During this conversation we approached the farm buildings he was constructing near the road to his château. These, said he, pointing to them, are the most innocent, and, perhaps, the most useful of all my works. I observed that he had other works, which would be much more durable than those….
After dinner, passing through a little parlour, where there was a head of Locke, another of the Countess of Coventry, and several more, he took me by the arm, and stopped me—Do you know this bust [Newton's]? It is the greatest genius that ever existed: if all the geniuses of the universe assembled, he should lead the band.
It was of Newton, and of his own works, that he spoke with the greatest warmth.
Voltaire died in Paris, age eighty-four, a decade before the French Revolution, feted by crowds of admirers. In his final eulogy of Emilie, he'd written:
Her memory is treasured by all who knew her intimately, and who were capable of perceiving the breadth of her mind.
She regretted leaving life, but… the image of a man sadly tearing himself away from his distressed family, and calmly making preparations for a long journey, would in a faint way depict her sorrow, and yet her firmness.
Emilie's family home overlooking the Tuileries in Paris still survives, although its interior has been divided into several smaller apartments. With the clay quarries in the Tuileries filled in and the area around the yew trees no longer used as open toilets, the gardens are now salubrious enough for the many tourists and locals who walk through them on their way to the Louvre.
Renée-Caroline, the snobbish teenage cousin who stayed with Emilie in 1715, became ever more reactionary as she grew old. Arrested and imprisoned during the Revolution, she was saved from execution by the fall of Robespierre.
The elderly astronomer who visited Emilie's family when she was a little girl, Bernard Le Bovier Fontenelle, used to say that he would be glad if he lived long enough to see “just one more strawberry season.” His wishes were fulfilled, for he survived to the age of ninety-nine, dying only in 1757, nearly a decade after Emilie.
The château at Semur, where Emilie and Florent-Claude had their first married home, is now a hospital.
The unfortunate Inspector Ysabeau, whom Voltaire inveigled into the sewers of Paris in the hunt for nonexistent writings, became intrigued by Voltaire's work. When the public executioner burned Voltaire's Letters from England, he obtained an illegally printed extra copy to keep for himself.
The grimly turreted Bastille prison had fewer political prisoners as the years went on. In 1789, when it was stormed by the citizens of Paris, only seven inmates were left inside: four forgers, two lunatics, and one aristocrat (who had been consigned to the prison by his family). A café stands on the location today.
Suzanne de Livry, who had so entranced Voltaire when he was young, was living in Paris in later years after his English exile. When he knocked at her gate to visit her, she instructed her servants not to let him in: she had married an aristocrat and did not want any reminders of her less noble past. She did, however, keep the portrait he'd commissioned of himself for her, apparently giving it pride of place in her drawing room.
Adrienne Lecouvreur never married, though she had an illegitimate daughter who became the grandmother of Amandine Dupin, a young woman who was fascinated by stories of her ancestor's links with famous men. Dupin had relations with de Musset and Chopin and became a writer in her own right, publishing under the pseudonym of George Sand.
The Duc de Sully's town house remains as an imposing mansion in Paris's Marais quarter. The wastrel aristocrat Auguste de RohanChabot, who had Voltaire beaten for impudence, lived a long life, protected first by his cardinal uncle and then by other family members.
The attempted taxation reforms of Jean-Baptiste de Machault failed.
Voltaire's nemesis Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Maurepas, remained at Versailles for many years, until he responded to Pompadour's charge that he should be more respectful by mockingly asserting that he was respectful to all the king's mistresses. Within the week he was expelled.
Brought back in old age by Louis XVI, he insisted on the construction of thin-hulled French naval vessels, which were easily destroyed by the more heavily timbered British ships they fought against. He also continued encouraging the king to resist calls for increased taxation of the old nobility or the Church, thus undermining the national finances and necessitating the eventual meeting of the Estates General—leading directly to the Revolution and the overthrow of the monarchy.
