The death of Madame du ChÂtelet marks one of the great epochs of Voltaire’s life.

For a while he was utterly crushed and broken. He wrote of himself to his friends as the most wretched of men. He was alone, abandoned, dying. Everything that made life worth having had been taken from him—and he would live no longer.

There is not the slightest doubt that he felt passionately every word he wrote, and that he suffered wretchedly. It was characteristic of his nation and himself to give grief words. It was characteristic of himself to remember nothing but good of that “friend of twenty years” who had been taken from him. He recalled Cirey and the springtime of their passion, and forgot LunÉville and Saint-Lambert. He remembered the woman of a splendid intellect and a most just judgment: who was learned without affectation of learnedness; who had “the genius of Leibnitz, with feeling”; and the literary style of a Pascal or a Nicole. He remembered “her imperial sympathy” and not her “shrewish temper.” “The pompons and the world are of her age, and her merit is above her age, her sex, and ours,” he had written to the AbbÉ de Sade in 1733. He thought that now. Her brilliant and ready understanding of his philosophies, thoughts, aims, came back to him overwhelmingly. She had sinned against him in the flesh. Her mind had been his for ever.

It would indeed have been impossible but that a fifteen years’ connection with such a woman as Madame du ChÂtelet should have had lifelong effects upon a character so impressionable as Voltaire’s. Her relentless logic and her passion for hard facts did a work, and a good work, upon his vivid, sensitive, bantering, and versatile intelligence. She added correctness to a style which has no equal in the world for interest, gaiety, and satire. She forced him to sound the depths his matchless sparkle hid, to examine first principles, to advance step by step in argument with the stern accuracy of a Euclid.

From his acquaintance with her he formed his conviction of the mental equality of women with men. In his first grief at her loss, says Longchamp, he wrote of her:

Voltaire denied the verses. He was in no mood for making mediocre rhymes, he said. But in 1754 he certainly did write that noble eulogy of her which forms the preface to her translation and commentary of Newton, and never afterwards spoke of her—and he spoke of her often—but in terms of a reverent and a passionate admiration.

For the first few days his grief was overwhelming. King Stanislas was full of compassion, and three times a day mingled his tears with the mourner’s.

LunÉville was now naturally horrible to Voltaire. He thought of going to stay with a certain priestly friend at the Abbey of Senones. Perhaps he would go back to England! He would have preferred the grave—or thought he would have preferred it—to either of these alternatives. About September 14, 1749, he ended by accompanying the Marquis du ChÂtelet to Cirey.

It is not difficult to realise that such a temperament as Voltaire’s might derive a melancholy consolation from revisiting the scene “de ces heureux jours quand nous Étions si malheureux!” It was for the last time. Every room in the house must have recalled her. Every corner in the garden had its own memory. There was that inscription over the summer-house—

Here, they had been tender. There, they had quarrelled. It is not always the most perfectly loved who are the most bitterly mourned. The keenest grief is called remorse.

That good-natured old lady—Madame de Champbonin—came to Cirey to mingle her tears with Voltaire’s.

Longchamp was kept busy packing books, furniture, vertu, to be transmitted to Paris. Voltaire and the Marquis settled their money affairs—much to the advantage and the satisfaction of that remarkable bonhomme. It was arranged that Voltaire should take the whole of the house in the Rue TraversiÈre-Saint-HonorÉ in Paris—of which hitherto he had only rented a part from the Marquis. They parted at the end of a fortnight: “on the best of terms,” though they never saw each other again. Voltaire also retained a friendship—for Saint-Lambert.

He left Cirey about September 25th, and proceeded by melancholy, slow stages to Paris. He stopped for a day or two at kindly Madame de Champbonin’s; at ChÂlons, and at Rheims, and finally reached the capital.

