Passionate Minds

by David Bodanis

  In a previous era, that would have been as far as his finding went, and it still wouldn't have revealed much about nature. Even Fontenelle hadn't known how to go further: he, like his master Descartes, kept most of his explanations at the level of general, nonexact description. But Newton had pushed for a mathematically exact physics. While 's Gravesande was only about Voltaire's age, he had made a pilgrimage to England a lucky several years before him, and so had been able to meet Newton in person. He'd spent time with other scientists and had even been made a member of the Royal Society. In his Leyden laboratory, 's Gravesande was carefully measuring how deep the different projectiles went.

  This was the level of arithmetic Voltaire liked best. There was none of the calculus, trigonometry, or long cube roots that Emilie was so quick with and at which he always came in a slow last. One just took a measuring rod, stuck it into the little holes in the clay, and read off the result. Yet from that simple procedure, a startling truth about the “inside” of any moving object in the universe could be found.

  What 's Gravesande had been discovering—as he happily shared with Voltaire—was that the force of a plummeting brass cylinder was not just a matter of how fast it was going at impact. Nor was it a matter of how much the brass cylinder weighed, nor even—another plausible guess—the combined figure one might get by multiplying its speed by its entire weight.

  Instead, 's Gravesande was finding something extraordinary. As the speed of the cylinder went up, the force with which it whacked into the mud went up too—by ever-increasing and predictable amounts. If one translated it into the image of a farm wagon sent skidding along an icy road, it meant that when the wagon was going at a slow one mile per hour and the wooden brake was jammed on, the wagon would skid a certain distance, perhaps ten feet. But if the wagon was going at twice that rate, at 2 mph when the wooden brake was slammed down, the wagon wouldn't just skid twice as far. It would skid four times as far. If the wagon was going at three miles per hour and the brake was slammed down, it wouldn't skid three times as far. It would skid nine times as far. There was no randomness. Rather, this predestined rule was waiting.

  Voltaire found that remarkable. When you've been holding a cylinder or ball or any other object and then let go so that it falls, some sort of force appears inside it and makes it act as if it had come quiveringly alive, with an independent life. But this independent life is not arbitrary, sending the cylinder slewing in any random direction, at some random speed. Instead, it follows this exact rule: the impact depends precisely on the square of the speed. A few other researchers had suspected this might happen; 's Gravesande was one of the first to show they were right.

  And Newton hadn't known it. Voltaire wanted fame. His poetry and drama were good, but he knew their survival depended on the whims of critics and actors; styles change and civilizations fall, bringing all the writings in their language to effective extinction. But science? It was written in much simpler language, be it the symbols of mathematics or just neutral, clear prose. Those particular writings might be as vulnerable to shifts in style or power as works of literature were. But the underlying laws of science were different. They could cross all boundaries of extinction, all voids of eternity and night. Voltaire realized that he was never going to come up with fresh ideas about how Saturn's moons orbited. That was perhaps something Emilie could do, but it was too abstract for him, too far away in space.

  What 's Gravesande was doing, however, showed another way to lasting fame. There were experiments—simple experiments—that careful investigators could do right here on Earth. If those experiments were ingeniously planned and conscientiously carried out, they could reveal eternal truths that even Newton had never seen. Voltaire knew that he could be too impulsive, but he also knew he could be supremely diligent when he had to. This would be one of those times. He was working closely with his printers and clarified his text's last pages to assert:

  [Newton's understanding] of gravity is not the final result that physics will have. There are no doubt other secrets, ones we scarcely suspect…and they are just as important…. In time, with enough experimental results, we can find them.

  This, Voltaire knew, would be his next task. It had been fun being feted by the crowds and seeing his plays performed. But he missed Emilie, and Cirey. That's where he could do his next stage of work—if, that is, Emilie was able to bring him back.

  By now, in February of the new year of 1737, it was almost impossible for him to learn what she was doing. “I'm 150 leagues from him,” Emilie had written their friend Argental, “and I haven't heard a word in two weeks…. His handwriting's easily recognized, so his letters are probably being intercepted.” When she and Voltaire did get letters through, they had to restrict themselves to banalities, knowing that their words were being read by Phélypeaux and his enforcers at Versailles.

  But to Argental, in a separate series of letters that she'd arranged to escape the censors, she now revealed something else. She'd finally discovered what was behind the order for Voltaire's arrest. “I know you'll find it hard to accept; the idea… that someone can be so capable of evil, but believe me: some men are capable of anything. Listen and you'll understand.

  “I firmly hope I'm wrong, but if I'm not, then I'm really worried; it would change everything. We'd have to abandon Cirey, who knows for how long.” And then to Argental she recounted the extraordinary story she'd just learned about. Her life wasn't what she'd thought it was.

  For you see, she began, “my father had another daughter…. ”

  11

  Michelle

  PARIS, LATE 1600S AND 1737

  Decades before Emilie had been born, a rich family of six sons had had a seventh child. That was in Montpellier, in 1648, and the wealthy father had been so proud of his lastborn that he'd brought the boy—it was Louis-Nicolas, Emilie's future father—to Versailles, even before he began his teenage years. The boy was unusually handsome and had none of the arrogance that children blessed with great beauty often acquire. He was courteous to everyone, and as he grew taller, in his teens and then as a young adult, his easy nature and golden looks made the still young king—Louis XIV—begin to grant him special respect.

