The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

At four o’clock on this afternoon a fiacre drew up at the door of his rooms. Fredersdorff had come from the King, bringing back the Order and Key. There was a long consultation. Collini, who was apparently eavesdropping in the next room, said his master only consented to receive them again after a very lively argument. The King’s Chamberlain, in fact, made a very wry face at finding himself his Chamberlain still. Go he would; but go with peace and honour he certainly would if he could. On January 2d, he wrote his King a conciliatory letter. “Do with me what you will,” it said. “But what in the world will you do with me?” it meant. As for the suppers—I will be of them no more.

On January 18th, Voltaire published a declaration denying the authorship of “Akakia.” It was a form—hardly a deceit, in that it deceived nobody. It was to oblige the King—the King who still hungered and thirsted for his Voltaire and could not let him go. True, it was a humble, obedient, penitent, reformed Voltaire he wanted—in short, an impossibility.

Frederick went back to Potsdam on January 30th, and begged his Chamberlain to come back there too, to his old quarters.

“I am too ill,” says the Chamberlain, but inconsistently pleased with the friendly offer and taking care to have it recorded in the newspapers, and to tell it to all his correspondents in Paris. Still, in the very letters in which he announced the King’s favour like a pleased child, the shrewd man was arranging to leave. On February 16th, he was still at Berlin with dysentery. His royal host sent him quinine. But that did not cure him. Nothing would cure him but some air which was not Prussian air—some diet which the kingly table could not produce—some company which was not Prussian company.

He could not go to Potsdam; but about March 1st he wrote to beg formal permission for leave of absence, to journey to French Plombières and take there the waters which were much recommended for his complaints. He awaited the answer with a feverish impatience. He made Collini arrange his papers and pack his things. Here was a book to be returned to the royal library; then, there were the coming expenses to be considered. But no answer came from Frederick. Voltaire, restless and irritable, must needs, on March 5th, move from the rooms he occupied in a house in central Berlin to another in the Stralau quarter—almost in the country. Here he lived at his own expense with Collini, a manservant, and a cook. His doctor, Coste, came to see him—Coste, who was not afraid to say Plombières was the only cure for his patient’s health, though he knew the recommendation would be displeasing to the King.

What if the King refused permission? Such things had been done by men of his temperament, and might be done again.

Voltaire would walk in the garden of that Stralau house with young Collini. “Now leave me to dream a little,” he would say. And he paced up and down alone—conjecturing, fearing, scheming. He must go somehow. He invented the wildest, absurdest plans of escape; and laughed at them gaily enough with that capacity for seeing the humorous side of the worst troubles, which was the best gift the gods had given him.

At last Frederick broke his silence; and Voltaire wrote to his niece on March 15th that the King had said there were excellent waters in Moravia! “He might as well tell me to go and take waters in Siberia.”

Not the least curious of the many human documents preserved in the archives of Berlin is that famous dismissal which at last, on March 16, 1753, Frederick the Great flung upon paper in a rage.

“He can quit my service when he pleases: he need not invent the excuse of the waters of Plombières; but he will have the goodness, before he goes, to return to me the contract of his engagement, the Key, the Cross, and the volume of poetry I have confided to him. I would rather he and Koenig had only attacked my works; I sacrifice them willingly to people who want to blacken the reputation of others; I have none of the folly and vanity of authors, and the cabals of men of letters appear to me the depth of baseness.”