‘Madame du Châtelet read other people’s letters and you didn’t stop her.’
‘She had a right to know what was being said by her guests!’
His bony face is perspiring with embarrassment. He’s pulled a thread on one of his lacy cuffs, and his cap is askew. I’ve injured his ageing masculine pride.
‘You said you retired from the sex game. Who’s the lucky lady?’
He straightens his cap. ‘Madame Denis. I’m revising some of my letters to her in case there should be a reissue of our correspondence.’
‘Let me see,’ I read a letter open on the desk. ‘‘‘My dear enfant, I shall not see you today. My days are not all happy ones. I can neither go out, work, rest, digest my diet or sleep . . . I’ve had not two good hours since I saw you last . . . I don’t know yet when my affairs will allow me to leave a place I abhor.’
Oh, thank you very much, Monsieur Voltaire. You abhor it here . . ?’
‘These weren’t about now, Madame, these were written while I was laboring away in that rat-hole in Versailles. Here’s my idea. I’ll hide them under the floor and you’ll come upon them—’
‘Wait a minute—Madame Denis—is she the lady who came to visit Émilie and you in Cirey?’
‘Oui.’
‘Monsieur Voltaire! That woman is your own niece, your sister’s daughter! That’s incest! Aren’t you the guy thrown in the Bastille for writing that the Regent was sleeping with his daughter?’
‘He was sleeping with his daughter. But this is different. Latin cultures do not consider it incest to sleep with your niece. In my day, a man could marry his niece by dispensation from the Pope for 40,000 ecus.’ He smirks, ‘But I hear the satirist Marmontel got his niece between the sheets for only 80,000 francs.’
‘Well, thank God times have changed!’
His expression looks almost satyr-like. ‘Humph! Not necessarily for the better. Now the Pope’s too busy covering up for his own priests to worry about nieces. Anyway, you shouldn’t act so superior. It just proves my theory that other people’s weaknesses brought to light give pleasure only to the spiteful.’
‘I’m not spiteful, just . . . just disgusted. How long did this go on?’
‘Well, let’s see, we all went to Paris in 1744. Richelieu asked Rameau and me to write that play for the wedding of the Dauphin to the Infanta of Spain. Things took off about then.’ He smiles the most self-satisfied, dirty-old-man leer ever seen.
‘That was only two years after you left Émilie’s bed, five years before Émilie died! I thought you said Madame Denis was fat and stupid. Then you fell in love with her?’
V. pulls his weedy frame upright.
‘Madame, you understand nothing! Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination, of which I, at least, have a great deal. For the last two centuries, Madame Denis has enjoyed her reputation as an honorable widow, a warm hostess, and besides,’ he hesitates, ‘besides, she had such a delicious derrière, really mignon—’
‘Oh, YUK! All she cared for was your money. You think she changed once you made a fortune selling war supplies with those crooked Pâris brothers? I know what your niece was after!’
His eyes flare up indignantly. ‘It wasn’t just physical. Sensual pleasure passes in the twinkling of an eye. The friendship between us, the mutual confidence, the delights of the heart, the enchantment of the soul, these things do not perish and can never be destroyed. I loved her until I—well, anyway, nobody knew about my passion for Madame Denis. It was a great secret from history and you wouldn’t have known about it if you weren’t such an aggressive, inquisitive—American!’
‘A secret from history that you’re now trying to publish to your profit! Oh, stop being an old fool. She was greedy as—’
His frosty expression tells me I’m wasting my breath. ‘Well, I certainly don’t begrudge deserving people who share in my good fortune. And at least she doesn’t nag!’
Blood floods my cheeks. Exhaustion from over-exposure to the kids’ homework problems, the frustration of publishing rejections, the burden of ever-mounting housework, these all wash over me. V.’s bills and insults are the last straw.
‘You’re calling me a nag? You boney, old, snuff-sniffing has-been? Your ninety volumes are crumbling into dust! Look at this mess, these brochures, these posters, these leaflets. The only people reading you are a bunch of French lit majors and—and—and web geeks. Your histories are all outdated. Nobody stages your plays! And if we get any more bills like these, I’ll tell Peter exactly who’s the house guest from Hell and he’ll call an exterminator or, yeah! Even better! He’ll call a priest! An exorcist to flush you out, you horny old insect—’
I stop yelling at him, shaking too hard to go on. His eyes turn mean.
