Oh! tenderly I took your tender giftsAnd sadly render them to you again,As bitter lover to lost love gives backHer pictured image, in his hot heart’s pain.
Oh! tenderly I took your tender giftsAnd sadly render them to you again,As bitter lover to lost love gives backHer pictured image, in his hot heart’s pain.
Oh! tenderly I took your tender giftsAnd sadly render them to you again,As bitter lover to lost love gives backHer pictured image, in his hot heart’s pain.
He accompanied the parcel with a letter—a melancholy reflection on the Vanity of Human Wishes. “My resignation is equal to my sorrow. I shall remember nothing but your goodness. I have lost everything; there only remains to me a memory of having once been happy in your retreat at Potsdam.... I made you my idol: an honest man does not change his religion, and sixteen years of a measureless devotion are not to be destroyed by a single unlucky moment.”
His sorrow was genuine; but so was his determination to go.
At four o’clock on this afternoon afiacredrew up at the door of his rooms. Fredersdorff had come from the King, bringing back the Order and Key. There was a long consultation. Collini, who was apparently eavesdropping in the next room, said his master only consented to receive them again after a very lively argument. The King’s Chamberlain, in fact, made a very wry face at finding himself his Chamberlain still. Go he would; but go with peace and honour he certainly wouldif he could. On January 2d, he wrote his King a conciliatory letter. “Do with me what you will,” it said. “But what in the worldwillyou do with me?” itmeant. As for the suppers—I will be of them no more.
On January 18th, Voltaire published a declaration denying the authorship of “Akakia.” It was a form—hardly a deceit, in that it deceived nobody. It was to oblige the King—the King who still hungered and thirsted for his Voltaire and could not let him go. True, it was a humble, obedient, penitent, reformed Voltaire he wanted—in short, an impossibility.
Frederick went back to Potsdam on January 30th, and begged his Chamberlain to come back there too, to his old quarters.
“I am too ill,” says the Chamberlain, but inconsistently pleased with the friendly offer and taking care to have it recorded in the newspapers, and to tell it to all his correspondents in Paris. Still, in the very letters in which he announced the King’s favour like a pleased child, the shrewd man was arranging to leave. On February 16th, he was still at Berlin with dysentery. His royal host sent him quinine. But that did not cure him. Nothing would cure him but some air which was not Prussian air—some diet which the kingly table could not produce—some company which was not Prussian company.
He could not go to Potsdam; but about March 1st he wrote to beg formal permission for leave of absence, to journey to French Plombières and take there the waters which were much recommended for his complaints. He awaited the answer with a feverish impatience. He made Collini arrange his papers and pack his things. Here was a book to be returned to the royal library; then, there were the coming expenses to be considered. But no answer came from Frederick. Voltaire, restless and irritable, must needs, on March 5th, move from the rooms he occupied in a house in central Berlin to another in the Stralau quarter—almost in the country. Here he lived at his own expense with Collini, a manservant, and a cook. His doctor, Coste, came to see him—Coste, who was not afraid to say Plombières was the only cure for his patient’s health,though he knew the recommendation would be displeasing to the King.
What if the King refused permission? Such things had been done by men of his temperament, and might be done again.
Voltaire would walk in the garden of that Stralau house with young Collini. “Now leave me to dream a little,” he would say. And he paced up and down alone—conjecturing, fearing, scheming. Hemustgo somehow. He invented the wildest, absurdest plans of escape; and laughed at them gaily enough with that capacity for seeing the humorous side of the worst troubles, which was the best gift the gods had given him.
At last Frederick broke his silence; and Voltaire wrote to his niece on March 15th that the King had said there were excellent waters in Moravia! “He might as well tell me to go and take waters in Siberia.”
Not the least curious of the many human documents preserved in the archives of Berlin is that famous dismissal which at last, on March 16, 1753, Frederick the Great flung upon paper in a rage.
“He can quit my service when he pleases: he need not invent the excuse of the waters of Plombières; but he will have the goodness, before he goes, to return to me the contract of his engagement, the Key, the Cross, and the volume of poetry I have confided to him. I would rather he and Koenig had only attacked my works; I sacrificethemwillingly to people who want to blacken the reputation of others; I have none of the folly and vanity of authors, and the cabals of men of letters appear to me the depth of baseness.”
The Abbé de Prades put that dismissal in a politer official form, and thus sent it to Voltaire. But this keen-sighted Arouet was not minded to be expelled like a schoolboy by an angry master. Wherever he might go, that master’s iron arm could reach him. He wrote, therefore, a gay letter of entreaty to Prades, asking for a parting interview with the King. Permission was granted him. On March 18th, after a stay of thirteen days at Stralau, Voltaire went to Potsdam. That evening he was once more installed in his old rooms at Sans-Souci.
The next day, after dinner, he and the King met in private, and once again met as more than friends. It has been said before that there was between these two men something of the glamour and the fitfulness of passion. “I could live neither with you nor without you,” wrote Voltaire after they had long parted for ever. “You who bewitched me, whom I loved, and with whom I am always angry.” That was the summing up of their whole relationship. The enchantment was at work again to-night. It is said that they talked over the Maupertuis affair. Collini affirms that they laughed at the President together. The harsh dismissal was altered into a gracious royal permit for a necessary change and holiday. Voltaire was to drink the waters, recover his health, and return. He was still the King’s Chamberlain. He was to retain his Cross, his Key, and alas! alas!—the royal volume of poems. The interview lasted two hours. Voltaire came from it radiant and satisfied. For a week Potsdam laid herself out to delight him. Perhaps she and the King would be so charming, Voltaire would not want to leave them even for a time! Frederick may have hoped so. Voltaire submitted to the blandishments; nay, enjoyed them. But behind the bright eyes and the gay, vain, susceptible, pleasure-loving French heart lay the purpose and iron resolution which make greatness. Voltaire was going. On March 26, 1753, about eight o’clock in the morning he went on to the parade ground where Frederick was holding the last review of his regiment before he started for Silesia.
