A Visit From Voltaire

by Dinah Lee Küng

  ‘Ah, Madame,’ the Frenchman trills, ‘How sad they don’t appreciate the superflous, that element so essential to life!’

  Okay, he’s funny, at least funnier than the young painter downstairs who is crying midway through the morning into his cellphone to his therapist. Apparently his middle-aged partner (and gay lover, the tiling man discreetly explains to me in hushed voice,) got hit by the ski train after a breakfast of coffee and white wine. St-Cergue’s single train platform is now spattered like vintage Pollock with two cans of our bedroom’s off-white latex acrylic, not to mention the various colors of the poor painter himself.

  My kitchen has become an impromptu grief-counseling headquarters as the bereaved receives well-wishing electricians, wood-flooring teams, and plasterers for consolatory reminiscences and a drink. They’re using my mother’s crystal, goddammit. We’ve had two major snowstorms, and thanks to this informal wake, it’s the first time the snow plow man has cleared away the slush blocking our gateway. Death as a one-time maintenance bonus.

  A horrible scraping shakes the front of the house,

  ‘Mon Dieu, what was that?’ V, throws open my office window to the freezing air. The firewood man, Monsieur Berner, has just arrived in his delivery truck to offer condolences. We hear his engine go into reverse, followed by more horrible grating sounds. We feel the house suddenly wrenched and then released.

  ‘What happened? Qu’est-ce qu’est arrivé?’ I yell downstairs.

  ‘It’s all right, Madame,’ the carpenter yells back in thick dialect, ‘Monsieur Berner just had a petit accident. Tranquillisez-vous. Le camion attached itself into the rain gutter.’

  ‘I didn’t understand the last bit,’ I complain to V.

  ‘I translate, Madame. Your gutter is no more. He says it’ll be repaired soon. I say, don’t expect anything before summer.’

  I clear away a foot of snow to peer over the windowsill. Five feet of new copper tubing dangle from the roof edge below. The assembled mourners politely call up to me for permission to unpack another Hong Kong dining chair to seat Monsieur Berner. His unscratched truck sits smack on top of my snow-covered flowerbeds.

  ‘What a fuss they’re making! To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth—which I must now speak. The deceased was a lousy painter, minable,’ V. comments.

  ‘I gather he was the younger painter’s first great love.’

  ‘Ah, young love! One of my favorite subjects!’

  Before he launches into yet another of his stories, I make my move.

  ‘Monsieur Arouet. I’ve come to a decision. Please stop unpacking.’

  That refined profile swivels in my direction.

  ‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave, or to return to, um, wherever you came from . . . uh, if there is a place . . . uh, you know . . .?’

  No response.

  ‘I’m really sorry. Please don’t take it personally. It was kind of you to come, but things are so busy and unsettled, I’m sure you understand.’

  Those brown eyes plead.

  ‘How can I put this? You’re a writer. Suppose we were both in a book together, or rather, a play? Well, I mean, it wouldn’t fit, would it? We’re the wrong mix, you and me. You belong in a literary masterpiece on a stage in Versailles, while my life is—well—kind of a TV sitcom.’

  ‘Tee vee sit come,’ he struggles.

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t get it. Excuse me.’

  The dancing brown eyes narrow to a slit. I hope firmness is written all over my face as I leave him stunned in the middle of his linen pile.

  ‘Mais, Madame!’

  ‘Let’s just say I’m an unworthy hostess, Monsieur Arouet. You won’t find any Society here, no members of the Académie Française, and absolutely no Royals, not a single Louis I through XX in sight.’

  ‘Have I complained?’

  ‘No. Please, stop following me. You’re just going to cause confusion. I can’t talk to ghosts all day. I’ve got my hands full. And in my free time, ha, ha, I have to learn French.’

  ‘But I can translate, assist you, guide you—’ He clutches his antique book and stumbles downstairs after me. I block him short, with both hands outstretched.

  ‘I’m just not ready for a, for a, a Lumière.’

  We circle the house down the bedroom stairs, past the mourners in the dining room, through the kitchen, across the living room and back up to my office.

  He slumps down on the guest bed and crosses his spindly legs. He wags his head in bewilderment.

  ‘I spent most of my life as a guest and was never made to feel unwelcome!’

