The enthusiasm may well have come back to him now. It did come back. Instead of sulky Louis’s cold shoulder, was “my Frederick the Great,” flattery, honour, and consideration. Potsdam was gay and busy with preparations for a splendid fête to be held in Berlin in August. But it forgot gaiety and business alike to do honour to Voltaire.
Saxe’s apartments left nothing to be desired. The royal stables were at the guest’s disposal. There were music and conversation. On July 24th, the guest sketched Potsdam for d’Argental—“one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers ... opera, comedy, philosophy, poetry, grandeur and graces, grenadiers and muses, trumpets and violins, the suppers of Plato, society and liberty—who would believe it? Yet it is very true.”
And on August 1st to Thibouville, “To find all the charms of society in a king who has won five battles; to be in the midst of drums and to hear the lyre of Apollo; ... to pass one’s days half in fêtes, half in the delights of a quiet and occupied life”—here was glamour indeed.
And then on a day before August 14th, and before Voltaire had been five weeks at Potsdam, Frederick, who perfectly understood the policy of striking while the iron is hot, offered his dearest friend, if he would but stay with him for ever, the post of Chamberlain, a Royal Order, twenty thousand francs per annum, and niece Denis a yearly pension of four thousand francs if she would come and keep her uncle’s house in Berlin.
The offer was so sudden and so brilliant! That impetuosity which had made all his shrewdness of no avail a hundred times before, was still at once Voltaire’s charm and stumbling-block. He forgot “Anti-Machiavelli” and d’Arnaud. Everything that makes life delightful surrounded him at the moment. Behind him lay the Bastille of his youth, flight to Holland, hiding at Cirey, the “English Letters” burnt by the hangman, the fierce persecution for that babbling trifle the “Mondain,” the Pompadour’s false smile, the kingly scowl, Crébillon, Desfontaines, Boyer. At its best his country had given him grudging and empty honours. If he had won fame and fortune, it had been in spite of Courtly malice and for ever at the point of the sword. He was sick to the soul of gagging and injustice. It was not the least part of his bitterness against his Louis, that he had cringed to and flattered such a creature—in vain. He was fifty-six years old. The fifty-six years had been one long persecution. He had still the daring spirit of a boy. He had still such deeds to do that the gods would make him immortal, if need be, to do them. A new heaven and a new earth lay before him. He accepted the offer—and began the world again.
There is still preserved his letter to Madame Denis, dated August 14, 1750, wherein he tells her of Frederick’s bounty. It has the spontaneous enthusiasm of youth. “You must come, niece Louise,” it says in effect. “Think of the magnificence of the offer! And then—Berlin has such operas!” (shrewd Uncle Voltaire!) He had hardly been given time to breathe, much less to think, since he arrived at Potsdam. Pleasure had succeeded to pleasure and flattery to flattery. For three hours at a time he would criticise his royal host’s writings. Crafty Frederick gave up whole days to belles-lettres. There was everything to intoxicate the excitable brain of this French child of genius. The great Frederick was cool enough. He had no glamour. Does it make the great Voltaire less lovable that he saw things all en rose or en noir, was led dangerous lengths by his emotions, and for all that rasping cynicism could be a dreamer of dreams, a visionary, and a sentimentalist?
Practical niece Denis, with her vulgar, shrewd instincts, wrote back and said that no man could be the friend of a king. Toady or slave—but friend, never. And Voltaire, carried to Berlin in the whirl of the Court for the Carrousel, wrote to d’Argental begging him to persuade her, and asking d’Argental’s forgiveness for the course upon which he was resolved.
On August 23d, Frederick, having read Madame Denis’s letter, condescended to write with his own royal hand from his private apartment to beg Voltaire to stay with him. What more flattering? Yet even now Voltaire was not quite sure he was wise. He took such immense pains to prove himself so. But he had decided irrevocably—and flung the responsibility of that choice on destiny at last. “I abandon myself to my fate,” he wrote on August 28th, “and throw myself head foremost into that abyss.”
The fall was soft enough at first.
The Carrousel had begun about August 8th.