Then the versatile Voltaire, at once a friend and a notary’s son, must needs arrange personally for the marriage of his friend Richelieu to Mademoiselle de Guise.

To be sure, Richelieu was amant volage if ever man was; but he took Mademoiselle without a dot, and the manners of the time were such that neither husband nor wife would in any case have expected fidelity of the other. Voltaire left for Montjeu, near Autun, the residence of the bride’s parents, on April 7th. “I have drawn up the contract, so I shall not write any verses,” said he. But he did his duty all the same a few days after, and composed an “Epithalamium.” The bridegroom left shortly to join his regiment. Among the wedding guests was that old love of Richelieu’s, the tender critic of “Adélaïde,” “the most amiable and calumniated of women,” Émilie de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet. Between composing love verses for the newly married pair, and perhaps some on his own account, Voltaire enjoyed a brief holiday, idle and content. Then the storm burst in such a clap of thunder as had never shaken even his world before.

By April 24, 1734, the “English Letters” had appeared without the slightest warning to the author and with his name on the title-page, and were running through Paris like a firebrand. Appended was his Letter on the “Thoughts of Pascal,” in which he had dared to doubt the omniscience and infallibility of that thinker, and which he had done his best to suppress altogether. Jore was thrown into the Bastille. The book was denounced. On June 10th it was publicly burnt in Paris by the hangman as “scandalous, contrary to religion, to morals, and respect for authority.” Voltaire’s lodging in the capital was searched. When the officer arrived to arrest him at Montjeu on May 11th he was told that he had gone five days earlier, that is, on May 6, 1734, to drink the waters of Lorraine, not yet a French possession.

But in reality Voltaire was making his way quietly to the Château of Cirey-sur-Blaise, in Champagne, a country home of the Marquis and the Marquise du Châtelet.

CHAPTER VII
MADAME DU CHÂTELET

In 1706, there was born one Émilie, the daughter of the Baron de Breteuil. Émilie grew up into a tall slip of a girl with very long legs, very bright eyes, very little grace, and a great deal of intelligence. She was about eight years old, and presumably living in Paris with her parents, when she saw one day, possibly at the house of Caumartin, that lean-faced scapegrace, François Marie Arouet, of twenty. Arouet was not yet out of love with Pimpette Dunoyer. Émilie was a child who ought to have been thinking about games and dolls and was thinking, with a quite undesirable precocity, of lessons and learning. The meeting made not the slightest impression on either of them. Arouet went on climbing the steep and rugged way that leads to glory. Émilie learnt Latin and Italian, devoted herself to the Muses, and at fifteen began to write a versified translation of the “Æneid.”

In the eighteenth century learning was a mode among women which they put on exactly as they put powder on their hair and patches on their cheeks. They talked philosophy as charmingly as they had once talked chiffons. They sentimentalised over the Rights of Men, neglected their children, and treated their servants like dogs. Culture was hardly a pose with them, as it has been with less clever women since, but it was a garment which they wore when and as they chose. There have been few women in any age “devoted from all eternity to the exact sciences,” impassioned for learning for learning’s sake, capable of that keen delight in the discovery of a new truth which is like the delight of the sportsman when he has run his quarry to earth. There were few such women even in the eighteenth century. But there were some: and Émilie de Breteuil was one of them.

She was married at nineteen to the Marquis du Châtelet. It was hardly even an episode in her career. This bonhomme was so stupid and so earthy! Madame always appears to have agreed with him well enough. But there were so many other things to think about! First of all, there was a Marquis de Guébriant. When he was false, his vehement young mistress took so much opium that she would have died, but for his timely assistance. The brilliant Duke of Richelieu became her lover presently: and she wore his portrait in a ring and loved him, temporarily, but sincerely enough, and exacted from him, if this girlish Marquise was anything at all like a later Madame du Châtelet, a quite extraordinary amount of attention and devotion. Pretty early in her career she became addicted to that modish pastime, gaming. She played on the spinet and sang to it. She loved dress and had a very bad taste in it. She loved society and talked in it much and brilliantly. She was an amateur actress of no mean ability. She had three children who interfered with her scheme of life not at all and on whom she seems to have wasted none of that effervescent emotion she felt for her lovers. There are many strange portraits in the great gallery of eighteenth-century France before the Revolution, but no one stranger than that of this bony, long-limbed woman, whose flashing intelligence made her harsh-featured face almost beautiful, who was familiar with Horace and Virgil, with Cicero, Tasso and Ariosto, with Locke, with Newton and with Euclid—a philosopher with a passion for metaphysics—a being at once excitable and sensual, who united to an entire lack of the moral sense, intellectual passions the most pure and sincere that ever raised a woman above the pettiness, the backbitings, and the meannesses common to her sex.

In 1731, before Voltaire knew her personally, her learned reputation had reached him and he had written her some lines on the Epic Poets. To 1732 belongs an “Ode on Fanaticism,” also addressed to the “charming and sublime Émilie.”

Early in 1733, when Madame was seven-and-twenty years old, studying mathematics under Maupertuis, one of the courtiers of the Duchesse du Maine at Sceaux reintroduced her to Voltaire, famous and forty. Then, with her modish Duchess and Marquis as chaperons, she visited him in his rooms. It took the man but a very little while to recognise in her a kindred passion for that noblest liberty, enlightenment; to see reflected in her his own genius for hard work; to find out that she too was tired of this Paris “at once idle and stormy” and would fain find a life where there should be more of the gods’ best gift—time—to think, to write, to speak one’s message for the benefit of that world which must listen at last.