A Visit From Voltaire

by Dinah Lee Küng

  ‘And this Maupertuis whom she was always begging to give her extra lessons?’

  ‘A very handsome, hard, disagreeable man. But looking back on all that now, one must make allowances for a woman so different from all the others of her time.’

  ‘Was she able to suffer being second to the great Voltaire?’

  I think of Eva-Marie’s constant resentment of her brothers and my resentment of Sean’s easier path in the macho world of journalism.

  He sits back from his work at last and considers, then beams fondly, ‘Of course. I had forgotten. The Contest.’

  He takes off the heavy linen apron covering a fine shirt of cotton lawn. He carefully rebuttons the exquisite lace cuffs. I’ve noticed the appearance of deep expression lines around his eyes and mouth. Are they due to his spending the long nights peering up at the stars through a lens?

  Or is my handsome friend ageing before my eyes?

  ‘Oh, the Contest!’ he laughs to himself again. ‘You see, in 1738, l’Académie des Sciences in Paris offered a prize for the best essay on the ‘Nature and Diffusion of Fire’.’

  He smiles wickedly, ‘I had wheedled the theme of the contest out of Maupertuis the year before. Well, you know me. I ordered the best chemical equipment available and set up my darkroom and physical apparatus. First, I carried out an experiment suggested by Newton, to prove that the reflection in a prism does not come to an end when the glass is surrounded by a vacuum instead of air. I tried then to determine the nature of heat, using every resource known at the time; a balance, a Réamur thermometer, and a Musschenbroek pyrometer by which I could observe how heated bodies expand.’

  ‘I wondered what that thing was.’ I point to a contraption of glass, wires and pipes warping the wood of my Ming side table.

  ‘I even carried out some experiments measuring the weight of iron before and after burning at a nearby foundry, and by setting fire to the back forest of the estate—’

  ‘Which you will not repeat in our back yard—’ I say firmly.

  ‘Tranquillisez-vous, Madame. My forest fires were too expensive to clean up, but what I discovered was very interesting—’

  ‘Smokey-the-Bear taking snuff?’

  He ignores that. ‘I observed that the same amounts of different fluids, such as oil, water, vinegar, of different temperatures, do not take an average temperature when mixed.’

  ‘And that means?’

  His disdainful glance conveys I am a complete ignoramus. ‘That I was on the brink of discovering the specific warmth of the physical body, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Had I developed a little further my idées of the calcination of metals and of the compound nature of air, it is I, François Arouet de Voltaire, who would have been the first to discover oxygen!’

  ‘Is that what this is?’ I ask, pointing to the total, happily ephemeral, mess he’s made of my office. It would be nice to think it was in the furtherance of science, even retroactive science.

  ‘Yes, I’m repeating the experiments of Scheele, carried out forty years after mine, using superior instruments and finer measurements which were not available to me then.’

  ‘Well, clean up when you finish. What did Émilie do for the contest?’

  ‘As far as I knew, nothing. My essay was nearly finished and she betrayed no interest at all. I only learned later that she was obsessed with the idea of winning, and can you imagine opposing all my ideas!’

  ‘How dare she?’ I mocked him.

  ‘Indeed,’ he commented, with a completely straight face. ‘Keeping her little secret, she worked without practical experiments of any kind through the nights for a week, sleeping only an hour before dawn. Her entry argued that fire has no weight, that it is possibly neither spirit nor matter, but a substance of an unknown nature, like the empty space whose existence can also be taken as proven but whose composition defies us.’

  ‘Did she win?’ I’m secretly hoping Émilie blew them away.

  ‘No, we both got honorable mentions,’ he says with obvious chagrin. ‘Of course, there was one thing I liked. Émilie supposed that the colors of a spectrum contain heat in varying degrees, red being the warmest and violet the coldest. Forty years later, Rochon proved she was right.’

  ‘Well, who did win?’

  ‘The mathematician Euler.’

  ‘I’ve actually heard of him.’ ‘I’m not surprised. Second and third prize went to a Cartesian, one Count Créquy—the Académie was riddled with Cartesians—and a Jesuit named de Fiesc who believed in those silly vortices of Descartes.’

  I imagine Émilie, sleepless in her diamonds and silks, exiled far from Paris in the forests of Champagne, learning of her honor.

  ‘Émilie was happy she got a mention?’

