She needed to open the door to science again. But how could she? Her father, whom she loved so much, had died recently, and although there was one kindly educated man in a town near Semur who lent her some out-of-date geometry texts, that wasn't what she needed.
It would have been easier for a man. Emilie knew that the great English thinker John Locke two generations before had found a patron in a wealthy aristocrat, and was led through him to interesting intellectual circles in London. The even greater researcher Isaac Newton had been sheltered and encouraged at Cambridge University. Yet no woman in France—or England—was allowed to register at a university, let alone at the grand Académie des Sciences in Paris. She was an outsider, a young isolated parent, and no one from those august institutions would know anything about her, however eager she was for intellectual companionship.
Florent-Claude realized that something was wrong, and was happy to set her up at a grand apartment in Paris. It made life easier for him, for although he would be away almost all the time—on military duties, let alone his various romantic affairs—it was convenient to have a base in Paris to return to. He respected Emilie, even if he didn't understand her, and had no reason to want her to be unhappy.
But Paris wasn't much better at first. Without her adored father around, she couldn't enjoy the consolation of sharing her feelings with this one man who'd understood her. Her mother was even colder now that the flurry of activity from the wedding was long over and the family had broken up; her older brothers were still sweet enough when she saw them, but busy with their own careers. Even if foreign research groups might be more welcoming than the Académie des Sciences, rules of etiquette meant that, as a woman, she could never travel on her own to visit them.
The first step to getting out of her isolation would be to have female friends here in Paris. But after her experience with her cousin Renée-Caroline, she still didn't trust that the wealthiest women in the capital would like her; too many of the ones she did meet were only interested in gossipy details about each other. Although she went through the motions of teas and lunches and even some outings to the theater, she was stepping back and analyzing these people she was supposed to spend her life amidst. Why were they so uniformly unkind? “If I were king,” she mulled in a later writing, “…women would be able to take part in all human rights, especially ones involving our reason. It's because of their lack of education [that] they seem born to deceive.”
The level of knowledge was stunningly low. It hadn't been atypical for Emilie's mother to be so poorly educated at the convent where she'd spent her years before marriage. The great majority of French women couldn't sign their name in marriage registers, let alone read anything complex. (Decades later, even Olympe de Gouges, author of the stirring “Declaration of the Rights of Women,” had to dictate her text because she'd never been taught to write.) Louis XV's daughters remained illiterate, even after several years in convents. An archbishop of a previous generation, who had promisingly written that “nothing is more neglected than the education of girls,” went on to explain that it was of course a limited education he had in mind, which should concentrate on managing servants.
In the few schools that were available for women, all science, philosophy, and literature were taboo. A small amount of history was sometimes allowed, but only, as one contemporary put it, “in order not to confuse a Roman emperor with an Emperor of China… all this must be accomplished without rules or methods, and only so that girls might be no more ignorant than ordinary people.” That was how almost all the women that Emilie was supposed to spend her time with had been educated. (Again, the handful of exceptions—women who were self-educated and had broken through those barriers—were extremely rare, and scarcely known to her then; most of the salons she had access to were more concerned with gossip than anything else.)
It was a desperate time: without good friends, with two small children, and with that door of science seemingly locked forever.
“I felt,” she wrote, looking back, “as if I was swimming in an endless sea of uncertainty. In the morning I'd undo whatever I'd decided the day before.” She would eat too much (“I gave in too often to my big appetite”), but then immediately go on diets before anyone could see that she'd gained weight. At one point, she even nervously tried an affair with what seemed a pleasant young noble, Guébriant, but it ended quickly. She wanted love, or at least a partner to go forward with in thought. Guébriant was both insincere and entirely vacuous.
She had too much dignity to entirely give up, though. John Locke's writings managed to give her some consolation, for his works spoke to her isolation, showing what a solitary explorer could find.
