He publicly, and with violent outrage, made war on Rousseau.Nor had he the heart of hiding his feelings under the semblance of good humour or of contempt.With all his great talents, and all his long experience of the world, he had no more self-command than a petted child, or a hysterical woman.Whenever he was mortified, he exhausted the whole rhetoric of anger and sorrow to express his mortification.His torrents of bitter words, his stamping and cursing, his grimaces and his tears of rage, were a rich feast to those abject natures, whose delight is in the agonies of powerful spirits and in the abasement of immortal names.These creatures had now found out a way of galling him to the very quick.In one walk, at least, it had been admitted by envy itself that he was without a living competitor.Since Racine had been laid among the great men whose dust made the holy precinct of Port-Royal holier, no tragic poet had appeared who could contest the palm with the author of Zaire, of Alzire, and of Merope.At length a rival was announced.Old Crebillon, who, many years before, had obtained some theatrical success, and who had long been forgotten, came forth from his garret in one of the meanest lanes near the Rue St.Antoine, and was welcomed by the acclamations of envious men of letters, and of a capricious populace.A thing called Catiline, which he had written in his retirement, was acted with boundless applause.Of this execrable piece it is sufficient to say, that the plot turns on a love affair, carried on in all the forms of Scudery, between Catiline, whose confidant is the Praetor Lentulus, and Tullia, the daughter of Cicero.The theatre resounded with acclamations.The King pensioned the successful poet; and the coffee-houses pronounced that Voltaire was a clever man, but that the real tragic inspiration, the celestial fire which had glowed in Corneille and Racine, was to be found in Crebillon alone.
The blow went to Voltaire's heart.Had his wisdom and fortitude been in proportion to the fertility of his intellect, and to the brilliancy of his wit, he would have seen that it was out of the power of all the puffers and detractors in Europe to put Catiline above Zaire; but he had none of the magnanimous patience with which Milton and Bentley left their claims to the unerring judgment of time.He eagerly engaged in an undignified competition with Crebillon, and produced a series of plays on the same subjects which his rival had treated.These pieces were coolly received.Angry with the court, angry with the capital, Voltaire began to find pleasure in the prospect of exile.His attachment for Madame du Chatelet long prevented him from executing his purpose.Her death set him at liberty; and he determined to take refuge at Berlin.
To Berlin he was invited by a series of letters, couched in terms of the most enthusiastic friendship and admiration.For once the rigid parsimony of Frederic seemed to have relaxed.Orders, honourable offices, a liberal pension, a well-served table, stately apartments under a royal roof, were offered in return for the pleasure and honour which were expected from the society of the first wit of the age.A thousand louis were remitted for the charges of the journey.No ambassador setting out from Berlin for a court of the first rank, had ever been more amply supplied.But Voltaire was not satisfied.At a later period, when he possessed an ample fortune, he was one of the most liberal of men; but till his means had become equal to his wishes, his greediness for lucre was unrestrained either by justice or by shame.He had the effrontery to ask for a thousand louis more, in order to enable him to bring his niece, Madame Denis, the ugliest of coquettes, in his company.The indelicate rapacity of the poet produced its natural effect on the severe and frugal King.The answer was a dry refusal."I did not," said his Majesty, "solicit the honour of the lady's society." On this, Voltaire went off into a paroxysm of childish rage."Was there ever such avarice? He has hundreds of tubs full of dollars in his vaults, and haggles with me about a poor thousand louis." It seemed that the negotiation would be broken off; but Frederic, with great dexterity, affected indifference, and seemed inclined to transfer his idolatry to Baculard D'Arnaud.His Majesty even wrote some bad verses, of which the sense was, that Voltaire was a setting sun, and that D'Arnaud was rising.Good-natured friends soon carried the lines to Voltaire.He was in his bed.He jumped out in his shirt, danced about the room with rage, and sent for his passport and his post-horses.It was not difficult to foresee the end of a connection which had such a beginning.
It was in the year 1750 that Voltaire left the great capital, which he was not to see again till, after the lapse of near thirty years, he returned bowed down by extreme old age, to die in the midst of a splendid and ghastly triumph.His reception in Prussia was such as might well have elated a less vain and excitable mind.He wrote to his friends at Paris, that the kindness and the attention with which he had been welcomed surpassed description, that the King was the most amiable of men, that Potsdam was the paradise of philosophers.He was created chamberlain, and received, together with his gold key, the cross of an order, and a patent ensuring to him a pension of eight hundred pounds sterling a year for life.A hundred and sixty pounds a year were promised to his niece if she survived him.The royal cooks and coachmen were put at his disposal.He was lodged in the same apartments in which Saxe had lived, when, at the height of power and glory, he visited Prussia.Frederic, indeed, stooped for a time even to use the language of adulation.He pressed to his lips the meagre hand of the little grinning skeleton, whom he regarded as the dispenser of immortal renown.