Passionate Minds

by David Bodanis

  Maybe I won't be able to say all this when we meet. But it's your choice if you want to threaten our life like this. I still want you—but I'm not going to be the person you're trying to make me become.

  It's up to you to change my views. My feelings are frozen, but at least there's one advantage in my feeling like this. I'd missed you desperately before.

  I miss you less now.

  While Emilie was deciding what to do, Voltaire was so preoccupied by rehearsals in Paris that he barely noticed that neither she nor Saint-Lambert showed signs of making it to his play. As part of his effort to get back in Marie-Louise's arms he'd asked her advice on an important bit of staging, but then, like a fool, he'd actually listened to what she said. It was a delicate matter, for his new play Sémiramis hinged on the discovery of the true murderer of a great king, and having seen Hamlet in London, Voltaire was tempted to bring a ghost onto the stage in Paris.

  It was daring, for the rules for drama in France were much stricter than they were in England, and no one had succeeded in doing this before. The question Voltaire had asked Marie-Louise was whether the ghost should appear dressed in ordinary clothes or should be shrouded in big black robes. Marie-Louise had decided that voluminous black shrouds were best.

  On the opening night, over a thousand people were in the audience, and the theater was so crowded that—as usual—many of them were crowded tight on the actual stage. Crébillon and others who had been insulted by Voltaire over the years—which meant a large percentage of all writers in Paris—had pooled together to hire a group of young aristocrats to hoot and yell insults during the play. Voltaire knew very well that Crébillon would try that, and so had paid substantially to get a larger group of applauders on his side.

  The play was going well, with the two groups of interrupters evenly balanced, until the ghost appeared.

  Possibly if it had been a more athletic ghost, Voltaire would have had a chance of victory. But it was an aged, stately actor who was now lost under Marie-Louise's chosen voluminous robes. There was no tradition of stage lights to guide such entrances, so there was a certain amount of ungainly staggering before he even managed to reach the stage. Crébillon's claque laughed. The ghost was angry and pushed harder to make his way forward. But the stage was crowded, and Voltaire's supporters made it worse, for they now pushed together, to try to see just who was coming their way whom they were trying to support. Dozens of young men were shoving back and forth; the other spectators onstage couldn't see what was happening, and so they had to push closer as well.

  All royal institutions needed an official guard, and the Comédie Française was no exception. When this largely ceremonial officer saw how the poor lost ghost was struggling to get onstage, he realized he had an important job to do and called out in a drilling voice: “Come on! Come on! Make way for the ghost!” It was downhill from there. The next day Voltaire went dressed in a thick cloak, with a big hat tipped low, to listen incognito to gossip at the nearby Café Procope. What he heard was so distressing that he decided to leave Paris almost immediately.

  He wanted Emilie's ministrations in this time of need, and told Longchamp to take him to Lunéville. His health had always been poor, he confided to Longchamp, and indeed, on the coach ride back he had a near-total physical collapse. He was unable to eat, losing ever more weight from his already thin frame.

  Longchamp was so worried that at one stop, where Voltaire seemed barely able to walk, he called for a priest, and also for the official governmental supervisor for the region. Voltaire waved the priest away and dictated some final notes to Longchamp, which he managed to sign with a weak, quivering letter V. Sunk in the depths of self-pity, and desolate at the thought of his life ending in this lost town, he looked at his servant and said that his one consolation was that at least the loyal Longchamp would be there to toss a handful of dirt on his grave.

  Emilie had little sympathy when she heard about this, and there's no evidence she even bothered to reply. She'd left the Plombières resort—suffering the embarrassment of realizing how much she'd confided about Saint-Lambert to Catherine—and had a far more serious matter to consider. Did she want Saint-Lambert back?

  He'd shown he could be a liar. But was that fundamental to his nature or just something he was prompted to do by pressure from the admittedly highly skilled Catherine? For perhaps Saint-Lambert was just getting so smitten by Emilie that Catherine had to show she was still in control. Yet would Catherine leave them alone after that?

