He had soon written her an Epistle on her scientific connection with Maupertuis, as well as that one dated 1733, to the “respectable Émilie,” on Calumny.
By August 14, 1733, he was writing to his dear Cideville “You are Émilie in a man and she is Cideville in a woman”: and a few days later to the Abbé de Sade giving his brilliant first impressions of his Marquise. In November he was writing to Sade again, proudly telling him how Émilie had learnt English in a fortnight.
Then she was with him at Richelieu’s wedding. Far from finding the situation embarrassing, she was in heaven, she said—until the fear of Voltaire’s arrest, and the news that it would not be safe for him to remain in France made her discover that men were insupportable. “I shall retire at once to my château,” she added. For her Château of Cirey was on the extreme edge of France; on the borders of Lorraine, and but a stone’s throw from safety.
Its position thus decided two destinies.
Of what did Voltaire think as he fled from Montjeu through the pleasant, budding country on those spring days, towards that desolate spot he was to make famous? The Marquise was not with him. She was going to Paris to use her noble name and influence at Versailles to obtain the revocation of that horrible lettre de cachet. Voltaire was already her lover; though he was not now, any more than he was hereafter, in love with her. He had a boundless and most generous admiration for her talents—the warmest enthusiasm for her whom he called “a great man whose only fault was being a woman.” He was indeed as faithful to her person as he was faithful to his belief in her great intellectual gifts. She was for ever his ideal of feminine erudition—“who listens to Virgil, and Tasso, and does not disdain a game of picquet,” “who understands Newton and loves verses and the wine of Champagne as you do”—the sorceress whose charms worked all their magic on his mind, but never touched his heart. To be at once a great creative genius and capable of an all-absorbing love passion is given to few men. It was not given to Voltaire. No doubt, as his carriage jolted along the roads under the May sunshine towards quiet, peace, and safety, he honestly supposed himself to be devotedly in love with his “divine Émilie.” He had chosen her to be the companion of life. Those eight volumes of his letters to her, which were destroyed at her death, were very likely in some sort the letters of a lover; but, arguing from the known to the unknown, they must have been the letters of the lover who worshipped his mistress’s scientific acquirements, her passion for knowledge, and her matchless intellectual industry, a thousand times more than any qualities of her heart and soul.
By May 23, 1734, Voltaire was at Bâle and writing from there to Madame du Deffand. She, as well as Madame du Châtelet, was doing her best to get him back into ministerial favour. They were of the opinion that the usual disavowal would be the best thing. Very well! “I will declare that Pascal was always right ... that all priests are disinterested: that the Jesuits are honest ... that the Inquisition is the triumph of humanity and tolerance: in fact I will say anything they like, if they will but leave me in peace.” Of course, no one could believe the disavowal. But they could pretend they believed it. Madame du Châtelet worked harder than ever among her influential friends and, when her mind grew easier respecting her lover, continued her lessons from Maupertuis. She spent the summer at Versailles. The government no doubt had never been very anxious to bring back such a troublesome fugitive as Voltaire. The matter dropped.
In June, 1734, Voltaire first saw the Château of Cirey. No one was there when he arrived. The obliging Marquis was with his regiment. He was generally with his regiment when he was not wanted at home. And he was very seldom wanted at home. It was the custom of the day for a fine lady to have a lover. The husband was the last person in the world to object to an arrangement so ordinary. Provided everything was done with a decent respect for the convenances—why, then, one might do anything. “Modesty has fled from our hearts and taken refuge on our lips” said Voltaire. The words may stand as the motto of French eighteenth-century morality. It shuddered horror-struck at the ill-bred word and connived gaily at the coarse thing. No one thought the worse of Émilie for her lovers; and rather thought the better of her for keeping them so long. One of Voltaire’s biographers has adduced as an excuse for that “Pucelle” of his that chastity was the peculiar boast of the Church, so that Voltaire, hating the Church, despised chastity too. Perhaps that excuse might serve for his attachment to Madame du Châtelet. But he himself considered that no excuse was needed at all. He was following the usual custom of his age. If the Church objected to immorality it was in theory only. In practice, the abbés who had influenced his boyhood and been the companions of his youth were a thousand times more vicious than he had ever been. That he never showed himself to better advantage than in that position, does not make his long connection with the Marquise less reprehensible. But it remains a fact, that he was loyal and patient when she was shrewish and unreasonable: that he was true to what he knew was no bond, and had long become a bondage: faithful when she was faithless: abundantly generous in appreciation of her mental gifts: and staunch to her false memory to the end.
Cirey-sur-Blaise is situated in Champagne, to the south of the wine country. It is surrounded by almost impenetrable forests. It lies one hundred and forty bad miles from Paris, four from Vassy, the nearest village, eight from St. Dizier, a little town. It is near Domrémy, the birthplace of Joan of Arc. In 1734, a coach came two or three times a week from Paris, bringing news of the world, some of the necessaries and a few of the luxuries of life. The château itself was utterly tumbledown, old, huge, bare, and desolate. A chapel adjoined it, and the gardens had long fallen into overgrown neglect. A lady visitor, who came there in 1738, spoke of the place in words which were at least admirably descriptive of her own character, and said it was “of a desolation shocking to humanity, four miles from any other house, in a country where you can see nothing but mountains and uncultivated land and where you are abandoned by all your friends and hardly ever see anyone from Paris.” The last words denoted the climax of horror in the vulgar little mind of roundabout Madame Denis, Voltaire’s niece. She had not “the insurance of a just employment” against ennui and melancholy.
The first sight of its solitary beauty may have been delighting her uncle’s soul when in Paris his “English Letters” were being burnt by the hangman and himself denounced by every opprobrious term in the vocabulary of the government. He had been there but a very short time when he heard news of a duel in which the Duke of Richelieu was engaged; and hastened to the camp of Philippsburg near Baden, where he arrived on July 1, 1734. The duel had arisen out of Richelieu’s marriage: so Voltaire, having made that, felt responsible for the duel too. Richelieu was at Philippsburg with his regiment. His injuries were not serious. The camp received Voltaire with so much éclat and delight that Madame du Châtelet warned him the French authorities were offended and he returned to Cirey. He had scarcely set foot in its tangled garden before he became a gardener, busily setting it to rights: or looked at the tumbledown château, before he was, in his own words, “mason and carpenter.” He had never had a home before. What matter if the place were desolate, ruined, and forlorn? It was on the borders of safety; it could be repaired, improved, beautified. He fell in love with it, with that impulsive idealism which was always a part of his nature and always at variance with the gay, deadly, careful cynicism of nearly all his writings. He had “a passion for retirement,” he said. He lent the absent Marquis forty thousand francs (at five per cent. interest, “never paid”) that the repairs might be set on foot. By August they were well in train and the house becoming habitable.
Voltaire hunted boar in the forest and exchanged country produce with an amiable neighbour, Madame de la Neuville. He wrote gallant letters to another, the fat and good-natured Madame de Champbonin, who was to be hereafter, a constant visitor at Cirey. He was working of course—at his “Century of Louis XIV.”—at new plays—at a certain “Treatise on Metaphysics” and some “Discourses on Man,” at once light and wise. The glory of summer was on the land. Voltaire was now a man of substance through his shrewdness and economy rather than through his writings. To the money he derived from them he was always strangely indifferent. For them he was to be paid, not by gold, but by their gigantic influence on the human mind.