On December 16th, Voltaire, come to Berlin with King and Court for the Christmas carnival, receives Hirsch. The two draw up a document, “a complete settlement.” Hirsch gives back Voltaire his unused drafts “and expressly engages to return the bill upon Paris.” Voltaire, in exchange, is to buy
MOREAU DE MAUPERTUISFrom an Engraving after a Painting by Tourmere
MOREAU DE MAUPERTUISFrom an Engraving after a Painting by Tourmere
MOREAU DE MAUPERTUIS
From an Engraving after a Painting by Tourmere
some of the Hirsch jewels he holds, and to give Hirsch the expenses of his journey and “compensation” for his time and trouble. The dangerous affair is at an end. M. de Voltaire supposes he has done with it for ever. He and Hirsch part satisfied. Then Hirsch discovers that Voltaire considers 9l.compensation sufficient. The Jew does not. Voltaire consults another money-lender, Ephraim, the enemy of the house of Hirsch, who tells him the jewels he holds are not worth what Hirsch said they were. “Then you must have changed them,” says Hirsch. That is the declaration of war.
Until the Christmas Day of that 1750, daily stormy meetings between Hirsch and Voltaire took place in Voltaire’s room in the palace. Voltaire was convinced the Jew meant to extract money from him by means of the Paris bill: and return that bill Hirsch would not. No one who remembers the character of a youthful and middle-aged Arouet will be in the least surprised to hear that an Arouet of fifty-six chased the Jew round the room at last, shook his fist in his face, pushed him out of the door in a rage, and banged it after him like a passionate child.
The “final total explosion” took place at a meeting at “brave Major Chasot’s” lodging when thevifinfuriated Voltaire sprang at Hirsch’s throat and sent him sprawling.
The affair had been noised abroad. If Hirsch still thought—and he did still think—that it would be so singularly unpleasant and impolitic for Voltaire to have the transaction made public and that he would submit to any indignity rather than to that catastrophe, he had mistaken his man. He had reckoned without the marvellous imprudence, mettle, and vivacity of the enemy of Rohan and Desfontaines and Boyer. Here was he who never made a compromise, and in his whole life never once bought peace by submitting to be cheated.
The fuse had been put to the gunpowder: and on December 30th came a shock which startled Europe.
The great Voltaire, the guest of the King of Prussia,versusMessrs. Hirsch & Son, Jew money-lenders of Berlin! Here was acause célèbrewith a vengeance!
Voltaire was quite as active and excited as he had been inthe affair Desfontaines. He engaged the best counsel he could get. On January 1, 1751, he obtained a warrant to throw old Hirsch into prison for wrongly detaining papers belonging to M. de Voltaire. Hirsch was released therefrom in a few days on bail—and the lawsuit began.
To unravel the truth from that complex tissue of lies has been the effort of all Frederick’s and of all Voltaire’s biographers. None have wholly succeeded. The case is infinitely intricate. The Hirsches lied very freely, and were inartistic enough not always to adhere to the same lie. It has been seen that though Voltaire preferred truth and honesty (which is already something)hewas not above lying—when there was necessity.Hiscase, in brief, was, “IlentHirsch money to help his business at Dresden in fur and jewels.” (This was the pretext on which the Jew had undertaken the journey.) “Some diamonds I took from him in part payment are not worth what he said they were; and he illegally retains my draft on my Paris banker, and has not kept to the agreement he signed.”
Hirsch’s case was, “M. de Voltairesentme to Dresden to deal in Saxon notes for him. The diamonds I gave himwereworth what I said. He has changed them for diamonds of less value. The agreement he produces, signed by me, was altered by him, to his advantage, after I had signed it.”
Documents were produced on both sides. That famous paper of agreement which Hirsch had signed and of which he now accused Voltaire of altering the wording, after he, Hirsch, had signed it, has been reproduced in facsimile.
It proves nothing. The documenthasbeen palpably altered. But who is to say if those illiterate and careless alterations were made before, or after, Hirsch had signed it? If after, then Voltaire was the most blundering and ignorant of forgers. But those early chafing months in a notary’s office must have given a shrewd head such as his a knowledge of law and legal documents which would have made him a better swindler than this forgery proves him. Voltaire’s cleverness, not his virtue, exonerates him from that crime.
The man’s mind was on the rack while the case lasted. Hisfury against the Hirsches blinded him to the folly and indignity of having been drawn into such a suit at all. “I was piqued. I was mad to prove I had been cheated,” he wrote penitently afterwards. Wretched old Hirsch died during the progress of the trial—of a broken heart, said his son pathetically. King Frederick preserved a very ominous silence indeed. His guest’s health was miserable. He had a fever—of the soul—and Berlin and Paris were watching, as at a play.
On February 18, 1751, the case was decided in favour of Voltaire. Hirsch was condemned on every count with which Voltaire had charged him. The purpose for which Voltaire had advanced the money was not, said the court shrewdly, the court’s business. But all the waiting and watching world knew what that purpose had been, and so did the waiting and watching Frederick. Hirsch was to restore the Paris exchange bill. The diamonds were to be valued “by experienced jewellers on their oaths.” Voltaire’s seizure of the person of Hirsch was declared just and right. As to the famous agreement, Hirsch was fined ten thalers for denying he had signed it; and Voltaire was to make an affidavit that he had not changed its wording.
It is said that he asked upon what book he was to take his oath, and when he was answered, “The Bible,” cried, “What, on that book written in such bad Latin! Now if it were only Homer or Virgil!” If the story is true, it was but a flash of the old mocking spirit. Voltaire was in no mood for jesting. He had won, it is true. But his victory was a sorry one.
It was such a sorry one that the unlucky victor had perforce to go about congratulating himself loudly thereon, if only to make other people congratulate him too. Even now, the settlement was not complete.
