Florent-Claude wasn't quite at Richelieu's level, but he too had been a powerful leader of men in battle. Also, Louis-Nicolas had thought ahead very carefully when he'd arranged Emilie's marriage. The Châtelet family had great powers in Lorraine, and Louis XV needed to ensure that the local nobility was on his side. As noted, Louis-Nicolas had given Emilie enough of a dowry so that whatever her husband turned out to be like—and Louis-Nicolas had suspected Florent-Claude was a decent man—the husband and this powerful du Châtelet clan would promote her interests in whatever serious problems might arise.
By the end of February the case was on the way to being solved. “M. du Châtelet,” Emilie happily wrote to Argental, “is leaving [for Paris], firmly resolved to respond to the cardinal.”
It worked. Cardinal Fleury wasn't going to upset one of the great families of this important frontier province, certainly not for something so trivial as some possibly forged writings from the pen of this noted poet. Nor did it hurt that Emilie's cousin was temporarily out of office (and would not be war minister again for several years). Phélypeaux was reined back.
Voltaire was free to return. The gentle, ponderous Florent-Claude had fixed everything. Cirey—the perfect retreat—could now be reborn.
12
Voltaire's Fire
CIREY, MARCH–AUGUST 1737
When Voltaire got back, he and Emilie were in love once more, they were passionate; the way he'd abandoned his incognito so quickly was forgiven. Each wanted the other near. “[She] means more to me,” Voltaire explained to his loyal friend Argental, “than father, brother, or son.” And also, most powerfully: “where there is friendship, there is our natural soil.”
And yet, despite the words, despite the warmth, something was beginning to change. Emilie had forgiven Voltaire for his showing off on the road, but that didn't mean she'd been able to quite forget what he'd done. Those antics showed he could be weak—and had put them in danger until she'd taken control and fixed it.
That gave her a confidence she'd never had before, and one of her first steps was to get rid of the bane of her life: the tutor that Voltaire had insisted upon for her son. This was a ridiculous overweight abbé named Linant, whose first action, when he'd tumbled out of the coach that brought him down from Paris, had been to inspect the pudgy Madame Champbonin and the taller young Madame de la Neuville— both of whom were eagerly awaiting the new arrival—and then almost immediately make a lunge toward the startled Neuville. It had taken Voltaire's best efforts—“he was quite carried away…your beauty must have inspired so many gentlemen to forget their manners”—to appease her, and from then on things had become worse.
Linant was supposed to teach Latin, but he'd been too busy attempting to be a playwright—that's why Voltaire had taken pity on him—to actually learn much of Virgil's language. Voltaire suggested that Emilie teach Latin to Linant, and Linant would then teach it to her son. She countered that finding a better tutor might be easier, but Voltaire laughed, and charmed and wheedled until she gave in.
Even though Linant didn't do much tutoring, he went for long walks and complained to the neighbors about how boring he found Cirey. He complained even more when Emilie begged Voltaire to keep him from eating with them. (That was especially cruel, for the preparation for his future writing took a lot of mental effort, so it was only natural that he had a hearty appetite and didn't always have time for fussy etiquette when there were delectable grease-dripping drumsticks to gnaw on.)
Then Linant's sister arrived, ostensibly to be Emilie's chambermaid, but she succeeded in making her brother seem a paragon of efficiency. When Emilie complained again to Voltaire, he had a firm word with Linant, who admitted to Madame that he hadn't always been as diligent as he should have, but vowed that—as soon as his muse delivered—he would dedicate his future writings to her.
Voltaire was proud of how he had solved the problem, while Emilie was reduced to muttering to a friend that “I don't want him to dedicate his tragedy to me…I want him to educate my son.” Nothing whatsoever had changed.
Before the Dutch exile it would have stayed like that. But now? Emilie found that the brother and sister had been writing scurrilous letters about their stay at Cirey. Her tone changed, and she said that the Linants were going to leave. Voltaire still had a soft spot for them—he always did for underdogs—but Emilie insisted, and won.
