Since that first letter of the August of 1736 the correspondence and friendship between Voltaire and Prince Frederick of Prussia had grown more and more enthusiastic. The devoted pair had from the first interspersed abstract considerations on the soul and “the right divine of kings to govern wrong” with the most flattering personalities and hero-worship. Each letter grew more fervent and more adoring than the last. By 1740 Voltaire was Frederick’s “dearest friend,” “charming divine Voltaire,” “sublime spirit, first of thinking beings.” In Voltaire’s vocabulary Frederick was Marcus Aurelius, the Star of the North, not a king among kings but a king among men. Voltaire dreamt of his prince “as one dreams of a mistress,” and found his hero’s Prussian-French so beautiful “that you must surely have been born in the Versailles of Louis XIV., had Bossuet and FÉnelon for schoolmasters, and Madame de SÉvignÉ for nurse.”

Not to be outdone, Frederick announced that his whole creed was one God and one Voltaire.

There was indeed no extravagance of language which this Teutonic heir-apparent of six or seven and twenty and the brilliant withered Frenchman of six-and-forty did not commit. They did adore each other. For Voltaire, Frederick was Concordia, the goddess of Peace—the lightbringer—the hope of the world—veiled in the golden mist of imagination, unseen, unknown, and so of infinite possibility and capable of all things. While heir-apparent Frederick was quite shrewd enough to know that a Voltaire might add lustre even to a king’s glory, and be as valuable a friend as he was a dangerous foe.

By 1740 and the return of Voltaire and the Marquise from Paris to Brussels, Frederick had begun compiling the most sumptuous and beautiful Édition de luxe of the “Henriade” ever seen. He counselled his author friend to omit a too daring couplet here and there, and his author would have none of such prudence. Then Frederick must turn writer himself, and sent his Voltaire a prose work called “Anti-Machiavelli” and an “Ode on Flattery.”

“A prince who writes against flattery is as singular as a pope who writes against infallibility,” said Voltaire. The “Anti-Machiavelli” is a refutation in twenty-six prosy chapters of the entire Machiavellian system. Voltaire called it “the only book worthy of a king for fifteen hundred years,” and declared it should be “the catechism of kings and their ministers.” He wept tears of admiration over it. He had it bound and printed. He wrote a preface for it. His transports of delight were sincere enough, no doubt. He was also sincere enough to criticise it to Frederick pretty freely, and to recommend “almost a king” to be a little less verbose, and to cut out unnecessary explanations. It must be confessed that the “Anti-Machiavelli” appears a very dull and trite composition to-day, and that the beautiful moral sentiments on the iniquities of war and the kingly duty of keeping peace lose a good deal of their weight when one knows that a very few months after they were written their author invaded Silesia and plunged Europe into one of the most bloody wars in history.

But when Voltaire waxed enthusiastic over the princely periods at Brussels in the January of 1740 he had no premonition of that future. Compared with other royal compositions “Anti-Machiavelli” is a masterpiece. Even to one of the shrewdest men who ever breathed it might well have given hopes that its author would be a king not as other kings, a benefactor and not an oppressor of humanity, a defender of all liberal arts, a safeguard of justice, freedom, and civilisation. Old Frederick William was dying. The time was at hand when his son might make promise, practice. On June 6, 1740, he wrote to Voltaire: “My dear friend, my fate is changed, and I have been present at the last moments of a king, at his agony and at his death”; and prayed friend Voltaire to regard him not as king but as man. And Voltaire replied to him as “Your Humanity” instead of “Your Majesty,” and saw in the heavens the dawn of a golden day, and on earth all things made new.

On July 19th, Voltaire arrived at The Hague to see about recasting and correcting a new edition of the “Anti-Machiavelli,” now being printed there. There were certain things in it safe enough for a crown prince to have written anonymously, but hardly prudent to appear as the utterances of a king.

Voltaire was quite as active and thorough on that King’s behalf as on his own. He wasted a whole fortnight of his precious time on Frederick’s business in Holland. He had infinite trouble with the printer, Van Duren, and stooped to trickery (to be sure, Voltaire thought it no abasement) to get the necessary alterations made in the royal manuscript. At length this most indefatigable of beings himself brought out an authorised version of the “Anti-Machiavelli.” Voltaire’s corrected edition and Frederick’s original version both appear in a Berlin issue of the Works of King Frederick the Great. A comparison of the two shows the versatile Voltaire to be the most slashing and daring of editors. He cut out, as imprudent, as much as thirty-two printed pages of the royal composition. The time had not yet come when Frederick was grateful for such a hewing and a hacking as that. But the time was very soon to come when he would have been but too glad if Voltaire had flung into the fire the whole of “Anti-Machiavelli,” and the memory thereof.

