So, in as much as I understand the political courts of my day, I grasp the ennui behind V.’ s soulful comment:
‘The French in Paris, I was tired of them. They played, supped, talked of scandal, wrote bad verses and slept like fools to recommence on the morrow the same round of careless frivolity.’
‘And Freder—’
‘Oh,’ he says, clasping his hands, ‘Frederick was the anti-Louis, he was a Horace, a Catullus, a Maecenas, an Alexander, a Socrates, a Trajan, an Augustus, he was Solomon of the North, he was!’
I see disaster looming.
‘Haven’t we been here God-Frederick before? One, running away from England over some forgery scandal? Two, a midnight escape from Versailles to avoid a duel? Just because you liked Frederick—’
‘Liked him? Someone who had flattered me for years with his verses, his political thoughts, his invitations? I loved Frederick.’ V. coos like a dove.
‘I hear he called you a ‘beautiful genius with the charming ways and all the malice of a monkey’.’
V. flashes back. ‘Where did you hear that?’
How can Monsieur Voltaire be so intellectually bright and so socially dim at the same time? For weeks I’ve been hearing this and that about Frederick. One minute it’s true love, the next minute it’s bitter complaint. V. talks so much about this German paragon, I feel I know the guy myself—short, acidic, brilliant, unwashed, sleeping more regularly with his dogs than with his boy attendants, desperate to capture the jewel of French verse—His Truly—to adorn his collection of celebrity brains.
V. is fussing with his papers as if the coach for Prussia were about to leave without him. ‘He offered me the post of Chamberlain, free lodgings and a salary of 5,000 thalers. I made sure he advanced the cost of the journey. With Émilie dead, how could I keep putting him off?’
‘He sounds more like a suitor than king.’
‘Oh, kings! Pompadour did her best, but Louis had had enough of me. All he said was, ‘That will make one more madman at the Prussian court and one less at Versailles!’ While Frederick promised that I would be received as the Virgil of my age! Oh, you see Madame, I left for Berlin without any regrets.’
Back in New York, the stifling atmosphere of the U.N. ‘court’ prompted me to seek other outlets. I signed up to work on the Overseas Press Club’s Committee for Freedom of Speech so at least I, for one, would be allowed freedom of speech, even if I couldn’t obtain it for others by writing letters of protest and meeting with visiting foreign journalists and publishing accounts of oppression.
In the afternoons, while the housekeeper took our three diapered offspring to Carl Schurz Park, I bashed out letters to heads of state all over the world. I protested against the bodies of journalists washing up headless on alien shores, the corpses of newsreaders found incinerated in cars, investigative reporters shot off their motorcycles, and for variety, the living dead in chains, behind bars, under house arrest, or just, ‘disappeared.’ Co-chairman Norman Schorr and I waged battle by fax.
I also toiled on a novel, ostensibly a nanny-killer-thriller, but as with so much in fiction, the subconscious wormed its way into make-believe. The winter had turned cruel. My mother was dying of cancer on the West Coast.
And so I found myself on an early April evening, sitting sweltering in one of my wool UN suits beside a rented hospital bed installed in the tiny front room of her West LA bungalow. Outside the open screen door, the cicadas of my childhood hummed in tune with her rasping breaths. The fine, dry heat of a Southern California spring bathed me in memories. Why had I fled all this? Why had I left her to the resentful attendance of my brother? Why and where had I been for twenty years?
Back in New York following the funeral, dispirited by a dentist’s failed attempt to anaesthetize a cracked molar, I strolled half-numbed around FAO Schwartz. I looked like hell, grimacing with pain, and dressed too casually for uptown. So I was startled at bumping into an old American acquaintance from Beijing and even more surprised that Steve, natty in a three-piece business suit and looking not a day, much less a decade older, even recognized me. It had been fifteen years since we breezily exchanged hellos in the Beijing Hotel.
On this miserable day in New York, he took it into his head that I should join the Council on Foreign Relations. Another club beckoned.
