Indeed, his relations with Madame du Châtelet were not those of an ordinary lover. He did not look upon her as in his young days he had looked upon the inconstant "Pimpette," on the beautiful "Aurore," the pretty "Artemire," on the very "natural" Rupelmonde, or the false Adrienne. His heart beat to a different tune at Cirey from what it did in the Rue Cloche Perce. She was a companion and a friend—"une âme pour qui la mienne était faite."
There is no need to review the incidents of that melancholy love-making in detail. They are well known. It was at Commercy that the treachery was detected, and that those half-comical, half pathetic scenes described by Longchamp occurred—Voltaire, mad with a sense of the injury endured, firing up, abjuring Emilie, almost accepting Saint Lambert's challenge to fight, ordering his valet, Longchamp, to bespeak a coach and horses at once, that very night, for Paris. Longchamp knew too well who was master. Instead of rushing to the posting-house, he went quietly to Emilie, who directed him to let post-master, horses, and coach alone, and report that there were none to be had. Her cynically frank explanation, next morning, in Voltaire's own room put matters straight and Saint Lambert was not only pardoned but asked pardon of by Voltaire and admitted as a friend to both parties. Later came the ludicrous trick played off upon the Marquis at Cirey. Last of all, there was the sad ending at Lunéville.
Madame du Châtelet had a short time before met Stanislas at the Trianon, and had begged him for the use, for the time of her confinement, of "le petit appartement de la reine" in the ducal palace, a handsome set of apartments on the ground-floor, looking out on one side on the Cour d'Honneur, on the other on the private gardens reserved for the Court—apartments which were magnificently furnished, but were prized by the petitioner chiefly for their comfort, and for their nearness to those other rooms, on the first floor (which command a splendid view across the Bosquet, bounded in the distance by the gorgeous façade of Chanteheux), in which Voltaire was to be lodged. Those rooms in the first story are now appropriated as a granary. Madame du Châtelet's apartments serve as quarters for the divisional General. King Stanislas, kind-hearted as ever, gladly acceded to the petition, and entered into all the arrangements with particular personal interest, as if they had concerned some near relative of his. Under his own and Madame de Bouffler's attentive care (to say nothing of Voltaire and Mademoiselle du Thil), we know how admirably Emilie was looked after, how satisfactorily at first all seemed to proceed—her Newton was finished just in the nick of time—till that fatal glass of iced orgeat suddenly turned happiness into grief, and made the palace a house of mourning.
Voltaire was dazed at the loss, unable to command his words or his steps. He tottered out on to the little flight of stairs, where he sat in dull despair and stupefaction. In spite of all that had happened of late, he declared that he had lost, not a mistress, but "half of his own self." The world would be a different world to him now. There was to be no more of woman's love for him in his after-life. Lunéville was no longer a place for him. "Je ne pourrais pas supporter Lunéville, où je l'ai perdue d'une manière plus funeste que vous ne pensez." Stanislas, kind to the last, did all that he could to comfort his distressed friend. On the day of his great trial he went up thrice into his room, sat with him, and wept with him. We hear little of the funeral, except that it was carried out in a magnificent style, attended by the whole of the Court, and with all the honours which were due to a member of one of the four "Grands Chevaux." It seemed like a mockery of Fate that, on being carried out to be placed on the car the bier should have broken down in the large saloon in which only a few weeks before Emilie had gathered brilliant laurels in her favourite character of Issé, and that a mass of flowers, with which her coffin was covered, should have dropped on the very spot where on that occasion had fallen a shower of bouquets thrown in token of admiration. The parish church of St. Remy, then quite new, received the body—it is that same hideously grotesque rococo church now dedicated to St. Jacques, overladen with misshapen ornament, whose two lofty but gingerbread spires, "bourgeoises, lourdes, cossues et bonhommes au demeurant," as Edmond About describes them, stand up, a conspicuous landmark, visible from afar off, and looking down on a scene far more attractive than themselves—the little town with its rectangular streets and squares, brightly-green vineyards all around, and laughing hop-grounds, carefully-kept gardens, dark bosquets, and luxuriant meadows, watered on one side by the broad Meurthe, on the other by the modest Vesouze—with the chain of the Vosges rising in the distance, overtopping those prettily undulating elevations with which Lunéville is fenced in. The tomb was new, the first dug in the nave—and it has remained the last. A black marble slab, bearing no inscription, was laid over the grave. That same black slab is there still. It was displaced once, when the rough champions of the Revolution raised it, in order to possess themselves of the lead of the coffin, scattering about rudely the bones which that coffin enclosed—almost at the precise moment when the body of Voltaire was being carried in triumph to the Pantheon in Paris. Pious hands gathered the remains once more together, and there they rest in the same humble vault.
