If the invasion of Silesia by King Anti-Machiavelli-Frederick-the-Great had given Voltaire a moral shock difficult to recover from, he experienced a shock far greater in degree and kind now.

He had been slow to see anything. But when he did see, he saw all. He broke into the most passionate and violent reproaches. The lofty Saint-Lambert responded that no one had the right to criticise his conduct, and that if M. de Voltaire did not like it, he had better leave the chÂteau. The remark irritated Voltaire to a frenzy. Émilie stood by, nonplussed for once in her life, not at all ashamed, but in very considerable difficulty. One can fancy the half dark study, the abominably aggravating coolness of Saint-Lambert, and the inarticulate fury of Voltaire. He flung himself out of the room in one of the greatest passions of his life. He called Longchamp, said that he must beg, borrow, or steal a post-chaise, and make ready to start for Paris that very night. The artful valet went straight to Madame du ChÂtelet for an explanation. “No post-chaise is to be found on any consideration,” said Émilie. An outcry would ruin her reputation. (It is inconceivable, but true, that Madame du ChÂtelet considered her reputation as yet immaculate.) At two o’clock in the morning Longchamp came to his master’s rooms and announced that a post-chaise was an impossibility. Then ride to Nancy at daybreak and get one! M. de Voltaire’s passion had not yet spent its force. He went to bed. And Longchamp crept down again to Madame du ChÂtelet. That marvellous woman was writing at her desk, and announced the extraordinary intention of going to see M. de Voltaire herself, then and there, and bring him to reason.

She did it. She took a seat on the end of his bed. She spoke to him in English, that old language of their quarrels and love, and by a tender name, long disused. Longchamp lit a couple of candles and retired—to listen to the conversation through the wall. It was the most marvellous conversation in the world. They spoke in French now. Émilie tried to excuse herself—somehow. The lean, furious, exhausted, unhappy man in bed started up.

“Believe you!” he cried. “Now! I have sacrificed health and fortune for you, and you have deceived me.”

And Émilie proceeded to explain with a perfect plainness of speech that Voltaire had long ceased to love her as a lover, and that since she must love someone, he should be pleased that her choice had fallen on a mutual friend, like M. de Saint-Lambert.

How the piercing eyes in the thin face on the pillow must have looked her through and through! Voltaire answered with a very fine irony: “Madame, you are always right; but if things must be so, do not let me see them.”

Before she left him, she embraced him. She had succeeded in her aim so far that he was calmer.

The rest of the night the energetic woman spent in appeasing Saint-Lambert, who considered Voltaire had insulted him.

Voltaire was ill in bed the next day. It must be allowed he had an excuse for illness this time. And behold, as the evening drew in, the young Marquis comes in person to make inquiries after the invalid’s health, and the invalid admits him. Saint-Lambert makes very handsome apologies for the hasty words which had escaped him in a moment of agitation. Voltaire takes him by both hands and embraces him. “Mon enfant, I have forgotten all. It was I who was wrong. You are at the happy age of love and pleasure. Make the most of both.”

The very next day the three met at supper at Madame de Boufflers’s, and all enjoyed themselves immensely. All idea of the post-chaise and Paris was dismissed. Did Voltaire recall that gay episode of his youth when he and de GÉnonville had shared the smiles of Mademoiselle de Livri?

In 1749, he actually wrote Saint-Lambert a beautiful gallant poem on the event which had for the time being so much disturbed his peace:

and went on to say in flowing couplets how the “astronomic, Émilie” had renounced mathematics and inky fingers for those “beautiful airs which Love repeats and Newton never knew.”

By October 17th, the ex-lover, the lover, and the mistress had returned to LunÉville with Stanislas’s Court (of which Voltaire justly complained as being “a little ambulant”) on terms of perfect amity. The whole episode had occupied only a few days. And presently Voltaire was once more engrossed heart and soul in his “History of Louis XV.”

The explanation of his conduct lies, as ever, in character.