The amiable Englishman Everard Fawkener remained Voltaire's lifelong friend and correspondent. He became Britain's emissary to the Turks, and also served the English commander during the battle of Fontenoy. His daughter married into the family of the great military leader Marlborough, thus putting him in the same family tree as Winston Churchill.
Though now surrounded by London, the bucolic wonderland of Wandsworth village has scarcely changed since Voltaire stayed at Fawkener's home. The Drury Lane theater, where Voltaire further perfected his English—and where the enthusiastic amateur actor Mr. Bond died during a performance of Voltaire's play Zaïre— remains a center of London's West End.
The mathematician La Condamine, who worked with Voltaire on manipulating the Paris lottery to their mutual advantage, became head of the official French expedition to South America. The goal of the mission was to measure the Earth's curvature close to the Equator for comparison with measurements from Maupertuis's expedition to the far north. Lacking Maupertuis's calming nature, the French explorers became so irritated with each other that for months on end they pushed through the jungle refusing to say a word to each other. La Condamine returned to France a decade after he left, having performed the first scientific exploration of the Amazon along the way.
After the death of Elisabeth, duchesse de Richelieu, the ever-voluble Madame de Graffigny had no one to stay with in Paris. She lived in great poverty for many years, but then, in old age, wrote a novel— Lettres d'une péruvienne— that became a bestseller. Renowned as a dispenser of wisdom and head of an important salon, she wrote dozens more plays.
Although Emilie and Voltaire had given up on the slothful tutor Michel Linant (“perhaps in fourteen more years he'll finish the fifth act of his play”), he actually did submit an essay for the royal prize competition of 1740, on the topic “The Advancement of Eloquence in the Reign of Louis XIV.” When the results were announced there was a greater surprise: he'd won.
Frederick the Great's unceasing militarism led to the catastrophe of the Seven Years' War, which saw his country of approximately 5 million people engaged in at times simultaneous battle against an array of enemies—Russia, France, Austria, Sweden, and others—with a combined population of about 100 million. Prussia's citizens were murdered and brutalized in a manner that hadn't been seen in Europe for centuries. The result was a terrified, blindly obedient Prussian citizenry and a mercilessly efficient officer corps.
The huge debt that Britain incurred in supporting Frederick led to Parliament calling for the distant American colonies to pay their fair share—a call that was received with a noted lack of enthusiasm by the thirteen colonies and was a proximate cause of the American Revolution.
The once curvaceously beautiful Marie-Louise, Voltaire's niece, had always liked to eat, and as she gradually took over her uncle's wealth (“I gave her my house in Paris, my silver, my horses, and I increased her fortune”), she was able to indulge that passion as much as she wished. She became very fat, and in time moved in with Voltaire, ostensibly as her uncle's housekeeper. Despite arguments and sulks, they lived together for the last twenty years of his life.
The handsome rosy-cheeked youngster Charles Stuart—whence the appellation “Bonny Prince Charlie”—never recovered from the destruction of his Scottish forces at Culloden and ended up disconsolate and drunk, traveling restlessly around Europe. He converted to Protestantism in yet another vain attempt to recapture his throne. He died in Rome.
Despite constant slurs fr
om the higher-born women at the court, as well as ceasing sexual relations with the king fairly early on (“He finds me very cold”), Madame de Pompadour (the onetime Jeanne Poisson) became so much Louis XV's friend that she remained his official mistress for seventeen years, dominating the French government most of that time. The magnificent porcelain works now at Sèvres are due to her patronage.
At the start of Louis XV's reign, France was the dominant power in Europe, America, and India. By the end, sixty years later—and due in large part to his impressively incompetent decisions in diplomacy, military strategy, judicial appointments, and taxation—France's dominance was over, and Britain's had begun.
Emilie and Voltaire's efficient servant Sébastien Longchamp remained discreet about his services till many years after Emilie's death, when he finally published his memoirs, for which he'd made copious notes while in their service. He'd further prepared for his retirement by stealing spare copies of Voltaire's manuscripts, which he sold at great profit in later years.
