What with feasting, working, acting, dancing, travelling, the time passed most pleasantly. "En vérité," writes Voltaire to the Countess D'Argental, "ce séjourci est délicieux; c'est un château enchanté dont le maître fait les honneurs. Je crois que Madame du Châtelet passerait ici sa vie." Sometimes at Commercy, sometimes at the Malgrange, most generally at Lunéville, with visitors coming and going, discussions raised, attentions being paid this side and that, gallantry, billiards, tric-trac, lansquenet, comète (which was a great favourite), marionettes, fancy balls, time could hang heavily on no one's hands. "On a de tout ici, hors du temps." Madame du Châtelet, writing till five o'clock in the morning, though she rose not later than nine, worked hard at her translation of Newton, which Voltaire cried up as a masterpiece—more particularly the preface. Whenever she found herself at fault, she had a splendidly fitted-up astronomical cabinet, kept up by Stanislas, to fall back upon, a cabinet which, says Voltaire, "n'a pas son pareil en France." Voltaire himself carried on a brisk correspondence with the Argentals, with Frederick the Great, with his friend Falkener in Wandsworth, and with many more, and worked at his history "de cette maudite guerre," at the Siècle de Louis XIV., at Catilina, and so on, with the easy industry which comes from comfort and absolute absence of restraint amid agreeable surroundings. To ingratiate himself the more with Madame de Boufflers, he wrote La Femme qui a raison. He acted and he criticized. He performed with a magic lantern, to the great amusement of the Court; and at masked balls he got himself up, sometimes as a "wild man," sometimes as an ancient augur. He was sorely troubled when threatened with a performance in Paris of a travesty of Semiramis. Then he lost some manuscripts. Then, again, Menoux frightened him with a tale that Le Mondain and Le Portatif, published at Amsterdam, had both been in France traced to his pen. Among the visitors who in the second year of his stay came to enliven the Court was our Young Pretender—over whose misfortunes Voltaire had pathetically lamented before King Stanislas—and Prince Cantacuzene. The Pretender's cause Voltaire had espoused with fervid warmth. The news of his arrest in Paris arrived at Lunéville at the very moment when he was delighting the Lorrain Court with reading out his just completed chapter of Le Siècle de Louis XIV., treating of the Stuarts. "O ciel!" he exclaimed, "est-il possible que le roi souffre cet affront et que sa gloire subisse une tache que toute l'eau de la Seine ne saurait laver?" "Que les hommes privés," he wrote later, "qui se plaignent de leurs infortunes jettent leurs yeux sur ce prince et sur ses ancêtres."
Several times he left Lorraine for a brief time, going with Madame du Châtelet to Cirey, to Châlons, and to Paris. One visit he paid to Paris by himself, to see Semiramis put on the stage. He came back in a pitiable state, the account of which in Longchamp's journal reads comical enough. "Il est vrai que j'ai été malade," he writes later, "mais il y a plaisir à l'être chez le roi de Pologne; il n'y a personne assurément qui ait plus soin de ses malades que lui. On ne peut pas être meilleur roi et meilleur homme." One would think not. Voltaire was petted like an invalid child. He had but to send word that he wished to see Stanislas, to bring the king to his bedside. When he found himself "malingre, bon à rien qu' à perdre ses regards vers la Vôge," he was taken out to Chanteheux, and made thoroughly comfortable there, where he could best indulge in the idle pleasure of contemplating the mountains. Meanwhile Madame du Châtelet had been to Plombières with Madame de Boufflers, and had come home just as much disgusted with the place as Voltaire himself had been nine or ten years before. Then the gay Court reassembled, and there was the same life, the same succession of pleasures, the same effusion of wit and raillery. Gilliers invented new dishes. King Stanislas exhibited his indifferent pastels. Madame de Boufflers played the harp, and courtiers with voices sang to her accompaniment. Under Voltaire's inspiration, all the Court turned littérateur and engaged in versifying. Stanislas took up his pen once more and wrote, among other things, Le Philosophe Chrétien—horrifying thereby his daughter, the Queen of France, who persuaded herself that in the book she discerned the malignant teaching of the infidel Voltaire. Madame de Boufflers wrote; Saint Lambert composed fresh ditties; Devaux grew industrious; even Galaizière found himself impressed by the lyric Muse. Every courtier mounted his own little Pegasus and made an attempt to produce something witty, or clever, or at least readable. Lunéville became a modern Athens.