The jewels had to be valued. That would take time. Voltaire was worn body and soul by a case which had kept him at a fever heat of passion from December 1, 1750, until this February 18, 1751. And in a deadly silence the King sat aloof in a rage. Voltaire’s friends implored him to end an affair which had been degrading to everyone concerned in it. And at last he did come to some sort of compromise with thedetermined Hirsch. A few minor points appear to have been still undecided as late as the December of 1751.
Throughout a whole three months Frederick had uttered never a word.
His attitude towards this case was at once natural and justifiable. It was a poor, mean, despicable business at the best. Kingly hands, of all hands in the world, if they touch pitch are defiled therewith. Frederick shut ears and eyes to the shriekings and the cheatings of this pair of low money-lenders—and his guest. At first, indeed, his fury with that guest had got the better of him. On January 12, 1751, the King of France announced at hislevéethat the King of Prussia had dismissed Voltaire. Angry Frederickhadturned to Darget, saying, “Write and tell him that he is to be out of my dominions in four-and-twenty hours.” Well for Voltaire that he had cultivated the friendship of the discreet secretary! Darget pleaded for him. “Wait till the case is tried, Sire! If he is guilty, then will be time enough to send him away.” Frederick agreed; but during January and February they never met. Voltaire was for the most part in Berlin, and the King at Potsdam, but sometimes they were in the same palace divided by a few planks of wood—and the Jew lawsuit.
The versatility of Voltaire had hardly ever been better exemplified than by the fact that during this very December and January when rage and anxiety were tearing him to pieces, and he was breathlessly waiting the judgment of his case, he was play-acting with the princesses in Berlin exactly as if nothing were happening, and as if he were in full favour with the King. On January 5th, “Zaire” was acted and Voltaire played Lusignan as he had done in happier days at Madame de Fontaine Martel’s: the Princess Amelia was Zaire; the Princes Henry and Frederick also took parts; and the Queen was enchanted. “The Death of Cæsar” was also acted, and other plays. Throughout the winter too Voltaire gave audiences to great persons; and received marshals, princes, statesmen, and nobles.
Yet, through it all, the man was appealing passionately to the King by Darget. “Throw yourself at the King’s feetand obtain for me that I may retire to the Marquisat” (a country house near Potsdam). “My soul is dead and my body dying.”
When he was not drawing tears from the spectators in that moving part of the old father, tears of rage and bitterness were very near his own eyes. “It is not sufficient to be courageous,” he said himself; “one must have distractions.” He had need of them if any man had.
On January 22d, the King summed up the case to the Margravine of Bayreuth as “the affair of a rascal who is trying to cheat a sharper.... The suit is in the hands of justice, and in a few days we shall know who is the greater scoundrel of the two.” On January 30th, Voltaire himself wrote to the Margravine with a very wry face: “Brother Voltaire is here in disgrace. He has had a dog of lawsuit with a Jew, and, according to the law of the Old Testament, he will have to pay dearly for having been robbed.”
Then Voltaire wrote direct to the King and pleaded and argued with him personally. Only receive me into favour and I will anger you no more! And on February 2d Frederick wrote again to the Margravine, softened not at all; andshewrote on February 18th to her friend Voltaire: “Apollo at law with a Jew! Fie then! that’s abominable.” Then Voltaire appealed again to Frederick. “All the genius of our modern Solomon could not make me feel my fault more than my heart feels it.”
Finally Solomondidgive Apollo that Marquisat he had asked for; and Voltaire’s “quarrel with the Old Testament,” as he called it, being settled, the King wrote to him icily on February 24th from Potsdam: “D’Arnaud had done nothing. It was because of you he had to go.... You have had the most detestable affair in the world with a Jew. It has made a frightful scandal.... If you can make up your mind to live like a philosopher I shall be glad to see you.” If not ... “you may as well stay in Berlin.”
On February 27th, Voltaire replied, volubly explaining, regretting, apologising. He owned himself in the wrong with a candour and humility rather engaging.
“I have committed a great fault. I ask pardon of your Majesty’s philosophy and goodness.... Do with me what you will.” His health was suffering dreadfully at the time. “The winter kills me”—especially the winter of our discontent. Even hard work at “Louis XIV.” could not make him forget that. He pleaded very hard indeed.
On February 28th, Frederick accorded a cold permission to him to come to Potsdam if he would.
By March 11th he was established at the Marquisat with, as he said, “pills and pill-boxes” and the fifth canto of a poem by King Frederick entitled “The Art of War.”
The King no doubt had missed Voltaire’s conversation. He had missed too his brilliant, delightful, inconsequent, unreliable personality. The old subtle charm drew the two men together—in spite of themselves, and the imprudence of their connection. They were sure to quarrel! But, like many a lover and his mistress, they were dying to see each other, if it were only to discover fresh reasons for disagreement. “I have committed a folly,” wrote Voltaire to Madame Denis, “but I am not a fool.” He was something so infinitely removed from a fool that his living touch of genius alone could raise, if anything could raise, Frederick’s poems from a dead mediocrity and the dreadful limbo of dulness. “To the Prussians” and “The Art of War” were very important factors in the Treaty of Peace.
Very early in his stay in Prussia the indefatigable Voltaire had begun learning a little of the despised German language—of which, says Morley, he never knew more “than was needed to curse a postilion.” To correct the King’s works, he needed none. By October 28, 1750, he was busy overseeing the second edition of Frederick’s history of his country, written in French and entitled “Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg,” and trying to modify the royal author’s round abuse of his own grandfather. But Frederick only loved truth the better if it burnt. “After all,” said Voltaire with a shrug of his lean shoulders, “he is your grandfather, not mine; do as you like with him.”