‘You? Threaten me? With priests? I came here to help you. You know nobody, you are nobody. You should have stayed in New York, kept your career and stopped slobbering over those three—WHO’S A HAS-BEEN? MOI?’
I whisper viciously in his face, ‘You’re jealous you never had any descendants.’
He can sink just as low. ‘You envy me my fame, my success, my—my—my GLOIRE!’
‘Which is nothing but glorious DUST!’
That turns him whiter than usual. His trembling hands slam down the lid of my laptop. He grabs his walking stick and raises it in the air, struggling for breath. His eyes are wild and he collapses in my chair, choking out, ‘I’m speechless.’
‘HAH. For once! Well, I’m not. I seem to recall a certain Enlightened Philosopher once said’ - I mimic his French accent cruelly—’The necessity of saying something, the perplexity of having nothing to say, and a desire to be witty are three circumstances which could make even the greatest writer ridiculous.’ Ridiculous! So there!’
‘Madame, you are excused!’
Really, it’s too much. When he was young and attractive, his ribald side had its eighteenth-century charm. I enjoyed his double-entendres. I understood his passion for the mercurial, mathematical Marquise Émilie. Am I jealous? No, lechery in a great man of his advancing age for his fat, money-grubbing niece is just not endearing.
I admit I’d started to avoid V., his eternal rivalries with that Maupertuis and all the others, and the backbiting over his only ‘real friend’ Frederick. The sheer vanity of the man has come to outweigh any fun we’ve had.
I’m too proud to let him think I’m pre-occupied with our fight. I attack the Tibet novel, lost cause or no. I throw Eva-Marie’s birthday party at a bowling alley. Theo must be driven to orchestra rehearsals. Alexander’s backpack needs cleaning out. I have to polish my mother’s silver.
No, really, I do.
Peter’s sixtieth birthday approaches. Desperate to escape the claustrophobia of St-Cergue or the sterility of a dinner in Geneva, I arrange a very special night away for the two of us in Lyon, over the border in France, ninety minutes’ away.
We drive through heavy rain towards an industrial city wrapped in white sales and late winter fog off the Saône and Rhône Rivers. I feel I haven’t really had a chance to enjoy my husband since we moved to Switzerland. We check into a luxury hotel and soak in a bubbly jacuzzi for two, sharing foot massages. We dress up and eat a four-star meal at Léon de Lyon that consists mostly of truffles and réductions de veau.
Peter is relaxed, passionate, and tender. He doesn’t say a single philosophical or archly witty thing all weekend. It’s great. It brings back our happy times in Hong Kong, before house restoration, school confusions, and Swiss taxes cut into our joie de vivre.
I reflect over a glass of fine wine. Who needs the Big Wig? Haven’t I adjusted well to Switzerland? I no longer mail order my clothes from the States or save that last ounce of special hair rinse from the York Avenue pharmacy. Do I still need the so-called solace of V.’s wacky faxes, dirty letters, and egotistical poetry readings?
I ride home Sunday night, braced all over again to evict the Greatest Mind of the Eighteenth Century from my corner of
the twenty-first century. If he clears out, I might start a new novel.
While Peter carries our bags in from the car, I march upstairs to my office, girded for what will be a difficult scene.
The corner of my office is stacked with boxes spilling over with V.’s stuff The oil portraits of his buddies Cathy and Fred ‘the Greats’ are rolled up. I find a note on my desk, written in the elegant hand of the greatest letter-writer of the eighteenth century, a man famous for penning more than fifty thousand letters in his lifetime.
To me the master of correspondence can only manage one word: ‘Ciao.’
Ciao?
Chapter Twenty-three LES DÉLICES
I survive three whole weeks without him.
The house is silent. I finish a morning’s stint of half-hearted revision, and tackle the housework with ill-humored ferocity. Peter is thrilled with the near-Swiss order of our domestic life. When I catch myself dusting the North Korean Red Cross medals in Peter’s cabinet, I crack.
Twice I reach for the phone, but whom do I call? How do you hunt for a phantom? Where would he go? What would he haunt? The Academie Française? The Globe Theatre? Berlin whorehouses?
