Sébastien Longchamp: Anecdotes sur la vie privée de Monsieur de Voltaire (review)

Present-day biographers of Voltaire stand like lucky pygmies on the shoulders of the memoirists and biographers who have preceded them: Longchamp, Collini, Wagnière, Duvernet, Condorcet, Desnoiresterres, Besterman, Pomeau, et al. But, as W.H. Barber first revealed (in John Lough’s 1978 Festschrift: see FS, 33 (1979), 447–48), Longchamp’s shoulders were padded — by Decroix, the working editor of the Kehl edition of Voltaire’s complete works. Here for the first time, with meticulous textual editing, rich annotation, and an informative introduction (pp. 7–40), we have Longchamp’s unadulterated reminiscences of his life as Voltaire’s secretary (from the manuscript acquired by the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1946), together with the embellished and annotated version that Decroix and Beuchot published alongside the memoirs of Voltaire’s later secretary, Wagnière, in 1826 — and on which many subsequent biographers have innocently but ill-advisedly relied. Born in Lorraine in 1718, Longchamp was employed from the age of fifteen as a footman to the comtesse de Lannoy, in Brussels and Lunéville. In 1746 he switched allegiance to his sister’s employer, the marquise Du Châtelet, hoping thereby to see the bright lights of Paris. Somewhat perturbed, as he himself recounts, to be required to attend his uncoy mistress in her bedroom and bath (where the requested provision of additional hot water entailed a ticklish choice between modesty of gaze and accuracy of aim) he soon attached himself to Voltaire, as reliable copyist and general factotum. In this capacity he remained privy to the couple’s activities over the next four years, until Émilie’s death and Voltaire’s departure for Berlin. Longchamp’s text (pp. 45–141) is homespun and itself not always trustworthy, whether through fault of memory or reliance on hearsay. But he has a gossip’s nose for a story and a servant’s gift for periphrasis: ‘Les assiduités de M. de S[ain]t-Lambert auprès d’elle [Mme Du Châtelet] l’avaient mise dans le cas de devenir mère’ (p. 94). Voltaire having extended his stay in Berlin, Longchamp set up shop in Paris as a map-seller, married, and raised a son. He met his former master one last time, when Voltaire returned to Paris shortly before his death in 1778; and at some point before 1786 he sold Decroix these ‘Anecdotes’ (along with the Traité de métaphysique). He died in 1793. Decroix ‘improved’ Longchamp’s ‘Anecdotes’ in both style and content, turning them into ‘Mémoires’ by adding, cutting, correcting, and distorting (as Trousson, following Barber, shows, and as we can here see for ourselves). But were Decroix’s ‘embroiderings’, as Barber perhaps implies, all necessarily unreliable? Might not some, at least, be reasonable inferences (e.g. that Voltaire did read Zadig to the duchesse du Maine in 1747) or be perhaps, as Trousson wonders briefly (pp. 38–9), based on Longchamp’s supplementary, probably oral testimony? Or other people’s? One further mystery remains: Albanès-Havard’s 1863 edition of an anonymous servant’s ‘révélations’ about Voltaire and Mme Du Châtelet. It strongly implies the existence of a second Longchamp manuscript. Missing manuscripts? Thus does life imitate the art of Voltaire’s contes.