The critic was not generally so accommodating, however. He was not a criticpour rire. He gave himself an enormousamount of work. He ran a thousand risks of offending his royal pupil. He cavilled at this, queried that, suggested endlessly. The manuscript of “Aux Prussiens” is still extant, with remarks in Voltaire’s little handwriting all over it. His minuteness and care were extraordinary. It would have been at least a hundred times easier for him to have praised lavishly and indifferently. Any author will accept flattery—on trust. It is only for blame and disagreement that the critic must give clear reason and proof; and chapter and verse for his alterations and amendments. If Voltaire had been a toady and had not loved his art better than all monarchs, he would have wasted much less of his dearly prized time in “rounding off a little the works of the King of Prussia.” His “official fidelity, frankness, and rigorous strictness” are a high testimony to his character. “The Art of War” is a much more ambitious work than “To the Prussians” and was subjected to the same relentless criticism. The eager critic wanted, he said, to enable his royal master to do without his help. Sometimes Frederick would leave a wrong word purposely. “We must give him the pleasure of finding some fault,” he wrote to Darget. But on the whole he accepted not only verbal emendations, but alterations of his very opinions with a generosity and fairness which prove the true royalty of the royal soul. This quick, thorough, breathless, aggravating schoolmaster would be satisfied with nothing less than his pupil’s best. If a man could be made a great writer without being born one, Frederick the Great’s literary efforts would not be mouldering in the libraries to-day.
The reconciliation between the teacher and the taught seems for a while to have been complete. The worry of the Hirsch affair had made Voltaire really ill. But Frederick was all goodness to the sufferer. He had a room kept for his use at Sans-Souci. Formey records how one day he went to the Marquisat to call upon Voltaire and found him in bed. “What is the matter with you?” “Four mortal diseases,” answers the invalid. “Your eyes look nice and bright though,” says the ill-advised Formey, meaning consolation. “And don’t you know,” shouts the sick man with all his strength, “that inscurvy peoplediewith their eyes inflamed?” It must be conceded that though Voltaire never allowed his ailments to stop his work, he liked to have full credit for them, and took care never to be ill without impressing upon his friends that he was dying. All the same, he began to attend those gay, frugal, philosophical little suppers once more—and was once more permitted to dispense with the ponderous dinners. Yet once more too, except for that ill-health, the life here was all he dreamed it. Frederick wrote him little friendly notes—“I have just given birth to six twins.... The ‘Henriade’ is engaged to be their godmother. Come to the father’s room at six o’clock this evening”—the six twins being six cantos of “The Art of War.” And Voltaire would answer, “Sire, you have the cramp, and so have I; you love solitude, and so do I.” The pair were again as lovers, in fact; writing nothings, only for the sake of writing something. The winter was past, and the summer blossoming again.
The trip to Italy, postponed from the autumn of 1750, had been arranged to take place in this May of 1751, but was finally abandoned altogether; partly on account of the Inquisition, but partly also, it may be surmised, because Frederick having found Voltaire again, was in no mind to lose him.
Through the summer host and guest were hard at work with their respective secretaries. Both knew at least one of the receipts for happiness. Prussiawasheaven. Only—only—there was a delightful earth called Paris where d’Argental was doing his vigorous best to get the authorities to permit the performance of “Mahomet”—an earth from which he wrote on August 6th of this 1751, one last, long, pleading appeal to Voltaire to return, while he could yet return, with honour. Madame Denis, resolved not to join her uncle in Prussia, added her entreaties. The foolish woman, who had atendressefor handsome young Baculard d’Arnaud in the days when he was her uncle’sprotégéin Paris, was now coquetting with a certain Marquis de Ximenès, or Chimenès, as Voltaire called him, and less minded than ever to leave the capital.
The wild La Mettrie, too, was for ever calling on Voltaire—volubly homesick for Paris himself. Voltaire would have gone,perhaps; but in August his “Louis XIV.” was actually in the press of Berlin, he had a hundred prospective engagements, and—he thought Frederick was his friend.
It was at the end of this same month of August that La Mettrie, calling on Voltaire, swore to him that he had heard Frederick say of him: “I shall want him at the most another year: one squeezes the orange and throws away the rind.” Voltaire would not believe the story. La Mettrie redoubled his oaths. Voltaire wrote the scene to Madame Denis on September 2d in his quick, vivid fashion. “Do you believe it? Ought I to believe it ... after sixteen years of goodness ... when I am sacrificing all for him?... I shall be justly condemned for having yielded to so many caresses.... What shall I do? Ignore what La Mettrie has told me, tell nobody but you, forget it, wait?” If Voltaire thought he really could do these things, he could have known little of his own character. He did try to forget. But that rind of an orange! It rankled, it rankled.CouldFrederick have said it? Impossible! But he had written the “Anti-Machiavelli” and spilled blood in war like water; condoled piously with Darget and made an epigram on his wife; caressed d’Arnaud and ruined him. It made one thoughtful.
On September 30th “Mahomet” was successfully performed in Paris. That was another voice urging Voltaire to return.
“The orange rind haunts my dreams,” he wrote to Madame Denis again, on October 29th. “I try not to believe it.... We go to sup with the King and are gay enough sometimes. The man who fell from the top of a steeple and finding the falling through the air soft, said, ‘Good, provided it lasts,’ is not a little as I am.”
On November 11th, the tale-bearer, La Mettrie, died from having consumed a wholepâté(composed of eagle and pheasant, lard, pork and ginger!) at Lord Tyrconnel’s house. He would make mischief no more. But, then, he could not undo the mischief he had made. “I should like to have asked La Mettrie when he was dying,” Voltaire wrote sombrely to Madame Denis on Christmas Eve, “about that rind of an orange. That good soul, about to appear before God, wouldnot have dared to lie. There is a great appearance that he spoke the truth.... The King told me yesterday ... that he would give me a province to have me near him.Thatdoes not look like the rind of an orange.”
Between doubting and hoping, mistrusting, fearing he knew not what, in health always wretched (“my distempers ... make me utterly unfit for kings”), homesick, uneasy, longing at once to go away and to be persuaded to stay, Voltaire spent his second winter—in heaven. Hirsch had made the first something very like pandemonium. But there was life, interest, excitement in a fight. The dull anxiety, the ugly care to wake up to in the dead nights and the dark mornings—these were worse a thousand times. Well for Voltaire that now, even more than ever, he had to comfort him that best relief from all the fears, doubts, problems, and presentiments of life—hard work.
