A Visit From Voltaire

by Dinah Lee Küng

  ‘Hmm, let’s see. A literary feud? I got into an endless series of barbs with Jean-Jacques Rousseau—-to set tongues wagging. Can’t you pick a public argument with someone?’

  I wonder with whom I could pick a literary fight, and more to the point, why they should care.

  V. sees my downcast face and tries again. The poor guy is really trying to help.

  ‘I’ve got it. Get yourself banned! Anytime the Keeper of the Royal Seal burned one of my works in the public square, it kept the printers up all night!’

  ‘They don’t bum books anymore,’ I inform him.

  ‘That’s bad news . . . from the publicity aspect.’

  The end of Royal Tyranny dampens his enthusiasm for a moment.

  ‘Well,’ he says, slapping all the papers back into their file, ‘I wrote more than ninety-three volumes of verse, plays, fables and letters, and,’ he flicks a finger at my poor little mystery sitting on the shelf, ‘you’ve only started. If you’re not up to a feud—?’ He looks hopefully in my direction.

  ‘With whom?’

  ‘And you can’t leak your stories to a salon—?’

  ‘Unlikely. ‘

  ‘Nobody wants to bum your books?’

  ‘‘’Fraid not.’

  ‘Well, you just have to get a new agent, and revise, revise, revise! I rewrote my satire of Joan of Arc, La Pucelle, for fifteen years before publication.’

  I explain yet again how difficult it is to work in two-hour intervals broken by the children’s lunch hour, homework sessions, and music practices. Not to mention hours of staining wooden shelves, sewing curtains, and shoveling snow every day. I hint that I could use some practical help.

  ‘Anyone can shovel, Madame. Anyone can sew. Not everyone can benefit from les conseils of the King of the Enlightenment,’ V. corrects me sternly.

  ‘Sorry, I forgot. Mere mortals do the shoveling. Ghosts set the intellectual pace.’ ‘You can’t expect to accomplish anything in two-hour intervals, Madame. We will start at five —’

  ‘Five in the morning?’ I sputter.

  ‘Oui, these days are too short and writers ought to be given a double ration of them, so we shall do exactly as Madame du Châtelet and I did in Cirey. We’ll work from dawn through to the midday meal. I meant to talk to you about that, by the way, please change the main meal from evening to noon. It’s much healthier. You’ll excuse me, now, I must change for dinner.’

  I protest vehemently. ‘That’s just the point! Dinner is the family meal. It’s very important for—for—for family bonding.’

  ‘Oouf!’ Voltaire waves family bonding aside with the swish of lace sleeve. ‘I realize you modem mothers have a bizarre, obsessive interest in your offspring, Madame, but they should eat in their rooms. Tomorrow morning we start at five, as usual, giving us seven hours before noon without fail every day.’

  ‘Very well for you not even to mention the cooking because you don’t eat—’

  ‘If you have house guests, slip away at midday while the coffee is being served—’

  ‘Served by whom, exactly?’

  He rubs his brow. ‘Exactly so. Refuse to receive them before tea. Madame du Châtelet and I often held poetry readings at dawn, and gave little theatricals around midnight for our house guests.’

  I groan to think of the exhaustion he is proposing. ‘Don’t you—sorry, didn’t you ever sleep?’

  V.’s brown eyes scrutinize me. ‘Let’s not lose a minute. The greatest expense is that of time. By the way, please move the coffee machine to the office, so much more convenient. I don’t care about food, but the flow of coffee around here leaves even a phantom dissatisfied.’

  The next morning, V. and I tiptoe to my office in pitch darkness. A jolt of icy air hits my face. The hissing coffee machine is the only warm thing in the room. V. has opened the dormer window to the frozen skies; an impressive antique telescope points up through the low roof at the black heavens.

  He gestures upward and I gasp. The neon life of Manhattan always blotted out this glorious sight. Thousands of stars fill the nightscape, so many I can’t find Orion or the Dipper.

  ‘You see, the Earth which looks so noble and grand, is only an imperceptible point in the scheme of things,’ he says.

  And two human souls, Voltaire and I, are dwarfed together by the immensity of the universe spreading across the sky. The two centuries that separate our births are reduced to a meaningless nanosecond. Suddenly my old house seems very young.

