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of his family; his father had had several Bastilles during the reign of Louis XIV. It must have been worth their while, in terms of cash.
    The party at Montjeu waited breathlessly for the post from Paris. The news got worse and worse. Jore was in the Bastille, Voltaire’s house had been searched, and there was a lettre de cachet out against him. As the authorities had no real desire to imprison this eminent man, they allowed him to be warned in time to get away from Montjeu, which he did with all possible speed. Two days after his departure the lettre de cachet, ordering him to report at once to the prison-fortress of Auxonne, was delivered to Mme du Châtelet. But the bird had flown. T have a mortal aversion to gaol.’
    Mme du Châtelet’s letters now breathe despair, and no wonder. She had been envisaging a long, peaceful life with her lover, and now their happiness seemed to be destroyed for ever. She was afraid he would be caught and put in a dungeon which, delicate as he was, might easily kill him, or where he might languish for years. At best he would have to live in exile where she would not be able to follow him. For a while she felt sure he had been arrested on leaving Montjeu; the lack of news added to her misery. She wrote to Richelieu: ‘What is the use of being young? I wish I were fifty, living in some country place with my unfortunate friend, Mme de Richelieu and you. Alas! We spend our lives making plans to be happy and we never succeed!’ Her great consolation was her friendship with Mme de Richelieu, whom she truly loved. She implanted Newton’s ideas in the mind of the young woman so thoroughly that a few months later Mme de Richelieu confounded a Cartesian Jesuit, to the admiration of some English tourists who were present. The fact that she was hardly grown up, and a Duchess, added to the interest they felt in this performance. Voltaire saidof her that she really did seem to understand the rudiments of philosophy.
    Soon the time came when Mme du Châtelet must leave Montjeu and go back to Paris. Here she began to agitate on Voltaire’s behalf with such energy and disregard of appearances that even he cried caution. It was too much, he said, people would begin to talk in a disagreeable way about their friendship. The whole affair was worse for Mme du Châtelet than for Voltaire. He was so well hidden, probably in Lorraine, that to this day nobody knows for certain where he went. The innumerable letters he wrote were posted in towns as far apart as Dijon and Basle, no doubt by travellers to whom he gave them. He had no intention of going to prison: he felt sure that he would wriggle out of the mess and meanwhile had the satisfaction of knowing that everybody in Paris was reading his book. He pretended to be indignant at the thought of society women and loungers in cafés discussing the rival merits of Newton and Descartes: in fact that was the object of his work. He never, himself, had an original philosophical idea, but he had a genius for simplifying the ideas of others so that society women and loungers in cafés could grasp them. ‘If I had not cheered up the subject [égayé la matière] nobody would have been scandalized; but then nobody would have read me.’
    It was not only Voltaire’s philosophical ideas and the attack on Pascal that were provoking anger in Paris, anger which this time was by no means confined to the Church and State. The theme of the Lettres, repeated over and over again, was that everything English was true and orderly, everything French rotten with frivolity and reaction. The English are free men, the French are enslaved by superstition, tyranny, and unreasonable laws. They have forgotten how to think. The serious English give their Kings a fair trial and then execute them. The capricious French assassinate theirs. English clergymen are old and married; when they get drunk they do it earnestly without causing a scandal.