Passionate Minds

by David Bodanis

  47 “He was woman's idolized lord”: Observations of Voltaire's friend d'Argenson, and of de Goncourt; modified from Frank Hamel, pp. 30–31, and Hubert Cole, First Gentleman of the Bedchamber: The Life of Louis-FrançoisArmand, Maréchal Duc de Richelieu (London, 1965), p. 153.

  48 “I can't believe that someone as sought-after”: Emilie's Lettres, vol. 1, pp. 64–65, n. 36. (All references are to the Besterman edition.) The quotation comes from a slightly later stage of the relationship.

  49 Marriage was a matter of… alliance: Florent-Claude and his contemporaries recognized that it was different in other, more coldly rational countries, where this easy French pragmatism didn't arise. When the Frenchman La Rochefoucault visited London a generation later, he was struck that wealthy English couples actually went out with each other, and postulated this was why the women there delayed marriage to the advanced age of twenty-five or even twenty-eight: it might take that long to find a partner they could stand spending so much time with.

  49 Two vastly wealthy young women: Mme de Polignac and the Marquise de Nesle.

  49 Louis-François Armand du Plessis…was in love: Cynics have suggested that if Richelieu was ever in love, it was with the face he saw in his shaving mirror. Certainly, like many womanizers he generally didn't like women, and spoke of them with scorn (though he spoke of most men with scorn as well). However, with Emilie he always made an exception; keeping an extraordinary, moving correspondence going for over a decade. The reason, I suspect, is that she was no longer sleeping with him; also, that early in their relationship she'd seen through much of his nonsense—and had enough trust in their friendship to let him know it.

  49 Indeed, one aristocratic young woman had reported: To Brantôme, in his Les Dames Galantes, a work straddling the genres of biography and personal memoir. First published in 1655, its reputation grew in the eighteenth century.

  50 “putting it in and frolicking”: Ibid., pp. 38–39.

  54 “Most educated Frenchmen had snubbed”: “In France…a merchant hears his profession so disdainfully spoken of that he is foolish enough to blush for it.” Voltaire, quoted in Ballantyne, Voltaire's Visit to England, p. 178.

  55 “He cured his wife of the spleen”: From Voltaire's Notebooks: Edited, in Large Part for the First Time, by Theodore Besterman (Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1952), pp. 52, 53. For his notebook Voltaire used twenty-one big sheets of paper, folding them to make eighty-four pages.

  55 When he needed help… the prompter loaned him a copy: The prompter at Drury Lane remembered a foreign gentleman—“this noted author”—who began to come to the theater, where “I furnished him every evening with the play of the night, which he took with him into the orchestra [so he could look at the words while hearing the actors speak them]: in four or five months he not only conversed in elegant English but wrote it with exact propriety.”

  56 “Sir, I wish you good health”: D338.

  56 He also learned…servants didn't have to carry water: The idea wasn't too complex, even in the pre-steam-engine era, but the execution was. Colbert had proposed a comprehensive system for piped water in Paris decades before, but it had never been implemented.

  56 He found his way… “the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together”: Compare Thomas Jefferson, a great fan of Voltaire, in his Notes on Virginia, sixty years later: “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket not breaks my leg.” That attitude is central to the separation of Church and State in the U.S. Constitution. “It is error alone,” Jefferson continued, “which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”

  56 In France…Protestants had been … tortured: A handful of Catholic priests or administrators would furtively violate that prejudice, giving families known to be Protestant the false label nouveaux convertis so that births, deaths, or marriages could be registered. But that was rare, and as late as 1752 Protestant vicars were still being hanged.

  57 “The reason of our not using the outward sword”: I've slightly reordered the quotation, which comes from early in Voltaire's Letters from England.

  57 “stick to the first [volume]”: D310 and D318. Voltaire has a good explanation of why the latter parts of Gulliver's Travels are so much less compelling. In the same letter (which is in English): “The reader's imagination is pleased and charmingly entertained by the new prospects of the lands which Gulliver discovers to him, but that continued series of newfangled follies, of fairy tales, of wild inventions, palls at last upon our taste. Nothing unnatural may please long. 'Tis for this reason that commonly the second parts of romances are so insipid.” He could have been writing of Hollywood sequels.

