That's how they ended up riding quickly to their main lodging, where Longchamp was, and having him rouse the coachman so that they could flee before anyone with powers of arrest could be woken and sent to intercept them. Longchamp stayed behind to gather the rest of their bags and would only leave for Paris once day broke.
The carriage was going fast when it left Fontainebleau, but the road was rutted, and a wheel suddenly broke. The carriage skidded on one corner; it didn't turn over, but the horse could drag it no more. The nearest town was still at least a mile or more ahead. To their relief, a wheelwright soon appeared out of the dark, drawn by their driver's torches. (The arrival wasn't as much blind chance as it might appear, for hundreds of nobles and their carriages were at Fontainebleau, which meant there was an influx of wheelwrights and other mechanics to tend to them all. It's likely that a few industrious repairers made sure the ruts at corners coming into nearby towns were kept especially deep, to ensure regular business.)
Their carriage, now fixed, continued on its way into Paris, and arrived, pushing into those muddy streets, before midday.
20
To Sceaux
The Court, late 1670s;
Paris and Château de Sceaux, November 1747
Emilie's first job, when she got back, was to start repaying her enormous debts. There was no way she could earn the money in time through investments, or even by remortgaging her family's various properties. But she knew that Voltaire had made a fortune after his return from England by ingeniously seeing a flaw in the Paris lottery. Emilie now took a leaf from that and began using her imagination to search out other financial opportunities that no one had recognized, and obtain the cash she needed that way.
What she realized, after just a few weeks, was that there would be a great demand in France for some organization that could supply decent streams of cash at reasonable interest rates. Large workshops and trading companies needed that, but there was no stock market and no well-developed bond market to supply it.
Now she thought of another way. Taxes in France weren't collected directly by the government—as we saw, there was no civil service capable of that. Instead, the king let a few private individuals collect taxes, for a high fee. After those individuals had collected enough to pay that fee, they got to keep the rest.
She couldn't take over that role, for the individuals who had the rights to it wouldn't let go. But those tax collectors themselves often needed money to organize the large private bureaucracies they required to collect taxes from across the nation. What if she offered to pay them for the right to get some of that money they'd earn in the future? Since hardly anyone was aware of this opportunity, she could buy what they'd be earning in the future at a low price. Once she had the tax collectors signed up, she could then tell the court gamblers (whose money she'd “lost”) that she'd pay them back by giving them some of that future money when it arrived.
It was a modern form of derivatives, and she didn't even need to keep it running until she had the full 84,000 francs she owed. The Fontainebleau cheats knew they'd gone too far, since they of course had also been violating the royal honor by rigging the games played at the queen's table. In exchange for accepting partial payment as a settlement, Emilie quietly promised that she wouldn't use her family connections to start an embarrassing investigation into how they'd arranged their cheating. The whole maneuver didn't cost Emilie anything, for the tax collectors were so dim that they had accepted the promise of a fairly low amount of money for the right to their future earnings. When those earnings did start coming in, months or years later, Emilie would get a profit.
It would take a month or more for her to complete all the contracts, and in that time Voltaire remained in danger of arrest. To avoid that, the two of them shared another secret. Voltaire had been in the carriage when it left Fontainebleau, and even when its wheel was fixed. But when it had arrived in Paris the next morning, he'd been nowhere to be seen—to everyone but Emilie and a very few trusted friends, it was as if he'd vanished from the face of the Earth.
What they'd agreed on during that night ride was that the carriage would stop on an empty road outside Paris. There Voltaire had stepped down, intending to go into hiding until Emilie cleared the gambling debt. There was little question where he would end up, for he knew who could be counted on to shelter him in any argument with the court.
Back in the reign of Louis XIV, the king's most revered mistress had a son who was so playful and so outgoing that the king came to like him far more than his petulant, spoiled legitimate children. Louis XIV kept the boy near, and recognized him as the duc du Maine.