InDecember, 1751, there appeared in Berlin, in two volumes octavo and anonymously, “The Century of Louis XIV.” by Voltaire.
The earliest idea of it was conceived by a wild Arouet of twenty listening to personal recollections of the Sun King from the old Marquis de Saint-Ange at Fontainebleau.
Arouet had heard with his own ears the strange tales told in Paris at that monarch’s death. In 1719, when he was five-and-twenty and falling in brief love with the exquisite Maréchale de Villars, her husband recounted him more anecdotes of that magnificent and miserable age. To write it had been a relief from Émilie’s shrewish tongue and inconvenient emotions, at Cirey. It was Voltaire’s “chief employment” in that first lonely summer there, before she joined him. He worked hard at it in Brussels. He found in it consolation for his mistress’s infidelity: and for her death. It involved him in an enormous amount of reading, and unparalleled labours in research. Since he came to Prussia, he hardly wrote a letter without alluding to it. He found in it balm for the wounds inflicted by a d’Arnaud, a Hirsch, and a king. As it drew nearer completion, his interest and excitement in it deepened daily. “I am absorbed in Louis XIV.” “I shall be the Historiographer of France in spite of envy.” Before the author had finished reading the proofs, a pirated edition of his work appeared in Holland and elsewhere. There was the usual scramble among the publishers for the profits. Voltaire appealed to Frederick; and wrote to Falkener, in English, trying, through him, to get a correct edition circulated inEngland. His efforts were astonishingly fruitless. An author had then not only no right to the moneys his brain had earned, but was not even allowed the privilege of correcting the work of that brain: and the more famous the author the worse his chances in both respects. No anonymity could conceal a Voltaire.
Boyer prohibited “The Century of Louis XIV.” in France, and its circulation in that country was enormous. The first authorised edition printed in Berlin was sold out in a few days. Eight new editions appeared in eight months. In those times, when to be educated was a rich man’s privilege and not a pauper’s right, such a success was unique. That it was deserved is proved by the fact that this is still the most famous history of that reign.
Voltaire had written it, as he always wrote, as a free man. But this time he had written, as he did not always write, as a free man who has no desire to offend the prejudices of the slave-dealers. He himself loved the glitter of that Golden Age: its burning and shining lights of literary genius, and the glory it gave to France. So far as he could be true and tactful, he was tactful. He did not run amok at abuses with that “strident laugh” which has been said to fill the eighteenth century, as he had run amok at them in that “Voice of the Sage and the People”—and in a hundred of his writings a thousand times before. When he wrote the latter part of the book in Prussia, it was in his mind always that he might some day—one day—soon—who could tell?—be not sorry to come back to France. If he could still tell the truth and not offend the authorities! If any man could have done it, that man was Voltaire. There is no writer in the world who so well knows, if he chooses, how to put blame as if it were praise, to turn censure into a dainty compliment, and to trick out harsh realities in a charming dress.
But now, as too often before, his reputation damned him in advance. Besides, did he not give the place of, and the witnesses to, that secret marriage of Louis XIV. and Madame de Maintenon? How imprudent! Some patriots “raised a noble clamour” against him for having praised Marlborough andEugene, and a great party of churchmen condemned him for having gently laughed at Jansenism and Molinism.
The book was full of reason; that in itself was enough. “My book is prohibited among my dear countrymen,” wrote Voltaire to Falkener on January 27, 1752, “because I have spoken the truth.” And again, to President Hénault, “I have tried to raise a monument to truth and my country, and I hope they will not take the stones of the edifice to stone me.” The style, too, of the book, that style which has kept it alive, fresh, and vigorous for a hundred and fifty years, made it offensive in the nostrils of the solemn and approved historians of the period who held that an author cannot be learned without being dull, and if he is readable can be by no means worth reading. “Louis XIV.” is a bright example of Voltaire’s own aphorism, “A serious book should not be too seriously written.” Though he had spent years of his life, and endless trouble and activity in gathering his information, he wrote with the same spontaneous life and vigour as he wrote theconteshe read to the Duchesse du Maine and her gay court; with not less inspiration than he flung on to paper in the morning the “Henriade” he had dreamt at night on his prison bed in the Bastille. In a word, “I tried to move my readers, even in history.” His own countrymen now understand him better; but it is to be feared many of his foreign students still suspect the fidelity of his facts because he puts them so gracefully, and fear that a sense of humour and a sparkling style are incompatible with sound judgment and deep learning, and that if an historian is really clever he must prove it by being excessively dull.
The success of the book must have exceeded its author’s eager hopes. It delighted England. D’Alembert, in his lodging over the glazier’s shop, and all the nobility of intellect in Paris, rejoiced in it. What matter if the Court frowned? Pirated editions appeared in Edinburgh, as well as London, Prussia, and Holland. The publishers were scrambling wildly for the proceeds. The author did at last get something—and shrugged his shoulders and was not ill-satisfied. After all, he had a better success than a monetary one. Lord Chesterfield called the book “the history of the human mind written by a man of genius.” Condorcet spoke of it as “the only readable history of the age.” Renault declared its author “le plus bel esprit” of the century. “Louis XIV.” excites men’s curiosity at every page. If the author had been deprived of the Historiographership of France, hewasthe Historiographer not the less.
“Louis XIV.,” and correcting Frederick’s works, were not all of Voltaire’s literary work in Prussia. He was always composingbagatellesand compliments for the two Queens and the Princesses. He wrote Frederick—in the room next to him—gay verses as well as many letters: and was also busy with his famous philosophical poem called “Natural Law,” not published till 1756. He began here his great “Philosophical Dictionary”; and was further fanning the flame, by innumerable suggestions, of that light-bringer of the eighteenth century, that torch in a darkness which could be felt, the “Encyclopædia” of Diderot and d’Alembert. Its preface appeared in 1750 and its first volume in 1751. Voltaire called it “the dictionary of the universe”—“the bureau of human learning,” and should have found in its splendid audacity—a quality so dear to his soul—an antidote for many afflictions. Perhaps he did. It was never because he had idle hands that Satan found them mischief still to do. But he was homesick. He was in that pitiable state of body which makes the mind irritable and despondent. Paris had been stormy enough. But here one lived always over a volcano. That orange rind rankled still. If one royal hand caressed, there was the other that might scratch at any moment. The never-sleeping anxiety affected Voltaire’sviftemper, just as anxiety affects the temper of lesser persons. He was in a mood when he was sure to be offended by someone. This time the person was Maupertuis.
