The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

But the danger that Longchamp’s perfidy had threatened had been no light one to the man who had already begun to look on that very sensitive and touchy French capital as a possible refuge, and was soon to find Prussia too hot to hold him.

Before the end of the year 1751 Frederick had begun to intercept and keep copies of Voltaire’s and Madame Denis’s letters. Voltaire wrote bitterly that the Golden Key tore his pocket, that the ribbon of the Order was a halter round his neck, that nothing in Prussia gave him a grain of happiness. “I have lost my teeth and my five senses,” he wrote on February 6, 1752, “and the sixth is leaving me at a gallop. I doubt if even ‘Rome Sauvée’ will save me.” He was sick now with such a homesickness as only a Frenchman knows. All these things, taken together, doubled his natural imprudence.

Before La Beaumelle left Berlin in May had begun a quarrel, into which Voltaire was to plunge headlong, between Maupertuis and the mathematician Koenig, who had stayed and worked for two years with Madame du Châtelet at Cirey.

Koenig was a member of the Berlin Academy and a strong partisan of Leibnitz, as Voltaire and Maupertuis were of Newton; but was all the same a warm friend and admirer of Maupertuis, whom in September, 1750, he had visited in Berlin. It was not unnatural that when these two partisans came to discuss Leibnitz and Newton they should quarrel. They did quarrel. Koenig, however, apologised handsomely to the touchy President, and returned to Holland where he lived. There he wrote an essay on the subject of their dispute—the principle of the least action—or the theory, which Maupertuis claimed to have discovered, that Nature is a great economist and works with the fewest materials with which she can possibly attain her purpose. Koenig disproved this theory, and quoted in his support a letter written by his dear Leibnitz. He submitted the essay to Maupertuis, who apparently did not read it, for he sanctioned its publication, and it appeared in March, 1751, in Latin. Then Maupertuis did read it, and was deeply offended. Produce these letters of Leibnitz from which you quote, M. Koenig! I am certain Leibnitz is of my opinion in the matter! Produce the originals! But only copies and not the original letters were forthcoming. They were undoubtedly genuine. Every page bore the unmistakable stamp of the Leibnitzian style. But there are none so blind as those who won’t see.

On April 13, 1752, Maupertuis, as President, called together a meeting of the Academy, and caused Koenig to be expelled therefrom as a forger.

Then Voltaire, hard at work at Potsdam, looked up from his books, thrust aside La Beaumelle, Darget, and those home worries of Madame Denis and Longchamp, and must needs go down to the shore just to see the storm coming up and wet his imprudent feet a little in the surf. “I am not yet well informed,” he wrote to Madame Denis on May 22d, “as to the details of the beginning of this quarrel. Maupertuis is at Berlin, ill from having drunk a little too much brandy.” Soon after June 8th the Berlin Academy, to which Koenig had appealed, ratified its shameful sentence. By now Voltaire at Potsdam was chafing and snorting to get into the battle. There were so many spurs to urge him there! One day he had been giving a dinner-party at which Maupertuis was a guest. Voltaire airily complimented the President on a pamphlet he had written on Happiness—Voltaire having really found “Happiness” very dry and depressing. “It has given me great pleasure—a few obscurities excepted—which we will discuss later.” “Obscurities!” cries the touchy President. “Only for you, Sir!” And Voltaire, with his lean hand on the presidential shoulder and his eyes uncommonly bright and malicious, answers, “Je vous estime, mon Président; you want to fight—you shall. In the meantime, let us go to dinner.”

On July 24th, he wrote Madame Denis another little story. Maupertuis had said that the King having sent Voltaire his verses to correct, Voltaire had cried “Will he never leave off giving me his dirty linen to wash?” And Maupertuis had told the anecdote, “in the strictest confidence,” to ten or twelve people. The King had heard of it, of course. Then, after the death of La Mettrie, had not Maupertuis declared that Voltaire had said that the post of the King’s Atheist was vacant? True, that story did not reach the King. But every story was a whip to goad Voltaire into the forefront of the fray. He hated tyranny and wrong wherever he found them. But being human, and chafing and longing to fight with him, he hated Maupertuis’ tyranny above other persons’. On September 18th, there appeared an anonymous pamphlet defending Koenig and entitled “A Reply from an Academician of Berlin to an Academician of Paris.” It was supposed to be from the pen of Voltaire—the first arrow from his quiver. A few days later Koenig produced his own “Appeal to the Public,” which easily proves his case to any fair-minded person. There was one man, however, who meant to stand by his President, as his President, and to defend him right or wrong. King Frederick would not even read Koenig’s “Appeal.” By October 15th he had himself produced a “Letter to the Public,” which was nothing, said Voltaire, but an attack on Koenig and all his friends. “He calls those friends fools, jealous, and dishonest.” Voltaire wrote an account of the thing to his niece, in which he spoke out as only a Voltaire could speak. In the letter are these ominous words: “Unluckily for me, I also am an author, and in the opposite camp to the King. I have no sceptre, but I have a pen.”

Then Maupertuis produced an extraordinary series of letters which certainly do not read like the composition of a sane person. He advocated in them the maddest scientific schemes, such as blowing up one of the Pyramids with gunpowder to see why they were built; and making an immense hole in the earth to find out what it contains.

In a preface he had very unpromisingly stated that he should follow no sequence or order, but write on the impulse of the moment, and no doubt contradict himself! Voltaire wrote that Maupertuis had previously been in a lunatic asylum and was now mad. It did seem as if drink and vanity had turned the poor wretch’s brain. But Frederick stood by his President; and on November 5th, while recommending him rest and repose, gravely congratulated him on his book.

On November 17th, from that room looking on to the terrace at Sans-Souci, Voltaire wrote a letter to Koenig, easy, graceful, and not exactly impolite to Maupertuis, but explaining that that solemn Infallibility had been in the wrong. As for those twenty-three scientific letters, why one must pity, not blame, him for them. And no doubt, M. Koenig, the same mental misfortune which made him write them, inspired his conduct to you!