‘ . . . And here we see a portrait of La Belle-et-Bonne, or La Marquise de Villette, whom Monsieur Voltaire adopted from a poor, but respectable family when she was about to be sent off to a convent to become a nun—’
‘You bet I stopped that!’ he crows.
‘—and whom he married off to the Marquis de Villette, the son of his old friend, Suzanne de Villette.’
‘Not a bad boy, but he always cherished the vain and wrongful notion that he was my bastard son,’ adds V.
‘—and some say was Voltaire’s illegitimate son,’ Sonya adds, to a groan of futile protest from V.
Sonya crosses the room and gestures, ‘Here at the foot of Monsieur Voltaire’s bed, we see the portrait of Marie Therese, Queen of Austria. Monsieur Voltaire liked to joke that—’
I finish it for her, ‘—It was so pleasant to wake up with an empress at his feet.’
Sonya looks startled. ‘Why, yes! That’s exactly what he used to say! And over here is the shawl La Belle-et-Bonne wore to Monsieur Voltaire’s funeral.’
Before I know it, V. has stretched himself out on the slim blue bed and closed his eyes.
‘Now here,’ she says, gesturing at a small oil painting, ‘is a painting of the actor Lekain of the Comedie-Française. He performed at the château many times. And here, of course, we have a portrait—’
I find myself looking up into V.’s youthful roguish eyes twinkling down at me from an oil painting.
‘He looks so . . . ’ I struggle for words.
‘Handsome, is the word you’re looking for, Madame,’ says the crotchety old coot from the bed. ‘Snappy, debonair, brilliant and—’
‘It looks so much like him,’ I falter, to V.’s disgust.
‘Humph! I’m going for a walk!’
I ask our guide for directions to the ladies room.
‘There is nothing working in the house, but some temporary facilities are outside,’ she says.
‘Some restoration!’ he grumbles on his way out of the door. A very up-to-date blue plastic toilet cabinet sits inside the shady flank of the house. I find V. a few minutes later, gazing down from the terrace.
‘Yes, yes,’ he murmurs to himself, stopping now and then to measure by eye the acreage of flattened grassland below. ‘Let’s see . . . over there were the vineyards,’ he explains. I try to imagine him striding the fields at sixty-five years old, laying them out with his workers. What optimism to plant new grapevines when most people are lining up for pensions!
A dappled pathway beyond is packed hard by his own repeated use two centuries ago, so hard that still nothing much can sink a root here even now. Sonya has told us that after his death, vengeful interests of Church and State tried to eradicate much of what he had built up but this long worn footpath resists time.
Neglect hangs over the place. The beech trees have lined both sides of the path long enough to form a dense canopy of leaves only a few feet above my head. The effect is protective rather than tunnel-like; my friend made an inner retreat for himself inside his public retreat and now he is sharing it with me.
I have never felt closer to V. than in this ‘cabinet de verdure,’ his ‘green office,’ where neither one of us is surrounded by the trappings of our separate centuries—the distractions of my children and kitchen, nor that garish aqua and egg-yolk decor of V.’s house.
What is two hundred and twelve years, after all? Figure that my hardy Swiss mother-in-law lived ninety-five years and V. himself lived eighty-four, then insert only one more generation in between and suddenly V. and I seem separated by very, very little, we two who now tread his favorite path, me in my mail-order driving moccasins and he in his wooden-heeled, hand-crafted shoes.
There is no sound around us but the twittering of birds. Time has totally stopped for me here in V.’s garden. No wonder Boswell pleaded by letter to Voltaire to stay over for one night. If I hear anything beside the birds, it is the murmurings of thousands of grateful souls whose lives V. changed for the better, including mine.
Chapter Twenty-eight TO DUST EVEN VOLTAIRE SHALT RETURN
A farm truck jounces its way across V.’s former vineyard.
And it jolts us back to the present.
‘I think that well-rehearsed child is waiting for us,’ V. sighs.
However, Sonya has run out of things to tell me. We’ve finished the tour of V.’s study filled with souvenirs of his triumphant procession to Paris and volumes in crumbling leather bindings under glass.
