THE FLIGHT FROM PRUSSIA
With the exception of the Hirsch affair there is no episode in
Voltaire’s life about which so many statements (usually conflicting)
have been made as about the quarrel with Maupertuis and Voltaire’s
flight from Prussia. Collini wrote _his_ version of the story. Prussia
naturally has its own. Voltaire has _his_ own. All the Lives of Voltaire
and of Frederick--French, English, and German--have their versions. To
quote authorities for every statement is the general custom of the
biographer. But the sifting for truth is surely a process which may be
well carried on behind the scenes; and then the result of that sifting
given clear and clean to the public. If the public cannot trust the
ability or the honesty of the biographer, the sources of his information
are not inaccessible, and the public with a little extra trouble can
verify his facts, even though he does not assist it by cumbering his
text with that annihilation of all interest, the perpetual footnote. If
the subject is not considered worth the extra trouble, the reader may
well take the biographer--on faith. It may be added that the custom of
learning a man’s life and character from other people and not from
himself, is far too closely followed. After all, the great do not tell
so many lies about themselves as their too partial friends, their
malicious enemies, and their interested, gossiping servants tell about
them. The best biographer of Voltaire is Voltaire himself. If any writer
can lead his reader to throw away the biographies, even his own, and
study Voltaire at first-hand--his letters, the wittiest in the world,
and his works, which in matchless adroitness can be compared to no other
production of the human mind--he will have done much and should be well
satisfied.
The light of that Christmas bonfire made “Akakia,” as it might have been
expected to make it, more conspicuous than ever. Thirty thousand copies
were sold in Paris in a few weeks. By January, 1753, in Prussia, twelve
presses were kept busy printing it night and day. The Prussian
newspapers held up their hands at it in holy horror, and did their best
for it by their abuse. For a week Voltaire lay _perdu_. He had thoughts
of escaping to Plombières on the very good excuse of his health. A
flight to England was often in his mind.
On New Year’s Day, at half-past three in the afternoon, he sent back to
Frederick “the bells and the baubles he has given me,” which comprised
the Cross and Ribbon of the Order of Merit and the Chamberlain’s Key.
On the outside of the packet he wrote the well-known quatrain:
Oh! tenderly I took your tender gifts
And sadly render them to you again,
As bitter lover to lost love gives back
Her pictured image, in his hot heart’s pain.
He accompanied the parcel with a letter--a melancholy reflection on the
Vanity of Human Wishes. “My resignation is equal to my sorrow. I shall
remember nothing but your goodness. I have lost everything; there only
remains to me a memory of having once been happy in your retreat at
Potsdam.... I made you my idol: an honest man does not change his
religion, and sixteen years of a measureless devotion are not to be
destroyed by a single unlucky moment.”
His sorrow was genuine; but so was his determination to go.
At four o’clock on this afternoon a _fiacre_ drew up at the door of his
rooms. Fredersdorff had come from the King, bringing back the Order and
Key. There was a long consultation. Collini, who was apparently
eavesdropping in the next room, said his master only consented to
receive them again after a very lively argument. The King’s Chamberlain,
in fact, made a very wry face at finding himself his Chamberlain still.
Go he would; but go with peace and honour he certainly would if he
could. On January 2d, he wrote his King a conciliatory letter. “Do with
me what you will,” it said. “But what in the world _will_ you do with
me?” it _meant_. As for the suppers--I will be of them no more.
On January 18th, Voltaire published a declaration denying the authorship
of “Akakia.” It was a form--hardly a deceit, in that it deceived nobody.
It was to oblige the King--the King who still hungered and thirsted for
his Voltaire and could not let him go. True, it was a humble, obedient,
penitent, reformed Voltaire he wanted--in short, an impossibility.
Frederick went back to Potsdam on January 30th, and begged his
Chamberlain to come back there too, to his old quarters.