He was angry at first because he had an uncommonly quick temper and a great provocation. But he was always a philosopher as he grew calmer. It was a very bad world. That was his lifelong conviction. So much the more reason to make the best of it! He had lost a selfish, irritating, and exigeante mistress. But there was no reason why he should not keep a clever woman for a friend. Émilie had, after all, but acted on a principle which was his as well as hers; that, in the relation of the sexes, when duty ceases to be a pleasure, it ceases to be a duty also. (It is but just to Voltaire and to Madame du ChÂtelet to say that they did not carry this remarkable theory, not yet out of vogue, into any other department of morals.)

The age looked upon such irregularities simply as subjects for a jest or an epigram. And every man sees in some degree with the eyes of the time in which he lives.

So Voltaire wrote “Louis XV.” The pain passed, as sharp pains are apt to do, quickly. He and Madame du ChÂtelet, unaccompanied by Saint-Lambert, left LunÉville for Cirey about December 20, 1748. The journey was very like a hundred they had made in old times. At that fatal ChÂlons, Émilie would call on the bishop and keep the post-horses waiting the whole day while she played cards, and Voltaire lost his temper with her just as if he had been her lover still. Once at Cirey, he was engrossed in hard work, and she wrote a preface to her Newton when she was not writing love letters to Saint-Lambert. Her infidelity would hardly have altered the course of her life were it not for that rigorous law that “every sin creates its own punishment.”

The events that followed are such as are best passed over in the fewest words possible. In this December of 1748 at Cirey, Madame du ChÂtelet found that she was again to be a mother. Saint-Lambert was summoned. He, Voltaire, and the unhappy woman consulted together on what course they would take. Émilie was in tears at first; and they all ended in laughter. They decided on a daring comedy. The Marquis—that simple bonhomme—was summoned home, fÊted, caressed—and deceived. It is sufficient to say that he was delighted with his wife’s prospects, and thought he had reason to be so delighted. He left Cirey, spreading the good news abroad. And Madame du ChÂtelet complacently considered that her reputation was saved.

Nothing damns the eighteenth century deeper than the fact that this loathsome story was its darling anecdote; and that his criminal connection with Madame du ChÂtelet, and the sinister events which were its consequence, made Saint-Lambert the very height of fashion. Every memoir of the period has the tale in detail. Longchamp gloats over it. The fine ladies of Paris made mots upon it, of which in our day a decent bargee would be ashamed. If the French Revolution immolated some of the very persons who brought it about, was the injustice so gross? A Voltaire shared the vices of the social conditions he condemned, and was himself in some sort a part of that system which set itself above decency and duty and which he knew to be fatal to the good of mankind.

He came out of this unclean comedy less smirched than the other actors therein. But that is to say very little. To be a part of it at all was defilement enough.

By February 17th of the new year 1749 Voltaire and Émilie were installed in the Rue TraversiÈre-Saint-HonorÉ in Paris.

The bonhomme had rejoined his regiment. Saint-Lambert was in attendance at LunÉville.

Voltaire had written a “Panegyric of Louis XV.” which was to be recited to his Majesty by Richelieu when the Academy went in a body on February 21st to offer their congratulations to the King upon the establishment of peace. But, as so often happened with Voltaire’s writings, the thing had become public too soon. Friend Richelieu, enraged at hearing his recitation being murmured and quoted by the courtiers about him, would not recite it at all. Voltaire was not present on the occasion. When he heard what Richelieu had done, he flung his old friend’s portrait into the fire in a rage.

March 10th saw a brief revival of “Semiramis”: but all the same it was the fashion just now to prefer CrÉbillon and his “Catilina.”

On May 27th, Voltaire obtained the privilege of selling his useless post of Gentleman-in-Ordinary, while he was allowed to retain its title. But privilege or no privilege, he did not stand well at Court. King Stanislas had written a work called the “Christian Philosopher”: in which his good daughter, Queen Marie Leczinska, saw, disapprovingly, the freethinking influence of Voltaire. He still courted Madame de Pompadour; but no Pompadour ever yet imperilled her own position for any friend in the world.

