Part 10
It is always a vexed point of morals to determine how far right can come out of wrong, how far a cause initially bad can be said to be good in its results. It must certainly be conceded in Grimm’s case that, having put himself into a false position and remaining there, he acted not only sensibly and discreetly, but even honestly and conscientiously. He found Madame d’Épinay silly, as are so many clever women, and he insisted on her behaving with judgment and discretion. One of his first acts was to demand that her old lover, Francueil, whom she still permitted to visit her as a friend, should be given his dismissal. With Duclos, man of letters, and of character rough, dissipated, and unscrupulous, he bade her break entirely. Then he turned to Rousseau.
It has been justly said of Grimm that he never lost a friend save Jean Jacques. In 1756 Madame d’Épinay, acting on one of those excessively foolish impulses which she herself felt to be wholly fascinating, and which had already more than once shipwrecked her life, gave Rousseau the little Hermitage in the forest of Montmorency, close to her own country-house of La Chevrette.
Grimm had not known Rousseau for six years without knowing his heart. He looked up suddenly from the ‘Correspondence.’ ‘You have done Rousseau a bad service,’ he told Madame d’Épinay sternly, ‘and yourself a worse.’ Still, it was done. In 1757, that _belle laide_, Madame d’Houdetot, also had a house close to La Chevrette, and there attracted the notice of Rousseau. After a brief summer day of delight, she grew tired of her vehement admirer, or her lover, Saint-Lambert, grew tired of him for her. At any rate, there burst over those three houses in the Montmorency forest a storm of fierce passions and scandalous recriminations. All Paris stood watching. Diderot plunged impulsively into that angry sea. Rousseau accused Madame d’Épinay, in terms which no self-respecting woman could have forgiven, of being the writer of a certain fatal anonymous letter; and she forgave him. Grimm had been appointed secretary to the Duke of Orleans, and was absent on duty in Westphalia. He did not spare his little mistress’s pusillanimous weakness. ‘Your excuses are feeble ... you have committed a very great fault,’ he wrote. Hurrying home, he dealt with Rousseau in terms of unmistakable plainness. He made Madame d’Épinay cast him off there, at once, and for ever, and carried her off to Geneva on the excuse, a just excuse in every sense, of her health.
But the consequences of her folly were not ended. Rousseau defamed her character in the ‘Confessions,’ and in that unique masterpiece of scurrility he speaks of Grimm as ‘a tiger whose fury increases daily.’ Diderot declared that Jean Jacques made him believe in the existence of the devil and of hell. But Grimm wrote an obituary notice of Rousseau in his ‘Correspondence’ of admirable justice and moderation, and spoke of him as ‘embittered by sorrows which were of his own making but not the less real,’ and as ‘a soul at once too weak and too strong to bear quietly the burden of life.’ It must be allowed that Grimm could be magnanimous.
Having saved Madame d’Épinay from her friends, it remained to him to save her from herself. At Geneva he put her under the care of the great and good Tronchin, and made her write for the ‘Correspondence.’ He helped her to manage the miserable remains of the fortune her husband’s mad extravagance had left her, supervised the education of her children, and even showed her the harm she did them by speaking disrespectfully of their father. His love was not fervent, perhaps, but it corrected her follies and her weakness, and made her do and be her best. It had at least some of the tokens of a good and honourable feeling.
These visits to Geneva were undoubtedly the happiest time in her life. On this first one, which lasted eight months, from February to October 1759, she and Grimm often saw and talked with Voltaire; and Grimm greatly appreciated the society of the solid and sensible Genevans and the cultivated Tronchins. Mademoiselle Fel came to stay with Voltaire at Les Délices, and when Grimm saw her there he proved convincingly the truth that ‘the man’s love, once gone, never returns.’ But his real passion was not even for Madame d’Épinay. His dominant taste was his ambition; his dearest mistress, his career.
