THE QUARREL WITH MAUPERTUIS
In December, 1751, there appeared in Berlin, in two volumes octavo and
anonymously, “The Century of Louis XIV.” by Voltaire.
The earliest idea of it was conceived by a wild Arouet of twenty
listening to personal recollections of the Sun King from the old Marquis
de Saint-Ange at Fontainebleau.
Arouet had heard with his own ears the strange tales told in Paris at
that monarch’s death. In 1719, when he was five-and-twenty and falling
in brief love with the exquisite Maréchale de Villars, her husband
recounted him more anecdotes of that magnificent and miserable age. To
write it had been a relief from Émilie’s shrewish tongue and
inconvenient emotions, at Cirey. It was Voltaire’s “chief employment” in
that first lonely summer there, before she joined him. He worked hard at
it in Brussels. He found in it consolation for his mistress’s
infidelity: and for her death. It involved him in an enormous amount of
reading, and unparalleled labours in research. Since he came to Prussia,
he hardly wrote a letter without alluding to it. He found in it balm for
the wounds inflicted by a d’Arnaud, a Hirsch, and a king. As it drew
nearer completion, his interest and excitement in it deepened daily. “I
am absorbed in Louis XIV.” “I shall be the Historiographer of France in
spite of envy.” Before the author had finished reading the proofs, a
pirated edition of his work appeared in Holland and elsewhere. There was
the usual scramble among the publishers for the profits. Voltaire
appealed to Frederick; and wrote to Falkener, in English, trying,
through him, to get a correct edition circulated in England. His
efforts were astonishingly fruitless. An author had then not only no
right to the moneys his brain had earned, but was not even allowed the
privilege of correcting the work of that brain: and the more famous the
author the worse his chances in both respects. No anonymity could
conceal a Voltaire.
Boyer prohibited “The Century of Louis XIV.” in France, and its
circulation in that country was enormous. The first authorised edition
printed in Berlin was sold out in a few days. Eight new editions
appeared in eight months. In those times, when to be educated was a rich
man’s privilege and not a pauper’s right, such a success was unique.
That it was deserved is proved by the fact that this is still the most
famous history of that reign.
Voltaire had written it, as he always wrote, as a free man. But this
time he had written, as he did not always write, as a free man who has
no desire to offend the prejudices of the slave-dealers. He himself
loved the glitter of that Golden Age: its burning and shining lights of
literary genius, and the glory it gave to France. So far as he could be
true and tactful, he was tactful. He did not run amok at abuses with
that “strident laugh” which has been said to fill the eighteenth
century, as he had run amok at them in that “Voice of the Sage and the
People”--and in a hundred of his writings a thousand times before. When
he wrote the latter part of the book in Prussia, it was in his mind
always that he might some day--one day--soon--who could tell?--be not
sorry to come back to France. If he could still tell the truth and not
offend the authorities! If any man could have done it, that man was
Voltaire. There is no writer in the world who so well knows, if he
chooses, how to put blame as if it were praise, to turn censure into a
dainty compliment, and to trick out harsh realities in a charming dress.
But now, as too often before, his reputation damned him in advance.
Besides, did he not give the place of, and the witnesses to, that secret
marriage of Louis XIV. and Madame de Maintenon? How imprudent! Some
patriots “raised a noble clamour” against him for having praised
Marlborough and Eugene, and a great party of churchmen condemned him
for having gently laughed at Jansenism and Molinism.
The book was full of reason; that in itself was enough. “My book is
prohibited among my dear countrymen,” wrote Voltaire to Falkener on
January 27, 1752, “because I have spoken the truth.” And again, to
President Hénault, “I have tried to raise a monument to truth and my
country, and I hope they will not take the stones of the edifice to
stone me.” The style, too, of the book, that style which has kept it
alive, fresh, and vigorous for a hundred and fifty years, made it
offensive in the nostrils of the solemn and approved historians of the
period who held that an author cannot be learned without being dull, and
if he is readable can be by no means worth reading. “Louis XIV.” is a
bright example of Voltaire’s own aphorism, “A serious book should not be
too seriously written.” Though he had spent years of his life, and
endless trouble and activity in gathering his information, he wrote with
the same spontaneous life and vigour as he wrote the _contes_ he read to
the Duchesse du Maine and her gay court; with not less inspiration than
he flung on to paper in the morning the “Henriade” he had dreamt at
night on his prison bed in the Bastille. In a word, “I tried to move my
readers, even in history.” His own countrymen now understand him better;
but it is to be feared many of his foreign students still suspect the
fidelity of his facts because he puts them so gracefully, and fear that
a sense of humour and a sparkling style are incompatible with sound
judgment and deep learning, and that if an historian is really clever he
must prove it by being excessively dull.
