‘Dr. Tronchin warned you to take it easy.’
‘If I’d listened to my doctors, I would have died the week I was born! But I misunderstood Richelieu’s instructions and drank all the opium in one go. It put me into a delirium, or it must have been a dream, because I remember some priests turning up and saying my confession had been inadequate!’
The hunched and craggy figure clings to the railing and gazes up at the rest of the stairs to be navigated. He turns to me with a disgusted expression. ‘Would you believe they wanted me to profess belief in the Divinity of Christ! Me! Voltaire!’
‘Thanks for coming to church with us. Now, go to bed.’
‘Believe in Christ, hah! In God’s name, don’t talk to me of that man! That’s exactly what I yelled with the last breath of my body at them!’
‘Goodnight. Sleep well.’ I say. ‘Remember to snuff out your candle.’
He shuffles up the rest of the flight of stairs, mumbling to himself, ‘Yes, let me go in peace, I’m really very tired.’
His words worry me, and his appearance even more. I know that look, that shadow of death. I saw it in my father’s face two nights before he succumbed, a grayish pallor corning over his skin as he lay in the hospital bed, his mind numbed by morphine. He rambled out memories of jungle warfare in the Pacific. I saw it in my mother’s face too, as the cicadas outside her bungalow on that April night in L.A. sang her a last lullaby nearly twenty-five years later.
Did I think that by making friends with the dead, I could defy Death itself? I sense shadows moving towards me. I can sleep only fitfully, my dreams mixing the church ceremony with visions of V.’s bloodstained handkerchief and graveyards full of applauding villagers from St-Cergue.
Chapter Twenty-seven THE PATRIARCH
On Monday, after everyone else in the house has sailed off to their regular ports of call, I glance at the stairs leading up to my office.
V. is late for our promised debate about moving the archery target to make way for a hen house. He proposes selling fresh eggs to pay for his book buys. I relish all our recent arguments, and not for the first time, am so happy to have someone to enliven the silent hours.
With relief I hear him inching down the stairway, humming a little tune, broken by fits of coughing. The buttons of his damask dressing gown are fastened to the wrong buttonholes.
I pass him his mail—an appeal against female circumcision—but he leaves it unread. His skeletal hand is lying on the kitchen table. His soft white cap flops over one ear. He smells of lavender soap, but some foam lurks behind one ear where his razor missed.
He raises his head from his reverie and repeats, in the gentlest of tones, almost a whisper, ‘You know, I meant what I said last night. It’s high time I go home.’
To my surprise, he lifts my hand and gallantly brushes a kiss over it. His own hand looks frail and—our eyes meet as we both notice—a little transparent around the knuckles.
There is an embarrassed pause, so unlike our usual morning banter. There must be something I can do to fend off this melancholy mood.
‘I think your batteries are running low,’ I joke. ‘I’ll get you a lobster from the fish market. You ridiculed people who said it was good for their blood, but hey, it’s worth a try.’
He doesn’t answer his own old joke about lobsters feeding the blood and eels curing paralysis. I start to panic. Is my best friend going to leave just like this, fade out on me, go all see-through, and vanish into a steam cloud?
‘You know, I didn’t really mean what I said about you being the house guest from Hell.’ I clench my teeth to keep from making some kind of whimper, that awful whine of loneliness that his arrival had erased from my heart.
His face brightens a little, ‘You know, it’s time to tend to my estate.’
‘That mausoleum in Geneva? C’mon! It’s okay for school tours and visiting scholars, but you tried that once. You wouldn’t be happy there, watching Lekain play Orosmane over and over again. Then you’d have to listen to the snide comments of that Englishman—what’s his name—Callander?’
He wags his head. ‘No, I mean we’re going to Ferney.’
‘We’re going?’
‘Of course! It’s still standing, non?’
‘We can go to Ferney, just like that? Yes, yes—of course we can. Why didn’t we think of it before?’
‘It’s not far from here. The private owners finally sold it back to the town. It was in the local paper, which you’re too much of a snob to peruse. They’re turning it into a center for free speech, a sanctuary to showcase the works of persecuted writers and artists. I can go home now. In fact, I’d better return before they make it some tourist nightmare or mummified library, n’est-ce pas? Besides, there’s something I want to find out, something I couldn’t learn at Les Délices.’