  ‘Mon Dieu, non! She wrote to the Académie begging she remain anonymous. ‘I have a thousand reasons for asking it,’ she pleaded, but—’ he turns to me confidingly, ‘she had only one.’

  ‘The scandal of living with you in sin,’ I nod in sympathy. ‘Mais non, sinning with me was a feather in her cap! No, obviously it was ridiculous in Society for a woman to be so learned.’

  I raise one eyebrow. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘She didn’t want to seem a fool! Now you must excuse me, I’m going to finish this before the apparatus cools.’

  That evening, Alexander is upstairs studying geography. Theo practices a Bach bourrée on his violin in the living room. Eva-Marie sits on the playroom floor, painting fake blood on her discarded hip-length plaster cast, which we’ve preserved for future games of ‘The Mummy.’

  ‘Levy beat me at the math game today,’ she reports. ‘So I putzed him at basketball.’

  ‘With a walking cast on your leg?’

  ‘No problem. I just stand there and toss the ball over his head. He’s got a computer at home to practice division, but there’s no software that can make him as tall as me.’

  Maybe Émilie was right to hide her entry in the contest from Voltaire, maybe not. It came out all right in the end, and it’s interesting to think that V. might have won but for the Cartesian obsession with vortices stuck in the antediluvian brains of the Academicians of Paris in 1738.

  Still, one question lingers in my mind as I set the table for dinner. What if Émilie had won? I won’t ask Voltaire, that’s for sure. He has the hindsight of the dead, but he’s still just a man.

  Chapter Twelve MAY THE FORCE BE DAMNED

  It’s almost Christmas.

  I adjust a pair of expensive corduroy pants to fit over Eva-Marie’s cast underneath a midnight blue velvet dress. The plaster leg has its upside, Even her teacher admits Eva-Marie will be unable to hop around the stage in a herd of twenty youngsters sporting donkey’s ears made of construction paper.

  Spared making a literal ass of herself, Eva-Marie will hobble downstage to a standing microphone to recite a poem about a Tibetan yak coming from the far Himalayas to worship at the manger. Her costume will consist of one of my fur-trimmed hats from Lhasa.

  She is only one of two children in her class who will directly address the audience. It marks a little watershed for our family; the first theatrical occasion in which a child from our family speaks French, but I say nothing. Being so small, she takes it in her stride. And there is something about her recitation that pains me. Like the yak in the poem, my children have come so far in so short a time. I drag behind their determined little caravan, my heart rigid in its own plaster cast, reluctant to leave New York for good and follow them.

  At least, we’ve found music is an international language to ease the children’s integration. We’ve located a Chinese piano teacher for Alexander who can understand the newly arrived American mother speaking Mandarin, and a Swiss-German violin teacher who can happily confer with Theo’s father. Already Theo has been assigned to his music school’s orchestra in time for the Christmas concert. Theo and I, and of course, the eager Monsieur Voltaire, head nervously to his first rehearsal.

  The Mu
sic Conservatory of West Vaud, freshly painted in deep Renaissance tones, sits in a lakeside villa in Nyon. The rehearsal hall, once the ballroom, is a silvery gray with maroon trim and burgundy velvet drapes. The only person who seems to be correctly dressed for the decor is Voltaire, who nonchalantly props his elaborate hat on top of a bust of Handel with an affectionate pat, ‘Bon soir. mon cher Georges.’

  Amidst the zip and clatter of violin cases and stands, Theo looks tiny. The Conservatory has a philosophy of starting children on string instruments around the age of seven, when Suzuki-trained Japanese prodigies are already haggling recording fees with Sony. Like a lot of New York music students, Theo took up the violin at four. Thus he’s the youngest tonight, eclipsed behind a buxom blonde teen in a pierced navel ring and platform sneakers.

  Hans-Walter Hirzel, the genial Swiss-German conductor, taps for ‘attention’ with his baton and addresses his team. He’s arrived in good humor, his hair still wet from riding a bicycle through a light snow along Nyon’s ancient lanes laid out by a Roman city-planner two thousand years ago.

  ‘I’m sorry the sheet music wasn’t ready until tonight, but that is the fault of the printers in Lausanne,’ Hirzel explains. ‘So we’ll read it through.’