The success of the book must have exceeded its author’s eager hopes. It
delighted England. D’Alembert, in his lodging over the glazier’s shop,
and all the nobility of intellect in Paris, rejoiced in it. What matter
if the Court frowned? Pirated editions appeared in Edinburgh, as well as
London, Prussia, and Holland. The publishers were scrambling wildly for
the proceeds. The author did at last get something--and shrugged his
shoulders and was not ill-satisfied. After all, he had a better success
than a monetary one. Lord Chesterfield called the book “the history of
the human mind written by a man of genius.” Condorcet spoke of it as
“the only readable history of the age.” Renault declared its author “le
plus bel esprit” of the century. “Louis XIV.” excites men’s curiosity at
every page. If the author had been deprived of the Historiographership
of France, he _was_ the Historiographer not the less.
“Louis XIV.,” and correcting Frederick’s works, were not all of
Voltaire’s literary work in Prussia. He was always composing
_bagatelles_ and compliments for the two Queens and the Princesses. He
wrote Frederick--in the room next to him--gay verses as well as many
letters: and was also busy with his famous philosophical poem called
“Natural Law,” not published till 1756. He began here his great
“Philosophical Dictionary”; and was further fanning the flame, by
innumerable suggestions, of that light-bringer of the eighteenth
century, that torch in a darkness which could be felt, the
“Encyclopædia” of Diderot and d’Alembert. Its preface appeared in 1750
and its first volume in 1751. Voltaire called it “the dictionary of the
universe”--“the bureau of human learning,” and should have found in its
splendid audacity--a quality so dear to his soul--an antidote for many
afflictions. Perhaps he did. It was never because he had idle hands that
Satan found them mischief still to do. But he was homesick. He was in
that pitiable state of body which makes the mind irritable and
despondent. Paris had been stormy enough. But here one lived always over
a volcano. That orange rind rankled still. If one royal hand caressed,
there was the other that might scratch at any moment. The never-sleeping
anxiety affected Voltaire’s _vif_ temper, just as anxiety affects the
temper of lesser persons. He was in a mood when he was sure to be
offended by someone. This time the person was Maupertuis.
Born in 1698, in Saint-Malo, Maupertuis was four years younger than
Voltaire, and in his precocious intelligence, ardent imagination, and
unquenchable thirst for knowledge, not unlike him. But there the
likeness stopped. Maupertuis studied in Paris, and then became that rare
anomaly, a _savant-_soldier. He was also elected a member of the
Academy of Sciences; and in 1728 spent six months in England, where he
was made a member of the Royal Society and imbibed Newtonian opinions.
In 1740, after an Arctic expedition which roused much public interest,
he was made by Frederick President of the Berlin Academy, that he might
form it “as you alone can form it.” Maupertuis married one of the
Queen-Mother’s maids of honour, and lived in a fine house in Berlin
close to the Royal Park, which his zoological tastes led him to turn
into a kind of menagerie. Precise, pompous, and positive; boring society
with his worrying exactness upon trifles even more than society bored
him; inordinately vain, and with a sensitive temper made yet more
inflammable by brandy and self-love; acutely conscious of his dignity,
and without any sense of humour, the ex-tutor of Madame du Châtelet was
the sort of person with whom, sooner or later, her lover was sure to
disagree. Added to these facts, Voltaire’s pension from King Frederick
exceeded that of Maupertuis by two thousand crowns; and while Maupertuis
was socially dull, at the King’s suppers Voltaire’s conversation was
even more brilliant than his writings.
On October 28, 1750, the naturalist Buffon had written to a friend,
“Between ourselves, Voltaire and Maupertuis are not made to live in the
same room.”
