The Women in Voltaire's Life
It must have been in his very earliest school years that the celebrated presentation of him by his godfather to Ninon de L'Enclos took place, for Ninon died in 1705. She left him two thousand francs "to buy books with." At the Hague, in about 1713, Voltaire met a certain Olympe Dunoyer ("Pimpette"), a girl apparently of respectable character and not bad connexions, but a Protestant, penniless, and daughter of a literary lady whose literary reputation was not spotless. The mother discouraged the affair, and, though Voltaire tried to avail himself of the mania for proselytizing which then distinguished France, his father stopped any idea of a match by procuring a lettre de cachet, which, however, he did not use. About 1715, Voltaire was introduced to the famous "court of Sceaux," the circle of the beautiful and ambitious duchesse du Maine. It seems that Voltaire lent himself to the duchess's frantic hatred of the regent Orleans, and helped to compose lampoons on that prince. At any rate, in May 1716 he was exiled, first to Tulle, then to Sully... and on the 16th of May 1717 was sent to the Bastille. Voltaire's visiting espionage, as unkind critics put it-his secret diplomatic mission, as he would have liked to have it put himself-began in the summer of 1722, and he set out for it in company with a certain Madame de Rupelmonde, to whom he as usual made love, taught deism and served as an amusing travelling companion. He stayed at Cambrai for some time... On the 13th of August 1732, he produced Zaïre, the best (with Mérope) of all his plays... In the following winter the death of the comtesse de Fontaine-Martel, whose guest he had been, turned him out of a comfortable abode. Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais, published in 1733, was condemned June 10th, 1734, the copies seized and burnt, a warrant issued against the author and his dwelling searched. He himself was safe in the independent duchy of Lorraine with Émilie de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet (1706-1749), with whom he began to be intimate in 1733; he had now taken up his abode with her at the château of Cirey. She was the daughter of the baron de Breteuil, and married the marquis du Châtelet-Lomont in 1725. She was an accomplished linguist, musician and mathematician, and deeply interested in metaphysics. When she first became intimate with Voltaire she was practically separated from her husband, though he occasionally visited Cirey. She is only important from her connection with Voltaire, though an attempt has been made to treat her as an original thinker... If the English visit may be regarded as having finished Voltaire's education, the Cirey residence may be justly said to be the first stage of his literary manhood.... He now obtained a settled home for many years and, taught by his numerous brushes with the authorities, he began and successfully carried out that system of keeping out of personal harm's way, and of at once denying any awkward responsibility, which made him for nearly half a century at once the chief and the most prosperous of European heretics in regard to all established ideas.... In September 1749 Madame du Châtelet died after the birth of a child. A... solid gain to Voltaire's happiness was the adoption, or practical adoption, in 1776 of Reine Philiberte de Varicourt, a young girl of noble but poor family, whom Voltaire rescued from the convent, installed in his house as an adopted daughter, and married to the marquis de Villette. Her pet name was "Belle et Bonne," and nobody had more to do with the happiness of the last years of the "patriarch" than she had. Excerpts from the Voltaire article in the 1911 Edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.
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