The years of fencing lessons Emilie's father had given her now paid off. One soldier who knew her well—and had himself killed a man in a duel—wrote, “She… wields a sword like a hussar, and becomes so ferocious when [a man] vexes her that she would not hesitate to run him through.” She didn't defeat de Brun, but he didn't defeat her either. They each put down their swords, panting.
To her mother this was the worst possible thing she could have done. “My youngest… frightens away the suitors…. We may be forced to send her to a convent [after all], but no abbess would accept her.” There was still no sign of the ideal suitor at Versailles, but Emilie could now go back to her studies, at least for a while.
It was harder than at home, because she'd gone beyond what her Paris tutors could teach her and there was no one at Versailles she could share her interests with, especially in philosophy and science. She began to study and read on her own. What she learned went roughly like this:
In medieval times, several hundred years earlier, there had been virtually no science. The universe was felt to be very simple. There was God on high, and kings and the Pope and cardinals below Him, and the chain of authority continued on, down through bishops, and knights, and monks, all the way to the humblest peasant. Everyone was in his place.
Nothing new was to be discovered. Even the heavens above were unchanging. Earth was at the center of a small universe, and the sun and planets orbited around us not very far away, possibly closer than the moon. At the outer extremity there were tiny flecks of light—the stars—which were affixed to a crystalline shell that slowly rotated overhead through the seasons. No one could question this, for not only was it obvious to direct sight, but the king and the Church derived their authority from the very nature of this unchanging universe. God ruled from a celestial throne, just as our superiors ruled us from their earthly thrones. Questioning the truths of astronomy would be the same as questioning the authority of kings and religious leaders here on Earth. It was a strict theocracy in which Emilie's distant ancestors lived.
For centuries on end that vision barely changed. But then—again, according to the standard texts she would have read—a few astronomers such as Copernicus and Kepler began to question the science that underpinned those views. They found that the data that had been unquestioned since ancient times were not as true as believed. The sun did not orbit daily around the Earth. The heavens were not changeless after all.
Most impressive of all, these new findings were not just guesses; vague notions that depended on intuition to prove true. There were ways to demonstrate that they were accurate, and to chart the new rules in detail.
Emilie was desperate to learn more—this was what she yearned for—but although she would no doubt drag Louis-Nicolas into nodding agreement when she shared some of these new ideas with him on visits, she couldn't get him to give her extra funds to buy more books. His lowered income didn't allow it.
There was one alternative. Emilie was bright enough at mathematics to teach herself analytic geometry. Shouldn't she be able to count the cards at the gaming tables quickly enough to give her a chance to win in gambling? (Gambling was popular, and well-bred young women were often exposed to it enough to pick up the rudiments.) If she did develop that skill, then with the money she might gain…
“My daughter is mad,” Louis-Nicolas soon wrote. “Last week she won more than two thousand gold louis at the card tables, and… spent… half on new books.” Louis-Nicolas hadn't pressured her as much as her mother, but where would this end? “I argued with her in vain, yet she would not understand that no great lord will marry a woman who is seen reading every day.”
Finally, though, late in 1724, at age seventeen, Emilie realized she had to give in. A few girls managed to still be on the marriage market into their early twenties, but that was rare. (In fact, there had been a small number of women who'd managed to create semi-independent lives, but they were scarcely remembered.) Most women had been signed away in marriage at much younger ages. Girls could be legally married at twelve, and engaged—with no chance of recourse—at age seven.
With some help from her friends, and advice from her father, the teenage Emilie ended up paying special attention to a heavyset, polite man in his thirties, named Florent-Claude, who was the marquis of Châtelet-Lomont. He was a musketeer, his grandfather had been one of the Sun King's senior generals, and although the family estates were divided with his younger brothers, he still had enough inherited money—and would be helped by Louis-Nicolas's dowry gift—to give this young woman a decent life.
