Passionate Minds

by David Bodanis

  Everything was collapsing. They'd had an agreement: they were to live in Brussels until the court case was over, when they would move to Paris and their grand home on the Ile St. Louis. But if he was banned from Paris after his embarrassment in Prussia and having been found to say traitorous things about France, how could that be? Already she was being made a laughingstock because of him. One wit said that there should be a clause in any mortgage Madame du Châtelet signed from now on: when Monsieur de Voltaire let her down, she shouldn't be obliged to keep up the payments on her own.

  Almost a decade before, Voltaire had fallen in love with the dream of who Emilie might think him to be. He'd always imagined he was great: as good as his cherished mother had believed, not the failure his father had always insisted he was. Emilie had been crucial in that, for he respected her so much that her approval was the most important support in his life. Yet now she'd seen him humiliated—and it was his own fault. Either he could stay close to her and accept her accurate evaluation of how badly he'd judged Frederick, or he could lash out and convince himself to scorn her, so that he wouldn't have to face her reminder of his flaws.

  He chose the coward's way out. It's cruel for a man to reject his lover, yet in his anger and embarrassment that's what Voltaire decided to do. He still cared enough about what other people thought that he had to do this properly. A dignified poem saying that he was too old for her would be just right. He'd get sympathetic tuts from his friends, while showing Emilie his anger.

  He wrote her a long poem, accordingly, pretending to be distraught at being past the age where he could have sex with her again. The lines that leaped out from it were:

  … I'm dying, you see

  I can't be your lover

  I'm old…

  Emilie was furious. It was a travesty of everything he'd penned for her at their first meetings in those sweet months back in 1733, when they'd been unable to keep their hands off each other in Paris, and in Cirey, and every inn along the way. Also, the poem was false. On Voltaire's final trip, Frederick had suggested stopping on the way back at a castle where he would meet Frederick's sister Ulrica, who was young and buxom and most exuberantly heterosexual.

  Voltaire had stayed there for weeks, writing erotic poems for Ulrica about their nights together. He was aware that Emilie knew this, for copies of those poems had been circulating widely. But he was hurting her on purpose now.

  18

  The Wound in My Heart

  PARIS AND VERSAILLES, MID-1740S

  From a servant in Voltaire's household, one year later:

  [Monsieur de Voltaire] is in an appalling temper, behaves to the Marquise with the utmost unkindness and makes her cry all day.

  The day before yesterday they had an argument that lasted much of the night. Voltaire expected to dine alone, and had a small table laid. Mme du Châtelet had come back to dine with him, and wanted them to use a larger table. Voltaire stubbornly clung to his, and when she insisted, he said that he was master in his own house, that he had been made subservient for too long and several other harsh things.

  These rows, which occur frequently, are mocked by the whole household.

  Emilie was falling, falling. She lied to her friends about what was happening, but that didn't change how she felt. “Nothing degrades you,” she jotted to herself, “as much as an effort to regain someone who has closed his heart to you.” Voltaire was horrible to her, cold and in an embarrassed withdrawal that seemed as if it would never end.

  She started to gamble again, but from the turmoil, the constant disparagement, her skill was crumbling.

  There had always been a different view of gambling between people raised in the middle classes and members of the older aristocracy. For the former, such as Voltaire, it was a dissolute waste of time, the very opposite of the sensible planning that was needed to take them forward in life. For aristocrats such as Emilie, though, it was a mark of how independent they were, how little they were tied down to such trivialities as paid labor and dull routine.

  That hadn't mattered in the old days, before the disastrous Prussian trips. Although Voltaire didn't gamble, he'd been proud of how good his companion was. “The Court's ladies,” as he'd noted, “playing cards with her in the company of the Queen, were far from suspecting that they were sitting next to Newton's commentator.” But now, her concentration ruined, and desperate for the sensation that only playing for high stakes could give her, she began to lose huge amounts. All Voltaire's years of suppressed resentment came out at all the little marks of class superiority she'd shown through their relation: her utter confidence with servants, and in addressing nobles; the automatic entrée she'd always had to the grand homes he'd had to struggle to get within.

  A little earlier he'd written, supposedly half joking: “If [Madame du Châtelet's]… superiority allows her to lower her eyes to me, it will be a noble deed, for she is very lofty. She has to blink her eyes in looking down to see me.” Now he could take his revenge. At one particularly desperate moment she wrote him (the words in italics are in English in the original):

  Dear Lover,

  I'm so sorry for choosing to write you rather than speak about this, but it turns out, dear lover, I'm really quite desperate for 50 louis to pay my rent this month. I'll also need 12½ louis more, to cover more gambling debts, and to leave me with a little something to live on.

  I'll only use it at the end of the month…. I can pay you in rent on the house, or, if you prefer, here is a receipt Monsieur du Châtelet sent me that luckily I haven't spent. Keep it, and loan me the money, and I won't use what you give me in expenses. We can begin a new account. You'll do this if you can, won't you?

  Voltaire turned her down. She tried other friends, with increasing, humiliating urgency. Only when the bailiffs were going to remove her possessions did Voltaire begrudgingly pay the debt.

