[ Tellentyre's Commentary: Mme. du Boccage, a pretty and charming woman, was greatly overrated as a poetess by almost all her contemporaries, including Voltaire. "Your translation of Milton" was her imitation of Paradise Lost which she called Le Paradis Terrestre. Her Letters, written on her travels, are much her best performance. In 1758, she was Voltaire's guest at Ferney.

In September, 1749, Mme. du Châtelet, with whom Voltaire's connection had lasted for fifteen years, died suddenly, in childbirth, at the Court of King Stanislas at Lunéville, while she, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Saint Lambert, who was now her lover, were on a visit there. Faithless to Voltaire as she had been, that he sincerely and passionately regretted her death and the loss of her clever and stimulating companionship, the following letter bears evidence.

"A wretch named Roi." Roi, or Roy, was a scurrilous old poet who, in 1745-6, jealous of Voltaire's election to the French Academy, had burlesqued and lampooned him; and whom Voltaire had not been wise enough to treat with the silence of contempt. Roi saw in Mme. du Châtelet's death the chance to sting afresh. ]

Paris, October 12, 1749.

I have just arrived in Paris, madam: the greatness of my sorrow and my wretched health shall not prevent my at once assuring you how deeply I feel your kindness. A mind as noble as yours must needs regret such a woman as Mme. du Châtelet. She was an honour to her sex and to France. She was to philosophy what you are to literature: and although she had just translated and simplified Newton--that is to say, done what, at most, three or four men in France would have dared to attempt--she also regularly cultivated, by reading lighter books, the splendid intelligence which nature had given her. Alas, madam! it was but four days before her death that I re-read your tragedy with her. We had also read together your translation of Milton, with the original. You would regret her yet more had you been present at this reading. She rendered you justice: you had no more sincere admirer. Just after her death there appeared a feeble quatrain belauding her. People with neither taste nor feeling ascribed it to me. Any one who could suppose that in the depth of my grief I should feel inclined to write verses on her must be himself unworthy of friendship, or exceedingly light minded: but what is much more horrible and culpable is that a wretch, named Roi, has actually dared to lampoon her.

I know, madam, only one thing against your character--to have been the object of that miserable creature's flattery. Society should unite to exterminate him. Was not my misery great enough, without that horror to crown it? Farewell, madam.