Finding Emilie

by Laurel Corona

  Maman would let her go to the Jardin de Roi. If she could send a carriage from the grave, it would be outside waiting for her right at that moment. Lili went over to the window and pulled the heavy curtain aside. A lump rose in her throat not so much because the courtyard was empty, but because she had been desperate enough to entertain a fleeting hope it might not be.

  A memory of the key turning in the lock in her cell in the abbey overtook her, and she shut her eyes in pain. The loss of Maman hit her with such force that she was surprised it didn’t knock her to the ground. She always rescued me, Lili realized. But she can’t do it anymore.

  Or could she? Perhaps it was Maman who had risen up inside her, giving her courage to say things to the baroness just now that she had never dared say before. Perhaps Maman was still worrying about her, and had managed to penetrate Lili’s mind and heart to tell her not to surrender. And perhaps it was more than just Maman. Was her mother whispering to her also? How else could Lili explain that all of a sudden she felt bigger than herself—and braver, almost reckless in what she believed she could do?

  It’s up to me. No going home to Maman to complain, no fuming with Delphine. Just me. Something came over Lili—a launching upward from her toes, a tightening of the belly, a burst of energy that carried her back into the parlor.

  “I’m sure you know I received a letter from Mademoiselle de Bercy yesterday,” she said, cutting off what looked like an angry and bewildered interchange between the baroness and her guest. “Her wedding has been set for next month. I have been invited to stay with her at the abbey to help her prepare. I am accepting the invitation, with or without your approval, since I am certain it is what both Madame de Bercy and my mother would have wanted, and I intend to honor them.”

  There. She turned and strode out of the room.

  Upstairs, Lili dipped her quill in the inkwell, trying to still the trembling in her hand after leaving Baronne Lomont and Robert de Barras in the parlor. Nothing else, she thought with a grim smile, can calm me like Meadowlark.

  “They cut off your wings?” Meadowlark asked in disbelief.

  “Of course,” the group of children said. “It hurts a little now, but we can’t wait to start decorating the stumps.”

  Two little girls held each other’s hands as they twirled in a circle. “We’ll have pearls, and diamonds shaped like teardrops, and lace made from gold thread!” they chanted, laughing as if it were a private song they had practiced for years.

  “But you could have flown!”

  The children looked puzzled. “What’s the point in that? Everything we want is on the ground.”

  “But you could have flown,” she whispered.

  Could they? Could she? Despite the scene she had just made, she still lived at Hôtel Lomont and had no place else to go. She wiped her quill and put it down in despair.

  She even depended upon Delphine to have enough ink and paper so she could keep writing her stories. Baronne Lomont had seen one of them, when Lili carelessly left it on her desk shortly after her arrival. The baroness had denounced Meadowlark as a frivolous and possibly dangerous use of time and began keeping the household’s writing supplies under lock and key. “You should read instead,” she had told her, giving her a book on the lives of the saints and another on female piety.

  Delphine’s secret supplies were hidden in a compartment in the back of a drawer, and Lili had been using the baroness’s ink and paper to copy in her neatest hand what she considered the most ridiculous lines from those odious books. These she left on top of the desk for the baroness to find, in hope she would take her effort seriously and be convinced of Lili’s improved temperament.

  “The quarrelsome woman’s society is more intolerable than living in the wilderness, or in a corner of one’s own attic,” she had written.

  “The woman who brings shame to her house is a rottenness in the bones of her husband.”

  “The beautiful woman without discretion is like a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout.”

  “The contentious wife is as annoying as the constant dripping on a rainy day.”

  Obviously the baroness would not be fooled by her false religiosity after her outburst today. Still, with nothing else to do, Lili picked up the book on piety and read from where she had left off.

  “The Bible is the best mirror by which most accurately to know what you are, and to become what you should be,” she read. “With it, you may adjust all the moral garb of the soul, and go forth adorned with the beauty of holiness, clothed with the garment of purity, and decorated with the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit.”

