Passionate Minds

by David Bodanis

  Unfortunately, quite a few of the oldest families did have to overcome this distaste, partly because of some unfortunate inbreeding, which had not always produced the finest intellects in their midst, and partly because their self-pride prevented even the less dim ones from working in any profession or business, which meant—despite the tax benefits we saw—that many of these families tended to go broke.

  That was what Voltaire knew would make this marriage possible. The de Guise family was very famous but also very low on funds, and through a series of loans and investments, Voltaire had conveniently come to own enough of their property that he could force them to let the relative upstart Richelieu in.

  There remained the problem of getting Richelieu to meet the eager Elisabeth in private—and, for goodness' sake, to keep the pair from sleeping together before it was time—but by this stage Emilie began to understand what was really going on. Voltaire was putting Richelieu in moral debt by securing him a bride from a supremely respected family he couldn't otherwise afford. The two men had been schoolmates at the Jesuit-run Louis le Grand school, and they liked and respected each other—but they also had long shared an understanding that, in general, women were fair game. The marriage arrangement, however, would make it hard for Richelieu to start up any affair with Emilie in the future. How could he two-time the man who had enabled his own marriage? Voltaire was ensuring that Richelieu would not be a threat to his newly reestablished relation with Emilie in the future.

  The wedding (“this dénouement of our intrigue”) was going to take place on April 6, at the de Guise château in Montjeu, several days' journey from Paris. Emilie and Voltaire would be honored guests—for some reason, Maupertuis didn't receive an invitation—and since travel was so difficult in the intermittent rain and sun of a French springtime, the guests expected to stay, celebrating, for at least a month. Emilie became especially close to the exuberant young Elisabeth. There was drinking and dancing, and ever more music. It was an idyll—but secretly was under threat:

  From Jean-Frederic Phelypeaux,

  to the Crown's Agent in the Region

  Encompassing the Auxonne Prison,

  Near Montjeu

  The King has deemed it appropriate to arrest Arouet

  de Voltaire and bring him to the prison at the château

  d'Auxonne. Inform me when you have carried this out.

  He is not to be freed under any circumstance.

  Phélypeaux was the same secretary of state who'd sent Voltaire to the Bastille after the de Rohan affair. He understood that Voltaire had mocked him to everyone in society for years afterward—which would be insulting to anyone, and especially so to a man who'd fancied himself the court wit. But permanent governmental officials do not need to get angry to get their revenge. They just need to bide their time. Voltaire had now supplied the opportunity, albeit inadvertently.

  His manuscript of the Letters from England recapped the nature of British society and thought, with sections on commerce, Shakespeare, Newton, and the like. All of it implicitly mocked France by repeatedly praising how things were done across the Channel. When Voltaire had described the Royal Exchange, for example, where investors were tolerant of each other's religions, since they only cared about successful business opportunities, it was a dig at France, where the king and Church insisted that there was to be no toleration of individuals of a different religion, however harmful to the nation's industry or commerce.

  That was critical enough, but it now also had the explosive additions he'd had included in his exuberance since meeting Emilie, about the right for human beings to choose to be happy, rather than being dully obedient to the traditional calls of the Church and social superiors. In particular, in those writings against Pascal, Voltaire had proposed that we could achieve this happiness largely on our own, rather than needing the official clergy to help avert or diminish the sour damnation that Pascal's God would have wished on us. That undermined the huge establishment of the Church, and even Voltaire recognized that publicizing such words within France was much too dangerous even to try. The author of such heresy could be sent to the Bastille, or worse.

  Unfortunately, Voltaire had left a few copies of his inked manuscript in the safekeeping of a printer near Brussels. That wasn't bright. The printer had a choice between keeping Voltaire safe by stowing the manuscript inside a strongbox and making a great deal of money by printing as many copies as he could, smuggling them into Paris, and arranging to sell them surreptitiously. The printer thought about it, no doubt for at least several milliseconds, then realized where his own happiness lay, and began his printing and smuggling operation forthwith.

  Phélypeaux's order was secret, and none of the guests knew of it at first. Communications were so slow, because of the rutted muddy roads, that even the king's local official didn't receive the lettre de cachet for several days. The happy wedding party went on. Richelieu had left shortly after the ceremony, since France was engaged in a military campaign on its eastern frontier, which had bogged down in a siege of the German fortresses at Philippsburg, near Karlsruhe. (The fighting was part of France's effort to keep Austria away from nearby Lorraine.) But Voltaire and Emilie stayed on at Montjeu with the other guests. The weather cleared, and they enjoyed brilliant sunny days. Voltaire charmed the bride, and Emilie was thrilled that her friendship with Elisabeth was becoming one of the closest she'd ever had. But then:

  “My friend Voltaire,” Emilie hurriedly wrote from the wedding town to de Sade (the uncle of the infamous marquis, as we saw in the previous chapter),

  … had just left us, to go and take the waters at Plombières

  … when one of the [king's officials] brought me a lettre de cachet,

  instructing him to go to [the nearby prison at] Auxonne

  and await fresh orders there… I'm sure Voltaire will get the

  king's orders soon, and he will have to obey. There is no

  alternative when one cannot escape. I don't think he can be

  warned in time.