When he was twenty-one years old, du Maine married the one other person at court who felt as strongly as he that the king's official children didn't deserve to continue the royal line. This was the young granddaughter of the great prince de Condé, that warrior who'd almost taken over the throne in the civil wars of the mid-1600s but had ended up rowing harmlessly around the royal reflecting ponds. Yet he hadn't been as content as he seemed, and rather had been biding his time while passing on to his granddaughter the belief that one day she should redeem his line.
When that child married the Sun King's favored but illegitimate son, a center of opposition to the official court was created. The du Maine couple had to wait, but in 1717 the regent who'd snatched power after Louis XIV's death began to move against them. The duc du Maine wasn't sure how to fight back, but his wife was different. No offspring of a Condé was going to accept this further usurpation against the rightful heirs. The duchesse—although a tiny blond pixie of a woman—explained to her husband that they were going to take over the government.
For such a task it helps to have a safe base of command, and this the young du Maine couple had par excellence, having been granted a magnificent château at Sceaux, a few miles southwest of Paris. There were forests and lakes surrounding it, turrets and arches and secret passageways within. The duchesse du Maine orchestrated furtive meetings and the assembling of printing presses. There were messages in invisible ink among the conspirators, double and triple agents, and intense coded communications with the Spanish court (whose military forces would help in the takeover).
The plot was revealed, however, and the du Maines were imprisoned for several years—a stint that for the duchesse included a solitary cell in the prison fortress at Dijon. When she was released she went back to Sceaux, and a little later her husband joined her. Before the plot, when they'd been France's unofficial anointed couple, they'd had weeks on end of entertainment, with fireworks, orchestras, and entire theaters invited for their dozens of ebullient guests. Now, after the collapse of their plot, no one with any interest in advancing at court could be seen visiting them.
The couple waited in their isolated palace, and when in time the duc died, the tiny duchesse waited some more. Season succeeded season; decade followed decade. There were a handful of loyal visitors from the old days, who stayed for months in scattered rooms here and there, but as the years went on and they died off, there were fewer and fewer times when the once grand palace was lit up as before.
When Voltaire stepped out of the coach that he and Emilie were escaping from Fontainebleau in, he'd waited till sunrise, then calmly walked to the isolated town of Villejuif. He was old enough to remember the tiny, forgotten duchesse du Maine from her glory days, and had kept in occasional touch over the years. He knew that if she was at all like the rebel she'd been those decades before, she'd take the side of anyone persecuted by the court.
From Villejuif he paid a peasant to go to her now, and soon got the reply he wished, including detailed instructions. Voltaire hired a horse in Villejuif and, once the hour was late enough, began riding to Sceaux.
It was freezing as the twilight came, but the duchesse had been adamant about the rules he needed to follow. Under no circumstances was he to be seen in daylight. The last paths through the woods and lakes around the château were especially hard to follow in the utter dark, especially with snow on t
he ground. When he emerged from the woods, finally in front of the château, he was frozen, exhausted, and deeply famished (for he hadn't dared to show his face at any inn or tavern in Villejuif).
The château had a huge banqueting hall, but when Voltaire met the trusted elderly retainer who was waiting for him, at a grilled porthole near the entry, it was clear that the duchesse's plans had only begun. Although there was hardly anyone in the château, there might be a leftover guest somewhere or other who would notice any sign of an arrival late at night. Under no circumstances would she let the important “personage”—for Voltaire's name was not to be mentioned— take that risk.
In the old days, when Sceaux had been used for important missions, the duchesse had built a secret stairwell. The servant led Voltaire along that now, skirting the empty rooms. Only at the top floor did the silent servant lead him out and show him to the room the duchesse had arranged for him. It didn't face the woods or lakes, for any spy the king sent with a telescope might see him from there; instead it overlooked the château's inner courtyard. But the shutters on that inward-facing window were still closed tight, to guarantee secrecy from any stray guests on the lower floor. The servant had led the way with a candle.
