be so, do not let me
see them.”
Before she left him, she embraced him. She had succeeded in her aim so
far that he was calmer.
The rest of the night the energetic woman spent in appeasing
Saint-Lambert, who considered Voltaire had insulted him.
Voltaire was ill in bed the next day. It must be allowed he had an
excuse for illness this time. And behold, as the evening drew in, the
young Marquis comes in person to make inquiries after the invalid’s
health, and the invalid admits him. Saint-Lambert makes very handsome
apologies for the hasty words which had escaped him in a moment of
agitation. Voltaire takes him by both hands and embraces him. “_Mon
enfant_, I have forgotten all. It was I who was wrong. You are at the
happy age of love and pleasure. Make the most of both.”
The very next day the three met at supper at Madame de Boufflers’s, and
all enjoyed themselves immensely. All idea of the post-chaise and Paris
was dismissed. Did Voltaire recall that gay episode of his youth when
he and de Génonville had shared the smiles of Mademoiselle de Livri?
In 1749, he actually wrote Saint-Lambert a beautiful gallant poem on the
event which had for the time being so much disturbed his peace:
Saint-Lambert, it is all for thee
The flower grows:
The rose’s thorns are but for me:
For thee, the rose--
and went on to say in flowing couplets how the “astronomic, Émilie” had
renounced mathematics and inky fingers for those “beautiful airs which
Love repeats and Newton never knew.”
By October 17th, the ex-lover, the lover, and the mistress had returned
to Lunéville with Stanislas’s Court (of which Voltaire justly complained
as being “a little ambulant”) on terms of perfect amity. The whole
episode had occupied only a few days. And presently Voltaire was once
more engrossed heart and soul in his “History of Louis XV.”
The explanation of his conduct lies, as ever, in character.
He was angry at first because he had an uncommonly quick temper and a
great provocation. But he was always a philosopher as he grew calmer. It
was a very bad world. That was his lifelong conviction. So much the more
reason to make the best of it! He had lost a selfish, irritating, and
exigeante mistress. But there was no reason why he should not keep a
clever woman for a friend. Émilie had, after all, but acted on a
principle which was his as well as hers; that, in the relation of the
sexes, when duty ceases to be a pleasure, it ceases to be a duty also.
(It is but just to Voltaire and to Madame du Châtelet to say that they
did not carry this remarkable theory, not yet out of vogue, into any
other department of morals.)
The age looked upon such irregularities simply as subjects for a jest or
an epigram. And every man sees in some degree with the eyes of the time
in which he lives.
So Voltaire wrote “Louis XV.” The pain passed, as sharp pains are apt to
do, quickly. He and Madame du Châtelet, unaccompanied by Saint-Lambert,
left Lunéville for Cirey about December 20, 1748. The journey was very
like a hundred they had made in old times. At that fatal Châlons, Émilie
_would_ call on the bishop and keep the post-horses waiting the whole
day while she played cards, and Voltaire lost his temper with her just
as if he had been her lover still. Once at Cirey, he was engrossed in
hard work, and she wrote a preface to her Newton when she was not
writing love letters to Saint-Lambert. Her infidelity would hardly have
altered the course of her life were it not for that rigorous law that
“every sin creates its own punishment.”
The events that followed are such as are best passed over in the fewest
words possible. In this December of 1748 at Cirey, Madame du Châtelet
found that she was again to be a mother. Saint-Lambert was summoned. He,
Voltaire, and the unhappy woman consulted together on what course they
would take. Émilie was in tears at first; and they all ended in
laughter. They decided on a daring comedy. The Marquis--that simple
_bonhomme_--was summoned home, fêted, caressed--and deceived. It is
sufficient to say that he was delighted with his wife’s prospects, and
thought he had reason to be so delighted. He left Cirey, spreading the
good news abroad. And Madame du Châtelet complacently considered that
her reputation was saved.
Nothing damns the eighteenth century deeper than the fact that this
loathsome story was its darling anecdote; and that his criminal
connection with Madame du Châtelet, and the sinister events which were
its consequence, made Saint-Lambert the very height of fashion. Every
memoir of the period has the tale in detail. Longchamp gloats over it.
The fine ladies of Paris made _mots_ upon it, of which in our day a
decent bargee would be ashamed. If the French Revolution immolated some
of the very persons who brought it about, was the injustice so gross? A
Voltaire shared the vices of the social conditions he condemned, and was
himself in some sort a part of that system which set itself above
decency and duty and which he knew to be fatal to the good of mankind.
He came out of this unclean comedy less smirched than the other actors
therein. But that is to say very little. To be a part of it at all was
defilement enough.
