It is said, and it was said first by one who lived with them for some time, and has left a graphic account of the interior of Cirey, that she made Voltaire’s life a little hard to him.[73] There were many occasional storms and short sullen fits even in these high regions of science and the finer tastes. Yet such stormful scenes, with great actors as with small, are perhaps more painful in description than they were in reality; and Voltaire was less discomposed by the lively impetuosity of a companion like Madame du Châtelet, than he would have been by the orderly calm of a more precise and perfectly well-regulated person. A man follows the conditions of his temperament, and Voltaire’s unresting animation and fire might make him feel a certain joy of life and freedom in the occasional contentiousness of a slightly shrewish temper. We cannot think of him as ever shrinking, ever craving for repose, as some men do as for a very necessity of existence. The health of your friend, wrote Madame du Châtelet to D’Argental in 1739, is in so deplorable a state that the only hope I have left of restoring it is in the turmoil of a journey[74]. A tolerably frequent agitation was a condition of even such health as he had, to one of Voltaire’s nervous and feverish habit.
Let it be said that his restlessness never took a form which involved a sacrifice of the happiness of other people. It was never tyrannical and exigent. There are many, too many, instances of his angry impatience with persons against whom he thought he had cause of offence. There is not a single instance in which any shadow of implacableness lurked for an enemy who had repented or fallen into misfortune; and if his resentment was constantly aflame against the ignoble, it instantly expired and changed into warm-hearted pity, when the ignoble became either penitent or miserable. There are many tales of the readiness with which his anger was appeased. Any one will suffice as a type. On some occasion when Voltaire was harassed by a storm of libels, and happened to be on good terms with the police, a distributor of the libels was arrested. The father, an old man of eighty, hastened to Voltaire to pray for pardon. All Voltaire’s fury instantly vanished at the first appeal; he wept with the old man, embraced him, consoled him, and straightway ran to procure the liberation of the offender[75]. An eye-witness related to Grimm how he happened to be present at Ferney when Voltaire received Rousseau’s Lettres de la Montagne, and read the apostrophe relating to himself. His face seemed to take fire, his eyes sparkled with fury, his whole frame trembled, and he cried in terrible tones—‘The miscreant! the monster! I must have him cudgelled—yes, I will have him cudgelled in his mountains at the knees of his nurse.’ ‘Pray, calm yourself,’ said the bystander, ‘for I know that Rousseau means to pay you a visit, and will very shortly be at Ferney.’ ‘Ah, only let him come,’ replied Voltaire. ‘But how will you receive him?’ ‘Receive him ... I will give him supper, put him in my own bed, and say, There is a good supper; this is the best bed in the house; do me the pleasure to accept one and the other, and to make yourself happy here[76].’ One does not understand the terrible man, without remembering always how much of the hot generosity of the child he kept in his nature to the last. When the very Jesuits were suppressed with circumstances of extreme harshness, he pitied even them, and took one of their number permanently into his household[77].
The most important part of a man’s private conduct after that which concerns his relations with women and his family, is generally that which concerns his way of dealing with money, because money in its acquisition and its dispersion is the outward and visible sign of the absence or of the presence of so many inward and spiritual graces. As has often been said, it is the measure of some of the most important of a man’s virtues, his honesty, his industry, his generosity, his self-denial, and most of the other elements in keeping the difficult balance between his care for himself and his care for other people. Voltaire perceived very early in life that to be needy was to be dependent; that the rich and poor are as hammer and anvil; that the chronicles of genius demonstrate that it is not by genius that men either make a fortune or live happy lives. He made up his mind from the beginning that the author of the French epic would not share the poverty and straitened lives of Tasso and Milton, and that he for his part would at any rate be hammer and not anvil.[78] I was so wearied, he wrote in 1752, of the humiliations that dishonour letters, that to stay my disgust I resolved to make what scoundrels call a great fortune.[79] He used to give his books away to the printers. He had a small fortune from his father; he is said to have made two thousand pounds by the English subscriptions to the Henriade; and he did not hide his talent in the ground, but resorted skilfully to all sorts of speculations in stocks, army contracts, and other authorised means of converting one livre into two while you sleep. He lent large sums of money, presumably at handsome interest, to the Duke of Richelieu and others, and though the interest may have been handsome, the trouble of procuring it was often desperate.[80] Yet after much experience Voltaire came to the conclusion that though he had sometimes lost money by bankers, by the devout, by the people of the Old Testament, who would have had many scruples about a larded capon, who would rather die than not be idle on the sabbath, and not be thieving on the Sunday, yet he had lost nothing by the great except his time.[81]
It is easy to point a sneer at a high priest of humanity jobbing in the funds. Only let us remember that Voltaire never made any pretence of being a high priest of humanity; that his transactions were substantially very like those of any banker or merchant of to-day; and that for a man who was preaching new opinions it was extremely prudent to place himself out of the necessity of pleasing booksellers or the pit of the theatre on the one hand, and on the other to supply himself with ready means of frequent flight from the ceaseless persecutions of authority. Envious scribes in his lifetime taunted him with avarice, and the evil association still clings to his memory now that he is dead. One can only say that good and high-minded men, who never shrank from withstanding him when in fault, men like Condorcet for example, heard such talk with disdain, and set it down to the disgraceful readiness of men to credit anything that relieves them from having to admire[82]. The people who dislike prudence in matters of money in those whose distinction is intellectual or spiritual, resemble a sentimental lover who should lose his illusions at sight of his mistress eating a hearty meal. Is their lot, then, cast in the ethereal fluid of the interstellar spaces?
