The Friends of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

It is hardly necessary to say that it gave its editor an enormous amount of work. Chaise de paille, his friends called him in allusion to his diligence; later, when he began to travel, Grimm suggested the nickname should be altered to chaise de poste. He had many secretaries working under him. One, Meister, was attached to him all his life, and benefited largely under his will. When he was away from Paris the good-natured Diderot made a brilliant substitute; and Madame d’Épinay took up a delicate pen to become the first, and surely the most charming, of women journalists.

Only a few months after his arrival in Paris Grimm had been introduced to this little black-eyed, bright-witted, and all too seductive wife of a worthless husband. In 1752, at Frisen’s table, he had heard her name insulted, and had fought a duel for its honour. By 1755, on his return from his journey with d’Holbach, he became a familiar figure in her salon. First her wise and masterful friend, he was soon her despotic lover.

It is always a vexed point of morals to determine how far right can come out of wrong, how far a cause initially bad can be said to be good in its results. It must certainly be conceded in Grimm’s case that, having put himself into a false position and remaining there, he acted not only sensibly and discreetly, but even honestly and conscientiously. He found Madame d’Épinay silly, as are so many clever women, and he insisted on her behaving with judgment and discretion. One of his first acts was to demand that her old lover, Francueil, whom she still permitted to visit her as a friend, should be given his dismissal. With Duclos, man of letters, and of character rough, dissipated, and unscrupulous, he bade her break entirely. Then he turned to Rousseau.

It has been justly said of Grimm that he never lost a friend save Jean Jacques. In 1756 Madame d’Épinay, acting on one of those excessively foolish impulses which she herself felt to be wholly fascinating, and which had already more than once shipwrecked her life, gave Rousseau the little Hermitage in the forest of Montmorency, close to her own country-house of La Chevrette.

Grimm had not known Rousseau for six years without knowing his heart. He looked up suddenly from the ‘Correspondence.’ ‘You have done Rousseau a bad service,’ he told Madame d’Épinay sternly, ‘and yourself a worse.’ Still, it was done. In 1757, that belle laide, Madame d’Houdetot, also had a house close to La Chevrette, and there attracted the notice of Rousseau. After a brief summer day of delight, she grew tired of her vehement admirer, or her lover, Saint-Lambert, grew tired of him for her. At any rate, there burst over those three houses in the Montmorency forest a storm of fierce passions and scandalous recriminations. All Paris stood watching. Diderot plunged impulsively into that angry sea. Rousseau accused Madame d’Épinay, in terms which no self-respecting woman could have forgiven, of being the writer of a certain fatal anonymous letter; and she forgave him. Grimm had been appointed secretary to the Duke of Orleans, and was absent on duty in Westphalia. He did not spare his little mistress’s pusillanimous weakness. ‘Your excuses are feeble ... you have committed a very great fault,’ he wrote. Hurrying home, he dealt with Rousseau in terms of unmistakable plainness. He made Madame d’Épinay cast him off there, at once, and for ever, and carried her off to Geneva on the excuse, a just excuse in every sense, of her health.

But the consequences of her folly were not ended. Rousseau defamed her character in the ‘Confessions,’ and in that unique masterpiece of scurrility he speaks of Grimm as ‘a tiger whose fury increases daily.’ Diderot declared that Jean Jacques made him believe in the existence of the devil and of hell. But Grimm wrote an obituary notice of Rousseau in his ‘Correspondence’ of admirable justice and moderation, and spoke of him as ‘embittered by sorrows which were of his own making but not the less real,’ and as ‘a soul at once too weak and too strong to bear quietly the burden of life.’ It must be allowed that Grimm could be magnanimous.

Having saved Madame d’Épinay from her friends, it remained to him to save her from herself. At Geneva he put her under the care of the great and good Tronchin, and made her write for the ‘Correspondence.’ He helped her to manage the miserable remains of the fortune her husband’s mad extravagance had left her, supervised the education of her children, and even showed her the harm she did them by speaking disrespectfully of their father. His love was not fervent, perhaps, but it corrected her follies and her weakness, and made her do and be her best. It had at least some of the tokens of a good and honourable feeling.

These visits to Geneva were undoubtedly the happiest time in her life. On this first one, which lasted eight months, from February to October 1759, she and Grimm often saw and talked with Voltaire; and Grimm greatly appreciated the society of the solid and sensible Genevans and the cultivated Tronchins. Mademoiselle Fel came to stay with Voltaire at Les Délices, and when Grimm saw her there he proved convincingly the truth that ‘the man’s love, once gone, never returns.’ But his real passion was not even for Madame d’Épinay. His dominant taste was his ambition; his dearest mistress, his career.

Already secretary to the Duke of Orleans, on the last evening of his stay at Geneva, he heard the satisfactory news that he was made Envoy for Frankfort at the Court of France. True, M. l’Ambassadeur, as Diderot called him, soon lost his post by joking in a despatch at the expense of an official person; but none the less he was rising in the world. Presently he was busy settling M. d’Épinay’s bankruptcy and helping Madame to arrange a satisfactory marriage for her daughter. Tyran le Blanc he was called by her and her circle. But, after all, no woman is happy till she has met her master. Well for her if she find one as judicious and upright as Melchior Grimm.

He was less with her as the years went by, though not in any sense less faithful. In 1762 the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha appointed him her chargé d’affaires; and when she died her husband made him Councillor of Legation, with a pension.