Then the Duc d’Aremberg invited his entertainers to stay with him at Enghien. The gardens were so exquisite that they almost reconciled even a Voltaire and a Marquise du Châtelet to a house where there was not a single book except those they had brought themselves. They played brelan: they played comedy: and the author of the “Century of Louis XIV.” listened to the Duke’s anecdotes of the days when he had served under Prince Eugene. They were back in Brussels by July 18th. Useful Moussinot was there too. On September 4, 1739, and after an absence from it of more than three years, Voltaire found himself again in Paris.
If he had not wished to move to Brussels, he had much less wished to move to Paris. But “the divine Émilie found it necessary for her to start for Paris, et me voilà.” That was the situation. They were both immediately engulfed in a social whirlpool—suppers, operas and theatres, endless visitors and calls—“not an instant to oneself, neither time to write, to think, or to sleep.” Voltaire wrote rather sorrowfully of the dreadful ennui of these perpetual amusements to placid old Champbonin, at Cirey. As for Madame du Châtelet—
Son esprit est très philosophe,
Mais son cœur aime les pompons
her lover had written of her to Sade in 1733, in perhaps the most apt and descriptive couplet ever made. She was enjoying the pompons now. Paris was en fête for the marriage of Louis XV.’s eldest daughter to a prince of Spain. Madame was as energetic in her amusements as she was energetic in acquiring knowledge. She gratified her tastes for dress, talk, and gaiety and her taste for mathematics all together. Koenig had come to Paris with them. Poor Voltaire wrote of her, not a little dolorously and enviously, “Madame du Châtelet is quite different; she can always think—has always power over her mind.” But to compose plays in this tumult!—it was impossible to the man at this time at any rate. His health was really as wretched as Madame said. It is not a little characteristic of him to find him ill in bed being copiously bled and doctored on Sunday, and gaily arranging a supper party on Thursday. But even his versatility and courage, even the good-humoured patience with which he watched Émilie enjoying herself, were not inexhaustible. He had two plays to be produced in Paris. He did not wait to see either of them even rehearsed. Early in November, 1739, he and Madame du Châtelet were spending a week or two at Cirey on their way back to Brussels.
CHAPTER XII
FLYING VISITS TO FREDERICK
Since that first letter of the August of 1736 the correspondence and friendship between Voltaire and Prince Frederick of Prussia had grown more and more enthusiastic. The devoted pair had from the first interspersed abstract considerations on the soul and “the right divine of kings to govern wrong” with the most flattering personalities and hero-worship. Each letter grew more fervent and more adoring than the last. By 1740 Voltaire was Frederick’s “dearest friend,” “charming divine Voltaire,” “sublime spirit, first of thinking beings.” In Voltaire’s vocabulary Frederick was Marcus Aurelius, the Star of the North, not a king among kings but a king among men. Voltaire dreamt of his prince “as one dreams of a mistress,” and found his hero’s Prussian-French so beautiful “that you must surely have been born in the Versailles of Louis XIV., had Bossuet and Fénelon for schoolmasters, and Madame de Sévigné for nurse.”
Not to be outdone, Frederick announced that his whole creed was one God and one Voltaire.
There was indeed no extravagance of language which this Teutonic heir-apparent of six or seven and twenty and the brilliant withered Frenchman of six-and-forty did not commit. They did adore each other. For Voltaire, Frederick was Concordia, the goddess of Peace—the lightbringer—the hope of the world—veiled in the golden mist of imagination, unseen, unknown, and so of infinite possibility and capable of all things. While heir-apparent Frederick was quite shrewd enough to know that a Voltaire might add lustre even to a king’s glory, and be as valuable a friend as he was a dangerous foe.
By 1740 and the return of Voltaire and the Marquise from Paris to Brussels, Frederick had begun compiling the most sumptuous and beautiful édition de luxe of the “Henriade” ever seen. He counselled his author friend to omit a too daring couplet here and there, and his author would have none of such prudence. Then Frederick must turn writer himself, and sent his Voltaire a prose work called “Anti-Machiavelli” and an “Ode on Flattery.”
“A prince who writes against flattery is as singular as a pope who writes against infallibility,” said Voltaire. The “Anti-Machiavelli” is a refutation in twenty-six prosy chapters of the entire Machiavellian system. Voltaire called it “the only book worthy of a king for fifteen hundred years,” and declared it should be “the catechism of kings and their ministers.” He wept tears of admiration over it. He had it bound and printed. He wrote a preface for it. His transports of delight were sincere enough, no doubt. He was also sincere enough to criticise it to Frederick pretty freely, and to recommend “almost a king” to be a little less verbose, and to cut out unnecessary explanations. It must be confessed that the “Anti-Machiavelli” appears a very dull and trite composition to-day, and that the beautiful moral sentiments on the iniquities of war and the kingly duty of keeping peace lose a good deal of their weight when one knows that a very few months after they were written their author invaded Silesia and plunged Europe into one of the most bloody wars in history.