  “Try that in a corset,” Lili muttered to herself.

  “While the word of God protects woman from the insults, the injuries, and the oppression of the other sex, it saves her with no less benefit from the sad effects which would arise from assuming prerogatives that do not belong to her, from those excesses of ambition to which her own vanity might otherwise prompt her, and from pretensions that would only make her look ridiculous in the eyes of others …”

  Lili tossed the book toward the desk, watching with disinterest as it skidded across the edge and fell to the floor. “At least I don’t have to memorize it,” she said to the empty air. Lying down on the bed, she missed Maman so badly she thought her bones might dissolve with aching.

  EMILIE WAS too tired to wince as the ice water bit into her hands. She pulled them out and shook off the water, scarcely noticing how chapped and red they’d become. The chips she ordered each night from the icehouse were already melted, and it wouldn’t be long, on a night now close to dawn, before the water would be too warm to shock her back into wakefulness.

  Two days to finish her paper on fire. The row of candles on her worktable were by now flickering stubs, and she replaced them all before sitting down again. She held her hand above a flame and felt it warm her palm. Interesting how heat traveled so much more slowly than light, and how it diffused in all directions, whereas light always moved in a straight line. How light didn’t always feel hot, though every source of illumination was.

  The calculations on her sheets of foolscap were so long that they strung out over several lines, and having no time to rewrite them, she turned the paper to continue along the margins. She dipped her quill and cursed under her breath when the ink dripped onto the page. She blotted it and moved on.

  Sunlight could not be made of matter, regardless of how miniature the particles. She’d figured that out riding Hirondelle back from the forge. If light had mass, the earth would be pulverized by sunbeams hitting it. Because fire consisted of heat and light, if neither of these had mass, fire could not be a material thing.

  If only she could carry out the experiments she had described in her notes, she might be able to prove that heat was a property inherent in light. She would take a beam of sunlight from the big window on the far side of her as-yet-unfinished study and refract it with a prism so its colors were arrayed on a sheet she would tack onto the bare wall at the other end of the room. Then she would take all of Voltaire’s thermometers and attach them to the wall, one at each end, red and violet, and the others at points in between. If the thermometers reflected differences in the heat they absorbed, that would be evidence that light carried heat, but only in part of its spectrum. And if light wasn’t matter, heat wasn’t either.

  But the experiment wasn’t possible because she wouldn’t be able to hide it from Voltaire. He would view her work as a criticism of him, and he had exploded in the past when he had perceived far lesser slights. Besides, the thermometers she needed were all being used for his experiments, which were obviously going nowhere, though he refused to believe it.

  “There are no mysterious nonsubstances,” he had scolded her that night at dinner. “To say that something in the physical world could exist without having mass is as foolish as belief in miracles. Perhaps we could produce heat by prayer!” he said, taunting her until she had thrown her napkin at him and stormed from the room.


  Well, let him laugh. She was tired of playing the dutiful assistant to the great man, tired of all the things about being a woman that did little more than drain her energy—supervising the workers remodeling Cirey, entertaining a constant stream of guests, schooling her son, being a dutiful wife to Florent-Claude, and taking care of a hypochondriac like Voltaire. If he got so much as a splinter he’d make such a fuss about the possibility of a slow and painful death from infection that he’d insist on changing a completely unnecessary bandage five times a day.

  If she were a man, she’d get rid of all the useless things in her life, but she wasn’t. Only when the household settled into sleep and the demands stopped could she finally work. “I won’t win the prize,” she said loudly enough to cause the nearest flame to bob. She was a woman and her ideas were too different from what the Academy had already decided was the truth. But the Academy was wrong. Truth was the only thing that mattered, the only thing that wasn’t a waste of time.