If the unhappy man had been miserable at Cirey he was a thousand times more so in Paris. He was alone. The house was in a dreadful confusion with the du ChÂtelet furniture being moved out and the Voltaire furniture being moved in. Voltaire was as sick in body as in mind. He tried to work. He did work—with his loss and his wretchedness thrusting themselves on his consciousness all the time. Sometimes in the dead of night, half dreaming, he would get up and wander about the disordered rooms, and fancying he saw Madame du ChÂtelet, call to her. Once, in the dark and cold, he got up and walking a few steps was too weak to go farther and leant shivering, supported against a table—“yet reluctant to wake me,” says Longchamp. The unhappy man stumbled into the next room presently, and against a great pile of books lying on the floor. Longchamp found him there at last, speechless and half frozen, in the chilly dawn of the October morning. All his letters of the month are miserable enough. A few chosen friends were admitted to see him after a while—Richelieu, the d’Argentals, nephew Mignot, and Marmontel. They would come and sit by his fire in the evenings and try to distract his thoughts with talk of the drama, which he had loved. They did their best to rouse him. He had certainly never needed rousing before. Frederick the Great wrote brusquely to Algarotti that this Voltaire talked about his grief so much he was sure to get over it quickly. Marmontel speaks of him as one moment weeping and the next laughing. Tears and laughter were both genuine enough, and to such a temperament, quite natural. There was something of the child in this Voltaire to the very last—the warm, quick emotions, so keenly felt, and so keenly felt to be eternal. That they were not eternal does not impair their sincerity in the least.

He was so lonely and miserable during that dismal autumn in Paris that one day, exactly upon the same principle as a sorrowing widower marries his cook and with much the same disastrous results, he asked his niece, Madame Denis, to come and live with him. She could not do so till Christmas. Before then, Longchamp declares he had helped his master’s cure by showing him some letters in which Madame du ChÂtelet had spoken slightingly of him. There was certainly bark in that tonic if it was administered, which seems a little doubtful. How did Longchamp come by such letters?

There was a sharper bark in the fact that while Voltaire was weeping for a woman who had been false to him, that dreary old CrÉbillon was making fine headway at Court, had a pension from the false Pompadour, and all Paris applauding his bad verses.

It was his enemy, not his friends, who roused Voltaire at last. He woke as after a disturbed dream—at first dazed; shook himself; looked round; and began life afresh.

He was, to be sure, fifty-five years old. But fifty-five in a Voltaire, though it meant an old and decrepit body, meant a vigorous and eager mind, thirsting for life and action. He was a man of substance, and a man whose time was his own. He had no ties. He had a reputation not a little feared. He had the world before him yet, and a world only he could save. The fighting zest to turn “dead Catilina of CrÉbillon into ‘Rome SauvÉe’ of Voltaire” was the spur that urged him back to “life and use and name and fame.”

“Rome SauvÉe” had been written in a fortnight in this August of 1749, at LunÉville. “The devil took possession of me, and said ‘Avenge Cicero and France: wash out the shame of your country.’” CrÉbillon had made the subject a weariness and a foolishness in “Catilina.” How could a Voltaire better avenge France and himself—particularly himself—than by turning the same subject into a masterpiece and a furore?

The pages of “Rome SauvÉe” were still wet, when he took another dull play of CrÉbillon’s—“Électre”—and turned it into “Oreste.”

He called together a few friends at the house of his “angels,” the d’Argentals, and a few of the chief actors and actresses, for a reading of “Rome SauvÉe”; and read them “Oreste” instead. The truth was the actors were in want of a play to act immediately, at the end of a week. If M. de Voltaire could not give them one—well, there were other playwrights who could! M. de Voltaire considered that his “Rome SauvÉe” would require at least six weeks’ rehearsal; so he read “Oreste.” He went in person to obtain the censor’s permission for it, and did obtain it. “Oreste” appeared in public on January 12, 1750, to a house equally crowded with the author’s friends and with the faction of CrÉbillon, headed by Piron as usual. Voltaire had written an opening speech in which, with a touching innocence, he disclaimed all idea of being the rival of CrÉbillon and “Électre.” Half the house received the play with applause which had nothing to do with its merits, and the other half with hisses which had nothing to do with its defects. The impulsive author, who was in the d’Argentals’ box and supposed to be incognito, forgot all about that, and leant over the side, crying, to encourage a burst of applause, “Courage, brave Athenians! This is pure Sophocles.” For a few nights the vivid energy of Voltaire

kept the piece going. He was improving and correcting it the whole time. “Voltaire is a strange man,” said Fontenelle. “He composes his pieces during their representation.” He kept the actors and actresses to their work with a dreadful determination. He was always altering and adding to their parts. Mademoiselle Clairon received at least four notes from him, full of the handsomest compliments and of apologies for making so many changes; but making them all the same. Mademoiselle Desmares at last totally declined to have her lines changed any more, or even to receive Voltaire. So, never baffled, on a day when she was giving a dinner-party he sent her a pÂtÉ of partridges—and behold! each partridge had a little note in its beak containing emendations to her rÔle.

