“One soldier was the only guard I found. The Privy-Councillor and Minister of State was walking in the court-yard blowing his fingers. He had on a large pair of coarse ruffles, a hat all in holes, and a judge’s old wig, one side of which hung into his pocket and the other scarcely touched his shoulder. They informed me that this man was charged with a state affair of great importance, and so indeed he was. I was conducted into his majesty’s apartments, in which I found nothing but four bare walls. By the light of a taper I perceived a small truckle-bed two feet and a half wide in a closet, upon which lay a little man wrapped in a morning dressing-gown of blue cloth. It was his majesty who lay perspiring and shaking beneath a miserable coverlet in a violent ague fit. I made my bow, and began my acquaintance by feeling his pulse, as if I had been his first physician. The fit left him, and he rose, dressed himself, and sat down to table with Algerotti, Maupertuis, the ambassador of the States-general, and myself. At supper he treated most profoundly of the soul, natural liberty, and the Androgynes of Plato. I soon found myself attached to him, for he had wit, an agreeable manner, and moreover was a king, which is a circumstance of seduction hardly to be vanquished by human weakness. Generally speaking, it is the employment of men of letters to flatter kings, but in this instance I was praised by a king from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet at the same time that I was libelled at least once a week by the Abbé Desfontaines and other Grub-street poets of Paris.”
Voltaire received a pressing invitation to Berlin.
“But I had before given him to understand I could not come to stay with him; that I deemed it a duty to prefer friendship to ambition; that I was attached to Mdlle. de Châtelet, and that, between philosophers, I loved a lady better than a king. He approved of the liberty I took, though, for his part, he did not love the ladies. I went to pay him a visit in October, and the Cardinal de Fleury [the French premier] wrote me a long letter, full of praises of the Anti-Machiavel, and of the author [Friedrich], which I did not forget to let him see.”
The French court wished to secure the alliance of Friedrich. No one seemed a more fitting mediator than his early counsellor, who was induced to accept the mission, and to set out for Berlin, where an enthusiastic welcome awaited him, apartments in the palace being placed at his disposal. Yet, in spite of the success of this and other public services, his enemies in Paris remained in full possession of the field. For the second time Voltaire sought admission into the Académie—an empty honour, the granting or refusal of which could neither add to nor detract from his fame. The prestige of that society, however, he seemed to consider essential to his safety against the increasing violence and formidable array of his enemies, who were bent on crushing him, by whatever means. It was only by submitting to the mortification of qualifying some of his opinions that he at length succeeded in his object. Notwithstanding the address with which he manages his language, it were better, as his biographer—the Marquis de Condorcet—justly remarks, he had renounced the Académie than have had the weakness to submit to so evident a farce.
On succeeding to a vacant chair it was customary, besides a eulogy upon the deceased member, to speak in set terms of praise of Richelieu and Louis XIV. This traditional and servile practice the new Academician was the first to break through. Philosophy and literature were treated of in unaccustomed strains of freedom, and his good example has been influential on after generations.
“I was deemed worthy [writes Voltaire] to be one of the forty useless members of the Académie, was appointed historiographer of France, and created by the king one of the gentlemen in ordinary of his chamber. From this I concluded it was better, in order to make the most trifling fortune, to speak four words to a king’s mistress, than to write a hundred volumes.”
A sort of experience he has finely illustrated in his romance of Zadig.
Stanislaus, the ex-king of Poland, was keeping his Court at Luneville, not far from Cirey, where he divided his time between his mistress and his confessor. To this royal retreat the friends of Cirey were invited, and the whole of the year 1749 was passed there. Meanwhile Madame de Châtelet died, and Voltaire, much affected by his loss, returned to Paris. Friedrich redoubled his solicitation with new hope.
“I was destined to run from king to king, although I loved liberty to idolatry.... He was well assured that in reality his verse and prose were superior to my verse and prose; though as to the former, he thought there was a certain something that I, in quality of academician, might give to his writings, and there was no kind of flattery, no seduction, he did not employ to engage me to come.”
The philosopher at length set out for Berlin, and his reception must have reached his highest expectations. We have no intention to repeat the account of this singular episode in his life, which has been so often narrated. Evenings of the most agreeable kind, abundance of wit, unrestrained conversation, the society of some of the most distinguished men of science of the time, the unbounded adoration of a royal host, eager, above all things, to retain so brilliant a guest—such were the pleasures of this palace of Alcina, as he calls it. But the imperious tempers of the two unequal friends soon proved the impossibility of a lasting entente, and rivalries amongst the literary courtiers hastened, if they did not effect, the final rupture.