Yes, Émilie, how frightened and how alone you must have felt, married to an old military bore, reduced to friendship by your greatest love, and knocked up by a second-rate dilettante. Listening to Voltaire, my heart fills with sympathy for mercurial Émilie, pregnant at forty-three—so brilliant, so passionate, so foolish, and so unlucky!
‘What was worse, the social stigma or her health?’ I ask V, We’re taking advantage of some early spring sunshine to collect the kids for lunch by foot, V, insists we exercise every day, though he still recoils at the suggestion of shoveling snow.
‘Her health. She fought night and day to finish her translation of Newton’s Principia, She worked from eight until three, then took coffee, then worked from four until ten, then dined and talked with me until midnight, after which she resumed her work through the night until dawn, This occupation helped her deal with the humiliation.’
‘The baby’s illegitimacy was a problem, huh?’
He chuckles with indifference to that small matter. ‘Oh, that was easily managed. Saint-Lambert and I urged poor Châtelet to visit us. We wined and dined him while Émilie flirted shamelessly with her own husband and lo! A brief but effective second honeymoon with the homecoming soldier won the future child the name of Châtelet!’
‘Didn’t he guess?’ I shout above the noise of screaming children flooding the playground. I find it impossible to believe the genial Marquis was that stupid.
‘Never underestimate the vanity of men,’ V. wags a finger at me. ‘The old goat couldn’t stop boasting. Behind his back, Saint-Lambert and I discreetly categorized the pregnancy as one of Émilie’s Miscellaneous Works. But that was our private joke.’
‘Ha. Ha.’
‘I assure you Madame, there was ridicule. Even Frederick the Great, who hated Émilie for keeping me all those years from joining his court in Potsdam, even a king as noble as Frederick could not resist composing a nasty little verse of victory over my poor friend:
A question of a life lost
In a double delivery
Of a philosophical treatise
And an unlucky newborn.
Who knows precisely
Which one stole her from us?
Of this fatal event
Whose opinion should be followed?
Saint-Lambert chooses the book
Voltaire blames the child.’
Spitting out the last line. V. makes Frederick’s disdain quite dear. ‘Ah, ha, les enfants!’ Our conversation is interrupted as we march uphill with Eva-Marie and Theo. I heat up frozen pizzas which the children detest. They are my culinary protest against the school dismissing them at 11:30 a.m. in the first place.
Against the background of a violinist sawing manfully on Dolfein’s Higher Positions exercises next door, V. watches me clear away the half-eaten crusts.
‘A life lost? Now I understand. Is that why you’ve been locked up for so many days?’
‘Oui. It all came flooding back to me. The infant, a girl, came without difficulty after all. Émilie felt weak, but otherwise everything was très bien. Then, a few days after the birth, on September 10th, 1749, Émilie started choking.’ V. gazes across the lake at Mont Blanc, still catching the late sun. His voice falls to a whisper. ‘It was very hot that evening. We gave her a glass of ice-cooled almond milk and dined with Madame Boufflers. Only Longchamp and her chambermaid du Thil and—’ he hesitates, covering his eyes with a shaking palm.
‘Sorry, I’ll tell Theo to stop that.’
To everyone’s relief, Theo switches to Vivaldi.
‘Saint-Lambert offered to watch over Émilie. Ten minutes after we left them, there was a terrible sound between hiccupping and rattling. She fell unconscious. We made her smell vinegar to revive her and slapped her hands and limbs. It was no use.
I reach over to take his shaking hand in mine, but he brushes me off.
‘She was gone.’ He stammers on, ‘I—I—I asked for the ring she wore, the one which had held my tiny portrait hidden inside. Boufflers had already removed it from her finger. You see, they knew Émilie had replaced my portrait with Saint Lambert’s. It was he who killed her! Whatever gave him the idea of getting her with child!’
V. sobs quietly to no one in particular assaulted by unbearable memories, locked up for so long. Where do everyone’s strongest memories go, when they die? All that grief, that energy, that electrical passion left crackling around us? Do the emotions of the dead just drift away like lost radio signals?
