The negotiating was fun, and brought Voltaire and Emilie together in a way they hadn't felt for almost a year. Even so, and despite their huge wealth, the new house was a massive undertaking, and they were in danger of falling short. Luckily a potential source of new income came their way.
Florent-Claude had a relative—a very old relative, in poor health— with a complex series of land holdings up in Flanders, which was part of an inheritance battle between factions in the du Châtelet family that had been simmering for sixty years. The relative had visited Cirey recently and made it clear that he was not long for this world. If Emilie could accelerate the court's deliberation, then she and Florent-Claude would receive a great deal of money when the relative died, which they and Voltaire could use to finish paying off the Palais Lambert.
Thus their plan. Since they didn't want to argue with each other, after all the upsets from the fire experiments, they had decided that buying and fixing up an additional house would be a safe shared activity. But since the house was so expensive, and a trip to Brussels could help hurry along the inheritance court case that would give them extra money, they'd take the occasion to relax by traveling to the Low Countries. They both realized they needed more shared projects like this, far removed from literature or science.
It wasn't quite as expected, for the Flanders population, they soon found on their trip north, was not known for its intellectual curiosity. Spanish troops had spent over a hundred years closing Protestant schools, burning Protestant churches, and torturing very many Protestant individuals—especially any intellectually or politically curious ones—in the Flemish lands. Their labors had been intermittently interrupted by British, Dutch, and other northern troops, who'd repaid the favor by closing Catholic schools, burning Catholic churches, and torturing very many Catholic individuals—especially intellectually curious ones—whenever they'd had the chance. Fighting had ended since the Austrian Habsburgs had taken over twenty-five years before, but from it all most survivors had wisely concluded that venturing opinions, or reading too much, was not a wise course of action.
The result—as when Emilie and Voltaire stayed at a castle that had no books whatsoever—was to bring them closer together, since each saw how much they really did have in common. When they reached Brussels they decided to throw a fireworks party to see if that might attract some more interesting locals. Card games were apparently the main social draw in Brussels, so Voltaire, ingenious as ever, arranged fireworks that would light up to resemble playing cards, three red fireworks in a rough heart-shaped pattern suggesting the three of hearts, and so on. The plotting worked, and they did meet a few locals they stayed sociable with.
Once they settled, Voltaire took out his essays and poems and plays, but he didn't achieve much. He needed Emilie's enthusiastic support, but she was distracted, busy now with learning law, taking Flemish lessons, supervising legal strategy, improving her calculus, relaxing by writing a translation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, and attending church regularly.
Even that was just in her spare time. Her deepest focus was still on science, and she was excited about something big: deeper research into work started by that mysterious Baron Gottfried von Leibniz, who'd died in 1716, when Emilie was just nine. Many mathematicians on the Continent, as we saw, whispered that Leibniz was the one who'd invented the calculus, not the Englishman Newton. But more importantly, Emilie had heard that Leibniz had suggested a detailed way God could control the universe—and what was greater, he seemed to have proof. The difference between the two men was more than just a personal rivalry. Within Newton's system, there was no space for what Leibniz proposed.
Emilie wanted to understand what Leibniz had proposed. At Cirey she'd spent so long analyzing the Bible that she could no longer believe in the simple, literal beliefs she'd been raised with. But she was still religious. If there was a more complex, more subtle God, she was willing even to go beyond Newton to find it.
Leibniz, she found out, had taken a curiously indirect approach in his research. One of his most important examples began with what seemed an entirely innocuous question. If you dangle a chain from a high point and a lower point, what shape does that dangling chain take?
That seems straightforward enough. Think, for example, of the long swooping cables in a modern suspension bridge, such as San Francisco's Golden Gate. The cable stretches from the top of one tower down almost to the roadway before it then is lifted up to the top of the next tower.
That cable sags, of course, but it doesn't first sag straight downward and then take a sharp turn horizontally along the roadway. Nor, however, does it go in a perfect 45-degree line from its high tower till it's above the roadway, and then at that point suddenly tilt straight up. How to predict the intermediate curve it really does follow?
