Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/312

Rh 288 VOLTAIRE disavowal being formal and procured by the exertion of all Voltaire s own influence both at home and abroad. For he had as little notion of tolerance towards others as of dignity in himself. In April 1739 a journey was made to Brussels, to Paris, and then again to Brussels, which was the headquarters for a considerable time owing to some law affairs of the Du Chatelets. Frederick, now king of Prussia, made not a few efforts to get Voltaire away from Madame du Chatelet, but unsuccessfully, and the king earned the lady s cordial hatred by persistently refusing or omitting to invite her. At last, in September 1740, master and pupil met for the first time at Cleves, an interview followed three months later by a longer visit at Remusberg. Brussels was again the headquarters in 1741, by which time Voltaire had finished the best and the second or third best of his plays, Merope and Mahomet. Mahomet was played first in the year and at the place just mentioned ; it did not appear in Paris till August next year, and Merope not till 1743. This last was and de served to be the most successful of its author s whole theatre. It was in this same year that he received the singular diplomatic mission to Frederick which nobody seems to have taken seriously, and after his return the oscillation between Brussels, Cirey, and Paris was resumed, in a manner rather difficult to record in a short biography. During these years Voltaire s production of miscellanies was as constant as usual, but his time allotted to serious work was chiefly given to history and much of the Essai sur les Moeurs and the Siede de Louis XIV. was now com posed. He also returned, not too well-advisedly, to the business of courtiership, which he had given up since the death of the regent. He was much employed, owing to Richelieu s influence, in the fetes of the dauphin s marriage, and was rewarded on New Year s day 1745 by the appoint ment to the post of historiographer-royal, once jointly held by Racine and Boileau. The situation itself and its ac companying privileges were what Voltaire chiefly aimed at, but there was a salary of two thousand livres attached, and he had the year before come in for three times as much by the death of his brother. In the same year he wrote a poem on Fontenoy, he received medals from the pope, and dedicated Mahomet to him, and he wrote court divertissements and other things to admiration. But he was not a thoroughly skilful courtier, and one of the best known of Voltairiana is the contempt or at least silence with which Louis XV. a sensualist but no fool received the maladroit and almost insolent inquiry Trajan est- il content ? addressed in his hearing to Richelieu at the close of a piece in which the emperor had appeared with a transparent reference to the king. All this assentation had at least one effect. He who had been for years ad mittedly the first writer in France had been repeatedly passed over in elections to the Academy. He was at last elected in the spring of 1746, and received on May 9. Then the tide began to turn. His favour at court had naturally exasperated his enemies ; it had not secured him any real friends, and even a gentlemanship of the chamber was no solid benefit, except from the money point of view. He did not indeed hold it very long, but was permitted to sell it for a large sum, retaining the rank and privileges. He had various proofs of the instability of his hold on the king during 1747 and in 1748. He once lay in hiding for two months at Sceaux, and afterwards for a time lived chiefly at Luneville, where Madame du Chatelet had estab lished herself at the court of King Stanislaus, where she carried on her flirtations with Saint Lambert, and where, in September 1749, she died, not in, but about four days after, childbirth. The death of Madame du Chatelet is another turning point in the history of Voltaire. He was now not ayoving man indeed he was fifty-five but he had nearly thirty years more to live, and he had learnt much during what may be called his Cirey cohabitation. On the one hand, he had discovered that it was undesirable that a man should not have a household ; on the other, he had dis covered that it was still more undesirable that a man should put himself under illegitimate petticoat government. For some time, however, after Madame du Chatelet s death he was in a state of pitiable unsettlement. At first, after removing his goods from Cirey, he hired the greater part of the Chatelet town house and then the whole. He had some idea of settling down in Paris, and might perhaps have done so if mischief had not been the very breath of his nostrils. He could not bring himself to testify in any open and dangerous manner for what he thought to be the truth ; he could not bring himself to refrain from attack ing, by every artifice and covert enginery, what he thought to be falsehood. He went on writing tales like Zad nj, He engaged in a foolish and undignified struggle with Crebillon pere (not fils), a dramatist who, in part of one play, Rhadamiste et Zenobie, has struck a note of tragedy in the grand Cornelian strain, Avhich Voltaire could never hope to echo, and who, in most of his other efforts, was and is mainly futile. He used the most extraordinary efforts to make himself more popular than he was, but he could not help being uncomfortable in a city where the court all but threatened, and where the city did more than all but laugh. All this time Frederick of Prussia had been continuing his invitations, and the &quot; respectable Emily &quot; was no longer in the way. It does not appear that, at any rate at first, Frederick made any real difficulty as to money. Indeed he behaved on the whole very generously. Voltaire left Paris on the 15th June 1751, and reached Berlin on the 10th July. This Berlin visit might itself be treated, without undue extension, at the length of the present article ; but its circumstances may be presumed to be already more or less familiar to most English readers from the two great essays of Macaulay and Carlyle as well as from the Frederick of the latter. It is desirable, if not altogether necessary, to say that these two masters of English were not perhaps the best qualified to relate the story. Both were unjust to Voltaire, and Macaulay was unjust to Frederick as well. It is quite certain that at first the king behaved altogether like a king to his guest. He pressed him to remain ; he gave him (the words are Voltaire s own) one of his orders, twenty thousand francs a year, and four thousand ad ditional for his niece, Madame Denis, in case she would come and keep house for her uncle. But Voltaire s con duct was from the first Voltairian. He sent a letter, in which Madame Denis pleaded with him to return, to Frederick an odd way of ingratiating his niece with that monarch. He insisted on the consent of his own king, which was given without delay and on very liberal terms, Louis XV., if gossip is to be trusted, pointing out with considerable shrewdness that it was not his fault if Voltaire would put himself constantly in hot water, and still less his fault that there were so few men of letters in Prussia that it suited the king of Prussia to ask them to dinner, and so many in France that it was quite impossible for the king of France to do so. Frenchmen, always touchy on such a point, regarded Voltaire as something of a deserter ; and he was not long before he bitterly repented his deser tion, though his residence in Prussia actually lasted for nearly three years. It was quite impossible that Voltaire and Frederick should get on together for long. Voltaire was not humble enough to be a mere butt, as many of Frederick s led poets were ; he was not enough of a gentle man to hold his own place with dignity and discretion ; he