On the road with Voltaire

Joseph Highmore, Painting showing a scene from Richardson's Pamela, 1744. 
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge  (Wikimedia)

Travel by road was hazardous in the 18th century, even for those who could afford the luxury of  a private coach and good horses.  The account which follows is taken from the memoirs of Voltaire's secretary Longchamp, who accompanied  Mme du Châtelet and Voltaire on an eventful journey from Paris to Cirey in the late 1740s.  Today the same journey by car (so Google Maps informs me) would take three-and-a-half  hours.

MY FIRST JOURNEY TO CIREY. 1747. 

On her return from Sceaux, Madame Mme du Châtelet, either to forget her losses or merely to economise, took the resolution to go with M. de Voltaire and pass the rest of the winter at her estate of Cirey in Champagne.   She preferred to travel by night.   It was the month of January, the earth was covered with snow, and it was freezing very hard.  Madame had caused to be made ready all the traps which usually accompanied her in her travels. Her old carriage was loaded like a coach, and it was drawn by post-horses.  After Mme du Châtelet and M. de Voltaire were well wedged in side by side in the carriage, they placed the femme de chambre on the front seat, with the bandboxes and the various effects of her mistress. Two lackeys were posted behind, and we got upon the road towards nine o'clock in the evening.

I rode on before as postilion, that they might find horses ready for them, and not have to wait for relays. They were to make one stop for rest at La Chapelle, a château three leagues beyond Nangis, belonging to M. de Chauvelin, where I was to arrive before them, to have a supper prepared and to light a fire in their rooms.

A Relais de Poste aux chevaux at Launois-sur-Vence in the Ardennes, now a museum

I did not wait for them at the post-houses, but kept on in advance, according to their orders.  It was an hour after midnight when I reached the post-house of Nangis.  It was the festival of the place, and the postilions, not expecting any one at that hour and in such weather, had gone to divert themselves at a ball at the other end of the town.  It was in vain therefore, that I cracked my whip and shouted for the door to open.  No one responded.  I dismounted, and knocked with all my strength with the heel of my boot.  At last, roused by this noise, a neighbour, putting his head out of the window, told me that there was no one at home, and that all the postilions were gone to the ball.  I asked him if I could not hire some one to run thither and get the postilions at once.  He offered to go himself, and in less than a quarter of an hour he returned with two postilions, which was the number required for the carriages. The time thus lost seemed to me sufficient to allow for the arrival of the carriage, and I was a little uneasy at the delay.  I hesitated a moment whether to go on or return to find them; but reflecting that our travellers would be very much dissatisfied if, on arriving at La Chapelle, they should not find their orders exactly executed, I determined to continue my journey; and so much the more as there remained three long leagues to go, by a cross-road with which I was not acquainted. 

Unable to procure a guide, I had the road explained to me several times.  I was told that, in going out of this town, I had only to follow the high-road to the first left-hand turning.  From that point the white horse they gave me, which knew that road perfectly, would serve me as a guide, and with the bridle upon his neck would take me straight to La Chapelle.  I followed these directions, and after an hour and a half found myself opposite to the gate of a château, where the horse stopped of his own accord.  The concierge, who expected no one, was gone to bed in the interior of the château, which was separated from the gate-way by a vast courtyard.  In vain, therefore, I called and shouted: no-one replied. Then, leading my horse by the bridle, I endeavoured to go round the château, to see if I could make myself heard better at some other place.  I came at last to a little door where there was a bell, which I rang several times.  I saw with pleasure that I was heard; a gardener came and asked me who I was and what I wanted.  I having answered him, he went to wake the concierge, who soon came and let me in.  He immediately roused the servants, lighted a great fire in the kitchen and fires in the chambers.  Some pigeons were brought and a  chicken, which  were  immediately  prepared  to roast.  They added everything which they could find suitable to satisfy travellers, whose appetite ought to be well disposed. Nevertheless, despite all the time thus employed, they did not arrive. The day was about to dawn, and, my uneasiness increasing at every moment, I decided to return to Nangis, in order to discover what could have happened to them.  I mounted, and set out from the château toward eight o'clock in the morning.  I had gone some hundreds of paces when I perceived a carriage coming towards me very slowly, which I soon recognised to be that of Madame du Châtelet. When I had ridden up, they soon told me the cause of their delay; and the story was related afterwards to me in detail by the femme de chambre, and confirmed by M. de Voltaire himself.

