There was in fact something lurking from that English visit. He'd loved Jonathan Swift's approach in Gulliver's Travels of recounting an imaginary voyage as if it were true, by pretending to have a narrator who'd seen it. He'd also had several dinners with Alexander Pope and had kept up with everything Pope had published in the years since. In particular, in 1733 Pope had begun publishing his long verse essay titled Essay on Man. Pope's content was clearly inadequate, and when the poem first came out, Voltaire and Emilie had laughed at how the poor Englishman had lived up to national stereotypes by forgetting to list passion as one of the motivating forces in life. But as a professional writer, Voltaire found it intriguing to see a tightly structured, very long poem that at least tried to carry through a systematic account of human nature in the world. It could be a great way to let out one's inner feelings.
Some of Voltaire's drafts for this new-style poem were a bit too raw. He tried a section on envy, which described how poisonous the feeling could be: how it's like a giant ogre imprisoned deep underground, swearing and struggling to tear its way to the surface. A copy of that section went to Frederick at Rheinsberg, who replied, most civilly, that it was perhaps a bit personal, and some refinements in phrasing might be in order. Voltaire toned it down.
Those cuts were easy, for Voltaire now had his strength back. He began to write afresh, moving away from his embarrassment at the mediocrity of his science research compared with Emilie's. (They'd both placed highly, but she'd come up with excellent findings without the advantage of his expensive equipment; he also recognized that she had no doubt been ranked lower than she deserved because of her sex.) He went on with his new poem—he called it a Discourse in Verse on Man— and now began to use the twists he'd always liked from Jonathan Swift, where animals can talk and size scales are reversed. He imagined a sage overhearing a group of mice speaking, and what the mice say is that they are very happy to have such a charming world in which to live. All they need do is look before them to see that the palace they live in is clearly built for them: God has put big holes in it, so they can scurry in and out, and there are delectable chunks of food magically appearing on the floors of that palace—“created from the hand of nature.”
The mice go on to praise the Lord, for even the cats that sometimes prowl in their palace are clearly put there just to instruct and correct mice, further proving the beneficence—the clearly mouse-centered purpose—of the universe in which they live.
Voltaire was writing fast now, examining the meaning of his own life, of course, and the draft poured out: after the mice he wrote in a group of sheep bleating that no, it is clear that the mice are deluded, and that in fact the world has been designed for them—look at all the nice humans who let the sheep stand in fields, and obediently feed them, and wash them, and lead them into safe paddocks.
It went on and on. Next there are humans who insist that they are the ones the universe is designed for (with winds designed to transport their ships, and stars in position to light their way); then there are angels, who insist that no, they are the true reason for creation, as the fine planets waiting for their angelic breath to rotate in orbit clearly prove.
Why stop there? The narrator wants to find out more of what this means: to understand the brevity of life, and the fading of human love. Voltaire's writing became beautiful as he gave dreams of his Emilie, or another wise alien visitor, soaring down to help, and saying that the fundamental secret lies in giving happiness to others. The narrator is desperate to learn how to do that. But this the visitor is not allowed to tell. It flies away, as kind as ever, to the realm where all answers lie. Voltaire, waiting below, can only watch it go.
What he wrote was new and quite revolutionary: commenting on the foolishness of man's grand self-perception, yet doing so not through hammering mockery, but in a tender, wistful story. Even so, as with almost all Voltaire's works of this period, royal censorship meant that it couldn't be officially published. It was circulated as if in an intellectual samizdat, among his friends and a few interested correspondents. The first parts were eventually published anonymously, with Voltaire publicly disavowing his authorship; later a more complete edition was printed abroad, to be smuggled back into France.
In the months after the Academy papers, Emilie paused in her own research, partly not to upset Voltaire and partly because she was finding it hard to get back the free time she needed to come up with a fresh topic. Instead, there was the new tutor to convince to come to distant Cirey for her son (“he's such a sweet-natured boy,” she wrote imploringly in one request letter), and the funds to arrange for her half sister, Michelle. There was ever more construction, and tapestries, and temperamental cooks, and even an extra expenditure on Maupertuis's account, to help support the two young Lapp women who'd followed him down to Paris from his polar expedition and had no one else to take care of them when he was out of town.
It was a detail she could learn about in person, for with the Lapland expedition over, Maupertuis came to Cirey for a visit. Voltaire encouraged the trip, recognizing that although Emilie's ex-lovers might be tempted to revisit an old affair far away in Paris, they'd have second thoughts with Voltaire around and being graciously hospitable.
Maupertuis and his team had had time to go over their measurements and were convinced they'd proved that Newton was right, and the Earth really was flatter near the poles. Voltaire was delighted. He knew that the main critic of Newton in France was Jacques Cassini, head of the Paris observatory. He now merrily declared that “Maupertuis has flattened the Earth and Cassini.”