The duchesse had to greet her guest—it was the one inviolate rule of country house arrivals—but climbing secret stairwells in stone fortresses is tiring enough for lanky, aging poets, and she was seventy and not in the best of health. Nothing, however, was going to keep a proud Condé down. Voltaire heard a creaking, grinding sound break the stillness of the night. The duchesse had long ago had a lift-like contraption installed in the château, run by a combination of counterweights in the lift shaft and sturdy servants tugging away on the ground floor. In this ingenious device, the tiny duchesse now ascended to the honored guest's floor, then walked the cold corridors to his room.
Voltaire was close to the wondrously inviting bed and had only to take off his wig and jacket and curl under the thick stuffed quilts to fall into the sleep he no doubt craved (for he hadn't been to bed since the night before the card-cheating scandal). But the duchesse knew the proprieties for welcoming a guest, and there were further instructions— she'd had decades to prepare—about how the escapee was to be protected. He could be assured that no word would leak from her lips, but there would have to be code names—the duchesse had always liked being called “director of the Honey Bee Society.” And then there was the schedule to be agreed on, and arrangements for food, for her poor visitor must be starving—though this, Voltaire, listening to her weave her intricate vision, yet knowing the rules of established country house etiquette, would have to respond was ridiculously far from the truth.
21
Zadig
CHâTEAU DE SCEAUX, NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 1747
When Voltaire woke the next day, his misfortunes had only just begun. Under normal circumstances a servant would be waiting near, to be instructed to open the shutters. The duchesse du Maine, however, had decided even natural sunlight would be too dangerous. Her guest was in hiding from the king, and she knew what that was like.
Voltaire was going to live in the dark, for there was too great a danger of him being seen otherwise. What if a guest or one of the untested servants from the main body of the château saw some movement from this window, even during the day?
The duchesse understood, of course, that he was a writer, and that he had certain needs. That's why “Museo” (for direct names still had to be avoided, and this seems to have been Voltaire's assigned code name) would have seen so many candles stacked up in the room. He could use this period of seclusion to write her a story.
It must have made the privy-bottomed, converted kitchen rooms he'd left at Versailles seem like heaven. Even if most of the courtiers and visiting ambassadors there were superficial, there had always been several individuals around—as with Richelieu or the quick Ms. Poisson—well worth talking to. But here the creaking of the ramshackle lift going down meant that the duchesse was leaving him for what might be days on end. He couldn't bring his niece Marie-Louise over from Paris, since she could keep a secret about as long as Voltaire himself could, and in any case she was far too used to luxury to ever accept this single room. Emilie was out also, for this bare single room would make it clear that his noble, supportive words at the gambling table hadn't been quite as successful as intended. Instead, as Longchamp recounts:
I received the following day instructions to find Monsieur de Voltaire at a new residence he had taken up, at the Château de Sceaux. It was impressed upon me that the strictest confidence must be practiced about this. I was to transport to him the small portable writing table in which we had always placed his unfinished manuscripts.
The instructions were for me to arrive at 11 p.m. exactly, and I was, if I might say, precisely on time. Madame du Maine's guard met me at the gate, and led me up to a small apartment, hidden on the second floor.
But he wasn't to be let back home. Servants were nearly invisible and their absence rarely noted. He had more news: “It was there, I found, that I was to spend nearly two months with M. de Voltaire.”
It's possible that there have been two individuals less suited to sharing a single room—one thinks of Cain and Abel—but the historical record is silent on them. Longchamp would perch eagerly on the edge of the bed or on a chair in their dark, candle-gloomy room and wait for Voltaire to give him rough manuscript drafts to recopy. Voltaire, unable to write anything with him there, would pace, or peer through gaps in the shutters, or sometimes escape into the upper hallways when du Maine's gatekeeper wasn't watching, but before long he'd have to come back to the room, where the ever-polite Longchamp would be stiffly waiting, an angel of creative death amidst the candles.