‘This is wonderful! The greatest house guest of the eighteenth century is finally inviting me to his château?’
‘Well, somebody has to drive me,’ he says testily.
‘Oh! Oh!’ I cry with undisguised delight. ‘Wait a minute oh—what about the kids? Theo and Eva-Marie come home for lunch at eleven-thirty. Damned that school! I can’t go!’
‘Madame, you will leave them a note. You haven’t noticed, but I have. Your children are growing up. They will make themselves a little goûter of peanut butter tartines and watch appalling Wishbone videos. They won’t miss you for hours.’
And so for the very first time, I write a note to my children, grab my driving glasses and passport, and the two of us set off to play hooky.
As the sun hits my face, I realize it is the last day of spring. The brilliant, dry day makes anything seem possible. We exit the back end of the village, and cross the higher plateau of La Givrine, heading towards the French border, formerly Voltaire’s Serf Central.
I can hardly imagine what I’m doing—just driving toward a part of France I’ve never visited, no phone call to Peter, no conception of how long it will take and what we will find, just speeding along with V., his lanks of white hair wafting in the draft of the open window.
Why has it taken the old journalist warhorse in me so long to throw off the yoke of maternal routine? Why has a creeping fear of dislocation and alienation kept me hiding in my house? I feel like breaking into song. We are ‘Crosby and Hope,’ we are ‘Thelma and Louise,’ we are ‘V. and Me,’
Over the last few weeks, V. has been visibly suffering from age. The cane is now his faithful third leg. He’s given up the wigs altogether for his floppy nightcap. His brown eyes have lost a great deal of their fire, although none of their sparkle. Now our getaway gives him energy I haven’t seen during the final, bleak months of our long, stubborn winter together.
Seven minutes later, I slow the car to pass the customs kiosk and inch around the German shepherds of the Swiss drug narcs and the lackadaisical French douaniers chatting over their coffees. Then turning sharp left, we drive along the ridge of the Jura mountains.
‘Can’t we cut down to the highway?’ he says, scanning the map spread across his tailcoat of black damask. I haven’t seen that garment in ages.
‘Why would you want to take a road that didn’t exist in your day? I chose the old road for your sake.’
I am such a misguided Romantic! Of course, Rousseau would have taken the forest road. Voltaire is the modem man of Science. My choice of the scenic route adds a quarter of an hour to our drive, but I gasp at the untouched forests and steep crevasses.
I’m thankful he didn’t get the homing urge last January. Warnings for winter drivers dot the roadway, ‘Check your brakes,’ ‘Drive carefully,’ and other hints as we swerve through the pines. Running below our two-lane tarmacked road is a rutted dirt track at the bottom of the valley.
‘The old carriage road!’ V. exclaims. And of course, I realize now, before the ski industry invaded these backwoods, there was no reason to cut a road halfway up the mountains, when the refreshing streams and fertile little valleys offered security below
.
V. drums his thin fingers on his cadaverous thigh. ‘Can’t you go faster?’ he grumbles.
‘Don’t get cranky. This was your idea.’ I grip the steering wheel a little too tightly around another sharp curve with an unpleasant thought. He seems to be in a hurry. For what?
After twenty minutes, we start a steep descent down the mountains back to the lakeside plateau and civilization again. We’re still in France, but within ten minutes of Geneva, too.
At the bottom of the long plunge, we pass through Gex, which my friend built into the watchmaking capital of Europe. Gex has fallen on seedy times and become a sort of an antique center, surrounded by do-it-yourself malls named things like Bricorama. We pass the Buffalo Grill, Shalimar Restaurant, the Dragon of Saigon, and the Mai Thai.
God help me if Voltaire’s beloved Ferney has also turned into suburban sprawl.
With one last swing through a roundabout, there we are, driving toward the center of Ferney. The streets are overhung with shade trees and the shops and low-rise office complexes are genteel and prosperous-looking. It looks good to me.