Since Emilie didn't know what to do next, she fell back on several of the things she and Voltaire used to do that gave them pleasure. Right under the roof at Cirey was a cramped open space where they'd built a tiny theater, with just two small rows of cushioned benches for seats, and a narrow gap in front of the stage for the plank with candles that could be raised or lowered—this was the stage lights. Now she encouraged Voltaire to fill up their time with more performances there. The material was easy enough to obtain, for Voltaire had years of plays he'd written stacked up in his study (“our first rule is that we perform only what's been written here”). He would get to be the director as well as the male lead; Emilie of course was the female lead. Everyone at Cirey was liable to be roped in for additional roles: cooks, butlers, groundskeepers, and any other staff who were needed to fill out the script. (The pudgy Madame Champbonin was a regular onstage; the more beautiful Comtesse de la Neuville seems to have been too wooden as an actress or singer, and so was brought in more for stage ornamentation than for sound.)
The children loved it. On the day of performances, Emilie's son would join Champbonin's older son in racing around the château, putting up posters they'd prepared, which announced the night's title. Then after dinner there'd be the steep climb up the stairs from the top inhabited floor of the house to this hidden-away theater, lighted candles shielded carefully against the gusts from cracks in the roof. On winter nights Emilie and Voltaire and their guests would wear layer upon layer of coats, and if it wasn't too windy they could hear the wolf packs in the forests across the river. On summer nights it was the opposite: sweltering in this wooden attic, where all the day's heat had soaked in.
A final time-passing pleasure was an innovation Emilie had installed on the entry level of the château: a private bathing room—and one of the first in France. Having a bathtub for long soaking wouldn't have made sense in Paris, with all the excrement, urine, ligaments, and other items that poured into the Seine (and often polluted ostensibly fresher sources as well). But not only was the water cleaner in Cirey. There was also something more to Emilie's innovation. It had to do with privacy.
Previous houses had usually been designed without corridors, and to get to a particular room, you'd simply walk through any other rooms that happened to be on the way. Whether the individuals you passed were praying, dressing, cooking, chatting, or defecating, you'd see them as you marched along. That was normal:
even Louis XIV at Versailles had been comfortable chatting with appropriate nobles while seated on his “chaise percée,” a chair that had a hole in the seat and a chamber pot beneath.
By the time Emilie and Voltaire had begun redesigning Cirey, though, they once again picked up on—and helped boost—a trend accepting the right to have more privacy. Their rooms weren't quite as demarcated as we're used to today—the corridor that went by Emilie's bedroom was only partly on the outside of the room, and rather seems to have gone partly past her bed—but they were changing in that direction. Her new tub and bathing room were marks of this transition. She'd installed comfortable sofas near the tub, for at least some visitors to sit and chat. When it came time for more hot water to be carried in and poured on her, she had no problem with an ordinary male servant doing the pouring. But her bath was not freestanding in a purely public space; it was in an attractively marbled room that could be closed off when she wished.
After Maupertuis left, Emilie wrote to her scientific contacts, backing his work against the ever-critical Cassini. But she was also aware of Voltaire's sensitivity, and so made little self-deprecating remarks to friends who would pass on her words to him, suggesting that she'd certainly need help in understanding Maupertuis's complex explanations; she even sent an anonymous review to a Paris journal, lauding Voltaire's scientific work.
No one was fooled. She understood Maupertuis's calculations perfectly well—indeed, she had helped Voltaire through the stellar angle calculations in their own Newton book. And because of the recognition she'd received from her fire paper, as well as follow-up work she'd done, she was now active in the Europe-wide networks of scientists who corresponded with each other: letters were coming in from important researchers in Italy, Switzerland, England. It was irritating having to tend Voltaire's ego when what she really wanted was to be free to get back into her research. Everyone who counted in this science community was watching to see what project she'd choose next, kept informed by that constant stream of letters.
Their unspoken tension was interrupted by a visit from Voltaire's orphaned niece, whose late mother—Voltaire's little sister—had been the one member of his family he'd always loved. He and Emilie barely knew the niece, a young woman named Marie-Louise, yet now, in the spring of 1738, she'd married a government official named M. Denis, and was coming down for the honeymoon.
Something went very wrong. Marie-Louise recognized that Emilie was attractive, and it also became clear to Marie-Louise how young her uncle's lady was, only a few years older than Marie-Louise herself. Yet while Monsieur Denis might be able to give her a good life, it would never be anything like this: the fabulous mansion, the furnishing with gold and silver everywhere, the gardens and guest rooms, and the easy mentions of so many of Europe's cultural and political elite, as well as copies of their books and manuscripts.
Marie-Louise had once written to her uncle that she was reading John Locke. Clearly she hadn't meant that—it's unclear if she ever read anything more than a light novel in her life—but it had seemed fine to say in a letter. Yet here, if one referred to such a thing, Emilie was likely to sit her down and with apparent eagerness launch into a burst of words to discuss Locke's philosophy.
A monster of envy reared. Cirey was ugly, Marie-Louise declared in a desperate letter she wrote soon after, and it was surrounded by vile mountains (there are no mountains in Champagne), and, and—and just everything was wrong! “My uncle is lost to his friends…he's impossibly linked to Châtelet…no one can break the chains…he hardly sees anyone else… she does everything to enchant him.” The tension was so bad that Voltaire felt a sudden illness coming on, and took to his bed. But transport for visitors was hard to arrange, and it was nearly a week more before Emilie could organize a coach and get the honeymooning couple to leave.
