Finding Emilie

by Laurel Corona

  “Well, why didn’t he just say that?” Lili demanded. She rolled her pencil across the table. “And look—it doesn’t even seem to be true. The pencil is obviously going to stop moving at some point.” It fell off the table onto the intricately patterned Savonnerie carpet, and Lili heard Delphine snicker.

  “But you see, the table is creating friction,” the tutor said. “If the pencil were moving through space unimpeded, it would never stop. And if it weren’t moving, it would never start unless something hit it.”

  “All right,” Lili said. “I can understand that, but—” She ran her finger across the next line. “Nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare? Latin is hard enough without someone so strange writing it.” She pushed the book toward him. “You translate!”

  Monsieur Nohant’s eyes flitted. “I’m afraid I can’t explain better than I have.”

  “Well, why not?” Lili had grown exasperated with this new tutor, who seemed to know little more than she did.

  The door to the library opened and Julie entered. Both girls stood up. “Bonjour, Maman!” they chirped.

  “Bonjour, mes chéries,” she said, coming over to give each of them a light caress on the shoulder. “My goodness,” she said, looking at Delphine’s sketch. “That’s a very good likeness!” She looked more closely. “But why did you erase Lili’s mouth?” Delphine shot an annoyed glance at Lili as Maman came over to her.

  “What’s wrong,” she asked, seeing Lili’s knit brow.

  “I can’t understand this!” Lili’s voice was husky with frustration.

  The tutor shifted his feet. “I’m not able to explain it using the Latin,” he said.

  Julie picked up the book. “This is—” She looked at Lili. “You’re already reading Newton?”

  “Oui, Maman. And I really want to understand, but I can’t seem to manage.” Maman’s eyes were oddly bright against her suddenly pale cheeks. “What?” Lili asked. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “I said nothing to her,” the tutor insisted.

  Lili looked back and forth between the two of them. “What are you talking about?” she demanded. “Said nothing about what?”

  Julie de Bercy looked away, her lips disappearing into a thin line as she pondered what to say. “I think it’s best if you leave us for the day,” she said to the tutor. “And you too, for a little while, ma chérie,” she said to Delphine. “I need some time with Lili alone.”

  “WHAT DO YOU know about your mother?” Julie asked when the others had left.

  “Nothing but the little you’ve told me,” Lili replied. She thought for a moment. “I’ve always sensed I wasn’t supposed to ask. There were a few girls at the convent whose mothers were dead, but since they never mentioned them, I thought maybe there was something improper about bringing it up.”

  Julie took a deep breath as she settled back onto the couch. “I was with your mother more than anyone else in her last days. I helped her into bed when she felt her first pains with you. I knew she was gone even before your father did.” She shut her eyes to gather her thoughts. The clock ticked and a carriage went by on the Place Royale while Lili waited for her to continue.

  Suddenly Julie stood up. “This is the best way to show you who your mother was.” She walked over to the desk to pick up the Principia. “It’s not just you who has trouble with this Latin. No one here could comprehend what Newton was saying until Emilie translated it into French.”

  “My mother translated the Principia?”

  Julie put the book back on the desk. “Yes. And it was more than the language that was the problem. I can’t comprehend it even in French, but I’ve been told it’s rewritten, not just translated, and that Emilie’s commentary is what allows people like your tutor to understand Newton at all. That, and her own mathematical calculations where Newton hadn’t provided them.”

  “Why didn’t Monsieur Nohant tell me this?” Lili demanded.

  “When he first started as your tutor, I told him that when you began to study physics, he was not to mention your mother. It might be hard for you to understand, but I felt it was for your own good.” Julie sat down next to her. “Your mother was a very complicated person. And controversial, I must add. She had trouble limiting herself to people’s expectations, and you’ve seen for yourself what that can be like, haven’t you?” She smiled and patted Lili’s knee.