The first tiff between the uncongenial pair took place, in point of
fact, in that very October of 1750, the autumn after Voltaire’s arrival
in Prussia. There was a vacant chair in the Berlin Academy. Maupertuis
wished it given to d’Argens--Voltaire, further seeing, to that Raynal,
already his friend, afterwards the famous philosopher and historian.
Voltaire won, with the help of Frederick; and Maupertuis was left surly
and jealous. In the Hirsch affair Voltaire asked his help, and
Maupertuis refused it. Maupertuis read “Louis XIV.” and compared it to
“the gambols of a child”--heavy Maupertuis who could not have gambolled
to save his soul.
Then, at the end of the year 1751, a certain book entitled “Mes
Pensées,” by a young French adventurer called La Beaumelle, made some
little stir in Berlin. The “Thoughts” were desultory, unequal, and very
ill put together. D’Argenson wrote of the book that half of it was
excellent, a quarter mediocre, and the other quarter bad. From the
excellent part he quoted a shrewd axiom--“Happy the State where the king
has no mistress, provided that he also has no confessor!” Two Berlin
readers, at the least, included in the bad quarter this extraordinary
sentence: “There have been greater poets than Voltaire, but never one so
well paid.... The King of Prussia overwhelms men of letters with
kindness for precisely the same reasons that a little German prince
overwhelms with kindness a jester or a buffoon.” The passage was the
joke of one of the royal suppers. But if Frederick and Voltaire laughed
at it, it was not the less a joke that left a taste in the mouth. Then
up comes La Beaumelle to Berlin. On November 1, 1751, he calls on the
great Voltaire; and Voltaire, though he asks him to dinner and wastes on
him four hours of his time, treats him with a civil chilliness which
surprises La Beaumelle, who appears to have no idea that Voltaire has
seen those “Pensées”; and attributes his cold manner to an indigestion.
La Beaumelle is much with Lord Tyrconnel, seeks to gain the good graces
of Darget, perhaps even to sup with the King. He has owned to an
admiration for Maupertuis. Voltaire bethinks himself presently of a
little ruse to rid his path of this bramble. “Will you lend me your
‘Thoughts,’ M. Beaumelle?” Beaumelle lends the book; and after three
days Voltaire returns it with the page containing the offensive remark
upon himself and the King turned down.
But La Beaumelle did not take the hint.
On December 7, 1751, the King and Voltaire arrived in Berlin from
Potsdam, and foolish La Beaumelle went again to see Voltaire. He
attempted to explain away that remarkable sentence. But it was hardly
capable of a favourable interpretation. Voltaire, on La Beaumelle’s own
showing, behaved with self-control and dignity.
“Who showed the passage to the King?” says La Beaumelle.
“Darget,” answers Voltaire.
So La Beaumelle goes to Darget. “You had better leave Berlin,” the
prudent secretary advises. Then La Beaumelle seeks, and finds, better
consolation in Maupertuis. “Voltaire gave the passage an offensive
interpretation,” says the President. “Send the King a copy of your
book.” But though La Beaumelle not only did this but addressed petitions
to the King, he received no answer and was not invited to the suppers.
In a sentimental affair of La Beaumelle’s, which was the next scene in
his adventures, Voltaire took his enemy’s part good-naturedly enough,
and did his best to get Beaumelle out of the prison into which an
injured husband had thrown him. He had some reason for wishing to
conciliate the foolish young man. La Beaumelle had in his possession
autograph letters of Madame de Maintenon which would have been of
infinite value to the author of “The Century of Louis XIV.” At their
first interview Voltaire had asked to look at them; and La Beaumelle had
made excuses. The persevering Voltaire tried again and again to attain
his aim; and at last after a furious interview, the two parted for ever,
La Beaumelle crying bitterly that his hatred would long outlive
Voltaire’s verses. Voltaire had not obtained the de Maintenon letters;
and La Beaumelle, after leaving Berlin in May, 1752, revenged himself on
his enemy by bringing out a pirated edition of “Louis XIV.” which
positively ran parallel to Voltaire’s own, and to which La Beaumelle
added “Remarks” offensive to the author and dealing also, with a
dangerous freedom, with the Royal Family of France.