  Even I can discern the hint of Lucerne in his French. ‘We’re going to play a concerto by Arcangelo Corelli, who was born in 1653 and died in 1713. Corelli tells us it was fatto per la notte di natale, that is, written for the night of Christ’s birth. It’s a typically baroque piece. The violin soloists will be answered by the first violin section, then the second, etc. Right. Let’s start.’

  A forest of poised cat gut obscures Theo’s expression as he encounters a nineteen-page thicket of black notes in the company of twenty-five strangers. I can only imagine his panic. He’s no sight-reading prodigy.

  With a downward gesture of Hirzel’s baton, off they go. Corelli has ordered up a majestic first chord, aching and prolonged. Then a long pause follows, broken suddenly by a low instrumental groan from somewhere on Hirzel’s right. The graceful cellist with a rope of hair reaching the back of her waist and glasses like Coca-Cola bottle bottoms is Levy’s older sister, also from St-Cergue. It seems she has lingered on her chord too long.

  ‘Non, non,’ Hirzel gently scolds her, ‘Like a sword thrust, like this,’ he slashes the air.

  V. nods with enthusiasm, illustrating a fencer’s slice, for no one’s benefit but mine.

  ‘Again.’ Hirzel orders. V. slices through the air again.

  The chord comes again, plaintive, but brief. The cellist, eyes wide with attention, this time holds her fire. Then the second, mounting harmonic plea. Another strategic pause. Then ten firm, lilting chords close the phrase.

  Hirzel lowers his arms. ‘Good,’ he says, ‘An excellent start, even if that’s all we accomplish tonight.’

  Everyone breaks into laughter. They repeat the chords from the beginning and then plunge after the elfin Hirzel into the cold waters of unknown notes, like faithful lemmings jumping off a cliff. As juvenile Christmas performances go, this first run-through is rough, but I have to admit, already a big improvement on ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,’ back at St. Boniface in New York.

  V, settles himself down amidst the discarded coats behind the second violin section, He seems perfectly comfortable admiring Hirzel’s management of his troupe, After all, the theater is more home to Voltaire than the many houses in which he lodged. He spent years like this, perched on the end of a stage. He’s enthralled to be back at a rehearsal, but to my astonishment, his slender fingers are dancing to the music off the beat.

  I find this very distracting, as well as slightly unbelievable. My eyes glance from time to time at his drumming fingers, lightly brushing the rounds of his brocade-covered knees. But something is wrong.

  Voltaire has no, repeat no, sense of rhythm whatsoever. How can this be? I hear Corelli’s music shift from movement to movement from:

  to , from back to but to any sentient human being who can multiply by two or three, musical binaires or temaires are hardly a challenge.

  And yet, even the tide of an entire ocean of violin bows cannot drag my enlightened buddy on the downbeat in time.

  ‘Did you ever study music?’ I ask in a whisper, affecting disinterest.

  He looks at me, innocently surprised, his fingers dancing their own crazy polka, ‘Mais, non. Since I turned twelve, I guessed the enormous quantity of things for which I have no talent. I know that my organs are not arranged to go very far in music. Why do you ask?’

  This is the first time it has occurred to me that V. might actually be bad at something!

  I am exhilarated, liberated, elated. Is every friendship, even an imaginary one, fraught with this kind of secret jealousy? Of course. No friendship could long survive such inequality in talent, and it’s pretty obvious I’m never going to be called the Mind of My Century, or for that matter, the Woman of Any Given Day. After weeks of hearing about his hit plays, his royal dinners, his love affairs with celebrity actresses and marquises, his endless print runs, his scientific discoveries, and political notoriety, I have discovered that God is Just. Oh joy! V. isn’t tone deaf—one wouldn’t want that—but obviously the guy ain’t got no rhythm.

  Meanwhile, Theo is stretching his talents to the limits. From where I sit, I can only see the point of his half-sized bow, rising and falling behind the others. Is he faking it? If he is, so what? I am so proud of him, this ‘Theo Dor,’ this ‘gift of God,’ whom I almost miscarried in my third month of pregnancy. His good humor in the face of his chronic asthma, and his natural generosity towards a well-meaning, but pedantic brother and temperamental little sister are essential pieces of ballast stabilizing our family ship. He has earned his family nickname, borrowed from the Peanuts strip, ‘Sweet Baboo,’ this plucky little soul sawing away in time punctuated by Hirzel’s shouts.

