Voltaire in Love by Nancy Mitford Read Free Book Online Page B

in Paris, since there he had two and in Paris only Thieriot – who, however, was well worth two Turks. He wandered from lodging to lodging; he needed an anchor. His affair with Mme de Bernières did not begin again; hardly had he left for England than she was seen at the Opera with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot. Voltaire had forgiven her, but she belonged to the past. His sister, whom he was so fond of, had died while he was away. Matters were made worse for him by two more deaths, those of Adrienne Lecouvreur and of the Marquis de Maisons who, having nursed Voltaire through the smallpox in 1723, was himself carried off by that disease in 1731. Both these dear friends ‘died in my arms’. As always when he was unhappy his health began to suffer and sometimes he wondered whether he would be able to go on working at all.
    In the winter of 1731—2 Voltaire took up with an old Baronne de Fontaine-Martel. He went to live in her house in the rue des Bons-Enfants, looking over the gardens of the Palais-Royal, acted as host at her supper parties, conducted rehearsals of his plays in the drawing-room, and generally dug himself in. She was most unattractive. She had been obliged to give up having lovers, not because of old age, which is never taken into account in these matters by the French, but because of her eczema. She was rich and miserly, her suppers were nasty, unless a Prince of the Blood happened to announce himself, when they became just eatable. Voltaire said the passport to her favour was impotence; she had a morbid fear that some man would cut her throat in order to give her money to an actress. She put up with Voltaire (according to him) because he was too ill to make love.
    â€˜I live very easy at the Baronne’s house.’ He thought it would be a good idea for Thieriot to live easy there, too, but the Baronne was no fool; she refused to fall in with this plan. She also, quite rightly, refused to harbour a new friend and protégé of Voltaire’s, the Abbé Linant. Linant, who came from Rouen where his mother kept a tavern, was an unlucky find of Cideville’s. He had literary ambitions and was writing a tragedy of ancient Rome. Cideville sent him to Voltaire, who soon became quite obsessed with him, bothering all his friends to find some agreeable, well-paid job for the Abbé. He admitted to Cideville, however, that it was not easy to place Linant, who was neither attractive nor well-read, whose writing was too illegible for secretarial work, who stammered too much to be a reader and who possessed the amiable virtue of idleness. Never mind, this excellent fruit would no doubt ripen.
    In January 1733 Mme de Fontaine-Martel was taken ill, and Voltaire had to tell her that she was dying. She had no desire to see a priest, but he insisted that she should, fearing that if she did not people would say that he had prevented her from doing so. He went out himself and found one. He had never become fond of her and was jocular about the way in which she received the Sacrament. She did not die in his arms. His only regret was for the excellent house of which he had been master and the 40,000 livres a year which had been spent on his pleasures.
    Mme de Fontaine-Martel’s last words were very strange: ‘What time is it?’ ‘Two o’clock, Madame.’ ‘Ah,’ said she, ‘how consoling to think that whatever time it may be there is somebody preventing the extinction of our race.’
    * This Queen only existed in Voltaire’s imagination. George I was still on the throne.

4. Émilie Inherits Voltaire
    The great question now was not who would inherit Mme de Fontaine-Martel’s fortune and furniture but who would inherit Voltaire? Her house had been a centre of merriment for the whole of Paris while he lived there; what lucky person would now carry off this fascinator? The answer was not long in coming. Voltaire took a lodging in a wretched neighbourhood