A Visit From Voltaire

by Dinah Lee Küng

  He flashes a wicked smile. ‘Her father! Why not? Émilie finally joined me from Paris, and after we’d sorted out a Châtelet family lawsuit in Brussels, we headed for Lorraine.

  Oh, Émilie could be so charming, she quickly became the bosom friend of the King’s mistress, Madame Boufflers, and her two other lovers, the King’s Chamberlain and ]ean-François, the Marquis de Saint-Lambert, and all would have been well, until—’ his face clouds over. He clams up.

  ‘Until what? What happened?’

  To my astonishment, after mentioning this Saint-Lambert person, V. turns and exits the room without explanation, his dark expression racked by some awful memory.

  For the next few days, he barricades himself in the office.

  ‘Do you need anything?’

  He groans. ‘Usually asses’ milk helps. Or maybe a small grilled ortolan with a glass of Alcante wine on the side? And if there’s any mail, or the chemistry books arrive from Amazon, give them to Longchamp.’

  Ortolans? Imported wines?

  ‘Need I remind you that your secretary isn’t here?’ I retort a bit tartly. I hear a discouraged whimper. ‘Are you all right in there? Open the door!’

  ‘I’m weak,’ he moans. ‘I have lived to be fifty-eight years old, with a very feeble body, and have seen the most robust die in the flower of their age: care has saved me until now. So let me die in peace.’

  ‘Hellooo? You’re already dead! Get up and help me put together this lunch. This is my chance to meet the few sentient life forms that live in the village. What do you have against Poles all of a sudden?’

  The door opens and his unshaven, grouchy face appears momentarily to say, ‘I have nothing against Poles! I am merely dying, Madame, dying. But for God’s sake, don’t call a priest!’ Then the door shuts, not too gently, in my face.

  He has struggled with ill health for some weeks now, that’s true. I was so used to him being sick with one complaint or other, I stopped taking any special notice.

  ‘Shall I call a doctor?’ It sounds absurd to suggest medical treatment two hundred years after death.

  I hear his voice, muffled by a thick scarf, ‘Each man must be his own doctor, must live by rules, now and again assist nature without forcing her; and above all, he must know how to suffer, grow old and die.’

  ‘Well, suit yourself,’ I say, clearing away his tray from the floor outside his door, ‘get well by Saturday.’

  He descends the stairs on Saturday, just as the bells of the two village churches finish their daily chime-out for God. He’s wearing a spotless coat of dark rose brocade and white stockings under blue-black breeches. He has masked his sallow complexion with some powdery paste, but at least he smells wonderfully of lilac water.

  The seating at the table is a puzzler, but at this V. is an expert.

  ‘I assume French is our lingua franca,’ he asks.

  ‘That’s your wishful thinking. Joanna speaks Polish and English. Jurek is bringing a girlfriend who speaks only Polish. Peter and I speak English and French, of course, but no Polish.

  Jurek, Dzidka and Beta speak Polish and French. Luckily, Henryk and Dzidek speak all three.

  This social conundrum reminds me of those children’s riddles: ‘Mr. Green has a dog and lives in a white house. Mrs. Smith drives a Ford and lives next door to Mr. Black. Mr. Baker has a cat and lives in blue house. The owner of the brown house drives a Studebaker . . . who drives a Fiat?’

  Jurek arrives first with a nearly mute girl half his age in tow. He’s an attractively gnarled Antarctic trekker. Were his remains to be found frozen in some iceberg, no doubt the defrosting team would nickname him, ‘Sinew Man.’ His teeth, the result of decades in Eastern Europe’s socialist dental chairs, are no setback to his glamor.

  This seasoned adventurer has brought us a present, a large poster of himself standing at the South Pole. He is butt-naked save for Arctic climbing boots. I blush to notice that Jurek is a very fit sixty-five, and that makes him nearly twenty years older than V., yet Jurek seems in no mood for sexual retirement. He holds a small Polish flag positioned modestly in front of his groin. The poster’s slogan reads, ‘Oldest to the Coldest.’ The unfortunate axiom that men can become more attractive as they age and women less so, was never better illustrated.

  I dart into the kitchen for dishes of nuts and olives and find V. supervising Peter’s uncorking of the wine.

  ‘I think that’s a pretty jazzy introduction, handing out nudes of yourself. I must try it before it’s too late!’ I exclaim.

