Passionate Minds

by David Bodanis

  Collapse 261

  But with Saint-Lambert it was different. She tried friendly cajoling at first:

  I wanted to wake up with you, and it was only 11 P. M. when the first party finished—but then you rushed off. Do write and tell me why. I've never loved you more, my sweet. Now I'll have to brush my teeth alone.

  My sweet, can't you even try to come see me tonight?

  His coldness got worse:

  You stopped by at 4 P.M.—but we'd agreed to meet at I P.M.! You know I'm leaving for Paris soon. Please, please don't treat me like this.

  You barely looked my way today. Why? Why are you suddenly treating me so coldly?

  Are you trying to make us be apart for ever?

  Their relationship was ending, but they still spent a few more times together in bed. There was no love now. Saint-Lambert was just using her—and it's possible he tried to insist on his prowess, in this one realm where he'd been so pleasing to her before. Suddenly the one thing happened that she couldn't control. She'd always been careful in contraception with her partners before. Yet now she was pregnant, and in an era when just getting through one's forties was impressive, there was no way of telling if she would survive the labor to come.

  25

  Pregnancy

  CIREY AND PARIS, CHRISTMAS EVE 1748–APRIL 1749

  She didn't mention it to Voltaire at first, and just said that they should stop at Cirey for a brief while. Saint-Lambert stayed behind; he was barely speaking to Emilie now.

  She was restless in the carriage with Voltaire, and at a stop they made halfway to Cirey for the horses to be watered and fed, she climbed down to investigate the town. When she found several locals and a priest amenable to some gambling, she sat down to take them on at cards. She didn't let it finish when the horses were ready, but instead insisted on playing more, almost as if she needed the intensity of that concentration, that diversion from what was going to come next.

  They left late, when night had already fallen and a cold rain had begun. It was almost impossible to see ahead. Longchamp was out in front when his horse lost its footing in the dark, flipping him over into a waterlogged ditch. Then the horse landed partially on top of him— and made no effort to get up.

  “This new position,” Longchamp recounted, “seemed to strike my steed as being commodious for sleeping, and my struggles to extricate myself could not avail against his substantial weight. It was only when the carriage with Madame and Monsieur approached that my exhausted beast awoke, upon which he scrambled upward—a maneuver that, in its hastiness, placed me in greater anguish, I might say.”

  They arrived late on December 24. As a little girl, Emilie had gone to midnight Mass with her parents on that day; when she was twentysix, she'd arranged to meet Maupertuis before an illicit night together in Paris; a little older, she and Voltaire had had years of blazing fires at Cirey on that day. Now, on this Christmas Eve of 1748, the stone and brick walls of Cirey were still icy cold; the fires being lit took hours to warm the main rooms. Longchamp directed the servants where to put the bags as Emilie and Voltaire went in.

  She still didn't tell Voltaire she was pregnant, and for several days they went through the usual routine of unpacking and settling into their old rooms. Yet “instead of Madame being in her usual vivacious good humor,” Longchamp noted, “she appeared, in my humble eye, to be unusually dreamy. I might even say sad.”

  When she finally did tell Voltaire, around January 1, he understood why she'd insisted they come to Cirey. Even if gossip was spreading that Saint-Lambert had been her lover, she and her husband had to at least make it seem plausible that Florent-Claude was the father of any living child she had. That was the only way to guarantee that the du Châtelet and de Breteuil inheritances stayed within the family. (Abortion would only have been considered as a desperate resort, for the ergot or other potions used for this purpose were highly dosesensitive: too little and there was no effect, too much and fatal uterine bleeding would result.)

  They sent word to Florent-Claude at his military base in Dijon, and when he arrived Voltaire left the two of them alone. Their son Louis was no longer at the house—he was serving in a regiment under Richelieu's command—and although Madame de Champbonin and the Comtesse de la Neuville were still in the area, and still eager to come over, they too respected what needed to happen.

