During this winter of 1757-58, the Doctor was, for the time being, almost the greater man of the two. He had just returned from Paris, where he had prescribed for all its rank, wit, and fashion; and where he and his inoculation had become a furore and the mode. In Geneva he now started a cure, to which flocked all the mondaines of Paris to learn the rudiments of hygiene, of temperance, and of common-sense; to be taught for the first time in their lives the value of simple living; and to undergo inoculation.
Voltaire always loved the bold and sensible regimen of this good physician. Like the women, he was also not a little influenced by the great Doctor’s charming manner, handsome face, and splendid six feet of height. Then, too, supposing ennui should be “of the acquaintance and family” of retirement, this “cure” brought half the wit of the capital to the very doors of the Hermit of Délices. The year 1757 was not over, and their acquaintance was of the briefest, when Voltaire, with his usual impulsiveness, was already in the midst of a delightful intimacy with one of the cleverest and most sympathetic of the Tronchin patients, Madame d’Épinay. Bright, black-eyed, about two-and-thirty years old, the ill-treated wife of a Farmer-General, the head of a salon, and the coquettish friend of Rousseau, Madame d’Épinay reflected in her sparkling little French mind the cleverness of a clever age, and, without ever saying or doing anything which gave substantial evidence of a superior intelligence, had a great deal of that vague quality which is now called culture. Voltaire delighted in her; played with her; laughed with her; talked with her; called her his Beautiful Philosopher; wrote her innumerable little notes about innumerable little nothings; welcomed her constantly at Délices; and in January, 1758, had her to stay there for two or three days with her doctor. Madame’s complaint was of the nerves, and the very best cure for that kind of disease is to be amused, as everybody knows. So she was delighted to come to Délices, where Madame Denis was “entirely comic,” and “fit to make you die of laughing”; short, fat, ugly; quite good-natured; a liar, simply from habit; clever enough to seem so without being so; always gesticulating, talking, and arguing, especially when that “Geneva” article—just now very much on the tapis—was mentioned, when she threw her arms and hands about, abused republics and their laws with a fine generality, and was entirely absurd.
The little, shrewd, shallow visitor was not quite so sure about the great Voltaire. He might have been fifteen, he was so gay, lively, and inconsequent! But then he had a number of quite childish prejudices; and an air of laughing at everybody, even himself. Madame d’Épinay was not at all certain she liked that. In Paris she had been taken gravely as a clever woman. The owl of Délices, looking at her through those little, cynic, half-shut and all-seeing eyes of his, regarded her as an ingenious little mechanical toy, whom it amused him to set in motion. That he was very gallant with her was true enough. But gallantry is hardly a compliment to a woman who wants to be looked upon as savante.
Madame d’Épinay was not the only one of Tronchin’s patients who visited Voltaire. Almost all of them came to peep at him. Here was the Marquise de Muy—“a very little soul in a very little body much debilitated by remedies,” said Tronchin—but the chère amie of Choiseul the minister, and so to be cultivated by a far-seeing Voltaire.
Here, too, came the nephew and niece of de Tencin, the Montferrats—whom Voltaire received very kindly though he liked neither them nor their uncle.
Among neighbours who were not of Tronchin’s “cure,” Huber, celebrated as a painter and wit, had been one of the most constant visitors at Délices from the first, and was fast dropping into the position he never afterwards relinquished, of ami de la maison. Madam Tronchin—as plain and disagreeable as her husband was handsome and charming—was a guest too. “Et que fait Madame Tronchin?” said someone one day to the sprightly Madame Cramer, herself a visitor. “Elle fait peur,” was the answer. Madame Cramer, as the wife of Gabriel Cramer, one of Voltaire’s publishers, and as, in her own person, gay, naïve, and witty, was always a persona grata at Délices. Her husband and brother-in-law were as successful socially as in their business; acted in their client’s theatricals, and were delightfully good-looking and pleasant.
Voltaire’s nearest neighbours at Délices, a Professor Pictet and his wife and daughter, were constantly of his parties. The daughter Charlotte was a gay and pretty little person, who had aroused the jealousy of Madame Denis by embroidering Voltaire a cap to wear on the top of the great peruke he always affected. Voltaire repaid the present by trying to find Mademoiselle what he always considered the summum bonum, a husband; and Madame Denis was not precisely pleased when Charlotte married a handsome major of eight-and-twenty, for whom the foolish niece herself had had a tendresse. In 1757, a Baron Gleichen, who wrote Souvenirs, also visited Délices.
It is no contradiction to say of Voltaire that he was all through his life both the most unsociable and the most sociable of men.
At Délices there were nearly always seven or eight persons to supper. On one occasion at least, the house was so full of guests for theatricals, that Madame Denis, having no bed, sat up all through the night playing cards. When he met his guests no host could have been more agreeable than Voltaire. He had a hundred stories to tell. He made so many mots that half the mots of the eighteenth century have been fathered upon him by posterity. Sometimes he read aloud, or quoted from memory. He was inimitably gay, good-natured, and courteous. One woman (who did not love him) said that he alone of his age knew how to speak to women as women like to be spoken to. That old quality which had made him revere the intellect of Madame du Châtelet made him respect now whatever was respectable in the intellect of his female companions. That surest sign of inferiority—to be afraid of mental superiority in the weaker sex—was certainly never to be found in Voltaire. If he toyed with a d’Épinay, it was because she was but a toy after all. He searched so diligently for cleverness in his nieces that he actually thought he had found it. Some of the best and most careful letters he ever wrote are those to Madame du Deffand—who was old, poor, blind—but splendidly intelligent.
He certainly took very good care during this social winter of 1757-58—as in all other social winters and summers—not to see too much of his guests, male or female. He worked twelve or fifteen hours a day; and generally kept his secretary writing part of the night as well. He never suffered himself to be interrupted in the mornings; and was fond of saying that he believed less in optimism at that time than at any other.