To be sure, Voltaire was fair game; but the House of Bourbon!
In a very little while M. La Beaumelle was expiating his imprudence in
prison.
Throughout the affair Voltaire seems only to have taken offence, and the
audacious Beaumelle to have given it. He was nothing after all. He might
rot in the Bastille and be forgotten. He had no significance, except
that Maupertuis defended him.
In the spring of 1752, while the affair of the “Pensées” was amusing
Berlin, events of importance to Voltaire had occurred both in Paris and
in the King’s _entourage_ in Berlin.
On February 24th, “Rome Sauvée,” much altered and improved by its
author, was successfully performed in Paris through the exertions of
d’Argental and Madame Denis. The niece, not content with superintending
Uncle Voltaire’s plays, had written one herself called “The Punished
Coquette.” Voltaire was in agonies for fear the thing should be a
failure; but his feelings were spared and it was not performed.
On March 2d, Lord Tyrconnel died in Berlin, and on March 4th Darget left
the King’s service; nominally, and perhaps in part really, for his
health’s sake. But he was glad to go, and he came back no more. Voltaire
lost in him a very faithful friend. “I ought to go too,” he wrote
thoughtfully.
Then Longchamp had been triumphantly discovered by Madame Denis
committing the unpardonable sin of copying his master’s manuscripts with
two accomplices who had been servants in the employ of Madame du
Châtelet. Madame Denis abused him for her own satisfaction, and exposed
him for his master’s.
Was it only because Longchamp knew too much and had in his possession
dangerous writings which were more likely to be coaxed than to be
scolded out of him, that his master wrote to him very gently and offered
pardon in return for the truth? The goodness and generosity which made
all his servants love him must have had some foundation in fact. On
March 30th of this 1752, Longchamp replied penitently and burnt the
copies he had made. Voltaire gave him a handsome sum of money over and
above the wages due to him, and Longchamp became a map and chart dealer.
Twenty-six years later he came to see his old master, when he was on his
last visit to Paris.
But the danger that Longchamp’s perfidy had threatened had been no light
one to the man who had already begun to look on that very sensitive and
touchy French capital as a possible refuge, and was soon to find Prussia
too hot to hold him.
Before the end of the year 1751 Frederick had begun to intercept and
keep copies of Voltaire’s and Madame Denis’s letters. Voltaire wrote
bitterly that the Golden Key tore his pocket, that the ribbon of the
Order was a halter round his neck, that nothing in Prussia gave him a
grain of happiness. “I have lost my teeth and my five senses,” he wrote
on February 6, 1752, “and the sixth is leaving me at a gallop. I doubt
if even ‘Rome Sauvée’ will save _me_.” He was sick now with such a
homesickness as only a Frenchman knows. All these things, taken
together, doubled his natural imprudence.
Before La Beaumelle left Berlin in May had begun a quarrel, into which
Voltaire was to plunge headlong, between Maupertuis and the
mathematician Koenig, who had stayed and worked for two years with
Madame du Châtelet at Cirey.
Koenig was a member of the Berlin Academy and a strong partisan of
Leibnitz, as Voltaire and Maupertuis were of Newton; but was all the
same a warm friend and admirer of Maupertuis, whom in September, 1750,
he had visited in Berlin. It was not unnatural that when these two
partisans came to discuss Leibnitz and Newton they should quarrel. They
did quarrel. Koenig, however, apologised handsomely to the touchy
President, and returned to Holland where he lived. There he wrote an
essay on the subject of their dispute--the principle of the least
action--or the theory, which Maupertuis claimed to have discovered, that
Nature is a great economist and works with the fewest materials with
which she can possibly attain her purpose. Koenig disproved this theory,
and quoted in his support a letter written by his dear Leibnitz. He
submitted the essay to Maupertuis, who apparently did not read it, for
he sanctioned its publication, and it appeared in March, 1751, in Latin.
Then Maupertuis did read it, and was deeply offended. Produce these
letters of Leibnitz from which you quote, M. Koenig! I am certain
Leibnitz is of _my_ opinion in the matter! Produce the originals! But
only copies and not the original letters were forthcoming. They were
undoubtedly genuine. Every page bore the unmistakable stamp of the
Leibnitzian style. But there are none so blind as those who won’t see.