By February 17th of the new year 1749 Voltaire and Émilie were installed
in the Rue Traversière-Saint-Honoré in Paris.
The _bonhomme_ had rejoined his regiment. Saint-Lambert was in
attendance at Lunéville.
Voltaire had written a “Panegyric of Louis XV.” which was to be recited
to his Majesty by Richelieu when the Academy went in a body on February
21st to offer their congratulations to the King upon the establishment
of peace. But, as so often happened with Voltaire’s writings, the thing
had become public too soon. Friend Richelieu, enraged at hearing his
recitation being murmured and quoted by the courtiers about him, would
not recite it at all. Voltaire was not present on the occasion. When he
heard what Richelieu had done, he flung his old friend’s portrait into
the fire in a rage.
March 10th saw a brief revival of “Semiramis”: but all the same it was
the fashion just now to prefer Crébillon and his “Catilina.”
On May 27th, Voltaire obtained the privilege of selling his useless post
of Gentleman-in-Ordinary, while he was allowed to retain its title. But
privilege or no privilege, he did not stand well at Court. King
Stanislas had written a work called the “Christian Philosopher”: in
which his good daughter, Queen Marie Leczinska, saw, disapprovingly, the
freethinking influence of Voltaire. He still courted Madame de
Pompadour; but no Pompadour ever yet imperilled her own position for any
friend in the world.
Another king and court were, indeed, particularly anxious that Voltaire
should return to them, but Voltaire refused Frederick’s invitation
firmly. He _was_ really ill, as he said. But there was another reason.
He had resolved not to leave Madame du Châtelet until the dark hour that
was coming upon her had passed.
They fell, even in Paris, into their old habit of hard work. Émilie
worked to kill thought, to stifle a dreadful foreboding which was with
her always. She studied mathematics with Clairaut, who had once visited
Cirey and was “one of the best geometricians in the universe.” She shut
herself up with him for hours and hours, resolving problems. She plunged
into all kinds of gaiety. Her letters to Saint-Lambert are the letters
of a very unhappy woman--tortured with jealousy and doubts, _exigeante_,
fearful, unquiet. He was true to her--and cold. She tried to thaw his
ice at the fire of her own passion. “I do not even love Newton,” she
wrote; “only you. But it is a point of honour with me to finish my
work.”
One day, she and Clairaut were so engrossed in their labours, that
Voltaire, whose philosophy never could endure being kept waiting for
meals, bounded up from the supper-table, ran upstairs “four steps at a
time,” found the door locked, and smashed it in with his foot in a rage.
“Are you in league to kill me?” he cried as he went down again, followed
by the too-zealous mathematicians, who had the grace to be ashamed of
themselves. There was a very cross, silent supper _à trois_. The next
morning Madame du Châtelet, feeling she owed her friend a reparation,
suggested that she should take her morning coffee in his rooms. She did
so, out of a priceless porcelain cup and saucer, which Voltaire, whose
temper was still rather irritable, broke by a clumsy movement. Madame
reproached him sharply. He retaliated. He grumbled a good deal at the
exorbitant sum he had to pay to replace the _bric-à-brac_. Both he and
Émilie were at the end of their tether. Yet they were good to each
other. Émilie felt she owed Voltaire much for his pardon, and his
reasonableness. And Voltaire never appears even to have thought that her
faithlessness as his mistress could exonerate him from fidelity to her
as his friend. He knew that she was unhappy. Compassion was in his
nature. It is that quality which made him to the last hour of his life,
in spite of his gibes and cynicisms, something more than commonly
lovable.
In April, Stanislas had come up for a fortnight to the French Court. The
unhappy Marquise had then been able to make arrangements for a future
sojourn at Lunéville, of great importance to her: and of which she
wrote, eagerly and feverishly, to Saint-Lambert.
Voltaire was now writing a play, “Nanine”--founded on Richardson’s
“Pamela.” When it was produced on June 16, 1749, he had followed his old
plan of filling the house as much as possible with his friends. There
were a few spectators in the gallery, however, who would talk aloud. The
nervous and sensitive author could by no means endure _that_. Up he got
on to his feet. “Silence, you boors, silence!” he cried; and silent they
were. Whenever he saw his own plays he found it impossible to contain
himself. He not only trained the actors beforehand; but he must lead the
laughter and the tears of the _parterre_ at the performance. And, to be
sure, if there is anyone who should know where a play is pathetic and
where it is comic, it is the man who wrote it.
He and Émilie were in Paris from February until the end of June.
