“I most certainly will not be coerced into such a choice,” the baroness hissed with the ferocity of a cornered animal. “My letter is as valid as either of these, and I will continue to presume it is in force until….” Her voice died away.
“Until you hear otherwise from the marquis?” Buffon said softly. “My dear madame, I think you just have.”
“I shall write him immediately to see if there’s been trickery here.” She looked away with a haughty toss of her head.
“My dear baroness,” Buffon said. “I must tell you with the utmost seriousness that, given the confusion that exists about the marquis as a result of these letters, even if you were to get another letter designating you, I would be obligated to file a formal objection to any marriage I knew was not desired by Mademoiselle du Châtelet. That is, of course, why public announcements of marriage are made in advance, so reasonable objections by any party may be heard.”
To Lili’s surprise, seeing Baronne Lomont so agitated was excruciating rather than pleasurable. “I’m sorry it’s come to this,” she said, trying to put a touch of softness into what she knew had to be a strong and unwavering voice. “I truly regret having to defy you when you have put so much effort into what you thought was right for me. I am grateful for your concern that I marry well, but I will be the one to decide what that entails.”
She struggled to hold her stare as her heart went out a little more to the anguished baroness. “And of course, any attempt to stop my monthly allowance based on a claim that I have been disinherited would require that you produce the letter naming Monsieur Saint-Lambert as my father when I bring the matter to a court of law.”
The blankness in the baroness’s eyes told Lili that her old nemesis would have no secret weapon to reveal this time. “And if I may interject,” Buffon said, “I propose that on the day Mademoiselle du Châtelet is married, not just one but all four letters be destroyed, including yours, Baronne Lomont. Nothing is served by discussing the marquis’s health or Lili’s parentage or finances beyond this room, but I must be clear that keeping these matters private will depend upon your conceding you have no further role to play in her marriage.”
“Shall we discuss this alone?” Brillat asked.
The baroness’s face was now scarlet and her eyes singed the air. “No!” she snapped. “That won’t be necessary. I wash my hands of this tawdry mess.” She stood up. “Marry whomever you wish, Stanislas-Adélaïde.” She did not look at her, but turned directly to the count. “I’ll call the doorman to see you out.”
* * *
JEAN-ÉTIENNE WAS WAITING in the greenhouse, but Tatou reached Lili and the count first, screeching as he bounded over, and scrambled up onto her shoulder. Jean-Étienne got up from the notes he was working on and rushed over.
“Well, it appears as if I misspoke again,” the Count de Buffon said. “It is just a matter of publishing the bans, and Lili will be married before the end of the year.” A bewildered Lili and a distraught Jean-Étienne stared at him openmouthed, and seeing the torture on both their faces, the count lost heart to toy with them. “Married to each other—at least that’s what I hope you will decide to do.”
It took a moment to register, but when it did, Jean-Étienne’s face exploded in a grin, and he ran over to Lili, picking her up and twirling her around. He put her down and held her at arm’s length to look at her beaming face. “I cannot believe how lucky I am,” he said. Too shy to give her more than a perfunctory kiss in front of the count, he let her go, slipping his hand down to take hers. “Tell me everything!” he said, looking back and forth between them.
“She washes her hands of the whole mess.” Lili looked at the count. “I think that’s what she said, wasn’t it?” Buffon rocked back on his heels, obviously pleased with himself. “I believe her exact words were ‘this tawdry mess.’”
“And you, Uncle?” Jean-Étienne asked.
“Mademoiselle’s representative in everything,” Buffon said with a smile.
“Well then,” the young man replied, “may we talk privately, sir?” He looked perplexed. “Is that what I’m supposed to say? Last time it was all said for me, so I’m not quite sure.”
Buffon held up his hand. “There’s a certain young lady whose feelings must be ascertained first. And for that, I shall leave you alone. When you’re ready, you’ll find me in my study, making a mess of those rodent bones you brought from the Falklands.”