  Richelieu's wife, Elisabeth, had died—from another burst of bleeding, this time that no one could stop—and at one point Emilie thought of starting up that affair again. But this too failed, embarrassingly, with Richelieu being too kind to take advantage of her now. “I don't know,” she wrote Richelieu quickly after one such incident, “why I told you that at Fontainebleau. I couldn't stop myself.”

  She entirely stopped doing science. It was disheartening, for with her research in Brussels she'd been on the edge of real creativity, her work bringing her ever more into the mainstream of original thinkers across Europe. When one of the old guard at the Paris Academy of Sciences had criticized her, for example, not on any valid grounds but just out of paternalism, she'd fired back a nearly book-length rebuttal in just three weeks, putting him in his place. But that audacity had depended on her having Voltaire's respect. Now that was lost. She would pull herself together enough to reply clearly to the letters that continued to come in—from members of the Royal Society in London, from important researchers in Italy, and elsewhere—but she couldn't concentrate enough to start anything fresh.

  When she was exploring in science, she'd felt connected to the universe. That was gone now. The solitude, the silence, was total.

  Voltaire was falling too, for, having excluded Emilie from his life, he no longer had the support he'd always needed to get the confidence for important writing. To make up for that, he engaged in what he later termed—when he finally got his senses back, several long years later—the only entirely wasted period of his life. He'd always despised the French court and the useless hangers-on who populated it. Now, though, he did everything he could to join the king's minions at Versailles and rise as high as he could as a mindless, powdered courtier.

  Being Voltaire, he justified it with some plausible reasons. He'd managed—barely—to avoid being arrested in France after the catastrophe of his Prussian trips, but that had been because the French government official he'd insulted the most—the aged Cardinal Fleury, long-standing chief adviser to the king—had had the good grace to die early in 1743, before any court actions could be taken.
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br />   Fleury's death had also opened up fresh possibilities at court. The boy-king Louis XV had spent his whole life being looked after by Fleury, and now—with Louis in his mid-thirties, and that elderly protector gone—poor Louis was at a loss. Even by the undemanding standards of European royalty, Louis was known for being a dolt, only with difficulty grasping what was happening in the world outside his palaces. The main body of nobles couldn't be counted on to help him, for Versailles was a hothouse of vendettas. Sarcastic posters were sometimes left anonymously on the outer door of the king's own rooms; even his predecessor, the far more authoritative Louis XIV, had once had the heavy tasseled drawstring from a curtain heaved over a wall partition, to land—amidst laughter and the quick scurrying away of feet outside—almost on his lap.

  This meant the bewildered Louis XV turned ever more to his trusted mistresses for advice about what to do. Whoever controlled the mistress controlled the king. Voltaire hadn't been able to carry out his ideas for bringing Newton's crisp, decent universe down to Earth in the inhospitable precincts of Berlin. But if he could get his hands on the levers of power here at Versailles, perhaps he could redeem himself after all.

  One of the most powerful individuals to take advantage of the void at Court had been Voltaire's old nemesis, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, the man who'd seen Voltaire imprisoned in the Bastille during the de Rohan incident those twenty years before (and had tracked him to Richelieu's wedding for the abortive arrest in the Letters from England incident ten years before). Phélypeaux hated commoners such as Voltaire—especially commoners who overreached themselves— and he had succeeded in encouraging the insecure Louis to choose the sexy, malleable, and most definitely aristocratic young Duchesse de Châteauroux as royal mistress.

  But Phélypeaux made a tactical mistake. One day in August 1744, while inspecting the troops on a hot day in Metz, the king fell ill, became terrified he'd die, and began to confess to his priest. He couldn't have a mistress during this deathbed confession (for then he'd suffer eternal damnation), and so young Châteauroux had to pack everything she owned and leave, fast.

  She'd always been hated by ordinary people, and the mob began gathering around her carriage even before she'd finished packing: there were jeers and probably clods of dirt thrown after her as she hurried off. Phélypeaux was one of the first to tell the king how much he'd always despised that ridiculous woman, whose sexual antics had so dangerously threatened the royal soul. Unfortunately, the king had merely been suffering sunstroke—he scared easily—and within a few days he was better, the confession forgotten, and Châteauroux was back.

  It was payback time. Châteauroux let everyone know she had a list of all the courtiers who'd made the very, very serious mistake of turning against her. In what everyone took to be desperation, Phélypeaux personally rode to Châteauroux's house, on the Rue du Bac in Paris. It was early in the evening of Wednesday, November 26, 1744. He was carrying certain documents with him, or perhaps it was something else, for he kept it in a closed case that no one else could examine. She made him wait downstairs, but when he finally was allowed through, he accepted her suggestion that they meet in her bedroom. The door was closed tight behind them. They were alone for a very long time.

  To this day, no one knows for sure what happened in there, but when Phélypeaux came out, he seemed quite content. So did she, for she now explained to her supporters that this great official had told her how wrong he'd been and begged her total forgiveness. The next morning she was all set to return to Versailles, but she wasn't feeling well. As the day went on, she felt worse and worse. Soon she was “screaming with pain and at unknown horrors.” She died soon after; the rumors of poisoning began almost immediately.