Frederick repeated his invitation warmly. “You are not a _sage-femme_
after all,” he wrote to Voltaire scornfully, “and Madame will get on
very well without you.” Any sarcasm penetrated Voltaire’s thin skin. But
he replied gravely, “Not even Frederick the Great can now prevent me
fulfilling a duty I believe to be indispensable. I am neither doctor nor
nurse, but I am a friend and will not leave, even for your Majesty, a
woman who may die in September.”
He was true to his word. Late in June, while “Nanine” was still running,
he and Madame du Châtelet went to Cirey at her urgent desire. When they
were there, the most versatile of human creatures, the author of the
“Pucelle” and the prim prologue for a girls’ school, wrote at her
request a eulogy of Saint-Louis, and a very good eulogy too, for an abbé
who had to deliver one before the Academy and could by no means compose
it himself.
It was at Émilie’s desire, too, that they left Cirey, after only a
fortnight’s stay there--“these delightful rooms, books and liberty, to
go and play at comets” at Lunéville. A few days at Commercy had preceded
their stay at Lunéville, which they reached on July 21, 1749. It was
there that Madame would find Saint-Lambert. It was there that the event
which she dreaded more every day was to take place. Voltaire was not
only sick to death of that wearisome mockery of astronomy with which
Stanislas’s little Court was still amusing itself, but was further
annoyed by being very uncomfortable and ill-attended to in his rooms, in
which he shut himself up as much as he could. He bore the
discomfort--not at all in silence indeed--but he bore it.
A quarrel on the subject with Alliot, who was commissioner-general of
the household of Stanislas, and a very economical commissioner too,
burst out on August 29th, and Voltaire relieved his feelings in some
_vif_ little notes: one of which he addressed to the King himself, and
besought his Majesty to remedy the defects in the meals, lighting, and
firing supplied to his guest. Émilie, who had so urgent a reason for
remaining at Lunéville, did her clever best to soothe her _ami_. He was
soothed apparently.
Meanwhile the little Court went its usual way. Madame de Boufflers was
her smiling, easy self--that _dame de volupté_ “who,” as she said in her
epitaph, “for greater security, made her Paradise in this world.” There
were also the austerer, priestly influences trying to gain Stanislas.
Poetry was a fashion among the guests and the courtiers, as also the
inevitable play-acting. Saint-Lambert was still at work on that lengthy
poem, “The Seasons.” The summer was waning. Émilie plunged into every
excess of gaiety, and every excess of work. She forgot that she was
three-and-forty, not three-and-twenty. To forget everything--that was
her aim--to have no time to think of past or future. His duties often
called Saint-Lambert away to Nancy, and when he was absent the wretched
woman endured torments of loneliness, helplessness, and foreboding. He
reassured her when he was there. He was always so calm! As September
drew near she sent for Mademoiselle du Thil from Paris, that ill-advised
friend of hers, once her lady-companion, who on one memorable occasion
had lent her money--to lose at the Queen’s table. The _bonhomme_
appeared on the scene. Voltaire was writing constant letters to his
friends, anticipating the coming event gaily. Madame had a herculean
constitution. All would be well! She was still constantly at her desk.
She employed many hours in doing up her manuscripts and letters in
parcels, and giving Longchamp directions as to the persons who were to
receive them--if--if----. It was a point of honour with her, as she had
said, to finish Newton. On August 30, 1749, she wrote her last letter to
Saint-Lambert. “I am wretched to a degree which would frighten me if I
believed in presentiments,” she said.
On September 4th, Voltaire was writing delightedly to announce the birth
of a little girl and the well-being of the mother. The infant was sent
straight into the village to be nursed, and in the stress of the painful
events which followed, died almost unnoticed. Madame du Châtelet
progressed favourably. The little Court was in the highest spirits and
spent most of its time in her room. On September 9th, the weather being
exceedingly hot, the patient asked for an iced drink. It was given her
and she was seized with convulsions.
Stanislas’s physician hastened to her and for the moment she seemed
better. The next day, September 10th, the convulsions returned: and two
doctors from Nancy were called in. The Marquise again appeared better.
In the evening Voltaire and the Marquis du Châtelet went down to supper
with Madame de Boufflers--still not the least anticipating any danger.
Longchamp, Saint-Lambert, and Mademoiselle du Thil were left in the room
with the sick woman. Eight or ten minutes later, they heard a rattle in
her throat. They did what they could. Mademoiselle hastened downstairs
to tell Voltaire and the Marquis. The horrified supper-party hurried to
the bedroom and a scene of dreadful confusion ensued. Madame du Châtelet
was already quite unconscious. No one had time to think “of priest, of
Jesuit, or of Sacrament.” But the Marquise was past their help. “She
knew none of the horrors of death,” wrote Voltaire. “It was her friends
who felt those.”
