One can scarcely help wondering that among all the books written about Voltaire and his varied experiences, there should be practically not one which treats of that brief but eventful period during which, in company with the "sublime Emilie," the great writer found himself the guest of hospitable King Stanislas—"le philosophe-roi chez le roi-philosophe." To Voltaire himself that was one of the most memorable episodes in his long and changeful life. It left on his mind memories which lasted till death. He showed this when, in 1757, looking about him for a peaceful haven of rest, he fixed his eyes once more, as if instinctively, upon Lunéville as a place in which to spend the evening of his days. Stanislas would have been only too thankful to receive him. Old and feeble, rapidly growing blind and helpless, and reduced by ill-health and the desertion of his Court to the poor resource of playing tric-trac—backgammon—in his lonely afternoons, with such uncourtly bourgeois as his messengers could pick up in the town, the fainéant Duke would have hailed Voltaire's presence, as he himself says, as a godsend. However, the philosophe was once more out of favour with Louis XV. Accordingly, the permission was withheld, and the royal father-in-law found himself denied the small solace which surely he might have looked for at the hand of his daughter's husband.
The biographical neglect of Voltaire's stay in Lorraine appears all the more surprising since in Lorraine, almost alone of Voltaire's favourite haunts, are there visible memorials left of his sojourn. Nowhere else is anything preserved that could recall Voltaire. In Lorraine dragoons and piou-pious now tramp where in his day courtiers sauntered, and nursemaids lounge where the first wits of the century made the air ring with their bon-mots. Still, the stone buildings, at any rate, of Lunéville and Commercy have been allowed to stand, and French destructiveness has spared some of the flower-beds that delighted Voltaire. In that pretty "Bosquet" of Lunéville you may walk where Voltaire trod, where he rallied Madame de Boufflers on her "Magdalen's tears," where Saint Lambert made sly appointments with Madame du Châtelet—and with not a few other ladies as well. In the Palace you may step into the upper room where Voltaire lived and wrote, and fought out his battles with the bigot Alliot. You may walk into "le petit appartement de la reine," on the ground-floor, which Stanislas good-naturedly gave up to Madame du Châtelet for her confinement—and her death. There it was that those impassioned scenes occurred of which every biographer of Voltaire speaks, and there that the Marchioness's ring was found to tell the mortifying tale of her unfaithfulness to her most devoted lover. You may walk through that side-door through which, dazed with grief, the stupefied philosopher stumbled; and sit on the low stone-step—one of a short flight facing the town—on which he dropped in helpless despair, "knocking his head against the pavement." In that hideously rococo church, tawdrily gay with gew-gaw ornament, you may stand by the black marble slab, still bare of any inscription, below which rest, rudely disturbed by the rough mobs-men of the first Revolution, the decayed bones of the sublime but faithless Emilie.
Barring his rather unnecessary grief over the threatened production of a travestied Semiramis, there were for Voltaire no happier two years than those which saw him, with one or two interruptions, King Stanislas' guest. And to Stanislas, eager as he was to attach the great writer to his bright little court, there could have been no more welcome rigour than that which, at his daughter's instance, drove the leading spirit of the age into temporary exile. Voltaire had paid his court a little too openly to the powerful favourite. After that cavagnole scandal at Fontainebleau, neither he nor Madame du Châtelet stood for the time in the best of odours at Court. Therefore, it probably required little persuasion on the part of the two royal princesses, prompted by their revengeful mother, to prevail upon Louis XV. in that one little square-rod of hallowed ground, over which the power of the mighty Circe did not extend, their nursery, to decree the banishment of the poet. Madame de Pompadour might have reversed the judgment had she been given the chance; but she was not given it, and, after all, Voltaire's exile did not make much difference to her. So the philosopher and Emilie were allowed to pursue their cold winter's journey, amid sundry break-downs and accidents, and prolonged involuntary star-gazing in a frosty night, to that pretty little oasis in ugly Champagne—a Lorrain enclave—in which stood the du Châtelets' castle.
