He must have found Cirey’s neighbourhood to Domrémy inspiring. By January, 1735, eight cantos were complete.
Voltaire received in March the revocation of his lettre de cachet—the end for which his friends had used all their influence. He was told almost in so many words that he might go back to Paris if he would be a good boy. On March 30, 1735, he did go back. The capital was always to him the gorgeous siren who fascinated him from far and disillusioned him near. Cantos of that dangerous “Pucelle” were already flying about the salons. Voltaire busied himself in finding a tutor for little Louis du Châtelet and characteristically engaged that Linant, his unsatisfactory protégé—ignorant and indolent—“for fear he should starve”—and trusting to the Marquise’s Latin to improve the master’s. The Marquis had desired that the tutor should be an abbé. It looked more respectable! But when Voltaire said decisively “No priests chez les Émilies!” the bonhomme contented himself with the stipulation that the youth should have a penchant for religion.
One night when in Paris, Voltaire supped with the famous Mademoiselle Quinault, actress of the Théâtre Français. She told him how she had seen at a fair a dramatic sketch with a good idea in it—and of which she was going to tell Destouches, the comic playwright. The other playwright listened in silence: but the next morning he brought her the plan of a comedy on the subject and vowed her to secrecy. Not only was the idea not to be divulged, but the very name of the author of the play, which was called “The Prodigal Son,” was to be a mystery. Theriot knew of course, and one Berger. “It is necessary to lie like the devil,” Voltaire wrote to them, “not timidly or for a time but boldly and always. Lie, my friends, lie. I will repay you when I can.”
He thought, not wrongly, that if its authorship were known, the play, good, bad, or indifferent, would be hissed from the stage. “I made enough enemies by ‘Œdipe’ and the ‘Henriade,’” he said.
He was weary, as he might well be, of quarrels, of dangers, and of jealousies. The visit to Paris was a very flying one. He left there on May 6th or 7th. On May 15th he was writing to Theriot from Lunéville, soon to be the Court of Stanislas, ex-King of Poland, and where Voltaire now found a few philosopher friends and the charming and accomplished bride, Madame de Richelieu. He was there but a very short time.
How good it was to see the Cirey forest again—the garden growing daily into order and beauty—balconies and terraces being built here—an avenue planted there—and within, everywhere delightful evidence of Madame’s clever touch! He rode about the country on her mare, Hirondelle. He urged on the workmen—and enjoyed doing it. He flung himself with ardour and enthusiasm into small things as into great. He had so many interests and was so much interested in them, no wonder he was happy. There was that idle Linant to spur to industry, and Mesdames de la Neuville and de Champbonin to vary the home party. Cirey was Cirey-en-félicité—Cireyshire, in memory of that dear England. Émilie was still “the divine Émilie,” “the goddess,” the cleverest, the only woman in the world.
In August, 1735, Voltaire’s play “The Death of Cæsar,” imitated from (Voltaire thought it an improvement on) the “Julius Cæsar” of Shakespeare, was played by the pupils of the Harcourt College on the day of their prize-giving. “I have abandoned two theatres as too full of cabals” wrote the author gaily, “that of the Comédie Française and that of the world.” The truth was “The Death of Cæsar” was unsuited to the stage, and of what its author called “a Roman ferocity.” It had no love interest and no female characters.
Voltaire was not a little indignant when the piece appeared in print in Paris—totally unauthorised and shamefully incorrect. “The editor has massacred Cæsar worse than Brutus and Cassius ever did,” said he. Its appearance was the chief trouble of this autumn of 1735. In its November, Algarotti, the Italian savant, and the friend of Prince Frederick of Prussia, came to stay at Cirey. He read aloud his “Dialogues on Philosophy”: and Voltaire read aloud a canto of the “Pucelle,” or “Louis XIV.,” or a tragedy. The rest of the time they laughed over their champagne and studied Newton and Locke. What extraordinary people! The bonhomme, if he was there at all, did not count. The Marquise, who, as has been seen, had learnt English in a fortnight, already translated at sight and had her inborn genius for philosophy and science.
The year waned in such studies. Algarotti left. In eighteen months, besides the seventy-five pages of the “Treatise on Metaphysics” which he had written in answer to Émilie’s question as to what she was to think on life, death, God, man, and immortality, Voltaire had also written a comedy—“my American Alzire,” “my savages”—the three-act tragedy “The Death of Cæsar,” cantos of the “Pucelle,” chapters of “Louis XIV.,” some part of “The Prodigal Son” and at least four of the rhymed “Discourses on Man.” His letters of the period which survive, and which only include a single fragment out of the number he must have written to Madame du Châtelet, fill a fourth of a large volume. Add to this that he was personally supervising the building and decorating, that he was the lover of the Marquise—a position that always occupied a good deal of time with that exigeante lady—correcting the incorrigible Linant, busy making all kinds of chemical experiments and collecting old pictures by proxy in Paris, and it will be seen that he was the living proof of his own saying, “One has time for everything if one chooses to use it.”