‘I don’t recognize a thing,’ V. complains.
I spy a statue; surely, I think, of V. himself To please him, I point the car straight towards the beckoning stone figure, its wing-like appurtenances on either side an ominous signal, but my eyesight is not that much better than V.’s. Our faces fall. It is a statue of V. but V as in the Virgin Mary, here in the center of his town!
He groans. We take another turn, and there, thank goodness, we see facing us a second statue, this one—yes!—it is of my V., smiling benevolently over an inscription, ‘À nôtre patriarche, Voltaire.’
It takes us only a few more minutes of looking for a parking space to realize that every other corner of the village is punctuated by a small sign pointing towards a facsimile silhouette in black and white of Voltaire’s château and a rather commercial rendition of his face. Considering how bad-tempered he’s been during the drive, I’m amused to see that the Historical Voltaire is condemned to an eternity of serene smiling down from every lamppost and bus stop.
I watch my own Voltaire steady himself on his two pins and walking stick and admonish him, ‘I think you had better pull up your stockings.’
‘Let’s see, where are we?’ he asks, gazing around the parking lot. ‘Ah, there’s the hill and if I’m not mistaken, my house is above that school yard.’
We head up the steep path. He leans on my arm, no weight at all, considering everything. We see children frolicking in a steel and concrete playground. He shakes his stick in warning, ‘If this school is named after some wretched saint—’
‘—or Jean-Jacques Rousseau—?’
‘—We’re heading right back to your house,’ he threatens, breathing heavily. He marches us over to the plaque over the school entrance.
‘École Jean Calas,’ I read aloud.
Visibly relieved, V. nods, ‘That poor, tortured soul. How good of them.’
We pass a graveyard, its tall gray stones basking in the sun.
‘Are you—?’ The question is so ominous, I haven’t the heart to finish it.
‘We shall see, we shall see,’ he says. A grim expression crosses his face. Is it possible he doesn’t know the answer to my innocent question?
The weather is so warm as we skirt the outer walls of V.’s château, I am relieved when we reach a cool, dark little gatehouse. There isn’t much here, just a few bookshelves and a reception counter. A desultory pair of French girls chitchat, smoking into each other’s faces, twisting their hair through their fingers. You’d think I was as invisible as V.
Finally, one downs her cigarette and sells me an entrance ticket. She tells me to wait for another forty minutes before the next ‘grope’ is taken through the gate.
I glance around me and there is only V. We wait in vain for more arrivals to join our ‘grope.’
The gatehouse is sufficient proof to me that the worst excesses of the international tourist industry have yet to discover my good friend. There are no: Ecrasez l’infâme T-shirts, no Cultivate Your Garden kiddie tool-kits (8-12 years), no carrier bags with ‘I (heart shape) Voltaire,’ no mouse pads covered with Newtonian calculations, no Madame Denis Cookbooks for Entertaining Hungry House Guests, no Louis XV hand puppets or books of Madame de Pompadour paper dolls.
In short, no Voltairiana Crap in sight.
Our ‘grope,’ still only us two, is taken in hand by a well-fed blonde student named Sonya. Just outside the gatehouse, she points out a substantial chapel built by the previous Swiss proprietor, a Monsieur de Bude, but re-designed by Voltaire. Engraved over the chapel door, I see:
DEO EREXIT
VOLTAIRE
‘Voltaire erects this to God.’
V. whispers to me, ‘This is the only Catholic church I know erected to God alone: all the others are consecrated to saints. I preferred to build a church to the Lord than to His servants.’
‘The letters spelling ‘Voltaire’ are a lot bigger than God’s,’ I comment.
V. smiles impishly.
‘Please pay attention, Madame.’ Sonya scolds. ‘When Monsieur Voltaire reconstructed the chapel, he added a pyramid along the side, half inside, half outside, meant to be Monsieur’s final resting place—’
‘Half inside the church and half outside, like me!’ V. crows.
‘Monsieur Voltaire wrote to Pope Benedict for relics for his church and received a piece of hair shirt belonging to St. Francis of Assisi. There were two bell towers for Monsieur Voltaire and Madame Denis, who was his niece and housekeeper—’
‘And so very, very much more,’ he winks at me,
‘ —But in the end these burial places were not used,’ Sonya states.
