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Updated: May 1, 2025
He spoke for a full hour in support of this particular suggestion of Maupertuis, and when he had finished his fellow-members assured him that what he had advanced was so novel and interesting that he would do well to expand his ideas into an essay, to be read at the next meeting.
Who could attend to Maupertuis while Voltaire was talking? Voltaire, who as obviously outshone Maupertuis as Maupertuis outshone La Mettrie and Darget and the rest. In his exasperation the President went to the length of openly giving his protection to a disreputable literary man, La Beaumelle, who was a declared enemy of Voltaire. This meant war, and war was not long in coming.
He had now been more than two years in Berlin, and the atmosphere of a Court was beginning to weigh upon his spirit; he was restless, he was reckless, he was spoiling for a fight; he would take on Maupertuis singly or Maupertuis and Frederick combined he did not much care which, and in any case he flattered himself that he would settle the hash of the President.
His patience with M. de Maupertuis, first and last, was very great. But we shall find it explode at length, a dozen years hence, in a conspicuous manner! Here is a poor rheumatic kind of Letter, which illustrates the interim condition, after that varnish of reconcilement at Brussels: "BRUSSELS, 29th August , 3d year since the world flattened.
Maupertuis is on the road, and we shall see him before long. Here is another little fact which had immense renown at home and abroad, in those summer months and long afterwards.
DIVUS FREDERICUS said to you, 'Sit down at my right hand in the Paradise of Berlin; and to me, 'Depart, thou accursed, into Holland. "Here I am accordingly in this phlegmatic place of punishment, far from the divine fire which animates the Friedrichs, the Maupertuis, the Algarottis.
Therefore, when he found near the village of Maupertuis a position in which a small force might have a chance to hold its own, he gave up the attempt to outmarch his pursuers, and he turned at bay, like a hunted boar, all tusks and eyes of flame.
Maupertuis has been at Brussels, on the road hither; saw Voltaire and even Madame, which latter was rather a ticklish operation, owing to grudges and tiffs of quarrel that had risen, but it proved successful under the delicate guidance of Voltaire.
Naturally cool and moderate, when it was nothing to do with Mdlle. de Lespinasse, the great affection of his life, the illustrious geometer was content with a little. "Twelve hundred livres a year are enough for me," he wrote to the Great Frederick who was pressing him to settle in his dominions. "I will not go and reap the succession to Maupertuis during his lifetime.
In cultivated French society there is no such lion as M. Maupertuis since he returned from flattening the Earth in the Arctic regions. "The Exact Sciences, what else is there to depend on?" thinks French cultivated society: "and has not Monsieur done a feat in that line?"
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