  ‘Well, maybe you can come next year. How’s that?’ I suggest. ‘By then I will have read your entire—what is this? Dictionnaire Philosophique, and we can talk. This is covered with corrections. Haven’t you already published this?’

  ‘I never stop revising.’ He grabs the book back. ‘Madame, I resent this. I stayed with Madame de Bernières in Paris—but always paid my way—or the adorable Duc de Sully in the country. After my second stay in the Bastille, my great friends in England, the Ambassador Everard Falkener and Lord Bolingbroke were thrilled to receive me.’

  ‘Thrilled?’

  ‘Ecstatic. And then I lived very happily for ten years with my mistress Madame du Châtelet and her husband in—’

  ‘—You spent your whole life crashing in other people’s houses? Did you never own your own home?’

  ‘Not ‘til my sixties, but that is beside the point! I was never, never made to feel unwelcome!’

  ‘Houseguests are like fish. They smell after three days. My mother taught me that.’

  ‘A witty saying proves nothing,’ he sniffs. ‘Well, maybe once or twice I chose to leave early,’ he adds, ‘but I never went anywhere I wasn’t invited. I carried letters of introduction from Horatio Walpole, British ambassador to France to the Duke of Newcastle, the Duchess of Marlborough, the Prince and Princess of Wales. Of course, that’s it! I am so sorry. Letters of introduction are lacking to us!’

  ‘That’s NOT it!’

  He turns sarcastic. ‘A royal recommendation will not suffice? Madame de Pompadour gave me a room in Versailles. I was a guest at the Polish court-in-exile for years, and, oh, yes, I was invited to live with Frederick the Great in Potsdam to discuss affairs of state for three years.’

  His face clouds momentarily, ‘I did leave Potsdam under a petit cloud, but it was a case of mutual disillusionment, I assure you.’

  ‘You know, I don’t know whether you’re the King of Light, or the King of Name-Dropping, but as you’re invisible, Peter can hardly talk Red Cross diplomacy with you.’

  ‘You don’t have a lover?’

  ‘Certainly not!’

  ‘Perfect. Then it’s just the three of us.’

  ‘I don’t think Peter’ll appreciate this menage à trois at all, especially if he doesn’t even know.’

  V. positively bristles.

  ‘I don’t see why Monsieur shouldn’t be pleased! Madame du Châtelet and I lived with her husband in the Champagne country quite happily! I turned their home from a tenth-century ruin surrounded by iron forges and forest beasts into the intellectual headquarters of France! Who knows what I could do with this?’

  ‘Didn’t he mind sharing his wife with her lover on his own estate?’

  ‘Poof! Why? He was always off fighting Germans. Anyway, he ate with the children. He preferred regular meals to our little midnight snacks.’

  Our tiff is cut off by the church bells ringing noon. I hear the workers heading out of the kitchen, the mourner leading his entourage to Les Cytises Pizzas.

  ‘They’re sitting shiva on my dime, day after day,’ I grumble.

  ‘His first love, you say . . . Oh, Pimpette!’ V. sighs.

  ‘A poodle?’

  He shoots me a withering glance. ‘Bien, her real name was Olympe Dunoyer. My father hustled me off to work for the French ambassador to The Hague. I was wretched. I wrote Pimpette, ‘Never lo
ve equaled mine, for never was there a person better worthy of love than you.’ She married a count instead.’

  ‘I guess that happens—’

  ‘No matter. Then I fell in love with Suzanne, just as my satires were making me the toast of all Paris. That was cut short by a lettre de cachet. ‘Sieur Arouet must be arrested and taken to the Bastille.’ ‘

  ‘What’s a letter of cachet?’

  His expression darkens and he whispers, ‘An instrument of terror, Madame, nothing less. Orders, signed by the King, for the imprisonment without trial of anyone who had incurred official displeasure.’

  ‘What had you done?’

  V. shrugs his shoulders. ‘Boasted to a stranger in a cafe.’

  ‘A stranger sent you to jail?’

  Monsieur Arouet glances behind both shoulders and spits out, ‘A police informer! Next thing I know, I’m dragged off with nothing but the clothes on my back! And irony of ironies, for verses that were not even mine! As soon as I was gone, my Suzanne fell into the waiting arms of my best friend, Lefevre.’