But there was a snake in the grass. One of the pleasantest features of the remarkably sociable life carried on by the brilliant company assembled under the roof of Stanislas, while at Lunéville and at Commercy, were those merry nocturnal gatherings held as soon as the king had retired to rest—which he did punctually at ten o'clock, without ever troubling the company, in spite of his jealousy, with an unexpected reappearance. Then began Madame de Boufflers' reign in good earnest; and to the good cheer of a choice little supper, to which often an exciting game of comète or of cavagnole added a fresh delight, was summoned, by means of a lighted candle placed in a particular window, a new guest, whom Stanislas' jealousy would not otherwise tolerate in the palace. This guest was the young and handsome Saint Lambert, a captain in the Duke of Lorraine's Guards, the cynosure of the ladies' world, of whom it was said that no fair heart to which he seriously laid siege could resist him. His muse had not yet taken the frigid turn which eventually produced those dull and chilling Seasons, a poem in which no one will now detect any merit, though Voltaire praised it up to the skies, and French contemporaries declared that the poet had surpassed Thomson. But he dabbled very neatly in little ditties, vers d'occasion, and the like, some of them rather light and pretty, though not of the most perfect style. Voltaire professes to regard Saint Lambert as a terrible élève, of whose poetry he owns himself "jealous." "Il prend un pen ma tournure et l'embellit—j'éspère que la postérité m'en remerciera." Posterity has done nothing of the kind. In matters of courtship Saint Lambert resembled the "papillon libertin" sketched by himself in one of his prettiest pièces fugitives:—
Plus pressant qu'amoureux, plus galant que fidèle,
De la rose coquette allez baiser le sein.
D'aimer et de changer faites-vous une loi:
A ces douces erreurs consacrez votre vie.
Neither Society nor History would ever have known him, nor have detected any talent in him, had it not been his fortune to dispossess his two great contemporaries, Voltaire and Rousseau, successively of their mistresses, conquering the heart, first of Madame du Châtelet, and later that of Madame de Houdetot. Madame de Houdetot and he turned out to be really congenial spirits. For Madame du Châtelet his own conduct shows that he did not really care—as how could a young man of thirty-one for a woman of forty-two or else forty-seven, who had been some years a grandmother? Her letters are full of impassioned professions of affection, impatient longings for his presence, reproaches for his indifference. On his side it was all a question of vanity. It flattered him to think that he had eclipsed the great genius of the age in the affections of a woman of whom all the polite world was talking. What she was he knew well enough. More than once had she tasted of the forbidden fruit. Voltaire's Epître à la Calomnie had not whitewashed the Magdalen who had had relations successively with Guébriant, with Richelieu, and with Voltaire. Of Voltaire's overstrained praise of her assumed modesty Saint Lambert himself writes:—
De cette tendre Courtisane
Il faisait presque une Susanne.
But what could have induced Madame du Châtelet to engage in this conspiracy of deceit all round—deceit on her part towards Voltaire, deceit on Saint Lambert's part towards both Voltaire (with whom he was not then on terms of intimacy) and Madame de Boufflers (with whom he had a standing liaison)? It was in Madame de Boufflers' drawing-room, of all places, that the courtship was most actively carried on. Her gilt-framed harp, we hear, served as a letter-box for the lovers. There was a slit in it just of a convenient size to hold the letters, which passed daily. Of Madame du Châtelet's passion there could be no doubt. She threw herself into the amour with the fervour of a girl of sixteen. She sent her lover dainty billets-doux written on pink and blue-edged, fringed, and scented paper; declared that she could not live two days without hearing from him, when he was away; appointed rendez-vous in the "Bosquet"—watched and waited for him. It seems ridiculous in a grandmother; but she was not the first woman of her age to go wrong.
Clogenson will have it that the attachment sprang up some years before—that Madame du Châtelet became annoyed at Voltaire's long absence at the Court of King Frederick, and looked out for a new lover. We know, however, that Emilie and Saint Lambert met for the first time at the Lorrain Court in 1748, when Voltaire had long been back from Berlin, and was devoting himself to his lady with an assiduity which could not be excelled. Besides, we know—from correspondence quite recently come to light—that as late as 1744 the relations between Voltaire and Emilie were still quite unclouded. The miniature portrait of Voltaire, which she wore so long secretly in her ring, and which was after her death found to have been replaced by one of Saint Lambert, was painted in 1744. In February of that year she writes to Abbé Moussinot: "Je vous laisse la choix du peintre, et je ne le trouverai pas cher, quoiqu'il puisse coûter." That does not sound like pining for a fresh lover. Evidently the later attachment dated only from 1748, when she first became personally acquainted with Saint Lambert; and, as the late M. Meaume puts it, "threw herself at his head." There is no need to look very far for an explanation. Emilie herself is perfectly outspoken about it. The temptation came. She had yielded so often that she had not sufficient virtue left to resist. The odd part of the business is, that Voltaire so readily forgave her; that he continued to dote upon her, to look upon her as half of his own self; and that he grew fast and admiring friends, almost in consequence of the betrayal, with his betrayer, Saint Lambert. Many years after, Saint Lambert very naïvely set forth his own views on the proper conduct of friends in matters of this kind in his Conte Iroquois. Voltaire accepted that not very chivalrous theory readily, and contented himself with protesting—"O ciel! voilà bien les femmes! J'en avais ôté Richelieu, Saint Lambert m'a expulsé: cela est dans l'ordre, un clou chasse l'autre."
"Dans ces vallons et dans ces bois,
Les fleurs dont Horace autrefois
Faisait des bouquets pour Glycère—
Saint Lambert ce n'est que pour toi
Que ces belles fleurs sont écloses:
C'est ta main qui cueille les roses.
Et les épines sont pour moi."