A Visit From Voltaire

by Dinah Lee Küng

  Tea time these days means bottles of local white wine sloshing down gelatinous cheese fondues. Old art deco postcards of St-Cergue illustrating fashionable flappers in tweedy ski pants and leather ski bindings sell out quickly at the grocery store of Monsieur Reymond. His late father was the mayor of St-Cergue for decades. Our Monsieur Reymond is a stooped, kind-eyed man, ranging bottles of sirop and instant soup packets along the shelves while his wife briskly handles the cash register.

  One day, to help my Alexander with a history assignment, this Monsieur Reymond describes the old St-Cergue of his youth. The town was only one third its present size, but teeming with wealthy English tourists in high season come to frolic, dance and flirt, ice-skate, curl heavy irons across the ice, or ski pulled along through town by horse-drawn sleighs.

  Talking to my ten-year-old, this seventy-year-old is momentarily again a child himself His eyes grow wistful, leaving my young interviewer sitting through an uncomfortable silence, his little worksheet half-filled. No one wants to forget the golden years, even as the town slips deeper into the cracks between semi-alcoholic decline and commuter gentrification.

  In this deep winter quiet, my life is more meditative than ever before. V. and I burrow like hibernating animals sheltered by thick stone walls and low-beamed ceilings. When Theo and I play our daily duets, we turn on all the lamps to read the music.

  I have never known till now the dead silence of a mountain town completely swathed in snow. Sometimes I walk with Alexander past the dog sled cages to his early morning train. With all the street lamps illuminating the snow banks high on each side of the street, it looks like a moonwalk. The footfalls of youngsters trudging out of the night into the glare of the train station parking lot are muffled down to a gentle crunch. The cars of dawn commuters crawl and slide in and out of the village on a whisper. Occasionally, we hear a gunning engine grinding itself deeper into a muddy rut.

  ‘I miss New York. I miss my Council meetings,’ I complain to Peter. Few of my first Christmas cards from St-Cergue sent off to the States have been reciprocated. The New Yorkers are the last to keep in contact and I realize why.

  I Left New York, ergo, I Am Not.

  ‘I don’t miss the hissing brakes of the bus outside our bedroom window every dawn,’ Peter answers firmly, stretching full-length to enjoy a leisurely bath. ‘And I don’t miss that straight-backed bathtub, that forced my knees up to my chin.’

  This winter offers time to think, to digest. The days of obliterating magazine deadlines are over. Some hopes, or memories, or regrets rise to the surface, others settle once and for all to the murky bottom of my subconscious. Scenes of the past reorder themselves, other events—so weighty at the time!—float downwards into irrelevance. Certain passages in my life telescope into oblivion, others zoom forward like slides under a microscope. My life feels whitewashed in ice, dormant, awaiting rebirth. Like Allen’s shifting molecules, the elements of my new existence reorder themselves, randomly floating around in this vacuum, making experience, knowledge, friendship, disappointment—all the things that used to press in on me—seem only particles that interact by some as yet, undiscovered set of physical principles.

  This impression of time collapsing and expanding is almost tangible to me these days, Einsteinian in its obviousness, I try to explain it to V. He enjoys this interplay between time and physics, distance and experience. He spent years working out scientific problems in his laboratory at Cirey.

  And after all, what is his visit to my house, but an exercise in time travel?

  ‘When I wrote Micromégas,’ he explains, stoking the dying fire with a poker and brushing the ashes off his velvet trousers, ‘I imagined two visitors to Earth arriving by means of a convenient comet. One visitor is six thousand feet tall from Saturn and the other a full eight leagues high, from the star Sirius. They watch as tiny figures on Earth, some dressed in turbans, some in tall hats, slaughter each other. Their enormous size makes all of our terrestrial wars and follies seem no more than the to’ing and fro’ing of insects.’

  ‘You ridiculed war between Christians and Muslims by reducing it to an anthill?’

  Precisely, Now that I visit you, Madame, Time refracts my memories, like . . . like a prism breaks light into color. I see so many things much more clearly from a distance, as it were,’

  ‘And what strikes you most?’

  ‘That my greatest energies were spent on my least-lasting endeavors. Take, for example, La Pucelle, my naughty epic about Joan of Arc.’