  ‘I think he’s sucking in his stomach a bit obviously,’ Peter comments.

  ‘The verse is acceptable, but the flag is very small,’ adds V. Both men seem a little snappish these days on the question of virility, and Jurek is a walking advertisement for hormonal endurance.

  Joanna, beautifully dressed, descends the stairs, leaving me momentarily wistful for Bloomingdales fashion ads in the Sunday New York Times. Despite our repeated protests, she’s weighed down with presents for the children. Amidst the flurry of unwrapping Beanie Babies and Star Wars Playing Cards, introductions get temporarily muddled.

  In her immediate wake come the thickset Dzidek and his blonde cherub-faced Beta. Then lanky, professorial Henryk, as courteous as a count, with his lately-gained bride, the willowy star of the Krakow State Theatre, the actress, Dzidka. She is dressed like a modem Rosalind, in slim black pants, a long slim black leather jacket and a red shirt.

  ‘My actress?’ V. rubs his hands eagerly.

  ‘She’s all yours,’ I laugh. ‘Maybe Peter and you can show her his collection of Polish theater posters, and I’m sure she’ll tell you all about her career.’ Peter and V. do just that, while I quickly cook the mussels in white wine and parsley and set out the thick, crusty pain de levain. The freshly plucked ducks from the Divonne open market are turning crispy brown on the oven spit. When everyone has been warmed with a drink, and the mussels are popping open in their broth, we sit in the winter sunshine wrapped in blankets and briney steam.

  There is so much life and warmth among these people. I realize that none of us is home; each of us, including my husband from his Alpine roots to the north, is an immigrant to this place, but is it more than that? I’m feeling a robust Slavic lust for life that would shame the correct Anglo-Saxon, overwhelm the Calvinist Genevan, horrify the overbred Parisian, and challenge even the reputation of the ‘salty’ Cantonese, ‘hot-blooded Irish,’ and the earthy Koreans.

  ‘ . . . That was a drama for us already when there was the vote over Poland and NATO,’ Dzidek is saying, ‘because it was really a reflection of whether, finally, we were going to be accepted by the Western Europeans, as members of the European family. And for us this was very, very important. You could hear everybody in Poland practically holding their breath. It was going to reverse something that we felt had been done to us at Yalta, saying we weren’t really part of Europe.’

  It strikes me viscerally where I am, literally, sitting. I have never lived so far ‘east’ of the’ ‘West,’ so close to what I was raised to think of as the Iron Curtain countries. This existential shock hits me with renewed force.

  ‘Some of my colleagues in Geneva have the same reaction as you,’ Dzidek jokes, ‘especially when I make a short visit to Warsaw for a long weekend. They are always shocked to think that Warsaw is just an hour and a half away by plane. It’s nothing, nothing.’

  Indeed, Jurek has just driven from Poland this weekend. Yet for me, Eastern Europe’s invisible curtain lingers, psychologically as impassable as the invisible wall that barricades Buñuel’s diners in The Exterminating Angel.

  ‘I’d like to visit the Eastern Bloc,’ I muse vaguely.

  ‘Too late, you missed it,’ Peter jokes.

  ‘What was it?’ V. asks of no one in particular.

  Dzidek chuckles. ‘We joke now that for twenty years we were told to Think Party and Say Lenin, then for the next twenty years, Think Lenin, Say Party, and all we can do now is laugh and sh
rug our shoulders and admit that for the last forty years, we were saying one thing and thinking another!’

  And what Dzidek and Peter are trying to convey to my American mind is that Eastern Europe as it sits on the compass of my imagination—that remote, gray, no-man’s-land of barbed wire minds and German shepherd borders, of secondguessing the machinations of Karla, of Len Deighton’s Berlinburied moles—that territory is gone.

  Voltaire has no inkling of my 1950s Cold War images. His century also saw the disintegration of Eastern Europe from the Holy Roman Empire into dozens of state-lets. But the sinister totalitarianism, I realize with a shock, was not in the East for V., but at home in France, headquartered in Versailles and anywhere the Church and the whims of the nobility persecuted his freedom of speech.