‘I want you to have this,’ he says, handing me a yellowed sheaf of papers. ‘It’s Émilie’s essay on Happiness,’ he says softly. ‘She knew she had lost my passion by then, but I did not realize I would lose her so soon . . . ’
For a moment, it seems that he is too overwrought by the flood of memories even to go on. He appears fatigued beyond my limited human measure, worn out by the ordeal of relating it to me. Who could relive all their life’s grief a second time, knowing the pains and disappointments ahead?
Suddenly he takes off his worn wig. The stiff brown ringlets splay across the table. Now, V.’s just another person in middle age with graying hair at the temples. The gap of centuries between us closes.
I read Émilie’s essay out loud to her ageing mate, translating with effort. ‘‘‘The ideal would be two individuals who are so attracted, so attracted to each other, that their passions would never cool, or‘—’
‘—’or become surfeited’—’
‘—’or become surfeited. One cannot hope for such harmony of two persons. That would be too perfect. A heart which would be capable of such love’—’
He takes the papers from me, ‘ . . . ’a soul which would be so steadfast and so affectionate, is perhaps born once in a century . . .’ You see, Madame, I had not lost just a mistress, but half of myself, a soul for whom mine was made. There would be none like her ever again in my life.’
I can imagine that the laughter and gaiety and inflections of French-speaking Polish Lunéville were hardly interrupted by the loss of that difficult, demanding, brash, insecure, passionate French marquise, her black curls and untidy aprons covered with chemicals, her ringed fingers stained with the ink of calculations, so faithless and loyal all in one. Here in the midst of my best efforts to make new friends, to find a place for myself in this willing exile with someone I love, so far from friends and family, V. reminds me that there will always be people who are irreplaceable.
It is painful to think Peter and I won’t be together forever, that after all the years of wrong choices, finding the ‘harmony of two persons,’ is, even at best, only a temporary state.
That night, as I sip red wine next to Peter over the remains of dinner, I drink a silent farewell to the long-suffering, headstrong, lovable Émilie.
Chapter Eighteen THE BODHISATTVA BABES
‘You’re really coming all this way just to see me?’
I feel like Sally Field waving her stupid Oscar and squealing, you like me, you really like me!
‘You’re coming all the way to Switzerland for only five days?’
‘Yes, I can’t believe I’m doing this. I haven’t even told my bosses that I’m leaving the country. I haven’t even told my mother. I took some of my vacation time and said I wouldn’t be back until Friday. Natalya’s coming down from Boston tomorrow and we leave from Kennedy on Saturday night.’
Jane is a ‘China’ friend who works at a New York daily editing overseas coverage. She is bringing her best friend of thirty years, Natalya, whose life intersects with mine in strange synchronicity, even though we’ve never been introduced. My parents rented Natalya’s house for the year I attended sixth grade, just after our move to California. Natalya and I attended the same junior high and high school, separated by two years and we tangentially shared acquaintances and teachers.
‘It is time you two met,’ Jane says, ‘it’s a karmic necessity, and I am going to make this happen.’
I envisage them as timely Bodhisattvas, each representing hal
f of my life—the one a pre-China youth in California, and the other, a young adulthood spent in the Far East. Maybe they’ve come to signal closure of some kind—come to bury my past, if not to praise it? Perhaps the disjointed chapters of my life will be reconciled somehow?
Moreover, I childishly await their judgment of my new life; if a foreign editor of a major daily and the programs director of a Boston museum deem my isolation on the top of a Swiss mountain as, hey, awesome, then will I feel better? Can I turn my wood and stone heap into a mountain sanctuary, a Tibetan monastery, a Zen retreat, or a rustic spa? Will freshly starched cotton yukatas, grapefruit bath mousse, and a long-handled back-brush do the trick?
Peter just looks forward to having a houseful of lively women for a week.
‘Bring on the babes,’ he jokes.
The morning of their arrival, the sky above Mont Blanc is an unmarred blue, leaving us awash in a celestial purity of snow and light. However, something is wrong with the front yard.
‘Do you see something poking out of the snow?’
