Part 16

The advent of the brilliant couple from Cirey, it need not be stated, added further strength to the _philosophe_ party. Abbé Menoux found out that he had reckoned without his host. Between the two Marchionesses, De Boufflers and du Châtelet, in the place of the expected jealousy and rivalry, there proved to be nothing but sincere, close, and demonstrative friendship. To some extent Madame du Châtelet's amiability towards the Duke's favourite was a piece of diplomacy. She had not come into Lorraine without a very material object in view. Her husband was not as well off as either he or she might have wished; and, although in other matters she showed herself very indifferent to the dull "_bonhomme_"--that is what she used to call him--in matters of money she thoroughly supported his interest. As in some respect a vassal of the Duke of Lorraine, and a member of one of those four distinguished families which were known in Lorraine as "Les grands Chevaux"--the Lignivilles, the Lenoncourts, the Haraucourts and the du Châtelets--she considered that her husband had something like a claim upon king Stanislas. One of King Stanislas' best pieces of patronage, the post of _grand maréchal des maisons_, worth 2,000 _écus_ a year, had at the time fallen vacant, and for her husband _la belle Emilie_ resolved to secure it. It cost her a tough struggle, for there was a formidable rival in the field in the person of Berchenyi, a Hungarian, and one of the King's old favourites. However, her woman's persistence triumphed in the end. Apart from such cupboard love, the two women, both of them possessing _esprit_, both born courtiers, and both, moreover, sharing a sublime contempt for the prosaic rules of what has become known as the "Nonconformist Conscience," seemed thoroughly made for one another. And their alliance told upon the Court. The Jesuits became alarmed. Menoux put himself upon his defence, and threw himself into the contest, more particularly with Voltaire, with a degree of vigour and energy which taxed all the combative power of his opponent. Others might eye the infidel askance and profess a holy horror of the opinions of one whom Heaven was fully expected some day to punish in its own way. There is an amusing anecdote of an unexpected encounter between Madame Alliot, the wife of the "Jesuit" _intendant_, and Voltaire, both of whom rushed for shelter, in a sudden and exceptionally violent storm, under the same tree. At first the lady shrank from the atheist as from an unclean thing. The rain, however, was inexorable. She revenged herself by preaching to the infidel, attributing the entire displeasure of Heaven, as evidenced in that fearful storm, to his unbelief. Voltaire, it is said, not feeling quite sure of his ground while lightnings were flashing, and in no sort of mood to play the Ajax, contented himself with meekly pleading that he had "written very much more that was good of Him to whom the lady referred than the lady herself could ever say in her whole life." Such harmless little hits the _philosophe_ had now and then to put up with; but for serious fighting few besides Menoux had any stomach. Devaux (Panpan), however "dévot," was disarmed by being--quite on the sly, but no less ardently--one of Madame de Boufflers' chosen admirers. Galaizière was taken up with other things. Solignac was too much of a dependent. "Mon Dieu" Choiseul did not carry sufficient weight. There was, indeed, another Abbé at Court, who might have been expected to help: Porquet, who became the Duke's almoner, a most amusing person in a passive way. But he was by no means cut out for a champion. Besides, being tutor to the young de Boufflers, he was scarcely a free agent. He himself describes himself as an "homme empaillé." When first appointed almoner, and called upon to say grace, he found that he had quite forgotten his Benedicite. Stanislas made him occasionally read to him out of the Bible, with the result that, half-dozing over the sacred page, he fell into mis-readings such as this: "Dieu apparut en singe à Jacob." "Comment," interrupted the Duke, "c'est 'en songe' que vous voulez dire!" "Eh, Sire, tout n'est-il pas possible à la puissance de Dieu?"

