Part 8

Voltaire's residence at Cirey was marked by the commencement of his correspondence with Frederic the Great, then prince royal of Prussia. It is well known that this sovereign passed a youth of great suffering--that he was imprisoned for an endeavour to escape from the state of servitude to which his father reduced him. His dearest friend was executed before his eyes, and measures taken that he himself should be condemned to death. To avoid a recurrence of these misfortunes, he lived in a most retired manner during the remainder of his father's life; given up to the cultivation of poetry and the study of philosophy. He shared the universal admiration entertained of Voltaire's genius, and his noble daring in breaking down the obstacles which the government and clergy of France threw in the way of the diffusion of knowledge, and his resolution in devoting his life to authorship. He addressed a letter to him at Cirey, requesting a correspondence. Voltaire could not fail of being highly flattered by a prince, the heir to a throne, who wrote to him that "Cirey should be his Delphos, and his letters oracles." Voltaire was far from being behindhand in compliments. He writes: "I shed tears of joy on reading your letter--I recognise a prince who will assuredly be the delight of the human race. I am in every way astonished: you speak like Trajan, you write like Pliny, and you express yourself in French as well as our best writers. What a difference between men! Louis XIV. was a great king--I respect his memory; but he had not your humanity, nor spoke French as well. I have seen his letters; he did not know the orthography of his own language. Berlin will be, under your auspices, the Athens of Germany--perhaps of Europe." The compliments on both sides were to a great degree sincere. Frederic shared the enthusiastic, almost, worship in which Voltaire was then generally held--and Voltaire regarding sovereigns and princes as powerful enemies, or at best as mischievous animals, whom it was necessary to stroke into innocuousness, was carried away by his delight in finding one who adopted his own principles--looked up to him as a master, and added to the value of his admiration, the fact of being himself a man of genius. After Voltaire had quarrelled with him, he spoke in a jocular tone of their mutual flattery; but still in a way that shows how deeply it sank at the time. "The prince," he writes, "employed his leisure in writing to the literary men of France, and the principal burden of his correspondence fell on me. I received letters in verse, metaphysical, historical, and political. He treated me as a divine man; I called him Solomon; epithets which cost us nothing. Some of these follies have been printed among my works; but, fortunately, not the thirtieth part. I took the liberty to send him a very beautiful writing desk; he was kind enough to present me with some trifles in amber; and the coffee-house wits of Paris fancied, with horror, that my fortune was made. He sent a young Courlander, named Keyserling,--no bad writer of French verses himself,--from the confines of Pomerania, to us at Cirey. We gave him a fête, and a splendid illumination in which the cipher of the prince was hung with lamps, with the device, "The Hope of the Human Race." In his pique, Voltaire speaks too slightingly. Had he not been a prince, the correspondence of Frederic was worth having; it is full of good sense and philosophical remark. It was a more disagreeable task to correct his verses. Yet these are by no means had; they are nearly as good as Voltaire's own. There is less pretension, but often more spirit. The whole mass has no real claim to be called poetry; and in these days nobody reads either: but when they were written, and had the gloss of novelty, and the interest of passing events and living men appended, they were at least respectable specimens of a talent, which in its own sphere could attain much higher things.