“Sire, here is M. de Voltaire, who comes to take his orders.”
“Eh bien! M. de Voltaire, you are resolved then to set out?”
“Sire, urgent business and my health make it necessary for me to do so.”
“Monsieur, I wish you a pleasant journey.”
They never met again.
Voltaire hurried back to his rooms. Everything was ready for flight. Collini had arranged all money matters. The travelling carriage was at the door. Voltaire hastily wrote a brief farewell to d’Argens. By nine the travellers wereenroute. They never paused or looked back. By six o’clock in the evening of March 27th they had covered ninety-two miles of road, and were in the rooms prudent Voltaire had engaged in advance at Leipsic. Did he then recall and wonder at that strange tragi-comedy of the last three years? Whatever his lips uttered, his heart knew he had left Frederick for ever. The time had not yet come, though it did come, for regret, remorse, and affection.
Voltaire had brought with him in that travelling carriage two supplements to his “Doctor Akakia.” Almost his last words from Potsdam, in a letter to Formey, were, “When I am attacked I defend myself like a devil; but I am a good devil and end by laughing.” But it was better to be attacked by a Voltaire than to be mocked by him—which Maupertuis, when he read those supplements, once more knew to his cost.
On April 3d, that very ill-advised person saw fit to write a threatening letter to Voltaire at Leipsic, in which he said, almost in so many words, If you attack me again, nothing shall spare you. “Be grateful to the respect and obedience which have hitherto withheld my arm and saved you from the worst affair you ever had.”
Voltaire’s answer was a new edition of “Akakia” with the two supplements added, a travesty of the letter he had just received from Maupertuis, and a burlesque epistle to Formey in his official character of Secretary of the Berlin Academy. If the first part of “Akakia” had been laughable, the second was exquisitely ludicrous. It reached Frederick soon enough, as everything reached him.
On April 11th, he wrote a very memorable and famous order to his Resident at Frankfort—one Freytag. The King commanded Freytag to demand of Voltaire, when he passed through Frankfort, the Chamberlain’s Key, the Cross and Ribbon of the Order of Merit, every paper in his Majesty’s handwriting, and a book “specified in the note enclosed.” If Voltaire declined to do as he was told, he was to be arrested. On April 12th, Frederick wrote to his sister of Bayreuth a letter wherein he spoke of his “charming, divine Voltaire,” that “sublime spirit, first of thinking beings,” as the greatestscoundrel and the most treacherous rascal in the universe; and said that men were broken on the wheel who deserved it less than he.
The Margravine confessed that, for the life of her, she had not been able to keep her countenance while reading that second part of “Akakia”; but her brother was in no laughing mood. To soothe Maupertuis he had caused his curt dismissal to Voltaire of March 16th to appear in the newspapers. “Akakia” may be fairly said to have been one of the most famous jokes of the eighteenth century, and to have been the delight of every person who read it, save only Maupertuis and Frederick the Great.
For two-and-twenty days Voltaire passed his time not unhappily at Leipsic. He visited the University there. He arranged his books and papers. He had with him, besides Collini, a copyist and a manservant, both of whom he employed in literary work. He now was busy defending “Louis XIV.” against La Beaumelle’s criticisms. To be sure “Louis XIV.” was its own defence; but it was never in Voltaire’s irritable and pugnacious nature to let the curs bark at his heels unheeded. He must be for ever kicking them or stinging them with his whip and so goading them to fresh fury. To sit serene above the thunder was quite impossible to this god: he was always coming down from his Olympus to answer the blasphemies of the mortals and to fight the meanest of them.
On April 18th, after he had been in Leipsic rather less than a month, the travelling carriage stood once more at his door. The luggage which was heaped into it did not contain the book to which Frederick had alluded in his letter to Freytag. That luckless volume, in which were compiled the poetic effusions of Frederick the Great, freethinking, imprudent, and not a little indecent, had been given in charge of a merchant of Leipsic, who was to forward it, with many other of Voltaire’s books, to Strasburg.
Chief among the royal poems was a certain “Palladium,” imitated from the “Pucelle,” but very much more ribald and insulting to the Christian religion; and, in that it abused other kings who might be dangerous foes, certainly not a work ofwhich King Frederick would care to own himself the author. It had been secretly printed in the palace at Potsdam in 1751.
Voltaire hoped to meet at Strasburg, not only his books, but the person whom Frederick spoke of as “that wearisome niece.” The criminal’s next stopping-place after Leipsic was Gotha. M. de Voltaire and suite intended to put up at the inn there, but were not installed in it when the delightful Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, not the least charming of Voltaire’s philosophic duchesses and with whom he had corresponded when he was at Cirey, begged him to be her guest, in her château. Forty years old, gentle, graceful, accomplished, with that love of learning without learnedness which was the peculiar charm of the women of the eighteenth century, Voltaire may well have found her, as he did find her, “the best princess in the world.” “And who—God be thanked,” he added piously, “wrote no verses.” She received him and his attendants with a delighted hospitality. She had a husband, who was not of much account on the present occasion. And there was a Madame de Buchwald, who also had all that fascination which seems to have been the birthright of the women of that time.
In all lives there are certain brief halcyon periods when one forgets alike the troubles that are past and the cares that are to come and enjoys oneself in the moment, defiant of fate, and with something of theabandonof a child. This month was such a period for Voltaire. After the fights and the worries of the past three years, he was peculiarly susceptible to the soothing flattery and the caressing admiration of this couple of gracious women.