Born in 1698, in Saint-Malo, Maupertuis was four years younger than Voltaire, and in his precocious intelligence, ardent imagination, and unquenchable thirst for knowledge, not unlike him. But there the likeness stopped. Maupertuis studied in Paris, and then became that rare anomaly, asavant-soldier. He was also elected a member of the Academy of Sciences; and in 1728 spent six months in England, where he was made a member of the Royal Society and imbibed Newtonian opinions. In 1740, after an Arctic expedition which roused much public interest, he was made by Frederick President of the Berlin Academy, that he might form it “as you alone can form it.” Maupertuis married one of the Queen-Mother’s maids of honour, and lived in a fine house in Berlin close to the Royal Park, which his zoological tastes led him to turn into a kind of menagerie. Precise, pompous, and positive; boring society with his worrying exactness upon trifles even more than society bored him; inordinately vain, and with a sensitive temper made yet more inflammable by brandy and self-love; acutely conscious of his dignity, and without any sense of humour, the ex-tutor of Madame du Châtelet was the sort of person with whom, sooner or later, her lover was sure to disagree. Added to these facts, Voltaire’s pension from King Frederick exceeded that of Maupertuis by two thousand crowns; and while Maupertuis was socially dull, at the King’s suppers Voltaire’s conversation was even more brilliant than his writings.
On October 28, 1750, the naturalist Buffon had written to a friend, “Between ourselves, Voltaire and Maupertuis are not made to live in the same room.”
The first tiff between the uncongenial pair took place, in point of fact, in that very October of 1750, the autumn after Voltaire’s arrival in Prussia. There was a vacant chair in the Berlin Academy. Maupertuis wished it given to d’Argens—Voltaire, further seeing, to that Raynal, already his friend, afterwards the famous philosopher and historian. Voltaire won, with the help of Frederick; and Maupertuis was left surly and jealous. In the Hirsch affair Voltaire asked his help, and Maupertuis refused it. Maupertuis read “Louis XIV.” and compared it to “the gambols of a child”—heavy Maupertuis who could not have gambolled to save his soul.
Then, at the end of the year 1751, a certain book entitled “Mes Pensées,” by a young French adventurer called La Beaumelle, made some little stir in Berlin. The “Thoughts” were desultory, unequal, and very ill put together. D’Argenson wrote of the book that half of it was excellent, a quarter mediocre, and the other quarter bad. From the excellent part he quoted a shrewd axiom—“Happy the State where the king has no mistress, provided that he also has no confessor!” Two Berlin readers, at the least, included in the bad quarter this extraordinary sentence: “There have been greater poets than Voltaire, but never one so well paid.... The King of Prussia overwhelms men of letters with kindness for precisely the same reasons that a little German prince overwhelms with kindness a jester or a buffoon.” The passage was the joke of one of the royal suppers. But if Frederick and Voltaire laughed at it, it was not the less a joke that left a taste in the mouth. Then up comes La Beaumelle to Berlin. On November 1, 1751, he calls on the great Voltaire; and Voltaire, though he asks him to dinner and wastes on him four hours of his time, treats him with a civil chilliness which surprises La Beaumelle, who appears to have no idea that Voltaire has seen those “Pensées”; and attributes his cold manner to an indigestion.
La Beaumelle is much with Lord Tyrconnel, seeks to gain the good graces of Darget, perhaps even to sup with the King. He has owned to an admiration for Maupertuis. Voltaire bethinks himself presently of a little ruse to rid his path of this bramble. “Will you lend me your ‘Thoughts,’ M. Beaumelle?” Beaumelle lends the book; and after three days Voltaire returns it with the page containing the offensive remark upon himself and the King turned down.
But La Beaumelle did not take the hint.
On December 7, 1751, the King and Voltaire arrived in Berlin from Potsdam, and foolish La Beaumelle went again to see Voltaire. He attempted to explain away that remarkable sentence. But it was hardly capable of a favourable interpretation. Voltaire, on La Beaumelle’s own showing, behaved with self-control and dignity.
“Who showed the passage to the King?” says La Beaumelle.
“Darget,” answers Voltaire.
So La Beaumelle goes to Darget. “You had better leaveBerlin,” the prudent secretary advises. Then La Beaumelle seeks, and finds, better consolation in Maupertuis. “Voltaire gave the passage an offensive interpretation,” says the President. “Send the King a copy of your book.” But though La Beaumelle not only did this but addressed petitions to the King, he received no answer and was not invited to the suppers.
In a sentimental affair of La Beaumelle’s, which was the next scene in his adventures, Voltaire took his enemy’s part good-naturedly enough, and did his best to get Beaumelle out of the prison into which an injured husband had thrown him. He had some reason for wishing to conciliate the foolish young man. La Beaumelle had in his possession autograph letters of Madame de Maintenon which would have been of infinite value to the author of “The Century of Louis XIV.” At their first interview Voltaire had asked to look at them; and La Beaumelle had made excuses. The persevering Voltaire tried again and again to attain his aim; and at last after a furious interview, the two parted for ever, La Beaumelle crying bitterly that his hatred would long outlive Voltaire’s verses. Voltaire had not obtained the de Maintenon letters; and La Beaumelle, after leaving Berlin in May, 1752, revenged himself on his enemy by bringing out a pirated edition of “Louis XIV.” which positively ran parallel to Voltaire’s own, and to which La Beaumelle added “Remarks” offensive to the author and dealing also, with a dangerous freedom, with the Royal Family of France.
To be sure, Voltaire was fair game; but the House of Bourbon!