The young Jean-François, marquis de Saint-Lambert, made a habit of borrowing the mistresses of famous writers. After leaving Stanislas's court and moving to Paris, he became romantically involved with JeanJacques Rousseau's Madame d'Houdetot as well. He tried staying in amiable correspondence with Voltaire for many years, and wrote an article on “genius” for the great Encyclopédie. Late in life, he became honored for writing a popular child's catechism of the Catholic faith.
Although the evidence is unclear, it seems that Emilie had entrusted him with eight leather-bound volumes in which she'd collected all the many hundreds of letters she and Voltaire had written to each other. Most likely Saint-Lambert burned them all, shortly after her death.
Louis-François Armand du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, continued with his numerous affairs so notably, and so impressively, that the young Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, a generation later, naturally modeled the Valmont character in his novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses on him.
Richelieu's successful assault on the British base at Port Mahon in Minorca in 1756 was commemorated in the creation of a convenient egg-and-oil mix that was first called “mahonnaise” and is now known as “mayonnaise.” He married for the final time in 1780, when he was eighty-six.
With admirable timing—as always—Richelieu died in 1788, one year before the Revolution.
After the acclaim from his Arctic explorations died down, PierreLouis de Maupertuis got married and moved to Frederick's court in Prussia, where he elaborated on fundamental scientific work he'd begun when with Emilie, especially the principle of “least action,” which is central to later physics, and especially to quantum mechanics. After Emilie's death, he was joined at Frederick's court by Voltaire, who soon began writing sarcastic pamphlets to mock his onetime rival for Emilie's affections.
In old age, Maupertuis returned to France, spending some of his last months in his old home town of St. Malo in Brittany.
Florent-Claude du Châtelet lived to age seventy. He did not marry again after Emilie's death.
Nothing more survives from the historical record of Michelle, Emilie's elderly half sister. Nor is it known how her mother, Anne Bellinzani, responded to the news of her discovery, for Bellinzani had been young when Michelle was born and was still alive a half century later, when news came that the daughter she'd had with Louis-Nicolas had been found. Bellinzani died in 1740, at the age of eighty-two.
Emilie's daughter, Françoise Gabrielle Pauline, inherited her mother's quick intelligence, once apparently memorizing all the lines for her part in a long play during a half-hour carriage ride. After marrying an Italian noble and moving to Naples, she never saw her parents again, though she remained a regular correspondent with her mother.
Emilie's son, Louis-Marie Florent, rose in the royal administration to become the ambassador of Louis XVI to the English court. During the Revolution he was guillotined in the Place de la Révolution, just yards from the river Seine. His own son died in prison, thus ending the du Châtelet line.
Partly ransacked during the Revolution, the Château de Cirey is now occupied by a private family, which has invested considerable funds in restoring it. Open to the public every afternoon from July to midSeptember, it's conveniently reachable from Paris's Gare de l'Est.
Notes
4 One terrified homosexual abbé: This was the Abbé Desfontaines, who never forgave Voltaire for saving him, and ended up attacking him through sarcastic articles and malicious intrigues for years. His role in leaking the Adam and Eve poem is central to the events in chapter 10.
4 In France, if the king had chosen: The tax exemptions ostensibly began in medieval times, when nobles were supposed to give services in kind to help the king in war, and thus had already “paid” their taxes that way. Such exemptions became less justifiable when feudalism was over. This was to some extent recognized in legislation, for although in our period nobles were exempted from the basic tax of the taille, they were supposed to pay the later taxes known as the capitation and the dixième. But—and it's a big but—there were a huge number of exemptions that had built up over the years, be it from exempted sources of income, obscure “traditional” privileges, or simply through corrupt arrangements with local officials (who were often related to the individuals they were supposed to collect tax from).
