Voltaire in Love Read Free

of his life: ‘I found, in 1733, a young woman who thought as I did, and who decided to spend several years in the country, cultivating her mind.’ It is rather mysterious that he had not found her sooner, for they moved in the same world; his father was her father’s man of affairs; the Duc de Richelieu, one of his greatest friends, had been her lover. Voltaire used to say that he had ‘seen her born’ but this was a literary convention he often used; another one was ‘he (or she) died in my arms’.
    However, as soon as they saw each other, the famous love affair began and was soon announced. Love, in France, is treated with formality; friends and relations are left in no doubt as to its beginning and its end. Concealment, necessitating confidants and secret meeting places, is only resorted to when there is a jealous husband or wife. The Marquis du Châtelet always behaved perfectly.
    Writing to Cideville, companion of his schooldays, Voltaire said of Mme du Châtelet: ‘You are a male Émilie and she is a female Cideville.’ He could not have praised her more highly, for Cideville was one of his great friends. So frivolous, so volatile in his likes and dislikes, Voltaire was unshakeable in friendship. He also compared her to Newton, the master of his thought. He said that though she was a genius and inclined to require a metaphysical approach at moments when it is more usual to think only of love, she fully understood the art of flirtation. From the first he wroteof her, in letters to his intimates as well as in the many poems he addressed to her, as Émilie. This was another literary convention; in those days Christian names were not used, even between brother and sister, and Voltaire certainly never spoke to her as anything but Madame. Sometimes, in his writings, she is Uranie, because Mme du Châtelet, though she moved in the thoughtless circles of high society, was learned and a scientist. The Breteuil family, whose glory and whose shame she is, speak of her to this day as Gabrielle-Émilie, her real name.
    While Voltaire’s friends were left in no doubt as to the new relationship, Mme du Châtelet herself went even further. She declared that she was planning to spend the rest of her life with him. Among the first to be informed was the Duc de Richelieu. We do not know when and how the news was broken to M. du Châtelet.
    The lovers were not young. Voltaire was thirty-nine, Mme du Châtelet twenty-seven. She had been married eight years and was the mother of three children, one of whom was only a few months old. Each had had a chequered past. Émilie was a passionate creature, excessive in everything. Her physical attraction for men was not great enough for the demands of her own nature and this often made her restless and unhappy. To look at she was quite unlike the general idea of an eighteenth-century Marquise. Mme du Deffand, who never forgave her for carrying off the greatest entertainer of the age, has left a description of her which is certainly too catty but may have some truth: thin, dry, and flat-chested, huge arms and legs, huge feet, tiny head, tiny little sea-green eyes, bad teeth, black hair, and a weather-beaten complexion, vain, overdressed, and untidy. Cideville, on the other hand who, like most of Voltaire’s men friends, was attracted by Émilie, speaks of her beautiful big soft eyes with black brows, her noble, witty and piquant expression. Calling on her one day and finding her in bed, he wrote:
    Ah mon ami que dans tel lit
    Pareille philosophie inspire d’appétit!
    Over and over again she is described, in letters and memoirs of her day, as beautiful; reading between the lines one can conclude that she was what is now called a handsome woman. She was certainly not a beauty in the class of Mme de Pompadour, nor, in spite of a great love of dress, was she ever really elegant. Elegance, for women, demands undivided attention;