  Luckily, Florent-Claude was home from his regiment for a while. He was a kind man, and a most tolerant husband. “I didn’t understand a word of what you and Voltaire were arguing about at the forge,” he had told her the other night, “but I was quite proud that you did.” He’d ride to the nearest postal stop at Wassy himself and send her paper to Paris without Voltaire knowing. He’d already promised.

  A crash in the courtyard brought her to her feet. The painters had arrived and she would need to discuss their progress in her bedroom. She wiped the pen and put it aside. “Two more days,” she whispered. The paper was almost finished. She would send word to Voltaire that she was indisposed, take a short nap, and then add her last calculations to a clean copy of the text. After Florent-Claude sent it off in the post, she would do nothing but sleep for a week.

  1767

  THE TREES in the courtyard of Delphine’s wing of the Abbaye de Panthémont were a froth of white and pink, and the puffs of breeze sent petals drifting to the ground. “If any more get in your hair,” Lili said, “you could wear them instead of a headdress in the church.”

  Delphine smiled dreamily. “I can’t believe that before the last of these has fallen I’ll be Ambroise’s wife.” They were sharing a bench, sitting close enough together for Delphine to reach over and take Lili’s hand. “Thank you for coming,” she said.

  Lili gave her hand a squeeze. “Thank you for being here, so I had someplace to go.”

  “It hasn’t been so bad, really,” Delphine said. “When I first got here, I would not go any farther than this courtyard because I thought the sight of anything that reminded me of my boarding days might turn my hair white or give me as many wrinkles as some of the widows who come here to die.” She looked around quickly to make sure no one had overheard. “And then, over time, I started to take walks, and eventually I found I could look at the buildings and not have all the memories be bad.” She smiled. “At least the ones that have you in them.”

  Lili stood up and loosened her shoulders with a long, deliberate shrug. “It’s really quite a pleasant place to live, at least here on this wing, if you have to be alone.” She tried to smile. “I’d definitely prefer it to marrying Monsieur de Barras.”

  Delphine’s face clouded. “I hope you don’t end up alone. But I pray every night I never have to go visit you at that simpering little rodent’s house.”

  “My, my!” Lili said, smiling at Delphine. “If your face gets stuck that way, white hair will be the least of your troubles.”

  “You’re going to find someone, Lili,” Delphine said. “I know you are. Just don’t marry because you feel you have to and then find that person a few months later.” Her face clouded. “You know something Ambroise told me? At Versailles, just before they came in to say the dauphin had died, Anne-Mathilde suggested to him that once they’d made such an advantageous marriage, she wouldn’t care if he kept me as a mistress. That’s when he knew for sure he would never marry her.”

  “She told him that?”

  “He said she was desperate to make the marriage happen, after everyone had talked about it so much.” Delphine brushed away a petal that had settled on her brow. “I suppose I should feel triumphant, but I just feel sick when I think about it.”

  A cloud crossed the sun, darkening the courtyard and causing the temperature to drop. “Look,” Delphine said. “Even the heavens object.”

  “I think they object to many things,” Lili said. “Now that I’m here with you and can clear my head, I’m astonished to see what a sheep I’ve been. Even though I said I would never marry Barras, I don’t know how much longer I could have held out with the two of them pressing me the way they were.”

  Lili picked a sprig of flowers and tucked it in her unlaced bodice. “No corset,” she said. “Just me, and springtime. It’s wonderful.” The sun came out again, lighting Delphine’s hair in a halo of reddish gold. “You look so happy.”

  “I am,” Delphine replied. “I’m getting all I ever wanted.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Except that Maman isn’t with us.” Her eyes glistened. “I miss her terribly.”

  “I do too,” Lili said, “but sometimes I think she’s here. Sometimes I think both my mothers are. I get waves of thought from nowhere, and I think it’s them, tapping me on the shoulder, telling me not to forget who I am, not to let anyone else have any part of me I don’t want to give.”

  Corinne came through the door. “I beg your pardon, mesdemoiselles, but your dinner is ready, and this letter just arrived.”

