The heroine of the famous Epistle, known as "Les tu et les vous," (Madame de Gouverné,) was one of Voltaire's earliest loves; and he was passionately attached to her. They were separated in the world:—she went through the usual routine of a French woman's existence,—I mean, of a French woman sous l'ancien régime.
Quelques plaisirs dans la jeunesse,
Des soins dans la maternité,
Tous les malheurs dans la vieillesse,
Puis la peur de l'éternité.
She was first dissipated; then an esprit fort; then très dévote. In obedience to her confessor, she discarded, one after the other, her rouge, her ribbons, and the presents and billets-doux of her lovers; but no remonstrances could induce her to give up Voltaire's picture. When he returned from exile in 1778, he went to pay a visit to his old love; they had not met for fifty years, and they now gazed on each other in silent dismay. He looked, I suppose, like the dried mummy of an ape: she, like a withered sorcière. The same evening she sent him back his portrait, which she had hitherto refused to part with. Nothing remained to shed illusion over the past; she had beheld, even before the last terrible proof—
What dust we doat on, when 'tis man we love.
And Voltaire, on his side, was not less dismayed by his visit. On returning from her, he exclaimed, with a shrug of mingled disgust and horror, "Ah, mes amis! je viens de passer à l'autre bord du Cocyte!" It was not thus that Cowper felt for his Mary, when "her auburn locks were changed to grey:" but it is almost an insult to the memory of true tenderness to mention them both in the same page.
To enumerate other women who have been celebrated by Voltaire, would be to give a list of all the beautiful and distinguished women of France for half a century; from the Duchess de Richelieu and Madame de Luxembourg, down to Camargo the dancer, and Clairon and le Couvreur the actresses: but I can find no name of any poetical fame or interest among them: nor can I conceive any thing more revolting than the history of French society and manners during the Regency and the whole of the reign of Louis the Fifteenth.
FOOTNOTES:
[137] Madame de Tencin used to call the men of letters she assembled at her house "mes bêtes," and her society went by the name of Madame de Tencin's ménagerie. Her advice to Marmontel, when a young man, was excellent. See his Memoirs, vol. i.
[138] Correspondence de Grimm, vol. ii. 421.