If the story be true or not, the fact remains that Voltaire was a very exigeant manager. He had dedicated “Oreste” to the Duchesse du Maine; and took the pains to write her a very long letter to reproach her for not having attended the first performance. But in spite of all pains “Oreste” was hardly a success. It was exceedingly tragic and had no love interest. It was revived, after being withdrawn for a time, which the author spent in rewriting it, and on its revival it was acted nine times. Its last performance took place on February 7, 1750.

Voltaire’s grief was certainly by this time on the high road to a cure. He had to fight so hard there was no time to sit at home, dull and wretched. He did not realise at first the strength of his enemy, CrÉbillon. The truth is, the Court was afraid of the Voltairian pen, and meant to stand by CrÉbillon and applaud his dulness to the echo, only because he was Voltaire’s rival. The ComÉdie FranÇaise—good, loyal toady—must needs think like the King. When Voltaire realised the nature of the conflict, he resolved to fight the enemy by a new method of warfare.

At Christmas, 1749, Madame Denis had come to live with him. A plump widow of forty, not at all disinclined to try matrimony again, was Madame Denis by this time. She had attempted to be a playwright when Voltaire was at LunÉville; and her dear uncle had written with dreadful plainness of language to d’Argental that to write mediocre plays was the worst of careers for a man and “the height of degradation for a woman.”

Not the less, he saw his niece as a rule through very kindly spectacles, and let his good nature so far warp his judgment as to make him think, or at any rate say, that if she was no playwright she was an actress of the highest ability. It is true that she was very fond of that amusement, having a vast appetite for pleasure of any kind. At the beginning of the year 1750 both she and her sister, Madame de Fontaine, were in the Rue TraversiÈre; and Madame Denis was making a very goodnatured, easy-going hostess for her uncle’s guests.

Voltaire had begun to go out and about again, too. It was at some very inferior amateur theatricals one night that he discovered an uncommonly good amateur actor: sent for him, and received the trembling and delighted youth the next morning. He embraced him, and thanked God for having created a person who could be moved, and moving, even in speaking such uncommonly bad verses. The pair drank chocolate together, mixed with coffee. Lekain—that was the youth’s obscure name—announced his intention of joining the King’s troupe. Voltaire offered to lend him ten thousand francs to start on his own account. Eventually, he received the young actor and his company into his house, and paid all his expenses for six months—“and since I have belonged to the stage I can prove that he has given me more than two thousand crowns,” says the famous Lekain in his “Memoirs.”

There was plenty of space in the house in the Rue TraversiÈre now the Marquis du ChÂtelet no longer shared it. Voltaire turned the second floor into a theatre capable of holding a hundred and twenty persons, and in a very short time had there a playhouse, players, and plays which were the height of the mode and made Court and ComÉdie, with all their hopes pinned on poor old CrÉbillon of seventy-six, green with jealousy.

The Voltairian amateurs began with “Mahomet.” There were only half a-dozen intimates, and a few of the servants, as spectators. Lekain was in the title rÔle, and the heroine was played by a shy little girl of fifteen, who—thanks, partly at least, to the energetic coaching of M. de Voltaire—became a pleasing actress. Actors and audience all stayed to supper; and, after it, M. de Voltaire produced the parts of “Rome SauvÉe,” distributed them, and begged the actors to learn them as soon as they could. He coached and rehearsed his company himself. He superintended the scenery. He saw personally to the smallest details. Nothing was too much trouble if Voltaire could but outvie CrÉbillon, and “Rome SauvÉe” “Catilina.” The audacious playwright actually had the coolness to make Richelieu get him the loan of the gorgeous costumes in which “Catilina” had been played at the ComÉdie.