The next change came in dealing with a young man Voltaire seemed to be readying to be his salvation if he needed a safe bolt-hole for a sudden exile again. This was Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia, just twenty-five years old. In the letters he had recently begun sending Voltaire, Frederick showed he was the gentlest, the most ethereal, of Francophile literature lovers. In elaborate, flowery letters he explained how much it wounded him that the barbaric French court had treated this living paragon so poorly. If only Voltaire would deign to visit the majestic lakefront mansion Frederick had set up well outside Berlin, then he would learn what true hospitality and security could be.
Emilie didn't believe any of it. In the previous century, Prussia had been brutalized by the Thirty Years' War, and up to a third of its population had been murdered or starved. The result had been a cowed civilian population, willing to do whatever the surviving military administration wished. The kingdom itself was only a recent creation, formed from a strip of what had been Polish territory, on a sandy, nearworthless stretch of land around the small town of Berlin. It was a garrison state, and the sensitive Frederick wasn't even its commander. His father, Frederick William, was king. This meant that if Voltaire ever went there, he would be under the father's authority—and Frederick William was not a normal person.
When he went out for lunchtime walks, he'd kick any women on the street he didn't like. If a clergyman was standing too close, watching one of the king's beloved guards regiments on parade, Frederick William would take out a thick cane and beat the clergyman to the ground. He regularly punched his son, dragged him by the hair, and choked him with curtain cords. When Frederick, at eighteen, had tried to escape with a friend, the father had caught them, made Frederick watch as the friend was murdered, and locked Frederick in the dreaded Küstrin fortress, on the Oder. Only at twenty-one, when the crown prince reached legal majority, was he trusted to be free—whence young Frederick's private mansion, which was as close to the outermost edge of Prussia as possible, but where he was still coweringly dependent on his father's strained goodwill.
Emilie knew that wasn't a safe refuge for her lover. In previous months she'd let Voltaire give hints he might take up the offer to visit there. Now she was ready to stop it.
Frederick wanted to send an emissary to visit Cirey, supposedly just to give him a flavor of the château. Emilie, however, suspected that Frederick would also get the emissary to seek unpublished writings, which Frederick could then use to show off at the Prussian court and prove how “close” he was with Voltaire. The most alluring writing was a mocking, semi-pornographic epic on Joan of Arc, which Voltaire had been embellishing for years, adding spoofs of contemporary political leaders being sexually humiliated or mocked. Its existence was the subject of intense rumor across Europe's high society.
When the emissary—tubby, cheerful Count Keyserlingk—arrived, he was delightful to everyone, exuberantly speaking any European language requested (“and often at the same time”). Emilie ensured that he was given fine dinners, and that there were firework displays, and that he got to see Frederick's name spelled in bright colored lanterns outside the château, beside the phrase “To the Hope of the Human Race!” He was even allowed to take back some of Voltaire's more innocuous drafts of history and poetry. But she placed the manuscript of Voltaire's Joan of Arc spoof in a heavy case, had that fastened with at least two sturdy English brass locks, and kept the only set of keys for herself.
Keyserlingk's return without even a fragment of the Joan of Arc poem was a little embarrassing to Voltaire, for it showed Frederick how much power Emilie had to decide what we
nt out from Cirey. But Voltaire didn't mind, for he realized it would probably just make Frederick try to court him more intensively in the future.
In any case, both Emilie and Voltaire were turning their attention back to science. The Academy of Sciences in Paris had recently declared its prize competition of the year, to determine the nature of heat, light, and fire. It was a vague, unformed question, but it was one that previous researchers such as Newton had barely touched. Emilie was surprisingly eager when the prize was announced, and that further helped Voltaire think it was worth investigating. For months he'd been itching to try out that new style of hands-on research he'd envisioned at 's Gravesande's lab. If he gave the best answer to the prize question, maybe he would become respected worldwide as Sir Isaac's pragmatic successor.