There was more. As a du Châtelet, he had a high enough ranking in the nobility that he would be able to call in the help of other powerful families if in the future there were legal attacks against him, his wife, or their income. That was important, for legal courts were so weak at the time, and judges so easily swayed by bribes or political influence, that without such personal connections it was quite possible for a family's inheritance to be gravely diminished. It made sense for Florent- Claude too, since Breteuil had his own useful links at court, aside from the wealth he would transfer in his dowry, and also the power of his wife's family name.
Contracts were now exchanged between the two families, and once the financial details were worked out, Florent-Claude officially proposed. He had been careful about the details but was not as solely mercenary as many others were. (One aristocrat, for example, had signed a marriage contract with the twelve-year-old daughter of a wealthy man and then left his new wife in a convent—she'd been sent back there after the wedding night—where she learned how to read and to sing while he proceeded to spend the dowry on his gambling debts.) Florent-Claude knew that although he and his wife would live quite separate lives, as was the custom, it would also help if they came to like each other.
The marriage was on, and now everything was changing fast. Gabrielle-Anne was in her element: finally her daughter was seeing some sense. There was no time for reading, of course, for instead there were hair styles to consider, and invitations to arrange, and legions of dressmakers to supervise. There was a rush of other activity at Versailles, of course—including a police hunt for someone who'd attacked a nobleman—but that could be ignored. Emilie was primped and styled and made over. Her mother had accumulated cloth for this occasion in a big wooden wedding chest; now there would be a silk veil-like fabric, to be held over Emilie's head at the ceremony (and which everyone knew would also be used in baptizing her first child); the tight bodice to have commissioned; new very high-heeled shoes (so uncomfortable to walk in that they would always have to be exchanged for slippers inside the house); specialists to prepare the rinses of mercury, bismuth, white lead, and rice flour to be rubbed on her face.
And then in June 1725 she was married. Florent-Claude wasn't callous, and understood that it would take his young bride a while to get used to her new life. He was willing to let her visit her brothers, whom she was close to, for a while; she could even continue to ride horses, so long as it was under proper supervision. But in September her formal duties began, for they were going to make a ceremonial entrance to the town of Semur in Burgundy, a several-day carriage ride southeast from Paris. He was governor of the castle, ruling over Semur, and this would be their formal home.
Emilie tried to pack some books, but there wasn't space for many. At noon on September 29 the town began to assemble, pressing up against the stone ramparts: the minor nobles in one area, the priests and monks in another, magistrates and guild artisans and ordinary people packed in their sections as well. The townsmen waited in the heat, and then at 4p.m. there were the first drums announcing that the town's new masters were in sight. The bells of the three grand churches sounded, and nobles with swords were soon riding alongside. Everyone wanted to see the new marquise, not least Florent-Claude's four sisters, who hoped they would soon have someone to give them the latest gossip about Versailles, and clothes, and fashionable decoration.
The cobblestone and packed-dirt streets in
Semur were crowded, and for almost two more hours Emilie had to stay inside the hot carriage beside Florent-Claude. Guards with pikes and arquebuses marched behind, and finally they reached the stone château's central court. Even more dignitaries were waiting there, as well as clusters of everyone who wanted to be thought a dignitary. Her husband was proud. Emilie got out of the carriage. Paris and all she'd learned there were impossibly far away. She was eighteen years old, and surrounded by crowds again, but she was still alone.
2
François
PARIS AND THE BASTILLE, 1717–1725
François-Marie Arouet, still just a minor poet and social butterfly (yet the man who would transform himself to become the great writer Voltaire): young M. Arouet, age twenty-three, partial to wearing black trousers and a white lace shirt, thin and with brilliant eyes, was standing, this Whitsunday morning, amid a group of burly police officers, just outside the Bastille prison in central Paris. He was joking with them, seemingly without a care in the world, explaining that he was happy to see these looming masonry towers of the Bastille, for he had once visited friends there.