He read them his “Natural Law.” He read them new cantos of the “Pucelle.” (Modesty was the lost piece of silver for which the woman of this period never even searched.) Nothing was bad about Gotha save its climate, said he. To please his dear Duchess and to instruct her son, the obliging Voltaire embarked here on a popular history of the German Empire from the time of Charlemagne.
“Annals of the Empire” is one of the least successful of Voltaire’s works. Truth compels the critic indeed to say thatit comes very near to being hideously, preposterously, and unmitigatedly dull. It was written to order and without inspiration. It is laborious, monotonous, and long. That its conscientious list of Kings, Emperors, and Electors, and its neat little rhyming summary of each century, may have proved useful to the young gentleman they were designed to instruct, is very likely. But Voltaire did not put his soul in it. In the mechanical effort it required of his brain he was soon indeed to find great, and greatly needed, soothing. The month passed on winged feet. But Voltaire had to proceed, leisurely it might be, but still to proceed to Strasburg to embrace his niece.
He had had an idea of visiting the clever and delightful Margravine of Bayreuth with whom he so often corresponded; but all the circumstances considered, he thought she was too nearly related to Frederick, and that a visit to her might endanger the little liberty he had obtained.
No doubt, as he lumbered along in the great travelling carriage, he congratulated himself on at last getting out of Prussia, at once easily and gracefully.
He left Gotha on May 25, 1753.
He rested a night or two with the Landgrave of Hesse at Wabern, near Cassel. At Cassel, Baron Pollnitz of the suppers was staying; as Frederick’s spy, Voltaire seems to have suspected. By May 30th the travelling party were at Marburg. After leaving there they passed through Fredeburg, where they visited the Salt Springs. And on May 31, 1753, Voltaire reached the “Golden Lion” at Frankfort-on-Main, meaning to proceed on his journey the next day.
Frederick the Greathad the misfortune to suffer now from subordinates so loyal that they went beyond their master’s commands, and officials with a blundering zeal not according to knowledge.
The second part of “Akakia” had flung him into one of the greatest furies of his life. The unmeasured terms in which he wrote of Voltaire to his sister have been recorded. Wilhelmina’s propitiating answer did not propitiate him. Voltaire was maddeningly and devilishly clever. The sting of the “Akakia” supplements lay in part for Frederick the Great in the fact that he could hardly prevent himself from laughing at such an exquisite humour, nor withhold his admiration of such a dazzling and daring genius. But add to this, that in making a fool of his President, Voltaire had also made a fool of the President’s friend and King; that that King had cringed to win Voltaire to Prussia, and cringed to keep him. Still extant were the royal letters filled with the wildest hyperbole of devotion and of admiration. He had stooped to entreat. He had licked dust to keep the Frenchman his property; and he had done it in vain. It may be forgiven him that, like Naaman the Syrian, he went away in a rage.
Before he went to Silesia he had caused to be written on April 11th that memorable order to Freytag, before alluded to, wherein he commanded Freytag to deprive Voltaire on his arrival at Frankfort of that Key, Cross and Order, all papers in the King’s handwriting, and—“the book specified in the note enclosed.” Only—there was no note enclosed, and no book specified at all.
A conscientious and fussy old busybody was Freytag; worryingly anxious to do right, and fretfully and rightly suspecting himself to be no match for Voltaire. Back he writes to Potsdam on April 21st, asking further instructions about that unspecified book; and “If Voltaire says he has sent on his luggage ahead, are we to keep him a prisoner at Frankfort till he has brought it back?”
“Yes,” comes back the answer on April 29th. “Keep him in sight till the luggage is brought back and he has given to you the royal manuscripts, especially the book called ‘Œuvre de Poésie.’”
For six weeks, while Voltaire was amusing himself with his Duchess and his “Annals,” fussy Freytag awaited him. Voltaire spent the night of May 31st in perfect tranquillity at the inn of the “Golden Lion.” On June 1st, Freytag, Councillor Rucker, who represented a Councillor Schmidt who was ill, and Lieutenant Brettwitz called upon Voltaire at eight o’clock in the morning at the “Golden Lion,” and in the name of his Prussian Majesty requested his Prussian Majesty’s ex-guest to deliver up immediately all the royal manuscripts, the Key, the Cross and the Order.
It was not wonderful, perhaps, that at this request Voltaire flung himself back in his chair and closed his eyes, overcome. Even to Freytag’s unemotional vision the Frenchman appeared ill, and was nothing better than a skeleton. Collini ransacked Voltaire’s trunks at his order. He delivered up all the royal manuscripts—save one which he sent to Freytag the next morning, saying he had found it later under a table. The Key and the Ribbon—that Key which had long torn his pocket, and that Ribbon which had been a halter round his neck—he also gave to Freytag. He sent on to him in the evening his commission as King’s Chamberlain. As for the “Œuvre de Poésie”—why,that, says Voltaire, I packed up with other books in a box, and, for the life of me, cannot tell you whether the box is at Leipsic or at Hamburg.
Considering the passionate nature of his desire to be out of this Prussia; considering his wretched health, which really did need Plombières waters, or some waters or some great changeof scene and of air; considering the affront that was being put upon him; considering the fact that that “Œuvre de Poésie” was his own, a present from the King, corrected and embellished by M. de Voltaire himself, it must be conceded that he took the news that he was to be a prisoner at the Frankfort inn until that unlucky book was forthcoming, pretty philosophically. He did indeed beg vainly to be allowed to pursue his journey. It was not pleasant to have to sign a parole not to go beyond the garden of one’s hotel; to have for host a man under oath not to let his guest depart. It was not pleasant to have three blundering German officials turning over one’s effects for eight consecutive hours, from nine in the morning till five o’clock in the afternoon. The facts that Freytag—who certainly meant very well—confided Voltaire’s health to the best doctor in the place, and offered the captive the pleasure of a drive with himself, the great Freytag, the Resident, in the public gardens, were insufficient consolations for delay and indignity. Freytag signed a couple of agreements wherein he declared that as soon as the book arrived, Voltaire could go where he liked. One copy of the agreement Voltaire kept. He and Collini declared that Freytag spelled Poésie,Poëshie; and on the second copy which Voltaire sent to Madame Denis, to reassure her, her uncle wrote “Good for the Œuvre dePoëshieof the King your master!” Voltaire could still joke; and still work. He was not all unhappy.
