That they were singularly ill-timed may be gathered from the fact that sixty thousand francs of Voltaire’s income were derived from annuities or bonds of the City of Paris, of which at any moment angry Louis might deprive him, by a line of writing and the royal signature, for ever. Two kings were now his enemies. Jesuitical Colmar hated him. Prussia and France were barred to him. Denis had turned upon him. The Pompadour was helpless. The “Essay,” filled with blunders and pregnant with daring and danger, was all over Europe. Such was Voltaire’s position in the month of March, 1754.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE ARRIVAL IN SWITZERLAND
Receiving no answer to his request to be allowed to travel, Voltaire prudently resolved to consider that silence gave consent. But he was still not a little nervous that if he took refuge in a foreign country Louis XV. might consider himself justified in seizing the pensions of his truant subject.
And then, where was he to go? It seems most likely that if it had not been for that unromantic disorder called mal de mer he would have ended his days in Pennsylvania. He had still his bizarre liking for the Quakers; and America was the country of the free. To be sure mal du pays was a worse and a longer lived disorder with him than the other: and if he had tried Pennsylvania on one impulse, he would quickly have left it on another.
He looked back lovingly, too, on bold little England, “where one thinks as a free man.” And on March 19, 1754, he asked M. Polier de Bottens, who had been a Calvinist minister at Lausanne, if he could assure him of as much freedom in Lausanne as in Britain. Meanwhile, there was no reason why, in the near future, that long-deferred and greatly discussed Plombières visit should not take place.
And, for the time, he was in Colmar. On January 12th of this year he had sent his Duchess of Saxe-Gotha twelve advance copies of those “Annals of the Empire” written at her request, and just printed under Voltaire’s own eye at Colmar by Schoepflin. In return, Madame had done her gracious best to reconcile him with Frederick. He was anxious to be reconciled. Frederick could influence France to receive back her prodigal, as could no one else. “Brother Voltaire,” as he signed himself in his letters to her, also pleaded his cause once more with the Margravine of Bayreuth; and then sent Frederick himself a copy of those “Annals” as a tentative olive branch. Frederick accepted the book, and declined the peace overtures in a letter, dated March 16, 1754, which contained bitter allusion to the Maupertuis affair and showed that the kingly heart was still sore and that the kingly soul still angrily admired the great gifts of his Voltaire.
The famous suppers “went to the devil” without him. But if the King missed his wit much, he dreaded it more; and if Voltaire wanted the King’s powerful friendship—he did not want the King’s society. They were better apart. And, for the first time, both were wise enough to know it.
To this spring belongs a very active correspondence between Voltaire, the most voluble correspondent who ever put pen to paper, and Madame du Deffand. Blind, bored, and brilliant, the friend of Horace Walpole, a courtier at Sceaux, and the head of one of the most famous salons in Paris, Madame du Deffand had long been a friend of Voltaire’s, and had visited him in the Bastille in 1726, just before his exile in England.
If she thought, as Frederick the Great wrote to Darget on April 1st of this same year 1754, that Voltaire was “good to read and bad to know,” her cynic old soul loved his wit if she feared it. Perhaps she even loved him—though mistrustingly. Blindness had just fallen upon her. And “the hermit of Colmar”—neither now nor ever only méchant—wrote to her with the finest sympathy and tact, cheering, amusing, rallying her. “My eyes were a little wet when I read what had happened to yours.... If you are an annuitant, Madame, take care of yourself, eat little, go to bed early, and live to be a hundred, if only to enrage those who pay your annuities. For my part, it is the only pleasure I have left. I reflect, when I feel an indigestion coming on, that two or three princes will gain by my death: and I take courage out of pure malice and conspire against them with rhubarb and sobriety.”
As Voltaire could have had nothing to gain by continually writing to amuse this blind old mondaine, it may be conceded that he did it out of kindness; and that if he loved her cleverness, he also pitied her misfortune. The eighteenth century, which failed so dismally in all other domestic relationships, perfectly understood the art of friendship.