The life of Voltaire. Evelyn Beatrice Hall
saw much to which the brilliant Madame and her Voltaire were both as yet blind. She loudly regretted that her uncle should be lost to his friends and bound hand and foot by such an attachment. Voltaire and Émilie parted from the bride and bridegroom, it may be assumed, pretty cheerfully. They were not only still happy in each other, they had a prodigious amount of work to get through. And your idle people, not content with doing nothing themselves, are the surest prevention of work in others and grudge the industry they will by no means imitate.
In the June of 1738, the second Mademoiselle Mignot was married to a M. de Fontaine. Voltaire did his duty and gave the bride twenty-five thousand francs: but he hated weddings and was not to be persuaded to go to this one, any more than to Madame Denis’s.
Lazy, good-natured Theriot came to stay at Cirey in October, and no doubt did his idle best to wean his indefatigable host from the scientific labours to which he was devoted, soul and body. The Cirey goddess did not care about M. Theriot. If she was not married to Voltaire she was at least wifely in her failings, and not at all too disposed to like her lover’s old friends. Voltaire went into the parting guest’s bedchamber, and under pretence of helping him to pack, slipped into his box fifty louis. He was a man of substance by now. It is estimated that at this period his income must have been about three thousand pounds per annum (English money). Few men who have made wealth as hardly and thriftily as he did, and are of temperament naturally shrewd and prudent, have been as generous with it when made. Voltaire was not only fully alive to the claims of his relatives and to the needs of his friends, but had a strangely soft spot in his cynic heart for anyone who was forlorn and poor. It was in 1737 he had written to Moussinot to go, from him, to a certain Demoiselle d’Amfreville and, for no better reason than that she was needy and had once had “a sort of estate” near Cirey, “beg her to accept the loan of ten pistoles, and when she wants more, I have the honour to be at her service.”
Ever since Voltaire returned from England he had been the most enthusiastic hero-worshipper of the great Newton and the great Newtonian system. In England, he had talked with Clarke, the dead Newton’s successor and friend. The year following his arrival at Cirey he had devoted himself to science as only a Voltaire understood devotion. At his side was the woman who was the aptest pupil of Maupertuis and almost the only other person in France who understood Newtonianism, save Maupertuis himself, Voltaire, and one Clairaut. The rest of the world was Cartesian. The philosophy of Descartes was de rigueur. Fontenelle’s “Plurality of Worlds,” which clothed that philosophy with all the grace and charms of a perfect style, was on the toilet table of every woman of fashion. The government said Descartes was infallible, so he must be infallible. With what a passion of zeal those two people set themselves to seek truth for truth’s sake—to seek truth whether it agreed with the fashionable belief and the text-books or whether it did not—to find it, and to give it to the world! To make Newton intelligible to the French people—to present his theories so that they would read as delightfully as a romance—to teach his countrymen to think boldly as Newton had thought—to weigh, to ponder, and consider whether the popular faiths were the true faiths—to believe intelligently or to deny, not afraid—that was Voltaire’s aim. “Nothing enfranchises like education.” “When once a nation begins to think, it is impossible to stop it.” The French were to be taught to think by the “Elements of Newton’s Philosophy.” The censor prohibited the work with its dangerous and terrible anti-Cartesian theories when it appeared. But in ten years’ time, the Cartesian theories were proscribed in the schools of Paris and the Newtonian taught everywhere in their stead. Voltaire hardly ever won a finer victory.