There was one sturdy supporter of Catholicism, however, who never flinched from the fight: that was Alliot, the Duke's _intendant_, who, by virtue of his office, had it in his power to make his dislike sharply felt. With what abhorrence he regarded the infidel guest, for whom he had to cater, we may learn from the contemporary records of his clerical allies, narratives which do not ordinarily come under the notice of persons reading about Voltaire. One can scarcely help drawing the inference that King Stanislas, with all his goodness and all his affected devotion to _periculosa libertas_, was a little bit of a "Mr. Facing-both-ways," using very different arguments in different companies--a Pharisee to the Pharisees, a _philosophe_ to the _philosophes_. Only thus could it come about that we have such extraordinary stories, altogether inconsistent with known facts, vouched for on the authority of reverend divines like Abbé Aubert and Abbé Proyart. "On vit quelquefois," says Abbé Proyart, "à la Cour du roi de Pologne certains sujets peu dignes de sa confiance, et le Prince les connoissoit; mais il trouvoit dans sa religion même des motifs de ne pas les éloigner." It was represented to him (by Alliot) that Voltaire "faisoit l'hypocrite." "C'est lui même, et non pas moi qu'il fait dupe," replied the king. "Son hypocrisie du moins est un hommage qu'il rend à la vertu. Et ne vaut-il pas mieux que nous le voyions hypocrite ici que scandaleux ailleurs?" But "le vrai sage," the Abbé goes on, found himself compelled at last to dismiss "le faux philosphe, qui commençoit à répandre à sa Cour le poison de ses dangereuses maximes." Under this clerical gloss the well-known story of Alliot stopping Voltaire's supply of food and candles assumes a totally new shape. "Ce ne fut pas une petite affaire que d'obliger Voltaire à sortir du château de Lunéville." In vain did the king treat his guest with marked coldness; the philosopher would not take the hint. In his predicament Stanislas appealed to the _intendant_ for advice. "Sire," replies Alliot, "_hoc genus dæmoniorum non ejicitur nisi in oratione et jejunio_," which means, he explains, that "pour se débarrasser de pareilles pestes," having "prayed" them to go without avail, he should now enforce a "fast," which would certainly drive them out of the place. Stanislas is alleged to have fallen in with the Jesuit's counsels; hence that open tiff with Alliot over the stoppage of provisions, which made Voltaire complain that he had not been allowed "bread, wine and candles." In truth, of course, all this clerical story is pure invention. Of the stopping of the provisions Stanislas knew nothing till advised by Voltaire, when he quickly set the matter right.

What with feasting, working, acting, dancing, travelling, the time passed most pleasantly. "En vérité," writes Voltaire to the Countess D'Argental, "ce séjourci est délicieux; c'est un château enchanté dont le maître fait les honneurs. Je crois que Madame du Châtelet passerait ici sa vie." Sometimes at Commercy, sometimes at the Malgrange, most generally at Lunéville, with visitors coming and going, discussions raised, attentions being paid this side and that, gallantry, billiards, _tric-trac_, _lansquenet_, _comète_ (which was a great favourite), marionettes, fancy balls, time could hang heavily on no one's hands. "On a de tout ici, hors du temps." Madame du Châtelet, writing till five o'clock in the morning, though she rose not later than nine, worked hard at her translation of _Newton_, which Voltaire cried up as a masterpiece--more particularly the preface. Whenever she found herself at fault, she had a splendidly fitted-up astronomical cabinet, kept up by Stanislas, to fall back upon, a cabinet which, says Voltaire, "n'a pas son pareil en France." Voltaire himself carried on a brisk correspondence with the Argentals, with Frederick the Great, with his friend Falkener in Wandsworth, and with many more, and worked at his history "de cette maudite guerre," at the _Siècle de Louis XIV._, at _Catilina_, and so on, with the easy industry which comes from comfort and absolute absence of restraint amid agreeable surroundings. To ingratiate himself the more with Madame de Boufflers, he wrote _La Femme qui a raison_. He acted and he criticized. He performed with a magic lantern, to the great amusement of the Court; and at masked balls he got himself up, sometimes as a "wild man," sometimes as an ancient augur. He was sorely troubled when threatened with a performance in Paris of a travesty of _Semiramis_. Then he lost some manuscripts. Then, again, Menoux frightened him with a tale that _Le Mondain_ and _Le Portatif_, published at Amsterdam, had both been in France traced to his pen. Among the visitors who in the second year of his stay came to enliven the Court was our Young Pretender--over whose misfortunes Voltaire had pathetically lamented before King Stanislas--and Prince Cantacuzene. The Pretender's cause Voltaire had espoused with fervid warmth. The news of his arrest in Paris arrived at Lunéville at the very moment when he was delighting the Lorrain Court with reading out his just completed chapter of _Le Siècle de Louis XIV._, treating of the Stuarts. "O ciel!" he exclaimed, "est-il possible que le roi souffre cet affront et que sa gloire subisse une tache que toute l'eau de la Seine ne saurait laver?" "Que les hommes privés," he wrote later, "qui se plaignent de leurs infortunes jettent leurs yeux sur ce prince et sur ses ancêtres."