On April 13, 1752, Maupertuis, as President, called together a meeting
of the Academy, and caused Koenig to be expelled therefrom as a forger.
Then Voltaire, hard at work at Potsdam, looked up from his books,
thrust aside La Beaumelle, Darget, and those home worries of Madame
Denis and Longchamp, and must needs go down to the shore just to see the
storm coming up and wet his imprudent feet a little in the surf. “I am
not yet well informed,” he wrote to Madame Denis on May 22d, “as to the
details of the beginning of this quarrel. Maupertuis is at Berlin, ill
from having drunk a little too much brandy.” Soon after June 8th the
Berlin Academy, to which Koenig had appealed, ratified its shameful
sentence. By now Voltaire at Potsdam was chafing and snorting to get
into the battle. There were so many spurs to urge him there! One day he
had been giving a dinner-party at which Maupertuis was a guest. Voltaire
airily complimented the President on a pamphlet he had written on
Happiness--Voltaire having really found “Happiness” very dry and
depressing. “It has given me great pleasure--a few obscurities
excepted--which we will discuss later.” “Obscurities!” cries the touchy
President. “Only for you, Sir!” And Voltaire, with his lean hand on the
presidential shoulder and his eyes uncommonly bright and malicious,
answers, “Je vous estime, mon Président; you want to fight--you shall.
In the meantime, let us go to dinner.”
On July 24th, he wrote Madame Denis another little story. Maupertuis had
said that the King having sent Voltaire his verses to correct, Voltaire
had cried “Will he never leave off giving me his dirty linen to wash?”
And Maupertuis had told the anecdote, “in the strictest confidence,” to
ten or twelve people. The King had heard of it, of course. Then, after
the death of La Mettrie, had not Maupertuis declared that Voltaire had
said that the post of the King’s Atheist was vacant? True, _that_ story
did not reach the King. But every story was a whip to goad Voltaire into
the forefront of the fray. He hated tyranny and wrong wherever he found
them. But being human, and chafing and longing to fight with him, he
hated Maupertuis’ tyranny above other persons’. On September 18th, there
appeared an anonymous pamphlet defending Koenig and entitled “A Reply
from an Academician of Berlin to an Academician of Paris.” It was
supposed to be from the pen of Voltaire--the first arrow from his
quiver. A few days later Koenig produced his own “Appeal to the Public,”
which easily proves his case to any fair-minded person. There was one
man, however, who meant to stand by his President, as his President, and
to defend him right or wrong. King Frederick would not even read
Koenig’s “Appeal.” By October 15th he had himself produced a “Letter to
the Public,” which was nothing, said Voltaire, but an attack on Koenig
and all his friends. “He calls those friends fools, jealous, and
dishonest.” Voltaire wrote an account of the thing to his niece, in
which he spoke out as only a Voltaire could speak. In the letter are
these ominous words: “Unluckily for me, I also am an author, and in the
opposite camp to the King. _I have no sceptre, but I have a pen._”
Then Maupertuis produced an extraordinary series of letters which
certainly do not read like the composition of a sane person. He
advocated in them the maddest scientific schemes, such as blowing up one
of the Pyramids with gunpowder to see why they were built; and making an
immense hole in the earth to find out what it contains.
In a preface he had very unpromisingly stated that he should follow no
sequence or order, but write on the impulse of the moment, and no doubt
contradict himself! Voltaire wrote that Maupertuis had previously been
in a lunatic asylum and was now mad. It did seem as if drink and vanity
had turned the poor wretch’s brain. But Frederick stood by his
President; and on November 5th, while recommending him rest and repose,
gravely congratulated him on his book.
On November 17th, from that room looking on to the terrace at
Sans-Souci, Voltaire wrote a letter to Koenig, easy, graceful, and not
exactly impolite to Maupertuis, but explaining that that solemn
Infallibility had been in the wrong. As for those twenty-three
scientific letters, why one must pity, not blame, him for them. And no
doubt, M. Koenig, the same mental misfortune which made him write them,
inspired his conduct to you!
It was a dainty glove thrown down; but it was a declaration of war not
the less.