  “Everyone felt it was better for you to assume there was nothing special about her until you were old enough to understand. Don’t blame Monsieur Nohant for obeying me, although I suppose he’ll be relieved that from now on he can consult the version of Newton he actually comprehends. And you probably will be too, from what I’ve heard.”

  She got up again and went to a small, locked cabinet. She opened it and withdrew a book. “I have been so looking forward to this day,” she said, handing it to Lili.

  “Principes Mathématiques,” Lili read, tracing her fingers over her mother’s name on the title page. “But this was just published a few years ago, when I was ten!”

  “She finished the last details in the few days after you were born, before she suddenly took ill. It took time for people to pay attention to her work. Most weren’t ready for her ideas—those who could understand them. And the salonnières made good entertainment of ridiculing her because her brilliance made them nervous.”

  Julie sat down again and watched Lili leaf through the pages. “People who know the truth see your mother’s great spirit, but she has her detractors. Some people say it must have been the men around her who did the difficult science and mathematics, but I saw her doing the calculations. Make no mistake of it, ma chérie. This”—Julie ran her finger over random lines of text—“this is your mother’s work.”

  “‘All objects remain in a uniform state of motion,’” Lili read in French. My mother was different too. “Until something changes,” she whispered, wondering whether something just had.

  EMILIE DU CHTELET pulled aside the curtain of her carriage and brought her face so close to the window that her nose almost touched the glass. A few men were trickling out of the Café Gradot to attend to afternoon business before a night at the theater, but she knew Pierre-Louis du Maupertuis would not be among the first to leave. It pained him, she thought with a touch of scorn, to tear himself away from the adoration of the scientists, mathematicians, and hangers-on who convened each day in a back room of the café. Honestly, couldn’t they see that even though he held the mathematics chair at the Academy of Sciences, he needed to consult his students to explain what were supposed to be his own ideas?

  What irked her most was not Maupertuis’s pretension, but that she was left to wait for him outside, since as a woman, she was forbidden by law from setting foot inside. Once, she had suggested to one of her friends that he offer a serving girl a bribe if she would lend out her uniform, since maids were the only exception to the law against women being present. The Marquis du Châtelet was a tolerant man, but he would not have taken kindly to such a breach of rank by his wife. Still, the hilarity of a scene in which a serving wench cleared the table while discussing mathematics with members of the academy was so delightful, Emilie had considered incurring what would at worst be a mild chastisement. Instead, she settled for showing up in men’s clothing, and though everyone had been most amused by a disguise that was revealed the first time she laughed, that kind of thing could only be done once. The café owner didn’t need problems with the police, who were always looking for new examples of how easy it was to disappear forever into the prison at the Bastille.

  She had to make do with random scraps of remembered conversation after she fetched Maupertuis and they were en route to his home. Once there, she would spend an hour or two being tutored in calculus while her carriage waited outside. Her arrangement with Maupertuis had been going on for a few months now, beginning when she was able to come out in public again after the birth of her third child. Already she could see that her questions and ideas seemed to
unnerve the illustrious Maupertuis. If she were not paying handsomely for his time, he would probably have ended his tutelage, saying he was too busy to make time for someone with no prospect of contributing to the field. All that, just to cover the fact that her questions were really quite beyond him.

  Despite her frustration, the chance to talk about advanced math at all, even with someone as overblown as Maupertuis, was the best part of her present life. “I’m twenty-seven years old,” she whispered into the glass, making a ring of fog that immediately vanished. “And I am so bored I—” She pressed her teeth into her gloved knuckle and sighed. Motherhood was a disappointment, since aristocratic women spent little time with their children. Her daughter, Gabrielle-Pauline, now seven, had already been removed to the Ursuline Convent to begin her education. Her son Florent-Louis was five, and his father had turned his heir into little more than a toy soldier with as little imagination and humor as possible. Her infant boy, Victor-Esprit, was weak and it was best not to think too much about what his prospects were when so many children, even in families with money for doctors and medicine, did not survive infancy.

