Yet, through it all, the man was appealing passionately to the King by Darget. “Throw yourself at the King’s feet and obtain for me that I may retire to the Marquisat” (a country house near Potsdam). “My soul is dead and my body dying.”
When he was not drawing tears from the spectators in that moving part of the old father, tears of rage and bitterness were very near his own eyes. “It is not sufficient to be courageous,” he said himself; “one must have distractions.” He had need of them if any man had.
On January 22d, the King summed up the case to the Margravine of Bayreuth as “the affair of a rascal who is trying to cheat a sharper.... The suit is in the hands of justice, and in a few days we shall know who is the greater scoundrel of the two.” On January 30th, Voltaire himself wrote to the Margravine with a very wry face: “Brother Voltaire is here in disgrace. He has had a dog of lawsuit with a Jew, and, according to the law of the Old Testament, he will have to pay dearly for having been robbed.”
Then Voltaire wrote direct to the King and pleaded and argued with him personally. Only receive me into favour and I will anger you no more! And on February 2d Frederick wrote again to the Margravine, softened not at all; and she wrote on February 18th to her friend Voltaire: “Apollo at law with a Jew! Fie then! that’s abominable.” Then Voltaire appealed again to Frederick. “All the genius of our modern Solomon could not make me feel my fault more than my heart feels it.”
Finally Solomon did give Apollo that Marquisat he had asked for; and Voltaire’s “quarrel with the Old Testament,” as he called it, being settled, the King wrote to him icily on February 24th from Potsdam: “D’Arnaud had done nothing. It was because of you he had to go.... You have had the most detestable affair in the world with a Jew. It has made a frightful scandal.... If you can make up your mind to live like a philosopher I shall be glad to see you.” If not ... “you may as well stay in Berlin.”
On February 27th, Voltaire replied, volubly explaining, regretting, apologising. He owned himself in the wrong with a candour and humility rather engaging.
“I have committed a great fault. I ask pardon of your Majesty’s philosophy and goodness.... Do with me what you will.” His health was suffering dreadfully at the time. “The winter kills me”—especially the winter of our discontent. Even hard work at “Louis XIV.” could not make him forget that. He pleaded very hard indeed.
On February 28th, Frederick accorded a cold permission to him to come to Potsdam if he would.
By March 11th he was established at the Marquisat with, as he said, “pills and pill-boxes” and the fifth canto of a poem by King Frederick entitled “The Art of War.”
The King no doubt had missed Voltaire’s conversation. He had missed too his brilliant, delightful, inconsequent, unreliable personality. The old subtle charm drew the two men together—in spite of themselves, and the imprudence of their connection. They were sure to quarrel! But, like many a lover and his mistress, they were dying to see each other, if it were only to discover fresh reasons for disagreement. “I have committed a folly,” wrote Voltaire to Madame Denis, “but I am not a fool.” He was something so infinitely removed from a fool that his living touch of genius alone could raise, if anything could raise, Frederick’s poems from a dead mediocrity and the dreadful limbo of dulness. “To the Prussians” and “The Art of War” were very important factors in the Treaty of Peace.