  It was quick thinking on Emilie's part. She knew that the letter to de Sade was likely to be opened, and that was good, for Phélypeaux was aware of Voltaire's constant hypochondria and would well believe he had gone to Plombières. He hadn't, of course, but several days would be wasted while government officers tried to find him.

  The reason his escape was so important was that the police had raided the printer's apartment in Paris. There they'd found bound copies of the book, with Voltaire's name on the title page; his guilt was thereby proven. The printer was thrown into the Bastille, but luckily one of Voltaire's contacts had managed to get a message to Montjeu before the arresting officials arrived. Voltaire had just had time to escape on horseback. Emilie's job, they'd agreed, was to mislead everyone who came to get him.

  Along with her letter to de Sade, she now also sent a letter to Maupertuis, suggesting that Voltaire might try to leave the country. This too, she trusted, was information that Maupertuis might leak, or that at least would be read when the government steamed open his mail.

  But as for where Voltaire really was—well, she actually didn't know.

  WHAT Voltaire ended up deciding was that none of the safe houses he and Emilie had arranged among their friends would do: word would get out, if not from the servants then from the hosts themselves, for gossip in their social circle was almost impossible to stop.

  But there was one man—and one group within French society— Voltaire was confident could be trusted to hide him entirely.

  Voltaire arrived in Richelieu's huge military encampment outside Philippsburg in the middle of that 1734 summer, proud of his ingenuity. Richelieu normally would have applauded such a stratagem, but he couldn't stand up to embrace Voltaire quite as steadily as he would have under normal conditions. Although the German forces hadn't broken out of their fortress, there had been some other fighting, and Richelieu was wounded.

  He wasn't going to talk about it, but Voltaire found everyone else aroun
d Richelieu's tent quick to explain. Stories varied, but the gist seemed to be that shortly before Voltaire arrived, Richelieu had been striding to a dinner for a fellow officer—or was he already inside the dinner tent?—when one of the other military officers, the hotheaded prince de Lixin, had accosted him. De Lixin was a relative of Elisabeth's who'd been especially disapproving of Richelieu marrying into the de Guise family. When he stopped Richelieu, it was late in the day, and Richelieu had come straight from the field after hours inspecting the trenches. His clothes were muddy, and de Lixin called out words to the effect of: In spite of this man's marriage, look at how much mud he still carries with him.

  Richelieu knew that de Lixin had refused to join the rest of his family in signing the marriage contract, for he believed that Richelieu's lineage was unacceptable. What he'd called out now was deadly. These charges of social inferiority were as loaded as charges of miscegenation were in the American South a century and more later. But de Lixin wasn't done. Richelieu was an impostor, he repeated now. If Elisabeth de Guise slept with him, then she was, of course, a whore.

  Why was de Lixin doing this? The wedding had already happened. Richelieu couldn't let the charges pass, not when they'd gone that far, but he also was a far better soldier than de Lixin. Everyone knew this. He had nothing to prove in fighting another man.

  Possibly Richelieu tried to defuse it by quietly asking de Lixin to just withdraw his words. But de Lixin would not back down. He may have been spurred on by the soldiers in his own regiment, or perhaps it was just his fury at hearing of the elaborate wedding, with the great Parisian poet and so many other notables over at Montjeu. Certainly he was used to getting his way. The laws in France were written so that a young man from a family as prestigious as de Lixin's could beat up any ordinary person he wished for fun, with almost no chance of being punished. His youth, accordingly, had been spent like the most spoiled prep-school teenager imaginable, who knows he can push anyone else around in safety. If an ordinary person did fight back and strike a noble, then the penalty could be death. De Lixin liked fighting and had already killed one man in a duel.

  Taking this attitude with Richelieu, however, was a different matter. After trying in vain to stop it—and perhaps de Lixin was drunk as well?—Richelieu simply called his closest officers to be his seconds.

  The duel had to begin quickly, since the siege commander had at least ostensible orders to avert fighting among his own staff. Duelling had increased in recent years. Cavalry officers lusted for it, not least because they hardly ever got to use their swords in the charges they'd been trained for. (Those charges were becoming too dangerous when thousands of enemy infantry faced them with loaded muskets.) Also, more and more nobles felt they needed to defend their status, since ever more newcomers, such as Richelieu, were being brought into traditional, old-establishment ranks.

  It was getting so dark when de Lixin and Richelieu began, in the loose soil around the trenches, that the other officers had to order servants to put up torches so that the two men could see. (One account has enemy troops in the fortress sniping at the French group crowding around the duelists; another account merely has the enemy guards and officers watching from the parapets as the bizarre French ritual began.)

  The result was foregone. Richelieu quickly blocked this privileged man's furious attacks, then stabbed him deep in the chest. De Lixin bled to death, either directly from a heart wound or choking as his lungs filled with blood. But before the final strike, he'd managed to get a blow in on Richelieu, cutting him sharply—hence his convalescing as Voltaire arrived.