  She settled back into her seat. “I do love that sweet child,” she whispered. Perhaps most of all three. Society permitted a frail child to need its mother, and that gave her permission to need Victor-Esprit. She certainly didn’t need her husband, nor he her, except for the social practicalities of marriage. Now that a war had broken out over the succession to the Polish throne, she rarely saw Florent-Claude, since he lived near the border with the regiment he commanded. But even before that, their marriage was always one of convenience and little more. He had few interests and even fewer ideas, excusing himself early from the dinner table when the subject turned to any of the things that so fascinated her. The marquis was not a difficult man, and she was thankful for that, but wouldn’t it be nice to find oneself in bed with a man of real—

  “Real appetites” she whispered. “I want someone who—” She thought for a moment. Someone who would end a discussion—even an argument—about the rarest and finest of the day’s new ideas, by tearing off her clothes and ravishing her. The most erotic thing in the world had to be when minds met and bodies followed. She sat back in the coach as forcefully as if the horse had jerked it forward, at the realization of just how desperately she wanted that to happen to her. I need a lover, she thought. But not just any lover. That kind.

  She felt the coach jiggle as the driver jumped down to open the door. Pierre-Louis du Maupertuis stepped up and settled down across from her. He was thirty-five, with a bulbous forehead and a rather large nose, but altogether he cut a pleasant enough figure, and he was much admired for his wit by the ladies at court. Emilie eyed him sidelong as the coach rumbled through the streets of Paris. Bodies meeting minds? He was not the answer to her fantasy, she was sure, but he would serve as an adequate test of her hypothesis.

  1765

  THE MALLET connected with an off-center thunk, and the ball dribbled less than a meter across the grass. “Oh, dear,” Delphine said, looking up with a pretty smile at the cluster of guests playing a game of paille-maille on one of the lawns of the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte.

  “You must hit the ball with more force,” Jacques-Mars Courville said. “May I?” He came up behind and slipped his hands alongside hers. “Like this.” The young man followed through with a firm whack and the ball rolled cleanly across a meter of short grass, directly through the metal arch at which he had been aiming.

  The guests at Vaux-le-Vicomte clapped, as fifteen-year-old Delphine turned her face up toward Jacques-Mars and gave him an admiring smile. “Perhaps it is my good fortune to be so bad at this that I require the help of someone so charming,” she said in a deliberately lilting voice.

  “And perhaps it will be my good fortune that you find you cannot master it.” Seeing Delphine’s confusion, he went on. “So you will permit me to help you forever,” he said, bowing with such dramatic exaggeration that the others broke out in amused applause.

  Lili suppressed a groan. No one could be as bad at paille-maille as Delphine pretended to be, and it was infuriating the way she slowed everything down, as if the whole point was to call as much attention to herself as possible. Anne-Mathilde and Joséphine, those disgusting girls from the abbey, were just as bad. Of the two, it was hard to know which was worse. Anne-Mathilde’s hair was curled in the latest style, and her skin was as perfect as ever, with a hint of a blush from the summer sun. At seventeen, she had gained a little weight, revealing her curves under a loosely corseted summer dress that was the latest style for a relaxing sojourn away from Paris.

  Joséphine de Maurepas was still the perfect foil. She also had grown an inch or two, but remained thin and flat-chested, with no feature worth singling out for a kind remark. Josephine’s prestige lay entirely in Anne-Mathilde’s preference for her, which was understandable, given that Joséphine could always be counted upon to gossip about others without the slightest shred of mercy, and even more importantly, she viewed Anne-Mathilde as perfect in every way. Lili watched as the two of them fluttered their little fans over their mouths as they bent in to make some comment or another, most likely about Jacques-Mars’s obvious attraction to Delphine.

  Trying not to glower, Lili stepped up to her ball. She sized it up for only a moment before hitting it cleanly through a hoop planted in the lawn at about two meters’ distance. What a waste of time this is, she thought, grimly planting a smile back on her face before looking up.