Frederick was far too shrewd and sane a person not to know very well
who had right and reason on his side in such a dispute. He and Voltaire
continued to meet as friends, and supped together as of old. Now
Tyrconnel and La Mettrie were dead, Darget gone away, and Maupertuis too
sick and sore to attend them, the suppers would have been small and dull
indeed without Voltaire. He had been always the real soul of them. At
one, only this last September, the daring idea of “The Philosophical
Dictionary” had been started; and in a day or two he had sent the King
that matchlessly audacious first article, “Abraham,” which would have
made the Pope laugh and might have made a Frederick forget that “Reply
from an Academician of Berlin” which Voltaire had written, under a
thinly veiled anonymity, but a few days earlier. But though the chain
which bound the royal Damon to his Pythias still held, it was weak in
every link. Voltaire declared of himself that he was a hundred years
old--that the suppers were suppers of Damocles--the world a
shipwreck--“sauve qui peut!” He was, in fact, too wretched to fear
anything, and so ready to dare all. There was a pause. The tiger
crouched a moment before it sprang, and then leapt on Maupertuis in the
“Diatribe of Doctor Akakia.”
There is no more scathing and burning satire in literature. The deadly
minuteness of Swift’s malign and awful irony is not so terrible as the
pungent mockery of this jester who laughed, and laughed; looked up and
saw his victim writhing and mad with impotent rage, and held his sides
and laughed the more. The great English-Irishman at least paid his
victims the compliment of taking them in some sort seriously; of
bringing great and terrible weapons to slay them; and gave them the poor
satisfaction of feeling like martyrs if they wished. But Voltaire made
Maupertuis a byword and a derision; the sport of fools, the
laughing-stock of Europe: a buffoon, a jest, a caricature: such that men
seeing, stopped, beheld open-mouthed, and then laughed to convulsions.
Akakia means guilelessness; and Akakia is a physician who takes the
remarkable effusions of Maupertuis with a serious innocence, very
deadly; who asks the most simple questions in the world; and turns upon
the President’s theories the remorseless logic of the gayest and
easiest commonsense. Read a hundred and fifty years after, when of
necessity many allusions must be missed and the point of many a jest be
lost, “Akakia” is still one of the wittiest productions in the French
language.
There could have been no style better than Voltaire’s for making
Pomposity mad. One can still see the “sublime Perpetual President”
writhing under that pitiless mockery and that infectious laugh of
malicious delight. The wickedest, cleverest little picador in all the
world goaded this great, lumbering, heavy-footed old bull to impotent
frenzy. The lithe tiger, agile as a cat, sprang on his foe, showing all
his teeth in his grin, and, grinning still, tore him limb from limb.
“I have no sceptre,” Voltaire had said, “but I have a pen.” He had
indeed.
Before that mild letter to Koenig was written from Sans-Souci on
November 17th, the first part of “Akakia” had been finished. But if
nothing could stop a man writing imprudence, under the absolute monarchy
of Prussia there was everything to stop him printing it. Trickery was in
Voltaire’s blood; and practice had made him perfect in the art.
Frederick had dealt treacherously with him; so why not he with
Frederick? He went to the King, and read aloud a pamphlet he had written
on Lord Bolingbroke. Will his Majesty sign the royal permission for that
pamphlet to be printed? By all means. Frederick signs the last page of
the manuscript. Voltaire sends it to the printers; asks for it back, to
make some trifling alterations, and puts “Akakia” in front of
Bolingbroke. What more simple?
It only remained to get a few printed copies sent out of Prussia, and
then one could face destiny bravely. One story runs that Frederick, who
heard everything, got wind of this “Akakia,” and that Voltaire, armed
with the manuscript, brought it to the King; and the King, who loved wit
very nearly but not quite so much as he loved his own greatness, laughed
till he cried. How should a Frederick the Great, with his bitter humour,
not laugh at a Maupertuis thus ridiculed by a Voltaire? Under the rose,
one could laugh at anything--God, man, or devil--even one’s own
Perpetual President. If those “Matinées du Roi de Prusse, écrites par
lui-même” are genuine, Frederick stands proven as one of the most
accomplished actors on the world’s stage. “One must think according to
the rank he occupies,” says he. So he laughed “to dislocation” and added
that there must be no publishing of such a wicked, delightful, malignant
document--and then laughed afresh. Voltaire flung the manuscript on the
fire, as a proof of good faith. He could afford to be thus generous.