  In the second week of September, everyone arrived back in Lorraine. (The court had moved to its autumn quarters in Commercy, a bit outside of Lunéville.) Voltaire had recovered, of course, as soon as Longchamp fed him some tasty, grease-soaked grilled birds, then gave him plenty of watered wine to drink, and made sure he had a long night's sleep. Catherine was smugly friendly again, though Emilie knew she couldn't trust her.

  Emilie made her decision. She needed love, and Saint-Lambert could give it. All she had to do was persuade him to focus on her. That shouldn't be too difficult, for she'd managed to make even Richelieu a reliable lover, after all. And even though she was older now, she could offer a world in Paris that was beyond anything Catherine knew. She spoke at length with Saint-Lambert, and they imagined how he'd meet her literary friends, and soon he was more committed than ever, leading her on walks, late-night rowing on the lakes, and more shared horse rides. He asked her to send him her portrait so that he could wear it in a watch, and specifically asked for one with her dressed as she'd been when she'd sung in the opera Issé, those first days when he'd seen her at Stanislas's court.

  Five years earlier, after Voltaire had been away for month after month at Frederick's court, Emilie had written that something goes out of a relationship when the partners are separated for too long. She didn't want that to happen with Saint-Lambert. They went back to regular lovemaking, sometimes in his room, and now increasingly often in hers. It wasn't the full love she wished, but she forced herself to believe that could come back.

  By now Voltaire recognized that something was going on, and one evening that October he descended from his upstairs apartment a little before the usual dinner time to do some exploring. “Finding no servant outside Emilie's door,” Longchamp later recounted,

  he felt free to enter without the usual procedure of being formally announced. My master then traversed her apartment, still without encountering any other person, until he came to a small room at the back, from which a dim light could be seen. He there came to believe that he saw Madame in close proximity with M. de Saint-Lambert, on a sofa in her chambers; engaged, if I might put it this way, in discourses which concerned neither poetry nor philosophy.

  Upon this striking turn of events, M. de Voltaire was struck with such surprise and indignation that he was unable to fully restrain his temper. He commented, with somewhat violent words, on what he had just seen. M. de SaintLambert, preserving an admirable sangfroid, remarked that he thought it inappropriate for M. Voltaire to censure his conduct, and that if the gentleman was unhappy, they merely had to leave the apartment, and step outside the château to conclude the argument.

  Voltaire knew that the pen was mightier than the sword, but he also understood the difference between a stirring metaphor and stepping out to imminent death. He tactfully withdrew from this threat by the quite fit young soldier, and instructed Longchamp to ready a coach: he was leaving, and he was leaving now.

  Emilie took Longchamp aside and told him to stall. Although she and Voltaire were no longer lovers, she realized that any male would be upset to so unambiguously see how she'd taken the obvious next step after the ending of their affair. She went to Voltaire's room, sat at the foot of his bed, and then said—while Longchamp prolonged the act of lighting the candles as long as possible—some words in English, which to Longchamp's ears sounded affectionate, but it was hard for him to tell. Only when he left them alone did they switch back to French, but since a humble servant was given a room across just
a very thin partition from the master's room, he was able—or so he said—to hear most of what came next.

  Emilie's first gambit was unimpressive. (She still didn't know the details of Voltaire's own affair, so she couldn't tax him with that.) Voltaire had weak eyes—he'd often said as much, hadn't he?—so had he considered that he might have been mistaken in what he thought he saw, given the low light in her rooms? This got Voltaire riled again— what he'd seen would have been impossible for a blind person to miss—so Emilie quickly changed tack and brought out her ultimate weapon: Voltaire's health.

  He was ill, was he not? He suffered, in a way that hardly any other mortal did, from a body that was fragile, delicate. Voltaire agreed, almost sadly. It was a shame that it took an occasion such as this for her compassion to come out, but yes, he had to admit she was quite right.