  Emilie and Florent-Claude spent days together: inspecting their estate on horseback and on foot. There were the forges outside, where the fire experiments from the 1737 Royal Academy competition had taken place, and the long stretching forests whose maintenance and harvesting they'd supervised for so long. They made a point of dining in clear view of the servants, Emilie in her finest gowns and with more jewels than ever, Florent-Claude also in his formal clothes, candles and silver and fine wines everywhere. After dinner there would be coffee, with Voltaire briefly joining their conversation, but then FlorentClaude and Emilie would go to a bedroom, to continue the crucial appearances for the servants.

  “I believe,” Longchamp remembered, “it was about three weeks into Monsieur le Marquis's most appreciated visitation that Madame announced she had reason to believe she was pregnant…. We certainly all congratulated her.” Soon, from the staff's letters to their friends and relations serving at the great houses in Paris—as well as the “confidential” gossip that Champbonin and de la Neuville were soon to spread—it would be general knowledge in Paris and Versailles that Emilie du Châtelet was pregnant at the age of forty-two. Her husband, it was to be noted, was overjoyed. So too—and this would seem no odder than how she'd run the rest of her life—was she.

  The one thing that remained was to try to finish her scientific work. Since she'd been in Cirey too briefly after the Fontainebleau gambling to move the bulk of her library and papers there, she needed to return to Paris, where her best resources still were. She and Voltaire left in early February, when the weather had turned colder and snow was thick everywhere. They took their largest carriage, but it was so loaded on the outside with extra crates for their books and papers that the horses found it hard to gather speed. For warmth the carriage's wooden doors were sealed tight, and the occupants—Voltaire, Emilie, and Emilie's maid—were snuggled under furs and lap rugs. A bruised Longchamp was once again riding in front, on his not quite trusty steed. Dusk came early, so again it was dark when they left.

  They'd been traveling many hours from Cirey when suddenly the rear axle on Voltaire's side broke, sending the wheel loose. The carriage skidded, then toppled over, with Voltaire at the bottom.

  It was dead quiet outside, in the isolated cold, but from the carriage a weak call could be heard. It was Voltaire, informing everyone that he was alive, albeit steadily being compressed. The servants who'd been perched on the outside of the moving coach were thrown off, but unhurt in the deep snow. They climbed up onto the overturned coach, reached down through the now topside door, and “as one hauls a bucket up a well” started pulling the occupants free: first the bags, then the maid, then Emilie—and finally a startled and disoriented, but remarkably undamaged, Voltaire.

  The accident was far enough from any town that it would be hours before servants could arrive back with help. But there were plenty of blankets, so although the temperature was below freezing, it wouldn't be too dangerous to wait. Emilie and Voltaire placed cushions in the thick snow beside the road, got under their favorite furs, and then lay back beneath the stars. Longchamp never would have lauded his own poetry, but even he briefly transcended himself in describing their wait that night:

  Despite the extreme froideur, [Madame and Monsieur] admired the beauty of the sky. It was serene, and stars were burning with a most vivid brightness. I detected no house or tree to disturb the least part of their view.

  We were aware that astronomy had always been one of their favorite studies. Ravished by this magnificent spectacle spread above and around them, they discoursed—while shivering, I should point out—on the nature and paths of the stars, and
on the destiny of so many immense globes spread in space.

  I believe that only the fact that they lacked a telescope kept them from being perfectly happy. Their spirit being lost in the depths of the heavens, they no longer saw their situation on the earth—or, if I might be exact, their situation on the snow and in the middle of so much ice.

  It was their last truly quiet moment together. The night was long; the nearest town was far. Emilie had spent a long time getting the skills to discover how this vast universe worked. If she'd been right in her Academy paper on the nature of light, there were even more stars than they could see now blazing away invisible to their sight.

