At first she felt the same. Part of it was simply the sex: they spent nights at his house, and then—flouting all convention—even at hers. When they caught breath enough to realize how dangerous that was, they took off for two summer weeks to a tumbledown abandoned old château at Cirey, in the Champagne region 150 miles east of Paris, and far from the dreaded Semur. She had access because it had been inherited from her husband's family—who probably didn't know at this early stage that there was any affair at all—and there they went at it some more.
It was more than just passion, though. Each had experienced physical attraction before, a meeting of bodies. Now they were multiplying that thrill, swept up in this meeting of minds as well.
Back in Paris, late in the summer of 1733, Emilie and Voltaire tried to keep their hands off each other, at least in public. Florent-Claude was far away, with the army, and if they were discreet enough it would be easy for no one to have to mention the affair. But one time right on the street Emilie couldn't restrain herself: she was a mother now, she was married to a well-known noble officer, but she wrapped her hands behind Voltaire's neck and leaned forward and they kissed and kissed and kissed. What could she do? “God gave me the sort of soul,” she explained, “that doesn't let me hide or moderate my passions.” France's most talked-about poet was in love with her—and she was seeing what it might be like to be in love back.
When Emilie had tried to share her ideas before, the women in Paris had snidely attacked: “She was born with a fairly good mind,” the acid Madame du Deffand typically commented, “but wishing to appear even cleverer, she preferred the study of the most abstract science to more agreeable knowledge.”
With Voltaire, though, there was nothing to hide. She'd become fascinated by Newton, and in the time since her affair with Richelieu she'd learned more and more of his work. The old medieval worldview had planets orbiting through space simply because it was God's pleasure to make them move that way. Even her first hero, Descartes, hadn't been able to provide a well-justified mechanism for explaining how they moved. All he'd been able to propose was that there were invisible whirlpools in outer space, and that the planets and the distant stars— by some unknown means—swirled around in those whirlpools. It was so vague that he was never able to attach any exact numbers to that vision or make fresh predictions from it. That vision was still lauded by the French chauvinists who dominated the research academies, but Emilie realized it should now be left behind.
Isaac Newton, working after Descartes in the late 1600s, had taken a very different approach. To him, the planets and distant stars were giant billiard balls. Stretching outward from each one was the great gaping force of gravity. That force was invisible, but it stretched across the heavens nevertheless. Think of the way the hands of a big clock move. If you couldn't see the cogs and rods inside the clock—if the cogs were made of totally transparent glass—you'd find it a mystery that the hands moved. But once you saw that the cogs and rods were there, you would then understand why the hands moved. In outer space, the force of gravity played the role of those invisible cogs. The billiard balls of our planets and the stars were tugged along by these stretching lines of gravity.
If Newton had left it at that, he would have been little better than Descartes. But he'd been able to do exact calculations, predicting how the different celestial bodies moved, and that's what had convinced Emilie that he was right. Voltaire knew some of the secondary accounts of what Newton had done, but could only copy the figures that these popularizers had written out. Emilie, however, understood the new mathematical techniques of the calculus that Newton had used, and was able to use them to perform fresh calculations. She could show Voltaire, in exact detail, how our planets really did roll along like clockwork.
Voltaire was awed: he'd never had an intellectual partner like this, and bragged to his friends, telling the Abbé de Sade (uncle of the notorious marquis) that he must meet her, even though
I swear to you, she's a tyrant
To be with her
I have to speak of metaphysics
(I'd rather speak of sex)
There was an extra attraction. Today we think of Voltaire as famous, while Emilie and the Breteuil and du Châtelet families are barely known. At the time, though—as the de Rohan assault showed— things were viewed differently. In Emilie's world, only families that had been ennobled for at least three hundred years were officially allowed to go hunting with the king. If a family had made its fortune in business or law, as with Voltaire's father, they had almost no chance of being let into the top levels of government; they or their relatives certainly couldn't be given a commission in the army. It would be as if only Americans who'd had ancestors who came over before 1776 could be allowed top jobs at the Pentagon or in the White House today, while everyone else, however competent, had to stay put.
There was a slight amount of mixing in some of the Paris salons, where the fiction existed that sufficiently clever intellectuals from humble backgrounds could be treated as “equal” to the wealthy aristocrats who ran those gatherings. But that was only for the duration of the evening gatherings, and there were clear bounds beyond which any quick-witted impudence would be punished.
Emilie was breaking all that by being willing to sleep with this man who so clearly was from the wrong class. A few close friends might be tolerant, but almost everyone else from her background would be waiting, often eagerly, for it to fail. Only the most intense love can survive such pressure from without—and in the bliss of these first months, Emilie and Voltaire knew they were lucky enough to be in that group.