“I am too ill,” says the Chamberlain, but inconsistently pleased with
the friendly offer and taking care to have it recorded in the
newspapers, and to tell it to all his correspondents in Paris. Still, in
the very letters in which he announced the King’s favour like a pleased
child, the shrewd man was arranging to leave. On February 16th, he was
still at Berlin with dysentery. His royal host sent him quinine. But
that did not cure him. Nothing would cure him but some air which was not
Prussian air--some diet which the kingly table could not produce--some
company which was not Prussian company.
He could not go to Potsdam; but about March 1st he wrote to beg formal
permission for leave of absence, to journey to French Plombières and
take there the waters which were much recommended for his complaints. He
awaited the answer with a feverish impatience. He made Collini arrange
his papers and pack his things. Here was a book to be returned to the
royal library; then, there were the coming expenses to be considered.
But no answer came from Frederick. Voltaire, restless and irritable,
must needs, on March 5th, move from the rooms he occupied in a house in
central Berlin to another in the Stralau quarter--almost in the country.
Here he lived at his own expense with Collini, a manservant, and a cook.
His doctor, Coste, came to see him--Coste, who was not afraid to say
Plombières was the only cure for his patient’s health, though he knew
the recommendation would be displeasing to the King.
What if the King refused permission? Such things had been done by men of
his temperament, and might be done again.
Voltaire would walk in the garden of that Stralau house with young
Collini. “Now leave me to dream a little,” he would say. And he paced up
and down alone--conjecturing, fearing, scheming. He _must_ go somehow.
He invented the wildest, absurdest plans of escape; and laughed at them
gaily enough with that capacity for seeing the humorous side of the
worst troubles, which was the best gift the gods had given him.
At last Frederick broke his silence; and Voltaire wrote to his niece on
March 15th that the King had said there were excellent waters in
Moravia! “He might as well tell me to go and take waters in Siberia.”
Not the least curious of the many human documents preserved in the
archives of Berlin is that famous dismissal which at last, on March 16,
1753, Frederick the Great flung upon paper in a rage.
“He can quit my service when he pleases: he need not invent the excuse
of the waters of Plombières; but he will have the goodness, before he
goes, to return to me the contract of his engagement, the Key, the
Cross, and the volume of poetry I have confided to him. I would rather
he and Koenig had only attacked my works; I sacrifice _them_ willingly
to people who want to blacken the reputation of others; I have none of
the folly and vanity of authors, and the cabals of men of letters appear
to me the depth of baseness.”
The Abbé de Prades put that dismissal in a politer official form, and
thus sent it to Voltaire. But this keen-sighted Arouet was not minded to
be expelled like a schoolboy by an angry master. Wherever he might go,
that master’s iron arm could reach him. He wrote, therefore, a gay
letter of entreaty to Prades, asking for a parting interview with the
King. Permission was granted him. On March 18th, after a stay of
thirteen days at Stralau, Voltaire went to Potsdam. That evening he was
once more installed in his old rooms at Sans-Souci.
The next day, after dinner, he and the King met in private, and once
again met as more than friends. It has been said before that there was
between these two men something of the glamour and the fitfulness of
passion. “I could live neither with you nor without you,” wrote Voltaire
after they had long parted for ever. “You who bewitched me, whom I
loved, and with whom I am always angry.” That was the summing up of
their whole relationship. The enchantment was at work again to-night. It
is said that they talked over the Maupertuis affair. Collini affirms
that they laughed at the President together. The harsh dismissal was
altered into a gracious royal permit for a necessary change and holiday.
Voltaire was to drink the waters, recover his health, and return. He was
still the King’s Chamberlain. He was to retain his Cross, his Key, and
alas! alas!--the royal volume of poems. The interview lasted two hours.
Voltaire came from it radiant and satisfied. For a week Potsdam laid
herself out to delight him. Perhaps she and the King would be so
charming, Voltaire would not want to leave them even for a time!