15
Leibniz's World
BRUSSELS, 1739
For a while Voltaire and Emilie went on with their usual schedule, trying hard to make their old patterns work. But even though MarieLouise had been an unpleasant guest, she'd clearly been in love with her new husband: whispering sweet words, probably staying close to his side; delighting when Voltaire—briefly managing to stagger upright from his sickbed—had been charming to them both. The contrast with how Emilie and Voltaire lived together now was sadly clear.
Emilie was spending ever more time alone in her rooms, and even though she carefully avoided discussing what she might be working on, the hints Voltaire picked up—from the books she ordered and the researchers she wrote to—made him think that she was abandoning Newton and switching allegiance to the late German diplomat and scholar Leibniz.
How could that be? Emilie herself had emphasized to Voltaire that Newton was the greatest thinker there had ever been. And hadn't Newton been proved entirely right by Maupertuis's polar trip? It was the one constant that Voltaire could hold on to, even as his own efforts in science were crumbling. Yet Leibniz had been Newton's mortal enemy; their quarrels had dominated European science for more than a decade before and after 1700, and Newton had become vitriolic whenever Leibniz's name was mentioned at meetings of the Royal Society. (The ostensible argument had been the matter of who had invented the calculus first. Leibniz had certainly published it first, and probably worked it out on his own; Newton, however, had the habit of keeping his great discoveries private, and insisted—plausibly—that he had created it first.)
Emilie was asserting her independence in her choice of topic. She suspected there were important areas in science beyond what Maupertuis had confirmed about Newton, and that these areas were still open to discussion. That's what she was going to investigate.
She was also offended by Voltaire's work choices. She respected him as a poet, of course, but now he was insisting on writing history, and returning to the manuscript he'd begun on the long reign of Louis XIV. Yet who cared about the arbitrary battles of one king against another? In her view, writing history wasn't the way to start a profound social science. She saw it as just a listing of arrogant royals engaging in one strutting contest after another.
They were tense with each other now, and Voltaire increasingly sulked, while Emilie became short-tempered. The gossipy Madame de Graffigny came for her none-too-welcome visit around this time, and after several weeks began nosing around among locked desk drawers. Emilie accused her of stealing illicit papers of Voltaire's that she could pass on to stir up trouble.
De Graffigny pleaded that she was innocent, and then suddenly Emilie started screaming at her, saying that she'd been giving her shelter for all these weeks—not because she liked her, God knows, but merely out of obligation. Yet in exchange she was being betrayed! Emilie was taking out her frustrations with Voltaire on this unsuspecting visitor. It went on, louder and louder, till Voltaire put his arm around Emilie and led her away from the terrified—though quite likely guilty—guest. There were only perfunctory apologies the next day, and finally de Graffigny left.
Yet even when a couple is irritable and exasperated by each other, they often don't want to go so far as to admit it explicitly. Voltaire halfheartedly tried his hypochondria again, but it got boring to stay in bed so much, and in any case Emilie saw through it. They tried their other usual evasion—of inviting lots of house guests to stay—and for a while they also splurged on gifts for each other, sending out orders to Moussinot in Paris for yet more trinkets, jewels, paintings. But Moussinot was so efficient, and knew the shops in Paris so well, that this was too easy. None of it worked, and they were both unhappy. They needed to do something else.
That's what gave them an enormous idea. Why not buy a brandnew house? It couldn't be another isolated château—there was no reason to lose Cirey as their main home—but if the court's censorship ever eased up enough for Voltaire to publish in France, then having a base in Paris would make sense.
There was one building in Paris so impressive that they both knew they shouldn't consider it at all. But there's a thrill in doing something you shoul
dn't. On the smaller of the two islands in the Seine at the heart of Paris, right where the Ile St. Louis narrows like the prow of a ship, is one of the city's most beautiful mansions. It was already a century old by this time. The architect was Le Vau, who had gone on to create Versailles. The interior decorations were by Le Brun, and he too had ended up at Versailles, becoming the chief designer of interior furnishings there. It was called the Palais Lambert, and for the first time in many years was now on the market. The owners may have thought they would get a good deal when some sort of rural military figure (Florent-Claude was involved, for the purchase had to be in his name, not Emilie's) and also a poet, however distinguished, proposed to negotiate with them. But Florent-Claude was a very sensible man—he'd efficiently led his troops in killing well-armed enemies—and Voltaire was so pleased at the possibility of negotiations that his health recovered entirely. He had been outwitting French aristocrats with his financial acumen for years.
The negotiations were carried out so deftly that it's quite possible the sellers felt they'd managed a good deal, even when they signed over the deed. Voltaire was happy to let them feel that, as it meant they wouldn't come back in a court case challenging the deal as having been unfair (as was often done if the sellers felt they'd been swindled). The absolute value was still high—it was one of the grandest houses in the most civilized city in the world—but he, Emilie, and Florent-Claude had ended up buying the Palais for just about 20 percent of what its original construction costs had been.
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