‘You know, you’ll have to write, or research, or do something,’ Steve warned me. I was more than happy to sign up for round tables on Sino-US trade, seminars on South-east Asian foreign policy, lunches on North Korean security threats, or speakers on Japanese-U.S. defense policy. I dove into research on China’s role at the UN wrote a booklet covering an Asian policy conference, anything, anything, thankful for a means of merging my reporting past with my current existence at the UN and the press freedom work at the OPC.
In short, I had found a court I liked and it wasn’t the UN I was going to make the most of it for the time we remained in Manhattan. It was certainly more useful than cooking pies for ladies’ luncheons.
I also knew the gratification of belonging does not necessarily last forever. Maybe for once, I have a piece of wisdom to share with the Enlightened One—not that he ever listens to me.
The morning after V. announces that Frederick is his ideal sovereign, I open the mail and with the blood draining out of my face, take no more than ten seconds to hunt him down. I storm into my office, where I find V. marking up a long page of verse.
‘What’s this?’ I nearly shout, thrusting a print-out of figures into his face, but he shoos me off impatiently.
‘Tranquillisez-vous, Madame, I’m going over some of Frederick’s verses. Really, sometimes it is tiresome making all these corrections. The man even sends me his suicide notes to edit and then doesn’t have the decency to act on them—’
‘I will not tranquilize myself! Sixty-seven trades in one month! Are you out of your mind? The market is sinking, Amazon shares are down 88% from their high, and you’re churning all these security-system stocks? What the hell are you trading with?’
He doesn’t even look up at me, flicking that little plume back and forth, changing verb endings, and muttering, ‘Wrong tense, if I change the ending here . . .’
I am glazed over with fury.
‘Oh, what is it!’ he looks up suddenly, and pounds a frustrated fist on the desk—my desk!
‘What is it? This! These accounts. Trading online! On my computer! Using my password! My credit, no doubt! Look at this.’
His expression darkens. His eyes glower. ‘You’ve been opening my mail!’
My voice drips with sarcasm. ‘Oh, no, I haven’t. These are addressed to—I read the names on a fistful of envelopes, ‘‘Monsieur Revol’ and ‘Madame D’Azilli.’ Did you think such silly aliases would fool me?’
‘Well, they fooled Louis XV’s court censors,’ he mutters. ‘Well, Monsieur Revol and Madame D’ Azilli can sell out their accounts as soon as they break even.’
V. is paying no attention to me, cursing under his breath at yards of handwritten poetry unraveling across the desk. ‘Does Frederick expect me to go on washing his dirty linen for ever?’
‘Are you even listening to me?’
‘Every day, I go over his mediocre poetry, but it never gets any better than it was the first time I saw it. In fact, that whole Potsdam was second-rate, except that bastard Maupertuis who was always feeding Frederick lies.’
‘Who’s second rate?’
‘The whole of Frederick’s court. Like that Algarotti who dabbles in Newton.’
‘Your house guest at Cirey who wrote Newton for Dummies?
‘Newtonism for Ladies, meant for simple females at court, yes.’
‘So Potsdam didn’t live up to its billing?’
‘Truth is never to be found near a throne,’ he remarks.
I am secretly pleased.
‘Besides, only that Maupertuis was worth anything, and I’ve never got on with him. I find him in Potsdam suggesting that doctors should be paid only
for cures, that we should dig a hole to the center of the earth, or build a city where only Latin is spoken—quel lunatic!’
‘Yes, an irritating fellow,’ I demur diplomatically, recalling Émilie’s Christmas Eve love note to the very same lunatic. ‘Now, Monsieur, about this Charles Schwab business . . . ’
‘By the way, Madame, what in God’s name is your husband doing? I have tripped over him more than once. Why is he underfoot, imitating Rousseau’s savage ideal, crawling around on all fours?’
‘He’s recalculating the rental value ofthis house.’
‘The what?’
‘The money we would earn if we rented it and—’
‘I said I’ll pay you back just as I have always paid my—’
‘This has nothing to do with you and as you have lived here rent-free for almost four months now, you had better think twice before you complain of my husband’s presence. Anyway, you’re so hot on Frederick and Potsdam? When are you going back?’
