MADAME DU CHÂTELET
From an Engraving after Marianne Loir
But his heart was softer than his judgment. Now, as later, he believed in the capacity as in the generosity of his fellows, with an enthusiasm which outlasted experience, and wholly contradicts the gay cynicism of his utterances.
On July 3, 1733, there is a little innocent, ominous sentence in a letter of Voltaire’s to Cideville. “Yesterday I began an epistle in verse on Calumny, dedicated to a very amiable and much calumniated woman.” That nameless lady, who had Voltaire’s Richelieu for a lover, had already written to Richelieu highly praising Voltaire’s new play, “Adélaïde du Guesclin.” In this July she, a certain Comte de Forcalquier and a gay young duchess, paid a surprise visit to Voltaire in his dingy lodging, which occasioned the poet to break into charming verse and to compare his guests to the three angels who visited Abraham. The summer also saw him busy buying pictures, writing an opera, “Samson,” to music by Rameau, and rewriting his “Adélaïde.” It was to have been performed in the April of this 1733, but the illness of the chief actress delayed its appearance, and gave the author more time to correct and improve it.
But paramount in his mind to any opera and tragedy, aye, to any amiable and calumniated woman of fashion too, was his haunting fear, which never left him all through this year, that the “English Letters,” which were being printed at Rouen privately and under his own supervision, should slip out and become public property before he gave the signal at what he took to be the psychological moment. By July they were already published in England—free England who received them with delight. “The Letters philosophical, political, critical, poetical, heretical, and diabolical are selling in English in London with great success.” But here?
The outcries against “The Temple of Taste” were still loud and vehement. Voltaire’s terror lest “our incorrect Jore” should play him false with regard to this far more dangerous work, vibrates passionately in every letter of the period he wrote. “These cursed Letters,” he called them. They were damned on their reputation alone in Paris, before anyone had seen them. It is almost impossible now to believe that any government should have thought it dangerous to the state and its citizens to understand the theory of gravitation or the principles of light. But, after all, those authorities were not such fools as they looked. Once allow the people to reason, and the Bourbon dynasty would fall like a pack of cards.
The author had already toned down some of his freer utterances. But he could never tone the free soul which breathed in them.
He had “a mortal aversion to prison,” he wrote. He had a reason, a stronger reason than he had ever had in his life, for wishing to remain quietly in France. But speak his message to the world he must. “The more liberty one has, the more one wants.” He had tasted of that deep nectar of the gods, and his countrymen must drink of it with him. He feared his gay manner of conveying grave truth would offend. “If I had not lightened matter, nobody would have been scandalised; but then nobody would have read me.”
The vif and anxious author paid Jore and worried him freely enough. And then he tried to propitiate the fickle French public, as he had propitiated it before, by a play. On January 18, 1734, was performed the long-delayed “Adélaïde du Guesclin.” The first act was received with hisses, which redoubled in the second. In the fifth, the ruin was completed by one of those mots at which a Parisian parterre is only too apt. On the second evening Voltaire spoke of himself as attending Adélaïde’s funeral. One critic, indeed, and no mean critic, had found the play “tender, noble, and touching.” But then that critic already looked on Voltaire with eyes more than friendly. “Adélaïde,” far from smoothing the way for the “Letters,” was but another stumbling stone in it.