  58 “I do not know… orders for [Bombay]…of the world”: His actual usage was “Surat,” north of Bombay, where the English East India Company had its headquarters. Here I'm using Archibald Ballantyne's old translation, in his Voltaire's Visit to England (London, 1898), p. 178.

  58 There was a lot more to learn… although Newton had had the bad grace: Newton died in 1727, about eleven months after Voltaire's arrival, but Voltaire hadn't been well enough connected in the UK to get to see the (ailing) Newton before he died. He did attend the funeral in Westminster Abbey, though, and conducted a famous interview with Mrs. Conduitt— where the apple story (see p. 70) first saw the light of day.

  60 In other words, they bought: The details were slightly more complex, for the exact flaw was that the probability of winning was not proportional to the cost of the tickets needed for entry. This meant that the chances of winning would, in fact, be hugely multiplied if one merely purchased an overwhelming number of the least expensive tickets—which Voltaire, with the help of a corrupt notary, was quick to do. See Jacques Donvez, De quoi vivait Voltaire? (Paris, 1949), esp. pp. 39–55.

  60 Voltaire amassed a fortune: Most nobles were not well off, and many of those that were had the bulk of their cash tied up in land. Voltaire's funds were highly liquid.

  60 And they had all been complacent… after the beating outside Sully's: In retaliation, Voltaire had removed all references to his friend Sully's direct ancestor from his epic on Henri IV (which took some doing, for the original Sully had been Henri's right-hand man).

  61 since she was an actress …excommunicated by the Catholic Church in France: An important qualification. Italian Catholicism was generally more liberal, and when Italian actors came to Paris they were careful to ensure that they remained under Italian rather than French Church law.

  62 But although he wanted… his Letters from England: There were various titles and editions. The main distinction is between the Englishlanguage Letters concerning the English Nation, printed in London, and the slightly later French edition Lettres philosophiques, printed in Rouen. For simplicity I use the shorthand “Letters from England,” which is how they were often referred to.

  62 the mathematics was too hard for him to advance: This is when he seems to have first made contact with Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis (see p. 71), asking him for help in the calculations of Newton's inverse square law for gravitation: Voltaire, always a superb popularizer, was working out how much the moon “fell” toward the Earth in one second. He wanted to compare it with the distance an apple closer to the Earth's surface fell in that time, to show that both followed Newton's laws, and that the exact amounts were in accord with the true orbit of the moon that we see.

  62 “If you neglect to enroll yourself”: Select Letters of Voltaire, tr. and ed. T. Besterman (London, 1963), p. 72. Voltaire here addresses Le Fèvre, several years later, giving this prospective writer counsel on what awaits him if he does choose that career: “If your talents are unfortunately mediocre (which I do not believe) your regrets will last all your life; if you succeed you will have enemies.” Voltaire goes on to describe book reviewers who will enjoy being witty at the author's expense, scholars who will “despise you, or pretend to do so”; cabals, an easily bored public, and much else that has changed l
ittle over the centuries.

  62 To save the effort…he moved in with: This was the baronne de Fontaine-Martel. Old and suffering from severe eczema, she made it clear that not only was there to be no sex with her, but that Voltaire was not to have any mistresses visiting either. He was, however, getting a large rent-free suite of rooms, with dinners and servants all laid on.

  65 The friends and Emilie turned up: By other accounts their first meeting was at the Opera, but the dating is inconclusive. Besterman suggests the first week of May, but the letter D607 that he assigns to that period has no date on it. By June, however, their letters are unambiguous.

  65 But he and Emilie had become lovers…he wrote a poem: This is his “Epistle to Uranus”; again, not so much a translation as a retelling.