  And I reflect on the sheer guts of all children everywhere—what they’ll take in their stride, what they’ll do on trust. After less than six months out of Manhattan, one tackling Corelli cold under a stranger’s baton, another delivering a Christmas poem to three hundred locals in their own dialect, a third standing up to a tribunal to confess a local ‘crime’ in his newly-learnt French. How dare I take them for granted?

  On and on go the musicians, movement by movement. Pimply complexions break into beads of sweat. Grimaced mouths press against orthodontic appliances.

  Two hours after that first, not-brisk-enough chord Theo finally surfaces, flushed and relieved, from a welter of slamming cases and clanging music stands.

  ‘How did you feel back there?’ I ask.

  ‘Well,’ he grins, ‘I got behind the wheel and stayed in my seat, but it was like I forgot to fasten my seat belt.’

  I haven’t seen him glow like this since we left New York, since I saw him hang over the uppermost balcony of Carnegie Hall, peering down at the violist Yuri Bashmet. Something tells me that tonight our wandering Sweet Baboo has found his tribe.

  We have all been so lonely in our different ways. In October Theo asked, ‘lf I don’t learn French, can we go home to New York?’ I think of the Statue of Liberty drawing on his desk and Alexander’s sketch of a boy, tears flowing down his cheek, sitting in an airplane watching his beloved cityscape—the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building—recede below. Little do we know that it is our last glimpse of the World Trade Center.

  Eva-Marie doesn’t cry or draw, but she wakes up at night from a nightmare in which she shouts in French one minute and in English another.

  Peter is reluctant to admit we’ve lost anything by moving to Switzerland. He hated the hypocrisy and bureaucracy of the U.N., the bumper-to-bumper commute in Third Avenue traffic, the lack of fresh air and heights. He cites Theo’s sufferings in Manhattan’s pollution, or the struggle to keep St. Boniface from putting Alexander on Ritalin, or our worries whenever Eva-Marie was so much as ten minutes late returning from Carl Schurz Park at nightfall.

 
; ‘Don’t you miss anything?’ I ask, hungry for sympathy. My husband thinks for a moment, then smiles and answers, ‘Eartha Kitt at the Carlyle.’

  The more we share our reminiscences, the more I realize that Peter lived at the UN, while I lived New York. When Ruth, my style guru took me to fashion shows, Peter was meeting the Bulgarian ambassador to resolve his country’s customs officials’ theft of Red Cross fuel for trucks delivering assistance to Bosnian and Serb civilians. While I sat at the Council on Foreign Relations listening to discussions of China policy, Peter had to meet the Chinese ambassador to be refused, yet again, the right to carry out prison inspections. While I caught up with Business Week friends over lunch, Peter was subjected to a harangue about humanitarian imperialism from an African general whose army had just murdered three Red Cross colleagues.

  The New York Christmas was the hardest for Peter, who could no more relate to the schmaltz of ‘We Need a Little Christmas,’ or the joyless banality of Home Alone, than I could to the austerity of Christmas spent in Switzerland; a handful of wooden toys, and days spent almost entirely outdoors celebrating the Return of the Great Snow Being.

  Peter spent five years longing for the traditional (real!) candles burning on the tree (a sure fire hazard, I quipped), the choir in the breathtaking baroque Abbey of Einsiedeln, the charade of departing sleigh bells his parents played on the four Küng siblings in post-war central Switzerland.

  Now I struggle with the elusive Christmas spirit, facing Christmas without the assistance of the giant tree at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Looney Rooney the Magician at the UN Children’s Christmas party, and Rudolph Giuliani leading son Andrew Giuliani down the main aisle of St. Monica’s Church at Christmas morning Mass.

  I’ve conveniently forgotten the ridiculousness of Christmas in New York—the inability to find a single crèche for sale in the Bloomingdales’ Christmas Boutique, the nullifying political correctness at the nursery schools when Kwanzaa songs were sung around the Christmas tree, or tiny Marys and Josephs hopped to ‘Hava Nageela,’ as if these festivals had no separate historical or theological integrity. I’ve forgotten the $8,000 toy cars at FAO Schwartz, the frozen sleet underfoot on a taxiless morning, the crazy urge to forget the whole thing and fly to Punta Cana on a last-minute Club Med deal.