Finding Emilie

by Laurel Corona

  Suddenly, before they could begin the first steps, the music stopped. A murmur arose in the crowd as everyone turned to look in the direction of the king and queen. They had risen to their feet, and Marie Leszczynska was being led away, leaning heavily on the arm of Madame Victoire. One of the king’s ministers held up his hand for silence. “We’ve just received news from Fontainebleau. The dauphin is dead. Long live Dauphin Louis-Auguste.” Without saying more, he turned and walked with the king to a side door.

  When the king disappeared from view, a hush settled down over the Salon de Mars. Lili heard a few sobs, as small groups of men and women headed slowly toward the doors, murmuring among themselves. Lili turned to Julie. “You’re crying, Maman!”

  “Of course!” she said. “He would have been our king. And dear Marie Leszczynska has lost yet another child.”

  “Maman?” Delphine’s ashen-faced partner had deposited her with Julie before rushing toward a group of friends waiting for him.

  “Come,” Julie said. “All France will be in mourning by tomorrow. We’ll be going back to Paris as soon as we can pack. The queen will expect us to pay her the courtesy of not making her ask for privacy.”

  “Home?” Delphine gasped in disbelief. “Now?” Holding her hand to her mouth, she whirled around to look for Ambroise. Lili knew she would not find him. She had already seen him disappearing from the king’s apartments with Anne-Mathilde on his arm.

  FLORENT-LOUIS DU Châtelet stood on his toes and held the piece of hand-lettered paper as high as his eleven-year-old arms could reach. “Anton! Hand me the hammer!” A smaller boy of about the same age, dressed in the simple clothing of a villager, put the tool in the outstretched fingers of the heir to the Château de Cirey. Florent-Louis gave several light taps to a nail, just enough to affix the paper to the door.

  He stood back to admire his handiwork. “Want me to read it to you? It says ‘Tonight at the Theater at Cirey! The premiere of Mérope by M. Voltaire. Cast—Mérope, Madame la Marquise; Polyphontes, Monsieur Voltaire; Ismène, Mademoiselle G-P du Châtelet; Euricles, Monsieur le Marquis, et al.’”

  He gestured to the copies in the boy’s hand. “Come on,” he said. “Help me put these up on the front gate and at the church. Race you!” Florent-Louis took off, pumping his legs in his stockings and breeches, the tail of his dark hair flopping against the back of his jacket.

  Emilie watched from the window of the upstairs gallery, savoring the commotion. A play was always a good way to relieve the tedium of being the hostess to what was at the moment a houseful of dull company, and the headache-inducing clanging and pounding of the workmen renovating the château. In the four years she and Voltaire had lived at Cirey, their remote haven was rarely without at least one guest from among Europe’s great men of science, but it had been months since Cirey had sparkled with that light. Now it seemed everyone was off doing something exciting, and she was reduced to receiving letters about their adventures. She couldn’t go to Lapland, as Maupertuis had done, to take measurements to show that the earth was flattened at the poles. She couldn’t even manage to find a way to go abroad, despite corresponding regularly with scientists from all over Europe. It would be so much better if people didn’t always have to come to Cirey to talk face-to-face, but …

  No point in fretting over it. She was a woman. She could be a helpmate to great men, but not the other way around. Thank God she had Voltaire in her life. She could talk to him about what were becoming obsessions for her—understanding the deepest principles of physics, and then going further. The God who governed the world through natural law must have had the same orderly mind when it came to shaping the human heart—a natural law for mankind that reflected his will for creation better than biblical legends could.

  Of course it annoyed her that after their endless discussions, Voltaire sometimes published her ideas as if they were his own, but at age thirty-two, she’d started too late and accomplished too little to establish an independent reputation as a natural philosopher herself. She inspired the greatest writer of the age to exercise his mind, not just with history and clever satire but with science, and it was good to see her ideas in print, even if works like their treatise on Newton were in his name alone. He said flattering things about her in his dedications, and that would have to be enough.