  Most of the young women at court would no doubt have been willing to be caught up romantically with the golden youngster, even if it wasn't known that he enjoyed the king's favor. With that advantage, though, he now truly had his pick of the nobles' daughters. But then, when he was twenty-three, at a ball given by a wealthy financier, he met a girl who was different from everyone with whom he had ever flirted. She was only fourteen—which made her too young for a physical relationship—and had only quite ordinary looks, being far less attractive than most of the women he'd met. Her name was Anne Bellinzani.

  Since the handsome young man was charming and always polite, he didn't snub her, but gave her the time to begin a serious conversation. For most plain fourteen-year-olds, to be focused on by one of the most attractive bachelors at court would have been overwhelming: enough to make them giggle, or blush, or in some other way be less than articulate in response. But Anne Bellinzani seems to have decided on the spot that this was the man she would someday marry, and she confidently drew him aside so that they would have a quiet corner or settee on which to talk.

  And talk they did, or rather, talk she did: about everything she'd read, and everything she'd dreamed of. There was poetry, of course, but there was also something else, something new at the time and suddenly compelling to the gorgeous yet scarcely educated Louis-Nicolas. Anne was fascinated by astronomy and all the fresh discoveries that were being made about the stars. Her own father had come from Italy and so knew of Galileo's discoveries with his new telescope that the universe above us was full of greater wonders—of moons that orbited distant Jupiter, of comets that could be charted in great detail—than had ever been imagined before.

  The conversation went on so long that the dazzling young man for once forgot his manners. There were many other women
at the ball, and they knew that even if a new flirtation was going to take up a certain amount of a young man's time, it was still right that before too long he should excuse himself, step away, and offer his services as a dancing partner. But Louis-Nicolas didn't do it. He wasn't going to dance with anyone else that night.

  The first explanation the court gossips gave, as word went around over the next days, was that he was drawn to Mademoiselle Bellinzani's money. Her father had become a colleague of Colbert, the king's brilliant finance minister, and from that connection had become immensely rich. But Louis-Nicolas had his own family money, and if he was trying to curry favor with this girl's father, he was going about it very oddly. He spent very little time with the parents—as in a proper courtship one was supposed to do—but rather seemed to remain entranced by young Anne. She'd teasingly called out to him from her window one Sunday morning, when he was walking alone to church, and then broke all precedent by tossing down a book for him to read. They went to the theater and opera, and were seen at other balls, but almost everywhere they remained transfixed in conversation. She taught him Italian and gave him poems; she listened to the new thoughts he had, and she went on, whenever he prompted, about her deepest interests in the extraordinary fresh insights into the distant stars, as well as all the rest of the new science being developed to explain our sublunary world.

  If he'd been less striking, the courtship might have led smoothly to the marriage for which Anne hoped. But almost as a habit, even while Louis-Nicolas continued his fascination with the young teenager, he engaged in a few of the affairs that were almost automatically necessary for the most dashing young men at court. Unfortunately, in one of those brief affairs the woman involved became pregnant. The pregnancy went badly, and she fell gravely ill.

  The handsome young man married the dying girl—it was the right thing to do, and of course the king wished it. But the Versailles doctors insisted on bleeding her, and just a few days after the marriage she was dead. The unborn child died with her.

  Anne Bellinzani was shocked that Louis-Nicolas had so unambiguously cheated on her. She was eighteen by now, and had always been impulsive. Now she was humiliated. She fled to a convent, but the court couldn't allow someone with a dowry the size her father could provide to do that. She was arrested inside the convent, brought back to court, and forced into a marriage of her own.

  Louis-Nicolas was in his late twenties now, and chastened: he tried to get diplomatic postings far from Paris, so as not to have the pain of being close to the married Anne anymore. But he did return, and soon Anne was writing him flirtatious letters (“I'm the tenderest lover you'll ever have”), and angry letters, and sometimes simply intense ones.

  They met in private rooms at court, and then—daringly, awfully—in her own home. “My lover,” she wrote, “is dearer to me than anything in the world. He's dearer than my life itself.”

  In 1683—a dozen years after they'd first met—the finance minister Colbert died. This meant that Anne's father no longer had a protector at court, and all his enemies who wanted a part of his fortune could now make their move. He was arrested and lost his money, upon which Anne's husband began divorce proceedings. She and Louis-Nicolas just had to wait a very little while longer, and they'd be free.

  But then, in 1686, she got pregnant by Louis-Nicolas. The timing was awful, for the baby was born before she had a complete legal separation from her husband. This meant that Louis-Nicolas couldn't recognize the child, and her husband certainly wasn't going to. It was a girl, and she was given only a single name: Michelle. When she was baptized no father was present or listed on the baptismal register. Instead, two beggars were dragged in and listed as her guardians. Almost immediately the foundling was sent away to an orphanage inside a convent. Death was nearly certain, given the poor care and epidemic diseases of the time.