The residence at Cirey was broken up by the necessity of attending to a lawsuit of madame du Châtelet at Brussels, and she and her husband and Voltaire proceeded thither. [Sidenote: 1740. Ætat. 46.] At this period Frederic succeeded to the throne of Prussia. The demonstrations of his friendship for Voltaire continued as fervent as ever. "See in me only, I entreat you," he writes, "a zealous citizen, a somewhat sceptical philosopher, but a truly faithful friend. For God's sake write to me simply as a man; join with me in despising titles, names, and all exterior splendour." Voltaire replied, "Your majesty orders me, when I write, to think of him less as a king than as a man. This is a command after my own heart. I know not how to treat a king; but I am quite at my ease with a man whose head and heart are full of love for the human race." Frederic, now that he was emancipated from his father's control, was most eager to see Voltaire. He asked him to visit him. Voltaire considered his friendship with madame du Châtelet as of more worth than the protection of a king; for although, through vivacity of temper and absence of self-control, they quarrelled, there was a deep feeling of mutual kindness and sympathy on both sides. The king had been ready to lavish compliments on the "divine Emily;" but his indifference to women, and his many and important occupations, made him shrink from receiving a French court lady, full of wit, caprice, and self-importance. He wrote: "If Emily must accompany Apollo, I consent; but if I can see you alone, I should prefer it." It ended in Frederic's forming the plan of including Brussels in a tour he made, and visiting his friend there. Voltaire's own account of their interview is full of spirit and pleasantry; showing how, in reality, a Frenchman, accustomed to the splendour and etiquette of his native court, could ill comprehend the simplicity and poverty of Prussia. He writes: "The king's ambassador extraordinary to France arrived at Brussels; as soon as he alighted at an inn, he sent me a young man, whom he had made his page, to say that he was too tired to pay me a visit, but begged me to come to him, and that he had a rich and magnificent present for me from the king, his master. 'Go quickly,' cried madame du Châtelet, 'I dare say he brings you the crown jewels.' I hurried off, and found the ambassador, who, instead of port-manteau, had behind his carriage a quarter of wine, belonging to the late king, which the reigning sovereign ordered me to drink. I exhausted myself in protestations of surprise and gratitude for this liquid mark of his majesty's goodness, substituted for the solid ones he had given me a right to expect, and I shared the wine with Camas. My Solomon was then at Strasbourg. The fancy had taken him while visiting his long and narrow dominions, which reached from Gueldres to the Baltic sea, to visit, incognito, the frontiers and troops of France. He took the name, at Strasbourg, of the count du Four, a rich Bohemian nobleman. He sent me, at Brussels, an account of his travels, half prose, half verse, in the style of Bachaumont and Chapelle; that is, as near the style as, a king of Prussia could attain; telling of had roads and the passport he was obliged to give himself, which, having with him a seal with the arms of Prussia, he easily fabricated; and the surprise his party excited--some taking them for sovereigns, others for swindlers. From Strasbourg he visited his states in Lower Germany, and sent word that he would visit me at Brussels incognito. We prepared a good residence for him; but falling ill at the little castle of Meuse, two leagues from Clèves, he wrote to beg that I would make the first advances. I went, therefore, to present my most profound homage. Maupertuis, who already had his own views, and was possessed by a mania to be president of an academy, had presented himself, and lodged with Algarotti and Keyserling in a loft of this palace. I found a single soldier as guard at the gate. The privy counsellor Rambonet, minister of state, was walking about the court, blowing his fingers; he had on large dirty linen ruffles, a hat full of holes, and an old judge's wig, which on one side reached to his pockets, and on the other scarcely touched his shoulder. I was told, and truly, that this man was charged with important state affairs. I was conducted to his majesty's apartment, where I saw only four walls. At length, by the light of a candle, I perceived, in a closet, a truckle bed, two feet and a half wide, on which was a little man, wrapped in a dressing-gown of coarse blue cloth. It was the king, trembling beneath an old counterpane, in a violent access of fever. I bowed to him, and began my acquaintance by feeling his pulse, as if I had been his first physician. When the access was over, he dressed and went to supper with me, Algarotti, Keyserling, Maupertuis, and his minister to the States General. We conversed on the immortality of the soul, free will, and Plato's "Androgynes." Counsellor Rambonet meanwhile mounted a hack, and, after riding all night, arrived at the gates of Liège, where he made a requisition in the name of the king, his master, which two thousand of his troops helped him to enforce. Frederic even charged me with writing a manifesto, which I did as well as I could, not doubting that a king with whom I supped, and who called me his friend, must be in the right. The affair was soon arranged, through the payment of a million, which he exacted in ducats, which served to indemnify him for the expense of his journey to Strasbourg, of which he had complained in his poetic letter. I grew attached to him, for he had talent and grace; and besides, he was a king, which, considering human weakness, is always a great fascination. Generally we literary men flatter kings; but he flattered me, while abbé Desfontaines and other rascals defamed me once a week at Paris.

"The king of Prussia, before his father's death, had written a work against the principles of Machiavelli. If Machiavelli had had a prince for disciple, he would have recommended him, in the first place, to write against him; but the prince royal did not understand this sort of finesse. He had written in good faith at a time when he was not sovereign; and his father inspired him with no partiality for despotic power. He sincerely praised moderation and justice, and in his enthusiasm regarded every usurpation as a crime. He had sent me the manuscript to correct and publish. I now began to feel remorse at printing the "Anti-Machiavel," while the king of Prussia, with an hundred millions in his treasury, took one, by means of counsellor Rambonet, from the poor inhabitants of Liège. I suspected that my Solomon would not stop there. His father had left sixty-six thousand four hundred excellent soldiers. He augmented the number, and seemed eager to make use of them. I represented to him that it was not quite right to print his book at a time when he might be reproached for violating its precepts. He permitted me to stop the edition. I went to Holland entirely to do him this little service; but the bookseller asked so much money in compensation, that the king, who in his heart was not sorry to see himself in print, preferred being so for nothing, rather than to pay not to be."

