No, not her opinions on him leaving for Potsdam, I haven't reread that section. But the incest question! (I mean, this is the sex thread. We have to stay on topic!)
Was he, as some scholars think, obliquely referring to the question of possibly marrying Mme Denis? The idea seems absurd. Mme Denis was his niece, and marriage with her would be incestuous and illegal. And yet it was not absolutely impossible, in the eighteenth century, for a man to marry his niece, if he got the right papal dispensation. Charles-Marie de La Condamine, the mathematician and physicist and one of Voltaire’s friends, married his niece in 1756; and the financier Jean Pâris de Montmartel also married his niece. Voltaire investigated the question in some detail. He claimed that there may have been about forty such marriages every year; and he estimated that the cost of the papal dispensation would have been some 120,000 francs (‘once you include the small expenses’), though he went on to say: ‘I have always heard it said that it cost M. de Montmartel only 80,000 francs.’
If Voltaire was so interested in the question of marriage between uncles and nieces and what it entailed, the implication must be that at some stage he gave real consideration to the idea of marriage with Mme Denis.
Footnoted citations: Voltaire, Romans et contes, pot-pourri, vol. XIII (Éditions de La Pléiade, Paris), p. 464 (first published in 1765); Voltaire, Mélanges, La Défense de mon oncle, de l’inceste (Éditions de La Pléiade, Paris), p. 1156, (first published in 1767).
Re: Voltaire and Madame Denis
Was he, as some scholars think, obliquely referring to the question of possibly marrying Mme Denis? The idea seems absurd. Mme Denis was his niece, and marriage with her would be incestuous and illegal. And yet it was not absolutely impossible, in the eighteenth century, for a man to marry his niece, if he got the right papal dispensation. Charles-Marie de La Condamine, the mathematician and physicist and one of Voltaire’s friends, married his niece in 1756; and the financier Jean Pâris de Montmartel also married his niece. Voltaire investigated the question in some detail. He claimed that there may have been about forty such marriages every year; and he estimated that the cost of the papal dispensation would have been some 120,000 francs (‘once you include the small expenses’), though he went on to say: ‘I have always heard it said that it cost M. de Montmartel only 80,000 francs.’
If Voltaire was so interested in the question of marriage between uncles and nieces and what it entailed, the implication must be that at some stage he gave real consideration to the idea of marriage with Mme Denis.
Footnoted citations: Voltaire, Romans et contes, pot-pourri, vol. XIII (Éditions de La Pléiade, Paris), p. 464 (first published in 1765); Voltaire, Mélanges, La Défense de mon oncle, de l’inceste (Éditions de La Pléiade, Paris), p. 1156, (first published in 1767).
Thoughts?