Locke believed that our mind was a mere blank slate when we were born, a tabula rasa (a “scraped tablet”). This was revolutionary. If the mind was blank, then it became very important to see who had the power to write on that slate. The writing might be pronouncements from the pulpit of an established church; it might be rules teaching us to defer to the royal family. But if something is wrong with how we think, then the fault is not with any preformed ideas we are born with. Rather, it's the institutions leading us to those misleading or dangerous beliefs that will have to change.
Locke's view made sense to Emilie, explaining how women in modern France were taught to simper or become lost in snide gossip. The “blank slate” they'd been born with had been filled in ridiculous ways, through books of etiquette or those narrow convent schools where the most challenging subjects were needlepoint and how to instruct servants. Even more, Locke's philosophy suggested that women didn't have to be indoctrinated that way. Different education, or different attitudes in society, could let us break free from that narrowness.
(There was a powerful shift in society beginning here, sweeping up Emilie and many others. Popular fiction in the 1600s and very early
1700s, for example, before Emilie came of age, seems odd to our eyes: the plots are amorphous or random, while the heroes or heroines are often led by internal moral or semi-religious quests. But now, when Emilie was a young woman, a new sort of writing—the novel—was becoming popular. In 1728, the very year that Emilie returned to Paris with her two toddlers, the Englishman Henry Fielding produced his first play at Drury Lane. It was the start of a career that would peak two decades later in his novel Tom Jones, with its perfectly Lockean hero, so energetically shaped by the sensations and attitudes that society has on offer for him.)
Yet even Locke's insights had a depressing twist, for Emilie might remain locked in the wrong world her whole life long. Suppose social attitudes didn't change. Then even if we personally did better—even if we'd tried to get our minds “written on” in a sensible way—we would still be trapped inside societies that didn't let us live as we wished. Emilie needed to break from that, but how to find the strength? She was greedy for knowledge, yet couldn't go forward on her own.
And then her world transformed. At age twenty-two, Emilie now met the most sought-after man in all of France. It wasn't Voltaire, but rather the one man Voltaire often said he wanted to be: Louis-François Armand du Plessis, the duc de Richelieu, ten years her senior.
If Emilie had wanted to make the women in her Paris circles dislike her even more, she couldn't have chosen better. Richelieu was a man's man, yet also one whom most women blindly adored. It was through him that she got the confidence crucial for the next stage of her life.
He was the great-nephew of the famous cardinal who'd helped establish the centralized French state; the Sun King, Louis XIV, himself had been his godfather. He'd inherited a fortune and been thrown into the Bastille three times before his mid-twenties—first at age fifteen by his own father for disobedience, then at age nineteen for dueling, and finally at twenty-three for plotting to overthrow the government. He was a renowned soldier—or at least successfully managed to give the impression he was one—and later led the victorious combined landsea attack on the fortified island of Minorca, reducing the British Empire in the w
estern Mediterranean (and making it fall back, once again, to what was felt to be the temporary stronghold of Gibraltar).
When Richelieu wasn't at the front he dressed cleanly, with only a minimal elaboration of the lace cuffs that Versailles drones insisted on. He was polite and quietly humorous, and—most wondrous of all—he listened at length to female confidences. Laclos probably modeled the character of Valmont in Liaisons Dangereuses on him, but in real life Richelieu was more scrupulous: he seems never to have slept with a virgin, or anyone underage.
Those were probably his only exceptions, though, as Emilie's friends all knew, for in the words of awed contemporaries: “He was woman's idolized lord. The coquette and the prude, the duchess and the princess—all alike yielded to him…never a passion, but much debauchery. He even has mistresses who aid him in his acts of infidelity, their jealousy stifled by their desire to please.”
Most pampered court appointees did poorly in the high jobs they were granted, but the confident, direct Richelieu was excellent. At age twenty-nine he was appointed ambassador to Vienna, the capital of the most ancient branch of the vast Habsburg Empire. In four years he transformed French prospects during complex peace negotiations, and when he returned to Paris—in 1729, when the unknown Emilie was twenty-two and he was still only thirty-three—no triumph was beyond his grasp.