  ‘She married him?’

  ‘No. She married a wealthy marquis. Who cares? I had lost a woman, but I had gained new fame and a new name. I emerged from prison no longer François-Marie Arouet, but surely you have now guessed?’

  ‘You reinvented yourself, like Madonna?’

  He frowns, ‘Well, even I could not compare to the Virgin, mais oui. Come, come, haven’t you guessed yet?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say playfully, ‘you’re actually Racine.’

  He scowls.

  ‘Molière? No? Corneille!’

  I take pity on him. ‘Okay, okay, you re-named yourself Voltaire—Monsieur François Arouet de Voltaire.’

  He bows slightly, blushing with pleasure.

  I looked up. ‘Did you ever see her again, Monsieur Voltaire?’

  ‘Suzanne? Yes,’ he nods, thoughtfully, ‘after her husband died. Our reunion—such laughter! Such tears! I thought she would trip on her silks as she hurried down the stairs to fall into my waiting arms.’

  At this, he alights on my laser printer, his right hand precariously clutching a low ceiling beam. Stretching one graceful hand towards an invisible audience below, he declaims, ‘Young, gay, content, without care, without a thought for the future, limiting all our desires to our present delights—what need had we of youthful abundance? We had something far better; we had happiness.’

  He glances down at me, ‘For Suzanne. To make her feel bad about dumping me. Sounds better in French. Want to hear it again?’ The hand shoots out in rhetorical readiness, as trained on the schoolboy boards of Louis-le-Grand.

  ‘Wasn’t there any hope of getting together with Suzanne again? ‘

  ‘Yes, but by the time we got together again, I was eighty-four and she was eighty-three.’

  I turn away, hand on mouth, suppressing a giggle.

  He’s offended. ‘No less delightful all the same.’

  V. thrusts a couple of my old diaries aside to make room for his collection of ink bottles. A small photo flutters out of one. He scoops it off the carpet.

  ‘Why this is a representation of Versailles!’ he exclaims.

  ‘Give me that.’ My spirit softens with recognition of this tiny black and white snap of my own first love, a French boy named François. The lens caught him sitting at a cafe table outside the Palace of Versailles during our brief reunion in Paris.

  ‘A handsome youth.’

  ‘Named François—’

  ‘Like me!’

  ‘Like you. We met in Santa Cruz, California the summer I was nineteen.’

  A crazy summer with hardly any responsibility, the only summer of my life when I was truly free of obligations of family, studies, or job—just free, the only time in my life I made love all day, hitchhiked to Mexico with nobody’s permission, tanned myself to the verge of Affirmative Action status, wore off-the-shoulder Romanian blouses. I have since then felt elegant, well—at least, groomed, chic or sexy. But it was the only time in my life I felt beautiful.

  And oh, he was so glamorous! His father was the political cartoonist for the French weekly, L’Express, and his mother a Russian-American expatriate painter. He was an Apollo, the bearer of all things European and civilized to my redwoody corner of the world infested with waterbeds, lava lamps, roach clips and lazy minds.

  V. interrupts, ‘A town of the Holy Cross?’

  ‘Santa Cruz? A faded resort in the mountains. Not unlike St-Cergue in its way.’

  ‘You accompanied this François to France?’

  ‘No, he returned to New York to finish his architecture degree. I finished my Chinese studies in California. His love was that of any other normal nineteen-year-old—totally physical. But I don’t think I ever fell in love that way again.’

  ‘And Versailles?’

  ‘Five years later I went to Paris and looked him up. He rescued me from a flea-pit hotel and we went to Versailles for the weekend. I remember I joked, ‘I’m not sure I’m ready for Versailles!’ and he answered, ‘The question is, is Versailles ready for you’?’

  ‘And this, Madame?’ V. rescues a faded slip of paper from the floor, from which he reads in the most perfect French:

  Voici pour Claire,

  L’ oiseau solaire

  Le grand tournesol

  Oui pleure et rigole

  Pour Claire

  This is for Claire,

  The sunbird

  The tall sunflower

  Who cries and laughs

  For Claire

  It has been thirty years since I have seen this tiny verse dedicated to me using my middle name. I turn away from Monsieur Arouet to hide my sudden emotion. How was I to know at nineteen that this was the only poem anyone would ever write for me? I had forgotten this scrap casually slipped into my hand under the sun-dappled Californian redwoods. The smell of pine needles, Johnson’s Baby Oil, and sandalwood soap floods my memory.