She waits for more questions and I have so many. My heart is full as I stand before this girl with her fresh face, neat summaries, and memorized anecdotes. She knows a great deal about the historic Voltaire, but so little of my friend: his disappointments in love, the betrayals of his friends, his terror of failure and his political and financial humiliations.
Does Sonya see him, bankrupt in exile in England writing to his faithless friend Thieriot for emergency funds?
Can she picture him arguing from the footlights with the booing audience at Artémire?
Does she pity him, sobbing with sorrow at Cirey, where Madame du Châtelet’s corpse lies still warm on her deathbed?
Does she follow him on his nightmarish carriage races across Europe, fleeing torture and l’infâme for the sake of a few pointed stanzas of truth?
V. has taught me to understand all the small forks and turnings that anybody’s half-century would bring. Perhaps this is all I share with him—not his fame, talent, wealth or royal society. I know my friend as the companion of every day of my difficult, lonely first year in Switzerland.
It is more than a twenty-year-old could have time to know. And as I stand before this sincere young woman, I cannot speak.
Bereft of more tourist patter, Sonya translates for me a motto painted over a large black cenotaph standing against the wall of his bedroom, ‘My heart is here.’
‘But where’s the rest of me?’ V. whispers. His quavering voice speaks of the terror with which his generation feared an unmarked grave. Hadn’t he reeled with shock at the hasty burial without rites of Molière’s corpse under cover of night? Hadn’t he boasted that one of his finest hours was his protest at Adrienne Lecouvreur’s body being tossed like a dog’s into an unmarked heap of quicklime? Hadn’t he envied Newton’s funeral procession marked by tributes of English dukes and earls?
His earlier elation at his homecoming has disappeared.
Trembling, he turns his back on my bewildered expression. He is reciting to himself the poem he wrote memorializing Adrienne:
‘ . . . Celle qui dans la Grèce aurait eu des autels, je les ai vus soumis, autour d’elles empressés; sitôt qu’elle n’est plus, elle est done criminelle! Elle a charmé le monde, et vous l’en punissez!’ They deprived her of burial, she who in Greece would have had altars. I have seen them adoring her, crowding about her; hardly is she dead than she becomes a criminal! She charmed the world and you punish her!’
He practically spits out the words, then turns to me, his expression furious.
So this was behind his impatience all morning.
‘Sonya, I do have one more question, maybe the most important question of all. Where exactly does Monsieur Voltaire lie now?’
‘I actually allowed a priest to sit at my deathbed,’ he says, quivering with tension, pleading in his eyes. ‘I’ve got to know.’
She nods, smiling. ‘Oh, yes, I forgot. The religious authorities in Paris refused him a burial and his family was afraid he would be denied burial by the bishop of Annecy as well.’
‘L’infâme to the last?’ he cries.
‘So Voltaire’s great-nephew, Alexandre d’Hornoy, smuggled the corpse, propped up the seat of a star-spangled carriage to the abbey of Voltaire’s nephew Abbé Mignot in Scellières in the province of Champagne. But not before La Belle-et-Bonne’s husband, the Marquis de Villette, had himself removed Monsieur Voltaire’s heart during the embalming.’
‘Is the abbey grave well-kept?’
Sonya looks
embarrassed. ‘Well, no, they buried the corpse in a hurry under two feet of lime in the basement before any Church orders from Paris could stop them.
I cannot bear to look at my friend, who mutters, ‘At least it was a burial.’
Sonya adds, ‘But he was honored during the French Revolution when the National Assembly moved his remains to the Pantheon in Paris!’
I hear a satisfied ‘Ah,’ behind me.
‘An oak wreath was put around the head and the body was moved to a sarcophagus, but not before an admirer had stolen the heel bone for the Museum of Troyes.’
‘Relics of me, like a saint!’ he remarks in ironic wonder, smacking his toothless gums.
Sonya now narrates a glorious return to Paris for my old pal.
‘On July 6th, 1791 a squadron of revolutionary cavalry, followed by infantry, set off with his sepulchral coach from Romilly-on-Seine on the five-day journey to Paris. Villages were lit up at night to illuminate his passage. Mothers held their children up to kiss the sarcophagus. His coffin was set down to rest on the site of the Bastille, now torn into a pile of rubble by vengeful revolutionaries.’
