Passionate Minds

by David Bodanis

  Voltaire had Zadig get caught in one after another of the seemingly arbitrary twists that Voltaire had experienced himself. It was never clear whether the twists would turn out for better or for worse. After being forced to flee Babylon, for example—and seemingly having left an innocent woman in peril by his escape—Zadig is sunk in despair as he journeys toward exile in Egypt. At that point Voltaire deftly shifts perspectives, drawing on all the feeling for astronomy that he and Emilie had shared in their first years together:

  Zadig set his course by the stars. The constellation of Orion and the brilliant star Sirius guided him toward the pole of Canopus. He marvelled at these vast globes of light which to our eyes appear to be only feeble sparks, whereas the Earth, but an imperceptible point in nature, appears to our cupidity as something so great and so noble. He then visualized men as they really are, insects devouring one another on a little atom of mud. This true picture seemed to annihilate his misfortunes, by retracing for him the nullity of his own being and of Babylon. His soul flew up into the infinite and, now detached from his senses, contemplated the immutable order of the universe. But when later, returning to himself and looking into his own heart again, he thought how the woman he'd left [Astarté] was perhaps dead for his sake, the universe disappeared from before his eyes, and he saw nothing… but Astarté dying, and Zadig miserable.

  There's no answer to the problems of life, for before we can fix on one conclusion, more events always get in the way. “As Zadig gave himself up to this ebb and flow—of sublime philosophy, and overwhelming grief—he was advancing toward the frontiers of Egypt. His faithful servant was in the first village, looking for lodging.” The British critic William Empson liked describing the power of ambiguity in literature. If an author insists that only one view is true, there's little we can do but accept or reject that view. It easily gets tedious, like a prose article we can read only once. But when the author holds two contrasting views and weaves a narrative where both are somehow true, then we're pulled to it more. (Good music is similar, being both powerful yet also evasive, so that we can listen to it over and over, our mind approaching it afresh each time.)

  There was a great consolation in Zadig, for although the events seem random, Voltaire, scribbling away up in his isolated Sceaux room, was able to guarantee that there was meaning to it all. In these fables, he was not just the randomly twisting hero down below; he was also the God up above, controlling all that happened.

  Once again, his writing was picking up on and furthering something very topical in the wider world. He and Emilie had long been interested in contemporary architecture, where a switch was taking place from rococo exuberance to cleaner neoclassical lines. She'd helped create a mix of those two styles at Cirey. In these stories the random twists of the main character were like rococo details, while the calm narrator's voice carrying all those twists forward so calmly was like the neoclassical columns holding a modern edifice up.

  The duchesse generally left Voltaire alone till midnight or 1a.m. before sending for “Museo” to see her. Voltaire would then clamber down the secret stairwell—or use the creaking lift—to reach her rooms on the ground floor. There the director of the Honey Bee Society would be (“her aged face like transparent parchment”) sitting up in bed, gesturing to a tiny table beside her, where she'd had candles lit and an extra dinner laid out. Voltaire would have his meal and chat with her, then take out the manuscripts he'd been working on and perform the homage she'd always expected would one day come to pass in her château.

  He would read to her, page after manuscript page of these new stories he was pouring out. Back in the 1710s, she'd devised a series of competitions for the young, energetic guests at Sceaux: there had been riddles, songs, and ballet steps to try on nighttime walks by the private lakes. The forfeit for losing was to tell her a story. The young Voltaire had once improvised such a tale for everyone's delight in that parkland at night, about a beautiful princess and her shy writerly admirer. She has the divine ability to achieve multiple orgasms at will; he, the humble scribe, can but observe in wonder.

  Its whimsy had pleased the assembled audience then, and now, these many decades later—he in his fifties, she in her seventies—he sat again beside her, legs tucked under the small dining table. They both were too old to be embarrassed by what age had brought them: both were wrinkled and increasingly frail; he needed to wear his thick nightcap, since the felt pad he normally wore under his wig wasn't warm enough on these winter nights; she probably had her own wig off; they both seem to have been clad in dressing gowns. None of that mattered. In the stories he was reciting, he was young again, and she, listening to these words, was young as well.

  Because he was speaking it to her—and because he always was highly attuned to what his audience wanted—Voltaire began to change the way he wrote. He was a famous writer, but to our ears most of what he'd written for the theater is hard to enjoy. This is because he'd accepted, as did everyone else in France, that there was a hierarchy in writing styles, and near the top was the form known as the alexandrine, where each line has twelve syllables and a pause is mandatory after the sixth syllable. Sometimes the repetitive singsong that results works well, as anyone who's taken trains in France will remember. The standard boarding announcement—“Messieurs, dames les voyageurs, en voiture s'il vous plaît ”—is close to an alexandrine. But used for hours on end it gets hard to take.

  One sentence must rise and, from that peak it must fall

  This may happen quickly, or it may then be slow

  But it must keep on thus, however dull the rush

  Voltaire's prose histories had been fairly free of this, but even there he'd felt pulled toward epigrams and balanced sentences that work well enough on the page but are too mannered to be compelling when read aloud at length. In these secret nights with the frail duchesse, though, he didn't have to fall back into that. In his rush of creativity, he even began playing with those formal alexandrine forms he'd once held so sacred.

