Lili stared at the words swimming on the page in front of her. “Does this mean I must marry Monsieur de Barras?” she said, feeling life flowing out of her as surely as if the letter had cut a mortal wound in her flesh.
The baroness sniffed. “Monsieur de Barras tired of you during your absence at the abbey, and he is betrothed to another. I have two suitable husbands in mind, but neither has anywhere near the same fortune—regrettable for you, but entirely your fault. They are noblesse d’épée, however, and that will help your situation.”
I am doomed, Lili thought, wishing she could simply refuse to breathe again and die right there in the baroness’s parlor.
“I have agreed to let you move to Hôtel Bercy because I am too old at this point for the burden of having you live with me. However, I will permit this only so long as you give me your word before God that you will accept the first suitable offer of marriage you receive.”
Lili’s heart had been pounding when she read the letter, but now, much like that of a mouse she’d once seen squeezed to death by a snake in Buffon’s laboratory, it slowed until she was not sure it was beating at all. “Apparently I have no choice. I will have to do as you wish.”
“Before God, Stanislas-Adélaïde,” the baroness reminded her. “Give your word before God.”
Lili’s knees shook. How will I ever get out of this now? she wondered. “You have my word before God,” she replied.
“TOSS IT higher, mon chéri—and as hard as you can this time.” Emilie watched her eleven-year-old son cock his arm back and throw a ball into the cloudless afternoon sky. “Watch it come down and tell me what you observe.”
Florent-Louis shielded his eyes and watched the ball’s motion until it landed farther down the lawn at Cirey. He ran over to where Emilie sat under a tree. “You’re right, Maman,” he said. “The arc as it comes down is the mirror image of how it went up.” Emilie opened the notebook on her lap. “Now if you throw it just as hard, but higher”—she drew one arc and superimposed a steeper one—“it will still come back down the same way.”
“Why, Maman?”
“Because that’s the nature of an object set in motion against a force of gravity too strong to resist. You can use Newton’s and Leibniz’s calculus to determine the exact trajectory any ball would follow. A cannonball going up like this”—she drew a curved line—“would come down like this.” She drew another arc. “Or, if you aimed the cannon higher, it might come down like this. You can use the calculus to know the exact path.”
“But why does it matter, Maman?”
Emilie smiled. “It will certainly matter when your regiment is aiming its cannons at the enemy—and more so when they are aiming theirs at you!” They both laughed, but Emilie quickly grew serious again.
“It matters, because the Creator examined all the ways things could possibly be before settling on the way that worked most harmoniously. ‘I’ll have gravity be just this strong and no stronger,’ he said, and ‘I’ll make objects able to travel this fast and no faster.’ Once he set it all in motion, everything followed, not just here, but everywhere in the universe. If gravity were different on another planet, the calculus for this arc would still hold.”
She retraced with her finger what she had drawn. “The symmetry is beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked, giving her son’s hair a gentle tug. “Science is really the purest form of beauty, Florent-Louis. Through study, we can come to see God’s hand, and I for one want to do that.”
It was difficult having chosen to educate Florent-Louis herself, but his latest tutor, Monsieur Linant, had been so incompetent and self-serving that she had been forced to fire him, and she was not going to get another if he would waste the child’s time with the same indefensible prattle. She had wanted to slap Linant when she overheard him tell Florent-Louis that some things in God’s creation were better left as mysteries, as a sign of respect. Nonsense! God wanted to be known. That was why he had ordained the human mind.
“So what we observe with your ball,” she went on, “is the effect of these laws. The force of gravity is exactly what it is, so the velocity with which you threw the ball made it go as high as it did and no higher, and that caused the ball’s path to be shaped precisely as it was, because no other path was possible.”
“God made it all happen,” Florent-Louis said with a solemn nod.
“Yes, mon chéri, but not in the way many people think. He did it through math. Through physics. When God said, ‘Let there be light,’ he meant let there be a source of energy to warm and illuminate the world, and let it be neither too far away nor too close, and let the earth circle around it, and let the movements of the sun and earth create day and night, and the seasons of the year.”