Frederick rescued the papers, says the story, and burnt his sleeve. And
the friends parted, still vastly entertained--and each pair of clever
eyes looking into the other pair--wondering--wondering----.
The anecdote, though it is recorded by two different persons and is
picturesque, is, however, of doubtful veracity. The more probable truth
is that Frederick, first discovering on November 20th that “Akakia” had
been printed at Potsdam by his own printers and in his own
printing-office, and on the strength of the permit signed by himself,
was furiously enraged. He sent off Fredersdorff--his servant, valet,
friend--post-haste both to the printer, who confessed all, and to the
author; and warned the author, who simply denied everything as usual, of
awful consequences to follow.
Then Frederick wrote Voltaire that famous letter, very badly spelt,
which under the circumstances was not immoderate. “Your effrontery
astonishes me.... Do not imagine that you will make me believe that
black is white.... If you persist in going on with the business I will
print everything, and the world will see that if your works merit
statues, your conduct deserves chains.”
And the irate host put, it is said, a sentinel outside the guest’s door.
Voltaire wrote his answer on the foot of Frederick’s letter and
continued to deny everything. The whole thing is a hideous calumny, and
I am very ill! But Frederick was not moved; and the sentinel was not
moved either. Fredersdorff was sent to Voltaire again--this time bearing
with him the signed confession of the printer. Then the crafty Voltaire
thought he had better turn the matter into a joke. A joke! On November
27th, Frederick wrote out for him a very elaborate promise to be a good
boy. Voltaire did not sign it. He wrote beneath it, calling attention to
its weak points instead. But, not the less, Frederick, on November 29th,
was able to console Maupertuis with the news that Voltaire had been
forced to give up the whole edition of the “Diatribe,” which had been
solemnly burnt in the royal presence. He had also been forbidden to
print the thing elsewhere. So, poor, mad, beaten Perpetual President,
you can be at peace!
After an “arrest” of eight days the sentinel was removed from Voltaire’s
door. He had behaved abominably. But he was very amusing--and so still
infinitely worth having.
On December 10th the King announced comfortably to Maupertuis, “The
affair of the libels is over.... I have frightened Voltaire on the side
of his purse (by the threat of a fine), and the result is as I
expected.” Before December 16th the Court came up to Berlin for
Christmas. Voltaire lodged at a friend’s house, the house of M. de
Francheville, whose son he employed as a temporary secretary. There
seems no doubt he would have been again of that _société intime_, the
suppers--but for one little event.
One edition of “Akakia” had been burnt; but M. de Voltaire had known
very well it was not the only one. King and Court had hardly arrived at
Berlin, when lo and behold! “Akakias” sprang up all over it as quickly
and plentifully as mushrooms and to be far longer lived.
Berlin hated Maupertuis and enjoyed “Akakia” as it had never enjoyed
anything before. The neat, staid town went mad with laughter and
delight. And in his lodgings the father of “Akakia” looked thoughtfully
to the future. “The orange has been squeezed--one must think now how to
save the rind.” The words were written to Madame Denis on December 18th,
and Voltaire, with the scales fallen at last from the sharpest eyes that
ever man had, added his “little dictionary as used by kings.”
“_My friend_ means my _slave_.
“_My dear friend_ means _I am more than indifferent to you_.
“_For I will make you happy_ read _I will endure you as long as I have
use for you_.
“_Sup with me to-night_ means _I shall mock at you this evening_.”
Voltaire might well feel that that three years’ dream was over, and that
it remained only “to desert honestly.”
On the afternoon of the Christmas Eve of 1752, Collini, that intelligent
young Italian who had seen Voltaire at the Carrousel at the giddy height
of glory and had now become his secretary, was standing at the window of
his master’s lodgings. There was a great crowd in the street, watching a
fine bonfire. Italian Collini did not understand the meaning of the
scene. But Voltaire, with his rich experience, knew in a flash. “I’ll
bet it’s my Doctor!” said he.
It was.