  To do this, Voltaire had Zadig write a four-line verse about the king. When his friends ask to read it, Zadig tells them that a true noble writes only for his beloved; he breaks the clay tablet it is written on into two halves, and throws them into a thick rosebush. An unscrupulous character pulls one of those halves out, and it looks as if Zadig is done for, for the broken fragment reads:

  The king, of course, is going to consign poor Zadig to death, but at the last minute a bird flies into the rosebush and brings out the second fragment, which reads:

  It seems useless, until Zadig's beloved and the king see the perfect alexandrines that were intended when the lines are joined:

  The revised tale was called Zadig. The director of the Honey Bee Society was content—her plans for her château had come true, just as she'd expected—and Voltaire was more than content. He'd written a great deal since his failure with the fire experiments, which had been almost exactly a decade earlier, in the summer of 1737. But aside from his Discourse in Verse on Man, in 1738, he had been in a creative trough, made worse by the ridiculous years spent at court after his failure with Frederick. Now, though—jump-started by the isolated room, the gloomy Longchamp, and the chirpily confident duchesse—he had come up with the greatest new literary form of his life. These philosophical fables were—as he guessed, with accuracy—the writings that would ensure his immortality.

  Voltaire could be lazy and dawdle beyond mortal sufferance when his writing was stuck—his whole Versailles interlude had been such a delay, in his desolation at losing Emilie's respect. But here he was fired up, amidst the candles in that shutter-dark room.

  Longchamp was more worried than ever, for “now my M. de Voltaire engaged in less sleep than he ever had experienced before. Despite my remonstrations he took no exercise, and instead consumed the totality of his waking hours in this nearly continuous writing.” One fable after another was coming out—Zadig, and portions of text that led to “Micromégas.” They and Voltaire's later writings i
n this genre— most notably Candide— have remained in print for almost two centuries and given sweet, saddened consolation to generations of readers. Longchamp recounts:

  By all the greatest crimes, the earth is racked and sore Established on the throne, the king controls our sphere In these our peaceful times, 'tis only Love makes war He is the foe alone, whom now men have to fear.

  Approximately two months passed, of this somewhat repetitive existence at Sceaux, until one wonderful day Madame du Châtelet arrived. I gather she was so excited that instead of addressing our distinguished hostess, the duchesse du Maine, she wished to inform M. de Voltaire in person of certain news that she carried.

  She took the stairwell we knew so well, up to our solitary apartment, and there informed Monsieur—and my humble personage as well—that the gambling debt from Fontainebleau had been sufficiently paid. I swiftly recognized that this meant those personages who had been disposed to harm my master and mistress had seen the error of their ways. In other words, M. de Voltaire was now at liberty to exit our château.

  I was most pleased at this information, and indeed—if I might say—I briefly experienced a sensation of great rejoicing. But all was not to be as I then expected.

  Emilie thought she'd come to rescue him, but Voltaire didn't want to leave. His writing was going better than it had in many, many years; no setting he could imagine at Versailles, or in Paris, or even back at Cirey would inspire him in the same way. He wasn't about to tell Emilie to leave, however, and he knew how much she loved to act and sing (her voice was still excellent). Wouldn't it be kind to their hostess—and a further reminder of the good days at Cirey—to create an impromptu play at Sceaux? There were plenty of his manuscripts Emilie could get from Paris that would be ideal.

  And that is what they did. Fresh servants were hired, and the château spruced up as it hadn't been in years. There were actors to hire, and dancers from Paris; letters to be sent to the duchesse's elderly friends who might want to act; pages of text and music to have copied for the more professional actors who would have to be involved as well; musical instruments to dust off; the great hall to rearrange; and dozens of other tasks.

  Voltaire tried to stay out of it and keep on with his writing, but after a few weeks he gave up. All the noise and bustle was too much fun. He left the manuscripts where they were and joined in, directing and rewriting and giving advice to anyone who would listen. Emilie was happy. It was delightful to be with Voltaire when he was in this mood, and she enjoyed the quick teasing that she could give him when his directorial instructions—as often happened—were irrelevant, contradictory, or both.

  After a few preliminary efforts they were ready for the big performance. It would be on December 15, and since it meant so much— and now that he finally was free of his upstairs room—Voltaire decided that they shouldn't stint on the invitations. He had Emilie arrange for a print run of several hundred, which they had their servants distribute to everyone they knew in Paris, and then Voltaire had more invitations printed, which might as well be offered to all those interesting people they didn't know. One guest jotted down what was written on the invitation:

  A new company of actors will present an original comedy on Friday 15 December, at the theater of Sceaux. Everyone is welcome. Come at 6 o'clock promptly. Order your [returning] carriage to be in the courtyard between 7.30 and 8. After 6 o'clock, the doors will be closed to the public.