Another king and court were, indeed, particularly anxious that Voltaire should return to them, but Voltaire refused Frederick’s invitation firmly. He was really ill, as he said. But there was another reason. He had resolved not to leave Madame du ChÂtelet until the dark hour that was coming upon her had passed.

They fell, even in Paris, into their old habit of hard work. Émilie worked to kill thought, to stifle a dreadful foreboding which was with her always. She studied mathematics with Clairaut, who had once visited Cirey and was “one of the best geometricians in the universe.” She shut herself up with him for hours and hours, resolving problems. She plunged into all kinds of gaiety. Her letters to Saint-Lambert are the letters of a very unhappy woman—tortured with jealousy and doubts, exigeante, fearful, unquiet. He was true to her—and cold. She tried to thaw his ice at the fire of her own passion. “I do not even love Newton,” she wrote; “only you. But it is a point of honour with me to finish my work.”

One day, she and Clairaut were so engrossed in their labours, that Voltaire, whose philosophy never could endure being kept waiting for meals, bounded up from the supper-table, ran upstairs “four steps at a time,” found the door locked, and smashed it in with his foot in a rage. “Are you in league to kill me?” he cried as he went down again, followed by the too-zealous mathematicians, who had the grace to be ashamed of themselves. There was a very cross, silent supper À trois. The next morning Madame du ChÂtelet, feeling she owed her friend a reparation, suggested that she should take her morning coffee in his rooms. She did so, out of a priceless porcelain cup and saucer, which Voltaire, whose temper was still rather irritable, broke by a clumsy movement. Madame reproached him sharply. He retaliated. He grumbled a good deal at the exorbitant sum he had to pay to replace the bric-À-brac. Both he and Émilie were at the end of their tether. Yet they were good to each other. Émilie felt she owed Voltaire much for his pardon, and his reasonableness. And Voltaire never appears even to have thought that her faithlessness as his mistress could exonerate him from fidelity to her as his friend. He knew that she was unhappy. Compassion was in his nature. It is that quality which made him to the last hour of his life, in spite of his gibes and cynicisms, something more than commonly lovable.

In April, Stanislas had come up for a fortnight to the French Court. The unhappy Marquise had then been able to make arrangements for a future sojourn at LunÉville, of great importance to her: and of which she wrote, eagerly and feverishly, to Saint-Lambert.

Voltaire was now writing a play, “Nanine”—founded on Richardson’s “Pamela.” When it was produced on June 16, 1749, he had followed his old plan of filling the house as much as possible with his friends. There were a few spectators in the gallery, however, who would talk aloud. The nervous and sensitive author could by no means endure that. Up he got on to his feet. “Silence, you boors, silence!” he cried; and silent they were. Whenever he saw his own plays he found it impossible to contain himself. He not only trained the actors beforehand; but he must lead the laughter and the tears of the parterre at the performance. And, to be sure, if there is anyone who should know where a play is pathetic and where it is comic, it is the man who wrote it.

He and Émilie were in Paris from February until the end of June. Frederick repeated his invitation warmly. “You are not a sage-femme after all,” he wrote to Voltaire scornfully, “and Madame will get on very well without you.” Any sarcasm penetrated Voltaire’s thin skin. But he replied gravely, “Not even Frederick the Great can now prevent me fulfilling a duty I believe to be indispensable. I am neither doctor nor nurse, but I am a friend and will not leave, even for your Majesty, a woman who may die in September.”

He was true to his word. Late in June, while “Nanine” was still running, he and Madame du ChÂtelet went to Cirey at her urgent desire. When they were there, the most versatile of human creatures, the author of the “Pucelle” and the prim prologue for a girls’ school, wrote at her request a eulogy of Saint-Louis, and a very good eulogy too, for an abbÉ who had to deliver one before the Academy and could by no means compose it himself.

