It was a dainty glove thrown down; but it was a declaration of war not the less.
Frederick was far too shrewd and sane a person not to know very well who had right and reason on his side in such a dispute. He and Voltaire continued to meet as friends, and supped together as of old. Now Tyrconnel and La Mettrie were dead, Darget gone away, and Maupertuis too sick and sore to attend them, the suppers would have been small and dull indeed without Voltaire. He had been always the real soul of them. At one, only this last September, the daring idea of “The Philosophical Dictionary” had been started; and in a day or two he had sent the King that matchlessly audacious first article, “Abraham,” which would have made the Pope laugh and might have made a Frederick forget that “Reply from an Academician of Berlin” which Voltaire had written, under a thinly veiled anonymity, but a few days earlier. But though the chain which bound the royal Damon to his Pythias still held, it was weak in every link. Voltaire declared of himself that he was a hundred years old—that the suppers were suppers of Damocles—the world a shipwreck—“sauve qui peut!” He was, in fact, too wretched to fear anything, and so ready to dare all. There was a pause. The tiger crouched a moment before it sprang, and then leapt on Maupertuis in the “Diatribe of Doctor Akakia.”
There is no more scathing and burning satire in literature. The deadly minuteness of Swift’s malign and awful irony is not so terrible as the pungent mockery of this jester who laughed, and laughed; looked up and saw his victim writhing and mad with impotent rage, and held his sides and laughed the more. The great English-Irishman at least paid his victims the compliment of taking them in some sort seriously; of bringing great and terrible weapons to slay them; and gave them the poor satisfaction of feeling like martyrs if they wished. But Voltaire made Maupertuis a byword and a derision; the sport of fools, the laughing-stock of Europe: a buffoon, a jest, a caricature: such that men seeing, stopped, beheld open-mouthed, and then laughed to convulsions. Akakia means guilelessness; and Akakia is a physician who takes the remarkable effusions of Maupertuis with a serious innocence, very deadly; who asks the most simple questions in the world; and turns upon the President’s theories the remorseless logic of the gayest and easiest commonsense. Read a hundred and fifty years after, when of necessity many allusions must be missed and the point of many a jest be lost, “Akakia” is still one of the wittiest productions in the French language.
There could have been no style better than Voltaire’s for making Pomposity mad. One can still see the “sublime Perpetual President” writhing under that pitiless mockery and that infectious laugh of malicious delight. The wickedest, cleverest little picador in all the world goaded this great, lumbering, heavy-footed old bull to impotent frenzy. The lithe tiger, agile as a cat, sprang on his foe, showing all his teeth in his grin, and, grinning still, tore him limb from limb.
“I have no sceptre,” Voltaire had said, “but I have a pen.” He had indeed.
Before that mild letter to Koenig was written from Sans-Souci on November 17th, the first part of “Akakia” had been finished. But if nothing could stop a man writing imprudence, under the absolute monarchy of Prussia there was everything to stop him printing it. Trickery was in Voltaire’s blood; and practice had made him perfect in the art. Frederick had dealt treacherously with him; so why not he with Frederick? He went to the King, and read aloud a pamphlet he had written on Lord Bolingbroke. Will his Majesty sign the royal permission for that pamphlet to be printed? By all means. Frederick signs the last page of the manuscript. Voltaire sends it to the printers; asks for it back, to make some trifling alterations, and puts “Akakia” in front of Bolingbroke. What more simple?
It only remained to get a few printed copies sent out of Prussia, and then one could face destiny bravely. One story runs that Frederick, who heard everything, got wind of this “Akakia,” and that Voltaire, armed with the manuscript, brought it to the King; and the King, who loved wit very nearly but not quite so much as he loved his own greatness, laughed till he cried. How should a Frederick the Great, with his bitter humour, not laugh at a Maupertuis thus ridiculed by a Voltaire? Under the rose, one could laugh at anything—God, man, or devil—even one’s own Perpetual President. If those “Matinées du Roi de Prusse, écrites par lui-même” are genuine, Frederick stands proven as one of the most accomplished actors on the world’s stage. “One must think according to the rank he occupies,” says he. So he laughed “to dislocation” and added that there must be no publishing of such a wicked, delightful, malignant document—and then laughed afresh. Voltaire flung the manuscript on the fire, as a proof of good faith. He could afford to be thus generous. Frederick rescued the papers, says the story, and burnt his sleeve. And the friends parted, still vastly entertained—and each pair of clever eyes looking into the other pair—wondering—wondering——.
The anecdote, though it is recorded by two different persons and is picturesque, is, however, of doubtful veracity. The more probable truth is that Frederick, first discovering on November 20th that “Akakia” had been printed at Potsdam by his own printers and in his own printing-office, and on the strength of the permit signed by himself, was furiously enraged. He sent off Fredersdorff—his servant, valet, friend—post-haste both to the printer, who confessed all, and to the author; and warned the author, who simply denied everything as usual, of awful consequences to follow.
Then Frederick wrote Voltaire that famous letter, very badly spelt, which under the circumstances was not immoderate. “Your effrontery astonishes me.... Do not imagine that you will make me believe that black is white.... If you persist in going on with the business I will print everything, and the world will see that if your works merit statues, your conduct deserves chains.”
And the irate host put, it is said, a sentinel outside the guest’s door.