  Through the open window on the other side of the room, she heard the sound of a carriage coming up the sloping path to the château. Gabrielle-Pauline, most likely. She watched as a carriage rounded the corner and stopped in front. Emilie smiled as her twelve-year-old daughter stepped down. Holding a manuscript in her hand, she stopped to examine the playbill her brother had tacked on the door before Berthe, the downstairs maid, ushered her inside. Thank heaven for a child who could be fetched from the convent and memorize her lines in the carriage before she arrived home. She would go down to greet her, and then it was time for the house to settle in for a nap before the excitement began.

  THE MARQUIS DU Châtelet walked with his wife from the dining room with their son and daughter. Florent-Louis pointed through a large window to a handful of villagers milling outside. “I told that boy who helped me with the announcement that there might be a costume he could put on and stand on the stage. May I go get him, Father?”

  Florent-Claude du Châtelet nodded his approval, and Florent-Louis took off through the gallery door. The marquis summoned Lucien, the downstairs manservant, with a flick of his brow. “Tell the people outside that we’re sorry, but it’s just too damned hot up there to let more than a few of them in.”

  Florent-Louis and Anton rushed up the two flights of stairs to the attic. They went through a rough-hewn entryway, past a lattice of beams supporting the roof overhead, into another room with a wood planked floor and an open-beamed ceiling. Voltaire and the rest of the cast had already begun fluttering about amid boxes of wigs on the floor and costumes flung over benches.

  Emilie came into the room and held out her arms for a maid to take off her dress. Standing with her hands on her hips and wearing only her chemise and several petticoats, she looked around in amusement at the flurry of activity. Anton stared at the breasts of the châtelaine of the estate, clearly visible under the thin silk, but Emilie did not notice. “Here,” she said, taking him by the hand and leading him to the other side of the stifling attic room. “Let’s see if Berthe has something to fit you.” She left him with the servant, going off with Gabrielle-Pauline so they could pin each other into sheets resembling Greek gowns.

  Even though her part tonight did not require singing, by the time the audience of household guests, servants, and awestruck villagers filed in, Emilie had begun warming up her throat with solfège exercises from lessons she’d once taken with a tutor from the Comédie Italienne. Her soprano voice was so rich and full it cast a spell over the cramped attic, and everyone stopped to listen. Seeing the admiration in people’s eyes, and out of the sheer joy of the moment, Emilie broke into an aria from her favorite opera, Issé. Voltaire, his scrawny legs covered in absurd pink stockings under his toga, and sporting a crown of leaves over his immaculately curled wig, led everyone in a raucous round of applause.

  When the audience was seated, Emilie and her daughter stepped onto a tiny stage whose wings and backdrop had been painted to look like a room in a Greek palace. With a grand, tragic gesture, Emilie draped herself on a couch that had been brought up from the parlor, its flowered brocade hastily covered over with a sheet.

  “Great queen,” Gabrielle-Pauline said. “Set aside your sad thoughts. The gods have given us victory, and now the people cry out for your coronation as their ruler. Widow of the great Cresphonte and daughter of the king, after fifteen years of the miseries of war, you alone can be the one to lead us into happier times.”

  Emilie sat up. “What?” she said, holding one hand dramatically to the side of her head and looking out at the audience in dismay. “Is there no news of my son, the rightful heir? Has he been missing now so long that all pronounce him dea
d?”

  She felt the first trickles of sweat running between her breasts in a room that now seemed airless in the heat. But what did it matter, when in the middle of nowhere, a play by her lover was being performed for the first time under her own roof? She looked up at the open beams of the attic. Under her own roof indeed.

  1765

  THE MUDDY tracks on the road from Versailles to Paris had frozen as solid as rock, causing the carriage in which Lili and Delphine returned with Maman to Paris to lurch so badly that Lili had trouble focusing on the words in front of her.

  “From the sky, Meadowlark picked out the Great Wall of China and guided Comète down to a palace nearby,” she began.

  Though Lili’s story about two men dueling for the hand of a princess momentarily lifted the gloom of their return to Paris, by the end Delphine was wiping her eyes again.

  “The princess stamped her foot,” Lili read. “‘Rules are rules!’ she said.