The friendship between editor and author grew apace, meanwhile, daily. They sent each other presents of wine and infallible medicines. Voltaire had an escritoire, designed by Martin, specially made in Paris for Frederick’s acceptance. But they had long discovered that the handsomest of presents and the most adoring of letters were but a feeble bridge to span the space that separated them, and the question of a meeting, long and repeatedly urged by Frederick, became imminent.

Since Frederick’s first letter it had been the rÔle of Madame du ChÂtelet to stand by and watch a comedy in which she was not offered a part. To be a passive spectator was little to the taste of her supremely energetic temperament. It was not long before she learnt to be jealous. She was a great deal too clever not to know from very early times that, but for her, Voltaire would have been a satellite to the Star of the North, instead of to any woman in the world. When his friendship with Frederick began he was no doubt true to her because he wished to be true. But how short a time was it before he was true only from a sense of duty! Madame du ChÂtelet, with her vigorous passions, was not the woman to be satisfied with a cold, conscientious affection like that. She must be first—everything! Her woman’s instinct told her to mistrust Frederick, and she did mistrust him. Then the mistrust grew to dislike; dislike to hate; and hate, war to the knife.

Oh what beautiful compliments that pair exchanged through Voltaire, or directly in the most flattering letters to each other—in those four years between 1736 and 1740! Frederick said the most charming things about Émilie. She was always the goddess, the sublime, the divine. Flattery costs so little and may buy so much.

When he read her “Essay on the Propagation of Fire,” he wrote to Voltaire that it had given him “an idea of her vast genius, her learning—and of your happiness.”

Did Madame look over her lover’s shoulder and smile not a little grimly with compressed lips at those last words? “Of your happiness”! Very well. Leave him to it then. What can your court or kingship give him better than happiness, after all? It is to be feared that if Émilie had rendered Voltaire’s life “un peu dure” in the time of Madame de Graffigny she rendered it much harder now, and that there was not much question of real happiness between them. To be fought over was a much more trying position for a nature like Voltaire’s than to be one of the fighters. And there is no hell on earth like that made by a jealous woman.

Within easy reach too, in tempting sight, were the pleasures of a king’s congenial society, honours to which a worldly-wise Voltaire could be by no means insensible. Yet in almost all his letters to Frederick he reiterates his decision that he will not leave his mistress; that he is bound to her in honour and gratitude; that he has chosen his fate and must abide by it.

In the spring of 1740 she had published her “Institutions Physiques,” in which she now championed Leibnitz against Newton, as Voltaire had championed Newton against Leibnitz. Frederick went into ecstasies over it—to its authoress; and damned it with very faint praise indeed to his confidant, Jordan. Madame may have suspected that perfidy. King Frederick, when he became king in that May of 1740, guessed he had met his match in that resolute woman whom he addressed variously as “Venus Newton” and the “Queen of Sheba.” If Frederick wanted to see Voltaire—well, then, he must have Venus too. Of that, Venus was determined. Voltaire returned to Brussels from The Hague in the early days of August, 1740. It was not the slightest use Frederick’s writing to him on the 5th of that month from Berlin: “To be frank ... it is Voltaire, it is you, it is my friend whom I desire to see, and the divine Émilie with all her divinity is only an accessory to the Newtonian Apollo”; and more plainly still the next day, “If Émilie must come with Apollo, I agree; although I would much rather see you alone.” Madame du ChÂtelet was for Voltaire a sovereign far more absolute than any on earth. He pulled a very wry face, shrugged his shoulders, and resigned himself to her determination with as much good-humour and nonchalance as he could compass. It was arranged that Frederick should meet Voltaire and Venus at Antwerp on September 14th, and should return with them for a brief visit, incognito, to the du ChÂtelet’s hired house in Brussels.

