On January 16th of the new year, 1746, Longchamp entered as a kind of confidential valet into the service of Madame du Châtelet, and from her service was shortly drafted into that of M. de Voltaire. Half secretary, half servant, and all observer, Longchamp lived to write memoirs of unusual interest and fidelity, and to make Voltaire a proof of the fallacy of the saying that no man is a hero to his valet. Longchamp, Collini, Wagnière, who were in turns the servant-secretaries of Voltaire, have all painted his picture as most generous, hasty, and kind, with the sensitive temper of genius and the forethought and consideration for others, even for dependents, which genius too often lacks. To Voltaire’s generation the canaille were as dirt beneath the feet; but not to Voltaire. Irritable and impulsive in speech, he had at times to his servants the manners of the old régime; but he had ever the heart of a better age.
Abundantly generous—“a miser of nothing, but his time”—one servant speaks in warm terms of his “solid and durable indulgence and goodness,” and another of his kindness, sympathy, and forgiveness. The character that masters give their servants is often unreliable through ignorance or weak indulgence; but the character that servants give their masters rarely falls into either of these errors.
From that fiery inquisition, the inquisition of the domestic eye, Voltaire is one of the few great men in history whose character comes out better than it went in.
All the early months of 1746 were taken up in keeping the vantage ground he had gained and in gaining more. He wrote letters to Italian cardinals in Italian. He reminded the Pope of the dutiful existence of his dutiful son. He pleased Madame de Pompadour. He amused sulky Trajan. He began a regular Voltairian battle against Charles Roy, an old scurrilous minor poet, who stood not ill at Court, himself hoped for a chair in the Academy, and had written an unsuccessful rival piece to Voltaire’s “Princess.” These occupations were very fatiguing. But they were essential. On March 17th a fresh vacancy fell in at the French Academy, and who should have it if not Voltaire? The gods were more favourable now. The candidate canvassed for himself feverishly. He wrote an artful letter to the Lieutenant of Police and a beautiful one to Father La Tour, one of his old schoolmasters, expressing a warm affection for religion and the Jesuits. If the thing was to be done at all it must be done thoroughly.
On April 25, 1746, the greatest literary man of the age, who was fifty-two years old and a member of almost every other Academy in Europe, was at last formally elected to the Literary Society of his own country. On May 9th he read before it his preliminary discourse, Voltairian in every line.
CHAPTER XVI
THE ACADEMY, AND A VISIT
Who is it that having climbed to a height does not look on the prospect that it affords him, and wonder if that prospect be worth the bogs and the mire, the stones and the boulders, the steep places and the thorns that lay on the way to it? Voltaire was not given to useless reflections. Yet it could but occur to his cynic soul that his friendship with a king’s mistress had gained him a reward that all his writings and genius could not; just as he had declared in a verse, whose gay bitterness is Voltaire’s only, that his “Henriade,” his “Zaire,” and his “Alzire” had not won him a single glance of kingly favour, while for a “farce of the fair,” “The Princess of Navarre,” honours and fortune had rained on him. He might well be a cynic.
What use would that coveted chair among the Forty be to him now he had it? Was it the hall-mark, the sign and seal of talent? That sign and seal were on every line the man had written. He, who had made by his works so startling an impression on the human mind that, though he had a host of enemies, adorers, fearers, none could be indifferent with regard to him, had surely no need of the cold distinction of an academical honour. But he thought that it would be valuable as a refuge from lettres de cachet and official interference. It conferred various legal privileges. It would be his passport, obtained from red-tapeism, to be flaunted in the face of it, to show the Voltairian right to say what a Voltaire pleased. The position further gratified a naïve and very human vanity. And now I am here I will be so uncommonly active, lively, and reforming as to drive my thirty-nine solemn, pompous, formal, conservative, elderly brethren pretty well distracted!
It was de rigueur in the inaugural address to do nothing but praise Cardinal Richelieu and flatter one’s predecessor in the chair. And up gets M. de Voltaire and delivers a brilliant discourse on the French language and French taste—smooth, polished, graceful, and with the grip of the iron hand felt always through the velvet glove.
“Gentlemen, your founder put into your society all the nobility and grandeur of his soul: he wished you to be always free and equal.”