He went on with his “Annals.” He received visitors—as a famous person whose extraordinary detention had already got wind in the town. He walked in the garden with Collini. He wrote several letters, without even alluding to his present circumstances. He was still a laughing philosopher. He enjoyed thatPoëshiejoke immensely. He also enjoyed boxing the ears of Van Duren, once printer at The Hague and now retired to Frankfort, who waited on him with a bill thirteen years old. Collini found his master, as ever, good and benevolent.
Five days later he had begun to grow a little impatient. Worthy Freytag was shocked when he visited his captive on that fifth day of his detention, June 5th, to hear him ask if hecould not change his residence, and go and call on the Duke of Meiningen; and, worst of all, break out into invectives against that solemn old conscientious stupidity, the Resident himself. Freytag, not a little flurried, went home and wrote for more explicit commands from Potsdam. Since that first order, dated April 11th, none had proceeded directly from Frederick. He was still away on his tour: and to Fredersdorff in Potsdam and Freytag in Frankfort, his too zealous servants, belongs most of the dishonour and ridicule the affair heaped on the name of Frederick.
Freytag was no sooner out of the house than Voltaire, who still pursued his old, old policy of leaving no stone unturned, sat down and wrote a very cunning letter to the Emperor of Austria beseeching his interference in his, Voltaire’s, behalf. The day before, on June 4th, he had written a similar one to d’Argenson, showing how it would really be to the best interest of the French Ministry to come to his rescue. On June 7th, he wrote to d’Argental of his detention with a calm and philosophy which, as has been well said, people keep as a rule for the misfortunes of others.
On the ninth day of his captivity, that is to say, June 9, 1753, there drew up at the door of the “Golden Lion” a post-chaise containing a very fat, hot, breathless, and excited lady of uncertain years, who fell upon the captive’s neck and fervently embraced him, crying out “Uncle! I always said that man would be the death of you.”
Marie Louise Denis was at this time about three-and-forty years old. Idle, self-indulgent, and extravagant, she was a good-humoured person enough if a vast appetite for pleasure were gratified to the full. Voluble, bustling, and impetuous; foolish, but not without a certain vulgar shrewdness; affectionate, until the objects of her affections were out of sight, when she entirely forgot all about them; vain, greedy, and good-natured; much too lazy to be long offended with anyone, and quite incapable of speaking the truth—Madame Denis was a type of woman which has never been uncommon in any age. So long as she was happy and comfortable herself, she was quite ready to allow her neighbours to be so too. She wasa cordial hostess; and talked a great deal and at the very top of her voice. With a mind as wholly incapable of real cultivation as was her heart of any great or sustained feeling, from long association with Voltaire she caught the accent of cleverness, as after living in a foreign country one catches the accent of a language though one may know nothing of its construction, its grammar, or its literature.
If Voltaire had been in many respects unfortunate in the first woman who influenced his life, he was a thousand times more so in the second. If Madame du Châtelet had had a shrewish temper, she had had transcendent mental gifts; Madame Denis had the shrew’s temper with a mind essentially limited and commonplace. Madame du Châtelet had once loved Voltaire; Madame Denis never loved anything but her pleasures. From the first moment of her connection with him, his niece was a worry and a care to him—making him, as well as herself, ludicrous with herpenchantfor bad playwriting and her elderly coquetries. It is not insignificant that Longchamp, Collini, and Wagnière hated her from their souls. (Collini, indeed, politely praised her in his memoirs, written long after the events they chronicled, and roundly abused her in his letters written at the time.) Voltaire kept her with him, partly no doubt because the tie of relationship bound them. But his enemies may concede that if he had not been in domestic life one of the most generous, patient, good-humoured, forbearing, and philosophic of men, he would have snapped that tie in the case of Louise Denis without compunction.
It must be briefly noted here that those enemies declare that there was another tie between Voltaire and Madame Denis than that of uncle and niece. But if there had been why should it not have been legalised by marriage? An appeal to the Pope and the payment of a certain sum alone were necessary. Voltaire was not too moral, but he was too shrewd, and had had far too much experience of the painful consequences of acting illegally, to do so when it was totally unnecessary. He had been, too, but a cold lover to Madame du Châtelet with heréblouissantepersonality. What in the world was there to make a decrepit uncle of nine-and-fifty fall in lovewith a lazy, ugly niece of forty-three, who bored him? The thing is against nature. The tone in which he speaks of Madame Denis in his letters—good-humoured and patronising—is certainly not the tone of a lover. Add to this, that the foolish relict of M. Denis was always the victim of gallantpenchantsfor quite other persons than Voltaire, now for d’Arnaud, now for Ximenès, presently for young secretary Collini, and a handsome major of twenty-seven.
The age was a vile one; and Voltaire was in it and of it. No woman, were she ever so old and ugly, could have been at the head of his house and escaped calumny. But he may be exonerated from being his niece’s lover. It was a sin he had no mind to.
