Passionate Minds

by David Bodanis

  Ms. Poisson wasn't as useful as hoped either. Although she would sometimes daringly leave out one of Voltaire's subversive manuscripts, that was just to irritate the older, class-conscious women at the court who looked down at her. Her fortunes depended on the king's favors, and she certainly was bright enough to recognize that. It didn't matter that Voltaire had helped lead her to those favors. On the contrary. If Louis felt he had won a great victory, then her job was to make clear to this outsider Monsieur de Voltaire that this was exactly how he must present it.

  Then it got worse. The king's ostensible victory at Fontenoy— and the confidence that Voltaire's praise brought him—tempted His Majesty to another feat of arms. His great-grandfather Louis XIV had repeatedly seen his plans for European domination thwarted by the dreadful English. Now that they were on the run, why not go all the way and invade their country, or at least install a puppet government that France could control?

  The king had enough sense to quietly suggest that Richelieu should handle such minor logistic details as actually organizing and then commanding the assault troops. But the invasion would serve the greater glory of France, and the king was the same as France, sort of— there were theorists who wrote about these confusing matters—and anyway, somehow it would accrue to his credit.

  At first the plan went well. In July, the Catholic claimant to the throne, the energetic twenty-four-year-old Charles Stuart, was landed in Scotland with promises of French support to come. By September he'd taken Edinburgh; soon he was marching on England. Pamphlets had to be prepared to get the English population to surrender, and Voltaire was the man to do it. There was a certain conflict of interest for Voltaire, in that it meant supporting the rights of what he had always described as a vicious, Church-ridden near-dictatorship (France) against a constitutional polity that for years he had thought was the greatest hope for the future of mankind (England). But if the outcome offered a chance of glory and an important role at court, isn't this what he would have to do?

  19

  Recovery … and Escape

  PARIS, VERSAILLES, AND FONTAINEBLEAU, 1745–1747

  Emilie recognized that Voltaire was destroying himself, but part of her recovery was to distance herself from everything he did. She started something of a journal—a manuscript she sadly entitled “Happiness”—to collect her thoughts on what had gone wrong. She had a lot to reflect upon.

  “For ten years,” she wrote, “I was happy, in the love of the man who subjugated my soul. I passed those years, alone with him, and it was always enough….

  “I've lost this happy state,” she went on. “What happened to make me see it was terrible: the wound in my heart bled for a long time.” But now she accepted it. “Nothing will bring back lost love. I've learned that at least.”

  She made a list of what she was content filling her time with. Some were little things, like fine meals or singing—she still had that lovely voice—or the marionette shows she always could laugh out loud at. But mostly for the depth she needed—and the affirmation as well— there was science.

  There was something about 's Gravesande's old experiment with the falling cylinder that kept pulling her back. Voltaire had been convinced that what 's Gravesande found was just a random fact, simply stating what happened when rounded brass chunks slammed into trays of Dutch clay. Emilie, however, still approached it differently.

  If you measured the energy those falling cylinders carried at impact, even Voltaire and the diehard Newtonians would admit that something about that number never disappeared. When a cylinder falls into clay, the cylinder soon stops but the clay itself gets deformed and shakes, passing on that shaking to the tray it's in, which no doubt passes it to the floor it's on, which probably ends up making the entire Earth shudder the slightest bit extra in its orbit.

  Emilie couldn't bear that: “what worries me now is free will. At heart I feel free, yet if the total amount of energy in the universe never changes, wouldn't that destroy free will? I mean, if we start to move, we must be creating some energy that didn't exist before. But if we're not allowed to do that—because it would add to the fixed amount of energy in the universe—then we can't choose to move. So then we're not free!”

  Slowly, and especially in correspondence with the Italian Jesuit Francesco Jacquier, Emilie realized what the task that would give her life meaning would now be. Newton was the greatest thinker of all, but he was exceptionally difficult to read. In many respects he wasn't even the first of the modern natural scientists, but rather was the last of the medievals, for the great Principia he'd written summarizing his ideas was cast almost entirely in centuries-old geometry. Hardly anyone could use it directly. Researchers across Europe were slowed by having to depend on often only partially understood secondary accounts.

  What if Emilie transformed Newton's Principia for the new modern era? Then the deepest answers she was looking for could be better explored, and she would have all of Newton's analytic tools to help. She'd made some desultory efforts on that before but had been too lethargic to take it forward. Now it was different. Her task wouldn't just be to turn Newton's Latin words into French. Instead, she would also turn his strange, immensely complicated geometric proofs into the form of more modern calculus—and would add her own commentaries, explaining how she thought his work could best be carried forward.

  That itself would be an immense undertaking—the Principia had taken Newton himself years of intellectual effort to produce—but Emilie was beginning to feel she could go further and add important original areas.