Stanislas did not allow the brilliant couple to remain long in their uncongenial retirement. He was anxious not to be forestalled by Prussian Frederick, who made wry faces enough on finding the preference over himself and his famous Sans-souci given to the prince bourgeois and his tabagie de Lunéville. Stanislas' great ambition was, to make his Court a favoured seat of learning and letters. In his own, rather too complimentary opinion, he was himself something of a littérateur. Voltaire laughed pretty freely—behind the king's back—at his uncouth and incorrect prose and at those long and limping verses de onze à quatorze pieds, which the world has long since forgotten, as well it might. There are some well-put thoughts to be found in the king's Réflexions sur divers sujets de morale—for instance: "l'esprit est bien peu de chose quand ce n'est que de l'esprit," to say nothing of his oft-quoted motto: "malo periculosam libertatem quam quietam servitutem." But, at best his writings, however carefully revised by Solignac—his answer to Rousseau, and his Oeuvres d'un Philosophe Bienfaisant—are but ephemeral trash. Really, Stanislas could not even speak or write French correctly. But though he was nothing of a writer, and not much more of a wit, he knew thoroughly how to appreciate talent and genius in others. And in a man occupying nominally royal rank, placed at the head of a brilliant Court, having a civil list corresponding in value to at least 6,000,000 francs in the present day, and a pension list of perfectly amazing length in his bestowal, such appreciation must mean something.
To understand the life of the little world into which, in 1748, Voltaire entered, we ought to remember what at that time Lorraine and its Court were. Stanislas had not been put upon his ephemeral throne without a definite object. To lodge the French king's penniless father-in-law, who no doubt had to be maintained somewhere, in the Palace of Lunéville, instead of that of Meudon or of Blois, and to allow him to amuse himself with playing at being king, was one thing. But very much more was required of him. In 1737 France had, after toying for several centuries, with greedy eyes and hungry tongue, with the precious morsel of Lorraine, at length firmly and finally closed her jaws upon it. It was a bitter fate for the duchy, in which France was detested; and the hardship was felt by every one of its sons from the powerful "grands chevaux" down to the humblest peasant. Of what French government meant, the Lorrains had had more than one taste. They were sipping at the bitter cup at that very time; they were having it raised daily to their lips, while that ablest of French administrators, De la Galaizière—a veritable French Bismarck, hard-headed, hard-hearted, inexorably firm, and pitilessly exacting—was loading them with corvées, with vingtièmes, with the burden of conscription for the French army, plaguing them with high-handed judgments and oppressive penalties, all of which ran directly counter to the constitution which the nominal sovereign, Stanislas, had sworn to observe. It was Galaizière who was king, not Stanislas, the ornamental figure-head; and under his stern rule all Lorraine cried out.
Even courtly Saint Lambert, who, as a moneyless member of the petite noblesse, with his mouth wide open for French favours, represented in truth the least popular element in Lorrain Society, felt impelled by his Muse to record his protest in verse:
J'ai vu le magistrat qui régit la province
L'esclave de la Cour, et l'ennemi du prince,
Commander la corvée à de tristes cantons,
Où Cérès et la faim commandoient les moissons.
On avoit consumé les grains de l'autre année;
Et je crois voir encore la veuve infortunée,
Le débile orphelin, le vieillard épuisé,
Se trainer, en pleurant, au travail imposé.
Si quelques malheureux, languissants, hors d'haleine,
Cherchent un gazon frais, le bord de la fontaine,
Un piqueur inhumain les ramène aux travaux,
Ou leur vend à prix d'or un moment de repos.
But there was no help for it. Kind-hearted Stanislas was caused many a wretched hour by the incongruity of his position, which led his "subjects" to appeal to him against the oppression of "his chancellor," as he patronizingly called him who was in truth his master. He had begged Louis to appoint a more humane and merciful man, but his prayer had proved of no avail.
Still, there was something which Stanislas could do. Affable, genial, kind, free-handed to a fault, the stranger puppet-king—the originally distrusted "Polonais"—might, in spite of all harsh government administered in his name, by tact and liberality gain the personal affections of his nominal subjects, and so in the character of a Lorrain Prince discharge better than any one else that odious task of un-Lorraining the Lorrains. All things considered, he earned his civil list.
French writers have very needlessly contended over the motives which led Father Menoux, of all men, the King's Jesuit confessor, to urge Stanislas to invite the great philosophe to his Court. Although repeatedly assailed on the score of its inherent improbability, Voltaire's own version is doubtless the most plausible. One of the leading characteristics of the Lorrain Court, as Voltaire knew it, was the sharp division prevailing between French and Lorrains, Jesuits and philosophes. By all his antecedents—by his rigidly Romanist education, by the principles carefully instilled into him, first by his parents, later by his wife—Stanislas was predisposed to take sides staunchly with the Jesuits. A more devout Catholic was not to be found. The king made all his household attend mass, appointed a special almoner for his gardes-du-corps, and directed the kitchen-folk to select a monastery for the scene of their daily devotions. In respect of offerings, the Church bled him freely, and found him a willing victim. More especially during the lifetime of his wife, that homely, very religious Catherine Opalinska whose bourgeois manners gave such great offence to the courtiers of Versailles, the Jesuit faction had it all their own way.