furious; and at length Voltaire snatched up a knife, and brandishing it exclaimed, "ne me regarde donc, pas avec tes yeux hagards et louches!" After such a scene as this, one would imagine that Love must have spread his light wings and fled for ever. Could Emilie ever have forgiven those words, or Voltaire have forgotten the look that provoked them?

But the mobilité of his mind was one of the most extraordinary parts of his character, and he was not more irascible than he was easily appeased. Madame du Chàtelet maintained her power over him for twenty years; during five of which they resided in her chateau at Cirey, under the countenance of her husband; he was a good sort of man, but seems to have been considered by these two geniuses and their guests as a complete nonentity. He was "Le bon-homme, le vilain petit Tricheteau," whom it was a task to speak to, and a penance to amuse. Every day, after coffee, Monsieur rose from his table with all the docility imaginable, leaving Voltaire and Madame to recite verses, translate Newton, philosophize, dispute, and to do the honours of Cirey to the brilliant society who had assembled under his roof.

While the boudoir, the laboratory, and the sleepingroom of the lady, and the study and gallery appropriated to Voltaire, were furnished with Oriental luxury and splendour, and shone with gilding, drapery, pictures, and baubles, the lord of the mansion and the guests were destined to starve in half-furnished apartments, from which the wind and the rain were scarcely excluded.*

In 1748, Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet paid a visit to the Court of Stanislaus, the ex-king of Poland, at Luneville, and took M. du Châtelet in their train. There Madame du Châtelet was seized with a passion for Saint Lambert, the author of the "Saisons," who was at least ten or twelve years younger than herself, and then a jeune militaire, only admired for his fine figure and pretty vers de société. Voltaire, it is said, was extremely jealous;

* "Vie privée de Voltaire et de Madame du Châtelet," in a series of letters, written by Madame de Graffigny during her stay at Cirey. The details in these letters are exceedingly amusing, but the style so diffuse, that it is scarcely possible to make extracts.

but his jealousy did not prevent him from addressing some very elegant verses to his handsome rival, in which he compliments him gaily on the good graces of the lady.

Saint-Lambert, ce n'est que pour toi
Que ces belles fleurs sont écloses,
C'est ta main qui cueille les roses,
Et les épines sont pour moi !*

Some months afterwards, Madame du Châtelet died in child-birth, in her forty-fourth year.

Voltaire was so overwhelmed by this loss, that he set off for Paris immediately pour se dissiper. Marmontel has given us a most ludicrous account of a visit of condolence he paid him on this occasion. He found Voltaire absolutely drowned in tears, at every fresh burst of sorrow, he called on Marmontel to sympathize with him. "Helas! j'ai perdu mon illustre amie! Ah! ah! je suis au desespoir!" Then exclaiming against Saint Lambert, whom he accused as the cause of the catastrophe—“Ah! mon ami! il me l'a tuée, le brutal!" while Marmontel, who had often heard him abuse his " sublime Emilie” in no measured terms, as "une furie, attachée à ses pas," hid his face with his handkerchief in pretended sympathy, but in reality to conceal his irrepressible smiles. In the midst of this scene of despair, some ridiculous idea or story striking Voltaire's vivid fancy, threw him into fits of laughter, and some time elapsed before he recollected that he was inconsolable.

The death of Madame du Châtelet, the circumstances which attended it, and the celebrity of herself and her lover, combined to cause a great sensation. No elegies indeed appeared on the occasion,-" no tears eternal that embalm the dead;" but a shower of epigrams and bon mots-some exquisitely witty and malicious. The story of her ring, in which Voltaire and her husband each expected to find his own portrait, and which on being opened, was found, to the utter discomfiture of both, to contain that of Saint Lambert, is well known.

If we may judge from her picture, Madame du Châtelet must have been extremely pretty. Her eyes were fine

* Epitre à Saint-Lambert.

and piercing; her features delicate, with a good deal of finesse and intelligence in their expression. But her countenance, like her character, was devoid of interest. She had great power of mental abstraction; and on one occasion she went through a most complicated calculation of figures in her head, while she played and won a game at piquet. She could be graceful and fascinating, but her manners were, in general, extremely disagreeable; and her parade of learning, her affectation, her egotism, her utter disregard of the comforts, feelings, and opinions of others, are well portrayed in two or three brilliant strokes of sarcasm from the pen of Madame de Staal.* She even turns her philosophy into ridicule. "Elle fait actuellement la revue de ses Principes;† c'est un exercise qu'elle réitère chaque année, sans quoi ils pourroient s'échapper; et peutêtre s'en aller si loin qu'elle n'en retrouverait pas un seul. Je crois bien que sa tête est pour eux une maison de force, et non pas le lieu de leur naissance."

