Frederick replied rather witheringly to the peace overtures on January 1, 1765: “I supposed you to be so busy crushing l’infâme ... that I did not dare to presume you would think of anything else.”
But the ice was broken. Both succumbed to the old, old, fatal, potent charm. They wrote to each other about “once a fortnight”; discussed everything in heaven and earth; and until they should be mortal enemies again, were, once more, more than friends.
Frederick was once again, too, the friend not only of Voltaire, but of Voltaire’s country. The Seven Years’ War had been concluded in 1763 by the peace of Hubertsburg. Frederick kept Silesia; and France, with her feeble ministry and her doddering King, lost, to England, Canada, Saint Vincent, Grenada, Minorca.
Changes were rife elsewhere too. Voltaire’s friend Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, had died in 1762, and was succeeded nominally by the miserable Peter, but really by his wife, Catherine the Great. In 1763, Peter disappeared under strong suspicions of poison, and Catherine reigned in his stead.
Many kings and potentates have been named the Great, but few so justly as Catherine.
If she was the perpetrator of great crimes, this woman of three-and-thirty was, even at her accession, of vast genius, of extraordinary capacity as a ruler, broad and liberal in her aims, and an enlightened lover of the arts. She declared that since 1746 she had been under the greatest obligations to Voltaire; that his letters had formed her mind. With the telepathy of intellect, these two master-minds had from their different corners of the world detected each other’s greatness. They never met in the flesh. But from their correspondence it is easy to see their close spiritual affinity. Their earliest letters, which are preserved, date from the July of this 1765.
Voltaire shocked even Paris and Madame du Deffand by the airy way in which he took that little peccadillo of the Empress’s, “that bagatelle about a husband.” “Those are family affairs,” he said, not without a wicked twinkle in his eyes, “with which I do not mix myself.” It is certain that, whether or no he believed Catherine a murderess, he regarded her as a great woman and served her when he could.
There came an opportunity in August. Her Majesty is pleased to admire girls’ education as conducted in Switzerland, and sends Count Bülow to arrange for a certain number of Swiss governesses to be brought to Moscow and Petersburg to instruct the noble jeunes filles of those cities.
Splendid idea! says Voltaire. But that “bagatelle about a husband” weighs on the Puritan conscience of Geneva. It is extraordinary now to think that any civilised Government could have dared so to interfere with personal liberty as to prevent women over age going to teach anyone they chose, anywhere they liked. But this is precisely what Geneva did. Voltaire was exceedingly angry. The refusal reflected on him. But he had done his best for Catherine, though in vain.
While this little affair was going on, a new friend, the young playwright La Harpe, of whom Voltaire was to see more hereafter, and an old friend, whom he had not seen for seventeen years, were both staying with him at Ferney.