Already secretary to the Duke of Orleans, on the last evening of his stay at Geneva, he heard the satisfactory news that he was made Envoy for Frankfort at the Court of France. True, _M. l’Ambassadeur_, as Diderot called him, soon lost his post by joking in a despatch at the expense of an official person; but none the less he was rising in the world. Presently he was busy settling M. d’Épinay’s bankruptcy and helping Madame to arrange a satisfactory marriage for her daughter. _Tyran le Blanc_ he was called by her and her circle. But, after all, no woman is happy till she has met her master. Well for her if she find one as judicious and upright as Melchior Grimm.
He was less with her as the years went by, though not in any sense less faithful. In 1762 the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha appointed him her _chargé d’affaires_; and when she died her husband made him Councillor of Legation, with a pension.
He met Frederick the Great when he was travelling in Germany in 1769; and Frederick, forgetting his grievance that Grimm would not turn the ‘Correspondence’ into a scandalous society newspaper, fell under the spell of his fellow-countryman’s encyclopædical knowledge and dignified affability. Grimm, said Meister, had the rare talent of living with great people without losing any of the freedom and independence of his character.
When he was nearly fifty years old, in 1771, he resumed an employment of his youth, and, at a very large salary, consented to be tutor to the Hereditary Prince of Hesse, a boy about nineteen. The pair went to England and were well received at its ultra-German Court. Grimm was delighted with ‘the simplicity, the naturalness, and the good sense’ of the English character. The Landgravine, young Hesse’s mother, sold her diamonds that her son might prolong his visit in so delightful a country. And then Grimm brought him back to Paris and formed his mind and manners in the society of d’Holbach and Diderot, of Madame Necker and Madame Geoffrin.
In 1773, tutor and pupil went to St. Petersburg to attend the marriage of Wilhelmina, the Prince of Hesse’s sister, with the Czarevitch Paul. In a very short time the skilful Grimm had gained the great Catherine’s interest and consideration. Even Diderot’s warm heart and glowing genius (he was staying at the Russian Court when Grimm arrived there) did not win her so well as the German’s delicate tact and keen perceptions. Herself before all things a great statesman, how should she not respect the shrewd judgment, the strength, and the determination of a Grimm? It is so rare to be clever and wise! It was most rare in the eighteenth century. Two or three times a week Grimm dined with her Majesty _en petit comité_--those dinners at which all men were equal, and at which no servants appeared to hamper the conversation. Afterwards she talked alone with him by the hour together. He told Madame Geoffrin how, when he left her, he would pace his room all night with the splendid ideas she had suggested coursing through his sleepless brain: ‘The winter of 1773-74 passed for me,’ he said, ‘_en ivresse continuelle_.’ But when Catherine would have permanently attached him to her service, his stern good sense helped him to refuse. There is no such dead-weight on genius as a post at Court--be it the Court of a Catherine or a Frederick--and Grimm knew it. ‘I have never seen you hesitate about anything,’ Madame d’Épinay had once written to him; ‘when you have once decided with your just, strong mind, it is for ever.’
His refusal was unalterable, and he returned to Paris. He was sure enough of his firmness to visit his royal friend again, two years later, in 1776. He had been acting tutor once more, to the two Counts Romanzoff this time. He had taken them to Naples to embrace Galiani, to Ferney to see Voltaire, and to Berlin to see Frederick. They arrived in Petersburg in time for the second marriage of the Czarevitch, of whose first marriage, with Wilhelmina of Hesse, Grimm had been the principal promoter. Catherine received him with the same flattering interest and offers, but he was as deaf to them as before. Then she gave him the title of Colonel--to the intense amusement of King Frederick--and appointed him her general agent in Paris at a salary of ten thousand livres.
After his return to the capital this appointment formed a very large occupation in his life.
His frequent absences had naturally not been the best thing in the world for the ‘Literary Correspondence,’ but it would have been a much worse thing if Diderot--Grimm’s ‘patient milch-cow whom he can milk an essay from or a volume from when he lists’--had not been there to do his work. The ‘Correspondence’ rightly appears with Diderot’s name as well as Grimm’s on its title-page. In these latter years, indeed, its readers often had to be content, not with Diderot, but with a mere Meister; and when Grimm did write himself it was sometimes carelessly and in a hurry. Not quite the first, or the last, perhaps, to commit that literary enormity, he occasionally reviewed books he had not taken the trouble to read.