  In the past, she'd depended entirely on Voltaire's respect. But he had worked himself into such embarrassing straits at Versailles that— at least for now—his lack of support didn't mean so much. Emilie knew she was still quicker in reasoning than almost anyone she'd met; it had been great being feted for her research on fire and light. She could be proud of the work she'd led with telescopes and prisms and geometrical diagrams; the systematic study she'd made on the early books of the Bible, and what that meant for faith today; the translations and commentaries she'd also found time for at Cirey on economics and politics. The response she continued to get from foreign academics and thinkers across the Continent added to that.

  She'd grown up in an aristocratic world, where making an elegant effort was all that counted. Yet she'd been drawn toward Voltaire and his more practical, middle-class world, where actual, solid achievement was what counted. That's what she was proud of, and what she was going to do more of, even if it was on her own. The difficult years were ending. She was taking control. European science would advance— and so would she.

  Voltaire knew he was stuck, but found it impossible to get out. Ms. Poisson had risen as high as he and Richelieu had hoped, but that simply made her more independent. Indeed, she was now increasingly known by the name the lovesick Louis had granted her, and had become the famous Madame de Pompadour. Since Voltaire and Richelieu had known her from the start, when she'd been viewed with suspicion, she was even more distant to them than to other courtiers, who'd been her enemies at first but whom she needed to convert into allies now.

  The invasion of England had also failed, through a combination of Charles Stuart's Scottish followers being too cautious and Richelieu bungling the arrangements for the invasion (not helped by his ongoing arguments with Phélypeaux), even while the invading troops were waiting in the French ports.

  Voltaire did get a wondrous promotion by the standards of Versailles, for he was granted a permanent suite of rooms of his own—an honor that aristocratic families had been known to barter their own daughters for. Since it was located at the top of an important and much-used stairwell, this meant it had an equally important and muchused large open toilet directly below. The odor of great half-floating islets of aristocratic excrement was hard to mask, even with the heavy orange-scented perfume candles used desperately for that purpose. Voltaire was reduced to writing to court officials in the humble third person: “Monsieur de Voltaire… beg
s the director-general of the buildings kindly to order… that a door be added to the public privies which are at the foot of his staircase, and that if possible the spout of the neighboring gutter be diverted so as to flush them.”

  Soon more honors came in, and there were even whispers that the king might appoint him Gentleman in Ordinary of the Chamber. The honors come with large cash stipends but also meant that Voltaire was requested to arrive outside the king's apartments often by 8a.m., to push in with other honored gentlemen and assist in the king's formal waking: the lifting of the royal covers, the holding of the royal shirt, and for a select few the brushing of the royal wig. In perhaps the greatest indignity of all, Voltaire even found that Phélypeaux was now his friend, writing him kind notes and discussing—as one fellow professional to another—details of print runs for the really quite wonderful odes, proclamations, dramas, histories, and other documents that Voltaire was churning out in his new posts.

  This wasn't anything like the application of Enlightenment ideas that Voltaire had been looking for. Before his Versailles stint, he and Emilie had been at the heart of Europe's new “republic of letters”: a meritocracy where decisions were to be made not on the basis of blind authority, but rather on an open, humane response to the facts.

  At Versailles, however, truth was determined in a different way. What the king wanted was true, and what his top advisers wanted could also become true. Science didn't matter. The hierarchy at court determined what could be thought and what could be said.

  Everything was crumbling. Voltaire had begun an affair with his now widowed niece Marie-Louise—incest between uncle and niece was much less abhorrent in Catholic countries then than it is now— but although that was thrilling for him at the start, she was a bit more cynical about it. When he managed to hobble up from the privy at the bottom of his Versailles stairwell, change out of his soiled dressing gown, bathe, shave his scalp and chin, dab on the clove oil he needed to keep his gums from hurting too much, have his manservant prepare a properly powdered wig, and make it all the way from the court for a romantic event at Marie-Louise's apartment in central Paris, he found that this voluptuous young lady often seemed distracted. (To one of her more appreciated lovers at the time she wrote: “I can barely believe, dear heart, that Voltaire is coming to dine with me again tonight…. I can't get out of it.”)

  And then after the flirting and the sex, when he had to talk to her, he realized what he'd always known. It was Emilie who had been right about Frederick, just as she had been right to warn him against getting pulled too far into Versailles. She understood him. No one would ever replace her.

  The question was how to get her back. It was especially hard, for he was too proud to apologize, and she certainly wasn't going to sleep with him after what he'd put her through. But they both knew they still had too much of a shared past to ever be content living entirely apart from each other: the years of daily talk, the dreams they'd shared at Cirey and after.

  They began, tentatively, taking trips that threw them together more intensely than they'd been for years. In the summer of 1747 they spent weeks on end as guests in a château about seventy miles from Paris. Both went through the forms of working, and the other houseguests were upset that they didn't see this mysterious couple for hours on end during the day, for both were busy in their own rooms. At the end of the visit, servants found that Emilie had pushed together a great number of tables in her rooms to make a big working area for her writing desk, her stacks of manuscript pages, and the big folio sheets she needed for the cascades of calculus lines she needed to develop. Her inner resources were strong enough to make her creativity come back. Voltaire, by contrast, had done nothing more than make minor editing changes on a potboiler of a play he'd been niggling over for months. After all his years spent at Versailles, he had become utterly empty.

  He knew he needed to get Emilie's full respect back if he was ever going to recover his skill. But what powerful event would allow him to convince her he was on her side enough to deserve it?

  In October 1747 the court undertook its annual move from Versailles (ten miles west of Paris), to the old palace and hunting lodges of Fontainebleau (beside a forest forty miles southeast of Paris). Voltaire had to go along, for although he was cautiously trying to get closer with Emilie again, his main lodgings, and efforts, were still at the court. Emilie for her part now decided to come along too. She had friends there, from her family connections, as well as from the socializing she'd done on her own in Paris. There also was gambling she could look forward to, for her skill had now come back; there was no doubt the pull of familiarity with Voltaire as well.

  Voltaire had a new chief servant now, Sébastien Longchamp, and it was with great, punctilious exactness that he oversaw the arrangements. Longchamp ensured that all their baggage was brought and unpacked, as well as the most important manuscripts and books, sufficient ink, quills, and fresh paper. It was also his job to see that fires were made in their respective rooms, that there was good stabling for the horses, and that the junior servants were well lodged. The logistics were complicated, but Longchamp lived to serve, and was so utterly without curiosity that he was ideal at his job. It all went without trouble until they'd been at Fontainebleau a few days, as Longchamp recorded:

  When I finished consuming my repast I returned to the rooms, and began neatly copying the manuscript Voltaire had left for me. The hour was achieving a lateness, but I was not worried for I was quite aware that individuals of Monsieur or Madame's social rank often remain out late.

  They arrived back at the time of 1:30 a.m., and it occurred to me that they were in a hurry. I would go so far as to say that they looked anxious. Madame informed me that they had to leave immediately. I was to rouse the servants, and get the horses ready.

  I responded to her requests with alacrity, and I chose to first wake the coachman, informing him of the necessity of harnessing the horses. I then attempted to assemble the other servants, but there was insufficient time for this further task. As soon as the horses were ready, Madame du Châtelet and M. de Voltaire climbed into the carriage, with but a single chambermaid, and only two or three of their many bags. They immediately left Fontainebleau. It was dark, for the hour was still well before dawn.

  What had happened? Emilie had known that several individuals at the court who liked to gamble for very high stakes were likely to be there that week. To be ready for those high stakes she'd brought a great deal of cash—400 louis—with her from Paris, and it seems she'd puzzled out a new strategy she thought she could use. On her first day of gambling, however, something had gone wrong, and she'd lost all the

  400 louis. Voltaire had quickly given her 200 louis more, and that disappeared too.

  She spent the next morning going over what might have happened, and when gambling began again, probably in the late afternoon or early evening, she had more funds in hand: 380 louis that she'd had sent from Paris, much of which she'd had to borrow at high interest.

  It was rare for a woman to bet using any intricate strategy, let alone a woman who, it became clear, could very quickly compute changed probabilities as each game went on. The betting continued, and her winnings went up and down; as the evening grew late, there were dense rows of glowing candles, for light as well as to help in heating the big room. Cold air gusted in through cracks in the walls; there was talc and perfume from everyone standing so densely crowded around the players. Voltaire, well dressed as always—his latest bout of dysentery was cured, and his wig preparers had perfected their technique—was standing immediately beside Emilie, keeping an eye on her, and the cards, and the other players, as well as on all the courtiers he knew so well.

  By midnight she was somehow losing more, and had to borrow extra funds on her word of honor; by 12:30 a.m. something serious was happening, she was losing a fortune; by about 1a.m. she was down the immense sum of 84,000 francs—the equivalent in purchasing power of perhaps a million dollars today. It would be hard for that to
have happened if all the other players were honest. Voltaire had known not to interrupt her while she was playing, but now, as she was breathing deep, taking in the enormous figure, he leaned close. He needed a great gesture to impress her and support her, to show that he was back with her.

  They'd become used to speaking in English when they didn't want the servants to understand what they were saying. Possibly he gave a final quick glance around the room before whispering to her, in English: what did she expect from playing with cheats?

  It was a dangerous accusation, even if true. He and Emilie were in the official rooms where gambling had been authorized by the queen, and only the highest aristocracy was allowed to play here. If someone had been cheating, then it was someone who lived within the very top circle of court society.

  By saying those words, he'd joined his fate with hers. She'd lost a fortune, which was serious trouble, but he'd insulted the queen and top courtiers, which put him in even greater jeopardy. He could be jailed or exiled for that.

  If he and Emilie were very lucky, no one would have heard, or if they did, they wouldn't have understood his English words. But Emilie now saw that one of the courtiers had registered what Voltaire said. A murmur began, spreading from table to table. She quickly looked to him. They wouldn't make any fuss or say a word, but they would turn and walk out of the room without delay.