One can fancy the baffled rage of the Marquise when at the very last moment the news arrived that that subtle Frederick had artfully developed an attack of ague which would quite prevent him meeting Émilie at Antwerp and Brussels, but need be no obstacle in the way of Voltaire, alone, coming to see his sick friend for two or three days at the ChÂteau of Moyland, near Cleves. Even Madame du ChÂtelet’s jealousy and resource could find no excuse to keep her lover now. He went—feeling no doubt rather guilty and very glad to get away—the precise sensations of a schoolboy who has escaped for a day’s holiday from a very exacting master. He was not going to play truant for long! After all, Madame had been dreadfully exigeante! One thinks of her with pity somehow—Voltaire thought of her with something very like pity too—left alone in Brussels, beaten, angry, and restless, and adding daily to an already magnificent capital of hatred for Frederick.

That meeting at Moyland is one of the great tableaux of history. Voltaire himself painted it in letters to his friends when its memory was green and delightful; and twenty years after, with his brush dipped in darker colours. The ague, though convenient, was not a sham. Voltaire found Solomon, Marcus Aurelius, the Star of the North, huddled up in a blue dressing-gown in a wretched little bed in an unfurnished room, shivering and shaking and most profoundly miserable. “The sublime spirit and the first of thinking beings” sat down at once on the edge of the royal pallet, felt the King’s pulse and suggested remedies. The day was Sunday, September 11, 1740: very cold and gloomy, as was the disused chÂteau itself. It is said Voltaire recommended quinine. Any how, the fit passed, and by the evening Frederick was well enough to join a supper of the gods.

Three men, who had been visitors at Cirey and were all renowned for learning or brilliancy, were of it—Maupertuis, Algarotti, and Kaiserling. Frederick forgot his ague, and Voltaire his Marquise. They discussed the Immortality of the Soul, Liberty, Fate, Platonics. On the two following nights the suppers were repeated. At one of them Voltaire declaimed his new tragedy “Mahomet.” Frederick wrote of him just after as having the eloquence of Cicero, the smoothness of Pliny, the wisdom of Agrippa, and spoke, with a more literal truth, of the astounding brilliancy of his conversation. As for Voltaire, he found for a brief space the realisation of his dream—the incarnation of his ideal. Here was the philosopher without austerity and with every charm of manner, forgetting he was a king to be more perfectly a friend. Writing after twenty years—after strife and bitterness—Voltaire still spoke of Frederick as being at that day witty, delightful, flattering—aye, still felt in some measure what he felt in fullest measure at the ChÂteau of Moyland in 1740, the siren seduction of the King’s “blue eyes, sweet voice, charming smile, love of retirement and occupation, of prose and of verse.” With a mind keenly acute and searching, Voltaire was youthfully susceptible to fascination. He had to the end a sort of boyish vanity, and Frederick greatly admired him. But that alone would not account for the fond pride and affection with which he regarded this young King—and which might have been almost the partial and sanguine love of a father for a promising son. No man ever wore better than Frederick the Great that fine coat called Culture. He fitted it so well that even a shrewd Voltaire thought it his skin, not his covering; and when he flung it on the ground and trampled on it, still regretfully loved him—not for what he had been, but for what he had seemed.

The three days came to an end. On September 14th, Frederick took Maupertuis to Paradise, or Potsdam, with him, and condemned Voltaire to Hell, or Holland (this is how Voltaire put it), where he was to stay at The Hague in an old palace belonging to the King of Prussia and complete his arrangements for the publication of his edition of the “Anti-Machiavelli.” The Marquise was at Fontainebleau paving the way for Voltaire’s return to Paris, and writing to Frederick to ask him to use his influence to win Cardinal Fleury, the Prime Minister’s, favour, for “our friend.” Fleury had formerly met Voltaire at the Villars’, “where he liked me very much”; but that liking had since turned to dislike. Madame worked at once with enthusiasm and with wisdom—that rare combination of qualities which can accomplish everything. She said herself, not a little bitterly, that she gave her lover back in three weeks all he had laboriously lost in six years: opened to him the doors of the Academy; restored to him ministerial favour. He sent a presentation copy of the “Anti-Machiavelli” to Cardinal Fleury presently, and the powerful Cardinal, now that Voltaire was a great King’s friend and the active Marquise was at Court, suddenly discovered that he never had had any fault but youth. “You have been young; perhaps you were young a little too long”—but nothing worse than that; really nothing. The two exchanged flattering letters. Then came events which changed the face of Europe. On October 20, 1740, died the Emperor Charles VI. He was succeeded by Maria Theresa of three-and-twenty. The Powers were looking hard into each other’s faces to see if peace or war were written there. “The slightest twinkle of Fleury’s eyelashes” was hint sufficient for this daring and versatile Voltaire to try a new rÔle. When he started off to Remusberg on November 4 or 5, 1740, to pay another little visit, already arranged, to friend Frederick, he went not only as a visitor, but to discover the pacific or bellicose disposition of Anti-Machiavelli who had already written, a little oddly, that the Emperor’s death upset all his peaceful ideas.

