The only Prussian of the suppers was Baron Pollnitz, and he was cosmopolitan, had many times visited Paris, and had a rich store of travellers’ tales. Clever and well born, he was extravagant and miserably poor; and since he could not afford to lose Frederick’s favour, was the butt of his royal master’s cruellest jokes—the wretched scapegoat who could not escape and whose very helplessness goaded Frederick’s bitter wit to new effort.
Of such an assembly as this, versatile and brilliant though it was, Voltaire and the King were the natural leaders.
Sulzer, who had listened to it, declared that it was better to hear the conversation of Voltaire, Algarotti, and d’Argens than to read the most interesting and best written book in the world. The talk was on “morals, history, philosophy.” It was the boast of the talkers that they had no prejudices. They explored all subjects as one explores a newly discovered country, knowing neither whether it be sterile or fertile, rich or poor—eager to learn, sharp-set to see—and without fear of consequence. No topic was debarred them. The only intoxication was of ideas. “One thinks boldly, one is free,” said Voltaire. “Wit, reason, and science” abounded. Frederick stimulated the conversation by always taking one side of a question when his guests took the other. His own tongue was so caustic that it has been said that it is difficult to conceive how “anything short of hunger should have induced men to bear the misery of being the associates of the great King.” But that is to take a very one-sided view of his character. If one hand could scratch, the other could caress. If on one side of his nature he was a brutal jester, an untamed barbarian, on the other he was a thinker and a philosopher with all the light, the ease, the charm, and the cultivation of France.
Besides, there was one man at the suppers whom the King feared. Frederick’s satire was a saw; but Voltaire’s was a knife: and the clumsier instrument dreaded the finer. A needy Pollnitz or a patient Darget might bear the royal insolence in silence. But it did not yet dare to encounter that “most terrible of all the intellectual weapons ever wielded by man, the mockery of Voltaire.” Saw and knife seem both, for the while, to have been quietly put away.
A Voltaire with his splendid capacity for living in the present moment may sometimes have forgotten the very existence of the King’s weapon. “No cloud,” “far less a storm,” marred the harmony of those suppers.
Between them, operas, receptions, correcting the royal compositions, and spending long days with his own, the September and October of this autumn of 1750 passed away. Now and again a courtly Voltaire went to pay his devoirs at the Court of the Queen Mother and read her cantos of the “Pucelle,” which he assured the good Protestant lady was nothing in the world but a satire on the Church of Rome. Nor did he neglect to attend the dull and frugal receptions of Frederick’s unhappy wife, the pretty and accomplished Elizabeth Christina. Hanbury Williams was in Berlin in September as English envoy, and made Voltaire complimentary verses on “Rome Sauvée.” The exile continued to write long letters to his friends, speaking of his speedy return to France and of the thousand delights of life in his present “paradise of philosophers.”
He had chosen rightly after all! All would be well. All was well. But——
CHAPTER XXII
THE RIFT WITHIN THE LUTE
On November 6, 1750, at Potsdam, and after he had been in Prussia rather less than three months, Uncle Voltaire took his versatile pen in hand and wrote to Louise Denis a famous letter—the letter of Buts. Prussia had fulfilled all his hopes, nay, had exceeded them, but—. “The King’s suppers are delightful, but—.” “My life is at once free and occupied, but—.” “Operas, comedies, carousals, suppers at Sans-Souci, military manœuvres, concerts, study, readings, but—.” “Berlin splendid with its gracious queens and charming princesses, but—.” “But, my dear, a very fine frost has set in.”
That letter might serve not only as a description of life at Potsdam, but of all human life. A most delightful world, but—. The truth was that Voltaire had begun to feel the grip of Frederick’s iron hand. On November 17th he wrote again to his niece and told her a little, ugly story. Secretary Darget had lost his wife. And the great Frederick wrote to him a letter of sympathy, “very touching, pathetic, and even Christian”; and the same day made a shameful epigram upon the dead woman. “It does not bear thinking about,” wrote Voltaire. Whose turn might it not be next? “We are here ... like monks in an abbey,” he added. “God grant the abbot stops at making game of us!”