His own anguish of spirit, when the dreadful truth was borne in upon
him, rendered him beside himself. He and Saint-Lambert remained by the
bed awhile. And then Voltaire, who had loved his mistress longer and
better than his supplanter, dragged himself away, blind and dull with
misery. He stumbled at the foot of the staircase without, and when
Saint-Lambert, who had followed, would have helped him, Voltaire turned
upon him with a bitter reproach. Its terms are so unrepeatable that the
eighteenth century repeated them _ad nauseam_: and the twentieth may as
well forget them if it can.
The brief remainder of that fatal day Voltaire spent in writing the
bitter news to his friends.
If any proof be needed of the vehemence and sincerity of his feeling for
the dead woman, those letters give it.
The next day Madame de Boufflers took from the Marquise’s ring a
portrait of Saint-Lambert and bade Longchamp give the ring to the
Marquis du Châtelet. A little later Voltaire asked Longchamp for the
ring in question. Thirteen years before, he had given Émilie his own
portrait for it, with these lines,
Bavier ’graved this likeness for you.
Recognise it, and his art.
As for me, a greater Master
Has engraved you--on my heart.
His portrait had displaced one of the Duke of Richelieu’s--and now his,
in its turn, had made way for Saint-Lambert’s.
Voltaire might well turn away saying that all women are alike; and
trying to comfort himself with the antique and barren reflection that,
after all, it was the way of the world.
Among Madame du Châtelet’s effects was a large parcel of letters. She
left a memorandum to beg her complaisant husband to burn them unread.
“They can be of no use to him and have nothing to do with his affairs.”
He did so, on his brother’s prudent advice. But Longchamp observed him
make a very wry face at certain ones of which, being uppermost, he
caught sight. The cautious valet rescued from the flames the whole of
Voltaire’s “Treatise on Metaphysics” and some letters, afterwards also
burnt. Among the destroyed manuscripts were historical notes of
Voltaire’s, of which he deplores the loss in his preface to his “Essay
on the Manners and Mind of Nations.” It has been thought, but it is not
certain, that the whole of his eight volumes of letters to Madame du
Châtelet also perished in this conflagration. If they did not, a new
Voltaire, a new world, rich in human interest, as no doubt in wit and
philosophy, still remains to be discovered by some literary Columbus. At
present, of all the letters he wrote to her, the human being with whom
he was most intimate and who shared the deepest secrets of his soul and
the highest aspirations of his genius, there can be found but one gay
little note.
Madame du Châtelet was buried with all honour at Lunéville. Paris had
already flayed her dead body with epigrams. She had not been too immoral
for its taste. That was impossible. But she had been far too clever. One
indignant person said that it was to be hoped the cause of her death
would be the last of her airs. “To die in childbed at her age is to wish
to make oneself peculiar: it is to pretend to do nothing like other
people.” Frederick the Great wrote her epitaph. “Here lies she who lost
her life in giving birth to an unfortunate infant and a treatise on
philosophy.” Maupertuis and Marmontel spoke of her in terms of warm
admiration. And Voltaire prefixed to her translation of Newton,
published in 1754, at once the kindest and the truest estimate of her
character yet made.
Madame du Châtelet was intellectually a very great woman. She had a mind
essentially clear and logical--the mind of a clever man. She had not
only a passion for learning rare in her sex, but for exactly the kind of
learning in which her sex generally fails. She had, too, an intellectual
fairness strangely unfeminine. She was long the champion of Leibnitz
against Newton; and then, convinced of her mistake, acknowledged it, and
made it the business of her life to prove it and to translate and
explain Newton for the benefit of the French people. In an age busily
idle, she was distinguished by a noble and untiring industry. In an age
of scandal, she was charitable. For all those terrible fine clothes and
that passion for high play and taking youthful parts in amateur
theatricals, the laugh of the de Staals and the du Deffands at her
expense turns against them now.
Still preserved among her letters are her “Reflections on Happiness.”
She plainly avows there that “rational self-indulgence” was her idea of
it. Upon that rock her barque split. She chose pleasure before duty and
gained a faithless Richelieu, fifteen jealous, feverish years with
Voltaire, and a wretchedness from the cool love of the lofty
Saint-Lambert, of which every letter she wrote him is proof.
Out of the picture painted by Loir there still looks down the shrewd,
smiling face--reflective eyes, clever forehead, mobile lips, drooping
nose--of the woman who was at once Voltaire’s curse and blessing--who,
if she had been all good might have been his blessing only, and if she
had been all bad would have been curse alone. At the Revolution, some
wretches broke open her coffin to steal the lead.
There had been gold in her heart once, but the world and the flesh had
overlaid it in dross.