The Hôtel Lambert.
In 1733 this queer couple found it to their comfort to quit Paris, where Voltaire was ceaselessly beset by the suspicions of the powers that regulated thought in France. They moved about much, to Voltaire's discomfort, living sometimes at Cirey, on the borders of Champagne and Lorraine, with or without the complaisant du Châtelet; sometimes in a mansion taken by Voltaire in Paris. This stood on the corner of two streets no longer existing, Rues du Clos-Georgeau and Traversière-Saint-Honoré, at No. 25 of the latter; and its site now lies under the roadway of new Avenue de l'Opéra. The cutting of this avenue has left unchanged only the northern end of Rue Traversière, and this has been renamed in honor of Molière. To place Voltaire's residence in the old mansion at the new number 25 in this street, as a recent topographer has done, is an ingenuous flight of fancy.
Here Voltaire went back to live after death had taken "la sublime Émilie" from him, from her other lover, and from her husband. This legal husband was less inconsolable than Voltaire, whose almost incredible reproach to the third man in the case makes Morality hold her hand before her face—peeping between the fingers, naturally—while Immorality shakes with frank laughter. On the second floor of this house, Voltaire remained, "de moitié avec le Marquis du Châtelet;" the first floor, which had been her own, being thenceforward closed to them both. Here he tried to find companionship with his selfish and stolid niece, Madame Denis, and with his protégé Lekain. He transformed the garret into a private theatre, for the production of his plays, free from the royal or the popular censor; and for the training of Lekain in the part of Titus, in "Brutus." That promising, and soon accepted, actor made his début at the Théâtre Français in September, 1750, and his patron was not among the audience. From this house, Voltaire went frequently across the river to visit Mlle. Clairon in her apartment in Rue Visconti, so well known to him when tenanted by Mlle. Lecouvreur, twenty years earlier. And from this house, wherein he came to be too desolate and lonely, Voltaire went forth from France in 1751, to find a still more uncongenial home at Potsdam. With his queer life there, and his absurd quarrels with Frederick the Great, this chronicle cannot concern itself.
"Café à la Voltaire" is the legend you may read to-day on a pillar of the Café Procope, in Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, directly opposite the old Comédie Française. We have seen the mixed delight and doubt with which coffee was first sipped by the Parisians of the end of the seventeenth century, but it won its way, and in 1720 the Sicilian Procope opened this second Paris café. It soon became the favorite resort by night of the playwrights and play-actors, and the swells among the audience, of the playhouse across the street. Gradually the men of letters, living in and visiting the capital, made this café their gathering-place of an afternoon; so that, on any day in the middle years of the eighteenth century, all the men best worth knowing might be found here. Their names are lettered and their atrocious portraits painted on its inner walls. In the little room on the left, as you walk in on the ground floor, they treasure still, while these lines are written, Voltaire's table. He sat here, near the stage that produced his plays, sipping his own special and abominable blend of coffee and chocolate. With him sat, among the many not so notable, Diderot, d'Alembert, Marmontel, Rousseau, with his young friend Grimm—hardly yet at home in Paris, not at all at home with its language—and Piron, Voltaire's pet enemy, who wrote his own epitaph:
"Ci-gît Piron,
Que ne fut rien,
Pas même Académicien."
Here, on an evening in 1709, sat Alain-René Le Sage, awaiting in suspense the verdict on his "Turcaret," brought out in the theatre opposite, after many heart-breaking delays; for the misguided author had convinced himself that his title to fame would be founded on this now-forgotten play, rather than on his never-to-be-neglected "Gil Blas"!