  ‘Never heard of it until you mentioned it the other day.’

  ‘Exactly. It started as a salon game, a challenge to write some clever verse about a tap maid burnt at the stake. It was a useless burlesque that I spent twenty-five years writing in secret. In order to evade the censors and elude the Bastille, I filled it with lots of vulgar stuff that no one could possibly imagine I would lower myself to write. Madame du Châtelet was so worried about it, she kept it hidden behind multiple locks.’

  He shrugs his shoulders, ‘It was rubbish. I can hardly read it now.’

  ‘Anything else a waste of time? I mean, relatively speaking.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, I spent years working in the pursuit of scientific progress . . . Oh yes,’ he smiles to himself, a bit abashed. ‘Oh, mon Dieu,’ he starts chuckling, ‘what fun that was . . . Oh, by the way, you wouldn’t by any chance have a Réamur thermometer around the house?’

  For weeks, V. has carried around his list of science books without saying anything. Then one day, he insists that I place an order on the Internet for all of them. He wants anything on ‘negative gravity,’ ‘string theory,’ and—well, the rest of it I can’t follow. He jabbers at length about two detectors in Antarctica that have picked up minute patterns in a glow from primordial gases—possible traces of the cosmic match that ignited the Big Bang and led to the creation of the universe fourteen billion years ago—he explains with a great waving of his arms, ‘traces of colossal waves, like sound waves, that the fluctuations probably set in motion, roiling the young universe.’

  Voltaire’s immersion into the world of modern science seems contagious, or is it merely coincidence that during that same week, Alexander’s class starts studying magnetic forces, and Eva-Marie is seized with a passion for division?

  ‘Give me a calcul,’ she orders, bundling herself into her ski jacket. ‘Say ‘division’ in English. Forty-two divided by seven. No fingers.’

  ‘Good, we haven’t done the seven livrets yet,’ she says, satisfied by the challenge. ‘‘I’ll get the fastest score. Faster than Levy.’

  Tell me your answers at lunch.’ I watch my littlest one limp off to battle her clever pal, Levy, over the multiplication computer game. The orthopedist promised that the dragging of the leg, still in a walking cast, will correct itself The beauty of her lovely, straight nose is forever marred. Although the crater dug by a tree branch has healed over, her best feature now bears a shiny dent. I massage the nose faithfully each night with cream, hoping to diminish the damage.

  I still can’t adjust to Eva-Marie’s rapid adaptation to Switzerland, every move she makes to fit in with local life taking her further away from that Manhattan princess I dressed for the United Nations Christmas party in red velvet and ribbons. As she chatters in local dialect to a playmate in the schoolyard, my once-graceful girl looks a stranger to me. When she learns a French word before she’s heard the English equivalent, I feel a trifle betrayed. All my life I wanted a daughter. I did not foresee the irony that the only one of my three children born in the U.S. would turn out the least American.

  Other aspects of her acculturation bother me. She’s quickly assimilated from some of the village children the Vaudois defiant slyness in the face of authority and an opaque manner. I start to notice that the first explanation of anything from Eva-Marie will always differ from the last. She’s tailoring truth to suit my reaction. She’s leading a double life.

  When I challenge her, I see she has already tagged
me as different. ‘You don’t understand my new lifestyle,’ is her flippant reply. We argue about brushing her tangled hair or her choice of grubby pants. At the same time, she’s increasingly vain, testing my perfume without permission. One morning, after yet another argument, I despair of her willfulness, her calculated coquetry, her sharp bilingual tongue, her foreignness. She exhausts my reserves of patience without feeling my profound love and sympathy for her.

  Distracted by this female wrangling, V. puts down some perusal of The Satellite Atlas of the World to watch her with affection written all over his face.

  ‘That performance amused you?’ I ask, once Eva-Marie is safely off to school.

  He shrugs with a chuckle. ‘She’s determined. She learns the rules, but only so she can successfully flaunt them. She will have physical passion. You can see that in her daring athletics. Look at how bravely she works to strengthen that leg. She’d already be sailing downhill again on those infernal sticks, if you hadn’t locked them up. Of course, she’s calculating. Your daughter will be one of life’s gamblers.’