The journey from The Hague to Remusberg took a fortnight. Voltaire had as companion a man called Dumolard, whom Theriot had recommended for the post of Frederick’s librarian. Their travelling carriage broke down outside Herford, and Voltaire entered that town in the highly picturesque and unpractical costume of his day on one of the carriage horses. “Who goes there?” cried the sentinel. “Don Quixote,” answered Voltaire.

Remusberg was en fÊte when they reached it. There were suppers, dances, and conversation, a little gambling, delightful concerts—the gayest Court in the world. Frederick played on the flute and was infinitely agreeable. The Margravine of Bayreuth, his sister, was of the party. Voltaire showed Frederick Cardinal Fleury’s complimentary letter on the “Anti-Machiavelli.” There was no change on the King’s face as he read it; or if there was a change, it escaped even a Voltaire. If Voltaire had been brilliant at Moyland he was twice as brilliant here—in spite of the fact that he could only describe himself to Theriot as “ill, active, poet, philosopher, and always your very sincere friend.” He busied himself in procuring for that faithless person a pension from Frederick, for having been the King’s agent in Paris. All the time, through the suppers and the talk and the parties, he was watching, watching, watching. The visit lasted six days. Voltaire had never in his life tried to find out anything for so long without finding it. But when he parted from Frederick at Potsdam he had not the faintest suspicion that that invasion of Silesia upon which the King was to start in twelve days’ time was even a possibility.

Frederick pressed his guest to prolong his stay. He went to Berlin for a brief visit to pay his respects to the King’s mother, brother, and sisters; but left there on December 2 or 3, 1740, and then returned to Potsdam to say good-bye to his royal host—and to look into the royal heart, if that might be. But it was not to be.

Voltaire was anxious to be back in Brussels in time to receive Madame du ChÂtelet on her return from Paris, where her husband had just bought a fine new house. He wrote a little epigram to his host before he left, in which he gaily reproached the King as a coquette who conquers hearts but never gives her own. He had been at least astute enough to divine that there was Something his master hid from him. And his master responded with a little badinage on that other coquette who was drawing Voltaire to Brussels.

They parted friends—and warm friends. But there was a highly practical side to both their characters which came to the fore when Frederick bade Voltaire send him the bill of his expenses at The Hague, and Voltaire added to that bill the expenses of the journey to Remusberg, taken at Frederick’s request. It was a large total—thirteen hundred Écus—but it was not an unjust one. It has been happily suggested that it at least contained no charge for Man’s Time, and this man’s time was of quite exceptional value. “Five hundred and fifty crowns a day” grumbled Frederick to Jordan; “that is good pay for the King’s jester, with a vengeance.” But when the King’s jester is a Voltaire, the King must expect to pay for him. That was Voltaire’s view of the question, no doubt.

A series of accidents befell him on his journey home. He was a whole month getting from Berlin to Brussels, and twelve days of the time ice-bound in a miserable little boat after leaving The Hague. In a wretched ship’s cabin he worked hard on “Mahomet” and wrote voluminous letters.

One of them, dated “this last of December,” 1740, was to Frederick—cordial, flattering, and expansive. Having been dutiful enough to tear himself away from “a monarch who cultivates and honours an art which I idolise” for a woman “who reads nothing but Christianus Wolffius,” Voltaire was a little disposed to grudge that act of virtue, and to make the most of it. He was anxious, too, to prove to Frederick that he had left him chiefly to finish the du ChÂtelet lawsuit—not merely “to sigh like an idiot at a woman’s knees.” “But, Sire ... there is no obligation I do not owe her. The head-dresses and the petticoats she wears do not make the duty of gratitude less sacred.” The last cloud of illusion must have been dispelled long before the Marquise du ChÂtelet’s ex-lover could have written those words.

He saw her now not only as she was, but at her worst. “Men serve women kneeling: when they get on their feet they go away.” Shall it not be accounted for righteousness to a Voltaire that he got on his feet and went back to her?