His letters to and from Catherine, after the first few years, were not conveyed through the post, but by special messenger, and are therefore delightfully outspoken. Grimm’s contain indeed a good deal of flattery and exaggeration; but Catherine’s are spontaneous enough. She used to say she was as ‘frankly an original as the most determined Englishman.’ The pair wrote sometimes in French and sometimes in German. They had nicknames for most of the crowned heads in Europe. Of ‘Brother George of England’ Catherine had always spoken with contempt, and considered his loss of the American colonies as ‘a State treason.’ But much of the correspondence was devoted to mere homely details. As her agent, Grimm bought the imperial rouge for the imperial cheeks, pictures, books, and bon-bons. He took long journeys in her interest: he supplied her with architects when she caught a fever for building; and presently, having been discreet matchmaker for the Hesses and the Czarevitch, he was commissioned to play the same delicate part for the Czarevitch’s daughters.
He was living now in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin. His love of music was still strong, and on young Mozart’s visits to Paris, Grimm was his kindest and most influential patron. The next few years saw the deaths of many old friends--of Voltaire, of Diderot, of Frederick the Great, of d’Holbach, and of Madame d’Épinay. For ever trying to conciliate all men, poor little volatile, self-deceived deceiver, under Grimm’s masterful influence the best qualities of her nature had come to the fore and the worst receded. She was to the last true to him as she had never been true to anyone else. Grimm adopted her grand-daughter and married her to the Comte de Bueil.
So far, his own life had been singularly happy and successful. If he had loved unwisely, he had taken care that the affection should never be of that inordinate kind which is its own punishment. He had, too, one of the dearest solaces of declining life in seeing young people growing up about him. As to his career, he was not only attached to the royal house of Orleans, but he was by now Catherine’s Councillor of State, Minister Plenipotentiary to the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, and Baron of the Viennese Empire. He was a rich man, with a fine collection of books, pictures, and _vertu_. He should have died before 1789.
In that year came the stunning fall of the Bastille. Of liberty, Grimm had talked easily enough, but he had also been shrewd enough to doubt its promises. He had at least nothing of the calm confidence of the fine ladies of the old _régime_ who drove out from modish Paris through the Faubourg Saint-Antoine to look at the ruins of the great prison, as at a sight prepared--for their amusement. To the wary German the destruction of the Bastille spelt the ruin of France. The Revolution sped on--Vengeance rushing through the night with a drawn sword in her hand.
In 1790 came the great emigration of the nobles. Who should be suspect if not this correspondent of kings? Grimm fled to Frankfort; but in two months’ time he plunged again into the whirlpool of Paris, to rescue the Comtesse de Bueil, his dear adopted grandchild, then in sore straits. He took her to Aix-la-Chapelle; but in October 1791 he returned himself to the capital, to get the Empress’s letters out of France if he could. He found he had already been denounced in the committees as carrying on a correspondence with her ‘little favourable to the Revolution.’ His only chance of safety lay, he saw, in ‘extreme circumspection.’ He had that quality by nature to the full; but, none the less, stirred by a generous pity, history tells of an interview he had with the royal saint, Madame Elisabeth, in which he tried to assist both her and Marie Antoinette. He could do nothing; fate and the fatal Bourbon character were too strong for the Bourbons to be saved.
In 1792 Grimm, who had loved her long and owed her much, said farewell to Paris for ever, leaving behind him, as he said, the fruit of the wisdom of his whole life and his entire fortune, and finding himself as naked as when he came into the world. He and Madame de Bueil lodged over a chemist’s shop in Düsseldorf, and even had to sleep in the Natural History Museum of that town. Grimm’s whole income was Catherine’s pension of two thousand roubles; her generosity indeed often added to it, and in 1796 she made him Russian Minister at Hamburg. This was one of the last acts of her life. She died, and left her friend and servant yet the poorer for her loss.