  They remained there for hours, pinned alone under the cold starlight. Finally the rescue party arrived: four local men lugging ropes, tools, and a new axle. Emilie and Voltaire slowly got up: there was work to do, a voyage to resume.

  In Paris they moved into their old apartments on the Rue Traversière St. Honoré. Although Emilie tried to sequester herself from the crowds who wanted to invite her out, the bustle was too much for her to concentrate. Voltaire wanted to be helpful, but he was becoming brittle from the tension of her condition. Although he sometimes tried to joke about how easy it might turn out to be (“the new baby shall be categorized among [Emilie's] miscellaneous works”), he also remembered how Richelieu's even younger wife, Elisabeth, had died, as the complications from her pregnancy led to bleeding that no doctor could stop.

  He snapped at Emilie when she was late for a meal, even though she was just trying to get extra time for her work. One morning, after he'd been especially short-tempered the night before, he knocked one of her favorite expensive cups from her hand when he abruptly jumped up from his sofa as she approached. He apologized, and immediately sent Longchamp to get a replacement—with instructions to pay whatever it took—but this wasn't the mood she needed.

  Saint-Lambert was making it worse. “I've told you I'm pregnant,” she wrote to him from Paris, “and that I need to make arrangements for my labor. Yet you haven't said a thing!” She was past anger. “This is a cruelty beyond all description—just as the sorrow I feel is beyond all expression.”

  The smoothly insincere Catherine came to Paris from the Lunéville court and invited Emilie out for meals, ostensibly as her friend. But then she pointedly dropped remarks about Saint-Lambert and how he was thinking of traveling to England in the autumn, saying that apparently—and she really shouldn't be sharing this with Emilie— he was telling everyone that nothing else important was coming up that he needed to do.

  Despite the ease of the pregnancy, Emilie was getting ever stronger premonitions that her labor would be difficult. It wasn't only her good friend Elisabeth who'd died from complications after childbirth. The king's daughter-in-law had also died horribly in labor (after which there had been the further indignity of her body being immediately sliced apart in public dissection).

  Emilie knew enough to be wary of most medical remedies but did accept the consensus that moderate bleeding by surgeons was sometimes a sensible precaution to take. She went to Versailles, where the surgeons went through the procedure. First they tied a tourniquet around her arm till the veins in her forearm swelled up. Then they brought out the mechanical marvel known as the scarificator: a small brass box, with about a dozen spring loaded blades inside. The blades were extremely sharp, and released in groups to cut into her.

  While that was going on, an assistant was heating the cupping glasses that would be applied over the open gashes. As the cups cooled, the vacuum inside helped pull even more blood out. (If the surgeon was especially advanced, the glasses would have valves on top, and he'd use a vacuum pump to make his subject's blood spurt especially fast.) The whole process left her with a sharp headache, but after a few hours she recovered enough to explore Versailles a little.

  She soon came across Stanislas, which was easy enough—since his daughter was married to Louis XV, he regularly visited Versailles. The mood was different with him now, though. Back in Lunéville, Stanislas had always seemed slightly distracted, but that was only what was appropriate for a king in his own court. Also, Emilie had made him feel shy, for he'd never met anyone who spoke as fast as she did; he'd certainly almost never seen a couple—her and Voltaire—where the woman was respected for her views so much. But he'd been paying attention to her conversations, perhaps more than he'd let on, and as a result he'd finished his own book!

  This was ideal for Emilie to hear. New authors need favorable editorial comment, and the fame of Emilie's book on Leibniz had spread even to Lunéville. She and Stanislas had one dinner, and then another, and then a third. He was trying to merge Catholic traditions with rational science and had many questions for her. He was sincere in his religion, a good Polish Catholic, yet he didn't quite believe the graphic stories of damnation that Father Menou tried to scare him with. He had picked up fragments from Emilie and Voltaire about a different view. That's what he wanted to know more about.

