By the August of 1746 this energetic courtier had reached the fourth act of a play written to order for the Dauphine, and entitled “Semiramis.” The Dauphine died at that juncture; but its author continued “Semiramis” all the same. He paid a flying visit in September to a very old friend, the Duchesse du Maine. In October he and Madame du Châtelet came up to Fontainebleau with the Court, and stayed at Richelieu’s house there, which he had lent them. Just as she was about to leave Versailles, the whole of Madame’s servants, except Longchamp, had left her in a body. Now, as at Cirey, she was a mistress not a little expectant and inconsiderate, and by fits and starts, if not habitually, mean. The invaluable Longchamp saved the present situation. He was not sorry when, at Fontainebleau, he was allowed to renounce a post in which he sometimes appears to have acted, literally, as the Marquise’s lady’s maid, for that of secretary to the quick-tempered and kind-hearted M. de Voltaire.
A new weapon was put into Voltaire’s hands in December wherewith to defend himself from his enemies, and, having been promised the post for two years, he was made Gentleman of the Chamber to Louis XV. What an honour, what a splendid honour, for the author of the “Henriade” and the “English Letters”—for the man who had already begun to inaugurate a new era of thought in Europe, and who was to make Voltairism such a power in the world that it would one day shake Catholicism on her immemorial foundations! What an honour—what a noble honour! M. de Voltaire did not meet with at all a warm reception from his brother Gentlemen. Bah! the creature was but a bourgeois. Where were his pedigree and his letters-patent of nobility? In his books? We do not want any literary hacks among Us! One youthful Gentleman of the Chamber, noble, but very uncertain as to his spelling, wrote to his uncle that the appointment of “ce Voltere” was a “dezoneur” to gentlemen of name and arms, and the King really should have known better. The naïve youth consulted his “respequetable oncle” as to whether it would not be best for the Chamber to refuse to receive “this Person named Arouet.” But at a very early date this Person named Arouet showed himself more than a match for the noble young gentleman and all his brethren at once.
Talking of the coming marriage of a lord’s daughter with a Farmer-General—that synonym for dishonesty and extortion—one of the Gentlemen inquired where the pair would be married. “At the tax-office,” suggested someone. “There is no chapel there,” said another. “Pardon me, gentlemen,” said Voltaire, who hitherto had not spoken a word, “there is the Chapel of the Impenitent Thief.”
It may be guessed that the Gentlemen of the Chamber at least learnt to respect a brother with such a killing tongue.
He passed the early months of 1747 busy with his Travenol lawsuit, taking patent pills which he was always warmly recommending to Frederick, and “making his court” to Madame de Pompadour. On July 2d he was congratulating the Minister of War on the French victory of Lawfeld; which he afterwards celebrated in an epistle, not at all equal to his “Fontenoy.”
He had now reached the climax of his favour. The Historiographer of France, the Gentleman of the Chamber, and the favourite of the mistress, may well have seemed a fixture at Court.
He was not sorry to escape from it on August 14th for a few days’ visit to the Duchesse du Maine, now at Anet. Voltaire must have altered greatly since he was first her guest as a promising boy of twenty-one, two-and-thirty years ago. The promise had become fulfilment. Once, he had been honoured in being the Duchess’s visitor; now, she was honoured in being his hostess. She allowed him to bring Madame du Châtelet with him, because he would by no means have been allowed to come without her. The Duchess was still the “sublime personage” Voltaire remembered. With her haughty and imperious temper, her brilliant grace and wit, her stately courtesy, and her magnificent condescension, she was the living type of those women who went later to the guillotine, scornful to the last of the canaille that brought them there—the women who lived so ill, and died so well. A little deformed was the great Duchess: very small; fair-haired; loving amusement and hating boredom above everything in this world and
MARIE LECZINSKA
From the Picture by Carle Van Loo in the Louvre