About half-way to the village of Nangis, the hinder spring of the carriage broke and let the carriage down upon the road, upon the side where M. Voltaire was seated.  Madame and her femme fell upon him, with all their bundles and bandboxes, which were loosely piled on the front seat on each side of the woman, and which, following natural laws, were precipitated toward the corner where M. de Voltaire was compressed.  Half-stifled under such a load, he uttered piercing cries, but it was impossible to change his position.  He had to remain as he was until the two lackeys, one of whom was hurt by his tumble, came up with the postilions to unload the carriage.  First, they drew out all the bundles, then the women, then M. de Voltaire. They could get them out only by the door of the carriage which was uppermost; and hence, one of the lackeys and a postilion, having climbed upon the body of the carriage, drew them out as from a well, seizing them by the first members which presented themselves, arms or legs, and passed them into the hands of their comrades below, who put them on the ground; since there was neither step nor stool by which they could be assisted to descend.  It was then the question how to raise the carriage and see what had caused its overturn. These four men were not strong enough to do it, so overloaded was the roof with baggage, and it was necessary to dispatch a postilion on horseback for help in the next village, a mile and a half distant.

A couple contemplate the stars.
Late 18c German book illustration [Wikimedia]

While he was gone, M. de Voltaire and madame were seated side by side upon the cushions of the carriage, which had been drawn out and placed upon the road, that was covered with snow;  and there, almost benumbed with cold notwithstanding their furs, they admired the beauty of the heavens. It is true, the sky was perfectly clear, the stars shone with the utmost brilliancy, the whole horizon was in view; no house, no tree, concealing from them the least part of it. It is known that astronomy was always one of the favourite studies of our two philosophers.  Ravished by the magnificent spectacle displayed above and around them, they discoursed, shivering, upon the nature and the movements of the stars and upon the destination of so many immense globes scattered in space. They wanted nothing but telescopes to be perfectly happy. Their minds being thus lost in the depths of the skies, they were no longer conscious of their disagreeable position on the earth, or rather upon the snow, and in the midst of fragments of ice.

[ Gustave Desnoiresterres long ago thought this little tableau too good to be true:

"It would doubtless have made a delicious picture: the carriage on its side, the baggage strewn on the road, the horses standing shaking piteously, whilst the men breathed on their fingers and stamped their feet to keep out the cold.  On the other side, the two scientists, sitting on their squares of Utrecht velvet, noses in the air, regretting nothing but the absence of a telescope..." Voltaire et la société au XVIIIe siècle, vol.3, p.159]

Their learned contemplation and discourse were interrupted only by the return of the postilion, who brought with him four men, furnished with cord, tools, and a false spring. The carriage being set  upright, the real cause of the accident was perceived, and they mended it as well as they could with the materials they had brought with them. Twelve francs were given them when their work was done and they returned toward their village, little content with this sum, and grumbling at it.

The carriage went on again, but had scarcely gone fifty paces when the cords, not being strong enough, became loose and partly broken, and the vehicle came down a second time, but without over-turning, which rendered this new break-down much less disagreeable to our travellers.

Some one ran quickly after the workmen who had just left. They, however, did not wish to return. They were brought back by force of promises that they should be better paid. With the assistance of the postilions, they raised the body of the coach with levers, and mended it more strongly, without deranging the interior of the vehicle. For greater safety, they proposed to these workmen to go with them as far as Nangis, which they did, and the carriage arrived there without other accident.  This time the men were liberally paid, and they went home well satisfied. The spring was solidly repaired by a blacksmith of that town, but the body of the vehicle was so badly damaged that the blacksmith advised them to go no faster than a walk, if they wished to prevent accidents and it was so that they went nine miles before arriving at a good harbour. 