  “‘Rules are rules,’ Tom said. ‘I suppose so,’ Meadowlark replied. ‘Even as far away as China.’”

  “I didn’t like that at all,” Delphine said.

  “Why?” Lili put down her notebook, grabbing it to keep it from slipping to the floor as the carriage wheels slid into another rut.

  “I hate the rules. They say Anne-Mathilde will marry Ambroise.” Delphine buried her face in Julie’s shoulder. “I really like him, Maman.”

  “I can tell,” Julie said, passing her handkerchief to Delphine. “Be careful not to muss my dress with your sniffles, ma petite. This velvet spots so easily.” Delphine gave her nose a dainty blow and roused herself just enough to settle in a limp heap next to her mother.

  “And I wouldn’t be so sure about the rules when it comes to what a young man might do in his situation,” Julie went on. “No one has said anything about a formal engagement to Anne-Mathilde—”

  “Do you think he might break off with her?” Delphine sat up so straight her back was no longer resting against the seat.

  “Break off? I saw no evidence that Ambroise thinks anything is on. But it is a good match, and quite openly talked of, so I imagine the families may be viewing it favorably even if he is not. The Praslin family is not as wealthy as it once was, and though they make gestures like acquiring Vaux-le-Vicomte to make it look otherwise, I’ve heard rumors that their fortune is not terribly secure.”

  She took back her handkerchief from Delphine and tucked it in her bodice. “Ambroise’s grandfather was much appreciated by Louis XIV for his discretion as the accoucheur who delivered the king’s seven illegitimate children by Madame de Montespan. He was made a member of the noblesse de robe at that time, and it was only a few years ago that the family received the king’s approval to purchase the château and lands around Étoges, and to use the title of count. So the Clément de Feuillet family will make a leap in status by marrying Ambroise to Anne-Mathilde, and the Duc and Duchesse de Praslin will place a daughter in a family with profitable lands in Champagne and the wealth to support her.” Julie looked at Delphine with an apologetic grimace. “It is a very favorable match.”

  “Except that the bride is a dragon,” Lili growled.

  Delphine slumped dejectedly against Maman. “I might as well become a nun right now.”

  Lili and Maman burst into laughter, but Lili’s face grew serious again almost immediately. “People don’t get what they wish for very often, do they?” she mused.

  “If they go through their lives wishing and wishing, probably not,” Julie replied. “Especially if they hope for unreasonable things. But there’s often more than one good way a situation can work out, and I think people who understand that will be more satisfied than people who don’t.”

  She thought for a moment. “When I was young, I used to pray for this and that, but as I saw more of life I realized how badly some of the things I wanted might have turned out, and sometimes the opposite, that a thing I didn’t want had consequences I liked. Now I’ve learned the most important thing to wish for is that I will have the grace and good character to handle whatever comes. And that you and Delphine will also.” She laughed. “And besides, can you imagine how impossible the world would be if everyone’s prayers were granted? There, ma petite, is something for Meadowlark to consider!”

  A rut in the road sent Lili bouncing to the other end of the seat, and Maman and Delphine clung to each other to avoid being thrown into the bottom of the coach. “Mon Dieu,” Julie said. “We’re lucky we didn’t lose the wheel. You’d think with all the money to build Versailles they could have made a better road to it.”

  Delphine had been lost in her own thoughts. “Maman?” she broke in. “Why didn’t Jacques-Mars marry Joséphine, if it’s true what people are saying about her?”

  The mood in the coach darkened again. Julie pressed her lips into a line and looked away. “No parents in their right mind would allow their daughter to marry someone like Jacques-Mars. He cares about nothing but himself, and I imagine he is no more to be trusted with money than he is with women. I’ve heard that Joséphine is one of three girls, in the middle of five children, and her parents hadn’t seemed to pay her much mind until now. Even a little attention would have made them realize Anne-Mathilde felt no real bond with her.”

