Voltaire in Love by Nancy Mitford

and a hideous house, behind the Hôtel de Ville. Here, one summer evening, 1733, he received a surprise visit: the three angels appearing to Abraham, he said. Two of the angels were lovers, the Duchesse de Saint-Pierre and M. de Fourqualquiers; they were chaperoning Voltaire’s new friend, the Marquise du Châtelet. The occasion was very cheerful. Whereas the three angels had supped with Abraham, Voltaire’s angels, fearing perhaps that the food in his bachelor establishment would not be up to much, preferred to take him to an inn where they ate fricassée of chicken. Just as well: ‘Marianne, my cook, would have screamed at the idea of such a supper-party in this slum.’ Voltaire probably showed his visitors the view, from his window, of the façade of Saint-Gervais saying that it was the only friend his Temple du Goût had made him. It was a joke he was very fond of and had a certain truth.
    Le Temple du Goût had just appeared and hardly had a single supporter. Most people nowadays would agree with the choice of writers, artists, and monuments which Voltaire allowed into the temple. They include Mme de Lafayette, Mme de Sévigné, Pascal (with reservations), the inimitable Molière, Racine who was Voltaire’s favourite poet, La Fontaine; Poussin, Lebrun, LeSueur, Le Vau, Perrault and his cour carrée at the Louvre, the fountains of Jean Goujon and Bouchardon, the Porte Saint-Denis, and the façade of Saint-Gervais. ‘All these monuments are neglected by the barbarous masses as well as by frivolous society people.’ His exclusions are more questionable. Notre Dame, ‘cluttered up with rubbishy old ornament’, is one. (The hatred of Gothic art in France during the eighteenth century was extravagant: one wonders that any was allowed to survive.) The chapel at Versailles and ‘that monument of bad taste’ which was being built by Servandoni, the church of Saint-Sulpice, were also excluded from the temple. Perhaps nothing arouses such strong feelings in the breasts of civilized human beings as questions of taste and Voltaire laid down the law in a very provocative manner. Even Cideville said that his feelings were hurt by some of the statements. The Comte de Caylus, a great collector and connoisseur but a disagreeable man, who was praised in the poem, asked that his name should be removed from it.
    Voltaire had rashly attacked the whole body of literary critics, ‘cowardly persecutors . . . who used to pretend that Scudéry was greater than Racine,’ as well as various contemporary writers, including Jean-Baptiste Rousseau and the Abbé Desfontaines. This stirred up a hornets’ nest and the hornets began to buzz. At the Marionettes there was a skit on Le Temple du Goût which was both coarse and cruel. Polichinelle is ill – comes the doctor – orders a good beating and a purge – after which the Temple du Goût is carried on to the stage, in the shape of an object that can be imagined. Voltaire, by bothering his powerful friends, had this parody taken off. Another one then appeared at the Comédie Italienne in which Voltaire, dressed as an Englishman in checks, made idiotic remarks on the subject of taste. Voltaire never could bear parodies of his works; he was now so furious that he became ill with inflammation of the bowels.
    In the middle of this fuss about his Temple, Voltaire was courting Émilie. The day after the angels’ visit he wrote a letter to the Duchesse de Saint-Pierre which was clearly meant to be read, over her shoulder, by another angel. ‘The charming letters that you write, Madame, and those sent you by somebody else turnthe head of the people who see them . . . I no longer venture to write in prose since I have read yours and that of your friend.’ It was natural that he and Mme du Châtelet should be attracted to each other. He had come back from England imbued with the scientific