  V. fixes his telescope on a distant target. ‘She is moved,’ he mutters to himself, noting the position in his little leather bound notebook. Thoughtfully, he has shoved all of his astronomical charts out of my way. My poor manuscript waits on the desk. I turn to a passage describing a night in a Lhasa hotel and see that what I’ve drafted is totally inadequate in conveying the vast sense of place under the Himalayan skies.

  I start to rewrite, ‘The wide Tibetan sky was punctured by more stars than she had ever seen in her lifetime of city living . . . ’ The words start to flow.

  ‘Better than shoveling, non?’ V. says, smiling back at me over his shoulder, framed by the glistening carpet of lights.

  Chapter Seven L’ACADÉMIE VAUDOISE

  The following Saturday night finds me inching my car through a snowstorm down an unlit country road.

  ‘I think we took a wrong turn in Duilliers,’ I say.

  Wrapped in her Zurich furs, my sister-in-law Bea is re-reading by flashlight a ten-year-old’s scrawled instructions to pick up his ‘boum’ guests at the Givrins communal hall. The required party costume is ‘rock et roll.’ Alexander departed before dinner in palpable excitement wearing his old St Boniface’s school blazer, disguised as a Beatle.

  ‘We should turn left at the well. Look, there’s a well.’

  I turn the steering wheel too quickly and the car starts sliding. It sideswipes someone’s parked snow blower. I hit the brake. All is still. The snow-covered stone houses look very picturesque, unless you’re sitting in a scraped Subaru with your sister-in-law, lost as hell.

  ‘Wrong well?’ Bea suggests.

  An elegant woman with a nearly royal profile and exquisite taste, she’s deeply proud of her family’s origins around the Alpine lakes near Lucerne and the founding canton of Switzerland, Schwyz. Now she’s visiting her brother so far south of the ‘Rösti Belt,’ the border between Swiss-German and French speakers, she feels as much of a foreigner as I.

  ‘It’s almost eleven. We’re late, I hope the party hasn’t ended already.’ I wrench the steering wheel around.

  ‘I see some lights over there.’

  With a daring maneuver of the car around a stone wall, we arrive in Givrins. Sure enough, here is Pierre-Edouard’s mother Noelle Gruyère, greeting the parents in a foyer off the darkened dance room full of bopping pre-teens. Armed with a pack of Marlboros, she is wearing cobra-patterned leggings and a fishnet tank top over some kind of snakeskin bra.

  ‘Madame Küng? You’re Madame Küng?’ she asks. ‘Alexander is such a gentleman, yah, yah, and he’s having a real good time. They’re all such sweet kids. I’m so glad that in the end, Alexander came.’

  ‘Oh, there was never any doubt,’ I say gratefully, ‘he’s looked forward to this for days.’

  Noelle confides, ‘Well, you know, Pierre-Edouard didn’t want to invite Alexander at first, because he was born in Hong Kong, you know, but I insisted. I reminded Pierre-Edouard that one year we invited a little refugee nom Kosovo. And last year, we had an Afghan orphan. I teach him you have to make room for everybody, for all kinds. You have to be generous.’

  Bea hasn’t quite caught Noelle’s cheerful implications. There’s something touching about my sister-in-law, the ex-wife of a director of the media giant EMI, charming the tobacco-wreathed Cobra Creature. Catching only that someone was born in Hong Kong, Bea asks, ‘Was Pierre-Edouard born in Hong Kong, too?’

  The eyes of Pierre-Edouard’s mother widen. She abandons us to greet parents who are
less of ‘all kinds.’

  It’s not as if being an immigrant into Swiss society is some kind of rare disease. Switzerland has welcomed foreigners since Voltaire’s day. Last week, someone put up an election poster in our village picturing Nazi skinheads on the rampage. The slogan read, ‘Xenophobia isn’t Swiss.’

  We’re lucky to be in the ‘liberal’ southwestern tip of Switzerland that sticks into the ribs of France. Yet, there is an urgent air to our assimilation. It’s not so much a racial issue as part of a larger French-language panic. The whole of Swiss-Romande society seems on red-alert when it comes to globalization, which equals Americanization, which equals spoken English. Forget that the Swiss cereal box reads on the back, ‘Let’s chat sur Internet!’

