The Hirsch business having blown over, as all things do, Voltaire resumed his place among the Court-Planets, and did his revolutions;striving to forget that there ever was a Hirsch, or a soot-explosion of that nature. In words nobody reminded him of it, the King least of all: and by degrees matters were again tolerably glorious, and all might have gone well enough; though the primal perfect splendor, such fuliginous reminiscence being ineffaceable, never could be quite re-attained. The diamond Cross of Merit, the Chamberlain gold Key, hung bright upon the man; a man the admired of men. He had work to do: work of his own which he reckoned priceless (that immortal SIECLE DE LOUIS QUATORZE; which he stood by, and honestly did, while here; the one fixed axis in those fooleries and whirlings of his);--work for the King, "two hours, one hour, a day," which the King reckoned priceless in its sort.
For Friedrich himself Voltaire has, with touches of real love coming out now and then, a very sincere admiration mixed with fear;and delights in shining to him, and being well with him, as the greatest pleasure now left in life. Besides the King, he had society enough, French in type, and brilliant enough: plenty of society; or, at his wish, what was still better, none at all.
He was bedded, boarded, lodged, as if beneficent fairies had done it for him; and for all these things no price asked, you might say, but that he would not throw himself out of window! Had the man been wise-- But he was not wise. He had, if no big gloomy devil in him among the bright angels that were there, a multitude of ravening tumultuary imps, or little devils very ILL-CHAINED; and was lodged, he and his restless little devils, in a skin far too thin for him and them!--Reckoning up the matter, one cannot find that Voltaire ever could have been a blessing at Berlin, either for Friedrich or himself;and it is to be owned that Friedrich was not wise in so longing for him, or clasping him so frankly in his arms. As Friedrich, by this time, probably begins to discover;--though indeed to Friedrich the thing is of finite moment; by no means of infinite, as it was to Voltaire. "At worst, nothing but a little money thrown away!"thinks Friedrich: "Sure enough, this is a strange Trismegistus, this of mine: star fire-work shall we call him, or terrestrial smoke-and-soot work? But one can fence oneself against the blind vagaries of the man; and get a great deal of good by him, in the lucid intervals." To Voltaire himself the position is most agitating; but then its glories, were there nothing more!
Besides hy is always thinking to quit it shortly; which is a great sedative in troubles. What with intermittencies (safe hidings in one's MARQUISAT, or vacant interlunar cave), with alternations of offence and reconcilement; what with occasional actual flights to Paris (whitherward Voltaire is always busy to keep a postern open;and of which there is frequent talk, and almost continual thought, all along), flights to be called "visits," and privately intending to be final, but never proving so,--the Voltaire-Friedrich relation, if left to itself, might perhaps long have staggered about, and not ended as it did.
But, alas, no relation can be left to itself in this world,--especially if you have a porous skin! There were other French here, as well as Voltaire, revolving in the Court-circle; and that, beyond all others, proved the fatal circumstance to him.
"NE SAVEZ-VOUS PAS, Don't you know," said he to Chancellor Jarriges one day, "that when there are two Frenchmen in a Foreign Court or Country, one of them must die (FAUT QUE L'UN DES DEUX PERISSE)?"[Seyfarth, ii. 191; &c. &c.] Which shocked the mind of Jarriges;but had a kind of truth, too. Jew Hirsch, run into for low smuggling purposes, had been a Cape of Storms, difficult to weather; but the continual leeshore were those French,--with a heavy gale on, and one of the rashest pilots! He did strike the breakers there, at last; and it is well known, total shipwreck was the issue. Our Second Act, holding out dubiously, in continual perils, till Autumn, 1752, will have to pass then into a Third of darker complexion, and into a Catastrophe very dark indeed.