But it didn't change the fact that he was under arrest. When he'd been staying in a Paris inn, a young fellow guest from the provinces had recognized the notorious young poet and asked, awestruck, if it was really true that the latest mocking verses that were going around Paris were his. The verses attacked the sexual escapades of the liberal regent, Philippe d'Orléans, who'd grabbed power after the recent death of the grand Louis XIV.
The lines had, in fact, been written by someone else, but Arouet loved to be the center of attention. He smiled and asked if the rural visitor—whose name was Beauregard—thought the verses were any good. Beauregard said yes, but added that now he had met Arouet, he could see that the poet was too young to have written something so accomplished, and they must have been written by someone else. Arouet quickly replied that no, Beauregard was quite wrong. In fact, he said, he'd secretly written a lot of verses like that.
Beauregard was impressed, and so was the superintendent of police when he saw the report of this one day later—for Beauregard was a police spy, whence young Arouet's position at the Bastille's gates, surrounded by these sturdy police officers.
From our era it might seem excessive to be arrested just for writing poems about a ruler's personal life. But in 1717 France, even seventy years before the Revolution, the royal family and its hangers-on were nervous individuals, with a great deal to be nervous about. Back in the previous century, when Louis XIII had taken the throne, a possible usurper was shot to death inside the royal palace as part of an effort to stop an assassination plot against the king. When that king's successor, Louis XIV, had been a child there had been repeated attempts, by massed armies of nobles who didn't accept the Crown's authority, to snatch the young king from the Paris palaces where his terrified mother kept him partly hidden. On several occasions they'd had to escape in secret to avoid these assassins. The new court that had been built at Versailles was a mark of weakness, stemming from those fearful days: the isolated palace there was more easily defensible against assassins, and several hours' ride from mass assaults in Paris.
For a while the successes in the middle years of Louis XIV's long reign had largely concealed that weakness. In the late 1600s France had dominated the Western world: it had the greatest army, the greatest economy, the greatest architects and engineers and thinkers. But from the latter years of the 1600s, in a decay accelerated by the old Louis's vicious attack on all French Protestants, forcing his country's greatest entrepreneurs to leave, the country's apparent success masked a steady decline. Wars were lost, and the frontiers drew closer: the theater and poetry became stilted. And these failures meant that at the end of Louis XIV's reign there were increasing doubts about the near-magical authority that the Crown had insisted came from God.
Most recently, since Louis XIV's death in 1715, the kingdom had officially been ruled by Louis XV, who was then, however, a mere five- year-old boy. This meant that the powerful army and all the nobles— with their wealth and centuries of pride—were supposed to obey that youngster's divinely authorized will. But since he spoke in a child's voice and had to be kept on reins to keep from running in random directions when he was brought outside, and he also understood nothing of the government he was supposed to run, all practical power was devolved to the regent, Orléans, who, however, was opposed by several powerful factions among the higher aristocracy in holding this patronage- rich position.
That's why the government was so touchy about writings that undercut public support. It didn't help that the popular poem Arouet took credit for was one claiming that the licentious Orléans was having sexual relations with his own daughter—an insult made worse by the fact that it quite likely was true.
Since there were no truly independent law courts in France, Arouet could be kept imprisoned for years. (A little later, for example, when a commoner named Desforges wrote two lines of poetry mocking the king, Desforges was dragged to the fortress of Mont St. Michel, thrown into a constricted iron cage, and kept there for three years.)
None of that was as important to Arouet as keeping up appearances, though, whence the easy banter with the arresting officers, and possibly the mention of his highly sensual girlfriend, an aspiring young actress named Suzanne de Livry, who was earnest and loyal as only a fresh-faced country girl eager to escape from the small village where Arouet had met her can be.
An even greater satisfaction would be to get back at the more senior officer who'd led the arrest, a Monsieur Ysabeau, who had made the unfortunate mistake of trying to bully Arouet when he led the police storming into the inn. As generations of government officials, literary opponents, aristocrats, crown princes, and scientists across Europe would come to learn, such bullying was not a wise course of action to commence.