Having reached the château, they warmed themselves thoroughly before a large fire, which was not less necessary to them than nourishment. After having supped, or, to speak more correctly, breakfasted, for it was daylight, they withdrew to their rooms, where good beds had been prepared for them, and they slept very well till late in the afternoon. M. de Voltaire, having got up, ordered me to get workmen to repair the body of the carriage, which proved to be in such bad order that it took two whole days to put it in tolerable condition. On the third day we left La Chapelle, and arrived at length, without new delay or accident, at Cirey, the estate of Mme du Châtelet.

"The homecoming" by Ferdinand Messerschmitt (1858-1915) [Wikimedia]

Reference

Longchamp et Wagnière, Mémoires sur Voltaire et ses ouvrages, vol. 2 (1826), p. 246-254.

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k864574/f166.item

The translation is taken from: James Parton, Life of Voltaire (1881)  p.533-36. [on GoogleBooks]  

See "Voltaire and travel" in Correspondance Voltaire [Bibliothek Voltaire] - This German website, with features an annotated list of all Voltaire's various journeys. 

https://www.correspondance-voltaire.de/voltaires-reisen/

Notes:

1. The chronological place of the narrative

Despite the fact that Longchamp gives the year as 1747, the anecdote of the broken axle is difficult to place.  Gustav Desnoiresterres situated the journey described at the start of Voltaire and Mme du Châtelet's first trip to the court of King Stanislas, which took place in January 1748 (rather than 1747 as stated).  Longchamp seems to corroborate this, since he goes on to relate that they subsequently spent four months at Cirey before moving on to Lorraine.   However, according to  René Vaillot, on this occasion they travelled from Paris in relative comfort in the company of Mme de Boufflers and her party. They stopped off only very briefly in Cirey, since Voltaire was writing from Lunéville as early as 1st February 1748.   Vaillot speculates that the incident of the broken axle in fact took place in late January/early February 1749 in the course of a journey from Cirey to Paris.  This fits in with the unusually cold winter that year, and  with Voltaire's complaints of "sciatica" in his correspondence from Paris at this time. (Vaillot,  Avec Madame Du Châtelet 1734-1749,  p.306). 

2. Longchamp and his text:

It is now clear that the text of Longchamp's memoirs, as originally published in 1826, includes a substantial amount of embellishment by Decroix, the working editor of the Kehl edition of Voltaire’s complete works.  A new critical edition, based on the manuscript acquired by the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1946 was published in 2009: 

Sébastien Longchamp, Anecdotes sur la vie privée de Monsieur de Voltaire, edited by Frédéric S. Eigeldinger, annotated  Raymond Trousson, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2009.

Sadly, one of the incidents which has been thrown into doubt on is the set-piece communion between Voltaire and Du Châtelet beneath the stars.

Here are extracts from two reviews by Voltaire scholars writing in English:

Roger Pearson in French Studies, 2010. Vol,64(2): p.208-9.