It was at Émilie’s desire, too, that they left Cirey, after only a fortnight’s stay there—“these delightful rooms, books and liberty, to go and play at comets” at LunÉville. A few days at Commercy had preceded their stay at LunÉville, which they reached on July 21, 1749. It was there that Madame would find Saint-Lambert. It was there that the event which she dreaded more every day was to take place. Voltaire was not only sick to death of that wearisome mockery of astronomy with which Stanislas’s little Court was still amusing itself, but was further annoyed by being very uncomfortable and ill-attended to in his rooms, in which he shut himself up as much as he could. He bore the discomfort—not at all in silence indeed—but he bore it.

A quarrel on the subject with Alliot, who was commissioner-general of the household of Stanislas, and a very economical commissioner too, burst out on August 29th, and Voltaire relieved his feelings in some vif little notes: one of which he addressed to the King himself, and besought his Majesty to remedy the defects in the meals, lighting, and firing supplied to his guest. Émilie, who had so urgent a reason for remaining at LunÉville, did her clever best to soothe her ami. He was soothed apparently.

Meanwhile the little Court went its usual way. Madame de Boufflers was her smiling, easy self—that dame de voluptÉ “who,” as she said in her epitaph, “for greater security, made her Paradise in this world.” There were also the austerer, priestly influences trying to gain Stanislas. Poetry was a fashion among the guests and the courtiers, as also the inevitable play-acting. Saint-Lambert was still at work on that lengthy poem, “The Seasons.” The summer was waning. Émilie plunged into every excess of gaiety, and every excess of work. She forgot that she was three-and-forty, not three-and-twenty. To forget everything—that was her aim—to have no time to think of past or future. His duties often called Saint-Lambert away to Nancy, and when he was absent the wretched woman endured torments of loneliness, helplessness, and foreboding. He reassured her when he was there. He was always so calm! As September drew near she sent for Mademoiselle du Thil from Paris, that ill-advised friend of hers, once her lady-companion, who on one memorable occasion had lent her money—to lose at the Queen’s table. The bonhomme appeared on the scene. Voltaire was writing constant letters to his friends, anticipating the coming event gaily. Madame had a herculean constitution. All would be well! She was still constantly at her desk. She employed many hours in doing up her manuscripts and letters in parcels, and giving Longchamp directions as to the persons who were to receive them—if—if——. It was a point of honour with her, as she had said, to finish Newton. On August 30, 1749, she wrote her last letter to Saint-Lambert. “I am wretched to a degree which would frighten me if I believed in presentiments,” she said.

On September 4th, Voltaire was writing delightedly to announce the birth of a little girl and the well-being of the mother. The infant was sent straight into the village to be nursed, and in the stress of the painful events which followed, died almost unnoticed. Madame du ChÂtelet progressed favourably. The little Court was in the highest spirits and spent most of its time in her room. On September 9th, the weather being exceedingly hot, the patient asked for an iced drink. It was given her and she was seized with convulsions.

Stanislas’s physician hastened to her and for the moment she seemed better. The next day, September 10th, the convulsions returned: and two doctors from Nancy were called in. The Marquise again appeared better. In the evening Voltaire and the Marquis du ChÂtelet went down to supper with Madame de Boufflers—still not the least anticipating any danger. Longchamp, Saint-Lambert, and Mademoiselle du Thil were left in the room with the sick woman. Eight or ten minutes later, they heard a rattle in her throat. They did what they could. Mademoiselle hastened downstairs to tell Voltaire and the Marquis. The horrified supper-party hurried to the bedroom and a scene of dreadful confusion ensued. Madame du ChÂtelet was already quite unconscious. No one had time to think “of priest, of Jesuit, or of Sacrament.” But the Marquise was past their help. “She knew none of the horrors of death,” wrote Voltaire. “It was her friends who felt those.”

His own anguish of spirit, when the dreadful truth was borne in upon him, rendered him beside himself. He and Saint-Lambert remained by the bed awhile. And then Voltaire, who had loved his mistress longer and better than his supplanter, dragged himself away, blind and dull with misery. He stumbled at the foot of the staircase without, and when Saint-Lambert, who had followed, would have helped him, Voltaire turned upon him with a bitter reproach. Its terms are so unrepeatable that the eighteenth century repeated them ad nauseam: and the twentieth may as well forget them if it can.