  66 “She was born with a fairly good mind”: Besterman, Voltaire, p. 181. He compared this much repeated diatribe against the original letter in which Du Deffand wrote it.

  68 “I swear to you, she's a tyrant”: René Vaillot, Madame du Châtelet (Paris, 1978), p. 78.

  68 There was a slight amount of mixing: Voltaire's ranking was only of the medium-high bourgeoisie, for his father had been merely a prosperous notary, and Voltaire was only a writer. This made a marriage between Voltaire and an aristocrat entirely impossible.

  68 But that was only for…the evening gatherings: Moderated slightly by the fact that salons were rarely run by women from the highest nobility: more commonly, they were organized by women from newly wealthy merchant families, who had married into more established aristocratic families.

  68 Emilie was breaking all that: If a woman from her background did, inconceivably, marry down, she would lose her claims to nobility. (If a male noble married a commoner, however, he kept his position.)

  69 “Why be so horrified by our existence?”: From Voltaire's 25th Letter.

  69 We take this for granted today: Many of these ideas were around before, but held by thinkers who were not at all as well known as they became once Emilie and Voltaire had helped focus and boost them (especially via all the correspondence from Cirey). Without amplification, the earlier thinkers held to “start” an intellectual trend are readily forgotten.

  69 Ordinary people were… placed on Earth to work: Our common word weekend, for example, was scarcely known at this time. The concept made no sense. Rich people never worked, so for them there was no working week in need of an ending. Ordinary people, by contrast, worked all the time—except when they were at church, or on Church-given holidays—and so their secular working had no end.

  70 He'd been a hypochondriac: “From time to time during his long life [Voltaire] complained of apoplexy, blindness, catarrh, chronic colic, deafness, dropsy, dysentery, erysipelas, fever, gout, grippe, herpes, indigestion, inflammation of the lungs, insecure teeth, itch, loss of voice, neuritis, paralysis, rheumatism, scurvy, smallpox and strangury.” Modified from Derek Parker, Voltaire: The Universal Man (Stroud, 2005), p. 79.

  70 Emilie was in her late twenties…a servant who later saw her nude: This was Sébastian Longchamp, valet and secretary. He was slightly ill at ease about her throughout his Mémoires, constantly on the edge of undercutting her, and had no reason to give unwarranted compliments.

  71 “my machine is totally exhausted”: D691.

  71 Paris's population was several hundred thousand: Since the sewers worked so poorly, homes further from the Seine usually couldn't use them at all. Sewage was either poured into the streets or taken away in carts—and although some of that was intended for fertilizer, much ended up in the Seine.

  72 He'd grown up on the coast of Brittany: The corsairs were encouraged by the royal administration, for the French Navy was barely functional in the 1690s and there were no funds to pay for ships and sailors. Offering the prize of British ships was a way of encouraging private entrepreneurs from the French coastal ports to attack Albion, with no upfront costs to Paris. See Mary Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth (Chicago, 2002), pp. 16, 17.

  72 When they weren't in bed: It even seems that they brought a microscope into the bedroom, to continue their scientific discoveries there. For although the nature of sperm cells was roughly known, no one was quite sure how or where women provided the matching cells. Maupertuis examined the fluid that could be collected from a woman during, as he put it, “the tender moments shortly after intercourse.” But although he and any partner looked carefully (“I have searched several times with an excellent microscope”), the magnifications they could achieve weren't enough for them to find the source of female reproductive cells (Quotations from Maupertuis's Vénus physique.)

  72 There seemed to be numerous cases of “slippage”: Late in the eighteenth century Joseph Lagrange and especially Pierre Laplace were thought to have shown that there were no such instabilities, though in the early twentieth century Poincaré and then much later the developers of chaos theory made clear how precarious the solar system really is. To Newton the issue was even simpler. Because of universal gravitation, everything pulled on everything else, and so the universe should collapse inward—whence his finding it natural that there would be detailed imbalances that God needed to fix.

  Note that long after Laplace's simple stability assumptions faded out of physics, they continued on in economics, especially as codified by Walras and his followers—an attractive notion to anyone seeking the comforting assurance of divine harmony guiding our lives.