V. shoots a look of alarm at the girl.
The chapel is closed to the public, like most of the house. I realize that not only are there no knickknack sales, V.’s house hasn’t even been fully restored. Visitors’ rules are no impediment, however, to the returning master of the house, who is wobbling ahead of me on his cane to inspect his property.
‘When he arrived in Ferney, Monsieur Voltaire described some forty shoeless savages and a dilapidated house which he rebuilt in stone and expanded with sixteen bedrooms. Soon so many famous celebrities came to pay their respects, he would come to be known as the Innkeeper of Europe,’ she recites to me. ‘One of the first things he did was to chop down the trees that grew along the line you see there, facing east, to open the view to the Alps.’
‘That blasted beautiful panoramic view of Mont Blanc. I cut down the trees to make way for it, and then I tired of it,’ he mutters back at me.
‘He drained marshes, constructed houses, paved streets, installed a public fountain, and built the village a new Catholic church. ‘
‘With NO Virgin Mary,’ he stipulates.
I turn to take in for the first time the full breadth of V.’s château.
I gasp, ‘It’s beautiful!’
‘Mais oui,’ he sighs. ‘You expected a goat shed?’
The château stands three stories high, with a main hall and two wings extending on either side, one wing for V. and one for Madame Denis. I hold my breath as Sonya leads me towards the front steps, but V. is too fast for her, struggling on his cane to extend to me a proper welcome to his last abode, the supreme host and gentleman to the last. He holds the door open with a ‘Ladies, please,’ and then jumps up with a strangled, ‘AIIIGH!’
His eyes are like two boiled eggs with shock.
‘Here we see two statues greeting us as we enter this historic residence,’ Sonya announces. ‘On the right, of course, a statue of Voltaire himself, and on the left—’
But I’m already staring, as google-eyed as V., at the statue on the left, as elegant and finely wrought as the one of my friend.
‘—a statue of Jean-Jacques Rousseau!’ Sonya explains.
I stammer, ‘B—b—but Voltaire despised Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Who put this thing in his
own foyer?’
‘NOT ME!’ he shouts in Sonya’s face.
Unperturbed, the girl explains, ‘The house was inherited from Voltaire by the Marquise de Villette, the child whom he adopted in his later years and whom he nicknamed La Belle-et-Bonne. Manyyears later, La Belle-et-Bonne sold it. It fell to the Lambert-David family who kept it until quite recently, when the Commune, which became Ferney-Voltaire in 1890, assumed ownership.’
‘Not Lamberts descended from Madame du Châtelet’s lover?’
‘No relation,’ she assures me. V. follows us, but not before giving the Rousseau statue a vengeful kick with his soft shoe. V. leans on my arm, recovering from the shock of the Rousseau intrusion. He gestures out of the bay windows over the grounds and points out the Lyon tapestry depicting a Chinese scene. I can almost ignore our guide prattling on about Catherine the Great’s purchase of V.’s books after his death, the family disputes over the house, the demolition of the original bed chamber, and the restoration that will be done on the floors above.
‘You noticed the heating works I installed near the front door? Did you see the matching trompe-l’oeil wall on the other side? I thought that was very clever,’ he boasts.
‘A turquoise and yellow color scheme?’ I cringe at the garish lacquer on the walls.
‘Very authentic, Madame,’ says Sonya.
‘Terribly chic at the time,’ V. butts in, then jokes, ‘I wasn’t born into a beige age. Ah! There is the chair upholstered by Madame Denis herself!’
I lean over to examine the less than masterfully worked greenish brown threads. ‘Was needlework her thing?’
‘Hardly, but it distracted her from insisting I produce any more of her dreadful plays,’ he replied.
‘Madame, please pay attention,’ the girl orders me. ‘Monsieur Voltaire built himself a hot-water bathhouse, one of the first of his time.’
‘I feared too much hygiene was weakening me, so then I tore it out,’ he adds.
A Visit From Voltaire Page 33