  It turned dark early that winter afternoon, but the carriages started coming anyway. There were dozens, then more dozens, and soon there were hundreds. By the time of the strict 6p.m. cutoff—with Longchamp no doubt happily fussing to enforce the rules—as many as five hundred people had crowded into the director of the Honey Bee Society's no-longer-forgotten château. It was the greatest gathering Sceaux had seen—and the finest of thank-yous from one now-recovered writer to his trusting elderly friend.

  22

  The Court of Stanislas and Catherine

  LUNéVILLE, 1748

  Neither of them wanted to go back to the coldness of the past few years after that. But Paris and the nearby court at Versailles had too many overtones of what had gone wrong. It was time to leave.

  Without quite saying why—and carefully explaining to Paris friends that they were just trying this for a while—Emilie and Voltaire hired a carriage, loaded up crates of books and clothes, squeezed in Emilie's maid, and sent Longchamp a half-day ahead so that he could make sure hot meals were ready at all the inns they would use along way. They would return, once more, to Cirey.

  It was cold when they arrived, and there hadn't even been time to warn Madame Champbonin, so there was no greeting committee as there had been most other times. But the few staff that always remained at the château had been alerted by Longchamp, and so several of the fireplaces were blazing; extra food would be brought in soon as well.

  After they had been there only a few days, a carriage with striking insignia pulled into the graveled courtyard. It was the crest of Stanislas, the deposed king of Poland. His daughter had married Louis XV, and Stanislas had been granted control of the wealthy duchy of Lorraine, to the east of Cirey. (French success at Philippsburg years before had given Versailles the power to install him there.) But stepping out was neither the great king himself nor one of his official ministers, but a medium-sized, middle-aged man, wearing the long black robes and distinctive collar crucifix of the Society of Jesus: Father Joseph de Menou.

  He'd met Emilie and Voltaire before, and on this cold January day he accepted their hearty invitation into the warmth of the château. There was easy conversation about what was happening at Lunéville, where Stanislas's Lorraine court was located, and interested queries about the gossip from Versailles. Only as the day went on did Menou broach his purpose. Would, by any chance, these two individuals care to visit the great King Stanislas at Lunéville? They would be hosted in style, and because of Voltaire's stature as a poet and Emilie's renown as a scientific thinker, it would be an honor: exactly what Stanislas had long dreamed of for his loyal Lorraine subjects.

  This was tempting: it could be yet another bonding adventure, and would also be less pressured than uninterrupted weeks facing each other at Cirey. After a brief private discussion, Emilie and Voltaire told Father Menou that they accepted.

  Almost as soon as they got to Lunéville—and even though they were put up in grand apartments in the main palace—they realized that Menou hadn't actually been as altruistic as he'd pretended. Stanislas had a mistress, the casually sensual Catherine de Boufflers, and Menou couldn't bear her and her influence on the good king.

  For over a year Menou had been trying to get rid of her, telling the sixty-six-year-old married Stanislas that fornication with the gorgeous Catherine would condemn his soul to hell for all eternity. Just to be sure the warning took—for Menou, although celibate, understood that fallible humankind, and male humankind in particular, is prone to lapses—Menou had the king fund a vast retreat building, where he would bring Stanislas for days of somber, chilling reflection.

  Each time Stanislas emerged he was shaken, and his soul was hardened: nothing, he realized—and this knowledge was now in his body, not just in his mind—nothing was worth chancing the damnation that lurked just a few years ahead. That's why Catherine, the mistress, knew never to approach him in the first hours after Father Menou let go. She would wait, often till the next morning—even older, morally chastened men are liable to find a resurgence of corporeal interest upon waking—before sitting on the end of the royal bed, casually holding the royal arm, and perhaps letting a firm young forefinger trace circles on the royal shoulder.

  The medieval logician Jean Buridan described the plight of what came to be called Buridan's ass, which was placed exactly equidistant between two equally tempting piles of tasty hay and consequently died of starvation, unable to decide which way to turn. Stanislas was more sensible in his decision making. He couldn't risk his immortal soul by not going to regular confession, let alo
ne missing the more occasional deep spiritual retreats with Father Menou. But since his physical body was, as Menou pointed out, such a fragile, insignificant, ramshackle thing, it would be most inconsiderate to keep the thoughtful Catherine de Boufflers from offering her regular ministrations as well. In his dilemma, both body and soul had to undergo these regular salves.

  This was the impasse that the frustrated Menou had resolved to break. A more discreet mistress might just have been acceptable, but a mistress who had lived in Lunéville for many years and built up an entire faction of courtiers and officials willing to mock Jesuit authority was too much. Menou couldn't force Stanislas to drop Catherine, tempting though that might be, for she had family connections at Versailles (and Stanislas, although easygoing in most things, was protective of certain pleasures). But if Menou could distract the king by offering him someone more worthy, then perhaps the king himself would drop de Boufflers. A famed thinker such as Madame du Châtelet would be ideal—hence the invitation at Cirey. Menou had heard how separate she and Voltaire had been in Paris, and thought she'd be attracted to the wealthy, distinguished old king.

  It was a total misreading by the celibate Jesuit. It's true that Emilie and Voltaire were no longer the tightly bonded couple they'd been in the first years at Cirey. But this didn't mean that Emilie would have any interest in Stanislas.