We have extracted this whole account as highly characteristic, and as explanatory of much that followed. Frederic loved and enjoyed talent, and was himself a man of genius; he was simple-minded as a German; unaccustomed to show and luxury; but he was a king and a soldier. He was young and ambitious. Voltaire laughed at his economy, ridiculed his plainness, saw through his pretensions to liberal opinions, and jested wittily on their friendship. Yet, withal, he was flattered by it. He saw a refuge and a support against the persecutions he feared in his own country; and though he would have preferred that a sovereign who called him friend had been more royal in outward show, he was forced to be satisfied that though badly dressed and meanly attended, yet he was really a king, with millions in his coffres, and thousands of soldiers at his command, and, above all, a man of genius. "He is the most delightful man in the world," he writes, "and would be sought by every one, even were he not a king: philosophical without austerity, full of gentleness, complaisance, and agreeable qualities; forgetting that he is a sovereign as soon as he is with his friends, and so forgetting, that it required an effort of memory to recollect that he was one." Such was the impression which the young king made on his older friend, who had been accustomed to courts and royalty. But still he felt that the friend of a king is not half as independent in the royal palace as in another kingdom. Probably madame du Châtelet's admirable understanding helped to keep him firm; at any rate, while she lived he declined all Frederic's invitations, and declared his tie of friendship with the "divine Emily" paramount to every other.

Voltaire and madame du Châtelet had agreed to vary their solitude at Cirey by visits to the metropolis. The leisure afforded by the seclusion of the country was congenial to labour. Far from the society and interruptions of Paris, they could both devote their whole minds to the subjects on which they were occupied; but they found difficulty in getting books. It was impossible at a distance from the capital for Voltaire to have access to the state papers necessary for the historical works he had in hand, or for the lady to keep up that communication with men of letters which, in matters of science particularly, is necessary to any one ambitious of extending and confirming discoveries. Yet the change was to be regretted. The vivacity of Voltaire's temper had caused him to be disturbed by the attacks of his enemies in his retirement. In the thick of society these attacks were more multifarious and stinging; and added to this, his reputation in the capital for a wit, could only be kept up by a sort of small money of authorship, so to speak, which frittered away the treasures of his mind.

The death of the emperor Charles VI. plunged Europe in war. France interfered to cause the elector of Bavaria to be chosen emperor, and attacked Maria Theresa of Austria, daughter of Charles VI. The king of Prussia, a potentate who had not yet figured in the wars of Europe, desirous of taking advantage of the distressed state of the empire, seized on Silesia. Twice Voltaire was employed by his court to sound the intentions of his royal correspondent, and to influence him to ally himself with France. The first mission of this sort that he undertook was at the request of cardinal Fleuri.

Cardinal Fleuri had been the author's friend in his early days. Voltaire took great pleasure in conversing with him, and collecting his anecdotes on the reign of Louis XIV. The cardinal was a timid man; the scope of his policy as minister, was to keep France at peace and Paris tranquil; to prevent all movement in the public mind, and to suppress literary influence, whether it tended to enlarge the boundaries of human knowledge, or to remark upon the events and personages of the day. He kept a tight hand over Voltaire. Several _lettres de cachet_ had been issued against him, and he had declared imprisonment in the Bastille should punish any future literary imprudence. Voltaire could only keep up a semblance of kindness and toleration by giving every outward mark of submission. It was matter of pride to him when he was applied to by the minister to visit Frederic, and learn his real intentions with regard to his attack on Silesia. His mission was secret; so that it was supposed that he had taken refuge in Prussia from some new persecution; while Frederic himself, not well comprehending his sudden apparition, after his frequent refusals, guessed that it was connected with politics, and showed himself for a moment dubious of his integrity. But this cloud was soon dissipated. The king tried to tempt the poet to remain. He was firm in his refusal. "I have quitted a brilliant and advantageous establishment," he writes; "I received the most flattering offers, and great regret was expressed because I would not accept them; but how could courts and kings and emolument outweigh a ten years' friendship: they would scarcely console me, did this friendship fail me." Nor did friendship alone recal him; he was eager for the applause of a Parisian audience. Any one who reads his letters, will perceive how Voltaire was wrapt up in his writings; enthusiasm could alone sustain him through so much labour. He was desirous that the tragedy of f Mahomet' should be acted; he was allowed to choose his own censor: he selected Crebillon, but Crebillon refused the licence; and an intimacy of thirty years ended in a quarrel.

To compensate for this disappointment, Voltaire brought out this tragedy at Lille. He found La Noue there, who was well fitted for the part of Mahomet; and Clairon in her youth, who took the part of Palmyre. During an interval between the acts, a letter was brought to Voltaire, announcing the gain of the battle of Molwitz; he rose and read it aloud from his box. The applause redoubled; and he afterwards said, jestingly, that the victory of Molwitz had insured the success of "Mahomet." The tragedy was approved even by the clergy at Lille, and Fleuri, when he read it, saw no objection to its being acted. It was brought out in Paris under brilliant auspices; but the clergy formed a cabal; it was declared to be a covert attack on the Christian religion, and Fleuri weakly begged the author to withdraw it after the second representation.