As the count took his leave, Lili gave Jean-Étienne a sidelong glance. He’ll be the father of my children, she thought, noticing how his cheeks glowed pink under his milky skin, how his fine, light brown hair glowed in the light, how his eyes sparkled with health and intelligence. Not the one you’d pick out in a crowd, she thought, but no matter who was in that crowd, he’d be the best one of all.
Jean-Étienne bent one knee to the ground and Tatou scrambled down from his shoulder to perch on it. Jean-Étienne laughed. “This doesn’t involve you, little friend.” Taking a small fruit from his pocket, he threw it on the floor and Tatou scrambled after it. “Stanislas-Adélaïde,” he said, “would you be so kind as to—”
Lili smiled at the formality. “Stop!” she said. “You sound as if you want me to pass you the salt. Start again—and call me Lili.”
“Lili.” Jean-Étienne’s face grew serious. “I think I fell in love with you that day in the salon when you faced down Abbé Turgot. I am so sorry that I caused you pain with Francine, and I promise I will do my best never to hurt you again. If you agree to be my wife, I will strive every day to be worthy of you.” He kissed her hand. “I will support your dreams, and together we can be more than we could ever be alone.”
He started to get up. “Haven’t you forgotten something?” Lili tried to tease him, but she could barely get the words out for the size of her grin. “You have to ask, remember?”
“Oh, yes.” Jean-Étienne’s cheeks colored. “Stanislas-Adélaïde du Châtelet, will you marry me?”
She put her hands around his face. “Get up,” she said in a mock command. “That’s my first order, and you’d better get used to hearing them!”
Once he had risen, she brushed his lips with hers. “Yes,” she said. “I will marry you.” He caught her up in his arms and kissed her firmly, passionately. “I will be by your side through whatever life brings,” Lili said when he had pulled away to kiss her eyes, her forehead, her neck. “I will be your champion and your friend, and—”
“Don’t forget,” Jean-Étienne said, still kissing her, “the mother of our children.”
“The mother of our children,” Lili whispered. “If God is good to us.” Tatou screeched, and Lili felt his feet tickle her back as he bounded to her shoulder. “And until then, we have you,” she said, with a laugh, scratching the monkey behind the ear.
“Let’s go tell Uncle!” Jean-Étienne said with the exuberance of a young boy who has found a treasure. He grabbed her hand, but Lili held back.
“I have something I want to do.” She looked around and found an orchid drooping with the weight of its flowers. Taking a pair of cutters from the table, she removed one stalk.
“I want to share this moment with a person I can’t run back and tell,” Lili said, tearing the petals from one orchid and sprinkling them at their feet.
“Let’s preserve our ambitions, and above all, know well who we want to be,” she said. “Let’s decide on the road we want to follow in life, and always try to scatter the path with flowers.” She took another orchid and tossed the petals in the direction of the greenhouse door.
“Who said that?” Jean-Étienne asked, taking Tatou on his hand and putting him down to investigate.
“My mother. She wrote something before she died—an essay on how to be happy. She wrote it for me, I think—strange as that may sound, since she never knew me. I’ve read it so many times I can recite parts from memory.” Facing him, she took his hands in hers and looked into his eyes. “Let’s try, Jean-Étienne. Whatever life brings, let�
�s try to be truly happy together.”
“Perhaps your mother can teach us both about that,” he replied. “It’s not always the easiest thing, although it seems it should be.”
He picked up Tatou. “Back in your cage, little fellow,” he said. “It’s time for Lili and me to go visit the count.” The greenhouse pulsed with life as they walked out into the golden light of the Jardin de Roi.
July 1778
THE SOAP bubble grew larger and larger before it drifted off across the lawn of the Château d’Étoges toward a girl with a halo of reddish-gold curls, and another with tresses so dark that in the bright summer sun they seemed tinged with blue. They giggled as they waved at the bubble to keep it afloat. “Ahh,” Charles-Anne Clément de Feuillet, the nine-year-old future Comte d’Étoges, grimaced when it disappeared in a wet pop.
“Make another!” the fair-haired girl, his older sister Julie, called out to him.
“Oh yes!” Emilie Leclerc clapped her hands. “Another—and another after that!”