Voltaire thrusts his nose towards the window and proclaims, ‘The leaves poussent.’ Then he disappears upstairs to bury himself in a rotting, leather-bound tome, Description of the Chinese Empire, by somebody named Du Halde. His moldy books flake all over my freshly vacuumed rugs.
I try again with someone in my own century.
‘Peter, what’s that sticking out of the snow? Am I hallucinating? Someone planted the yard in a yin and yang pattern?’ My husband, redolent of some after-shave unearthed from the back of the closet in honor of the visitors, follows my gaze along swirls of inch-high spiky protuberances. ‘When I bought the house, I did see lines of tulips . . . ’
‘Like this?’ I draw the distinctive in-and-out half circles. ‘Uh, uh. That hippie son of Föllmi, the old farmer, probably planted them. He also brought the trees over there from the Himalayas.’
‘God has changed her dress,’ Eva-Marie interrupts.
‘Is God a She?’ I ask my woman-in-progress.
Eva-Marie nods and sweeping her arm in a graceful arc at the pink and blue horizon, ‘God changes her dress depending on Her mood. You see, today is a good mood.’
‘Yeah, but when She takes a shower, it rains,’ Theo teases.
We must ready the guest room for Jane and Natalya. V. sweeps away the cobwebs from the low eaves. Various mementos of working in China hang around the room: replicas of Business Week covers, some photos of BBC film shoots in the countryside. Next to an Overseas Press Club award from 1991 stands a tiny snapshot of me grinning into the sun with some Chinese college girls ‘sent down’ to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.
That photo dates from 1972 and the girl that was me wears two long braids, like the Chinese trio with their black tresses. These two pieces of cardboard—the photo of me on a Maoist commune and the award earned twenty years later—are the symbolic bookends of my China career.
‘You know,’ V. sighs, ‘I once championed the Chinese above all the other nations of the world. I studied the Jesuit, Trigault, who explained the Chinese civil service. And there was that other Jesuit, Kircher, who praised the Chinese philosopher-kings. The problem with the Jesuits was that they compared Confucius to the school of that man Jesus. The cart before the horse, non?’
‘China has changed. The system of civil service exams rotted away two centuries ago. Jiang Zemin ain’t no philosopher-king.’
‘Well, how lucky you were to see the Celestial Kingdom!’ Voltaire insists, ‘That country of virtue and rule of law!’
My first impression of China in 1972 was less of a country of virtue and rule of law than of a country suppressed by lawless Maoism into paralyzing fear. But whatever political dissension, economic illogicality and bloodshed the Chinese successfully hid from their prying American guests during that hot August, nothing could have put me off left-wing revolution more than the bickering of our own band of teachers and students hosted by the quixotic Prince Norodom Sihanouk and paying tribute to the Central Kingdom’s Great Leader.
It was a rocky tour, and no doubt a traumatic exposure to the West for the Chinese.
From Tianjin, one of our party, a professor’s wife, sent home a ‘Dear John’ letter. Our patient hosts relayed the angry husband’s pleas from Berkeley via one rural, hand-cranked telephone to another. The Latin American Leninist in our group decided the South Asian expert was a Trotskyist, so those two stopped speaking. Our youngest member broke down because she couldn’t take crowds; an untimely discovery when our every appearance commanded an audience of thousands of gaping Chinese on foot or bicycle.
‘Does it hurt?’ a little Chinese boy in Henan asked me. His mother hastily explained that her son meant no insult. He’d never seen a foreigner before and assumed my blonde hair and blue eyes were the symptoms of a painful disfigurement.
Finally reaching Beijing, our Hispanic member thanked our flummoxed Chinese translators at the farewell banquet for giving him the courage to ‘come out of the closet.’ This was not in their Foreign Ministry phrase books.
Twenty years in China followed, but where did it go? Into dozens of notebooks—filled with hundreds of Chinese, interviewed and quoted—now dumped in the corner of my office. V. dusts his wardrobe with a silver-handled brush. Something must be done with him. I can’t stick him in a box with the discarded notebooks.
‘The room looks great. I’m leaving now for the airport. Have you seen my car keys?’
