He himself was safe in the independent duchy of Lorraine with Emilie de Breteuil, marquise du Chatelet,' with whom he began to be intimate in 1733; he had now taken up his abode with her at the château of Cirey.
If the English visit may be regarded as having finished 1 Gabrielle Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Chatelet (1706-1749), was the daughter of the baron de Breteuil, and married the marquis du Chatelet-Lomont in 1725.
The principal literary results of his early years here were the Discours en vers sur l'homme, the play of Alzire and L'Enfant prodigue (1736), and a long treatise on the Newtonian system which he and Madame du Chatelet wrote together.
The best-known accounts of Cirey life, those of Madame de Grafigny, date from the winter of 1738-39; they are somewhat spiteful but very amusing, depicting the frequent quarrels between Madame du Chatelet and Voltaire, his intense suffering under criticism, his constant dread of the surreptitious publication of the Pucelle (which nevertheless he could not keep his hands from writing or his tongue from reciting to his visitors), and so forth.
Frederick, now king of Prussia, made not a few efforts to get Voltaire away from Madame du Chatelet, but unsuccessfully, and the king earned the lady's cordial hatred by persistently refusing or omitting to invite her.