Voltaire, now retired to Cirey, science, and Madame du Châtelet, had made poetry the fashion. I too will be a poet! The young Farmer-General racked his sharp brains a little, and as a result sent Voltaire some long, dismal cantos on ‘Happiness.’ The master replied with the kindliest criticism, and offered advice so keen and excellent that if poets were made, not born, Helvétius’ verses might still live. But, after all, advice by post is always unsatisfactory. Helvétius’ Farmer-Generalship made periodical tours in the provinces an agreeable necessity. On a journey through Champagne, what more natural than to stop awhile at Cirey, where Voltaire was writing ‘Mahomet,’ and Madame du Châtelet was the most delightful of blue-stocking hostesses? Between Arouet of five-and-forty and Claude-Adrien of five-and-twenty a warm friendship was cemented. All Voltaire’s correspondence from 1738 until 1771 is studded with letters to Helvétius. The young man was his ‘very dear child,’ ‘my rival, my poet, my philosopher.’ If he took so large and liberal a view of Helvétius’ talents as to declare that, as a poet, he had as much imagination as Milton, only more smoothness and regularity (!), yet he was not afraid to wrap up the pill of many a shrewd home truth in the fine sugar-plums of compliments.
But, after all, is poetry the easiest way to glory? Claude-Adrien, returned to Paris, walking through the Tuileries gardens one day, saw the hideous Maupertuis, the geometrician, surrounded by all the charming and pretty women, adoring him, and immediately decided to abandon verse and be a geometrician instead. But before he had taken a couple of steps in this direction, the publication of the ‘Spirit of Laws’ in 1748 electrified Europe, and changed his mind. To be sure, when, three years earlier, Montesquieu had brought the book up to Paris and asked the young Farmer-General’s judgment on it, Helvétius had replied that it was altogether unworthy of the author of the ‘Persian Letters,’ and had strongly recommended him not to publish it. Well, that advice can be conveniently forgotten. Helvétius paid Montesquieu the sincerest of all flattery by resolving on the spot to be a philosopher himself.
If, between these eventful years of three-and-twenty and six-and-thirty, Helvétius had been nothing but an astute, ambitious young man-about-town, seeking the likeliest way to fame and fortune, he would have been undistinguishable from hundreds of others around him, and not worth distinguishing. But, at his worst, there was something in him which was never in that selfish crowd which thronged the galleries of Versailles.
As tax-gatherer, it was his interest and profession to extract the uttermost farthing—and he did not do it. Nay, he pleaded in high places for the wretches it was his business to ruin. When in Bordeaux they rebelled against an iniquitous new tax on wine, he encouraged the rebellion. Though he was constantly at Court and in a position which entailed lavish personal expenditure, he pensioned Thomas, the poet, out of his own pocket; and by an annuity of a thousand écus opened the world of letters to Saurin, hereafter the dramatist. The Abbé Sabatier de Castres declared himself to have been the recipient of his delicate and generous charity. Marivaux, the novelist and playwright, who was personally very uncongenial to Helvétius, received from him a yearly sum of two thousand livres.
It was in Helvétius’ house in Paris, as he afterwards told Hume, the historian, that he concealed, coming and going for ‘nearly two years,’ Prince Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, at a time ‘when the danger was greater in harbouring him in Paris than in London’ on account of the clause in the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle of the year 1748, which stipulated that France should shelter no member of the family in her domains. Helvétius, like many another generous dupe, fell a victim to the Stuart grace and charm: ‘I had all his correspondence pass through my hands; met with his partisans upon the Pont Neuf; and found at last I had incurred all this danger and trouble for the most unworthy of all mortals,’ for a poor coward who ‘was so frightened when he embarked on his expedition to Scotland’ that he had literally to be carried on board by his attendants. (It is fair to say that Helvétius made this statement only on the testimony of a third person whose name is not given.) The sole good quality, indeed, his host ended by finding in this faint hope of Britain, the guest for whom he had risked his safety and spent his money, was that he was ‘no bigot.’ As this meant he had ‘learnt a contempt of all religions from the philosophers in Paris,’ not everyone would consider even this an advantage.
In 1740, Madame de Graffigny, famous as the gossiping visitor at Cirey with whom Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet quarrelled, had arrived in Paris, and there, in the Rue d’Enfer, near the Luxembourg, had set up her salon. To insure its success, Madame, who was five-and-forty, fat and unbeautiful, had with her a charming niece, Mademoiselle Anne Catherine de Ligniville, who was then one-and-twenty, fair, handsome, intelligent. A year or two before, her aunt had adopted and so rescued her from a convent, to which the fact of the unfortunate girl having nineteen living brothers and sisters had condemned her.
In 1747, Madame de Graffigny attained celebrity by her ‘Letters from a Peruvian.’ Turgot did her the honour of criticising them: frequented her salon, which rapidly became famous, and at which, in 1750, Helvétius, still young, rich, agreeable, and unmarried, became a constant visitor. For a year, he was there perpetually. ‘The sheepfold of bel esprit,’ people called it. Helvétius liked to be thought a bel esprit, and it was de rigueur to admire the hostess’s ‘Peruvian’ and her play ‘Cénie,’ which was produced in 1750. He soon came to admire something besides her writings. ‘Minette,’ as she nicknamed her niece, was such a woman as fashionable eighteenth-century society rarely produced—such a woman as any fashionable society rarely produces. Strong in mind and body, good, straightforward and serene, refreshingly unconventional in an age which had no god but the convenances, not half so clever as that accomplished old fool, her aunt, and a hundred times more sensible—such was Mademoiselle de Ligniville.
Helvétius studied her in his calm manner for a year, and at the end of it proposed to her. Then he resigned his Farmer-Generalship with its rich income; bought, to pacify his father, the post of maître d’hôtel to Queen Marie Leczinska, and the estates of Voré and Lumigny in Burgundy, and, on June 17, 1751, married Mademoiselle de Ligniville, who was a Countess of the Holy Roman Empire, satisfactorily connected with the nobility, and had not a single franc to her dot.
All these actions caused something very like consternation in the world in which Helvétius lived. Give up a Farmer-Generalship! The man must be mad! ‘So you are not insatiable, then, like the rest of them?’ says Machault, the Controller-General. As to the estates in Burgundy, one might as well be buried alive at once! While to marry a woman who is by now certainly not a day less than two-and-thirty, has not an écu, and has a tribe of hungry brothers and sisters clinging to her, as it were, is certainly not the act of a sane person! Followed by the mingled pity and contempt of all Paris, Helvétius and his wife left immediately for Voré, and settled down to the eight happiest years of their lives.
Voré was one of those country estates which would still be called dull. In those days, before railways, with a starving peasantry at its gates, with rare posts of the most erratic description, and with the vilest impassable roads between one country house and another, it might have been called not merely dull, but dismal. But, after all, happiness is what one is, not where one is. Perfectly content with each other, the Helvétius would have been contented in a wilderness. Minette, says a biographer, asked nothing better than to adore her husband and perpetually to sacrifice herself to him.