  ‘She worries me.’

  He smiles fondly to himself. ‘She reminds me of an ambitious Marquise, an incorrigible card player, a flagrantly adulterous mother of three, and a domineering housekeeper. A woman who wore her best diamonds twenty-four hours a day, but who was too busy refuting Descartes’ theory of the vortices to brush her hair.’

  ‘Sounds a real harpy. Someone at Versailles?’

  ‘No, she came one night with friends to a simple supper after I returned from England. She stayed with me for thirteen years. ‘

  I blush. ‘Your mistress, Madame du Châtelet!’

  ‘Oui, our little Eva-Marie reminds me of my beloved Émilie, or to introduce her properly, Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, La Marquise du Châtelet-Lomont. The official French translator of Newton’s Principia.’

  ‘Does Eva-Marie look like Émilie?’

  ‘Oh, non, non, pas du tout. Émilie had dark, curly hair tied up like a child’s, and sea-green eyes, while your daughter has brown eyes and hair like streams of honey. But Émilie was taller than average, like Mademoiselle, and the energy! Émilie could work all night on a mathematical problem, study English all morning, and still preside over a houseful of guests at Cirey for a lively dinner.’

  ‘She sounds rather tempestuous,’ I comment, ‘and not so easy to live with,’ looking in the direction my own termagant has taken to school.

  He shrugs, ‘I had my own wing in Cirey, with my library, my scientific instruments, my bedroom. She had her wing, decorated in light blue and yellow with a boudoir lined with panels by Watteau and filled with bowls of rings, snuff boxes and other baubles.’

  ‘She liked jewelry?’ I ask, smiling,

  ‘Oh yes. I gave her a ring with a tiny portrait of myself engraved by Monsieur Barier, with this little verse:

  Barier grave ces traits destines pour vos veux;

  Avec quelque plaisir daignez les reconnaître!

  Les vôtres dans mon coeur jurent graves bien mieux,

  Mais ce fut par un plus grand maître.

  ‘Did you understand?’

  My French is coming along.

  ‘Let me try. ‘Barier engraved these features, as you asked: With whatever pleasure you may deign to recognize them!’

  ‘Very good!’

  ‘ ‘Your features were engraved much better on my heart, but then, done by a much greater Master’.’ I sigh. ‘That’s lovely.’

  He bows slightly, flushing with pleasure. ‘Aha, the sweet intoxication of praise untainted by flattery! Such a little bagatelle! Émilie liked it. I was really smitten, although I was thirty-nine, and she was already twenty-seven, hardly young.’

  I let that last bit pass. There is something about this passionate partnership that reminds me of my six-year affair with a fellow journalist, a New Yorker named Sean. It began as I turned thirty, ‘hardly young.’ Introduced by colleagues in Hong Kong, here at last was my soul mate! Here was another journalist who could understand the pressure of deadlines, the thrill of pinning down a scoop, the late-night torture of crafting the elusively perfect ‘lede,’ the challenge of the telling ‘nut’ graph, the hashing out of political theories over drinks with other correspondents.

  Soft-spoken, courteous, tall, with curly-brown hair, large green eyes, and a muscular build. Sean made our first date a tropical fantasy of dining on the veranda of a romantic colonial hotel, followed by a midnight swim, me wearing his borrowed dress shirt.

  Like V. and Madame du Châtelet buried in the wilds of Champagne, we hid ourselves away, but in our case, in the palmy suburbs of Singapore, where it was never winter, cold, or dark. We reveled in the equatorial strangeness of the island that combined high-rise banking centers and teak-poled kampung shanty-towns.

  However, our working idyll was overshadowed by the Singaporean government, as ever-present an authority as an eighteenth-century Keeper of the Seal. Our telex traffic moved the old-fashioned way out of the Reuters’ external service punching room: certainly nothing we filed to faraway desks was private. The stories we were assigned by our editors inevitably concerned some of the city-state’s touchier spots: trade union politics, weapons exports, treatment of the island’s single Indian parliamentarian who stood in opposition to the ruling People’s Action Party, social engineering policies, and political detentions.