At all events Voltaire had two important gifts which do not commonly belong to the avaricious; he was a generous helper alike of those who had, and those who had not, a claim upon him, and he knew how to bear serious losses with unbroken composure. Michel, the receiver-general, became bankrupt, and Voltaire lost a considerable sum of money in consequence. His fluency of invective and complaint, which was simply boundless when any obscure scribbler earned a guinea by a calumny upon him, went no farther on the occasion of this very substantial injury than a single splenetic phrase, and a harmless quatrain:
Michel au nom de l’Eternel, Mit jadis le diable en déroute; Mais, après cette banqueroute, Que le diable emporte Michel!
It has been fairly asked whether a genuine miser would content himself with a stanza upon the man who had robbed him.[83] His correspondence with the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha shows him declining to accept the thousand louis, which she had sent as a fee for the composition of the Annales de l’Empire.
Much has been made of the bargaining which he carried on with Frederick, as to the terms on which he would consent to go to Berlin. But then the Prussian king was not one with whom it was wise to be too nice in such affairs. He was the thriftiest of men, and as a king is a person who lives on other people’s money, such thrift was in his case the most princely of virtues. Haggling is not graceful, but it need not imply avarice in either of the parties to it. The truth is that there was in Voltaire a curious admixture of splendid generosity with virulent tenacity about half-pence. The famous quarrel with the President de Brosses about the fourteen cords of firewood is a worse affair. Voltaire, who leased Tourney from him, insisted that De Brosses had made him a present of the fourteen cords. De Brosses, no doubt truly, declared that he had only ordered the wood to be delivered on Voltaire’s account. On this despicable matter a long correspondence was carried on, in which Voltaire is seen at his very worst; insolent, undignified, low-minded, and untruthful.[84] The case happily stands alone in his biography. As a rule, he is a steady practitioner of the Aristotelian μεγαλοπρέπεια, or virtue of magnificent expenditure.
The truly important feature of the life which Voltaire led at Cirey was its unremitting diligence. Like a Homeric goddess, the divine Emily poured a cloud round her hero. There is a sort of moral climate in a household, an impalpable, unseizable, indefinable set of influences, which predispose the inmates to industry and self-control, or else relax fibre and slacken purpose. At Cirey there was an almost monastic rule. Madame Grafigny says that though Voltaire felt himself bound by politeness to pay her a visit from time to time in her apartment, he usually avoided sitting down, apologetically protesting how frightful a thing is the quantity of time people waste in talking, and that waste of time is the most fatal kind of extravagance of which one can be guilty[85]. He seems to have usually passed the whole day at his desk, or in making physical experiments in his chamber. The only occasion on which people met was at the supper at nine in the evening. Until then the privacy of the chamber alike of the hostess, who was analysing Leibnitz or translating Newton, and of the unofficial host, who was compiling material for the Siècle de Louis XIV., or polishing and repolishing Mahomet, or investigating the circumstances of the propagation of fire, was sacredly inviolable.
The rigour of the rule did not forbid theatrical performances, when any company, even a company of marionettes, came into the neighbourhood of the desolate Champagne château. Sometimes after supper Voltaire would exhibit a magic lantern, with explanatory comments after the showman’s manner, in which he would convulse his friends at the expense of his enemies.[86] But after the evening’s amusement was over, the Marquise would retire to work in her chamber until the morning, and, when morning came, a couple of hours’ sleep was the only division between the tasks of the night and the tasks of the day. Two splenetic women have left us a couple of spiteful pictures of Madame du Châtelet, but neither of her detractors could rise to any higher conception of intellectual effort than the fine turn of phrase, the ingenious image, the keen thrust of cruel satire, with which the polished idle of that day whiled away dreary and worthless years. The translator of Newton’s Principia was not of this company, and she was wholly indifferent to the raillery, sarcasm, and hate of women whom she justly held her inferiors. It is much the fashion to admire the women of this time, because they contrive to hide behind a veil of witty words the coldness and hollowness of lives which had neither the sweetness of the old industrious domesticity of women, nor the noble largeness of some of those in whom the Revolution kindled a pure fire of patriotism in after days. Madame du Châtelet, with all her faults, was a far loftier character than the malicious gossips who laughed at her. ‘Everything that occupies society was within her power, except slander. She was never heard to hold up anybody to laughter. When she was informed that certain people were bent on not doing her justice, she would reply that she wished to ignore it.’ This was surely better than a talent for barbing epigrams, and she led a worthier life at Cirey than in that Paris which Voltaire described so bitterly.