“Rome SauvÉe” appeared on the boards of the theatre of the Rue TraversiÈre before an audience composed almost exclusively of the greatest literary men of the age and country. Here were d’Alembert, the prince of mathematicians, and, to be, perpetual secretary of the Academy; HÉnault, President of the Chambre des EnquÊtes, and of at least two of the most famous salons in Paris; young Marmontel, rising in the world; Diderot, the encyclopÆdist of unclean lips; gallant and accommodating friend Richelieu; and schoolmaster d’Olivet. The performance was a brilliant success. “Rome SauvÉe” was worthy of its author.

At a second representation that untiring person himself played the part of Cicero, and excited the enthusiasm of the audience.

The fame and ability of the troupe of the Rue TraversiÈre reached the ears of Court and ComÉdie of course. They had players as good; but where were they to find such plays?

One of the aims of the performance of “Rome SauvÉe” in the Rue TraversiÈre was attained when on February 28th, “after long hesitations,” that shifty Pompadour—a little bit to oblige Voltaire and chiefly because no other play so suitable could be found—had “Alzire” acted by a distinguished company of amateurs in the royal apartments.

Madame de Pompadour herself played “Alzire.” The Queen was not present; nor her daughters; nor the Dauphin; nor the playwright himself.

But on March 6th “Alzire” was repeated: with Voltaire in the audience. The King was well pleased with “Alzire,” but not with its author.

When the play was over he said loudly that he was astonished that the author of so good a play as “Alzire” could also have written “Oreste”; and the writer of “Oreste” had to swallow that royal rebuff in silence.

It was in this same March of the year 1750 that Voltaire was stung to fresh action by the attacks of FrÉron, enemy and journalist, the tool of Boyer, and the acknowledged foe of all the light and knowledge in France. FrÉron had written an unsuccessful poem on the victory of Fontenoy, and had never forgiven Voltaire for winning where he had failed. All the aggressions seem to have been on the part of FrÉron. Voltaire was only aggravatingly successful and good-humoured. FrÉron had not found it an easy task to goad him to anger. But he had done it at last. “That worm from the carcase of Desfontaines” was Voltaire’s vigorous epithet for him now. And when in this March there was question of this “worm” being made Parisian correspondent to Frederick the Great—“to send him the new books and new follies of our country”—Voltaire flung on to paper a warm remonstrance to his King against any such appointment; and then recommended in writing to Darget, Frederick’s friend, the AbbÉ Raynal for the post instead. Raynal was not appointed; but then neither was FrÉron. For many years, FrÉron was to Voltaire the wasp who stung, and stung, and stung again—with a sting not deadly indeed, but infinitely annoying and malicious.

The death of Madame du ChÂtelet had, not unnaturally, been the signal for King Frederick to renew his pressing invitations to Voltaire to visit him. In the November of 1749 this most persistent of monarchs and of men had written to reproach his friend for making excuses for not coming. They must be excuses now! And Voltaire was so apt in them! In December the King wrote again. In the January of 1750, more persistently still. In February—“well, I will not press an immediate visit: but I will hold you bound to come when the weather is better and Flora has beautified this climate of mine.”

It was all very flattering. Voltaire felt it to be so. He was in the not uncommon position of the man who likes to be asked but does not want to go. There were many reasons against his going. He had just settled into his house in Paris. Niece Denis had come to look after it for him. All his friends lived hard by. The feverish events of the past year had made rest and quiet peculiarly desirable. His health made them almost necessary. Travelling was exceedingly expensive. But if these were all good reasons for remaining in the Rue TraversiÈre-Saint-HonorÉ, there were better ones for leaving it.

Running now through Paris were those gay satirical contes of his which ridiculed every vice of the old rÉgime and made King, Court, and confessor supremely ridiculous. The graceless old Duchesse du Maine, sitting up in bed at three o’clock in the morning, had laughed to hear her order burlesqued in “Zadig.” But all her class had not her saving sense of humour. The satire was too keen not to cut—the portraits too lifelike to be unrecognised.

If he had stopped at “Zadig,” at “Barbouc,” at “Scarmentado,” there was no reason in the world why Voltaire should be a popular member of the society he had chastised with such whips. And when he chastised it with the scorpions of that deadly pamphlet of brief paragraphs called the “Voice of the Sage and the People,” there was very small wonder that he should once more find Paris getting too hot to hold him.