  One lunch hour, I’m chatting to Eva-Marie as I carry her across the icy schoolyard to our car. Suddenly a teacher with upturned nose and wiry hair darts like an attacking marmot across the yard to grab my arm, nearly landing us all on the treacherous ice.

  She yells, ‘You mustn’t speak English! You’re in Switzerland!’

  Well, I would gladly embrace the language of Moliere, Proust, and—yes, Voltaire—if that was what I was hearing around me. Even V. has trouble with the local accent—hick Vaudois evolved from Julius Caesar’s cavalry men once posted here that renders even simple words like oui into an Appalachian ‘waah. ‘ And the accent isn’t the only problem. Eva-Marie’s teacher has sent a brusque demand that I kindly return a fiche, which I don’t understand.

  Happily, I have the Great French Playwright in residence.

  ‘Ah . . . of course! ‘ Voltaire responds. ‘The Paris police kept a fiche on me for decades. They just want her police file.’

  ‘Police file? She’s six years old.’

  ‘That’s what fiche means.’

  I come home from school that afternoon with egg on my face.

  ‘A fiche can also mean a loose worksheet,’ I inform the master of eighteenth-century French.

  ‘Pardon, Madame. I hope I caused no embarrassment.’

  ‘Only a little. I’ll give you another chance. Shed some of your lumière on this—’ I let him tackle Theo’s latest school circular. ‘It’s about a Course d’École —’

  ‘A course of study?’

  ‘No, it must be an outing. It lists hats, gloves and . . . a helmet. He has to bring something called a K-Way. What’s a K-Way?’

  V. starts flipping the page of his Larousse. ‘There are no K-Ways in the dictionnaire,’ he says. ‘What’s that? Combis? Let’s see. . .’

  ‘Wait, I heard it the other day at school! What was that kid putting on? It might mean a one-piece ski suit, you know, combined pants and top?’ My pride in this linguistic victory is pathetic.

  Voltaire sniffs. ‘Combi . . . an ugly word. Les baskets? That is English. To hold the picnic.’

  ‘No, baskets means sneakers, not baskets. Like in basketball shoes.’

  ‘But, Madame, this is not—what has happened to French?’ V. shoves the sheet back at me.

  ‘Don’t shout. It’s not English either! I’ve been trying to decipher these hieroglyphics for weeks! ACT. de CF means art, not acting, CYT—2 stands for second grade. Look at this notebook, here! A multiplication tables assignment sounds like secret NATO coordinates—Fiche 27, Math 1: OP, livret 4!’

  Voltaire is in despair. ‘You’d think they’d never heard of the Académie Française. The French language is a very poor but proud woman. We have to give her alms against her will, but I dare say even she’d turn up her nose at K-Way or combi.’

  The school hours are harder for us to track than the jargon. Two days a week Eva-Marie and Theo start school at 8:05 (but not the same days), while three days a week they should arrive at 8:50, provided they don’t have to come early for tutorials (noted in their carnets only the night before). Eva-Marie has no school on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons until after Christmas. Friday afternoon sessions start after Easter. Alexander is off Thursday afternoons as well as Wednesdays. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he comes home an hour earlier than on Mondays and Fridays. Frankly, at this point, I’ve lost track of Theo entirely.

  Any Swiss mother with a full-time job outside the home is fighting the entire school establishment of the canton of Vaud.

  About a week after Noelle Gruyere’s patronizing treatment of me as an immigrant, I experience the Swiss system’s dismissive treatment of me as a mother. Voltaire and I pay a visit to Theo’s slow-moving maîtresse, Madame Vacher. I explain that her proposed class outing to the circus will conflict with Theo’s after-school violin lesson. Our family is going to the circus that night, anyway, so Theo can spend Friday afternoon at home with me practicing his music.

  ‘No,’ Madame Vacher says flatly. ‘Theo can’t go home, He must spend the afternoon in the classroom.’ She resumes cleaning the backboard.

  V. and I pursue the flying eraser in protest.

  ‘Alone? Alone in the classroom while the others go to the circus? His violin lesson will seem like some kind of punishment. ‘

  ‘It’s the law, Madame. The other teacher Gregory will look in on him from time to time.’

  V. tries blowing chalk dust in her face.

  I protest, ‘Obviously, Theo would be better off practicing at home than sitting here alone.’

  ‘You’ll have to make a request.’

