The death of Madame du Châtelet marks one of the great epochs of Voltaire’s life.
For a while he was utterly crushed and broken. He wrote of himself to his friends as the most wretched of men. He was alone, abandoned, dying. Everything that made life worth having had been taken from him—and he would live no longer.
There is not the slightest doubt that he felt passionately every word he wrote, and that he suffered wretchedly. It was characteristic of his nation and himself to give grief words. It was characteristic of himself to remember nothing but good of that “friend of twenty years” who had been taken from him. He recalled Cirey and the springtime of their passion, and forgot Lunéville and Saint-Lambert. He remembered the woman of a splendid intellect and a most just judgment: who was learned without affectation of learnedness; who had “the genius of Leibnitz, with feeling”; and the literary style of a Pascal or a Nicole. He remembered “her imperial sympathy” and not her “shrewish temper.” “The pompons and the world are of her age, and her merit is above her age, her sex, and ours,” he had written to the Abbé de Sade in 1733. He thought that now. Her brilliant and ready understanding of his philosophies, thoughts, aims, came back to him overwhelmingly. She had sinned against him in the flesh. Her mind had been his for ever.
It would indeed have been impossible but that a fifteen years’ connection with such a woman as Madame du Châtelet should have had lifelong effects upon a character so impressionable as Voltaire’s. Her relentless logic and her passion for hard facts did a work, and a good work, upon his vivid, sensitive, bantering, and versatile intelligence. She added correctness to a style which has no equal in the world for interest, gaiety, and satire. She forced him to sound the depths his matchless sparkle hid, to examine first principles, to advance step by step in argument with the stern accuracy of a Euclid.
From his acquaintance with her he formed his conviction of the mental equality of women with men. In his first grief at her loss, says Longchamp, he wrote of her:
The world has lost her! She, sublime, who, living
Loved pleasures, arts, the truth. The gods in giving
Her their soul and genius, kept but for their own
That immortality which is for gods alone.
Voltaire denied the verses. He was in no mood for making mediocre rhymes, he said. But in 1754 he certainly did write that noble eulogy of her which forms the preface to her translation and commentary of Newton, and never afterwards spoke of her—and he spoke of her often—but in terms of a reverent and a passionate admiration.
For the first few days his grief was overwhelming. King Stanislas was full of compassion, and three times a day mingled his tears with the mourner’s.
Lunéville was now naturally horrible to Voltaire. He thought of going to stay with a certain priestly friend at the Abbey of Senones. Perhaps he would go back to England! He would have preferred the grave—or thought he would have preferred it—to either of these alternatives. About September 14, 1749, he ended by accompanying the Marquis du Châtelet to Cirey.
It is not difficult to realise that such a temperament as Voltaire’s might derive a melancholy consolation from revisiting the scene “de ces heureux jours quand nous étions si malheureux!” It was for the last time. Every room in the house must have recalled her. Every corner in the garden had its own memory. There was that inscription over the summer-house—