  74 “The sublime Maupertuis”: Vaillot, Madame du Châtelet, p. 85.

  75 But the de Guise ancestors who had cheated: French rulers who were low on funds were liable to send out blank letters of royal grant, which local administrators would auction off: the winner would get to be a noble, and the king—after the percentage skimmed off by his administrators— would be richer. The practice occurred at least as early as the late thirteenth century, while an especially great surge of direct purchases took place at the start of the sixteenth century, under Louis XII, when the government was again desperate for funds. The second-tier category of “nobles of the robe” was created at that time, offering further opportunities for royal enrichment.

  75 The Richelieu fortunes, however: Although nobles of the sword, the Richelieus had been quite minor within that grouping. Worse, the present duc was only related to the cardinal through his aunt, and was a direct descendant only of the less-distinguished du Plessis family.

  75 Such variations within the aristocracy… biologically superior: Think of the bitchiness and squabbling that develops among rich families after just one or two generations today. Now carry that over centuries, extend it to several thousand families, and then have the prerogatives that the different individuals are fighting about become enshrined in law. To make it more complicated, although all titled individuals were noble, not all nobles were titled. (The title was not the personal quality, for that was the status of nobility; rather, the title was linked to particular lands, as with Emilie later being a “princess” because of holdings in the Low Countries.)

  What was at issue here was not quite our modern biological racism, but more a strong snobbery toward different groups. Thus families that were nobles of the sword would mock and despise others that were nobles of the robe—even if they were related.

  77 “From Jean Frédéric Phélypeaux, to the Crown's agent:” The message was to the local intendant, Pierre Arnaud de la Briffe. The intendants were a relatively new category of officialdom, appointed directly by the king, in the hope that they would be more likely to do his bidding than the traditional— and often unresponsive—local nobles. (It was similar to the creation of the National Security Council in the United States, overlain on a not-quitetrusted State Department.)

  77 “The King has deemed it appropriate”: D731.

  78 “My friend Voltaire”: Emilie's Lettres, vol. 1, p. 40, n. 14.

  79 The printer was thrown into the Bastille: They also found other intriguing and not quite approved titles that the printer had high hopes of: The Reluctant Nun was one,
The Fifteen Joys of Marriage another. The warning that Voltaire received was from his friend Argental, another schoolmate of his and Richelieu's from Louis le Grand, and also, conveniently, quite close to Phélypeaux.

  79 What Voltaire ended up deciding: Voltaire stayed briefly at other locations, including Cirey; but the details are unclear, for he made sure that any letters in his hand were sent by courier from a range of places, the better to mislead the Paris authorities. Some historians suggest he went to Philippsburg only by chance, but that seems unlikely, for Cirey was still scarcely inhabitable, and Voltaire liked his luxury. Also, he'd just spent weeks under Richelieu's hospitality at Montjeu, and visiting the military camp would just be a continuation of that in a safer place. Perhaps most compelling of all—to the authority-mocking Voltaire—was that he knew it would irritate Phélypeaux beyond measure when the truth finally came out.

  81 Also, more and more nobles… needed to defend their status: For those who weren't nobles at all it was worse, as they were blocked at the level of noncommissioned officer, however skilled or dedicated they might be. Come the Revolution, their resentment meant that this important core of the army readily took the anti-royalty side.

  82 The officer was the son of the prince: The prince de Conti: no great genius, but a loyal fan of Voltaire.

  83 Voltaire wrote to an acquaintance: D766. To the comtesse de la Neuville, who would become one of his two most important neighbors at Cirey.

  84 The printer had been interrogated: D760. He quickly implicated Voltaire.

  84 Now, on June 10, the city's Parlement: The Parlement was strongly Jansenist, as was Voltaire's hated older brother. Versailles officialdom might personally be at ease with critiques of the official religion, but fervent Jansenists took more of a Savonarola-style line and hated Voltaire's mockery.