About midsummer there arrived at Cirey on a visit, one Kaiserling, a Prussian, young, gay, delightful, with a pretty talent for making French verses—tant bien que mal—and the social ambassador of Prince Frederick. Kaiserling brought his master’s portrait as a present to his master’s guide, philosopher, and friend, and the warmest of greetings and messages, besides the second part of somebody’s Metaphysics and the whole of somebody else’s Dissertations. He was received, he said, as Adam and Eve received the angel in Milton’s garden of Eden, only the hospitality was better and the fêtes more gallant. There were plays and conversations. Eve, as Madame du Châtelet, was the easiest and most delightful hostess in the world, who sang to the celestial organ, played the spinet, spoke all languages, and no doubt amused the visitor, if he were not of nervous habit, by driving him about the country in her “phaeton for fairies drawn by horses as big as elephants.”
In the evenings, if one did not read aloud a canto of that wicked “Pucelle” or a chapter of “Louis XIV.,” there were fireworks, the most beautiful fireworks with letters of flame spelling Frederick’s name and surrounded by the motto “To the Hope of the human race.” It is not a little curious to note the naïve delight Voltaire took to the very end of his days in these, and such, amusements. He had always something of the child in him—the child’s love of laughter, the child’s love of the gaudy, as well as the child’s hot temper, generous impulse, and quickness to forgive. Nothing was so small that he was too great to be amused by it. “Rire et fais rire” was one of his mottoes. He threw himself into those firework preparations as thoroughly as a very few months later, and after days passed in the most abstruse studies, he devoted himself body and soul to marionnettes, charades, and a magic-lantern. To say that he was a versatile Frenchman is some explanation: but it is not a sufficient one. He worked and thought so hard that the more frivolous the recreation, the more it recreated. “The divinity of gaiety,” Catherine the Great called him. “If Nature had not made us a little frivolous we should be most wretched,” he said himself. “It is because one can be frivolous that the majority of people do not hang themselves.” It was because Voltaire could always laugh and work that it could be truly said of one of the most impressionable and sensitive of human creatures that “sixty years of persecution never gave him a single headache.”
After three weeks’ stay, Kaiserling left, taking with him to his Prince a part of “Louis XIV.” and some short poems. They both wanted—and begged—just a few cantos of the “Pucelle.” But on this point the goddess of Cirey was perfectly firm. “The friendship with which she honours me does not permit me to risk a thing which might separate me from her for ever,” Voltaire wrote. Entrust King and Kaiserling with a bomb which might explode at any moment and scatter love, liberty, peace, to atoms! Madame was too clever a woman for that. The guest left without his “Pucelle,” and Émilie and Voltaire plunged deeply again into the scientific studies and experiments which were the particular madness of the hour.
At the end of the year 1737, the lazy Linant, the tutor, was very rightly discharged by Madame du Châtelet. She had extended her kindness to both his mother and sister. But the sister was as unpromising as the brother. They left Cirey. Voltaire said he had given his word of honour not even to write to his former protégé; “but I have not promised not to help him.” Through a mutual friend he was weak and generous enough to send this “enfant terrible,” as Diderot called him, fifty livres: and thereafter took no little pride and interest in Linant’s third-rate writings.
There are some very characteristic letters of Voltaire’s written at this period in which he economically tries to arrange, through Moussinot, for the engagement of a young priest, who is also to be something of a chemist, so that he can say mass in the Cirey chapel on Sundays and Saints’ days and devote himself to the laboratory all the others. This factotum did not turn out a success, and a separate young man had to be engaged for each occupation.
In the November of 1737 died M. Mignot, the husband of Voltaire’s dead sister Catherine. M. Mignot left behind two slenderly portioned and unmarried daughters—and behold! the versatile Voltaire in the part of the paternal uncle, seeking them husbands and furnishing them with dots. He wanted Louise, the elder, to marry the son of his Cirey neighbour, the stout, good-natured Madame de Champbonin. But Louise, who was a bouncing young woman of four-and-twenty, with a pronounced love of pleasure and the sound of her own voice, entirely declined to be buried alive for the rest of her life in an impossible country neighbourhood: and expressed these sentiments quite distinctly to Uncle Voltaire. In practice, as well as principle, he was for freedom of action. In his day, the father, or the person who stood in place of the father to a marriageable girl, disposed of her literally without consulting her, and exactly as it seemed best to himself.
“They are the only family I have,” Voltaire wrote of his nieces rather sadly. “I should like to become fond of them.... If they marry bourgeois of Paris I am their very humble servant, but they are lost to me.” But he had said too that to restrict the liberty of a fellow creature was a sin against Nature. So on February 25, 1738, Louise Mignot married a M. Denis, who was in the Commissariat Department in Paris, and received from Uncle Voltaire a wedding present of thirty thousand francs.
In March, the young couple came to spend part of their honeymoon at Cirey. It has already been said that Madame Denis found the country horribly, abominably, and dismally dull. There was a theatre, to be sure! But where was one to find actors in this desert? The bride had to put up with a puppet show, which, indeed, was very good, she added grudgingly. They were received in “perfect style” too. That must have been comforting to the soul of a Madame Denis. Uncle Voltaire was building “a handsome addition to the château”—also comforting perhaps to the Denisian temperament. The bride added naively that her uncle was very fond indeed of M. Denis, “which does not astonish me, for he is very amiable.”
But what an eerie enchanted castle it was amid these tangled forests of Champagne! Its sorceress—pretty and charming as well as clever, niece Denis found her—brewed every potion that could keep a lover, humoured his whims, dressed for him, sang to him, decorated the house to his fancy and—strange love-philtre!—quoted him “whole passages of the best philosophers.” The captive was an unconscious captive, but a captive still. The chains were gold, but there were chains. And even gold chains chafe and bruise and eat into the flesh at last. The commonplace niece saw much to which the brilliant Madame and her Voltaire were both as yet blind. She loudly regretted that her uncle should be lost to his friends and bound hand and foot by such an attachment. Voltaire and Émilie parted from the bride and bridegroom, it may be assumed, pretty cheerfully. They were not only still happy in each other, they had a prodigious amount of work to get through. And your idle people, not content with doing nothing themselves, are the surest prevention of work in others and grudge the industry they will by no means imitate.
In the June of 1738, the second Mademoiselle Mignot was married to a M. de Fontaine. Voltaire did his duty and gave the bride twenty-five thousand francs: but he hated weddings and was not to be persuaded to go to this one, any more than to Madame Denis’s.