At Hamburg he had a disease of the eye which necessitated its removal. Then he retired to Gotha and lived with the Comtesse de Bueil in a house given him by the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, the munificent Duke providing furniture, linen, kitchen utensils--everything. The Countess’s two young daughters acted as Grimm’s secretaries. The music he had loved was still a resource to him, and he seems to have kept to the last something of his old power and mastery over others. Goethe found him, when he saw him in 1801, still an agreeable man of the world and rich in interest and experience, but unable to conceal a profound bitterness at the thought of his misfortunes. Under the Directory some of his confiscated property was restored to him. But it could hardly benefit him; he no longer lived, he only existed. He, who had been born when the Regent Orleans ruled France and the old order was at the supreme height of its magnificence and depravity, was roused from the dotage of his last days to hear the thunder of the cannon of Jena and Austerlitz, or the story of the peace concluded between Catherine’s grandson, Alexander, and Napoleon Bonaparte upon the raft at Tilsit.
Grimm died on December 19, 1807, aged eighty-four.
No unpleasing contrast, this ‘methodical, adroit, managing man,’ with his cold uprightness and steady prudence, to a reckless, out-at-elbows Diderot, or a mad, miserable Rousseau. Thriftiness and caution are unromantic virtues and even accounted selfish; but, after all, the world would have no beggars to relieve if every man laid by for himself.
If it was the Encyclopædists’ mission to teach the people to reform their kings, it was Grimm’s to teach those kings to reform themselves--to be as careful and judicious as he was. He tried; but from long and close association with them he himself caught at last that disease epidemic among rulers--oblivion to unpleasant consequences and a relentless future--and never recovered from the fearful shock which opened his eyes at last.
VII
_HELVÉTIUS: THE CONTRADICTION_
Most of the reforming philosophers of the eighteenth century were better in word than deed.
Helvétius wrote himself down self-seeker and materialist, and in every action of his life gave his utterance the lie. Helvétius was, as Voltaire had been, a courtier--not the teacher of kings, like Grimm, but their friend and servant. Helvétius alone was at once of that body, which of all bodies the philosophers most hated, the Farmers-General--the extortionate tax-gatherers of old France--and of a practical philanthropy Voltaire himself might have envied.
He belonged to a family famous in the medical profession. His great-grandfather, a religious refugee from the Palatinate, had been a clever quack, practising in Holland. His grandfather introduced ipecacuanha to the doctors of Paris, and his father, having saved Louis XV.’s life in some childish complaint, was made physician to the Queen and Councillor of State. Still, the
family fortunes were but mediocre. Little Claude-Adrien, who was born in 1715, was at first educated at home by a mother ‘full of sweetness and goodness.’ Her tenderness, perhaps, was an ill preparation for the harsher, wider world of the famous school of Saint Louis-le-Grand, whither Claude-Adrien was presently sent. It was Voltaire’s old school, and it was Voltaire’s old school-master, Père Porée, who helped the shy, sensitive, new boy with kindliness and encouragement, and first roused in him a love of letters. Grimm, who nearly always has his pen pointed with malice when he writes of Helvétius, records that poor Claude-Adrien always seemed stupid at school through being the victim of a chronic cold in the head: an unromantic affliction, which would make genius itself uninteresting. Young Helvétius was no genius, however.
After leaving school he was sent to an uncle, who was a superintendent of taxes at Caen, to learn finance. There he wrote the usual boyish tragedy of promise--never to be performed--and the usual youthful verses, and was made a member of the Caen Literary Academy. The sensitive shyness soon disappeared. Young, healthy, and handsome, loving literature much and women more, an excellent dancer and fencer, clever, cool, agreeable, and much minded to get on in the world, young Helvétius comes up to Paris. At three-and-twenty, in 1738, being the son of his father, and having the necessary financial equipment, he was made Farmer-General, a post certain to bring in two or three thousand a year, and possibly, with the requisite extortion and unscrupulousness, a good deal more.
Paris, in the years between 1738 and 1751, was certainly the most delightful and the most seductive city in the world. In the early part of that period, Madame de Tencin, the mother of d’Alembert and the sister of the Cardinal, was forming the youth of the capital in her famous _salon_. In the later period, Madame de Pompadour was revealing to it by her example the whole secret of worldly success--a clear head and a cold heart. The Court was eternally laughing, play-acting, intriguing. For the few, the world went with the liveliest lilt; and for the many--the many were dumb.