  VAUX-LE-VICOMTE HAD BEEN recently purchased by the Duc de Praslin, Anne-Mathilde’s father. When Maman had made plans for a month-long respite from the sultry August heat in Paris, Lili had been eager to come, even if it meant putting up with Anne-Mathilde and Joséphine. The usually idyllic Place Royale had no special protection from the stench rising up from the sewage and rotting garbage floating in the Seine. The eye-watering odor rose up and gathered force as it wafted down the filthy streets and alleyways of the city before—at least it seemed to Lili—it sank with special malevolence over the Place Royale. She was tired of hiding in the deepest recesses of Hôtel Bercy to keep her head from throbbing. Now she could remember only the advantages of its solitude.

  She looked across the sculpted gardens beyond the lawn toward the imposing yellow sandstone walls of the massive château. The jagged rows of steeply pitched sections of roof were mottled with dark verdigris, crowned by a massive dome over the main foyer. From the open arches of the cupola on top of the dome she had looked out the morning after their arrival at endless stretches of clipped boxwood hedges in beds of crushed red brick that looked more like Turkish carpets than anything found in nature.

  The view from the cupola at Vaux-le-Vicomte made it clear that visitors there were to walk in straight lines up and down the parterres and along the walkways of the canals rather than have ideas of their own about what to do or where to go. Even flowers were not allowed to splatter their colors over such a perfect subjugation of nature, except in tight girdles around statues, which were spaced out in perfect rows in each tidy rectangle of lawn. Beyond the green moat around the château, Lili counted eight artificial, geometrically shaped lakes placed in perfect symmetry along a broad pathway that ran like a spine down the middle of the property.

  It’s as if the whole place is wearing a corset, Lili thought as she and Delphine stood in the cupola that morning. Lili agreed to stroll through every open room on the ground floor in return for Delphine’s word they would climb what felt like hundreds of steps to the best viewpoint on the estate. Looking down, Delphine had eyes only for the strolling parties of women in shimmering gowns and ruffled parasols, accompanied by men in dark coats and fitted trousers. She could hardly wait to get back down to begin meeting whoever was presently in residence.

  At fifteen, Delphine had grown from a pretty girl into a beautiful young woman, with hair as lovely as a cascading bolt of pinkish yellow silk, now caught up stylishly under a tiny hat. Though her skin was inclined to
freckle in the summer, a thin coat of lotion tamed it to a soft glow. No one would be likely to glance long away from her large, green eyes to notice any imperfections. “I plan to charm everyone who will pay me any notice,” she had said as they turned to leave the cupola. “I shall be scintillating.” She paused a moment to search for another word. “Just impertinent enough to be endearing.”

  “You’ve been reading too many novels,” Lili retorted.

  “Well, why shouldn’t I try to make everyone notice me?” Delphine sniffed. “The best entries into society are by girls whose reputation for charm and beauty has preceded them. I intend to surpass them all, and since you don’t care a whit about any of it, I’ll do it without you.”

  Lili scarcely noticed the snappishness in Delphine’s voice. In the distance, beyond the constraints and forced perfection of the grounds, treetops of a vast forest billowed and undulated like a skirt loose and light enough for her to pick up in her hands and run laughing into another world. Equestrian trails headed off here and there, disappearing into the thick trees. That’s where I want to be, Lili thought. By myself. Alone with my thoughts, and maybe a book, under a tree.

  “Well?” Delphine challenged.

  “Well, what?”

  “Are you going to go around being a good guest with me, or just spend the next month flopping around on a couch reading philosophy, or working out pointless math problems, or whatever it is you do?”

  Lili sighed. “I can’t help what I am.”

  “Well, if you cared a little more about your hair, and not having ink stains on your fingers, you would get a lot more attention.” Delphine turned again to look down at the people in the garden. “It’s cold up here. Aren’t you ready to go down?”