  Anne and Louis-Nicolas stayed together for almost two more years, but something had broken. In 1690 they parted a final time, by their own volition. In 1691 she withdrew to another convent, committing herself to a life of penance.

  Louis-Nicolas had no heart for love after that, and in his despondency quickly married the first suitable woman with some money his friends pointed him toward—a fact recognized by Emilie's mother, Gabrielle-Anne, and a source of her unending bitterness.

  For almost half a century the story had been hidden, only occasionally surfacing in furious whispers between Emilie's parents. No one but a very few intimates knew all the details, and even that knowledge seemed to be of fading importance, for everyone assumed the child had died. But then, in 1736, a notary came across some long-lost records, and out of professional diligence, or expectation of a reward, he followed the chain from baptism to orphanage to nunnery. The child had lived. He continued tracking the long-forgotten documents till he found an obscure fifty-year-old nun named Michelle, living in a Paris-area convent, and told her who she was.

  Everything made sense to Emilie once she discovered this: why her father had been so proud when she'd shown her own first interests in science and especially in astronomy; why—even more—her mother had always been so angry, and especially so whenever her daughter had tried to gain favor by showing more of the scientific interest her father admired.

  That past intrigue did more than just explain her early years. It also solved the mystery of the continued attacks on her and Voltaire at Cirey. It was a question of money. Michelle, the bewildered fifty-yearold nun, was bringing a court case to claim her share of the Breteuil family's huge fortune. Emilie, of course, would support her. But Emilie also had a most unpleasant first cousin who'd achieved eminence as the secretary of war to Louis XV himself. He was a Breteuil, as she was, which meant they all shared a stake in that Breteuil fortune. The rich cousin didn't want to lose any of it, yet realized that Emilie would take her newly discovered half sister's side. If he could threaten to destroy her idyll at Cirey, though—or give her a sample of the untouchable power he could muster against her—then she would have no choice but to take his side in the court case against this unwanted half sister.

  The cousin had ensured that Voltaire's Adam and Eve parody went all the way up to Cardinal Fleury, who was the wily chief adviser to the king, and effective head of the government. Fleury's dislike of such impious writings gave Phélypeaux the chance to move against Voltaire once more. Being locked away, or just sent into permanent exile, would destroy Voltaire for good. It would also—as the war minister cousin wished—have the further advantage of sending this arrogant young marquise back to Paris in disgrace. She would be unable to resist his wishes after that.

  It was a powerful plan, and might even have worked if the cousin hadn't gone too far. But he had decided it wasn't enough to attack Voltaire from the outside, simply through sending arresting officers. He also wanted to undercut his irritating cousin even more directly. Why not wreck her marriage while he was at it? He had a word with Emilie's mother, Gabrielle-Anne, who was now quite recovered from her health scare of the year before, and furious as ever that her child was so different from what a proper daughter should be—perhaps even more furious that this intense shame from the past was coming back.

  The cousin wanted Gabrielle-Anne to write directly to Emilie's husband, Florent-Claude du Châtelet, and with false naiveté say that she had just heard rumors that something untoward might be going on between her daughter and Voltaire and that, as a diligent mother, she was bringing this to the husband's attention so that he could, of course, discipline his wife as he saw necessary. In French law, not only were women legally the same as children (aside from the financial protection their families might have arranged for them in their marriage contracts), but they had no legal protection against physical punishment from their spouses. The distinguished and wealthy Monsieur Popelinière, for example, regularly knocked his wife to the ground and kicked and beat her, even in public. There was some murmuring at fine dinners where he did this, but no one was going to stop it.

  That was when E
milie realized she could win. “The letter from my mother might have shattered any other relationship,” she explained to Argental in relief, “but happily, I can trust the good intentions of M. du Châtelet.” For what Gabrielle-Anne, the war minister cousin, and the tight-lipped Phélypeaux all had missed was the fact that her husband had frequently been at Cirey in the company of Emilie and Voltaire—and Voltaire, when he put his mind to it, was the most charming man alive.

  The trick, Voltaire knew, was never to pretend an affection you didn't feel. Any intelligent person would see through that. Rather, you need to find what you genuinely do like about a person and then go ahead and share that.

  Florent-Claude may have been distant at the start, but he had long had his own mistresses and—as we've seen—had also grown up in a culture that never expected a husband and wife to spend much time together. He recognized that Voltaire had been very generous in paying to rebuild Cirey, which by inheritance laws would likely end up being left to du Châtelet's own son.

  Florent-Claude had taken long walks in the woods with Voltaire on his visits, together inspecting the many charcoal-fired forges on the estate; they'd gone hunting for wild boar and sometimes deer, and although Voltaire was not an especially dangerous shot, Florent-Claude with his years of military experience was comfortably better. Voltaire played with the du Châtelets' now ten-year-old son, bought him mechanical toys from Paris, and helped select the tutor for the boy; he had used his great pull in Paris salons to help Florent-Claude in everything else he wished. They really were friends now, from the heart.

  And soldiers do not like it when someone starts picking on their friends.