Arouet was quick-witted, terrifyingly so, and now, at the first interrogations after the arrest, he spitefully told Ysabeau that he'd left the poem on the table in his inn room. Ysabeau replied that there were no papers there. He pressed Arouet again about where they were, till Arouet finally admitted, angry at having to give in, that perhaps he'd thrown them into the toilet.
Upon which news the good bureaucrat Ysabeau quickly returned to the inn, on the not especially salubrious Rue de la Calandre, and found the neighborhood official—the vidangeuse, always a woman— who was responsible for emptying the drains. (There was no reliable sewage system in 1710s Paris, and waste built up in underground pipes and chambers.) The local vidangeuse opened the top of the drain, lowered a candle on a string, perched over the edge, and after as much of a look as she could bear told Ysabeau that there were no papers floating on the thin layer of water that covered the more solid “matière grossière.”
By now it was Friday the twenty-first. Ysabeau told his superior that he was satisfied, and asked if it was truly necessary to investigate further. But the order for Arouet's arrest hadn't been a mere lower court matter: it had come from the pen of the Regent himself. The superior told Ysabeau that he must do his duty.
Back at the Rue de la Calandre soon after, or rather in good part under the Rue de la Calandre, officer Ysabeau and madame la vidangeuse got to work. The neighbors were beside themselves because of the odor being stirred up—they'd begged for the drain to be closed after the first inspection—but soon there was worse. The drains were built of old brick and mortar. As Ysabeau and the vidangeuse pushed in, they brought too much pressure to bear. There was a spurting, perhaps an ominous cracking, and then suddenly, in the cellars beneath the inn where beer and wine were stored, there was an almighty explosion as the old pipes burst, and there appeared, in quick succession, officer Ysabeau, the vidangeuse, a great amount of water, and an even greater amount of the matière grossière that had accumulated from nowimprisoned poets, visiting informers, and the numerous other guests at the inn.
The beer and wine were ruined (the owner won compensation from the city administration),
but in all the torrent, no subversive poems, intact or torn up, were to be found. They'd never been there, as Ysabeau now realized. “It appears,” Ysabeau wrote with immense self- control to the police superintendent, that “M. Arouet, with his active imagination, only pretended to have thrown away [the documents]… to create unnecessary work.”
Across Paris, inside the Bastille, the source of this mischief, young François-Marie Arouet, seemed to be settling in easily. He knew that accounts of Ysabeau's misadventures would add to his own reputation for being able to turn harassment to advantage. He also let his friends know that he would soon be dining at the table of the Bastille's governor, and that he'd received volumes of Homer (in Greek, but with facing Latin translations). He prepared a neatly scripted list of further items for the fortress governor to supply: linen handkerchiefs, a nightcap, two cravats, even a bottle of essence of cloves (to keep his teeth clean). During the day François could visit the billiards room in the wealthier part of the Bastille, or wander and chat with aristocrats in other cells. Only at night was he locked in his cell.
But Arouet's acceptance was just an act. In a poem written much later he described what it really felt like to be locked away as a young man. The cell was deathly silent when the thick bolts of the door were slammed closed: it made the inmate feel separated from the whole universe, like a corpse being wheeled in silence to a cemetery. Arouet had a horror of imprisonment. There were rats and fleas; his cell's walls were at times alive with cockroaches from the cesspools; in neighboring cells there were inmates who had, simply, gone mad. Arouet's cleverness had thrown him into a dead end. That meant he had to change. In all of world literature, the play that had most attracted young Arouet was Sophocles' Oedipus, with its hard-to-resist motif of a son murdering his father. For Arouet's own father had constantly disparaged him, calling him lazy and “cursed by God.” When as a teenager Arouet had refused to go through the charade of law school that his father had tried forcing him into, he'd been threatened with exile to a miserable, malaria-ridden life on the plantations in the French West Indies. It didn't help that Arouet was probably illegitimate, and that his father had furiously taxed him with this fault as well.
Passionate Minds Page 3