  ‘All physical, Madame?’ V. chastises me gently.

  The pain of loss floods my heart. Until this second, the only gift I had remembered this golden youth giving me was the burning ambition to return to his arms one day a dazzlingly accomplished foreign correspondent, equal to his charms and sexual experience. Is there not something ironic that after those thirty years of searching for success and adventure in Asia, I ended up in a French-speaking village married to a man also trained as an architect?

  ‘Who knows? You might once again lay eyes on your golden Apollo, sportif et fort.’

  ‘I doubt it. He moved from Manhattan to Manhattan Beach.’

  ‘Not adjacent?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  He shrugs, disgusted by my obstinacy. ‘I find this pessimism depressing. You’re discouraged, listless and sarcastic. Cut off from your habitual circles and your professional rewards, you can only complain your life is over.’

  He seizes an abandoned toy—Theo’s plastic Hercules blade—and hand held high, leads himself back and forth across the room. At the click of a button, the toy clanks like iron and steel clashing with enemy weaponry. Punctuating his pep talk with Energizer acoustics, V. thrusts it, backing me into the corner of the office.

  ‘Did I sulk, sitting in the Bastille? Did I whine, fleeing Versailles in disgrace? Did I moan, driven from the gaieties of the Richelieu wedding in Montjeu to flee for my life from château to château, retreating to exile in Champagne? Did I groan leaving my post in the great Frederick’s entourage in Potsdam? Did I sit on my hands when finally exiled from France at the age of sixty-five?’

  I have a plastic blade pressed against my heart. ‘Um, lemme guess. ‘

  ‘Madame, NOTHING could be better for you than this exile! I drafted my Letters Concerning the English Nation while in exile! I wrote Micromégas and Zadig in exile! You were at grave risk of wasting time—’

  ‘Watching the Cooking Channel, only I can’t get it over here,’ I sigh.

  ‘—Thinking you were living just because events roll
ed you along!’ He bursts out, ‘Finalement, I understand why I am here!’

  ‘You do?’ I whimper.

  ‘Mais oui! L’art de vivre has escaped you! I have come to teach you the fine art of being happy! There is nothing I haven’t seen or done. Nothing can surprise me! Now,’ he tucks the Hercules sword in his belt, ‘Finish decorating this house! Invite your wittiest friends! Write your next novel!’

  ‘In other words, get to work.’

  ‘Use your time well! The world is full of lies, superstition, dishonesty, cruelty, prejudice, bureaucracy,’ he declaims. ‘Ecrasez l’infâme!

  He has to have the last word. ‘And as for meeting old Apollos, judging from my experience with Suzanne, let’s see, I was eighty-four, you’re almost fifty, yes! You have thirty-four more years to go. Let’s not waste them.’

  ‘How about I just make dinner?’ I escape the plastic sword and slink out of the office.

  ‘I’ve almost finished unpacking,’ he says, satisfied. ‘I routinely employ all my daylight hours for research and correspondence,’ he adds, and flipping his coat tails free of my desk chair, resumes scribbling in his leather book.

  He’s won yet another round. Where has the day fled? Already the workers are packing up. When I reach the kitchen, I stumble on proof that V. is right. The loss of young love can be endured. I surprised the bereaved painter standing in the middle of the kitchen in the comforting embrace of none other than the Ticinese tiling man.

  Chapter Five THE BASTILLE

  A few days later, a panting Alexander appears at the kitchen door.

  His back hunches over under its load of textbooks and his face is streaked with dust

  ‘Mama, I’ve gotta tell you something.’

  His face suddenly crumples into wrenching sobs, through which he croaks out, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘What’s happened? Are you all right?’

  ‘Please don’t get mad at me.’

  I hate it when they do that. I’ll have every reason to get mad, while information I need is held ransom for a guarantee of superhuman maternal restraint. I hold him by both thin shoulders and look him straight in the eyes.