In March they “preached the ‘Enfant Prodigue,’ with an opera-bouffe (‘Serva Padrona’) for dessert.” Also in March, they played “Zulime” “better than it will be played in Paris,” said its author. He proudly numbered among the audience on its first night twelve Calvinist ministers and their young students, studying for the Church. Here was liberal-mindedness indeed! Besides acting plays, there was the house to improve or to alter. Its master was surrounded with workmen. He had also a parrot and a squirrel. He had turned to play-acting, he said, because though “tranquillity is a beautiful thing—ennui is of its acquaintance and family.” But he knew too well, by that old courtly experience, that the worst of all boredoms is perpetual amusement. He was happy at Monrion because there, as everywhere, he knew how to work as well as to play. In articles for the “Encyclopædia,” rewriting “Zulime,” and beginning “The History of Peter the Great,” he justified his existence. He had much to do, so he enjoyed his theatricals and the lovely country in which he found himself, as only the busy can enjoy anything “From my bed I can see the lake, the Rhone, and another river. Have you a better view? Have you tulips in March?... My vines, my orchard, and myself owe no man anything....”
Was it glamour again? If it was, it was a better glamour than had made him dream Prussia heaven, and Frederick the Great a faithful friend.
On June 3th, he went back to Délices for the summer. Madame Denis was still in high good-humour—furnishing the house, entertaining, acting. Voltaire said she was “a niece who made the happiness of his life.” Everything was couleur de rose. Switzerland had proved a successful venture indeed. By August the man who now signed himself the Swiss Voltaire had acquired yet another house in Lausanne—Chêne, in the Rue de Lausanne, which was the last street in the town on the Geneva side, and from where he had exquisite views of the lake. He rented it for nine years. Quite near it was a house called Mon Repos, which belonged to two of Voltaire’s amateur dramatic company, the Marquis and Marquise de Genlis. Very soon these two enthusiasts made, in a barn adjoining their house, a theatre which practically belonged to Voltaire, and where in future nearly all his theatricals were held. His first letter from Chêne is dated August 29, 1757. Here he soon received with great gravity the Lord Bailiffs of Berne: good, sober, pompous people, with a very amusing idea of their own importance, and a strictly limited sense of humour. “What the deuce, M. de Voltaire,” said one of them one day, “are you always writing verses for? What is the good of it, I ask you? It leads to nothing. Now I, you see, am a Bailiff.” And another day, a second observed solemnly, “They say you have written against God. That is bad, but I hope He will pardon you; and against religion, which is worse; and against our Lord, which is worse still: but He will forgive you in His mercy. Only take care, M. de Voltaire, you do not write against their Excellencies the High Bailiffs, for they will never pardon you!” It is not difficult to imagine the zest and delight with which Voltaire repeated these stories.
These good Swiss had not only charming scenery, cultivated society, and some kind of freedom, but they were also, without intending it, positively amusing! It would have been well for Voltaire’s peace of mind if he could have engrossed himself entirely in their small world, and forgotten wholly that vaster, louder one, which stretched wide beyond Délices, Monrion, and Chêne. But he had ever itching fingers for a fight.
In the August of 1756 had begun the third, longest, and greatest struggle for Silesia, the Seven Years’ War. Voltaire did not choose to remember that, though he had tried diplomacy before, he had never tried it successfully. He flung himself, head foremost in every sense, into the contest. He began in the spring of 1757 by inventing a war machine: “an engine of massacre upon the plan of the Assyrian war chariots of old.” Certainly, he was a peace advocate. But if men must destroy each other, let them do so by the best and quickest of possible means. He had had, too, a dozen careers already without adding to them that of a scientific inventor. It is marvellous, but true, that this “paper smudger’s” idea—the appellation was his own—was really very excellent. The machine was also intended to carry ammunition and forage. The Minister of War thought well of it. The inventor recommended it highly to Richelieu. The Assyrian chariots were not tried until they were used for carrying grape-shot, but they were not the less an uncommonly bright, ingenious, and Voltairian invention.
The inventor relinquished the idea of their immediate use rather sadly. But the war, considered apart from war chariots, was becoming of personal moment to him.
In the spring of 1757, the Petticoats, which were the damnation of France, swept her into it.
In his old Paris days, Voltaire had known, and scornfully liked, a certain rosy-cheeked bon conteur of an abbé, called Bernis. Verse-maker and bon-vivant—not yet developed into the shrewder and wiser personage his “Memoirs and Letters” reveal him—Voltaire had named the abbé the flower-girl of Parnassus, or Babet, after a famous pretty flower-seller of the day; and loved to tease him on those rosy cheeks and that cheerful air. Babet, who was nothing if not audacious, had asked Boyer (the âne of Mirepoix, who had died in 1755) for a post: and when Boyer told him that as long as he was in power a Babet had nothing to hope for, replied, “Sir, I shall wait.” The answer ran through Paris. It was the beginning of success. Madame de Pompadour turned the smile on this round-faced wit; pensioned him; installed him in the Tuileries; and made him ambassador to Vienna, and Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Frederick, who had received the mistress’s kind regards, sent through Voltaire, with that curt “I do not know her,” had also laughed at Bernis-Babet in the fatal “Œuvre de Poëshie du Roi Mon Maître.”
Therefore, on May 1, 1757, “the first minister of the state,” Pompadour, made her willing tool, Bernis, sign an offensive and defensive treaty with the ambassador of Austria against Frederick the Great, and plunged France into the blood of the Seven Years’ War.
Voltaire’s interest in it was varied and conflicting. He was the friend of Richelieu, of Bernis, and the Pompadour: and he was a Frenchman. He had strong sympathy with brave Maria Theresa and with Austria—the allies of his country. Her great enemy, Frederick, was both his friend and his foe: still loved, still admired, and still unforgiven. All through these seven years one sees that fatal affair of Frankfort rankling in Voltaire’s heart; struggling with his admiration for Frederick as a king and a soldier: with his pity for him when beaten, with his pride in him when victorious. All through the war Frederick wrote him prose and verse; the deepest sorrows of his soul, reproaches, confidences, yearnings. And Voltaire answered half bitterly and half tenderly, with angry allusions to the past, and brave words to comfort the King’s sore heart for the future: never consistent, not seldom spiteful, and yet touched, affectionate, and sympathetic.