One of Madame du ChÂtelet’s idiosyncrasies was to travel only by night; and another, to overload the travelling carriage with luggage. She insisted on having her way in both particulars this time. It has been aptly said of Voltaire that he was at once patient and hasty. He certainly must have been patient to take the road with a woman whose packages frequently numbered a hundred and who could never travel without her lady’s maid. That he usually lost his temper on such journeys, is simply to say that he was human.

On the present occasion, as they were nearing Nangis, the hind spring of the carriage broke, and the overladen vehicle fell over on the side of Voltaire. Madame du ChÂtelet, large and bony, the femme de chambre (whose weight and figure history does not record), and a vast quantity of bandboxes and parcels, came tumbling on the top of him. He relieved his feelings by uttering “piercing shrieks.” Two footmen, by getting on the roof of the overturned carriage and dragging their mistress, the lady’s maid, and the bandboxes up through the doors “as from a well,” at last released M. de Voltaire in the same manner. It was bitterly cold and a brilliant starlight night. The two footmen, aided by the postillions, tried to set the carriage straight again, and failed. One of the postillions rode on into the next village for further assistance. And Voltaire and Émilie sat by the roadside on the carriage cushions, and would have been “perfectly happy” shiveringly studying astronomy, if they had only had a telescope. They were philosophers, after all.

The carriage was mended at last. But it had not gone fifty paces before it broke down again. The workmen, who considered Madame had underpaid them, had to be brought back by force—and promises. At last the carriage was able to proceed at a walking pace the nine miles to the ChÂteau of Chapelle, where the travellers halted. They reached Cirey about the middle of January, 1748, without further adventure.

The month they spent there was a gay one. Neither was anxious for too many tÊte-À-tÊtes. The honeymoon had set for ever. When they were alone, each wrote all day; in the evenings they read aloud together or played trictrac. Émilie had an aggravating habit of keeping her Voltaire waiting till supper was cold while she finished “a little calculation.” That her Voltaire, himself orderly and punctual, was extremely vif at the delay need not be doubted. Madame du Deffand had once said that he followed Émilie like a faithful dog with the collar round his neck. Well, the dog was faithful still. But the collar irked and worried him; and there were times when he snapped at the hand that had put it there.

Madame de Champbonin reappeared on the scene very soon, with a hoydenish twelve-year-old niece in her train. She had been very warmly invited—if only to finish that solitude À deux. The whole neighbourhood received invitations presently to act in, or to witness, theatricals. Émilie wrote charades for the occasion. She played comic parts as well as any other. Sometimes the servants were pressed into the cast and acted too. The bonhomme would seem to have been conveniently absent, as usual. Voltaire doubtless enjoyed the freedom of private life after the slavish etiquette of the Court. He was certainly able to enjoy theatricals to his last breath.

About the middle of February he and Madame went to visit another Court, at LunÉville, where the etiquette was not slavish at all, and where a king was a great deal more anxious to have them than ever dull Louis had been.

Stanislas, once King of Poland, had been not a little thankful to exchange that quarrelsome and much quarrelled over kingdom for the peaceful little duchy of Lorraine, the tranquil enjoyment of a pipe six feet long and the dolce far niente of his lazy and easy-going mistress, Madame de Boufflers. He still had the title of King. He still had a position—he was the father of Marie Leczinska. His miniature Court had all the pleasures and intrigues of a greater, with no weary formalism. Stanislas had his Jesuit, Menou, to rule him just as other kings had their priests to rule them. The priest fought the mistress for the command of the royal puppet, in the approved, courtly fashion; and the mistress fought the priest, when she was not too lazy.

The little Court was further ornamented by a child dwarf, who could sleep in a sabot, and a most beautiful young guardsman, six feet high.

Following the example of Frederick, Stanislas was a feeble author himself and a very enthusiastic admirer of the literary Voltaire. The literary Voltaire was not sorry to show the offended Court of France that he stood well with its offended Queen’s royal father. So the visitors and the visited were gratified alike.

The visit was a gay one. “IssÉ” was played; and “MÉrope,” when everyone sobbed just as they had done in Paris. In the evenings they played lansquenet or talked. It was an agreeable, idle life. Voltaire, ailing as usual, was humoured and made much of by the King. Émilie overwhelmed the inert and voluptuous Madame de Boufflers with her energetic friendship. And then—

The Marquis de Saint-Lambert is one of the most picturesque figures of his century. Poet and soldier, handsome, haughty and cold, with just enough disdain in his perfect manner to make every woman adore him and long to thaw that flawless ice—he had almost every quality which makes riches superfluous. He was, in fact, nothing but the officer of a company of Lorraine guards. He was much in LunÉville because he had, said the world, a fancy for his King’s mistress, Madame de Boufflers. His own age accounted him celebrated because he wrote the loveliest drawing-room verses and was the author of a poem called “The Seasons”—much duller than Thomson’s. The present age only knows him as the man who robbed Rousseau of Madame d’Houdetot and Voltaire of Madame du ChÂtelet.