‘Oh, you couldn’t send me back there, Madame, I implore you. Prussian wine is like vinegar, no—donkey’s piss—and the food at Frederick’s court is only as passable as possible in a country without any decent game or butcher’s meat.’
‘For example?’
‘He ignores his French chef and tells the German to make pasta mixed with Russian beef marinated in eau-de-vie on top of polenta stuffed with crushed garlic and parmesan cheese. Blah!’
‘Food is no longer the point. I’m sure your old friend still misses you, wherever he ended up.’
‘Hmm,’ V. looks abashed at this. ‘I’m not so sure.’ ‘What did you do?’ I press him.
‘Well . . . ’ his face assumes an ingratiating expression. ‘You see,’ and then he stops to choose his words a little too carefully, as if phrasing his defense, ‘three months after I arrived in Frederick’s court, I heard from a Jewish financier, one estimable Abraham Hirschel, that one could buy tax certificates issued in Saxony for half their face value. Part of Frederick’s treaty with Saxony guaranteed any Prussian holding these notes a full refund.’
‘Oh, no! Don’t tell me you tried to - you’re not Prussian!’
‘Un petit detail, Madame. Hirschel went to Dresden and bought 40,000 francs’ worth for me, but—’
‘You were caught, weren’t you?’
He nods in sheepish admission.
I sit down next to him. ‘Frederick figured out that his genius of French literature was a little bent when it came to making a buck?’
‘I gave the money to Hirschel to purchase jewels and furs for me.’
‘Rubbish. Just like you’re weasling about this day-trading now. Frederick saw through you.’
‘I won the lawsuit.’
‘But not Frederick’s respect.’
Two hundred and fifty-three years later, it’s obvious this incident caused Voltaire pointless humiliation.
‘He told La Mettrie he was almost finished with me,’ V. whispers, then imitating Frederick’s imperial whine, ‘Bah! Vhen von has sucked za orange, von throws avay za peel.’
‘The King of Prussia called the Great Voltaire an orange pee!?’ After all, this mutual admiration society between V. and Frederick had sustained both men for years.
‘He did. After that, what could I do?’
‘You left?’
‘For three months I played sick—’
‘Well, you’re sick all the time anyway—’
‘I fled to Leipzig. Frederick panicked, thinking I was carrying away his letters mocking the French court. He put me under house arrest when I reached Frankfurt until I handed over his stupid poems. I took off in a hired coach, but Frederick dragged me back again, Madame Denis, Longchamp, and the servants joined me from Strasbourg—so Frederick arrested them, too!’
‘Obviously you finally got away.’
‘Only after I had bribed the Frankfurt officials with a hefty sum to cover my ‘board and lodging’ while in captivity! And you complain of your ‘rental value’ tax!’ he laughs dryly, ‘What a bastard!’
‘Non, Madame.’ V, fights back, ‘Frederick was the only monarch of his time to declare in that dark age that he was a free-thinker, to brandish a philosophical spirit unleashed from the superstition of the Church, to let so-called ‘religious crimes’ go unpunished.’
‘You still defend a guy who called you an orange pee!?’
‘Y u don’t understand my debt to Frederick, Until Potsdam, my work had been literary, scientific or a jab at the priests, nothing truly great, Thanks to him, from then on, well . . .’
V. stops, a steely look in his eyes. The amusing court jester, the sly wheeler-dealer, the foppish theater wizard, these make way for a Voltaire I’ve never seen before. It’s not just that he’s aged. I’m afraid of V, for the first time since he arrived.
‘Frederick gave me courage that lasted the rest of my life.’
‘Where did you go?’
His voice drops back to a whisper. ‘I was a hunted man, In the public squares of Paris, they were making bonfires out of my satire of Maupertuis, The Story of Dr. Akakia and the Native of St. Malo. I stopped in Alsace, but the Jesuits evicted me from Colmar though I went to Mass and even took Holy Communion! Anyway, Colmar was a dump—half German, half French and so uncivilized it might as well have been totally Iroquois.’
‘Didn’t anyone help you?’