She looked up through the branches of the tree. “There’s a bird’s nest up there. If you follow one thing to another, you see how the birds and the nest came to be only because God said ‘Let there be light.’ God is the Great Mathematician and if you want to find him, look in the arc of a thrown ball. Look anywhere in his universe. Look particularly hard at things you don’t understand, for that’s where he hides, waiting for us to come looking for him.”
She could see his attention was waning. “I brought something for you,” she said, producing a glass vial and a long, thin tube open at both ends.
“What is it?”
Emilie pulled out the stopper in the vial and dipped one end of the tube into it. Holding the other end to her lips, she blew out an iridescent sphere that went wobbling off into the air before it burst.
Florent-Louis’s eyes grew wide. “How did you do that?”
She laughed. “It’s just one of the properties of soap. Would you like to try?” Florent-Louis took the tube and the vial. “See how the light doesn’t have visible colors either inside the bubble or outside but only on its surface?” she asked. “It breaks apart there, and then comes back together inside.”
Florent-Louis was blowing one bubble after another, half listening. Emilie smiled. “Run along,” she said, watching him dance across the grass, sending skyward one bubble after another, as she walked back to the house.
What was God’s plan? That was what she cared about. She didn’t want to look only at the products of it. She wanted to see his hand move, wanted to hear what words he spoke to make a universe that functioned as one whole. Could it be reduced to two or three great principles working together, or perhaps even a single one from which everything derived? In the book she had started while waiting for the results of the Academy competition, she would do her best to show the foundations of God’s world, as she understood them. She’d work on what she had decided to call “The Institutes of Physics” until the book was good enough to be published, good enough to be her message to the world.
Inside the house, two letters from Paris, one for Voltaire and one for her, lay on a tray. She examined the seal on her own. The Academy of Science! “We understand that, despite the anonymous nature of the submission, you are the author of a paper submitted to the Academy for its annual competition,” it read. “We are pleased to inform you that it has received an honorable mention.
“We found your ideas promising enough that we are taking the unusual step of publishing your paper in addition to the three winning entries, so it may receive the attention it deserves and begin the discussion it will most surely generate. By separate letter we are sending Monsieur Voltaire his results as well. His work received the same special commendation as your own, coming as it does, most unusually, from a man of letters. The Academy wishes to encourage the pursuit of science by all those inclined to it. However, since there are some notable errors in his data and concerns about the validity of his conclusions, we have told him if he wishes to publish it he must do so on his own.”
Emilie held the letter to her chest. “I won!” she whispered. That was what the Academy was really telling her. If she weren’t a woman, she would have won.
“What did you say?” Voltaire came to the door, dressed
for a walk. Emilie’s hand trembled as she gave him his letter.
He scanned the terse message on the single sheet. “Honorable mention?” he sniffed. “Well, I suppose it’s a good start.” He looked at Emilie. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, handing him her own letter. Voltaire’s face grew scarlet as he took in the meaning. “You submitted your own paper without telling me?” Emilie’s heart pounded with fear as he tapped his finger on the words. “And it’s being published?”
Then, unexpectedly, he laughed. “Well, this could be quite good!” he announced. “Cirey just became the most famous laboratory in France. People will beg for an invitation to visit. I’ll buy more instruments and every book on physics that’s ever been published.” He danced a circle around her. “Just wait and see. In two years I’ll be one of the most celebrated scientists in Europe!”
Emilie’s heart sank. Hadn’t he read the letter? Didn’t he understand the greater honor had gone to her? Voltaire saw her stricken face. “Of course I’ll never forget to point out how intelligent you are,” he said, “and don’t worry—I’ll always say I wouldn’t have achieved nearly as much without you.”
1767
SUNLIGHT POURED through the windows onto the yellow walls of the music room at Hôtel Bercy. Delphine sat on a fauteuil next to Lili while a new dog, a bichon frise like the one they had when they were little girls, sat between them on the carpet.
