After a while they began to assign each other a few verses of the Bible each morning, and they'd report on them in the afternoon. “I hardly spent two hours apart from him,” Emilie remembered later, “and then we'd send each other little notes from our rooms.”
By moving from Paris they knew they'd broken free of the traditional rules of society—not just about having this long-term relationship, but also in terms of the unspoken rules that said women could be chatty yet weren't really to be respected, or rules insisting that monks and bishops of the Church were in touch with the holy and so deserved whatever prerogatives they'd accumulated over the years. Now though, as they went through the books of the Old Testament, and then the New, they began to question the very foundations of those attitudes.
Until recently, they wouldn't have stood a chance. In much of the 1600s, there had been little notion of privacy for such important investigations. When a handful of dissidents in England did insist on the strange concept of “freedom of conscience,” they ended up expelled from the civilized world to the distant reaches of rocky soil in the future Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
What Emilie and Voltaire were doing was creating a space where they could think for themselves—and doing this not in some primitive wooden shelter on the far side of the planet, across the Atlantic, but right here, in the center of the civilized world. It was a portentous accomplishment. The two lovers could cross the threshold to enter their château at Cirey, but the king—and the Church—could not. It was far different from the salons of Paris (“each presided over,” Voltaire noted, “by a woman who begins to cultivate her mind as her beauty declines”), where no real science, let alone deep questioning of the established Church, was then being explored.
In their fresh investigations of the Bible, Emilie was especially good at catching illogicalities. If Noah had brought onto his ark all the animals of the world, she jotted, and yet he had lived in the Middle East, then how had he brought on board the animals that recent explorers had shown to live uniquely in North America? There were other problems as well: a sun that could stand still, a Red Sea that could part, and all the other impossibilities that we today are used to viewing as metaphors but which at the time were, with few exceptions, taught as mysteries that everyone was expected to take as fully true.
It was one of the fundamental acts of the Enlightenment, this questioning the bases of beliefs that had been held for centuries. There was a great bravery here, for almost every law and procedure in society ultimately depended on traditional religious beliefs. Rich young men, as we saw, could buy government posts and pocket the tax money that peasants and businessmen generated. This was allowable because the king decreed so, and the reason the king's edicts were to be followed was because the Church decreed they were to be followed. There was the same justification for keeping anyone from a workingor even professional-class background from being made an army officer: the king's edicts were that they were to be excluded, and the Church upheld what the king ruled. Undercut the Church, on however obscure a theological point, and the whole chain might come undone.
In fact, what Emilie and Voltaire were doing wasn't entirely negative, for they weren't using the surface flaws in the Bible to reject everything about it. If they had, they would have been as closed-minded as the individuals they were critiquing. Years before, Voltaire had jotted down for himself what he felt about God, in the form of a prayer:
I'm not a Christian, but that's only to love Thee more closely, People turn Thee into a tyrant—yet what I seek in Thee is a Father.
Emilie was religious too. They had a chapel installed at Cirey, and she attended regularly. Voltaire, ever uncomfortable with authority, didn't go as often, but in good weather he kept the doors leading out from his ground-floor rooms open so that he could hear the services. They both wanted their biblical study to lead further.
Again, Emilie was the quickest here. She'd made one start with Maupertuis and his realization (as we saw in chapter 5) that the amount of polar flattening in the spinning Earth was a mark of whether Newton's theories or competing theories were right, and accordingly could be used to decide if Newton's corresponding views on how God intervened in our world were true or not. Now there was another way to analyze religious tradition: leaving science to the side for a while longer, and using the accounts of explorers and travelers to see how habits varied around the world. There was a powerful civilization in China, for example, yet from all accounts it didn't depend on anything like an established Church. There also were descriptions of societies where women ruled, or eagles were worshiped, or children were never chastised. She accumulated several hundred pages of manuscript queries from their coffee mornings, trying to work out what could be left once the hard-to-believe literal biblical tales were pulled away.
From her notes and general reading, she recognized that what was considered good and bad varied from country to country. It was, she wrote, “like the rules of a game. Just as a move may be considered a mistake in one game, and be allowed in another, so the terms virtue and vice will fit different acts in Paris and Constantinople.” But what to do with that insight?
When she was younger she might have left that as a witty aside. She'd still lacked confidence (“Women usually don't recognize their own talents,” she wrote, “or they bury what skills they have…. I know—for it's what I've done”). Here at Cirey, though, something was changing. “Since I've met a man of letters [Voltaire] who gave me friendship,” she now wrote, “I've started to feel different. “I've begun to believe I'm a being with a mind.” A number of writers had tried putting the travelers' stories together but often couldn't do much more than list how odd the world was. A few others did try to go further and use the apparent naiveté of an Oriental sage or a “barbaric” American Indian in Paris, to mock the over-refined manners of the Court, or expose the brutality on the street.