‘I wasn’t the only one forced on the run. The French Inquisition was bursting into flames everywhere I looked. People were burned, hung, branded, whipped, pilloried, sent to the galleys for owning books! My Charles XII was banned, the Henriade suppressed, the Letters Concerning the English Nation publicly burned by a hangman. Imagine my shock when I went to see my old friend Cardinal de Tencin in Lyon and he refused to be with me for longer than a minute. A minute!’
I can see the mounting flames of intolerance licking their reflection in V.’ s terrified eyes. Deep creases of middle age line his cheeks. Is it the sunlight burning through my orange sarong that is washing his features this frightening color?
Seeing me standing alone, transfixed over my desk, Peter stops in the doorway of my office, still dangling a long measuring tape wrapped around his neck.
‘We’ve been over-taxed by two thousand francs. I just faxed the proof to the accountant.’ He shines with triumph.
‘Oh!’ I take a deep breath. ‘What did he say? Did he apologize for leaving you to do it?’
‘Of course not. He’s so stunned, he can’t speak. I had the feeling I was the first of his clients to ever challenge the tax officials in Lausanne.’
Peter concludes that taxpayers in this historically colonized part of Switzerland have given up questioning anybody, and they’ve had a lot of practice, since they’ve scraped by under the bureaucratic yoke of Julius Caesar, the Duke of Burgundy, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the distant burghers of Berne with scarcely a breather. It’s a miracle that anybody can even stand up straight around here. Peter, however, was not raised to bow to Rome, Paris, or Berne.
He hums to himself as he leaves my office. I’m sure he will prevail. Does this prove that sooner or later, we all get our day in court?’
I turn back to a subdued Voltaire. ‘Where did you go?’
‘I considered America, drawn by the spirit of Benjamin Franklin and William Penn, but I was forty years too old to try the New World. In the end, I sent a desperate letter to Geneva.’
He sighs and wipes his brow with a handkerchief.
‘The Calvinists’ permission reached me in hiding just in time. There were no more courts for me to turn to, no more crowns to shield me. At the turn of 1755, I crossed the River Arve on the Lyon Road, leaving the hypocrisy of France on one side and the misery of Sardinia on the other, into Switzerland—and safety.’
Chapter Twenty-one THE WALLS CAN TALK
So now I know what hounded him to a new life in Switzerland—the terrors of the French Inquisition.
I start to understand why V. feels so at home here, and why he i
s so damned hard to dislodge. Maybe he’s got nowhere else to go? That doesn’t stop him from complaining.
‘Is this house haunted, Madame?’ he says through his shivers, pulling a shawl over his brocade dressing gown even tighter. His claw-like feet cling to soft kid slippers.
I laugh a little. ‘That’s sweet coming from you. Have you looked in a mirror lately, Mr Apparition?’
‘I tried,’ he rubs the deep circles under his eyes with dismay, ‘but it’s too early in the day. Unless I really concentrate, I don’t reflect much light . . . ’
He pours himself a second coffee, more proof that the caffeine habit can be tenacious, even beyond the grave. He squanders all that psychic energy that could go into great rewrites just to digest endless cups of java.
‘Lay off that stuff.’
‘Just to open the eyes, Madame. I couldn’t sleep all night because of a woeful moaning in the walls that speaks of misery, hunger and all the evils of this world.’
That afternoon, I hear low groans coming from beneath the floorboards under my feet. I check the living room below. No one there.
That afternoon, Alexander comes to me, his worried moon face pale under its spread of freckles. ‘Mama, I think Frisbee’s trapped in the wood pile outside the living room.’
We brave piercing ice flurries to remove layer after layer of logs. Then feeling like total dorks, we notice Frisbee observing our frantic search from a cozy indoor perch on the living room windowsill
The wailing travels through the bowels of the house. Peter hears it coming from the wall of his study. There are animal laments over the kitchen table during dinnertime and groans mid-morning in the laundry-room to the sound of the BBC World Service. V. is right. It sounds like a desperate soul mourning the sadnesses of the whole world.
Peter is not the kind of man who tolerates this Muzak of Misery without an explanation. When a low growl starts up during dinner, Peter slams down his fork, and the kids giggle nervously.
A Visit From Voltaire Page 25