Several times he left Lorraine for a brief time, going with Madame du Châtelet to Cirey, to Châlons, and to Paris. One visit he paid to Paris by himself, to see _Semiramis_ put on the stage. He came back in a pitiable state, the account of which in Longchamp's journal reads comical enough. "Il est vrai que j'ai été malade," he writes later, "mais il y a plaisir à l'être chez le roi de Pologne; il n'y a personne assurément qui ait plus soin de ses malades que lui. On ne peut pas être meilleur roi et meilleur homme." One would think not. Voltaire was petted like an invalid child. He had but to send word that he wished to see Stanislas, to bring the king to his bedside. When he found himself "malingre, bon à rien qu' à perdre ses regards vers la Vôge," he was taken out to Chanteheux, and made thoroughly comfortable there, where he could best indulge in the idle pleasure of contemplating the mountains. Meanwhile Madame du Châtelet had been to Plombières with Madame de Boufflers, and had come home just as much disgusted with the place as Voltaire himself had been nine or ten years before. Then the gay Court reassembled, and there was the same life, the same succession of pleasures, the same effusion of wit and raillery. Gilliers invented new dishes. King Stanislas exhibited his indifferent pastels. Madame de Boufflers played the harp, and courtiers with voices sang to her accompaniment. Under Voltaire's inspiration, all the Court turned _littérateur_ and engaged in versifying. Stanislas took up his pen once more and wrote, among other things, _Le Philosophe Chrétien_--horrifying thereby his daughter, the Queen of France, who persuaded herself that in the book she discerned the malignant teaching of the infidel Voltaire. Madame de Boufflers wrote; Saint Lambert composed fresh ditties; Devaux grew industrious; even Galaizière found himself impressed by the lyric Muse. Every courtier mounted his own little Pegasus and made an attempt to produce something witty, or clever, or at least readable. Lunéville became a modern Athens.

But there was a snake in the grass. One of the pleasantest features of the remarkably sociable life carried on by the brilliant company assembled under the roof of Stanislas, while at Lunéville and at Commercy, were those merry nocturnal gatherings held as soon as the king had retired to rest--which he did punctually at ten o'clock, without ever troubling the company, in spite of his jealousy, with an unexpected reappearance. Then began Madame de Boufflers' reign in good earnest; and to the good cheer of a choice little supper, to which often an exciting game of _comète_ or of _cavagnole_ added a fresh delight, was summoned, by means of a lighted candle placed in a particular window, a new guest, whom Stanislas' jealousy would not otherwise tolerate in the palace. This guest was the young and handsome Saint Lambert, a captain in the Duke of Lorraine's Guards, the cynosure of the ladies' world, of whom it was said that no fair heart to which he seriously laid siege could resist him. His muse had not yet taken the frigid turn which eventually produced those dull and chilling _Seasons_, a poem in which no one will now detect any merit, though Voltaire praised it up to the skies, and French contemporaries declared that the poet had surpassed Thomson. But he dabbled very neatly in little ditties, _vers d'occasion_, and the like, some of them rather light and pretty, though not of the most perfect style. Voltaire professes to regard Saint Lambert as a _terrible élève_, of whose poetry he owns himself "jealous." "Il prend un pen ma tournure et l'embellit--j'éspère que la postérité m'en remerciera." Posterity has done nothing of the kind. In matters of courtship Saint Lambert resembled the "_papillon libertin_" sketched by himself in one of his prettiest _pièces fugitives_:--

Plus pressant qu'amoureux, plus galant que fidèle, De la rose coquette allez baiser le sein. D'aimer et de changer faites-vous une loi: A ces douces erreurs consacrez votre vie.

Neither Society nor History would ever have known him, nor have detected any talent in him, had it not been his fortune to dispossess his two great contemporaries, Voltaire and Rousseau, successively of their mistresses, conquering the heart, first of Madame du Châtelet, and later that of Madame de Houdetot. Madame de Houdetot and he turned out to be really congenial spirits. For Madame du Châtelet his own conduct shows that he did not really care--as how could a young man of thirty-one for a woman of forty-two or else forty-seven, who had been some years a grandmother? Her letters are full of impassioned professions of affection, impatient longings for his presence, reproaches for his indifference. On his side it was all a question of vanity. It flattered him to think that he had eclipsed the great genius of the age in the affections of a woman of whom all the polite world was talking. What she was he knew well enough. More than once had she tasted of the forbidden fruit. Voltaire's _Epître à la Calomnie_ had not whitewashed the Magdalen who had had relations successively with Guébriant, with Richelieu, and with Voltaire. Of Voltaire's overstrained praise of her assumed modesty Saint Lambert himself writes:--

De cette tendre Courtisane Il faisait presque une Susanne.

But what could have induced Madame du Châtelet to engage in this conspiracy of deceit all round--deceit on her part towards Voltaire, deceit on Saint Lambert's part towards both Voltaire (with whom he was not then on terms of intimacy) and Madame de Boufflers (with whom he had a standing _liaison_)? It was in Madame de Boufflers' drawing-room, of all places, that the courtship was most actively carried on. Her gilt-framed harp, we hear, served as a letter-box for the lovers. There was a slit in it just of a convenient size to hold the letters, which passed daily. Of Madame du Châtelet's passion there could be no doubt. She threw herself into the _amour_ with the fervour of a girl of sixteen. She sent her lover dainty _billets-doux_ written on pink and blue-edged, fringed, and scented paper; declared that she could not live two days without hearing from him, when he was away; appointed _rendez-vous_ in the "Bosquet"--watched and waited for him. It seems ridiculous in a grandmother; but she was not the first woman of her age to go wrong.