It seemed inconceivable at first that he would turn to this quiet, intellectual young woman. But Emilie's late father, Louis-Nicolas, had indirectly helped set it up. He'd known that the du Châtelets had distant family connections with the Richelieus, which ensured that at some point his daughter would meet this powerful man. Whatever Louis-Nicolas might have intended, when Richelieu did return to Paris Emilie had already stayed many times at his sister's house, and it was there that they naturally overlapped.
She was cautious at first, almost disbelieving what was beginning to happen—“I can't believe that someone as sought-after as you wants to look beneath my flaws, to find out what I really feel.” To make it more intimidating, affairs were a serious matter, and were allowed only so long as the appropriate forms were followed. In Florent-Claude's own affairs, for example, he was always careful to sustain the external forms of Catholic marriage. This meant no holding hands in public and no staying the night at someone else's home while you were in the same city as your spouse. (Having more public affairs away from Paris was less of a difficulty, for one was showing polite discretion by being so far removed.)
The trick was to be able to hold two views at once. The married Louis XIV, for example, would always stop his carriage when he passed a priest, and bow with full sincerity—even if he was in the carriage because he was heading off for an afternoon with one of his innumerable mistresses. All of France worked that way. Censorship, for example, was not a matter of either/or. There was an intermediate category of “tacit” censorship, where a work was somewhat illegal, but not strongly so: the author could publish a few copies so long as he was discreet. (Even the king's chief censor, in a later generation, temporarily used his own home to hide copies of a work he didn't want to be generally circulated, yet which he didn't want to be entirely destroyed either.) Marriage was a matter of financial and social alliance between families, and so long as that was respected, the natural passions that humans felt could be fulfilled without destabilizing the system.
When Emilie began sleeping with Richelieu, everyone waited for him to drop this intense, albeit gracefully tall youngster and move to a more conventional partner. But he was having too much fun. As Richelieu would be the first of many powerful men to discover, Emilie was different from anyone he'd ever met. She still blurted out her sentences, and sometimes it was as confusing as when she'd been that child trying to get a word in past her visiting cousin (“My ideas were all mixed up last night,” she wrote to Richelieu, “…I know I'm not eloquent”). But when she wasn't too shy or too excited, she was captivating. Two vastly wealthy young women from the court had once awkwardly grabbed pistols and fought a duel in the Bois de Boulogne after arguing about which one should get Richelieu. That level of behavior was beneath his dignity, and Emilie would never do such a thing. Which of Richelieu's previous conquests would have been able to intrigue him with the twists and turns of Locke, or—a legacy from that kind old dinner guest Fontenelle—lead him on to ideas he'd never suspected about the distant reaches of outer space? For now the truly astounding had happened.
Louis-François Armand du Plessis, the duc de Richelieu, was in love.
It couldn't last, of course, despite the increased thrill he found. Emilie was young and pretty enough, and also would have picked up from Florent-Claude's sisters, as well as from other female friends, knowledge of the appropriate bedroom techniques for these circumstances. With one's husband, formal sex in the missionary position was all that should be offered, but with a lover, the woman could be more inventive. Indeed, one aristocratic young woman had reported that she only engaged in sex in the female-superior position when she was with her lover: she respected her husband so much that if he asked her if she'd let another man mount her while he was away, she wanted to be able to reply truthfully that she certainly had not.
Nor was contraception a difficulty. The rhythm method was occasionally used at this time, but withdrawal was more common. With mutual trust, this could be satisfying enough. Aristocratic women of sufficient confidence, as the ever-diligent chronicler Brantôme had earlier recorded, took pleasure in “putting it in and frolicking until they are surfeited, but they do not receive any of the seed… for they do not wish to permit anything to be left inside them.”