4 Working for pay was demeaning: The problem was the dreaded dérogeance— the losing of nobility through practicing forbidden occupations.
The provisos were of Talmudic intricacy. Manual crafts such as carpentry or metalworking were disallowed, although glass-blowing was not. Commerce was forbidden if it was retail, but wholesale commerce was allowed, although maritime commerce was allowable both wholesale and retail (which exempted it from questions about what size of purchases distinguished wholesale from retail, which was much debated). Farming your own land was acceptable, but farming someone else's was severely unacceptable, even if you'd paid full rent. Owning a mine was acceptable, so long as your income came directly from its products, but not if you earned money through selling the value of the ownership. If there was any underlying logic, it was that (1) only God could create something from nothing (which is why retail commerce was out), and (2) aristocrats were warriors, not of the caste of laborers (which is why carpentry was out).
7 By the end of the eighteenth century: Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, tr. John Goldthwart (Berkeley, 1960), p. 78. The attitude long continued. In the 1833 paper in which the English academic William Whewell coined the term scientist he went on to say that “notwithstanding all the dreams of theorists, there is a sex in minds.” Even in 1911, Marie Curie, winner of two Nobel Prizes, wasn't allowed full membership of France's Académie des Sciences. The Royal Society in London only opened full membership to women in 1945, the French Académie in 1979.
9 Since du Châtelet's life was focused on science: In Mitford's world, women in France ended up as mistresses, whom one could treat humorously; English women became adulteresses, who had to be treated tragically. See Allan Hepburn, “The Fate of the Modern Mistress: Nancy Mitford and the Comedy of Marriage,” Modern Fiction Studies 2 (1999), pp. 340–68.
11 Translations presented more of a difficulty: When Denis Connor used a catamaran to win an America's Cup heat against a New Zealand monohull, he defended it by telling the world's press: “We have a cat, not a dog.” In languages where dog only means a four-legged furry beast, one can translate either the meaning or the brevity, but not both—for the multiple registers into which words fit rarely cohere across languages. See Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language for an eloquent discussion.
15 “illusion is not something you can have”: Robert Mauzi, ed., Discours sur le bonheur (Paris, 1961), p. 79.
16 The moonlight that streamed past: The full moon was on June 29 (right when Emilie stopped over at Cirey), as Britain's Nautical Almanac Office has kindly computed, and that June was especially dry, as harvest records
confirm. Whatever moonlight did enter the room would have had to strike the head of her bed, as visitors to the château can observe (there's only one natural place for the bed if it's not to block the doorway).
19 Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil: Her mother was very formal, and would have insisted on following the fashion for children of pinning in this manner.
19 “Nothing is so beautiful”: Fontenelle's Conversations on the Plurality of Inhabited Worlds, “Fifth Evening” (Berkeley, 1990), p. 64. The interpolated “solar systems” replaces “vortices,” i.e., I'm omitting the author's assumption of Cartesian rather than Newtonian physics. The preceding sentences, too, closely paraphrase Fontenelle.
19 It was dark outside: Up to twenty guests were regularly present, so this is a low estimate of candles.
20 “I don't think that anyone ever saw her smile”: Modified from Souvenirs de la Marquise de Créquy (7 vols., Paris, 1834), p. 104.
20 “Don't ever blow your nose on your napkin”: The source was the very old and much reprinted popular guidebook La Civilité Puerile et honnête. At the start of chapter 4 of Créquy's memoirs she describes Gabrielle-Anne's recourse to it. I've modified the paraphrase in Mitford's Voltaire in Love (London 1834) after comparison with the original text.
21 For hours on end she would happily gossip: The nobles of the sword, who'd been ennobled many centuries earlier and believed—whether justifiably or not—that it was for brave military service, lorded it over the nobles of the robe, who tended to have acquired their positions in more recent centuries and through administrative service. Emilie's mother was a Froulay, and in the former category; several relations of Emilie's father belonged to the latter.
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