Voltaire wrote serious verses upon Emilie's death; King Frederick the Great wrote flippant ones. Maupertuis lamented the possessor of brilliant powers never put to a bad use, a woman guilty of "ni tracasserie, ni médisance, ni mechanceté." Madame de Grafigny mourned over one who had "never told a lie:" Voltaire added that she had "never spoken ill of anyone." It all mattered little after she was gone. Voltaire packed up his things, and hurried off sorrowfully to Cirey, where he gathered together the various chattels with which he had made that place more habitable and more attractive; and before the Marquis could seriously object, he had carried them off to Paris.
He had done his work at Lunéville. He had put the stamp of literature and taste on the place. He had set the current of learning flowing towards the Lorrain capital, where a year after de Tressan appeared, to add one more captive to the admiring army vanquished by de Boufflers—Tressan, the "Horace, Pollion et Tibulle" of Voltaire, but forgotten now—who in 1751 founded, under Stanislas' auspices, that "Société de Sciences et de Belles Lettres," which soon acquired the name of "Academy," and took rank in public estimation almost on a par with the sacred Olympus of the "Forty" at Paris. Montesquieu, Helvétius, Hénault, Fontenelle, Bishop Poncet, Bishop Drouas—all begged as a favour to be admitted. Really, that Academy—which is still a flourishing institution at Nancy—was Voltaire's work. Stanislas' fond dream had been realized, and the Court of Lorraine had become a foremost seat of the Muses.
Voltaire never forgot the hospitality received at Stanislas' hands. To the time of that nominal sovereign's melancholy death, he continued in friendly and affectionate correspondence with him. In 1760, after Louis XV. had refused him permission to settle once more on the banks of the Vesouze, we find him writing to the Polish king:—"Je me souviendrai toujours, Sire, avec la plus tendre et la plus respectueuse reconnaissance des jours heureux que j'ai passés dans votre palais. Je me souviendrai que vous daigniez faire les charmes de la société comme vous faisiez la félicité de vos peuples, et que si c'était un bonheur de dépendre de vous, c'en était un plus grand de vous approcher."
Six years after that the little drama of the Lorrain Court was played out. Blind, and old, and deserted, Stanislas was not even sufficiently cared for to have some one handy to help when his silk dressing-gown caught fire. He died of his wounds—with an innocent bon-mot on his lips. The Lorrains, who had been slow to welcome him, crowded round his sick bed and his hearse. He had done his work. In spite of his failings, his posings, his airs, and his frivolities, no one need grudge him that tribute of esteem. He had made the change from independence, dear as life itself to the Lorrains while under their own dukes, to incorporation with France very much easier. He had done much material good to the Duchy, and to literature he had rendered very useful service. His Court is forgotten now. His Palace is turned into a barrack; and the once gay capital has, but for its garrison, become a sleepy little provincial town, in which the presence of a stray stranger puts the police at once on the qui vive. The hop-trade and the manufacture of dentelleries monopolize the attention of the inhabitants; and only rarely is it that some inquiring traveller comes to inspect with interest the spot on which was enacted the most important scene of what the late Comte d'Haussonville has aptly called "the great second act" of the comédie of Voltaire's life—that act which, according to the same gifted author, might be named "L'amour de la science, et la science de l'amour."