Charles-Anne groaned as if he were quite beleaguered to be in the service of two girls, but he dipped his wand and started again.
In the afternoon light, the purple foliage of a magnificent copper beech created a pool of shade where Lili and Delphine sat. “Julie is becoming quite the young lady,” Lili said, watching Delphine’s eleven-year-old daughter practice dance steps on the newly mown grass, the outline of her legs faintly visible under her gauzy muslin dress. “Indeed,” Delphine said. “It’s really astonishing how quickly time has passed. I was just a few years older than she when I started thinking that all I really wanted in life was to get married.” She shook her head. “It seems so different when it’s your own child. I feel like saying, ‘Don’t you dare grow up until I’m ready.’”
“And I’m certainly not ready,” Lili said, watching her own eleven-year-old daughter trying to persuade Delphine’s son to give the metal straw and vial of soapy water to her. “Emilie’s a little tiger,” she said. “If she wants something, she won’t let go. And I, for one, am happy that she’s still got her nose in her books most of the time, and doesn’t talk about wanting to grow up at all.”
She laughed. “Emilie cares even less about hats and dresses than I did. Do you remember getting your wardrobe for Versailles? How Maman and I were about ready to drag you out by your heels, we wanted so badly to go home?”
Delphine chuckled. “Julie’s like that. Now that I’m on the other side, please accept my apology. I must have driven you to distraction about so many things.” Her eyes took in both girls. “It’s quite something, isn’t it—we have girls a few months apart in age, just like us? And they’re different in the same ways, but they love each other.” She reached for Lili’s hand, not needing to say the rest.
“And luckier in some ways. They have fathers who adore them …” Lili’s voice trailed off. The visit to the marquis at Cirey still hurt her to think about more than a decade later, and when he died a few months after she left, she had felt only a brief moment of sadness. As for her true father, shortly after her marriage she had arranged to meet Jean-François de Saint-Lambert. He seemed as unenthused about her as she was about him, and after making an insincere pledge to remain in touch, they had said good-bye with great relief and made no further effort.
By now, Charles-Anne had gone off to a small spring-fed pond and was lying on his stomach, reaching into the water to grab the turtle he called his pet. Emilie remained behind, sitting on the grass with her skirt billowing around her, blowing a bubble and taking the pipe from her mouth to examine the small, iridescent orb before it floated away. Lili gestured in Emilie’s direction. “She’ll ask me a million questions tonight,” she said. “Just how I imagine her grandmother as a child.” She supposed it would never go away, the twinge of sadness that Emilie’s grandmother would not be pulling up in her carriage for a visit with her namesake, not see her turning out in so many ways to be just like her, from her raven-black hair to her insatiable curiosity.
Lili looked out across the lawn to the château where she and her children spent every summer with Delphine, now the Comtesse d’Étoges. The small but elegant mansion was surrounded by a moat, patrolled by three white swans and a family of ducks. Emilie and Charles-Anne’s tutor Anatole was in a rowboat, making the circuit around the château with two boys, aged six and four.
Anatole, a distant cousin of Jean-Étienne’s, had come into their lives when George-Louis, the older of the two boys in the boat, was born, and Lili realized she could not continue schooling Emilie herself. Anatole was more like a part of the family than an employee, and in Paris, when he was not teaching the children, he worked just for the love of it in the laboratory Jean-Étienne had set up in one of the buildings at the Jardin de Roi. Like Jean-Étienne, Anatole was the odd one in his family, intensely intelligent and progressive in his thinking, more concerned about science than status.
Emilie had been taught solely at home, first by Lili and then by Anatole, and never spent a single night at a convent. Instead, for two years she had gone with her best friend, Julie, one day a week for catechism at an Ursuline convent near Hôtel Bercy. From Emilie and Julie’s secretive giggles and imitations of the nuns, Lili was quite sure the church had made little progress in impressing upon them the importance of submission and piety for future wives and mothers of France. It was important to be sufficiently informed to make one’s way in a society shaped by the church, Lili and Delphine both felt, but their children could choose for themselves what to believe.