The “Voice of the Sage and the People” is the voice of the man who could sting with bald truths as well as lively satires. It hacked at superstition and the Mirepoix with a hatchet that always went to the root of the tree. “A government in which it is permitted a certain class of men to say, ‘Let those pay taxes who work: we should not pay because we are idle’—is no better than a government of Hottentots.” “A woman who nurses a couple of children and spins does more for the State than all convents have ever done.” “The Church ought to contribute to the expenses of the nation in proportion to its revenues.... The body set apart to teach justice should begin by giving an example of it.” Forty years later these truths were enforced by the blood of the Revolution.

Could Voltaire have thought even in 1750 that they were politic truths to utter in a city where he had just bought a house and was much minded to settle down and be at peace? It is to his infinite and lifelong credit that he seldom cared whether a truth were politic or not. The moment he saw it to be truth he must utter it in scorn of consequence.

Even “Rome SauvÉe” and “Oreste” could not shield a man responsible for the paternity of such writing as this, nor the uncertain smile of a Pompadour save him from its consequences. Well, he had better go! He had always wished to travel in Italy. He would take Potsdam and Berlin en route. His visit there could be brief. On May 8, 1750, he wrote to Frederick saying that, though he was rich, “even very rich for a man of letters,” his house in Paris and the du ChÂtelet affairs had made him so short of money that he must beg the royal permission for Mettra, an exchange dealer of Berlin, to advance him four thousand crowns for the expenses of his proposed journey. The delighted King wrote back on May 24th enclosing a letter of exchange for sixteen thousand francs. He was willing to pay, and to pay highly, for a man who was “a whole Academy of belles-lettres in himself.” Voltaire was gratified of course. But he wrote dismally that he was more in need of a doctor than a king, and on June 9th spoke of himself to that King, in verse which was meant to be gay and sounds a little dreary, as “your very aged DanaË, who leaves his little home for your star-spangled dwelling-place, of which his years make him unworthy.” A little home is so much more comfortable than a star-spangled dwelling-place, after all! Voltaire in fact needed a spur to make him undertake that long-talked-of visit with alacrity. And he had it.

Among the many other poor and generally worthless literary hangers-on, whom the most generous literary genius of any age had commissioned his agent Moussinot to assist with gifts of money, was one Baculard d’Arnaud. A conceited young writer of very fluent rhymes and three, dull, unacted tragedies, was d’Arnaud.

But he was needy and a man of letters. That was enough for Voltaire. He procured him the post of Paris correspondent to King Frederick for which Raynal and FrÉron had competed unsuccessfully, and on April 25, 1750, young d’Arnaud arrived in Berlin, with letters and verses from Voltaire to the King. A personable young man was Baculard. A gay head, very easily turned. Was it to pique Voltaire that Frederick gave Voltaire’s protÉgÉ a pension of five thousand francs yearly, and compliments much above his merits? If so, that aim failed at first. On May 19th, Voltaire wrote to young d’Arnaud the kindest of friendly letters. On May 31st, d’Arnaud wrote to Voltaire saying that he was waiting for him “as a child awaits his father.” The father was not hurrying himself, it appears.

On June 22d, Voltaire and his company of clever amateurs were at Sceaux, and played “Rome SauvÉe” to the Duchesse du Maine and her court, Voltaire taking Cicero, and Lekain, Lentulus Sura.

On June 23d, CollÉ, writer of memoirs, meets Theriot, that idle gossip of a Theriot, who tells CollÉ a most piquant, incredible story about the great Frederick and little Baculard d’Arnaud. Then friend Marmontel, also writer of memoirs (and of memoirs written, it must be remembered, many years after the events they chronicle), tells how he and Theriot went together to see Voltaire one morning and found him writing in bed as usual. Theriot played the part of candid friend. “I have news to tell you,” says he. “Well, what is it?” asks the writer in bed. “D’Arnaud has arrived at Potsdam and the King has received him with open arms.” “With open arms?” says Voltaire. “And that d’Arnaud has written him an Epistle.” “Dull and bombastic, I suppose?” “On the contrary, very good, and so good the King has replied by another Epistle!” “What! the King of Prussia an Epistle to d’Arnaud?” says the person in bed, roused a little. “Someone has been gaming you, Theriot.” But Theriot produces copies of the two Epistles from his pockets. Voltaire stretches out a lean hand, seizes and reads them. “What rubbish! What platitudes!” says he, reading d’Arnaud’s verses to Frederick. But Frederick had not thought so. Then he comes to Frederick’s verses to d’Arnaud, and reads “for a moment in silence and with an air of pity.”