He was undoubtedly very sincerely glad to see her at the present moment. And if she was not quite heroic enough to keep herself from saying, “I told you so!” she was quite good-natured enough to sympathise with her uncle, even if he had brought his misfortunes at least in part upon himself. This meeting, too, had been so long planned, written of, and delayed. Both uncle and niece—not yet knowing each other as fatally well as they were soon to do—had heartily desired it. One of the very first things practical Madame Denis did was to sit down and write on June 11th a very sensible and moving letter to Frederick the Great, which, if her uncle did not help in its composition, is an example of the truth of the axiom that one intuition of a woman is worth all the reasoning of a man. It was not Madame Denis’s fault that that appeal to Frederick to let Voltaire go free did not reach Frederick until it was too late to be of use. She had already implored the good offices of Lord Keith, who had been of Frederick’s suppers, and was now in France as Prussian envoy; and the prudent Scotchman had replied advising her to recommend Uncle Voltaire to keep quiet, and to remember that “Kings have long arms.” Nothing daunted, Madame Denis wrote to Keith again. This letter, too, though in the niece’s hand, bears evidence of the uncle’s brain. The energetic pair (Madame Denis declared in every letter that they were both very ill) further wrote to d’Argenson and Madame de Pompadour to lay before France the astonishing facts of their case.
It only remained for Madame Denis after this to try and cheer the captivity of the prisoner of the “Golden Lion,” and to help him entertain the illustrious local notables who came to call upon him.
Early on the morning of Monday, June 18th, the chest containing that famous “Œuvre dePoëshie” was delivered at Freytag’s house. “Now we can go!” thinks Voltaire. He completed his preparations. He sent Collini to Freytag’s house to be present at the opening of the parcel. But cautious Freytag was awaiting clearer orders from Potsdam: and would not open the case. Voltaire sent Collini many times during that morning; nay, many times in a single hour: and Freytag sent him away again. At noon comes a despatch to Freytag from Fredersdorff. “Do nothing,” says that official, “until the King returns here next Thursday, when you shall have further orders.” And Freytag, in a note of the most excessive politeness, conveys this message to Voltaire.
Voltaire’s patience had had eighteen days to run out: and the supply was pretty well exhausted. At his side was his niece dying to go, and anticipating, not unnaturally, that Frederick intended something very sinister indeed by these delays. Voltaire went to Freytag and asked to see Fredersdorff’s despatch. And Freytag refused, in a rage. That night Madame Denis wrote to the Abbé de Prades—as the intimate of Frederick—telling him of this new insult and delay. And Voltaire resolved upon action.
Leaving Madame Denis to look after the luggage and await events at the “Golden Lion,” on Wednesday, June 20th, about three o’clock in the afternoon, Voltaire and Collini slipped out of the inn and went to another hostelry, called the “Crown of the Empire,” where they got into a post-chaise which was returning to Mayence. A servant followed them as far as the “Crown of the Empire” and put into the post-chaise a cash-box and two portfolios. But for the fact that one of the escaping criminals, sombrely dressed in black velvet for the occasion, dropped a notebook in the city and spent four minutes of priceless time looking for it, they would have been out of Frankfort and the jurisdiction of Freytag before that breathless and flurried official caught them up and arrested them, with the assistance of the officer at the Mayence gate, which they had actually reached.
It is not necessary to say that Voltaire did not submit to this arrest tamely. He argued with no little passion and adroitness. Collini supported all his statements impartially. “The worst bandits could not have struggled more to get away,” said unfortunate Freytag. But the Resident had might on his side, if not right. He left Voltaire and Collini under a guard of six soldiers and “flew” back to the Burgomaster of Frankfort, who confirmed the arrest. When the unhappy official got back to the city gate, he found Voltaire had spent his time burning papers. What he did not know, was that Voltaire had further taken advantage of his absence to abstract a sheaf of manuscript from one of the portfolios and to give it to Collini, saying, “Hide that somewhere about you.”
Freytag brought his prisoners back to the city in his carriage, which was surrounded by a guard of soldiers, and very soon by a crowd. He took them to the house of that Councillor Schmidt (whose office had been temporarily filled on June 1st by Councillor Rucker) because, said Freytag, the landlord of the “Golden Lion” would not have Voltaire in his house any longer “on account of his incredible meanness.” Freytag then made the prisoners give up the cash-box and their money. “Count the money,” said Schmidt; “they are quite capable of pretending they had more than they really had.” From Voltaire were also taken “his watch, his snuff-box, and some jewels that he wears.” Collini recounts that Voltaire feigned illness to soften the hearts of his captors. But this very transparent ruse failed entirely; as might have been expected. After two hours’ waiting, Dorn, Freytag’s clerk, a disgraced solicitor of Frankfort, took the pair to a low tavern called the “Goat,” where Voltaire was shut up in one room guarded by three soldiers with bayonets; and Collini in another. Voltaire’s cash-box and portfolios had been left in a trunk at Schmidt’s, and the trunk padlocked.
Madame Denis, hearing of Voltaire’s arrest, had flown to try the effect of feminine eloquence upon the Burgomaster.
He replied by putting her under arrest at the “Golden Lion”; and presently sent her, under guard of Dorn and three soldiers, to the “Goat” tavern, where she was placed in a garret with no furniture in it but a bed; “soldiers forfemmes de chambre, and bayonets for curtains.” Madame Denis appears to have spent the night in hysterics. The miscreant Dorn actually persisted in taking his supper in her room and emptying bottle after bottle in her presence and treating her with insult. The truth was, Freytag and Dorn did not believe in her nieceship to Voltaire and mistook the poor lady for a wholly disreputable character.
Collini spenthisnight, dressed, on his bed. Beneath the shelter of its curtains he drew forth from his breeches that sheaf of manuscript Voltaire had given him at the Mayence gate. It was the manuscript of the “Pucelle,” so far as it was then written.