  Julie’s eyes clouded and she seemed not to notice the jostling of the coach. “I pity poor Joséphine,” she finally said. “Obviously she was flattered by the attentions of someone as dashing as Jacques-Mars and as pretty as Anne-Mathilde, and perhaps she wanted their friendship badly enough to do whatever they asked.”

  “Do you think she really did, Maman?” Delphine was sitting up again. “You know—did that—with Jacques-Mars.”

  “I think we’ll know soon enough, and Anne-Mathilde seemed too concerned about appearing innocent for me to believe she really is. I think she’s done herself a great deal of harm, especially if gossip about a scheme to ruin Joséphine gets back to the queen. Marie Leszczynska has suffered too much to take it lightly when a young girl is despoiled.”

  “I’m sorry about the dauphin,” Delphine added. “And that his little boy doesn’t have a father. Even if he is going to be the King of France someday.” She thought for a moment. “If anyone told me that to become queen I’d have to lose you, I’d tell him to take his crown and throw it in one of his stupid fountains.” She dabbed her eyes and sniffed. “Why does everything have to be so sad?”

  “And I pity Marie Leszczynska too,” Julie added. “She’s lost so many of her children. I’d never choose to be queen over the life I have with both of you.” She sat mulling something for a few moments. “Aren’t either of you curious about why Jacques-Mars wasn’t bothering you after Delphine and Madame Sophie’s recital?”

  Had it been just yesterday? “He wasn’t at the dance,” Lili suddenly realized.

  Delphine scowled. “He was probably off seducing someone.”

  Julie smiled. “I doubt it. I saw how he and Anne-Mathilde were watching both of you, and when I saw him coming in your direction, I took him into one of the other rooms for a little tête-à-tête. Shall I say we came away with an understanding that it would be in his best interests not to pursue either of you?”

  “Maman!” Delphine covered her mouth so that only her eyes showed above her gloved hand. “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him that I was fully prepared to speak to the queen about the rumors regarding Joséphine, and offer what happened last summer—”

  Delphine gasped. “In strictest confidence, ma chérie,” Julie went on. “To offer it as evidence of the unsuitability of his presence in her chambers.” She drew up her shoulders. “As I suspected, the ridicule to which he would be exposed at being unable to cross the queen’s threshold was quite sufficient to make him agree he would have no contact with either of you whatsover. I took the fact that he did not appear at the dance to be a sign of “—her mouth turned up in a sly smile—“his sincerity about the matter.”

  Delphine slumped in her seat. “I�
��m so embarrassed.”

  “Why? I didn’t tell the queen anything.”

  “But would you have, Maman?” Lili asked.

  Julie cocked her head. “I was quite sure I wouldn’t have to,” she said with a smile. “So I guess the answer is, we’ll never know.”

  1766

  BY THE TIME the trees blossomed, Paris had put behind its sadness. The future Louis XVI was installed at Versailles with his mother, Marie-Josèphe of Saxony, and the cafés, theaters, and salons of the city were again bustling with life. Green shoots and blossoms burst out at the Jardin de Roi as well. Since her return from Versailles, Lili had been spending two afternoons a week in the private natural history museum on the ground floor of the Comte de Buffon’s house, replacing with neatly written Latin labels the tattered and yellowing ones in the specimen drawers and cabinets de curiosités.

  On days when Julie could not spare the carriage, Jean-Étienne Leclerc came to fetch Lili at Hôtel Bercy. Jean-Étienne cultivated exotic medicinal plants, going back and forth between the greenhouse laboratory and his experimental plots in the garden, and since Lili’s tasks for the time being were mostly in the museum, they saw little of each other after they arrived. The twenty-minute ride to and from the Jardin de Roi was all the time they had to talk, and it was scarcely enough for a breathless summary of what each had seen and done.

  “I don’t think I’m really much use to your uncle, but I’m certainly learning some astounding things,” Lili said to Jean-Étienne as they crossed the Pont de la Tournelle and passed under the arch of the Port Saint Bernard on the way to the garden. “Like shapes of beaks—some longer than the body of the bird, all to be able to get at food.” She laughed. “I don’t suppose I’d want to try to eat a saddle of lamb with the bill of a toucan or hummingbird.”