There were, admittedly, a few problems. Newton had written his great Principia Mathematica text in Latin, and although Voltaire proudly quoted Latin epigrams with ease, it seems he couldn't read the language as easily as Emilie. Even worse, Newton's great book was densely loaded with the most advanced mathematics of the time, and Voltaire's aptitude for mathematics made his Latin skills seem impressive. “I am,” he admitted to his mathematician friend Pitot, “like those brooks that are transparent because they are not deep… calculations tire me.”
But perhaps there could be an advantage in that. The year before, in 1734, Voltaire had brought Emilie closer by involving her with the shenanigans of getting Richelieu married into the de Guise clan. Now, if he was going to write the world's greatest account of Newton, he would need her help once again. This actually wasn't too bad, for he didn't realize quite how insecure she felt too. “There are,” she jotted, in yet more unpublished manuscript pages at Cirey, “a few great geniuses, such as M. de Voltaire, who are capable of achievement in almost any field…. The rest of us have to look harder for useful work.” She would be honored to work with him, even if she had to carry much of the analysis behind the project on her own.
They began with practical experiments, reconstructing procedures that Newton had described. It was cutting-edge stuff. The salons of Paris knew nothing of this, for society hostesses were not going to be able to follow complex Latin texts and advanced mathematics. But even the Academy of Sciences was largely opposed to it, or even unaware of the details: the majority of members were sunk in the older, nearly mystic astronomical visions of Descartes.
The trick was just to work through the stages carefully. In his book entitled Opticks, Newton had written that seemingly ordinary white light actually is built of numerous different colors of light, all hidden away within it. To confirm his experiments describing this, Emilie and Voltaire shuttered off an upstairs room at Cirey, making it dark enough to shoot single beams of white sunlight sharply into it. They put a prism by the window where the narrow beams of sunlight came in, and then saw that Newton was right: an exploding rainbow of colors really did burst from the light after it traveled through the prism.
Soon they installed a telescope in that room, and gazed out at night to examine the incredible rings of Saturn; they brought Emilie's son out into the open gardens to see how the full moon appeared to grow larger as it neared the horizon; they immersed a straight rod in water and measured how abruptly it appeared to become jagged as the light they viewed it by had to push through the denser water; they took sketches that the first modern astronomers had made of orbiting planets, and transformed those into the crisp numbers of Newton's powerful equations. The nights watching the moon were especially bonding: Voltaire sent notes to Emilie about that “brilliant light, so perfect for lovers”; it “lit our hearts…as it lit our love.”
Voltaire was in his element. He'd always been a fast writer, once he got over his interminable delaying, and now, by mid-1736, when they finally had the builders away long enough for the hammering and banging to cease, he was flying. Everything made so much sense! When he'd met Emilie, back in 1733, he'd been so thrilled that he'd added his large section rebutting Pascal to the nearly final draft of his Letters from England. Pascal had believed that the world was fundamentally sinful, but Voltaire did not; as he recapped it at the time, “Pascal taught men to hate themselves; I'd rather teach them to love each other.” Now Newton's vision, as Emilie was explaining it to him, also squared with his and Emilie's beliefs that the world was not fundamentally sinful. For the physical world wasn't a collection of accidents, with mountains or lakes randomly appearing in the middle of continents, and “we guilty beings deserving to inhabit the crumbling ruins” of our planet.
Instead, he and Emilie prepared a section showing the interconnected, meaningful cycles of nature: the snow on mountaintops came from clouds and moisture in the air, and will melt and replenish the riverbeds, which in turn will fill the seas, from which water vapor can evaporate to turn into rains for farming or more snow up on mountaintops. That's not the sign of a wrathful God, always wanting to terrorize His creations. The new science was backing up their philosophy and showing that Pascal's pessimism didn't have to be true.
Once again, this wasn't just a theological assertion, for they could see Newton's forces in exact action, leading to these harmonious results. The kindly Fontenelle had been unable even to imagine working out what gravity would feel like for any inhabitants or explorers on the planet Saturn—as a little girl Emilie had heard at her father's table how this, alas, was forever beyond our ability. But now, with the insights from Newton, she was able to work out the pull of gravity on Saturn, and the amount of sunlight that reached its great distance, and how much smaller our sun would look, glittering over its ring-bursting horizon. It had been a possibility waiting in Newton's work, but it's not clear if anyone in the world had worked through the details in exactly this way; certainly no one in France had.
Emilie showed Voltaire, on one foolscap sheet after another, how to go through the calculations. She stepped back from the final drafting, in recognition of his still superior writing skill, and Voltaire spent hours on end at his desk until, by the start of December 1736, his hundreds of manuscript pages were completed. It was cold out, there was icy sleet, and the winter was shaping up to be freezing, but Cirey had over a dozen fireplaces, and servants had put aside enough wood from the estates to keep them blazing. When they ate dinner, much of the research apparatus they'd used was stacked on tables and platforms around them: the magnifying lenses, telescope, prisms, a pendulum, and everything else. There was their automatic dumbwaiter to bring up food while it was still hot from the big kitchen downstairs, the butler who stood behind Voltaire to aid the elegant couple, shiny silver serving plates.