This is just the beginning of the hero treatment.
Once in Paris, V. gets an eighteenth-century version of a ticker-tape parade—Swiss Guards, flag-carriers, Bastille-wreckers, French Academy members, and all the assembled writers of France bearing volumes of his works—marching past half a million cheering onlookers.
Sonya tells us that his coffin bears the inscription, ‘He defended Calas, La Barre, Sirven, and Montailli. As a poet, thinker, and historian, he gave mankind the greatest gifts. He has prepared us for liberty.’
‘Are you quite content?’ I signal to V.
He’s grinning behind me. ‘Hush, this is good.’
‘The procession halted at the Opera, where the company sang a song from Monsieur Voltaire’s Samson, which became, with “La Marseillaise,” the anthem of the French Revolution.’
‘Wake ye people. Break your chains!’ V. sings in glee around Sonya, who, unmindful of the croaking old monkey, continues, ‘After the Opera, they passed the Tuileries. Every window was filled with spectators, save one. Behind that, closed and barred, sat King Louis and Marie Antoinette, awaiting their doom.’
‘Tant pis,’ V. quips.
Sonya adds, ‘The sides of the coffin bore two of his own quotations: “If man is created free, he must govern himself,” and “If man has tyrants, he must dethrone them”.’
‘Mellifluous, non?’ V. crows.
I interrupt. ‘So his body lies in the Pantheon?’
My blunt question startles Sonya out of her dramatic recreation of Voltaire’s glory. ‘Well, his official grave is there,’ she says, matter-of-factly and starts towards the exit gate.
V. and I give a start, and chase after her, panting a little in surprise.
‘What are you not telling us? I mean, me?’
‘Well, there are two versions. One is that Monsieur Voltaire’s bones were stolen, along with those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by reactionary fanatics in 1814—’
‘—Why?’
‘On orders from the director of the mint, a Monsieur de Puymorin. Or some say they were stolen during the restoration of the Pantheon in 1821,’ she answers with the complacency of youth contemplating dead history. I hear a shuddering choking next to me. Sonya blithely finishes her tale. To this young woman, it is all one—the Pantheon, the pit, the parade or the guillotine.
‘They say thieves drove by night to a city dump at the Barrière de la Gare. Some accomplices had already dug a big hole in a sewage ditch and—’
‘The city dump? There’s no grave there at all?’
‘Well, no,’ Sonya shrugs. ‘Perhaps Monsieur Voltaire’s remains were lost forever.’
Taken out with the garbage? And with Rousseau, of all people!
She adds, Of course, there’s more to the story—’
‘Yes? Yes?’
‘His Pantheon grave was opened in 1878 and reportedly they did find bones inside, and a skull with saw marks from an autopsy. You see, after his death, they had measured and reported the weight of Voltaire’s brain to the world.’
‘But how can they be sure those remains were Voltaire’s?’
Sonya shrugs. ‘They can’t be sure. But the officials present said one could still recognize the sardonic smile on the skin still stretched across his skull. But anyway, you can go to see the statue of him by Houdon at the Théâtre-Francais.’
I steel myself to face the crumpled, crestfallen old man, merely a bundle of bones in his homecoming wrappings of linen and damask. It saddens me to see the once-elegant figure of theatrical gaiety, who danced with a toy sword across the narrow width of my office, reduced to this ambiguity. Those wise old eyes start filling with tears, his expression pleading with me to change history itself.
Then he stumbles blindly out of the French doors opened to the garden, a low wail piercing the air, his despairing form limping jerkily away on his stick.
I thank Sonya for the tour, but she lingers, sensing that she has failed me in some way. ‘You seem more interested than most of the American tourists we get here,’ she says. ‘Maybe you’d like to meet the curator some time?’
‘Yes, yes, I’ll do that,’ I say, glancing out of the French doors for a sign of V. The sunlight warms the wooden floor, but the questionable story of Voltaire’s bones has chilled me. Sonya jabbers on about how soon, the cyber-chocolaterie will be offering coffee, hot chocolate, and Internet access, in memory of Voltaire.
I shake her hand and excuse myself. When I reach the steps, I scan the whole vista—the broad path leading to the house and the grove of trees where his theater of three hundred seats once stood.