  For him, Russia of all places, was the home of his devoted correspondent and imperial German-born pupil, Catherine the Great, trying to smash feudal shackles, not forge them. Compared to France, the east of Europe was a fluid region of experimentation and change. The French King persecuted V. and all his philosophe friends, while in Moscow, Catherine the Great hosted Diderot to dinner and let him slap her thigh in his enthusiasm for debate. In France, warrant after warrant went out for Voltaire’s arrest, while in Lunéville, he was free to speak his mind. And more and more, the safe haven of Frederick the Great’s Potsdam (sixteen miles from Berlin!), beckoned V. from Émilie’s embrace.

  How can V. encompass, during his stay at my little farmhouse, the extraordinary shifts of fascism, socialism and communism that took the East hostage, kept Spain sclerotic, and left the English, French and West Germans together, battered and embattled, but free to speak their minds?

  My guests are busy studying an atlas spread across the remains of the lunch. Jurek is tracing his proposed route across Antarctica. No one has noticed V.’s distraction. Court life goes on.

  Voltaire seems preoccupied with working off his strange, private melancholy. He collects himself just enough to ask me, ‘Madame, have you forgotten the coffee?’ We all take our cups inside, abandoning the fading sun and escaping the inevitable chill for the comforts of the fireside.

  All language barriers have been broken by good will and fine wine. It no longer matters where people sit. Using the excuse that, he of all people, can’t find a place to settle himself, Voltaire discreetly slips up the stairs. I watch his sad figure retreat.

  What is wrong with the greatest literary courtier of the Polish Royal Court?

  Chapter Seventeen DOUBLE DELIVERY

  ‘Why are you so troubled by memories of Lunéville?’

  I quiz V. as we launch back into work on Monday. He’s rewriting his play Sémiramis. After its first premiere, he listened in disguise to the exiting audience. Working from notes jotted down on that long-ago evening, his pen is flying this morning.

  Watching him from the other end of the room, I’m swamped with the envy of a worker bee watching a talented butterfly. I’m thinking of dumping the Tibet book. I’m not Voltaire and there are only so many times I can revise something before rejection makes me collapse inside.

  I try distracting him again. ‘So, why the big melancholy?’ ‘Please, Madame, if you will allow me to tighten this dialogue for Lekain, you know . . . brilliant actor . . .’ he scribbles away. ‘There! With that, I’ll outdo Pompadour’s favorite playwright, Crébillon! In fact, I’ve set myself to do a new play based on each of his themes—Sémiramis will just be the first—that’ll show him up, the tired-out has-been!’

  ‘You seem in a better mood now.’

  He casts an irritated eye in my direction and at last the furious pen is laid aside.

  ‘Oh, all right, I’ll tell you. The morality of Lunéville was even more debased than in Versailles. King Stanislaus shared his Madame Boufflers with his Chamberlain. The King showered her with compliments, praised her skin, her eyes, the whiteness of her throat, but if she became bored with the old man, he just left the room, saying, ‘All right, I’ll send my Chamberlain to finish the job.’

  I laugh at the decadence of Stanislaus. ‘Why would that upset you?’

  V. clears his throat, hesitating over some difficulty. ‘Alors, well, here I was, in a beautiful palace, a free man, my host a king, with all my historical books and references, and with Madame du Châtelet. And I was one of the unhappiest creatures on earth.’

  ‘Why?’ I insist.

  He lowers his voice and leans towards me as if making a shameful confession. ‘Madame Boufflers had a third man in her bed, the so-called poet Saint-Lambert. Even in Lunéville, three lovers at a time was a little de trop—’

  ‘Over the top?’

  ‘Exactly. Saint-Lambert was forced to sneak in disguise into La Boufflers’ rooms once the King and his Chamberlain had finished for the night. Such a charade became tiresome to Saint-Lambert, not a greatly energetic man despite his good looks.’

  ‘I still don’t understand why—’

  ‘This game of musical beds had a terrible consequence for my poor Émilie,’ he explains. ‘One day I finished work early. I went to Émilie’s chambers to fetch her for dinner. The candles weren’t lit. I proceeded without hesitation through the dark to the last of her rooms where I discovered Saint-Lambert and Émilie—’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  All of V.’s fame and riches, and all of Émilie’s brilliance at algebraic formulae couldn’t protect them from the passage of time and passion. How shallow and wasteful all of these flirtations and parties must have seemed to V., how foolish and disloyal Émilie’s sudden infatuation with a mediocre courtier ten years her junior!