‘Ici, Madame.’
‘Good. Thanks. Now what are you going to do while I’m with my guests? Natalya and I will be reminiscing about our Californian childhoods. And you’ll be bored listening to me talk to Jane about China. I’m afraid you’ll be kind of out of it for a week . . . what the hell are you wearing?’
V. isn’t listening, as usual. He is following me out of the house, half striding, half stumbling along in a preposterous outfit of embroidered turquoise brocade that reaches all the way to black cotton slippers with pointed toes. His usual headgear has been replaced with something featuring upside-down Mickey-Mouse ears on either side, festooned by tassels and long ribbons hanging down the nape of his neck. His long, drooping sleeve catches on the car door handle.
‘Out of it? Madame, I will be deeply in it!’ he screeches, yanking at the dangling sleeve. ‘Did I not dedicate the first three chapters of my world history to the achievements of ancient Cathay? Did I not devote the last chapter of my history of Louis XIV to the bitter arguments between the Jesuits and Dominicans over the Confucian Rites? The Devil with this sleeve!’
I scrutinize him over the top of the Subaru. ‘You aren’t coming to the airport in that get-up.’ ‘We are greeting an accomplished Sinologist, non? Was I not the father of modern Sinology?’
His headdress hits the roof of the car as he gathers up the voluminous folds of his silk robe.
‘Thank God nobody but me can see you.’
‘Ah, La Chine!’ he sighs, as he settles himself next to me. ‘Do you know my play, The Chinese Orphan? I’m wearing the costume of Zamti, the Confucian mandarin! I did everything I could to represent the customs and morals of the Chinese, right down to the style of Manchu dress. Your friend Jane might appreciate it, seeing as she herself is married to a mandarin.’
Jane’s husband, Wu Ming, is a Chinese academic employed in New York. He researches in Beijing on a half-year basis.
‘Give Jane my Chinese play. She must judge how accurately I showed that a truly virtuous monarch could be governed by justice and an absolute absence of religious prejudice!’
‘Sounds like a roaring hit. Bring on the dancing priests for the Rites Controversy Revue!’ I tease, navigating the curves down the mountain toward the highway.
‘Oh, you must at least have heard of it. The loyal Zamti offers his only infant son to be killed by the invading Genghis Khan in place of the heir to the throne, But his beautiful wife Idame, beloved by Genghis Khan in his previous days as a wandering barbarian—’
> ‘A convenient coincidence,’
‘A theatrical device! The wife Idame woos the Tartar invader with her virtue until he spares both her infant and the baby prince.’
‘Doesn’t sound like any Genghis Khan I’ve heard of’
V. bristles. ‘One hundred and ninety performances in Paris in 1775 say you’re wrong, Madame. It was based on the play by one Ji Jun-xiang, The Orphan of Tschao. What could be more authentic than that?’
I’ve offended my friend again. This guy is so touchy. He pouts for at least fifteen minutes until I try to make peace. ‘Sorry, I never took you for the China-hand type. I mean, what with all your other accomplishments.’
‘Madame, I studied things Chinese for over forty years! Not for me, the petites chinoiseries that captured all the ladies - the parasols, the porcelains, the little bibelots of the Chinese export trade, ‘
‘No? The Voltaire I know never yet turned down a luxury that money could buy.’
‘Mais non! To me, what was China but proof that the Scriptures did not contain all the truths of mankind!’
Of course. It’s all about his battles with the Church again, I should have guessed.
‘Why, Confucius was recording some thirty-six solar eclipses when, according to the theologians of my vulgar era, Noah was selling seats on his silly ark. China was printing books when we couldn’t read or write. A nation that can prove its antiquity independent of the Holy Scriptures is a very useful country indeed. The Chinese were deists without the Church, without the Trinity, without a lot of superstitious transcendentalism, in short, with nothing but tolerance for all.’
‘I start to understand the big draw.’
‘Oh, why couldn’t France have been like that, with a virtuous monarch with only one priority—like a father concerned with the well-being of his children?’
A Visit From Voltaire Page 21