If Voltaire spenthisnight in a rage, he had every excuse for it. At ten o’clock in the evening he wrote to that good friend of his, the Margravine, laying his desperate case before her and begging her to send his letter on to her brother. He had broken his parole—true; but not until Freytag had broken his written agreement that when that “Œuvre dePoëshie” arrived he should go where he listed. He had borne a most galling delay not impatiently. For being in possession of a book which had been given to him, he, his niece, and his servant had been hustled, jostled, and insulted. If the book was blasphemous, indecent, and a dangerous work for a king to have written, was that Voltaire’s fault? He had but corrected its blunders and its grammar. If its model was the “Pucelle”—the royal author had chosen that model himself. Voltaire suffered for the King’s imprudence and for the King’s official’s folly. He was in a situation not too common to him—he really was not the aggressor.
The following day, Thursday, June 21st, the Potsdam mail arrived bringing orders dated June 16th from Frederick—just returned from his tour—that Voltaire, on giving his promiseand a written agreement that he would send back the “Poëshie” to Freytag within a given time, and without making any copies of it, was to be allowed to go “in peace and with civility.”
That is all very well, thinks fussy Freytag. But when the King wrote that, he did not know this Voltaire had set at naught his Resident’s solemn authority and had had the audacity to try and escape. He must wait to go until we hear what the King’s commands are when he knows of this abominable breach of discipline.
Voltaire, goaded to desperation, wrote again to the Margravine of Bayreuth, begging her to send to his Majesty a most indignant statement of the wrongs done to Madame Denis—the statement having been drawn up by that outraged lady herself. As a good niece, she also wrote again passionately, direct to the King, on behalf of her uncle. He himself implored Freytag in quite humble terms to at least let them go back to the “Golden Lion,” which was a more decent habitation than the “Goat”; and, besides, would save the prisoners from paying for two prisons.
A few hours after, he appealed again to the mercy of that harassed and unfortunate jailer. All these letters are of June 21st. It must have been a busy day. It is strange that at such a juncture Voltaire himself did not write direct to the King. It could not have been his pride that prevented him. If pride was an obstacle in the way of attaining his end, an impulsive Voltaire could always kick it aside. Besides, he stooped to entreat a Dorn and a Freytag. In answer to his requests Madame Denis and Collini were allowed to go out of doors. But Voltaire was kept to his room in that wretched “Goat” and guarded by two sentinels as if he had been a dangerous criminal awaiting hanging. Four days went by. Then, on June 25th, came clearer and more positive orders from Frederick to let the prisoners go. Frederick was sick of the business and ashamed of it. But still, argues Freytag, when he sent those orders, he did not know of the attempt to escape. So the only effect of them was that the guards were removed from the door, and Voltaire was put on his honour not to leave the room.
The chest of books from Strasburg had meanwhile been opened; and the “Poèshie” extracted therefrom. But for the punctilious idiocy of one dull official, Voltaire might long ago have been at his Plombières and have done with Prussia for ever. The very burgomaster began to pity him. Frankfort was near regarding him as a martyr. Freytag, a little nervous, splendidly allowed the captive the freedom of the whole inn; and then he and that captive fought tooth and nail over money matters. For Voltaire had not only endured the miseries of arrest and detention, but had had to pay their whole expenses. He and Collini swore they had been robbed of jewels, money, and papers, and of various trifles as well.
On July 5th—after they had been detained thirty-five days—came sharp orders from Potsdam that Voltaire was to be released at once. Even a Freytag could doubt and delay no more. On July 6th the party returned to the “Golden Lion”: where Voltaire called in a lawyer and laid before him a succinct account of the events of those five-and-thirty days. Collini completed their preparations for departure. On the very morning when they were going, the impetuous Voltaire caught sight of Dorn passing his door and rushed out at him with a loaded pistol. Collini intervened. They had been in scrapes enough already.
On July 7, 1753, Voltaire and Collini left Frankfort. That fighting, scrambling, wearying month of folly and indignity was over. The same night they reached Mayence-on-the-Rhine—a city which knew not Frederick. The day following, Madame Denis left Frankfort for Paris.
Nothing is more remarkable about the Frankfort affair than the moderation Voltaire, considering he was Voltaire, displayed in it. When the Margravine wrote on the subject to her brother and described Voltaire as “intense and bilious” and “capable of every imprudence,” the description was not unfair. When Frederick wrote to his sister and said plainly that Voltaire and Madame Denis lied in their descriptions of the event and coloured it and embroidered on it to suit their own ends, he was not precisely lying, though he was not precisely truthful, himself. But leaving the account of Voltaire,Madame Denis, and Collini altogether alone, from the account of Freytag the prejudiced, it is proved that Voltaire behaved, all things considered, with a great deal of philosophy and an unusual amount of patience.
Why?
He was leaving Prussia—with enormous difficulty to be sure—but hewasleaving it at last. He was returning, as he hoped, to France. He had made a final trial of courts and kings—and found them wanting. Liberty was whispering and wooing him again—the siren he had loved and deserted, and whom he was to love again and desert no more. His blessed monotonous work at his “Annals” made him “forget all the Freytags.” For five hours a day, whether he was living in palaces or in prison, with princes or with jailers, he “laboured tranquilly” at that book. The comic side of the situation appealed to him. He knew, or said he knew, that he deserved some of his misfortunes. And above all—far above all—the dream and the night were ending, and with the dawn of a new day came the courage, the fight, and the energy to win it.
Thearrival of Voltaire at Mayence rang down the curtain upon the greatest act of one of the most famous dramas of friendship in the world. It left Frederick enraged: first of all with himself; secondly, with blundering Freytag, whose blunders the King ostensibly approved, according to his principle, in a formal document written for that purpose; and only thirdly with Voltaire. With his muse taught by that Voltaire, Frederick abused the teacher in spiteful epigrams, and then dealt him a blow which shook Voltaire’s whole life, as a lover will kill the mistress who has been false to him not because he has loved her too little, but too much.
