and the nimble wicked Voltaire so seizes his moment, trips poor Sisyphus; and sends him down, heels-over-head, in a torrent of roaring debris! 'From gradual transpiration of our vital force comes Death; which perhaps, by precautions, might be indefinitely retarded,' says Maupertuis. 'Yes, truly,' answers the other: 'if we got ourselves japanned, coated with resinous varnish (INDUITS DEPOIX RESINEUX); who knows!' Not a sublime owlery can you drop, but it is manipulated, ground down, put in rifled cannon, comes back on you as tempests of burning dust." Enough to send Maupertuis pirouetting through the world, with red wig unquenchably on fire!
Peals of laughter (once you are allowed to be non-official) could not fail, as an ovation, from the King;--so report the French Biographers. But there was, besides, strict promise that the Piece should be suppressed: "Never do to send our President pirouetting through the world in this manner, with his wig on fire; promise me, on your honor!" Voltaire promised. But, alas, how could Voltaire perform! Once more the Rhadamanthine fact is: Voltaire, as King's Chamberlain, was bound, without any promise, to forbear, and rigidly suppress such an AKAKIA against the King's Perpetual President. But withal let candid readers consider how difficult it was to do. The absurd blusterous Turkey-cock, who has, every now and then, been tyrannizing over you for twenty years, here you have him filled with gunpowder, so to speak, and the train laid.
There wants but one spark,--(edition printed in Holland, edition done in Berlin, plenty of editions made or makable by a little surreptitious legerdemain,--and I never knew whether it was AKAKIAin print, or AKAKIA in manuscript, that King and King's Chamberlain were now reading together, nor does it matter much):--your Turkey surreptitiously stuffed with gunpowder, I say; train ready waiting;one flint-spark will shoot him aloft, scatter him as flaming ruin on all the winds: and you are, once and always, to withhold said spark. Perhaps, had AKAKIA not yet been written--But all lies ready there; one spark will do it, at any moment;--and there are unguarded moments, and the Tempter must prevail!--On what day AKAKIA blazed out at Berlin, surreptitiously forwarded from Holland or otherwise, I could never yet learn (so stupid these reporters). But "on November 2d" the King makes a Visit to sick Maupertuis, which is published in all the Newspapers; [Rodenbeck, IN DIE; Helden-Geschichte, iii. 531, "2d November, 1752, 5 P.M."]--and one might guess the AKAKIAconflagration, and cruel haha-ings of mankind, to have been tacitly the cause. Then or later, sure enough, AKAKIA does blaze aloft about that time; and all Berlin, and all the world, is in conversation over Maupertuis and it,--30,000 copies sold in Paris:
--and Friedrich naturally was in a towering passion at his Chamberlain. Nothing for the Chamberlain but to fly his presence;to shriek, piteously, "Accident, your Majesty! Fatal treachery and accident; after such precautions too!"--and fall sick to death (which is always a resource one has); and get into private lodgings in the TAUBEN-STRASSE, [At a "Hofrath Francheville's" (kind of subaltern Literary Character, see Denina, ii. 67), "TAUBEN-STRASSE(Dove Street), No. 20:" stayed there till "March, 1753" (Note by Preuss, OEuvres de Frederic, xxii. 306 n.).]
till one either die, or grow fit to be seen again: "Ah, Sire"--let us give the Voltaire shriek of NOT-GUILTY, with the Friedrich Answer; both dateless unluckily:--VOLTAIRE. "AH, MON DIEU, Sire, in the state I am in! I swear to you again, on my life, which I could renounce without pain, that it is a frightful calumny. I conjure you to summon all my people, and confront them. What? You will judge me without hearing me! I demand justice or death."FRIEDRICH. "Your effrontery astonishes me. After what you have done, and what is clear as day, you persist, instead of owning yourself culpable. Do not imagine you will make people believe that black is white; when one [ON, meaning _I_] does not see, the reason ?ONE p. 218, book XVI+++++++++++++++++is, one does not want to see everything. But if you drive the affair to extremity,--all shall be made public; and it will be seen whether, if your Works deserve statues, your conduct does not deserve chains." [ OEuvres de Frederic, xxii.
302, 301.]
Most dark element (not in date only), with terrific thunder-and-lightning. Nothing for it but to keep one's room, mostly one's bed,--"Ah, Sire, sick to death!"December 24th, 1752, there is one thing dismally distinct, Voltaire himself looking on (they say), from his windows in Dove Street:
the Public Burning of AKAKIA, near there, by the common Hangman.
Figure it; and Voltaire's reflections on it:--haggardly clear that Act Third is culminating; and that the final catastrophe is inevitable and nigh. We must be brief. On the eighth day after this dread spectacle (New-year's-day 1753), Voltaire sends, in a Packet to the Palace, his Gold Key and Cross of Merit. On the interior wrappage is an Inscription in verse: "I received them with loving emotion, I return them with grief; as a broken-hearted Lover returns the Portrait of his Mistress:-- Je les recus avec tendresse, Je vous les rends avec douleur;C'est ainsi qu'un amant, dans son extreme ardeur, Rend le portrait de sa maitresse."
And--in a Letter enclosed, tender as the Song of Swans--has one wish: Permission for the waters of Plonbieres, some alleviations amid kind nursing friends there; and to die craving blessings on your Majesty. [Collini, p. 48; LETTER, in OEuvres de Frederic, xxii. 305.]
Friedrich, though in hot wrath, has not quite come that length.