  He goes on, ‘Do you remember when the Polish actress was chatting of her days on the boards in Krakow?’

  ‘When Peter showcd off his collection of Polish theater posters?’

  ‘Yes. And Dzidka explained that the end of socialism meant the end of state subsidies for her theater group?’ V. sighs. ‘I too, lost my royal pension when I was exiled from Versailles.’

  ‘That’s when you whispered to me that it was too bad Dzidka didn’t have kids,’ I say. I am realizing what a blessing the children have been in dragging me into this unfamiliar environment. When life’s road bends suddenly and curves away in an unexpected direction, it is dangerous to have only two wheels.

  ‘And I said—I said I supposed it was too late for Dzidka to have children,’ I fumble. ‘I didn’t tell you what I was thinking, yesterday, when you said that,’ he continued. ‘I was thinking, it was too late for Émilie,’ V. mutters.

  ‘What do you mean? The Châtelets had three kids. By the time you got to Lunéville, the youngest must have been, let me see—’

  He waves these offspring aside. ‘Oh, the youngest was already seventeen. But with Saint-Lambert—’

  ‘She had a child by Saint-Lambert?’

  He nods gravely. ‘Pregnant at forty-three, a figure of ridicule!’

  ‘C’mon, many women have babies now at that age. Madonna, Cherie Blair—having late babies hasn’t made them figures of ridicule.’

  He looks at me, those penetrating eyes filling with sadness, but says nothing.

  ‘I had Eva-Marie after forty!’ I protest.

  ‘No one had babies at that age!’ He slams his walking stick across the face of my desk. Sémiramis goes flying in all directions. Well, I didn’t say it was easy.

  Motherhood for me started when I went to my gynecologist because a reporting trip to India had left me with a persistent stomach ailment.

  ‘Well, it’s not exactly Delhi Belly,’ Dr. Siu said slowly, reading the test results. I feared cancer—she was sliding the Kleenex box across her desk nearer to my reach. When I heard the diagnosis, I did shed tears—of shock and excitement. Precautions had failed, leaving me feeling this child was some kind of unexpected gift.

  Dr. Siu was a delicately built southern Cantonese. She was sure that at thirty-nine, I would need a Caesarean. On the other hand, my new obstetrician, Dr. Liang, a tall, lumbering woman of China’s hardy north
, predicted a natural delivery. I thought this was a difference of medical opinion. I was forgetting the Chinese cultural factor. True to Hong Kong’s passion for horseracing and mah-jongg, the two Chinese doctors had laid bets on my endurance over a friendly dim sum lunch. The biggest event of my life was just another good-natured round of Chinese gambling.

  As an embryo, Alexander went ‘on assignment’ outside Hong Kong eleven times: at five months’ gestation, he bounced along the ring road of Beijing with demonstrating students headed towards Tiananmen Square. He traveled to Taiwan, Shanghai, and points south.

  Lying on my back in a Jakarta hotel swimming pool, my nine-month stomach ballooning up to the heavy equatorial sky, I let tropical rain wash my face and abandoned myself at last to physical fate. I could no longer deny his ‘otherness.’ This person inside me was going to acquire an independent existence soon.

  After twelve hours of painful labor, assisted by laughing gas and Peter’s exhortations to breathe, the baby came. Alexander’s first seconds of life were celebrated by a Chinese doctor in a yellow plastic delivery apron shouting down a delivery room phone, ‘No Caesarean! I won! I won!’

  Twenty months after Alexander’s birth, the edges of my health and nerves were fraying, I was about to give birth a second time, Maybe Voltaire’s right, Pregnancy at forty-one was not to be taken so lightly, After weeks of bleeding, Dr. Liang warned, ‘You may be losing this one. Let nature take its course,’ Happily, Theo did not want to be lost.

  And so soon—the grueling last months of waiting for our Eva-Marie’s arrival in Manhattan—slogging that February past shoulder-high snow drifts,

  All the insouciance of that first pregnancy was gone. Now I was as fearful as Émilie of losing my strength, my work, not to mention my independence. Forget hopping on planes, I trudged no farther than the 79th St. Diner at First Avenue to buy a bran muffin. I was too wrung out to change diapers, to clean rooms or make beds. I collapsed with relief at the first sound of Peter’s key in the latch. One evening I realized he’d been tending to the boys for more than an hour, and still had not had the chance to shed his raincoat.