The finished work was called The Elements of Newton. Voltaire's name alone went on the title page, for that was the usual order of things, but it really should have listed them both. He knew whom to thank. At the start of their manuscript he penned the most graceful of acknowledgments, to “Madame La Marquise du Ch∗*,” pointing out that “the fruit of your worthy aid is what I now offer to the public.” Emilie was delighted: “My companion in solitude has… dedicated it to me!” she boasted to Maupertuis.
Voltaire sketched out a frontispiece that took the compliment even further. It showed Newton floating amidst a heavenly cloud, shining his insight down, while a graceful goddess—an attractive woman, with one breast tastefully exposed—holds a mirror to collect that light and redirect it to a humble scribbler, working at his desk far below.
It was ease, it was tranquility: it was exactly what they had envisaged life at Cirey could be. Emilie was finally content, with the man “to whom I happily subjugated my soul.” Their ideas were spreading. Voltaire too was satisfied, in a way he'd never imagined before. “I spend my life, dear Abbé,” he wrote to Thoulier d'Olivet, his old schoolteacher, “with a lady… who understands Newton, Virgil and Tasso, and who does not disdain to gamble at cards. That is the example I try to follow, though badly.” But then, suddenly, in that freezing December:
From Voltaire, to his friend Argental; 9 December, 1736
We have just left Cirey. It is four o'clock in the morning. We are at Vassy, whence I am to take post-horses….
There had been another order for his arrest, and this time it looked even more serious than before. Word from the court was that if he was caught and sent to the Bastille, he might never be let out. In the nearby town of Vassy, he and Emilie waited for first light for his coach to leave safely. “I see approaching me,” Voltaire hurriedly scribbled to Argental, “the hour when I must leave forever the woman who… left Paris and all her past life for me. Yet I adore her. It's a horrible situation… [Emilie's] in floods of tears.”
The coach was ready, and Voltaire left, on the road leading to the frontier. There were no passports, so if he got there before any king's officers arrived, he'd be ab
le to cross. The snow was deep. A year before, Emilie had spent Christmas warm and giggling with Maupertuis in Paris. Now she got back on her own horse, probably Hirondelle “Swallow,” her favorite stallion. What she'd created was being destroyed. If she was crying still, no one would know as the wind blew hard on her face. Cirey was nearly empty. The coach had quickly rolled out of sight, and Emilie rode back alone.
10
Dutch Escape
CIREY AND THE LOW COUNTRIES, 1736–1737
What had happened? On the surface it seemed straightforward. In his months of hard work on the Newton book, Voltaire had relaxed by writing a brief poem parodying the traditional story of Adam and Eve, playing with the idea that they wouldn't have had nail clippers or running water to clean with in their garden, and that in all that isolation the eager though not especially sparkling Adam would have ended up caressing Madame Eve. At the end of the little rhyme, he remarked how much finer was luxury of the sort he and Emilie experienced at Cirey. It was brief, playful, to Voltaire's mind entirely innocuous. But once again, he'd given ammunition to his enemies.
He'd sent copies of the poem to a few selected friends, but one draft had ended up purloined by a literary enemy, who'd copied it, added more potentially blasphemous lines that he said were by Voltaire as well, and then spread it among senior officials at Versailles.
Even that, however, shouldn't have been enough to get an arrest warrant issued against Voltaire. There had to be someone more powerful behind it. Emilie knew that the Versailles court felt threatened whenever one of the higher nobility lived in contentment away from the center of power. It was crucial—it was what the safety of the state depended on—to have them look only toward Versailles. The great prince de Condé, for example, at the age of just twenty-two had ended the Spanish military domination of western Europe when he led a fierce cavalry encirclement and directed artillery attacks in the Battle of Rocroi; years later he'd defeated the prince of Orange (the future William III of England), despite having three horses killed under him. Someone of that power who stayed independent could have sustained a dangerous center of opposition to the king. The luxuries on offer at court, however, as well as the unique chance of professional advancement there, managed to ensure that even Condé was drawn to a trivial courtier's life. The mighty warrior ended his years splashing in an ornate rowboat, seemingly content to row slowly around the ceremonial pools outside the king's chambers.
If country life could be made genuinely attractive—if the top nobles ever decided to leave this easily supervised clustering at Versailles— then who could say whether the centralized royal state would be able to survive? Government officials such as Phélypeaux had their ongoing personal reasons to hate Voltaire, but the example of his successful independent life with Emilie was a greater threat for them to defend against.
Even so, why the assault on Cirey just then? If it wasn't mere literary opponents, then who? “I need to know,” Emilie wrote to Argental. She couldn't bear being responsible for having Voltaire forced out onto the sleet-freezing road. Knowing the truth would be the only way to get Voltaire safely back. But even with Argental making inquiries along with her, it could be months before they got to the bottom of the plot.
