The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

For six weeks, while Voltaire was amusing himself with his Duchess and his “Annals,” fussy Freytag awaited him. Voltaire spent the night of May 31st in perfect tranquillity at the inn of the “Golden Lion.” On June 1st, Freytag, Councillor Rucker, who represented a Councillor Schmidt who was ill, and Lieutenant Brettwitz called upon Voltaire at eight o’clock in the morning at the “Golden Lion,” and in the name of his Prussian Majesty requested his Prussian Majesty’s ex-guest to deliver up immediately all the royal manuscripts, the Key, the Cross and the Order.

It was not wonderful, perhaps, that at this request Voltaire flung himself back in his chair and closed his eyes, overcome. Even to Freytag’s unemotional vision the Frenchman appeared ill, and was nothing better than a skeleton. Collini ransacked Voltaire’s trunks at his order. He delivered up all the royal manuscripts—save one which he sent to Freytag the next morning, saying he had found it later under a table. The Key and the Ribbon—that Key which had long torn his pocket, and that Ribbon which had been a halter round his neck—he also gave to Freytag. He sent on to him in the evening his commission as King’s Chamberlain. As for the “Œuvre de Poésie”—why, that, says Voltaire, I packed up with other books in a box, and, for the life of me, cannot tell you whether the box is at Leipsic or at Hamburg.

Considering the passionate nature of his desire to be out of this Prussia; considering his wretched health, which really did need Plombières waters, or some waters or some great change of scene and of air; considering the affront that was being put upon him; considering the fact that that “Œuvre de Poésie” was his own, a present from the King, corrected and embellished by M. de Voltaire himself, it must be conceded that he took the news that he was to be a prisoner at the Frankfort inn until that unlucky book was forthcoming, pretty philosophically. He did indeed beg vainly to be allowed to pursue his journey. It was not pleasant to have to sign a parole not to go beyond the garden of one’s hotel; to have for host a man under oath not to let his guest depart. It was not pleasant to have three blundering German officials turning over one’s effects for eight consecutive hours, from nine in the morning till five o’clock in the afternoon. The facts that Freytag—who certainly meant very well—confided Voltaire’s health to the best doctor in the place, and offered the captive the pleasure of a drive with himself, the great Freytag, the Resident, in the public gardens, were insufficient consolations for delay and indignity. Freytag signed a couple of agreements wherein he declared that as soon as the book arrived, Voltaire could go where he liked. One copy of the agreement Voltaire kept. He and Collini declared that Freytag spelled Poésie, Poëshie; and on the second copy which Voltaire sent to Madame Denis, to reassure her, her uncle wrote “Good for the Œuvre de Poëshie of the King your master!” Voltaire could still joke; and still work. He was not all unhappy.

He went on with his “Annals.” He received visitors—as a famous person whose extraordinary detention had already got wind in the town. He walked in the garden with Collini. He wrote several letters, without even alluding to his present circumstances. He was still a laughing philosopher. He enjoyed that Poëshie joke immensely. He also enjoyed boxing the ears of Van Duren, once printer at The Hague and now retired to Frankfort, who waited on him with a bill thirteen years old. Collini found his master, as ever, good and benevolent.

Five days later he had begun to grow a little impatient. Worthy Freytag was shocked when he visited his captive on that fifth day of his detention, June 5th, to hear him ask if he could not change his residence, and go and call on the Duke of Meiningen; and, worst of all, break out into invectives against that solemn old conscientious stupidity, the Resident himself. Freytag, not a little flurried, went home and wrote for more explicit commands from Potsdam. Since that first order, dated April 11th, none had proceeded directly from Frederick. He was still away on his tour: and to Fredersdorff in Potsdam and Freytag in Frankfort, his too zealous servants, belongs most of the dishonour and ridicule the affair heaped on the name of Frederick.

Freytag was no sooner out of the house than Voltaire, who still pursued his old, old policy of leaving no stone unturned, sat down and wrote a very cunning letter to the Emperor of Austria beseeching his interference in his, Voltaire’s, behalf. The day before, on June 4th, he had written a similar one to d’Argenson, showing how it would really be to the best interest of the French Ministry to come to his rescue. On June 7th, he wrote to d’Argental of his detention with a calm and philosophy which, as has been well said, people keep as a rule for the misfortunes of others.

On the ninth day of his captivity, that is to say, June 9, 1753, there drew up at the door of the “Golden Lion” a post-chaise containing a very fat, hot, breathless, and excited lady of uncertain years, who fell upon the captive’s neck and fervently embraced him, crying out “Uncle! I always said that man would be the death of you.”

Marie Louise Denis was at this time about three-and-forty years old. Idle, self-indulgent, and extravagant, she was a good-humoured person enough if a vast appetite for pleasure were gratified to the full. Voluble, bustling, and impetuous; foolish, but not without a certain vulgar shrewdness; affectionate, until the objects of her affections were out of sight, when she entirely forgot all about them; vain, greedy, and good-natured; much too lazy to be long offended with anyone, and quite incapable of speaking the truth—Madame Denis was a type of woman which has never been uncommon in any age. So long as she was happy and comfortable herself, she was quite ready to allow her neighbours to be so too. She was a cordial hostess; and talked a great deal and at the very top of her voice. With a mind as wholly incapable of real cultivation as was her heart of any great or sustained feeling, from long association with Voltaire she caught the accent of cleverness, as after living in a foreign country one catches the accent of a language though one may know nothing of its construction, its grammar, or its literature.

If Voltaire had been in many respects unfortunate in the first woman who influenced his life, he was a thousand times more so in the second. If Madame du Châtelet had had a shrewish temper, she had had transcendent mental gifts; Madame Denis had the shrew’s temper with a mind essentially limited and commonplace. Madame du Châtelet had once loved Voltaire; Madame Denis never loved anything but her pleasures. From the first moment of her connection with him, his niece was a worry and a care to him—making him, as well as herself, ludicrous with her penchant for bad playwriting and her elderly coquetries. It is not insignificant that Longchamp, Collini, and Wagnière hated her from their souls. (Collini, indeed, politely praised her in his memoirs, written long after the events they chronicled, and roundly abused her in his letters written at the time.) Voltaire kept her with him, partly no doubt because the tie of relationship bound them. But his enemies may concede that if he had not been in domestic life one of the most generous, patient, good-humoured, forbearing, and philosophic of men, he would have snapped that tie in the case of Louise Denis without compunction.

It must be briefly noted here that those enemies declare that there was another tie between Voltaire and Madame Denis than that of uncle and niece. But if there had been why should it not have been legalised by marriage? An appeal to the Pope and the payment of a certain sum alone were necessary. Voltaire was not too moral, but he was too shrewd, and had had far too much experience of the painful consequences of acting illegally, to do so when it was totally unnecessary. He had been, too, but a cold lover to Madame du Châtelet with her éblouissante personality. What in the world was there to make a decrepit uncle of nine-and-fifty fall in love with a lazy, ugly niece of forty-three, who bored him? The thing is against nature. The tone in which he speaks of Madame Denis in his letters—good-humoured and patronising—is certainly not the tone of a lover. Add to this, that the foolish relict of M. Denis was always the victim of gallant penchants for quite other persons than Voltaire, now for d’Arnaud, now for Ximenès, presently for young secretary Collini, and a handsome major of twenty-seven.