87 The siege had ended… misfortune of having his head separated: Phrasing from the eloquent Cole, First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, p. 79.
89 “To be able to keep an audience interested for five acts”: D841. Frank McLynn has proposed that this difficulty with sustaining a long play might explain why Voltaire was so insanely jealous of Shakespeare and tried, absurdly, to disparage him. He is one of a trio of famous Shakespearehaters—the others being Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw.
89 At one important moment… Phélypeaux chose as admiral: Not only had the relative—the young duc d'Enville—never been on the Atlantic, but he had never been on a sailing ship, either. He led his fleet of sixty-four ships in the vague direction of the French fortress on Cape Breton Island, but he'd brought so few war materials that the attack had no chance of success. Since he also had little idea how much food to bring for the expedition, on the long voyage home cannibalism broke out aboard the defeated French fleet.
89 Though in fairness to Phélypeaux: Admittedly he could never get Fleury or—after Fleury's death—the king himself to spend sufficient money on the French navy to allow it to match its archrival, Britain's Royal Navy. But he still didn't do much to improve that:
“In the British navy, the test to become a junior officer depended on having spent at least six years at sea and the candidate had to prove that he could: ‘Splice, Knot, Reef a sail, work a Ship Sailing, Shift his Tides, keep a Reckoning of a Ships way by Plain Sailing and Mercator, Observe by the Sun or Star, find the variation of the Compass and be qualified to do his Duty as an Able Seaman and a Midshipman.' For the young French aristocrat officers there was no equivalent. They studied… nothing about fighting or sailing tactics. There were [however] daily sessions set aside for both dancing and fencing.” Condensed from Adam Nicolson, Men of Honor (London, 2005), pp. 24–26.
90 “This custom causes epidemic maladies”: Modified from Margaret Sherwood Libby, The Attitude of Voltaire to Magic and the Sciences (New York, 1966), p. 254.
90 “It is time for…” one supporter wrote: This was Voltaire's friend d'Argenson, yet another schoolmate from Louis le Grand and, for a while, minister for foreign affairs; taken from his Considérations sur le gouvernement de la France.
91 “I will be there”: D803. To Thieriot; the original is in English.
91 He watched her countermand his orders: This is usually described by biographers as delighted exuberance on her part. But almost immediately after she arrived at Cirey, she wrote to Maupertuis (D797), saying that it was awful in Cirey without him, and that she hoped to arrange her life “in the sweet hope of spending many years philosophizing with you.” Voltaire had a habit of presenting a cheerful persona when things went wrong—as with his encomium to London at the start of chapter 4—and here too it seems he's trying to give a positive spin on Emilie's doings to friends who already have doubts about her commitment.
92 “I've been reading Locke again”: Edited version of D764.
92 “There's a woman in Paris, named Emilie”: Ibid.
92 “Let's go to Midnight Mass together”: Emilie's Lettres, vol. 1, p. 55, n. 26.
93 A police official: D884. The official was one Dubuisson.
93 Back home in the light of day: Ibid. As Dubuisson pieced together the story from servants and night constables, she'd spent hours with Maupertuis and the other explorers going over charts and maps for their polar expedition; then “at midnight she suddenly remembered that she'd left her coachman waiting. It was too late to expect him to still be there, so she rode into Paris alone, but dislocated her thumb while galloping so far. When she was home she sent a messenger to Mr. de Maupertuis, and he set out right away to console her. Apparently his rhetoric was quite elaborated, for he stayed closeted with her from four in the morning till just before noon, when a courier told the household that Mr. du Châtelet was approaching…. If it weren't for that, I suspect de Maupertuis would still be there.”
94 “Perhaps there's folly in my shutting myself up at Cirey”: Emilie's Lettres, vol. 1, p. 74, n. 38. To Richelieu.
97 What happened…dozens of letters and memoirs: The format of this chapter was suggested by Besterman's ingeniously arranged chapter 18, in his biography Voltaire.
97 Mme du Châtele has arrived: Hamel, Eighteenth-Century Marquise, pp. 65–66.
97 Voltaire says I'm busy: D930.
97 Madame wishes to order: D1336.
98 Now she is putting windows where I've put doors: Hamel, EighteenthCentury Marquise, p. 66. The note is from October 1734, but work would have stopped for the winter, and so would continue the following year.