Until then, at least Emilie could be satisfied with the strategy she'd agreed on with Voltaire. It was Richelieu who'd managed to get advance word of the arrest to Voltaire, sending a fast rider to Cirey to warn them before the king's forces could arrive. This meant they'd had a few hours' grace, in which he could grab a few manuscripts and some gold coins. In that time she'd explained that it was imperative he travel with complete discretion. Voltaire understood. “The key thing,” she recounted soon after to Argental, “is that no one knows he's in Holland…. Everything depends on his being sensible… and remaining incognito.”
He'd agreed, of course, at that intense dawn parting in Vassy, but telling Voltaire to remain invisible when there was an audience to be had was about as useful as telling Richelieu to take a cold bath in preparation for a vow of eternal chastity. It was not going to happen. Voltaire managed to hold out for almost a whole day, explaining to the coachmen that he was actually a businessman named Revol. But he soon let the cover slip at one inn after another along the way, even before he'd reached Brussels, across the main frontier to the north. (Crossing the border was easy, but discretion was important, for there were no clear rules about extradition: if Voltaire was publicly irritating enough, pressure could be applied to get him sent back to France.)
When Voltaire did arrive in Brussels, there had been enough excited notice that the good burghers had prepared a thoroughly advertised production of Alzire (the play he'd written when first at Cirey) for the great author. It wouldn't do to disappoint the admirers of such a fine play, so “Monsieur Revol,” the traveling businessman, was induced to attend its performance and wave to the crowd, accepting their cheers and compliments.
It was what Voltaire lived for, and although he'd never seemed to notice the lack of it at Cirey—or was it just that he hadn't complained about it?—now he was in heaven. After Brussels, when he went on to the Netherlands, the glory got even better, for his arrival was soon announced in the Utrecht Gazette. Again, he tried to be fairly discreet, merely supervising the printing of his new work on Newton, but he couldn't really be expected, could he, to turn away the great range of people—far more than he would have had a chance to meet in the isolated winter months in Cirey—who crowded to see him at the inns and private homes where he stayed. There were ambassadors, writers, businessmen—his investments could always benefit from up-to-date information—and even, in Leyden, a great sprawling dinner with twenty traveling Britons from the English court, who told him the unexpected news of how one of his latest productions had been received in London.
It was the play he'd written on the life of a young female slave, named Zaïre, caught between Islam and Christianity in her captivity in the Middle East. One Mr. Bond, in London, had liked the script so much that although he'd failed an audition at the Drury Lane theater, he'd used his own funds to rent another theater and put on the play anyway. Since Bond was sixty years old, he'd taken the role of Zaïre's beloved father, Lusignan.
The first night was going well, the audience compelled by the drama, when, just as the tension reached its peak and the Lusignan character was to die, clutching his beloved daughter, Mr. Bond emoted so powerfully that he did, in fact, die. Voltaire was delighted by this reminder of the professionalism of English actors and was even more encouraged when his English guests explained that, rather than it upsetting the cast, there was a great clamoring by London's actors to take on the role for the next night's performance. Everyone wanted to see the play, now advertised as the only one with “The Role That Kills!”
But there was something more than just stage gossip. In that play, Voltaire had given the girl playing Zaïre the lines “The way we're raised shapes our views…. I would have been a Christian in Paris, but I'm a Muslim here.” It was a theme that increasingly intrigued him, for it was something more than just an argument about the relativity of manners or beliefs. The play was also reminding the audience that once we recognize how arbitrary is the world we've been born to, then we start to have the chance to reshape our own lives.
This was quintessential Voltaire: transmitting groundbreaking philosophy by means of a commercial play, so well written, with all the twists and pulls of an adventure plot, that it became a great popular success. But he wasn't yet done with the move from poetry to science that he'd begun with Emilie. For here, in the Netherlands, he saw that he had the chance to advance further still.
In the same city of Leyden, only 130 miles from the French border—but a world away in its openness to fresh ideas—he knew that there was an earnest, bemused Dutch lawyer who was even more ingenious in going through Newton's experiments than he and Emilie had been. For not only was the lawyer, Willem Jakob 's Gravesande, duplicating Newton's work, but he had found that with quite ordinary
tools he was able to take those great findings further.
A central question for everyone following Newton was what it really meant to talk about the force or power that a moving object carries. It was clear that our moon had been spinning in orbit at a great altitude above the Earth for what must have now been thousands upon thousands of years without stopping. Emilie had studied similar observations for the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and also of course knew that the Earth had been swinging in steady circuits around the sun for great lengths of time as well. What was the force that moving objects carried inside that let them perform these miracles?
The way the conscientious 's Gravesande was determining this was to build a tripod-like tower, the height of a man, and drop bulletshaped ivory or brass cylinders straight down from it. What was underneath was important. If they merely hit against something hard, such as the fired clay tiles that the Dutch used to decorate their floors, the result would be a sudden shattering of the tile, with the brass or ivory cylinder rolling uselessly away after the destruction was over.
But 's Gravesande had something more important in mind than destroying nicely colored kitchen tiles. Instead, he put pans filled with soft clay right under the tripods. When the cylinders came falling down, they didn't shatter the carefully smoothed clay, but instead ended up simply stuck in the clay, with their tips embedded several inches down. The greater the height from which 's Gravesande dropped his dense little projectiles, the farther they pushed into the clay.
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