On the whole, those first few solitary months at Cirey must have been some of the happiest he knew. The future shone rosy like dawn. Peace, love, and work—there is no better life. That was the life to which Voltaire looked forward now.
In October he spent, for some reason not certain, a few weeks at Brussels: and then returned to Cirey.
In November, there arrived from Paris, laughing and vigorous, not having slept a single wink on the journey, and preceded by mountains of chiffons and books, boxes, pictures, necessities, luxuries, and superfluities—Madame du Châtelet.
The extraordinary pair wasted no time at all in sentiment. They turned their energetic attention to the dilapidated house and grounds at once. Madame became “architect and gardener.” She found the secret, with plenty of old china and tapestry to help her, “of furnishing Cirey out of nothing.” Voltaire had valuable pictures to contribute to the general effect. Both workers were so thoroughly practical, so indefatigable, so clever! It was in these early days of happiness that Voltaire wrote a blissful quatrain which was placed over one of the summer-houses in the garden and which may be broadly translated by the quatrain of another poet:—
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
The du Châtelet children, little Pauline of eight and Louis of six (the third had died a baby in the January of this year, 1734), kept much in the background, were, if anything, an additional charm to the illustrious visitor. He found Louis a doux and sensible little boy: discovered him a tutor on one occasion: gave him a silver watch on another: and saved his life, for the guillotine, by dosing him with lemonade when he had smallpox. Pauline, early sent to Joinville, sixteen miles away, to be educated, was frequently recalled therefrom when, a little later, she was wanted to act in the Cirey theatricals, for which, like her mother, she had a pretty talent.
Madame la Marquise did not herself pretend at any time to a great interest in her offspring. When her husband foolishly returned presently from his regiment she wrote to her old lover, Richelieu, that her situation was very embarrassing, “but love changes all thorns into flowers.” She and Voltaire both spoke of the Marquis as le bonhomme. Beyond being a sad bore in conversation, and as incapable of appreciating wit in others as he was of originating any himself, he seems to have given no trouble provided he had his meals regularly: and remains for posterity what he was for his contemporaries—a stupid, good-natured, complacent, slip-slop person whom one could neither much dislike nor at all respect.
When he was at home, his wife and her famous guest left him to his sport, his dinner, and his nap, and themselves plunged into work of every kind, but particularly into that intellectual work which was the passion of their lives. It was a strange household in that tumbledown château in the depths of primæval forests—a strange mixture of the laxity and wickedness of the evil Paris of the day and of the highest mental effort and enjoyment—of the meanest sensual indulgence and the noblest aspirations towards light and liberty—the clear voices of children and the biting and dazzling sarcasms of a Voltaire against those who would keep men in bondage and ignorance, children for ever.
In the December of 1734, Madame du Châtelet went to Paris, taking with her to d’Argental a new tragedy Voltaire had written, called “Alzire.”
At the end of 1734, Voltaire first makes allusion in his letters, to one of the most famous—and certainly the most infamous—of his works, the “Pucelle.” The idea of it had been suggested at a supper at Richelieu’s—Richelieu, equally celebrated for both kinds of gallantry—in 1730. The “Pucelle” is Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans. Dull Chapelain had spoilt the subject already. It did not occur as a promising one to poet Voltaire. Richelieu and his guests over-persuaded him to try his hand upon it. In a very short time, he was reading aloud to them the first four cantos of that gay masterpiece of indecent satire. How very little he could have guessed then what a plague, danger, torment, solace and delight “my Jeanne,” as he called her, was to be to him for the rest of his days! He had indeed many other things to think of. “Jeanne” could only be an interlude to weightier occupations. He turned to her as one man turns to gaming and another to dissipation. She was the self-indulgence of his life, and it must be owned a very pernicious one.