98 Please remember to buy two small…tweezers: D1313, D1362.
98 I spend my time with masons: D943 except for the first sentence about masons, which is from a different letter. Emilie pointedly used the word amant of Voltaire, and ami of Richelieu, to clearly lay out the new arrangement.
99 Would you please send the thermometers: Collated from various letters to Moussinot, especially D1351 and D1306. In these Moussinot extracts I generally use Besterman's translations.
99 I stopped at Cirey: D2789.
99 Would you very kindly send me a hundred… quills: D1414.
99 Please have two good copies made: D1058. It's not a portrait of her, but one of him. See the image of Voltaire on page 2 of the photo insert.
100 I only got there at two in the morning: Unless specified otherwise, the de Graffigny quotations here are from her long compilation of letters near the end of vol. 5 and start of vol. 6 in the correspondence section of the Complete Works of Voltaire. She was writing to her equally gossip-desperate friend François-Antoine Devoux, nicknamed Panpan. This is from vol. 5, p. 394.
100 “Could you please send… wig powder”: André Maurel, La Marquise du Châtelet, amie de Voltaire (Paris, 1930), p. 54.
101 Yes, Hébert [the goldsmith] is expensive: D1338.
101 The next morning, when Madame woke up: Sébastien Longchamp and Wagnière, Mémoires sur Voltaire (2 vols.; Paris, 1826), pp. 119–20. This dates from later on, but I'm aware of no evidence pointing to her having changed her habits. Linant describes, from the early Cirey period, her general obliviousness to those in a serving capacity.
102 “Reflect on the advantages we enjoy”: Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, entry on “Love.”
103 By the way, is Maupertuis really going: Emilie's Lettres, vol. 1, p. 75, n. 38. Aside from Emilie and Voltaire's letters, the main sources for the quotations in this expedition section are Terrall's The Man Who Flattened the Earth; the 1756 edition of Maupertuis's collected works (Oeuvres de Mr. de Maupertuis, A Lyon, Avec Approbation, & Privilège du Roi), and the letter that he sent from his expedition to Mme de Vertillac (in Mélanges publiés par la société des Bibliophiles Français (Paris, 1829)).
103 This voyage would hardly suit me if I was happy: Terrall, Man Who Flattened the Earth, p. 101. The letter dates from late December 1735, the year that Emilie had definitely left Maupertuis for Voltaire.
104 After [many adventures]…how to avoid the insects: “On the river we'd been attacked by huge mosquitoes with green heads, which drew blood wherever they bit; we found ourselves on Niwa, persecuted by several other species even more cruel.” Maupertuis, Oeuvres, p. 103.
104 I will say nothing more of the rigors of traveling: “If you try to stop a reindeer by pulling on the sleigh's bridle, it just makes them turn around and kick you. The Lapps know how to turn over the sleigh and use that as a shield. But we were so little used to it that we were nearly killed before working it out. Our only defence was a little baton we carried by hand, and had used to steer the sleigh and avoid tree trunks in the deep snow.” Maupertuis, Oeuvres, p. 148.
106 And my good Moussinot: Libby, Attitude of Voltaire to Magic, p. 52.
106 The text was written in Latin: E. Asse, ed., Lettres de Mme de Graffigny (Paris, 1879) p. 50. See also Jonathan Mollinson's Françoise de Graffigny, femme de lettres. Ecriture et réception. In SVEC, December 2004.
107 The punishment for adultery could include whipping: The spectacular punishment of the comtesse de La Motte in a later generation—as depicted in the 2001 film The Affair of the Necklace, with Hilary Swank as the countess—was not so much for her adultery as for her embarrassment of the royal family through theft.
107 “adultery is punished in the person of the wife”: Alain Lottin, La Désunion du couple sous l'ancien régime (Lille, 1975), p. 75.
108 “The yogis of India”: Ira O. Wade, Voltaire and Mme du Châtelet: An Essay on the Intellectual Activity at Cirey (Princeton, 1941), p. 131.
108 “I hardly spent two hours apart from him”: Emilie, Lettres, vol. 1, p. 151, n. 85.
109 “each presided over … by a woman”: Besterman, Select Letters, p. 72.