The brief remainder of that fatal day Voltaire spent in writing the bitter news to his friends.

If any proof be needed of the vehemence and sincerity of his feeling for the dead woman, those letters give it.

The next day Madame de Boufflers took from the Marquise’s ring a portrait of Saint-Lambert and bade Longchamp give the ring to the Marquis du ChÂtelet. A little later Voltaire asked Longchamp for the ring in question. Thirteen years before, he had given Émilie his own portrait for it, with these lines,

His portrait had displaced one of the Duke of Richelieu’s—and now his, in its turn, had made way for Saint-Lambert’s.

Voltaire might well turn away saying that all women are alike; and trying to comfort himself with the antique and barren reflection that, after all, it was the way of the world.

Among Madame du ChÂtelet’s effects was a large parcel of letters. She left a memorandum to beg her complaisant husband to burn them unread. “They can be of no use to him and have nothing to do with his affairs.” He did so, on his brother’s prudent advice. But Longchamp observed him make a very wry face at certain ones of which, being uppermost, he caught sight. The cautious valet rescued from the flames the whole of Voltaire’s “Treatise on Metaphysics” and some letters, afterwards also burnt. Among the destroyed manuscripts were historical notes of Voltaire’s, of which he deplores the loss in his preface to his “Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations.” It has been thought, but it is not certain, that the whole of his eight volumes of letters to Madame du ChÂtelet also perished in this conflagration. If they did not, a new Voltaire, a new world, rich in human interest, as no doubt in wit and philosophy, still remains to be discovered by some literary Columbus. At present, of all the letters he wrote to her, the human being with whom he was most intimate and who shared the deepest secrets of his soul and the highest aspirations of his genius, there can be found but one gay little note.

Madame du ChÂtelet was buried with all honour at LunÉville. Paris had already flayed her dead body with epigrams. She had not been too immoral for its taste. That was impossible. But she had been far too clever. One indignant person said that it was to be hoped the cause of her death would be the last of her airs. “To die in childbed at her age is to wish to make oneself peculiar: it is to pretend to do nothing like other people.” Frederick the Great wrote her epitaph. “Here lies she who lost her life in giving birth to an unfortunate infant and a treatise on philosophy.” Maupertuis and Marmontel spoke of her in terms of warm admiration. And Voltaire prefixed to her translation of Newton, published in 1754, at once the kindest and the truest estimate of her character yet made.

Madame du ChÂtelet was intellectually a very great woman. She had a mind essentially clear and logical—the mind of a clever man. She had not only a passion for learning rare in her sex, but for exactly the kind of learning in which her sex generally fails. She had, too, an intellectual fairness strangely unfeminine. She was long the champion of Leibnitz against Newton; and then, convinced of her mistake, acknowledged it, and made it the business of her life to prove it and to translate and explain Newton for the benefit of the French people. In an age busily idle, she was distinguished by a noble and untiring industry. In an age of scandal, she was charitable. For all those terrible fine clothes and that passion for high play and taking youthful parts in amateur theatricals, the laugh of the de Staals and the du Deffands at her expense turns against them now.

Still preserved among her letters are her “Reflections on Happiness.” She plainly avows there that “rational self-indulgence” was her idea of it. Upon that rock her barque split. She chose pleasure before duty and gained a faithless Richelieu, fifteen jealous, feverish years with Voltaire, and a wretchedness from the cool love of the lofty Saint-Lambert, of which every letter she wrote him is proof.

Out of the picture painted by Loir there still looks down the shrewd, smiling face—reflective eyes, clever forehead, mobile lips, drooping nose—of the woman who was at once Voltaire’s curse and blessing—who, if she had been all good might have been his blessing only, and if she had been all bad would have been curse alone. At the Revolution, some wretches broke open her coffin to steal the lead.

There had been gold in her heart once, but the world and the flesh had overlaid it in dross.