Everything was ready. The grain shipments from North Africa and other ports had proved very profitable; the property investments were doing well; the loans out at 10 percent were being steadily repaid. (Ten percent was a high figure, but many noble families accepted it, for they had difficulties with more complicated calculations.) Using that cash, as the summer of 1737 approached, Voltaire now ordered all the equipment he wanted, from the finest instrument makers in London as well as Paris: soon more air pumps, giant focusing lenses, tureens that could resist strong flames, glass retorts, and everything else he might need began to be delivered by the coachman from the post station at Vassy. It was an expenditure that only a few very wealthy private individuals could afford, the equivalent perhaps of several million dollars today.
He also was more cunning in his approach than Newton. Over in England, Newton had almost always worked on his own, which meant he couldn't easily build on the findings of others. That may have been fine for theoretical work, but Voltaire was convinced it must have slowed him down in practical experiments. (The unfortunate incident when an agonized Isaac Newton had shoved a dull knife several inches long all the way into the edge of his eye socket—to measure the light flickers one saw when the eyeball was compressed—was something Newton perhaps would have avoided if he'd been as articulate as Voltaire and had simply quizzed others beforehand about what worked or not.) Voltaire now would give himself a much faster—and less painful—start.
He employed his cunning by asking Moussinot, his efficient financial agent, to make inquiries around the leading chemists in Paris, to find out how competitors were approaching the problem. Moussinot was to act as naive as possible. (The fact that he was an abbé and hardly anyone knew that he acted for Voltaire would make that easier.) Nor was he just to go ahead and blurt out his questions about the Academy's prize. There was a more indirect way, and when Moussinot began with the apothecary to the Academy of Sciences itself, Voltaire told him what to do. “Draw him into a conversation, by saying you wish to buy a half-pound of quinine,” Voltaire advised. What merchant wouldn't be in a good mood after a large order like that? “You will [then] easily find out what the good [apothecary] understands of [the prize topic]. Send me what you glean…. You will of course keep my name out of it.”
Most importantly, though, in his preparations he had Emilie. He didn't quite understand why she was more insistent now in deciding how to handle servants and foreign visitors, but that didn't matter. Deep inside, he believed that she still lacked confidence. It's true that she'd been willing to leave Paris and try a life of full-time investigations in history, religion, and science. But she was competing against great thinkers and, as she admitted, “I do sometimes wonder if I started too late.” Voltaire managed to get her to put her own work aside now. She would help him in the calculations that Newton could do so easily. With that aid, Voltaire felt he could be equal to them.
Where to start? Objects changed when they got hot: some glowed, and some burst into flames; some got a thick chalky layer on their surface when they were heated red-hot, while others apparently did not. No one could work out the patterns. But had anyone ever taken the time to measure every aspect of heating with accuracy?
That's what Voltaire now began, and as he expected, Emilie was happy enough to help. Their sharing was even more spirited than the year before. They'd have the servants lug huge blocks of iron to one of Florent-Claude's forges in the forest, and there they'd heat it till it glowed, and then they'd measure its weight, more exactly than anyone had before, to see how it had changed in the glowing transformation.
It went on for weeks: iron was heated and cooled, and lead was heated and cooled; thermometers were plunged into half-molten metal (and when the first, insufficiently insulated thermometer burst in a shatter of glass, Voltaire simply wrote to Moussinot for a sturdier one).
They set small forest fires—servants standing near with buckets of water—to measure the rate of a fire's growth; they prepared a perfect cubic foot of wood, and set it flaming to see whether it expanded before it collapsed in ash. They even brought in glassblowers to create huge glass containers, big enough to fit one of those cubic feet of wood inside, and then—as an air pump was attached to the glass, and the atmosphere inside was gradually sucked out—he and Emilie, with Florent-Claude, and no doubt Emilie's son jumping around excitedly to see as well, took note of the result.