110 Undercut the Church… and the whole chain might come undone: A similar concern is perhaps at the root of fundamentalist literalism in America, especially as it spread in the early twentieth century. In fast-industrializing America, as well as ancien régime France, turning back to the sources that had once seemingly upheld old relations, and guarding them tighter than ever before, seemed to be the sole way to keep everything from dissolving. For a fresh take on the psychological assumptions behind this, see Arthur L. Stinchcombe, When Formality Works: Authority and Abstraction in Law and Organizations (Chicago, 2001). A more recent example is the Chinese government's great effort to block investigation of Mao's career. If the foundations of China's Communist Party were undercut, millions of careers could have to change.
110 “I'm not a Christian, but that's only to love Thee:” Vaillot, Avec Madame du Châtelet, p. 32. Voltaire was writing in 1722.
110 It was… “like the rules of a game”: Modified from Esther Ehrman, Mme Du Châtelet: Scientist, Philosopher and Feminist of the Enlightenment (Leamington Spa, 1986), p. 64. It was a commonplace of writers such as Montesquieu in his Persian Letters, but here, at the start of her intellectual creativity, Emilie was making it fresh for herself.
111 “Women usually don't recognize their own talents”: Modified from Ehrman, Mme du Châtelet, p. 61.
112 This too was a fundamental step: Greek writers had developed explicit typologies of polities, but that approach collapsed in the Christian era when mankind's doings were taken to be the unfolding of a divine plan. Only as that busy divinity was pushed aside could Montesquieu and Vico and others closer to Emilie's time reassert a meaningful pattern to purely secular activities.
112 Hardly anyone had collected autographs before: See Beatrice Fraenkel's La Signature: genèse d'un signe (Paris, 1992).
113 “I couldn't whisper… the hoops of our dresses made us stand too far apart”: Créquy, p. 123. Her stranded friend was Mme d'Egmont.
113 “There were supposed to be… strict arrangements of tiny patches”: “It required a special knack to place these patches where they would best set off the face—upon the temples, near the eyes, at the corners of the mouth, upon the forehead. A great lady always had seven or eight, and never went out without her patch-box, so that she might put on more if she felt so inclined, or replace those that might happen to come off. Each of these patches had a particular name. The one at the corner of the eye was the passionate; that on the middle of the cheek, the gallant; that on the nose, the impudent; that near the lips, the coquette; and one placed over a pimple, the concealer (receleuse), etc.” From ch. 19 of Paul Lacroix, The Eighteenth Century, with 21 Chromolithographs and 351 Wood Engravings (New York and London, 1876).
114 Now, though, a new form of publication: See Dena Goodman, Republic of Letters: A Cultural History at the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, 1994), pp. 137, 142.
114 It was much like a primitive Internet: The phrasing is lifted from Tom Standage's wonderfully titled Victorian Internet; the concept is an old one, promoted by Tocqueville (in his Ancien Régime) and many others. What earlier studies missed, though, was the extraordinary power that a handful of “superlinkers” at the nodes can provide in spreading ideas. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's Linked: The New Science of Networks (Cambridge, Mass., 2002) demonstrates that power with a number of clear diagrams.
115 Even if someone did reach their thirties… much else steadily going wrong: The less polluted air counterbalanced these ailments to some extent, as did greater physical exercise, especially for men. But poor nutrition and hygiene more than made up for that, as studies of skeletons even from wealthy areas show.
117 “I am…like those brooks that are transparent”: Libby, Attitude of Voltaire to Magic, p. 47.
117 “There are…a few great geniuses, such as M. de Voltaire”: From Emilie's preface to her translation of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees.
118 that “brilliant light, so perfect for lovers”: Modified from Maurel, Marquise du Châtelet, p. 55.
118 “Pascal taught men to hate themselves”: From a slightly earlier (1732) poem; in the Moland edition of Voltaire's works, vol. 22, pp. 33–34.
118 “we guilty beings deserving to inhabit the crumbling ruins”: Elements of Newton, section 3, ch. 10.
120 “My companion in solitude has… dedicated it to me!”: Emilie's Lettres, vol. 1, pp. 125–26, n. 73. She'd been disappointed at not receiving a dedication from the visiting Francesca Algarotti in his popular Newtonism for Women, which was based in large part on what she'd explained to him. This more than made up for it.
120 “I spend my life, dear Abbé… with a lady”: Besterman, Select Letters, p. 49. The letter is dated December 9, so if that's accurate it would have been written immediately before the forced escape.