In 1738, when Madame de Graffigny, who was a friend of his, was at Cirey, she had corresponded with him. He had much wished to be asked to stay there. Since he knew how “to read and rest in his own room during the day” and would only expect to be amused in the evenings, Madame du ChÂtelet desired to have him for a visitor. But the plan, probably owing to the rupture with Madame de Graffigny, had never been carried out.

Madame du ChÂtelet was now two-and-forty years old, and, on the unanimous testimony of all her female friends, not at all beautiful. But that inflammable temperament, which years before had made her fling honour and prudence to the winds and give her heart and life to Voltaire, was hers still. Age had not quenched the fire. Abstruse thought and long devotion to the exact sciences had still left her, on one side of her nature, passionately a woman. Voltaire had passed quickly and easily from love to friendship—but not Émilie. Her jealousy of Frederick the Great was a proof that she loved her lover as he had long ceased to love her. As early as 1741, in Brussels, after his return from his second Prussian visit, she had bitterly reproached him with no longer caring for her. He had replied to her in verses of which the following give the keynote.

In the year after he first met her, on the occasion of Richelieu’s marriage to Mademoiselle de Guise, in April, 1734, he had written:

He had always been honest at least. If he had been still lover indeed, it might yet never have occurred to him that there could be cause for jealousy of Émilie of two-and-forty and a young guardsman of one-and-thirty.

When did that wild passion begin? Did it begin in those idle, early days of the LunÉville visit, gradually nourished by propinquity, that gay, easy life, those lovely society verses, and the tantalising fact that Saint-Lambert was a little bit in love with that stupid, lazy, self-indulgent de Boufflers? It would have been an irresistible temptation to Émilie’s cleverness and energy to win away such a man from such a woman.

But it seems more likely that she had no time for designs, that she fell head over ears in love madly, recklessly, and at once—with that utter abandon, all foolish and half pathetic, with which an old woman too often loves a young man. Was it the handsome face and cold manner and heart that attracted her? The whole eighteenth century found them attractive. Saint-Lambert had so much, too, of that particularly vague quality called taste! He liked being amused, though he found it too much trouble to be amusing himself. And here was one of the cleverest women of her day, or of any day, who could not be dull if she tried and wanted nothing better than to entertain him. She was an invigorating change from the sleepy de Boufflers, at any rate. He was not sorry, too, to obtain the cachet which would accrue to him for having robbed a Voltaire.

But whether the passion on both sides was born full-grown, dominant, and irresistible, or had slower roots in vanity and idleness, matters not. It was soon an accomplished fact. Madame du ChÂtelet wrote her Saint-Lambert the most mad, adoring letters on rose-coloured or sky-blue notepaper with an edge of lace. She put the letters in Madame de Boufflers’s harp in the salon. And when everyone had gone to bed, the young guardsman came and found them there. He replied of course. If he did not adore, he graciously submitted to be adored. “Come to me as soon as you are up,” wrote the deluded woman. And sometimes, secretly creeping round by the thickets of the garden, she would visit him. She hardly thought her conduct required apology. She loved him. That was enough. Or if it did, well then, for years Voltaire had been but her friend when he should have been her lover. “I loved for both.” “I had reason to complain and I forgave all.” She had tried to be satisfied with friendship: but she could not. She wrote thus to d’Argental in a letter not devoid of genuine feeling and even of pathos. She had some excuse. But she made the common mistake of thinking that an excuse and a justification are the same thing.

The AbbÉ Voisenon has recorded how once Madame du ChÂtelet, after, it may be guessed, a quarrel with Voltaire, spoke of herself as entirely alienated from him. The AbbÉ took down one of the eight volumes of Voltaire’s manuscript letters to her and read some aloud. All his love letters contained, says the AbbÉ, more epigrams against religion than madrigals for his mistress. But when the reader stopped, Émilie’s eyes were wet. She was not cured yet. A few years later, in 1749, her priestly friend tried the same experiment. She listened unmoved. She was cured indeed: and the doctor had been Saint-Lambert.

The LunÉville visit lasted from about February, 1748, until the end of April. Then Madame du ChÂtelet left the Court, and returned to Cirey, where she and Saint-Lambert may have spent a few blissful, uninterrupted days together. Voltaire prolonged his visit to Stanislas a short time. By May 15th he and Madame du ChÂtelet were both once more at Cirey en route for Paris.