The way Leibniz and his followers went about this was to imagine tying lots of different ropes to the top of the bridge's suspension tower and connecting them all to the same point on the roadway. Some of the ropes are pulled so tight that they do stretch in a nearly straight line; others are left to sag so much that they almost hit the roadway; others are given an intermediate degree of sag. Now climb to the top of the tower and string a big round bead on each of the ropes. Let all the beads go at the same time. Imagine there's no friction.
They'll all start skidding down their different ropes, and they'll all take different amounts of time. The ones on ropes that sag nearly straight down will get the fastest start—they'll be falling almost vertically at first—but then they'll slow down as they reach the nearhorizontal lower stretch of the rope. The beads that are on straighter ropes won't slow down so much near the end, but of course they won't get the same boost from being in free fall near the start.
There can be thousands, millions of possible ropes, yet only one will be the winner, leading its bead to the finishing line down on the roadway fastest. This curve of the winning rope, it turns out, is very closely related to the shape used by engineers on real suspension bridges. It's not mere coincidence. It's the shape that physical objects in our world really do take.
This was astonishing. Did God actually measure thousands or millions of possible paths and work out which one would let a bead slide down fastest, then use that as His basis for working out what the rippling tension in a real bridge's curved cables should be? To Voltaire the question would have been ridiculous. To Emilie it was wondrous. Maupertuis had hoped to find out whether God actively intervened in our world, by voyaging to the high Arctic. But that would just be a single, unique measurement: saying what our planet's overall shape was like, but not showing how to track God's hand as it actually intervened in ordinary events around us. Taking Leibniz seriously, though, was different. It meant believing that in some way God was sifting through these millions of possible measurements all the time, selecting for us the single one that kept the total time of this mythical bead's travel to a minimum.
These were the issues Emilie wanted to explore further. No one had synthesized the thinking of Leibniz and Newton before. Why couldn't she, showing how the best ideas of both their systems could be combined? It would be a step beyond her uncredited co-authorship of that recap of Newton's basic work that she and Voltaire had written at Cirey. Other researchers wouldn't consider undertaking the new syntheses she had in mind, for they were all, very distinctly, either in the Newton camp or in the Leibniz camp. But once again there were advantages in being excluded from the main science academies. Emilie was far enough outside that she could view them both objectively.
Voltaire wouldn't be happy with that—he worshiped Newton, and felt he had to despise Leibniz—but what alternative did she have? She knew that the insights she'd come up with from her fire experiments (about new forms of light) were too far in advance of her time to be followed up by the researchers she was corresponding with.
She'd been isolated long enough in her intellectual life before she'd met Voltaire.
She wasn't going to be isolated again.
; Something important was going on. In previous periods, “time” had been something that the Church controlled: there were regular, recurring festivals, and regular, recurring daily prayers. Everything fitted within established traditions; nothing fundamental was ever supposed to change. When Emilie had been a child, her life had been planned for her in a similar way: there was to be a genteel yet trivial education in etiquette, marriage, and then subservience to a wealthy man. She was supposed to live as her mother had lived; any daughter she had was expected to live the same as well.
But a different sort of linear time was also making its appearance. In this new approach, events happened in a sequence that didn't circle back on itself, dully repeating from year to year, lifetime to lifetime. Instead, each day and each year might reveal something new. That's how Emilie wanted to live. There were hints of it at the time, especially with so many new technologies: big tapestry factories being created where none had existed before, new pumping engines that drained swamps or supplied water, new manufacturing processes. Careers and the relative positions of groups in society also seemed to be transforming more quickly than before. Amidst all that tumult, Emilie would start a new, self-chosen life.