Letters for ‘Frank Arouet’ overflow our mailbox. The Tiananmen Mothers’ rally in New York comes and goes without his petition. His invitation from the American AntiSlavery Group to a conference in Washington DC sits unanswered.
Then Mr Mustapha telephones.
‘Please, very kind lady,’ he says, ‘may I speak to Mr Arouet?’
‘Well, I can honestly say that Frank’s not here anymore. He left no forwarding number or address.’
‘It is very important I get in touch with him, dear lady. A letter from Mr Arouet at this time would be most useful, most necessary, indeed.’
‘I wouldn’t count on any more letters for the moment. He’s really out of contact with me.’
‘Oh, that is most unfortunate, most unfortunate. We have a situation of extreme delicacy, involving a certain Dr. Shaikh.’
‘You’re referring to the capital punishment case in Islamabad? The disagreement about Mohammed’s, um, uh, personal grooming?’
‘That is the case, dear lady. Peace be upon the Prophet.’
I have the impression that his last utterance is to wipe out any contamination caused by my irreverent summing up of the Islamic circumcision dilemma.
V.’s caller continues, ‘The arguments are in the balance. The mullahs from Bahawal Nagar have tried to reason with the mullahs from Islamabad that no blasphemy can be committed if issues are raised about the period before the Holy Prophet declared his prophethood. The mullahs in Islamabad are almost convinced, but they don’t want to lose face. Dr. Shaikh’s life hangs by a slender thread, slender indeed. The pen of Mr Arouet could find a way around this, I am very sure.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, I’ve no idea where Frank went. Have you checked his web site?’
‘Yes, lady. We have sent Mr Frank Arouet many e-mails, but to no avail.’
I take down Mr Mustapha’s telefax number. It looks painfully familiar. I promise to let him know if Frank gets in touch.
Frank doesn’t get in touch.
Finally, I turn for help to the only French literature expert I know. It’s a little hard to get Christine by phone. I haven’t seen her, the ‘Duchess of Richelieu,’ since our New Year’s Eve party, where she so charmed V. with her sagesse and smiling blue eyes. Jean is always travelling to distant parts on behalf of children with AIDS, and Christine teaches full-time in Lausanne. I have to try at least three times before she answers the phone.
‘Christine, I’m doing a little research. I need some information on Voltaire.’
‘His stories? I can lend them to you, in French of course.’ ‘No, not his stories.’
I’ve certainly heard enough of his stories.
‘Well, how can I help?’ I hear little Charlotte singing in the background.
‘If you were Voltaire today, where would you go?’
Christine laughs, a little confused. ‘Pardon?’
‘I mean, if you were Voltaire around here, where would you spend your time?’
‘At the theater?’
‘Yes . . . Any other ideas?’
‘Maybe at home? He had a house in Geneva called Les Délices, on the Rue des Délices. He used to insulate the flooring with books he’d already read. I take my students there.’
I find Rue des Délices on a Geneva city map. I can’t believe I’m doing this. I spent weeks hinting to the man that he should clear out. Then I can’t endure the silence without him. His old-fashioned science collection heaped in a cardboard printer box is starting to fade into invisibility. His leather-bound books are shedding little piles of dust at each corner. Any minute now, I reckon, the rest of his belongings might be collected by one of his po-faced secretarial wraiths, like Longchamp or Wagnière.
‘You don’t seem very happy these days,’ Peter observes, and orders me up his cure-all—new bras from Victoria’s Secret. The April skies pour with rain. As I set off from St-Cergue, angry curtains of water obscure Geneva from my view. Even in good weather, I’m a lousy driver. I rarely drove in Hong Kong and New York. Usually I only drive to and from schools and music lessons along well-memorized routes.
My car pushes dawn the curves of our mountain against a virtual cloud of flying raindrops, as if Lac Leman has risen up and is throwing itself against the Jura. The weather lets up for a few minutes as I round a hairpin curve into a blanket of steam, drifting in wisps through the tall pines.
‘Rousseau would love this,’ I complain, then realize there’s nobody at my side to share the laugh.
I reach the expressway on-ramp by nine in the morning, my hands clenching the wheel, headlights beaming against the fog. My car is caught up in a pack of commuters taking lane changes at 140 kilometers an hour. The wake kicked up by their speeding fenders splashes against my wheels. I’m pulled along by their reckless momentum into the suburbs of Geneva, elegant villas hiding behind manicured hedges.