Lili watched as the little creature tugged the lace on Delphine’s slipper to get her attention. “Remember Tintin, how he would take over the whole bed while we played with each other’s hair?”
“And you’d tell me stories,” Delphine added.
Lili gave Delphine a fleeting smile. “About dresses. Lots of them for Princess Delphine.”
Delphine sighed wistfully. “I used to think princesses went around—well, just being princesses.” She thought for a moment. “Marriage makes me appreciate Maman. She seemed to do everything so effortlessly, but being the lady of the house is more work than I thought.”
Lili barely heard. “I wonder which one she would tell me to marry.”
“You wouldn’t be forced to marry anyone, not even the King of France,” Delphine retorted.
In the three months since the marquis’s letter giving Baronne Lomont permission to see to Lili’s marriage, several men had approached Baronne Lomont to express interest. One was from an impoverished family with excellent ancestry, noblesse d’épée on both sides. He was thirty, a good age for an aristocratic marriage. Lili would be distressingly poor, the baroness pointed out, but her children could hope to do better, because they would bear his name. Though he was reasonably attractive in appearance, simple-minded jokes caused him to laugh until he passed gas or gave himself the hiccups. Lili and the baroness visited the home where he lived with his mother, and when Lili wandered into the library, she had been amazed to find it nearly empty of books.
“But he has a regiment,” Delphine offered as consolation. “That means he’d be gone a lot. You could take over the library for yourself and buy all the books you want with your stipend.”
“And talk about them with whom?” Lili raised her eyebrows. “He doesn’t seem to have a brain at all.” Lili stood up and walked nowhere in particular before returning to sit down in the same spot. “I just don’t want to hate my life,” she said. “I wonder how many women dread having their husbands at home.”
“Probably quite a few,” Delphine said. “I’m fortunate not to be one of them—although Ambroise will soon be among those not at home, I’m afraid, since he’s required at Étoges soon. I’m supposed to go with him, but I’m so nauseous all the time.” She stood up and touched her stomach lightly with her fingertips. “It’s supposed to pass in the next few weeks, but for now, the idea of an endless coach trip on those bumpy roads is just unbearable.”
Lili smiled. “In a few months you’ll be round as a ball. And by—when, March?—you’ll have a baby. It’s just so hard to believe.”
Delphine looked at her dreamily. “If it’s a girl her name will have to be Julie. And what do you think of Jules for a boy?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone by that name,” Lili said. “Maybe that’s good. It hasn’t been ruined by someone awful.” Her smile faded. “All right, we’ve decided I can’t marry Charles Laroche, so I guess that leaves Édouard de Rabutin.”
Delphine made a sour face. “That’s enough to make me throw up again right now. Just the thought of having to kiss that—that lizard.” Seeing Lili’s stricken face, she went back to the bed and sat down next to her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot you might have to.”
“Maybe he’ll turn into a prince.” Lili tried to smile. “I told Baronne Lomont I needed another month to decide, and she’s told me that’s all I have. She says if these two offers slip away due to my stalling, she’ll arrange to have me committed to the Abbaye de Panthémont.”
“That wouldn’t be so bad, would it, compared to marrying either of them?”
Lili grimaced. “She’d have me living in poverty on the nun’s end, just to punish me. I can’t be forced to take vows, but I’d have to live as if I had, not in the nice wing where you were. The baroness said commital is the only thing left to do when a family decides a girl is incorrigible.” Her voice trembled, and she looked down at her hands to try to force herself not to cry. “She keeps reminding me I made a promise before God, and it makes me feel so—so obligated.”
“Nonsense!” Delphine retorted. “Did you ever ask God if he accepted your promise? Maybe he was waving his hands telling you to say no, or maybe he covered his ears at just that moment and didn’t hear you.”