During her stay at LunÉville the energetic Marquise had not only found a lover, but obtained for her bonhomme the lucrative post of the Grand Marshal of the Household to Stanislas, and a commission in the army for her son.

But her thoughts were not with husband, son, or friend (as, she still called her Voltaire), but with M. de Saint-Lambert. Wherever she was she wrote to him continually—letters filled with passion, abandon, tenderness, bitterness, doubt. He had purposed taking a journey in Italy, but renounced it at her pleading. She thanked him with the melancholy effusion and the humiliating gratitude of the woman who has obtained from her master a sacrifice she knows to be unwilling. She and her unsuspecting Voltaire came up to Paris. If she spent her time writing to her lover, Voltaire spent his in superintending the rehearsals of his new tragedy “Semiramis.” One day his versatility appeared in a new character, and he wrote a prologue for his “Death of CÆsar” for a girls’ school that proposed to act it. It is characteristic of the man that he adapted himself to this entirely new rÔle with the most perfect flexibility and thoroughness. The prologue’s chief characteristics are its “ease and orthodoxy.” He wrote it leaning on a mantelpiece, on the spur of the moment. He included a charming little letter to the Sister Superior and even begged the prayers of that good lady on his behalf!

On June 28th he and Madame du ChÂtelet left Paris for Commercy, another seat of Stanislas, where that King then was.

Voltaire was ill and miserable and Madame a more impossible travelling companion than ever. On their route, at ChÂlons-sur-Marne, she must needs engage in the most vociferous, fatiguing dispute with the landlady of an inn over a basin of soup.

Commercy was as gay as LunÉville. There were the inevitable operas and comedies, and on July 14th Providence kindly arranged a total eclipse of the sun to further amuse the little Court. One of its number had astronomised ever so many years ago at Sceaux and at Villars: and had not forgotten those times.

On August 26th he returned to Paris, leaving Madame du ChÂtelet behind him. She did not complain of his neglect this time. King Stanislas also came up to Paris to stay for a few days with his daughter, the Queen. Voltaire arrived in the capital on the very day of the production of “Semiramis”—probably August 29, 1748.

There had long been forming a cabal against the piece, headed by enemy Piron and joined by most of the adherents of that dismal old playwright CrÉbillon, who had himself written a clumsy “Semiramis” in 1717. Well, conspiracy for conspiracy. What weapons you use against me, I have the right to use against you. That was Voltaire’s theory now as ever. He met cunning with cunning. He bought up half the seats in the house. He gave them to persons who could be absolutely relied upon to clap and cry at the right moments, and to drown all hisses with applause. Theriot helped him. The d’Argental husband and wife had been already active on his behalf. Voltaire too had boldly asked the patronage of King Louis and Madame de Pompadour, and the King, in consideration of the piece having been originally written for the late Dauphine, agreed to pay the expenses of putting it on the stage. If the play but once had a hearing Voltaire believed that no conspiracy could damn it.

The little scheme succeeded fairly well. M. de Voltaire’s friends wept and applauded to perfection. But the first three acts were received by the audience as a whole with only a very moderate warmth. And in the fourth, the play was nearly ruined. It was then the custom in France for the spectators to sit and walk about on the stage. During this fourth act, at a scene at the tomb of Ninus, there were so many of them, that the too enthusiastic player who took the part of the sentinel and was guarding the tomb, called out: “Make way for the ghost, if you please, gentlemen. Make way for the ghost!” which set the house in a roar. The playwright, to be sure, had no reason to find the incident amusing. He complained to the Lieutenant of Police, and in future performances of “Semiramis” the abuse was corrected.

That first night, then, was by no means so decidedly successful as its author had hoped.

On the second night, August 30th, M. de Voltaire, wanting to hear what his friends as well as his enemies said of the piece behind his back, disguised himself and went to the famous CafÉ Procope, opposite the ComÉdie FranÇaise, and largely frequented by literary and theatrical people. He had been an amateur actor to some purpose, and understood the art of make-up as well as any professional on the boards. With cassock and bands, an old three-cornered hat, and an immense full-bottom unpowdered wig that showed hardly anything of his face except the sharp end of his long, pointed nose, he looked the part of an abbÉ to perfection. He put a breviary under his arm; arrived at the cafÉ; possessed himself of a newspaper; chose a dark corner; put on his spectacles, and read the paper over a modest repast of a cup of tea and a roll. The cafÉ filled presently—journalists, actors, some of the partisans of CrÉbillon and some of Voltaire—all fresh from the play and all anxious to air their views thereon. That sensitive, thin-skinned, long-nosed abbÉ in the corner had to exercise all his self-control to keep himself from contradicting an enemy who criticised unjustly, or a friend who praised foolishly. But he did it. The rÔle pleased his sense of humour. And one or two of his critics quoted some of his fine passages not amiss. He sat there for an hour and a half, keenly attentive to the conversation. The result as a whole was not unsatisfactory. The play would do.

