the world to come; seventy years old, but as appreciative of a Voltaire as she had been at forty.
With her was Madame de Staal, formerly Mademoiselle de Launay, whom Voltaire already knew; half maid, half companion, very observant and with a brilliant, satirical pen, much in use for writing famous Memoirs and recounting the gossip of the Maine court to Madame du Deffand in Paris.
There were various other visitors. The Duchess liked society, she said, because everybody had to listen to her and she had to listen to nobody.
Play-acting was much in vogue. Cleverness was de rigueur. To be moral was unnecessary—but to be a bore, that was not to be dreamt of. It was upon this court that the erratic Émilie, with her lover and a great quantity of luggage in her train, descended very late on the evening of the day before she was expected.
There was a fine fuss, according to the acid, elderly de Staal. The pair wanted supper. One of the visitors had to give up his bed to Madame du Châtelet, who complained of it the next morning. She tried two other rooms, and grumbled at them. She was determined, as usual, to carry on her studies, and required a bedroom where she could have silence, not so much by night, as by day. She shut herself up there and worked hard at Newton, joining the other visitors only in the evenings. Sublimely indifferent to social obligations was the Marquise. The stupid rules which govern guests in most polite societies she ignored entirely. She preferred work to tittle-tattling with the other women; so she worked. There were not enough tables in her room for her papers, her jewels, and her pompons; so she made a foraging expedition round the house and appropriated six or seven for her use. Anyone with a taste for occupation, and condemned to polite idleness, will understand and sympathise with Madame du Châtelet. It is also easy to understand that the old Duchess, who invited her guests solely to amuse herself, was offended. And that Voltaire, whose own passion for work kept him shut up alone almost as much as Émilie, felt it necessary to atone for their conduct by writing the Duchess lovely, gallant verses, and when he did appear, by being delightfully amusing and agreeable.
In a few days the company began to rehearse Voltaire’s farce “Boursouffle,” which had formed the amusement of a Cirey evening nine years before. Madame du Châtelet took a part and would not submit, wrote the acrimonious de Staal, to the simplicity of costume it demanded, but persisted in dressing it like a Court lady.
She and Voltaire had a passage of arms on the point, de Staal added. “But she is the sovereign, and he the slave”; and of course the slave had to submit. It is noticeable here, again, that it was the other women who abused Émilie, and not Émilie the other women. Perhaps her eternal Newton, at which they sneered, kept her from the meanness and the backbiting which disfigured their own conduct. Let her sublime inconsideration for other people’s feelings and her childish fondness for fine clothes be granted. Those failings were common to most of the great ladies of the eighteenth century, and, no doubt, to Émilie’s detractors among them. Her passion for work and her noble intellectual endowments were her own alone.
“Boursouffle” was an immense success. Voltaire and Madame took leave of the Duchess on August 25, 1747, the morning after its performance, and in their usual confusion of bandboxes, chiffons, and papers, left “Boursouffle” behind them. Madame de Staal, whose temper was perhaps rendered uncertain by her post of polite maid-of-all-work to all the Duchess’s guests, received agonised letters from Voltaire imploring her to send the farce by a safer means than the post, for fear it should be copied, and to keep the list of characters “under a hundred keys.” He and Madame were back at Court again—with the sun of kingly favour shining on them, it seemed, as brightly as ever. Six weeks passed without any distinguishing events. On October 14, 1747, the Court was at Fontainebleau, and Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet, its constant attendants, still staying at the house of the Duke of Richelieu in the same place.