Voltaire was so delighted at finding someone who adored him— and whose intellect he admired so much—that his creativity rose to a higher level. He quickly added a key section to the Letters from England that he was preparing for publication. He'd always hated his older brother, a smug Calvinist-style rigid Catholic who was a member of the grouping called the Jansenists. Pascal had powerfully written that the Jansenists were right, that we are alone in a harsh universe, and that without blind submission to God we deserve to be terrified by our solitude. Now, however, amidst those long days entwined with Emilie, Voltaire was confident enough to refute him. The essay-like form of the Letters from England was ideal for this:
“Why be so horrified by our existence?” Voltaire inked in his tight, neat script. “To look at the universe as a prison, and all men as condemned prisoners about to be executed: that's the idea of a fanatic…. Why despair because we can't see God directly? It would be like despairing for not having four legs and two wings…. We can [simply] be…as happy as human nature allows.”
We take this for granted today, but it was radical at its time. For centuries the Church had taught that fallen mankind had no right to be happy: this was not our role on Earth. Our purpose was to suffer, as the Savior had suffered for us. The aristocratic elite also would have laughed at the idea that mere ordinary people should aim to be happy. Ordinary people were, quite obviously, placed on Earth to work. Let the majority of people aim for their own happiness, and the system could collapse.
Like all new lovers, Emilie and Voltaire soon wanted to change each other. He told her she should spend less time at Versailles, and she explained to him that he should do more thoughtful work and spend less time on mere rhymes. He taught her English (and in a few weeks she was starting to read Milton in the original). She seems to have tried teaching him the basics of projective geometry. It was fun, it was delicious—but then, as the summer ended and the cooler days of late September began, something changed.
The rhyme Voltaire had written about metaphysics and sex had been a joke, but it was also a little bit true: Emilie was brighter than he was, as Voltaire was the first to admit, and his attention wandered as she inked out, during the discussion, the force lines and tangents that so fascinated her.
Did she know, he would happily interrupt, how it was that Newton had come up with his idea of universal gravitation in the first place? When Volt
aire was in England he'd interviewed Mrs. Conduitt, the great man's niece, and discovered a sweet story Newton had told her: that Newton had been at his mother's house in Lincolnshire and had seen an apple fall to the ground—Voltaire was going to publish this in his forthcoming Letters from England; it would be the first time the story would see the light of day—and when Newton had seen that it had made him wonder: was the force that pulled the apple down something that stretched higher and higher, all the way above the Earth's atmosphere, to pull the moon tumbling along as well? And this was how he realized that one linking force spreads out through the whole universe.
But Emilie had heard the story, and from Voltaire: he had told it to her many times already. It was getting irritating. He was bright but had the attentiveness of a magpie, flitting from one anecdote to another. Unlike her, he couldn't use the insight about the apple to take any of Newton's calculations further. Indeed, she wasn't sure he'd ever be able to seriously explore what it meant.
At first all their arguments had been easily resolved—they would tumble into bed—but that September Voltaire got sick, with another bout of his recurrent dysentery. He'd been a hypochondriac at the best of times, but when he actually was ill he became impossible, always needing more attention, sometimes joking about it, but also getting short-tempered and cranky. Emilie was in her late twenties and very trim despite her children: a servant who later saw her nude described her as having the body of a fine Greek sculpture. Now she had a difficult, bedridden older man—he was thirty-nine—to take care of.
Everything that had brought them together was changing. He was no longer the confident, powerful man who would give her the support she needed to organize her own tentative thoughts, perhaps even to help her become one of the great writers and thinkers she admired so much. Yet she, in his mind, was failing him. His illness was testing her for signs of love, for the affection that comes across in tending an ill partner as a parent would, even when the partner has nothing to give back. Since each was failing the other, they got angry; they had arguments; they split up.
Voltaire didn't care. He was in the depths of hypochondriac misery, writing to an old school friend that he was dead to pleasure: Emilie's sexual demands had become all wrong, for “my machine is totally exhausted.” His susceptibility to infection wasn't helped by the condition of the river Seine. Paris's population was several hundred thousand, and although there were workers who were supposed to cart away waste products in special carts, immense quantities of excrement and urine and vomit daily ended up in the Seine. From the city's large numbers of animals yet more sewage, as well as blood, intestine, skin, and tendons, also went directly to the river. (Refrigeration was scarcely existent, so slaughtering was local and daily.) Small quantities of water could come in bottles from rural springs, but although the city's fountains were supposed to be clean, those too often got polluted from the Seine.
Unfortunately, even in his illness Voltaire couldn't keep from bragging. He wasn't as weak in science as Emilie thought, he told her: why, he was very well acquainted indeed with one of the most eminent young mathematicians in France, an expert on Newton named PierreLouis de Maupertuis. They'd corresponded, they'd even met, and he could assure Emilie that Maupertuis was just the sort of vigorous young friend who appreciated him.
Which is how Emilie's second affair of 1733 began. Emilie didn't really want to find another man now—what she'd begun with Voltaire was clearly better than anything she was likely to find again. But once she'd opened up with Voltaire, she couldn't bear to return to her previous isolation.
Maupertuis certainly seemed plausible, at least at first. He'd grown up on the coast of Brittany, and his father had been as close to a pirate as sailed in the North Atlantic, heading a forty-gun attack ship that stormed English vessels on the open sea. But the son had also studied with Europe's leading mathematicians, in Switzerland and in London, and he'd just written a book on the higher mathematics of the universe—and best of all, having completed several years as a cavalry officer, he was far more muscular than the ever-complaining Voltaire.
