The History of Peter the Great, Emperor of Russia

by Voltaire

Feb. 1717.] King George immediately wrote to the states-general, requiring them to cause the person of baron Gortz to be arrested, agreeable to the treaty of union subsisting between England and that republic for their mutual security. But this minister, who had his creatures and emissaries in every part, was quickly informed of this order; upon which he instantly quitted the Hague, and was got as far as Arnheim, a town on the frontiers, when the officers and guards, who were in pursuit of him, and who are seldom accustomed to use such diligence in that country, came up with and took him, together with all his papers: he was strictly confined and severely treated; the secretary Stank, the person who had counterfeited the sign manual of the young duke of Holstein, in the affair of Toningen, experienced still harsher usage. In fine, the count of Gillembourg, the Swedish envoy to the court of Great Britain, and the baron de Gortz, minister plenipotentiary from Charles XII. were examined like criminals, the one at London, and the other at Arnheim, while all the foreign ministers exclaimed against this violation of the law of nations.

This privilege, which is much more insisted upon than understood, and whose limits and extent have never yet been fixed, has, in almost every age, received violent attacks. Several ministers have been driven from the courts where they resided in a public character, and even their persons have been more than once seized upon, but this was the first instance of foreign ministers being interrogated at the bar of a court of justice, as if they were natives of the country. The court of London and the states-general laid aside all rules upon seeing the dangers which menaced the house of Hanover; but, in fact, this danger, when once discovered, ceased to be any longer danger, at least at that juncture.

The historian Norberg must have been very ill informed, and have had a very indifferent knowledge of men and things, or at least have been strangely blinded by partiality, or under severe restrictions from his own court, to endeavour to persuade his readers, that the king of Sweden had not a very great share in this plot.

The affront offered to his ministers fixed Charles more than ever in his resolution to try every means to dethrone the king of England. But here he found it necessary, once in his life time, to make use of dissimulation. He disowned his ministers and their proceedings, both to the regent of France and the states-general; from the former of whom he evicted a subsidy, and with the latter it was for his interest to keep fair. He did not, however, give the king of England so much satisfaction, and his ministers, Gortz and Gillembourg, were kept six months in confinement, and this repeated insult animated in him the desire of revenge.

Peter, in the midst of all these alarms and jealousies, kept himself quiet, waiting with patience the event of all from time; and having established such good order throughout his vast dominions, as that he had nothing to fear, either at home or from abroad, he resolved to make a journey to France. Unhappily he did not understand the French language, by which means he was deprived of the greatest advantage he might have reaped from his journey; but he thought there might be something there worthy observation, and he had a mind to be a nearer witness of the terms on which the regent stood with the king of England, and whether that prince was staunch to his alliance.

Peter the Great was received in France as such a monarch ought to be. Marshal Tessé was sent to meet him, with a number of the principal lords of the court, a company of guards and the king's coaches; but he, according to his usual custom, travelled with such expedition, that he was at Gournay when the equipages arrived at Elbeuf. Entertainments were made for him in every place on the road where he chose to partake of them. On his arrival he was received in the Louvre, where the royal apartments were prepared for him, and others for the princes Kourakin and Dolgorouki, the vice-chancellor Shaffiroff, the ambassador Tolstoy, the same who had suffered in his person that notorious violation of the laws of nations in Turkey, and for the rest of his retinue. Orders were given for lodging and entertaining him in the most splendid and sumptuous manner: but Peter, who was come only to see what might be of use to him, and not to suffer these ceremonious triflings, which were a restraint upon his natural plainness, and consumed a time that was precious to him, went the same night to take up his lodgings at the other end of the city in the hotel of Lesdiguiére, belonging to marshal Villeroi, where he was entertained at the king's expense in the same manner as he would have been at the Louvre. The next day (May 8, 1717.) the regent of France went to make him a visit in the before mentioned hotel, and the day afterwards the young king, then an infant, was sent to him under the care of his governor, the marshal de Villeroi, whose father had been governor to Lewis XIV. On this occasion, they, by a polite artifice, spared the czar the troublesome restraint of returning this visit immediately after receiving it, by allowing an interview of two days for him to receive the respects of the several corporations of the city; the second night he went to visit the king: the household were all under arms, and they brought the young king quite to the door of the czar's coach. Peter, surprised and uneasy at the prodigious concourse of people assembled about the infant monarch, took him in his arms, and carried him in that manner for some time.

Certain ministers, of more cunning than understanding, have pretended in their writings, that marshal de Villeroi wanted to make the young king of France take the upper hand on this occasion, and that the czar made use of this stratagem to overturn the ceremonial under the appearance of good nature and tenderness; but this notion is equally false and absurd. The natural good breeding of the French court, and the respect due to the person of Peter the Great, would not permit a thought of turning the honours intended him into an affront. The ceremonial consisted in doing every thing for a great monarch and a great man, that he himself could have desired, if he had given any attention to matters of this kind. The journeys of the emperor Charles IV. Sigismund, and Charles V. to France, were by no means comparable, in point of splendour, to this of Peter the Great. They visited this kingdom only from motives of political interest, and at a time when the arts and sciences, as yet in their infancy, could not render the era of their journey so memorable: but when Peter the Great, on his going to dine with the duke d'Antin, in the palace of Petitbourg, about three leagues out of Paris, saw his own picture, which had been drawn for the occasion, brought on a sudden, and placed in a room where he was, he then found that no people in the world knew so well how to receive such a guest as the French.

He was still more surprised, when, on going to see them strike the medals in the long gallery of the Louvre, where all the king's artists are so handsomely lodged; a medal, which they were then striking, happening to fall to the ground, the czar stooped hastily down to take it up, when he beheld his own head engraved thereon, and on the reverse a Fame standing with one foot upon a globe, and underneath these words from Virgil—'Vires acquirit eundo;' an allusion equally delicate and noble, and elegantly adapted to his travels and his fame. Several of these medals in gold were presented to him, and to all those who attended him. Wherever he went to view the works of any artists, they laid the master-pieces of their performances at his feet, which they besought him to accept. In a word, when he visited the manufactories of the Gobelins, the workshop of the king's statuaries, painters, goldsmiths, jewellers, or mathematical instrument-makers, whatever seemed to strike his attention at any of those places, were always offered him in the king's name.

Peter, who was a mechanic, an artist, and a geometrician, went to visit the academy of sciences, who received him with an exhibition of every thing they had most valuable and curious; but they had nothing so curious as himself. He corrected, with his own hand, several geographical errors in the charts of his own dominions, and especially in those of the Caspian Sea. Lastly, he condescended to become one of the members of that academy, and afterwards continued a correspondence in experiments and discoveries with those among whom he had enrolled himself as a simple brother. If we would find examples of such travellers as Peter, we must go back to the times of a Pythagoras and an Anacharsis, and even they did not quit the command of a mighty empire, to go in search of instruction.