Madame de Champbonin reappeared on the scene very soon, with a hoydenish twelve-year-old niece in her train. She had been very warmly invited—if only to finish that solitude à deux. The whole neighbourhood received invitations presently to act in, or to witness, theatricals. Émilie wrote charades for the occasion. She played comic parts as well as any other. Sometimes the servants were pressed into the cast and acted too. The bonhomme would seem to have been conveniently absent, as usual. Voltaire doubtless enjoyed the freedom of private life after the slavish etiquette of the Court. He was certainly able to enjoy theatricals to his last breath.
About the middle of February he and Madame went to visit another Court, at Lunéville, where the etiquette was not slavish at all, and where a king was a great deal more anxious to have them than ever dull Louis had been.
Stanislas, once King of Poland, had been not a little thankful to exchange that quarrelsome and much quarrelled over kingdom for the peaceful little duchy of Lorraine, the tranquil enjoyment of a pipe six feet long and the dolce far niente of his lazy and easy-going mistress, Madame de Boufflers. He still had the title of King. He still had a position—he was the father of Marie Leczinska. His miniature Court had all the pleasures and intrigues of a greater, with no weary formalism. Stanislas had his Jesuit, Menou, to rule him just as other kings had their priests to rule them. The priest fought the mistress for the command of the royal puppet, in the approved, courtly fashion; and the mistress fought the priest, when she was not too lazy.
The little Court was further ornamented by a child dwarf, who could sleep in a sabot, and a most beautiful young guardsman, six feet high.
Following the example of Frederick, Stanislas was a feeble author himself and a very enthusiastic admirer of the literary Voltaire. The literary Voltaire was not sorry to show the offended Court of France that he stood well with its offended Queen’s royal father. So the visitors and the visited were gratified alike.
The visit was a gay one. “Issé” was played; and “Mérope,” when everyone sobbed just as they had done in Paris. In the evenings they played lansquenet or talked. It was an agreeable, idle life. Voltaire, ailing as usual, was humoured and made much of by the King. Émilie overwhelmed the inert and voluptuous Madame de Boufflers with her energetic friendship. And then—
The Marquis de Saint-Lambert is one of the most picturesque figures of his century. Poet and soldier, handsome, haughty and cold, with just enough disdain in his perfect manner to make every woman adore him and long to thaw that flawless ice—he had almost every quality which makes riches superfluous. He was, in fact, nothing but the officer of a company of Lorraine guards. He was much in Lunéville because he had, said the world, a fancy for his King’s mistress, Madame de Boufflers. His own age accounted him celebrated because he wrote the loveliest drawing-room verses and was the author of a poem called “The Seasons”—much duller than Thomson’s. The present age only knows him as the man who robbed Rousseau of Madame d’Houdetot and Voltaire of Madame du Châtelet.
In 1738, when Madame de Graffigny, who was a friend of his, was at Cirey, she had corresponded with him. He had much wished to be asked to stay there. Since he knew how “to read and rest in his own room during the day” and would only expect to be amused in the evenings, Madame du Châtelet desired to have him for a visitor. But the plan, probably owing to the rupture with Madame de Graffigny, had never been carried out.
Madame du Châtelet was now two-and-forty years old, and, on the unanimous testimony of all her female friends, not at all beautiful. But that inflammable temperament, which years before had made her fling honour and prudence to the winds and give her heart and life to Voltaire, was hers still. Age had not quenched the fire. Abstruse thought and long devotion to the exact sciences had still left her, on one side of her nature, passionately a woman. Voltaire had passed quickly and easily from love to friendship—but not Émilie. Her jealousy of Frederick the Great was a proof that she loved her lover as he had long ceased to love her. As early as 1741, in Brussels, after his return from his second Prussian visit, she had bitterly reproached him with no longer caring for her. He had replied to her in verses of which the following give the keynote.
If you want me still to love
Give me back love’s golden morn;
To the twilight of my days
Join, forsooth, love’s happy dawn.