Helvétius was one of the few. Now at Madame de Tencin’s, ‘gathering in order that he might one day sow;’ now in the _foyer_ of the Comédie, where Mademoiselle Gaussin, the charming comic actress, nourished a hopeless passion for him; now at the opera, seeing for the first time Buffon, Diderot, d’Alembert, and joining hotly in the question of French or Italian music, which agitated the capital a thousand times more than national glory or shame; now at Madame de Pompadour’s famous little dinners of the Entresol, or at Court, daintily distinguishing between the Queen of reality and the poor Queen _en titre_--the new young Farmer-General was Everywhere where Everybody who is Anybody goes, and Nowhere where Nobody goes. Be sure there was a fashionable shibboleth then as there is now, and be sure Helvétius prattled it and lived up to it. Grimm declared that if the word ‘gallant’ had not been in the French language, it would certainly have had to be invented in order to describe him.
One day, society heard of him dancing at the opera under the mask of the famous dancer, Dupré. The next, he was whispered to be the lover of a modish Countess, who had taken Atheism as other women took Jansenism, Molinism, or a craze for little dogs, and passionately imbued her lover with the exhilarating doctrine of All from Nothing to Nothing. Then he posed as the _amant-en-titre_ of the Duchesse de Chaulnes. For the passions were only a pose--like the opera dancing. Helvétius was merely minded to get on in the world, and was looking about for the shortest cut to glory. He soon saw, or thought he saw, a pleasant road thereto called Verse.
Voltaire, now retired to Cirey, science, and Madame du Châtelet, had made poetry the fashion. I too will be a poet! The young Farmer-General racked his sharp brains a little, and as a result sent Voltaire some long, dismal cantos on ‘Happiness.’ The master replied with the kindliest criticism, and offered advice so keen and excellent that if poets were made, not born, Helvétius’ verses might still live. But, after all, advice by post is always unsatisfactory. Helvétius’ Farmer-Generalship made periodical tours in the provinces an agreeable necessity. On a journey through Champagne, what more natural than to stop awhile at Cirey, where Voltaire was writing ‘Mahomet,’ and Madame du Châtelet was the most delightful of blue-stocking hostesses? Between Arouet of five-and-forty and Claude-Adrien of five-and-twenty a warm friendship was cemented. All Voltaire’s correspondence from 1738 until 1771 is studded with letters to Helvétius. The young man was his ‘very dear child,’ ‘my rival, my poet, my philosopher.’ If he took so large and liberal a view of Helvétius’ talents as to declare that, as a poet, he had as much imagination as Milton, only more smoothness and regularity (!), yet he was not afraid to wrap up the pill of many a shrewd home truth in the fine sugar-plums of compliments.
But, after all, _is_ poetry the easiest way to glory? Claude-Adrien, returned to Paris, walking through the Tuileries gardens one day, saw the hideous Maupertuis, the geometrician, surrounded by all the charming and pretty women, adoring him, and immediately decided to abandon verse and be a geometrician instead. But before he had taken a couple of steps in this direction, the publication of the ‘Spirit of Laws’ in 1748 electrified Europe, and changed his mind. To be sure, when, three years earlier, Montesquieu had brought the book up to Paris and asked the young Farmer-General’s judgment on it, Helvétius had replied that it was altogether unworthy of the author of the ‘Persian Letters,’ and had strongly recommended him not to publish it. Well, that advice can be conveniently forgotten. Helvétius paid Montesquieu the sincerest of all flattery by resolving on the spot to be a philosopher himself.
If, between these eventful years of three-and-twenty and six-and-thirty, Helvétius had been nothing but an astute, ambitious young man-about-town, seeking the likeliest way to fame and fortune, he would have been undistinguishable from hundreds of others around him, and not worth distinguishing. But, at his worst, there was something in him which was never in that selfish crowd which thronged the galleries of Versailles.