Frederick may have hoped so. Voltaire submitted to the blandishments;
nay, enjoyed them. But behind the bright eyes and the gay, vain,
susceptible, pleasure-loving French heart lay the purpose and iron
resolution which make greatness. Voltaire was going. On March 26, 1753,
about eight o’clock in the morning he went on to the parade ground where
Frederick was holding the last review of his regiment before he started
for Silesia.
“Sire, here is M. de Voltaire, who comes to take his orders.”
“Eh bien! M. de Voltaire, you are resolved then to set out?”
“Sire, urgent business and my health make it necessary for me to do so.”
“Monsieur, I wish you a pleasant journey.”
They never met again.
Voltaire hurried back to his rooms. Everything was ready for flight.
Collini had arranged all money matters. The travelling carriage was at
the door. Voltaire hastily wrote a brief farewell to d’Argens. By nine
the travellers were _en route_. They never paused or looked back. By
six o’clock in the evening of March 27th they had covered ninety-two
miles of road, and were in the rooms prudent Voltaire had engaged in
advance at Leipsic. Did he then recall and wonder at that strange
tragi-comedy of the last three years? Whatever his lips uttered, his
heart knew he had left Frederick for ever. The time had not yet come,
though it did come, for regret, remorse, and affection.
Voltaire had brought with him in that travelling carriage two
supplements to his “Doctor Akakia.” Almost his last words from Potsdam,
in a letter to Formey, were, “When I am attacked I defend myself like a
devil; but I am a good devil and end by laughing.” But it was better to
be attacked by a Voltaire than to be mocked by him--which Maupertuis,
when he read those supplements, once more knew to his cost.
On April 3d, that very ill-advised person saw fit to write a threatening
letter to Voltaire at Leipsic, in which he said, almost in so many
words, If you attack me again, nothing shall spare you. “Be grateful to
the respect and obedience which have hitherto withheld my arm and saved
you from the worst affair you ever had.”
Voltaire’s answer was a new edition of “Akakia” with the two supplements
added, a travesty of the letter he had just received from Maupertuis,
and a burlesque epistle to Formey in his official character of Secretary
of the Berlin Academy. If the first part of “Akakia” had been laughable,
the second was exquisitely ludicrous. It reached Frederick soon enough,
as everything reached him.
On April 11th, he wrote a very memorable and famous order to his
Resident at Frankfort--one Freytag. The King commanded Freytag to demand
of Voltaire, when he passed through Frankfort, the Chamberlain’s Key,
the Cross and Ribbon of the Order of Merit, every paper in his Majesty’s
handwriting, and a book “specified in the note enclosed.” If Voltaire
declined to do as he was told, he was to be arrested. On April 12th,
Frederick wrote to his sister of Bayreuth a letter wherein he spoke of
his “charming, divine Voltaire,” that “sublime spirit, first of thinking
beings,” as the greatest scoundrel and the most treacherous rascal in
the universe; and said that men were broken on the wheel who deserved it
less than he.
The Margravine confessed that, for the life of her, she had not been
able to keep her countenance while reading that second part of “Akakia”;
but her brother was in no laughing mood. To soothe Maupertuis he had
caused his curt dismissal to Voltaire of March 16th to appear in the
newspapers. “Akakia” may be fairly said to have been one of the most
famous jokes of the eighteenth century, and to have been the delight of
every person who read it, save only Maupertuis and Frederick the Great.
For two-and-twenty days Voltaire passed his time not unhappily at
Leipsic. He visited the University there. He arranged his books and
papers. He had with him, besides Collini, a copyist and a manservant,
both of whom he employed in literary work. He now was busy defending
“Louis XIV.” against La Beaumelle’s criticisms. To be sure “Louis XIV.”
was its own defence; but it was never in Voltaire’s irritable and
pugnacious nature to let the curs bark at his heels unheeded. He must be
for ever kicking them or stinging them with his whip and so goading them
to fresh fury. To sit serene above the thunder was quite impossible to
this god: he was always coming down from his Olympus to answer the
blasphemies of the mortals and to fight the meanest of them.