There was another powerful idea. Our modern notion of optimism comes not so much from human affairs as from these earlyeighteenth-century studies of how trajectories can take the “optimum” path (as with the Golden Gate bridge example above). Emilie was one of the very first people to use the word optimiste, and she did so in her mathematical analyses of these curves, in accord with her (and Leibniz's) belief that there's a beneficent deity behind the seemingly random events we see around us. An optimist was someone who believed that however complicated or random or odd a stretching curve might seem, if we had enough insight then we could understand the simple guiding principle from which it actually came. The concept then spread from mathematics to mean anyone who believes that such an optimal path can open up in life.
It was hard to keep these views entirely private from Voltaire, for although their rented house in Brussels was big, it wasn't quite as spacious as Cirey had been. Also, who could turn down his editorial help? Despite herself, Emilie let him read portions of the text she was working on. He tried to stick to just expository corrections and would neatly ink little queries in the margin (“explain more,” “an example, please,” “which means exactly what… ?”). But at times he couldn't help commenting on the work overall and letting Emilie know how inane he felt this genre of concerns to be.
To Voltaire, she seemed to be saying that there are many possible worlds, yet somehow, magically, we automatically are living in one that is perfect. But how could all the flaws we see around us—disease and torture and all the rest—be a mark of a perfect world? It was the opposite of what he'd been saying in his Discourse in Verse on Man, where he'd mocked the mice and other creatures that believed the universe was created for them.
Their relationship couldn't take this. Voltaire had always seemed to treat Emilie as an independent person, but now he responded as if deep down he still expected her to defer to him. Yet here she was attempting to surpass him, and discard what he'd believed. It was a betrayal. He was so upset that he began publishing public rebuttals of her work, scorning her for pretending that we lived in the best of all possible worlds. (His critiques were written as passionate technical arguments now, but in two decades he'd be elaborating the points in his philosophical fable Candide.) His writing hurt Emilie, for it was going well beyond their agreement to respect each other's separate study. But their argument summarized yet more key responses to modernity.
In medieval times, before modern science, it had been easy to accept that God shaped everything that we saw or lived through. There were no “coincidences,” because there were no separate, freely moving causal lines to “co-incide.” But the scientific revolution had changed that. Voltaire believed that almost everything we saw around us really was just the result of chance.
He liked that, for since the details of what we experienced were not all part of a complex divine plan, then we had the opportunity to reach out, intervene, and reform the world around us. In the medieval view, for example, God ordained when and where disease was to occur. In the modern view—as Voltaire saw it—disease happened because, for example, taxes were being misused and so clean water wasn't supplied to city slums. The French administration couldn't do anything about a divinely ordained disease, but it could certainly work to get more efficient government officers who would ensure that everyone had fresh water.
Emilie, however, was angry, convinced that Voltaire was willfully taking what she said the wrong way. Didn't he realize she was the last person who'd declare we could never make an effort to improve our lives? The world wasn't perfect—it would be inane to say that. All she was asserting, rather, was that before you began any course of action, it would be wise to look more closely at the subtleties of how things were connected in the world around us. Voltaire believed in straight, narrow reason to fix things. Emilie saw a world of more subtle interrelations.
The evidence seemed to be everywhere, once you knew how to look. Cynics might say that the universe isn't really arranged in the best way. Our eyes, for example, are so weak that even simple animals, such as hawks, can see much better. But Emilie countered that. Our eyes have a limit to their magnifying power, she wrote, but it's a limit that's forced on us by a higher good. For suppose somehow we had been granted eyes that were ten times or even a hundred times more powerful than now. We'd be able to see fine details, of course. But we wouldn't be able to see any overall topography or shapes. We'd be bewildered, unable to orient ourselves. What seems a limitation—the fact that our eyes aren't as strong as our best optical machines—is actually a strength. If they were that strong, we'd be as useless as a blinded Samson.
That, she pointed out, is what Leibniz was getting at. Clearly, we don't live in a perfect world. But that's because there is no such thing as a perfect world. Rather, every world that can possibly exist is going to have these sorts of trade-offs. Although our world isn't ideal, it might still be the best possible.