Clogenson will have it that the attachment sprang up some years before--that Madame du Châtelet became annoyed at Voltaire's long absence at the Court of King Frederick, and looked out for a new lover. We know, however, that Emilie and Saint Lambert met for the first time at the Lorrain Court in 1748, when Voltaire had long been back from Berlin, and was devoting himself to his lady with an assiduity which could not be excelled. Besides, we know--from correspondence quite recently come to light--that as late as 1744 the relations between Voltaire and Emilie were still quite unclouded. The miniature portrait of Voltaire, which she wore so long secretly in her ring, and which was after her death found to have been replaced by one of Saint Lambert, was painted in 1744. In February of that year she writes to Abbé Moussinot: "Je vous laisse la choix du peintre, et je ne le trouverai pas cher, quoiqu'il puisse coûter." That does not sound like pining for a fresh lover. Evidently the later attachment dated only from 1748, when she first became personally acquainted with Saint Lambert; and, as the late M. Meaume puts it, "threw herself at his head." There is no need to look very far for an explanation. Emilie herself is perfectly outspoken about it. The temptation came. She had yielded so often that she had not sufficient virtue left to resist. The odd part of the business is, that Voltaire so readily forgave her; that he continued to dote upon her, to look upon her as half of his own self; and that he grew fast and admiring friends, almost _in consequence_ of the betrayal, with his betrayer, Saint Lambert. Many years after, Saint Lambert very naïvely set forth his own views on the proper conduct of friends in matters of this kind in his _Conte Iroquois_. Voltaire accepted that not very chivalrous theory readily, and contented himself with protesting--"O ciel! voilà bien les femmes! J'en avais ôté Richelieu, Saint Lambert m'a expulsé: cela est dans l'ordre, un clou chasse l'autre."

Growing poetic, he says:

"Dans ces vallons et dans ces bois, Les fleurs dont Horace autrefois Faisait des bouquets pour Glycère-- Saint Lambert ce n'est que pour toi Que ces belles fleurs sont écloses: C'est ta main qui cueille les roses. Et les épines sont pour moi."

Indeed, his relations with Madame du Châtelet were not those of an ordinary lover. He did not look upon her as in his young days he had looked upon the inconstant "Pimpette," on the beautiful "Aurore," the pretty "Artemire," on the very "natural" Rupelmonde, or the false Adrienne. His heart beat to a different tune at Cirey from what it did in the Rue Cloche Perce. She was a companion and a friend--"une âme pour qui la mienne était faite."

There is no need to review the incidents of that melancholy love-making in detail. They are well known. It was at Commercy that the treachery was detected, and that those half-comical, half pathetic scenes described by Longchamp occurred--Voltaire, mad with a sense of the injury endured, firing up, abjuring Emilie, almost accepting Saint Lambert's challenge to fight, ordering his valet, Longchamp, to bespeak a coach and horses at once, that very night, for Paris. Longchamp knew too well who was master. Instead of rushing to the posting-house, he went quietly to Emilie, who directed him to let post-master, horses, and coach alone, and report that there were none to be had. Her cynically frank explanation, next morning, in Voltaire's own room put matters straight and Saint Lambert was not only pardoned but asked pardon of by Voltaire and admitted as a friend to both parties. Later came the ludicrous trick played off upon the Marquis at Cirey. Last of all, there was the sad ending at Lunéville.

Madame du Châtelet had a short time before met Stanislas at the Trianon, and had begged him for the use, for the time of her confinement, of "le petit appartement de la reine" in the ducal palace, a handsome set of apartments on the ground-floor, looking out on one side on the Cour d'Honneur, on the other on the private gardens reserved for the Court--apartments which were magnificently furnished, but were prized by the petitioner chiefly for their comfort, and for their nearness to those other rooms, on the first floor (which command a splendid view across the Bosquet, bounded in the distance by the gorgeous façade of Chanteheux), in which Voltaire was to be lodged. Those rooms in the first story are now appropriated as a granary. Madame du Châtelet's apartments serve as quarters for the divisional General. King Stanislas, kind-hearted as ever, gladly acceded to the petition, and entered into all the arrangements with particular personal interest, as if they had concerned some near relative of his. Under his own and Madame de Bouffler's attentive care (to say nothing of Voltaire and Mademoiselle du Thil), we know how admirably Emilie was looked after, how satisfactorily at first all seemed to proceed--her _Newton_ was finished just in the nick of time--till that fatal glass of iced _orgeat_ suddenly turned happiness into grief, and made the palace a house of mourning.