Bavier ’graved this likeness for you.
Recognise it, and his art.
As for me, a greater Master
Has engraved you—on my heart.
His portrait had displaced one of the Duke of Richelieu’s—and now his, in its turn, had made way for Saint-Lambert’s.
Voltaire might well turn away saying that all women are alike; and trying to comfort himself with the antique and barren reflection that, after all, it was the way of the world.
Among Madame du Châtelet’s effects was a large parcel of letters. She left a memorandum to beg her complaisant husband to burn them unread. “They can be of no use to him and have nothing to do with his affairs.” He did so, on his brother’s prudent advice. But Longchamp observed him make a very wry face at certain ones of which, being uppermost, he caught sight. The cautious valet rescued from the flames the whole of Voltaire’s “Treatise on Metaphysics” and some letters, afterwards also burnt. Among the destroyed manuscripts were historical notes of Voltaire’s, of which he deplores the loss in his preface to his “Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations.” It has been thought, but it is not certain, that the whole of his eight volumes of letters to Madame du Châtelet also perished in this conflagration. If they did not, a new Voltaire, a new world, rich in human interest, as no doubt in wit and philosophy, still remains to be discovered by some literary Columbus. At present, of all the letters he wrote to her, the human being with whom he was most intimate and who shared the deepest secrets of his soul and the highest aspirations of his genius, there can be found but one gay little note.
Madame du Châtelet was buried with all honour at Lunéville. Paris had already flayed her dead body with epigrams. She had not been too immoral for its taste. That was impossible. But she had been far too clever. One indignant person said that it was to be hoped the cause of her death would be the last of her airs. “To die in childbed at her age is to wish to make oneself peculiar: it is to pretend to do nothing like other people.” Frederick the Great wrote her epitaph. “Here lies she who lost her life in giving birth to an unfortunate infant and a treatise on philosophy.” Maupertuis and Marmontel spoke of her in terms of warm admiration. And Voltaire prefixed to her translation of Newton, published in 1754, at once the kindest and the truest estimate of her character yet made.
Madame du Châtelet was intellectually a very great woman. She had a mind essentially clear and logical—the mind of a clever man. She had not only a passion for learning rare in her sex, but for exactly the kind of learning in which her sex generally fails. She had, too, an intellectual fairness strangely unfeminine. She was long the champion of Leibnitz against Newton; and then, convinced of her mistake, acknowledged it, and made it the business of her life to prove it and to translate and explain Newton for the benefit of the French people. In an age busily idle, she was distinguished by a noble and untiring industry. In an age of scandal, she was charitable. For all those terrible fine clothes and that passion for high play and taking youthful parts in amateur theatricals, the laugh of the de Staals and the du Deffands at her expense turns against them now.
Still preserved among her letters are her “Reflections on Happiness.” She plainly avows there that “rational self-indulgence” was her idea of it. Upon that rock her barque split. She chose pleasure before duty and gained a faithless Richelieu, fifteen jealous, feverish years with Voltaire, and a wretchedness from the cool love of the lofty Saint-Lambert, of which every letter she wrote him is proof.
Out of the picture painted by Loir there still looks down the shrewd, smiling face—reflective eyes, clever forehead, mobile lips, drooping nose—of the woman who was at once Voltaire’s curse and blessing—who, if she had been all good might have been his blessing only, and if she had been all bad would have been curse alone. At the Revolution, some wretches broke open her coffin to steal the lead.
There had been gold in her heart once, but the world and the flesh had overlaid it in dross.