  ‘Of whom?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘I just did.’

  ‘No, Madame,’ she turns to me with a superior smile on her face. ‘You attempted to inform me. The law requires an application making your request of me a week in advance, with an attestation.’

  ‘An attestation? Of what?’

  She thrusts an application form into my astonished face,

  V. and I storm out of the classroom. When we reach the house, my first thought is to call Peter with a resentful tirade. But that only doubles my indignation. Ever since I’ve arrived in Switzerland, I’ve felt like a child who needs constant introduction, translation and explanation, and now attestation from a real ‘grown-up.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll sign that attestation,’ V. says with determination. ‘She is nothing but une petite fonctionnaire, a petty bureaucrat. She wouldn’t dare challenge the name of Voltaire.’

  ‘Oh, right, good. Monsieur François Arouet de Voltaire promises to babysit Theo. That’s not the point. I’m an adult. I’m his mother. Why should I need an attestation, from you, or my husband, or anybody? Aren’t mothers full citizens?’

  ‘I assure you Madame, you are an adult.’ He bows in respect.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Moreover, that woman’s French diction was so very poor! No rhetorical presence! No enunciation! Such slovenly posture! Graceless gestures! The attire of a peasant! Clearly she was never properly finished.’

  His eighteenth-century priorities make me smile, despite my fury.

  ‘Well, I guess standards at the École Jean-Jacques Rousseau are not up to your buggering Jesuits at Louis-le-Grand.’

  Voltaire drops his silk scarf

  ‘Ecole WHAT?’

  ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau. You said you knew him—?’

  V. spits out the question in a squeal of horror. ‘Know him? They named a school after that coquin traipsing around in an Armenian costume? That clockmaker’s boy? That Judas to philosophy? That monster who sent his own children to a foundling home rather than care for them himself? That romantic idiot who wrote his Social Contract against the human species? No wonder they can’t speak French!’

  Voltaire fumbles for Peter’s armchair for support. He looks sick to his stomach.

  ‘I hate to break it to you, but they absolutely revere Rousseau around these parts. He is—as a god.’

  V. turns even whiter than usual. ‘Impossible! No man did more to undermine education and reason in arguing for Nature! Bah! Why, I told him that reading his book made me want to run around on all fours but it was sixty years since I had done so, and it was impossible that I resume the pr
actice. ‘

  He circles the coffee table, dragging his knuckles on the carpet, in imitation of Rousseau’s Natural Man, sending me into peals of laughter.

  ‘You’ re wicked.’

  ‘Oh, Madame, never was anyone so witty as Rousseau when trying to turn us all into brutes again. I really wonder what they teach at that school. Surely it’s obvious that Man is not corrupted by social institutions, Man is civilized by them! Is this a school where they make sure the savage in Theodor is safely preserved? Come to think of it, Rousseau’s novel Julie was full of grammatical errors, too.’

  I have never seen V. so caustic.

  ‘There’s a parent-teacher meeting tomorrow night. Why don’t you come with me? It’s about time you met the locals.’ The taut lips curl at one end.

  ‘You know, that’s a felicitous idea.’

  V. appears in the kitchen after dinner with a self-conscious flourish. I haven’t seen these green velvet breeches before, nor the knee-high polished boots or mauve silk stockings. His arrival is preceded by a whiff of lavender soap and he sports an Olympian wig of platinum curls.

  ‘Wow! This isn’t opening night, Monsieur Voltaire.’

  I’ve seen him working in his tufted green dressing gown for days on end, so I know this is a big gesture.

  ‘Just a little something from the good old days,’ he says, slightly abashed. ‘A debonair approach is always the mark of someone in control.’ He deftly tightens one of his stockings, ‘I hope the local dress has improved. When I took up residence near here, I found nothing but forty savages without even shoes to their names. One of the first things I did was start a stocking factory.’

  Crossing the school grounds, Peter and I greet Marius Metzler’s parents, the Swiss-Germans who herd cows on the plateau above our house. They park their jeep embellished along its side with licking flames of red paint. Monsieur Metzler is wearing an embroidered peasant’s work shirt under his leather jacket and a strange little skullcap. The cap is so picturesque, it might even qualify as what my fashionista New York friend Ruth back at the Times might christen a ‘fashion moment.’ Suddenly, I miss her.