It ran for fifteen nights in succession. When a month or so later a vile parody appeared on it, Voltaire, supported by her father’s friendship, begged Marie Leczinska to suppress that parody. But the Queen, remembering Voltaire not as the man whose “Indiscret” and “Mariamne” had charmed her youth, but as the imprudent friend of Madame de Pompadour, coldly declined to interfere. The Pompadour herself could do little. But the parody did not much harm the original after all. On October 24, 1784, “Semiramis” was performed at Fontainebleau and well received. The play is still of interest to English people—not for itself, but for the “Advertisement” which precedes it: and which contains the most famous and the most adverse criticism upon Shakespeare in the world. He was “a drunken savage”; and “Hamlet” “a coarse and barbarous piece which would not be endured by the dregs of the people in France or Italy.” In his head “Nature delighted to bring together the noblest imagination with the heaviest grossness.” This was Voltaire’s most remarkable word on the great Englishman. But it was not his last.

Before “Semiramis” was performed at Court Voltaire had returned to LunÉville. The excitements of Paris had been too much for him. From being always ailing, he was now really ill. Longchamp was his travelling companion. By the time they reached that unlucky ChÂlons, on September 12th, Voltaire was in a high fever and compelled to take to his bed in a wretched post-house. Longchamp, seeing that his condition was critical (Voltaire never gave in to illness until he could neither stand nor speak), told the bishop and intendant of the place. They hastened to the patient and offered him hospitality, which he declined; and then they sent him a doctor. He listened to the professional advice very patiently. Long ago, at Cirey, Madame de Graffigny had noted his good humour and politeness in sickness: and recorded how he was grateful even for advice and prayers! His gratitude for advice fortunately did not extend to following it. On the present occasion he heard meekly and replied laconically when he was told he must be bled and swallow various violent and nauseous mixtures. But he was not bled and he did not take the medicines. Temperance and exercise in health, and abstinence and rest in illness, were the main principles of the system which he followed all his life. That with a wretched constitution and a fatal habit of taking too little sleep and doing far too much brain-work, he lived to be eighty-four at a period when the threescore years and ten of the Psalmist were accounted very old age, is a proof that his rÉgime was not wholly a mistaken one.

On the present occasion he was so ill that he thought himself dying. But he still read and still dictated letters to Longchamp; though he was so weak he could only sign himself “V.” After a few days on a self-imposed diet of tea, toast, and barleywater, the fever left him. He was far too feeble to stand. But he made Longchamp wrap him up in his dressing-gown and carry him into the post-chaise, in which they proceeded towards LunÉville. He was still so ill that he travelled thirty miles without uttering a single word. Before this, unknown to him, Longchamp, who was very sincerely attached to him, had written to tell Madame du ChÂtelet and Madame Denis of his condition. Once, Émilie would have hastened to him, and half killed him with her vigorous, overwhelming affection and attentions. It was as well for his health that she was quite engrossed with her lover at LunÉville and simply sent a courier with a message.

That message cheered the sick man a little. If he was but her friend, he was her very faithful friend. And friendship meant much more to Voltaire than to most people.

He was better by the time he reached LunÉville. The urgent desire to get well as soon as possible, on that old principle that illness was a kind of degradation, may have helped his recovery.

Madame du ChÂtelet insisted upon his being cheerful because she felt so herself. He was soon fairly well again, and that miserable journey faded into a bad dream.

In the early part of the October of 1748, Stanislas, and his little Court with him, moved again to Commercy. The guilty loves of Madame du ChÂtelet and Saint-Lambert were still not even suspected by Voltaire. The guardsman, who soon resigned his commission to become Grand Master of Stanislas’s Royal Wardrobe, seems to have been not a little embarrassed by the vehemence of Émilie’s passion. But in exact proportion as he was cold, she was ardent. His letters to her have not survived; but from hers to him it is evident that while she was imprudent, headlong, and reckless, he was at least cool enough to see danger and discourage the maddest of her schemes.

The discovery of their secret was of course only a matter of time. One night early in that October of 1748 at Commercy, Voltaire walked into Madame du ChÂtelet’s apartments, unannounced as his habit was, and there in a little room at the end of the suite, lighted by only one candle, he found the handsome young soldier and his clever, foolish, elderly mistress “talking upon something besides poetry and philosophy.”