Lili smiled. “I suppose you could be right. Maybe a promise before God really is no different from any other. After all, I didn’t exactly give my word to God himself, just to another person, and there are good reasons to break promises sometimes.” Her voice drifted off. “I just wish I could be sure it wasn’t wrong this time.”
“Of course it’s not! We simply aren’t going to have you marry either of them, promise or no promise!” Delphine’s eyes flashed but her brow quickly furrowed. “But what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.” Lili’s words barely came out.
“You sound just like I did when I thought Ambroise was going to marry Anne-Mathilde, and I flopped around like a limp old petticoat about it.” Delphine picked up the dog and nuzzled its soft coat. “You wouldn’t let me get away with it, remember? And I am going to do the same for you.”
Delphine stared so intently at the white moldings on the music room walls, it seemed as if she might be expecting a secret message to materialize in their frostinglike designs. “Have you ever considered trying to talk to your father yourself? If he won’t come to you, perhaps you could go to him.”
“How would I know if he’s even in Paris?”
“That’s easy enough to find out. I’ll ask Ambroise to inquire.”
“And if he’s not?”
“Well,” Delphine said, “I think you’ll just have to go and pay him a visit at Cirey.”
“Of course!” Lili said. “I’ll just ask the baroness if I can borrow her coach. Or maybe ride there on Comète.”
“No—I mean it!” Delphine put the dog back on the carpet. “Baronne Lomont wouldn’t have to know. We’ll all go together to Étoges, or at least that’s what she’ll think. You’ll say good-bye to her and tell her you’re going to decide on a husband at Étoges and be back in a month. We’ll put you on a coach for Cirey and go on to Étoges ourselves.”
“But you’re having a baby! You just said you couldn’t bear the trip.”
“I don’t care if I throw up along the entire road from here to there,” Delphine said. “I said on my wedding day that it was your turn to be happy, and as long as there’s one thing left in my power, you’re not going to marry someone who would—” Her eyes filled with tears. “Who would destroy the person I love most in the whole
world.”
LILI’S COACH LEFT the station in the Rue du Braque shortly after dawn the following Saturday. For three days, as the coach continued eastward, the towns had gotten smaller and the estates dotting the countryside became increasingly modest. Late on the third day, Lili stepped down in the tiny village of Bar-sur-Aube and watched as the coach made its way out of the sleepy village in Champagne and disappeared down the road toward Geneva.
“How far is Cirey from here, I wonder?” she asked aloud, although the valet and maid sent with her from Hôtel Bercy were as much strangers to the place as she was. No need to worry, she told herself. Ambroise had been a willing conspirator, outlining exactly what Lili was to do when she arrived. “Take a room for the night,” he told her, “and use my family’s title. Pretend to be married, and have the valet make it known in the town that Madame d’Étoges has arrived from Paris.”
Ambroise had written to a friend who lived not too far from Cirey, asking him to send a carriage and driver to Bar-sur-Aube to meet her. The plan left a great deal to chance, and Delphine was so fretful that she had been unable to sit down for more than a few minutes without jumping up to pace the floor. What if his friend was away and couldn’t help? What if the letter was lost? What if something terrible happened to Lili on the way?
“Quite frankly,” Lili had told Delphine, “getting my throat slit by a bandit would be preferable to marrying anyone Baronne Lomont chose for me.” There hadn’t been any bandits, or breakdowns, or depraved fellow passengers, as Delphine had imagined, only mile after mile of fields and poor roads. And now, here she was.
The Marquis du Châtelet had not been informed she was coming, for fear he would write to Baronne Lomont and ruin everything. No one at the château would pick Lili up, and she was to stay at an inn until someone came for her, or a letter arrived from Étoges telling her of a change in plans. If necessary, Ambroise would rescue her himself.
Stephane, the valet, arranged to have her trunk sent up to her room before going to see if there was a letter for Lili anywhere in town. They had not gotten off the coach since daybreak, but only when her maid, Justine, went upstairs to unpack what they would need for the night did Lili realize how hungry she was.
Finding Emilie Page 29