What they saw made no sense. Sometimes the metals that they heated gained weight when they got hot. That suggested some substance from the atmosphere was being pulled down by the fire and attaching to the metal to make it grow. But other metals didn't gain weight at all. There were even a few—however carefully they tried to calibrate the scales—that seemed to temporarily lose weight when they were heated up.
Voltaire wrote urgently to Moussinot for more equipment and instructed him to make more surreptitious inquiries among the various other experts in Paris, to find out what they were doing, and so learn methods that might help him fix these problems. But it didn't help: the weight figures kept on fluctuating. If Voltaire couldn't even tell whether fire made metals heavier or lighter, what chance did he have of gaining the Academy's prize?
Emilie was supportive, always standing with him during the day, and willing to do whatever calculations he needed. But it seemed that, as a woman, the heavy labor with all the forges and metal and fires was exhausting her. Often now she cut short their late-night coffees and chats, almost unsteady with tiredness as she left; when they met again, for morning coffee, she still appeared to need a good rest. Voltaire accepted that, and as a good hypochondriac, he was never kinder than when someone was actually suffering one of the many ailments he'd so vividly imagined for himself. It got worse for both of them as the heat of the summer built to its peak. The deadline was September 1, and now, in mid-August, he had to begin writing up his incomplete results as best he could. He was alone, the only one awake in the château as he sat at his writing table, working till midnight or beyond.
Or rather, that's what he thought. He wasn't alone in his writing at all. Emilie wasn't ill, and she wasn't asleep either. She was at her desk, over in her own candlelit rooms in the château. She'd seen that Voltaire was flailing in his experiments and she'd decided what she was going to do about it. She'd decided to enter the Academy's competition in secret, and on her own.
13
Emilie's Fire
CIREY, AUGUST 1737–MAY 1738
Voltaire had never had a chance of succeeding. Metals do gain weight when they're heated, but not nearly as much as he'd expected. The effect is so slight that the scales he'd lugged to Florent-Claude's forest forges were far too crude to detect it, hence his randomly scattered high and low results.
From the beginning, Emilie had recognized that he was going in the wrong direction, but she also knew she couldn't simply tell him to stop all his heating, burning, and woefully inaccurate weighing. It would have been undercutting him; it also would have been bolder than she felt justified in being at the time. Voltaire was famous across the civilized world, and she was an unknown woman. Although this was his first attempt at original work in experimental physics, he'd succeeded in almost every other creative discipli
ne he'd tried. She, by contrast, had never done any original work at all.
It didn't help that women were widely considered—even by other women—incapable of true creativity, with one male authority after another declaring they should simply be cheerful consumers of what their male betters produced. “I didn't want to be ashamed…” Emilie wrote about her efforts later. “When I got the idea to work secretly at night, I didn't even know if I'd submit my results.”
Yet in the months before the prize competition was announced, she'd stood up to Voltaire over the exhausting Linants, and to Crown Prince Frederick over the Joan of Arc poem, and that had made her begin to feel differently about herself. In previous years, she'd needed Voltaire as a guide, to carry her across to the realm where she could try to be creative. Now, though, she'd seen that she could plan things, and envisage how they might turn out, and then—on her own—make sure that they happened.
Everyone who's going to try true creativity needs that selfassurance. Voltaire had achieved it with his Oedipus play at the age of twenty-four, after his year in the Bastille. Emilie had taken till thirty— but was ready now. She even had an advantage in her relative isolation in the countryside. Maupertuis had needed to hide many of his true interests in Newton at first so he could be accepted at the overly traditional Academy of Sciences in Paris. Here at Cirey she didn't have those constraints.
She got to work. “I couldn't perform any experiments, because… I wouldn't have been able to hide them from M. de Voltaire.” But now the strengths she knew she did have—her easy ability to do long calculations and, even more importantly, to carry through chains of original reasoning—came to the fore. She couldn't use the solid instruments of wood and glass and metal that Voltaire had, so she would simply have to think her way through to the solution.
Passionate Minds Page 14