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It happened once that this learned pair dropped unexpectedly into a fashionable circle in the château of a French nobleman. A Madame de Staël, the persifleur in office of Madame Du Deffand, has copiously narrated the whole affair. They arrived at midnight like two famished spectres, and there was some trouble to put them to supper and bed.
Voltaire and Madame de Chatelet would have suffered the same pain in being forced to an abstinence of their regular studies, as this circle of "agréables" would have at the loss of their meals and their airings. However, the persifleur declares they were ciphers "en société," adding no value to the number, and to which their learned writings bear no reference.
He dwelt in a vast, bright silk dressing-gown, and said that if an Emperor shook his hand he would cut it off. I said if a workman shook mine I should wash it. And so we parted, and he fell to denouncing me as a traitor and a persifleur, who would preach monarchy or republicanism, according to which sounded better in the sentence. Poor Lob Baruch!
There was only one Abbe Touvent, for morning or afternoon, for church or fete, for the chateau or the cottage. There were a dozen Albert de Chantonnays, fierce or tender, gay or sad, a poet or a soldier a light persifleur, who had passed through the mill, and had emerged hard and shining, or a young man of soul, capable of high ideals.
They feel withal that, if persiflage be the great thing, there never was such a persifleur. He is the realized ideal of every one of them; the thing they are all wanting to be; of all Frenchmen the most French. He is properly their god, such god as they are fit for. Accordingly all persons, from the Queen Antoinette to the Douanier at the Porte St. Denis, do they not worship him?
But if this literary couple would not play, what was worse, Voltaire poured out a vehement declamation against a fashionable species of gambling, which appears to have made them all stare. But Madame de Chatelet is the more frequent victim of our persifleur. The learned lady would change her apartment for it was too noisy, and it had smoke without fire which last was her emblem.
There was only one Abbe Touvent, for morning or afternoon, for church or fete, for the chateau or the cottage. There were a dozen Albert de Chantonnays, fierce or tender, gay or sad, a poet or a soldier a light persifleur, who had passed through the mill, and had emerged hard and shining, or a young man of soul, capable of high ideals.
Such things have not been possible in English since Swift, and the persifleur Heine cannot offer the same excuse of savage cynicism that might be pleaded for the Irishman.
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