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"Truly, if I should eat all my enemies, I should suffer from an everlasting indigestion, and, in my despair, I might fly to La Mettrie for help. It is well known that when you suffer from incurable diseases, you seek, at last, counsel of the quack." "You forget that La Mettrie is a regular physician," said the king, with seeming earnestness.
Voltaire was very gracious this morning. As he was to play the part of improvisator that night, he thought it politic to make favor with all those who would be present. He hoped that all the world would thunder out their enraptured applause, and that Maupertius, D'Argens, Algarotti, La Mettrie, and all other friends of the king, would be filled with envy and rage.
In that case the war, which now seems probable with England, will not take place." "And yet it is said that great events can only arise from great causes," cried the king. "The peace of the world now hangs upon the receipt of a truffle-pie, which La Mettrie wishes to obtain." "What is the peace of the world in comparison with the peace of our souls?" cried Voltaire.
After his death the King himself delivered a funeral oration over him in the Academy. Voltaire was jealous of him, as he was of everyone who stood in his way, but La Mettrie was a physician, and Voltaire could be amiable to anyone of whom he stood in need. The doctor came, not out of philanthropy, but from curiosity and a certain malicious satisfaction at seeing the favourite in disgrace.
A heavy dissoluteness was paraded in Prussia. Officials, the gentry, women, all fed their minds on d’Holbach and La Mettrie, taking their doctrines seriously and applying them to the very letter. Add to this that in the newly built Prussian capital society, utterly artificial as it was, an improvised amalgam of incongruous elements, was predisposed, so to speak, to dissoluteness.
Accordingly he closed the window-shutters, and made a fire in the stove in order to burn dangerous papers. When he had finished, he went to bed, and rang for a servant: "Ask Monsieur La Mettrie to come; I am ill," he ordered. La Mettrie, the author of L'Homme Machine, a most rigorous materialist and atheist, enjoyed Frederick's favour on account of his writings.
Algarotti was an elegant dabbler in scientific matters he had written a book to explain Newton to the ladies; d'Argens was an amiable and erudite writer of a dull free-thinking turn; Chasot was a retired military man with too many debts, and Darget was a good-natured secretary with too many love affairs; La Mettrie was a doctor who had been exiled from France for atheism and bad manners; and Pöllnitz was a decaying baron who, under stress of circumstances, had unfortunately been obliged to change his religion six times.
La Mettrie might have done without Eulogy from a King of men. "The truth is," says Nicolai, "the King put no real value on La Mettrie. De la Mettrie showed himself unworthy of any favor he had. Not only did he babble, and repeat about Town what he heard at the King's table; but he told everything in a false way, and with malicious twists and additions.
Army-Surgeon La Mettrie, of busy brain, expert with his tourniquets and scalpels, but of wildly blusterous heterodox tongue and ways, is thrice-busy in Hospital this night, 'English and French all one to you, nay, if anything, the English better! those are the Royal orders: La Mettrie will turn up, in new capacity, still blusterous, at Berlin, by and by.
"La Mettrie may say what he will, and the worthy Abbe Bastiani may be wholly silent, but I believe I have a soul, which does not lie in my stomach, and this soul of mine will never be satisfied till your majesty keeps your promise, and relates one of those intellectual, piquant histories, glowing with wisdom and poesy, which so often flows from the lips of our Solomon!"
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