Free Voltaire in Love by Nancy Mitford

There are no gay young Abbés de Cour, no boy bishops in England. Which is the more valuable citizen, a French nobleman who can tell you exactly what time the King gets up and goes to bed, or an English merchant who gives orders to Surat and Cairo from his office, contributes to thehappiness of the world and enriches his country? The English had a theatre long before the French. It was created by Shakespeare, a genius of force and fecundity though without a ray of taste or any knowledge of the rules of drama. No people in the world love a public hanging so much as the English and this partly accounts for the success of his plays, in which he loads the stage with corpses. Literature is more honoured in England than in France, and if there were an English Academy of Letters it would be vastly superior to that ridiculous institution the Académie Française. English doctors are stamping out the dreaded smallpox with the simple process of inoculation. The French medical profession, of course, is far too hidebound to allow its patients to benefit by this discovery. As for philosophy, a Frenchman arriving in London finds everything upside-down. In Paris the universe is composed of whirlwinds which do not exist in London. Voltaire then proceeds to demonstrate the superiority of Newton as a thinker over Descartes.
    To say that the French were displeased would be putting it mildly. The whole reading public was in a rage. How dared Voltaire set the barbarous English, heretics and regicides, above the civilized French? How dared he compare their primitive literature with that which had produced Racine? Shakespeare indeed! And what of Grévin, who lived at the same time and wrote a splendid play about Julius Caesar? ‘The English are very welcome to this deserter from our land,’ said Mathieu Marais.
    As angry as anybody were the scientists. Nationalism had a strong influence on eighteenth-century thought. The French were prejudiced in favour of Descartes because he was French; it was years before Voltaire, Maupertuis, and other philosophers were able to get Newton accepted in academic circles. In the same way, the Germans, in spite of Frederick the Great’s efforts to impose Newton on them, could never really be weaned from Leibnitz, because he was German.
    On 10 June the Lettres philosophiques were torn to pieces and burnt outside the Palais de Justice. ‘Scandalous, against religion, decent behaviour, and the respect due to the powers that be.’ When he received the news Voltaire merely remarked that another time he would say a great deal more.
    Richelieu, back at the siege of Philippsburg, found himself in the same army group as his wife’s cousins, the Prince de Lixin and the Prince de Pons. The Prince de Conti, who was commanding a regiment, gave a party to celebrate his own seventeenth birthday. Richelieu was an old friend of the Prince’s father; he felt he could go to the party straight from a day in the trenches, without changing his clothes. When the Prince de Lixin saw him he remarked in a loud voice that M. de Richelieu, in spite of his marriage, still seemed to have a good deal of dirt clinging to him. The Duke called him out; they decided to fight at once, because fighting among officers was forbidden and they were afraid of being stopped. So they proceeded, with their friends, to a deserted place behind the trenches and told the servants to light flares. These attracted the enemy’s fire, and the duel took place amid falling shells; the Germans soon found the range and one of the servants was killed. The opponents were evenly matched; Lixin almost immediately wounded Richelieu in the thigh. The Duke’s seconds, who were liking the situation less and less, urged him to give up. He refused and the fight went on a good long time. In the end Richelieu ran Lixin through the heart. The officers present, thankful to be alive themselves, carried the two principals off the field, one to