  To have any of his other friends be slashed in a murderous duel would have been unexpected, but since Voltaire had known Richelieu for almost thirty years, he took this escapade in stride. He now explained to his old friend the slight problem with his Letters from England manuscript. Richelieu liked the humor of what he was proposing. It also didn't hurt that Richelieu and Phélypeaux hated each other. A military encampment under the direct authority of the king would be the last place Phélypeaux would look for one suspect author.

  If Richelieu had not been wounded, he would no doubt have politely shown his friend around the sprawling base. As it was, Voltaire decided to wander a bit on his own through the rutted grounds. Since he was French and the soldiers were French—or allies of the French—he naturally assumed he would be safe.

  The camp was huge, with more than seven thousand workers digging approach trenches and diverting streams, as the left and right wings of the French army stretched for acre after acre along the Rhine. They were cautiously working their way closer to the fortress, while also preparing for a surprise attack from the rear or the side by Habsburg troops who might try to break the siege of the fortress. Along with the troops, prostitutes, engineers, and carpenters, there were hundreds upon hundreds of supply animals and their handlers, scattered amidst the pitched tents or shacks. There was no canned food, so hundreds of cooking fires were spreading their smoke; there was shattering clanging from all the blacksmiths at work as well.

  Hardly any of the siege force knew that Richelieu's personal visitor was alone in their midst. When this thin, constantly peering civilian was found wandering around, sentries arrested him. The penalty for espionage was immediate execution by hanging. Voltaire's protests that he personally knew one of the army group's top officers were scarcely believable to young, uneducated soldiers.

  Luckily, the French army was very corrupt then (like those of almost every great country). Well-connected youngsters were made officers even when they were still in their teens. The sentries who'd grabbed Voltaire reported to a commander in their sector of the camp who was but seventeen. He had the authority to confirm the immediate execution, but as soon as he saw the prisoner, all was changed. The officer was the son of the prince who'd written an ode for Voltaire after the triumph of his Oedipus. His father had constantly lauded the great writer, so instead of the gallows, Voltaire was invited to a feast.

  For the next month he enjoyed the hospitality of the siege camp, drinking and singing with the officers (including Emilie's husband), giving readings, and making up impromptu verses that everyone liked. Occasionally they had to pause. Prince Eugène was the enemy commander, and an aggressive soldier. Voltaire wrote to an acquaintance back in France:

  It seems that Prince Eugène will present himself before our trenches and pits tomorrow morning, about four a.m. It's the day of the Virgin, and it's said that he has a great devotion for Mary, which should help him against the Chevalier Asfeld [the French commander], who is strictly a Jansenist. (You realize, of course, madam, that you Jansenists are suspected of not having enough devotion for the sainted Virgin.)

  Naturally our troops are determined to destroy him, and are armed to the teeth. We have trenches, pits, and even a double fore-trench—it's a delightful new invention, well designed to snap the necks of the gentlemen who are now readying their attack. We'll see tomorrow who gains the victory. The 80 cannon in our camp are already beginning to fire. Here madam, you see human folly.

  At Montjeu, Emilie had been distraught at missing Voltaire. “I've lost him,” she wrote de Sade, “just when I felt the greatest happiness with him—and how I've lost him! If he was safely in England, I could bear it. But to know, with his health, that he could be held in prison… I'd never understood that closeness could produce such pain.

  “I'll have to go back to Paris soon. I'm scared of that.” But when she did return to Paris late that summer, things got more complicated. She couldn't argue full out with her contacts at the court to revoke the lettre de cachet, for—the eternal plaint of the mistress—she had no official grounds to care about him. And when she did embarrass herself by trying, she found that he wasn't making things easier for her. The stunt of going to Philippsburg had backfired: when news did get out, Phélypeaux and the other ministers were furious for having been ridiculed. Voltaire's apartment had already been broken into—the same one where she and Voltaire had first met on that
impossibly distant evening over a year ago—and his belongings torn open in a search for more evidence that he'd colluded with the printers of his book.

  The printer had been interrogated and probably beaten while he was in the Bastille, but a further example had to be made. Prisoners were still subject to arbitrary torture, and the king oversaw a legal system that allowed certain offenders to be burned alive. Now, on June 10, the city's Parlement formally condemned Voltaire's Letters from England, for the book's heretical views mocking the one true path to religious salvation. The same day, at 11 a.m., the public executioner stood before the grand stairwell of the Palais de Justice on the Ile de la Cité, in the center of Paris. (It was in that very complex of buildings that Voltaire had grown up, for his father's notary duties gave him the right to lodgings there.) A great fire was lit, there was the stench of turpentine and billowing smoke, and then the executioner shredded the book and threw it into the flames.

  Emilie was scared, but she was also infuriated at Voltaire again. This was the brutal, arbitrary world one suffered in France. Why hadn't Voltaire simply crossed the border into the far safer Switzerland or to Rotterdam, and stayed out of further trouble? Yet now he was nagging her in letters smuggled through friends to let him live at the tumbledown château at Cirey where they'd spent the delicious summer weeks a year before. She couldn't decide if he was utterly brave or merely a fool. She'd let Voltaire go to the château—but she was damned if she was going to join him there.

  7

  Decision