Present-day biographers of Voltaire stand like lucky pygmies on the shoulders of the memoirists and biographers who have preceded them: Longchamp, Collini, Wagnière, Duvernet, Condorcet, Desnoiresterres, Besterman, Pomeau, et al. But, as W.H. Barber first revealed (in John Lough’s 1978 Festschrift: see FS, 33 (1979), 447–48), Longchamp’s shoulders were padded — by Decroix, the working editor of the Kehl edition of Voltaire’s complete works. Here for the first time, with meticulous textual editing, rich annotation, and an informative introduction (pp. 7–40), we have Longchamp’s unadulterated reminiscences of his life as Voltaire’s secretary (from the manuscript acquired by the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1946), together with the embellished and annotated version that Decroix and Beuchot published alongside the memoirs of Voltaire’s later secretary, Wagnière, in 1826 — and on which many subsequent biographers have innocently but ill-advisedly relied. Born in Lorraine in 1718, Longchamp was employed from the age of fifteen as a footman to the comtesse de Lannoy, in Brussels and Lunéville. In 1746 he switched allegiance to his sister’s employer, the marquise Du Châtelet, hoping thereby to see the bright lights of Paris. Somewhat perturbed, as he himself recounts, to be required to attend his uncoy mistress in her bedroom and bath (where the requested provision of additional hot water entailed a ticklish choice between modesty of gaze and accuracy of aim) he soon [End Page 208] attached himself to Voltaire, as reliable copyist and general factotum. In this capacity he remained privy to the couple’s activities over the next four years, until Émilie’s death and Voltaire’s departure for Berlin. Longchamp’s text (pp. 45–141) is homespun and itself not always trustworthy, whether through fault of memory or reliance on hearsay. But he has a gossip’s nose for a story and a servant’s gift for periphrasis: ‘Les assiduités de M. de S[ain]t-Lambert auprès d’elle [Mme Du Châtelet] l’avaient mise dans le cas de devenir mère’ (p. 94). Voltaire having extended his stay in Berlin, Longchamp set up shop in Paris as a map-seller, married, and raised a son. He met his former master one last time, when Voltaire returned to Paris shortly before his death in 1778; and at some point before 1786 he sold Decroix these ‘Anecdotes’ (along with the Traité de métaphysique). He died in 1793. Decroix ‘improved’ Longchamp’s ‘Anecdotes’ in both style and content, turning them into ‘Mémoires’ by adding, cutting, correcting, and distorting (as Trousson, following Barber, shows, and as we can here see for ourselves). But were Decroix’s ‘embroiderings’, as Barber perhaps implies, all necessarily unreliable? Might not some, at least, be reasonable inferences (e.g. that Voltaire did read Zadig to the duchesse du Maine in 1747) or be perhaps, as Trousson wonders briefly (pp. 38–9), based on Longchamp’s supplementary, probably oral testimony? Or other people’s? One further mystery remains: Albanès-Havard’s 1863 edition of an anonymous servant’s ‘révélations’ about Voltaire and Mme Du Châtelet. It strongly implies the existence of a second Longchamp manuscript. Missing manuscripts? Thus does life imitate the art of Voltaire’s contes. 

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/8/article/379226

The text referred to, edited by Albanès-Havard, is available on GoogleBooks. 

Édouard Langille in The French Review,  Vol.85(3): p.561-2.

Late in life, when the Kehl edition was being printed, Longchamp provided the editors (one of whom was Decroix) with an important and hitherto unpublished manuscript: Voltaire’s Traité de métaphysique (1734). He then consigned to the same editors his personal recollections. These “Mémoires” were finally published in 1826; they quickly became celebrated as providing a unique aperçu into the domestic life of one of the eighteenth century’s most intriguing couples. Through Longchamp, for example, it has come down that the divine Émilie was in the habit of undressing in front of her male servants and that on at least one occasion she went so far as to expose herself in the bath without the slightest hint of embarrassment. Longchamp naturally gives a unique account of Voltaire’s relationship with the tempestuous Émilie and a number of anecdotes he records figure prominently in the standard biographies. For example, Longchamp is the only known source of the story that Voltaire tried to curb Émilie’s gambling by whispering in English at the Queen’s table (where she had accumulated losses of 80,000 livres) that she was “playing with a pack of cheats” That incident, and its implied insult to the queen, precipitated the couple’s midnight flight from Fontainebleau and their sojourn at Sceaux under the protection of the duchesse du Maine. Also, according to Decroix, it was for the diminutive Duchess’s amusement that Voltaire composed Babouc, Memnon, Scarmentado, Micromégas, and Zadig. Longchamp, we now learn, said nothing of the sort, only that Voltaire wrote (or perhaps revised) Zadig, Babouc, and other tales during his stay at Sceaux. Other less dramatic incidents include the “broken axle story” in which Voltaire and Mme Du Châtelet, stranded on a wintry night, contemplated the starry cosmos propped up on cushions and wrapped in furs: “Ravis du magnifique spectacle déployé au-dessus d’eux, ils dissertaient, en grelottant, sur la nature et le cours des astres, sur la destination de tant de globes immenses répandus dans l’espace”  We now know that none of this took place; that the mise en scène was entirely invented by Decroix.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/771502/summary

Louis de Carmontelle, Voltaire et Mme du Châtelet (apparently sewing??), c.1747-50. Utpictura18