It might have been a rebound relationship, but Emilie began by having her fun. She'd undoubtedly learned a lot about sexual satisfaction in her affair with Richelieu when she was twenty-three. The cover story she and Maupertuis gave for their trysts was that he was tutoring her in advanced calculus. She taunted him delightedly about that. “You must not want,” she wrote him in January 1734, “to encourage your student, for I still haven't heard if you found my last lesson agreeable.”
When they weren't in bed, they actually did talk about science— why should lounging naked with a handsome corsair's son get in the way? Maupertuis had recently been able to show that the immense gravitational attraction Newton wrote about would—if true—cause our fast-spinning Earth to squash ever so slightly as it turned, like a sheet of dough stretching lengthwise as an exuberant chef tossed it spinning in the air. He'd worked out exactly how much of this flattening there would be.
It seemed unimportant, but it wasn't, for there was a profound linkage with theology. If Newton's views were right, then the invisible stretching pulls of gravity were what tugged the planets around. But Newton's rules were so exact that he—and Maupertuis, and Emilie— were able to calculate exactly how gravity's pulls worked. These calculations showed that although the universe was like a giant clock, God was not a watchmaker who had set up our solar system and universe, wound the handles once, and then walked away. On the contrary. There seemed to be numerous cases of “slippage,” where planets would tumble out of orbit unless some outside force reached into our universe to keep everything whirring at the right speeds. There was no guesswork in saying this. If Newton's mathematics and the laws of gravity were true, then this had to follow.
This is why Maupertuis's further calculation about the Earth's flattening was so important. What if someone managed to clamber across the uncharted ice above the Baltic Sea, reach the North Pole, and actually measure our planet's flattening? Then it would be possible to find out if this intervening God did exist! (Why? If the Earth was indeed slightly flattened as it spun, then that would be a sign that gravity operated exactly as Newton had described, and so—since Newton's gravity left gaps farther out in the solar system where only divine adjustment could keep the planets from tumbling away—God really was constantly reaching in and intervening to make thing operate smoothly.)
It was an immense change from Descartes's much vaguer vision of the universe, where all one could say was that, in some unknown, inexact way, planets and stars slipped around on spinning whirlpools. There was no way from Descartes's image to prove mathematically that those spinnings produced gaps that only a fresh force created by God could bridge.
This was unprecedented. For hundreds, thousands of years, theologians had either settled their arguments with volumes of dusty words or—when tensions grew too great—passed them on to religious warriors, who decided the truth on the battlefield, at the point of swords. Now there was another way.
If Emilie had met this Breton much earlier in her life, perhaps she would have decided to stay with him. But although he wasn't much older than she, he had already acquired the habits of a confirmed bachelor. It wasn't so much that he was selfish as that he was self-contained—and she needed more than that.
She realized she was missing what she'd begun with Voltaire, and began to keep an ear out for what he was up to—as Voltaire, once he finished sulking, now was doing for her. Each wanted the conversation they could only have with each other, and the passion of deeper contact too.
Emilie needed courting, of course, and by February 1734, Voltaire was feeling well enough to begin. He knew that he wasn't as educated in astronomy as Maupertuis, so he shifted that to his advantage, writing to Emilie:
The sublime Maupertuis
eclipses my mere words.
I'm not surprised
Who wouldn't be overwhelmed
by such eternal truths?
B
ut Emilie, what are these truths?
How will you use them and what is their cost?
… He's shown you the heavens
he's uncovered their secrets
… But where is your happiness
Does he know that secret?
For a brief while in late February she was seeing both men— Voltaire's machine was pretty much in order—but that wasn't sustainable, and soon enough she broke with Maupertuis and was back to the man she'd always wanted.
Just to ensure she stayed, Voltaire began another gambit. The year before, he and Emilie had decided that it was time their mutual friend Richelieu should settle down and get married. They'd started working on that together, introducing possible brides, dropping heavy hints to Richelieu that he was aging and this was the right course of action.
Voltaire decided that it would bring them together to continue that task. By plotting with her to get Richelieu married, he would keep this woman he needed.
6
Hunted
MONTJEU, PHILIPPSBURG, AND PARIS, 1734
They couldn't tell Richelieu at first what they were arranging for him, since he was enjoying his bachelorhood about as much as any mortal could. There was also the complication that the woman Voltaire decided on for Richelieu was the young Elisabeth de Guise, from one of the haughtiest families in all of France.
The nineteen-year-old Elisabeth would be happy enough for the marriage to go through, of course—Richelieu was the finest catch a young woman could want. But the de Guise ancestors who had cheated, stolen, murdered, and prostituted themselves to acquire their great wealth had possessed the grace to do this many, many centuries before, which meant that their actions were obscured by a gentle mist of history. The Richelieu fortunes, however, were more recent, dating back only to the cardinal who had advised Louis XIII, scarcely a century before. Such variations within the aristocracy had developed over so long a time—and were encrusted with so much tradition and rules—that the oldest noble families had come to think that they were biologically superior to the newer ones. It was repugnant for them to marry someone outside their own caste.
Passionate Minds Page 7