  With that major premise established, her syllogistic conclusion was swift. Did he not realize that she was doing all this—those endeavors he'd seen with Saint-Lambert—to protect Voltaire's health? Certainly he remembered how excitable her temperament in bed had been. A friend who was coldhearted would ignore all that and insist on making an invalid fullfil those requirements, with no care at all for his health. But Emilie cared. And given that she was going to be so considerate on his behalf, wasn't it best for the new partner to be a mutual friend, whom they could both admire?

  Voltaire's resistance melted. He'd always loved Emilie's extraordinary quickness, her sparkling confidence; he also—though this is something he wouldn't tell her—had reason, from a successful visit to Marie-Louise's during the latest Paris stay, to believe that that other relation might continue as well. A delicate acceptance of Emilie's logic was in order.

  The next day he met Saint-Lambert. But instead of demanding that the duel take place—which would have saddled poor SaintLambert with the dishonor of being the man who slaughtered Europe's greatest poet—Voltaire took the young writer's hands in a double grip and, almost in tears, refused even to accept his earnest apologies. “My child,” Longchamp recounts Voltaire saying, “I've forgiven everything.” He explained that it was he, Voltaire, who was in the wrong, while “you, however, are at the happy age where one can still be a lover.” He told Saint-Lambert to enjoy those pleasures, so brief in our life, and explained that an old man, an invalid like himself, was no longer made for such joys.

  It was such an attractive pose that Emilie didn't mind, even though they both understood it wasn't quite the truth. She knew he was having some sort of affair in Paris (though she guessed it was with a noted actress); he'd had his suspicions about her even before SaintLambert, when she'd taken to spending undue amounts of time with one of their most attentive lawyers in Brussels. But it didn't matter. If anything, their shared pretense that he was too old for romance brought their true friendship somehow closer. In their worst days, when he'd been racing back and forth to Frederick in Prussia, he'd written her a poem that captured how they could both imagine their relation to be. Liberally translated:

  Were I to still be a lover, You'd need to bring me back to the age of my first loving; to the start of my days.

  For I'm dying you see I can't be your lover I'm old.

  (It's the worst death It's a death worse than death)

  I can give you friendship, though from my heart I can; I swear I can…

  He wasn't too old to have sex, of course, as his times with MarieLouise showed. What he was really saying was that he wasn't fully in love with Emilie—but that their years together had opened them up so much to each other that he still needed her warmth. Emilie understood that now, and she and Voltaire were ever more at ease with each other that autumn.

  Voltaire's year was finishing well. He could write to Marie-Louise with confidence after his successful performances in Paris (“How is my beloved?… thinking of you gives me really quite frequent erections… I'm afire to see you every hour”). He was rewriting the mangled Sémiramis and was confident that by keeping spectators off the stage and working on the crucial last act, he would carry off another great success.

  Even the insistently independent Madame de Pompadour at Versailles was acting in a way he approved of. The Church still paid virtually no tax, even though it supported many thousands of officials of no discernible religious inclination: the government paid for almost all their needs, despite their enormous landed estates. A new finance minister, Jean-Baptiste de Machault, was proposing a minimum 5 percent tax, to at least begin to rectify that injustice.

  If the king supported Machault, then the Church would be his enemy—and that was something Pompadour was desperate to ensure. (For if, by contrast, the king did get emotionally close to the Church, he might drop her as a mark of his receiving divine grace, as he had dropped her predecessor Châteauroux in those fervid moments of sunstroke at Metz years before.) As a result, because of Pompadour's influence the king really did seem to be on the verge of establishing the country's finances in a rational, equitable way.

  Voltaire also found an ingenious way to publish Zadig. Printers had regularly pirated copies of his previous books by preparing several thousand extra copies when he gave them the manuscript and then selling those copies under the counter. One of the worst offenders had been the Prault family in Paris. Voltaire now contacted them, explained that bygones should be bygones, and—ostensibly under extreme secrecy—let them prepare several hundred copies of the first half of Zadig.