Ordinarily, I would take the right hand turn up the Avenue de la Paix, to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Instead, I plunge along a river of commuter traffic, winding down narrow lanes never meant for impatient cars, past the overcrowded train station, and sidewalks spilling over with people under umbrellas pushing against the lights.
‘Not the left lane,’ I warn myself, as that would shoot me over one of the bridges to the Old Town of Geneva, with its stolid bank buildings lining the quai.
‘Lemme over, you turkey,’ I curse the truck blocking my shift into the right lane mounting the Rue de Lyon. I sail on with no way of reading the street signs, slowing down or pulling over to consult my map. Cars honk and screech their wheels around me.
Where am I? Rue de Benjamin Franklin whizzes by, and then Rue de Tronchin.
‘If they’re naming streets after your buddies, you must be around here somewhere,’ I address the empty passenger seat.
Nothing eighteenth-century catches my eye. I pass an Ethiopian restaurant, second-hand shops, and boarded-up storefronts. I can hardly imagine V. strolling this neighborhood in his red velvet coat with its satin piping and grosgrain-covered buttons on each cuff. I can’t recall—did he take his rain cloak?
At one point, I reach a corner of Rue des Délices, but a traffic warden waves me off in the opposite direction. Sweating in my plastic mac, I lurch desperately into a loading dock and yank off my driving glasses to read the map. North African youths shout at me to back out of the path of a departing van.
White-knuckled, I finally work the car into a tiny space along the Rue de Poterie. I’ve probably parked illegally and I no longer care. I’m tossed by blustering spring winds down the Rue de Lyon, past Rue de Tronchin. The wet map slaps into my face.
Ugly signs raise my hopes: Video Voltaire, Voltaire Pressing, Voltaire Pharmacie, and Bibliothèque Voltaire. I must be getting warm. My feet turn into the Rue des Délices. Finally, I stand before a pair o
f stately gates and peer through the whipping gusts to read a sizable bronze plaque engraved, Musée Voltaire.
I squeeze past the gate into a garden of hedges set out in a formal maze and then, what a house! Two stories high, of classical dimensions, with a little round window peeking out from the attic floor through the roof, a stately entrance up a few steps, V.’s own stately home. Well, why wouldn’t he prefer this elegant dwelling to my crooked farmhouse with its low ceilings and bat-eating cats? Even in the rain, his garden is immaculate compared to my mountain potager with its torn plastic tunnels collapsing on to weedy seedlings.
I adjust my soggy appearance. Inside the tall double doors sits a Cerberus of a man, his beard cut into an artificial curve along his chin, his broad face as sun-burnt as a sailor’s. He gives only a hint of a smile.
The house is dead silent. My wet shoes squeak.
‘Put your umbrella in the stand at the head of the stairs, then go around these rooms, starting on the right,’ the man states without any introduction on my part.
‘Then go upstairs,’ he adds.
I dutifully shake the water off my umbrella before putting it in the stand. Like a schoolgirl, I obediently enter a long gallery decorated in panels of light blue and yellow. Display cases filled with documents and letters from Voltaire, Madame du Châtelet, and Frederick the Great line the center of the room.
How strange to see their handwriting - so human, so real!
I know V.’s handwriting—large-lettered, rounded and full. Émilie’s calligraphy is sharp and urgent, her letters like rows of anxious rose thorns, her words full of constant anxiety for V.’s safety. Frederick’s letters look the strangest of all, for someone coming down through history as so ‘great’: teeny-tiny letters, the meek presentation of a boy thoroughly bullied by his ogre of a father. I am startled to see that I can read every word of the Prussian’s epistle to his mentor; his calligraphy is so polite and modestly unaffected.
Here is V.’s pension from Marie Leszczynska, the Queen of France! Just a simple piece of paper, noting the size of V.’s portion, 1500 francs, in the corner, almost as an afterthought. No royal seal, no majestic flourish below the simple, ‘Marie.’ Here is a girl who knows that had she not been miraculously located in a stable by her dethroned father King Stanislaus as he fled Poland, she would have been raised as a foundling. She knows who she is, this girl who relies only on ‘Marie.’
A Visit From Voltaire Page 28