[Sidenote: 1743. Ætat. 49.]

When cardinal Fleuri died, and Louis XV. declared he would have no other first minister, Voltaire hoped to establish his influence on surer foundations, through his long-established friendship with the duke de Richelieu. This libertine, but not unambitious, noble sought to lay the foundations of his power by any means, however disgraceful. By giving the king a mistress of his own choosing, he hoped to rule his sovereign; and while the duchess de Châteauroux lived, he possessed considerable power. One of the first advantages Voltaire wished to reap was, to succeed to the seat in the academy, vacant by the death of cardinal Fleuri.

To understand the importance Voltaire attached to success in this endeavour, we must consider his views and his position. The chief aim of his life was to diffuse in France that knowledge and freedom of discussion which was permitted in England, but which was barred out of his country with a rigorous and persecuting spirit. At the same time, desirous of living in his native land, and to reap there the fruits of his labours in the applause of his countrymen, he wished to insure his personal security. As a chief means to this end, he believed it necessary to gain the favour of influential persons about the sovereign, and to make himself one of a powerful society, such as formed the French academy. Voltaire understood his countrymen. He knew how a word can sway--how a jest could rule them. His own temper was vivacious and irritable. He never spared an enemy. While accusing Boileau and Molière for holding up the poetasters of their day to ridicule, did any of the _literati_ attack him, he defended himself with acrimonious sarcasm and pertinacious abuse. He spared no epithet of contempt, no vehemence of condemnation, nor any artful manœuvre, so to obtain the advantage. While he thus sought to annihilate his foes, and to secure himself, the gates of the Bastille yawned in view, and by the tremour which the sight inspired, added that bitterness to his sensations which the fear of disaster inspires. These were the causes of the virulence of his diatribes--of the sting of his epigrams in which he devotes Piron and others to everlasting ridicule. It was on this account that he sought to be a member of the academy.

The moment he began to canvass for the vacant seat in the academy, a violent cabal was formed to oppose him. Maurepas, secretary of state, an excellent man, but narrow-minded, was the moving spring of the opposition. He pat forward a Theatin monk, named Boyer, as his agent. This man declared that the deceased cardinal's empty chair could only be filled properly by a bishop. He found some difficulty in finding a prelate who chose to undertake the invidious part; one was at last found, and Voltaire lost his election. The same scene was renewed when another vacancy recurred, during the following year. In some degree the poet was consoled by the success of the tragedy of "Mérope." The audience were transported by enthusiasm; they perceived the author in a box--they insisted on his coming forward. The young and beautiful duchess de Villars was with him. She was called upon to embrace the poet; at first she was embarrassed by the singular part she was called on to act, but, recovering herself, obeyed the call of the pit with the grace that distinguished a high-born Frenchwoman. Voltaire might well desire to achieve success with an audience of his countrymen, when such were the tokens he received of triumph.

The king of Prussia, meanwhile, having exhausted his finances by war, and gained two provinces, found it eligible to conclude a peace with Maria Theresa; a peace, detrimental to the interests of France, which was thus left to carry on the war single-handed. It became matter of policy to induce Frederic to infringe a treaty scarcely signed. The duke de Richelieu requested Voltaire to be the negotiator. Again his mission was secret. He pretended to renounce his country, disgusted by the cabal carried on by Boyer against him, and he had the appearance of applying to Frederic for refuge and defence against the injustice he met in his native country. Voltaire's own account of this negotiation is written in his usual jesting, sarcastic style; he made a joke of the bishop, his successful rival; and when Frederic answered by a deluge of pleasantries on the subject, he took care to make his letters public. The bishop of Mirepoix complained to the king that he was made to pass for a fool at foreign courts; but Louis XV. replied that it was a thing agreed upon, and that he must not mind it. Voltaire remarks that this reply was opposed to Louis's usual character, and that it appeared extraordinary. But the king probably spoke in the innocence of his heart, announcing a mere fact, that the bishop's reputation for talent was to be sacrificed for the good of the state. Indeed, there is a letter from Voltaire to his immediate employer, Amelot, secretary for foreign affairs, which shows that he by no means felt easy with regard to the light in which Louis might view his conduct, and excuses the style of his correspondence with Frederic. "There are in his notes and in mine," he writes, "some bold rhymes, which cannot hurt a king, though they may an individual. He hopes that I may be forced to accept his offers, which hitherto I have refused, and take up my abode at the court of Prussia. He hopes to gain me by losing me in France; but I swear to you I would rather live in a Swiss village than gain at this price the dangerous favour of a king."