The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough ...
A Jug of Wine ... and Thou....

Here, they had been tender. There, they had quarrelled. It is not always the most perfectly loved who are the most bitterly mourned. The keenest grief is called remorse.

That good-natured old lady—Madame de Champbonin—came to Cirey to mingle her tears with Voltaire’s.

Longchamp was kept busy packing books, furniture, vertu, to be transmitted to Paris. Voltaire and the Marquis settled their money affairs—much to the advantage and the satisfaction of that remarkable bonhomme. It was arranged that Voltaire should take the whole of the house in the Rue Traversière-Saint-Honoré in Paris—of which hitherto he had only rented a part from the Marquis. They parted at the end of a fortnight: “on the best of terms,” though they never saw each other again. Voltaire also retained a friendship—for Saint-Lambert.

He left Cirey about September 25th, and proceeded by melancholy, slow stages to Paris. He stopped for a day or two at kindly Madame de Champbonin’s; at Châlons, and at Rheims, and finally reached the capital.

If the unhappy man had been miserable at Cirey he was a thousand times more so in Paris. He was alone. The house was in a dreadful confusion with the du Châtelet furniture being moved out and the Voltaire furniture being moved in. Voltaire was as sick in body as in mind. He tried to work. He did work—with his loss and his wretchedness thrusting themselves on his consciousness all the time. Sometimes in the dead of night, half dreaming, he would get up and wander about the disordered rooms, and fancying he saw Madame du Châtelet, call to her. Once, in the dark and cold, he got up and walking a few steps was too weak to go farther and leant shivering, supported against a table—“yet reluctant to wake me,” says Longchamp. The unhappy man stumbled into the next room presently, and against a great pile of books lying on the floor. Longchamp found him there at last, speechless and half frozen, in the chilly dawn of the October morning. All his letters of the month are miserable enough. A few chosen friends were admitted to see him after a while—Richelieu, the d’Argentals, nephew Mignot, and Marmontel. They would come and sit by his fire in the evenings and try to distract his thoughts with talk of the drama, which he had loved. They did their best to rouse him. He had certainly never needed rousing before. Frederick the Great wrote brusquely to Algarotti that this Voltaire talked about his grief so much he was sure to get over it quickly. Marmontel speaks of him as one moment weeping and the next laughing. Tears and laughter were both genuine enough, and to such a temperament, quite natural. There was something of the child in this Voltaire to the very last—the warm, quick emotions, so keenly felt, and so keenly felt to be eternal. That they were not eternal does not impair their sincerity in the least.

He was so lonely and miserable during that dismal autumn in Paris that one day, exactly upon the same principle as a sorrowing widower marries his cook and with much the same disastrous results, he asked his niece, Madame Denis, to come and live with him. She could not do so till Christmas. Before then, Longchamp declares he had helped his master’s cure by showing him some letters in which Madame du Châtelet had spoken slightingly of him. There was certainly bark in that tonic if it was administered, which seems a little doubtful. How did Longchamp come by such letters?

There was a sharper bark in the fact that while Voltaire was weeping for a woman who had been false to him, that dreary old Crébillon was making fine headway at Court, had a pension from the false Pompadour, and all Paris applauding his bad verses.

It was his enemy, not his friends, who roused Voltaire at last. He woke as after a disturbed dream—at first dazed; shook himself; looked round; and began life afresh.

He was, to be sure, fifty-five years old. But fifty-five in a Voltaire, though it meant an old and decrepit body, meant a vigorous and eager mind, thirsting for life and action. He was a man of substance, and a man whose time was his own. He had no ties. He had a reputation not a little feared. He had the world before him yet, and a world only he could save. The fighting zest to turn “dead Catilina of Crébillon into ‘Rome Sauvée’ of Voltaire” was the spur that urged him back to “life and use and name and fame.”