As for Voltaire, he was both angry and sorry. In that mean, world-famous story of their quarrel he must have known well enough that he had been too often most aggravating,méchant, and irrepressible. Yet that letter he wrote on July 9th from Mayence to Madame Denis, seen and meant to be seen by Frederick, gave a view of the situation not wholly false. The King “might have remembered that for fifteen years he wooed me with tender favours; that in my old age he drew me from my country; that for two years I worked with him to perfect his talents; that I have served him well and failed him in nothing; that it is infinitely below his rank and glory to take part in an academical quarrel and to end as my reward by demanding his poems from me at the hands of his soldiers.”
Adoring and quarrelling, passionately admiring and yearning for each other when they were apart, admiring and fighting each other when they were together—that is the history of the friendship of Frederick and Voltaire. If it be true that thegreat are no mates for common people, still less are they mates for each other. Even in fabled Olympus, gods could not live in peace with gods.
It is not unworthy of remark that their connection conferred far greater benefits on the King than on the commoner. Voltairehadconsistently trained and taught the royal intellect from that first letter written in August, 1736, to the Prussian heir-apparent. He had been such a master as kings do not often find—and his royal pupil had gained from him such advantages as kings are seldom wise enough to use.
But for Voltaire himself—for the most fruitful literary producer of any age—those three years in Prussia were comparatively barren and unprofitable. True, in 1751, “The Century of Louis XIV.” had appeared; but all the materials for it had been collected, and by far the greater part of the book written, before Voltaire came to Prussia at all. The “Poem on Natural Law” (not published till 1756), a few improvements to “Rome Sauvée,” the beginnings of that “magnificent dream,” “The Philosophical Dictionary,” were, as has been seen (except “Akakia”), his only other works written in Prussia. For a while the author of the “Henriade” and the “English Letters” was chiefly famous as the enemy of d’Arnaud, Hirsch, and Maupertuis; as the hero of the low comedy of Frankfort; and as the guest “who put his host’s candle-ends into his pockets.”
If without Voltaire the glory of Frederick would have been something less glorious, without Frederick the great Voltaire would have been greater still.
Flourishing Mayence, with its Rhine river flowing through it, its fine castles, its fine company, its indifference to the opinion of Frederick, and its warm enthusiasm for Frederick’s guest, friend, enemy, might well have seemed Paradise to Voltaire. He was free. His social French soul was delighted with many visitors. He worked hard too. He spent three weeks in “drying his clothes after the shipwreck,” as he phrased it himself. But for one fear, he would have been happy. It was not only in Prussia that Frederick was Frederick the Great. His name was everywhere a power and terror. Why should prudent France embroil herself with the greatestof European sovereigns for the sake of clasping to her breast an upstart genius who was always making mischief whether he was at home or abroad, and who had been punished for his abominable, free, daring, unpalatable opinions a hundred times without changing them?
Voltaire had arrived in Mayence on July 7, 1753. On July 9th he was writing to Madame Denis that letter for the public eye in which he gavehisaccount of the affair with Frederick; and went on to prove that he had never been a Prussian subject, or anything but a Frenchman to the bottom of his soul, which was true enough; and to assert, the truth of which he felt to be very doubtful, that Frederick would be the first to ask of the King my master (I am still Gentleman-in-Ordinary, you will be pleased to remember) that I may be allowed to end my days in my native land. Madame Denis was working hard to attain that same end in Paris: and thought herself likely to succeed. Her sufferings in Frankfort had been such that the emotional lady had to be bled four times in a week, she said. She still hoped, in italics, that her old prophecy that the King of Prussia would be the death of Uncle Voltaire would not be fulfilled after all; and recalled Frankfort in terms so agitating that there was no wonder her uncle—who greatly overestimated his niece’s goodness in coming to him there—harped on the treatment she had received, on Freytag, Fredersdorff, and the “Goat,” in every letter he wrote. In one at least, written at this period, he ominously signed himself Gentleman of the Chamber of the King of France. Voltaire was coming home.
He and Collini left Mayence on July 28th for Mannheim, where Charles Theodore, the Elector Palatine, had invited Voltaire to stay with him. They passed a night at Wormsen route. Voltaire’s spirits were light enough for him to pretend to be an Italian for the benefit of the Worms innkeeper, and make the supper what his secretary called “very diverting.” At Mannheim, the Elector Palatine’s Court being in the country, Voltaire spent a short time putting money matters in order, and changing his German money into French. He was nearly in his “patrie”; no wonder he was lighthearted.In a few days the Elector fetched him to Schwetzingen, his country house, where was held the gayest and most charming of little Courts. Voltaire always dined with the Elector, and after dinner read aloud to him one of his works. There werefêtesand concerts. The court theatrical company came to visit the author of “Zaire” and “Alzire,” of “Mahomet” and “Mérope.” Four of his own plays were acted. He was only too delighted to show the actors how to render this passage, and give to that character its true weight and significance. He began here (“like an old fool,” he said) a new love drama called “The Orphan of China.” If liberty was the passion of his life, the drama was the pet child of his leisure. An agreeable fortnight passed away. The distinguished guest was taken to see the Elector’s library at Mannheim and presented to it the companion volume to that ill-omened “Poëshie” of the King my master—Frederick’s “Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg.”
While unconscious Voltaire was still at Schwetzingen, training actors, or reading the “Annals” to the Elector, d’Argenson, Voltaire’s old school friend and member of the French Cabinet, recorded in his diary “Permission to re-enter France is refused to M. de Voltaire ... to please the King of Prussia.”
On August 16th, Voltaire and Collini reached Strasburg and put up there at a poor little inn called the “White Bear,” because it was kept by the father of a waiter at the inn at Mayence; and good-natured Voltaire had promised to patronise it to oblige him. He moved shortly to a little house outside the city gate, and received there everyone of note in Strasburg.