Then I hear a familiar chuckle escalating into a hoarse shout of laughter coming from his ‘green office.’ I spot him standing in the middle of the verdant corridor, waving his cane, wildly gesticulating for me to join him. I dash over to find that he is not collapsing, but merely gathering his breath, shaking his head as if at some enormous joke.
‘Oh, what does it matter?’ he cries to me, pointing at the skies. ‘What did it ever matter? HE has had the last laugh. From dust I cam’st and to dust I shalt return! What does it matter now, if the truth is I’m here again and we can stroll together? Why did I care so much? Why? Why?’
‘Because . . . because you’re the Great Voltaire, the true king of your time, La—La Lumière,’ I stutter, near tears. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
He looks at me, blows his nose, and shakes himself like a bony old dog. We stand for a minute staring at Mont Blanc.
Then with a claw-like grip, he takes my arm.
‘We never talked about my efforts to clear the name of Admiral Byng who lost the sea battle at Minorca to my friend Richelieu. The vanity of England was so hurt by this defeat, they court-martialed and shot their own man in 1757— “to encourage the others,” they claimed.’
My heart is still thudding from the fear that his soul has been swallowed into some unreachable place along with his controversial carcass. I can’t take that risk again.
‘Do you mind if I jot down some of the things we’ve talked about?’
‘For some little book philosophique?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Why not?’ he says. ‘Frederick always said that any companion of mine with nothing more than a good memory could make a brilliant book out of the good things I said just at random.’
Clearly mere old age will not dim his ego, nor time wither his courtier’s vanity.
He wags an arthritic finger in my face. ‘Just remember that history is a form of playing tricks with the dead. It’s gross charlatanry to pretend to paint the portrait of a man with whom you’ve never lived!’
‘Oh, I’ve lived with you all right. And now I want to write down what’s happened this first year, how you’ve kept me company, all the stories you’ve told me—something fictional, but at the same time—’
; ‘Fiction is nothing but truth in disguise,’ he states, tapping his stick on the beaten path.
‘Yes, that’s what I mean—truthful fiction—that’s the idea, although,’ I hesitate, not a little embarrassed, ‘at the end of the day, I’m not sure what it all means.’
He chuckles and sucks at his gums, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry. The most useful books are those in which the readers supply half the meaning. That was the point of Zadig.’
With that settled, we set off to walk the shady length of his ‘green office’ together under the last rays of early summer.
‘You’ll come to visit me often?’
‘Are you sure you’ll be here?’
‘I don’t think I’ll take any more trips to Paris. The last one proved so fatal,’ he jokes. ‘This house needs work. That Rousseau statue goes first. I can use those computers in the coffee shop to run my web site. And God knows what the Commune intends as a center for writers. If I can’t persuade this bunch to revive at least one of my plays, I might as well give up the ghost.’
‘So to speak,’ I respond, smiling.
V. wipes a little dribble off his stubbly chin. ‘Persecuted writers, humph! Let’s hope the quality of their writing is worthy of the persecution. I won’t stand for any second-raters on my lawn.’
He grins defiantly through his withered gums.
‘Oh,’ I interject, ‘The BBC reported that a Professor Holgate in Southampton has just discovered the asthma gene. You remember the night you arrived? Theo’s asthma attack? They hope for a cure within ten years—’
‘You mean gene therapy might work better than two hundred pints of lemonade? Hah!’
We laugh so hard, we break our stride. Then he collects his breath, and resumes his careful steps.
‘You’ve learned a little from me, non?’
‘Oui. Except how to speak French.’
‘You know what I’ve learned from talking to you, Madame?’
‘From me?’
He nods. ‘That I had the best of all possible lives. Yes,’ he sighs, ‘most men die without having even lived. Not me. I’m contented now. You know, the news broke only days before I died, how my appeals had finally cleared the name of General de Lally, executed for treason in 1766 because he lost our Indian colony of Pondichery. That dear girl La Belle-et-Bonne pinned the news to my deathbed curtains, written in huge letters so that I . . . Well, anyway, it was kind of a French version of the Byng outrage, you see. . .’
A Visit From Voltaire Page 34