That Madame du Châtelet was a woman of extraordinary talent, and that her progress in abstract sciences was uncommon, and even unique at that time, at least among her own sex, is beyond a doubt; but her learned treatises on Newton, and the nature of fire, are now utterly forgotten. We have since had a Mrs. Marcet; and we have read of Gaetana Agnesi, who was professor of mathema

* Madile. de Launay: it has become necessary to distinguish between two celebrated women bearing the same name, at least in sound.

"Les principes de la philosophie de Newton."

V. Correspondence de Madame de Deffand. In another letter from Sceaux, Madame de Staal adds the following clever, satirical,—but most characteristic picture :

"En tout cas on vous garde un bon appartement: c'est celui dont Madame du Châtelet, après une revue cxacte de toute la maison, s'était emparée. Il y aura un peu moins de meubles qu'elle n'y en avait mis; car elle avait dévasté tous ceux par où elle avait passé pour garnir celuila. On y a trouvé six ou sept tables; il lui en faut de toutes les grandeurs; d'immenses pour étaler ses papiers, de solides pour soutenir son necessaire, de plus légerès pour ses pompons, pour ses bijoux; et cette belle ordon. nance ne l'a pas garantie d'une accident pareil à celui qui arrive à Phil. lippe II. quand, après avoir passé la nuit à écrire, on répandit une bouteille d'encre sur ses dépèches. La dame ne s'est pas piquée d'imiter la moderation de ce prince; aussi n'avait-il écrit que sur des affaires d'état; et ce qu'on lui a barbouillé, c'etait de l'algèbre, bien plus difficile à remettre au net."

tics in the University of Padua; two women who, uniting to the rarest philosophical acquirements, gentleness and virtue, have needed no poet to immortalize them.

Of the numerous poems which Voltaire addressed to Madame du Châtelet the Epistle beginning

Tu m'appelles à toi, vaste et puissant génie,
Minerve de la France, immortelle Emilie,

is a chef d'œuvre, and contains some of the finest lines he ever wrote. The Epistle to her on calumny, written to console her for the abuse and ridicule which her abstractions and indiscretions had provoked, begins with these beautiful lines

Ecoutez-moi, respectable Emilie:

Vous êtes belle; ainsi donc la moitié
Du genre humain sera votre ennemie:
- Vous possédez un sublime génie ;
On vous craindra; votre tendre amitié
Est confiante; et vous serez trahic:
Votre vertu dans sa démarche unie,
Simple et sans fard, n'a point sacrifié
A nos dévots; craignez la calomnie.

With that famous ring, from which he had afterwards the mortification to discover that his own portrait had been banished to make room for that of Saint Lambert, he sent her this elegant quatrain.

Barier grava ces traits destinés pour vos yeux;
Avec quelque plaisir daignez les reconnoitre:

Les vôtres dans mon cœur furent gravés bien mieux,
Mais ce fut par un plus grand maitre.

The heroine of the famous Epistle, known as "Les Tu et les vous," (Madame de Gouverné,) was one of Voltaire's earliest loves; and he was passionately attached to her. They were separated in the world:-she went through the usual routine of a French woman's existence,-I mean, of a French woman l'ancien régime.

Quelques plaisirs dans la jeunesse,

Des soins dans la maternité,
Tous les malheurs dans la vieillesse,
Puis la peur de l'éternité.

She was first dissipated; then an esprit fort; then très

dévote. In obedience to her confessor, she discarded, one after the other, her rouge, her ribands, and the presents and billets-doux of her lovers; but no remonstrances could induce her to give up Voltaire's picture. When he returned from exile in 1778, he went to pay a visit to his old love; they had not met for fifty years, and they now gazed on each other in silent dismay. He looked, I suppose, like the dried mummy of an ape: she, like a withered sorcière. The same evening she sent him back his portrait, which she had hitherto refused to part with. Nothing remained to shed illusion over the past; she had beheld, even before the last terrible proof

What dust we doat on, when 'tis man we love.

And Voltaire, on his side, was not less dismayed by his visit. On returning from her, he exclaimed, with a shrug of mingled disgust and horror, "Ah, mes amis! je viens de passer à l'autre bord du Cocyte !" It was not thus that Cowper felt for his Mary, when "her auburn locks were changed to gray:" but it is almost an insult to the memory of true tenderness to mention them both in the same page.

To enumerate other women who have been celebrated by Voltaire, would be to give a list of all the beautiful and distinguished women of France for half a century; from the Duchesse de Richelieu and Madame de Luxembourg, down to Camargo the dancer, and Clairon and le Couvreur the actresses: but I can find no name of any poetical fame or interest among them: nor can I conceive any thing more revolting than the history of French society and manners during the Regency and the whole of the reign of Louis the Fifteenth.