  Lili and Delphine exchanged looks. “Who is it from?” Delphine asked.

  “I don’t know. There’s no address. It was brought by a messenger, and he’s already gone.”

  Delphine reached out her hand. “I suppose we’d better see it right away,” she said, breaking the seal of the envelope. She read a few lines and smiled. “It’s really for you.” She handed it to Lili. “From the Comte de Buffon.”

  “‘Esteemed Mademoiselle de Bercy,’” Lili read aloud. “‘I write because I have heard that Mademoiselle du Châtelet is no longer at Hôtel Lomont. I hope that this may be a sign that an unpleasant spell of silence has been broken and that I may again communicate with her.’”

  Lili looked up. “Well, it’s not exactly like breaking Sleeping Beauty’s spell, but good enough!”

  “‘Would you please inform her, if indeed she is there, that I believe she was right about the ethanol dissolving something essential to the outer surface of the organisms we observed. I hope that she will be able to correspond with me about this and other research while she is in residence at the abbey. I will send some papers once you have confirmed they will be favorably received.’”

  “Isn’t that just like him to talk about those squirmy little things before anything else?” Delphine said with a laugh. “Let’s invite him to come for a visit!”

  Lili shook her head. “Listen to what he says next. ‘I have been told that the abbess is in sympathy with Baronne Lomont over what they feel is unacceptable behavior by Mademoiselle du Châtelet, and I believe it would make things worse if we attempted a meeting either here or there. Until the situation is more agreeable, I remain, at a distance, your devoted friend, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon.’”

  Lili waved the letter in her hand. “And then he adds, ‘Please note that I have enclosed something that came from the Falkland Islands for Mademoiselle du Châtelet.’”

  Inside the sheet of paper forming an envelope around the letter was another sheet, folded in quarters. Inside was a pressed, dried flower, its bright yellow center surrounded by six overlapping white petals. Drawn as if by a paintbrush from the center to the edge of each petal were three delicate lines in a purple tinged with green. On the paper protecting it, Jean-Étienne had written a note.

  “‘The hand of God seems to paint flowers here as well,’” Lili read. “‘This one, called a pale maiden, is quite common on the islands, growing in the heath from the coast up into the hills. I thought you would l
ike to know that I think of you when I see it, for I recall you had a dress in just these colors.’”

  Delphine danced around the courtyard with delight. “He can’t stop thinking of you!” she said. Lili folded the note gently around the flower. Could that be true? she wondered as she put it back inside the count’s letter. Even if it is, does it matter?

  “Why the long face?” Delphine asked. “There’s nothing but good on such a beautiful day. He’s going to sail home with a clear head about his future, and we have two of your favorites—new peas and crevettes—for dinner.” She took Lili’s arm. “Shall we go in?”

  Esteemed Comte de Buffon,

  I cannot begin to tell you what a joy it was to receive the letter you sent to Mademoiselle de Bercy here at the Abbaye de Panthémont. I had been in the most terrible despair over my loss of contact with you. I feel safe here for now, but I do not know what methods Baronne Lomont may have to bring me back, and your warning about the abbess makes me think staying here may be more difficult than I thought.

  Delphine’s apartment was bathed in the dusty light of late afternoon as Corinne and the cook finished their work and stole quietly out for their after-dinner rest. Delphine had fallen asleep on a daybed, with swatches of fabric for her wedding dress strewn over her lap.

  I do believe it is within the rights of a young woman of nearly eighteen to visit a sister who is about to be married, without needing permission she is certain will be cruelly and unfairly denied. But the most hopeful aspect of my situation is that Monsieur Clément de Feuillet has agreed to rent out his home in Paris and live with Delphine at Hôtel Bercy after their wedding. He has made it quite clear that I am welcome to return to my own quarters and live indefinitely with them. There can certainly be no grounds for objection to a husband and wife offering safe haven to a maiden relative, and I shall be able to return to life almost as before.