  He asked them to send him those initial copies for safekeeping until he could convey to them the second half of the text. (They, of course, had printed up thousands of additional copies of this first half, and were only waiting for his remaining text so that they could go ahead with their pirated editions and cheat him out of his payments as before.) What he neglected to tell them was that under similar secrecy he'd had a like-minded printer in Lorraine prepare a few hundred copies of the second half. He now collected the two sets of unbound pages, hired a few nimble-fingered local women, and had them do all the binding and sewing. The swindlers in Paris and Lorraine had been outswindled: he now distributed, through trusted business associates in Paris, small numbers of exactly the edition he wished.

  The Zadig story was hailed as a masterpiece, and Voltaire took that in his stride. He knew how good it was. Repeatedly in his life he'd appeared to be a fool—the bragging that got him sent to the Bastille, the failure of his fire experiments, the seemingly inane goading of Versailles authorities over the years. Yet repeatedly he'd also managed to turn defeat into victory. His stay in the Bastille had led to the triumph of his Oedipus, the de Rohan assault to his Letters from England, the fire experiment to his Discourse in Verse on Man. He needed the energy he acquired from those apparent defeats. The weeks spent locked up at Sceaux with Longchamp hadn't been an embarrassment either, but had led to this conquering success with Zadig. Once again he was able to show that he'd ended up on top.

  For Emilie, the rest of the autumn was far worse. For a while Saint-Lambert continued trying hard to romance her, with his mixture of elegance and occasional puppyish eagerness. But he was getting out of his depth. He laboriously wrote her a play now, about two Iroquois Indians who shared a wife. Emilie almost certainly kept from pointing out the obvious—how much worse it was than the texts Voltaire could dash off in a moment—but others at Lunéville undoubtedly made those comments for her.

  It's the problem all younger lovers face. Saint-Lambert was barely thirty, while Emilie was already forty-two. When a couple first meets, their relation can just be of two bodies, entranced in a timeless space, and there the younger one naturally has the advantage. As time goes on, though, wider life enters in.

  It would have been different if Saint-Lambert had been courting the usual possible companion for a man of his age, which would be a girl in her teens or early twenties. She would be impressed that he had occasional garrison command of an actual infantry group, albeit in the scarcely substantial army of Lorraine. Emilie's husband, FlorentClaude, however, had surpassed that
level thirty years before and was now one of his country's most distinguished cavalry officers, having commanded large battle groups in Europe's most powerful army. Saint-Lambert might also have bragged to a youngster about the position he held at the Lunéville court, but that was as nothing to the Versailles that Voltaire and Emilie knew so well.

  It wasn't much of a help that Emilie didn't care about these differences and even tried to encourage his career. To an old friend she wrote that she was sending “some verses written by a young man who…I know here. I feel sure that you'll like them. He's dying with envy to meet you—and he's quite worthy of it. I'd like to bring him to Cirey. Let's arrange for you to meet him there.”

  Saint-Lambert was humiliated. He knew he was failing—in skill, in charm, and in the ability to keep up with Emilie's social level, let alone ever support her. Even the romantic poem he'd presented to Emilie about waking up in the morning with her wasn't quite as effortlessly written as he'd implied. He'd labored over it for a long time, for he'd started it during his affair with Catherine a year before. But what young man is going to be happy admitting that he's incapable of matching a woman? It was made worse by the fact that he'd always been effortlessly attractive: handsome, yet shy enough in demeanor that women wanted to take care of him. He'd never had to face a truly hard problem before—and so he panicked. Instead of having the decency to say he couldn't continue their relationship, he began to shun her.

  Emilie had to pretend to outsiders that everything was all right. To another old friend in Paris she wrote in her usual buoyant tone: “I send you a thousand greetings, fine sir, as does M. de Voltaire, who's here with me. I hope we'll see you this winter—you'll find me in Paris at the start of the New Year.”