On April 18th, after he had been in Leipsic rather less than a month,
the travelling carriage stood once more at his door. The luggage which
was heaped into it did not contain the book to which Frederick had
alluded in his letter to Freytag. That luckless volume, in which were
compiled the poetic effusions of Frederick the Great, freethinking,
imprudent, and not a little indecent, had been given in charge of a
merchant of Leipsic, who was to forward it, with many other of
Voltaire’s books, to Strasburg.
Chief among the royal poems was a certain “Palladium,” imitated from the
“Pucelle,” but very much more ribald and insulting to the Christian
religion; and, in that it abused other kings who might be dangerous
foes, certainly not a work of which King Frederick would care to own
himself the author. It had been secretly printed in the palace at
Potsdam in 1751.
Voltaire hoped to meet at Strasburg, not only his books, but the person
whom Frederick spoke of as “that wearisome niece.” The criminal’s next
stopping-place after Leipsic was Gotha. M. de Voltaire and suite
intended to put up at the inn there, but were not installed in it when
the delightful Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, not the least charming of
Voltaire’s philosophic duchesses and with whom he had corresponded when
he was at Cirey, begged him to be her guest, in her château. Forty years
old, gentle, graceful, accomplished, with that love of learning without
learnedness which was the peculiar charm of the women of the eighteenth
century, Voltaire may well have found her, as he did find her, “the best
princess in the world.” “And who--God be thanked,” he added piously,
“wrote no verses.” She received him and his attendants with a delighted
hospitality. She had a husband, who was not of much account on the
present occasion. And there was a Madame de Buchwald, who also had all
that fascination which seems to have been the birthright of the women of
that time.
In all lives there are certain brief halcyon periods when one forgets
alike the troubles that are past and the cares that are to come and
enjoys oneself in the moment, defiant of fate, and with something of the
_abandon_ of a child. This month was such a period for Voltaire. After
the fights and the worries of the past three years, he was peculiarly
susceptible to the soothing flattery and the caressing admiration of
this couple of gracious women.
He read them his “Natural Law.” He read them new cantos of the
“Pucelle.” (Modesty was the lost piece of silver for which the woman of
this period never even searched.) Nothing was bad about Gotha save its
climate, said he. To please his dear Duchess and to instruct her son,
the obliging Voltaire embarked here on a popular history of the German
Empire from the time of Charlemagne.
“Annals of the Empire” is one of the least successful of Voltaire’s
works. Truth compels the critic indeed to say that it comes very near
to being hideously, preposterously, and unmitigatedly dull. It was
written to order and without inspiration. It is laborious, monotonous,
and long. That its conscientious list of Kings, Emperors, and Electors,
and its neat little rhyming summary of each century, may have proved
useful to the young gentleman they were designed to instruct, is very
likely. But Voltaire did not put his soul in it. In the mechanical
effort it required of his brain he was soon indeed to find great, and
greatly needed, soothing. The month passed on winged feet. But Voltaire
had to proceed, leisurely it might be, but still to proceed to Strasburg
to embrace his niece.
He had had an idea of visiting the clever and delightful Margravine of
Bayreuth with whom he so often corresponded; but all the circumstances
considered, he thought she was too nearly related to Frederick, and that
a visit to her might endanger the little liberty he had obtained.
No doubt, as he lumbered along in the great travelling carriage, he
congratulated himself on at last getting out of Prussia, at once easily
and gracefully.
He left Gotha on May 25, 1753.
He rested a night or two with the Landgrave of Hesse at Wabern, near
Cassel. At Cassel, Baron Pollnitz of the suppers was staying; as
Frederick’s spy, Voltaire seems to have suspected. By May 30th the
travelling party were at Marburg. After leaving there they passed
through Fredeburg, where they visited the Salt Springs. And on May 31,
1753, Voltaire reached the “Golden Lion” at Frankfort-on-Main, meaning
to proceed on his journey the next day.