The problem, rather, was that Richelieu's attraction to Emilie had depended on her reversing the usual course he was used to, of women blindly glorifying him. Instead, with her extraordinary quickness and insight, she soon managed to assess his underlying feelings, his underlying self. Being Emilie, she also felt no need to keep her thoughts to herself. “Friends get to see each other in every way they are,” she wrote. “I love you sad, happy, lively.”
Soon, however, she began to see too deeply. It had been clear from the start that he wasn't going to be the man who could lead her forward into science. Now it was evident that their relation couldn't last as a mere sharing of passion either. She joked about it at first. “No, I'm not at all satisfied with your letter,” she wrote with mock seriousness. “It's not that you're not charming, but…you don't speak about yourself enough.” But then she got closer: “You write as if you have all the grace and gaiety in the world. But I see the melancholy you're feeling.” And even later, most coldly dissecting of all: “I think we met too late for me to have a real place in your heart. You'll never love anyone unless you need them for your pleasure, or if they're useful to you.”
The affair went on for a while longer, but no eighteenth-century French galant, conqueror of foreign armies—not to mention the majority of the court's favored mistresses—was going to forever remain lovers with someone who made him probe so closely into himself. He realized he couldn't quite match up, and broke it off.
Emilie then did another thing no other woman in France had managed. Richelieu wasn't the man she was looking for, but she was so graceful during the breakup that the two became lifelong correspondents and friends. In the years to come, he sent her hundreds of letters, sometimes superficial, sometimes thoughtful (and always poorly spelled, even by the relaxed standards of the time).
It was a happy enough ending, and Florent-Claude, as always, was friendly with his wife when they happened to overlap in Semur or Paris. But now that she'd had a glimpse of real passion she was even less content to be alone with her books. She was still excluded from the world of science researchers and exciting writers, still looking—despite Florent-Claude's kindness—for the partner who could help her enter this world she sought.
4
Exile and Return
LONDON, 1726, TO PARIS, 1733
Voltaire ended up in England when he was expelled from France after d
e Rohan's attacks. His arrival there was magnificent, as he explained to his friends back home:
It was in the middle of spring [1726] that I disembarked near Greenwich, on the banks of the Thames. The sky was cloudless, the air cooled by a gentle west wind…The river was covered for six miles with rows of merchant vessels, their sails all spread in honor of the King and Queen, who were rowed upon the river in a golden barge, preceded by boats full of musicians, and followed by a thousand little row-boats.
Close to the river, on a large green which extends for about four miles, I saw an immense number of comely young people caracoling on horseback round a kind of racecourse marked off by white posts stuck in the ground…. There were young girls on foot… [who] were to be in a footrace as well…. Some merchants to whom I had letters of introduction got me a horse; they sent for refreshments; they took the trouble to put me in a place where I could easily see…. I fancied that I was transported to the Olympian games; but the beauty of the Thames, the crowd of vessels, and the vast size of the city of London soon made me blush for having dared to liken [Olympus] to England.
It was a great story, but about as accurate as his declaring to Beauregard that he really had written the scurrilous poems about the regent. Voltaire was thirty-one but still needed to exaggerate and show off. There were no music barges on the river that spring, he had no letters of introduction to local merchants, and if there were footraces at Greenwich, he wouldn't have been able to ask any of the locals about them, for he didn't speak English.
What really happened his first day, or near his first day, was that he trudged up to Highgate, on a hill north of London, where he'd arranged for a cash transfer to be waiting. But when he arrived he found that his banker was bankrupt. He had to go all the way back to the grand boulevard of Pall Mall, where Bolingbroke's city mansion stood, yet there he found that “My Lord and my Lady Bolingbroke were in the country.” Voltaire was broke, and no doubt sweaty, and knew no one to help him. The Bolingbrokes' country house was impossibly far away. As he later admitted to the one friend to whom he was always honest, Nicolas Thieriot, “I was without a penny, sick to death of a violent flu, a stranger, alone, helpless, in the midst of a city, wherein I was known to nobody. I could not make bold to see our ambassador in so wretched a condition.”
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