120 “We have just left Cirey”: Ibid., p. 49.
123 He'd sent copies… one draft had ended up purloined: The thief was our angry ex-Jesuit, Desfontaines, the homosexual abbé who had been condemned in 1725 to be burned alive in a public square for his deeds, and whom Voltaire had lobbied the authorities to save. On the principle that no good deed goes unpunished, Desfontaines spent much of his life trying to torment his savior. Voltaire had managed to brush off most of those attacks—once, after having had to endure the labor of reading and rebutting a scurrilous paper, he remarked that, really, it might have been better to have burned a monk, rather than now be bored by one. But the distortions Desfontaines added to the Adam and Eve poem could mean exile for life.
123 Emilie knew that… the higher nobility lived in contentment: Only a small percentage of the country's 100,000 or so nobles could live at Versailles. Most were far too poor; a few had fallen so far that they could only be told apart from the peasants they lived amidst by their right to carry a sword, and their reserved pews in church. See G. Chaussinand-Nogaret's La Noblesse au dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 1976) for sensible demographic estimates.
124 It was… what the safety of the state depended on: This wasn't the first time a king had decided to safeguard his position by concentrating or bankrupting his nobles, but it reached its pinnacle here.
124 “I need to know”: Emilie's Lettres, vol. 1, p. 144, n. 82.
124 It was Richelieu… sending a fast rider: It was possible there would be only a stern warning from the court, but it was also sensible to prepare for an actual arrest, which would probably be carried out with forces directed by the local intendant.
125 There were ambassadors, writers, businessmen: Gustave Desnoiresterres, Voltaire et la société au XVIIIe siècle (8 vols., Paris, 1867–76), vol. 2, p. 119.
126 It was the play he'd written: Voltaire made a significant innovation in his text, for French had undergone a pronunciation shift in previous years. For example, what had been spelled and pronounced les bordelois in the seventeenth century was now pronounced les bordelais… but still spelled the old way. (It would be as if we pronounced the word the as we're used to, but the government insisted we still spell it thee.) In his play Zaïre Voltaire used the new spelling—ais— for all the many words that had that same ois/ais imbalance between sound and sight. He was the first writer to make that shift, and what was important was not just that,
with his authority, it came to be accepted (whence today's Paris headlines about Les Anglais (“The English”); rather, that effect demonstrates how justified the authorities in tightly hierarchical France were to worry that more political aspects of his writings could catch on as well.
126 “The Role That Kills!”: Jean Orieux, Voltaire ou la royauté de l'esprit (Paris, 1966), p. 225.
127 For not only was…Willem Jakob 's Gravesande: The odd 's in front of his name is the Dutch way to write “of the,” similar to the French des or the German von.
127 The way…'s Gravesande was determining this: Voltaire also saw many other experiments, for (as I've written elsewhere) 's Gravesande also used hollow and solid brass balls, pendulums, scraped clay (of a deeply elaborate consistency), supporting frames, and a Laputan-like variety of other contraptions to carry out his contention that “The Properties of Body cannot be known à priori; we must therefore examine Body itself, and nicely consider all its Properties.”
128 He'd spent time with other scientists… been made a member of the Royal Society: Though that wasn't as much of an honor then as now, for membership was often granted to wealthy supporters or visiting dignitaries. (It was still somewhat more legitimate than the University of St. Andrews, notorious for selling rights to its doctorates, whence the remark that it was “getting richer by degrees.”)
129 [Newton's understanding] of gravity is not the final result: Elements of Newton, p. 536.
130 “I'm 150 leagues from him”: Emilie's Lettres, vol. 1, p. 151.
130 For you see…“my father had another daughter”: Ibid., pp. 145, 147.
133 She'd teasingly called out: From Anne Bellinzani's scarcely disguised Histoire des amours de Cléante et de Bélise (Paris, 1689), p. 168, in Présidente Ferrand, ed., Lettres, Notice par Eugène Asse (Paris, 1880).
133 “I'm the tenderest lover”: Modified from Vaillot, Madame du Châtelet, p. 26.
135 But Emilie also had a most unpleasant first cousin: FrançoisVictor Le Tonnelier, Marquis de Breteuil; he'd been in office 1723–26, and would be again 1740–43. Although not the minister responsible during Voltaire's stunt at Philippsburg, he would have felt the insult.
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