In 1735, there had begun, then, to arrive by that bi-weekly coach from Paris air-pumps, crucibles, prisms, compasses, almost every kind of scientific appliance then known. One day the coach brought a practical young chemist (not a priest)—also purchased by the useful Mouissinot. Voltaire and Madame were by no means going to be content with reading of Newton’s experiments. They must try them themselves! One day, with a good deal of outside help, it may be presumed, they weighed a ton of red-hot iron. The dark room gave an almost childish pleasure to them both. Voltaire tried experiments of his own. He was so absorbed in them that he neglected his correspondence even. For the time being he was the most scientific scientist who ever breathed—in a fever of interest in his work, agog to know more, for more time, more power to labour, longing for a body that never wanted sleep or rest, change or refreshment. “How will you be the better,” a friend inquired of him, “for knowing the pathway of light and the gravitation of Saturn?” It was a stupid question, to be sure, to ask a Voltaire. All knowledge was a priceless gain, he thought. We must open our souls to all the arts, all the sciences, all the feelings! Poetry, physics, history, geometry, the drama—everything. What! to miss knowing what one might have known! to have a mind only ready for one kind of learning, when it had room in it, if properly arranged, for every kind! Friend Cideville had mistaken his man.
The Marquise was no whit less enthusiastic. Voltaire’s own mathematical education had been neglected. But not hers. The pupil of Maupertuis could help out her lover’s defects. Metaphysics was her passion. She had the accuracy of Euclid, Voltaire said, and algebra was her amusement. In his dedicatory Epistle to the “Elements,” which was the fruit of their joint labour, he spoke of her in terms which were, at once, high-flown compliment and hard fact. She had penetrated “the depths of transcendent geometry” and “alone among us has read and commented on the great Newton.” She had “made her own by indefatigable labour, truths which would intimidate most men,” and had “sounded the depths in her hours of leisure of what the profoundest philosophers study unremittingly.” She had corrected many faults in the Italian “Newtonianism for Ladies” written by their visitor Algarotti, and knew a great deal more about the subject than he did himself. It is not hard to understand how Voltaire came by what he called his “little system”—that women are as clever as men, only more amiable. He had Madame du Châtelet always with him—Madame whose whole aim in life then was to work, and to please him. Her industry was as great as his own. The word “trouble” was never in her vocabulary. He loved her intellect if he did not love her. They should have been happy. If they ever were, it was over the “Elements of Newton’s Philosophy.”
The book was ready at last. To make the theory of gravitation clear—and entertaining—had been Voltaire’s chief difficulty. If any man was adapted to enlighten obscurity, he was that man. His own mind was not only extraordinarily brilliant, but it was extraordinarily neat. In the “Elements” sequence follows sequence, and effect, cause, as incisively as in a proposition of Euclid.
It has been seen that while Voltaire was in Holland in the spring of 1737 he was superintending the printing of these “Elements.” Before forwarding the last chapters to the printers he sent the whole book for the inspection of the Chancellor of France, full of hope. “The most imbecile fanatic, the most envenomed hypocrite can find nothing in it to object to,” he wrote in his vigorous fashion. Six months passed, and no answer. And then the French authorities sent a refusal. “It is dangerous to be right in things in which those in power are wrong,” wrote Voltaire. Very dangerous. And how unmannerly of this presumptuous Voltaire to dare to treat the beloved Descartes with cool logic and relentless scrutiny just as if he were not sealed, signed, and stamped by the infallible decree of fashion!
But, though it was not permitted, as Voltaire said, to a poor Frenchman to say that attraction is possible and proved, and vacuum demonstrated, yet, as usual, the pirate publishers would by no means miss their chance.
The printers of Amsterdam produced an edition of the work which they called the “Elements of Newton’s Philosophy Adapted to Every Capacity” (Mis à la Portée de Tout le Monde). Of course there was not wanting to Voltaire an enemy to say the title should have been written Mis à la Porte de Tout le Monde—shown the door by everybody. The author raged and fumed not a little over the printers’ blunders and incorrectness.
The usual host of calumnies attacked him again. Society and the gutter press united in feeling that a person who dared to doubt their darling Cartesian system must be of shameful birth and the most abandoned morals. They insulted him with all “the intrepidity of ignorance.” He was accused of intrigues with persons he had never seen or who had never existed. The vile licence of that strictly licensed