  It was a significant precedent, for in the decades to come many other seemingly conventional individuals would be inspired by Voltaire and Emilie—by their writings, and by the example of their unconventional life together—to question traditions around them that had apparently been accepted since time immemorial. With this attitude, authority no longer had to come from what you were told by a priest or royal official, and the whole establishment of the established church or the state behind them. It could now come, dangerously, from small, portable books—and even from ideas you came to yourself.

  Stanislas's daughter, the French queen, had been furious when she'd first heard of her father's new interests, blaming those visitors to Lunéville for having corrupted him. But Stanislas had long grown used to ignoring her. And since he was Louis XV's father-in-law, his lodgings now were not miserable rooms of the sort Voltaire had once been granted. Rather, he had chambers in the magnificent Trianon palace at Versailles, and there he graciously invited Emilie to stay if she wished.

  She'd planned to try finishing her scientific work in her Paris apartment, but this would be better—the ideal refuge if she was to take her writing to the deepest level. Very quickly, she had her main books and manuscript brought over from the Rue Traversière apartment. Much like her father, Stanislas was not the bumbling older man he appeared. Catherine was but a plaything to him. In his youth he'd had more serious affairs of the heart, and understood how much Emilie was missing her dreams of love now. “I don't want anyone to know what I'm feeling,” Emilie had written to a stone-cold Saint-Lambert, “so I'm quiet about it. But I cry for where my heart took me.”

  Stanislas also recognized—again, almost certainly without stating it—the medical position that Emilie was in. Her pregnancy still barely showed (“aside from my breasts swelling, and feeling tired, I'm still as thin as before”), but he assured her that when her time came she could be given the finest rooms in the main palace at Lunéville for her labor. It would be more tranquil than Paris or Versailles, and also safer; she could be assured that the manure piles she'd seen there of the sort that were omnipresent at Versailles as well—would be cleared from anywhere near her lying-in rooms.

  He was an old man, and there was a further understanding they shared. At his age—close to seventy—death could be counted on to be close. He wanted to learn from Emilie what remained of God when science replaced the literal beliefs he'd been raised with. Voltaire had never been able to answer that. But anyone facing possible extinction, as he and Emilie both were, needed an answer. And here Emilie could console this kind old man. For she was convinced that in the writings of Newton, which she was now exploring more profoundly than ever, she could find the answer.

  26

  A Portal Unto the Stars

  LINCOLNSHIRE, 1600S, AND FRANCE, 1749

  Isaac Newton had been a resentful, suspicious young man, angry that he'd never known his father (who'd died two months before Isaac's birth on Christmas Day 1642); that his mother had quickly remarried and sent him awa
y to boarding school, where he'd been bullied; that even when he did get to Cambridge she gave him so little money (even though she was middling rich from her remarriage) that he was forced to work as a servant, waiting on tables, cleaning other students' boots, even, if they gestured him over, combing their hair or preparing their wigs. But he learned at a speed no one else had, almost as if he already understood what was in the books and lectures. Within six months, his first passive notes on the mathematics on offer began to turn into original queries; six months more, and he had all of what was then known in seventeenth-century mathematics behind him.

  Then, in the hot moist summer of 1665, something sickening began to spread across England. It “pleased Almighty God in his just severity, to visit this town of Cambridge with the plague of pestilence.” The university immediately shut down, and the students and faculty and any townspeople who could afford it fled. The young man returned to his mother's isolated farm, at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire. And there a storm burst in the young, angry, secretive Isaac Newton's mind. Recounting it much later:

  In the beginning of the year 1665, I found the Method of approximating series…. The same year in May I found the method of Tangents… and in November had the direct method of [calculus] & the next year in January had the Theory of Colors…. And the same year I began to think of gravity extending to ye orb of the Moon &…I deduced [what] the forces wch keep the Planets in their Orbs must be…& thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her Orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth, & found them answer pretty nearly.

  All this was in the two plague years of 1665–1666. For in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention & minded Mathematics & Philosophy more than at any time since.