  Phélypeaux had gone too far, however, for now there was no royal mistress at all. This meant Voltaire's access to power wasn't blocked anymore. If he could get his own choice of mistress selected, perhaps that would help erase from Emilie's mind the embarrassment of his frozen, bedraggled return from Prussia.

  He and his old school friend Richelieu worked together. There was an exquisite young woman, tall and quick-witted, whom they realized the meek king would be awed by. Even better, her grandfather had been a mere fishmonger—she was born Jeanne Poisson (Jean Fish)— and that low heritage meant that everyone else at court would look down on her so much that she'd be unable to make alliances. Richelieu and Voltaire, accordingly, would be her sole protectors and thus the chief beneficiaries of her rise. Voltaire also recognized her as another outsider like himself, eager to rise from an imperfect background to power at the court.

  Getting Poisson into the king's bed wasn't too difficult, for the men of the French royal family had a lack of restraint that made Richelieu look like a penitent. (When Louis XIV once had to wait while one of his upper-class mistresses got ready, he'd impatiently gestured to her maid to get undressed: he'd have sex with her first, while he was there.) Through a mix of bedroom skills and conversational ability Ms. Poisson soon became his official mistress, and at that point all Voltaire had to do was become more trusted by the king, so as to properly use the power that this new woman's access gave him.

  The opportunity came in a military campaign that looked set to take place soon in the Low Countries, beyond the northern border of France, in this spring of 1745. (The ostensible reason was revenge for earlier losses against Austrian forces in central Europe, and a French attack on scattered Austrian possessions near Brussels seemed an easy way to do that. The Dutch and English sent forces to block that, however, for they didn't want France expanding near them.) For this military assault the king wanted to show everyone how virile he was, and so decided to actually join his armies in the field.

  Voltaire and Richelieu knew how catastrophic that could be, so Richelieu traveled along, staying near the vast group of guards, cobblers, cooks, seamstresses, laundry staff, wig powderers, valets, and miscellaneous fops who traveled with His Majesty. Tough British troops were already landing, and joined with their Dutch allies as the French army was marching north. On the morning of April 11, 1745, near the village of Fontenoy, the battle began. Soon after the shooting started, the French infantry were in serious trouble. To help them, the French cavalry—officered entirely by hereditary nobles—raced forward. Their horses smashed into and killed a great number of French foot soldiers as they galloped forward; then, once the pampered nobles saw how fast the British were firing, they turned around and hurried to their starting point again, trampling and smashing more of their own infantry.

  The king was scared, and his generals were dithering, when Richelieu abruptly pressed his spurs into his horse and galloped forward past everyone in the command group. If he could get closer to the battle, he could see what was going on. He collected a group of French marines and with them managed to move to the very front. He was soon forced back by British firing but had seen that there was a weakness in the British formation. Because of the English success, they'd been pushing further and further forward into the French lines, which meant that they were “as tightly wedged…as a square peg in a square hole.”

  Richelieu got back to the king and—at least in the version Voltaire recorded—explained that a sudden attack by French artillery would startle the British. Once that happened, a cavalry charge against their flanks would destroy them. The king's generals, however, were explaining that there was a very nice bridge over the Scheldt River that was quite close behind them, and with all the dry straw that their sappers were stacking under it, the king could safely escape, then burn the bridge behind him.

  It was the moment when a commander shows his mettle. Louis sweated. Where was someone to tell him what to do? Everyone was yelling at him. Richelieu looked as if he might draw his saber and kill one of the other French officers; the weather was very hot; there were horrible shooting and screaming noises not far away.

  Somehow Louis recognized that Richelieu was repeating something. There were at least four French cannon available that he'd seen on his ride
back. Could he order them into action? Louis still wavered, but Richelieu seemed very upset now and kept on repeating, in an increasingly intemperate tone, what he was saying. Finally Louis realized that if he agreed, perhaps Richelieu would shut up.

  The king gave in, and Richelieu immediately wheeled around. With one set of commands, he had the cannon readied. With another set of commands, he had got every trooper who could ride to form up right away. The British troops, who'd been steadily advancing, now saw the French forces directly in front of them majestically separate, like the Red Sea before Moses. In their place, four uncomfortably large and loaded cannon appeared, aimed straight at them. The cannon blasted, and Richelieu led the charge. Irish troops, fighting with the Catholic king of France, were especially powerful in supporting him. The British lines were smashed, and the battle was quickly over. Soon there was nothing more to do than bayonet the wounded British troops who couldn't run away, and tug useful boots or coins from the inert or twisting bodies.

  It was a victory for Richelieu and the ordinary French soldiers, but no one could admit that. Voltaire was beginning to realize what he had let himself in for. To continue his climb at Versailles, he now had to prepare a booklet titled The Battle of Fontenoy, as Won by Louis XV, in which he lauded His Majesty's cool, nearly superhuman determination. This wasn't what Voltaire had had in mind when he'd wittily explained to his young listeners at the Paris salons how the plans for political reform that he and Emilie had begun at Cirey might come to pass.