On the afternoon of the Christmas Eve of 1752, Collini, that intelligent young Italian who had seen Voltaire at the Carrousel at the giddy height of glory and had now become his secretary, was standing at the window of his master’s lodgings. There was a great crowd in the street, watching a fine bonfire. Italian Collini did not understand the meaning of the scene. But Voltaire, with his rich experience, knew in a flash. “I’ll bet it’s my Doctor!” said he.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE FLIGHT FROM PRUSSIA
With the exception of the Hirsch affair there is no episode in Voltaire’s life about which so many statements (usually conflicting) have been made as about the quarrel with Maupertuis and Voltaire’s flight from Prussia. Collini wrote his version of the story. Prussia naturally has its own. Voltaire has his own. All the Lives of Voltaire and of Frederick—French, English, and German—have their versions. To quote authorities for every statement is the general custom of the biographer. But the sifting for truth is surely a process which may be well carried on behind the scenes; and then the result of that sifting given clear and clean to the public. If the public cannot trust the ability or the honesty of the biographer, the sources of his information are not inaccessible, and the public with a little extra trouble can verify his facts, even though he does not assist it by cumbering his text with that annihilation of all interest, the perpetual footnote. If the subject is not considered worth the extra trouble, the reader may well take the biographer—on faith. It may be added that the custom of learning a man’s life and character from other people and not from himself, is far too closely followed. After all, the great do not tell so many lies about themselves as their too partial friends, their malicious enemies, and their interested, gossiping servants tell about them. The best biographer of Voltaire is Voltaire himself. If any writer can lead his reader to throw away the biographies, even his own, and study Voltaire at first-hand—his letters, the wittiest in the world, and his works, which in matchless adroitness can be compared to no other production of the human mind—he will have done much and should be well satisfied.
The light of that Christmas bonfire made “Akakia,” as it might have been expected to make it, more conspicuous than ever. Thirty thousand copies were sold in Paris in a few weeks. By January, 1753, in Prussia, twelve presses were kept busy printing it night and day. The Prussian newspapers held up their hands at it in holy horror, and did their best for it by their abuse. For a week Voltaire lay perdu. He had thoughts of escaping to Plombières on the very good excuse of his health. A flight to England was often in his mind.
On New Year’s Day, at half-past three in the afternoon, he sent back to Frederick “the bells and the baubles he has given me,” which comprised the Cross and Ribbon of the Order of Merit and the Chamberlain’s Key.
On the outside of the packet he wrote the well-known quatrain:
Oh! tenderly I took your tender gifts
And sadly render them to you again,
As bitter lover to lost love gives back
Her pictured image, in his hot heart’s pain.
He accompanied the parcel with a letter—a melancholy reflection on the Vanity of Human Wishes. “My resignation is equal to my sorrow. I shall remember nothing but your goodness. I have lost everything; there only remains to me a memory of having once been happy in your retreat at Potsdam.... I made you my idol: an honest man does not change his religion, and sixteen years of a measureless devotion are not to be destroyed by a single unlucky moment.”
His sorrow was genuine; but so was his determination to go.