“Voltaire n’est pas beau, il n’est que joli. It would be shameful for the Academy to admit him, and it will one day be shameful for it not to have admitted him.”
In what a far different and far larger spirit it was that Voltaire criticised his critic—“Humanity had lost its title-deeds. Montesquieu found them and gave them back.”
CHAPTER XIV
VOLTAIRE AS DIPLOMATIST AND COURTIER
Voltaire had a little distraction from his disappointment about the Academy in the April of this 1743 in the marriage of Pauline du Châtelet, the vivacious little amateur actress of Cirey. Pauline was fresh from a convent and aged exactly sixteen. The Italian Duc de Montenero-Caraff, the bridegroom, was distinctly elderly, and, as sketched in a few lively touches by Voltaire, very unprepossessing. The Marquise maintained she had not arranged the alliance. But mariages de convenance were the established custom of the day. Who knows? Voltaire had been for freedom of choice in the case of niece Denis, it is certain. Pauline was not his to dispose of. He would appear to have shrugged his shoulders and given her his blessing. With it, she disappears out of the history of his life.
In June he had another chagrin. The performance of his play, “The Death of Cæsar,” already acted in August, 1735, by the pupils of the Harcourt College, was stopped on the very evening before it was to have been produced in public. Not many days after, M. de Voltaire left Paris on his fourth visit to Frederick the Great. Frederick wanted him socially as the wittiest man in the world, the most daring genius of the age. If the French Academy would have none of him, the Prussian Court knew better. Besides—besides—could not this subtle Solomon of the North rely on himself to find out from his guest something of the temper and the disposition of France toward Prussia? The guest was not less astute. The rôle of amateur diplomatist pleased his fancy and his vanity. What if he had not been successful in it before? A Voltaire could always try again. He left Paris then in June pretending that his journey was the outcome of his quarrel with Boyer, but really as the emissary of Richelieu on a secret mission to Frederick to warn him of the danger of allowing King George of Hanover and England to help Maria Theresa to her rights, and meaning to win over the cleverest monarch in Europe to an alliance with France. It was a beautiful scheme. It had first “come into the heads” of friend Richelieu and Madame de Châteauroux; then the King had adopted it, and Amelot, the Minister for Foreign Affairs. It was ambitious enough to particularly appeal to Voltaire’s audacity. The King of France was to pay all expenses: which was not unjust. The Bourbons seldom spent their money so wisely. Madame du Châtelet was the only person intrusted with the secret of the journey’s real object. She felt that it was due to herself to have a fit of hysterics since her Voltaire was leaving her for this Frederick, and she had it. But she kept the secret. If she was a little proud in her heart of the honour such a mission implied, yet her grief at the departure of her “ami” was so unrestrained as to make her and it the laughing-stocks of Paris. Frederick “is a very dangerous rival for me,” she wrote on June 28, 1743. “If I had been in Voltaire’s place I should not have gone!” “I am staying here in the hopes of getting ‘Cæsar’ played and so hastening his return.”
Voltaire set off in very excellent spirits. It would so annoy Boyer to see his enemy protected by the most powerful monarch in Europe—and by a monarch who was not at all above making mots on an “anc: de Mirepoix”! “I had at once the pleasure of revenging myself on the Bishop ... of taking a very pleasant little trip, and being in the way of rendering services to the King and the state.” In July he was writing to his friends, and to Amelot, from “a palace of the King of Prussia at The Hague”—a little humanly proud of being able to date his letters from such a place, keen for the fray, sick in body as usual, and vividly alert in mind.
On August 31st he arrived at Berlin. The first news he had to communicate to Amelot was the victory of George II. of England at Dettingen. What honours could be too great for a man who, at such a juncture, made Prussia the friend of France? Madame du Châtelet, keeping her counsel at home, must have had high hopes for her Voltaire. And her Voltaire, at Berlin, cherished them for himself.
To all appearances indeed the visit was but a fête, and a gorgeous fête. Berlin was gay with balls, operas, and parties. Sometimes there were ballets, and nightly almost those royal suppers where, said the guest, “God was respected, but those who had deceived men in His name were not spared.” Voltaire had a room adjoining Frederick’s, and the King came in and out of the visitor’s apartment familiarly. The old potent charm which these two men had for each other was at work again. But not the less, through the glamour, the wit, the wine, and the laughter, each pursued his secret object, adroit, thorough, and unsleeping.
Voltaire played the rôle of diplomatist as he played all rôles—brilliantly. He was delightfully gay and easy. He seemed so volatile and so gullible. He threw himself into the pleasures of the hour with all his French soul. An ulterior motive? The man was bon enfant, bon conteur, bon everything. He had come to enjoy himself and was doing it to the full.
“Through all,” he wrote, “my secret mission went forward.” He despatched immense diplomatic documents to his country via Madame du Châtelet. He drew up a famous series of questions, to which friend Frederick was to append such answers as would bare the secrets of his Prussian soul to France. The diplomatist had immense conversations with the monarch, which he reported. Frederick wrote Voltaire a most beautiful open letter to show in Paris, wherein he complimented France on her Louis XV., and Louis XV. on his Voltaire. He renewed his pressing invitations to Voltaire to come and live at Berlin—nay, did more. He worked behind his back so as to further embroil him with Boyer, and make France too hot to hold him. “That would be the way to have him in Berlin.”