Emilie did even better. She began to wonder if there are deeper ideas, beneath the surface, that don't change from culture to culture, despite the different ways people behave. As one example, she noted, in all societies it seems to be expected that people should keep their promises. The golden rule—“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”—also seemed to be accepted almost everywhere. Even ordinary grammar gave insights about what's universal. In no language that she knew of was there an imperative of the verb “to be able.” The reason, of course, is that all peoples recognize that we can't order someone to be capable of doing something that's beyond him.
How to phrase her conclusions? Her writing had been stilted when she was young, but that was simply because she had no one to share her ideas with. Now, though, talking over her ideas with Voltaire in their long hours after morning coffee, she began to change how she wrote.
Within a few months she was inking it out gracefully: “There is a universal law for all men,” she wrote, “which God himself has engraved on their hearts.” The ideas and phrasing were so good that Voltaire recapped them in his later—long-unpublished—Treatise on Metaphysics: “It seems clear to me that there are natural laws [with] which men throughout the world must agree, even against their will.” This too was a fundamental step in Enlightenment thinking, for it helped create the very idea that there could be a universal social science, looking for insights about behavior that would apply to everyone, rather than— as previous history had generally implied—just be random curios of human action, to be pulled from one separate society after another.
Voltaire would have been willing to continue with these studies of society, even though they could never be published, but Emilie was restless. It was good to stumble along trying to find the universals in human nature, but Newton had traveled further and actually worked out the true universals in our physical world. What she decided now was that her next task should be to go through all Newton's work and recount that great achievement in fresh detail.
Her confidence—in criticizing the Bible, in promoting her own view of Newton—was a
mark of a new sort of individualism. For example, people had written letters to their friends and family before, of course, but now that was happening more than ever. And in writing your thoughts in a letter rather than in a private, confessional diary, you're showing that you're proud enough, and confident enough, to expect that other people will want to hear what you're expressing about yourself. Emilie wrote an immense number of such letters, sharing her feelings about every conceivable topic with her close friends, and often with her favorite brother.
Even Emilie's signing a letter with a personal autograph flourish, representing her personality—something we take for granted—also matched this significant step. (Earlier letters had often just had an impersonal mark or printed name showing who had sent them, something that a scribe could put on just as well as the person dictating or writing it.) Hardly anyone had collected autographs before this period, but now that too began. It made sense, for autographs were yet another sign of this underlying individual personality.
In her choice of clothes, Emilie also insisted on the right to question received judgment. Her unpleasant cousin Renée-Caroline had always accepted Parisian style, and at one point was wearing dresses so wide that “I couldn't whisper to [my friends], since the hoops of our dresses made us stand too far apart.” There were supposed to be tight bodices with innumerable eyelets to lace; layer upon layer of undergarments, with frilled petticoats on the highest level; hoops, and supports for the hoops; formal tucking of the outer surfaces of the dress, along with triple rows of embroidery at the sleeves; strict arrangements of tiny patches near the temples, close to the eye, or at the corner of the mouth, each signifying a different emotion. Emilie would have none of that. She greeted one startled guest with her hair up elegantly and a diamond brooch, but also just wearing a big taffeta apron over a simple India cotton dress: it was comfortable, and what she wanted, and so she felt no need to act differently.
Her furniture at Cirey matched this practice. Well before this period, many chairs weren't designed for comfort. They were built to show power and authority. It didn't matter how uncomfortable they were, so long as they held the sitter upright. Now, though, there was an increasing move toward soft, cushioned seats, or even padded armrests, which curved outward so that the elbows could rest comfortably. Emilie wasn't going to sit in chairs that stifled her ability to shift around and be herself. Why follow someone else's rules about propriety?
The portraits she and Voltaire commissioned—to hang on the wall, or as lockets for each other—were more of the same. Instead of having the artists draw a generic figure, representing wealth or authority or beauty, she and Voltaire at Cirey were confident enough to insist that the portrait accurately reflect their individual characteristics. By the time of d'Alembert and Diderot's massive Encyclopédie, two decades later, this led to the shocking definition that a portrait “is a likeness according to nature.”
That was dangerous. When kings had been drawn in noble, idealized poses, it was a way of saying that the quirks of the human being who'd inherited the throne didn't matter, and indeed did not occur. All that existed was a perfect ruler. But if portraitists ever started showing bad skin or distracted looks, it would be natural to ask if those weaknesses were a mark of deeper flaws. The hereditary principle, however, depended on rulers being accepted, not evaluated. This is, for instance, what the parents of the young George Washington were ready to teach that child, over in the dominions of His Britannic Majesty in the North American colonies. But now at Cirey doubts were being raised about the whole notion of blind obedience to authority—and by two individuals, Emilie and Voltaire, who were so eloquent in their letters and their secretly shared writings that knowledge of what they were doing could not help but spread.
A whole network of correspondents was opening up to communicate this, and that too was part of a wider trend. When Emilie was a child, there had been virtually no newspapers in the world. A handful of noble or extremely wealthy individuals who had direct access to courts or merchants knew what was going on; others might try to scrape up gossip but had hardly any formal sources for finding out more. Now, though, a new form of publication—the “news gazettes”—was becoming popular, and these were often just compilations of the sort of letters coming from Cirey. (Today's newspapers are a direct descendant of those gazettes, with many news articles still presented as if we merely happened to overhear a modified letter—as with the label of reports “from our own foreign correspondent.”)