  The mood turned ugly. We persisted in our assignments despite the whispered warnings of a British diplomat over private lunches as well as hints from American Embassy staffers that we were tackling too-sensitive issues. The jungle that surrounded our apartment building turned more ominous than romantic. Promised interviews with Singaporeans were cancelled without explanation. U.S. Embassy officials would meet us only outside their offices. Little slurs began to circulate and grow, and finally reached our ears. Sean was described to me at a cocktail party as a ‘Communist troublemaker,’ when in truth, the only thing markedly leftist about Sean was his handwriting. These imagined political affiliations were repeated by Singaporeans to other foreigners. Nor did I escape the innuendo. Although I was writing for The Washington Post, the IHT and others with an accreditation from the government press office as a reporter, I was slandered as Sean’s ‘camp follower.’

  Our apartment, its large veranda opened to the equatorial breezes, began to seem as private as a fish bowl. There was no way we could lock away our writing in a drawer as did Voltaire. We had professional reputations already established outside Singapore and we had to ride it out, but the mounting tension made an already competitive relationship now paranoid and fractious.

  After eighteen months, Sean’s application to renew his work visa was refused. De facto expulsion from Singapore came as a relief, trailed as it was by questions in a public session of the Singapore Parliament and coverage by the BBC World Service.

  ‘She could not bear it,’ V. interjects.

  ‘Couldn’t bear what?’ I look up to see Voltaire nodding.

  ‘Émilie couldn’t bear the stress, her fear of the state taking revenge for my writing. I had to run for my life to Holland because a copy of Le Mondain was found in the drawer of a dead bishop.’

  ‘What was so incriminating about Le Mondain?’

  He shrugs, ‘I dared to say that I preferred an age with fine clothing, civilized books, and Gobelin tapestries on the walls to running around the Garden of Eden stark naked. Adam and Eve had long dirty nails, unkempt hair, no knives or forks, and no decent bedding. Let’s face it, they knew no sanitation and, without cleanliness, even the happiest love is nothing more than a shameful base instinct.’

  ‘Seems pretty obvious to me.’

  ‘The Church took offense. I fled in secret for months, disguised as Monsieur Revol, travelling from Brussels to Antwerp, to Amsterdam, to Leyden. Émilie interceded for me by letter and in person with as many influential people as she could contact. I confess that I was so pre-occupied with proofreading my book on Newton’s theories
in Holland, I neglected my poor friend back in Cirey. She grew quite frantic.’

  Frantic—ah, yes. After his deportation to Hong Kong, Sean completely neglected me, too and even began a new affair. There were long weeks of silence, then a brief, unsuccessful reunion in Malaysia. After six months I joined him in Hong Kong, but the romance was over. We lasted a few more years together, but he didn’t really want a partner so much as a handmaiden to his talent. After all, his misplaced items needed to be retrieved, his dry cleaning had to be dropped off, his forgotten secretarial chores had to be done—‘little favors’ I should do that would prove my love.

  I came to resent his assumption that I should be ready to edit his copy at any time of day or night. He called me ‘unsupportive and disloyal.’ Our volatile relationship became a subject of barfly gossip. After one final and very public break, I found myself giggling at the delicious relief of solitude.

  ‘How did you, with all your talents, live with Émilie without immolating your relationship in competition?’ I ask V. as he fiddles with an antique Bunsen burner. Every day, my office looks more like Dr Frankenstein’s lab. Émilie and her scientific passions have become an unseen presence.

  ‘Ah, ma belle Uranie, she was so much better at mathematics and calculations than I, I had no chance there. But I had a different type of talent. Newton’s theories had been buried for twenty-seven years in a warehouse and only the most academic scholars in England, Germany, Holland and Russia had probed his depths or understood his reasoning. Émilie could translate, but even she couldn’t explain. If I understood Newton’s proof of a general gravitational force, then I knew how to explain it, and then—well, all Paris understood, too.’

  ‘You two were always able to work side by side without any jealousy or rivalry? What was this story about her locking herself up with Clairaut to study mathematics until you kicked the door down?’

  ‘Clairaut was annoying, yes,’ he nods, still unable to take his eyes off a curious prism shining a rainbow of streaming light on my desktop.