and so on; and so on. Not much in that, to be sure. But when he came to the last verse—

he sprang out of bed as if he had been stung and danced about the room in a fury. “I will go! I will go!” he cried, “if only to teach him to know mankind!”

That “sunset” had accomplished Frederick’s purpose. Perhaps he had guessed it would. He was certainly too astute to really think that a d’Arnaud’s twinkle would show at all in a sky where the sun of a Voltaire’s genius beamed and burnt.

“To sit high is to be lied about.” Many of Marmontel’s “facts” are conspicuously inaccurate. But if this story be true—and having regard to Voltaire’s character it sounds at least as if it had truth in it—no doubt remains that he was quite clever enough to disguise his anger. A gay little versified reproach to Frederick dated June 26, 1750—that was all. The very reproach was written from CompiÈgne, whither the Gentleman-in-Ordinary had gone to beg the permission of Louis XV. to visit Frederick II. Frederick was to pay all expenses of the journey. Voltaire would put the cachet of genius on the King’s prose and verse which just missing that, just missed everything. He left his house in the Rue Saint-HonorÉ in the joint care of Longchamp and Madame Denis, giving the latter a handsome income for its maintenance. He apologised to his friends for leaving them.

And on June 26th the “domestique” of the King, as he called himself, was at CompiÈgne, as has been seen, taking leave of his master. The farewell was hardly a success. Louis wanted the dangerous Voltaire gone, and was offended at his going. What room was there in France for the author of those shameless contes and that loud passionate “Voice of the Sage and the People”? None. That “Voice” had been the sensation of the year among the orthodox. A hundred “Voices” had been raised to answer it—in parody, in refutation, in agreement. Even Madame de Pompadour was offended—this clever Voltaire had whispered in her ear too apt and impudent a couplet. True, when he took farewell of her, she smiled on him a little and sent her kind regards to King Frederick. When Voltaire gave the message, that astute boor of a monarch curtly observed, “I do not know her”—and the artful Voltaire wrote the Pompadour some very pretty verses to tell her that he had the honour to give Venus the thanks of Achilles!

As for his French Majesty, when Voltaire begged permission to visit the Prussian, he turned his back on the greatest man in his kingdom and said indifferently, “You can go when you like.”

Even now, a word would have detained Voltaire. But that word was far from being spoken. After he was gone, there arose at Court one day some question of the royal treatment of this child of genius. “After all,” said Louis, “I have treated him as well as Louis XIV. treated Racine and Boileau.... It is not my fault if he aspires to sup with a king;” and proceeded to add that if he had been too good-natured to talent “all that”—which included d’Alembert, Fontenelle, Maupertuis, Montesquieu, PrÉvost—“would have dined or supped with me.” Comment is needless.

Voltaire left France with Boyer keeping the conscience of King and Dauphin; and keeping from the people light, knowledge, and advancement. The Ânes of Mirepoix were the sworn enemies, not of Voltaire alone, but of all his friends, of all the intellect of France. FrÉron, that “worm from the carcase of Desfontaines,” was their tongue and pen. They were busy now refusing the Sacrament to dying Jansenists who could not produce a certificate to show they had accepted the Bull Unigenitus. Voltaire could not resist a parting shaft at them. Two little pamphlets, gently satirical and both directed against the clergy, were the final bolts which shut the gates of Paris upon him for eight-and-twenty years. In the belief that he was leaving it for a very few months at the most, he set out from CompiÈgne on a day towards the end of June; but precisely what day is not certain. On July 2d he was at Cleves. On July 10, 1750, he arrived at the palace of King Frederick the Great, at Potsdam.