Cirey was crucial to this new movement. Voltaire had always been respected as a clever wit, but now, with his more significant plays, and hints of these deeper explorations that he and Emilie were undertaking, he was being taken more seriously. That meant a lot, for there were so few significant thinkers in France or any other country. Only a few hundred books were officially published a year in France, and a similarly low number in North America. (Today in the United States more than 150,000 books are published each year: any one thinker is easily lost in that outpouring.)
People who received letters from Cirey accordingly tended to share them: sometimes just with a few close friends, but often formally recopying them, to send to even greater numbers of contacts. It was much like a primitive Internet: with information and opinions being fed in, then swirling from one node to another across Europe. If Emilie and Voltaire had merely been coasting in luxury—as rich people had since time immemorial—then this model of their self-created life, with its furnishings and clothes and portraits, wouldn't have mattered. But the research in science and theology and history they were doing was important, and showed the power this new sort of unconventional, strong-willed team could achieve.
It went even further. When people start to feel they should have the freedom to act as they wish in one sphere, it's natural to expect governments to respect them as individuals in other spheres. This was the attitude, after more vicissitudes in history, that led to such worldchanging documents as Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, with its flamboyant listing of inalienable claims to life, liberty, and—as two independent Cirey residents would have enthusiastically understood—the pursuit of happiness.
Voltaire accepted Emilie's proposal to go ahead with a shared study of Newton, not least because—although she didn't recognize it—he was feeling insecure in their relationship. It had nothing to do with Florent-Claude, of course, who was happy to allow this liaison to continue, even when he stayed over at the château on his occasional visits. He and Voltaire rode together, shared dinners, and no doubt gossiped about Richelieu's ever more complex courtships. There was no reason why the purely financial arrangements of a marriage should get in the way of their friendship.
The problem, rather, was that Emilie was young, yet Voltaire was old, over forty already (and as he explained in confidence to his good friend Thieriot, his weakening health was now such that “I fear I am not long for this world”). Life expectancy was short, and poor nutrition, contaminated water, incompetent doctors, and constant lowgrade infections made people age much more rapidly than in wealthy countries today. Even if someone did reach their thirties or even forties, it was common to have bone loss from lack of fresh milk or cheese, bad teeth, damaged skin, breathing ailments, and much else steadily going wrong.
Voltaire had done a lot—all his plays and odes and essays and letters—but on despondent days he felt that all it had brought him was the stings of theater critics (“those insects who live for but one day”) and the harassment of the court. To keep up with Emilie he'd need to move into fresh fields, and he had reason to think he couldn't delay.
A little earlier, Emilie had received word that her mother was suddenly ill. After Louis-Nicolas's death, back in 1728, her mother had left the family townhouse and moved to a smaller villa in the town of Créteil a few miles outside of Paris. Now, in August 1735, Emilie hurried there from Cirey. When she found that in the days it had taken her to arrive her mother had recovered, she no longer had any reason to be dutiful and, show
ing her true feelings, arranged to start back to Cirey the very next day. First, however, she sent a note to Maupertuis, saying that she'd be in Paris for a few hours. If he wanted to meet, she said, she'd wait outside one of his old haunts, at the Café Gradot.
She wasn't exactly propositioning him—all she went on to say in her note was that if he was there, they could then go to the Opéra with friends—and since Maupertuis was still sulking, he didn't reply to her note till it was too late to meet. But to avoid having to meet her, he had sent that reply directly to her at Cirey.
Voltaire didn't open the letter when it arrived, but the servants would have let him know whom it was from, whether he wanted to hear or not. Since it came so soon after her excursion to the Paris region, he would have to realize that there was at least some feeling still there. Maupertuis was boldly going to the far north to measure the Earth's curvature and see if Newton was right. Voltaire, as Emilie understood it, was merely planning to write a history of Louis XIV's France. That wasn't the true universal social science she'd glimpsed. When it came to a choice between learning how the universe was constructed and hearing anecdotes about a bygone court, it was pretty clear which one she would find more enticing. Voltaire was convinced he could write a more profound history than Emilie suspected, but he could tell she wasn't interested. Which meant…
“I've decided to give up poetry,” he wrote to Richelieu. “Life is too short to waste my time merely hunting after sounds and rhymes.” Over the years he'd reinvented himself as wit, professional houseguest, poet, playwright, diplomat/spy, expert on British society, financier, and much else. It was time for one more transformation. Maupertuis might impress the ladies by venturing to test one particular prediction Newton had made about the Earth's curvature. Yet Voltaire would now help Emilie write an account of everything Isaac Newton had done, presenting modern science in its full majesty. No one on the Continent had dared to do that before. What bright young woman would not be thrilled to share in such a task?
Passionate Minds Page 11