In a very little while M. La Beaumelle was expiating his imprudence in prison.
Throughout the affair Voltaire seems only to have taken offence, and the audacious Beaumelle to have given it. He was nothing after all. He might rot in the Bastille and be forgotten. He had no significance, except that Maupertuis defended him.
In the spring of 1752, while the affair of the “Pensées” was amusing Berlin, events of importance to Voltaire had occurred both in Paris and in the King’sentouragein Berlin.
On February 24th, “Rome Sauvée,” much altered and improved by its author, was successfully performed in Paris through the exertions of d’Argental and Madame Denis. The niece, not content with superintending Uncle Voltaire’s plays, had written one herself called “The Punished Coquette.” Voltaire was in agonies for fear the thing should be a failure; but his feelings were spared and it was not performed.
On March 2d, Lord Tyrconnel died in Berlin, and on March 4th Darget left the King’s service; nominally, and perhaps in part really, for his health’s sake. But he was glad to go, and he came back no more. Voltaire lost in him a very faithful friend. “I ought to go too,” he wrote thoughtfully.
Then Longchamp had been triumphantly discovered by Madame Denis committing the unpardonable sin of copying his master’s manuscripts with two accomplices who had been servants in the employ of Madame du Châtelet. Madame Denis abused him for her own satisfaction, and exposed him for his master’s.
Was it only because Longchamp knew too much and had in his possession dangerous writings which were more likely to be coaxed than to be scolded out of him, that his master wrote to him very gently and offered pardon in return for the truth? The goodness and generosity which made all his servants love him must have had some foundation in fact. On March 30th of this 1752, Longchamp replied penitently and burnt the copies he had made. Voltaire gave him a handsome sum of money over and above the wages due to him, and Longchamp became a map and chart dealer. Twenty-six years later he came to see his old master, when he was on his last visit to Paris.
But the danger that Longchamp’s perfidy had threatened had been no light one to the man who had already begun to look on that very sensitive and touchy French capital as a possible refuge, and was soon to find Prussia too hot to hold him.
Before the end of the year 1751 Frederick had begun to intercept and keep copies of Voltaire’s and Madame Denis’s letters. Voltaire wrote bitterly that the Golden Key tore his pocket, that the ribbon of the Order was a halter round hisneck, that nothing in Prussia gave him a grain of happiness. “I have lost my teeth and my five senses,” he wrote on February 6, 1752, “and the sixth is leaving me at a gallop. I doubt if even ‘Rome Sauvée’ will saveme.” He was sick now with such a homesickness as only a Frenchman knows. All these things, taken together, doubled his natural imprudence.
Before La Beaumelle left Berlin in May had begun a quarrel, into which Voltaire was to plunge headlong, between Maupertuis and the mathematician Koenig, who had stayed and worked for two years with Madame du Châtelet at Cirey.
Koenig was a member of the Berlin Academy and a strong partisan of Leibnitz, as Voltaire and Maupertuis were of Newton; but was all the same a warm friend and admirer of Maupertuis, whom in September, 1750, he had visited in Berlin. It was not unnatural that when these two partisans came to discuss Leibnitz and Newton they should quarrel. They did quarrel. Koenig, however, apologised handsomely to the touchy President, and returned to Holland where he lived. There he wrote an essay on the subject of their dispute—the principle of the least action—or the theory, which Maupertuis claimed to have discovered, that Nature is a great economist and works with the fewest materials with which she can possibly attain her purpose. Koenig disproved this theory, and quoted in his support a letter written by his dear Leibnitz. He submitted the essay to Maupertuis, who apparently did not read it, for he sanctioned its publication, and it appeared in March, 1751, in Latin. Then Maupertuis did read it, and was deeply offended. Produce these letters of Leibnitz from which you quote, M. Koenig! I am certain Leibnitz is ofmyopinion in the matter! Produce the originals! But only copies and not the original letters were forthcoming. They were undoubtedly genuine. Every page bore the unmistakable stamp of the Leibnitzian style. But there are none so blind as those who won’t see.
On April 13, 1752, Maupertuis, as President, called together a meeting of the Academy, and caused Koenig to be expelled therefrom as a forger.
Then Voltaire, hard at work at Potsdam, looked up fromhis books, thrust aside La Beaumelle, Darget, and those home worries of Madame Denis and Longchamp, and must needs go down to the shore just to see the storm coming up and wet his imprudent feet a little in the surf. “I am not yet well informed,” he wrote to Madame Denis on May 22d, “as to the details of the beginning of this quarrel. Maupertuis is at Berlin, ill from having drunk a little too much brandy.” Soon after June 8th the Berlin Academy, to which Koenig had appealed, ratified its shameful sentence. By now Voltaire at Potsdam was chafing and snorting to get into the battle. There were so many spurs to urge him there! One day he had been giving a dinner-party at which Maupertuis was a guest. Voltaire airily complimented the President on a pamphlet he had written on Happiness—Voltaire having really found “Happiness” very dry and depressing. “It has given me great pleasure—a few obscurities excepted—which we will discuss later.” “Obscurities!” cries the touchy President. “Only for you, Sir!” And Voltaire, with his lean hand on the presidential shoulder and his eyes uncommonly bright and malicious, answers, “Je vous estime, mon Président; you want to fight—you shall. In the meantime, let us go to dinner.”