Voltaire didn't listen. Their arguments were getting worse—and then they both pulled back. This wasn't what they'd come to Brussels for. Maybe things would be easier if they tried Paris.
16
New House, New King
PARIS, 1739
Although they arrived ostensibly to inspect their new home, Emilie and Voltaire's first stop was at Richelieu's town house in the Marais, where his young bride, Elisabeth, was bleeding from complications of pregnancy. From Emilie's years of experience with Voltaire's illnesses, she knew that the one certain way to make a patient worse was to let doctors near. The rusty hooked knives they brought, and worst of all, their insistence that home visits should begin with sharp open cuts so that the patient poured out more blood, were treatments Emilie knew Elisabeth had to avoid. Only when she improved did Emilie and Voltaire visit their new home, which they still hadn't seen.
They rode over the crowded bridges on the Seine, first passing across the larger island, the Ile de la Cité. This held the Palais de Justice, where Voltaire's Letters from England had been torn apart and burned by the public executioner. But that was years ago, and since Voltaire had carefully not said too much to Emilie about the possibly subversive history of Louis XIV he was secretly printing, she had no reason to worry that it might happen again. Then there was another bridge, connecting the big island to the smaller one, and then it was just a short ride to their house.
They loved it. Voltaire wrote to Fawkener (again in English) that it “is without doubt the finest [house] of Paris, and situated in a position worthy of Constantinople; for, it looks upon the river, and a long tract of lands interspers'd with pretty houses is to be seen from every window.” With the Brussels arguments far away, he was content: “Upon my word,” Voltaire went on to Fawkener, “I [could not] live without that Lady, who… understands Newton, she despises superstition, in shor
t she makes me happy.”
Emilie was content too. There was much less pressure on their relationship in Paris. Instead of facing each other with the utterly identical schedule of coffee, then work, then riding, then dinner, day after day, as at Cirey, now each had fresh things to tell the other. Voltaire had found out, for example, that their failed tutor, the pudgy Linant, had given up teaching, the poor man, and was trying to make a living as a writer. He was even planning to submit an entry for the king's prize essay competition. Since Voltaire and Emilie didn't want him to starve, Voltaire discreetly gave him some cash through an intermediary; Emilie, for her part, wrote letters of recommendation for the future tutoring jobs he would need after he failed to complete his prize essay.
Other arrangements would be more satisfying. Emilie had hired an advanced tutor for herself, the young Swiss mathematician Samuel Koenig. But soon she had outgrown what he could teach (and Voltaire's nerves couldn't take overhearing her explain that fact to him much longer). The most distinguished possible replacement would be Johann Bernoulli, in Basel, but he was past his best work and too old to move to Paris. His son, however—somewhat less than creatively also named Johann Bernoulli—had supplanted him as perhaps the leading active mathematician in Europe.
It would be invaluable to have him in Paris, not least because Emilie had heard that he too was keen on extending the now increasingly forgotten, fascinating approaches of Leibniz. Unfortunately, Bernoulli junior showed little interest in leaving his comfortable establishment in Basel. But Emilie's work was going so well that she was confident in every activity she began to plan, and her six years with Voltaire had done wonders in showing her the many ways of getting around such obstacles.
She realized she'd need to get Maupertuis to back up her request to Bernoulli. If she was charming, and even flirted with Maupertuis a bit, that wouldn't hurt in getting him to help. “Here you are back in Paris,” she wrote Maupertuis a few days later, “yet I had to find it out from someone else. Ah, this is very bad…. But do come and see us at the Opéra, in M. de Richelieu's box. Madame de Richelieu is counting on you dining with us today.” Maupertuis tried to hide, by ignoring the invitation, but Emilie kept at him—“Despite your prodigious indifference, sir, Madame de Richelieu again requests you to dine with us today.” In a few days he relented, of course, and wrote the encouraging letter she wanted to Bernoulli.
Passionate Minds Page 17