He was still hard at work on the “Annals.” He spent the evening sometimes with the agreeable Countess de Lutzelburg, who lived near. He took counsel about his “Annals” with Schoepflin, the German historian. Altogether he would have passed a couple of months quite after his heart—if—if—Madame Denis had been able to tell him that it was safe for him to proceed further into France. Alsace was the borderline. On it was written, it seemed, “Thus far shalt thou come, but no further.” But still—patience, patience! Voltaire didnot yet despair. He knew nothing of that entry in d’Argenson’s diary. But much bitter experience had taught him that discretion is the better part of valour. On October 2d he left Strasburg, and arrived the same evening at Colmar.
Colmar was a well-chosen spot for several reasons. One was that Schoepflin’s brother, who was a printer, was going to print Voltaire’s “Annals” for him there. Another was that Colmar had plenty of agreeable literary society. And a third—and most important—it was very conveniently situated for the receipt of Madame Denis’s communications. Within a drive of it was Lunéville. Two days’ journey from it was Cirey. Its upper classes all spoke French. And though the Jesuits were no small power in it, Voltaire seems to have forgotten that unpleasant little fact, when he came. He went into modest rooms; and was his own housekeeper, with a young peasant girl called Babet, whose gaiety, simplicity, and volubility much entertained him, as cook. He played chess after dinner with Collini. His way of life delighted tastes always modest; and his health improved rapidly. He drew plans for his “Orphan.” With a brilliant play he had successfully defied his enemies before. Why not again? But the dramatic muse required much wooing this time; and the most versatile writer in the world began compiling articles for the “Encyclopædia” instead.
In this October Voltaire buried himself in the village of Luttenbach, near Colmar, for a fortnight, where he was happy enough proof-correcting his “Annals” and still hoping for good news from France. On October 28th, he came back to Colmar, had a fit of the gout, and, as usual, gaily bemoaned his ill-health in all his letters.
He still liked Colmar. He still thought he was creeping home. Prussia was behind him; and, though he was nearly sixty years old and always talked of himself as dying, he knew there was still a world before.
And then, in this December of 1753, Fate struck him one of those stunning blows she had too often dealt him.
Just as he was hoping for the best, as his friends in Paris were straining every nerve to smooth the way for his return, ashe was laboriously wooing the histrionic muse that he might captivate the capital with a comedy; just as he had renounced Frederick and Prussia and remembered that he was Gentleman-in-Ordinary to his French Majesty and a Frenchman body and soul, and no Prussian after all, there appeared at The Hague, in a shamefully incorrect pirated edition, the most ambitious, the most voluminous, the most characteristic, and the most daring of all Voltaire’s works, the “Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations.”
If Madame du Châtelet “despised history a little,” it had not the less been her and her lover’s chief employment at Cirey. “The Century of Louis XIV.” was not enough to occupy such an energy as Voltaire’s. That cramped him to one time and to one country. And behold! there was the world to look back upon; the history of all nations to study—the progress of mankind to regard as a whole.
The “Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations” is of all Voltaire’s works the one which has exerted the most powerful influence on the mind of men. On July 10, 1791, when his body was taken to Paris and placed on the ruins of the Bastille on the very spot where he himself had been a prisoner, on the funeral car were written the memorable words, “He gave the human mind a great impetus: he prepared us for freedom.” That line might have served as the motto of his great essay. It prepared men for freedom. It records the history of human progress from Charlemagne to Louis XIII. It was the first history which dealt not with kings, the units, but with the great, panting, seething masses they ruled; which took history to mean the advance of the whole human race—a general view of the great march of all nations towards light and liberty. It was the first history which struck out boldly, and hit prejudice and oppression a staggering blow from which they have not yet recovered. Yet its style is infinitely frank, gay, and daring. It is such easy reading, so light, clear, and sarcastic. It is the one book of its kind the frivolous will finish for pleasure. It has such a jesting manner to hide its weighty matter. It is infinitely significant; and yet sounds as if it were simply meant to be amusing. It is said that Voltaire put it into sucha form to overcome Madame du Châtelet’s dislike of history. But it was his lifelong principle as a writer that to be dull is the greatest of all errors. He was always wishing that Newton had written vaudevilles; and praying that his own taste might never be “stifled with study.” What Frederick the Great called the “effervescence of his genius” bubbles over in the “Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations,” as in all his works. But it must be remembered that easy reading means hard writing; and that this “picture of the centuries,” this “history of the human mind,” needed, as its author declared, “the patience of a Benedictine and the pen of a Bossuet.” When he wrote “Finis” on the last page of the last edition in 1775, the book numbered six volumes, and was in every sense the greatest of its author’s works. Parton has justly said that to it “Grote, Niebuhr, Gibbon, Colenso, and especially Buckle, are all indebted.” That it is full of mistakes which any fairly well-educated person of to-day could easily correct does not make it a less extraordinary production for the age in which it was produced. That it is now obsolete, only proves how thoroughly it accomplished its aim. The great new truths for which Voltaire fought with his life in his hand are the commonplaces and the truisms of to-day.
But then he made them so.
Jean Néaulme, the pirate publisher at The Hague, said he had bought the manuscript from a servant of Prince Charles of Lorraine—Charles having obtained it either by persuasion or treachery from Frederick the Great. Voltaire had given a manuscript copy of the book to his royal friend. In his present state of mind, it was only natural he should suspect Frederick of foul play.
However this might be, the thing was printed. It was called, and miscalled, “An Abridgment of Universal History.” It was filled from end to end with astounding, and, very often, wilful blunders. It confused the eighth century with the fourth, and the twelfth with the thirteenth, and Boniface VIII. with Boniface VII. The unhappy author, with tears in his eyes, called it “the disgrace of literature.” He had, of course, never corrected the proofs. Since writing that first