The two boys in the rowboat were as blond as Emilie was dark—the image of their father, with skin so fair their noses and cheeks were covered with freckles within days of their arrival at Étoges. Georges-Louis looked up and saw her watching them. “Maman!” he called out. “There’s fish in here, and Anatole said he’d make me a net to catch them!”
“That’s wonderful!” Lili called out. The younger one tried to stand up to wave. “Be careful, François! Georges—hang on to your brother!”
She had named them Georges-Louis and François-Marie, after the two men who had meant the most to her during her struggle with Baronne Lomont. The baronne was dead now, having failed to wake up one morning the previous winter. Her death was followed only a few months later by Buffon’s in April, and Voltaire’s in May. Lili and Jean-Étienne were pleased that both men had a chance to see while they were alive how lovingly they would be remembered.
Buffon had been buried, as he wished, not in the Pantheon but a day’s coach ride from Paris, on his country estate at Montbard. Voltaire had been staying in Paris at the hôtel of the Marquis de Villette when he was struck by his final illness—this one all too real—and he had been unable to return to Ferney. Lili had gone several times in his final days to be by his side. His last conscious act was to wave away the priest who had come to hear his confession, before turning his back to reject the last rites of the church. “Let me die in peace,” she had heard him say.
That was less than two months ago. A coach had set out with his body for Ferney, but the weather was too hot and the embalming inadequate for the journey. Somewhere along the way the stench grew too great, and now he lay, buried quickly under the stone floor of an abbey church in a town Lili had never heard of. She couldn’t decide whether, if Voltaire knew, he would laugh or cry.
The village of Étoges was probably much like that town, little more than a row of buildings on both sides of a dirt road. The château was on a small rise, making it possible to look out from the lawn and see every cart that came along the road, filled when Lili arrived for the summer with vegetables and fruit, and by the time she left in the fall, with the first of the grapes that would be turned into champagne by the vintners on the estate. Since Étoges was not on a road connecting any cities, only the occasional coach announced itself by the clouds of dirt kicked up behind it.
Today, just such a billow of dust appeared beyond the formal gardens on the far side of the grounds. Delphine saw it fir
st. “I think they’re here!” she said, getting up. In a matter of minutes, a dusty black coach came through the gilded entry gate. Charles-Anne jumped up and joined Emilie and Julie, who were already running toward it. Anatole was rowing furiously toward the tiny dock, with the two boys bouncing in their seats.
“Papa!” they all cried out, stumbling to get there first as they ran across the gravel courtyard to the coach. Ambroise opened the door before the coachman could do it for him and stepped down into the group of excited children. Charles-Anne grabbed his father around the waist, bouncing up and down, while Julie wrapped her arms around him from behind.
Walking arm in arm with Delphine, Lili watched for her first glimpse of her husband. As Jean-Étienne’s head appeared in the open door of the coach, Lili felt the familiar leap of her heart. I love him, she thought to herself, smiling with beatific warmth as she watched her little boys run across the drive to him, while their daughter grabbed both his hands in hers and jumped with delight.
“All right, mes chéris,” Jean-Étienne said. “Maman’s turn.” He took Lili in his arms and squeezed her tight. “Umm,” he said, stepping back to look at her at arm’s length. “The air at Étoges certainly agrees with you,” he said, giving her a brief but affectionate kiss. “You look lovely—and I cannot wait until tomorrow, when I can join you over there on those chairs and recuperate from that awful Paris heat.” The expression in his eyes said privately to Lili how much he looked forward to something else, just between them, that would take place before then. He looked down at his daughter. “The smell’s been brutish this last week, ma petite,” he said, wrinkling his nose in disgust and pinching her nostrils.
“Papa! Papa!’ The boys were tugging at his coat. Jean-Étienne picked up first one and then the other, holding the little one out for a spin before pulling him close. “I’ve missed you all so much!” He kissed Jean-François on the cheek before putting him down, and turned to gaze at Lili with a look that said he knew he was the luckiest of men.
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