On July 24th, he wrote Madame Denis another little story. Maupertuis had said that the King having sent Voltaire his verses to correct, Voltaire had cried “Will he never leave off giving me his dirty linen to wash?” And Maupertuis had told the anecdote, “in the strictest confidence,” to ten or twelve people. The King had heard of it, of course. Then, after the death of La Mettrie, had not Maupertuis declared that Voltaire had said that the post of the King’s Atheist was vacant? True,thatstory did not reach the King. But every story was a whip to goad Voltaire into the forefront of the fray. He hated tyranny and wrong wherever he found them. But being human, and chafing and longing to fight with him, he hated Maupertuis’ tyranny above other persons’. On September 18th, there appeared an anonymous pamphlet defending Koenig and entitled “A Reply from an Academician of Berlin to an Academician of Paris.” It was supposed to be from the pen of Voltaire—the first arrowfrom his quiver. A few days later Koenig produced his own “Appeal to the Public,” which easily proves his case to any fair-minded person. There was one man, however, who meant to stand by his President, as his President, and to defend him right or wrong. King Frederick would not even read Koenig’s “Appeal.” By October 15th he had himself produced a “Letter to the Public,” which was nothing, said Voltaire, but an attack on Koenig and all his friends. “He calls those friends fools, jealous, and dishonest.” Voltaire wrote an account of the thing to his niece, in which he spoke out as only a Voltaire could speak. In the letter are these ominous words: “Unluckily for me, I also am an author, and in the opposite camp to the King.I have no sceptre, but I have a pen.”
Then Maupertuis produced an extraordinary series of letters which certainly do not read like the composition of a sane person. He advocated in them the maddest scientific schemes, such as blowing up one of the Pyramids with gunpowder to see why they were built; and making an immense hole in the earth to find out what it contains.
In a preface he had very unpromisingly stated that he should follow no sequence or order, but write on the impulse of the moment, and no doubt contradict himself! Voltaire wrote that Maupertuis had previously been in a lunatic asylum and was now mad. It did seem as if drink and vanity had turned the poor wretch’s brain. But Frederick stood by his President; and on November 5th, while recommending him rest and repose, gravely congratulated him on his book.
On November 17th, from that room looking on to the terrace at Sans-Souci, Voltaire wrote a letter to Koenig, easy, graceful, and not exactly impolite to Maupertuis, but explaining that that solemn Infallibility had been in the wrong. As for those twenty-three scientific letters, why one must pity, not blame, him for them. And no doubt, M. Koenig, the same mental misfortune which made him write them, inspired his conduct to you!
It was a dainty glove thrown down; but it was a declaration of war not the less.
Frederick was far too shrewd and sane a person not to knowvery well who had right and reason on his side in such a dispute. He and Voltaire continued to meet as friends, and supped together as of old. Now Tyrconnel and La Mettrie were dead, Darget gone away, and Maupertuis too sick and sore to attend them, the suppers would have been small and dull indeed without Voltaire. He had been always the real soul of them. At one, only this last September, the daring idea of “The Philosophical Dictionary” had been started; and in a day or two he had sent the King that matchlessly audacious first article, “Abraham,” which would have made the Pope laugh and might have made a Frederick forget that “Reply from an Academician of Berlin” which Voltaire had written, under a thinly veiled anonymity, but a few days earlier. But though the chain which bound the royal Damon to his Pythias still held, it was weak in every link. Voltaire declared of himself that he was a hundred years old—that the suppers were suppers of Damocles—the world a shipwreck—“sauve qui peut!” He was, in fact, too wretched to fear anything, and so ready to dare all. There was a pause. The tiger crouched a moment before it sprang, and then leapt on Maupertuis in the “Diatribe of Doctor Akakia.”
There is no more scathing and burning satire in literature. The deadly minuteness of Swift’s malign and awful irony is not so terrible as the pungent mockery of this jester who laughed, and laughed; looked up and saw his victim writhing and mad with impotent rage, and held his sides and laughed the more. The great English-Irishman at least paid his victims the compliment of taking them in some sort seriously; of bringing great and terrible weapons to slay them; and gave them the poor satisfaction of feeling like martyrs if they wished. But Voltaire made Maupertuis a byword and a derision; the sport of fools, the laughing-stock of Europe: a buffoon, a jest, a caricature: such that men seeing, stopped, beheld open-mouthed, and then laughed to convulsions. Akakia means guilelessness; and Akakia is a physician who takes the remarkable effusions of Maupertuis with a serious innocence, very deadly; who asks the most simple questions in the world; and turns upon the President’s theories the remorseless logicof the gayest and easiest commonsense. Read a hundred and fifty years after, when of necessity many allusions must be missed and the point of many a jest be lost, “Akakia” is still one of the wittiest productions in the French language.
There could have been no style better than Voltaire’s for making Pomposity mad. One can still see the “sublime Perpetual President” writhing under that pitiless mockery and that infectious laugh of malicious delight. The wickedest, cleverest little picador in all the world goaded this great, lumbering, heavy-footed old bull to impotent frenzy. The lithe tiger, agile as a cat, sprang on his foe, showing all his teeth in his grin, and, grinning still, tore him limb from limb.
“I have no sceptre,” Voltaire had said, “but I have a pen.” He had indeed.
Before that mild letter to Koenig was written from Sans-Souci on November 17th, the first part of “Akakia” had been finished. But if nothing could stop a man writing imprudence, under the absolute monarchy of Prussia there was everything to stop him printing it. Trickery was in Voltaire’s blood; and practice had made him perfect in the art. Frederick had dealt treacherously with him; so why not he with Frederick? He went to the King, and read aloud a pamphlet he had written on Lord Bolingbroke. Will his Majesty sign the royal permission for that pamphlet to be printed? By all means. Frederick signs the last page of the manuscript. Voltaire sends it to the printers; asks for it back, to make some trifling alterations, and puts “Akakia” in front of Bolingbroke. What more simple?
It only remained to get a few printed copies sent out of Prussia, and then one could face destiny bravely. One story runs that Frederick, who heard everything, got wind of this “Akakia,” and that Voltaire, armed with the manuscript, brought it to the King; and the King, who loved wit very nearly but not quite so much as he loved his own greatness, laughed till he cried. How should a Frederick the Great, with his bitter humour, not laugh at a Maupertuis thus ridiculed by a Voltaire? Under the rose, one could laugh atanything—God, man, or devil—even one’s own Perpetual President. If those “Matinées du Roi de Prusse, écrites par lui-même” are genuine, Frederick stands proven as one of the most accomplished actors on the world’s stage. “One must think according to the rank he occupies,” says he. So he laughed “to dislocation” and added that there must be no publishing of such a wicked, delightful, malignant document—and then laughed afresh. Voltaire flung the manuscript on the fire, as a proof of good faith. He could afford to be thus generous. Frederick rescued the papers, says the story, and burnt his sleeve. And the friends parted, still vastly entertained—and each pair of clever eyes looking into the other pair—wondering—wondering——.