When Voltaire couldn't bear it any longer he'd probably tell Longchamp he didn't have to sit waiting at the writing table, but since there's no record of Longchamp ever reading anything or otherwise entertaining himself, this would just make things worse. “I slept a great part of those days,” Longchamp recorded, “for it is true that the lack of activities to help with was a difficulty for one such as myself. I am chagrined to admit that to alleviate my tedium I sometimes [consumed my sole meal of the day very slowly], continuing till one or indeed even two a.m.” There was no escape for either man, since they had to wait at Sceaux for however long it would take Emilie to set up the financial instruments she was devising to pay back the gambling debt.
Sometimes Voltaire managed to send Longchamp away on furtive errands into Paris—for which, by the duchesse's rules, Longchamp would have to leave before dawn, and return only late at night. But that just made Voltaire's isolation worse (“I saw that my absences bothered him as well,” Longchamp observed).
Eventually there was no alternative. Voltaire had to start writing, even if it killed him. But what? The château was an ideal place to look back on the failure of his life. In over thirty years of effort he'd written about Oedipus, English governance, Inca lovers, Newton's laws of gravitation, the nature of envy, and military battles; he'd received ovations at the Comédie Française, galloped across Westphalia, and entertained at many, many dinners. If he was despondent, he'd say his accomplishments added up to nothing. If he was even more despondent, he'd say that his bare life experience was the only thing he actually did know about.
Which… raised an interesting possibility. Why not take some of the old manuscripts from that portable writing table the ghoulish Longchamp had brought, and work on them, writing totally afresh if needed, but this time writing not in formal meter, or for any audience at the court, or the Science Academy, or even at Cirey. What if he wrote just for himself—and only about himself?
And so he began. There was an old tale he'd once started, on the adventures of a young Middle Eastern noble. In itself that manuscript had been too random, just a series of disconnected episodes. Now Voltaire pushed that to one side. He took out a fresh sheet of paper. The royal censor who'd tormented him for years, under Phélypeaux's eye, had
been an old literary hack named Crébillon. The new tale, the one Voltaire would write without any care for how it was received— for it would be private, and composed just to break the grinding tedium of this candlelit room—would begin with a direct tease at Phélypeaux's censoring apparatus. His quill dipped into the ink, and he mimicked almost exactly the pompous way Crébillon and other minions phrased their proclamations—but with a twist:
Approbation
I the undersigned, who have passed myself off as a man of learning and even of wit, have read this manuscript, which, in spite of myself, I have found curious, amusing, moral … and worthy of pleasing even those who hate literature. So I have disparaged it and assure the authorities that it is a detestable work.
Now he was off. He'd reenact his own life's odyssey from Cirey on! The tale would begin in tranquility, with the hero starting in an isolated, perfect kingdom. He couldn't call it Cirey—the cover name would be Babylon—and he'd call the hero Zadig (from the Hebrew for “just man”). There would be a woman Zadig loved, from the highest social levels—the Emilie character—and she would have once loved him too. But when he made a mistake she would be too judgmental and drop him. Only much later, when she realized that he wasn't flawed, would she want him back. There would also have to be a Marie-Louise character, from a far more humble background, who somehow ends up betrothed to Voltaire/Zadig along the way.
Those twists were fine, but he was aiming for something richer now. Voltaire had always wondered how random anyone's life really is. What if Zadig's quest now incorporated the problem of whether our life's events create a coherent meaning or not? That way, Voltaire's fictional character would be trying to understand his life for him.
Longchamp's days changed. There were a lot of candles now, and a lot of copying, for “all the time that Monsieur Voltaire was not asleep—and I assert that he slept only five or six hours at most—he now spent writing.” It got so busy—for when Voltaire was flying, his quill skidded in a blur of scribbled words—that they brought yet another servant to live in their tiny room, to tend to the chores that the frantically recopying Longchamp now no longer had time for: the stoking of fireplaces, the careful carrying of full chamber pots, the occasional errands into town.
Passionate Minds Page 21