The anecdote, though it is recorded by two different persons and is picturesque, is, however, of doubtful veracity. The more probable truth is that Frederick, first discovering on November 20th that “Akakia” had been printed at Potsdam by his own printers and in his own printing-office, and on the strength of the permit signed by himself, was furiously enraged. He sent off Fredersdorff—his servant, valet, friend—post-haste both to the printer, who confessed all, and to the author; and warned the author, who simply denied everything as usual, of awful consequences to follow.
Then Frederick wrote Voltaire that famous letter, very badly spelt, which under the circumstances was not immoderate. “Your effrontery astonishes me.... Do not imagine that you will make me believe that black is white.... If you persist in going on with the business I will print everything, and the world will see that if your works merit statues, your conduct deserves chains.”
And the irate host put, it is said, a sentinel outside the guest’s door.
Voltaire wrote his answer on the foot of Frederick’s letter and continued to deny everything. The whole thing is a hideous calumny, and I am very ill! But Frederick was not moved; and the sentinel was not moved either. Fredersdorff was sent to Voltaire again—this time bearing with him the signed confession of the printer. Then the crafty Voltairethought he had better turn the matter into a joke. A joke! On November 27th, Frederick wrote out for him a very elaborate promise to be a good boy. Voltaire did not sign it. He wrote beneath it, calling attention to its weak points instead. But, not the less, Frederick, on November 29th, was able to console Maupertuis with the news that Voltaire had been forced to give up the whole edition of the “Diatribe,” which had been solemnly burnt in the royal presence. He had also been forbidden to print the thing elsewhere. So, poor, mad, beaten Perpetual President, you can be at peace!
After an “arrest” of eight days the sentinel was removed from Voltaire’s door. He had behaved abominably. But he was very amusing—and so still infinitely worth having.
On December 10th the King announced comfortably to Maupertuis, “The affair of the libels is over.... I have frightened Voltaire on the side of his purse (by the threat of a fine), and the result is as I expected.” Before December 16th the Court came up to Berlin for Christmas. Voltaire lodged at a friend’s house, the house of M. de Francheville, whose son he employed as a temporary secretary. There seems no doubt he would have been again of thatsociété intime, the suppers—but for one little event.
One edition of “Akakia” had been burnt; but M. de Voltaire had known very well it was not the only one. King and Court had hardly arrived at Berlin, when lo and behold! “Akakias” sprang up all over it as quickly and plentifully as mushrooms and to be far longer lived.
Berlin hated Maupertuis and enjoyed “Akakia” as it had never enjoyed anything before. The neat, staid town went mad with laughter and delight. And in his lodgings the father of “Akakia” looked thoughtfully to the future. “The orange has been squeezed—one must think now how to save the rind.” The words were written to Madame Denis on December 18th, and Voltaire, with the scales fallen at last from the sharpest eyes that ever man had, added his “little dictionary as used by kings.”
“My friendmeans myslave.
“My dear friendmeansI am more than indifferent to you.
“For I will make you happyreadI will endure you as long as I have use for you.
“Sup with me to-nightmeansI shall mock at you this evening.”
Voltaire might well feel that that three years’ dream was over, and that it remained only “to desert honestly.”
On the afternoon of the Christmas Eve of 1752, Collini, that intelligent young Italian who had seen Voltaire at the Carrousel at the giddy height of glory and had now become his secretary, was standing at the window of his master’s lodgings. There was a great crowd in the street, watching a fine bonfire. Italian Collini did not understand the meaning of the scene. But Voltaire, with his rich experience, knew in a flash. “I’ll bet it’s my Doctor!” said he.
It was.
Withthe exception of the Hirsch affair there is no episode in Voltaire’s life about which so many statements (usually conflicting) have been made as about the quarrel with Maupertuis and Voltaire’s flight from Prussia. Collini wrotehisversion of the story. Prussia naturally has its own. Voltaire hashisown. All the Lives of Voltaire and of Frederick—French, English, and German—have their versions. To quote authorities for every statement is the general custom of the biographer. But the sifting for truth is surely a process which may be well carried on behind the scenes; and then the result of that sifting given clear and clean to the public. If the public cannot trust the ability or the honesty of the biographer, the sources of his information are not inaccessible, and the public with a little extra trouble can verify his facts, even though he does not assist it by cumbering his text with that annihilation of all interest, the perpetual footnote. If the subject is not considered worth the extra trouble, the reader may well take the biographer—on faith. It may be added that the custom of learning a man’s life and character from other people and not from himself, is far too closely followed. After all, the great do not tell so many lies about themselves as their too partial friends, their malicious enemies, and their interested, gossiping servants tell about them. The best biographer of Voltaire is Voltaire himself. If any writer can lead his reader to throw away the biographies, even his own, and study Voltaire at first-hand—his letters, the wittiest in the world, and his works, which in matchless adroitness can be compared to no other production of the human mind—he will have done much and should be well satisfied.
The light of that Christmas bonfire made “Akakia,” as it might have been expected to make it, more conspicuous than ever. Thirty thousand copies were sold in Paris in a few weeks. By January, 1753, in Prussia, twelve presses were kept busy printing it night and day. The Prussian newspapers held up their hands at it in holy horror, and did their best for it by their abuse. For a week Voltaire layperdu. He had thoughts of escaping to Plombières on the very good excuse of his health. A flight to England was often in his mind.
On New Year’s Day, at half-past three in the afternoon, he sent back to Frederick “the bells and the baubles he has given me,” which comprised the Cross and Ribbon of the Order of Merit and the Chamberlain’s Key.
On the outside of the packet he wrote the well-known quatrain: